Born Fighting Read online

  Restlessness to some extent drove this journey, and impetuosity no doubt filled their conduct. But so also did a sense of moral and biblical righteousness coupled with an unrelenting poverty. Land values had increased in Pennsylvania as a consequence of the improvements brought by pioneering, driving many who had made the improvements as well as new arrivals out of the local market because they could no longer afford to pay rent. Some squatted, some headed south. Few had left Ulster with financial assets, and fewer still were destined to own appreciable amounts of land, even in the coming generations. As David Hackett Fischer points out, even in later decades, “A majority of adult males in the southern highlands owned no land at all. . . . One of the most stubborn myths of American history is the idea that the frontier promoted equality of material condition. . . . Inequality was greater in the back country and the southern highlands than in any other rural region of the United States.”19

  Luckily—for them and for those who wished to expand the American frontier—the Scots-Irish and their counterparts from Scotland and the border areas of northern England had brought a special skill with them. That skill was in demand, particularly farther south. It eventually brought them individual and community freedom, but in and of itself it would never make them rich. This skill was their unique ability to combine family homesteads with military expertise and to adapt to a battlefield on which they and their families actually lived. It was not simply that these people made great soldiers, in the sense of the rampaging armies of Europe that paraded in pennant-crested columns and met each other on famous, set-piece battlefields. Many of them were indeed great soldiers, but unlike in most other scenarios, their family unit itself had become part of a warrior culture as well. The entire family structure had been shaped by a millennium that spanned the formation of the Scottish nation, the centuries of border warfare in the regions that ebbed back and forth between England and Scotland, and in the case of the Scots-Irish, the decades of unrelenting tensions in Northern Ireland. The families from the north of Britain accepted—and actually expected—that their lives would at some point include harsh and even bloody conflict.

  The men expected to fight, and every able-bodied man was automatically a member of the local militia. The women expected their men to fight, and sometimes their homes to be invaded. Strongly independent, these women understood also that they would be required to run households and farms when their men were away, and to be at risk from raiding parties in their home communities. The children grew up playing constant games of physical challenge, wrestling, racing, and becoming familiar with weapons. Young boys began hunting wild game with their fathers at an early age, knowing that it was only a matter of time before they would be expected not only to hunt but also to fight, or at least to defend their family against attack. And finally, the generations along the war-torn Scottish borders and in the frequently ravaged hamlets of Ulster had taught them to accept simple, expendable living structures, because one never knew when their home might be attacked and burned to the ground.

  In the 1730s and beyond, nowhere were these skills more needed than along the long spine of the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia and into North and South Carolina. And nowhere were the economic inequalities between the Scots-Irish and those who controlled government affairs greater than in these colonies. In many ways the reasons that brought the Scots-Irish to Virginia and the Carolinas, and the economic disparities that existed there, provided a microcosm of what was to happen in the entire Southern region after America won her independence. And the pervasive disparities among white cultures, so pronounced along ethnic and religious lines but largely unnoticed outside the region, would foreshadow not only the way the South has been misunderstood in the years following the Civil War and Reconstruction, but also some of the major divisions that linger in American society today.

  After the founding of Jamestown in 1607, the Virginia colony had evolved into a rigid, three-tiered society. At the top was a landed English-American aristocracy whose wealth and holdings owed much to the patronage of the ruling royalty in the mother country. Contrary to the prevailing mythology of a ruggedly competitive, rags-to-riches ethos among those who had braved the Atlantic to come to America, the majority of this privileged class was originally granted huge tracts of land by royal decree. Family names and quasi-royal prerogatives were taken seriously, and as the generations unfolded, this “Cavalier aristocracy” took great pains to protect and advance their own interests as well as those of others in their small circle of elites.

  As one famous but not exceptional example, Thomas, Lord Fairfax, who was the friend and patron of the young George Washington after Washington’s father died, first came to Virginia in 1735 to inspect his hereditary land grant of 5,282,000 acres—an area between the Rappahannock and Potomac Rivers including a vast portion of the Shenandoah Valley that was as large as the entire country of Wales. This private domain had been granted with all the rights of a traditional English baron, including the power to develop, rent, or sell portions of the property. It had its origins in a royal grant in 1649 by Charles II when he was exiled in France, had been renewed in 1673 through a reissue to Thomas, Lord Culpeper and Henry, earl of Arlington, and had descended through marriage to the good Lord Fairfax himself. Lord Fairfax originally settled at Belvoir in 1747 and then moved to an estate in the Shenandoah Valley in 1752. Those who live in or have visited modern-day northern Virginia will find all of these names strikingly familiar, although few will have understood their royal origins.

  The power of this elite group of “first families of Virginia” was pervasive and decidedly English in both its bloodlines and its outlook. And in contrast to the more intellectual and cultural “Englishness” of the New England colonies, it was also unapologetically aristocratic—a seminal distinction that would manifest itself again and again in the decades leading up to the Civil War and that still has its implications in today’s much more variegated America. This aristocracy kept close ties with England, many of its families wintering in London and many more sending their children to English boarding schools. Its leadership established the Anglican Church as the only formally recognized religion in Virginia. Its members controlled the political and business affairs not only of the colony, but also of the state of Virginia for many years after American independence. And its attitudes creep up here and there in the snobbishness, profligate spending, and excessive behavior that still mark the “upper crust” in many areas throughout the South.

  The second tier in early-eighteenth-century Virginia consisted of an almost exclusively white underclass mixed with a small gentry of tradesmen who could never aspire to joining the so-called “Tidewater aristocracy.” Until the mid-1700s this underclass was predominantly English and heavily populated by men and women who had come to Virginia either as indentured servants or as convicts “transported” from England in lieu of death or long-term prison sentences. In this group was also a very small percentage of mixed-blood “people of color”—including the descendants of some families that had intermarried among blacks, Indians, and whites in the earlier years of the colony before miscegenation laws came into effect—and small pockets of Indian tribes along Virginia’s east coast. But the class lines in early Virginia were clearly calcified. As David Hackett Fischer comments, these were “a degraded rural proletariat who had no hope of rising to the top of their society. Not a single ex-servant or son of a servant became a member of Virginia’s House of Burgesses during the late seventeenth century. The mythical figures of Virginia cavaliers and poor whites were solidly founded in historical fact.”20

  The third tier were the slaves imported from Africa, who were overwhelmingly in the hands of the plantation-owning Tidewater aristocracy. As Virginia’s agricultural base expanded, driven heavily in the early years by the exportation of tobacco, slaves became an essential commodity of the wealthy class. By 1700 they comprised 20,000 of Virginia’s population of 70,000, and by 1740 they actually outnumbered the whites in the co
lony.21

  But these numbers would change very quickly as the Scots-Irish and other settlers began pouring out of Pennsylvania into the distant mountains, forming a veritable ring of frontier fortresses around this “flatlander” system.

  As the eighteenth century dawned and the Virginia colony moved into its second century, its leadership had a problem: security along its western frontier. The solution to that problem—military protection by the Scots-Irish—would add an unexpected fourth component to this societal makeup, comprising not so much another “tier” as a catalyst that rarely intermixed with the other three but would in many ways change the formula altogether. As evidence of the immediacy of its impact, by 1756 the population of Virginia had jumped to 292,000, more than four times its population only fifty years before, and a firm majority of 172,000 were white, a direct indicator of the magnitude of the Scots-Irish migration to the Appalachian and Allegheny mountains.22

  The brittle structure of lords, servants, and slaves had been sufficient to establish and control the plantation system along the flatlands of Tidewater Virginia. But as the colony expanded westward into the Piedmont region, the plantation system itself was not suited to the terrain. And as it neared the mountains on the other side of the Piedmont, it was not only unworkable in an economic sense, but it also brought the fragility of the aristocratic plantation system face-to-face with the volatility of the Indian nation, and particularly the warlike Cherokee. The colony’s leaders recognized this danger as early as 1701, when they offered generous terms to settlers for land in the mountains if they would establish forts and other means of defense. By 1705, Virginia’s leaders were offering fifty acres of land in the mountains for free to any settler who would venture into the “up country.” They got few if any takers. As Leyburn points out, “Such offers brought no results, so far as the Valley was concerned, for the Shenandoah was as yet unknown and unexplored, too far away from any available supply of settlers to be practically accessible.”23

  Two farsighted Virginia governors, Alexander Spotswood and William Gooch, would change this situation, and in so doing forever alter the character of the mountain South. Spotswood, an early ally of James Logan, was a former soldier who led one of the first expeditions into the Shenandoah Valley, in 1716. A strong believer in the military necessity of fortifying the mountains against the Indian tribes, his expedition did much to reassure prospective immigrants that the empty but fertile lands in the valley also offered good potential for successful farming. Gooch went further. In 1730 he decided, in the modern parlance, to put the market into play. He granted several huge but remote tracts of land to a few prominent individuals, with the stipulation that they must populate the lands with a minimum number of settlers in order to keep the land grants. And, as an added incentive, in 1738 he guaranteed to the Ulster Presbyterians and other “dissenters” that they would be able to practice their own religions in the mountains despite the restrictions inherent in Virginia’s official “state religion.”24

  This structure seemed to be a deal designed in heaven. The flatlander aristocracy got free land as well as the profits from selling it. William Beverly, a man “prominent in colonial affairs,” received a “splendid gift” from Governor Gooch of 118,491 acres along the Shenandoah River. Benjamin Borden, an agent of Lord Fairfax, swung a deal for 500,000 acres near Lexington, a parcel on which several of my own father’s ancestors settled. Both of these developers were “indefatigable” in their efforts to procure settlers, making fortunes in the process.25 The leading families of Virginia got the resourceful and pugnacious northern British settlers to protect them, and at the same time were able to maintain a comfortable distance from their strange, combative ways. And the settlers got cheap land—many of them in fact getting land for free, taking up squatter’s rights as the migration hit full flow, owning no land but paying no rent, either—as well as the opportunity to live their lives as they saw fit.

  The Ulstermen as well as many German settlers were ready to come. And once they began their trek, the road that stepped out into the wilderness from Lancaster became an ever-lengthening highway. Settlers from Pennsylvania immediately poured into the lands made available through Gooch’s land grants. The Germans, typically wealthier and more stable, bought good lands in the northernmost areas of Virginia and western Maryland and for the most part remained on them rather than continuing the southward migration. The migration from Germany itself dried up in the early 1750s even as those from the north of Britain, and particularly from Ulster, kept increasing. The odd political situation of the non-Anglican Protestants in Ulster did not abate, and in combination with a series of crop failures and famines in 1740–41, 1744–45, and 1756–57 drove many more families onto the small ships that sailed for Philadelphia. New turmoil enveloped Scotland, brought about by Bonnie Prince Charlie’s romantic but absurd attempt to reinstate the Stuart family to the throne, an effort that Winston Churchill termed “one of the most audacious and irresponsible enterprises in British history.”26 His defeat at Culloden in 1746 added a mix of highlanders and border dwellers from northern England and southwestern Scotland to the surge of emigration.

  The North and South Carolina governments, representing the interests of a less-refined governing class that was similar to the three-tiered society dominated by Tidewater aristocrats, quickly followed the Virginia pattern. Again the English aristocrats benefited enormously, although the Carolinas were not nearly as tightly structured as the Virginia colony, eventually allowing the Scots-Irish to have far more influence in those governments.

  In 1663 a grateful (and possibly inebriated) King Charles II had granted all of what is now North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee to eight English lords in order to thank them for helping him reclaim the British throne after the death of Oliver Cromwell. The equally grateful lords named the territory Carolina (a latinization of Charles), probably as an obsequious gesture to Charles but ostensibly in honor of his father, King Charles I. These eight “lords proprietors” and their heirs controlled the land from their English baronies on the far side of the Atlantic until 1729, when the descendants of seven of them sold the titles back to the Crown so that North Carolina could become a royal colony with the same legal status as Virginia. The one exception was John Carteret, the earl of Granville, who kept his inherited properties—a massive stretch of land that comprised almost the entire upper half of what is now the state of North Carolina, including the modern-day cities of Raleigh, Durham, Greensboro, Winston-Salem, and Asheville.

  In truth Lord Granville had taken a gamble, for unlike the Virginia colony, the Carolinas had not prospered. By 1729 there were only some thirty thousand non-Indian inhabitants, mostly English settlers who had inched down along the coast from southeastern Virginia. The land had no navigable rivers for commerce, in contrast to the James, Potomac, and Rappahannock Rivers in Virginia. And other than a marginal port at Wilmington, only Charleston could compare to the many sea-friendly and deepwater ports in Virginia. But Granville’s holdings straddled the Great Wagon Road, and as the unending stream of hard-bitten settlers from the north spilled into North Carolina, he and his agents prospered beyond belief. The movement into the Carolinas was “one of the mightiest migrations of colonial times. So great was the tide pouring in from the north that, by the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, the North Carolina back-country had at least sixty thousand settlers, while that of South Carolina had eighty-three thousand—almost four-fifths of the colony’s white population.”27 Some estimates put the number much higher, claiming that the backcountry of North and South Carolina had grown from almost zero in 1750 to a quarter million settlers by 1780.28

  An interesting distinction revealed itself during the settlement of the Carolinas, which may have given the impetus for the Ulster Scots to begin calling themselves Scotch-Irish, a term that became interchangeable in later years with the more ethnically proper Scots-Irish. Beginning in the late 1740s, a colony of Scottish highlanders fresh from the defeat at
Culloden had made their way into North Carolina through the port of Wilmington rather than along the Wagon Trail, settling in the North Carolina Piedmont. Tensions between the Ulster Scots and the highlanders were immediate and strong. On the surface the two groups, although having their origins in the same small country, now had little in common. They dressed differently, used different idiomatic languages, and, most important, had different political beliefs. The Scottish highlanders would overwhelmingly support the loyalists during the Revolution, while the Scotch-Irish were the strongest supporters of the movement to declare independence. Within a few generations these differences would disappear, but in the years just before the American Revolution they were significant and in some ways defining.

  Many responsible historians claim that the term “Scotch-Irish” was not used until “the late nineteenth century, when real and imagined descendants of settlers from Ulster embraced it to distinguish a Protestant people from Catholic Irish immigrants streaming into the country.”29 But we begin to see a general use of the term almost from the beginning of the mountain settlements. James Logan would write as early as 1730, “They are of the Scotch-Irish (so called here) of whom J. Steel tells me you seem’d to have a pretty good opinion but it is more than I can have tho’ their countryman.”30 As another example, in 1755, Arthur Dobbs, an Ulster-born governor of North Carolina, wrote of a group of families that had settled on land that he owned, “They are a colony from Pennsylvania of what we call Scotch-Irish Presbyterians.”31 As yet another, Nathaniel Grubb complained in 1763 to the Pennsylvania legislature that “a pack of insignificant Scotch-Irish” was responsible for having retaliated too fiercely against a series of Indian attacks.32