Great Scots

From Georgia to Pennsylvania and maybe even up to Maine, the Scots-Irish largely settled these mountains in which we live, the Appalachians. Arriving too late to settle in the coastal plains or the piedmont of the English colonies, these Ulster-based people traveled into the mountains, expanding westward in their search for land and livelihood.

Because of their history, these Scots-Irish pioneers proved to be the ideal people to face the rugged terrain, the frequent battles with Native Americans, and quarrels with politicians back East. They were a hard-bitten, hardscrabble lot, often fiercely Calvinistic Presbyterians. Their history included fighting and raiding, distaste for government, and a bountiful sense of clan and family.

Myriad historians have tackled the stories of this endlessly fascinating people. Here are two favorite books on the topic.

In The Steel Bonnets: The Story of the Anglo-Scottish Border Reivers, George MacDonald Fraser gives us the history of the Lowland Scots who would eventually make their way first to Ulster and then to the New World. Best known for his highly recommended Flashman Papers series of novels, Fraser here chronicles a people caught up in almost constant fighting as England and Scotland finally entered into a union under James I of England. 

Fraser shows us how the battles against the English created strong family clans in conflict with the government—Armstrongs, Elliots, Grahams, Johnstones, Maxwells, Scotts, Kerrs, Nixons, and other families whose names still echo in our hollows and valleys—and why these families became border raiders known then as reivers. 

These reiver families on both sides of the border lived in times—particularly during the 16th century—when murder, arson, theft, and kidnapping were commonplace. To go unarmed in this environment was to risk your life. To leave cattle or other goods unguarded meant their likely disappearance.

Jim Webb’s Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America, offers a vivid history of how these Scots came first to Ireland and then to America, and the enormous imprint they have left on American culture. 

Webb—a Naval Academy graduate, decorated veteran of the Vietnam War, former Secretary of the Navy, one-term United States senator, and now a Democratic candidate for the presidency in 2016—brings the gifts shown in his novels to this account of the Scots-Irish. The book details their settlement on plantations in Ulster under James I, their savage conflicts with Irish Catholics, their migration to the American frontier beginning in the 18th century, and their subsequent impact on American history from that time until the present.

Webb, an outspoken defendant of a people many outsiders had labeled as hillbillies, shows us how the Scots-Irish were key to the success of the American Revolution, why they supported the Confederacy in spite of the fact that the vast majority owned no slaves, and why they continued to fight in overwhelming numbers in America’s wars.

Webb also offers individual mini-biographies to reveal to us how this culture shaped the country. Andrew Jackson, for example, was often stubborn and wrong-headed in his decisions, and to this day some people despise him for his defiance of the Supreme Court decision banning the removal of Native American tribes from Georgia and North Carolina to Oklahoma. Yet Webb contends that his Scots-Irish culture also made Jackson a tough-minded opponent who believed in the common man. 

In addition, Webb gives us the cultural contributions of the Scots-Irish to America: writers, actors, politicians, musicians. Sometimes people forget, for instance, that country music came out of the mountains around Bristol,  joining with the technology of the time—radio and records—to sweep the nation.

Webb, who is of Scots-Irish heritage himself and writes movingly of his own ancestors, has also given us insights into this culture in his fiction. Works such as Fields Of Fire (one of the finest novels about Vietnam), A Sense of Honor, Something To Die For, and A Country Such As This contain at least one central character from Appalachia, often from Southwestern Virginia, the place where Webb has his own roots.

Too often in the history of our nation the culture of the Northeast has taken swipes at Appalachia and those who have lived, endured, and died here. The Scots-Irish, particularly those in the South, have been mocked for their religion, their music, their cultural interests, and their values. In Born Fighting, Webb reminds all of us of the contributions of these people and their descendants.

Perhaps the greatest contribution of the Scots-Irish is a fierce love of liberty. Regarding this, Webb writes:

“The power—and ultimately the attractiveness—of the Scots-Irish culture stemmed from its insistence on the dignity of the individual in the face of power, regardless of one’s place or rank in society.”

The dignity of the individual in the face of power: words to remember.