The
following excerpts were taken from: *Brownstein, Robin.
The Peoples of North America - the Scotch-Irish Americans.
Chelsea House Publishers. 1988. Pages 13-14
On
April 21, 1836, a ragtag band of soldiers collected near
the San Jacinto River in southeast Texas. Defenders of the
newly formed Republic of Texas, they awaited the arrival
of their enemy, the Mexican army, led by President Antonio
Lopez de Santa Anna. Although outnumbered two to one, the
small troop defeated Santa Anna’s army at the Battle
of San Jacinto and thus secured Texan independence. The
leader of the small army was General Sam Houston, whose
name remains synonymous with Texas. He served as the republic’s
first president and later, when Texas became America’s
28th state in 1845, represented its interests in the U.S.
Senate. In 1859 Houston was elected governor. Today the
nation’s fourth-largest city (according to the 1990
Census) bears his name.
Sam
Houston’s success completed a line of energetic pioneering
that began in 1689, when Houston’s great-great-grandfather
made the hazardous ocean crossing from Northern Ireland
to North America. His son Robert - Sam’s grandfather
- moved his family from Philadelphia to Virginia. When the
13 American colonies rose up to defy Great Britain in the
revolutionary war, another Robert Houston - Sam’s
father - served as a captain under General George Washington.
In 1806, Robert Houston led his family west from Virginia
to the Tennessee frontier, when his son Sam was 13.
The
Houstons belonged to an ethnic group that played a major
role in American history during its formative years. This
group, known as the Scotch-Irish, immigrated to North America
from Ulster, or Northern Ireland, after migrating there
from Scotland. The term Scotch-Irish is actually an American
invention, first coined in 1695. Initially the immigrants
themselves shied away from the term, preferring to describe
themselves as Ulster-Scots, as they had in their homeland….
Theodore
Roosevelt - U.S. president from 1901 to 1909 - wrote: "The
backwoodsmen were American by birth and parentage, and of
mixed race; but the dominant strain in their blood was that
of the … Scotch-Irish… Mingled with the descendants
of many other races, they nevertheless formed the kernel
of the distinctively and intensely American stock…
fitted to be Americans from the very start.
