Orange campaign
Sir: Charles Moore's claim that 13 US pres- idents are of Ulster Protestant descent (Another voice, 27 November) is a nice bit of Unionist propaganda — or would be, if there were any large number of Americans who knew Ulster from Tajikistan. Alas, it is not true.
In the middle two quarters of the 18th century, huge numbers of Protestants emi- grated from Ulster and the Anglo-Scottish borders to the back country of the Ameri- can south-east. To the Americans these people seemed, culturally, to be all of a piece — as indeed they were, since the Ulster Protestants descended mostly from border folk. Americans call them the `Scotch-Irish'. Mr David Fischer, in Albion's Seed, identifies 18 US presidents as descended wholly or in part from these `Scotch-Irish', and that is probably what Mr Moore is thinking of.
Most of those 18, however, have border ancestry. Only eight can claim Protestant Irish origins: Jackson, Polk, Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Arthur, Cleveland, Wil- son and Ford. Furthermore, Buchanan's people came from Donegal, not properly part of Ulster; so there have been only seven 'Unionist' presidents.
This still trumps Catholic Ireland, of course, which can claim only two presi- dents: Kennedy and Reagan. Reagan is only Catholic on his father's side: his moth- er's ancestry was Protestant. If she had also been Irish he could sing the old Belfast ditty in his bath: 'Sure it was the strangest family the world has ever seen /Me mother she was Orange and me father he was Green.'
Giles Mathews
148 East 46th Street, New York, NY 10017, USA
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