“Born Fighting, How the Scots-Irish Shaped America,” by James Webb

I’d like to call attention to this historical treatment, by James Webb, of the discrete but not necessarily insular Scots-Irish Protestant minority, which has contributed a great deal to basic American attitudes. 

Conflict in fundamental attitudes produces political conflict, constitutional law, and ultimately what it means to be an American.

The book is  “Born Fighting, How the Scots-Irish Shaped America,” by James Webb, Broadway Books, New York, 2004, 369 pp., including notes and index.. 

Mr. Webb is a U.S. Naval Academy graduate, a U.S. Marine who was mustered out of active military service following wounds sustained in ground combat in Vietnam, a Georgetown Law Center graduate, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Reserve Affairs (beginning in 1984), and a former Secretary of the Navy (beginning in 1987).  He is the author of the novels “Fields of Fire,” “A Sense of Honor,” “A Country Such As This,” “Something to Die For.” “The Emperor’s General,” and “Lost Soldiers.”

This is Webb’s first non-fiction book, part historical, part descriptive of the U.S.-Vietnam and post-Vietnam experiences, and part moving memoir, in which he traces his ancestry back through the Civil War, through the Revolution, and back to the exodus of Ulster Presbyterians of Northern Ireland following the Ulster Plantation and resulting battles of Bannockburn, and the Boyne.  He notes the ultimate defeat of Scotland at Culloden, 1745, which contributes to the waves of migration.  In general, the British use, discard,  betray, and defeat the Scots and the Scots-Irish.

These are a tough, hardheaded, independent-minded people who resist outside intervention and the imposition of values from above.  Their values come from the bottom up, Webb observes.  He traces this vigorous Celtic culture back to the time of the Romans in Britain, who gave up trying to tame them.  The Romans built Hadrian’s Wall, instead, to fend them off and keep them out.  They never bent a knee to Rome, or anyone else, for that matter, per Webb’s reading of history.

They become us, is Webb’s thesis, and deserve better consideration than they've been getting.

Along the way, these are the people of Braveheart (William Wallace) and Robert the Bruce, who fight Proud Edward I, and rally behind the hapless Bonnie Prince Charlie.  Often betrayed and sometimes misled, they follow their warrior chiefs along a hard road as they sometimes lose and move on to the promise and hardship of frontier opportunities.  They are sustained by a tremendous sense of kinship, laterally and longitudinally, Webb demonstrates. 

Arriving in the Colonies in the mid-1700s, in several waves triggered by trouble at home, these independent-minded Scots of the Presbyterian Kirk, which rejects distant, superimposed church rule in favor of local, democratic, self-rule, are far different than either the intellectual Puritans of New England who found universities, or the Cavalier - Tidewater Aristocracy of Virginia, Lord Fairfax and his like who acquire huge stakes of land from Charles II.  These latter are the people who produce four of our first five presidents, the Southern Virginia Dynasty of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, who establish and maintain slaves and slavery.  Adams represents the Puritan stock of the Northeast.  Pioneers don’t have slaves.

The Scots-Irish are water to their oil, being neither Puritan nor Cavalier, neither Anglo nor Saxon.  They’ve been fighting the British kings for so long that when the Revolution comes along, it is a wonderful cause for them and they take to it, as in what took us so long.  They fight the British under Washington, rout Cornwallis from the South, and have stuck out the hard winter at Valley Forge in what becomes known as the Spirit of ‘76, which, in good measure, is their spirit.

Not fitting in along the Coast, the Scots-Irish settle first in New Hampshire, then head west and south where their warlike traits are taken advantage of, as they are invited to act as a buffer, fighting Indians, adopting Indian war-fighting methods, blending and concealing while fighting. 

Pioneering Scots-Irish trailblazers such as Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett lead the way west, and  hundreds of thousands hike and ride by wagon through the Cumberland Gap to found Tennessee and Kentucky and many more states.

The first Westerner president is the Scots-Irish general, Andrew Jackson, an Indian fighter and the victor against a much larger British force, in 1815, in New Orleans.  This makes him both famous and presidential timber.  After his loss in the House in the “corrupt bargain” of 1824 (election of Quincy Adams, with Henry Clay as VP), he shores his fences and rides to victory in 1828, for two terms, a triumph of the common man over Federalist, Hamiltonian, and aristocratic views. 

Jackson kills the 2d Bank of the U.S. as an eastern monopoly by which the Philadelphian, bank president Nicholas Biddle, holds the country hostage by threatening another Panic.  Jackson staves off civil war, by resisting with threat of force, southern threats, in the name of nullification and states rights, to secede over tariffs.  His attorney-general later becomes Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, known today mainly for Dred Scott and slavery.

Jackson epitomizes the traits that Webb describes as being characteristic of the Scots-Irish culture for 2,000 years, a wide, deep, and stubborn streak of faith in the dignity of the common man. Jacksonian Democracy, which some say is a contradiction in terms, is the result.

“Jacksonian Democracy was buried at Fort Sumter, but it had died many years earlier,” according to Princeton historian Sean Wilentz, writing for Houghton-Mifflin, who describes the term, here:

http://tinyurl.com/45du7

The Scots- Irish, populating the seceding states, as well as others, fight for the Confederacy, following their fighting leaders, as is their wont. Few owned a slave and many did not feel they were fighting to maintain a rich man’s property in humans.

The legalism of states rights in the South unfortunately trumped the northern morality which denounced slavery, producing the war.

Union soldiers were seen by some Confederate soldiers also to be fighting to maintain slavery in border states in which Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation did not apply. 

Moral purity was in short supply on both sides, it appears. 

The slavery vs. states rights issue is far more complicated than we typically characterize it today, when we “Nazify” the south from this distance, Webb notes.  By shining a light on factors typically overlooked, he hopes to understand, not justify.

The Scots-Irish were largely struggling farmers, mechanics, and tradesmen.  After the Civil War, they were little better off than the freed slaves, both being powerless and relegated to tenant farming or sharecropping during Reconstruction.  The power equation changes, of course, after the Hayes-Tilden election of 1876 and the withdrawal of federal troops.  KKK and Jim Crow follow with effects we deal with today.

One of the tragedies of history, Webb observes, is that given their bottom-of- the-ladder status, the Scots-Irish and the freed slave became antagonists, unable to make common cause. It’s not too late to cooperate, he suggests, in general.

Webb explains how the South became a virtual colony of the North after the Civil War, unable to struggle to its feet until the FDR inspired federal programs of the Depression such as the CCC, WPA, and TVA projects, followed by the mobilization for the war, WWII, and the post-war boom, or Second Reconstruction.

Yesterday’s Scots-Irish Presbyterians become today’s Baptists, Methodists, and Evangelicals, the religious right, and particularly the party of George Bush and John Ashcroft.

These are the people of “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” who give us Country Music, a direct descendant of the music of Scotland and Northern Ireland.  They are the Okies and Arkies who move west during the Dust Bowl and the Depression to populate Southern California and the Central Valley, the Americans John Steinbeck portrayed in Grapes of Wrath.

Protestant in origin, they are not to be confused, as they often are, to their disadvantage, with the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant WASPs who at one time were widely believed to control the world, in America. Webb debunks even this.

Since WASPs, by that light, need no government help, when the Scots-Irish are lumped in with them, they also seem to need no government care or concern.  This is a mistake which makes affirmative action programs for African-Americans that much more difficult to accept, as I read Webb, since they single out one needy group for relief as another equally needy group is ignored and allowed to wallow in the hills.

Much of the American military backbone in all wars is attributable to this culture, partly natural tendency and partly the only opportunity available in which to contribute to the greater good and to thrive by warrior lights.

The Scots-Irish, more commonly Scotch-Irish, have become so much a part of the fabric of the nation in terms of fundamental values that unless described and pointed out, the values and the people are hard to see and easy to overlook.  The racist referent often heard, however, is “redneck,” “cracker,” and “hillbilly,” a practice that deserves to be relegated along with the N-word.

Webb performs the necessary service of pointing out who these folks were and are, what they contribute, and why they deserve a bit more respect and understanding.  Given their current power to decide elections, and influence Supreme Court nominations, among other reasons, his timely point seems well-taken indeed.

I, for one, was unaware of so much of this.  I had earlier asked, and researched, who the Puritans were, and became, but not the Scots-Irish.

Since I’m from New York and came of age during the Civil Rights movement, I’ve tended to use the South as the handy whipping-boy for inconvenient racial attitudes, not that I think New York racial attitudes are so pure.   I’ll be more careful to skip the verbal shorthand that ignores the historical complexity of earlier times which leads to today's complexities, another debt I have to Webb.

rs
sfls

Comments

[Thad Anderson]

I'm reading "Born Fighting" right now, and I think that understanding the history of the Scots-Irish is one of the keys to understanding the South, and the current "Culture War."

My family is from North Carolina, which is incredibly Scots-Irish: my great-grandparents, the Laughridges, lived in the town of Marion, in McDowell County. Growing up in the South, everyone was either "white" or "black." I knew my family was Scots-Irish, but didn't really know what that meant, and, believe it or not, only recently started thinking about the fact that this meant they had lived in what is now Northern Ireland. Growing up, I just didn't even think about it that much - we didn't have contact with any relatives, because my family moved to NC during the mid-1700's. And with the exception of friends whose families had moved to NC since the 1950's or 60's, almost all of the white folks I knew growing up were Scots-Irish.

When I moved to New York, everyone kept asking where I was from. "North Carolina." Where's your family from? "Uh, a lot of my dad's family is from the mountains, and my mom's from Alabama (much of which was settled by Scots-Irish from NC)." No, where were they from before that? "Ohhh . . . Scotland, originally."

Anyway, the Scots-Irish tradition has played a huge role in the South's historical distrust of central government. North Carolina still doesn't give its Governor executive veto, which stems from a combination of Colonial-era factors: the Protestants' distrust of central leaders, and the distrust and resentment that most of the people in the Piedmont and Mountains had towards the wealthy aristocrats in Eastern NC, and in VA and SC (an old North Carolina maxim calls the state "A vale of humility between two mountains of conceit.")

And the Scots-Irish take on the Protestant work ethic is cut and dry: those who pray and work hard are rewarded with success, and inversely, those who are not successful either must not have prayed or must not have worked hard (if it's a friend or family member, you're less direct, and politely say "bless his/her heart"). This goes a long way towards understanding the deeply-ingrained opposition to welfare and similar programs.

I still don't know if it is politically correct for me to celebrate St. Patrick's Day this week, or whether that is the equivalent of Teresa Heinz-Kerry saying she is an "African-American." I figure that, as long as I explain that my folks left Ulster in the 1730's, I'll be okay. One scotch, one bourbon, and one Guinness, please.

Thad Anderson
outragedmoderates.org

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"Lord grant that I may always be right, for Thou knowest I am hard to turn." (An 18th Century Scots-Irish Prayer).