The People with No Name: Ireland's Ulster Scots, America's Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World, 1689-1764.

Author - Patrick Griffin ... [Goo?] [Posters]

This Paperback Book item from Princeton University Press was reviewed on 5-Nov-2008.

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1) Paperback Book The People with No Name: Ireland's Ulster Scots, America's Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World, 1689-1764. by Princeton University Press. This work is a mass of disjointed ancedotes from historical archives put together without a purpose except to satisfy a dissertation advisor and gain a PhD. In spite of the volumious end notes, there is nothing new or revealing here. Leyburn´s book is clearly superior.

I was put on to this book by a criticism of another of the author´s books on the Scotch-Irish who described the author as "a dynamic young historian on the cutting edge of early American and Atlantic world scholarship." Wow, was I disappointed!

The title is stupid and trite, as the term "Scotch-Irish" will do just fine for the people described and has been in general use since 1744. So now, all of a sudden, we can´t name them?

The author focuses only on the Scotch-Irish in Pennsylvania, and although he clearly knows there were large and prosperous settlements of Scotch-Irish along the frontier from Maine to Georgia, he chooses to ignore them. Moreover, he marginalizes the Scotch-Irish by primarily using sources in the colonies that viewed the Scotch-Irish with disdain and hostility (including Logan, who was Scotch-Irish himself.) Not much fairness or scholarship here.

The numbers of Scotch-Irish immigrants are somewhat controversial although the 100,000 number prior to 1776 is often quoted. Writers such as Fiske have gone as high as 500,000. That is clearly an exaggeration given the numbers of ships sailing from Ulster during this period and their passenger capacity. But other sources give 30,000 as the number following the Antrim evictions, and 44,000 from 1769-1774, and the annual rates of 70-100 sailings from Ulster indicate higher migration numbers. A better estimate might be 140,000, but the author would be well advised to spend some time checking sailings and passenger lists. At any rate, it is generally thought that the Scotch-Irish population in the colonies in 1776 was about 600,000 out of a population of approximately 3,200,000. The Scotch-Irish put a premium on having large families.

Worst of all, he states "... these people did not comprise the political nation, those few who held the reins of political power." Well, the Scotch-Irish came to the colonies without money or power, did not attempt to become "Britons" as the author claims, but in one or two generations became the leading power in the American Revolution and the early US. Four of the first five commanders-in-chief of the US Army were Scotch-Irish, seven of the first thirteen governors, a large number of the signers of the Declaration of Independence including John Hancock, Rutledge, Paine, Whipple, McKean, Nelson, Thornton and Taylor, many of the generals in the Revolutionary War including George Rodgers Clarke, Daniel Morgan, Richard Montgomery, Henry Knox, Anthony Wayne, Andrew Lewis, Walter Stewart, Thomas Robinson, William Thompson, Enoch Poor, John Stark, William Maxwell, John Clark, Andrew Pickens, Ephraim Blaine, Thomas Polk, James Miller, Joseph Reed, James Clinton, John Armstrong, James Ewing, William Henry, Michael Simpson, William Irvine, Francis Preston and William Campbell, to name a few, and we should not forget Simon Kenton, Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone. And almost half of the first 31 presidents have Scotch-Irish ancestors.

The British knew their enemy: Walpole made the famous comment that "... our American cousin has run away with a Scotch-Irish parson." Plowden stated that "... most of the successes in America were immediately owing to the vigor and courage of the Irish emigrants." One British officer simply described the war as "a Presbyterian Revolt." When the opportunity offered itself to shoot down redcoats, the Scotch-Irish did so with relish.

The author might have looked at the Irish Dougherty clann for its history of converting to Presbyterianism in the middle 17th century, then losing half of the clann back to Catholicism between the English Civil War and the "Glorious Revolution." Those that remained Presbyterian became part of the Scotch-Irish, and swarmed to the rolls of the Pennsylvania Line and other units from every state, but most importantly New Hampshire, Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, and the "over the mountain" men of East Tennessee. No less than three Doughertys were members of Washington´s Lifeguard.

General Charles Lee stated that half of the Continental Army was Irish, and the early regiments of the Pennsylvania Line were almost entirely Scotch-Irish. To a very large degree, the War for Independence was fought and won by the Scotch-Irish, not the least for the injustices, many religious, done to them by the English in lowland Scotland and the Ulster Plantation. Without the fifth or less of the population that was Scotch-Irish during the Revolutionary War, we might still be in the British Commonwealth. Nonetheless, what the English sent around came around, but somehow the author missed all of that. Oh well, maybe later.¤

2) Paperback Book The People with No Name: Ireland's Ulster Scots, America's Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World, 1689-1764. by Princeton University Press. If you want a less academic-sounding book on the subject, it is hard to find a better book than that which was penned by James Leyburn back in 1962. On the other hand, comparing Griffin´s book to James Webb´s romantic depiction of the Scots-Irish, is a terrible mistake. Griffin´s book is a tough read, but if you have an interest in identity formation and its relationship to religion, then give it a look. It will not be a waste of time. If you have an interest in Irish Catholics and their imprint on the Irish and American landscapes, you can´t beat Kerby Miller´s two books. The only serious academic competition No Name has to date on the diffusion of Presbyterianism is found in Marilyn Westerkamp´s Triumph of the Laity.¤

3) Paperback Book The People with No Name: Ireland's Ulster Scots, America's Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World, 1689-1764. by Princeton University Press. Unless you are really interested in all the petty arguments about religion among the protestant, presbyterians and baptists this book is not for you. Data on the Scots Irish people themselves makes up less than 25% of this book and even then it is more into quoting what this official or that official had to say. You don´t really get a feel for what the people were like or why they were the way they were.

If you want to understand our ancestors and what drove them, read "Born Fighting : How the Scots-Irish Shaped America" by James Webb. Not only does it bring these early settlers to life but tickled my intestests enough to buy more books on the over-mountain people and Andrew Jackson.¤

4) Paperback Book The People with No Name: Ireland's Ulster Scots, America's Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World, 1689-1764. by Princeton University Press. The first question I asked myself prior to reading the book was: "How will this book be different than Leyburn´s book on the same subject, written in the 60s?" Not much. Given the number of studies, articles, etc covering this very topic it would have been valuable for griffin to have included a bibliographical essay to outline how his study breaks new ground. Still, Griffin does a thorough job outlining why the Protestant Dissenters left Ulster for the shores of America. However, his title "People With No Name" is curious, as these folks had several names (Ulster Scots, Presbyterians, Scots Irish, Dissenters) all of which Griffin acknowledges. It was also dissapointing to see a dissertation/book once again ignore Catholic migrants to America from Ireland. Catholics in Ireland are only mentioned on 7 of this book´s 173 pages. No comparison is made between Griffin´s Ulster Scots (or whatever he decides to call them) and their Catholic neighbors who surely underwent the same economic, agricultural, etc. trials in the 18th century.
Finally, on the back cover of the paperback, there is extremely high praise for the book from T. H. Breen, professor of history at Northwestern Univ. He calls the book "masterful," etc. Seeing how Breen was Griffin´s Ph.D. dissertation advisor and presumably had a guiding role in the writing of this study, such praise seems out of place and distateful; Breen should have had the taste and sense of manners to skip the submission such a "blub" on the back cover.¤

5) Paperback Book The People with No Name: Ireland's Ulster Scots, America's Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World, 1689-1764. by Princeton University Press.

More than 100,000 Ulster Presbyterians of Scottish origin migrated to the American colonies in the six decades prior to the American Revolution, the largest movement of any group from the British Isles to British North America in the eighteenth century. Drawing on a vast store of archival materials, The People with No Name is the first book to tell this fascinating story in its full, transatlantic context. It explores how these people--whom one visitor to their Pennsylvania enclaves referred to as ´´a spurious race of mortals known by the appellation Scotch-Irish´´--drew upon both Old and New World experiences to adapt to staggering religious, economic, and cultural change. In remarkably crisp, lucid prose, Patrick Griffin uncovers the ways in which migrants from Ulster--and thousands like them--forged new identities and how they conceived the wider transatlantic community.

The book moves from a vivid depiction of Ulster and its Presbyterian community in and after the Glorious Revolution to a brilliant account of religion and identity in early modern Ireland. Griffin then deftly weaves together religion and economics in the origins of the transatlantic migration, and examines how this traumatic and enlivening experience shaped patterns of settlement and adaptation in colonial America. In the American side of his story, he breaks new critical ground for our understanding of colonial identity formation and of the place of the frontier in a larger empire. The People with No Name will be indispensable reading for anyone interested in transatlantic history, American Colonial history, and the history of Irish and British migration.

Page Updated: Robert N. Goolsby, 3-Dec-2008, 06910746239780691074627, 560-400-230-910-910-291-8

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