Born Fighting Read online

  Leyburn seems to think that Anglicans and Quakers applied the term to the Ulster Presbyterian immigrants as something of a slur, to distinguish them from both Anglican Irish and “true Scots.”33 It is also logical to assume that the reverse was equally true. The Scots-Irish, not wishing to be associated with the views of many who had migrated directly from Scotland, may well have begun using the term to distinguish their unique origins and perspectives, and especially their strongly held views about the English aristocracy, well before there was a need to draw a cultural point of demarcation between them and the Irish Catholics who would migrate a century later. This probability fits well with Irish historian R. F. Foster’s characterization of the Ulster Scots’ “religious and cultural apartness that enabled communities to emigrate and stay together . . . The Ulster Scots stood out: possibly because, even in the New World, they remained ostentatiously separate,”34 thus allowing their cultural uniqueness to plant itself for generations inside tightly knit communities on the frontier.

  This migration into the mountains, especially considering the thin population of America at that time, was indeed historic. Along the narrow mud trails that traversed the ridges and disappeared for miles inside dark forests were Scots, English, Irish, Welsh, French, Swiss, and a good number of Germans who generally kept to their own communities. But mostly, overwhelmingly, the road heading south from Philadelphia was filled with the Scots-Irish Presbyterians who had poured out of Ulster. As the decades of the mid-1700s passed, hardscrabble settlements grew up all along the spine of the Appalachians in places where few Europeans had dared to travel only a few years before. The people came in surges, like an incoming tide. After the Shenandoah Valley met the mountain town of Roanoke, the waves of voyagers split. Some headed farther southwest, down what was called the Wilderness Road, into the gaps and hollows of the difficult mountains and fast-rushing streams where modern-day Tennessee meets the southwestern tip of Virginia. Others pushed directly south, keeping to tamer trails and gentler ridges along what became known as the Great Philadelphia Wagon Trail and ending up in the Carolinas.

  From start to finish, this highway of mostly northern British immigration stretched nearly seven hundred miles. Whole families walked hundreds of miles, some of them using cows as pack animals. These were uncommonly tough people, used to hardship. They asked for nothing from the government or anyone else, and nothing is what they usually received. They followed the Wilderness Road into the backcountry and the Wagon Trail into uncharted Piedmont and mountains where only the Indians dwelled, creating a series of log cabin settlements that were little more than small but interconnecting fortresses. Trees were cleared. Cabins were built. Subsistence crops were planted. They built churches, the Scots-Irish first following the Presbyterian faith, but over time becoming more and more inclined to adopt the evangelical Baptist and Methodist denominations, again possibly to draw a line between their communities and the tamer form of Presbyterianism being brought directly from an increasingly enlightened Scotland. By 1906, of the 793,546 members of religious denominations in Virginia, 416,000 would be Baptist, 201,000 would be Methodist, and only 40,000 would still call themselves Presbyterian.35 In the mountain communities, their principal economic activities were cattle and hog farming, hunting, trapping, and rudimentary trade, especially with the Indians whom the flatlanders so desperately feared. And every male adult automatically became part of a local militia.

  The Indians watched them, mingled with them, and sometimes attacked them, as many of them were settling on ancient hunting grounds that the Indians had agreed among themselves to keep unpopulated. The settlers adapted, learning from the Indians and learning how to fight the Indians when necessary. These communities grew and in their own way began to thrive. The Tidewater aristocracy that had allowed such settlements looked askance at these new Americans, often snidely belittling them for their coarseness and their backward, nonintellectual ways. But their ferocious performance against a variety of Indian attacks that began in 1754 and continued even after the seven years of the French and Indian War gained them not only respect but also an enduring legitimacy. They fought and played by their own rules, expecting no quarter from any enemy and giving none in return. And by the eve of the American Revolution in 1775, they had become a political force in their own right.

  The emerging power of the expatriate Ulster Scots had become cause for concern back in Britain, especially among the Anglican elites in Ireland. From 1717 forward into the 1770s, the Presbyterian communities in Ulster had steadily dwindled as exodus became the province’s most common ritual. Family after family made their way to the port cities of Londonderry, Belfast, Portrush, and Larne, risking—and often losing—their lives on small ships heading across the treacherous Atlantic for America. Statistics for this and other early migrations from Britain are difficult to obtain, but it is clear that those leaving from Ulster numbered in the hundreds of thousands. And the last decade and a half of this huge migration, between the years 1760 and 1775, saw not only an estimated 55,000 Protestant Irish leaving Ulster, but also another 40,000 leaving Scotland and 30,000 departing from England.36

  These migrations from Britain’s north—Scotland, Ireland, and the border areas—involved substantial percentages of the overall local population and caused concerns in London about the economic future of the North. And as this emigration progressed, the English aristocracy and the Anglicans who controlled Ireland became oddly ambivalent about the departure of so many Presbyterian and other “dissenters.” On the one hand, many of the governing class understood that their own insistence on dominating this subculture was driving it away. On the other, the structure of favoritism toward Anglicans that had been enforced in the wake of the Protestant Reformation had made the large landowners dependent on revenues generated from the very conditions that these people were seeking to avoid.

  The earl of Hillsborough, who became secretary of state for the colonies in 1768, was symbolic of this odd duality. A landowner with vast holdings in County Down, the Anglo-Irish Hillsborough was a staunch opponent of large-scale migration from northern Britain to America. He viewed the Presbyterian Scots-Irish emigration not so much in political or even religious terms, but as an economic risk to the aristocracy. Presuming correctly that the Anglicans would continue to dominate Irish affairs, Hillsborough worried that the massive departure of the Ulster Scots to America was reducing both the tax base and the value of land available for leasing in Ulster. In 1753 he had even argued in Parliament that it would be “for the public good to lay a restraint upon poor people leaving the place of their birth without leave from the magistrates of the place.” During this debate he expressed his puzzlement as to why people should be allowed to emigrate “for no other reason but because they hope to live better, or to earn more money in those countries than they can do at home.”37

  The Anglicans needed their revenues. And although the London-ordained Test Acts had protected them from strong political challenges to their local authority, the raw business prospects of the Irish situation became severe during periods when the British economy ebbed and flowed. As the Ulster Scots continued to melt into the far horizons on the dangerous little ships that took them to a new beginning, others joined Hillsborough’s camp, searching for the same simple solutions. The secretary to the lord lieutenant of Ireland was typical of the times. He lamented the reduction of excise revenues coming from Ulster, claiming that the loss of revenues was due as much to emigration as to poverty, and warned that the Scots-Irish emigration was threatening the entire future of Ireland. His suggestion was to create a few more economic incentives that might hold the Ulster tenants to their rented lands, reasoning that “if the cow is to be milked, she must be fed.”38

  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.’ ”39

  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.”40

  3

  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.”41

  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.”42 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 moun
tains, 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.”43 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.”44 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.”