April 1774

 Last month we talked about the fact that the news of the Boston Tea party had reached Great Britain and that Parliament  had passed the first of the  Coercive Acts of 1774 which were  known as the Intolerable Acts in the American colonies,  These acts were a series of four laws passed by the British Parliament to punish the colony of Massachusetts Bay for the Boston Tea Party.  

Then it took time for the  news to reach our shores via the ships that sailed from Great Britain.  The News reached Virginia in May.  The colonies were abuzz with the news of the audacious act of the Sons of Liberty in Boston.

So while the Revolutionary actions are quiet in April, I'll talk about a contributing factor to the Revolution.  And it includes a great many of our ancestors for those of us who live in Appalachia:  the Scotch-Irish.  The Scotch-Irish are people who originally lived in Scotland or England and moved into the northern part of Ireland.  I believe that without the Scotch-Irish the war might never have happened.  Our population was made of many people.  There were Quakers who did not believe in fighting.  There were Germans who were busy with their very tidy and productive farms.  There were the English who traded with England and might not have become so unhappy with the government in Great Britain.  And then there were the Scotch-Irish who did not have great love for the English and were always ready for a fight!  They had their rifles (while the English mostly had muskets) and they were excellent marksmen.  They were proud and quick tempered by nature.  So I suggest as we wait for the news to get back to the colonies about Parliament's action to punish the Boston people for the Boston Tea party in May that we take a look at these colonists who fit the description of Scotch-Irish.  These families had lived in Scotland and England and then moved to Northern Ireland and lived there for a generation or two or even three.

The first major influx of border English and Lowland Scots into Ulster came in the first two decades of the 1600s.  Bailyn in his book, The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction, says on page 26: 
in one 24 month period in the 1630's at least 10,000 Scots migrated to Ireland.  The below map shows how easy this migration was because of the geography of the area.

Many of the early migrants came from the Scottish borders, men with names like Armstrong, Bell and Elliot.  These settlers  had been hardened in an age-old struggle with the English.   By 1640 it is estimated that as many as 100,000 Scots had settled in Ulster compared with some 20,000 migrants from England. 

And many of these families lived in Ulster for several generations.  What caused them to look to the shores of North America?

Pushed out of Ireland by religious conflicts, lack of political autonomy and dire economic conditions, these immigrants, who were often called "Scotch-Irish," were pulled to America by the promise of land ownership and greater religious freedom.

And they poured into the ports of Philadelphia from 1717 to 1750.

They came in such a deluge that the settled Quakers and English began pushing them towards the frontier which at that time would have been Lancaster County, PA.

A great many Scotch-Irish squatted on the land without purchasing the land on which they lived.  When in 1730 the Penn family began to try to crack down on these settlers forcing them to buy their land, the Scotch-Irish moved.  

And a large number ended up in what was often called the Irish Quarter:

The Beverly Patent and the Borden Survey.

On a modern map it would look like the below:

To make it easier to know which county to look in, I present a few maps from the site

https://homepages.rootsweb.com/~george/countyformations/virginiaformationmaps.html

Why did the settlers move south rather than West?  One reason was the Indians who lived to the west of the Susquehanna river in PA.  Another was the Proclamation line of 1763.  After the French and Indian War, the British government drew up the proclamation line and it was illegal to live west of this line.

So why do I believe that this was a factor leading up to the Revolution?  Because these men and women had no love for the British government.  And they were rough and ready and did not shirk from a fight.  When the call went out to fight at Point Pleasant only a few months after the Boston Tea Party in the early fall of 1774, it was the Scotch-Irish living on the frontier who gathered  at Camp Union (present Lewisburg) and journeyed down the Kanawha River to its mouth at Point Pleasant, arriving on October 6.  While the northern events were happening in the early years leading up to the Revolutionary War, our Scotch-Irish ancestors were gathering on the frontier of our new lands ready to fight the British for their land and the right to practice their Presbyterian non-conformist religion.