Conceived in Liberty Volume 2 - Ludwig von Mises Institute

10
The Ulster Scots
Pennsylvania, during the first half of the eighteenth century, was the focal
center for a great wave of non-English immigration into the American colonies.
The American colonies grew with great rapidity: the total population
rising from 250,000 in 1700 to almost 1,200,000 in 1750, an almost fivefold
increase. Of this rise, the bulk was caused by immigration, and the great part
of this migration came from two non-English groups: the Ulster Scots (called
the "Scotch-Irish") and the Germans. The major part of them settled in
Pennsylvania.
If the total population grew fivefold between 1700 and 1750, Massachusetts
and New York populations rose scarcely more than three times, the latter's
meager growth reflecting its restrictive land policy. In contrast, the population
of Pennsylvania, the newest colony in 1700, rose from 18,000 to 120,-
000 in this period, a remarkable increase of nearly sevenfold. Pennsylvania
was now more populous than Connecticut and considerably more than New
York. This influx led to an accelerated swamping of the original Quaker element
of Pennsylvania and to increasing tension between the newcomers and
the Quakers. By the end of the colonial era, Pennsylvania was approximately
one-third German and one-third Ulster Scot.
The Ulster Scots were the largest immigrant group in the eighteenth century.
These men were, in the main, intense Presbyterians from lowland Scotland
whose families had been settled in Ulster in northern Ireland during the
seventeenth century. By the turn of the eighteenth century, England began to
oppress the Ulstermen: a woolen act gravely crippled the export trade of
Ulster weavers, a test act disenfranchised the Presbyterians, and tenants were
especially oppressed and rackrented by absentee feudal English landlords.
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