Webb spins his Ulster-Scots heritage into the US elections

Adams is one of those names that can cut either way. Up in the North of Ireland there are Protestant Adams's and Catholic Adams's. I believe the Catholic ones were probably Mac Adam. The blood lines up there are all mixed up anyway. You have Gerry Adams (head of Sinn Fein--political wing of the IRA) and you have our presidents John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams who were of English background (came to Massachusetts Bay colony in the 1630s). when they speak of Scots-Irish or Ulster Scots they specifically mean the people & their descendants who were planted by James I (some came afterward)in Ulster (an Irish province) after the native Irish chieftains were defeated around 1604. These people were both large landowners (mostly English and Anglican) and small farmers (mostly Scottish and Presbyterian) It was these small farmers who came to North America in the 1700s in droves because the Presbyterian Church was not given full freedom to operate (the Catholics were basically outlawed). These folks formed the backbone of the frontier folk at the time (Appalachian Mts.)and joined George Washington's army in droves.

Ulster Scots are Scots that emigrated to northern Ireland during the 1600’s at the invitation or order of King James.
He had driven a lot of Irish off their land in Northern Ireland (or Ulster as it was called) and wanted to give it to Protestant Scots and Englishmen. The Scottish emigrants were lowlanders, or part of the ruling class. The Highlanders, or commoners, were not invited to emigrate but they emigrated later uninvited. In the 1700’s these Scotch-Irish, as they were called, were persecuted by both the Catholics in Ireland and the Anglicans in England (the Scots were Presbyterians). A famine in Ireland plus other problems in the mid 1700’s caused large numbers of Ulster
Scots to emigrate to the colonies. King George III encouraged this with land grants. The Scotch-Irish came in mostly through the port of Charleston, SC and settled in the Carolinas, Virginia, and the Appalachian regions.
They were more than eager to fight the English in the Revolutionary War, and one officer said that these Scots were among General Washington’s best soldiers. The reason I know all of this is because I am a descendant of an Ulster Scot who left County Antrim and arrived in Charleston in 1763 with his wife and children. One of his sons was a revolutionary soldier.

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