Significant emigration from Scotland to America began in the 1700s, accelerating after the Jacobite rising of 1745, the steady degradation of clan structures, and the Highland Clearances.

[b][11]: 6  Despite emphasis on the struggles and 'forced exile' of Jacobites and Highland clansmen in popular media, Scottish migration was mostly from the Lowland regions and its pressures included poverty and land clearance but also the variety of positive economic opportunities believed to be available.

[32][33] The controversial Zeno letters have been cited in support of a claim that Henry Sinclair, earl of Orkney, visited Nova Scotia in 1398.

[35][36] After the Union of the Crowns of Scotland and England in 1603, King James VI, a Scot, promoted joint expeditions overseas, and became the founder of British America.

Regular contacts began with the transportation of indentured servants to the colony from Scotland, including prisoners taken in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms.

[39][40] In the 1670s and 1680s Presbyterian Dissenters fled persecution by the Royalist privy council in Edinburgh to settle in South Carolina and New Jersey, where they maintained their distinctive religious culture.

[39] More than 50,000 Scots, principally from the west coast,[39] settled in the Thirteen Colonies between 1763 and 1776, the majority of these in their own communities in the South,[41] especially North Carolina, although Scottish individuals and families also began to appear as professionals and artisans in every American town.

Unlike their Lowland and Ulster counterparts, the Highlanders tended to cluster together in self-contained communities, where they maintained their distinctive cultural features such as the Gaelic language and piobaireachd music.

By far the largest Highland community was centered on the Cape Fear River, which saw a stream of immigrants from Argyllshire, and, later, other regions such as the Isle of Skye.

After several generations, their descendants left for America, and struck out for the frontier, in particular the Appalachian mountains, providing an effective "buffer" for attacks from Native Americans.

However, in many cases, this occurred through the medium of print rather than aurally, explaining the presence of Highland-origin tunes in regions like Appalachia where there was essentially no Highland settlement.

[48] Scotland's leading thinkers of the revolutionary age, David Hume and Adam Smith, opposed the use of force against the rebellious colonies.

Other Founding Father like James Madison had no ancestral connection but were imbued with ideas drawn from Scottish moral philosophy.

The Scotch-Irish, who had already begun to settle beyond the Proclamation Line in the Ohio and Tennessee Valleys, were drawn into rebellion as war spread to the frontier.

[52] Tobacco plantations and independent farms in the backcountry of Virginia, Maryland and the Carolinas had been financed with Scottish credit, and indebtedness was an additional incentive for separation.

[53] The Scottish Highland communities of upstate New York and the Cape Fear valley of North Carolina were centers of Loyalist resistance.

[39] Uncle Sam is the national personification of the United States, and sometimes more specifically of the American government, with the first usage of the term dating from the War of 1812.

[55] Emigration from Scotland peaked in the nineteenth century, when more than a million Scots left for the United States,[56] taking advantage of the regular Atlantic steam-age shipping industry which was itself largely a Scottish creation,[57] contributing to a revolution in transatlantic communication.

Among the most notable Scottish American writers of the nineteenth century were Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville.

[citation needed] Other Scotch-Irish presidents included James Buchanan, Chester Alan Arthur, William McKinley and Richard M. Nixon, Theodore Roosevelt (through his mother), Woodrow Wilson, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Ronald Reagan were of Scottish descent.

Winfield Scott, Ulysses S. Grant, Joseph E. Johnston, Irvin McDowell, James B. McPherson, Jeb Stuart and John B. Gordon were of Scottish descent, George B. McClellan and Stonewall Jackson Scotch-Irish.

Grace Murray Hopper, a rear admiral and computer scientist, was the oldest officer and highest-ranking woman in the U.S. armed forces on her retirement at the age of 80 in 1986.

Alexander Graham Bell, in partnership with Samuel Pierpont Langley, built the first machine capable of flight, the Bell-Langley airplane, in 1903.

[70] Ross Perot, another Scottish American entrepreneur, made his fortune from Electronic Data Systems, an outsourcing company he established in 1962.

[70] Glasgow-born Microsoft employee Richard Tait helped develop the Encarta encyclopedia and co-created the popular board game Cranium.

There are also other notable Scottish Festivals in cities like Tulsa, Oklahoma, Ventura, California at the Seaside Highland Games, Atlanta, Georgia (at Stone Mountain Park), San Antonio, Texas and St. Louis, Missouri.

Unlike other ethnic groups in Scotland, Scottish Highlanders preferred to migrate in communities, and remaining in larger, denser concentrations aided in the maintenance of their language and culture.

[87] The American Revolutionary War effectively stopped direct migration to the newly formed United States, most people going instead to British North America (now Canada).

Sizable concentrations of Gaelic communities existed in Ontario, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island, with smaller clusters in Newfoundland, Quebec, and New Brunswick.

In some parts of the Carolinas and Alabama, African-American communities spoke Scottish Gaelic, particularly (but not solely) due to the influence of Gaelic-speaking slave-owners.