Wednesday

                  Musings and History

Quote of the day:

“I has been found that the average American is overweight. This means that a couple of years ago I was fat but now I am average.”

                                          Jo Brand

Rather than local and non-local news Items, I am going to add an essay I wrote about my Scots-Irish ancestry. I think a great many of us have Scot-Irish blood along with a dab or two of Creek, Choctaw and/or Cherokee 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 whiskey. 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 Irish Catholics 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 the tenants 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 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, Choctaw, 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, 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 their revenge and they 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.

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