This is a thorough, well-researched account of a major group of immigrants to North America. It is also an arrogant, bigoted, and libelous broadside on an entire class of people. Had the author penned a similar work on any other group, say Irish Catholics or Italians or Polish refugees from Nazi persecution for example, he would have been rightly pilloried.
The first few chapters cover life and conditions in Scotland around 1600 and the plantation of Ulster. These aren't too bad, if you can get past the "oh, they were poor, dirty, and ignorant" tone. Where he really gets going, however, is in his description of the settlements and frontier life in North America. According to him, relations between European settlers and Native Americans were just peachy until the Scotch-Irish showed up. All of the wars that followed were apparently their fault, just because they are a difficult people.
He has an entire chapter on the Scotch-Irish in politics, wherein he states that they produced presidents, jurists, congressmen, and governors far in excess of their representation in the general population, but then he goes on to claim that they contributed nothing original to the political development of the United States. He baldly states that it was not the Scotch-Irish but English settlers who introduced ideas such as trial by jury, bans on excessive fines, etc., but he makes no mention of separation of church and state or freedom of speech. I don't know if the Danbury Baptists who so publicly lobbied Thomas Jefferson for just these freedoms were necessarily Scotch-Irish, but Leyburn lumps Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians all together as uniformly Scotch-Irish and then makes no mention whatsoever of this rather important political innovation. Perhaps he doesn't like it.
He seems to have an absolute fixation on Scotch-Irish crudity, accusing them of being "deaf, dumb, and blind" to any artistic sentiment. He harps at great length in multiple passages on their complete indifference to painting, architecture, music, and even landscaping, calling their houses "prisons in miniature." Music! Really? Oh, I forgot. Bluegrass doesn't count as culture. As for architecture, the only people that produced grand mansions on the frontier were the ones who employed slave labor to do it. This the Scotch-Irish did not do, and while he admits this point, in his mind it doesn't seem to absolve them of lack of taste.
The mask of objective scholarship comes off completely in the final chapter. Here he talks about the descendants of the Scotch-Irish who stayed behind in regions after the frontier had moved on. Their goal, according to the author, was not to create grand works of art or architecture, but to merely improve their farms and businesses and build prosperous, stable communities. Oh, the horror!
The book is terrible. I'm glad I bought it used and didn't contribute to the author's estate.
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