Their fighting spirit and economic distress often made them less than welcome in the earlier colonies. Prosperous New Englanders were disgusted by their deplorable smell and behavior. In 1729 an angry mob actually prevented a ship from Londonderry from docking. Pennsylvania initially offered a heartier welcome. But in 1729 James Logan, himself born in Ireland, complained that a settlement of five families from Ireland gives one more trouble than fifty of any other people. His solution was to send them westward, where they could act as a buffer between the settled towns of the East and the Indians on the frontier. Unfortunately, the immigrants knew only one way of dealing with troublesome neighbors: battle. This undermined the peaceable policies of the Quakers and disrupted the good relationships they and German immigrants to Pennsylvania had built up with the Indians.

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The problem was that the warrior culture into which the waves of 18th-century immigrants were born had left them independent, hot-tempered and often rash to the extent of lawlessness. Fierce protection of one’s own and taking the law into one’s own hands were acceptable norms. This did not provide a stable basis for an economy, and just as their homelands were economically less developed than other parts of the British Isles, the Southern regions they inhabited in America did not become as prosperous as New England, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

They did, however, produce great leaders. President Andrew Jackson’s father was a farmer from Ulster. His wife Rachel was descended from another Irish family. President James Polk was the great-great-grandson of Captain Robert Polk, who left Donegal in 1699. The father of Patrick Henry, the Revolutionary orator, left the Scottish borders in 1730. The Jacksons, the Polks and the Henrys were all reasonably well-to-do before they left Britain–indeed, Patrick Henry had close relations among the English aristocracy. In contrast, Thomas Mellon was 4 when he and his family left a thatched farmhouse in Omagh for Baltimore. They settled in Pennsylvania, where Thomas grew up working on the family farm, but reading books and dreaming of an education. Eventually he became a lawyer specializing in estate litigation–a position that gave him many investment opportunities. Based on this, his son Andrew Mellon founded one of the greatest fortunes in America.

The Mellon family’s entrepreneurship is akin to President Jackson’s enthusiasm for minimal government combined with maximum personal autonomy, and Patrick Henry’s insistence on natural liberty as something every animate creature does naturally desire, yea, and even vegetables themselves. All derive from the northern warrior culture of Britain in which men demanded freedom from restraint and clung fast to the right to take care of their own affairs.

It is no surprise that some men from this culture have risen to great heights. Paradoxically, it is also no surprise that unlike the settlers in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Virginia, who had respected and powerful leaders in John Winthrop, William Penn and Sir William Berkeley, respectively, the people of the lands bordering the Irish Sea arrived as family groups, occasionally with a clergyman or some noted man of their community to whom they would be loyal, but fundamentally were too independent to array themselves under anyone’s banner or to accept any hierarchical social structure.

This article was written by Claire Hopley and originally appeared in the March 2006 issue of British Heritage. For more great articles, subscribe to British Heritage magazine today!

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