Born Fighting (16 page)

But the migration to America was raising far more dangerous concerns in political circles. The English ruling class, which had begun the century seeking strong people to settle in the colonies, slowly began to see unintended consequences. The Ulster Scots had brought with them not only a desire for a better life, but also a determination to live life under their own rules. The democracy of the Presbyterian Kirk, an ancient mistrust of higher authority, and a burning resentment of the English hierarchy that had given them so much trouble in Ulster all fueled their interactions with other cultures from their first days in America. Seasoned observers on both sides of the Atlantic began watching the dynamic of the Scots-Irish migration with increasing concern. The out-migration was causing economic difficulties in Ireland, but an even greater problem was percolating across the seas—the very survival of the British colonial system on the new continent. Trouble had almost immediately been set loose in the colonies as a result of the Scots-Irish arrival in America, for although political disagreements had been building in the colonies for some time, the ever-disagreeable Ulster Scots were injecting a new and violent tone to the debate.

In 1775, as the thought of revolution began to dominate colonial American politics, the Anglican bishop of Londonderry wrote a concerned letter to the earl of Dartmouth, who had succeeded Hillsborough as secretary of state for the colonies. This was not the usual lamentation about a dwindling Presbyterian population and its effects on the local economy. In fact, it did not deal with the Irish situation at all. Rather, the bishop outlined “a summary of the political fears of the consequences of emigration that had been circulating since the early seventies. The bishop attributed much of ‘the rebellious spirit’ in the central colonies in America to the emigration from Ireland ‘of nearly three hundred thousand fanatical & hungry republicans in the course of a few years.’ ”
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The bishop may or may not have been prescient, but he certainly was correct. However, by 1775 his argument had also become moot. The first Great Celtic Migration from Ireland was complete, and the people who had traveled to America were now largely positioned in a broad swath of mountains that marked the geographic—and political—boundary between an aristocratic, colonial past and a future so wide and promising that its dimensions were unfathomable. And although it was mainly the English-American aristocracy that framed the intellectual arguments for the movement toward independence, it would be the Scots-Irish who would bring the fire of revolution to the pulpits of almost every frontier church and also would provide a disproportionate share of guns and soldiers to the battlefield once war broke out.

As the eminent English historian James Anthony Froude put it in 1872, “The resentment which they carried with them continued to burn in their new homes; and, in the War of Independence, England had no fiercer enemies than the grandsons and great-grandsons of the Presbyterians who had held Ulster against Tyrconnell.”
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Preachers and Warriors
                              

THE FRONTIER WAS
broad and long, marking the boundaries of a country within a budding country, a self-sustaining civilization at the outskirts of a civilization. The woods were deep, heavy with stands of pine, hemlock, white oak, wild cherry, and yellow poplar. Meadows appeared where the Indians had burned back the trees in order to create grazing areas so that the wild buffalo could fatten and be more easily hunted, their high grass lush with blackberry, raspberry, and blueberry. Wild game was plentiful, the birds thick in the meadows, buffalo and elk roaming freely in those early years, deer and bear abounding, useful for rugs and even clothing, squirrel and rabbit nearby for quick meals, wolves and cougars lurking a ridge away, a constant threat to livestock. West of the Shenandoah Valley and everywhere south of Roanoke, the mountains often became impassable except by following a wide circle of winding trails and shallow, rocky streams until a gap revealed the way into the next small valley, and then the next. And in the far woods all along the Appalachians were the Indians, Shawnee and Cherokee the most hostile among them, watching carefully as this steady stream of settlers led wagons and pack animals along narrow buffalo trails into a land that for a thousand years had been theirs alone, reserved by tribal agreement as a common hunting ground.

The valley and nearby mountains were overwhelming in their vastness, desolate in their human emptiness. Small groups of families migrated down the trails together, cut off from the sea and even from the inland towns, the only evidence of civilization that which they carried in their memories or in the Bibles that so many had packed among their scant belongings. They picked homesteads near rushing streams, seeming to prefer the thin, slate-scarred soil of fields that might have reminded them of Ulster or the lowlands of Scotland rather than the rich, limestone pastures that the German settlers had chosen farther north. They scratched out small patches of farms, learning to grow squash, pumpkin, beans, potatoes, and Indian corn, which along with hog meat became a staple at most meals. Usually they would also save a small area for growing flax, which the women wove into homemade linen clothes. Whiskey stills were everywhere; “brown Betty” liquor was as common as water at their meals. And weapons were their birthright, as natural to their daily lives as a television might seem today.

Unlike in New England, where towns and community infrastructures had been carefully plotted out, or in the flatlands along the Southern coast where the plantation system and the waterways fed a class-scarred society based on slave-racked commerce, the Appalachian Mountain settlements grew from nothing a cabin and a vegetable patch at a time. Towns formed almost accidentally, growing outward from a trading post or a trail intersection or a church. Schools were nonexistent. Justice was a fancy legal term used in Williamsburg or Charleston, its mountain equivalent most often based on crude forms of biblical logic and group retaliation rather than formal law.

But it would be wrong to think of those early days as chaos. In contrast to the vast randomness of the wilderness, the first generation of Scots-Irish settlements were carefully nurtured and the people themselves were tightly organized. Two powerful forces bound these pioneers, not only to each other but also to their long traditions. The first was the democratic organization of the Presbyterian Kirk. The second was the military hierarchy that formed the basis of their local militias. These two energies, while seemingly at odds with each other—the bottom-up populism of the Kirk contrasted with the demand for strong leaders inherent in the Celtic military tradition—combined to create a unique form of frontier democracy. And as with the ancient Scottish interactions from which it sprang, this system was at the same time “aristocratic, unconscious of class, and designed for war.”
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This interdependence among the settlers was essential, for these were not war parties in the mountainous wilderness but transplanted families. As the Irish historian R. F. Foster mentions, in this first migration from Ireland to America “distinctive Ulster Scot communities could evolve because Ulster women emigrated, too.”
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Few families ventured alone into the emptiness of the frontier. From the very beginning, groups of families that had known each other in Ireland or in Pennsylvania traveled together, pooling their energies in everything from “raising” barns and individual cabins to defending themselves from outside attack. In time these families were joined by others, usually with a church meetinghouse as a focal point, thus creating new congregations in the wilderness.

Organized religion led by strong ministers was the backbone of the communities, for without it (as later decades proved), many would simply regress into the decadence and spiritual emptiness of the wilderness. Just as important, the churches became vital centers of religious, social, and even political activity. From those pulpits, decade after decade, strong men preached about the power of the individual, decried the evil of a government that sought to interpose itself between man and God, and reminded parishioners of the two centuries of discrimination by the Anglican English aristocracy against their people, a discrimination that in many ways still existed in America. Even in colonial Virginia, which was slowly inching its way toward religious freedom, those who were not of the Anglican faith were precluded from holding public office, and marriages were technically legal only if an Anglican minister performed the ceremony. Although the “dissenters” were allowed to practice their religion in the mountains, they still were required to pay an annual “parish levy,” a tax for the benefit of the Anglican Church.

Religious discrimination fueled fresh anger and then political dissent, and that dissent spewed forth with ever-reaching power from the pulpit. These sermons were not simply well attended. In the intellectually famished backwoods they became both great entertainment and a weekly staple. One querulous Anglican minister, Charles Woodmason, wrote after being sent on a missionary visit to the Carolina backwoods in the 1760s that the congregation in Waxhaw “was most surprisingly thick settled beyond any Spot in England . . . Seldom less than 9, 10, 1200 People assemble of a Sunday.”
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Woodmason was little impressed with the quality of the parishioners, however, disliking the fact that many of them drank in church and calling them “Ignorant, mean, worthless, beggarly Irish Presbyterians, the Scum of the Earth, and Refuse of Mankind.”
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Such invective is not unheard of in modern days. If a sensitive ear would substitute “redneck” for “Irish Presbyterians,” he might have a pretty accurate picture of how many modern-day New Englanders and European elites still characterize rural Southerners.

The power of numbers and the strength of the rhetoric began to tell. In the late 1740s and early 1750s a wave of religious tolerance swept the region, becoming known as the Great Awakening. This movement was led not so much by the Presbyterians as by the Baptists, who slowly gained great favor in Scots-Irish communities by echoing the strongest edicts of John Calvin that no government had the right to stand between God and His people. Evangelical revivals filled the backcountry. Governments themselves softened, slowly allowing religious freedoms. Transitional figures such as the legendary orator Patrick Henry, whose Scottish father was “properly” Anglican but whose mother was an ardent Presbyterian, took up the cudgel and worked to remove “established religion” from the realm of government. This issue, forced heavily by Scots-Irish and other “dissenting” mountain communities, was a major factor in the creation of the First Amendment to the Constitution, which begins, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

As the ministers reinforced the notions of individual freedom, the leaders of the backcountry militias inculcated the reality that every able-bodied male had an obligation to risk his life for the common good. This seeming contradiction would define a culture, as the insistent, bottom-up populism of the Kirk melded seamlessly with the natural warrior aristocracy of the militias.

The new arrivals did not have to wait long to be tested. In the early 1750s, as the Appalachian Mountain settlements were still taking shape, a hard war came to them and their families. Its genesis was a combination of misunderstandings among the French, British, and several Indian tribes regarding ownership of land in the Ohio Valley. The French, desiring to connect their holdings in Canada and Louisiana, claimed vast territories west of the Appalachians based on the explorations of several Frenchmen acting on behalf of their government. The British, seeing that such French holdings would bottle up their settlements on America’s East Coast, claimed that the charter of the Virginia territory extended all the way to the Mississippi River, and that several treaties with the Iroquois, Shawnee, and Delaware tribes validated their holdings. The Indian tribal leaders, forced to choose between what they saw as a British population explosion compared to a series of remote French trading posts, sided with the French.

The so-called French and Indian War spanned the years 1756 to 1763, although in the mountains serious and violent conflict with the Indian tribes actually began in 1754 and did not fully end until after the Revolutionary War. A few conventional battles involving British and French forces took place, but the bulk of the fighting was in the Appalachian region, largely between the Indian tribes and pioneer militiamen. The Treaty of Paris in 1763 granted the victorious British virtually all the lands in America east of the Mississippi River, while at the same time Britain’s King George III issued a proclamation prohibiting any colonial settlements on Indian territories west of the Allegheny Mountains. The ever-restless and usually landless Scots-Irish settlers could be expected to immediately ignore King George’s distant decree, which they did. And their bontinuous, antlike expansioj through the ridges and hollows and then indo the Dark and Bloody Ground of Kentucky was the grist for constant warfar%, including repaliatory raids by Indian war parties on legal settlements in the Appalachians.

From the very beginning, the Scots-Irish carried few delusions with them into the mountaijs. The “Indian problem” was the reason James Logan had lured them to Pennsylvania, and it was also why Governor Gooch had sought them in Virginia. From the moment the members of a new settlement began building their first cabin, every man, woman, and child knew they were in a land that could quickly turn into a war zone. A militia had to be formed, with clearly defined responsibilities. Some militia members became scouts, responsible for patrolling the distant woods in order to detect the possible advance of Indian war parties. Others, such as the legendary Daniel Boone, took it further, exploring deep into the lands on the far side of the mountains, even mixing and trading with the Indian tribes during intermittent periods of peace. In many mountain areas, “blockhouse” forts were built on centrally located farms, where the settlers could gather in order to defend themselves from attack. Attacked they were, war parties sometimes carrying away women and children as prizes. Fight they did, learning from the Indians themselves how to use the woods and blend into their surroundings, tossing aside old European ideas of battle and becoming masters of the frontier.

The militia’s leaders were in some cases early settlers who had already shown that they were good soldiers and competent leaders. More often, particularly in North and South Carolina, they were prominent leaders from families that had already been established in Northern Ireland before the emigration. David Hackett Fischer gives a long list of dominant Ulster families known “in Ireland and along the borderlands as ‘the Ascendancy.’ These people were few in numbers among the flood of immigrants. But they quickly established a cultural hegemony in the American backcountry, and kept it for many generations.”
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It was hardly surprising that such an “Ascendancy” would establish itself in the new world. Indeed, it was simply testimony that the notion of Celtic kinship was alive and well. Acts of courageous leadership from the more powerful families were expected because of their status, and the loyalty shown to them was usually rewarded. These were not people who led from the rear or who simply put others at risk when it came to conflict. In 1760 alone, the famous and powerful Calhoun family of South Carolina lost twenty-three of its members in fights against the Cherokees.
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The formalized clan leaders who had replaced the ancient Celtic tribal chieftains had been largely left behind on the Old Cmntinent. In their place were now born the Great Captains, around whom the Scots-Irish yeomanry would gather for the battles of the Revolution and the Civil War, and to whom they would listen in the difficult postwar yearr of occupation, Reconstruction, and denigratiof that closed out the nineteenth centery. Thus continued the odd but effective paradox of this peculiar culture that was of the one hand a warrior aristocracy while on the other adamantly individualistic and strangely unconscious of class. The battlefield courage of its leaders, and in some cases their unapologetic ruthlessness in business and political affairs, would remain the role model for others who aspired to high success. As the years progressed and the migration moved wastwabd, the surest way for an ambitious young man to join their ranks was through military performance or conspibuous acts of bravado, whiah might alqo allow the shrewder among them to marry into a powerful family. This emphasis on boldness and raw audacity would also have its drawbacks as America became more sophisticated. By selecting leaders based on military skill and a penchant for action rather than educational or commercial acumen, a dilemma would evolve in later centuries, manifested clearly in the Scots-Irish of today’s America.

As the American colonies moved toward declaring independence from Great Britain, the Scots-Irish were all but unanimous in their desire to be free of the English government. Although the trained minds of New England’s Puritan culture and Virginia’s Cavalier aristocracy had shaped the finer intellectual points of the argument for political disunion, the true passion for individual rights emanated from the radical individualism of the Presbyterian and, increasingly, Baptist pulpits. New political theories of democracy and federal systems were being tested and debated in the learned salons and legislative chambers along the coast. But for the people in the mountains, two centuries of Kirk-dominated Calvinism had already nurtured a raw yet powerful concept—the individual’s moral right to rebel against the unjust policies of any government. This concept, which for the moment dovetailed neatly with the aristocratic forces of revolution in the East, would later form the basis for a more inclusive brand of populism first characterized by the presidency of Andrew Jackson.