Born Fighting Read online

  It is one of the odd paradoxes of modern America that this movement has had such an impact while at the same time those who brought it to this country have been so frequently reviled, and their history has been allowed to melt into obscurity. To understand the movement and its future implications, one must understand the people who created it and still sustain it. And to understand the people who created it, one must comprehend their journey, which has been not simply one of hardship or disappointment, but rather of frequent and bitter conflict. These conflicts, from which they have never in two thousand years of history retreated, have followed a historically consistent cycle of, among other things, a values-based combativeness, an insistent egalitarianism, and a refusal to be dominated from above, no matter the cost.

  That mind-set promises to play an even greater role in American politics as the philosophical debates shift into unpredictable new territory. We have now entered an era where the old labels of liberal and conservative no longer resonate, and where the most comfortably predictable alliances of both Democrats and Republicans may soon begin to fall away. On these shifting political sands, the hyperindividualistic Scots-Irish and their Jacksonian allies will very likely have more influence than at any time since the age of Andrew Jackson himself.

  To understand the forces that drive this culture, one must begin in Scotland, a very long time ago.

  PART TWO

  The Making of a People—

  and a Nation

  Oh, Flower of Scotland

  When will we see your like again?

  That fought and died for your wee bit Hill and Glen?

  And stood against them, Proud Edward’s armies

  And sent them homeward, tae think again

  —“Flower of Scotland,”

  a Scottish traditional song

  1

  Hadrian’s Wall

  ON MARCH 6, 1997, I buried my father in Arlington National Cemetery. It was bitter cold on Arlington Ridge. The sky was cloudless, so blue that it reminded me of robins’ eggs. The wind blew in hard from the northwest, just as it always does in this part of Virginia when bringing in a cold front. It whipped our faces as my family and a few dozen friends stood at his grave site, listening to the Air Force chaplain utter his final prayers.

  I had done my duty, as it is demanded of the eldest son in my culture. I had met his casket at the front door of the Fort Myer chapel when the Air Force burial detail ushered it inside from the hearse. I had welcomed the guests and delivered the eulogy. I had chosen the four-verse poem “Crossing the Bar” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson so that each of his children could read a verse and in some small way say good-bye. It was the same poem that my father’s mother had asked to be read at her own funeral, many years before. He had made me memorize it when I was eight years old, but there would be few other times in my life that he would have to force me into poetry. Poetry was one of our little games, a shared passion, along with hunting and fishing and long, intense discussions about how to lead, and how to fight, and who had led the best and who had fought the hardest.

  Sunset and evening bell, and after that the dark

  And may there be no sadness of farewell when I embark

  But at the grave site, as the biting wind blew my tears into salt streaks along my face, my eyes were on my brother. He stood farther up the hill, near an old tree, shivering in a kilt. And as the chaplain finished the eternal, never-ending prayer that committed my father’s remains forever into the honored soil of Arlington, my brother’s bagpipes filled the air, his music washing over us. Standing alone on that knob of earth, like a sentry guarding the gates of our distant past, my brother played “Amazing Grace,” and then “Scotland the Brave.”

  The music reached inside me, to a place that I can neither identify nor explain, and I thought of the long, impossible journey that had brought my blood to this very spot. I was, I reasoned, so very different from the first of my people who had come to the mountains those hundreds of years ago. And yet I also was so very much the same. We were pioneers, that was what my father and mother had so strongly urged upon us when we were small. Scots-Irish, with a smattering of Irish and English and even Cherokee thrown in. Out of Ulster, into the mountains, off to other places. Your people carried this country on their backs, and don’t you ever forget it.

  Did America change us? Or did we change America? And who were we—was there really a consistency that could be defined?

  The answer, I decided, was some, some, and definitely yes. And I knew that the best way to examine that consistency was to go back to where it was formed.

  Some might think it absurd to reach back two thousand years in order to fully comprehend the temperament of a cultural piece of today’s America. And yet, many people are comfortable looking into the biblical Scriptures for evidence of how they should conduct their lives, and others argue firmly that the basis for Western ideals in government, philosophy, and even drama can be found in ancient Greece. Indeed, the Japanese people can trace the direct ancestry of their emperor and thus the movement of their culture through a line that begins before the time of Christ.

  For many centuries the ancestors of today’s Scots-Irish Americans carried on an oral rather than a written tradition. They were a warlike culture that indulged in little trade and left few tangible records, other than the observations from the more learned peoples who observed them. But strong cultures come together in the face of challenge and cannot help but leave their mark. To fully comprehend the forces that created the Scots-Irish mind-set of today, one must actually begin nearly two thousand years ago, and then trace a series of events that culminated in the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314. It is best to start from atop the ruins of an ancient structure built by Roman soldiers at the command of an emperor named Hadrian.

  The enduring character of the Scots-Irish people was formed first and foremost in Scotland. Geography shaped it, cultural traits related closely to survival were its grist, and a peculiar form of struggle hardened and refined it. At Hadrian’s Wall, one can consider the interplay of all of these. For along this wall, give or take a few miles, is where the Scottish nation took its physical shape. And it was the resistance of one people as well as the ebbing of another that drew its southern boundary.

  The wall stretched for seventy-three miles from sea to sea across the island’s narrow neck a few miles south of where modern-day England and Scotland share their border, from Carlisle in the west to the other side of Newcastle in the east. It took Rome’s soldiers six years to build it. Made principally of stone, it was in most places fifteen feet high and ten feet across. The wall was marked along the way by a series of signal towers—about eighty “mile castles” where small Roman garrisons manned outposts, and seventeen larger forts with gateways into and out of the northern “wilderness” that we now call Scotland. A thirty-foot-deep ditch ran in front of it, and another ditch was dug behind it.

  The wall’s ruins are not much to look at—mostly crumbling stones now set in overgrown fields, where it seems far more sheep pass their days than humans. But if one considers the energies that propelled the building of it and the cultural forces that thereafter stacked up behind each side of it, Hadrian’s Wall assumes a magic all its own. Indeed, it becomes a nesting place for remembering a tale of dissipating empires, and of new peoples emerging from the seeds of past defiance.

  Fifty-five years before the birth of Christ, Roman legions crossed what someday would be called the English Channel and invaded Britain. Behind them lay the societal wreckage and reassembly from their conquest of much of Central Europe and Gaul. The tribes that the Romans had defeated on this journey were largely Celtic. The Celts were a warlike but emotional people known for their flowing oratory as well as their mastery of metallurgy, both in personal adornments and in weaponry.1 They had lost to the Romans because they were consistently hampered by one tragic flaw: they were adamantly tribal, gathering not as nations but instead following the lead of a long succession of warrior princes,
and thus defied modern notions of political unity. Nora Chadwick illuminated this point in her classic work, The Celts. “In any conflict between Celts and Romans, the superior powers of organization, sense of discipline and general orderliness of the Roman culture were bound to overcome the volatile and undisciplined Celts whose sense of loyalty, powerful though it may have been, was normally centered on an individual rather than on an institution or an ideal.”2

  But although defeated, the stronger warriors among the Celtic tribes did not submit to Roman conquest. Some chose to die on the battlefield with sword in hand. The others moved on, expanding outward in several directions from the Roman areas, in some cases swooping south to attack Rome itself.3 In fact, there is considerable evidence to indicate that the Teutonic tribes that later emerged in Germany were yet another division of the Celtic people.4

  The invading Romans faced a similar assortment of Celtic tribes in Britain, which were doomed to meet similar results. In a series of campaigns that ran intermittently for more than a hundred years, the Romans conquered most of what is now termed England, and then Wales after that. Again, the stronger, the luckier, and ultimately the freer among the Celts avoided the yoke of conquest, refusing to go through that mandatory ritual of defeat, the bowing of heads as the vanquished were required to walk under a low bar in order to “bend the knee to Rome.” Many of them headed for the untamed areas of Cornwall, Wales, and especially Scotland, and from these redoubts continued to resist the Roman occupation. In the words of Winston Churchill, “In the wild North and West freedom found refuge among the mountains, but elsewhere the conquest and pacification were at length complete and Britannia became one of the forty-five provinces of the Roman Empire.”5

  And resist they did. In A.D. 71, after brutally suppressing a rebellion in East Anglia, the Romans headed north in an attempt to conquer the southern areas of what is now Scotland. In Scotland the Romans met up not only with the tribes that had migrated away from their earlier invasions, but also with a fierce native people they later named the Picts, due to their tradition of painting important tattoo-like symbols on their bodies. Many campaigns followed, including, as Chadwick writes, an eastward march where the Romans “were met by a vast array of Caledonians, presumably the immediate ancestors of the historic Picts, with whom they fought a great pitched battle at an unidentified place called Mons Graupius.”6 Factual accounts of such campaigns are difficult to verify, since the Celts of Scotland did not commit records to writing until the fifth century,7 but some estimates, probably taken from Roman reports, indicate that thirty thousand Caledonians were killed in this battle.8

  But it was not only the wild Celts of the north who took fearsome casualties. As Churchill writes, the positions the Romans “had won in Scotland had to be gradually abandoned. The legions fell back on the line of the Stangate, a road running eastward from Carlisle. The years which followed revealed the weakness of the British frontier. The accession of Hadrian was marked by a serious disaster. The Ninth Legion disappears from history combating an obscure uprising of the tribes in Northern Britain. The defenses were disorganized and the province was in danger.”9

  In A.D. 122 the Romans decided to partition their conquered lands from the wilderness they had been unable to tame. Roman emperor Hadrian visited Britain, and in a trip to the north he decided to build a boundary stretching from sea to sea in order to defend Rome’s holdings from further attacks. And thus was built the wall that bears his name. A second wall called the Antonine Wall was built farther to the north twenty years later, but the Romans found themselves surrounded on both sides by the ferociously resisting barbarians, and this structure was quickly abandoned. One can get a hint of the nature of the Celtic people the Romans were up against at the Antonine Wall in the works of Cassius Dio (c. A.D. 150–235). Dio, one of Rome’s most influential “mid-period” historians, described the tribes that were to the front and rear of the Roman position.

  There are two principal races of the Britons, the Caledonians and the Maeatae, and the names of the others have been merged in these two. The Maeatae live next to the cross-wall which cuts the island in half, and the Caledonians are beyond them. Both tribes inhabit wild and waterless mountains and desolate and swampy plains, and possess neither walls, cities, nor tilled fields, but live on their flocks, wild game, and certain fruits; for they do not touch the fish which are there found in immense and inexhaustible quantities.

  They dwell in tents, naked and unshod, possess their women in common, and in common rear all the offspring. Their form of rule is democratic for the most part, and they are very fond of plundering; consequently they choose their boldest men as rulers. They go into battle in chariots, and have small, swift horses; there are also foot-soldiers, very swift in running and very firm in standing their ground. For arms they have a shield and a short spear, with a bronze apple attached to the end of the spear-shaft, so that when it is shaken it may clash and terrify the enemy; and they also have the dagger.

  They can endure hunger and cold and any kind of hardship; for they plunge into the swamps and exist there for many days with only their heads above water, and in the forests they support themselves upon bark and roots, and for all emergencies they prepare a certain kind of food, the eating of a small portion of which, the size of a bean, prevents them from feeling either hunger or thirst.

  Such is the general character of the island of Britain, and such are the inhabitants of at least the hostile part of it.10

  Once the Antonine Wall was abandoned, Hadrian’s Wall became the permanent dividing line between the forces of Rome and those who refused to be assimilated. But Rome’s retreat to this wall did not stop these burgeoning and volatile tribes from making war on the Romans. Nor did it put an end to punitive raids by the Romans into northern territory. Its intention, and its main effect, was to enable Rome to consolidate its political control in the south by clearly defining its boundaries.

  And still the tribes of the north persisted. Cassius Dio went on to describe the costly and exhausting nature of the military operations undertaken by the Romans when they sought to subdue these Celtic warriors and their families, as well as the draconian measures the Romans were inclined to take when things went wrong. On the one hand, his accounts demonstrate the strategic and tactical acumen of the loosely knit tribes the Romans faced. On the other, they give fresh meaning to the importance of the concept that we now term “the laws of war.”

  Severus, accordingly, desiring to subjugate the whole of it, invaded Caledonia. But as he advanced through the country he experienced countless hardships in cutting down the forests, leveling the heights, filling up the swamps, and bridging the rivers. . . . The enemy purposely put sheep and cattle in front of the soldiers for them to seize, in order that they might be lured on still further until they were worn out; for in fact the water caused great suffering to the Romans, and when they became scattered, they would be attacked. Then, unable to walk, they would be slain by their own men, in order to avoid capture, so that a full fifty thousand died.

  When the inhabitants of the island again revolted, he summoned the soldiers and ordered them to invade the rebels’ country, killing everybody they met; and he quoted these words:

  “Let no one escape sheer destruction,

  No one in our hands, not even the babe in the womb of the mother,

  If it be male; let it nevertheless not escape sheer destruction.”11

  These raids by the emperor Severus in A.D. 208 were uncommonly vicious. They did not break the spirit of the northern tribes, but they did succeed on another level. Failing to defeat the enemy that inhabited this harsh wilderness, Severus decided for once and for all to permanently seal them off. As Churchill wrote, Severus “flung his energies into the task of reorganization [along the wall, and] stability was achieved. So great had been the destruction, so massive were his repairs, that in later times he was thought to have built the Wall, which in fact he only reconstructed. He died at York in 211; but for a hundre
d years there was peace along the Roman Wall.”12

  The Romans could conduct all the punitive raids they wanted and kill all the Caledonian men, mothers, and babies that they desired, but in the context of history it did not matter. Their empire in Britain had reached its high-water mark, and there were a whole lot of people on the northern side of the wall whom they had not conquered and would never be able to conquer. And thus the peoples of the north, ragged and barbaric though they were, could forever make one important boast: they had never bent a knee to Rome.

  Hundreds of years passed. Differing bloodlines mixed on both sides of the wall. Different forms of government were attempted. On the southern, English side of the wall, the Romans eventually disappeared, replaced as rulers and occupants by a continuing mix of Angles and Saxons, Jutes and Danes, and, eventually, after the 1066 Battle of Hastings, by the scions of the Norman Conquest.

  And on the northern, Scottish side of the wall, a different sort of mixing and adaptation was taking place, leading to the creation of a different sort of people.

  2

  Tribalism Versus Feudalism:

  The Celtic Tie of Kinship

  AS THE CENTURIES progressed south of Hadrian’s Wall, the Romans and then the Saxons and especially the Normans who followed them developed a cultural and governmental system that would be recognizable in some form in England today. Their methods and structures are also visible when one looks at the early New England settlements, whose townships in America comprised a distant mirror. By contrast, the basic formation of society on the northern side of Hadrian’s Wall can still be identified in Scotland and to some extent in Ireland, and are clearly recognizable in the Scots-Irish cultures that dominated the making of the American South.

  England became Anglo-Saxon and then Norman while Scotland remained Celtic. England became highly structured, top-down, and feudal while Scotland remained atomized, bottom-up, and in many respects tribal. The English (particularly under the Normans) built a military caste system coldly imposed from above as a sort of tax. The Celts retained a no-less-warlike tribal system, but the personal loyalties that fueled it, emanating as they did from below, made it more democratic and compelling, based on an individual’s honor in belonging to the tribe. And the implications of these distinctions, subtle as they may seem, are in fact enormous.