Whose America? (Supplement), pt. 1

The Scots-Irish & English Borderers Who Settled Appalachia

When I sat down with all the accumulated notebooks, scraps of paper, dog-eared books, and printed essays and articles to hammer out the episode notes for the recent episode on the West Virginia Coal Wars, I had in mind a particular approach that eventually proved unworkable in a single episode. If I had been doing a whole series on the coal wars, I would have wanted to tell you more about the culture of the people who made up those coal communities, to build a sense of tense inevitability as they came into confrontation with the forces of industry.

The people who first settled Appalachia began arriving in Philadelphia in the 1720s or so, a good hundred years after the first English settlements in North America. The most numerous were Scots-Irish - lowland Scots by blood and nationality who had been sent to settle the Ulster Plantation in Northern Ireland a century earlier. After centuries of incessant warfare to establish Scotland’s independence, the English and Scottish crowns had finally been united in the person of James I (or, James VI, to the Scots). The Irish had had a troubled recent history with the English, to say the least, and were not happy about having an English colony in the north of their island. Lowland Scots were sent to settle it because they were tough, self-sufficient, and accustomed to violence, traits they’d acquired over many centuries of living on their own in the most lawless and war-torn region of Britain. We could (and, since this is MartyrMade, we will) take the story all the way back to Julius Caesar.

On the campaign that made him famous, Caesar’s legions utterly destroyed the ancient Celtic civilization of the Gauls. Some estimates have it that his forces killed a third of the population and enslaved another third. Still, although the Gauls were outmatched, they were stubborn folk. As Caesar handed their armies defeat after defeat, there were always some who refused to stop fighting. After taking a loss, the remnant would take a step back, regroup, and prepare for the next defense. When they were pushed back to the English Channel and Caesar’s victory was complete, still many of the Gauls refused to take on the Roman yoke, and they made their way across the water into Britain.

A reliable, if unaesthetic, rule of history is that, over the long term, warriors eventually lose to soldiers. The Native Americans, the tribal warriors on other colonized continents, the Germanic barbarians of Central Europe, even the mighty horsemen of the Eurasian steppe, might have been man-for-man tougher and more skilled than their conquerors, but over time the weight of encroaching civilization inevitably bore down and crushed them. In Nora Chadwick’s book on the Celts, she wrote:

In any conflict between Celts and Romans, the superior powers of organization, sense of discipline, and orderliness of the Roman culture were bound to overcome the volatile and undisciplined Celts whose sense of loyalty, powerful though it may have been, was normally centered on an individual rather than on an institution or an ideal.

And so the Celtic warriors kept losing to the Roman soldiers, but the most resistant and rebellious among them refused to surrender. They kept retreating, settling in one place only to see legions coming over the horizon again, and again, until the Romans chased them all the way into Britain. And still they resisted. When they couldn’t fight, they would ambush and raid, and do whatever they could to make life difficult for the Romans, embodying a slogan of the Irish Republican Army nearly two millennia later: Inflict and Endure.

As the Romans established their rule over England and Wales, the Celtic remnant and all those who refused to bend the knee retreated still northward, into Scotland, where they encountered a whole range of Celtic inhabitants who millennia before had made their way through Europe, up into Scotland, and over the Irish Sea into Ireland.

Rome turned southern Britain into the Roman province of Brittania, but always hit a wall when they tried to push north. The people of the northern British Isles were the distilled essence of resistance to Roman power - the people who refused again and again to bow their heads in exchange for peace - and their spirit of rebellion mixed with the native loyalty of people who’d lived there for thousands of years. Roman order eventually reigned in the far south, but the lands further north were never quite settled, always subject to raids and attacks by the mixed Celtic peoples of Scotland.

Eventually after a few generations of trying and failing to get these people under control, the Roman emperor Hadrian decided enough was enough, and ordered the construction of a massive, 70-mile-long wall that stretched from one coast of Britain to the other, sealing off the wildlings to the north from the civilized people of Westeros to the south. For 400 years, they worked on Romanizing what would later become England, building up its infrastructure and civil society, while the Celtic peoples north of the wall continued along a completely different path of development. The border between the two remained an anarchic land of frequent conflict, and the people who lived there, far from any central authority they could call on for help, became hardened over the years.

When the Romans packed it in in 410 AD, they took Christianity with them, because it wasn’t long before the Angles and the Saxons, pagan Germanic tribes, were filling the vacuum and turning England, now properly called, into their own domain. Before the Romans had left, some of their soldiers and missionaries in the north had given Scotland the gift of Christianity, and so even as England temporarily reverted to paganism, a distinctive form of Celtic Christianity developed north of the wall. Cut off from the Roman church, it was a praxis that focused on local leadership and self-sufficiency, a religion based around the monastery and the abbey. Like its people, it would develop into a faith that resisted rigid hierarchy and distant authority.

Between the 8th and 13th centuries, Scotland resisted Saxon, Viking, and Norman attempts to do what the Romans could not and unite the whole island. The famous king Edward I, aka Edward Longshanks, aka Edward, Hammer of the Scots, put it to them hard, and managed to compromise and co-opt most of the Scottish nobility, but all that got him was a populist uprising under William Wallace that saw an English army defeated and several northern English towns sacked before Wallace was finally betrayed and captured. When Edward finally got his hands on Wallace, his torturers did a number on him even worse than in the movie. Wallace said nothing during the course of his long execution, except to give a legendary answer to the charge of treason against him:

I can not be a traitor, for I owe him no allegiance. He is not my sovereign; he never received my homage; and whilst life is still in this persecuted body, he shall never receive it. To the other points of which I am accused, I freely confess them all. As Governor of my country I have been an enemy to its enemies; I have slain the English; I have mortally opposed the English king; I have stormed and taken the towns and castles which he unjustly claimed as his own. If I or my soldiers have plundered or done injury to the houses or ministers of religion, I repent me of my sin; but it is not of Edward of England that I shall ask pardon.

I hope that if I’m ever about to get dragged through the streets of London behind horses while the population lobs curses and rotten veggies at me, then hanged until I’m about to pass out, then have my belly opened up and my intestines yanked out while I watch, then finally killed by having four horses tied to each of my arms and legs pull me apart in opposite directions - I hope that if I’m ever in that position I can come up with something awesome to say.