A Cultural History of America's Scots Irish: From Border Reivers of the Anglo-Scottish Border to Mountaineers in Appalachia

Published by Napoleon Avenue Publishing

1303 Napoleon Avenue

New Orleans, LA 70115

Copyright 2024 by Harold L. Longaker

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

First published 2024

ISBN-13: 978-0-9979617-3-7 (pbk)

ISBN-13: 978-0-9979617-2-0 (ebk)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023922398

For information about this version, contact the publisher or haroldlongaker@gmail.com.

Cover photograph courtesy Randy Ball Photography

Contents

Tables

Figures

Preface

CHAPTER 1. Introduction

CHAPTER 2. Borderers

CHAPTER 3. Ulster Scots

CHAPTER 4. Traits of the Ulster Scots

CHAPTER 5. The Scots Irish Emigrants

CHAPTER 6. The Scots Irish as Mountaineers

CHAPTER 7. The Who and What of Mountaineers

CHAPTER 8. Darwin’s Bootstrap

Lagniappe

Further Reading

About the Author

Tables

TABLE 1. Population estimates for principal cultures at America’s founding

TABLE 2. Re-sorted tables from Weller’s Yesterday’s People: Life in Contemporary Appalachia

Figures

FIGURE 1. Marches of the Anglo-Scottish border.

FIGURE 2. Statue of a border reiver at the border town of Galashiels.

FIGURE 3. Plantation of Ulster.

FIGURE 4. Irish tower house with bawn.

FIGURE 5. The Great Valley Road, used by settlers in 1700s America.

FIGURE 6. Physical geology of America at its founding.

FIGURE 7. Map of the Cumberland Gap.

FIGURE 8. Counties in the Appalachian Regional Commission as of July 2023.

FIGURE 9. Approximate extent of Southern American English.

FIGURE 10. Terrain map of Stonega, Virginia.

FIGURE 11. Where people exist, not do.

Preface

Once upon a time, very, very long ago, there was an island known to the ancient Greeks as Albion. Today we know that island as Great Britain, the largest of the British Isles. For reasons not presently recalled, in May 2018, I purchased historian David Hackett Fisher’s magnum opus, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (1989). It is the foundation for this book.

It has been said that history is just one damn thing after another. Albion’s Seed is not; it is not even event based. Rather, it is a portrait of America at its very start. Painted not with the strokes of a brush dipped into a palate of often-dry historical facts, it uses the medium of culture (folkways) to create its picture.

History, when viewed through the lens of culture, becomes far more understandable than otherwise. Fisher’s unique approach makes Albion’s Seed what it is: a superb masterpiece of American history, one with unusual clarity and insight.

The four British folkways of Albion’s Seed are as follows:

The Puritans, a utopian cult whose culture still reverberates in the Northeast

The Cavaliers of Virginia, a major source of the Enlightenment thinking expressed in our founding documents

The Quakers of William Penn’s colony of Pennsylvania, whose adherence to the Golden Rule made them the point of the spear of the abolitionist movement

The Scots Irish, with origins in the Borderlands between Scotland and England, who, with their love of natural liberty, became the quintessential American patriots

The first of the four folkways discussed are the Puritans. In my initial reading, I found their culture to be offensive to my individualistic nature, a condition whereby being told what to do is distasteful to say the least. In the Puritan culture of colonial times, when a person was observed not following Puritan norms, others were obligated to tell the person so and to instruct him or her how to behave. Their demand to conform or else would drive away anyone of an individualistic bent.

The last of the folkways covered are the Scots Irish. Their culture elicited in me a response fully opposite to what I felt of the Puritans. Most importantly, in their culture, conformity was never a consideration. Other than the requisite niceties of a civil society, all were free to exercise their agency in any manner desired. Additionally, these people were self-reliant, independent of any need for others. They were subservient to no man and desired nothing more than natural liberty, the freedom to do as one wishes. Importantly, their idea of good government was one that regulates least. I could identify; these were my kind of people!

The timing of my reading could not have been better. Trump derangement syndrome (TDS) was ascendant, and all things Trump were rancorously denounced by one segment of our society, the political left. Given his personality, especially with its often coarse, over-the-top, combative language, such a response was understandable. Concurrently, many in the media had no idea who the many, sometimes obstreperous Trump supporters were, let alone any understanding of their culture. Even now, most do not.

When I finished Albion’s Seed, the possibility that the Puritans might be a model for the Trump haters and their cultural counterparts, the Scots Irish, for Trump’s base had become apparent. My working model became that Puritans were the forebearers of the Trump haters, whereas the Scots Irish were those of his base.

In the same time frame, I had become aware of the seriousness of our national divide. It appeared existential. It struck me that the conflicting cultures of the Puritans and the Scots Irish could explain more than just the phenomenon of TDS. It might not only lend insight into our divide; it could even be its cause.

The Puritans and the Scots Irish, or rather, their cultures, appear to map onto opposite sides of our national discontent. One side, comprising the Puritans, appears to have a collectivist nature, and the other side, comprising the Scots Irish, has an individualistic one. My thesis is that our culture war is one between collectivists and individualists, blue versus red, left versus right.

The foregoing describes my thought process leading to the writing of a book, one comparing the collectivist Puritans to the individualistic Scots Irish. My objective is to frame this contrast as comprising the opposite sides of our current culture war. It is a work still in progress.

It was during the development of the aforementioned book that I began to realize that the little-known Scots Irish of America have a story in need of telling. They have contributed a significant fraction of the mosaic of cultures making up America. Theirs is a story that has been ignored for far too long. This book is their story: their journey from the Borderlands between the kingdoms of Scotland and England to the mountains of Appalachia.

Before starting our narrative, we should have a common understanding of this book’s title: A Cultural History. Culture is a property of groups, not individuals; it is what we consider when stereotyping is in play. It is when we use it for individuals that we get into trouble, and rightly so.

The definition of culture includes the response of a people to their environment. Environment is where we live; it is what impinges on our lives. It has geographical components like temperature and local vegetation. Learning how to make clothes when humans first experienced cold is an example of a cultural response to the environment.

There is also a man-made component. War is an example, as are marital relations. For example, when needed resources are held by others but not ourselves, going to war to acquire them is a cultural response.

As environments change, culture responds, and in so doing, culture itself changes. We can view history as something more than the usual who, what, where, when, and why of events. It can be considered as a recording of the changes in the environment impinging on a people, thus explaining why people come to be who they are. In our narrative, we will see that when history and culture are coupled with environment, we get a deeper understanding than otherwise.

one

Introduction

David Hackett Fisher’s Albion’s Seed is the point of departure for our journey through the cultural highways and byways of America’s Scots Irish. As I note in the preface, this important work is a portrait of the four dominant cultures present at America’s founding. If we are who we were, there is no better place to start a journey to answer the questions, Where did we come from? and, more importantly, Who are we?

The Medium of Culture

As the preface notes, Fisher uses the palate of culture or folkways to create a portrait of the four principal cultures or folkways present at America’s founding. For each, he covers such traits as speech ways, marriage ways, and childrearing ways. In all, there are twenty-three. His discussion of cultural traits informs what these cultures are; it says nothing as to why they are.

Like all portraitures, Fisher’s is static, representing conditions only at a single slice of time. Static portraitures are limited, incapable of informing about changes over time. For Albion’s Seed, this is not a problem. Essentially, its intent is to describe the four folkways at a particular time and place, and that it does. Fisher’s static portrait serves his intent quite nicely.

For our narrative, such a static approach would be inadequate. Consider that it starts in thirteenth-century, medieval Scotland; spends time in the Borderlands between England and Scotland; relocates to the province of Ulster in Ireland; then migrates to the New World and, in modern times, ends up in the mountains of Appalachia. Over those seven centuries and environments of various locales, a population’s culture would be expected to change. For the population we know as the Scots Irish, it did.

Like Albion’s Seed, our narrative will use the palate of culture, but in the dynamic, not in the static, sense. This we will get by using a camera with cultural evolution as its lens. Framing our narrative with cultural evolution is not as daunting as it might first appear. Evolution, genetic and cultural, is driven by the environment, where environment includes nature as well as others of the same species. Other humans, individuals or groups, are part of our evolutionary environment. Much of the evolution of our culture is driven by the actions of others and will inform much of our narrative.

Why the Scots Irish?

A proper answer to this question needs several facts, but to get to them, we have to get to the end of this book. For now, we will have to depend on facts not yet in evidence.

The opening question is fair, even necessary. We want to know the relevance of our protagonists, the Scots Irish, in today’s America. Are they significant or important? Why should we care about them? Better yet, why read this book?

As kids, we were taught about the Puritans of New England, and most of us learned about the pacifist Quakers of William Penn’s colony. Although we might not have been taught explicitly about the Cavaliers of Virginia, implicitly we were. We knew their leaders, men like Jefferson, Washington, Madison, and others, and their contributions to our founding.

Of America’s Scots Irish, we were taught nothing. If the teachers of yesteryear were comparable to those of today, they knew little to nothing about this group. Go out onto the street and ask any man or woman what they know of the Scots Irish. Their response will probably be, Who? If no one is aware, they must not be important. But ignorance has no bearing on importance. Importance is not dependent on the eye of the beholder;