Born Fighting Read online

  And on page 9 of the typed version of a letter written long, long ago, my father’s aunt introduces us to her mother—my great-great-grandmother—Rebecca Miller. Born in the remote wilderness of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains in 1825, Rebecca had filled her daughter with stories of her own grandmother, Margaret Lackey. The House of Ochiltree mentions the Millers as having “distinguished themselves in the terrible siege of Londonderry,” a high honor to be singled out among so many courageous people, and the aunt’s letter confirms how deeply those memories had burned into the progeny of those who had survived. “Their ancestors had been in the Siege of Londonderry, and my Mother said she had often heard her grandmother Margaret Lackey Miller tell the stories of that time, and sing the song of ‘The Battle of the Boyne’ in a most dramatic and thrilling manner. She would sometimes get quite excited in describing the sufferings and courage of her people in the Siege of Londonderry.”

  All this written no doubt from an obscure farm in Missouri by a woman in her later years, now reflecting on the memories of her mother telling the stories she herself had learned from a grandmother while sitting before the fireplace in the near-dark of a Virginia cabin within a few miles of what we now call the Appalachian Trail. Voice to voice, before my eyes I am transferred back six generations and am looking back several generations further, to the remembered tragedies in Northern Ireland that both shaped these people and helped spur them on into a new and sometimes fearsome wilderness.

  In their words, I can sense them looking coolly at the pretenses and attempted restrictions placed upon them by yet another branch of an Anglican establishment that they imagined they had left behind in Ulster, a pervasive aristocracy that in America controlled most of the “flatlands” along the colonial coast. They were told that they could practice their religion in the mountains even if it was not “lawful,” so long as they did not seek to infect the more ordered societies along the coast. And they were expected to reciprocate by both staying in the mountains and keeping the Indians at bay. These memories burned like fire among people who knew, even nearly three centuries ago, that the Eastern Establishment looked down on them, openly demeaning their religion and their cultural ways, and at bottom sought to use them toward its own ends.

  Their answer, then as now, was to tell the Eastern Establishment to go to hell. A deal was a deal—they would fight the Indians, although many of them would also trade with them and even intermarry. But at bottom they would not forget the duplicity that followed Londonderry, or the Test Acts that fell on the heels of their contributions at the Boyne. Nonconformity as well as a mistrust of central power was now in their blood. America was a far larger place than Ireland, a land in which they could live as they wished and move as freely as they dared whether or not the established government liked what they were doing and were about to do, so long as they did not move too conspicuously toward the east.

  So they made their own world in the mountains. And most of them knew that their future was not along the coast anyway, but ever westward, where they might meet fierce challenges, but where they also could create a new kind of society more akin to their own traditions.

  2

  Pioneers and Radicals

  THE SCOTS-IRISH PRESBYTERIANS began trickling out of Ulster soon after the 1704 Test Acts came into force. In the next two decades a rather small assortment of families, typically traveling in “parcels” of 600 to 800 people, ventured across the Atlantic to test America’s promise as well as its receptivity to their religion and their cultural ways. They traveled in tiny, crowded, disease-ridden two-masted ships that sailed from the ports of Londonderry, Belfast, Newry, Larne, and Portrush, taking on the average about two months to cross the treacherous Atlantic. In this first experimental wave of emigration the Ulster emigrants scattered their arrivals among the major ports of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Annapolis, and Charleston, South Carolina.

  But by the early 1720s, when the large-scale migrations from Northern Ireland began, the port of choice had become Philadelphia. Over the next five decades the overwhelming majority of Scots-Irish settlers entered the American colonies through either Philadelphia or the nearby cities of Chester, Pennsylvania, and New Castle, Delaware, which were just south of Philadelphia along the Delaware River.4 From these locations the Scots-Irish settlers first spread westward into the vicinity of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and then later followed the mountain roads southward into Virginia, North and South Carolina, and points beyond.

  From the early 1720s to the beginning of the American Revolution in 1775, there were four great surges of Scots-Irish migration. Each was brought about not only by events in Ireland, but also by a series of incidents and incentives in different American colonies that affected both the pace of their migration and the locations they chose for settlement. The first large migration, from 1720 to about 1730, brought them heavily to Pennsylvania. The second, concentrated in the years 1740 and 1741, drew them to the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia and brought with them many of those who had already settled in Pennsylvania. The third, beginning in the mid-1750s, saw a heavy influx farther down the Appalachian and Allegheny Mountains into southwest Virginia and then into North and South Carolina. This influx included many Scottish highlanders—although they generally arrived in Wilmington, North Carolina, rather than in Philadelphia and settled in the Piedmont rather than in the mountains—as well as Scottish and English borderers, these three groups having been uprooted by political events that followed the Battle of Culloden in 1746. The final surge, in the years just before the beginning of the American Revolution in 1775, saw large numbers of new settlers from Northern Ireland move into the communities that had already been established, especially in southwest Virginia and the Carolinas.

  By the time this migration was complete, as many as a half million Scots-Irish immigrants and their American-born descendants were living in a cohesive geographic area in the mountainous areas of modern-day Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, and South Carolina.5 It has been estimated that as much as one-third of the entire Protestant population of Ireland left for America between the years 1731 and 1768 alone, and this ratio was much higher for the Scots-Irish since few Anglicans were leaving Ulster.6

  Once in America, this was a highly reproductive cultural group—early studies showed its fertility ratios to be 40 percent higher compared to those who remained in the Delaware Valley, and higher also than on the northern frontier.7 Within a few decades they would spill farther west into the southern regions of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois as well as the northern regions of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Within another generation they would move farther west, becoming the dominant culture in the settlements of many parts of Texas, Arkansas, Kansas, Iowa, and Missouri. In the decades following the Civil War, the Scots-Irish would count heavily in populating the Rocky Mountains and the Far West. In these early years, at every step of the way, English, German, and other settlers intermarried and joined these communities, but the sheer numbers and cultural power of the Scots-Irish would shape and define the mores of America’s rural heartland, particularly in the South.

  Philadelphia became the Ulster Scots’ most popular port of entry for two reasons. The first was that the Pennsylvania colony had been created with an eye toward accommodating religious freedom and thus largely welcomed the Ulster dissenters, at least initially. And the second—equally as important—was that the communities in New England and New York wanted nothing to do with them.

  The Ulster Presbyterians who migrated to New England in the early 1700s had believed that the Puritan communities would embrace them as fellow Calvinists, but “the Puritans liked neither Scots nor Irish . . . especially because of their illiteracy, their physical dirtiness and slovenliness, and their notable divergence from Puritan customs, habits, and outlook.”8 To make the obvious point, the fact that the Scots-Irish were Calvinists hardly made them Puritans. A quick-tempered but sensual and playful people, they oft
en dressed provocatively, acted with a volatile belligerence, drank to excess, engaged in constant and open competition in every form, and adamantly defied the attempts of outsiders to control them.

  This initial, instinctive dislike of the Scots-Irish by the Puritans was a clear harbinger of things to come in future decades and even centuries as the American colonies matured into a nation. The Scots-Irish were the cultural antithesis of those who had founded New England. In the years preceding and following the Civil War, not to mention during the war itself, the predominantly Scots-Irish culture of the South would frequently square off against the descendants of those who were making these judgments in the early 1700s. Suffice it to say that none of the characteristics that defined the Scots-Irish culture warmed the hearts of the rigidly intellectual, rules-oriented, and frequently humorless founders of New England.

  As Leyburn put it, the reception of the Scots-Irish who attempted to settle among the Puritans was “grudging in the extreme . . . They were shortly informed that citizenship would not be granted in any Puritan colony except by membership in the established church, which was Congregational.” As a result, most of the Scots-Irish moved off to the frontiers, eventually settling in the remote areas of Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire. In the Puritan areas it was common to refer to them as “these confounded Irish.” Feelings against them grew so strong that in 1729 a mob arose to attempt to prevent the landing of one of the ships arriving from Ulster. “Wherever the Scotch-Irish went in New England it was made abundantly clear to them that they were unwelcome.” Despite such resistance, the Ulster Scots succeeded very well in New England’s mountainous frontier. The town of Londonderry, New Hampshire, was founded by a group that had emigrated from Ulster under the leadership of James McGregor, a minister who had lived through the Londonderry siege as a boy. And to this day many descendants of those early settlers still occupy the rural areas of New England.9

  The migrations to New York and New Jersey were even smaller than those that went to New England, with much the same consequences. There was “nothing to attract them to New York. Its land policy was not generous; its country regions along the Hudson were taken up in great estates; and no special effort had been made . . . to attract colonists from Northern Ireland . . . only three small colonies of Scotch-Irish settled in New York throughout the eighteenth century.”10

  In Pennsylvania the story was entirely different. Not only had the colony been founded with an emphasis on religious tolerance, but also the provincial secretary during the early years was an Ulsterman who, at least at the outset, actively sought their presence.

  James Logan, Pennsylvania’s provincial secretary at the beginning of the Scots-Irish migration, was born in 1674 near Belfast, of Scottish parents. His father was an Anglican clergyman who became a Quaker and thereafter worked as a schoolmaster, causing the family to experience firsthand the differences in treatment in Ulster based on religious affiliation. Apprenticed at the age of thirteen to a linen merchant in Dublin (coincidentally, by name of Edward Webb), James fled with his family to Bristol, England, in 1688 during the uprisings that led to the siege of Londonderry and the Battle of the Boyne. Due to his Quaker faith and his involvement with the linen industry, Logan was befriended and then personally recruited by William Penn, who in 1699 appointed him provincial secretary of the Pennsylvania colony.

  As provincial secretary, Logan spent the next thirty years alternating between his own business interests and representing William Penn’s family in all matters pertaining to Pennsylvania. A self-trained but gifted mathematician who also dabbled in such serious scientific issues as crop hybridization, Logan was best known for inventing the Conestoga wagon, which became the most memorialized vehicle used by the early pioneers as they made their way into the wilderness. He served briefly as mayor of Philadelphia in 1722 and 1723, was chief justice of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania in the 1730s, and even served a brief term as acting governor of the colony.

  Logan’s principal role was to act as William Penn’s land agent and administrator, and in that capacity he was the agent for all land sales in Pennsylvania. And in a related area that gave him increasing concern, he was responsible for both the burgeoning fur trade, on which he made considerable money, and for relations with the Indian tribes. As the years progressed and tensions with the Indians increased, it became clear to Logan that Penn’s dream of forming a government with strictly pacifist principles in this raw frontier was impractical. The Indians were threatening many settlements, and yet the pacifist Quakers who controlled the colony’s affairs could not bring themselves even to raise a militia to counter the incidents of violence at the mountainous edges of the colony.11

  And so Logan, who still retained strong memories of the fighting spirit of the Ulster Scots at Londonderry and elsewhere, decided to import one, convincing the Pennsylvania government to encourage their migration to settlements he would create along the mountains west of Philadelphia. Advancing this idea in 1720, Logan wrote admiringly of his “brave fellow countrymen,” pointing out that he and others in Pennsylvania had become “apprehensive from the Northern Indians . . . I therefore thought it might be prudent to plant a settlement of such men as those who formerly had so bravely defended Londonderry and Inniskillen [sic] as a frontier in case of any disturbance. . . . These people if kindly used will be orderly as they have hitherto been and easily dealt with. They will also, I expect, be a leading example to others.”12

  Over the coming years Logan would be more than well rewarded for his faith in the fighting ability of these Ulster immigrants. But the example that they would provide to others was not the one he expected. Ten years later he would be lamenting that “a settlement of five families from the North of Ireland gives me more trouble than fifty of any other people,” and that the Scots-Irish were “troublesome settlers to the government and hard neighbors to the Indians.”13

  The problem was as old as the issues that had brought about the creation of the Presbyterian Kirk. The refusal to be intimidated from above was by now in the Scots-Irish DNA. Inclined to obey no one other than their local leaders, they were reluctant to follow any dictate of government that contradicted their individual consciences. Logan wanted a warlike people to fight the Indians, and he got them. But he was naive to have expected them at the same time to be docile in the face of laws and other restrictions that were neither to their benefit nor their liking.

  Logan set aside a large tract of land for the Ulster Scots near modern-day Lancaster, Pennsylvania, which the settlers immediately named Donegal in memory of the Northern Irish county near Londonderry from which many of them had migrated. But after settling the land Logan had earmarked for them, they then proceeded to expand in every direction without regard to who owned the properties, causing Logan to lament their “audacious and disorderly habits.” Outside Donegal they began building small farms on virgin land owned by absentee landlords, largely inventing the concept of “squatter’s rights” that would become famous on the American frontier. Logan and others in the Pennsylvania hierarchy grew furious at this usurpation of their own legal authority. Now and then government officials, accompanied by land surveyors and sheriffs with armed escorts, would tear down the squatters’ simple cabins, but once the official party had departed the settlers would simply rebuild them.

  Tensions increased, and the Scots-Irish settlers took to their own style of renegade justice—as the modern-day country song goes, “When you’ve got nothing, you’ve got nothing to lose.” Even though they were legally in the wrong, they believed they were morally in the right, and many of them brought their own weapons into play. The Scots-Irish settlers began facing down government parties sent out to destroy their homes and plow under their crops. In the process, they established a rather disturbing point—that they owed no allegiance to the arbitrary actions of the government and were just as prepared to fight Quakers and English bureaucrats as they were the Indians. A litany arose among the settlers who had braved the fierc
e Atlantic at the invitation of the good Mr. Logan. “It was against the laws of God and nature that so much land should be idle, while so many Christians wanted it to labor on, and to raise their bread.”14

  This conduct could hardly have surprised anyone who had paid attention to the evolution of Presbyterian nonconformist doctrine in Ulster. Indeed, they might even have expected it. The Ulster experience had hardened the traditional Scottish belief that revolts against authority were morally justifiable, extending that concept into the view—important even in today’s America—that the principle of revolution could also apply to the individual in the form of civil disobedience.

  Many historians have contrasted this cultural volatility with the more orderly and respectful behavior of a similarly large but much calmer population of German immigrants during this early period, pointing to these and other rebellious acts as evidence of the admittedly fierce temperament of the Ulster Scots. It is also common to point out the Scots-Irish tendency to move three and four times before finally settling into a permanent home. As Leyburn commented, “If impetuosity early proclaimed itself as a dominant trait among many Scotch-Irish, so also did their restlessness. In contrast to the Germans, who once they found a home tended to remain fixed, the Scotch-Irish never seemed satisfied. . . . Long before fertile areas in the Susquehanna and Cumberland valleys had been filled up, scores who had settled here had . . . moved on down the Great Valley into Virginia, and thence into the Carolinas. . . . One result of this mobility was that excellent land in Pennsylvania which had originally belonged to Ulstermen now came into the hands of the Germans.”15

  The Scots-Irish settlers were indeed restless, as if their natural makeup demanded turmoil. They showed no hesitation in pushing into Indian territory and settling on lands claimed by tribal chiefs. In so doing, their aggressiveness actually helped “light the torch of Indian resentment” rather than discouraging uprisings through a forceful defensive presence, as Logan had first imagined.16 They pressed ever westward across the Pennsylvania mountains and were among the first settlers of Pittsburgh, so that by the mid-1800s the city was viewed as “Scotch-Irish in substantial origin, in complexion and in history—Scotch-Irish in the countenances of the living, and in the records of the dead.”17 Some of them were even lured by Pennsylvania’s proprietors into settling along the Maryland border where they might be “happy in constituting the frontier line against encroaching Maryland Catholics.”18 But their greatest push was to the southwest, along the Wilderness Trail that took them into settlements that spanned the spine of Virginia and eventually led to the western reaches of North and South Carolina.