Edmund Burke, 1750s – "Presbyterians from the north of Ireland, who in America are generally called the Scotch-Irish”.

"... Of the inhabitants of the British Isles, by far the largest contribution, next to that of England, was from Ireland. This immigration, though somewhat spasmodic, had reached a vast but indeterminate total before the Revolution.

The Irish settled all the way from New Hampshire, where Londonderry was founded in 1719 by a colony of about 100 families from Ulster, to Carolina, where a colony of 500 arrived as early as 1715.

The author of European Settlements in America [Edmund Burke] speaks of the population of Virginia in 1750-54 as "growing every day more numerous by the migration of the Irish, who, not succeeding so well in Pennsylvania as the more industrious and frugal Germans, sell their lands in that province to the latter and take up now ground in the remote counties of Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina. These,” he adds, “are chiefly Presbyterians from the north of Ireland, who in America are generally called the Scotch-Irish”.

It is probably to some colony thus planted that Jefferson referred when he wrote of "the wild Irish, who had gotten possession of the valley between the Blue Ridge and the North mountains, forming a barrier over which none ventured to leap, and could still less venture to settle among”.

But Pennsylvania was still the especial center of attraction to the Irish before the Revolution. In 1729 there was a large Irish migration to Pennsylvania. The years 1771-73 appear also to have witnessed a wholesale movement of population from Ireland, especially the northern counties, into this province. Of these, large numbers found their way to the region of the Monongahela and the Allegheny, and formed the pioneers of a vast population in western and southwestern Pennsylvania.

We get a lively impression of the importance of this element a little later, when we find in the letters of that vehement federalist, Oliver Wolcott, jr., the formidable “whisky insurrection” of 1794 attributed almost wholly to the Irish of Pittsburgh and vicinity. Thus: “The Irishmen in that quarter have at length proceeded to great extremities;" "Pennsylvania need not be envied her Irishmen," etc..."

- From Statistics of the Place of Birth of the Population of the United States (1880), on the United States Census Bureau website - census.gov