Scotch-Irish in America: A Revisionist History of a People Betrayed

Pioneers and Warriors on the American Frontier

“Their bloodline was stained by centuries of continuous warfare along the border between England and Scotland, and then in the bitter settlements of England's Ulster plantation in northern Ireland. Their religion was a harsh and demanding Calvinism that sowed the seeds of America's Bible Belt…On occasion they sold themselves as indentured servants in order to escape Ulster’s harshness…

“They came to America on small boats they took months to cross the Atlantic, as many as 30% of their passengers dying on a typical voyage. They settled not in the plantations along the southern coast or in the bustling towns of New England but in the raw and unforgiving mountain wilderness, some spilling out from settlements in New Hampshire, but the overwhelming majority populating an area along the Appalachians that stretch from Pennsylvania to Georgia and Alabama. It was not unusual to find that their first task beyond building a cabin was to defend themselves against the bloodcurdling attacks of Indian war parties.

“They fought the Indians and then they fought the British, comprising 40% of the Revolutionary War army.… They formed the bulk of the Confederate Army and a good part of the Union Army as well, and in later wars provided many of the greatest generals and soldiers our nation has ever seen…Indeed, they have fed dedicated soldiers to this nation far beyond their numbers in every war—for instance, the heavily Scots-Irish people of West Virginia ranked first, second, or third in military casualty rates in every U.S. war of the 20th century. As one comparison, West Virginia's casualty rate was twice that of New York and Connecticut in Vietnam, and more than 2 1/2 times the rate experienced by those two states in Korea.”

Thus begins Born Fighting, James Webb’s 2004 history of the Scots (or “Scotch”) Irish in America; 369 pages published by Random House in 2004. Twenty years on and we have Colin G. Calloway’s Hard Neighbors: The Scotch-Irish Invasion of Native America (from Oxford University Press, 528 pages). From the title alone we discern the woke alteration over the course of two decades.

Dartmouth College Prof. Calloway is a painstaking scholar and his book is worth its purchase price if you have the inclination to separate his documentary wheat from his pro forma radical-lib chaff. Calloway outclasses Webb in terms of a detailed, footnoted chronicle of many corners of Scotch-Irish history in America with however, of gaps amounting—in the case of the kidnapping and enslavement of some of the Scotch-Irish—to a chasm. Yet for those seeking to understand a major ethnic element of the people who made America, Calloway’s book cannot be ignored. It’s too deeply researched. The abundance of facts he has collected are indicative of his industrious exploration.

Webb’s Born Fighting surpasses Calloway in its sympathetic embrace of the ordeal of the Scotch Irish on the frontier; of “the dirt poor white” (p. 245), even as Webb decries the extent to which they were cynically pitted against equally impoverished blacks at the end of the Civil War.

Hard Neighbors is marred by the fundamental premise encapsulated in its title: the Native Americans as victims of invaders and the Scots as invading victimizers. While he is too discerning to permit the formulation to descend to the level of a cartoon— offering modifiers and nuances—these do not entirely rescue his thesis from its omissions.

The standard way of viewing the Native American experience of white settlement is to submit to the conformist historical trend now in vogue. Conformity to trends in vogue is devastating to the historian’s mission of honestly excavating the past without regard for the consequences of toe-stepping truth-telling.