Scotland to Ireland, the First Migrations

The migration of Protestant Scots to Ulster, Dublin, and other parts of Ireland, occurred mainly during the 17th and 18th centuries. The first major influx of Scots into Ulster came during the settlement of east Down. This started in May 1606 and was followed in 1610 by the arrival of many more Scots as part of the Plantation of Ulster. During the Irish Rebellion of 1641, Irish Catholics attempted to expel the settlers, resulting in inter-communal violence and, ultimately, leading to the death of between 10,000 and 20,000 settlers and an undetermined number of Irish people, over 10 years of war. The memory of this traumatic episode, and the savage repression which followed, poisoned the relationship between the Scottish and English settlers and Irish Roman Catholics, almost irreparably.
The Scots-Irish population in Ulster was further augmented during the subsequent Irish Confederate Wars, when a Scottish Covenanter army was landed in the province to protect the settlers from Irish Catholic forces. After the Wars were over, many of the soldiers settled permanently in Ulster.
Finally, another major influx of Scots into northern Ireland occurred in the 1690s, when tens of thousands of people fled a famine in Scotland to come to Ulster.
The settlers and their descendants, the majority of whom were Presbyterian or Anglican, became the majority in the province of Ulster. However, along with Roman Catholics, Presbyterians and other non-Anglican Protestants were legally disenfranchised by the Penal Laws, which gave full rights only to Anglicans, who were mainly the descendants of English settlers belonging to the Church of Ireland. For this reason, up until the 19th century, and despite their common fear of the dispossessed Catholics, there was considerable disharmony between the Presbyterian and Anglican populations of Ulster. Subsequently, in 1798, many Ulster-Scots joined the United Irishmen and participated in the Irish Rebellion of 1798.

(Source: Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots_Irish)

Lowlanders, Celts & Beginnings of the Troubles

From The Road to Guilford Courthouse, by John Buchanan, ©1997, John Wiley & Sons, pp. 120-121:

There are Celtic myth enthusiasts who believe the Scotch Irish were Celts, have peopled with Highlanders whole American landscapes where there were none, imagined bagpipes on American battlefields that never echoed their wails, conjured a Celtic culture for an entire American region where it never existed. But the Scotch Irish were not Celts by either blood or culture. Their ancestors were Lowland Scots, inhabitants of a poor, backward, violent land. The difference between the Lowland Scots and the more famous Highland Scots should be established immediately. All that Lowlanders and Highlanders had in common, besides wretched poverty, was a political line on the map separating Scotland and England, and their incompatibility survived the Act of Union (1707) of the two kingdoms well into the nineteenth century. They might have lived in very different countries, for they were very dissimilar people and they hated each other.
The hardening split between Highlanders and Lowlanders had developed at least by the late fourteenth century and was rendered more intransigent by deep ethnic and cultural differences. ... To these differences was added after the Protestant Reformation the profound distinction between Protestant Lowlanders and largely Catholic Highlanders in an age of fierce religious conflicts.
In the early seventeenth century, in a continuation of an effort England had begun five centuries before to subdue Ireland, James I of England, who was also James VI of Scotland, confiscated the Ulster lands of the Irish aristocracy and created the Plantation of Ulster. On it were settled Scottish Lowlanders and English farmers and Londoners, Protestants all. Earlier settlements under private initiative were also composed of Scottish and English Protestants. James also hoped that flooding the land with Lowland Scots and English would prevent joint actions by Irish Celts and Scottish Highland Celts. Thus were the seeds planted for the terrible "troubles" we have witnessed on our television sets for the past decades.

John Lewis, First Settler of Augusta County

From History of Augusta County, Virginia, by John Lewis Peyton, pub. 1882, Samuel M. Yost & Son:

Among those whose attention was now directed to our Valley was John Lewis, who had been for some time in Pennsylvania, quietly awaiting the arrival from Europe of his wife and children. This remarkable man was born in the north of Ireland, descended from a French-Protestant family, and was educated in Scotland. In Ulster, where he resided until fifty years of age, he commanded the confidence, respect and esteem of the people, and occupied that position of influence, and took that leading part in society and county affairs, which had been traditionally the role of the O'Donnells, Chichesters and O'Doghertys. In youth he was of impetuous temper, but the varied experience of an active life had taught him to control his spirit. He was endowed with a high order of intellect, a valorous soul, and soon became noted for his virtuous principles. A deplorable affair, but one alike honorable to his spirit and manhood, terminated his career in Ireland. He had been sometime in America, when, in 1732, Joist Hite and a party of pioneers set out to settle upon a grant of forty thousand acres of land in the [Shenandoah] Valley, which had been obtained, in 1730, by Isaac Vanmeter and his brother, by warrant from the Governor of Virginia. Lewis joined this party, came to the Valley, and was the first white settler of Augusta....John Lewis' settlement was a few miles below the site of the town of Staunton, on the banks of the stream which still bears his name. It may be proper to remark here, that when the circumstances of the affray [in Ireland] became known, after due investigation, a pardon was granted to John Lewis, and patents are still extant, by which his Majesty granted to him a large portion of the fair domain of Western Virginia.
For many years after the settlement of Fort Lewis, great amity and good will existed between the neighboring Indians and the white settlers, whose numbers increased apace, until they became quite a formidable colony.