Scottish Americans or Scots Americans (; ) are Americans whose ancestry originates wholly or partly in Scotland. Scottish Americans are closely related to Scotch-Irish Americans, descendants of Ulster Scots, and communities emphasize and celebrate a common heritage.Celeste Ray, 'Introduction', p. 6, id., 'Scottish Immigration and Ethnic Organization in the United States', pp. 48-9, 62, 81, in id. (ed.), The Transatlantic Scots (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2005). The majority of Scotch-Irish Americans originally came from Lowland Scotland and Northern England before migrating to the province of Ulster in Ireland (see Plantation of Ulster) and thence, beginning about five generations later, to North America in large numbers during the eighteenth century. The number of Scottish Americans is believed to be around 25 million, and celebrations of Scottish identity can be seen through Tartan Day parades, Burns Night celebrations, and Tartan Kirking ceremonies.
Significant emigration from Scotland to America began in the 1700s, accelerating after the Jacobite rising of 1745, the steady degradation of clan structures, and the Highland Clearances. During the 18th century, the "push" elements of emigration decisions were set alongside the "pull" of the many opportunities for Scots in the British Empire created by the Act of Union. At this stage, those leaving included members of the lower-ranking gentry; for instance, emigrants from the Highlands had among them tacksmen and some wealthier farmers who chose not to accept the changes being imposed in the earliest phases of the Highland clearances.
Even higher rates of emigration occurred after these times of social upheaval. In the second half of the 19th century, Scotland was losing to emigration, in the years 18551860, an amount equal to 28% of its natural population increase; this rose to 54% in 18811890 and 84% by 19011910.
In the 1920s, Scotland experienced a reduction in total population of 0.8%, totally absorbing the natural population increase of 7.2%: the U.S. and Canada were the most common destinations of these emigrants. Despite emphasis on the struggles and 'forced exile' of Jacobites and Highland clansmen in popular media, Scottish migration was mostly from the Lowland regions. The vast bulk of Scottish emigration was at times when the domestic economy was doing well. The idea that the typical emigrant was escaping poverty is not supported by the evidence. Those who left, while being a diverse cross-section of all of Scottish society, included many whose abilities were considered by some to be a worrying loss to Scotland.
Numbers The table shows the ethnic Scottish population in the British colonies from 1700 to 1775. In 1700 the total population of the colonies was 250,888, of whom 223,071 (89%) were white and 3.0% were ethnically Scottish. Composition of the American Colonies1700 %1755%1775 % English / Welsh80.0 English / Welsh52.0 English 48.7 African11.0 African20.0 African20.0 Dutch4.0 German7.0 Scots-Irish 7.8 Scottish3.0 Scots-Irish7.0 German6.9 Other European2.0 Irish5.0 Scottish6.6 Scottish4.0 Dutch2.7 Dutch3.0 French 1.4 Other European2.0 Swedish 0.6 Other 5.3 Colonies100.0 Thirteen100.0 Colonies100.0
1790 population of Scottish and Scotch-Irish origin by state Population estimates are as follows. State or Territory Ulster Scottish Total ScotchScotch-Irish#%#%#%2.20%1.80%4.00%8.00%6.30%14.30%15.50%11.50%27.00% & Tenn. 10.00%7.00%17.00% 4.50%8.00%12.50% 7.60%5.80%13.40% 4.40%2.60%7.00% 6.20%4.60%10.80% 7.70%6.30%14.00% 7.00%5.10%12.10% 14.80%5.70%20.50% 8.60%11.00%19.60% 5.80%2.00%7.80% 15.10%9.40%24.50% 5.10%3.20%8.30% 10.20%6.20%16.40% 8.21%5.99%14.20%4.08%2.92%7.00%1.53%1.10%2.63% Spanish America 0.35%0.25%0.60%8.09%5.91%14.00%
Data results per census Scottish origins Year Population %1980 10,048,816 4.44 1990 5,393,581 2.2 2000 4,890,581 1.7 2010"Total ancestry categories tallied for people with one or more ancestry categories reported 2010 American Community Survey 1-Year Estimates". United States Census Bureau 5,460,679 3.1 2020 5,298,861 1.6Scotch-Irish origins Year Population %1980 16,418 0.007 1990 5,617,7732.3 2000 4,319,232 1.5 2010 3,257,161 1.9 2020 2,937,156 0.9 The number of Americans of Scottish descent today is estimated to be 20 to 25 million (up to 8.3% of the total U.S. population).
The majority of Scotch-Irish Americans originally came from Lowland Scotland and Northern England before migrating to the province of Ulster in Ireland (see Plantation of Ulster) and thence, beginning about five generations later, to North America in large numbers during the eighteenth century.
In the 2000 census, 4.8 million Americans self-reported Scottish ancestry, 1.7% of the total U.S. population. Over 4.3 million self-reported Scotch-Irish ancestry, for a total of 9.2 million Americans self-reporting some kind of Scottish descent. Self-reported numbers are regarded by demographers as massive under-counts, because Scottish ancestry is known to be disproportionately under-reported among the majority of mixed ancestry,Mary C. Walters, Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 31-6. and because areas where people reported "American" ancestry were the places where, historically, Scottish and Scotch-Irish Protestants settled in North America (that is: along the North American coast, Appalachia, and the Southeastern United States). Scottish Americans descended from nineteenth-century Scottish emigrants tend to be concentrated in the West, while many in New England are the descendants of emigrants, often Gaelic-speaking, from the Maritime Provinces of Canada, from the 1880s onward. The Western U.S. in particular, especially the Northwest, had a mix of immigration direct from Scotland, post-Civil War migration from the upland South, as well as down from Canada. Americans of Scottish descent outnumber the population of Scotland, where 4,459,071 or 88.09% of people identified as ethnic Scottish in the 2001 Census.
Scottish origins by state The states with the largest populations of either Scottish or Scotch Irish ancestral origin:
California – 677,055 (1.7% of state population) Texas – 628,610 (2.8%) North Carolina – 475,322 (4.5%) Florida – 469,782 (2.3%) Pennsylvania – 325,588 (2.5%) Ohio – 314,214 (2.7%) Georgia – 293,211 (2.8%) Washington – 289,953 (3.0%)
The states with the top percentages of Scottish or Scotch-Irish residents:
Maine (6.0% of state population) Vermont (5.5%) New Hampshire (5.3%) Utah (5.0%) Wyoming and North Carolina (4.5% each) South Carolina (4.4%) Idaho and Tennessee (4.2% each) Oregon (4.0%)
The metropolitan and micropolitan areas with the top percentage of Scottish or Scotch-Irish residents: Boone, NC (9.1% of micropolitan area population) Barre, VT and Sevierville, TN (8.3% each) Asheville, NC (8.1%) Marion, NC and Pinehurst-Southern Pines, NC (7.7% each) Jackson, WY and Lebanon, NH (7.0%) Cullowhee, NC (6.8%) Craig, CO (6.5% each) Morehead City, NC, Morristown, TN and Sandpoint, ID (6.4% each)
2020 population of Scottish ancestry by state As of 2020, the distribution of Scottish Americans across the 50 states and DC is as presented in the following table. +StateNumberPercentage 1.79%2.15%1.69%1.68% 1.19%2.48%1.60%1.57%1.33%1.45%1.67%0.94% 3.20% 1.13% 1.67% 1.51%1.88%1.86% 0.98% 4.47% 1.44% 2.03% 2.08% 1.17% 1.44% 1.69% 2.95% 1.35% 1.50% 4.11% 0.96% 1.45% 0.99% 2.24% 1.19% 1.77% 1.73% 2.79% 1.45% 1.67% 2.25% 1.21% 2.05% 1.32% 4.18% 4.27% 1.97%2.65% 1.99% 1.05%3.12%1.62%
A significant of Scottish Gypsies number made their way to the United States after 1880.
Many African Americans have Scottish ancestry because Scottish people had owned black slaves in the Southern United States.
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.Grænlendinga Saga (c. 1190), 2, tr. Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Pálsson, in The Vinland Sagas (Penguin: Harmondsworth, Middx, 1965), pp. 51-2, 107.Michael Fry, How the Scots Made America (New York: Thomas Dunne, 2005), p. 7.
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.Eirik's Saga (c. 1260), 8, tr. Magnusson and Palsson, in Vinland Sagas, pp. 95, 109.Fry, How the Scots Made America, pp. 8-9.
The controversial Zeno letters have been cited in support of a claim that Henry Sinclair, earl of Orkney, visited Nova Scotia in 1398.Fry, How the Scots Made America, p. 10.
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.Jim Hewitson, Tam Blake & Co.: The Story of the Scots in America (Edinburgh: Orion, 1993), pp. 12-13.Fry, How the Scots Made America, p. 11.
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.Fry, How the Scots Made America, p. 12. 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.Fry, How the Scots Made America, p. 19. 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.Alex Murdoch, "USA", Michael Lynch (ed), The Oxford Companion to Scottish History (Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 629-633.
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.Fry, How the Scots Made America, pp. 18, 19. 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,Fry, How the Scots Made America, p. 20. 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.Fry, How the Scots Made America, p. 41.
Settlers