Lone Star

by T. R. Fehrenbach

  Two characteristics of this American immigration stood out: the people left mainly for ideological reasons, not to seek their fortunes; therefore, few ever had any intention of returning. Second, the emigration was never controlled, certainly not in its decisive years. For long periods the various governments of Great Britain paid only minimal attention to its Atlantic dominions. This, plus the long-developed traditions of county government in England, allowed the scattered colonies to build viable local societies of their own.

  To understand the pattern of sudden Anglo-American expansion after the middle of the 18th century, it is necessary to understand that English-speaking society between the Atlantic and the Appalachians was not a cohesive whole. In modern times, the differences between Puritan New England and the plantation South have been thoroughly explored. Actually, these differences were probably not so great in the 18th century as a century, or two centuries, later. If the "aristocratical spirit" reigned south of the Mason-Dixon Line, still Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and Delaware had evolved a tight and interrelated landed and mercantile elite. The local affairs of Massachusetts Bay were not in the hands of Yankee small farmers. A Middleton or Rutledge of South Carolina was perfectly able to room with, or communicate his views to, New England's Hancock or Sam Adams in the Continental Congresses at Philadelphia.

  By the year 1750 the British colonies in America had evolved into a newly prosperous, Protestant, inherently liberal "deferential society" in the seaside counties and towns. One enormous difference between America and Europe was that on this side of the Atlantic there was almost no poverty on the European scale. Underpopulation had something to do with this, but human poverty seems to be more often the result of social forces than the nonavailability of resources. In Europe, with an abundance of the richest soils on earth, millions still went hungry; on the rock-scrabble soil of Massachusetts no one, after the first few winters, starved.

  The social structure of British America and the position of the landed and mercantile elite could best be described as that of an oligarchy or squirearchy, with limited powers. Institutions as they developed on the coast were remarkably free. Local governments were elected by mass ballot. The laws of most colonies required electors to be freeholders or to own land, but this requirement does not seem to have been strenuously enforced. George Washington as a young squire was returned to the Virginia Burgesses by "cheerful, rumpot elections" in which he bought the barrel. But the clusters of men and families colonial America deferred to possessed a remarkable ethical sense. A Washington, Jefferson, Richard Stockton, Livingston, or Hancock, from Virginia to Massachusetts Bay, did not sit in the seats of power due to law or caste, but more by use and wont and demonstrated ability. In this squirearchy America had a gentry fully equal to its role.

  This elite was fully influenced by the enlightenment and rationalism of the century, and they inherited the Enlightenment without the crippling weight of the customs, traditions, and establishments that plagued older societies. Because it was rational and ethical, the American leadership was inherently liberal, and these men were optimistic, as men who believe in the rationality of mankind must be. The one dark cloud on this rational and optimistic horizon was the institution of Negro slavery, which was early established in all European colonies where it was economically feasible, English, Spanish, and French. This troubled the Jeffersons, Rutledges, and Lees apparently more than it did the New England squires in the 18th century, since they saw it at close hand. There was general agreement that the institution should not be permitted to spread, but beyond that there seemed to be no workable economic or social solution. No one was less fitted by rationale to make human chattels of other men than Anglo-Americans, but the problem was horribly complicated by economics, social factors, and race.

  The important differences, and real tensions, within the British-American community were not between North and South in the 18th century, but between East and West, tidewater and foothills, Cohee and Tuckahoe. New England and the South did not then impinge on each other. They pursued separate ways, culturally, economically, and politically, with the only common focal point the British Isles. Atlantic America looked outward, not inward. It was part of the greater 18th-century world, and it was essentially a maritime world. The mercantile establishments of New England and the Middle Atlantic were geared to European or Caribbean trade. Even the landed estates to the South were mercantile in nature; they raised and sold produce primarily for foreign markets. A high percentage of the American gentry were educated in England, or traveled there. The Benjamin Franklins, Morrises of New York, and Southern planters never thought of themselves as anything but a part of the maritime British world. When they revolted against the home country in 1775–76, they were not so much turning their backs on Europe as demanding new and more favorable arrangements with the Old World. Washington, in reestablishing economic ties with Britain, made this very clear. The Anglo-American leadership, after independence, did not want political connections or political involvement. They had a cold and clear understanding America did not have sufficient power to play that role.

  In this essentially Atlantic orientation, the dominant view of the English seaboard was different from the outlook of the backwoods frontier. The people who had pushed to the blocking range of Appalachia by 1750 had a different culture, worldview, and even racial origin from the coast. The predominant strain, and dominant ethic, of the up-country or frontier was that of the Presbyterian, or Scotch-Irish.

  Nineteenth-century American historians, who exhaustively sifted American evidence but rarely delved deeply into European sources or documents, were once converted to the idea that the Western frontier and free lands shaped American individualism, self-reliance, democratic ways, optimism, and the notion of virtually unlimited material or economic opportunity. The concept, really the hope, that Americans created something uniquely new on this continent is understandable, if no longer supportable. The best evidence indicates that only the sense of unlimited material opportunity derived from the frontier, for obvious reasons. For decades, the land was limitless. The other ideas and qualities were European transplants.

  The background and ethic of the Scotch-Irish who immigrated to America is quite important to understanding the process of Anglo-American expansion out of the Atlantic slope, and of the dominant ethic of all inner America itself. It is a valid question, whether the long frontier shaped Anglo-America, or whether attitudes, prejudices, and ethics brought from Europe shaped the American frontier. Interestingly enough, almost all modern foreign observers, from France to Brazil, believe the latter. One band of European immigrants created Hispanic-American civilization. Very different men, facing reasonably similar conditions in many places, made the United States.

  The Scotch-Irish were once Scots borderers in the British Isles, the mixed race of Dane, Gael, and Saxon of the Teutonic Scottish south. They evolved as a tough, stubborn, dour people, conditioned to border war. They fought the English for generations, though they themselves were English-speaking from the Middle Ages. The great break in their history came in the 16th century, when they took up the teachings of John Knox.

  Knox brought a stunning new vision of God, man, and the world from Calvin in Geneva. This doctrine was far more than a mere reformation of the rites, and rebellion against the authority, of Rome. At bedrock, it was a rejection of the whole mysterious panoply of the medieval world, and all the pageantry of medieval British life. The Scots of the south swept the religious attic bare not only of Popes and prelates but of the concepts of hierarchy and organic society. When the priest was transformed into the preacher, not only the Church but the entire structure of Christendom was starkly changed. As always, the polities of the new religion became more important than its policies and theology, which grew stale.

  Scots Presbyterianism had a common root with English Puritanism of the 17th century. But the Puritans south of the border were dominantly members of the English middle class, the tradesmen, mercha
nts, and artisans of an already highly organized society. The Pilgrims who fled to Plymouth Rock maintained a similar worldview to the border Presbyterians, but with one difference: the Scots were still a rural, and for some centuries a warrior, race.

  "Freeholders and Tradesmen are the strength of Religion and Civility in the land," trumpeted a spokesman for both parties in the 17th century. "And Gentlemen and Beggars and servile Tenants are the strength of Iniquity." The social outlook of frontier America can be traced to that feeling. The idea that gentlemen were superfluous and pernicious and beggars were to be despised permeated the American frontier, but it was not born there. The statements, arguments, and atmosphere surrounding the Puritanism that failed to triumph in England and peeled off to British America show more than a hatred of social hierarchy and dependency. They indicate a strident insistence that everyone was, or should be, middle-class.

  The religious wars of England's 17th century eroded Laud's insistence on the organic state of State and man, but Calvinism did not win. Modern England was to be a compromise between organic Anglicanism and Protestant Puritanism. Attitudes that were abortive in England fled to, and took root in, America. Merrie England eventually broke out of the Middle Ages keeping many of its social and religious toys intact. The Scots Covenanters made no such deals.

  Hating prelacy almost as much as popery, the Scots took part on Cromwell's side in the Civil War. By one act of political genius, the Lord Protector of Great Britain transported some thousands of them to the turbulent province of Ireland. This served two ends: he removed a hardcore, armed, and dissident ethnic group away from the English border, where they were bound to cause trouble, and he delivered that trouble to the rebellious native Irish. In their new home the Scots picked up the name "Scotch-Irish," transferred their blood feuds with the Saxons to the Celts, and carved out Ulster, the greatest pale of all.

  These transplanted Presbyterians were unable to become a settled peasantry in Ireland; their surprisingly middle-class ethic, and their hatred of both Irish Papists and Ascendancy Anglicans made this impossible. When the bloody battlefields of 17th-century Ireland faded into the gray, futureless landscape of the next century, the Scots had lost their function. Thousands began to look for a new border, a new frontier. Family after family packed up their Bibles, old fiddles, rusty broadswords, pewter utensils, and bleak, bourgeois ethical baggage, and set sail. By 1730, they were arriving in America by the thousands.

  They left an enclave behind; the Scotch-Irish were always leaving enclaves behind. In their three major migrations—from Scotland, from Ireland, and from Appalachia—there may have been something of natural selection. The evidence indicates that those who went were more vigorous than those who stayed behind.

  The Scots landed on the wharves at Philadelphia and Charleston with certain convictions firmly fixed. They were enormously self-disciplined, both by their Puritan ethic and the warlike borderer's life. They had three public virtues: thrift, because they had always been poor and Knox taught poverty was a disgrace; self-reliance, because in the new Reformed world every man felt himself something of an island; and industry, agreeing with St. Paul that who did not work should not eat. They interpreted the New Testament mainly as a moral destruction of aristocracy and beggardom. The quality of social mercy was not strained, but the idea made Scotch-Irish uncomfortable. Calvin, through Knox, extolled material success and despised human weakness. He had destroyed the old Christian concept of a station in life and built a new cosmos in which men and women should have no place, but functions. The act of being was thus meaningless; action was everything, and the worth of any man could only be judged by what he did.

  The Scotch-Irish, like all English-speaking Puritans, were thus driven to material success, and whether they enjoyed this or not, they were not permitted to translate success into social class. This last was to confuse foreign observers, and Anglo-Americans themselves, for generations. Calvinists were always uneasy and rebellious at the concept of the gentleman, even when they hungered for rank. Status in society, which is much less definable than class, became their goal.

  A code this practical and functional had almost no room for art as it had evolved in Europe, but it did for learning, or at least literacy. Each man and family head was expected to read, and interpret, his own Bible. The Scotch-Irish had another religious distinction; they believed that as a matter of right they should elect their own clergy, and support no other. In these attitudes, and the distrust of social rather than functional station, some historians, probably rightly, have seen the seeds of American middle-class democracy.

  Like all truly successful immigrants, these Anglo-Celts abandoned a world in Europe they at heart hated. They were Israelites leaving Egypt. They had already burned most of their bridges to the traditional culture behind them when they sailed for America, but they were bringing their own brand of civilization with them. They were bound for the Wilderness, on an Old Testament trek to build the new Jerusalem. All such peoples, throughout history, have been the most fitted to seize new ground, because peoples, like children, must first sever their umbilical cords before they can stand alone. Those who would rather remain in Egypt tend to make poor pioneers.

  The invasion of the Anglo-Celts between 1700 and 1740 was decentralized, uncontrolled, and uncoordinated. Apparently, Ireland was content to see them go. America was indifferent to their arrival. No government either aided or hindered them so far as can be ascertained. Yet there was a strange order, almost a pattern, to their actions in America. The Scotch-Irish were the only major immigrant group in American history that completely avoided all existing civilization and settlement. They passed through no coastal screen, but headed for the western, Indian frontier.

  There were several reasons. Lands close to the coast were largely taken; and it was already an American custom to obtain legal title to country that lay beyond present development; speculation was already old. Only the frontier, which might be legally owned by a British company or seacoast squire, had open lands. Indians or the wilderness still had possession, and few people on the Atlantic slopes were disposed to dispute this. The valleys up against the Alleghenies were untaken. There was no other place to stake out thousands of small, free farms.

  The newcomers did not have to seek the frontier; all the other immigrants did not. Labor was in short supply. But the Anglo-Celts had not crossed the sea to become servile tenants. Both the Anglican South and Congregational New England had established churches and levied land taxes. For all these reasons, and probably for another, more important—the borderer instinct, which no historian can measure—the Scotch-Irish went beyond the effective jurisdiction of the colonial establishments, up against the Indian frontier. Even then, they did not go far enough to suit many of them; they were soon in continual tension with tidewater legislatures, sheriffs, and men who had no desire to fight Indians but did understand how to get legal possession of ground they had never seen through the courts of law. This tension, then and later, caused some bloodshed.

  In the rolling, wooded, well-watered valleys of the Alleghenies and Appalachians, which are a single chain, the new borderers found a country admirably suited to their ethic and mythology. Conditions everywhere were much the same. Every man started equal. The Scotch-Irish staked out small farms, with the ridge lines serving as boundaries in between. They knocked down trees and burned out stumps. They cleared the hillsides and scratched open the reddish earth. They quickly learned local agronomy from the Indians, and raised corn, squash, melons, and beans. Fruit trees they brought from Europe. They did great damage to this land, but this was neither reckless nor unreasoning in their eyes. The land seemed limitless; it would never be exhausted in their time. They were functional men, not trained to see or dwell on beauty. Later Americans would know only from French and other European travelers' accounts that western Pennsylvania, which was the Anglo-Celts' great nurturing ground in America, and particularly the river junction where Pittsburgh now stands, was perhaps th
e loveliest region in all the primitive continent.

  With a Calvinistic, potentially urban ethic, the Scotch-Irish could only regard land as a commodity. They could not become affixed to it, like Quebecois peasants. They acquired it and spent it; hungered for it, used it, left it. Within one generation, thousands of Anglo-Celts born in Pennsylvania were moving on, side-slipping down the barrier mountains to the south. They filtered through western Virginia and met another stream, those Scotch-Irish who landed at Charleston, in the foothills of the Carolinas. The two streams joined and formed a solid, Anglo-Celt population between the inner Indian country and the coast.

  These people built rude log cabins, rougher and less comfortable than Indian lodges, and ephemeral beside the adobe houses of the dry Southwest. They did not make towns, at first. They created small forts and trading posts out of necessity, and scattered their farms around them. The heavy stockades were inhabited only in times of Indian uprising, or danger. No soldiers manned them. The frontiersmen were their own warriors. These forts and stockades later became the nucleus of towns.

  Society was thus ridge- and valley-bound, deep in the forest, and rural and far-flung. It was cohesive mainly because it was a society at war; defense against Indian raids demanded cooperation. But cooperation did not normally extend much beyond the valley or the settlement. Although the land and the people were everywhere much the same from Pennsylvania to the Carolinas, the frontiersmen were suspicious toward men they didn't know. The farms and the frontier produced a real sense of isolation, which would have appalled some races but which the Anglo-Celt was easily prepared to endure.

  The extended 18th-century family, almost a clan, which might comprise fifty or more persons, under these conditions broke down. The settlers were spreading out, moving on, even if only laterally. The economic basis became the small farm, and under this condition the family group narrowed, to husband, wife, dependent children, and those old folks who survived past their prime. With open lands, children married and moved away. Clans grew together in some valleys, but the more vigorous human stock wandered away. Thus, in America, the family group fragmented long before the Industrial Age.