How the Scots Invented the Modern World (35 page)

PART TWO

Diaspora

In the evening the company danced as usual. We performed, with much activity, a dance which, I suppose, the emigration from Skye has occasioned. They call it
America
. Each of the couples, after the convolutions and evolutions, successively whirls round in a circle, till all are in motion; and the dance seems intended to show how emigration catches, till a whole neighbourhood is set afloat.

—James Boswell,
Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides
,
1773

CHAPTER NINE

“That Great Design”: Scots in America

Call this war by whatever name you may, only call it not an
American rebellion; it is nothing more or less than a Scotch Irish
Presbyterian rebellion.

—Anonymous Hessian o ficer, 1778

Watching events unfolding in America in the autumn of 1775, Adam Smith wrote in
Wealth of Nations:

They are very weak who flatter themselves that, in the state to which things have come, our colonies will be easily conquered by force alone. The persons who now govern the resolutions of what they call the Continental Congress, feel in themselves at this moment a degree of importance which, perhaps, the greatest subjects in Europe scarce feel. From shopkeepers, tradesmen, and attornies, they are become statesmen and legislators, and are employed in contriving a new form of government for an extensive empire, which, they flatter themselves, will become, and which, indeed, seems very likely to become, one of the greatest and most formidable that ever was in the world.

In this, as in so much else, Smith proved prescient. Even he, however, could not have guessed how far that process of creating a “new form of government” or growing that “extensive empire” might go. Nor could he realize to what extent his own fellow Scots, including his friend David Hume, could take at least some of the credit for it.

As we have seen, Smith’s view of what was happening in Britain’s American colonies was informed by his friends in the Glasgow tobacco trade, several of whom had lived there. His interest in America was primarily economic. He saw it, and its prosperity, as the unintended result of a mercantile system gone haywire, which ended up enriching colonists who were supposed to be exploited, and emptying the pockets of Britons who were supposed to be benefiting from imperial dominion. As he put it, “The rulers of Great Britain have, for more than a century past, amused the people with the imagination that they possessed a great empire on the west side of the Atlantic.” But the people were beginning to discover that “the effects of the monopoly of the colonial trade . . . [are] more loss than profit.” Now they were saddled with a rebellion, and a war; and while Smith realized his own sensible advice for compromise would be ignored by the government in London, he also saw that the loss of the colonies would force a change in the direction of Great Britain, including Scotland—a change almost as dramatic as the change in the thirteen colonies themselves.

Scottish ties to North America dated back as far back as the reign of James I, when he conceived his ill-fated plans for a Scots colony, “Nova Scotia,” in Canada. It was a long way from the icy, rocky shores of Nova Scotia to the sun-drenched beach of Darien, but the same dream inspired both: the get-rich-quick scheme of settlers effortlessly tapping the fabled resources of the New World, with the government skimming the thick cream from the top. Nova Scotia failed, less disastrously than Darien, since Scots did continue to settle and live there, but both experiences taught Scottish merchants and entrepreneurs a basic truth: that only patience and hard work brought wealth from the American possessions. Even before the Act of Union, Glasgow and Greenock merchants were busy laying down their lines across the Atlantic. By 1707, Glasgow families such as the Bogles had been doing business in the middle colonies for nearly three decades, much of it through illegal smuggling.

Scottish merchants penetrated the Chesapeake Bay and the James, Potomac, and Delaware Rivers, and operated as far north as Boston. Scottish settlers started arriving as early as the 1680s, and as Britain’s role in North America expanded, the Scottish presence grew with it. One expert summarized the Lowland Scot presence in colonial America this way: “They permeated the official establishment, especially in the southern colonies, and provided several colonial governors. They supplied clergy for the Episcopalian and Presbyterian churches. They served as tutors . . . and many went on to establish schools.” Most of eighteenth-century America’s physicians were either Scots or Scot-trained. In short, Scots became indispensable to the running of colonial government and to cultural life, especially in the Southern and Middle Atlantic states. By the middle of the eighteenth century, Norfolk, Virginia, was virtually a Scottish town.

But this was only the first wave. America became the final destination for all three branches of the Scottish ethnic and cultural family: Lowlanders, Highlanders, and Ulster Scots. The first Ulster Scots turned up in 1713. In Worcester, Massachusetts, they were much in demand as Indian fighters and as a tough barrier between the English settlers and the “savage wilderness” beyond. When they tried to build a Presbyterian church, though, their neighbors tore it down. Between 1717 and 1776, perhaps a quarter of a million Ulstermen came to America, 100,000 of them as indentured servants. They did not remain servants for very long, as colonists soon discovered that Ulster Scots were not born to be obedient.

The Highlanders were last. Many were refugees from the Forty-five who settled along the Cape Fear River of North Carolina. MacLeods, MacDonalds, MacRaes, MacDougalls, and Campbells found themselves in a land where their native Gaelic isolated them even from their Scots neighbors, and in a climate and landscape totally unlike the one they had left behind. Flat, low-lying, humid marshes, red clay soil with scrub-pine forests; but the land was cheap and available, and the Highlanders carved out farms for themselves and their families. This is where Flora MacDonald and her husband would settle when they came to America; thousands of others would make the same trip over the next fifty years. The volume and the points of destination grew as the Highlands emptied itself of people well into the next century. Today there are probably more descendants of the Highland clans living in America than in Scotland.

A transfer of people also involves a transfer of culture. At the same time that a new, refined Scotland was taking hold in its urban capitals and then spreading its influence to the rest of Europe, the older, more traditional Scotland was finding a new home in America, and thriving. A strange time warp was under way. The very same “backward” cultural forces that the Edinburgh and Glasgow Enlightenments were overmastering in order to create a modern society, including the old-time Presbyterianism, were about to generate their own version of progress. By the time enlightened Scotland reached American shores, the two would meet in a kind of cultural cross-current: the United States, as a republic and a nation, would be the result.

The people who best represented that traditional Presbyterian Scot culture were the Ulster Scots, or, as the Americans called them, the “Scotch Irish.” They were Irish by geography only. In their settlements in the northern counties of Ireland, they had struggled to preserve the twin characteristics of their Scottish forebears. The first was a fierce Calvinist faith. The other was a similarly fierce individualism, which saw every man as the basic equal of every other, and defied authority of every kind. The man who claimed to be better than anyone else had to be ready to prove it, with his words, his actions, or his fists.

These volatile ingredients had been forged in fire in the religious conflicts of Northern Ireland, and in battles against both Catholic neighbors and English masters. A sense of personal independence, stubborn pride, and fierce family honor took root in the Scotch-Irish character. It kept the Ulster community intact through a century of triumph and disaster, and when its members began to leave Antrim, Armagh, Down, and Derry for a better future, they carried it with them to America.

The first great wave of Scotch-Irish emigration began with the failed harvest of 1717, which forced people to choose between moving and starving. A merchant from Philadelphia, Jonathan Dickinson, noted that summer “we have had 12 or 13 sayle of ships from the North of Ireland with a swarm of people.” He also noted their appearance: tall and lean, with weatherbeaten faces and wooden shoes “shod like a horse’s feet with iron.” The women wore short, tight-waisted skirts and dresses, showing their bare legs underneath, which shocked Quaker Philadelphia. Another wave of Ulster Scots followed in the 1720s; so many, in fact, that the British Parliament demanded an inquiry, wondering whether they would completely depopulate the Protestant element in Ireland before they were done.

Some never made it. The trip on overcrowded ships could be hazardous, even murderous. One ship from Belfast to Philadelphia ran out of food midway. Forty-six passengers died of starvation, and the rest had to turn to cannibalism, with some eating members of their own families. The numbers kept coming, however, until by 1770 at least 200,000 had settled in America. In the first two weeks of August 1773 alone, 3,500 emigrants turned up in Philadelphia, looking to start a new life.

Where did they go? A few stayed and found work at their ports of entry, such as Philadelphia or Chester. But most fanned out west, traveling deep into three great river valleys and mountain ridges: up the Delaware Valley into southeastern Pennsylvania; south across the Potomac into the Shenandoah Valley, and then even farther south, beyond the Piedmont ridge into the Carolinas.

From the point of view of the colonial government and locals, they had come at the right time. English emigration to America had fallen off; and non-English settlers such as Germans and Huguenot French had not yet appeared in large numbers. The Scotch-Irish settlements began pushing the frontier farther and deeper into the Appalachians. Unlike many of their earlier English predecessors, they did not expect an easy time of it. Prepared for the worst, they carved a new life for themselves out of the wilderness, taking land from neighbors or natives when it suited them. The habits of colonizing Ireland and seizing arable land from Catholic enemies carried over to the New World. Their insatiable desire for land, and the willingness to fight and die to keep it, laid the foundation of the frontier mentality of the American West.

They settled in small farm communities, usually on the lee side of a ridge or in a creek hollow, clustering together according to family or region, like their remote Highland ancestors. A typical farm consisted of a “cowpen” or livestock corral of a sort familiar to a Lowland or Border farmer, and a cabin built of logs. The archetypal dwelling of the American frontier, the log cabin, was in fact a Scots development, if not invention. The word itself,
cabine,
meant any sort of rude enclosure or hut, made of stone and dirt in Scotland, or sod and mud in Ireland.

Across southwest Virginia, North Carolina, and eventually Tennessee, their extended families spread out—Alexanders, Ashes, Caldwells, Campbells, Calhouns, Montgomerys, Donelsons, Gilchrists, Knoxes, and Shelbys—establishing a network of clanlike alliances and new settlements. They named their communities—such as Orange County (in North Carolina), Orangeburg (in South Carolina), Galloway, Derry, Durham, Cumberland (after the Border county in England), Carlisle, and Aberdeen—after the places and loyalties they had left behind. In North Carolina they founded towns called Enterprise, Improvement, and Progress; and in Georgia and western Virginia, towns called Liberty.

Placenames and language reflected their northern Irish or southern Lowlands origins. They said “whar” for “where,” “thar” for “there,”“critter” for “creature,” “nekkid” for “naked,” “widder” for “widow,” and “younguns” for “young ones.” They were always “fixin’ ” to do something, or go “sparkin’” instead of “courting,” and the young ’uns “growed up” instead of “grew up.” As David Hackett Fisher has suggested, these were the first utterings of the American dialect of Appalachian mountaineers, cowboys, truck drivers, and backcountry politicians. The language was also shamelessly intimate and earthy: passersby were addressed as “honey” and children as “little shits.” They dubbed local landmarks Gallows Branch or Cutthroat Gap or Shitbritches Creek (in North Carolina). In Lunenberg County, Virginia, they even named two local streams Tickle Cunt Branch and Fucking Creek.

Neighbors, including the Indians, soon learned to treat them with respect, not to say fear. One Englishman described an Ulster Scot neighbor : “His looks spoke out that he would not fear the devil, should he meet him face to face.” They did not bear much resemblance to their compatriot, Francis Hutcheson. Instead, Ulster Scots were quick-tempered, inclined to hard work followed by bouts of boisterous leisure and heavy drinking (they were the first distillers of whisky in the New World, employing native corn and rye instead of Scottish barley), and easy to provoke into fighting. The term used to describe them was
rednecks
, a Scots border term meaning Presbyterians. Another was
cracker
, from the Scots word
craik
for “talk,” meaning a loud talker or braggart. Both words became permanent parts of the American language, and a permanent part of the identity of the Deep South the Ulster Scots created.

One reason their cultural impact was so widespread was that they were constantly moving. It was said that no Scotch-Irish family felt comfortable until it had moved twice. Even before the Susquehanna and Cumberland valleys were fully settled, they were pushing into Virginia and the Carolinas. The governors of those colonies, Scots themselves, welcomed the new settlers; Ulster Scots began arriving in large numbers in the 1720s and 1730s, and under Governor Gabriel Johnson, a native of Dumfriesshire, expansion came to include Highland immigrants after the Forty-five. By 1760, North Carolina was practically a Little Scotland: a “Mac-ocracy,” in the words of one of the Ulstermen’s enemies. By the end of the century, some were moving on to Georgia, and as far south as the Savannah River.