who arrived relatively late so they settled in the less populated less expensive parts of the country. I read a book last year on the history fundamentalism in America called The Sword of Lord it's by Andrew Himes, the Scots-Irish played a big role development of fundamentalism in this country.
How the Scots-Irish Invented Fundamentalism
James’ second problem was a troublesome group of dirt-poor, hardscrabble farmers and fighters in the borderlands and lowlands along the Scottish, English, and Welsh borders. They led a marginal existence, were famous for their cattle-rustling and raiding, and were considered to be pugnacious, contentious, and easily inflamed. They were known as the “Border Reivers” or “Borderers” because they had played the invaluable role of a buffer between the Scottish and English warring parties during 300 years of intermittent fighting.
The Borderers were militantly Protestant, espousing an especially dogmatic and anti-Catholic version of Calvinist Presbyterianism. They believed that every word of the Bible was literally true, and that anyone who disagreed with them on any speck of Biblical doctrine was headed straight for Hell, including the Irish Catholics with whom they had been at war for centuries, and the denizens of the Church of England whom they despised for slavish service to the British state and monarch. They were people of strong convictions, easily angered, and valued for their fighting prowess. They cherished their individual freedoms: their freedom from taxes, freedom from the interference of the state in their lives, freedom to practice their religion just as they pleased. They were a ferocious people of an egalitarian spirit, and did not easily accept the yoke of any king, governor, or politician.
hey didn’t get along with the native Irish, either. The next century was replete with complicated conflicts that would sputter for a time and then flare up into armed dispute with their Catholic neighbors to the south or rebellion against a British monarch who failed to appreciate their political demands or their Calvinist theology. Life continued to be marginal, brutish, and oppressive, and their sojourn in Ulster was not a happy one. They struggled with famine, wars, and religious persecution. The first large scale immigration of Scots-Irish to America was a group that arrived in Boston from County Londonderry in 1718, and then moved to New Hampshire, where they founded the town of Londonderry.
They were followed by hundreds of thousands of other Scots-Irish over the next several decades. Many of them first settled in Pennsylvania, and then, finding all the eastern lands in the colonies either occupied or too expensive, they traveled south into Virginia and the Carolinas, and to the interior frontier lands, to the foothills of Appalachia—an area geographically very similar to their original homes in the borderlands between England and Scotland. By the beginning of the Revolutionary War, the Scots-Irish probably constituted about a quarter of the colonial American population, and on at least one occasion King George III referred to the war in North America as ‘that Presbyterian revolt.” Over the next several decades the Scots-Irish spread farther west and to the lowlands of the deeper South , and by the mid-19th century, they provided the dominant culture of the American South.
http://andrewhimes.net/content/how-scots-irish-invented-fundamentalism
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