Who were the Scots-Irish?
The term Scots-Irish is generally used to refer to people whose ancestors originated in Scotland, but who lived in Ireland, sometimes for several generations, before emigrating to America. They are also called Scotch-Irish or Ulster Scots. Considering the impact this group of people made on the new world, a better term might be the one coined by historian David Hackett Fischer, writing in Albion’s Seed, who called them borderers. Borderers encompassed a number of other settlers who shared many of the traits of those Scots who first settled in northern Ireland and then migrated to North America. These closely related peoples were from the borderlands of northern England, southern Scotland, and the north of Ireland. Once in America, they formed a more-or-less cohesive unit, if that can be said of a people who nurtured a proud and sometimes argumentative spirit, and a distain for authority. They tended to settle in large kinship groups, and often shared the same surname, a fact that made
