Scottish Infuence on American Identity

Did you know that:

• In the 1790 Census of the United States, at least 6 percent of the population at that time could trace their ancestry directly back to Scotland.
• Scottish colonies were established in the United States before the Act of Union, which united Scotland with England and created the United Kingdom. Colonies founded in East Jersey in 1683 and South Carolina in 1684 served partly as refuges for religious dissidents. East Jersey served Quakers, and South Carolina served Presbyterians who, at the time, were liable to prosecution because the Church of Scotland had an Episcopal constitution.
• There were three major settlements founded primarily by Scottish Highlanders in the American colonies before the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745–46 and the Battle of Culloden: the “Argyll Patent” in upstate New York in 1738, Oglethorpe’s Georgia colony from 1736–41, and the “Argyll Colony” of the Upper Cape Fear region of North Carolina. The Carolina settlement was by far the largest of these and saw a period of emigration lasting for about 100 years, which also spilled over into the Upper Pee Dee region of South Carolina. A majority of Americans of Highland Scots descent who reside between the Carolinas and Texas can trace their ancestors through the port of Wilmington, North Carolina, back to Scotland.
• Roughly 250,000 emigrants from Ulster in Northern Ireland, many descended from transplanted Lowland and Border Scots who were settled there beginning in the late 16th century, had arrived in the American colonies by the coming of the American Revolution.
• Highland, Lowland, and Ulster Scots Presbyterians were founders of some of America’s earliest institutions of higher learning, including Princeton University in 1746 and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1789, the nation’s oldest state-sponsored university.
• The Presbyterian form of church government brought to America by Scots greatly influenced the founding and structure of our own national government, and the Declaration of Arbroath in 1320 was referenced in the drafting of our own Declaration of Independence in 1776.
• The Scots Gaelic language, as well as the Broad Scots dialect of English, have had a significant influence on our own American vernacular. There are pure Gaelic and Broad Scots words and terms that can still be heard in the United States today.