Monday

Good morning,

Quote of the day:

“I shall pass through this life but once. Any good I can therefore do, let me do it now. Let me not defer nor deflect it, for I shall never pass this way again.”

                                             Etienne de Grellet

Rather than local and non-local news Items, I am going to give y'all an essay I wrote about my Scots-Irish ancestors. I think a great many of us have Scots-Irish blood along with a drop or two of Creek/Cherokee/Shawnee/Choctaw blood especially those of us that have roots associated with the Appalachians. Here it is:

                         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 crowned kings of Great Britain and Scotland. It got started when James financed the expedition to the new world led by Captain John Smith and the establishing of Jamestown in 1607. 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. Some of his anger came from the beheading of his mother Mary, Queen of Scots due to her being involved in a planned assassination of protestant Queen Elizabeth I instigated by Catholics. The Irish Catholics had been in rebellion against England for centuries and James saw this as a way of diluting them. This resulted in many Irish Catholic 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 would be formed and named Ulster. It consisted of six “shires” or counties in northeast Ireland. To fill the void James 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...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. The Scottish Lords indeed took the offer and brought their Scottish tenants with them. As you might suspect the Irish Catholics fought like hell to keep their lands to no avail. There was a stipulation that the Scottish 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, y'all. This influx put the Irish Protestant 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 back to Scotland 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 no 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 in Scotland and as a result the protestant Scots became the majority. The planters were known as the Ulster Scots. The present partition of Ireland with Northern Ireland gets it roots from this era. Northern Ireland is occupied by the progeny of British/Scot protestants and they wanted to keep a link with England whereas the rest of Ireland are Catholic and wanted independence. Later on the Scots being fed up with restrictions on their religion began heading west to America. They primarily landed in Annapolis, Philadelphia and New York. They were not welcomed by the high bred plantation owners on the Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina tidewater nor 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 Virginia and then south and west down the chain into the Carolinas and Georgia. They were encouraged in this endeavor because of their warlike nature they would be a good border guard against the savage Shawnee, Creek and Cherokee 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. He could not hold on to it because of the repeated attacks by 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 a great many of the troops fighting for the Patriots in the Revolutionary War in the south were Scots that came down out of the mountains. They used guerrilla tactics like they use against the Indians 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 Colonel 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. Ferguson waved a white hanky and said “We surrender but I am an officer in his majesty's army and will be treated with respect.” He was immediately hit with eight musket balls and was as dead a fried chicken before he hit the ground. 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 earlier that had surrendered but were bayoneted by Tarleton’s troops. This atrocity angered the Patriots and especially the mountain men...they sought revenge at King's Mountain and found it. My ancestry comes via the Holston river Valley of Tennessee (father) and the mountains of Habersham County Georgia (mother). That’s right folks, I am a Redneck albeit a well read and well spoken one.

The Scots proved their heritage again during the Civil War, some fought in gray and some fought in blue but they fought with great zeal just for the sheer joy of it.

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.

                    Thanks for listening I can hardly wait until tomorrow