The Flight from North Britain, 1717-1775
Whole neighborhoods formed parties for removal; so that departure from their native country is no longer exile. He that goes thus accompanied … sits down in a better climate, surrounded by his kindred and his friends: they carry with them their language, their opinions, their popular songs, and hereditary merriment: they change nothing but the place of their abode.
—Dr. Samuel Johnson on the emigration
from North Britain to America, 1773
EARLY IN THE SUMMER OF1717, the Quaker merchants of Philadelphia observed that immigrant ships were arriving in more than their usual numbers. By September, as the first hint of autumn was in the air, the Delaware River was crowded with vessels. They came not only from London and Bristol, but from Liverpool and Belfast, and small northern outports with strange-sounding names—Londonderry and Carrickfergus in northern Ireland, Kirkcudbright and Wigtown in Scotland, Whitehaven and Morecambe on the northern border of England.
In October of the same year, a Philadelphia Quaker named Jonathan Dickinson complained that the streets of his city were teeming with “a swarm of people … strangers to our Laws and Customs, and even to our language.”1 These new immigrants dressed in outlandish ways. The men were tall and lean, with hard, weather-beaten faces. They wore felt hats, loose sackcloth shirts close-belted at the waist, baggy trousers, thick yarn stockings and wooden shoes “shod like a horse’s feet with iron.” The young women startled Quaker Philadelphia by the sensuous appearance of their full bodices, tight waists, bare legs and skirts as scandalously short as an English undershift. The older women came ashore in long dresses of a curious cut. Some buried their faces in full-sided bonnets; others folded handkerchiefs over their heads in quaint and foreign patterns.2
The speech of these people was English, but they spoke with a lilting cadence that rang strangely in the ear. Many were desperately poor. But even in their poverty they carried themselves with a fierce and stubborn pride that warned others to treat them with respect.3
The appearance of these immigrants in the streets of Philadelphia marked the start of yet another great folk migration from Britain to America. The magnitude of this movement was very large—more than a quarter-million people altogether. This was truly a mass migration, on a scale altogether different from the movements that had preceded it. Its rhythm was different too—not a single migration but a series of wavelike movements that continued though much of the eighteenth century. It also drew from a different part of Britain. Many of these people came from territories that bordered the Irish Sea—the north of Ireland, the lowlands of Scotland, and the northern counties of England. Together they introduced still another variety of British culture to the New World.
The first slow trickle of emigration from North Britain to America had actually begun much earlier, in the seventeenth century. In Virginia, headrights had been granted for Irish servants before 1630. In New England, a group of 140 Irish Calvinists had arrived from Belfast as early as the year 1636, on board an immigrant ship nicely named Eagle’s Wing.4 A small flow of population continued through the seventeenth century. Then, after the end of Queen Anne’s War in 1713, this movement began to accelerate in a strong wavelike rhythm that continued to the outbreak of the American Revolution. Peak periods occurred in the years 1718, 1729, 1741, 1755, 1767 and 1774. Two-thirds of this
traffic was concentrated in the decade from 1765 to 1775. As much as one-third of it may have occurred in the four years preceding American Independence.
Motives for Migration
As the flight from North Britain approached its climax, Dr. Samuel Johnson and his faithful friend James Boswell were touring the west coast of Scotland. At Armadale they were invited to a country dance which captured the spirit of this great folk movement. Boswell remembered:
We had again a good dinner, and in the evening a great dance … we performed a dance which I suppose the emigration from Skye has occasioned. They call it “America.” A brisk reel is played. The first couple begin, and each sets to one—then each to another—then as they set to the next couple, the second and third couples are setting; and so it goes on till all are set a-going, setting and wheeling round each other, while each is making the tour of all in the dance. It shows how emigration catches till all are set afloat.5
Boswell asked a lady to explain the dance, and recorded her reply:
Mrs. Mackinnon told me that last year when the ship sailed from Portree [a small village on the Isle of Skye] for America, the people on shore were almost distracted when they saw their relations go off; they lay down on the ground and tumbled, and tore the grass with their teeth. This year there was not a tear shed. The people on shore seemed to think that they would soon follow.6
Through the long period from 1718 to 1775, the annual number of immigrants from Ireland, Scotland and the north of England averaged more than 5,000 a year. At least 150,000 came from northern Ireland, sailing mostly from the ports of Belfast Lough, Londonderry, Newry, Larne and Portrush.7 Another
75,000 departed from seaports in the west of Scotland, from the Clydebank to Solway Firth.8 At least 50,000 (probably more) left from coastal towns of northern England from Maryport to Merseyside. These are conservative estimates. The true magnitude may have been much larger.9
In one respect, this folk wandering from North Britain was similar to other migrations that preceded it. It was mainly a movement of families. A study of British records (1773-76) finds that 61 percent of emigrants from northern England traveled in family groups. From the border counties of Scotland, 73 percent also did so.10 From northern Ireland, 91 percent of 405 Ulster emigrants who came to the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia during the year 1740, arrived in families. Only 37 traveled as individuals.11
Many of these emigrants were women and girls. The sex ratio of those who left Scotland in the 1770s was 149 males for every 100 females—an unusually even-handed distribution in an emigrant population. The mix of genders was less equal than in New England’s great migration, but more so than in the movement to the Chesapeake colonies.12
The age distribution of men and women was also remarkably broad in this moving population. A large proportion were adolescents and young adults. But 25 percent were children under fifteen, and nearly 40 percent were over twenty-five. All age-cohorts were represented in large numbers except the elderly. Here again, the pattern was intermediate between the migration to New England and the Chesapeake.13
In other respects, however, this fourth great migration differed very much from all of its predecessors. The motives of these emigrants were fundamentally unlike those of New England Puritans, Delaware Quakers and even Virginia cavaliers. Among the North Britons, there was no talk of holy experiments, or cities on a hill. These new emigrants came mainly in search of material betterment. In the early eighteenth century, many surveys of their motives found the same pattern of concern about high rents, low wages, heavy taxes and short leases. In northern Ireland, conditions were so very hard that famine and starvation were often mentioned as a leading cause of migration.14
The same material motives also appeared fifty years later, when this movement was nearing its end. In the year 1774, four shiploads of emigrants to Nova Scotia were individually asked why they had come to America. Their answers were more positive than before, but still strongly materialist. Once again, they spoke about the rapacity of English landlords, the shortage of food, and their dreams for a better life in the New World.15
An important stimulus to emigration was correspondence from family and friends who had already made the journey. In 1729, two clergymen wrote that members of their congregations received “many letters from their friends and acquaintances …
[in the] plantations, inviting them to transport themselves thither, and promising them liberty and ease as the reward of their honest industry, with a prospect of transmitting their acquisitions and privileges safe to their posterity, without the imposition of growing rents and other burdens.”16
The process of migration itself also became more materialist in the eighteenth century. Much of it was organized for profit by shipping agents who scoured the countryside in search of likely prospects. The Atlantic crossing also tended to pass into the hands of greedy entrepreneurs, with horrific human consequences. Ships were laden beyond their capacity. In 1767, an epidemic broke out on board a crowded emigrant vessel sailing from Belfast to South Carolina; the unscrupulous owners had packed 450 people into its hold and more than 100 died at sea. Another ship bound from Belfast to Philadelphia ran out of food in mid-passage. Forty-six passengers starved to death; the survivors were driven to cannibalism and some even consumed the flesh of their own families. The transatlantic journey became more dangerous in the eighteenth century than it had been in the seventeenth. Mortality in ships sailing from North Britain approached that in the slave trade.17
When these people arrived in the New World, they faced intense prejudice from other ethnic groups. “I was looked upon as a barbarian,” wrote Lieutenant James MacMichael.18 But so desperate were conditions at home that few chose to return to the world that they had left. One Scots-Irish immigrant wrote from Pennsylvania in 1767, “I do not know one that has come here that desires to be in Ireland again.”19
Social Origins: Poverty and Pride
On the question of social origins in this migration, contemporary opinion was divided. Some observers believed that most emigrants came from the middling ranks of their society. Reports from three different Irish ports in 1774, for example, agreed that the majority were “paying passengers of the middle class.”1 Others, however, formed a different impression. One writer unkindly described the Scots-Irish emigrants as “the scum of two nations.” An outspoken Anglican clergyman, not to be outdone, called them, “the scum of the universe.” Another estimated that no more than “one man in ten is a man of substance.” A fourth remarked that most seemed “very poor.”2
All of these observers accurately described some parts of the North British migration, but none of them comprehended the whole of it. This large flow was very mixed in its social composition. A small but important minority of Irish and North British migrants were gentry who came from the ruling order of this region. This narrow elite was destined to become eminent in American affairs. But in quantitative terms it accounted for no more than 1 or 2 percent of all emigrants.
A somewhat larger group were independent yeomen who had achieved a measure of independence from the great landlords who dominated the border region. In Cumberland and Westmorland these yeomen were called the “statesman” class. Their numbers were comparatively small throughout this area, and even smaller in the emigrant stream.
Most emigrants came from ranks below that of the gentry and statesmen. In the border counties of England and Scotland and northern Ireland as well, the majority were farmers and farm laborers who owned no land of their own, but worked as tenants and undertenants. A large minority were semiskilled craftsmen and petty traders. In northern Ireland, many had worked in the linen trade—impoverished handloom weavers, unemployed agents, traders and entrepreneurs. This was especially the case in the period from 1772 to 1774, when the linen industry suffered a contraction of great severity.3
Remarkably few came in bondage. From 1773 to 1776, indentured servants were only 1 percent of Scottish border emigrants, and less than 20 percent of those who had left the six northern counties of England.4 Among emigrants from northern Ireland, the proportion of servants was somewhat higher, but even there a majority were free. This was so in part because Irish servants were not much wanted in America. They were thought to be violent, ungovernable and very apt to assault their masters. Buyers were discouraged by lurid accounts of Irish servants who rioted in Barbados, “straggled” in Bermuda or ran away on the mainland, sometimes with their masters’ wives and daughters in tow. In the Leeward Islands, 125 unruly Irish servants were deliberately marooned on the desolate Isle of Crabs. Throughout British America, purchasers complained of the “proud” and “haughty” spirit of these people.5
The social origins of these emigrants were more humble than those of New England Puritans or Delaware Quakers. But they did not come from the bottom of British society. Only a minority were unskilled laborers. As always in a voluntary migration, desperately poor people were excluded by the fact of poverty itself. The cost of a family’s passage to America was high enough to keep the poorest people at home. An even greater obstacle was an impoverished spirit which robbed the poor of their hope, their pride and even their dreams of betterment.
The Scots-Irish who came to America in the eighteenth century were not poor in any of these senses. Their pride was a source of irritation to their English neighbors, who could not understand what they had to feel proud about. It was said of one Scots-Irishman that “his looks spoke out that he would not fear the devil, should he meet him face to face. … He loved to talk of himself, and spoke as freely and encomiastically as enthusiastic youths do of Alexander and Caesar. … Qualities united in him which are never found in one person except an Irishman.”6
This combination of poverty and pride set the North Britons squarely apart from other English-speaking people in the American colonies. Border emigrants demanded to be treated with respect even when dressed in rags. Their humble origins did not create the spirit of subordination which others expected of “lower ranks.” This fierce and stubborn pride would be a cultural fact of high importance in the American region which they came to dominate.
Religious Origins: Militant Christianity
The borderers of North Britain were mixed in their religious beliefs. Those who came from Scotland and the north of Ireland tended to be Presbyterian, with a scattering of Roman Catholics among them. The English border folk were mostly Anglican, with a sprinkling of small Protestant sects. Border emigrants of the two leading denominations, Anglican and Presbyterian, both showed a strong tendency toward what was called New Light Christianity in the eighteenth century. Many Scottish and Irish Presbyterians called themselves People of the New Light before coming to America. They believed in “free grace,” and before emigrating they had formed the habit of gathering in “field meetings” and “prayer societies,” a custom which they carried to America and established in the backcountry. In Scotland, these New Light Presbyterians were specially numerous on the edges of the Irish Sea.7
In Protestant Ireland, similar religious tendencies also appeared—a deep interest in reformed religion, a settled hostility to the established church, a belief in “free grace,” a habit of field meetings and a bias toward New Light Christianity. An Anglo-Irish archbishop in 1714 wrote that “the people of the north have a particular aversion to curates and call them hirelings.”8
The same religious attitudes also existed among the English borderers. Though they were mostly Anglican, an increasing number had joined small Protestant sects, or were converted to more evangelical forms of Christianity by Methodist and Baptist missionaries. They also were hostile to the “hireling clergy” which the Church of England had settled upon them.
In Scotland some were of a militant sect called “Society People” or “Cameronians.” Their founder, Richard Cameron, was a field preacher who advocated a particularly uncompromising form of covenanted Christianity. The Cameronians grew very strong in the south and west of Scotland, where they engaged in a practice called “rabbling,” or forcibly removing “unregener-ate” clergy from their livings, sometimes with much violence. The authorities hunted the Cameronians like animals across the countryside, and hanged several of their leaders. But many survived, worshipping defiantly with a Bible in one hand and a weapon in the other, and slaughtering the forces that were sent to suppress them. After 1689, the authorities conceded defeat, and adopted the typically North British solution of recruiting these Protestant rebels to fight against Roman Catholic Jacobites in the Highlands. The result was the creation of a great fighting regiment in the British army called the Cameronians, the only regiment in the army list to bear the name of a religious leader. It appointed an Elder in every company of infantry, and required each enlisted man to carry a Bible in his kit. Even in the twentieth century this Presbyterian regiment carried arms to worship and posted sentries at the four corners of the church. It quickly became known for the ferocity of its fighting. In its first battle in 1689, 1,200 recruits of this regiment broke a veteran force of 5,000 Jacobites and burnt many in their fortifications.9
In 1743, the followers of Richard Cameron reorganized themselves as the Reformed Presbyterian Church. Many found their way to the American backcountry, with other North British sects. The Anglican missionary Charles Woodmason complained in 1765 that “Africk never more abounded with new Monsters, than Pennsylvania does with the New Sects, who are continually sending out their emissaries around. One of these Parties, known by the title of New Lights or Gifted Brethren (for they pretend to inspiration) now infest the whole Back Country.”10
Sectarian conflicts became commonplace in the backcountry. Many denominations were planted in the wilderness, but various groups of Presbyterians outnumbered all others, and outrivaled them in religious bigotry.11 The journal of the English missionary Charles Woodmason was a running chronicle of religious strife. When Woodmason tried to conduct an Anglican sermon in the back settlements, Presbyterians disrupted his services, rioted while he preached, started a pack of dogs fighting outside the church, loosed his horse, stole his church key, refused him food and shelter, and gave two barrels of whiskey to his congregation before a service of communion. One Baptist tried to discredit the Anglican missionary by stealing a clerical dressing gown, climbing into bed with a woman in the dark, and “making her give out next day the Parson came to bed with her.”12
Their victim complained bitterly that “the perverse persecuting spirit of the Presbyterians displays itself much more here than in Scotland. … the sects are eternally jarring among themselves.” He quickly learned the border variant of the golden rule—do unto others as they threatened do unto you. He preached furiously against the Presbyterians, and tried to start legal actions against them, but all in vain. “As all the magistrates are Presbyterians, I could not get a warrant,” he wrote, and further, “if I got warrants, as the constables are Presbyterians likewise I could not get them served.”13
This sectarian strife continued for many generations in the backcountry. In the year 1846, Allen Wiley remembered, “the preachers and people of the present day can form no estimation of the asperity of feeling and language which prevailed in those days of bitter waters, even among good men and able ministers.”14 Military metaphors abounded in backcountry sermons and hymns. Prayers were invoked for vengeance and the destruction of enemies. When these Christian warriors were not battling among themselves they fell upon the Indians with the same inplacable fury. Their militant faith flourished in the environment of the back settlements, just as it had done on the borders of North Britain for many generations before.
Ethnic Origins: “We Are a Mixed People”
Some historians describe these immigrants as “Ulster Irish” or “Northern Irish.” It is true that many sailed from the province of Ulster in northern Ireland, but these labels are not accurate when applied to the movement as a whole. The emigration from Ulster was part of much larger flow which drew from the lowlands of Scotland, the north of England, and every side of the Irish Sea.
Many scholars call these people “Scotch-Irish.” That expression is an Americanism, rarely used in Britain and much resented by the people to whom it was attached. “We’re no Eerish bot Scoatch,” one of them was heard to say in Pennsylvania.15 Some preferred to be called Anglo-Irish, a label that was more commonly applied to them than Scotch-Irish during the eighteenth century. Others were called “Saxon-Scotch.”16 One scholar writes: “ … some Ulster Protestants derived from families that were not Scottish at all, but English or Irish,” He adds, “ … some immigrant groups that historians have labeled as Scots-Irish never lived in Ireland but came directly from Scotland.”17
A student of Appalachian culture in the early twentieth century reached the same conclusion:
Inquiries … as to family history and racial stock rarely bring a more definite answer than that grandparents or great-grandparents came from North Carolina or Virginia or occasionally from Pennsylvania, and that they “reckon” their folks were “English,” “Scotch,” or “Irish,” any of which designations may mean Scotch-Irish.18
Two historians have characterized these people as “Celts.” But this label is also very much mistaken as a rounded description of their ethnic origins. Some among them were indeed of Celtic descent. Before the Roman invasion of the north, the dominant people in the north of England were a loose confederacy of Celtic warrior tribes called in Latin Brigantes. The ruined ramparts of their hill forts may still be seen at Carrock Fell in Cumbria and many other places throughout the region.19 The Brigantes were broken by the Romans about the year A.D. 80. Thereafter, many other people invaded and colonized the region—the Romans themselves in the first century, the Saxons in the sixth century, the Vikings and Irish in the tenth century, and the Norman French in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. All of these groups contributed to the growth of this regional culture.20
By the eighteenth century, the culture of this region bore little resemblence to the customs of the ancient Celts. The dominant language was English—unlike that of Gaelic-speaking Irish Catholic peasants, Scottish highlanders, Welsh cottagers, and Cornish miners. The borderers had comparatively little contact (much of it hostile) with these Celtic people. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was observed that “the Ulster settlers mingled freely with the English Puritans and Huguenots,” but married very rarely with the Gaelic-speaking people of Ireland and Scotland.21
Few Gaelic-speaking people emigrated from Ireland, Cornwall or Wales to the American colonies before the nineteenth century. Celtic Irish immigrants were excluded by law from some American colonies. A South Carolina statute of 1716 forbade “what is commonly called native Irish, or persons of known scandalous character or Roman Catholics.”22
Gaelic-speaking Scottish highlanders also were ethnically distinct from the borderers. There was no love lost between lowland and highland Scots, who differed in language, politics, religion and culture. In America, Scottish highlanders tended to settle apart in North Carolina’s Cape Fear Valley, where Gaelic continued to be spoken even into the late twentieth century. Many of these transplanted highlanders became Tories in the American Revolution, largely because their border neighbors were Whig. The fighting between them was as savage as any conflict in North Britain.23
“We are a mixed people,” a border immigrant declared in America during the eighteenth century. “We are a mix’d medley,” said another. So they were in many ways. They were mixed in their social rank, mixed in their religious denominations, and most profoundly mixed in their ancestry, which was Celtic, Roman, German, English, Scandinavian, Irish and Scottish in varying proportions. They were also very mixed in their place of residence—coming as they did from England, Scotland and Ireland.24
But in another way, these immigrants were very similar to one another. No matter whether rich or poor, Anglican or Presbyterian, Saxon or Celt, they were all a border people. They shared a unique regional culture which was the product of a place in time.
The Borders of North Britain
Early in the twentieth century the English folklorist Cecil Sharp left his home in Stratford-on-Avon and spent many months in America’s Appalachian highlands, collecting the songs and dances of the back settlers. After careful comparison with British materials, he wrote of these people:
From an analysis of their traditional songs, ballads, dances, singing-games, etc. … they came from a part of England where the civilization was least developed—probably the North of England, or the Border country between Scotland and England.1
This border region included six counties in the far north of England: Cumberland, Westmorland and parts of Lancashire on the western side of the Pennines; Northumberland, Durham and parts of Yorkshire to the east. It also embraced five counties of southern Scotland—Ayr, Dumfries, Wigtown, Roxburgh and Berwick. During the seventeenth century, its culture was carried westward across the Irish Sea to five counties of Ulster—Derry, Down, Armagh, Antrim and Tyrone.2
Within this region the North British emigration to America drew heavily from counties that touched upon the Irish Sea—Ayr, Dumfries and Wigtown in Scotland; Cumberland and Westmorland in England; Derry, Antrim and Down in Ireland. The sea itself united its surrounding lands in a single cultural region.3
To a traveler who enters this border region from the south of England, the landscape seems strange and forbidding even today. As one drives northward on the M6 motorway, the first impression is of a bare and empty country, which by comparison with the teeming English Midlands appears almost uninhabited. The terrain is uneven—a stark succession of barren hills and deep valleys. West of Kendal, a handsome stone-built shire town in the old county of Westmorland, the countryside begins to change. Here one enters the Lake District, with its romantic scenery and beautiful views. Westward beyond Lake Windermere lies the Fell country, a sparsely settled mountain district with peaks rising to 3,000 feet, and high moorlands of almost lunar bleakness. Still farther to the west, the houses grow more numerous as one approaches the close-built coastal towns on the Irish sea.
Forty-five miles north of Kendal lies the city of Carlisle, the metropolis of the English marches. This town is still dominated by its castle with massive walls of crimson stone which brood ominously above the busy traffic on Castle Way. To wander through the damp dungeons of Carlisle Castle, and to study the strange graffiti carved in its walls by captives many centuries ago, is to feel once again the violence of life upon the border. Everywhere in the region one still discovers ruined walls and crenellated towers which are memorials to its violent past. At Penrith, a market town halfway between Carlisle and Kendal, there is a great red sandstone beacon high on a barren hill, where warning fires were lighted when the Scots came over the border.4
The border derived its cultural character from one decisive historical fact. For seven centuries, the kings of Scotland and England could not agree who owned it, and meddled constantly in each other’s affairs. From the year 1040 to 1745, every English monarch but three suffered a Scottish invasion, or became an invader in his turn. In the same period, most Scottish kings went to war against England, and many died “with their boots on,” as the border saying went. Scotland’s first king, Duncan (1034-40), was murdered by Macbeth after losing a war to the Northumbrians. In 1057, Macbeth himself suffered the same fate after his defeat by another English army in the forest fight at Dunsinane. The next Scottish king, Malcolm Canmore (1058-93), invaded England five times in hopes of conquering its northern provinces, and was at last slain in Northumberland. After 1093 the Normans attacked northward in their turn and when Scotland’s king Donald Bane (1093-97) resisted, they took him captive and their Scottish allies put out his eyes to quiet him.
An interval of peace followed, but in 1136 Scotland’s King David led an army into England and the fighting began again. In the course of the next century most towns on both sides of the border were brutally sacked and burned, and the countryside was ravaged from Newcastle to Edinburgh. Churches and monasteries became favorite targets; one Scottish army struggled home so laden with loot that soldiers drowned in the river Eden beneath the weight of plundered chalices and crucifixes.
These wars continued for many generations. In the year 1215, England’s King John marched north on a mission of revenge. The Scottish burghers of Berwick were put to death by torture; the English king set fire to their houses with his own hand. During the late thirteenth century, Scotland was forced to accept English overlordship, which brought another interval of sullen peace. Conditions improved in the reign of Alexander III (1249-86), a golden age for Scottish culture. But on a dark night in 1286, Alexander fell to his death over a cliff—or perhaps was pushed—and the slaughter began again. England’s King Edward I (1272–1307) captured the border town of Berwick and put to death every male of military age. For three centuries Scottish soldiers in their bloodlust cried “Remember Berwick!”
The lowlands remained in English hands until about 1297, when Scotland’s national hero William Wallace invaded Cumberland. His soldiers flayed the bodies of English officers who fell into their hands. When Wallace himself was captured, his body was drawn and quartered, and his head impaled atop an English pike. England’s warrior King Edward I (1272-1307) then harried the north with such violence that he was called the “Hammer of the Scots”; as he lay dying in Cumberland, Edward ordered his bones to be carried into Scotland by an avenging English army. His hapless son Edward II (1307-27) tried to obey, but was beaten at Bannockburn (1314) by the Scottish hero Robert the Bruce, whose followers looted, burned and raped the northern counties of England, and part of Ireland for good measure. England’s Edward III (1327-77) took his revenge in the campaign which is still remembered as the “burnt Candlemas”—a systematic destruction of the Scottish lowlands as far north as Edinburgh. The act of savagery led to new atrocities by the Scots, and new expeditions by England’s Richard II (1377-99) and Henry IV (1399-1413).
All the while, private fighting continued between warlords on both sides of the border. Through the fifteenth century, North Britain was reduced to anarchy. Scotland’s James I (1406-37) was assassinated by his own henchmen; James II “of the fiery Face” (1437-60) was blown to pieces while attacking the English at Roxburgh; James III (1460-88) was murdered by a family of rampaging border warlords; and James IV (1488-1513) died fighting the English on Flodden Field. English vengance reached its bloody climax when Henry VIII (1509-47) ordered the ruin of hundreds of border villages in a retribution that Scots remember as “the Rough Wooing.”
The border fell quiet after 1567, when James VI became King of Scotland and later King of England as well. But in the reign of Charles I, English and Scots went to war again, and hostilities continued under the Commonwealth and Protectorate. Major raids and border risings also occurred in 1680, 1689, 1715 and 1745. Altogether, two historians of the border write that “until after 1745, the region never enjoyed fifty consecutive years of quiet.” This endemic violence caused heavy loss of life on both sides of the border. It was written that “a Scots raid down toward
Penrith Beacon stands high on a hill near the Cumbrian town of the same name. Its purpose was to warn the English countryside when Scottish raiders were over the border. Many such beacon towers were constructed throughout this turbulent region. Several had earlier stood on the site where this one was constructed of a local red sandstone in 1715, the year of the Scottish Jacobite rising. It was used in 1745 during the last Scottish invasion of England. The Penrith Beacon still stands today, a monument to many centuries of violence in the borderlands. This drawing follows two illustrations, kindly supplied by the Penrith Library.
the Tyneside often did as much killing in relation to the local population as the plague did nearly everywhere.”5 The cultural effect of violence was magnified by a climate of fear which continued even in periods of peace. Long after the “Forty-five,” English diaries often recorded rumors that the Scots were “over the borders.” Fear itself remained a social fact of high importance after so many centuries of strife.6
Dynastic stuggles between the monarchs of England and Scotland were only a small part of the border’s sufferings. The quarrels of kings became a criminal’s opportunity to rob and rape and murder with impunity. On both sides of the border, and especially in the “debatable land” that was claimed by both kingdoms, powerful clans called Taylor, Bell, Graham and Bankhead lived outside the law, and were said to be “Scottish when they will, and English at their pleasure.”7 They made a profession of preying upon their neighbors—“reiving,” it was called along the border.8 Other families specialized in the theft of livestock—“rustling” was its border name. Rustling on a small scale was endemic throughout the region. Large gangs of professional rustlers also “operated on a scale more reminiscent of the traditional American model than any English equivalent,” in the words of an historian.9
This incessant violence shaped the culture of the border region, and also created a social system which was very different from that in the south of England. On the border, forms of tenancy were designed to maintain large bodies of fighting men. Lord Burghley noted, “ …there is no lease in that country, but with provision to find horse and arms, to be held by an able man.”10 In the great manors of Wark and Harbottle, it was observed that “customary tenure was very secure … descent was by partible inheritance, so that potential fighting men were guaranteed subsistence.”11
Endemic violence also had an effect upon the economy, which lagged far behind other parts of England in the pace and pattern of its development. In 1617 the Venetian ambassador noted that the border country “at a distance of forty miles from the frontier, and especially the county of Northumberland was very poor and uncultivated and exceedingly wretched … from the sterility of the ground and also from the perpetual wars with which these nations have savagely destroyed each other.” For centuries the region remained in the grip of a vicious cycle. Poverty and violence caused much poverty and more violence.12
The insecurity of the borders created a unique style of architecture throughout this region. The gentry lived in buildings called peles, stone towers three or four stories high. The ground floor was a windowless storeroom with walls ten feet thick. Stacked above it was a hall for living, a bower for sleeping and a deck for fighting. Camden wrote that “there is not a man amongst them of the better sort that hath not his little tower or pele.”13 Some of these structures were begun as early as the twelfth century; others as late as 1586. A few still stand today.14 Poor tenants dealt with danger in another way, by erecting rude “cabbins” of stone or wood or beaten earth “such as a man may build within three or four hours.” The destruction of these temporary buildings was not a heavy loss, for they could be rebuilt almost as rapidly as they were wrecked.15
Border violence also made a difference in patterns of association. In a world of treachery and danger, blood relationships became highly important. Families grew into clans, and kinsmen placed fidelity to family above loyalty to the crown itself. One officer, who was charged with the thankless task of keeping the King’s peace among the borderers, reported in despair in 1611:
They are void of conscience, the fear of God; and of all honesty, and so linked in friendship by marriage, and all or most of them of one flesh, ending to make their gain by stealing, that of a hundred felonies scarcely one shall be proved.16
Borderers placed little trust in legal institutions. They formed the custom of settling their own disputes by the lex talionis of feud violence and blood money. There was also a system which the borderers called “blackmail,” involving the payment of protection money to powerful families.17
As we shall see, endemic violence shaped the culture of this region in many other ways—in attitudes toward work, sport, time, land, wealth, rank, inheritance, marriage and gender. This culture was much the same on both sides of the border. “English and Scots Borderers had everything in common except nationality,” writes historian George Fraser. “They belonged to the same small, self-contained, unique world, lived by the same rules and shared the same inheritance.”18
This border culture was carried across the Irish Sea to Ulster by the settlers who would be called Scotch-Irish and Anglo-Irish. Those immigrants came from many parts of Scotland and England, but an historian observes that “the greatest numbers came from the Borders.” In Ireland they found another environment of endemic violence. There the old folkways survived for centuries after they had disappeared on the border itself, and still go on today in northern Ireland, with its Protestant drums and Catholic bombs and savage knee-cappings and tortures in the Maze. In the unceasing torment of that beautiful ravaged land, the long legacy of border violence still bears its bitter fruit.
But in the borderlands themselves, the old culture began to be transformed in the seventeenth century—mainly by new political conditions. The two warring kindgoms gradually became one, in a long consolidation that began when Scotland’s James VI inherited the English throne in 1603, and ended in the Act of Union in 1706-7.
In this process, the borders experienced a sweeping social revolution. There are many truths to be told about this event. One was the truth of its agents, who saw it as a process of “pacification.” Another was the truth of its objects, who thought of themselves not as villains but victims. In any case, this ordering process was as violent as the world that it destroyed. The pacification of this bloody region required the disruption of a culture that had been a millennium in the making. Gallows were erected on hills throughout the English border counties, and put busily to work. Thrifty Scots saved the expense of a rope by drowning their reivers instead of hanging them, sometimes ten or twenty at a time. Entire families were outlawed en masse, and some were extirpated by punitive expeditions. Many were forcibly resettled in Ireland, where officials complained that they were “as difficult to manage in Ireland as in north Cumberland,” and banished them once again—this time to the colonies. The so-called Scotch-Irish who came to America thus included a double-distilled selection of some of the most disorderly inhabitants of a deeply disordered land.19
The pacification of the border transformed its social system. The old border warlords were deprived of their income and fell deep in debt, losing their properties to the merchants of expanding towns. A romantic account of their fate was the history of the Osbaldistone family, in Scott’s great border novel Rob Roy. An actual example was Sir William Chaytor, seized for debt in his ancient pele and carried off to London’s Fleet Prison raging helplessly, “From Hell, Hull, Halifax and York, Good Lord deliver us.”20
The old warrior families were replaced by a new class of entrepreneurs who saw the future of their region in commerce and coal. Arable lands along the border passed into the hands of agricultural capitalists. Most great landlords in Cumberland and Westmorland were absentees who never knew their tenants and rarely visited their estates. One of the largest holders, the Duke of Somerset (1682-1748), saw his Cumbrian lands only once in sixty-six years. These properties were run by stewards and bailiffs. The income that they extracted from the tenantry was sent to southern England. The distribution of wealth, always unequal in the borderlands, now became still more so.21
Some middling families of the class called statesmen were able to improve themselves. Even these small holders were technically tenants, but in fact they owned everything except the mineral became highly vulnerable to harvest fluctuations. Major crop failures occurred repeatedly in the eighteenth century—notably in the years 1727, 1740, and 1770. Each scarcity was followed by a surge of emigration.
These trends also occurred in Ireland, where Calvinist colonists were caught between a rapacious Anglican elite on the one hand, and a fast-growing Catholic majority on the other. They were increasingly exploited by rack-renting landlords, bullied by county oligarchies, and taxed by a church to which they did not belong. Another factor in Ireland was the depression of the linen trade. This industry suffered a prolonged decline throughout the period of emigration, and experienced a major collapse in the early 1770s.
The cause of these various troubles was a social transformation of high complexity. Their consequence was a surge of emigration so strong that observers compared it to an “epidemic” or “rage” or “distemper.” Authorities were appalled by the loss of population, but could find no way to stop it. One of them wrote in 1728:
The whole north is in a ferment at present, and people every day engaged one another to go next year to the West Indies. The humour has spread like a contagious distemper, and the people will hardly hear of anybody that tries to cure them of their madness. The worst is, it affects only Protestants.27
In Ireland, so desperate did people become that some attempted to escape in open boats across the Irish Sea and drowned in those treacherous waters.28
These people were refugees from a great historical transformation which had caught them in its complex coils. Some wished only to keep their own customs; others thought more of the future than the past. For both groups, the New World held the promise of a happiness which eluded them at home. In their teeming thousands they fled to America.
rights to their lands for the payment of nominal rents. Some enlarged their holdings, and were able to pass them to their children for the payment of a fine equal to two years’ rent, plus a piece of silver called “God’s Penny.”22
Others were not so lucky. When the borders were pacified, changes were made in the form of tenure. “When fighting men were no longer needed,” one historian has written, “landlords began to argue that customary tenants were in fact tenants of the will of the lord.”23 In the process, both tenants and undertenants became vulnerable to exploitation. The cruelties of rack renting became commonplace throughout the region, and evictions were widespread. Many emigrants brought to America an indelible memory of oppression which shaped their political attitudes for generations to come.24
Some tenants resisted by going to law against the landlords. Others took the law into their own hands. This was specially the case in southwestern Scotland, where the rural population rose against their oppressors and leveled the stone walls that landlords were building for livestock. The largest of these insurrections was the so-called Galloway Levellers’ Revolt of 1724. In northern Ireland, tenants banded together in violent vigilante groups called Hearts of Steel and Hearts of Oak against rack-renting landlords. The absentee proprietors themselves were safe in London or Dublin, but many an agent was brutally assassinated.25
More violence occurred when new roads began to be built throughout the region, and were forcibly resisted. A custom called “pulling up the ways” became a common form of rural protest against encroaching civilization. England’s new standing army was called out to suppress road riots along the border.26
As if these miseries were not enough, the people of the borders were also afflicted by famine and epidemic disease, which so often accompanied rapid change in the early modern era. A large part of the population lived close to the edge of subsistence, and
The American Backcountry
The borderers entered America principally through the ports of Philadelphia and Newcastle. They moved quickly into the surrounding countryside, and in the words of one official, simply squatted wherever they found “a spot of vacant land.” The Quakers were not happy about this invasion. “Our people are in pain,” wrote Jonathan Dickinson in 1717, “From the north of Ireland many hundreds [have come].”1 The North Britons brought with them the ancient border habit of belligerence toward other ethnic groups. As early as 1730, Pennsylvania officials were complaining of their “audacious and disorderly manner.” One of them wrote, “I must own from my own experience in the land office that the settlement of five families from Ireland gives me more trouble than fifty of any other people. Before we were now broke in upon, ancient Friends and first settlers lived happily; but now the case is quite altered.”2
Among Quakers there was talk of restricting immigration as early as 1718, by “laying a Duty of £5 a head on some sorts and double on others.”3 But this idea cut against the grain of William Penn’s holy experiment, and was not adopted. Instead, the Quakers decided to deal with the problem in a different way, by encouraging the borderers to settle in the “back parts” of the colony. In 1731, James Logan informed the Penns in England that he was deliberately planting the North Britons in the west, “as a frontier in case of any disturbance.” Logan argued that these people might usefully become a buffer population between the Indians and the Quakers. At the same time, he frankly hoped to rid the east of them.4
With much encouragement from Quaker leaders, the North Britons moved rapidly westward from Philadelphia into the rolling hills of the interior. Many drifted south and west along the mountains of Maryland, Virginia and the Carolinas. They gradually became the dominant English-speaking culture in a broad belt of territory that extended from the highlands of Appalachia through much of the Old Southwest. In the nineteenth century, they moved across the Mississippi River to Arkansas, Missouri, Oklahoma and Texas. By the twentieth century, their influence would be felt as far west as New Mexico, Arizona and southern California.
The area of their settlement may be observed in the first U.S. Census of 1790. The distribution of surnames shows that immigrants from North Britain found their way into every part of the American colonies. But by far the largest concentration was to be found in the backcountry region that included southwestern Pennsylvania, the western parts of Maryland and Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky and Tennessee.5
Throughout that broad area, more than half of the population came from Scotland, Ireland and northern England. Other ethnic minorities also moved into the backcountry, but their numbers remained comparatively small. The largest of the non-English-speaking groups were the Germans, who swarmed into the west-central parts of Pennsylvania and Maryland, and also in the northern reaches of the Valley of Virginia. But altogether, the Germans made up only about 5 percent of the population in North and South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee and Kentucky in 1790. They remained a very small minority in the southern highlands.6
Other ethnic groups also included scattered settlements of French Huguenots, Swiss Protestants, Welsh Baptists, West Indians and even a colony of Greeks. But 90 percent of the backsettlers were either English, Irish or Scottish; and an actual majority came from Ulster, the Scottish lowlands, and the north of England. North Britons were 73 to 80 percent of the population in Virginia’s Augusta, Rockbridge, Fayette and Lincoln counties; 75 percent in Pennsylvania’s Washington County, 90 percent in some counties of Tennesses and Kentucky, nearly 100 percent in the Hillsboro district of North Carolina and a large majority in much of the South Carolina upcountry. These areas would become the seed settlements of the southern highlands.
Numbers alone, however, were not the full measure of their dominion. These emigrants from North Britain established in the southern highlands a cultural hegemony that was even greater than their proportion in the population.7 An explanation of this fact may be found in the character of this American environment, which proved to be exceptionally well matched to the culture of the British borderlands.
The southern backcountry was a vast area roughly the size of western Europe, extending 800 miles south from Pennsylvania to
Georgia, and several hundred miles west from the Piedmont plateau to the banks of the Mississippi. The terrain consisted of corrugated ridges and valleys, rising from the coastal plain to the crest of the Appalachians (the highest point was Mt. Mitchell in North Carolina at 6,684 feet), then falling away to the western rivers.
In the mid-eighteenth century this area was a great deciduous forest of oak, hickory and chestnut. In the mountains, the forest changed to birch, evergreens and maple. On the banks of the Mississippi it turned into stands of tupelo, red gum and cypress; and further south it became the “pineywoods” of loblolly and long leaf pine. Scattered throughout the region were canebreaks and grassy openings such as the Kentucky bluegrass which attracted early settlement by their fertility.
The backcountry was a beautiful land in every season of the year. On sunny spring days the woods were dappled with a golden light that filtered through the trees. The undergrowth was bright with blooming dogwood, mountain laurel, wild azaleas and trailing arbutus. In summer mornings, the countryside was shrouded by a mist that rose like a white cloud from the hollows; the author can remember how it awakened a sense of mystery even in the mind of a child. On summer afternoons, the distant hills were masked in a shimmering haze that gave the mountains their names: Great Smoky, Blue Ridge, Purple Mountain. When fall came to the southern highlands, the hills were as colorful as New England—a riot of red maples, yellow hickories and russet oaks beneath a bright October sky. Even winter brought an austere beauty to the landscape when its gothic tracery of bare branches showed black against the setting sun.
The climate of the backcountry was very moist, with forty or fifty inches of rain a year, rising as high as eighty inches on the mountain slopes of North Carolina. The land was laced by falling waters and mountain springs that never ran dry. This abundance of water became a social fact of high importance in the back-country, for it allowed small family farms to flourish independently without the aid of any earthly power, and encouraged a sense of stubborn autonomy among the farming folk who settled there.
Temperatures tended to be moderate throughout the region—another important fact. By seventeenth-century standards, the southern highlands proved to be healthy for Europeans during the first years of settlement, before the malaria parasites followed their human hosts into the interior, and the disease called the “milk sick” came to be a major problem. Even at their worst, mortality rates in the upcountry were much lower than the tidewater, and far below the fever-ridden valleys of the old southwest. Low levels of endemic illness made the backsettlers highly vulnerable to epidemics which struck with deadly force, but families increased rapidly and were not so often shattered by death as in other parts of British America.
Before the borderers arrived, the backcountry was occupied by strong and warlike Indian nations, from the Shawnee in the north, to the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw and Chickasaw in the south. These proud people did not give way easily before white settlement. Savage warfare began in the late seventeenth century, and continued to the early nineteenth century in some of the fiercest Indian wars of American history.
To the first settlers, the American backcountry was a dangerous environment, just as the British borderlands had been. Much of the southern highlands were “debateable lands” in the border sense of a contested territory without established government or the rule of law. The borderers were more at home than others in this anarchic environment, which was well suited to their family system, their warrior ethic, their farming and herding economy, their attitudes toward land and wealth and their ideas of work and power. So well adapted was the border culture to this environment that other ethnic groups tended to copy it. The ethos of the North British borders came to dominate this “dark and bloody ground,” partly by force of numbers, but mainly because it was a means of survival in a raw and dangerous world.
Border Names for the New Land
The cultural hegemony of the borderers appeared in the names that were given to the new land. In the southern highlands one rarely met the Royalist names that were so common in tidewater Virginia. There were a few exceptions, such as Charlotte and Mecklenberg County and an occasional Orange County (North Carolina) or Orangeburg (South Carolina), which had a special meaning for Scotch-Irish Presbyterians. But as a rule, these settlers cared little for the trappings of English monarchy. One western river which a tidewater Virginian named after Princess Louisa quickly degenerated into Levisa among the backsettlers. High-toned names in general did not flourish in this environment; a place originally called Mont Beau, North Carolina, became Monbo. The settlers of Appalachia also made little use of the hortatory names which had been common in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. But when they did so, their choices ran not to Concord or Contentment as in New England, but to Liberty (West Virginia, Georgia), Soldier’s Delight (Maryland), Barbacue [sic], Frolicsome, Faro, Bacchus, and Calypso (all in North Carolina).8
A large proportion of Appalachian place names were drawn from the geography of Britain—with a heavy bias toward the border region. The most common British county name in Appalachia was Cumberland—the extreme northwestern county in England. There was a Cumberland town in western Maryland, a Cumberland River in Tennessee, the Cumberland Mountains in Kentucky, Cumberland Knob in North Carolina, Cumberland Gap through the Appalachians, and Cumberland counties in most states throughout this region. The name had a double appeal to English borderers, for it also commemorated the Duke of Cumberland who broke their ancient highland enemies at the battle of Culloden.
Other border place names also frequently recurred in the back-country. In North Carolina alone, one finds a Galloway Creek, Galloway Crossroads, Galloway Mountain and a Galloway town in six different counties. There is also Durham Branch, several Durham Creeks, Durham County and Durham Township as well as the city of Durham, which were named at various dates between 1705 and 1855.9 Counties in Pennsylvania were also called Westmoreland [sic] and Northumberland.
A specially popular place name was Londonderry or Derry, which was given to the leading Scots-Irish settlement in New Hampshire, and also to townships and hamlets in southwestern Pennsylvania, Virginia and the Carolinas. A Scots-Irish settlement in New Hampshire was named Antrim, and interior towns in Massachusetts and Maine were called New Glasgow, Colerain, Belfast and Newcastle. Other settlements throughout the backcountry were named Aberdeen, Abernethy, Ayr, Balfour, Balgra, Blantyre and Dalkeith (all in North Carolina), Donegal (Pennsylvania), New Dublin (Virginia), Hillsboro (North Carolina) and Lochaber (South Carolina). There were many New Scotlands, Caledonias and Little Brit-ains and Scotchtowns.
Immigrants from North Britain also liked to name their settlements after individuals and clans—an uncommon practice in Puritan New England and Anglican Virginia. Many of these names also came from the borderlands. In North Carolina alone, for example, there are more than 130 place names beginning with Mc or Mac, and many Alexanders, Jacksons, Robertsons, Williamsons, and Grahams. Other examples included Harper’s Ferry, Graham’s Meeting House, Gordon’s Meeting House, McAden’s Church, Craig’s Creek and Jackson River in Virginia; Hobkirk’s Hill and Lynch’s Creek in South Carolina; Bryan’s Station, Logan’s Fort and McAfee ‘s in Kentucky; McMinnville, Johnston’s Fork, Sullivan and Knoxville in Tennessee.
The names of backcountry places reflected many other aspects of border culture. Its food ways appeared in place names such as Clabber Branch, Frying Pan, Corncake, Whiskey Springs and Hangover Creek. Its religion was evident in settlements called Campground and New Light. The material bias in this culture was evident in the villages of Ad Valorem and Need More, both in North Carolina. The disappointment of dreams was registered in Hard-bargain Branch, Pinchgut Creek, Lousy Creek, Worry, Noland, Big Trouble, Hell’s Half Acre and Devil ‘s Tater Patch. The violence of this culture appeared in Bloody Rock, Bloodrun Creek, Breakneck Ridge, Brokeleg Branch, Cutthroat Gap, Gallows Branch, Hanging Rock, Killquick, Scream Ridge, Lynch’s Creek, Whipping Creek, Skull Camp Mountain, Scuffletown, Grabtown and See-off Creek, also in North Carolina. Names of that sort were very rare on the New England Frontier.10
Backcountry place names were the products of a period as well as of a place. In North Carolina, there was a Whigg Branch, and a distinctively Whiggish spirit appeared in the towns of Enterprise, Improvement, and Progress. Kentucky has a creek called Lulbegrud, after the capital city of Brodingnag in Gulliver’s Travels. It was named by one of Daniel Boone’s explorers who carried a copy of Jonathan Swift’s book into the wilderness and read it aloud in the evening around the campfire.11
Other backcountry names showed a spirit of improvisation which differed from naming customs in other regions. Back settlements were called Thicketty and Saltketcher (both in South Carolina), Licking Creek (Tennessee), Big Sandy, Kerless Knob, Tater
Knob and Teeny Knob. A relaxed attitude toward naming in general appeared in Aho, whose founders were unable to agree upon a choice, and decided to take the first sound that was made in the new community. Other names in the same vein included Why Not, Odear, Shitbritches Creek, Naked Creek, Cuckold’s Creek, Stiffknee Knob, Big Fat Gap, Ben’s Ridge and Bert’s Creek and Charlie’s Bunion Mountain. This casual nomenclature was far removed from the naming ways of Puritans, Quakers and Cavaliers.12
The distribution of these place names defined the cultural boundaries of a region that was called the “back settlements” or the “backcountry” or simply the “back parts” in the eighteenth century. Scarcely anyone thought of it as a “frontier” in Frederick Jackson Turner’s sense during the first two centuries of American history. The fact that it was thought to be “back” rather than “front” tells us which way the colonists were facing in that era.13
The Backcountry “Ascendancy”:
Border Origins of an American Elite
Not all of these backcountry settlers were people of humble origins. Some had held high rank in the Old World. Their motive in moving to America was not to rise higher in society, but to keep from falling below the status which they had already achieved. A case in point was the family of Andrew Jackson, the first of many American Presidents to spring from border stock. Jackson’s campaign biographies have stressed the plebian origins of this popular leader. But in fact he did not come from poor or humble people. In his earliest youth, he was taught to think of himself as a gentleman. President Jackson’s Irish grandfather, Hugh Jackson, was a rich man who called himself a “weaver and merchant of Carrickfergus, Ireland, and left his American grandson a legacy later reckoned at three or four hundred pounds sterling. The future President’s immigrant father had been a well-to-do farmer who held a large property near the town of Castlereagh in northern Ireland, and led an entire party of emigrants to America in 1765. Andrew Jackson’s wife, Rachel Donelson, also came from
The archetypical backcountry leader was Andrew Jackson, the son of Scots-Irish immigrants who became the seventh President of the United States. Historians and social scientists have suggested many ways of making sense of this man and his movement. To study him in the context of his time and place is to discover that he was the carrier of a special folk culture which was brought from the borders of North Britain to the American backcountry.
an eminent family. Her father, Colonel John Donelson, was one of the most powerful men in the southern backcountry. She was the grandniece of Dr. Samuel Davies, a learned Presbyterian minister who became president of Princeton College.1
Still other immigrants came from even higher ranks, and had belonged to a narrow elite who were known in Ireland and along the borderlands as the “Ascendancy.” These people were few in numbers among the flood of immigrants. But they quickly established a cultural hegemony in the American backcountry, and kept it for many generations. An example of this backcountry “Ascendancy” was the Polk family. Its American progenitor was Captain Robert Polk (d. 1699), who emigrated from County Donegal, Ireland, ca. 1680. He had been highly placed in Anglo-Scots-Irish society. His wife, Magdalen Tasker Porter Polk, was the daughter of the Lord Chancellor of Ireland, who had lived at Bloomfield Castle near Londonderry, and inherited an Irish estate called Moneen. Robert and Magdalen Polk had seven sons. One of them was David Polk who settled in Maryland where his offspring intermarried with the Chesapeake gentry—Tilghmans, Fords, Coxes and Hacketts. Another son, William Polk, made his way to Virginia, and his five children settled mostly in Mecklen-berg County, North Carolina. By the end of the eighteenth century, the Mecklenberg Polks had intermarried with leading back-country clans throughout North Carolina and Tennessee—Alexanders, Ashes, Caldwells, Campbells, Donelsons, Hawkinses, Gilchrists, Knoxes, Shelbys, Spratts and many others. One member of this family was the extraordinary Bishop-General Leonidas Polk, who managed to be both Episcopal bishop of Louisiana and lieutenant general in the Confederate Army. Another descendant was a future president of the United States, James Knox Polk. Two other Presidents, Andrew Jackson and Zachary Taylor, were related by marriage to this clan, as were many political leaders of North Carolina and Tennessee.2
A third example of the backcountry Ascendancy was the Calhoun clan, which moved from Scotland to Ireland in the seventeenth century, and thence to America in 1733. The immigrants included Patrick and Catherine Calhoun, and their four sons
Political leaders in the southern highlands for many generations traced their descent from elite families of North Britain’s border “ascendancy. “An example of this persistence was the eleventh President of the United States, James Knox Polk (1795-1849). He was called “Young Hickory” and was elected as a Democratic leader, but in fact his ancestors had come from the uppermost strata of North British society. President Polk’s public acts and personal values, and his ideals of honor and loyalty, were shaped by the culture of his border forebears.
James, William, Ezekiel and Patrick. These four brothers lived and worked closely together. In 1746 all were named in a single indictment as “divulgers of false information.”3
The Calhouns settled first in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, then moved south and west to the Carolina upcountry, where they made their home on Long Cane Creek, intermarrying with other North British families along the way—Montgomerys, Nobles, Pickenses—with whom they had been allied even before coming to America. They also intermarried with themselves. The most eminent member of this clan, John C. Calhoun, married his cousin Floride Calhoun, the daughter of John E. Calhoun (or Colhoun). Most of their matrimonial alliances were with other border families—Scottish, Irish and English.
The Calhouns were pioneers in the Carolina backcountry, settling so near the frontier that in 1760 the Cherokees killed twenty-three of them, including the family matriarch Catherine Montgomery Calhoun, who was seventy-six years old.4 By the end of the eighteenth century, there were hundreds of Calhouns in the Carolina upcountry.
From the start the Calhouns were people of substance. The family patriarch Patrick Calhoun was called “squire” even before he settled in South Carolina. As early as the mid-eighteenth century, the four Calhoun brothers owned thousands of acres, and rapidly acquired large numbers of slaves as well. They also held many high offices. Four of them represented South Carolina in the federal Congress before 1815.
Yet another example was the Henry family. Its progenitor was an Anglo-Scottish gentleman named John Henry, who emigrated about the year 1730. He was related to leading families on both sides of the border. Among his cousins was David Henry, publisher of Gentleman’s Magazine, and on his mother’s side he was connected to William Robertson, the historian who became principal of Edinburgh University. Yet another cousin was Eleanor Syme, a famous Edinburgh beauty who married Henry Brougham of Brougham Hall in Westmorland and raised one of England’s great political families.
In Hanover County, the immigrant John Henry met and married one of his own relatives, a beautiful backcountry widow named Sarah Syme. The ubiquitous William Byrd stayed a night
In old portraits and early photographs, the baleful faces of backcountry leaders often bear a striking resemblance to verbal descriptions of the North British borderers who settled the Appalachian highlands. Contemporary observers described these men as tall, lean and sinewy, with hard, angry, weatherbeaten features. The strong emotions that were so actively cultivated in this society left indelible marks upon them. A case in point was John Caldwell Calhoun, whose physiognomy in many ways resembled his enemy Andrew Jackson. Both of these men were descended from the backcountry ascendancy. The compelling portraits of these men testify to their strength of character and force of will, and also to their courage and cruelty. Their vices and virtues had been nourished by the environment of the British borderlands and the American backcountry.
in the home of this lady, and described her in his diary as “a portly handsome dame … of a lively and cheerful conversation. …” Byrd wrote:
we tost off a bottle of honest port, which we relished with a broiled chicken. At nine I retired to my devotions, And then slept so sound that Fancy itself was stupified, else I should have dreamed of my most obliging Landlady. … the courteous Widow invited me to rest there the next day, and go to Church with her, but I excused myself by telling her she would certainly spoil my Devotion. Then she civilly entreated me to make her House my Home whenever I visited my Plantations, which made me bow very low.5
A little later, Mistress Syme married John Henry, and in 1736 became the mother of Patrick Henry. That great revolutionist liked to appear as a tribune of the people, but by birth he was a high-born backcountry gentleman with connections to the English border gentry. Patrick Henry was the cousin of the great English Whig Lord Brougham of Brougham Hall, Westmorland.6
Yet another example of the backcountry ascendancy was John Houston, who arrived in America with his wife and six children in 1730. He signed himself “John Houston, Gent.,” and was of a family of border baronets. He did not come penniless to the New World. According to family legend he arrived with a small keg of gold sovereigns. In passage to America, a rapacious captain and crew discovered the wealth of their passenger, and made the fatal mistake trying to steal it. John Houston promptly organized the passengers, seized the ship, and sailed it himself to America. In the backcountry, he instantly assumed the station of county justice and acquired vast holdings of rich land in the Valley of Virginia. At the age of sixty-five, he was killed by a falling tree. One of his descendants was Sam Houston, the future governor of Tennessee and president of Texas.7
Other elite groups in the backcountry included three of the most prominent raiding, reiving and rustling families on England’s northwestern frontier: the Grahams, Bells and Bank-heads. All were expelled from England and forcibly resettled in Ireland. Many members of these clans came to America, and joined the elite of the southern highlands. The Bankheads became specially eminent in Alabama—producing leaders in
The Backcountry Elite: The Polks of Mecklenberg
Source: Angellotti, “The Polks of North Carolina and Tennessee,” NEHGR 77 (1923), 133-45; 78 (1924), 33.
The Backcountry Elite: The Calhouns of Long Cane
Source: A. S. Salley, Jr., “The Calhoun Family of S.C.,” SCHGM 7 (1906), 81-98, 153-69; idem, “The Grandfather of John C. Calhoun,” 50; Charles M Wiltse, John C. Calhoun, Nationalist (Indianapolis, 1944), 18.
many fields, including U.S. Senator John Bankhead, his brother William Bankhead, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, and the Speaker’s actress daughter Tallulah Bankhead. Even to our own time, Bankheads occupy many positions of eminence throughout the southern highlands. Also present in even greater number were the Grahams and Bells, two of the earliest border clans to settle in western North Carolina. They held many high offices, and gave their name to counties and towns throughout the southern highlands.
The Calhouns, Polks, Jacksons, Henrys, Houstons, Bells, Grahams and Bankheads were typical of the backcountry elite. The founders of these families in America had all been people of substance in North Britain. They tended to emigrate during the early eighteenth century. Some came a generation earlier or later, but most arrived in the backcountry during the 1730s. They moved quickly to the top of backcountry society, and preserved their eminence for many generations.
These elite families firmly established their hegemony in the backcountry before the American War of Independence. Other ethnic elites also appeared in that region, but the North British borderers reigned supreme. An example of their dominion was the pattern of leadership at the battle of King’s Mountain in 1780, a decisive event in the southern highlands during the American Revolution. The victorious backsettlers fought under ten commanders. One of those officers came from southwest of Scotland, another from northern Ireland, three from the north of England, two from the marches of Wales. One was from Germany, one was from a mixed Huguenot and border family, and one was from parts unknown. The first impression is one of ethnic diversity. But of nine whose regional origins are known, seven came from the borderlands of North Britain. None came from East Anglia or from southwestern England. Further, of eight families whose dates of emigration are known, all arrived in America between 1726 and 1740, the critical period for the formation of the backcountry elite.8
These border families, no matter whether English, Scots, Scots-Irish, Anglo-Irish or even Anglo-Welsh, shared many values and beliefs in common. They intermarried among themselves, and rapidly became an integrated elite throughout the southern highlands. For two centuries the public life of this region has been dominated by names that first appeared in the backcountry during the middle decades of the eighteen century.
The Colonial Mood:
Anxiety and Insecurity in the Back Settlements
A backcountry gentleman was once heard to pray, “Lord, grant that I may always be right, for thou knowest I am hard to turn.”1 This supplication captured the prevailing cultural mood in the back settlements, which were profoundly conservative and xenophobic. The people of this region were intensely resistant to change and suspicious of “foreigners.” One student of the Appalachian dialect found that “the word foreigner itself is used here [in Appalachia] in its Elizabethan sense of someone who is the same nationality as the speaker, but not from the speaker’s immediate area.” All the world seemed foreign to the backsettlers except their neighbors and kin.2
The people of the southern highlands would become famous in the nineteenth century for the intensity of their xenophobia, and also for the violence of its expression. In the early nineteenth century, they tended to detest great planters and abolitionists in equal measure. During the Civil War some fought against both sides. In the early twentieth century they would become intensely negrophobic and antisemitic. In our own time they are furiously hostile to both communists and capitalists. The people of the southern highlands have been remarkably even-handed in their antipathies—which they have applied to all strangers without regard to race, religion or nationality.
Behind these attitudes lay the same deep feelings of cultural anxiety and insecurity that had existed in most other colonial societies. These emotions were specially intense among the first generation. They reached their climax in the violent movement called the Regulation, which swept through the back settlements of North and South Carolina from 1765 to 1771. In both colonies, the Regulators were backcountry vigilantes who sought to impose order by force upon their region, and also attacked outsiders. Their actions were part of a cultural process which was common to all new colonies—an expression of feelings of cultural danger and loss.3
Another symptom of this attitude was a strong mood of cultural conservatism. From the seventeenth century to the twentieth, travelers in the backcountry often remarked upon the intensity of its attachment to ancestral ways. The Anglican missionary Charles Woodmason wrote in disgust, “They delight in their present low, lazy, sluttish, heathenish, hellish life, and seem not desirous of changing it.”4 That statement, without its pejoratives, described an instinctive conservatism which was also noted by other travelers and acknowledged by the backsettlers themselves. “We never let go of a belief once fixed in our minds,” wrote an Appalachian woman with an air of pride.5
This mood caused the backsettlers to cling tenaciously to the customs that they had carried from the borderlands of North Britain. The result was a complex process of continuity and change, similar in its form to that which occurred in other cultural regions of the New World, but different in its substance. Let us examine this subject in more detail, beginning with the speech ways which were carried to the American backcountry.
Backcountry Speech Ways:
Border Origins of Southern Highland Speech
In the United States, a distinctive family of regional dialects can still be heard throughout the Appalachian and Ozark mountains, the lower Mississippi Valley, Texas and the Southern Plains. It is commonly called southern highland or southern midland speech.1
This American speech way is at least two centuries old. It was recognized in the colonies even before the War of Independence, and identified at first in ethnic rather than regional terms, as “Scotch-Irish speech.” In the backcountry, it rapidly became so dominant that other ethnic stocks in this region adopted it as their own. As early as 1772, a newspaper advertisement reported a runaway African slave named Jack who was said to “speak the Scotch-Irish dialect.”2
The earliest recorded examples of this “Scotch-Irish” speech were strikingly similar to the language that is spoken today in the southern highlands, and has become familiar throughout the western world as the English of country western singers, transcontinental truckdrivers, cinematic cowboys, and backcountry politicians.
This southern highland speech has long been very distinctive for its patterns of pronunciation. It says whar for where, thar for there, hard for hired, critter for creature, sartin for certain, a-goin for going, hit for it, he-it for hit, far for fire, deef for deaf, pizen for poison, nekkid for naked, eetch for itch, boosh for bush, wrassle for wrestle, chaney for china, chaw for chew, poosh for push, shet for shut, ba-it for bat, be-it for be, narrer for narrow, winder for window, widder for widow, and young-uns for young ones.3
Its grammar also differs in many details from other English dialects. Verb forms include constructions such as he come in, she done finished, they growed up, the plural they is judged, the interrogative you wasn’t there, was you, the emphatic he done did it, and the use of hoove as a past participle of heave. The indefinite article as she had a one frequently occurred in the southern highlands, as did the emphatic double negative, he don’t have none.4 It also used prepositions in a curious ways. In the early nineteenth century, James Parton recorded examples such as “He went till Charleston” and “there never was seen the like of him for mischief.” Par-ton wrote, “ … these are specimens of their talk.”5
Southern highland speech also has its own distinctive vocabulary in words such as fornenst (next to), skift (dusting of snow), fixin (getting ready to do something), brickle (brittle), swan (swear), hant (ghost), hate (it ain’t worth a hate), nigh (near), man (husband), cute (attractive), scawmy (misty), lowp (jump), lettin’on (pretend), sparkin (courtin), hippin (a baby’s diaper), bumfuzzled (confused), scoot (slide) and honey as a term of endearment.6
This was an earthy dialect. The taboos of Puritan English had little impact on Southern highland speech until the twentieth century. Sexual processes and natural functions were freely used in figurative expressions. Small children, for example, were fondly called “little shits” as a term of endearment. A backcountry granny would say kindly to a little child, “Ain’t you a cute little shit.”7 Sexual terms also frequently appeared in backcountry place names, before the Victorians erased them from the maps of this region. In Lunenberg County, Virginia, two small streams were named Tickle Cunt Branch and Fucking Creek.8
Scholars generally agree that this language developed from the “northern” or “Northumbrian” English that was spoken in the lowlands of Scotland, in the North of Ireland, and in the border counties of England during the seventeenth and early eighteenth century.9 Every vocabulary word which we have noted as typical of American backcountry speech also appears in word lists collected in the English border counties of Cumberland and Westmorland during the nineteenth century. W. Dickson observed, for example, that man was “the term by which a Cumbrian wife refers to her husband,” as in “stand by your man.” He noted that honey was “a term of endearment expressive of great regard” in the English border counties, northern Ireland and the southern lowlands. Dickson and others recorded in Cumbria usages such as let on for tell, scawmy for thick or misty, cute for attractive, nigh for near, fixin for getting ready, and lowp for jump, hoove as a past participle for heave, and lang sen or langseyne for long since. This emphatic double negative had long been common in border speech. One Northumbrian gentleman wrote to another, “I assure your honour I never sold none.”10
In North Britain, this speech way tended to be broadly similar on both sides of the border. One early nineteenth century student of speech in Cumberland and Westmorland observed that “in the Border and all along the verge of the old Marches or debateable lands the speech of the people is completely Scotch, in everything, excepting that there is but little tone.”11 North of the border, another speech-scholar described the accent of the Scottish lowlands as “nothing more than a corruption of that which is now spoke … in all the northern counties of England.”12
This border dialect became the ancester of a distinctive variety of American speech which still flourishes in the southern highlands of the United States. The process of transmission was complex. Southern highland speech was not merely an archaic North British form—this was not a simple story of stasis and replication. New words were required to describe the American environment, and many were coined in the backcountry. Other expressions were borrowed from Indians, Spanish, French and Germans. But the strongest ingredients were the speech ways of North Britain in the seventeenth century.
Backcountry Building Ways:
Border Origins of Cabin and Cowpen
As early as the mid-eighteenth century, travelers also found a characteristic style of vernacular architecture in the Appalachian highlands. “These people live in open log cabins with hardly a blanket to cover them.” Charles Woodmason observed in 1767.1 Log cabins had not been much used by English colonists in Massachusetts, Virginia or the Delaware Valley during the seventeenth century and were not invented on the American frontier. The leading authority on this subject, H. B. Shurtleff, concludes after long study that the log cabin was first introduced by Scandinavians, and popularized mainly by Scots-Irish settlers in the eighteenth century. “The log cabin did not commend itself to the English colonists,” Shurtleff wrote. “The Scotch Irish who began coming over in large numbers after 1718 seem to have been the first … to adopt it.”2
The historiography of the log cabin has centered mostly on the history of the log, but at least equally important is the history of the cabin. The trail of that topic leads from the American back-country to the British borderlands. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, cabin architecture was commonplace throughout the Scottish lowlands and northern Ireland, and also in the English counties of Cumberland, Westmorland and Northumberland, but not often in the south of England. Travelers in the border country expressed surprise at the state of housing they found there. One soldier from the south of England, marching north near Duns a few miles beyond the river Tweed, noted that the “husbandmen’s houses … resemble our swine coates, few or none of them have more storeys than one, and that very low and covered usually with clods of earth, the people and their habits are suitable to the dwellings.”3
Small and impermanent houses were common throughout North Britain, in part because the system of land tenure gave no motive for improvement. An historian of Scotland wrote in 1521:
In Scotland, the houses of the country people are small, as it were, cottages, and the reason is this: they have no permanent holdings, but hired only, or in lease for four or five years, at the pleasure of the lord of the soil; therefore do they not dare to build good houses, though stone abound, neither do they plant trees or hedges for their orchards, nor do they dung their land; and this is no small loss and damage to the whole realm.4
On the borders, this factor was compounded by chronic insecurity. There, cottages became cabins of even more primitive construction. The word “cabin” itself was a border noun that meant any sort of rude enclosure, commonly built of the cheapest materials that came to hand: turf and mud in Ireland, stone and dirt in Scotland, logs and clay in America.5
Within these structures, raised beds were uncommon as late as 1582, when George Buchanan wrote of his fellow Scots, “In their houses, also, they lie upon the ground; strewing fern or heath, on the floor, with the roots downward, and the leaves turned up. In this manner they form a bed so pleasant that it may vie in softness with the finest down, while in salubrity it far exceeds it.”6
In the American backcountry, the first emigrants from the borderlands began by building earthen cabins which one of them described as “dirt houses or rather like potato houses, to take their families into.” Roofs were made of poles and sand, with catastrophic consequences in a heavy storm. “The rain quickly penetrated through between the poles and brought down the sand that covered over, which seemed to threaten to cover us alive … I believe we all sincerely wished ourselves again at Belfast.”7 These cabins of dirt and stone soon yielded to log cabins which were better suited to the climate and resources of the New World. But no matter what the materials happened to be, the cabin idea remained much the same.8
The interior design of these cabins was similar on both sides of the Atlantic. Rectangular walls enclosed a single room in which an entire family lived together. The floors were usually of hard-packed dirt. The walls had a few simple openings for windows, and doors were placed on both the front and back walls for quick exits. Some of these structures had a firepit and a hole in the roof; others had a rough open fireplace on the gable end.9
Backcountry cabins had a standard size. Many were between sixteen and seventeen feet long. This dimension had been common in northern England, where it was taken from an old unit of measure variously called a rod, lug, pole, or perch, normally five and a half yards long. It had been used in the mother country for “coppice cutting” of saplings which were carefully regulated by local folk law. Those customs were preserved in log-cabin building for many years in the New World.10
Methods of construction also tended to be much the same on both sides of the water. The spaces between the logs or other materials were “daubed” with clay. In the English border county of Cumberland, this was done in a communal event called a “clay-daubin” where neighbors and friends of a newly married couple came together and built them a cabin with weathertight walls. The work was directed by men called daubers.11 The same technique of wattle and clay daubing (sometimes called wattle and funk) was widely used in the American backcountry. In 1753, for example, James Patton had two “round log houses” on his Shenandoah farm, with “clapboard roofs, two end log chimnies, all funcked and daubed both inside and out.”12
Larger dwellings in the backcountry tended to be several small cabins built close together, rather than buildings of a different type. The traveler Johann Schoepf observed in 1784:
Thus are built gradually a good many small houses and cabins, commonly without the assistance of carpenters, patched together by the people themselves and their negroes; this being an easier method than to put together a large house all at once. One often sees such little houses growing up where there is neither material nor capital for bringing them together in one solid house.13
A common practice was to raise two log structures side by side, with an open breezeway covered by a simple roof. In Appalachia, this was called a dog-trot cabin. The same plan had long been used in Britain, where breezeways were widely known.14 Other
The log house did not spring spontaneously from the American forest. It was a type of vernacular architecture that had been carried out of Europe by Scandinavians, Germans and especially North British borderers. Log-building was common to all of these ethnic groups, but the idea of the cabin was brought from the borderlands. The choice of materials changed in the forests of the New World, where log walls and wooden roofs replaced stone and thatch. But the cabin plans and proportions remained very much the same. Many other forms of log architecture also appeared in America—solid New England garrison forts, fragile Swedish log houses, dovetailed Finnish plank buildings, and big German Blockhausen—but the classic American log cabin came from North Britain.
plans were the saddle-bag, in which two adjacent cabins shared a single chiminey stack; and the “double pen,” in which they had a wall in common. These also had been known in Britain.15
Cabin architecture was striking for its roughness and impermanence. It was a simple style of building, suitable to a migratory people with little wealth, few possessions and small confidence in the future. It was also an inconspicuous structure, highly adapted to a violent world where a handsome building was an invitation to disaster. In that respect, cabin architecture was an expression of the insecurity of life in the northern borders.16
The cabin was also the product of a world of scarcity. It was a style of vernacular architecture created by deep and grinding poverty through much of north Britain during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. In that barren country, cabins made of earth and stone were an adaptation to an environment in which other building materials were rare.
Cabin architecture was also a style of building well suited to a people who had a strong sense of family and a weak sense of individual privacy. Travelers from the south of England expressed horror at the lack of respect for privacy. Much the same observations were also made in the American backcountry. “They sleep altogether in common in one room, and shift and dress openly without ceremony,” Woodmason wrote, “ … nakedness is counted as nothing.” Sometimes there was not even a bed. William
Byrd described one backcountry family that “pigged lovingly together” on the floor.17
In the eighteenth century, these cabins began to rise throughout the American backcountry wherever migrants from North Britain settled. The strong resemblance of these houses to the vernacular architecture of the borders was noted by travelers who knew both places. One English traveler noted of a Scots-Irish settlement in the backcountry of Pennsylvania that the people lived in “paltry log houses, and as dirty as in the north of Ireland, or even Scotland.”18
Cabin architecture was not static in its new environment. Folklorists have studied in fascinating detail the hewing of cabin logs, the notching of corners, the development of floor plans and the refinement of fenestration. This was mostly a form of cultural involution, in which things changed by becoming more elaborately the same.19
The architecture of the cabin itself was merely one part of an entire regional vernacular which also included other structures. Barns and stables were crude, impermanent shelters, often made of saplings and boughs—a method widely used in the border country.20 Cattle were kept in simple enclosures called cowpens, descended from border “barmkins” which had been built for centuries in North Britain. Historians Bouch and Jones note that “the basis of medieval settlement appears to have been the ‘barmkin,’ a sort of corral or stockade, where behind a timber fence, cattle and dependents could shelter, defended by menfolk.” Cowpens became very common throughout the southern highlands in the eighteenth century. One such area in the Carolina upcountry became the site of the battle of Cowpens during the American War for Independence.21
In North Britain the architecture of cabin and cowpen began to be abandoned during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as violence diminished and prosperity increased. The vernacular architecture that one finds throughout the region today was a later development. “In the seventeenth century,” one local historian writes, “the statesmen had begun to build better houses, in imitation of Jacobean manor halls, and evolved a type of their own—the low, rough-cast building with porch and pent-house, a dead-nailed door and massive threshwood, mullioned windows, and behind the rannel-balk a great open fire-spit where peat burned on the cobble-paved hearth.”22
But the architecture of cabin and cowpens persisted for many generations in the American backcountry. As late as 1939 there were 270,000 occupied log cabins in the United States. Many were in the southern highlands. In the county of Halifax, Virginia, 42 percent of all houses were log cabins as recently as World War II.23
Even today an architecture of impermanence survives in new forms such as prefabricated houses and mobile homes, which are popular throughout the southern highlands. The mobile home is a cabin on wheels—small, cheap, simple and temporary. The materials have changed from turf and logs to plastic and aluminum, but in its conception the mobile home preserves an architectural attitude that was carried to the backcountry nearly three centuries ago.
Backcountry Family Ways:
Border Ideas of Clan and Kin
The family ways of the backcountry, like its speech and building ways, were also brought from the borderlands of North Britain and adapted to a new American environment with comparatively little change. “The conquest of the back parts,” writes Carl Bridenbaugh, “was achieved by families. … The fundamental social unit, the family, was preserved intact … in a transplanting and reshuffling of European folkways.”1
From the perspective of an individual within this culture, the structure of the family tended to be a set of concentric rings, in which the outermost circles were thicker and stronger than among other English-speaking people. Beyond the nuclear core, beyond even the extended circle, there were two rings which were unique to this culture. One was called the derbfine. It encompassed all kin within the span of four generations. For many centuries, the laws of North Britain and Ireland had recognized the derbfine as a unit which defined the descent of property and power. It not only connected one nuclear family to another, but also joined one generation to the next.
Beyond the derbfine lay a larger ring of kinship which was called the clan in North Britain. We think of clans today mainly in connection with the Scottish Highlands. But they also existed in the lowlands, northern Ireland and England’s border counties where they were a highly effective adaptation to a world of violence and chronic insecurity.
The clans of the border were not precisely the same as those of the Scottish Highlands, and very different from the Victorian contrivances of our own time. They had no formal councils, tartans, sporrans, bonnets or septs. But they were clannish in the most fundamental sense: a group of related families who lived near to one another, were conscious of a common identity, carried the same surname, claimed descent from common ancestors and banded together when danger threatened.
Some of these border clans were very formidable. The Armstrongs, one of the largest clans on the Cumbrian border in the sixteenth century, were reputed to be able to field 3,000 mounted men, and were much feared by their neighbors. The Grahams held thirteen towers on the western border in 1552, and bid defiance to their foes. The Rutherfords and Halls were so violent that royal officials in 1598 ordered no quarter to be given to anyone of those names. The Johnston-Johnson clan adorned their houses with the flayed skins of their enemies the Maxwells in a blood feud that continued for many generations.2
The migration from North Britain to the backcountry tended to become a movement of clans. A case in point was the family of Robert Witherspoon, a South Carolinian of Border-Scots descent. Witherspoon recalled:
My grandfather and grandmother were born in Scotland about the [year] 1670. They were cousins and both of one name. His name was John and hers was Janet. They lived in their younger years in or near Glasgow and in 1695 they left Scotland and settled in Ireland in the county of Down … where he lived in good circumstances and in good credit until the year 1734, [when] he removed with his family to South Carolina.
When Witherspoon used the word “family” he meant not merely a nuclear or extended family but an entire clan. His grandparents, their seven children, at least seventeen grandchildren and many uncles and cousins all sailed from Belfast Lough to America and settled together in the same part of the southern backcountry. Witherspoon described their exodus in detail:
We did not all come in one ship nor at one time. My uncles William James and David Wilson, and their families with Uncle Gavin left Belfast in the beginning of the year 1732 and Uncle Robert followed us in 36.3
Here was a classic example of serial migration or stream migration which was common in the peopling of the backcountry. A few clan members opened a path for others, and were followed by a steady stream of kin.
These North British border clans tended to settle together in the American backcountry. An example was the Alexander clan. In North Carolina’s Catawba County, the first United States Census of 1790 listed 300 nuclear families named Alexander. Most were blood relations. Similar concentrations appeared throughout the backcountry—the Polks of Mecklenberg, the Calhouns of Long Cane, the Grahams of Yadkin, and the Crawfords of upper Georgia, to name but four examples.
These concentrations of kinsmen, all bearing the same surname, created endless onomastic confusion. We are told that in Catawba County, “so numerous were the tribe of the Alexanders that they had to be designated by their office, their trade or their middle name.” The most eminent Alexander was called “Governor
Nat” to distinguish him from “Red Head Nat” and “Fuller Nat.” This became a common custom throughout the southern highlands.4
The clan system spread rapidly throughout the southern highlands, and gradually came to include English and German settlers as well as North Britons, because it worked so well in the new environment. When George Gilmer compiled his classic history of upper Georgia, he organized his book by clans, beginning with the Gilmers and moving to others in order of their kinship with the author. He specifically described these groups as clans, and wrote that their members “called each other cousin, and the old people uncle and aunt. They lived in the most intimate social way—meeting together very often.”5
The internal structure of the clan was not what some modern observers have imagined. Historian Ned Landsman writes, “ … among the distinctive features of clan organization was the emphasis on collateral rather than lineal descent. In the theory of clan relationships, all branches of the family—younger as well as older, female as well as male—were deemed to be of equal importance. This fit in well with the mobility of the countryside, which prevented the formation of ‘lineal families’ in which sons succeeded to their fathers’ lands.”6
Admission by marriage was a process of high complexity. “When a Scottish man or woman took a spouse who was not of Scottish descent,” Landsman writes, “the whole family could be absorbed into the ‘Scottish’ community.”7 But when the bride had belonged to a rival clan, then the question of loyalty became more difficult. Generally a new bride left her own kin, and joined those of her husband. Elaborate customs regulated the relationship between the wife and the family she had joined by marriage. These customs were highly complex, but by and large they established the principle that marriage ties were weaker than blood ties. One marriage contract in Westmorland explicitly stated that a newly married wife could never sit in her mother-in-law’s seat.8
In many cases the husband and wife both came from the same clan. In the Cumbrian parish of Hawkshead, for example, both the bride and groom bore the same last names in 25 percent of all marriages from 1568 to 1704. Marriages in the backcountry, like those on the borders, also occurred very frequently between kin.9
Within these family networks, nuclear households were highly cohesive, drawing strength from the support of other kin groups round about them. Landsman writes: “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. Rather than a deterrent, mobility was an essential component of community life.” The effect was reinforced by exchanges of land, by rotations of children, and by chain migrations.10 The clan was not an alternative to the nuclear family, but its nursery and strong support. The pattern of cohesion was different from the nuclear families of Puritans and Quakers which had exceptionally strong internal bonds, powerfully reinforced by ethical and religious teachings. Among the North Britons the clan system provided an external source of cohesion—supporting each nuclear family from the outside like a system of external buttresses.
Nuclear households were large in the backcountry—among the largest in British America during the eighteenth century. The Anglican missionary Charles Woodmason wrote with his usual mixture of fact and prejudice, “ … there’s not a cabin but has ten or twelve young people in it … in many cabins you will see ten or fifteen children—children and grand children of one size—and the mother looking as young as the daughter.”11
Woodmason’s account was exaggerated, but other evidence confirms the same general pattern. North Carolina’s governor Arthur Dobbs, who had served as surveyor general of Ireland, took his own informal census of household size in the backcountry, and found that of thirty households on Rocky River, near the boundary of North and South Carolina, there were “not less than from five or six to ten children in each family.”12
In the first comprehensive census of the backcountry, taken in 1800, fertility ratios in the southern highlands were 40 percent higher than in the Delaware Valley, and higher also than on the northern frontier. An unusually large proportion of backcountry households were intact, with both husband and wife present. Many were also joint households, with more than one nuclear family living under the same roof. As late as 1850 one-third of all households in the southern highlands included members who were not of the primary nuclear group.13
There was no “emergence of the modern nuclear family” in this region, through its first two hundred years. The very opposite was the case. As time passed, clans became stronger rather than weaker in the southern highlands. In the early twentieth century, a mountain woman wrote:
All the children in the district are related by blood in one degree or another. Our roll-call includes Sally Mary and Cripple John’s Mary and Tan’s Mary, all bearing the same surname; and there is, besides, Aunt Rose Mary and Mary-Jo, living yon side the creek. There are different branches of the Rogers family—Clay and Frank, Red Jim and Lyin’ Jim and Singin’ Jim and Black Jim Rogers—in this district, their kin intermarried until no man could write their pedigree or ascertain the exact relation of their offspring to each other. This question, however, does not disturb the children in the least. They never address each other as cousin; they are content to know that uncle Tan’s smokehouse is the resource of all in time of famine; that Aunt Martha’s kind and strong hands are always to be depended on when one is really ill; that Uncle Filmore plays the fiddle at all the dances, and Uncle Dave shoes all the mules owned by the tribe.14
These clans fostered an exceptionally strong sense of loyalty, which a modern sociologist has called “amoral familism,” from the ethical perspective of his own historical moment.15 In its own time and place, it was not amoral at all, but a moral order of another kind, which recognized a special sense of obligation to kin. That imperative was a way of dealing with a world where violence and disorder were endemic. Long after it had lost its reason for being, family loyalty retained its power in the American backcountry.
An example was the persistence of the family feud, which continued for many centuries in the southern highlands. These feuds flowed from the fact that families in the borderlands and back-country were given moral properties which belonged mainly to individuals in other English-speaking cultures. Chief among them were the attributes of honor and shame. When one man forfeited honor in the backcountry, the entire clan was diminished by his loss. When one woman was seduced and abandoned, all her “menfolk” shared the humiliation. The feuds of the border and the backcountry rose mainly from this fact. When “Devil Anse” Hatfield was asked to explain why he had murdered so many McCoys, he answered simply, “A man has a right to defend his family.” And when he spoke of his family, he meant all Hatfields and their kin. This backcountry folkway was strikingly similar to the customs of the borderers.16
Historians of a materialist persuasion have suggested that the feud was a modern invention in the southern highlands. One has called it a “response to industrialism.” Another has interpreted it as the product of changes in the means of production. These modern processes would indeed provide many occasions for feuds.17 But they were not the cause of the feuding itself, which had deeper cultural roots. Other historians have argued that southern feuds were mainly a legacy of the Civil War. But feuds occurred in the backcountry before 1861. They were part of the brutal violence of the American Revolution in the backcountry. Strong continuities in family feuding may be traced from the borders of North Britain to the American backcountry—a pattern that persisted throughout the southern highlands even into the twentieth century.18
Backcountry Marriage Ways:
Border Origins of Bridal Customs
Marriage customs among the people of the backcountry also derived from border roots. An ancient practice on the British borders was the abduction of brides. In Scotland, Ireland and the English border counties, the old custom had been elaborately regulated through many centuries by ancient folk laws which required payment of “body price” and “honor price.” Two types of abduction were recognized: voluntary abduction in which the bride went willingly but without her family’s prior consent; and involuntary abduction in which she was taken by force.1 Both types of abduction were practiced as late as the eighteenth century. It was observed of the borderlands and Ulster during this period that “abductions, both ‘under the impulse of passion and from motives of cupidity,’ were frequent.”2
The border custom of bridal abduction was introduced to the American backcountry. In North and South Carolina during the eighteenth century, petitioners complained to authorities that “their wives and daughters were carried captives” by rival clans.3
Even future President of the United States Andrew Jackson took his wife by an act of voluntary abduction. Rachel Donelson Robards was unhappily married to another man at the time. A series of complex quarrels followed, in which Rachel Robards made her own preferences clear, and Andrew Jackson threatened her husband Lewis Robards that he would “cut his ears out of his head.” Jackson was promptly arrested. But before the case came to trial the suitor turned on the husband, butcher knife in hand, and chased him into the canebreak. Afterward, the complaint was dismissed because of the absence of the plaintiff—who was in fact running for his life from the defendant. Andrew Jackson thereupon took Rachel Robards for his own, claiming that she had been abandoned. She went with Jackson willingly enough; this was a clear case of voluntary abduction. But her departure caused a feud that continued for years.4
For a cultural historian, the responses to this event were more
The old border custom of bridal abduction continued in the American back-country. The petitions of the Regulators complained of frequent abductions, and even members of the border ascendancy resorted to this practice. The leading example was Andrew Jackson and Rachel Donelson. This was a case of voluntary abduction; Rachel went willingly. But her departure started a feud that continued many years. It later became an electioneering issue in other parts of the United States, but in the backcountry, Rachel and Andrew Jackson were not condemned by their own culture. Most backcountry marriages, of course, were not abductions, but abduction rituals long remained an important part of marriage customs in this region.
important than the act itself. In later years, Jackson’s methods of courtship became a campaign issue, and caused moral outrage in other parts of the republic; but in the backcountry he was not condemned at the time. Historian Robert Remini writes, “One thing is certain. Whatever Rachel and Andrew did, and whenever they did it, their actions did not outrage the community.”5
Most backcountry courtships were not as primitive as this. The strict Protestantism of Scottish and Ulster Presbyterians created a heavy overlay of moral restraint. But many backcountry marriages included mock abduction rituals that kept the old customs alive in a vestigial way. A wedding in the back-settlements was apt to be a wild affair. On the appointed day, the friends of the groom would set out for the wedding in a single party, mounted and heavily armed. They would stop at cabins along the way to fire a volley and pass around the whiskey bottle, then gallop on to the next. Their progress was playfully opposed by the bride’s friends, also heavily armed, who felled trees along the road, and created entanglements of grape vines and branches to block the passage of the groomsmen.
Sometimes an ambuscade was formed by the way side, an unexpected discharge of several guns took place, so as to cover the wedding company with smoke. Let the reader imagine the scene which followed this discharge, the sudden spring of the horses, the shriek of the girls, and the chivalric bustle of their partners to save them from falling. Sometimes, in spite of all that could be done to prevent it, some were thrown to the ground; if a wrist, elbow or ankle happened to be sprained, it was tied with a handkerchief, and little more was thought or said about it.6
The two parties then came together and staged a contest in which their champions raced for a beribboned bottle of whisky. The results were celebrated with another explosive feu de joie.
Two young men would single out to run for the bottle; the worse the path, the more logs, brush and deep hollows, the better, as obstacles afforded an opportunity for the greatest display of intrepidity and horsemanship. The English fox chase, in point of danger to their riders and their horses, was nothing to this race for the bottle. The start was announced by an Indian yell, when logs, brush, mud holes, hill and glen, were speedily passed by the rival ponies. The bottle was always filled for the occasion, so that there was no use for judges; for the first who reached the door was presented with the prize, with which he returned in triumph to the company. On approaching them he announced his victory over his rival by a shrill whoop. At the head of the troop he gave the bottle to the groom and his attendants, and then to each pair in succession, to the rear of the line, giving each a dram, and then putting the bottle in the bosom of his hunting shirt, took his station in the company.
Finally, both parties would assemble with invited guests from the neighborhood. These were “bidden weddings,” which could be attended only by invitation. “It often happened,” Kercheval remembered, “that some neighbors or relations, not being asked to the wedding, took offence; and the mode of revenge adopted by them on such occasions, was that of cutting off the manes, foretops and tails of the horses of the wedding company.”7
When all were assembled, the bride would be brought into the room by the best man—not, significantly, by her father. The bride and groom put their right hands behind their backs, and their gloves were ceremonially removed by the best man and the bridesmaid, who took care to do so at exactly the same moment.
After the ceremony, there were more volleys, much whooping, and an abundance of kissing, drinking and high hilarity. Then a dinner and dance would take place, with everyone joining in wild reels, sets and jigs while a fiddler scraped frantically in the corner. Before the wedding dinner, another mock-abduction was staged indoors; the bride was stolen by one party and “recovered” by the other. During the dinner itself the party played still another abduction-game called stealing the shoe. While dinner went on, the young people crawled about beneath the table and some of the groomsmen tried to steal the bride’s shoe while others sought to stop them. Four of the most beautiful girls and the most handsome men were appointed “waiters” and had the honor of protecting her while at the same time they served the dinner. Their badge of office was an exquisitely embroidered white apron, on which the bride and her family had labored for many weeks before the wedding. If the bride lost her shoe, she could not dance until it was recovered by her champions in mock combat.
As the sun set upon this turbulent scene, the couple retired to their chamber, while hordes of well-wishers crowded round the bed and offered ribald advice. Yet another contest was staged at the foot of the marriage bed. After the couple was placed beneath the covers, the bridesmaids took turns throwing a rolled stocking over their shoulders at the bride. Then the groomsmen did the same, aiming at the groom. The first to hit the mark was thought to be the next to marry. These games continued well into the night. When the wedding party finally left the chamber, a “cali-thumpian serenade” took place outside—the bells and whistles punctuated by uninhibited gunplay that sometimes caused a back-country wedding to be followed by a funeral.8 As morning approached, a bottle of Black Betty was sent to revive the bride and groom and the merriment continued, sometimes for several days.9
All this was very similar to marriage customs in the borders of north Britain, as appears in a poetic description by the “Cumberland bard” Robert Anderson:
They sing of a weddin’ at Worton
Where aw was fehgt, fratchin’ and fun,
Feegn! sec a yen we’ve hed at Codbeck
As niver was under the sun.
The breydegruim was weaver Joe Beyley
He com’ frae about Lowther Green;
The breyde Johnny Dalton’s h’sh dowter,
And Betty was weel to be seen.10
In this scene, “Betty” was Black Betty, the whisky bottle.
A good deal of wealth changed hands on these occasions. Affluent families in Cumbria kept the custom of marriage portions, often very large, which were paid over a period of several years.11 In families too poor to afford a portion, other marriage customs were carried from the border to the backcountry—the “bidden wedding,” and “bridewain.” The former was explained by a Cumbrian antiquarian:
Some of the Cumbrians, particularly those who are in poor circumstances, have, on their entrance into the married state, what is called a BIDDING (invitation) or BIDDEN WEDDINGS, at which a pecuniary collection is made among the company for the purpose of setting the wedded pair forward in the world. It is always attended with music & dancing; and the fiddler when the contributions begin takes care to remind the assembly their duties, by notes imitative of the following couplet:
Come my friends, and freely offer
Here’s a bride that has no toucher.12
Another custom called bridewain had a similar social function in this culture:
In Cumberland … the friends of a new married couple assemble and are treated with cold pies, fermenty and ale; at the close of the day the bride and bridegroom are placed in two chairs in the open air, or in a large barn, the bride with a pewter dish on her knee, half covered with a napkin. The company put offerings into a dish—offerings often amount to a considerable sum. The word wain was said to be ancient custom in the north.13
Even in poor border families, much was spent on weddings. One antiquarian wrote of the borderers, “They intermarry one with another, and will spend all they have in the wedding week, and then go begging.”14
Marriage customs in the American backcountry bore a striking resemblance to those of the British border lands—complete even to the abductions and mock abductions, the competitions and mock combats, bidden weddings and bridewain, the wild feasts and heavy drinking, wedding reels and jigs, the rituals of the wedding chamber, and the constant presence of Black Betty. Some of these customs were shared by other cultures. But in their totality the backcountry wedding was a unique adaptation of ancient border customs to the conditions of an American region.
The distinctiveness of this system also appeared in quantitative indicators. Age at marriage in the backcountry was different from every other American region. Both brides and grooms were very young. South Carolinian David Ramsay wrote of the backcountry, “ … marriages are early and generally prolific. In one district, containing upwards of 17,000 white inhabitants, there is not one woman at the age of twenty-five who is neither wife or widow.”15 That impression has been solidly confirmed by statistical fact. Historian Mark Kaplanoff finds that in three districts of upcountry South Carolina during the eighteenth century, women married at the average age of nineteen; men at twenty-one. In no other region of British America did both sexes marry so early. Nowhere else were the ages of males and females so nearly the same.16
This was partly the result of a frontier environment, but not entirely so. Other frontiers were very different. And it is interesting to observe that of all the regions of England, age at marriage was lowest in the north—as much as three years below southern England. Here again, the backsettlers followed their ancestral ways.17
Backcountry Gender Ways:
Border Rituals of Love and Violence
In his account of backcountry marriages, Samuel Kercheval recorded another curious custom called the wedding toast. After dinner, as Black Betty passed from hand to hand, each male guest raised the bottle in his right fist and cried: “Here’s to the bride, thumping luck and big children!” Kercheval explained:
Big children, especially big sons, were of great importance, as we were few in number and engaged in perpetual hostility with the
Indians, the end of which no one could foresee. Indeed many of them seemed to suppose war was the natural state of man, and therefore did not anticipate any conclusion of it; every big son was therefore considered a young soldier.1
Here was the basis of gender relationships in the backcountry. The first principle was that men were warriors. The second was that women were workers. These ideas had long flourished on the borders of north Britain. When they were combined with the ethics of Christianity, the result was a gender system of high complexity which might best be described as a bundle of paradoxes.
One paradox concerned gender distinctions. In the backcountry, work roles were not as sharply divided by sex as in other English cultures. But at the same time, the people of the back-country had exceptionally clear-cut ideas of masculinity and feminity in manners, speech, dress, decorum and status.2
Travelers in the backcountry often reported that women and men routinely shared the heaviest manual labor. Both sexes worked together in the fields, not merely at harvest time but through the entire growing season. Women not only tended the livestock but also did the slaughtering of even the largest animals. Travelers were startled to observe delicate females knock down beef cattle with a felling ax, and then roll down their sleeves, remove their bloody aprons, tidy their hair, and invite their visitors to tea. Females also helped with the heavy labor of forest-clearing and ground-breaking. William Byrd noted that women in the back settlements were not merely “up to their elbows in housewifery,” but also busy with what other English cultures took to be a man’s work.3
Those customs have sometimes been explained as a response to the frontier environment. But they did not exist in quite the same way on the Puritan frontier, and the same patterns had long been observed by travelers in the borderlands of North Britain. One anonymous visitor to the counties of Cumberland and Westmorland wrote that wives of even landowners were expected to share equally in the heavy farm work. “These petty landowners work like slaves,” one traveler observed in 1766. “They cannot afford to keep a manservant, but husband, wife, sons and daughters all turn out to work in the fields.”4 An historian of Galloway wrote that on women “devolved almost every task of mean and painful drudgery.”5
In other respects, there was very little equality between husbands and wives in the British borderlands or the American back-country. The historical myth that the frontier created a spirit of equality among the sexes could not be farther from the truth. Backcountry families were decidedly male-dominant—much more so than in New England or the Delaware Valley. The male was expected to be the head of the household; his consort was required to do his bidding quietly, cheerfully and without complaint. This was a traditional folkway among the border people. Of a woman’s place in Ulster, Leyburn writes, “the status of women, whether legal or actual, improved not a whit during the seventeenth century. … they were disciplined in the churches, but their life must otherwise have been the traditional one of subordination to men in a patriarchal society.”6 Precisely the same patterns appeared in the American backcountry families. Arthur Calhoun remembered from the experience of his own Appalachian childhood that “the Scots-Irish … were marked by family loyalty. The women led hard lives but were patient and submissive. The person familiar with the backcountry of western Pennsylvania today [c. 1917] will note apparent survivals of the last two primitive features.”7
More than in other English-speaking cultures, the identity of backcountry women was submerged in the status of their husbands. An example appeared on a gravestone. When Patrick Calhoun erected a memorial to his wife, the name he placed at the top was not hers but his. The inscription read:
Patk Calhoun Esq
In memory of Mrs. Catherine Calhoun
Aged 76 years who with 22 others
was here murdered by the Indians, the
First of February 1760.8
George Gilmer remembered many similar vignettes of gender relations in this society. He told one such story about John Marks and his pretty bride Mary Tomkins. One day the husband was building a log cabin:
His wife came to the place, and began objecting to the manner in which he was fashioning what he was doing. He listened to her for some time, and reasoned the matter with her; but she still insisted upon having the house made according to her own notions. He pulled off his breeches, and threw them down to her, telling her to put them on and wear them.”9
There was yet another paradox in the tone of these relations—which were filled with love and violence both at the same time. Gilmer told another tale of a hard-drinking backsettler who called himself Colonel Nicholas Johnson. One day, Colonel Johnson got drunk and assaulted his daughter and wife:
Col. Johnson threw one of his daughters on the floor, and made such a plausible feint that he intended to take her life, by sticking his knife into the floor near her head, that his wife interfered to save her child. He immediately let go his daughter, and attempted to seize his wife. She fled from the house to Broad River, about half a mile distant. Whilst seated over the water, considering the question whether it were better to be or not to be, she was suddenly precipitated into the river, and turning her head, saw that her husband’s hand had done the deed. As soon as he perceived that his wife’s life was in imminent peril, his whole nature underwent a sudden revulsion. He was sober in a moment. Unable to swim, to have jumped into the water would have been certain destruction to both. He looked around with the quickness of thought for means to save her. He found nothing at hand, but a long weed. Extending it at once towards her, he spoke gently, and begged her to take hold. The voice of love never fails to find a vibrating chord in a woman’s heart. Her clothes held her up for a moment. She saw the change in her husband’s feelings, and did as she was implored to do.10
Love and violence together were common ingredients of back-country marriages—both expressed with an emotional intensity that rarely appeared in Massachusetts or the Delaware. Gilmer told another tale of love and violence in the backcountry family of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Meriwether:
His love for his wife was without intermission, and … his gallantry equalled his love. When she tired of sleeping on one side, and turned on the other, he always crossed over, if awake, that they might be ever face to face.
But Thomas Meriwether did not hesitate to use violence to dominate the woman he loved so deeply. Once he and his wife attended a camp meeting, and she began to be caught up in the process of conversion. “Tom Meriwether,” we are told, “became alarmed, lest his wife’s love might be drawn away from him, and placed upon what he took no interest in. He seized her by the arm, and led her forcibly away,” dragging her violently from the camp meeting.11
Despite these expressions of love, there was a great distance between men and women of the backcountry. A mountain woman wrote from hard experience of her own marriage:
A rift is set between the sexes at babyhood that widens with the passing of the years, a rift that is never closed even by the daily interdependence of a poor man’s partnership with his wife. Rare is a separation of a married couple in the mountains; the bond of perfect sympathy is rarer. … The pathos of the situation is none the less terrible because it is unconscious. They are so silent. They know so pathetically little of each other’s lives.
Of course the woman’s experience is the deeper; the man’s gain is in breadth of outlook. His ambition leads him to make drain after drain on the strength of his silent wingless mate. Her position means sacrifice, sacrifice and every sacrifice, for her man first, and then for her sons.12
Gender relations in the backcountry, like those of the borderlands, combined elements which have often coexisted in warrior cultures—clear-cut ideas of men as fighters and women as workers; exceptionally sharp distinctions between masculine and feminine roles; extreme male domination and female dependence within the family; intense expressions of love and violence between wives and husbands; and sometimes a great aching silent distance that kept them apart.
One is occasionally tempted to abandon the role of the historian and to frame what social scientists call a theory. Whenever a culture exists for many generations in conditions of chronic insecurity, it develops an ethic that exalts war above work, force above reason, and men above women. This pattern developed on the borders of North Britain, and was carried to the American backcountry, where it was reinforced by a hostile environment and tempered by evangelical Christianity. The result was a distinctive system of gender roles that continues to flourish even in our own time.
Backcountry Sex Ways:
The Border Celebration of Sensuality
On the subject of sex, the backsettlers tended to be more open than were other cultures of British America. Sexual talk was free and easy in the backcountry—more so than in Puritan Massachusetts or Quaker Pennsylvania, or even Anglican Virginia. So too was sexual behavior.
The Anglican missionary Charles Woodmason was astounded by the open sexuality of the backsettlers. “How would the polite people of London stare, to see the Females (many very pretty) …,” he wrote. “The young women have a most uncommon practice, which I cannot break them of. They draw their shift as tight as possible round their Breasts, and slender waists (for they are generally very finely shaped) and draw their Petticoat close to their Hips to show the fineness of their limbs—as that they might as well be in puri naturalibus—indeed nakedness is not censurable or indecent here, and they expose themselves often quite naked, without ceremony—rubbing themselves and their hair with bears’ oil and tying it up behind in a bunch like the indians—being hardly one degree removed from them. In a few years I hope to bring about a reformation.”1
The backsettlers showed very little concern for sexual privacy in the design of their houses or the style of their lives. “Nakedness is counted as nothing,” Woodmason remarked, “as they sleep altogether in common in one room, and shift and dress openly without ceremony … children run half naked. The Indians are better clothed and lodged.”2 Samuel Kercheval remembered that young men adopted Indian breechclouts and leggings, cut so that “the upper part of the thighs and part of the hips were naked. The young warrior, instead of being abashed by this nudity, was proud of his Indian-like dress,” Kercheval wrote. “In some few places I have seen them go into places of public worship in this dress.”3
Other evidence suggests that these surface impressions of back-country sexuality had a solid foundation in fact. Rates of prenuptial pregnancy were very high in the backcountry—higher than other parts of the American colonies. In the year 1767, Woodmason calculated that 94 percent of backcountry brides whom he had married in the past year were pregnant on their wedding day, and some were “very big” with child. He attributed this tendency to social customs in the back settlements:
Nothing more leads to this than what they call their love feasts and kiss of charity. To which feasts, celebrated at night, much liquor is privately carried, and deposited on the roads, and in bye paths and places. The assignations made on Sundays at the singing clubs, are here realized. And it is no wonder that things are as they are, when many young people have three, four, five or six miles to walk home in the dark night, with convoy, thro’ the woods? Or perhaps staying all night at some cabbin (as on Sunday nights) and sleeping together either doubly or promiscuously? Or a girl being mounted behind a person to be carried home, or any wheres. All this contributes to multiply subjects for the king in this frontier country, and so is wink’d at by the Magistracy and Parochial Officers.4
Another factor was a scarcity of clergy to perform marriages in the backcountry. But there was also a different explanation. Rates of illegitimacy and prenuptial pregnancy had long been higher in the far northwest of England than in any other part of that nation. The magnitude of regional differences was very great. Rates of bastardy in the northwest were three times higher than in the east of England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Regional disparities persisted from the beginning of parish registers to the twentieth century. Historian Peter Laslett notes that “in early Victorian times Cumberland … had the highest recordings [of bastardy] in the country.” Westmorland was very similar. High rates of illegitimacy and prenuptial pregnancy in the backcountry were not the necessary consequences of frontier conditions. Puritans also moved onto new lands in the northern colonies and continued to behave in puritanical ways. The same continuities appeared among the Quakers when they moved to the frontier. The sexual customs of the southern backcountry were similar to those of northwestern England.5
When prenuptial pregnancy occurred, customary responses in the backcountry differed from other regions. Where Puritans, Quakers and cavaliers launched formal prosecutions for fornication, the back settlers had a merry game and a good laugh. Kercheval remembered that a backcountry custom “adopted when the chastity of the bride was a little suspected, was that of setting up a pair of horns on poles or trees, on the route of the wedding company.”6
Another sort of sexual deviance was very rare in the backcountry. There were not many cases of seduction and abandonment, which was regarded not merely as a violation of a woman’s virtue but of her entire family’s honor. Such an act was thought to be a high crime, and any man who committed it was lucky to escape a lynching. Kercheval could remember but a single instance of this offense, in which reactions were so violent that “the life of the man was put in jeopardy by the resentment of the family to which the girl belonged … this crime could not take place without great personal danger from the brothers or other relations of the victim seduced, family honor being then estimated at a very high rate.”7 Some cases of this sort were settled by cash payments, without intervention of church or court. In 1770, for example, one backcountry diarist noted, “George Johnson made up with
Pegg Wright for ten pounds I hear.” Such a sum was sufficient to preserve the honor of a family, if not the virtue of its wayward daughter.8
The sexual customs of backcountry, like those of the North British borderers, were rigid in this respect. But in others, they were much more relaxed. An example was a sexual game called cockle bread, which were played by nubile girls in Westmorland. It was described by a disapproving Victorian folklorist as a “wanton sport of young wenches,” who would “get upon a Tableboard and then gather-up their knees and their coates as high as they can, and then they wabble to and fro with their buttocks,” singing ‘Up with your heels, down with your head; that is the way to make cockeldy bread.’”9
Here was an earthy and unrestrained celebration of animal sexuality that was distinctly different from the ways of Puritans, Quakers and even cavaliers. Once again we find another strong similarity between the British borderlands and the American backcountry.
Backcountry Child-naming Ways: Border Onomastics
Another important clue to backcountry culture was the naming of its children. The onomastic customs of these people were unique. Favored forenames in the backcountry included a mixture of biblical names (John was the top choice), Teutonic names (such as Robert or Richard), and the names of border saints (especially Andrew, Patrick, David). This combination did not exist in any other English-speaking culture.
Popular namesakes in the backcountry included Saint Andrew, an apostle who became the patron saint of Scotland. Also much in vogue was David, a name associated not only with its biblical bearer, but also with a seventh-century archbishop who became the patron saint of Wales, and with two early Scottish kings. Yet another favorite namesake was Saint Patrick, the legendary missionary-priest who converted Ireland to Christianity; his name was often used by Protestant as well as Catholic families throughout northern Ireland.
These saints’ names were rare in the other regional cultures of British America. Davids were few and far between in New England and the Delaware Valley; Puritans and Quakers were not amused by King David’s biblical antics. Patricks were uncommon in Anglican Virginia and nearly unknown in Puritan New England. Harvard College did not admit a single undergraduate named Patrick in all the years from 1636 to 1820. But in Cumberland Country, Pennsylvania, Patrick was the fourth most popular name on military muster rolls during the eighteenth century.1
The backsettlers sometimes used Celtic names such as Ewan (var. Ewen, Owen), Barry and Roy. They also had a taste for Scandinavian and Teutonic names unknown to other English-speaking cultures, such as Archibald and Ronald. Particular favorites in the American backcountry were the names of Scottish kings Alexander, Charles and James. Also popular were the names of brave warriors on both sides of the border, notably Wallace, Bruce, Percy and Howard. Nostalgic parents even named their children for border places such as Ross, Clyde, Carlisle, Tyne, Cumberland and Derry.2
These backcountry naming patterns had long existed on the borders of North Britain. But they were different from onomastic patterns in the south of England, and also from naming practices in the Gaelic-speaking parts of the Scottish Highlands and Catholic Ireland. The borderers did not often use forenames such as Douglas, Donald, Kenneth, Alan, Ian, Neil or Stewart which were favored by highlanders. Neither did they make much use of Gaelic Irish names such as Sean, Kathleen, Maureen or Sheila.3 Altogether, a complex border and backcountry combination of biblical names, Celtic names, Teutonic names, saints’ names, folk names, Scottish kings’ names and border warriors’ names was unique to this regional folk culture.
In another respect, however, backcountry naming customs were not unique. The descent of names from one generation to the next was very similar to the folkways of Virginia and the south of England, but different from Puritan and Quaker customs. Eldest sons in the backcountry tended to be named after grandfathers, and second or third sons after fathers, much as in tidewater Chesapeake families. An example was the family of Andrew Jackson (1767-1845). The future President was the second son of a Scots-Irish immigrant also named Andrew Jackson (1730-67), and grandson of Hugh Jackson (d. 1782), a weaver in the Irish town of Castlereagh. The naming rhythm ran as follows through three generations:
Precisely the same pattern had long prevailed in the northwestern counties of England, as well as in Scotland and northern Ireland. Another example was a Cumberland family (originally from the Isle of Man) which variously called itself McChristen and Christian:
This naming rhythm was much the same in every part of the border region—in the English counties of Cumberland and Westmorland, in the Scottish lowlands and also in northern Ireland. It was introduced to the American backcountry in the eighteenth century and persisted for a long time.4
A good example of this persistence was another presidential family, that of Zachary Taylor. His ancestors were an English border family from Carlisle in the county of Cumberland, who first settled in Virginia, and then moved west to Kentucky. The descent of names in the Taylor family ran as follows:5
In this respect, backcountry onomastics were much like those of the tidewater south. But in another curious naming custom, the backsettlers went their own way. From an early date they cultivated a spirit of onomastic individualism, sometimes with bizarre results. One famous border family of high status in the backcountry were the Hoggs, who later became one of richest and most cultivated families in Texas. One daughter, a lady of taste and refinement, was named Ima Hogg by her proud parents. Another example of onomastic individualism occurred in Oklahoma City, during the 1940s, where a woman named Hoyette White named her daughters Hoyette, Norvetta, Yerdith, Arthetta, Marlynne and Wilbarine White. A reporter was dispatched by the local newspaper to ask why she made those choices. Mrs. White explained, “When my mother saw I looked so like my father, she made a girl’s name out of the family name Hoyt and called me Hoyette. That started the names. When I named my own girls, I wanted names no one had ever had, and names that nobody would ever want. So I made them up.”6
Backcountry Child-rearing Ways: Building the Will
Backcountry families also had special ways of raising their young. Child-rearing customs in the southern highlands tended to be very different from those of New England Puritans, Pennsylvania Quakers and Virginia Anglicans—and yet similar to the folkways of the British borderlands.
This system of child rearing was also far removed from modern thinking on the subject. In cultural terms, one of its most important stages occurred before the baby was born. A world of extreme uncertainty required that the fates should be propitiated with the same care and attention that a suburban mother today studies the latest treatises on infant science. The entire community joined in these precautions, and the old grannies were consulted as urgently as a modern pediatrician:
What a plucking of herbs, what a consulting of signs and omens, both before and after the event! … The baby must wear a strong of corn-beads round its neck to facilitate teething, and later a bullet or coin to prevent nose-bleed. Its wee track must be printed in the first snow that falls, to ward off croup. The first woodtick that fastens itself to the little body is an omen, too; you must kill it on an axe or other tool if you wish baby to grow into a clever workman. If it be killed on a bell or banjo, or any clear-ringing substance, he will develop a voice for singing; if on a book, he will learn to speak “all kind o’ proper words,” all gifts highly esteemed in the mountains.1
No self-respecting mother neglected this form of prenatal and postnatal care.
After the baby was born, parents began the process which the modern world calls socialization. For backcountry boys, the object was not will-breaking as among the Puritans, or will-bending as in Virginia. The rearing of male children in the back settlements was meant to be positively will-enhancing. Its primary purpose was to foster fierce pride, stubborn independence and a warrior’s courage in the young. An unintended effect was to create a society of autonomous individuals who were unable to endure external control and incapable of restraining their rage against anyone who stood in their way.
A case in point was the childhood of young Andrew Jackson, the future seventh President of the United States. Important parts of his socialization in this oral culture were the stories that his mother told him. They were old border tales that celebrated courage, pride and independence. The games of his youth were contests for dominion—wrestling, running and fighting. A childhood friend remembered, “I could throw him three times out of four, but he would never stay throwed.”2
As a small boy, Jackson was remembered as “wild, frolicsome, mischievous, daring and reckless.” His upbringing left him quick to take offense, and with a mighty rage that burst upon its objects with explosive violence. As a young militiaman, he was described as “bold, dashing, fearless and mad upon his enemies.” That style of behavior was widely admired in the backcountry, where small boys were routinely taught to conduct themselves in the same way.3
This system of child rearing began by being highly indulgent and permissive. In both the British borderlands and the American backcountry, parents doted upon male children, with an intensity of feeling that startled observers. An example of this attitude was recorded in North Britain in the eighteenth century:
Harry Potts has got a son of which he’s very fond. … He got it in his arms the morning it was born, which was yesterday and said, “Honey, thou’s my darling and shalt want for nothing as long as I am able to work for thee.”4
This custom was carried to the back settlements, where infants received the same indulgent attention from both sexes—more than at any other stage of life. This tendency was remarked upon as early as 1782 by the Marquis de Chastelleux, who found child rearing in the southern highlands to be very different from that in his own nation. “They are very fond of their little ones, and care much less for their children,” he wrote after a tour of the back settlements. The same pattern continued to be observed even into the twentieth century.5
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, travelers such as Charles Woodmason complained constantly about the forwardness and freedom of backcountry children. His remarks were repeated by many other observers in the southern highlands. One wrote, “for three centuries … parents often look on it as evidence of spirit and smartness to see their children rudely insulting the quiet and often humble citizens of the country.” Similar descriptions were also written in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, by travelers and by the southern highlanders themselves. A mountain woman wrote in 1905, “ … most of the children hereabout run free as the fawns and cubs that they often capture for playmates.”6
After a small boy “dropped slips” and put on his first pair of breeches, he toddled after his parents and was allowed great freedom on the farm. At an early age, male children were given their own miniature weapons—an axe, a knife, a bow, even a childish gun. Daniel Drake recalled that as a child he was given a hatchet to “hack down saplings,” while his father did the “heavy chopping.” More than fifty years later, Drake remembered the joy that he felt in annihilating his first tree. “I loved it in proportion to the facility with which I could destroy it,” he wrote.7
Corporal punishment of children was condemned in the abstract, but much practiced in an intermittent way. A backcountry church in Lunenburg County, Virginia, considered the question, “Is it lawful to beat or whip servants or children … before the method that Christ laid down in the 18th Matthew?” and decided the issue in the negative by majority vote. Another doctrine of St. Matthew was explicitly ratified by this congregation: “Take heed that ye despise not one of these little ones.”8
But backcountry autobiographers also remembered terrific beatings received from frustrated fathers and mothers who found themselves equally incapable of controlling their children or restraining their own parental rage. These autobiographers also recalled their feelings of anger against what seemed to be parental tyranny. The result was a highly volatile process of child rearing: extremely permissive most of the time, but punctuated by acts of angry and illegitimate violence.
This problem of promiscuous violence in child rearing was compounded by alcohol. The diary of a school boy in Tennessee described the terror that the entire family felt whenever “papa was groggy.” All the members of the household conspired to dilute his whisky in hopes of diminishing the fury that caused “Papa” to beat and kick even his own infant children.9
Youngsters responded by running away, fighting back, or sometimes even trying to murder their parents. In 1805, when one North Carolina mother attempted to control her “large family of children,” they rose en masse and tried to kill her.10 From an early age, small boys were taught to think much of their own honor, and to be active in its defense. Honor in this society meant a pride of manhood in masculine courage, physical strength and warrior virtue. Male children were trained to defend their honor without a moment’s hesitation—lashing out instantly against their challengers with savage violence.
This method of child rearing was used mainly for boys. The daughters of the backcountry were raised in a different way. Mothers were expected to teach domestic virtues of industry, obedience, patience, sacrifice and devotion to others. Male children were taught to be self-asserting; female children were trained to be self-denying.
These backcountry child ways were not the product of slavery or the frontier. They were transplanted from the borders of North Britain, where they were yet another cultural adaptation to the endemic violence of that region. They were also similar to systems of socialization which have existed in warrior castes throughout the world.
This system of child rearing flourished in its new American environment. This backcountry held a different set of dangers, but they operated in the same way. Indians, bandits, regulators, weak governments and wars all combined to reinforce the warrior ethic of the backsettlers. That ethic in turn promoted a system of child rearing which was designed to make boys into warriors and girls into their consorts and helpmeets. The backcountry environment reinforced these border customs in relations between young people and their elders.
Backcountry Age Ways:
The Border Idea of the Elder-Thane
Not many elderly emigrants moved to the back settlements during the first few years. This was a country for young people. In the eighteenth century, less than 1 percent of the population were over sixty-five—a very small minority. But a few older folk were to be found in even the newest settlements. The manner of their treatment tells us many things about this regional culture. Even more than in most societies, the status of elders in the backcountry tended to vary from one older person to the next. Some received deference and deep respect. A case in point was Patrick Calhoun, “Squire Calhoun” as he was called, the founder and family patriarch of the Calhouns of Long Cane, and also his wife Catherine Calhoun. This aged couple sat in the seats of honor on public occasions. Their wisdom was routinely consulted on domestic questions, and their word was law in the community.1
Similar attitudes of respect for age often appeared in the Presbyterian churches of Appalachia. Congregations were normally seated by age, and the oldest were given the best and most comfortable places. “Women with little children were seated nearest the fireplace—the old men were honored with seats near the wall where they could lean back—the young men and young ladies next in front of them, and the boys of restless, unruly age were placed in the center, where batteries of eyes could play on them from all quarters.”2
Old women, as well as old men, were often treated with special respect in this culture. Emma Miles has left us a memorable portrait of a backcountry granny named Geneva Rogers, “Aunt Genevy” to all the neighborhood. Her ancient profile was deeply lined with a lifetime’s suffering. Her manner was gentle, but she was a force to be reckoned with in the community. Emma Miles recalled:
For all her gentleness and courtesy, there is something terrible about old Geneva Rogers. … At an age when the mothers of any but a wolf-race become lace-capped and felt-shod pets of the household … she is able to toil almost as severely as ever. She takes wearisome journeys afoot, and is ready to do battle upon occasion to defend her own. Her strength and endurance are beyond imagination to women of the sheltered life. … I have learned to enjoy the company of these old prophetesses almost more than any other. The range of their experience is wonderful; they are, moreover, repositories of tribal lore—tradition and song, medical and religious learning. They are the nurses, the teachers of practical arts, the priestesses, and their wisdom commands the respect of all. An old woman usually has more authority over the bad boys of a household than all the strength of man. A similar reverence may have been accorded to the mothers of ancient Israel, as it was given by all peoples to those of superior holiness. … It is not the result of affection, still less of fear.3
The authority of these mountain grandmothers was very great, and their wrath was terrible to behold. Emma Miles observed a scene between one of these old women and a backcountry preacher called Elisha Robbins who preached that even his own mother would be eternally damned without baptism in his own small sect. This doctrine brought upon him the full wrath of a mountain granny:
“Lishy,” she shrilled at him, unheeding the crowd, “Lishy Rob-bins, I held you in my arms before you was three hours old, and … you ought to be slapped over for preaching any such foolishness about your mother, and I’m a-gwine to do it!” And forthwith she did. Her toil hardened old fist shot out so unexpectedly that the young preacher went down like a cornstalk. Angry? Of course he was angry, but she was a grandmother of the mountains. There was nothing for it but to pick himself up with as much dignity as remained to him.4
The rule of deference to the old was widespread throughout the backcountry, but it was far from universal. If some old people were respected and obeyed, others were deeply degraded and treated with extreme contempt. One backcountry traveler came upon a toothless “old man” in the woods, who might have been only fifty years of age, but seemed much older. He was a helpless dependent, who was kept alive by his daughter in a small sylvan “hut.” The traveler described him as “an Indian-like animal … in mien and feature, as well as ragged clothing; and having lit [his pipe], made an awkward scratch with his Indian shoe and … fell to sucking like a calf without speaking for near a quarter of an hour.”5
Other travelers recorded similar descriptions of solitary old women who wandered alone through the American forest—the outcasts of their culture. In the Pennsylvania backcountry, Rhoda Barber remembered an aged female named Mary Pitcher. “I have heard my mother describe her as wandering through the woods leading an old horse, her only property her knitting in her hand and her dress mostly sheepskin,” Barber wrote.6
Many sad accounts exist of lonely, weak and impoverished old people in the backcountry. Daniel Drake, for example, recorded his vivid memory of another despised old backsettler:
Old Mr. Rhodes, or “Grand-daddy” as the children called him, was a man of large frame, very meanly dressed, with a rude and extensive white beard. When I most frequently saw him, he must have been, as it now appears to me, nearly ninety years of age. He stayed constantly in the little cabin, and much of the time in bed. He was silent, childish and morose, seemed to have no sympathy with those around him, and they appeared to have but little care or affection for him, who was their terror. His aspect, and the relations of the family with him, made on my feelings and memory an ineffaceable impression. I had never before, nor scarcely since, seen the forlorn and repulsive character of extreme old age so impressively illustrated. I believe that to the sad spectacle which he exhibited to me 53 or 4 years ago, I may trace up much of my dread of falling, at that advanced period of life, out of communion of mind and heart with children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren. When an old man is found in this desolate isolation—those around him praying that he would die, instead of laboring to make him comfortable and cheerful—the fault is generally, I presume, in himself; for it is more reasonable to believe one person to be wrong in feeling and conduct, than a whole family.7
The degradation of these unfortunate older people in the back-country made a dramatic contrast with the deference given to patriarchs such as Patrick Calhoun, and to mountain grannies such as Aunt Genevy Rogers. Similar dualities have existed in many cultures, but in the backcountry this disparity was exceptionally strong. It derived from an ancient custom deeply embedded in the culture of North Britain, where it was called the rule of tanistry.
In North Britain, from time immemorial, the rule of tanistry (or thanistry, as in thane) had long determined the descent of authority within a clan. It held that “succession to an estate or dignity was conferred by election upon the ‘eldest and worthiest’ among the surviving kinsmen.”8 Candidates for this honor were males within the circle of kin called the derbfine—all the relatives within the span of four generations. By the rule of tanistry, one man among that group was chosen to head the family: he who was strongest, toughest and most cunning. This principle became an invitation to violent conflict, and the question was often settled by a trial of strength and cunning. The winner became the elder of his family or clan, and was honored with deference and deep respect. The losers were degraded and despised—if they were lucky. In ancient days they were sometimes murdered, blinded or maimed.
This rule of tanistry had long existed throughout parts of Ireland and Scotland. For many centuries, it had been formally invoked to decide the descent of the Scottish crown.9 Tanistry caused much violence in the history of North Britain. It was also a product of that violence, for it was a way of promoting elders who had the strength and cunning to defend their families, and command respect. But those elders who were unable to do so became a danger to their people. They were degraded and even destroyed. Here was yet another custom by which the culture of North Britain adapted itself to conditions of chronic disorder. By the rule of tanistry, families, clans and even kingdoms gained strong leaders who were able to protect them.
The principle of tanistry operated in North Britain on two levels. It was used in a formal way to settle the descent of high office—in Scotland, even the monarchy. At the same time it also existed as a broad principle of eldership which sorted the old into two categories—the strong who were respected and honored; and the weak who were degraded and despised. In some other cultures, the respect given to age tended to be a form of ascription. In the borders and the backcountry it had more to do with achievements of a special kind that stressed cunning, force, power and the manipulation of others.
These customs were reflected in quantitative indicators of age-heaping. A census in 1776 of exact ages in Maryland’s Frederick County (which then included all of the backcountry region in that colony) showed an interesting pattern of age heaping. An exceptionally large proportion of the population rounded their ages to years ending in zero or five. This bias grew stronger beyond
The familiar features of Andrew Jackson are an image of aging in the back settlements. Even in his middle years, the leathery face of this tough old warrior was ravaged by age. Jackson’s gaunt cheeks were deeply scarred by pain, his brow was lined and furrowed by constant care, and his deep-set eyes were marked by an ineffable sadness. Yet, this was the face of power, strong in the habit of command. The marks of age deepened its air of authority.
Old age also had another face in the back settlements. For every border chieftain who grew old in authority and all the mountain grannies who bullied the young bucks of the neighborhood, there were other men and women for whom old age brought a kind of social death. This had long been the cruel rule of tanistry in the British borderlands, where the strong were treated with deference and the weak were despised and abandoned.
thirty, and was very strong after fifty. In these patterns we may ask what proportion rounded their ages up and down—that is, how many made themselves older, and how many younger.
The evidence showed nothing like the extravagant youth bias of Americans in the twentieth century. But neither did it show the strong age bias of New England or the Chesapeake in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Attitudes of backcountry men and women toward age were very mixed. Except when they approached twenty-one, backcountry men and women tended to show a strong youth orientation into their fifties, and also a pronounced age bias in the later years of life.10
These border and backcountry age ways differed from the customs of other regions in British America, and also from attitudes in our own time. But they were not unique. Similar patterns have also appeared in many human cultures which survive precariously on the edge of insecurity. It was this factor that lay behind the principle of tanistry in North Britain, and that also caused Patrick Calhoun to be honored in the Long Cane, and Aunt Genevy to be instantly obeyed, whilst the “silent, childish and morose” old man in his cabin and the wandering old women of the woods were neglected and despised until death at last overtook them.
Backcountry Death Ways:
The Border Idea of Nescient Fatalism
In the borderlands of North Britain, death had long been the constant companion of life. Warfare and raiding took a heavy toll of the population on both sides of the border. Communities shattered by violence also suffered much from famine, and their weakened inhabitants became easy prey for epidemic disease. This pattern changed during the eighteenth century, when the toll of epidemics diminished, and the worst excesses of violence were also suppressed. But life remained precarious upon the borders, and death was still its dark companion.
The American backcountry, for all its romantic reputation as a “bloody ground,” was healthier than the British borderlands had been. Rates of morbidity were higher in the southern highlands than in the northern colonies—largely as a consequence of the malaria which the colonists themselves introduced, and later of other environmental illnesses such as the “milk sick.” But rates of mortality were lower than in the Chesapeake country, and below those of North Britain as well.1
Even so, there were dangers enough in the formative years of this region. Settlers and Indians warred constantly upon one another. Bandit gangs roamed the wilderness, and many an unwary traveler disappeared without a trace. Regulators enforced order with vigilante violence as savage as the acts they condemned. Major wars broke out at least once in every generation from 1689 to 1865. These bloody events did not drive death rates as high in the backcountry as in the Chesapeake region, or other places in British America. But they created a climate of danger and uncertainty that kept old border customs alive. Attitudes toward death in the backcountry long remained very much the same as they had been in the borderlands.
There was a curious way of thinking about dying in these cultures—as if death were itself an act of lawless violence against the living. Images of death in border poetry were strikingly different from those in the south of England. Robert Burns, in a poetic epitaph for a friend, described death as a murderer:
Whoe’er thou art, O reader know
That death has murdered Johnny! …2
Another poem by Burns compared death to a border warlord:
Ae day, as Death, that gruesome earl,
Was driving to the tither warl’ …3
Yet another of his verses made death into a corrupt, illegitimate and violent ruler over uncertain life:
O Death! thou tyrant fell and bloody!
The meikle devil wi’ a woodie.4
The poetry of Robert Burns, so bright and sunny and good-humored on most subjects, was filled with rage on the subject of mortality—anger, darkness and despair.
I’ve seen yon weary winter-sun
Twice Forty Times return,
And ev’ry time has added proofs
That Man was made to mourn.5
The people of this culture were very superstitious about death. They searched the world for signs and portents. When, for example, Daniel Drake was writing his autobiography, both his candles suddenly burned out at the same moment. That event instantly turned his thoughts to the subject of his own death:
My candles both burnt out at the same moment; an emblem of the beautiful termination in old age, by death, at the same hour, of husband & wife. I have lit two others; which indicates that I am likely to keep on, though it is not far from midnight.6
Daniel Drake’s two guttering candles inspired a morbid midnight fantasy about his death-bed scene. “When that solemn event shall come,” he wrote, “I hope to see female faces round my bed,
And wish a woman’s hand to close
My lids in death, and say—Repose!7