When the American-Irish Historical Society was organized a year ago
in Boston, it declared its purpose to be the investigation into, and
the recording of, the influence of the Irish element in the
up-building of the American nation. We said then that the work and
contributions of the Irish race on this soil had received scant
recognition from the writers of American history; and we announced
that whether that omission sprang from carelessness, ignorance,
indifference, or design was not so important as the imperative
necessity of remedying such a state of affairs in the interest of
historical accuracy and racial fair play. For the past year our
society has been in its formative stages; in the coming years I have
ample faith that numbers, funds, earnestness, and enthusiasm will
enable us to do our work effectively.
American history is being rewritten; the legendary and sentimental
method of writing it is growing in disfavor; a scientific age
demands the truth, and under its insistence new data are coming to
light and old myths are passing away. It is beginning to dawn on
American minds that this republic is the child of Europe and not of
England; that old man of buckram—the Anglo-Saxon—is having a hard
time with that new man of straw—the Scotch-Irishman; and when
science gets the latter on the dissecting table there won’t be much
left of him but rags and papier-maché.
To-night I will try to direct your attention to “Some Ways in which
American History is Falsified”; and by falsification I do not mean
so much the deliberate perversion of facts as I do the false effects
produced by evasion, distortion, wrong point of view, and the
physical and mental limitations and defects of writers, which in
their results are quite as mischievous as those produced by
perversion and design.
I will for my purposes group my object lessons under four heads,
illustrating each with a writer passing current as an historian.
1. _Mental Invalidism._ The disease of certain literary doctrinaires
whose natural defects have been aggravated by education and fixed by
training. Prof. John W. Burgess, of Columbia University, is a fine
type of this arrogant school of dogmatism.
2. _Legend and Sentiment._ The exploitation of legends, inherited
ideas, race and family myths, made current and passing into
literature by the efforts of those whose faith in folklore as
historical data is profound, and to whom facts and documentary
evidence are unimportant. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, an amateur
historian, is the high priest of this cult; he is the custodian and
incense swinger of the deified Puritan, the marvel and fountain of
the graces of the modern age.
3. _Imagination._ The school of writers who add to the gayety of
nations, who make history from their own inner consciousness, and
who record it as they imagine it ought to be, not as it is. Under
this head comes that humorless horde of scribblers, the Scotch-Irish
littérateurs, and the intellectual giant of Tennessee, Judge Temple,
author of _Covenanter, Cavalier, Puritan_.
4. _Carelessness and Credulity._ Writers who accept any evidence
stated with solemnity and the air of authority, but who subject it
to no tests to ascertain its verity and genuineness. Under this head
I take exceptions to the statements made by Prof. John Fiske in a
recent work, a writer hitherto regarded as safe and reliable.
I will now devote a few minutes to a work entitled _Political
Science and Constitutional Law_, written by Prof. John W. Burgess,
of Columbia University, and designed to be a text-book for that and
other educational institutions.
Mr. Burgess is a rampant type of what a coldly critical and
remorselessly correct writer, John M. Robertson, of London, calls a
Celtophobe—a Celt hater. The learned Professor asserts dogmatically
that the Celt never has, never can, and never will amount to
anything nationally or politically; and that all law, order, and
scientific government have sprung from and are due to what he calls
the Teutonic races. Professor Burgess is a product of German
training and education, and his views have received the cordial
endorsement of such a calm and dispassionate authority as the London
_Times_. The careful writer in stating his theory will fortify it
with facts and figures and marshal his authorities before proceeding
to erect a fabric on it; but Professor Burgess isn’t that kind of a
man. He states his theory with an air of profound conviction and
authority and goes ahead. His theory, like a good many other fabrics
“made in Germany,” looks well, is calculated to deceive the unwary
and unthinking, but under very ordinary scrutiny proves to be very
commonplace, shoddy.
Let me show you a few of the gems from his treasury:
“Only the Teutonic races have produced national states.... The
National State is thus the most modern and most complete solution of
the whole problem of political organization which the world has as
yet produced; and the fact that it is the creation of the Teutonic
political genius stamps the Teutonic races as the political nations
_par excellence_, and authorizes them in the economy of the world to
assume the leadership in the establishment and administration of
states.”
This brilliant outburst winds up a series of equally impressive
statements. Just what the Professor means by National States and
political nations I do not know, nor am I sure he knows himself. At
any rate, he appears to lay down a doctrine very delightful to these
governments which bully nations and steal territories, if not quite
so agreeable to those bullied and plundered.
Now listen to his views on the unfortunate Celt; they have the old
familiar ring of anti-Irish hysteria, for which familiarity has bred
Irish contempt.
“Personal attachment in small bodies to a chosen Chief is the
peculiar political trait of the Celtic nations.... The effect of
such a political character has always been the organization of the
Celtic nations into numberless petty military States, in each of
which individual rights have been ignored; between all of which
civil war has been the permanent status; and against which foreign
force has been continually successful.... Violence and Corruption
have always marked the politics of Celtic nations.”
Let us stop for a moment to analyze this tremendous blast from
Columbia University, remembering that Germany and England are
Professor Burgess’s ideal Teutonic nations.
From the time of the Roman retrocession from England until the
landing of William the Norman at Hastings, that unfortunate land was
in the hands of one of the dullest, most unimaginative,
worst-governed, and worst-governing races history mentions—the
Saxons—for six hundred years; it had become a congeries of warring,
military chieftainship, in which civilization was almost
obliterated, learning had disappeared, religion was at its lowest
ebb, life and property had no safety, the people were enslaved, and
the coast harried by foreign and victorious foes. The advent of a
strong conqueror—a mixed Celt and Norseman—changed all this,
hammered England into a strong military kingdom, connected her with
the civilization that has made the world what it is—the Latin—and
did in six years what the pure Teutonic race had signally failed to
do in as many centuries.
Prior to the historic event known as the Reformation, Germany had as
much peace as her neighbors—which wasn’t much—and all she had she
owed to her intercourse with the Latin South, to her touch with the
civilization and religion of Rome. After that event Germany was torn
into factions, military chiefs sprang up, petty military states were
made, violence and corruption were the rule, civilization
retrogressed, the people were degraded and the land devastated.
Germany was without unity; her mercenaries were for sale to the
highest bidder; she was terrible only to her children, the prey of
foreign forces, with civil war a permanent status. The advent of
Napoleon was a blessing; he hammered a lot of petty principalities
out of existence and formed two or three monarchies out of the
bewildering many. The fall of Napoleon saw Germany a confederation,
much after the fashion of pre-Reformation days, with Austria on top.
Again came wars and dissensions, and finally the strong conqueror
who united Germany against a common foe and made her what she is
to-day. Germany, I take it, is the highest political expression of
the Teutonic race, according to the dictum of Professor Burgess.
What is it?
A military despotism of the most mediæval type, governed by an
autocrat of doubtful sanity, whose person is more sacred apparently
than that of the Deity; a land whence the people fly to seek safety,
peace, liberty; a government that is a constant threat to the peace
and civilization of the earth and that embodies all the reactionary
principles a free people hate.
One does not expect the German professor, his disciple, or the mole
in the earth to see what is going on in the sunlight.
If we turn to Ireland we see nothing but violence, corruption, and
plunder in the methods of the Teutonic race ruling there; and we
observe improvement in Irish affairs only with the decrease of
English influences and the increase of Irishmen in Irish affairs.
It is a favorite axiom of the Teutonic writer of the Burgess type,
wherever English and German rule is a failure, that the people ruled
are unfit for government. Did it ever occur to them that the shoe is
on the other foot—they are unfit to govern?
The unfitness of the English to govern Ireland is historic; it was
exhibited in America, as some may recall; it is notorious in India
and round the earth. The best-governed possessions of England are
the lands where Englishmen are least in evidence. Germany in Africa
is producing the usual harvest of Teutonic “genius”—depopulation and
devastation.
But Mr. Burgess has a theory, and he does not propose to hamper it
with facts. He asserts that the government—the political
organization—of Spain, Italy, and Portugal are the results of
Teutonic genius. This will probably be news to the world; but if the
debility, decay, and general rottenness of those kingdoms are the
result of Teutonic genius, the sooner they try the genius of the
negro and the Chinaman the better for them. He covers whatever
political good may exist in Greece, Bulgaria, and Roumania by
attributing it to the impecunious German princes now adorning the
rickety thrones in those lands. The idea is original, but not
impressive. Why not attribute the political condition of Scandinavia
to the presence on its throne for ninety years of Bernadotte, the
French (Celtic) military adventurer, and his wife, the daughter of
the Irish merchant Cleary, and their children? The logic is as good,
or as bad, in one case as the other.
But why go on with this tissue of professional rubbish?
Nations are made what they are by climate, environment, peace, war,
and economic and industrial conditions. Groups of men learn as does
the individual, in the school of experience. Nations have no genius
for anything; the botch work we call government to-day at its best
is hardly a manifestation of genius. Nations may have temperaments,
the product of experience, but only the individual has character.
Professor Burgess is merely a mental invalid, an hysterical
Celtophobe. He either forgets the existence of Rome and Greece, or
he fails to understand the value of civilization and human
experience; he is a kind of literary phonograph, repeating the
slanders and absurdities which a school of race egotists have raised
to a cult. He is a decidedly unsafe man to educate a coming
generation of Americans, for the writer of solemn and dogmatic
nonsense is unfit to train the American youth. Certainly no
self-respecting man of Irish-Celtic blood should permit his children
to attend a university where they are taught that the perpetrators
of ages of outrage and wrong are divinely selected beings, chosen
“to assume leadership in the establishment and administration of
States.”
If we desire that sort of rubbish taught, it is just as easy to
secure professors at Bloomingdale as it is at Columbia.
The legendary and sentimental makers of history seem to thrive best
in New England; and a fine type of the cult is the so-called
“scholar in politics,” Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, of Massachusetts
and Nahant. There is in China a religion whose principal tenet is
the worship of ancestors, the placation of ancestral manes. This
religion is called Tavism; and possibly the purest type of Tavist,
outside of China, is the junior senator from Massachusetts.
Mr. Lodge is firmly convinced that the Puritan represents the
perfect type of man; that the history of the world began in 1620;
that the Puritan derived most of his excellence from being of
English blood; and that, while Puritans were Dutch, French, Scotch,
and even Irish, the lack of English blood somehow made them
incomplete. While the ordinary English Puritan was a wonderful
personage, the one who landed in Massachusetts was a genuine marvel,
but when he settled around Boston and Nahant, he began to ooze
genius and take on wings and halo. To this legend is added,
sometimes by direct statement and sometimes by implication, the
intelligence that all the great and good things that make this
republic different from and superior to other lands are due to the
miraculous powers of the Puritan. He is the creator of human
freedom, the father of religion, liberty, and tolerance, the founder
and originator of free schools, and the reputed author of so many
ideas totally at variance with his narrow creed that were he to rise
from his bed of clay in New England into the sunlight of to-day, he
wouldn’t know himself.
This is the school of historical incubation of which Mr. Lodge is
the high priest. Mr. Lodge has many admirable qualities; but his
mental vision is defective, strabismal, and his ancestral credulity
amazing. I am satisfied that Mr. Lodge would not _knowingly_ do an
unjust, intolerable, or dishonorable thing; but he is so en-webbed
in tradition and so steeped in myth and legend that his rôle of
historian is a decided misfit. How else can we account for the
absurd theories he has exploited and the conception of historic
events he has fathered in literature?
Anybody who has even read his history of the _Thirteen Colonies_
will learn that the success achieved in building them up was due to
the Puritans; and one is convinced that had some wandering vagabond
from Massachusetts been cast away on the coast of Spanish-America,
the Latin Republics south of us would now be the model governments
of the earth and probably be called “Anglo-Saxon” nations.
Everything that makes for success he attributes to the Puritan; and
he does it with such a solemn, awe-stricken lack of humor that the
irreverent are moved to Homeric mirth.
Now, as a matter of fact, the Puritan was a hard and fast bigot, who
hated and persecuted everybody who differed from him religiously,
and tolerated nobody; he was as priest-ridden as a Scotch
Presbyterian, and he set up a system of Church and State that
amounted almost to a theocracy. The climate and soil of New England
made him a hard worker; his environment and neighbors, a stout
fighter; but if his laws and records tell us any story, they say his
morals and practices were no better than they ought to have been.
New England in colonial days produced some shrewd and levelheaded
men, but if she ever produced a great one, I have failed to catch
his name. When the hour of her struggle came the same phenomenon was
exhibited in New England as elsewhere in the Colonies; her natural
leaders, the people of education and wealth, followed the fortunes
of the oppressor, and the common people took up the cause of
freedom. New England in the Revolution did her whole duty, but the
other Colonies did not shirk, and furnished not only men and money,
but the theater of war.
Mr. Lodge is now furnishing “The Story of the Revolution” for
_Scribner’s Magazine_, and already we can see his peculiar defects
of historical vision in what he has written. Here is a hint of his
ideas: “He [Washington] entered on the war with an army composed
wholly of New England men. He ended the Revolution with an army,
after seven years’ fighting, largely made up from the same New
England people.” He does not say so in so many words, but he leads
us to infer that the army between those two periods was made up of
New England men. This sort of writing is as absurd as it would be to
say New England did nothing. Has Mr. Lodge never heard of the 40,000
men on the Revolutionary rolls of New York? Has it ever occurred to
him that Pennsylvania, Virginia, and other Colonies furnished some
men, money, and leaders? Have his historical researches ever led him
far enough to learn that Yorktown might have been a waste of blood
but for the armies and navies of France? Does he know that the
soldiers of America’s ally were the regiments of a brigade
immortalized on every battlefield of Europe,—the Irish Brigade?
It is very doubtful. I sometimes wonder if Mr. Lodge knew what an
Irishman was before he went into politics.
In his account of Bunker Hill he hasn’t a word to say of Sullivan,
whose capture of Fort William and Mary with its supplies of precious
gunpowder made Bunker Hill possible; yet he has much to say of the
lack of powder during the siege of Boston.
He says the American soldiers engaged at Bunker Hill were “of almost
pure English blood, with a slight mingling of Scotch-Irish from
Londonderry.” I note among the dead killed there the following
“Scotch-Irish” names: Broderick, Collins, Dalton, Dillon, Doyle,
French, Haggett, McGrath; and Washington, desirous of recognizing
this “Scotch” element in his army made St. Patrick the countersign
on a certain evening during the siege. I recall that it was this
same class of Irishmen with the Scotch prefix, from the New
Hampshire town of Londonderry, called after an Irish town of that
name, and which was originally planted by English and Irish, who
insisted upon double rations of whiskey to celebrate St. Patrick’s
day before Ticonderoga.
Mr. Lodge should learn to call a spade a spade, an Irishman an
Irishman, for we will. The desire of a certain class of people to
call themselves “Scotch-Irish” may be passed by with a smile;
ignorance and weakness deserve pity rather than censure; but we must
insist that the dead of our race shall be neither miscalled nor
misrepresented, and that their laurels shall not be filched nor
their glory stolen by those who have neither pride nor scruples.
Whatever Irish came from New Hampshire—and the hills were full of
them—it would be a grave mistake to imagine that Massachusetts, so
English and so Puritan, did not have her share. The Puritan
Alva—Cromwell—and his villainous understrappers sent many a thousand
Irish victims to Massachusetts Bay as bondmen and women; and
voluntary immigration brought thousands of others. The town records
show this; and whole districts in western Massachusetts were settled
by them; and yet we are asked to believe that when men cease to be
Catholic Irishmen they become Scotch-Irishmen. I can find no other
excuse for the absurd title. Here are a few of the “Scotch-Irish”
names on the rolls of the minute men of the day:
Joseph Burke,
Richard Burke,
Daniel Carey,
Joseph Carey,
Peter Carey,
Patrick Carroll,
Joseph Carroll,
Cornelius Cockran,
Daniel Connors,
William Connors,
James Dempsey,
Philip Donahue,
Joseph Donnell,
John Donnelly,
Andrew Dunnigan,
John Farley,
Michael Farley,
John Flood,
William Flood,
John Foley,
Matthew Gilligen,
Richard Gilpatrick,
James Gleason,
Daniel Griffin,
Joseph Griffin,
John Hacket,
Joseph Hacket,
John Haley,
John Kelly,
Patrick Kelly,
Peter Kelly,
Richard Kelly,
Stephen Kelly,
Daniel Lary,
Michael McDonnell,
Henry McGonegal,
John McGrah,
Daniel McGuire,
Patrick McKeen,
John McMullen,
John Mullin,
John Madden,
Daniel Mahon,
James Mallone,
John Mahoney,
John Murphy,
Patrick Newjent,
Patrick O’Brien,
Richard O’Brien,
Daniel Shay,
John Shea,
John Walsh,
Joseph Walsh.
It is well to note that the English parliament of that day was
looking keenly at the causes that cost England her mighty empire on
this continent; and apparently they underrated the influence of Mr.
Lodge’s Puritan in that struggle, and bitterly blamed the plain
Irish without any Scotchery.
Mr. Lodge means well; but folklore and history are two distinct
affairs.
The imaginative school of history finds its best exemplar in a
gentleman from Tennessee, the home of the Cardiff giant, the
Giascutus, and the Scotch-Irishman. He is known as Judge Temple, and
has written a volume called _Covenanter, Cavalier, Puritan_,—a work
which has shaken the earth and spoiled the apple crop. The Judge is
original; he honors the Scotch-Irishman as he does all ghost
dancers, but he has discovered that all the might of the republic
sprang from the Covenanter. I know what a Covenanter used to be, but
I can’t solve this covenanter of Judge Temple. I can explain him as
he appears in this literary offspring of this intellectual Cardiff
giant. If an Irishman a few years ago did anything extraordinary,
wonderful, or notorious, he would have been a Scotch-Irishman; in
the Temple history he is a Covenanter; if he breaks a bank, or a
man’s head, or the Decalogue, he is merely an Irishman. Apply that
rule to all men and you have history as it is hatched out in
Tennessee. The Covenanter germ was born in Scotland and spread over
America, creating miracles. As the natives of North Britain are not
remarkable for national modesty and self-effacement, I am puzzled to
learn how this conversion of the world to freedom and civilization
has escaped the shrinking writers of Scotland. If Judge Temple is
not restrained by an injunction at an early date, Professor Burgess
and Senator Lodge will be compelled sorrowfully to march on
Washington, there to deposit in the National Museum the Teutonic
Genius and the Puritan Marvel; or they might be turned over to some
of the Yellow Sundays which specialize the exploitation of freaks.
Meantime we should keep our eye on Judge Temple, the young Lochinvar
of history, who has come out of the South.
In _Old Virginia and her Neighbors_, Vol. II, p. 391, Prof. John
Fiske says: “Until recent years little has been written of the
coming of the so-called Scotch-Irish to America, and yet it is an
event of scarcely less importance than the exodus of English
Puritans to New England and that of English Cavaliers to Virginia.
It is impossible to understand the drift which American history,
social and political, has taken since the time of Andrew Jackson,
without studying the early life of the Scotch-Irish population of
the Alleghany region, the pioneers of the American backwoods. I do
not mean to be understood as saying that the whole of that
population at the time of the Revolution was Scotch-Irish, for there
was a considerable German element in it, besides an infusion of
English moving inward from the coast. But the Scotch-Irish element
was more numerous and far more important than all the rest.
“Who were the people called by this rather awkward compound name
Scotch-Irish? The answer carries us back to the year 1611, when
James First began peopling Ulster with Colonists from Scotland and
the North of England. The plan was to put into Ireland a Protestant
population that might ultimately outnumber the Catholics and become
the controlling element in the country. _The settlers were picked
men and women of the most excellent sort._ By the middle of the
seventeenth century there were 300,000 of them in Ulster.
“That province had been the most neglected part of the island, a
wilderness of bogs and fens; they transformed it into a garden. They
also established manufactures of woolen and linens which have since
been famous throughout the world. By the beginning of the eighteenth
century their numbers had risen to nearly a million. Their social
condition was not that of peasants; they were intelligent yeomanry
and artisans. In a document, signed in 1718 by a miscellaneous group
of 319 men, only thirteen made their mark, while 306 wrote their
names in full. Nothing like that could have happened at that time in
any other part of the British empire, hardly even in New England.
“When these people began coming to America, those families that had
been longest in Ireland had dwelt there but for three generations,
and confusion of mind seems to lurk in any nomenclature which
couples them with the true Irish. The antipathy between the
Scotch-Irish as a group and the true Irish as a group is, perhaps,
unsurpassed for bitterness and intensity. On the other hand, since
love laughs at feuds and schisms, intermarriages between the
Colonists of Ulster and the native Irish were by no means unusual,
and instances occur of Murphys and McManuses of the Presbyterian
faith. It was common in Ulster to allude to Presbyterians as
‘Scotch,’ to Roman Catholics as ‘Irish,’ and to members of the
English Church as ‘Protestants,’ without much reference to pedigree.
From this point of view the term ‘Scotch’ may be defensible,
provided we do not let it conceal the fact that the people to whom
it applied are for the most part Lowland-Scotch Presbyterians, very
slightly hibernicized in blood.”
Again, “By 1719 this hope was torn away, and from that year until
the passage of the Toleration Act for Ireland in 1782, the people of
Ulster kept flocking to America. Of all the migrations to America
previous to the days of steamships this was far the largest in
volume. One week of 1727 landed six ship loads at Philadelphia. In
the two years 1773 and 1774 more than 30,000 came. In 1770 one-third
of the population of Pennsylvania was Scotch-Irish. Altogether
between 1730 and 1770, I think it probable that at least half a
million of souls were transferred from Ulster to the American
Colonies, making not less than one-sixth of our population at the
time of the Revolution.”
The merest examination of this will show that the writer is on
uncertain ground; he is begging the question; his own training and
education convince him that there is a false ring to the term
“Scotch-Irish”; the statements he makes, or quotes, show the
earmarks of that organized humbug the Scotch-Irish Society; and he
is reluctant to face the question squarely, and, by reversing the
conventional concealments, evasions, and falsifications which have
marked the writing of American history in the interest of the
English element, acknowledge the splendid work done by the Irish in
America.
Let us examine his statements in detail.
Relative to Ulster settlement he says: “The settlers were picked men
and women of the most excellent sort. By the middle of the
seventeenth century there were 300,000 of them in Ulster. The
province was a wilderness of bogs and fens; they transformed it into
a garden. They also established manufactures of woolens and linens;
... they were intelligent yeomanry and artisans.”
These extracts are the amusing myths of the Scotch-Irish Society. We
have an emigration from Scotland by, say 1650, of 300,000, with no
account of the English, French, Walloon, and German emigrants who
were introduced, and nothing said about the original settlers of
Ulster, the Irish. In 1659 Sir W. Petty, a government official in
Ulster, estimated the population as follows: Irish, 63,350; English,
Scotch, and other aliens, 40,571; a total of 103,921. It is very
possible that Sir W. Petty’s estimate was correct; that he would
find it very difficult to arrive at a correct estimate of the Irish;
and much more easy to get at the numbers of those who were naturally
the English supporters. It is well to recall that at the date of
this estimate Ireland had gone through the horrors of twelve years
of Civil War, marked by cruelty of the most ferocious kind; that the
Cromwellians had added deportation and slavery in the Americas to
their other crimes and abominations; that Cromwell had settled his
own soldiers on confiscated lands; and that he was not particularly
partial to the Scotch, whom he had fought and defeated, and whose
immigration he was not likely to encourage at a time when they were
parleying with the exiled Charles and plotting the downfall of the
Commonwealth.
Professor Fiske’s 300,000 seem to vanish in smoke.
The character of the population introduced into a country where the
natives are treated as outlaws and wild beasts by the government, is
not hard to guess. It is not at all likely that it is going to
consist of model farmers, expert artisans, pious, educated, peaceful
men and women; that kind of people usually remain at home. The
adventurer, the ne’er-do-well, the poor, the desperate, the
homeless; those are the kind willing to face the hazards of war and
fortune in a land where the natives are hard fighters and haters of
the government, even though exhausted by war.
The Rev. Andrew Stewart, Presbyterian pastor of Donaghadee from 1645
to 1671, who was born and raised in Ulster, leaves this record of
Professor Fiske’s selected yeomanry and artisans:
“From Scotland came many, and from England not a few; yet all of
them generally the scum of both nations, who for debt, or breaking,
or fleeing from justice, or seeking shelter, came hither, hoping to
be without fear of man’s justice in a land where there was nothing,
or but little as yet, of the fear of God.”
Such were the selected yeomanry; selected evidently by the king’s
writ, by the beggarly planters who received the stolen lands from a
beggarly king, and by the London guides whose gold went into the
king’s pocket.
The reverend gentleman gives us a further hint of the people who
came thus running from the sheriff and the heavy hand of the law. He
says: “In a few years there flocked such a multitude of people from
Scotland that the Counties of Down, Antrim, Londonderry, etc., were
in a good measure planted; yet most of the people made up a body—and
it is strange—of different names, nations, dialects, tempers, and
breeding, all void of Godliness, who seemed rather to flee God in
this enterprise, than to follow their mercy; albeit at first it must
be remembered that they cared little for any church.”
People of many nations and dialects coming out of Scotland needs an
explanation. Mr. Motley, in his history of the Dutch Republic,
throws a great light on this subject. He says in effect that the
religious wars of Protestant and Catholic, and the persecutions
growing out of them of the ever-increasing sectaries, drove shoals
of artisans from Germany, Holland, and France to England. Elizabeth
of England had troubles of her own; and while she quarreled with the
Pope and disputed his headship, she was jealously insistent of her
own leadership of her state church and had no use for the pugnacious
sectaries from across the Channel. In time, owing to the English
jealousy of foreigners and rival manufacturers and the Queen’s
abhorrence of rebels against divinely selected kings, Elizabeth shut
down on the refugees and refused them asylum. In those days it was a
much graver offense to insult the majesty of earth than heaven.
Scotland, then in the throes of religious squabbles and the game of
church plundering and under the practical guidance of the amiable
John Knox, gave them a welcome as kindred spirits. When other days
came, when Mary’s head had rolled from the block at Fotheringay,
when her wretched son was enthroned, the foreign element found
Scotland a poor land to live in. The settlement of Ulster gave them
their chance, and they flocked there with Scotchmen and Englishmen,
to settle down and intermarry and become—as all before them had
become at that Irish crucible—Irish.
The forms of religious dissent driven out of Europe to Great
Britain, like Presbyterianism, had a common basis of agreement in
their common Calvinism, and the foreigners naturally drifted into
that form of ecclesiastical organization. Few went into the Anglican
State Church, and many of that faith drifted away from it to
Catholicity and Presbyterianism; and it was a special subject of
reproach later that the state-beneficed clergy caused such a state
of affairs by their indifference and greed.
But it remains for American historians to find the terms race and
religion synonymous, and to advise an astonished world that when an
Irishman, Frenchman, Englishman, Dutchman, or Walloon, adopts
Presbyterianism as his religious faith, he is at once transformed
into that hyphenated hybrid, a Scotch-Irishman.
This is one of the marvels of this inventive age.
Before Professor Fiske—for whose talent and industry I have a very
great respect—gives us his promised views on the Scotch-Irishman in
his forthcoming work, _The Dutch and Quaker Settlements in America_,
let me propound a question or two to him.
If, as is pretended, a certain number of Lowland Scotchmen of the
Presbyterian religion accomplished so much in Ulster and America,
why have not the great majority of the same people accomplished as
much in their own land and elsewhere, when all the conditions were
in their favor? And again, if so much was accomplished by an Irish
environment and an Irish racial admixture, and so little achieved by
the pure Scot under more favorable circumstances, is it not a
reasonable deduction that the Irish element was the responsible
factor in the achievement? If not, why not?
[Illustration:
GEN. A. G. MALLOY
TEXAS
]
[Illustration:
TIMOTHY P. SULLIVAN
NEW HAMPSHIRE
]