The City of Londonderry

The City of Londonderry was the jewel in the crown of the Ulster plantation. It was laid out according to the best contemporary principles of town planning, imported from the continent (the original street lay-out has survived to the present almost intact). More importantly, the city was enclosed by massive stone and earthen fortifications. It was the last walled city built in Ireland and the only city on the island whose ancient walls survive complete. Among the city's new buildings was St. Columb's Cathedral (1633). This is one of the most important 17th century buildings in the country and was the first specifically Protestant cathedral erected anywhere in the world following the Reformation.

History of the Scotch-Irish or Ulster Scot

From  - History of the Scotch-Irish or Ulster Scot

By Linda Merle

Scotland

Most Ulster Scots were in Scotland before they migrated to Ireland. MOST but not ALL! 

Most of them were in areas of Scotland adjacent to Ireland. The largest migration of Scots to Ireland was in the early 1600's. Due to lack of definitive records, we do not have exact numbers, but in the early 1600's 120,000 are believed to have migrated -

In the early 1600's Ireland was the primary destination for migrating Scots because it provided opportunities that Scotland couldn't offer-- and Scots were not welcome in English colonies. Protestants were welcome. Catholic Scots, of which there are many, were not welcomed by the government in Ireland, though some did come, largely at the behest of Scottish Catholic lords, on whose lands in Scotland they may have already been living. But the bulk were Presbyterian lowlanders. They include a group of Protestant lowlanders that the Scottish government settled in Kintyre.

An unknown number of Scots fled back to Scotland in the 1630's to avoid religious persecution in Scotland.

Ulster

The Ulster Irish spoke of course Irish, which was simply a different dialect of Gaelic. Scots and Irish could communicate without difficulty. This isn't surprising since the Scotti, an Irish tribe, moved from Ireland originally. They also followed similar naming patterns to the Irish. There were sons of Hughs, Johns, and James everywhere. So they sometimes ended up with the same or similar surnames as the incoming Scots.

In 1641, many Ulster Scots were killed by the Irish in the Rising, but we are not sure how many. 

In the 1680's more Scots came to Ireland, fleeing the Killing Times in south western Scotland.

In the late 1690's, another period of enhanced Scots immigration to Ireland occurred after King William secured his throne. Apparently, whole new towns and villages sprang up at this time. There is also evidence of a famine in Scotland which caused increased migration.

After the Williamite Settlement, there were no large movements of Scots to Ireland because economic conditions in Ireland were not good. Sometimes, they fled to Ireland to avoid religious persecution, though sometimes they fled back to Scotland to escape it in Ireland. People also moved in both directions at various times to avoid political problems. People also migrated seasonally to Scotland to work on farms.

The surnames of the non-British settlers rapidly became anglicized so that they can be difficult to identify by surname alone.

Finally, Irish assimilated into the Ulster Scots ethnic group. As Irish converted to Protestantism, descendants assumed their families came from Scotland as they adopted the myths of the Ulster Scot as their own. However some don't! Surnames were fluid. Adopting a new ethnic identity was very simple: drop the O. Some Irish surnames began with Mac as well as Scots. By dropping the Mac, the name was anglicized and indistinguishable from English surnames.

In the 1600's, there appears to have been an ethnic fluidity in Ireland. Your "ethnicity" was determined more by your choice of religion rather than your ancestrage.

Ulster is adjacent to Scotland -- so that's where many Scots went. It was easy to go over and come back again.

Often, it was difficult to tell a Scot from an Irish because in many cases, they shared a common culture and spoke a common tongue. They had similar cultures.

In the late Middle Ages, a new phenomena began to occur that would have a massive impact on Ireland. Irish lords began to hire Scottish mercenaries to help fight their intertribal and wars with the English. They were called Galloglass soldiers from the Irish gall oglaigh or stranger soldiers. They were apparently from the western Scotland and of mixed Scots and Viking origin. They changed the course of history in the 1500's. Through one dynastic marriage, an Irish lord got 10,000 of these soldiers. Some of them settled down in Ireland and established clans of their own. The McSweenies are one example of a galloglass clan who assimilated into the Irish. If they stayed Catholic, they assimilated into the Irish and lost their ethnic identity as Scots.

As mentioned, the majority of the Ulster Scots came in the Ulster Plantation period. They came willingly, recruited by their lairds, many of whom were also acquiring Irish estates. Their forte was not only farming but also the skilled labor required to create a colony. They could build homes, raise livestock, blacksmith, and so on.

Colonial United States

Many other peoples came to the new world before the Ulster Scots. They did not begin coming in large numbers in 1718.

New England

The first to emigrate came to Boston. Their ministers were invited by the Rev. Cotton Mather. In 1781, the first five ships arrived in Boston harbor. However, they did not receive a warm welcome since they were very different from the ethnocentric Massachusetts Bay Colony. Massachusetts was a theocracy aimed at a homogeneous society.

The Ulster Scots attempted to set up insular, isolated colonies in which they could be themselves, but the New Englanders literally tore down their meeting houses. Hence, the Scotch Irish moved to the frontier in search of places beyond the control of Massachusetts. As Massachusetts moved in to control them, they moved on. Hence, they are to be found in New Hampshire, Connecticut, Western Massachusetts.

They continued to migrate westward to New York (Newburgh area) and beyond to Pennsylvania. Then they joined other newcomers in the Great Migration southward and westward.

The first five ships who brought Ulster immigrants are know as the Five Ships.

Southern Colonies

The Scotch-Irish, moving down the Wagon Road from the north, were joined by countrymen arriving from Ulster. They moved southward and settled the inland Great Valley of Virginia first, then moved to the hilly Carolina Piedmont area to the south. In the 1750's and later, the Scotch-Irish were still arriving via Philadelphia and then traveling by land up to 700 miles southwest to the Carolinas. However, they also entered through Charleston though almost none are known to have entered ports in North Carolina. 

In 1761, the colony offered to pay passage for these poor Protestants but required a certificate from their church testifying that they were of good character. These terms expired in 1768 though the Council ruled that poor Protestants would still be given land free of charge but still were charged various fees. They, also, had to travel to the land and to appear in person before the Governor in Council to request land.

Thus the names of grantees appear in the Council records.

Families from Ulster and elsewhere (Pennsylvania, Scotland) began to flood in. In the 1750s, while still more came in the 1760s and even after the bounties expired. They continued to come after the Revolution. Note that, some Catholics also came from Ireland, including a few that were granted land though their religion was known.

They Came From Ulster

The emigrants who left Ireland prior to the American Revolutionary War came solely from the province of Ulster. More than five thousand people emigrated from Ulster in 1717-1718. Those families sent back favorable reports, which helped to pave the way for future migrations. Between 1725 and 1729 there was another wave of emigration from Ulster, again induced primarily by the suffering caused by rack-renting. During that migration it was estimated that over six thousand people left Ulster in 1728 alone. In 1740 a major famine devastated Ireland and brought about the third major wave of emigration from Ulster. The fourth wave emigrated in 1754-1755, partly as a result of hardships occasioned by drought and partly because of an effort made by the governor of the province of North Carolina to attract settlers to that colony. Governor Dobbs had left Ulster himself, and his call was answered by many other Ulstermen. The last major wave of emigration occurred between 1771 and 1775. At least twenty-five thousand people are believed to have emigrated during this period. That great wave of departure from Ireland was motivated primarily by the eviction of so many families from county Antrim when the leases on the estate of the Marquis of Donegal expired and the settlers could not comply with the rack-renting demands. Altogether, approximately 200,000 people, primarily of Scottish descent and Presbyterian faith, left Ulster and sailed for America between 1717 and 1775.

Patrick Was Likely From Ulster When He Ran Away

In the northern counties of Ulster, however, a different attitude (than very hesitant to leave family) held sway with a sizeable proportion of people.

Presbyterians, most of whom had Scottish ancestry, had also suffered discrimination in Ireland but they were not inhibited to the same degree by 'ancestral' connection with the soil. They sincerely believed they would find tolerance, freedom and happiness in North America.

They were also, to varying extents, more economically independent than their Catholic neighbours. Many were artisans, shopkeepers, or young professionals, and some worked in the Irish linen trade. These early waves of Irish emigration were often in response to economic peaks and troughs.

Up to 1720, when New England was the destination of choice for most, the flow was steady but numbers were not large. Numbers rose at the end of that decade and then dropped again.

A famine in the early 1740s saw renewed interest in Atlantic passage, and Irish emigration never really subsided afterwards. In 1771-1773, more than 100 ships left the Ulster ports of Newry, Derry, Belfast, Portrush and Larne, carrying some 32,000 Irish immigrants to America. Meanwhile, a similar number set sail from Dublin, Cork and Waterford alone. Some of these would certainly have been Catholics. By 1790, the USA's Irish immigrant population numbered 447,000 and two-thirds originated from Ulster.
Back in Ireland, the population had grown from only 2.3 million at mid-century to as much as 5 million by 1800. The vast majority lived in poverty.

Horrific Religious Bigotry In Action

The people of Northern Ireland have endured a bloody and brutal conflict for centuries caused by religious, cultural and political prejudices. The Troubles, as the conflict is known in Ireland, has heightened the division between two different peoples, Catholics and Protestants. So, how is compromise found with the blood of over 3500 dead staining the streets and hearts of Northern Ireland? Where is peace in a community so divided? Is there a solution in a land where bigotry and hate dominate the political landscape? The heartbreaking complexity of the Northern Irish conflict is summed up in this account by Seamus Heaney in a lecture when he received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1995:

“One of the most harrowing moments in the whole history of the harrowing of the heart in Northern Ireland came when a minibus full of workers being driven home one January evening in 1976 was held up by armed and masked men and the occupants of the van ordered at gunpoint to line up at the side of the road. Then one of the masked executioners said to them, “Any Catholics among you, step out here”. As it happened, this particular group, with one exception, were all Protestants, so the presumption must have been that the masked men were Protestant paramilitaries about to carry out a tit-for-tat sectarian killing of the Catholic as the odd man out, the one who would have been presumed to be in sympathy with the IRA and all its actions. It was a terrible moment for him, caught between dread and witness, but he did make a motion to step forward. Then, the story goes, in that split second of decision, and in the relative cover of the winter evening darkness, he felt the hand of the Protestant worker next to him take his hand and squeeze it in a signal that said no, don’t move, we’ll not betray you, nobody need know what faith or party you belong to. All in vain, however, for the man stepped out of the line; but instead of finding a gun at his temple, he was thrown backward and away as the gunmen opened fire on those remaining in the line, for these were not Protestant terrorists, but members, presumably, of the Provisional IRA.”

The historical context of the conflict in Northern Ireland must be understood to comprehend the scope of the tragedies and appreciate the hard won compromises of recent years. After the bloody military conquest of a Catholic Ireland by the Protestant British in the 1600′s, order needed to be established in the region. The British monarchy’s solution, The Plantation of Ulster, gave much of the most fertile farm land in the Northeast region of Ireland to Scottish and English Protestant plantation owners, and other British settlers, thus driving native Irish Catholics from their homes. Injustice, combined with close proximity, differing cultures, ideologies, political allegiances, and religious beliefs created fierce hostilities. Alienated Catholics reacted with spurts of violence against the new migrating Protestants, and these conflicts would continue, unresolved, into the 1900′s.

The full article can be found by clicking here: 

Ulster County of Armagh, Ireland Is Consistant?

Update on Ulster: The Plantation of Ulster was presented to James VI as a joint "British", or English and Scottish, venture to 'pacify' and 'civilise' Ulster. Therefore at least half the settlers would be Scots. James had been King of Scots before he was King of England and needed to reward his subjects in Scotland with land in Ulster to assure them they were not being neglected now that James had moved his court to London. In addition, long-standing contact and settlement between Ulster and the west of Scotland meant that Scottish participation was a practical necessity.^[16]

In a search for Patrick Cragun I found reference his father Caleb had roots to Ulster, County of Armagh. Armagh is mentioned as part of the plantation movement.
Plantation of Ulster

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The counties of Ulster (modern boundaries) that were colonised during the plantations. Note that this map is a simplified one, as the amount of land actually colonised did not cover the entire shaded area

The Plantation of Ulster (Irish: Plandáil Uladh) was the organised colonisation (plantation) of Ulster – a province of Ireland – by people from Scotland and England. Private plantation by wealthy landowners began in 1606,^[1] while official plantation controlled by King James I of England and VI of Scotland began in 1609. All land owned by Irish chieftains of the Uí Néill and Uí Domhnaill (along with those of their supporters) was confiscated and used to settle the colonists. This land comprised an estimated half a million acres (2,000 km²) in the counties Tyrconnell, Tyrone, Fermanagh, Cavan, Coleraine and Armagh.^[2] Most of the counties Antrim and Down were privately colonised.^[1]
The "British tenants",^[3] a term applied to the colonists,^[4] were mostly from Scotland and England. They were required to be English-speaking and Protestant.^[5] The Scottish colonists were mostly Presbyterian^[3] and the English mostly members of the Church of England. The Plantation of Ulster was the biggest of the Plantations of Ireland. Ulster was colonised to prevent further rebellion, as it had been the region most resistant to English control during the preceding century.