5 James Boswell, Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1785, New York, 1936), 242 (2 Oct. 1773).

6Ibid. Dr. Johnson noted in his journal, “I inquired the subjects of the songs, and was told of one, that it was a love song, and of another, that it was a farewell composed by one of the Islanders that was going, in this epidemical fury of emigration, to seek his fortune in America.” Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775), ed. Mary Lascelles (New Haven, 1971), 59, 67, 95.

7 The “Scotch-Irish” emigration to Anglo-America before 1775 has been variously estimated as follows:

Period

Number

Area or Population

Date and Source

1733-73

400,000

Ireland “mainly Ulster”

Dublin Journal, 1773

1750-99

200,000

Ireland

Newenham, 1805

1718-75

250,000

Scotch-Irish

Dunaway, 1944

1718-75

200,000

Scotch-Irish

Leyburn, 1962

1718-75

114,000

Ulster Scots

Dickson, 1966

More recently, the American historian Bernard Bailyn has reckoned that 155,000 to 205,000 people left Ulster for the New World from 1718 to 1775. In the period 1760-75, he also estimates the number of emigrants at 55,000 from the north of Ireland, 40,000 from Scotland and 30,000 from England. See Bailyn, Voyagers to the West (New York, 1986), 26; Faulkner’s Dublin Journal, 10-13 April 1773; Thomas Newenham, A Statistical and Historical Inquiry into the Progress and Magnitude of the Population of Ireland (London, 1805), 59-60; James G. Leyburn, The Scotch-Irish: A Social History (Chapel Hill, 1962), 180; R. J. Dickson, Ulster Emigration to Colonial America, 1718-1775 (London, 1966), 23, 34, 59, 64; Forrest McDonald and Ellen Shapiro McDonald, “Commentary,” WMQ3 41 (1984), 95.