How Scotch-Irish is your English? The Ulster Heritage
of East Tennessee Speech
Revision of an essay
originally published in Journal of East Tennessee History, vol. 67, 1-33
(1995).
By Prof. Michael Montgomery (copyright of the author)
Growing up in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the 1960s, I was required to take a
six-week course on the state's history in the eighth grade.1 There my classmates and I
learned such notable facts as why Tennessee is nicknamed the "Volunteer State,"
what the "War of the Roses" political campaign of the late 19th century was, and
who the three Presidents were the state contributed to that national office. The
answer to the last question, Tennesseans should know, is Andrew Jackson, James
K. Polk, and Andrew Johnson. Our textbook also informed us that all three men
were born outside the state (in the Carolinas, actually), but this mattered very
little to us. Since they had adopted Tennessee, had built their careers there,
and were elected from there, these men were Volunteers foremost. It was
therefore a little unsettling to me, upon leaving the state in 1981 to take a
job at the University of South Carolina, to learn that not only did both
Carolinas fervently claim Andy Jackson, who was born in 1767 in a vaguely mapped
area of the Carolina Piedmont called the Waxhaws, but that the two Carolinas
were still arguing about the issue—putting forth rival claims and
counterclaims—of the exact site of his nativity.
After a decade of living in Columbia and hearing the local arguments, I could
finally begin to concede South Carolina a partial claim to Old Hickory, but
little could have prepared me for the surprise at finding still another
claimant—in what I thought was half a world away. When traveling in Northern
Ireland in 1990 I discovered that the village of Boneybefore took credit for
Jackson as well! Indeed, in this tiny County Antrim community, which one reaches
a mile north of the medieval fortress town of Carrickfergus, fifteen miles from
Belfast, one comes suddenly upon a roadside cottage which calls itself the
Andrew Jackson Centre. In the summertime the site features a program of
craftwork demonstrations and related events and a selection of historical
videos, including "From Here to the Whitehouse," whose account begins in 1765
(two years before Jackson's birth), when "Andrew Jackson, Snr., his wife
Elizabeth and sons Hugh and Robert left Boneybefore, Carrickfergus. They
emigrated from Larne and sailed to Charleston, South Carolina." In presenting a
chronology of "Andrew Jackson 1765-1845 7th President of the United States of
America," the center's brochure asserts a local claim to be Jackson's pre-natal
home, though of course he could not even have been conceived there.2
While the effort of this small place in northeastern Ireland, in the historical
province of Ulster
3, to share some of
Jackson's reputation might strike Americans as only rank local boosterism, it is
in fact this and much more. Anyone who spends much time in the book shops of
Northern Ireland, keeps up with the popular press there, or becomes acquainted
with the activities of its local historical societies or the Ulster-Scots Agency
(a government-funded body set up in 1999 as an outgrowth of the Belfast Good
Friday Agreement) begins to discover an extensive popular literature and
awareness on Ulster people who went to North America in the 18th or early 19th
century and contributed to the developing new country of the United States of
America. One comes across small books such as W. F. Marshall's Ulster Sails
West: The Story of the Great Emigration from Ulster to North America in the 18th
Century. Together with an Outline of the Part Played by Ulster Men in Building
the United States, Eric Montgomery's The Scotch-Irish and Ulster: The
Scotch-Irish in America's History, Ronnie Hanna's The Highest Call:
Ulster and the American Presidency, and Billy Kennedy's The Scots-Irish
in the Hills of Tennessee.4 One finds articles in
magazines, such as David Hume's "Garden of the Waxhaw," in which he declares
that "Andrew Jackson was destined to be a great leader and to enter the White
House as the first of the Ulster Presidents of the United States of America."5 Ulster Presidents? This is
a term that few Americans are familiar with. I certainly wasn't. In Northern
Ireland, though, there is an official ancestral homesite not only for him, but
also for Chester Arthur and Woodrow Wilson (that this writer knows about—there
may well be others).
This literature in Northern Ireland goes to considerable length to name the men
of Ulster stock who signed the Declaration of Independence (at least eight,
including Charles Thompson, Secretary of the Continental Congress, a native of
County Londonderry), who printed the Declaration of Independence (John Dunlap, a
native of County Tyrone), who led the assault at King's Mountain during the
American Revolution, who served as generals during the American Revolution
(twenty-one, by one reckoning), who later became President of the American
republic (at least eleven, as many as seventeen by another count), and so on.
Whether such calculations reflect something of modern political and cultural
currents in Northern Ireland or are the product of an intense sense of history
in the province (in whose six counties today around one hundred local historical
societies flourish), the interest in Ulster-American connections is lively and
genuine, and it represents far more than a ploy for American tourist dollars.
Along with the extensive literature, there is a popular awareness, unparalleled
in the British Isles or anywhere else, of strong historical ties between Ulster
and the United States, even though these took place many generations ago. This
awareness has increased markedly in recent decades, four demonstrations of which
can be cited.
In 1976 the Ulster-American Folk Park was opened near Omagh, County Tyrone, at
the birthplace of Thomas Mellon, who emigrated to the United States as a child
in 1818 and founded a financial empire. The outdoor portion of the museum
attempts to recreate the homesteads and community life that Ulster emigrants
would have known two hundred years ago. The indoor portion features conventional
exhibits, and a recently initiated computer database provides written records of
many kinds on the process of people uprooting themselves from their families and
native soil to sail to a distant, unknown land. Additionally, the museum has
recreated something of the voyage that emigrants would have experienced, by
constructing a replica of a passenger ship, and something of the world they
would have found, by building a section of the Philadelphia waterfront of the
early 19th century. An expanded gallery built in the mid-1990s further documents
struggles and successes of Ulster emigrants and their descendants in the new
environment, featuring the Batlle of King's Mountain, David Crockett, Andrew
Jackson, and so on. The gift shop sells a full-color pictorial map,
"Ulster-American Heritage Trail," which identifies the "ancestral home" in
Ulster of, among many other persons, Edgar Allan Poe, Stephen Foster, Amelia
Earhart, and Neil Armstrong.
Also in 1976 a group of historians at the University of Ulster at Coleraine
organized the first Ulster American Heritage Symposium, an increasingly lively
biennial gatherings that includes scholars across the humanities, amateur
historians, genealogists, and the public at large. The conference alternates
between Northern Ireland and the United States, with recent gathering attracting
attendance of well over a hundred. The next symposium is scheduled for
Knoxville, Tennessee, in June 2006, to be hosted by the East Tennessee
Historical Society.
Third, in 1989 Ulster Television broadcast the four-segment series God's
Frontiersmen: The Scots-Irish Epic, produced by Rory Fitzpatrick, who also
authored a pictorial book of the same title recounting the lives of individuals
of Ulster extraction such as frontiersmen Crockett and Sam Houston and Civil War
generals Stonewall Jackson and Ulysses S. Grant
6. The program was broadcast
throughout the British Isles and was received with great interest. A final
example that can be cited is a special twelve-page section titled "American
Country" (commemorating American Independence day) of the morning daily
Belfast News Letter that emphasized the historical influence of Ulster on
Southern Appalachian music. Among other stories, this included a long feature
article on "The Queen of Tennessee" (Dolly Parton—who else?). The newspaper's
special correspondent wrote dreamily about the Smoky Mountains in an article
titled "Magic in the Place of the Blue Smoke" about how East Tennessee was
settled largely by men and women of Ulster ancestry whose modern-day descendants
faithfully preserve the culture of their forebears.7
While these phenomena are undoubtedly important reflections of the cultural
psyche of Northern Ireland today and of the conviction that the province should
put on record its own unique contributions, that topic belongs to a separate
essay. The purpose here is to put them into perspective with a series of
historical events and to relate them to cultural and linguistic developments in
the United States following the emigration from Ulster. Historically speaking,
two things are most important here. One is that such demonstrations of
Ulster-American connections, seen most broadly, are part of a larger phenomenon:
extensive annals, academic and popular, over the past century on the emigration
of people, largely of Scottish heritage, from Ulster in the six decades before
the American Revolution.8 Nothing comparable exists
for any region of the British Isles, large or small. These are people who are
called "Ulster Scots" in Ireland but in the U.S. usually "Scotch-Irish" or, much
less often, "Scots-Irish."9 Arguably the first account
of their trans-Atlantic contributions was James Craighead's Scotch and Irish
Seeds in American Soil: The Early History of the Scotch and Irish Churches, and
Their Relations to the Presbyterian Church of America.10 The most voluminous study
is Hanna's two-volume The Scotch-Irish, or the Scot in North Britain, North
Ireland, and North America
11, while the most heroic
portrayal appears in The Winning of the West by Theodore Roosevelt, who
wrote that they were the "vanguard of the army of fighting settlers, who with
axe and rifle won their way from the Alleghenies to the Rio Grande and the
Pacific."12.
Similar enthusiastic, testimonial accounts can be found today in both America
and Northern Ireland) and sometimes arouse great fanfare.13 However, modern-day
American versions are more often the critical work of seasoned historians who
rely on original sources, quantitative methods of interpretation, and
dispassionate assessment. Among the best of the latter kind from a generation
ago are R. W. Dickson's Ulster Emigration to Colonial America 1718-1775,
David Noel Doyle's Ireland, Irishmen and Revolutionary America 1760-1820,
Kerby A. Miller's Migrants and Exiles, and James G. Leyburn's The
Scotch-Irish: A Social History. The first three of these cover only segments
of the migration period, while Leyburn provides a detailed chronicle beginning
in 16th-century Scotland. Within more recent years three important volumes that
have appeared are Patrick Griffin's The People with No Name: Ireland's Ulster
Scots, America's Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World,
1689-1764, Kerby A. Miller et al.'s Irish Immigrants in the Land of
Canaan: Letters and Memoirs from Colonial and Revolutionary America 1675-1815,
and Marianne Wokeck's Trade in Strangers: The Beginning of Mass Migration to
North America.14
The other important historical point is that although the vast majority of
Ulster emigrants landed in Philadelphia or elsewhere in the Delaware Valley
(Charles Town, capital of the colony of South Carolina, was a distant second in
popularity), most soon migrated to what became known as the "back country," the
inland parts of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the Carolinas, as well as nearby
regions like Kentucky and East Tennessee. This movement resulted in the
Scotch-Irish often being the dominant settlement group in much of the territory,
and their traditions had a profound formative influence on other groups,
according to many historians (David Hackett Fischer, the most ambitious of
these, identifies twenty-four broad cultural "ways" that connect the
Scotch-Irish with Southern Appalachia in his Albion's Seed: Four British
Folkways in America).15
Although there are many accounts of the pre-Revolutionary emigration of people
from Ulster to North America, controversy remains over what label should be
assigned to them ("Scotch-Irish" is employed here because it is the conventional
term in the U.S.), over the size of the emigration, and over the relative
distinctiveness of this emigrant stream from others that came from the British
Isles. "Scotch" (a term that represents a contraction of "Scottish" and is a
traditional form for the latter) element of the population originated from the
17th-century "Ulster Plantation" of Scottish and English settlers in the north
of Ireland, a process that brought them and the "native" Irish into intimate
contact and often conflict from the first quarter of that century. By the year
1659, the year of one rough survey, 60% of the Ulster population was Irish, 30%
Scottish (primarily in the northeastern counties of Antrim and Down), and 10%
English. The heaviest influx of Scots was still to come—in the 1690s, to escape
famine and religious strife in the Scottish Lowlands.16
Misconceptions about the Scotch-Irish »
Revision of an essay originally published in Journal of East Tennessee History, vol. 67, 1-33 (1995).
By Prof. Michael Montgomery (copyright of the author)
« How Scotch-Irish is your English? | Scotch-Irish pronunciation »
Despite lively debates on some issues, a number of widely held ideas about the Scotch-Irish are genuine misconceptions. Among these is that they represent a mixture or interbreeding of Scottish and Irish populations in Ulster. In fact, these groups usually remained in separate communities in Ireland, though they often lived close to and worked alongside one another. A second misconception is that the Scots who came to Ulster were outcasts—deportees, criminals, and ne'er-do-wells. In fact, the vast majority were driven by economic pressures and the lure of long-term leases on good land, not by political or legal expulsion. They came because land was available on good terms, and they intended to stay. Most of their descendants did, and it is they who constitute the bulk of the present Protestant population there, especially in Antrim, Down, Londonderry, and east Donegal.17
A third misconception is the view that the term "Scotch-Irish" is a 19th-century creation of Americans having Ulster ancestry who wanted to distinguish their heritage from that of the Catholic Irish, who were coming en masse to the U.S., particularly as a result of the Great Potato Famine of the 1840s. The term had been used, at least by outsiders (e.g. Anglican clergymen Jonathan Boucher and Charles Woodmason) in the 18th century. although it is not clear to what extent Ulster emigrants used it for themselves.18 At least one well-informed scholar believes that, when arriving in North America, they most likely would have labeled their ancestry as simply "Irish."19
The consensus on the Scotch-Irish migration to America appears to be 1) that at least 150,000 people left Ulster for North America in the six decades preceding the American Revolution 20; 2) that they were overwhelmingly Presbyterian (as many as ten percent of the migrants were Catholic Irish and at least as many were probably Anglicans of English ancestry; smaller numbers of Baptists, Quakers, Huguenots, and other groups came); 3) that the great majority of these were of Scottish ancestry and tradition (whose forebears had migrated from Scotland one to four generations earlier in the previous century); and 4) that they left primarily for economic reasons. Most Ulster emigrants to North America had never owned land or enjoyed the status or security this afforded. Beginning around 1717 rents in Ulster were significantly raised (or "racked") as leases expired, crop failures brought scarcities of food, and downturns in trade (especially with linen, whose manufacture was the principal cottage industry) occurred, only to reoccur with unnerving frequency in succeeding decades. These factors tipped the balance for countless individuals who, though no doubt strongly attached to their native soil and communities, made the usually irrevocable decision to emigrate. The same factors affected all of Ireland in the 19th century, especially during the potato famine, as a result of which a million people left the Emerald Isle in the 1840s alone.21
From time to time because of their religious affiliation, Irish Presbyterians, called "dissenters" in their day, suffered a measure of political and religious discrimination (these were inseparable because of the established Church of Ireland, affiliated with the Church of England). The legal disabilities and the disaffection over paying compulsory tithes for the support of another denomination and its clergy spurred Presbyterian pastors to promote emigration, sometimes leading their congregations by enlisting a ship, recruiting passengers, organizing supplies, and undertaking the voyage themselves. From their pulpits they characterized their parishioners as an oppressed but chosen people and the American colonies as a veritable Promised Land. Even so, it is doubtful that many left Ireland solely or mainly for religious reasons, even though religious "persecution" by the established church later became a strong element in Scotch-Irish mythology, the set of beliefs which developed to recount how the people survived and overcame obstacles in crossing the Atlantic and how their experience in Ulster had uniquely prepared them for life on the American frontier. This mythology, through which has run a strong element of Calvinistic predestinarianism, has been articulated by popular historians in both Northern Ireland and the U.S. in recent decades, e.g. "Ideally suited for their new life by reason of their experience as pioneers in Ulster, their qualities of character and their Ulster-Scottish background, they made a unique contribution to the land of their adoption"22). Fitzpatrick's God's Frontiersmen and Kennedy's Scots-Irish Chronicles are only two of the most recent examples of the heroic version of this story. For 18th-century Ulster emigrants, such sentiments fed on existing convictions about events in the previous century, when the largely Scottish population in Ulster felt itself abandoned, particularly after the Siege of Londonderry in 1689, by the Stuart monarchy after having it induce them or their ancestors to move to Ulster in the first place, or so they argued. These sentiments have more recently been reinforced by a sense of political and cultural isolation of the Protestant population in Northern Ireland over the past quarter century.
The complexity of the history of the Scotch-Irish has required it to be sketched in some detail. This essay will not deal further with what happened in Scotland and Ireland in the 17th and 18th centuries, but the preceding paragraph reveals one particularly important point. In studying the different groups who came to North America and their subsequent history (especially their own versions of this history), it is often quite difficult to separate sobering fact from dramatic interpretation, or what is demonstrably true from what is widely supposed. One must always ask on what basis a statement is made. Much 20th-century literature about the settlement of East Tennessee and the rest of Southern Appalachia, for instance, states that the most numerous, and in fact the dominant, group was the Scotch-Irish:
From Pennsylvania, many found their way along Virginia's Shenandoah and into the Valley of East Tennessee. Others who went from Philadelphia on a more direct route south into the North Carolina Piedmont were the source of subsequent migrations from middle Carolina westward into the Tennessee country. There were many English, some Germans—mainly from the Palatinate—and Welsh and Irish, a few Huguenots, but the dominant character of Tennesseans came to be identified with that of the Scotch-Irish. Fondness for migration was only one of their characteristics.23
If one were to ask how such a scenario has been determined, the answer would be surnames. This approach to gauging the ethnic derivation of a population is fraught with many difficulties, some better known than others, and many pitfalls, but it has proved to be the principal way to estimate even roughly the relative proportions of different groups among a sample population, because surnames are the least elusive cultural element to trace.24
A standard assessment of the ethnic composition of the first federal census is Surnames in the United States Census of 1790, published by the American Council of Learned Societies.25 Using surnames, this lengthy report judges the population of Tennessee and Kentucky combined to have been 57.9% English, 10.0% "Scotch," 7.0% "Ulster Irish" (i.e. Scotch-Irish), 5.2% South Irish, 14.0% German, 3.6% Dutch/French/Swedish, and 2.3% Miscellaneous (N.B.: people of African ancestry were not considered).26 Subsequently it has become clear that for a variety of reasons, the Scotch-Irish are significantly underrepresented in this calculation. Some emigrants shifted their names after migrating, for instance, to enhance their social and economic prospects in the new environment (those with the Scottish name McKean, from Mc "son of" + Ian "John," sometimes changed it to Johnson; in like manner MacAndrew sometimes became Anderson). The ACLS study considered many names to be English (e.g. Bell, Russell, Robinson) or Scottish (e.g. Campbell, Boyd) that were and are quite common in Ulster. As a result, a reasonable estimate is that twelve to fifteen percent of the late-18th-century white population in the United States derived from Ulster, although again what is most relevant to East Tennessee and nearby regions is the fact that the Scotch-Irish and their descendants were concentrated in the back country. According to a recently published atlas based on the 1980 census, Tennessee is the state with the second-highest proportion of its population, after Massachusetts, having Irish ancestry; for nearly all Tennesseans, their Irish ancestors would have been the Scotch-Irish who left the island in the 18th century.27
It is beyond my purpose to recalculate the surname evidence or to rethink the ethnic proportions of the American population. This essay attempts to consider the Scotch-Irish emigrant stream in terms of its cultural and linguistic bequest to 20th-century East Tennessee and Southern Appalachia. Does the fact that most East Tennesseans have some, and many (like the present writer) have a great deal, of Scotch-Irish ancestry mean anything more than that many of us have names on our family trees that ultimately hark back to Ulster and Scotland? This writer has heard all of his life that most of his foreparents were Scotch-Irish, but so what? To what extent can the culture of East Tennessee be traced to Ulster?
That there is an inheritance of styles and traditions of music can hardly be disputed, but beyond such an obvious statement and a few very limited examples that can be pointed to, what more can be said? Can one make a more precise assessment? Can these musical influences be counted or measured or compared? Experts rankle, as well they should, at the notion of comparing, for instance, Celtic and African influences on country music. These are often inseparable. They have merged in many respects and taken lives of their own in others. They are qualitatively quite different and largely intangible, and individual performers use and blend traditions in multiple ways. Musical styles and traditions are difficult to document before the turn of the present century, making it hazardous to identify and connect traditions that would have crossed the water in the 1700s. Besides, since the Second World War, the influence has also flowed vigorously in the other direction, to Ireland and Scotland. For example, Appalachian Mist is a bluegrass band based in Irvine, Scotland, not in the U.S. However, there is one cultural phenomenon that, with some qualifications, is both measurable and comparable and that one can use to investigate the cultural heritage of East Tennessee.
This is language—the cumulative vocabulary, grammatical patterns, and other usages that are shared within a region and that often distinguish one region from another. It should be possible to examine a select set of expressions common to East Tennessee and Southern Appalachia (but not generally known to the country at large) and then to trace as many of these as possible back to the British Isles to ascertain their probable source. After this is done, the number of usages having a "Scotch-Irish" source can be counted and compared to those found elsewhere (and presumably brought by emigrants from those places), to explore the relative contributions of different regions of Britain and Ireland to the modern-day language of East Tennessee. In part because of the sketchiness of the records for many words, it turns out that such a systematic investigation is more impressionistic and less scientific than one would like, and it will be attempted only for grammatical patterns here. However, it is difficult to imagine anything other than language through which one might seek to what extent the antecedents of East Tennessee culture are Scotch-Irish, English, a mixture of these, or something else. One long-encountered and often-heard idea in East Tennessee is that traditional mountain speech is "Elizabethan" or "Shakespearean."28 It will be interesting to discover how far this may be true (if one takes these terms literally as applying to the time period and location of Shakespeare—Southern England around 1600) and how this inheritance compares to that from Scotland and Ireland. As we will see, East Tennesseans owe much of their traditional speech to Scotch-Irish emigrants of more than two hundred years ago, in fact considerably more than to ancestors who can be traced back to Elizabethan England. Of course, much of East Tennessee speech either was brought in common by emigrants from many parts of the British Isles, or it originated in the United States. These latter two points are especially true for vocabulary. They are not germane to the question at hand, though they remind us of the complexities in establishing the etymological and geographical sources of East Tennessee speech and warn us against oversimplifications. The question is also complicated by the fact that linguistic usages have often undergone changes after reaching American shores.29
What are some of the Scotch-Irish terms? One is the pronoun you'uns, the traditional mountain equivalent of the plural pronoun you and the general Southern American pronouns y'all and you all (the latter have also been used in the mountains, but less often and in somewhat more formal situations). You'uns is a contraction of you + ones; in East Tennessee English ones contracts to form other terms, such as young'un "child" and big'un. Another example is the combination of helping verbs like might + could, as in "I wonder if you might could help me." Also one can cite the adjective airish "windy, chilly" and the preposition till "to" in expressions like "a quarter till five (o''clock)."
It becomes evident from considering only these four expressions that many of the terms useful for comparison (in that they are traceable to the British Isles and are more or less confined to the larger region surrounding East Tennessee) will be old-fashioned and now probably unknown to many younger, particularly urban, speakers. We will sometimes have to scratch beneath the surface of today's speech to identify the "traditional" language of the region, what is sometimes known as "folk" speech, but all of the expressions discussed in this essay are used today, though they are more widely attested in interviews with older East Tennesseans, in old letters, and in dialect stories written in the 19th century (for the most part there is not space to demonstrate these sources).
We also realize from considering these few terms that many traditional usages have acquired a negative reputation in the schoolroom, where they are now considered "country" or "uneducated" or "improper" or "incorrect." Legions of schoolteachers have preached and enforced the values and virtues of "Standard" English. They have given a bad name to and tried to erase many forms, like several to be cited, whose ancestry is as authentic and respectable as any others, even though they may be labeled as "errors" by grammar books today. Whether these expressions are up to snuff for the modern-day classroom and "proper" enough for use in writing is an entirely different issue (and a debatable one) from their historical validity, but there are no grounds to dismiss terms like you'uns and might could as "corruptions" or "ignorant." They are traditional spoken usage, in many cases the literary style of a bygone day, and will accordingly be discussed here as ordinary language distinct to or particularly prevalent in the Southern Appalachian region.
Retracing the ancestry of words to the British Isles is a very different, and usually more difficult, matter than tracing a family tree. While people reproduce and disperse rather slowly, words are more fluid. They can spread across large territories or groups of people quickly and can easily be modified in meaning, sound, or use. Individual people can usually be dated and located with some precision and their relations across generations can be traced in a linear fashion. While words are a common currency used by countless individuals, they are by comparison often extremely elusive and cannot be traced so directly. Historical linguists and compilers of dictionaries are at the mercy of the written documents that survive if they wish to discern the speech patterns of the common people of a bygone day. Each word has a history of its own, and groups of words can never be traced like families. Usually because they have differing social significance, words and pronunciations have variations that compete with one another, meaning that each generation, even each individual, assesses anew the language it inherits, and it makes choices sometimes quite different from its predecessors. Every dialect and variety of language, no matter how isolated or far removed from the effects of the schoolroom, is in a state of constant change.
For all these reasons, it would be a good idea, before turning directly to my investigation, for us to consider how realistic it would be to expect a clear and strong linguistic carryover from Scotch-Irish emigrants of the 18th century and their descendants. Though they came in large numbers to the back country, they are also known to have lost, largely or entirely, many aspects of their culture early on—their Presbyterianism, for example, and most of their musical instruments. The traditional folktales of Northern Ireland and Appalachia today are quite different from one another. The effects of time, education, the dispersal of people, contact with other groups, and other factors at work since the colonial period to smooth away differences in language cannot be doubted. However dominant the Scotch-Irish and their descendants may have been in some places, they often did not constitute a majority. In the early days the population everywhere was ethnically diverse, and it became only more so in succeeding generations. Many Scotch-Irish expressions used early on would no doubt have been considered "provincial" and would not have been reinforced by either the written language of schoolbooks or the accents used in colonial and state capitals.
Another reason one might doubt a significant residue of Scotch-Irish language patterns is the absence of Ulster-derived place names where the Scotch-Irish and their descendants settled. Often after an emigrant group arrives, it begins to name its communities after those it remembers from the old country (this is why the names of so many towns in Massachusetts are the same as those in Southern and Eastern England). There is little, if any, evidence of this in East Tennessee, though one perhaps shouldn't expect very much of it since its settlers were usually a generation or more removed from arrival on the coast. Outside southeastern Pennsylvania and southern New Hampshire, names reminiscent of Ulster are hardly to be found in the Shenandoah Valley, the Carolina Piedmont, or other areas of notable early Scotch-Irish settlement. Rather, towns were given names whose origin was English or local, and natural features (rivers such as Nolichucky and Chattahoochee, lakes, etc.) and territories (Tennessee, Alabama, etc.) often kept pre-existing names of indigenous origin.
Further, the great dissimilarity in accents and tones of voice between present-day East Tennessee on the one hand and Northern Ireland and Scotland on the other would rarely prompt one to suspect that two hundred years ago people in these different parts of the world had similar-sounding voices. However East Tennessee speech has been described over the years, it has not been with an "Irish lilt." In neither speech nor music does Dolly Parton, from Sevierville, Tennessee, sound remotely like James Galway, from Belfast, Northern Ireland.
Finally, there has been the presumption that people in the Southern mountains speak to a significant degree a remnant of "Elizabethan" English. It is difficult to identify the precise source of this notion, though it has been around for at least a hundred years. William Goodell Frost, President of Berea College in Kentucky in the late 19th century and a tireless speaker and writer on the positive qualities of mountain people, was probably more responsible for its popularity than anyone else. The idea has appealed to both mountain people and outsiders, though for different reasons. It received its fullest and most simplistic and romantic, if not extravagant, articulation in the first third of the twentieth century, and it is still very much alive today.30 Until a few years ago, the North Carolina Department of Commerce was distributing at the state's interstate welcome centers a booklet titled The Queen's English. However, even cursory consideration tells us that William Shakespeare, from Southern England, would on the whole have used a type of language quite different from his early 17th-century counterparts in the northern reaches of the British Isles, though they would have shared many usages, even many that have passed entirely from fashion in modern-day English. It is certain that East Tennessee speech has influences from both Scotch-Irish and Elizabethan ancestors, and it should be possible to separate these to some extent. Since the question of this relative inheritance has not been investigated in a thorough manner until very recently, the popular myth about the "Elizabethan" ancestry of Appalachian speech has gone more or less unchallenged.
Having read this far, the reader may now wonder whether very much Scotch-Irish influence can be identified at all. Linguists have patiently collected a great deal of material on the speech of East Tennessee and Southern Appalachia in recent decades.31 While it is true that the linguistic influence of the Scotch-Irish is not as apparent in this as it might be and that it is often difficult to discern earlier speech patterns from written documents, detective work does enable us to piece together a reasonably clear picture, especially for grammatical features, of how much can be traced to the Scotch-Irish. In this essay I share the results of my own research, which includes work over many years in archives in Belfast, Edinburgh, East Tennessee, and elsewhere. Because people in these parts of the world sound and talk quite differently today, one cannot simply compare what modern-day dictionaries and studies have to say. Instead, one must rely when possible on evidence from historical documents, the most crucial of which are emigrant letters that were written back to the British Isles by family members who had made the move. Thousands of such letters are deposited in archives in the British Isles. At the end of this essay are appended portions of two emigrant letters having phonetic spellings and other evidence of speech patterns, to exemplify the kinds of documents most useful in discovering the language patterns of the Scotch-Irish emigrants themselves.32
« How Scotch-Irish is your English? | Scotch-Irish pronunciation »
Revision of an essay originally published in Journal of East Tennessee History, vol. 67, 1-33 (1995).
By Prof. Michael Montgomery (copyright of the author)
« Misconceptions about the Scotch-Irish | Scotch-Irish Vocabulary »
Linguists often divide language into three broad components—pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar. The Scotch-Irish influence on East Tennessee speech is clear in each of these, but most prominent in grammar, to which we will give the closest attention.
Pronunciation
As far as pronunciation is concerned, one of the most prevalent tendencies in East Tennessee speech today is the identical sounding of pairs of words like pen/pin, ten/tin, and hem/him, that is, what are popularly known as the "short i" and "short e" vowels before the consonants "n" and "m". Most people in East Tennessee, regardless of their education or social class, neither hear nor produce the vowels differently in such words, but they do distinguish word pairs like bit/bet and lid/led, in which the vowels come before other consonants. Indeed, growing up in Knoxville in the 1950s/60s I distinguished pen and pin only by the words that were put in front of them, such as ink, straight, or safety, and my mother, a first-grade teacher, had more trouble teaching the phonics lesson for words like pen than any others. There is a perfectly reasonable historical explanation: this speech rule or habit was brought by emigrant ancestors, just as many others were. Letters written back to Ulster by emigrants are full of spellings like gineral and sind. Samuel Brown, living in Philadelphia but recently emigrated from Belfast, exhibited the same tendency in writing home to his brother in 1793, "Dear Brother, I take this opertunity of Wrighting you Afew Lines to Lett you know that I am in good health at preasent thanks be to god and hopeing these Lines will find you and My sister And the Children Injoying the seam ..." (see the appendix).33
A pattern of pronunciation that can possibly be traced to the Scotch-Irish is what is known as the "Southern drawl." This involves the stretching of short vowels in words like bad and bed, the result being that a vowel is added (a kind of "uh" sound) that produces another syllable: "I felt so ba-ud that I just fell in the be-ud"). This type of pronunciation is, of course, common throughout the South, and where it occurs in the Lower South it most likely is due in part to an African-American influence. We can be less certain of the history of this pronunciation feature than the one discussed in the previous paragraph, because no evidence of it ever shows up in writing (no matter how poorly educated writers were and therefore tended to spell by sound, their spelling never reflected such a pattern). The drawl that speakers in Ulster today have is unlike the American one, but there are certain clues in their speech suggesting a connection between the two.
We could also cite any number of individual words (like whip sounded as whup, still the usual pronunciation in Scotland), but suffice it to say that some of the most widespread and distinctive features of East Tennessee pronunciation are quite possibly inherited from the Scotch-Irish. We turn now to vocabulary.
Revision of an essay originally published in Journal of East Tennessee History, vol. 67, 1-33 (1995).
By Prof. Michael Montgomery (copyright of the author)
« Scotch-Irish Pronunciation | Scotch-Irish Grammar »
For East Tennesseans, the vast bulk of their vocabulary (by which is meant their nouns, adjectives, most verbs, and most adverbs) consists of either terms that originated in the United States or that were brought by settlers from several regions of the British Isles. Some two to three dozen terms can be determined to have a Scotch-Irish origin—admittedly a relatively small number, but more than twice as many as those coming from Southern England. Some terms of Scotch-Irish origin are specialized or technical, such as ones from distilling: singlings "liquor that has been run through a still once" and double "to redistill"). Most can be described as traditional, some as now becoming old-fashioned. Here are the more common of these terms, with definitions and examples 34:
1) airish "windy, chilly": "It's right airish out today."
2) backset "a setback or reversal (in health)": "He took the whooping cough along about Christmas time and was out of school for a month, and then he took a backset and was out of school again."
3) beal, bealing "an abscess, boil, festering sore": "Mary had a bealing on her neck."
4) bonny-clabber "curdled sour milk."
5) bottom(s), bottom land "fertile, low-lying land along a river or creek": "The house was right out in the middle of a little bottom."
6) chancy "doubtful, dangerous": "It was a chancy thing to do."
7) contrary (as a verb) "to vex, oppose": "Don't contrary him any more."
8) creel "to twist, wrench, give way": "His leg creeled under him."
9) discomfit "to inconvenience": "I hope it won't discomfit you any."
10) fireboard "mantelpiece": "She got a big pistol and laid it up on the fireboard, and she said, 'you see this gun? If anything takes place here tonight,' she says 'I'll use this gun on you'."
11) hull "to shell (beans or peas)": "We hulled two bushels of butter beans last night."
12) ill "bad-tempered": "He was acting awful ill this morning."
13) kindling "twigs, pine needles, and scraps of wood to start a fire": "Before we began the fire, we made sure we had plenty of kindling."
14) let on "to pretend": "She let on that she didn't care."
15) mend "to improve physically": "He's mending very slowly."
16) muley "hornless cow": "Come on, Robert, let's get our little muley-cow to work again."
17) nicker "whinny": "Sure enough in a few minutes four lank horsemen were dismounting at the gate amid much nickering of horses and yapping of hounds."
18) palings "upright stakes (of a fence)": "That's what the mountain people called them, palings. They're split out just like boards."
19) piece "distance": "It's a far piece to town and back."
20) redd up "to tidy up, get a place ready": "I mean to wash and redd up the house before I do any special cooking."
21) soon (adjective) "early": "I hope that we can get a soon start in the morning."
22) take up "begin": "Has the meeting taken up yet?"
Just as the descendants of Scotch-Irish emigrants spread far beyond Tennessee and across much of the United States as the country grew, their vocabulary did as well. Some terms in the foregoing list, as well as other features cited in this essay, are or were known in parts of the Midwest, the Lower South, and the Southwest. Some diappeared where they had formerly prevailed. This is true for two intriguing terms brought by Ulster emigrants in the 18th century, both of which were applied initially to back country whites. One is cracker, now most often referring to a white native of Georgia or Florida. The other is cohee, once referring to a less-cultivated person in the backwoods from Virginia to the Carolinas. Cracker in 20th-century Ulster parlance refers to an expert talker or raconteur, a master of good crack or a boaster; in colonial America it was used in the latter sense. In 1766 a Mr. Gavin Cochrane wrote from the American colonies to The Earl of Dartmouth in England: "I should explain to your Lordship what is meant by Crackers, a name they have got from being great boasters; they are a lawless set of rascalls on the frontiers of Virginia, Maryland."35 Cohee derives from co he or quo he, originally a phrase used in oral narration, whereby one reports another's speech by "quo he," "quo she," "quo I," etc. (literally "he said," etc.); this is still known in Ulster. In the 18th century the speech habit was brought to the American colonies, where it became a nickname for the people who had it. Thus, in an 1815 letter from western North Carolina a writer said, "The back country people [of Virginia] are called 'Co-hees' from some of the back country people using frequently the term 'quote he' or 'quote she' or as they usually speak 'coo he' and 'coo she'."36 Cohee did not catch on like cracker, apparently dying out a century ago.37 Neither is used in East Tennessee or elsewhere in the U.S. today with their traditional meaning.
Revision of an essay originally published in Journal of East Tennessee History, vol. 67, 1-33 (1995).
By Prof. Michael Montgomery (copyright of the author)
« Scotch-Irish Vocabulary | Scotch-Irish Emigrant Letters »
For a variety of reasons it is easiest and most appropriate to examine patterns of grammar if one wants to see how much East Tennessee English is ultimately due to Scotch-Irish emigrants and how much is due to those who came from England. Old letters, even those written by the uneducated, reveal few clues about pronunciation and have few occurrences of vocabulary items like those discussed above, but they exhibit grammatical patterns far more regularly. By grammar is meant how words are combined, the use of suffixes, and parts of speech like pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, helping verbs, and some adverbs—words that stand for and relate words to one another. The distinction between vocabulary (nouns, adjectives, most verbs and adverbs) and grammar (other parts of speech, but also helping verbs and some adverbs) is not just a technical one made by linguists. It is important here because vocabulary can change, disappear, or spread over space much more rapidly than can grammar, which is more stable across generations and therefore easier to track historically. Even today, it is new vocabulary and terminology that can catch on around the country almost overnight.
To begin with, this writer examined linguistic studies, tape recordings, old documents, and other sources to compile 21 grammatical features that are common in or are confined to Southern Appalachia and traceable either to Ireland/Scotland or to Southern England. These are grouped and listed below, with examples and sometimes comments about their usage and historical derivation. Not all of them occur in the British Isles today, but they are possible to document, through the use of dictionaries, historical grammars, and other sources that enable us to tell if they were originally Scotch-Irish or not. Of the 21, 18 (86%) are Scotch-Irish in origin. Five of these involve verbs, four pronouns, three prepositions, three conjunctions, and three adverbs.
The following grammatical features are Scotch-Irish:
1) the combination of used to and could: "You used to could look from Grandpa's door to the graveyard and the church house where we attended church." This construction contrasts a practice or reality of the past with one today.
2) the combination of might and could and similar patterns (may can, might would, etc.): "You might could ask somebody along the road [for directions]"; "I may can get it out tomorrow." This type of construction expresses uncertainty or indirectness.
3) done as a helping verb or an adverb: "We done finished up the chores for you"; "By the time we got there, he was done dead"; "I done told that boy not to go near the river." This verb usually means "already" or "completely"; it is sometimes used, as in the third example, to emphasize that something was done and ought not need to be repeated.
4) the suffix -s on a plural verb (or is), but only if its subject is a plural noun (as in people knows). The suffix doesn't occur on a verb whose subject is a personal pronoun (they know). This rule for using the suffix (or is) only on verbs with certain subjects has been common in Scotland since the 14th century and in the British Isles has been limited to Scotland and Northern England, and by extension to Ulster. In all these areas it is very common today. While a construction like People knows may be judged as an "error" in subject-verb agreement in the schoolroom nowadays, it was formerly used by royalty and nobility and in high literature by the Scottish ancestors of many of us.
5) the combination of need and the past participle of a verb: "There were men and women living in the Sugarlands with talent and the ability to do most anything needed done in the community"; "That thing needs washed." Most Americans say needs washing or needs to be washed.
6) you'uns = "you" (plural): "I appreciate every one of you'uns here"; "You'uns make yourselves at home."
7) y'all = "you" (plural): "I hope that y'all are ready."
8) the combination of all with other pronouns and occasionally with nouns: "A number of people taught—I don't know who all"; "I don't know where all he sold it at"; "Old man Lon and Will all, they all went with him." These compound pronouns emphasize the inclusion of other things or individuals that are not specifically named.
9) all the = "the only": "In Sugarlands that's all the one I know anything about"; "It was all the way you could take anything up there"; "No, we didn't know nothin'—all the thing we knowed was what the teacher told us around the school."
10) all the far = "as far as": "That's all the far I want to go."
11) till = "to" (in expressions of time): "He said he'd be here about quarter till eight."
12) wait on = "wait for": "I was supposed to wait on this fellow at the forks of the creek where we heard the dogs barking."
13) fernent/forenenst = "opposite, next to": "I crawled down through the alders by the river till I got fernent the bear"; "It's over forenenst the wall."
14) and used to introduce an elliptical clause without a verb: "He would steal the hat off your head and you [would be] lookin' at him"; "He married them and them sitting there in the buggy."
15) whenever = "when, at the time that, as soon as" (for a single instance of something): "Whenever I heard about it, I signed up right away"; "What did they do with you whenever you killed that man?"; "They were real good religious people, I mean, whenever I'd know them"; "Whenever I was about eight years old, when I got old enough to know where I was at, I left."
16) till = "so that, to the point that": "She said that somebody was witching the milk till she couldn't churn [it]"; "If you get this would you drop me a card till I'll know you did get it"; "My mama had rheumatiz [and] she got till she couldn't walk."
17) they = "there" (to introduce a sentence): "They come a big rain and washed the old foot bridge into the hallway between the two barns"; "They was just enough of us to fill them three benches [in school]"; "They's not many that go there anymore."
18) anymore = "nowadays" (in positive sentences): "Government jobs are about all they have anymore"; "Anymore they have a hard time protecting things like that." All speakers of American English use this word in negative sentences ("I don't play anymore") and in questions ("Does he play anymore?"), but only a minority do so in positive sentences like those cited.
We now come to those grammatical features in traditional East Tennessee speech that were brought by settlers from Southern England (who in many parts of Appalachia were probably as numerous as those of Scotch-Irish heritage, if not more so). There are only three of these, each of which involves a suffix or a prefix, one on verbs, one on pronouns, and one on nouns:
1) the prefix a- on verbs: a-runnin', a-comin'. This pattern is historically unknown in Scotland outside ballad style, while in southern parts of England it was a feature of folk speech for centuries. It is thus classified as a Southern British feature. The prefix is especially likely to be used on action verbs, as is illustrated by the following quotation: "But here's the Good Book a-talkin' tonight, a-talkin' louder than the wind a-roarin' out yonder an' the thunder a-poppin'."38
2) the suffix -n on possessive pronouns (hern, hisn, theirn, yourn, etc.:) "I thought hern was prettier than mine"; "I don't know just how he made hisn." These forms take the suffix by analogy with mine (my/mine, her/hern).
3) the suffix -es on words ending in -st and -sp (nestes, postes, waspes): "Then one day she was out hunting turkeys' nestes"; "Look over on the side of the mountains [and] you will see a little house on stilts or postes."
The comparison just presented reveals that the Scotch-Irish contribution to modern-day East Tennessee grammar is much more substantial (in terms of the number of features), broader (in terms of the diversity of features), and deeper (in terms of the level of structure) than the Southern British or English one is. Most of the Scotch-Irish patterns can still be found in Ulster or Scotland, indicating that, however different people in Ulster and East Tennessee might sound today, this is a misleading impression based on the tone of voice, rhythm, and other more superficial characteristics; how they structure their sentences is much more similar and more telling. The settlers of the Volunteer State maintained much of what Scotch-Irish emigrants brought from Ulster a generation or two earlier, and Tennesseans today continue to preserve it, although social and educational pressures in the 20th century eroded many features. While our comparison enables us to answer the question that forms the title of this paper, it does only this and leaves other questions unanswered. The most intriguing and perhaps most important of these is why the Scotch-Irish features were preserved. The relative conservativeness of Southern mountain culture, a quality which has sometimes been confused with geographical isolation, is a factor external to the language that must be partially responsible for these retentions. Internal factors are probably at play as well (such as whether the form fills a useful niche, as the pronouns you'uns and y'all certainly do, or expresses a particular nuance of meaning not captured by forms brought by other dialects). But one can hardly do more than speculate about such matters (for instance, as functional as it might appear for speakers to have, a distinction between singular you and plural you'uns/y'all, it is a mystery why a similar distinction—between thou/thee and ye/you—disappeared in Shakespeare's day, though it is maintained in the conservative idiom of the King James Version).
In making our comparison, we have isolated only a handful of words and expressions from many times this number that can be found in everyday speech, so we must careful not to overstate our conclusion-that, after all, has proved time and again a fault of those claiming the "Elizabethan" ancestry of mountain speech. The methodology has limitations and caveats. For instance, among the grammatical features brought by emigrants from the British Isles in common are at least a dozen that are traditionally associated with Southern Appalachia. These include the phrase liked to "nearly" ("I liked to died"), several pronouns (e.g., hisself "himself," theirself/theirselves "themselves," hit "it"), nouns that are not marked with the plural suffix if preceded by a measure word (five bushel, twenty mile, etc.), the preposition again/against in the sense of "before, by the time that" ("She'll be back again five o'clock"), and the adverbs right "rather" ("It's right cold this morning") and yonder "over there" ("When the roll is called up yonder, I'll be there").
Still, we now have countable, measurable evidence from grammar and to some extent vocabulary to support an important conclusion: the Scotch-Irish contribution significantly outweighs that from Southern Britain and appears much more responsible for the distinctiveness of Appalachian English today. To the extent that Southern Appalachian and East Tennessee speech differ from most of the rest of the country, this is more than anything else attributable to the language brought by Scotch-Irish emigrants and spread through the rest of the population in settlement times.
Rather brief though it in many ways is, the survey of language in this essay enables us to come much closer to saying how "Elizabethan" Appalachian speech is or how "Scotch-Irish" it is. It is the latter more than the former. The idea that East Tennesseans and other Southern hill folk have spoken or still speak in a fashion similar to Shakespeare, the English bard from Stratford-on-Avon, is less true than that they maintain the language brought to American shores by Ulster farmers and artisans in the 18th century. It is another question whether the image of stern Ulster Calvinists as the progenitors of East Tennessee speakers is as remotely appealing, not to say as romantic, as the figure of the master of words who authored Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet or the charming Good Queen Bess, after whom the phrase "the Queen's English" was coined. Now that East Tennesseans can say with some assurance that their speech preserves considerably less of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Chaucer than often claimed, and far more of the faceless, and often nameless, commoner from the north of Ireland, East Tennesseans will have to decide what this says about them and their region. One thing for certain is that some of those early Tennesseans of Scotch-Irish ancestry did not remain faceless for long. Andy Jackson saw to that.
Revision of an essay originally published in Journal of East Tennessee History, vol. 67, 1-33 (1995).
By Prof. Michael Montgomery (copyright of the author)
« Scotch-Irish Grammar | Notes to How Scotch-Irish is your English »
Appendix: Excerpts of Sample Emigrant Letters
Among the most interesting, for both historians and linguists, of the items documenting the movement of people from Ulster to North America are letters written back to family members in Ireland. Excerpts of two of these from the 18th century are presented below.
To the modern-day reader, such letters have erratic spelling and capitalization and virtually no punctuation. This reflects two things: the little formal education the writers had (it is in the schoolroom that such niceties are taught and stressed) and the consequent reliance of the writers on their ear (spoken language has no equivalent of capital letters and many marks of punctuation). In analyzing texts like these, misspellings are the key, because most of them reflect speech patterns. Many reflect familiar pronunciations (aw and teechin from the Murray letter, sins from the Brown letter). Others reflect colloquial grammar (grows, comes, and is from Murray) occur with plural noun subjects and follow the subject-verb concord rule identified earlier. It is interesting to note many words in the Murray letter that are Scotticisms and either did not migrate to or did not long survive in North America: ged "goed" [went], ken, weans "wee ones" [children], bonny, etc.
Letter of James Murray of New York to Rev. Baptist Boyd of Co. Tyrone, Ireland
(Reprinted from The Pennsylvania Gazette, Oct. 27, 1737)
Read this Letter, and look, and tell aw the poor Folk of your Place, that God has open'd a Door for their Deliverance; for here is ne Scant of Breed here, and if your Sons Samuel and James Boyd wad but come here, they wad get mere Money in ane Year for teechin a Letin Skulle, nor ye yer sell wad get for Three Years Preeching whar ye are. Reverend Baptist Boyd, there ged ane wee me in the Shep, that now gets ane Hundred Punds for ane Year for teechin a Letin Skulle, and God kens, little he is skill'd in Learning, and yet they think him a high learned Man: Ye ken I had but sma Learning when I left ye, and now wad ye think it, I hea 20 Pund a Year for being a Clark to York Meeting-House, and I keep a Skulle for wee Weans: Ah dear Sir, there is braw Living in this same York for high learned Men: The young Foke in Ereland are aw but a Pack of Couards, for I will tell ye in short, this is a bonny Country, and aw Things grows here that ever I did see grow in Ereland; and wee hea Cows and Sheep, and Horses plenty here, and Goats, and Deers, and Racoons, and Moles, and Bevers, and Fish, and Fouls of aw Sorts: Trades are aw gud here, a Wabster gets 12 Pence a Yeard, a labourer gets 4 Shillings and 6 Pence a Day, a Lass gets 4 Shillings and 6 Pence a Week for spinning on the wee Wheel, a Carpenter gets 6 Shillings a Day, and a Tailor gets 20 Shillings for making a Suit of Cleaths, a Wheelwright gets 16 Shillings for making Lint Wheels a piece, Indian Corn, a Man wull get a Bushell of it for his Day's Wark here; Rye grows here, and Oats, and Wheet, and Winter Barley, and Summer Barley; Buck Wheet grows here, na every Thing grows here. ---Now I beg of ye aw to come our here, and bring our wee ye aw the Cleaths ye can of every Sort, beth o'Linen and Woollen, and Guns, and Pooder, and Shot, and aw Sorts of Weers that is made of Iron and Steel, and aw Tradesmen that comes here, let them bring their Tools wee them, . . .
Samuel Brown, Philadelphia, to his brother, David Brown, Mill Street, Belfast, 23 December 1793 (Public Record Office of Northern Ireland Collection T 3525)
Philadelphia Decr 23rd 1793
Dear Brother
I take this opertunity of Wrighting you Afew Lines to Lett you know that I am in good health at preasent thanks be to god and hopeing these Lines will find you and My sister And the Children Injoying the seam as is My Ever sinser Wish-Dr David I hope youl not think me Neglectfull not Wrighting to you Sooner for the times hav been So very Disagreeable sins I Came hear I Detianed to give you as full account of this Cuntry as possable I had a very Good passage of Eight Weeks and two days With out the Least sickness on the passage there Was a feavour aboard but Not mortal Wee Landed at New Castle on the Eight Day of September on account of a feavour that Prevealed in Philadelphia Thomas Stewart and Thos Smyth and I thought it better to Detain there for a few days to Wee Could Hear a better acount of the sickness which I think was Very fortunate for us only that I took A Feavour Which Continued for Near Four Weeks I Would Seen more of this Cuntry only on that acount for the feavour Was so shocking in Philadelphia I stoped there for Eight Weeks Which Cost Me ten Guineas With out-I Came to this Sitty on the 7th of Novb: Which Was Nearly the end of the Sickness When I got the acount of So many of My aquentanses being dead Shocked me Verry Much amongst these Was Mr Faulkner and Andrew Sproule Carpenter and Wm: Campble Stone Cutter & Medole the Beaker and Russal the Plummer and John Morrow Cabnit Meaker and A great Nomber two numerous to Mention the Number in Whole Died from the first of Agust to the 15th of Novb, in Concluded to be 6500 People this sitty is verry Much hurted by the Sickness and is thought by many it has a chance to brake out against the Spring it has Spoiled all kind of Trade there has numbers Left the sitty on Acount and not Coming back to after Spring I should not Came here only on the acount of the Lead I brought on our arival here put me to a studdy Whether to Leave the sitty or stay to Spring ...