Born Fighting Page 16
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.”45 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.46
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.
The noted journalist, historian, and diplomat Whitelaw Reid summed up the differences among these three approaches neatly nearly a century ago in successive papers presented to the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution (1911) and the Presbyterian Historical Society of Belfast (1912). “The Puritan did not seek a new world to establish liberty of conscience—far from it. He only sought a world where he could impose his own conscience on everybody else. The Cavalier did not seek a new world where he could establish universal freedom. He only sought freedom for himself. Even for the early Scottish immigrants sent out to him he had no use save as bond-servants. Later on he found them also useful as Presidents.”47
The power of this Scots-Irish resistance was not lost on the British and loyalist elites. As Leyburn writes:
An Episcopalian of Philadelphia said that “a Presbyterian loyalist was a thing unheard of.” A Hessian captain wrote in 1778, “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.” It was reported that King George III characterized the Revolution as “a Presbyterian war,” and that Horace Walpole remarked in Parliament, “There is no use crying about it. Cousin Amer
ica has run off with a Presbyterian parson, and that is the end of it.” A representative of Lord Dartmouth wrote from New York in November 1776 that “Presbyterianism is really at the Bottom of the whole Conspiracy, has supplied it with Vigour, and will never rest, till something is decided upon.” Jonathan D. Sergeant, member of the Continental Congress from New Jersey, said that the Scotch Irish were the main pillar supporting the Revolution in Pennsylvania. A New Englander who opposed the rupture with England declared the Scotch Irish to be, with few exceptions, “the most God-provoking democrats on this side of Hell.”48
Despite such passions, for practical and ideological reasons the Scots-Irish were at the outset divided in their opinions about how to react to the war itself. Many flocked immediately to the Continental Army. The famous Pennsylvania Line, perhaps the best unit in the regular army, was mainly Scots-Irish. True to form, it is also remembered for angrily (and drunkenly) marching on the Continental Congress on New Year’s Day, 1781, after having not been paid for more than a year.49 Estimates vary, but it is undeniable that the Scots-Irish comprised at least one-third and as many as one-half of the “rebel” soldiers during the Revolutionary War. They became quickly known not only for their battlefield tenacity, but also for their loyalty during the brutal winter of 1777 at Valley Forge, where they remained steadfast while large numbers of soldiers deserted George Washington.50
Many others among them, while loyal to the cause of independence (one is tempted to write, with a hint of premonition, the cause of secession), nonetheless remained for several years as members of the militia units in the mountains, fearing that a mass exodus of the militias toward the coastline to fight the British would open up their Appalachian communities to attacks from Indian war parties in the west. And finally, a sizable percentage felt an equally strong dislike of the colonial elites who were pulling all the strings in the war for independence and felt little obligation to fight and die for the English-American aristocrats who for so long had controlled government services without bringing benefits to the communities in the mountains.
In 1780, while the war slid miserably into its fourth year of conflict, these differences would disappear as the British compounded a key political and strategic misjudgment with the grave error of attempting to intimidate an unyielding people. And in the space of a few months the fierce militiamen from the rock-strewn, frequently embattled Appalachian Mountain settlements would show the Redcoat forces a whole new way of fighting, in the process finally forcing an end to the war.
1780 was a pivotal year for the hierarchy in London. An antiwar element had gained favor among many key British political leaders after their defeat in the pivotal Battle of Saratoga in late 1777, which brought the French into the war on the side of the American colonists. Lord North, heading the government of King George III, had then offered his resignation with the observation that “the best we can make of the war is to get out of the dispute as soon as possible,” but George had rejected both the resignation and the advice.51 The king and others in London persisted largely at the urging of a group of “loyalist exiles who had fled from America to spend the duration of the war in Britain. They were loud and positive in asserting that they represented a large, though muffled, body of opinion in the American colonies.”52 With visions that reflect the distorted dreams of exiled elites throughout history, including the recent predictions that the Iraqis would rise up to greet American forces who came to “liberate” them from Saddam Hussein, the “potential of loyalist support in the Southern backcountry became primary ‘evidence’ in arguments for continued prosecution of the war . . . There was no alternative now. Britain, rent by internal divisions and increasing weakness of its far-flung external resources, increasingly dependent upon a surge of Southern loyalists to win its war, launched the Southern offensive of 1780.”53
This strategy envisioned a “domino effect” whereby the Southern colonies would be rolled up from Georgia northward, creating enough despair in an already demoralized Continental Army that the “rebel” forces would eventually surrender. It was not wholly without merit, and as long as it was applied along the coastal areas, the strategy had good effect. In February 1780 the British landed at Savannah, Georgia, with 6,000 regulars under the command of Sir Henry Clinton. By May the British, whose forces had swollen to 10,000 with the addition of colonialist Tory soldiers, had put Charleston, South Carolina, in a noose through a combination of naval and ground attacks. The mass surrender of 5,500 Continental soldiers in that city on May 12 would remain the worst embarrassment for American military forces until the defeat of Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s army at the hands of Japanese attackers at Bataan in 1942.54
Shortly afterward, one of Sir Henry’s key officers announced that “the most violent Rebels are candid enough to allow the game is up,” and Clinton himself sailed back to New York, leaving his second-in-command Lord Cornwallis in charge.55 But the most violent rebels were not yet even in the game. The population of the coastal areas of North and South Carolina where the initial battles were fought was dominated by English-Americans and highland Scots, many of whom had already shown allegiance to the Crown. The great majority of the population in the Carolinas was in the mountains, and the bulk of the people in the mountains were Scots-Irish with long memories, deep hatreds, and battle skills that had been continuously honed against the Indians. Blindly—some might say arrogantly—the British ignored that reality as they pressed their campaign farther inland. Having toppled the Continentals so easily along the coastline, their leaders reasoned that a policy of terror and intimidation in the western communities would quickly bring the rest of the Carolinas into the fold.
This misjudgment proved to be perhaps the most costly error of the war. By launching a campaign that in its tone was chillingly reminiscent of Proud Edward’s attempt to hammer Scotland and Henry VIII’s “rough wooing” of the Scottish lowlands in centuries past, the British and their Tory cohorts provoked the anger of the very people who were capable of smashing their advance. And smash it they would.
The first British mistake, a series of cavalry raids into the Carolina countryside to convince the locals of their overwhelming superiority, oddly mirrored the actions of the Norman conquerors seven hundred years before. What had worked in England had not worked in Scotland, and what worked along the Carolina coastline did not work where the Piedmont began to give way to the mountains. British colonel Banastre Tarleton, the commander of Clinton’s light cavalry, was, to be blunt, an avid butcher who had learned the wrong lessons from England’s past. A twenty-six-year-old graduate of Oxford, the short, stocky redhead was known as “a hard-riding, high-living dragoon officer who bragged about his triumphal subjugation of sundry women and the victorious conquests of his Legion.”56 Determined to fully intimidate what remained of the Continental Army in the South, on May 29, 1780, Tarleton attacked a retreating column under the command of Col. Abraham Buford. “After the Americans were driven together in a mass, with white flag flying and arms grounded, the Tories fell upon them with sword and bayonet. That was ‘Tarleton’s Quarter,’ a byword for the slaughter of surrendered men.”57
The British and Tory soldiers, in an attempt to stamp out what they believed to be the last pocket of resistance in the Carolinas, shot or bayoneted every surrendering soldier. In all, 113 were killed “and another 150 so badly maimed that uhey were left to die on the$battlefield. Tarleton lost five men killed qnd 12 wounded.”58 But instead of quelling the countryside, Tarleton had enraged it, drawing famed guerrilla fighters such as Francis “Swamp Fox” Marion, Thomas Sumter, and Andrew Pigkens into fresh retaliation in the lowlands. “Tarleton’s quarter” became a rallying cry for colonists bent on revenge. Word of such British atrocities spread quickly into the western mountains as well—even to the remote “over-mountain” communities in eastern Tennessee and in the Clinch River area of southwest Virginia—convincing the hard-bitten militiamen of Appalachia that they could no longer stay out of the fight.
This led to the second, eventually fatal, British mistake. Rather than leaving the backcountry to these mountaineer militiamen or perhaps trying to lure them toward the coast, the British decided to directly challenge them on their own terrain. Worse yet, they boasted that they would soon hang the mountaineer leaders and destroy their homes.
In late summer, his army increasingly harassed by patriot guerrillas and slowed by malaria and yellow fever, Lord Cornwallis decided to sweep through North Carolina from the south in order to wipe out what he viewed to be the last pockets of patriot resistance. The British army would advance on three fronts: the first along the coast, a second, commanded by Cornwallis, moving through the center, and a third to fan out into the mountains and neutralize the principally Scots-Irish militia units. For the movement into the mountain region, Cornwallis chose Maj. Patrick Ferguson, a highly regarded Scottish highlander who at age thirty-six already had served as a soldier for twenty years. Along with Ferguson was a core group of about 300 New York and New Jersey loyalist soldiers called the American Volunteers, who had been handpicked from the King’s American Regiment, the Queen’s Rangers, and the New Jersey Volunteers, plus a supplementary force of about a thousand local Tory militiamen that Ferguson himself had recruited and extensively trained.