Daily history

Good morning,


Quote of the day:

“The basic thing is that everyone wants happiness, no one wants suffering. Happiness mainly comes from our own attitude rather than external factors. If your own mental attitude is correct, even though you remain in a hostile atmosphere, you will feel happy.”

                        Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama

Today will be a short dialogue about the history of Rednecks and then the regular history lesson…enjoy.

A Brief History of Rednecks

I have been reading the history of the impact of the Scots-Irish in America and naturally the author went back into the far past to trace them out to present day. By the way it is Scots, not Scotch. Scots are a people and Scotch is a whisky. Anyway, the big movement came right after James I became the King of Great Britain. Previously, he was James VI of Scotland making him the first of the dual crowned kings of Great Britain. It got started when James financed the expedition to the new world led by Captain John Smith. But James real passion was religion. He could not abide Catholics and he began a project to oust the Catholic landowners in Ireland and seize their lands. The Catholic Irish had been in rebellion against England for centuries and James saw this as a way of diluting them. This resulted in many Catholic Irish Earls fleeing the Emerald Isle trying to escape the wrath of the Protestants and Anglicans. To fill this void, it was decided that a “plantation” in Ireland in an area called Ulster would be formed. It consisted of six shires or counties. To fill the void James and company decided to kill two birds with one stone and offered land in Ulster to Protestant Scottish lords with the stipulation that they would bring their Scottish tenants with them. The waspish Scots would fight at the drop of a hat over anything that interfered with their independence or messed with the clans, or their tight-fisted Presbyterian religion. They were a hard-ass bunch, especially the Borderers or those that lived close to the border with England. As you might expect, the disenfranchised Catholic Irish fought like hell to take their lands back to no avail. The Scottish Lords indeed took the offer and brought their Scottish tenants with them. There was a stipulation that the Lords could not employ Irish tenants, they had to import them from England and Scotland and they had to be English speaking Protestants, moreover the landowners were banned from selling land to the Irish. Whatever land that was left over was given to the Protestant Churches of Ireland including any lands previously owned by the Roman Catholic Church. James meant to castrate the Catholics in Ireland, ya’ll. This influx put the Protestant Irish in a hard way because they spoke Gaelic while everyone else spoke English. As a result of this turmoil there were civil wars in England, Scotland and Ireland. In 1630 many Ulster Scots went home because Charles I, the king of England declared that the Church of Ireland had to use the prayer book of the Church of England essentially making it an Anglican church. That would change the way the fiery Scottish Presbyterians practiced their religion. As I have said before, you don’t pull on Superman’s cape or spit into the wind and you don’t fool around with the Scots religion. In 1638 an oath was imposed by King Charles I on the Ulster Scots binding them to never take up arms against England not matter what. I don’t need to tell you what kind of hell was raised after this outrage. By the way, it was King Charles I presumptuousness that cost him his head as will be discussed in a future lesson. In 1641 the Irish Catholics rose up in an armed rebellion and the prime target was the Plantation land owners. Many, many atrocities were committed by the Irish on the Scottish land owners in retribution for them taking Irish lands. In the 1690s a huge immigration of Protestant Scots came over to Ulster during a famine and as a result the Protestant Scots became the majority. The planters are known as the Ulster Scots. The present partition of Ireland with Ireland and Northern Ireland gets it roots from this era. Northern Ireland is occupied by the progeny of British Protestants and wanted to keep a link with England whereas the rest of Ireland are Catholic and want independence. Later on, the Scots being fed up with restrictions on their religion began heading west to America. They primarily landed in Philadelphia. They were not welcomed by the highbred plantation owners on the Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina tidewater and not by the snooty Puritans in the northeast so they headed further west and settled in small clans in the Appalachian mountain chain starting in western Pennsylvania and then south and west down the chain into Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia. They were encouraged in this endeavor because of their warlike nature they would be a good match for the savage Shawnee and Cherokees, and a good match they were. There is a legend in my family on my father’s side that one of my great-great uncles owned a huge chunk of land in Maggie Valley, NC which is the very heart of Cherokee country, but he could not hold on to it because of the repeated attacks of the Cherokees. There are many reports of atrocities committed by both the natives and the Scots. It is the roots of almost constants turmoil, the love of fighting and an independent nature, especially their religion, which the so-called Scots-Irish have in their hearts and souls. Actually, the Scots-Irish are not a mix of Scots and the Irish; it is Scots that immigrated to Ulster, Ireland before coming to America and it is these Ulster Scots that are my ancestors on my father’s side. It is known that nearly all the troops fighting for the Patriots in the Revolutionary War in the south were Scots that came down out of the mountains and using guerilla type tactics like they use against the Indians and against the staid and upright British to great effect. They demonstrated their ferocity at the Battle of Cowpens where Patriot General Daniel Morgan outmaneuvered the infamous British Colonel Banastre Tarleton and would have annihilated the entire army of British/Loyalists but some of them escaped the wrath of Morgan’s wild-eyed mountain men. But there were no escapees at the Battle of Kings Mountain. This group of Patriots was led by General John Sevier and was able to trap British General John Ferguson and his army of Loyalists on the peak of a mountain by surrounding the base. General Ferguson fought for a while but then realized that there was no escape and surrendered. The surrender was not accepted and the Patriots waded in and either shot or hanged them all to a man. This massacre was brought about because of Tarleton killing 220 Patriots that had surrendered but were bayoneted by Tarleton’s troops angering the Patriots and especially the mountain men. They sought revenge and found it. My ancestry comes from the Holston Valley of Tennessee and the mountains of Habersham County Georgia. That’s right folks; I am a Redneck and/or a Cracker albeit a well read and well spoken one. I am proud of my ancestors, if you do not believe me, just ask.

The Scots proved their heritage again during the Civil War, but that is another story.

This epistle in no way covers everything that happened to the Ulster Scots during this time period but it gives you an idea of the mold that formed them.

This date in history May 26

1637    Since the establishment of the Massachusetts Bay colony the settlers had been expanding into what is now Connecticut. The problem here was that in central Connecticut was a tribe of very hostile Indians known as the Pequot. The Pequot began raiding the settlers’ villages more and more frequently. In early 1637 the Pequot had raided a small village and killed 13 men, women and children. The Governor of the Colony, John Endicott, ordered a mobilization of a military force to punish the Pequot. The Indians found out about this and in an act of defiance raided another village killing six settler and kidnapping two girls. On this date the retaliation against the Pequot began. The settler military force commanded by John Mason and accompanied by several Mohegan Indians, who were enemies of the Pequot, got underway. The settlers attacked three different Pequot villages killing over 500 in one village alone. After the third attack there were only a handful of Pequot that escaped to live with the southern tribes. What were not killed was sold into slavery and that was the end to yet another tribe of Native Americans at the hands of our ancestors.

1782    General George Washington had gotten fed up with the Indians of the Ohio Valley fighting on the side of the British during the Revolutionary War. He tasked his friend retired Colonel William Crawford with assembling a military force and punishing the offending Indians. On this date Crawford and his troops headed out from central Pennsylvania. Crawford had been retired from the French and Indian War but came out of retirement on three different occasions to help Washington. It was not a good time to go into the Ohio Valley because the local tribes were extremely irate about a horrendous event perpetrated by the Patriots. What happened was this: A group of Patriot soldiers happened upon a church occupied by Indians that had adopted the pacifist Christian Moravian religion and were kneeling in prayer when the soldiers arrived. The soldiers unfortunately chose to go up behind and shoot them all in the back of the head. Some of the soldiers that had participated in this massacre were with Crawford on this expedition. Anyway, after this came to light the Ohio Valley Indians had blood in their eyes, especially the Wyandot under Chief Pipe. Again, unfortunately Colonel Crawford’s troops lost contact with their supply train and were surrounded and captured. Colonel Crawford and his son-in-law William Harrison were scalped and burned at the stake. But the Indians did not let them burn to death at once. They pulled them out of the fire at the point of death and let them recover a little and then put them back. It took 2 ½ hours before Crawford perished. Needless to say that Crawford was named a martyr and later a stone monument was erected at the spot where he died. The monument is listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

1940    On this date almost any British boat that could stand the crossing crossed the English Channel to Calais, France. There were 46,000 British and other allied soldiers pinned on the beach after the ill-fated invasion of Dunkirk. The Germans had the invasion force out manned and out gunned with their tanks and half tracks. The plan was to evacuate the troops back to England in two days but the German Air Force (Luftwaffe) had other ideas. They strafed and bombed the trapped soldiers relentlessly, that is until the British Air Force came over and provided air cover for the evacuation. The allied soldiers were finally back to safety after nine days of hell. They were not the only people suffering. The French and Belgian civilians that lived on the coast had to flee their homes during the air battle and many were homeless after their homes were destroyed by bombs and machine gun fire. War is hell.

1924    YA’LL PAY ATTENTION: On this date President Calvin Coolidge signs into law the most stringent immigration law in American history. This law mirrored the American attitude of isolationism after the unequaled slaughter of World War I. It also demonstrated the pervasiveness of racial fear and discrimination prevalent in America at that time. After the influx of so many unskilled workers in the early 1900’s the Americans felt that they were taking too many jobs and too much land. The law stated that no one could enter the country without a college degree or a recognized skill. It also disallowed Mexicans entirely and severely restricted central and southern Europeans and Japanese. Again Coolidge was parroting the American attitude of citizens being mostly of Northern European descent. The law really pissed off the Japanese because a few years earlier the United States and Japan had a “Gentleman’s agreement” that would loosen up immigration quotas for Japan. But eventually that went down the toilet when the agriculture in California exploded and provided plenty of work for those Americans already here. There was fear that the Japanese workers would take many of those jobs and they were probably right. Anyway, Cal had no problem with enacting laws that he felt was in the nation’s best interest. Where is Cal or someone like him when you need him?

Born today:

1689 English writer Lady may Montagu. She said “Most people wish their enemies dead. I do not, I wish them to stay alive and have gout and kidney stones.” Ouch

Died today:

1703    English writer Samuel Pepys. He said “Me thinks lesser of kings if they cannot command the rain”.

           Thanks for listening I can hardly wait until tomorrow