Born Fighting (12 page)

Who were these people? The English mixed among them, as did the Irish and a smattering of Huguenots. But principally these were the same lowland Scots who had left the thin-soiled and embattled border areas, hoping for a better life in Ireland. Many of these families had spent more than a hundred years in Ireland. Almost all had spent more than a generation there, so that their children had no direct memory of Scotland. Some observers claim that they were at this point neither Scottish nor Irish. The truth is that they were both, having gleaned from the culture of one people and the land of another until they were a unique hybrid mix. They were Protestants but could not coexist peacefully with the Anglican English. They were Irish but had brought with them from Scotland a view that Catholic religious leaders had veered away from God. They were Scottish in their history and traditions but had lost their physical connection to their homeland and thus had become Irish in many aspects of their daily lives.

Whatever one may have wished to call them, they had had enough of Ireland. They were a new people, strong and unfulfilled, and they were ready for a new land. The “nonconformists” who had given the Anglicans such continual fits were aptly named. And they would take with them from Ireland a greater sense of injustice at the hands of the English governing class than any sort of anger toward the Irish.

Unfortunately, even as they began their second great migration within the span of a century, as a culture the Ulster Scots were missing out, both on the dawning era of educational enlightenment and on the benefits of the Industrial Revolution.

In the early 1700s, Scotland’s economic and educational systems would begin to change dramatically. By the 1780s the country would be in an intellectual and commercial “takeoff,” still rural but having passed a turning point fed by the Industrial Revolution and the advent of the cotton textile industry. Indeed, the country would be entering a “golden age, the likes of which had never been seen before or since.”
⁶⁹
Some have compared this “explosion of creative energy” to “the great periods of Athens or Florence. It included the philosophy of David Hume, the poetry of Robert Burns and the architecture of Robert Adam. The study of economics was transformed by Adam Smith, of physics by Black, of geology by Hutton and of sociology by Adam Ferguson.”
⁷⁰
Those who had moved on to Ireland and then to America were long-gone from the treeless lowlands by the time this renaissance occurred.

In Ireland, the Anglicans of the Church of Ireland and the Catholics who were benefiting from a Jesuit emphasis on education would press the importance of academic learning on their parishioners. The Kirks of the Calvinist Ulster Scots would continue to lecture more about discipline and self-reliance than on book-fed philosophy. In America, the settlers of New England and to a lesser extent those Cavalier societies along the Southern coast had already created many of the great universities that survive even to this day. But the Ulster Scots would head into the mountains with few texts other than the Bible in their canvas sacks, beginning a century of educational regression even as others saw the New World as a land of enlightenment.

The world that they would inherit was harsh and unforgiving. No towns had been platted out to await their arrival. No London municipal corporation was financing their venture. No merchants traveled among them. No schools would welcome their children. The threat of Cherokee and Shawnee war parties would be the reality that filled their long nights in the dark woods behind the log walls of their fresh-built cabins. And no government other than that which they agreed upon among themselves would control their daily interactions.

In such a wild, uncharted place the book of God was vital, for it nourished their spirit and laid boundaries for their conduct. Other subjects simply had no relevance. Trigonometry and calculus would not help them find their way along the mountain trails. Adam Smith’s economics were of no consequence in the matter of planting corn and breeding cattle. Nor did they need the essays of Plato or the plays of Shakespeare to teach them how to shoot a rifle, or to make clothes from animal skins, or to clear away the wilderness with their own bare hands.

They would not go to America as Scots or as Irishmen, nor would they go as tradesmen or plantation owners. A century of turmoil in the beautiful but tormented hills and waterlines of Ulster had changed them. They were, as always, farmers and fighters, these two callings inseparable in their history and in their culture. But they now were a different people. Their blood and traditions had been shaped by centuries in Scotland, then both hardened and sentimentalized by Ireland. And yet neither land would ever again fully claim them. They were the unsung orphans of both.

In Ireland, they would always be remembered as a hybrid, the Ulster Scots. In America, they would gain a new hyphen, becoming known as the Scotch-Irish, and also by the more ethnically proper term, the Scots-Irish. Although the term Scotch-Irish is still frequently used inside the United States, in other countries and especially in Scotland itself it is considered rude to refer to a person as being Scotch. “Scotch,” as they say, is a whiskey. “Scots” are people whose roots go back to Scotland. This book honors that judgment.

PART FOUR

The Spirit of a Revolution
                              

Call this war by whatever name you may, only call it not an American rebellion; it is nothing more or less than a Scotch Irish Presbyterian rebellion.

—
A HESSIAN OFFICER,
writing home during the War of the American Revolution

                              

1

Roots
                              

SOME MIGHT THINK
it morbid, but I find solace and even affirmation among old graves.

And here I stand on a sloping hill in a remote cemetery two miles east of Natural Bridge, Virginia, staring at a marker that rises above the remains of my five-times-great-grandfather. Thomas Lackey was born in Ulster in 1732, a member of a family—variously spelled Lecky, Leckie, and Lackey, even among the stones in the small confines of this cemetery—that for centuries in Scotland before their journey to Ireland had been part of the McGregor clan. Relocating in Ireland and then shipping out to America from Londonderry in 1748, the family lived first in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, then later moved south to this solitary and thickly wooded section of the Blue Ridge Mountains not far from the Appalachian Trail.

And here old Thomas died. It is an eerie feeling thinking of the bones that are buried just beneath my feet, a corpse who braved the harsh Atlantic and later walked the long trails through the mountains to just this spot, and whose blood still courses in my veins. And old Thomas Lackey is not alone. Looking around this small cemetery, I see numerous other family names that still dot its hills. In fact, I’m having a pretty jolly family reunion as I stand among the gravestones in the sweet spring grass, recognizing this long-remembered person and that—except of course that everybody else is dead. But, no matter, I’m happy to find them, after all the bedtime stories and front-porch chronicles of my youth. Their journey in many ways defined me. And just as important, by placing their families in what was then an isolated wilderness, these old souls dared to make a nation.

Actually I’m living out a ritual, for an irony abounds in the Scots-Irish mind-set. On the one hand, for a variety of reasons Americans of Scots-Irish heritage seldom refer to themselves by a specific ethnic identity. And yet on the other, they probably boast a higher percentage of ardent genealogists than any other cultural group in the country. This paradox is instructive, for it is a millennial rather than a recent phenomenon. It reaches back to the distinctions in ancient Scotland that encouraged strong family pride and even patriotism while at the same time dismissing notions that nationalism needed to be wrapped up in a specific racial or ethnic identity or even in a larger loyalty to king and crown.

The Scots-Irish, like other cultures, have always had their group prejudices as well as their fiercely held internal codes. But on the whole they are an embracive people who have tended to focus more on shared concepts such as family loyalty and personal honor than on simple ethnic similarities. Historian Ned Landsman writes of “the emphasis on collateral rather than lineal descent” in the clan structure and points out that “when a Scottish man or woman took a spouse who was not of Scottish descent, the whole family [of the new spouse] could be absorbed into the ‘Scottish’ community.”
¹
The long history of family feuds that marks this culture, from the border areas of western Scotland to the hills of West Virginia, is testimony that local and personal loyalties drive their passions far more deeply than any contrived notion of larger ethnic differences. The Hatfields and McCoys were hardly different in their ethnic origins, but they killed each other for generations.

Just as the notion of Celtic kinship was defined from the bottom up even a thousand years ago by clan allegiance rather than a mandatory fealty to some distant king, in modern times studying the movement of family members over the generations has provided the clearest way to tell the story of the Scots-Irish journey. Of the communities on the American frontier, Professor Landsman observes that “the patterned dispersal of the Scots, rather than isolating individual settlers from their homes and families, served instead to bind together the scattered settlements through a system of interlocking family networks.”
²
David Hackett Fischer amplifies this thought by pointing out that in America, “[A]s time passed, clans became stronger rather than weaker in the southern highlands. . . . These clans fostered an exceptionally strong sense of loyalty . . . which recognized a special sense of obligation to kin.”
³

Couple this with the near-biblical storytelling tradition of the culture, and the journey of an extended family can be the most logical way for those who came in the first great migration out of Ireland to relate the history of the frontier writ large. The personal becomes history, and history becomes personal. Names introduce themselves on the well-worn pages of family Bibles, some of those books carried from Ulster into the wilderness and treasured through the centuries, births and marriages and deaths entered carefully as the book itself was passed down over the generations into the present day. Others show up in faded letters sent from faraway relatives recalling places and events, pooling information that might reconstruct a family’s journey. Still others appear in the handwritten notes of people like my maternal grandmother, who when I was twelve years old finally wrote out an amazingly accurate eleven-page summary of her family’s movement from Virginia through Tennessee, then down into Mississippi and finally into Arkansas, replete with the dates of births and deaths, marriages, and military enlistments. Granny Doyle had been carrying all of this in her head, passed down from mother to daughter through each generation in singsong verses on the narrow front porch of some latest cabin as the hot summer sun gave way to a sultry, bugfilled evening, or huddled next to the fireplace before there ever was such a thing as radio to fill the boredom of a winter night.

My Daddy was Francis Adolphus Doyle. His great grand daddy Zachariah Thomas Doyle was in the War of 1812 in Hicks Ford, Virginia, a town that later became known as Emporia. My Mama was Louella Marsh, the only member of her family except for her Daddy to survive the cholera epidemic that swept the Memphis area in 1873. My Mama’s Daddy was Samuel Jasper Marsh, whose family came to Tennessee from North Carolina and who himself helped settle Woodruff County Arkansas. Samuel Marsh enlisted in the Eighth Arkansas Infantry in July 1861, then later on returned to Tipton County, Tennessee and served in the Confederate army over there. My Mama’s Mama was Parmelia Long Marsh, whose brother Alec Long was a Confederate soldier and died of smallpox in a Federal prisoner of war camp in Alton Illinois. My Grandpa Samuel caught the cholera when he took a mule run of cotton into Memphis during the epidemic, and came on home to die. Then the whole family caught it, and only Samuel and my Mama Louella survived. When Parmelia died of the cholera, before Samuel buried her he cut off a lock of her hair and a piece of her dress and wrapped it in her wedding glove. He kept it with him, along with her wedding ring, until the day he died. Your great aunt Lena still has those things, and since she has no natural children maybe she’ll pass them on to you when she dies. . . .

And here, as I sort through reams of family genealogy, is a note written to me by my father nearly thirty years ago. Along with the note, he sent me dozens of pages copied from a book called
History of the House of Ochiltree
. Written in 1916 and published by a remote press in a small Kansas town, the book traced a group of families that had their beginnings in the Ochil Hills of Ayrshire, Scotland, just west of Stirling, where William Wallace turned back Proud Edward’s army and not far from the battlefield of Bannockburn. These were Braveheart’s people. The families included many of my father’s direct ancestors such as the McKnights (also known as McNaught and McNaughton), the Leckeys, the Leeches, the Johnsons, and the Millers. All of them made the long trek from western Scotland to Northern Ireland and then later to the Pennsylvania and Virginia colonies and beyond. The book was never intended to be great literature, but like so many similar works of family genealogy, it was a means of capturing vital family information before it became lost in the frenzy of America’s obsession with the future rather than the past. And in that sense its author, Clementine Brown Railey, succeeded quite well.

As was his fashion, my father had marked a few sections of the book for my perusal. Along with it he also sent me a dozen typewritten pages, worn and faded with age, filled with amplifications and personal observations about different family members mentioned in the
House of Ochiltree
book. I do not know their origins, but the typed pages appear to be the transcript of a personal letter sent more than fifty years ago by one of my father’s aunts. And across the first page he had written, “Have you ever heard of the Battle of the Boyne? See page 9.”

The dozen typed pages focus on one branch, the Millers, revealing a mere trickle of our own family’s journey and only a drop or two in the stream of the great Scots-Irish migration. But they give us human faces and comment on personal tendencies, thus allowing an honest window into the distant past. Henry Miller, born in Londonderry in 1726, came to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, in 1745, where he married Rebecca Boggs, also a native of Ireland. In 1770 they migrated to Rockbridge County, Virginia, along with a group of closely knit Northern Irish families that included the Lackeys, the Leeches, and the McKnights, with whom the Millers intermarried. The family cemetery at which I found Thomas Lackey’s and others’ graves is near the old Miller homestead, as is a church that was reportedly built on land donated in part by Henry Miller.

Other details abound in these simple pages, showing us a people impelled by the inescapable momentum of a larger political history that finds its way so dryly into little-read textbooks, living the hardships that we objectively describe through footnotes and excerpts from the speeches of great statesmen, affected by political events rather than controlling them. We are reminded that even in colonial Virginia “no churches except the Church of England were allowed by law, but in order to make the Presbyterian frontier settlers contented to live there and be a buffer between the Indians and the coast towns, they were allowed to build their churches—but only in the country.” There is mention of the “horrible Indian massacres” that broke out in the settlements along the mountain regions of Pennsylvania and Virginia after 1754 and continued for years thereafter.

We learn little things about long-dead people. That John Miller loved fine horses, priding himself in a silver-mounted harness, and eventually left Virginia by himself, disappearing into Kentucky. That William Miller, my four-times-great-grandfather, fought as a soldier in the Revolutionary War, including at the famous Battle of Cowpens. That every farm had its own distillery, and that Samuel Miller, another ancestor, “was inclined to drink more than he should.” And that his wife “saw that it was an evil in their house, so she closed the distillery.”

And on page 9 of the typed version of a letter written long, long ago, my father’s aunt introduces us to her mother—my great-great-grandmother—Rebecca Miller. Born in the remote wilderness of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains in 1825, Rebecca had filled her daughter with stories of her own grandmother, Margaret Lackey.
The House of Ochiltree
mentions the Millers as having “distinguished themselves in the terrible siege of Londonderry,” a high honor to be singled out among so many courageous people, and the aunt’s letter confirms how deeply those memories had burned into the progeny of those who had survived. “Their ancestors had been in the Siege of Londonderry, and my Mother said she had often heard her grandmother Margaret Lackey Miller tell the stories of that time, and sing the song of ‘The Battle of the Boyne’ in a most dramatic and thrilling manner. She would sometimes get quite excited in describing the sufferings and courage of her people in the Siege of Londonderry.”

All this written no doubt from an obscure farm in Missouri by a woman in her later years, now reflecting on the memories of her mother telling the stories she herself had learned from a grandmother while sitting before the fireplace in the near-dark of a Virginia cabin within a few miles of what we now call the Appalachian Trail. Voice to voice, before my eyes I am transferred back six generations and am looking back several generations further, to the remembered tragedies in Northern Ireland that both shaped these people and helped spur them on into a new and sometimes fearsome wilderness.

In their words, I can sense them looking coolly at the pretenses and attempted restrictions placed upon them by yet another branch of an Anglican establishment that they imagined they had left behind in Ulster, a pervasive aristocracy that in America controlled most of the “flatlands” along the colonial coast. They were told that they could practice their religion in the mountains even if it was not “lawful,” so long as they did not seek to infect the more ordered societies along the coast. And they were expected to reciprocate by both staying in the mountains and keeping the Indians at bay. These memories burned like fire among people who knew, even nearly three centuries ago, that the Eastern Establishment looked down on them, openly demeaning their religion and their cultural ways, and at bottom sought to use them toward its own ends.

Their answer, then as now, was to tell the Eastern Establishment to go to hell. A deal was a deal—they would fight the Indians, although many of them would also trade with them and even intermarry. But at bottom they would not forget the duplicity that followed Londonderry, or the Test Acts that fell on the heels of their contributions at the Boyne. Nonconformity as well as a mistrust of central power was now in their blood. America was a far larger place than Ireland, a land in which they could live as they wished and move as freely as they dared whether or not the established government liked what they were doing and were about to do, so long as they did not move too conspicuously toward the east.

So they made their own world in the mountains. And most of them knew that their future was not along the coast anyway, but ever westward, where they might meet fierce challenges, but where they also could create a new kind of society more akin to their own traditions.