Ulster to America: The Scots Irish Migration Experience, 1680–1830. Warren R. Hofstra, ed. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press. 2012. xxvi and 263 pp., maps, ills., notes, bibliography, index. $74.45 cloth (ISBN 9781572337541).

Readers interested in colonial and early American life, as it manifested itself in certain parts of Pennsylvania, Delaware, Virginia, and the mountains of North Carolina and Kentucky, will be delighted by the work of Warren R. Hofstra and his team of contributing writers that includes notable historians Patrick Griffin, Kerby Miller, Richard MacMaster, Marianne Wokeck, and linguist Michael Montgomery, among others; however, there are no professional geographers among the contributors, so do not expect to see any serious application of the mobility models made famous by E. G. Ravenstein, Wilbur Zelinsky, and Huw Jones. Also, one will not see terms and concepts like push and pull factors, although constructs like diffusion are certainly present. Nevertheless, taken together, the essayists form quite an impressive lot of Scots-Irish scholars.

The book offers a series of temporally situated case studies to cast light on one of the most nebulous ethnic groups to ever set foot on the mid-Atlantic area of the American colonies. The authors' main objective is to dispel myths associated with the group. Because of an absence of a common ethnic identity among the settlers and the different push and pull factors that affected successive waves of immigrants from Ulster (topics not easily discernible in the book), it is inviting to accept the authors' contention that these folk were indeed less stereotypical than the buckskinned frontiersman of popular imagination. Dispelling the image of backcountry pioneers in search of natural liberty, which Fischer (1989) so boldly proclaimed in Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America, is an ambitious aim for the authors of such a small book, however. In addition to problems inherent in discussing such an amorphous body of people, there are a number of factors that reduce the book's placement into one of H. C. Darby's three delineations of historical geography: “past geographies,” “geography behind history,” and “history behind geography.”

A number of the essays rely too much on secondary sources, which in many cases, were used by the authors in their earlier publications. Of particular note is Patrick Griffin's chapter on searching for independence. One is hard pressed to find a source that was published after 2005. Indeed, he mostly relies on his People with No Name: Ireland's Ulster Scots, America's Scots Irish and the Creation of the British Atlantic World (Griffin 2001), The Scotch-Irish: A Social History (Leyburn 1962), Kerby Miller's body of work, and some other secondary sources, virtually ignoring primary sources and more recent publications. A similar problem limits David Miller's chapter on searching for a new world. There are other problems with Miller's chapter, which I address later in the review.

Whereas Griffin and Miller rely heavily on their prior work and other secondary sources, Richard MacMaster successfully harvests primary sources from the Donegal area of Pennsylvania. Among the extant records he used were minutes from the Donegal Presbytery, Rev. John Roan's account books, and a number of wills. MacMaster succeeds in crafting an excellent “past geography” of a place in Pennsylvania that carries the same name as a western county in Ulster.

The book has five more, sometimes related limitations. First, the political events that forged an Ulster Scots identity in Ireland during the 1600s as well as the emergence of a schismatic culture area that straddled the Irish Sea is hardly mentioned. A second issue involves the lack of discussion of the ethnic diversity that made up Protestant Ulster. Miller penned the chapter on Ulster and Scotland, so it was clearly intended to provide the foundation for the remainder of the book. He attempts to compress a highly complex provincial and transatlantic history that spanned several centuries into one chapter that, for some unknown reason, he picks up in 1680. As the book is about the Scots-Irish, Miller is understandably concerned with the Ulster Scots portion of Protestant Ulster, but he unfortunately makes several faulty statements about them along the way. The Protestant population of Ulster was made up of Scottish Presbyterians and Episcopalians, which Miller acknowledges, and several other groups that he does not discuss: French Huguenots, who settled in Ulster after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685; English Quakers; and German Baptists from the Palatinate. The diversity of Protestant Ulster is an important and seriously undermined aspect of the book. This is especially concerning when one considers that the main purpose of the book is to dispel myths built on the ‘backcountry” homogeneity of the Scots-Irish. How, for example, did the authors know who among the immigrants in America were of Scots-Irish origin? The people discussed in the middle and late chapters might have had family connections in Ulster and might have attended a Presbyterian church in Pennsylvania or North Carolina, but their ancestry could have been English, German, or French. The French Huguenots, for example, brought flax-growing practices and linen manufacturing to Ulster, so their Ulster community was economically robust and distinct from the lowly Scottish planters who toiled away on rented lands in Antrim. English Quakers and German Baptists, too, would have lived among their kin and ethnic compatriots in Ulster. Indeed, Protestants in Ulster lived in ethnic enclaves, so there might not have been any cultural mixing among them until their descendants settled in America. Could this be the source of the Scots-Irish cultural heterogeneity identified by the writers? I suspect such is the case.

Because the authors make little use of Black's Surnames of Scotland, Bells's Surnames of Ulster, or MacLysaght's Surnames of Ireland to identify the ethnic origins of people referred to in the book, it seems affiliation with Presbyterianism and some basic assumptions about surnames were used to attach the Scots-Irish label to Ulster settlers in America. Clearly, Presbyterianism, which was described by English divines as they wrote the Confession articulating Presbyterian orthodoxy at Westminster between 1643 and 1646, is a universalizing expression of Christianity; it is not an ethnic religion as is so often assumed by American writers.

Related to the last point is the third issue that plagues the book, which is the association of Presbyterianism with Scotland. Miller writes that “Migration from Lowland Scotland to Ulster contributed to the formation of a new little tradition built around the claim of literate but unreflective laymen to hold their clergyman to account for his fidelity to the Scottish Presbyterian great tradition of the previous century as they understood it” (7). In addition to being a convoluted sentence, it is factually in error. Although admired by Andrew Melville, the administrator of the University of Glasgow in 1590s, Presbyterianism was not established as the official polity of the Scottish church in 1690, but in 1688, which Miller also claims. Although the discrepancy in the two dates is not a major concern, Miller does not discuss the fact that Presbyterianism was actually born at Carrickfergus in Ulster nearly fifty years earlier on 10 June 1642. By 1654, the original Presbytery of Ulster had grown so much that it was renamed the Synod of Ulster.

More specific to geography, which provides the book's fourth area of weakness, Miller erroneously reduces Scotland into two cultural regions: the Gaelic Highlands, and the English-speaking Lowlands. In the seventeenth century, Scotland also boasted a region called the Central Belt, which was the most populous region in the country; the southwest of Scotland was certainly a distinct culture area set apart from the borders and northeastern coastal strip.

The fifth issue that negatively impacts the book's geographic appeal is its weak treatment of the political oppression leveled on the Scots in Caledonia and in Ulster and how those experiences might have shaped their new American identities and political opinions. Miller again misses the mark in describing their experiences with the Crown. The ebb and flow of political policies such as the implementation and then the elimination of the regium donum and the adoption of discriminatory test acts in the late 1690s were unquestionably political push factors, but they receive little treatment and might well have shaped the imagined geographies of liberty-seeking frontiersmen of popular American lore.

In summary, the collection of essays in Ulster to America shows how the Scots-Irish (perhaps more precisely “Ulster folk”) immigrants settled in Delaware, Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, and Kentucky. Despite its geographic shortcomings, the book succeeds in describing settlers' search for community, land, social order, peace and prosperity, freedom, security, and independence. The fact that it is easy to misidentify Ulster folk as Scots-Irish raises some question about the main purpose of the book, which was to dispel myths about the buckskin-wearing frontiersmen of colonial lore. Their Ulster ancestors might well have spoken French or German, not Scots, at the dinner table.