Scotch-Irish in the Southern states

A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American South

Edited by Richard Gray and Owen Robinson (2004)

Chapter 18, The South Through Other Eyes, page 327

Professor Helen Taylor

I came across the following paragraph on the Scotch-Irish of the American South, which was written by Professor Helen Taylor of the University of Exeter:

From the late seventeenth century to the American Revolution, the Southern backcountry was flooded with one of these groups, the Scotch-Irish, and it has been said that their heritage and style are the characteristics most associated with Southerners over the last two centuries: herding rather than tilling, leisurely, musical, tall-taletelling, violent, clannish, family-centered, fiercely Protestant, with a strong sense of honor.  Indeed, the term most used, usually pejoratively, to describe poor white Southern frontiersmenfrom the mid-1700s is the Scottish term for a noisy, boasting fellow, a 'cracker'.