The following excerpts were taken from:  *Brownstein, Robin. The Peoples of North America - the Scotch-Irish Americans. Chelsea House Publishers. 1988. Pages 13-14

On April 21, 1836, a ragtag band of soldiers collected near the San Jacinto River in southeast Texas. Defenders of the newly formed Republic of Texas, they awaited the arrival of their enemy, the Mexican army, led by President Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. Although outnumbered two to one, the small troop defeated Santa Anna’s army at the Battle of San Jacinto and thus secured Texan independence. The leader of the small army was General Sam Houston, whose name remains synonymous with Texas. He served as the republic’s first president and later, when Texas became America’s 28th state in 1845, represented its interests in the U.S. Senate. In 1859 Houston was elected governor. Today the nation’s fourth-largest city (according to the 1990 Census) bears his name.

Sam Houston’s success completed a line of energetic pioneering that began in 1689, when Houston’s great-great-grandfather made the hazardous ocean crossing from Northern Ireland to North America. His son Robert - Sam’s grandfather - moved his family from Philadelphia to Virginia. When the 13 American colonies rose up to defy Great Britain in the revolutionary war, another Robert Houston - Sam’s father - served as a captain under General George Washington. In 1806, Robert Houston led his family west from Virginia to the Tennessee frontier, when his son Sam was 13.

The Houstons belonged to an ethnic group that played a major role in American history during its formative years. This group, known as the Scotch-Irish, immigrated to North America from Ulster, or Northern Ireland, after migrating there from Scotland. The term Scotch-Irish is actually an American invention, first coined in 1695. Initially the immigrants themselves shied away from the term, preferring to describe themselves as Ulster-Scots, as they had in their homeland….

Theodore Roosevelt - U.S. president from 1901 to 1909 - wrote: "The backwoodsmen were American by birth and parentage, and of mixed race; but the dominant strain in their blood was that of the … Scotch-Irish… Mingled with the descendants of many other races, they nevertheless formed the kernel of the distinctively and intensely American stock… fitted to be Americans from the very start.