The Ulster-Scots Presbyterians who settled in such large numbers on the American frontier 200 to 250 years ago were an independent breed with a steely determination to overcome the considerable obstacles they faced in their New World wilderness.
As non-conformist Calvinists who had suffered decades of religious and economic persecution, they were imbued with a desire never again to have to obey the undemocratic, and at times despotic diktats of monarchs and prelates.
Civil and ecclesiastical laws made life so difficult for the dissenting Presbyterians in the first half of the 18th century that they were forced to emigrate from their native homelands in counties Antrim, Down, Derry, Donegal and Tyrone.
The huge exodus of the Roman Catholic population from Ireland to America after the Great Famine of the late 1840s has been well documented down the years and the Irish-American diaspora has made enormous political and social strides in the 150 years since. Until recently, however, the movement across the Atlantic of a quarter-of-a-million Presbyterians has not been fully recorded, or appreciated to the extent that it deserves.
Completely absorbed
This is probably because the 18th-century immigrants were completely absorbed into American life and, effectively turning their backs on the old country, took part in the shaping of the new nation.
These hardy Ulster pioneer settlers were the people who cradled European-style civilisation on the North American landscape and pushed the frontier westwards from Pennsylvania, Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky to Mississippi, Oklahoma, Texas, Colorado and California.
Whereas two American Presidents - John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan - have southern Irish roots, no fewer than 13 of the 41 occupants of the White House have direct family links with northern Presbyterian stock. From Andrew Jackson, the founder of the Democratic Party whose parents left Carrickfergus in Co Antrim in 1765, 18 months before his birth on Carolina soil, the list of Scots-Irish Presidents is certainly impressive: James Knox Polk, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant, Chester Alan Arthur, Grover Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley, Woodrow Wilson, Richard M. Nixon, Jimmy Carter and William Jefferson Clinton.
Throw in John C. Calhoun, the early 19th-century American vice-president over two terms; legendary frontier luminaries like Davy Crockett and Sam Houston; Civil War generals Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson, J. E B. Stuart, Joseph Eggleston Johnston and George Brinton McClellan; and musical, literary and movie personalities such as Stephen Foster, Samuel Langhorn Clemens (Mark Twain), Edgar Allan Poe and James Stewart.
Publishing magnate
Add to these the publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst, a great-grandson John Hearst from Ballybay, Co Monaghan, who sailed from Newry to Delaware in 1764 for a fare of four shillings and eight pence, and the agricultural machinery innovator Cyrus McCormick, and you begin to realise the extent of achievement by members of the Scots-Irish community.
It has been my privilege and pleasure over the past five years to have travelled frequently and extensively in the United States in pursuit of the 18th-century immigrants and their inheritors. The result of my research has been the publication of three books Scots-Irish in the Hills of Tennessee, Scots-Irish in the Shenandoah Valley and Scots- Irish in the Carolinas, with another shortly on the way cataloguing the remarkable contribution of the Scots-Irish in Pennsylvania and Kentucky.
Travelling from Philadelphia and Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania down through the rugged, south-eastern Appalachian states of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee and Georgia, one is always conscious that for several centuries the influence of the Scots-Irish was writ large in the religion, culture and political landscape of the region.
There, the many families you meet exude pride that their forebears braved the Atlantic in simple wooden ships to carve an indelible niche on American society. And, though 3,000 miles may separate them from the hillsides of Antrim and Down, and several centuries from the first early settlers, these inner-state Americans still have an affinity with Ulster, though they may not always understand of the stridently pro-Union politics of many Ulster Protestants.
British influence
Paradoxically, the Scots-Irish immigrants, who were largely responsible for the removal of British influence in America through their active involvement in the Revolutionary War of 1776-1782, are the same race of people who today in Northern Ireland strive to maintain the Union. The characteristic thrift, principle and work ethic displayed by many people in Appalachia and beyond closely resembles that of their cousins up to eight generations removed in Ulster.
The 19th-century historian J. A. Froude said: "The Scotch-Irish had a system of religious faith and worship which has ever borne an inflexible front to illusion and mendacity, and has preferred to be ground to powder like flint than to bend before violence under enervating temptation."