Soli Deo Gloria: For the Glory of God Alone

The Messenger, February 25, 2010
Origins: the Scots-Irish and Presbyterianism
in North America

By RB TOLAR
Special to The Messenger
Many people in West Tennessee claim Scots-Irish descent. One may wonder: Who are the Scots-Irish, exactly, and what brought them to North America?
Early in the 17th century, James I of England, a Scotsman and devout Presbyterian, attempted to bring a Protestant influence to Roman Catholic Ireland. A common faith, he reasoned, would subdue the rebellious spirit of the people and strengthen the bond with England. He hoped to accomplish this by settling Lowland Scottish Presbyterians in Northern Ireland, on lands confiscated from recalcitrant Irish nobles. The Ulster Plantation, as the settlement was called, also contained Englishmen who were members of the Church of England.
The Scots prospered initially. However, ownership of the land passed increasingly, through a series of royal grants by James’ successors, into the hands of the English settlers in Northern Ireland.
Viewed as religious dissenters by their Anglican landlords and despised by the Catholic Irish peasants they had displaced, the Ulster Scots were caught between rising rents and falling prices.
As the 17th Century progressed, they were gradually reduced to the status of poor tenant farmers. A series of droughts in the 1690s brought many of them to desperate straits.
A solution to this dilemma was brought about by a confluence of happy circumstances — good Calvinists that they were, the Scots would have said that God’s sovereign control over all things had brought these circumstances about.
First, the burgeoning linen trade brought ships bearing cloth from the middle colonies of North America to Irish ports.
Lacking cargo for the return trip across the Atlantic, ships’ captains were only too glad to provide transport for those willing to emigrate. Second, the colonies were starved for manpower and farmland was plentiful and cheap. 
So it came about that the first wave of a 70-year migration began, first to the corridor between New York City and Philadelphia. The immigrants were drawn there by the arable land, the familiar climate and the Quaker founders’ well-known religious toleration.
The term Scots-Irish was coined for these diligent folk and they thrived in America. They would eventually spread south along the northern shores of Chesapeake Bay, into Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, and from there further southward to North Carolina.  Then they migrated westward through the Cumberland Gap into the wilderness areas that became Kentucky and Tennessee.
As they moved, they took their Presbyterian faith with them. In the sparse settlements of the colonial frontier they established churches and the cry went back across the ocean to Ulster and to Scotland: Send us ministers, men trained to preach the Word of God.
Editor’s note: RB Tolar, saved by God’s grace alone, is grateful for the opportunity to participate in this writing ministry, he says.

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