Colin Woodard (16 page)

The Quakers' expectation that immigrants from other cultures would embrace the Friends' worldview also proved unfounded. While the Germans caused few troubles, starting in 1717 a new group of colonists began arriving on Philadelphia's docks, one whose values were in stark opposition to all the Quakers held dear. They were a warrior people from the bloody borderlands of Britain, contemptuous of the Indians, quick to turn to violence to solve problems, and committed to a Calvinist faith that held that humans were inherently wicked. Fleeing their blighted homelands in Scotland and Ulster, these Borderlanders poured into Pennsylvania in staggering numbers: over 100,000 by 1775. The vast majority went straight to the hilly frontier in central Pennsylvania and would soon surge down the spine of the Appalachian Mountains, founding a powerful regional culture of their own. But while they stood apart from the Midlands as a cultural nation, tens of thousands of Borderlanders lived within the borders of the arbitrary rectangle of territory called Pennsylvania. They would prove the undoing of Quaker control of that colony. “It looks as if Ireland is to send all her inhabitants hither,” a worried colonial official reported. “The common fear is that if they continue to come, they will make themselves proprietors of the province.”
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The Borderlanders occupied Indian lands without paying for them, launched preemptive attacks on Indian villages, and pushed generally peaceful tribes into alliances with New France, who provided them guns and ammunition with which to attack their British rivals during the eighteenth century's many imperial wars. The dysfunctional Quaker government, secure behind concentric rings of German and Scots-Irish settlements, made no effort to respond to the mounting crisis except to send the Indians gifts and supplies. Even when French mercenaries sailed into Delaware Bay and began sacking plantations a few miles from Philadelphia, the government refused to consider any defense preparations. Benjamin Franklin, a Boston Yankee who'd relocated to Philadelphia, railed at the Friends for their complacency. “To refuse defending one's self or one's country is so unusual a thing among mankind that . . . [our enemies] may not believe it,” he wrote in 1747, “till by experience, they can come higher and higher up our river, seize our vessels and plunder our plantations and villages and retire with their booty unmolested.” The Quakers, steadfast in their pacifism, ignored Franklin, leaving him to raise private donations to organize the colony's defense.
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Things came to a head in 1755 when the Lenni Lenape Indians launched a full-on assault on the Scots-Irish and German settlements in the western part of the colony, wiping out entire towns and massacring or taking prisoner hundreds of settlers. Thousands of survivors fled eastward, some going all the way to Philadelphia to demonstrate before the impotent assembly. Residents from the previously peaceful German settlements in Lancaster County suddenly found themselves living in a war zone, but without arms or ammunition with which to defend themselves. As refugees choked the capital, Quaker politicians refused to endorse military appropriations. One leading Quaker, Daniel Stanton, wrote in his diary that the fact that few Friends had been killed in the fighting indicated that God approved of their inaction. Few non-Quakers endorsed Stanton's analysis, noting that the Friends' lack of casualties had more to do with the fact that they were clustered in the safest corner of the province. Even London Quakers were appalled. “You owe the people protection and yet withhold them from protecting themselves,” an influential Friend there wrote his coreligionists in Philadelphia. “Will not all the blood that is spilt lie at your doors?” Forced to choose between defending their society and upholding their religious principles, key Quaker officials resigned from office. The Friends would never again monopolize political affairs in the Midlands.
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The Quakers were replaced by a partisan system of competing interest groups, with Franklin and his allies often dominating the scene. On the eve of the American Revolution, the Midlands was a civilization unsure of itself, its leaders, and the cause of independence. And by then, large swaths of what was to have been part of William Penn's utopia were being incorporated into other nations. Connecticut Yankees were pouring across the north country and were ready to fight a war if need be to keep Pennsylvania's Wyoming Valley under New England rule. And in the west a new power had taken hold and was spreading southward across the highlands. This Borderlander civilization didn't control a single colonial government—indeed, it was barely represented at all in the coastal capitals—but it would radically reshape the future of all the American nations and the strange federation in which they would soon find themselves.

CHAPTER 9

T
he last of the nations to be founded in the colonial period, Greater Appalachia was the most immediately disruptive. A clan-based warrior culture from the borderlands of the British Empire, it arrived on the backcountry frontier of the Midlands, Tidewater, and Deep South and shattered those nations' monopoly control over colonial governments, the use of force, and relations with the Native Americans. Proud, independent, and disturbingly violent, the Borderlanders of Greater Appalachia have remained a volatile insurgent force within North American society to the present day.

The nations that we have encountered to this point have been largely contained within the jurisdiction of one or more colonial governments, controlled by their own political elite. But Greater Appalachia started as a civilization without a government. The Borderlanders weren't really colonists, brought to the New World to provide some lord or shareholding company with the manpower for a specific colonial project. They were immigrants seeking sanctuary from a devastated homeland, refugees who generally arrived without the encouragement or direction of officials, and often against their wishes. Having no desire to bow to “foreign” rule or to give up their ways, the Borderlanders rushed straight to the isolation of the eighteenth-century frontier to found a society that was, for a time, literally beyond the reach of the law, and modeled on the anarchical world they had left behind.

The founders of Appalachia came from the war-torn borderlands of northern Britain: lowland Scotland, the adjacent Marches of northern England, and the Scots-Irish-controlled north of Ireland. Their ancestors had weathered 800 years of nearly constant warfare, some of them fighting in (or against) the armies of William “Braveheart” Wallace or Robert the Bruce. By the time America was being colonized, the borderlands were in ruins. “The country is so stored with infinite numbers of begging and vagrant poor, who by reason of their extreme want and misery are very bold in their behavior and impudent,” an English spy said of Scotland in 1580. The north of England, a foreign diplomat wrote in 1617, “was very poor and uncultivated and exceedingly wretched . . . from the perpetual wars with which these nations have savagely destroyed each other.”
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Under such conditions, Borderlanders learned to rely only on themselves and their extended families to defend home, hearth, and kin against intruders, be they foreign soldiers, Irish guerrilla fighters, or royal tax collectors. Living amid constant upheaval, many Borderlanders embraced a Calvinist religious tradition—Presbyterianism—that held that they were God's chosen people, members of a biblical nation sanctified in blood and watched over by a wrathful Old Testament deity. Suspicious of outside authority of any kind, the Borderlanders valued individual liberty and personal honor above all else, and were happy to take up arms to defend either. When Queen Elizabeth I and her successors needed tough, warlike people to settle Northern Ireland and crush native resistance, they turned to border Scots who, in Ulster, became the Scots-Irish. A century later, many Americans would value their willingness to hold down frontier lands against restive Native Americans, creating a protective buffer for more docile settlers near the coast.
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The Borderlanders arrived in five increasingly massive waves between 1717 and 1776, each a response to a disaster back in the British Isles. The first followed a drought and sheep-killing blight in Ulster, a fall in demand for the region's principal export (linen), and a shocking increase in the rents Ireland's absentee English landlords began exacting from their tenants as their long-term leases expired. “I do not see how Ireland can on the present foot pay greater taxes than it does without starving the inhabitants and leaving them entirely without meat or clothes,” one visitor warned the Anglican archbishop of Ireland in 1716. “They have already given their bread, their flesh, their butter, their shoes, their stockings, their beds, their house furniture and houses to pay their landlords and taxes. I cannot see how any more can be got from them, except we take away their potatoes and butter milk, or flay them and sell their skins.” Taxes were increased all the same, leaving thousands of tenants with no other option than to sell their tenancy rights and book passage to the New World. As rents on newly expired leases doubled, cattle prices fell by half, and more crop failures occurred, the initial group of emigrants would be followed by tens of thousands and, later, hundreds of thousands of countrymen.
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By the early 1770s the exodus had grown so enormous that London authorities feared that Ireland and the Scottish borderlands would be economically crippled. “They emigrate in swarms to America,” one official in Ireland warned. “Something must be done to give the Irish poor a means of getting bread. If the cow is to be milked, she must be fed.” A land agent on the Isle of Skye reported that the manor estates were becoming a “wasteland.” The bishop of Derry in Northern Ireland told imperial officials that “the rebellious spirit” then brewing in the American backcountry was due to the emigration from Ireland of 33,000 “fanatical and hungry republicans in the course of a very few years.” Newspapers and magazines across Britain carried worried predictions of a deserted kingdom. When the American Revolution broke out, British officials were still debating how best to restrict the emigration of the Borderlanders.
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While small groups of Borderlanders settled in New England, the Deep South and, later, British Canada, the vast majority arrived in North America via the Midlands: over 100,000 by 1775. The Midland-governed colonies were attractive because official Quaker policy was to welcome immigrants of all nations and let them practice their faith unmolested. Still, Midlanders were alarmed by the newcomers' rough manners and clannish loyalties. Philadelphia newspapers accused them of a litany of misdeeds: counterfeiting of currency, murder, the rape of a six-year-old child, and making “threatening words against authority” should the government dare execute one of their countrymen as punishment for his crimes. Officials did their best to get them out of town and onto the frontier, where they could serve as a buffer against French or Native American attack.
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Destitute and land hungry, the vast majority were indeed happy to move straight to the backcountry, where they seized, in the words of a senior colonial official, “any sort of vacant land they can find without asking questions.” Some had a little money left from their passage and could have rented land in settled areas closer to Philadelphia but chose not to. As one explained: “We having been, before we came here, so much oppressed and harassed by under landlords in our own country, from which we with great losses, dangers, and difficulties came [to] . . . this foreign world [to be] freed from such oppression.” The Scots-Irish, who came in extended families, traveled for days on narrow Indian paths in search of vacant land in the forested hills of what is now south-central Pennsylvania. Settling on widely dispersed parcels, they built rude cabins, cleared small garden plots, and set about herding their livestock over unfenced country. Rather than trying to produce cash crops for export, the Borderlanders embraced a woodland subsistence economy. They hunted, fished, and practiced slash-and-burn agriculture, moving every few years as the soil became depleted. Life in Britain had taught them not to invest too much time and wealth in fixed property, which was easily destroyed in time of war. Instead, they stored their wealth in a very mobile form: herds of pigs, cattle, and sheep. When they did need cash, they distilled corn into a more portable, storable, and valuable product: whiskey, which would remain the de facto currency of Appalachia for the next two centuries.
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This was a lifestyle that allowed for long periods of leisure, an indulgence that visitors from the other nations condemned. “They are very poor owing to their extreme indolence, for they possess the finest country in America and could raise but everything,” a Deep Southern minister wrote of the southern Appalachians in 1768. “They delight in their present low, lazy, sluttish, heathenish, hellish life and seem not desirous of changing it.” Indeed, the Borderlanders' top priority rarely seemed to be increasing their wealth; rather, it was maximizing their freedom, especially from outside forces.
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There weren't any towns to speak of in the early days, but the settlers maintained close communities of kin and neighbors scattered among the hills. Throughout the Appalachians they would often name settlements for places they had left behind: Donegal, Galloway, Londonderry (or Derry), New Scotland, Newcastle, Durham and Cumberland. These communities started in considerable isolation from the outside world, to which they owed no loyalty. With no roads, trade was almost entirely by barter. With the nearest courthouse often several days' journey away, the Borderlanders fell back on their old-country practice of taking the law into their own hands. Justice was meted out not by courts but by the aggrieved individuals and their kin via personal retaliation. “Every man is a sheriff in his own hearth” was a Borderlander creed that informed the Scottish practices of “blackmail” (as protection money), the blood feud (most famously practiced by the Hatfields and McCoys), and “Lynch's law,” named for Appalachian Borderlander William Lynch, who advocated vigilante justice in the lawless Virginia backcountry. Between outlaws, outlaw justice, and conflicts with the Indians, Appalachia quickly earned an unsavory reputation. “The conduct of my countrymen from the North of Ireland . . . ,” Penn's secretary reported, “their violence and injustice to each other [is something] this province till their arrival was very much stranger to.”
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