Product Description

Dispelling much of what he terms the 'mythology' of the Scotch-Irish, James Leyburn provides an absorbing account of their heritage. He discusses their life in Scotland, when the essentials of their character and culture were shaped; their removal to Northern Ireland and the action of their residence in that region upon their outlook on life; and their successive migrations to America, where they settled especially in the back-country of Pennsylvania, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia, and then after the Revolutionary War were in the van of pioneers to the west.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #97847 in Books
• Published on: 1989-08-30
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 397 pages

Review
A most readable contribution to the growing body of sophisticated literature on immigration in the colonial period.

Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography

Work . . . of such merit that it should supersede most of its predecessors.

Mississippi Valley Historical Review

Shrewd and novel speculations on frontier society and national character. . . . The best survey yet of the Scotch-Irish.

American Historical Review

This admirable book takes a fresh and frank look at the Scotch-Irish.

Journal of Presbyterian History

Clearly written and well organized. . . . Leyburn has provided the general reader with an extremely useful account.

North Carolina Historical Review

Customer Reviews

A Great Book With One Major Flaw
Leyburn and the Scots-Irish
Leyburn's book (1962) is now "the grand old man" of Scots-Irish historiography, having easily displaced Henry Jones Ford's "The Scotch-Irish in America" (1915) - a book that was the previous generation's best study of the subject. Leyburn was one of the earliest authors to seriously investigate the Scottish background of the Scots-Irish, and did a wonderful job of not overpraising or overly denigrating the Scots-Irish (as a number of previous authors had done). Unfortunately, his book has an important flaw: he did not think very highly of Scots in general, and compared them unfavorably with their more successful (in modern terms) English cousins just about every chance he got. In other words, he did not understand the anthropological concept of culture at all; he was a historian after all, and largely a very good one. However, there is more to understanding the Scots-Irish than documents and written records, as is explained more fully below.

Scots-Irish Historiography
One of the most interesting aspects in Scots-Irish studies is how different schools of thought have risen and debated each other over the course of the last century and a half. There are four primary schools of thought. 1) The Ancestor Worshipper historians were the first to investigate the subject and brought a huge amount of forgotten information to the public eye between circa 1850 and today. Their primary limitation was that they believed that every great thing accomplished by Americans - representative government, education, religion, etc - had their origins with Scots-Irish traditions and heritage. These authors included those included in the volumes published by the Scotch-Irish Congresses, Charles Hanna, Ford, Maude Glasgow, W.F. Marshall, Wayland Dunaway, Rory Fitzpatrick, Billy Kennedy, and many others. 2) The Irish Catholic Historians wrote in strong reaction against the Ancestor Worshippers, saying that the Scots in question originally came from Ireland (which is historically accurate), so it was really Ireland that was responsible for so many great American ideas and traditions. These authors included John Francis Maguire, Thomas Hamilton Murray, Joseph Smith, John C. Linehan, Michael J. O'Brien (long associated with the American-Irish Historical Society), Kerby Miller, and others. The bitter warfare between these two schools over cultural origins itself caused a reaction amongst mostly academic scholars of the subject by about 1950, when 3) the Pragmatist Historians arose. These authors - who included T.W. Moody, Leyburn, R. J. Dickson, E.R.R. Green, E. Estyn Evans, M. Perceval-Maxwell, Raymond Gillespie, Maldwyn Jones, Kenneth Keller, and many others - believed that debates over culture did not matter, and that only the facts of written history should be investigated and reported. The Pragmatists probably did more than any other school to bring forgotten documents in Ireland and America to light. However, their disdain for cultural origins left a big opening for those who disagreed and thought that culture (in the anthropological sense of the word) did indeed matter, and the 1970s witnessed the rise of 4) the Celtic Thesis Historians. These writers believed that Celtic culture survived into modern times in rural areas of Britain and Ireland, and that despite the loss of nationhood among the Scots and Irish, this culture was transmitted to North America through the emigrations of the Scots-Irish in the 18th and 19th centuries. These authors included Grady McWhiney and Forrest McDonald (the originators of this viewpoint), Ellen Shapiro McDonald, Rodger Cunningham, Leroy Eid, Michael Hill, and to a lesser degree David Hackett Fischer and Bernard Bailyn. Today all four of these schools of thought are still in existence, and their adherents continue to publish books on the Scots-Irish. One author alone combined the best from all four schools in his treatment of the subject, and eliminated the worst, making him worthy of especial mention - especially since he is really the only author that cannot be pigeonholed. David Noel Doyle's "Ireland, Irishmen, and Revolutionary America" (1981) was a much needed synthesis when it appeared. Today a new synthesis combining the best from all four schools - and the many books and articles published in the last 25 years - is once more needed. Scots-Irish historiography is a fascinating study in itself, and deserves much serious attention from future authors. Let us hope that the subject is studied and debated for a long, long time, and that a new synthesis and historiographical study is out there waiting somewhere in the wings!

A great approach
Pros: Works extremely well as a general study, is written in a way that will appeal to several different kinds of audiences.

Cons: Is too absorbed with presenting the national character of the Scotch Irish.

This book really gives such a full understanding of the Scotch-Irish people. This is largely because it takes into account their full experience -- it begins by showing what life was typically like in Scotland for the people who would later come to be called "Scotch-Irish". It suggests reasons for why they came to Ireland and shows how their experiences in Ireland both changed and did not change them. It details their experience in Ulster and only then turns to their journey to America and their experiences there. Leburn does a particularly good job of showing how the Scotch-Irish contributed to American frontier culture.

The book is also very well written. It has enough meat to it to appeal to people who have read a bit on the subject while still being explanatory enough for those who haven't. One would think that a book that covers such a broad topic would barely touch on specifics, but Leyburn does a very good job of focusing the chapters so that the book gets quite detailed at times.

However, there is a niggling concern that I had many times while reading this book. Despite Leyburn's apparent dislike of the idea of a Scotch-Irish "race", he seems very intent on assigning them national personality traits, both good and bad. Leyburn presents the Scotch Irish as hard working, hardy, stubborn, religious, uncivilized, independent, and brutal. He seems to want to pigeonhole an entire people into this vision and he immediately dismisses any evidence which contradicts it or which would provide a more complex picture. This does not, by any means, destroy my enjoyment of the book, as this attitude only shows up at times and seems completely absent at others. It is, however, very pervasive in a few of the chapters.

An interesting, if prejudiced, look at the Ulster Scots
Prof. Leyburn obviously did some study on his subject, and it shows in this book. He is able to recount in fair detail the history of "the Scotch Irish", but it is plain how little he thought of them. It seems that his underlying goal is to correct the "overpraise" the Ulster Scots have received from some quarters. His descriptions of the Scots could have been penned by the most bigoted English historian. Leyburn has used such disparaging accounts of the Scots in their homeland that one would be lead to believe that Cro-Magnons could teach them some things about hygiene and manners, but due to the lack of Cro-Magnons, God gave the Scots the English to help them.

His contention that the Ulster Scots did not remain Ulster Scots but became "Americans" is not wholly true. While those states with a large number of people with Scots ancestry have always been among the first to defend this country and stand up to the rest of the world as Americans, they have also been very rooted in the history of their people and their family. I grew up in the South in an area of heavy Scots/Ulster Scots ancestry, where the current use of words from Scotland and Ulster continues by the elder generation. The people there have all been born in America, but they are quicker to point out that they are "Scotch Irish" than they are to say American. They raised their children to be the same way. The United States may be the place of birth, but the blood is Scots.