Major contributors to American social and cultural life since the earliest days of British
settlement. A Scot named Thomas Henderson was one of the original settlers of
Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607 (Donaldson 1980:909). Altogether about 1.5 million
migrants have come to America from Scotland, which currently has a population of
roughly five million.
During the 17th and 18th centuries, tens of thousands of Scots were transported and
voluntarily migrated to British America, settling first along the Eastern seaboard,
concentrating in greatest numbers in the Southern colonies. When the first U.S. Census
was taken in 1790, at least 6 percent of the population was of Scottish or Scotch-Irish
background (descendants of English-speaking Lowland Scottish Protestants who began
colonizing the Northern Irish province of Ulster at the behest of James VI of Scotland
and I of England in 1610). Between 1715 and 1775, roughly 250,000 Ulster Scots
Presbyterians came to America, most landing in the middle colonies and gravitating to
the colonial frontier. Nearly 2.5 percent of Americans claim some degree of Scottish
ancestry, while approximately 3.3 percent identify themselves as Scotch-Irish, a term
originating in America, not in Britain, where the terms “Ulster Scots” or “Scots-Irish” are
preferred.
Scottish Americans and their Scotch-Irish cousins have not been clannish from a
demographic perspective. Instead, American Scots have intermarried more than any other
single European-American ethnic group, contributing to the general cultural mix of
English-speaking America on many levels. Scottish influences pervade American folk
music. Alexander Campbell “Eck” Robertson, Bill Monroe, Jim and Jesse McReynolds,
Howdy Forrester, Jim Buchanan, Fiddling Cowan Powers, John Cowan Hartford, and
Stuart Ian Duncan are a few notable 20th-century American fiddlers and bluegrass
musicians with Scots ancestors. Folksinger Jean Ritchie and her family, and Woody
Guthrie and his son Arlo, also have Scottish roots. Perhaps 40 percent of the Child
ballads are distinctly Scottish rather than English in origin; most ballads found in
Appalachia in the 1990s are still current in Northern Ireland and Lowland Scotland.
Scottish singing styles have influenced various American regional ballad traditions.
Many American fiddle tunes were originally Scottish, such as “Hop High Ladies”
(“McLeod’s Reel”) “Leather Britches” (“Lord McDonald’s Reel,”) and “Too Young to
Marry” (the tune of Robert Burns’ “My Love Is But a Lassie-o”). Upland Southern
American cabins, settlement patterns, and farming practices reflect Lowland Scottish and
Ulster Scots prototypes. Scots influences are evident in American New Year’s and
Halloween celebrations, particularly in the South.
American regional dialects and folk speech are filled with Scottish and Scotch-Irish
retentions. The hard postvocalic r that characterizes inland and Western American
regional pronunciation patterns originated in north Britain, particularly Ulster and
Lowland Scotland. The soft postvocalic r of America’s Eastern coastal dialects from
Maine down to Louisiana agrees with modern standard British usage, which emanates from metropolitan southern England. Nonstandard expressions like “used to could” for
“used to be able to” and “done gone” for already gone” still commonly used by
Southerners have been traced to north British sources. Scottish words in American folk
speech are as localized as “bonnyclabber” for clabbered milk in eastern Massachusetts
and as widely distributed as “pinky” for little finger and the exclamation “wow!” Golfing
terms like “caddie,” “birdie,” and “bogie” have become as familiar to most Ameri-cans as
Campbell’s soup, McDonald’s hamburgers, or Lassie, the canny collie who was perhaps
America’s favorite canine television celebrity.
Other Scottish contributions to American folklife are less obvious, less innocuous.
Throughout its history, Scotland has been complex and conflict ridden. The successive
waves of Scots who migrated to America included Gaelic-speaking Highlanders and
English-speaking Lowlanders; Catholics versus Episcopalians versus Presbyterians
versus Nonconformists and Dissenters; Tory royalists versus Whig republicans;
repressive Calvinist fundamentalists and liberal secular humanists; Americanized
pragmatists and nostalgic Romantics. Long-standing differences in language, religion,
ethnicity, and regional politics carried over from the British Isles contributed to the
tensions leading to the American Revolution and still affect the cultural politics of the
United States (see Fischer 1989). Most Highland Scots in the colonies remained loyal to
the Crown and removed to Canada following the Revolution. So many Lowlanders and
Ulster Presbyterians supported colonial independence that many Tories were convinced
the American Revolution was at heart a Scotch-Irish insurrection (Jackson 1993:121).
The anti-Catholic Lowland Scottish Calvinists who subjugated Ulster envisioned
themselves as a righteous minority in a wicked world, a Church Militant justifying its
violence against demonized infidels through a convenant with God transcending corrupt
worldly authority. Their descendants on the American frontier carried on traditions of
severely plain church architecture, rejection of a paid clergy, and insistence upon
moralistic, repressive church discipline. Early Calvinist reformers in Scotland burned
bagpipes, smashed fiddles, flogged fornicators, and hanged witches (Farmer [1947]
1970:117–158). Camp meetings, singing in unison, “lining out” of hymns, banning of
musical accompaniment in church, and violent opposition to sinful secular amusements
like fiddling, dancing, and ballad singing are all part of the legacy of militant covenanters
and seceders who left the Presbyterian Church in America to join more radically
evangelistic denominations. Historians note bickering between contending Scottish sects;
the high degree of individualism and fragmentation of American Protestantism,
especially in the South, is an extension of this schismatic tradition.
By the time most Ulster Scots arrived in America, the traditional system of clans
(families bound by feudal ties between chiefs and their retainers) had largely disappeared
in the Lowlands. Clans survived in the Highlands, however, well into the 18th century
and were reorganized and revitalized following the series of Jacobite rebellions that failed
to restore the Stuart dynasty to the British throne. Some Scots in America quickly came
to think of themselves as Americans; others found ways of expressing their sense of
Scottishness that did not conflict with their identities as Americans. Even as Scots played
leading roles in British and American industry, medicine, the military, education, and
politics, many still were deeply attached to the idea of Scotland.
The disintegration of the Jacobite cause gave rise to Scottish romantic nationalism,
which survives in various forms even in the late-20th century. The Disarming Act of 1747, which followed Bonnie Prince Charlie’s defeat at Culloden, specifically prohibited
displays of Scottish national symbols, including kilts, tartans, plaids, and Highland
bagpipes. Loyalist Highland regiments, however, were exempted from the bans on the
kilt and pipes. Their officers refined modern Scottish martial music and costume,
inventing regimental tartans, which in turn inspired the clan tartans we know today. In
1778 a group of Scottish gentlemen dwelling in London founded the Highland Society, so
that they could periodically gather together “…in that garb so celebrated as having been
the dress of their Celtic ancestors, and on such occasions at least to speak the emphatic
language, to listen to the delightful music, to recite the ancient poetry, and to observe the
peculiar customs of their country” (Trevor-Roper 1983:26). This group successfully
petitioned the House of Commons in 1782 to repeal the ban on Highland dress and other
strictures of the Disarming Act. By this time, a flourishing Scottish Romantic nationalist
movement engaged artists and intellectuals like Robert Burns, who championed
traditional Scottish music and the Lowlands Scots dialect during his brief, brilliant career.
Long before the 1745 Uprising or the American Revolution, Scottish immigrants in
the New World were forming special-interest groups preserving the social and cultural
traditions of their homeland. In 1657 a Scots Charitable Society was established in
Boston, possibly the first organization of its kind anywhere (Donaldson 1966:44).
Increased Scottish migration to America during the 18th century saw the establishment of
St. Andrew’s Societies in Charleston (1729), Philadelphia (1749), New York (1756), and
Savannah (ca. 1750). Then as now, these societies provided periodic opportunities for the
celebration of Scottishness. Some Scots in America were apparently engaged in the
Scottish romantic movement before the American Revolution or the repeal of the
Disarming Act, as Donaldson noted: “It is, however, curious that so early as 1765 George
Bartram, a native of Scotland who had become a cloth merchant in Philadelphia, was
advertising ‘best Scotch Plaids for gentlemen’s gowns and boy’s Highland dress’”
(Donaldson 1966:128).
The continued expansion of British industrialism and imperialism led to the
establishment of more Scottish immigrant organizations and revivalistic institutions in the
late 18th and 19th centuries. The state visit of George IV to Edinburgh in 1822
orchestrated by Sir Walter Scott inspired another wave of newly invented clan tartans.
The patronage of the Balmoral Highland Games by Victoria and Albert established the
prototype for modern Highland games, reaffirming the ties of the Scottish clans through
their chiefs to the British royalty: “British national and imperial identity chimed quite
nicely with a powerful strand of Scottish national identity, reinforced by Protestantism,
Unionism, and militarism” (McCrone 1992:209). It seems ironic that the British
aristocracy and the Lowland Scots came to romanticize the Highland Gaels and to
expropriate selected features of their culture, after having struggled for centuries to
subdue and disperse them (see Chapman 1992).
Roughly two million people left Scotland between 1830 and 1914; nearly half went to
America. Burns’ birthday was celebrated in New York as early as 1820; by 1836 the
Highland Club of New York held its first annual Highland Games. Within a very short
time, Caledonian Games including most of the sports and performing-arts competitions
featured in the contemporary Highland Games were being held in major Scottish
settlements in the United States, Canada, and New Zealand (see Redmond 1971). Though
initially organized to celebrate Scottish culture, the Caledonian Games were soon open to the general public, regardless of national origin. During their peak years, the Caledonian
Games attracted tens of thousands of spectators and participants. The same period also
saw the formation of modern clan societies, which reorganized the traditional Scottish
system of hereditary chiefs and retainers as formally chartered special-interest
associations with elected officers and dues-paying members.
By the turn of the 20th century, most aspects of modern Scottish cultural revivalism
were already in existence. Highland Games, Burns Suppers, and clan societies continue
to flourish in the United States, Canada, and other Scottish diaspora communities. The
magnitude of this interest can be gleaned from the annual listings of Scottish American
organizations and events compiled by Angus Ray of Barrington, Illinois, publisher of The
Highlander: The Magazine of Scottish Heritage, which reports a circulation of over
40,000. The Highlander’s 1993 Directory Issue lists 255 clan societies, 172 Scottish
societies, such as Saint Andrew’s and Caledonian societies, 227 bagpipe bands, 179
vendors, 171 clan chiefs, 53 miscellaneous Scottish organizations, and 64 Highland
Games and Gatherings. These figures only begin to suggest the actual number of Scottish
American special-interest organizations. Emily Ann Donaldson’s The Scottish Highland
Games in America lists a minimum of 80 Highland Games held during 1985–1986 across
the United States from Maine to Maui, featuring not only athletic events, but also
competitions for Highland solo dancing and Scottish country dancing, solo piping and
pipe bands, fiddling, Celtic harp, and sheepdog trials (Donaldson 1986).
Within the Scottish American heritage community there are many special-interest
groups, part of a complex of Scottish social and cultural organizations that has been
developing since colonial times. These organizations thrive because Scottishness is still
meaningful to many people, regardless of the fact that Scotland ceased to be a sovereign
state nearly 400 years ago. The idea of Scotland is still very much alive in Scotland in the
1990s. According to Scottish sociologist David McCrone, seven out of ten modern Scots
consider themselves Scottish, not British, and an additional 19 percent consider
themselves Scottish and British (McCrone 1992:198).
Many Americans consider themselves Scottish in spirit, though American by birth.
Even though their ancestors might have left Scotland because their lairds displaced them
to make way for sheep, there are Scottish Americans who thrill to Burns’ often quoted
lines: “My heart’s in the highlands, my heart is not here. /My heart’s in the highlands, a
chasing the deer.” Not all Scots share or appreciate that Romantic, nostalgic vision. In
fact, debunkers have challenged the historical authenticity of the icons of Scottish
Romantic nationalism for more than 200 years. James MacPherson, who claimed to have
recovered gems of ancient Scots Gaelic poetry, was called a forger, yet his Ossian poems
(1760–1763) contributed to the rise of romantic nationalism and the academic study of
folklore in the 18th and 19th centuries. Modern Scottish antiroyalists have little love for
tartans, kilts, and bagpipes, which they perceive as symbols of dependency and
complicity in British colonialism. Their efforts to unravel the cult of the kilt, to expose it
as a recent, spurious fabrication, have not changed the feelings of those Scots at home
and abroad who do find positive value in the kilt and other emblems of Scottish identity.
(The modern pleated kilt is quite literally a fabrication of the early industrial age, the
product of the collaboration of an English foundryman, Thomas Rawlinson, and a
Scottish chief, lan McDonnell of Glengarry, who employed a regimental tailor in Inverness to fashion a garment less clumsy and bothersome in the workplace than the
toga-like belted plaids still commonly worn by Highland Scots) (see Trevor-Roper 1983).
Alan Dundes has said that folklorists cannot prevent the folk from believing fakelore
is folklore. If a group of people like Scottish Americans identifies with a set of cultural
symbols, then it matters little whether these symbols are ancient or recently invented. As
McCrone says: “Traditions may be invented; symbols of national identity remanufactured. Perhaps there is a suggestion in the word ‘invented’ that myths and
traditions are fabricated; what seems to happen is that the cultural raw materials are
refashioned in a manner that gives coherence and meaning to action. The task is not to
debunk these inventions, but to show how and why they are put to such telling use”
(McCrone 1992:30).
Richard J.Blaustein
References
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Donaldson, Emily Ann. 1986. The Scottish Highland Games in America. Gretna, La: Pelican.
Donaldson, Gordon. 1966. The Scots Overseas. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
——. 1980. Scots. In Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, pp. 908–916.
Farmer, Henry George. [1947] 1970. A History of Music in Scotland. New York: Da Capo.
Fischer, David Hackett. 1989. Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. New York:
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Jackson, Clayton. 1993. A Social History of the Scotch Irish. Lanham, MD: Madison Books.
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