Authors: T.R. Fehrenbach
The Scots landed on the wharves at Philadelphia and Charleston with certain convictions firmly fixed. They were enormously self-disciplined, both by their Puritan ethic and the warlike borderer's life. They had three public virtues: thrift, because they had always been poor and Knox taught poverty was a disgrace; self-reliance, because in the new Reformed world every man felt himself something of an island; and industry, agreeing with St. Paul that who did not work should not eat. They interpreted the New Testament mainly as a moral destruction of aristocracy and beggardom. The quality of social mercy was not strained, but the idea made Scotch-Irish uncomfortable. Calvin, through Knox, extolled material success and despised human weakness. He had destroyed the old Christian concept of a station in life and built a new cosmos in which men and women should have no place, but functions. The act of being was thus meaningless; action was everything, and the worth of any man could only be judged by what he did.
The Scotch-Irish, like all English-speaking Puritans, were thus driven to material success, and whether they enjoyed this or not, they were not permitted to translate success into social class. This last was to confuse foreign observers, and Anglo-Americans themselves, for generations. Calvinists were always uneasy and rebellious at the concept of the gentleman, even when they hungered for rank. Status in society, which is much less definable than class, became their goal.
A code this practical and functional had almost no room for art as it had evolved in Europe, but it did for learning, or at least literacy. Each man and family head was expected to read, and interpret, his own Bible. The Scotch-Irish had another religious distinction; they believed that as a matter of right they should elect their own clergy, and support no other. In these attitudes, and the distrust of social rather than functional station, some historians, probably rightly, have seen the seeds of American middle-class democracy.
Like all truly successful immigrants, these Anglo-Celts abandoned a world in Europe they at heart hated. They were Israelites leaving Egypt. They had already burned most of their bridges to the traditional culture behind them when they sailed for America, but they were bringing their own brand of civilization with them. They were bound for the Wilderness, on an Old Testament trek to build the new Jerusalem. All such peoples, throughout history, have been the most fitted to seize new ground, because peoples, like children, must first sever their umbilical cords before they can stand alone. Those who would rather remain in Egypt tend to make poor pioneers.
The invasion of the Anglo-Celts between 1700 and 1740 was decentralized, uncontrolled, and uncoordinated. Apparently, Ireland was content to see them go. America was indifferent to their arrival. No government either aided or hindered them so far as can be ascertained. Yet there was a strange order, almost a pattern, to their actions in America. The Scotch-Irish were the only major immigrant group in American history that completely avoided all existing civilization and settlement. They passed through no coastal screen, but headed for the western, Indian frontier.
There were several reasons. Lands close to the coast were largely taken; and it was already an American custom to obtain legal title to country that lay beyond present development; speculation was already old. Only the frontier, which might be legally owned by a British company or seacoast squire, had open lands. Indians or the wilderness still had possession, and few people on the Atlantic slopes were disposed to dispute this. The valleys up against the Alleghenies were untaken. There was no other place to stake out thousands of small, free farms.
The newcomers did not have to seek the frontier; all the other immigrants did not. Labor was in short supply. But the Anglo-Celts had not crossed the sea to become servile tenants. Both the Anglican South and Congregational New England had established churches and levied land taxes. For all these reasons, and probably for another, more important—the borderer instinct, which no historian can measure—the Scotch-Irish went beyond the effective jurisdiction of the colonial establishments, up against the Indian frontier. Even then, they did not go far enough to suit many of them; they were soon in continual tension with tidewater legislatures, sheriffs, and men who had no desire to fight Indians but did understand how to get legal possession of ground they had never seen through the courts of law. This tension, then and later, caused some bloodshed.
In the rolling, wooded, well-watered valleys of the Alleghenies and Appalachians, which are a single chain, the new borderers found a country admirably suited to their ethic and mythology. Conditions everywhere were much the same. Every man started equal. The Scotch-Irish staked out small farms, with the ridge lines serving as boundaries in between. They knocked down trees and burned out stumps. They cleared the hillsides and scratched open the reddish earth. They quickly learned local agronomy from the Indians, and raised corn, squash, melons, and beans. Fruit trees they brought from Europe. They did great damage to this land, but this was neither reckless nor unreasoning in their eyes. The land seemed limitless; it would never be exhausted in their time. They were functional men, not trained to see or dwell on beauty. Later Americans would know only from French and other European travelers' accounts that western Pennsylvania, which was the Anglo-Celts' great nurturing ground in America, and particularly the river junction where Pittsburgh now stands, was perhaps the loveliest region in all the primitive continent.
With a Calvinistic, potentially urban ethic, the Scotch-Irish could only regard land as a commodity. They could not become affixed to it, like Quebecois peasants. They acquired it and spent it; hungered for it, used it, left it. Within one generation, thousands of Anglo-Celts born in Pennsylvania were moving on, side-slipping down the barrier mountains to the south. They filtered through western Virginia and met another stream, those Scotch-Irish who landed at Charleston, in the foothills of the Carolinas. The two streams joined and formed a solid, Anglo-Celt population between the inner Indian country and the coast.
These people built rude log cabins, rougher and less comfortable than Indian lodges, and ephemeral beside the adobe houses of the dry Southwest. They did not make towns, at first. They created small forts and trading posts out of necessity, and scattered their farms around them. The heavy stockades were inhabited only in times of Indian uprising, or danger. No soldiers manned them. The frontiersmen were their own warriors. These forts and stockades later became the nucleus of towns.
Society was thus ridge- and valley-bound, deep in the forest, and rural and far-flung. It was cohesive mainly because it was a society at war; defense against Indian raids demanded cooperation. But cooperation did not normally extend much beyond the valley or the settlement. Although the land and the people were everywhere much the same from Pennsylvania to the Carolinas, the frontiersmen were suspicious toward men they didn't know. The farms and the frontier produced a real sense of isolation, which would have appalled some races but which the Anglo-Celt was easily prepared to endure.
The extended 18th-century family, almost a clan, which might comprise fifty or more persons, under these conditions broke down. The settlers were spreading out, moving on, even if only laterally. The economic basis became the small farm, and under this condition the family group narrowed, to husband, wife, dependent children, and those old folks who survived past their prime. With open lands, children married and moved away. Clans grew together in some valleys, but the more vigorous human stock wandered away. Thus, in America, the family group fragmented long before the Industrial Age.
Men were farmers, fathers, hunters, and soldiers. Women inherited all the incredible backbreaking labor of the primitive frontier. The Anglo-Celts arrived with perhaps a few spoons, an axe, and only the most essential minor tools. They were forced to buy a rifle and metals and salt. Almost everything else they made themselves. It was in no sense an easy life, and it was one that never should have been romanticized. In its time and place, like most successful institutions, frontier life was necessary.
Children were not particularly ornamental, but useful. They were needed for the secondary tasks about the farm. Whenever possible, they were given essential schooling: the Bible, some writing, and simple arithmetic. Oddly, even frontier America in the mid-18th century was more literate, in the literal sense, than the old country. But children quickly had to put aside childish things. When a boy was big enough to hold a gun, he was taught to shoot. When a girl was big enough to marry, she was often considered old enough. There seems to have been little rebellion inside the Anglo-Celt family; in any event, children were pushed on their own soon enough. Family tension, like problems of social order, required a certain amount of affluence or leisure to sprout. The frontier family was functional, and maturity came earlier than it would probably ever arrive again. Work, hunger, danger, and terror could not be kept or disguised from young people. It was impossible for a boy or girl to create a false, or romantic, vision of the world. In terms of its own reality, the Allegheny world was vastly sophisticated. No Anglo-Celt child reached physical maturity without seeing babies born and people hurt, animals slaughtered and old folks die.
In Ireland, the native Scots had acquired some Huguenot and Irish blood. Crossing Pennsylvania and congregating against the barrier Appalachians, the strain became more mixed. There was an infusion of both Germanic and English stock. Here, actual national origins blurred. The Huguenot name Maury was soon thought of as English. Surnames like Boone, Frisbe, Forbes, Crockett, Reed, and Houston lost their Scottish connotation. Many Pennsylvania Dutch joined the clans, and became Celticized as Rohrbaugh or Ferenbaugh. The old American names of Wentz and Utterback seemed to cease being German. All of these, American English–speaking, Puritan Protestant, and culturally Calvinistic, were blending into a great population mass of Northern stock that would finally be termed Anglo-Saxon in the United States.
They tended to be a tall, very Caucasoid race, more rawboned than wiry.
They filled the ridges and valleys with fair-skinned people and blue-eyed children, and two centuries later huge enclaves of their stock would still remain. Their birthrate was phenomenal, by any standard. Life was hard, but the climate was moderate; food was plentiful most years, and the valleys were far from pestilential cities and human crowding. Two generations before Europe learned of sanitation, Appalachia was enjoying certain of its effects. Ten children to a family were common, and the majority survived. The Anglo-American population increase, in the 18th century, was far higher than the birthrates of Spain, Britain, or even fertile France. It was higher than that of any region in the 20th-century world, including the Orient or Middle America. Here, on the threshold of what a French historian called the "Anglo-Saxon centuries," this remarkable increase was regarded by the Latin world with despair.
In 1750, almost all frontier people who professed a religion, or were churched, claimed Scots Presbyterianism. But the formal persuasion was eroding in the backwoods, and not more than a small minority of the American-born generations were churched. The Church itself suffered enormously in this century, not only from theological contradictions but from an inability to adjust itself to its people on the frontier. Presbyterianism was essentially urban in outlook, and it was not to inherit the American frontier. The newer denominations of Baptists and Methodists soon took the region for their own. But the Anglo-Celt polity and outlook suffused those religions and stamped them immutably; Baptistry and Methodism, on the frontier, were very much Puritanism reorganized to fit society. The Calvinistic code remained. Even Episcopacy, when it leaped the mountains at last, seemed to absorb an indelible Calvinist stain. The striking Puritanism of the inner South, so odd against the easy Anglicanism of the tidewater coast, did not, as some supposed, suffuse down from New England. It came from Ireland, via Pennsylvania.
If the old Church fragmented in the Cumberlands, it still achieved immortality of a sort, for its ethic dominated. Organic Anglicanism was left behind.
As the second half of the century began, a tremendous American-born generation of Scotch-Irish frontiersmen was crowding its valleys to capacity. As land was then used, eroded, and abandoned, and as the hated writs from the coastal counties began to appear, the Appalachian region was threatening to explode. The excess could have drifted back to the tidewater, or added to the growing cities. There was more than enough room in this still-dawning America. But the backwoods generation was unequipped, and more important, mentally unprepared, to enter Deferential Civilization. Jammed between the endless forest, the savage unknown beyond the mountains, and encroaching Anglo-America in their rear, they had only one place to go. The New Jerusalem, whatever each man sought, did not lie behind him.
The Presbyterian Irish—never "Irish" and no longer Presbyterian—of America had turned their backs on the whole panorama of their cultural history. They retained only its tools and an ethic, abandoning bishops and baronets, pageantry, paganism, and Bach. The world they abandoned was already in a crisis of rationale, stretching from Koenigsberg to Philadelphia, when they departed with their 17th-century values intact. But they would be only dimly affected by either Paine or Rousseau. They were withdrawing from European time, and from ideas as remote from their experience as dance steps at Versailles or Hampton Court.
They were not going to retreat. They were poised to attack, a tough, hungry, numerous, riotous, and yet curiously disciplined horde. They were moving out of cultural time, to devour limitless space. They had no banners, armies, or grand leaders, no real rationale for conquest. They had their long rifles and sad songs, their fiddlers and graybeards, their chopping axes and their essentially gloomy grasp of life. McAfees, Bryans, McGees, McConnells, Harlans, Boones, Logans, and Clarks; Maurys, Autrys, Wetzels, and Wentzes—De Riencourt, the French historian who was both fascinated and appalled by these folk, tried to describe them: