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ethnicity, today’s America has a hole in its understanding of its own origins. Not a small hole, as for instance the need to rediscover and recount some long-ago incident in an isolated backwater, but a huge, gaping vacuum that affects virtually every major debate where ethnicity plays a role.
    This lack of cultural awareness applies to many people of Scots-Irish heritage as well.
    The story of the Scots-Irish has been lost in the common understanding for a variety of reasons. First, due to their individuality and the timing of their migration—roughly the first seventy years of the 1700s—the Scots-Irish never really desired to define themselves by their ethnic identity. In their rush to become Americans, the “hyphens” didn’t matter, except in the telling of family histories in the front-porch chronicles that persisted into my own generation. Indeed, although they were the dominant culture of these regions, they were not ethnically exclusive and often intermarried with those who accepted the mores of their communities. A good example of how this phenomenon has affected self-identification is that fully 38 percent of the city of Middlesborough, Kentucky (in the heart of Scots-Irish America), listed their ethnicity on the 2000 census simply as “native American,” compared to 7 percent nationwide. America’s “ethnocentric retreat” of the last few decades caught this culture unaware and by surprise.
    Second, many of the most literate observers of American culture tend to lump the Scots-Irish in with the largely English-derivative New England Protestant groups and the original English settlers of the vast Virginia colony as “WASPs” (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) under the rubric of “British” ancestry. But these were, and are, distinctly separate and different peoples. In terms of historical background, education, religious formality, and experiences here in America, the people who made up the New England settlements had nothing in common with the Scots-Irish or even with the English who settled in Virginia. Alexis de Tocqueville was instructive on this point in his 1835 classic
Democracy in America
. “The settlers who established themselves in New England,” he pointed out, “all belonged to the more independent classes of their native country. . . . These men possessed, in proportion to their number, a greater mass of intelligence than is to be found in any European nation of our own time. All without exception had received a good education, and many of them were known in Europe for their talents and acquirements.” 2
    The New England migrations were well planned, carefully structured, and organized from their beginning to create townships and the advantages of urban infrastructure. The townships were platted out with a careful sense of equality, and families were given their own pieces of land. Academic institutions were created early on, including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and many of our other great learning institutions. The WASP societies of New England were indeed formidable, dominating America’s intellectual and economic institutions for centuries.
    The original English settlements in Virginia were quite the opposite, immediately creating an agrarian economy and a three-tiered class system that often caused members of the lower classes to regress rather than advance as the generations moved forward. Of those English settlements de Tocqueville wrote, “The men sent to Virginia were seekers of gold, adventurers without resources and without character. . . . They were in nowise above the level of the inferior classes in England.” 3 Even the later migrations of “Cavalier aristocracy” that eventually made up the famed first families of Virginia had little to do with the WASP cultures of New England—and were not interconnected with the Scots-Irish themselves at all. The Scots-Irish migrations were separate from this three-tiered structure along the Virginia Tidewater, in geographic,