Yet these transplanted Scotch changed the fens
and mires into fields and gardens; in three generations they had built
flourishing towns and were doing a thriving manufacture in linens and
woolens. Then England, in her mercantilist blindness, began to pass
legislation that aimed to cut off these fabrics from English
competition. Soon thousands of Ulster artisans were out of work. Nor
was their religion immune from English attack, for these Ulstermen
were Presbyterians. These civil, religious, and economic persecutions
thereupon drove to America an ethnic strain that has had an influence
upon the character of the nation far out of proportion to its
relative numbers. In the long list of leaders in American politics and
enterprise and in every branch of learning, Scotch-Irish names are
common.
There had been some trade between Ulster and the colonies, and a few
Ulstermen had settled on the eastern shore of Maryland and in Virginia
before the close of the seventeenth century. Between 1714 and 1720,
fifty-four ships arrived in Boston with immigrants from Ireland. They
were carefully scrutinized by the Puritan exclusionists. Cotton Mather
wrote in his diary on August 7, 1718: "But what shall be done for the
great number of people that are transporting themselves thither from
ye North of Ireland?" And John Winthrop, speaking of twenty ministers
and their congregations that were expected the same year, said, "I
wish their coming so over do not prove fatall in the End.
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