Scottish Americans

Numbers

1790 population of Scottish and Scotch-Irish origin by state

Data results per census

Scottish origins by state

• California – 677,055
• Texas – 628,610
• North Carolina – 475,322
• Florida – 469,782
• Pennsylvania – 325,588
• Ohio – 314,214
• Georgia – 293,211
• Washington – 289,953

• Maine
• Vermont
• New Hampshire
• Utah
• Wyoming and North Carolina
• South Carolina
• Idaho and Tennessee
• Oregon

• Boone, NC
• Barre, VT and Sevierville, TN
• Asheville, NC
• Marion, NC and Pinehurst-Southern Pines, NC
• Jackson, WY and Lebanon, NH
• Cullowhee, NC
• Craig, CO
• Morehead City, NC, Morristown, TN and Sandpoint, ID

  2020 population of Scottish ancestry by state

State	Number	Percentage
Alabamants|87,580 Historical contributions Explorers The first Scots in North America came with the Vikings. A Christian bard from the Hebrides accompanied Bjarni Herjolfsson on his voyage around Greenland in 985/6 which sighted the mainland to the west. The first Scots recorded as having set foot in the New World were a man named Haki and a woman named Hekja, slaves owned by Leif Eiriksson. The Scottish couple were runners who scouted for Thorfinn Karlsefni's expedition in c. 1010, gathering wheat and the grapes for which Vinland was named. The controversial Zeno letters have been cited in support of a claim that Henry Sinclair, earl of Orkney, visited Nova Scotia in 1398. In the early years of Spanish colonization of the Americas, a Scot named Tam Blake spent 20 years in Colombia and Mexico. He took part in the conquest of New Granada in 1532 with Alonso de Heredia. He arrived in Mexico in 1534–5, and joined Coronado's 1540 expedition to the American Southwest. Traders After the Union of the Crowns of Scotland and England in 1603, King James VI, a Scot, promoted joint expeditions overseas, and became the founder of British America. The first permanent English settlement in the Americas, Jamestown, was thus named for a Scot. The earliest Scottish communities in America were formed by traders and planters rather than farmer settlers. The hub of Scottish commercial activity in the colonial period was Virginia. Regular contacts began with the transportation of indentured servants to the colony from Scotland, including prisoners taken in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. By the 1670s Glasgow was the main outlet for Virginian tobacco, in open defiance of English restrictions on colonial trade; in return the colony received Scottish manufactured goods, emigrants and ideas. In the 1670s and 1680s Presbyterian Dissenters fled persecution by the Royalist privy council in Edinburgh to settle in South Carolina and New Jersey, where they maintained their distinctive religious culture. Trade between Scotland and the American colonies was finally regularized by the Acts of Union 1707 that combined Scotland and England into the single kingdom of Great Britain. Population growth and the commercialization of agriculture in Scotland encouraged mass emigration to America after the French and Indian War, a conflict which had also seen the first use of Scottish Highland regiments as Indian fighters. More than 50,000 Scots, principally from the west coast, settled in the Thirteen Colonies between 1763 and 1776, the majority of these in their own communities in the South, especially North Carolina, although Scottish individuals and families also began to appear as professionals and artisans in every American town. Scots arriving in Florida and the Gulf Coast traded extensively with Native Americans. Settlers Highland Scots started arriving in North America in the 1730s. Unlike their Lowland and Ulster counterparts, the Highlanders tended to cluster together in self-contained communities, where they maintained their distinctive cultural features such as the Gaelic language and piobaireachd music. Groups of Highlanders existed in coastal Georgia and the Mohawk Valley in New York. By far the largest Highland community was centered on the Cape Fear River, which saw a stream of immigrants from Argyllshire, and, later, other regions such as the Isle of Skye. Highland Scots were overwhelmingly loyalist in the Revolution. Distinctly Highland cultural traits persisted in the region until the 19th century, at which point they were assimilated into Anglo-American culture. Commerce with Native American tribes was common, and interactions between Highland men and Native American women varied from brief meetings to long-lasting partnerships. Marriages between Highlanders and Native Americans occurred throughout North America, resulting in whole Scots-Indian families from these unions. The Ulster Scots, known as the Scots-Irish in North America, were descended from people originally from Scotland, as well as the north of England and other regions, who colonized the province of Ulster in Ireland in the seventeenth century. After several generations, their descendants left for America, and struck out for the frontier, in particular the Appalachian mountains, providing an effective "buffer" for attacks from Native Americans. In the colonial era, they were usually simply referred to as "Irish," with the "Scots-" or "Scotch-" prefixes becoming popular when the descendants of the Ulster emigrants wanted to differentiate themselves from the Catholic Irish who were flocking to many American cities in the nineteenth century. Unlike the Highlanders and Lowlanders, the Scots-Irish were usually patriots in the Revolution. They have been noted for their tenacity and their cultural contributions to the United States. Folk and gospel music American bluegrass and country music styles have some of their roots in the Appalachian ballad culture of Scotch-Irish Americans. Fiddle tunes from the Scottish repertoire, as they developed in the eighteenth century, spread rapidly into British colonies. However, in many cases, this occurred through the medium of print rather than aurally, explaining the presence of Highland-origin tunes in regions like Appalachia where there was essentially no Highland settlement. Outside of Gaelic-speaking communities, however, characteristic Highland musical idioms, such as the "Scotch-snap", were flattened out and assimilated into anglophone musical styles. Some African American communities were influenced musically by the Scottish American communities in which they were embedded. Psalm-singing and gospel music have become central musical experiences for African American churchgoers and it has been posited that some elements of these styles were introduced, in these communities, by Scots. Psalm-singing, or "precenting the line" as it is technically known, in which the psalms are called out and the congregation sings a response, was a form of musical worship initially developed for non-literate congregations and Africans in America were exposed to this by Scottish Gaelic settlers as well as immigrants of other origins. However, the theory that the African-American practice was influenced mainly by the Gaels has been criticized by ethnomusicologist Terry Miller, who notes that the practice of "lining out" hymns and psalms was common all over Protestant Britain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and that it is far more likely that Gospel music originated with English psalm singing. The first foreign tongue spoken by some slaves in America was Scottish Gaelic picked up from Gaelic-speaking immigrants from the Scottish Highlands and Western Isles. There are accounts of African Americans singing Gaelic songs and playing Scottish Gaelic music on bagpipes and fiddle.