Note that the owners of the big plantations who served as the Confederacy’s ideologues and political elites were not those "insular Scotch-Irish". On the contra

Note that the owners of the big plantations who served as the Confederacy’s ideologues and political elites were not those "insular Scotch-Irish". On the contrary, they often boasted of their descent from prominent English families and set themselves apart from the poorer whites of less prestigious ethnic origin. Meanwhile, among those Scotch-Irish, quite a lot of them from Appalachia actually went north to fight for the Union. This is because as poor tenant farmers, they often owned no slaves themselves and were not invested in the big plantation economy based on slavery that the Confederacy’s elites sought to protect. This fact sadly gets overlooked today in, say, northern Alabama where many whites are enamored of Confederate symbolism and Lost Cause mythology, but if they actually dabbled in genealogy and looked at where their forefathers were during the Civil War, those forebears may well have been fighting for the Union.