Calvin and the Scots-Irish in America

by Bill Potter, June 5, 2009

Some New England Congregationalists despised them: “They keep the Sabbath and everything else that’s not tied down.” The English king had many of them transported from their homes in Scotland to the Ulster Plantation. Radical Irish Catholics hated them as Protestant heretics and interlopers who deserved to die. The Anglican Church disbarred their pastors and tried to impose the Prayer Book and liturgy. Many were barefoot and dirty and owned not much more than the clothes on their back. They were the Scots-Irish, and they helped create the United States. Then they defined the cultural ethos that would be the majority view of what it meant to be an American. And they were Calvinists.

The character and culture of the Scots developed over hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years prior to their coming to America. Certain traits that are identified with the Scots-Irish in America — their disposition to keep moving into the frontier, their headlong aggressive tactics in a fight, the centrality and love of family and clan and their willingness to die for them, resistance to tyranny and love of liberty, are all of ancient lineage. Their uncompromising attachment to the belief in man’s total depravity, God’s sovereignty, predestination, regulative principle of worship, and “republican” church government, entered their souls in the Reformation. Historian William T. Latimer put it this way: “The principles of Protestantism sank into their hearts, and changed the habits of their lives. In two generations, ‘men of clay’ became ‘men of iron.’”^[1]

The Scots’ connection with John Calvin came through the preaching of John Knox. Occasionally God places a man in a position of influence and power that so dominates a nation or a cause that historians stand back in awe at the world-changing result. Certainly Martin Luther and John Calvin assumed those roles. In Scotland, John Knox was just such a man. He identified with the reformers in Scotland and was arrested and sent to the galleys. Released in 1549 and exiled to England, he traveled to Geneva Switzerland in 1554 to sit at the feet of John Calvin. Returning to England and Scotland, he fearlessly led the reformation of the Scottish Kirk, defying Mary Queen of Scots and fearlessly preaching the Gospel of Christ to the nation. His theological training had come from Calvin himself, and the Presbyterian government and Calvinist theology transformed the churches north of England.

The history of the Scottish Church, so closely associated with the teaching of John Calvin, was also intertwined with the monarchs and dynastic intrigues of England. As English kings James I, Charles I, Charles II, and James II, all attempted to impose the Anglican liturgy and Episcopal church government on the Presbyterian Scots, some quickly accommodated the impositions, but many did not. The result was persecution and sometimes war and slaughter. Many a covenanted Scottish Calvinist died for refusing to use the Book of Common Prayer or bow to bishops.

During the seventeenth century, many Scots moved to the Ulster Plantation of Northern Ireland. Sometimes the lure of better land or possible economic improvement motivated the move, but just as often they were fleeing the religious persecutions in their homeland. Founded in 1607 when James I seized millions of acres of Irish lands, recently vacated by their two chief Irish overlords, the English triggered three hundred years of bloody battles, wars, and reprisals, as the native Irish Catholics tried to oust the newcomers. Both Englishmen and Scots settled in Ulster and other parts of Ireland throughout the next two centuries, transplanting their cultures and trying to keep an uneasy rapprochement with their Roman Catholic neighbors. Some of the native Irish leaders tried, in turn, to maintain ties with Spain, France, and Rome, with the hope of someday driving the Scots and English from their soil.

The Scots brought their Calvinist Presbyterianism with them, although they were still harassed and pressured by the Anglican establishment in England. The bigotry and persecution by the English bishops never reached the same intensity that it did in Scotland. Also, with the migration of Puritan Englishmen to Ulster, the Calvinist theology found favor and acceptance even in some English churches. The Scots in Ireland still faced poverty and famine occasionally, compelling a few to immigrate to the American colonies in the seventeenth century. Cotton Mather wrote in the 1640s that “we are comforted with great numbers of the oppressed brethren coming from the north of Ireland. The glorious providence of God, in the removal of so many of a desirable character from the north of Ireland hath doubtless very great intentions in it.”^[2] Most of them united with the Congregationalist churches. Presbyterians in America invited the Scots in Ireland to send ministers once their numbers increased enough to support pastors. The first man to accept a call to America, twenty-five year old Francis Makemie, came to Maryland from the presbytery of Laggan in Northern Ireland in 1683. He traveled up and down the Maryland and Virginia Eastern Shores as well as in New York and New England, planting Presbyterian Churches and laying the ground-work for future immigrants, mostly from Northern Ireland.

The large influx of Scots-Irish began around 1714 and became a tide in several periods of the eighteenth century. While some remained in the eastern settlements, many more moved to the frontier, especially in Pennsylvania and the Carolinas. One of the central features of the immigrants’ theology was a tenacious adherence to the Westminster Confession of Faith and Catechisms. That document, which had been carefully crafted by Reformed Bible scholars of the English-speaking people in the 1640s, in large measure defined and refined the central doctrinal tenets espoused by John Calvin and his students a century earlier.

One church historian of the period said “the emigration began, and like the mighty rivers in the New World, went on in a widening and deepening current to pour into the vast forests of America. . . . All the colonies from New York southward were enriched by shiploads of these people. They came with little money, but with strong hands and stout hearts and divine principles.”^[3]

The idea of strict subscription to the Confession became a hallmark of the Scots-Irish Churches and a point of ardent debate, as Presbyterians in America expanded in the original 13 colonies and into the more amorphous frontier regions, devoid of the discipline of the more settled coastal churches. The western mountains beckoned the new immigrants where personal liberty and independent self-reliance enabled extended families and small communities to flourish. As in Calvin’s Geneva, “The Bible and the catechism held an honored place in the instruction of youth in their schools and in their families.”^[4]

Also as in Geneva, many of those hardy immigrants valued both Calvinistic Presbyterianism and education. Wherever they went, the Scots-Irish started grammar schools, for ability to study the Bible ranked high as a priority. Their first institute of higher instruction was known as “The Log College,” begun by William Tennant who sought to train ministers for the Presbyterian churches. While Princeton University and Seminary became the most important Calvinist College, throughout the nineteenth century they built colleges across the Ohio Valley and the South, wherever they settled. Many of those schools still have their doors open though most have discarded their Scottish theological heritage.

The Scots-Irish fertility rate was 40% higher than most other groups; they increased their numbers exponentially. Modern DNA studies have proven that, for whatever reason, people of Scottish origin are still the most fecund race in the world, though they are no longer reproducing themselves at a survival rate in Scotland or Ireland. In any case, the Scots-Irish of America took seriously the mandate to be fruitful and multiply; by 1775 as many as a half a million Scots-Irish immigrants and their American born descendants lived in the geographic area in the mountainous areas of Pennsylvania, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, and South Carolina. Within a very few generations, the Scots Irish would expand into the Ohio Valley, Indiana, Illinois, Texas, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Arkansas, Kansas, Iowa, and Missouri would soon be the settlement areas, then off to the Pacific coast.

They took their theological ties to Calvin and the Reformation with them. As James Webb has observed, “organized religion led by strong ministers was the backbone of the communities. . . . the churches became vital centers of religious, social, and even political activity.”^[5] In the 1750s, hard war came to the mountains — the French and Indian War. They built blockhouse forts and fought in clan groupings, and they took losses not unlike previous centuries in Ireland and Scotland. In 1760 alone, the famous and powerful Calhoun family of South Carolina lost twenty-three of its members in fights against the Cherokee.

By the time of the American War for Independence, the Scots-Irish were a force to be reckoned with — families with ten or more children were not uncommon. With a history of English persecution and a love of liberty and non-interference, the Scots-Irish overwhelmingly supported the Patriot cause, so much so that a member of Parliament called the troubles in America “the Presbyterian rebellion.”

Fully forty percent of American army was of Scots-Irish descent. While some of their Scottish brethren remained loyal to the king and became Tories, and Highland regiments stiffened the backbone of the British army, the Scots-Irish would have none of it. Of American Generals and Major Generals, the following were Scots-Irish Calvinists: Anthony Wayne, John Stark, Henry Knox, William Alexander (Lord Stirling), Alexander McDowell, Richard Montgomery, John Sullivan, William Moultrie, Daniel Morgan, John Beatty, Francis Marion, Griffith Rutherford, and about twenty-five others. The number of colonels and other officers of Scots-Irish descent were described as “legion.”^[6]

One of the most revealing records that shows the attitude and disposition of the Scots-Irish regarding the desire for a break with England is found in the Mecklenburg, North Carolina Declaration of Independence, fully a year before Congress acted. All the members of that convention were connected with the seven Presbyterian churches and congregations that embraced the county of Mecklenburg. One of the signers was a minister, and nine were elders of Presbyterian Churches. Calvin’s Geneva had introduced federal government, checks and balances, and “interpositional magistracies.”^[7] John Knox had posited the “moral duty to resist Tyranny,”^[8] and the Mecklenburg Declaration reflected those principles. In part, that Declaration of 1775 read:

Resolved: That whosever directly or indirectly abetted, or in any way, form, or manner, countenanced the unchartered [i.e. unconstitutional] and dangerous invasion of our rights, as claimed by Great Britain, is an enemy to this County, to America, and to the inherent and inalienable rights of man.

Resolved, That we the citizens of Mecklenburg county do hereby dissolve the political bands, which have connected us to the Mother country, and hereby absolve ourselves to the British Crown . . . who have wantonly trampled on our rights and liberties and inhumanly shed the innocent blood of American patriots at Lexington.

Resolved, That we do hereby declare ourselves a free and independent people . . . under the control of no power other than that of our God and the General government of the congress; to the maintenance of which independence, we solemnly pledge to each other, our mutual cooperation, our lives, our fortunes, and our most sacred honor.

After outlining their commitment to the laws they inherited and establishing a militia to protect the people, these Scots-Irish Calvinist stalwarts vowed “to use every exertion to spread the love of country and fire of freedom throughout America.”^[9]

I think John Calvin would have been a signatory.