An excerpt from Stephen Budiansky’s The Bloody Shirt concerning South Carolina during Reconstruction. As in Alabama, there were bloody insurrections against negro/carpetbagger rule in the name of the “white race” (all of the Reconstruction governments were overthrown), which at that time referred to a common Southron ethnic group.
“No free people, ever,” declared a speaker at a convention of the state’s white establishment a few years later, had been subjected to the “domination of their own slaves,” and the applause was thunderous. “This is a white man’s government” was the phrase echoed over and over in the prints of the Democratic press and the orations of politicians denouncing the “tyranny” to which the “oppressed” South was being subjected.
Stephen Budiansky, The Bloody Shirt: Terror After Appomattox (New York: Viking, 2008) 7
“Scot-Irish” was never used.