Quote Originally Posted by gilmore View Post
It's not that I think so, it's that I have read so in quite a few histories of the colonial American south.

While it may be more desireable and politically correct these days to think of Scots as slaves than as slave owners, this just wasn't usually the case here at all.

While some Scots were indeed transported here as convicts (and by far most who came here were not), they could eventually become liberated, buy land and own slaves themselves. Africans could not. However they came here, Gaelic-speaking Scots tended to be deeply religious and felt it their Christian duty to teach their ways to their Gaelic speaking African slaves, stripping them of their culture and their religion in order to civilize and convert them, saving them from the fires of Calvinist hell in the afterlife.
Of course there were Scottish plantation owners, but the Scottish plantation owners would've spoken English. Only the poor (i.e. slaves or sharecroppers) would've spoken Gaelic as their primary language.