The men and women who came to settle this region were a stalwart race,
the men usually six feet in height, the women gaunt and prolific. They
were descendants of English, Scotch, and Scotch-Irish who landed along
the Atlantic coast at the close of the sixteenth century--around 1635,
when the oppression of rulers drove them from England, Scotland, and
Ireland. Some were impelled by love of religious freedom, while others
sought political liberty in the new world. Their migration to America
really started with a project, a project that had its beginning in
Ireland as far back as 1610. It was called the English invasion of
Ireland. King after king in England had sent colonists to the Emerald
Isle and naturally the native sons resented their coming. Good Queen
Bess in turn continued with the project and tried to keep peace between
the invaders and the invaded by donating lands there to court favorites.
But the bickerings went on. It was not until after Elizabeth's death
that King James I of England worked out a better project--temporarily at
least. He sent sturdy, stubborn, tenacious Scots to Ulster; their
natures made of them better fighters than the Irish upon whose lands
they had been transplanted. But even though it was English rulers who
had "planted" them there the Scots were soon put to all sorts of trials
and persecution. They resented heartily the King's levy of tax upon the
poteen which they had learned to make from their adopted Irish brothers.
Resentment grew to hatred of excise laws, hatred of authority that would
enforce any such laws. These burned deep in the breast of the
Scotch-Irish, so deep that they live to this day in the hearts of their
descendants in the southern mountains.
So political strife, resentment toward governmental authority, hatred
toward individuals acting for the rulers developed into feuds. In some
such way the making of poteen and feuds were linked hand-in-hand long
before the Anglo-Celtic and Anglo-Saxon set foot in the wilderness of
America.
They were pawns of the Crown, used to suppress the uprisings of the
Irish Catholics and in turn themselves even more unfairly treated by the
Crown. They could not--these Presbyterians--worship as they chose;
rather the place and form was set by the State. Their ships were barred
from foreign trade, even with America; they were forbidden to ship
products or cattle back to England, though after the Great Fire of
London, Ireland generously sent thousands of head of cattle to London.
Barred then from engaging in profitable cattle trade, they turned to
growing wool. This too was defeated by prohibitive duties, and when
Ireland undertook to engage in producing linen, England thwarted that
industry too. They were forbidden to possess arms, they were expelled
from the militia, and what with incessantly being called upon to pay
tithes, added rents, and cess they had little left to call their own,
little to show for their labors. Then adding insult to injury, the Crown
declared illegitimate the children born of a marriage performed by the
ministers of these Presbyterians, so that such offspring could not
legally inherit the lands of their parents.
Oppressed and persecuted for a century, they could bear it no longer;
these transplanted Scotch-Irish (as America came to call them) turned
their faces to the new world.
The massacres of 1641 sent them across the uncharted seas in great
numbers. And to stimulate and spur their continued migration to America
these "adventurers" and "planters" were offered land in Maryland by Lord
Baltimore--three thousand acres for every thirty persons brought into
the state, with the provision of "free liberty of religion." But
Pennsylvania offered a heartier welcome and "genuine religious liberty"
besides.
Oppression and unfairness continued to grow in Ireland. Protestants
there had never owned outright the land which they struggled to clear
and cultivate. Moreover they toiled without pay. Protest availed them
little. And the straw that broke the camel's back was laid on in the
form of rent by Lord Donegal. In 1717 when their leases had expired in
County Antrim, they found themselves in a worse predicament than ever.
Their rents were doubled and trebled. Now, to hand over more than two
thirds of what they had after all the other taxes that had been imposed
upon them left them with little or nothing. How was a man to pay the
added rent? Pay or get out! demanded Lord Donegal. Eviction from the
lands which their toil had developed--a wasteland converted into fertile
productive fields--stirred these Scotch-Irish to fury. They didn't sit
and tweedle their thumbs. Not the Scotch-Irish.
In 1719, just two years after the Antrim Eviction, thirty thousand more
Protestants left Ulster for America. They continued to come for the next
half century, settling in various parts of our land. There was a goodly
settlement in the Virginia Valley of Scotch-Irish. You'd know by their
names--Grigsby, Caruthers, Crawford, and McCuen.
As early as 1728 a sturdy Scot from Ulster, by name Alexander
Breckinridge, was settled in the Shenandoah Valley, though later he was
to be carried with the tide of emigration that led to Kentucky.
Naturally, first come first served--so the settlers who arrived first on
the scene chose for themselves the more accessible and fertile lands,
the valleys and rich limestone belts at the foot of the Blue Ridge and
the Alleghenies. The Proprietors of Pennsylvania, who had settled on
vast tracts, were prevailed upon by the incoming Scotch-Irish to sell
them parts of their lands. The newcomers argued that it was "contrary to
the laws of God and nature that so much land should lie idle when
Christians wanted it to labor on and raise their bread." But that wasn't
the only reason the Scotch-Irish had. There were other things in the
back of their heads. A burnt child fears the fire. Their unhappy
experience in Ulster had taught them a bitter lesson and one they should
never forget, not even to the third and fourth generation. They would
not be renters! Hadn't they been tricked out of land in Ulster? They
would not rent! They would buy outright. And buy they did from the
Proprietors at a nominal figure. Nor were the Pennsylvanians blind to
the fact that the newcomers were good fighters and that they could act
as a barrier against Indian attacks on the settlement's fringe. There
was still a fly in the ointment for the Scotch-Irish. That was--the
Proprietors' exacting from them an annual payment of a few cents per
acre. It wasn't so much the amount that irked the newcomers as the legal
hold on their land it gave the Proprietors. They objected stoutly and
didn't give up their protest until their perseverance put an end to the
system of "quitrents."
This cautious characteristic persists to this day with the mountaineer
and can be traced back to the persecution of his forbears in Ulster.
Mountaineers in Kentucky refused point-blank to accept fruit trees
offered them gratis by a legislator in 1913, fearing it would give the
state a hold on their land.
But to get back to the settling of the Blue Ridge Country.
When political and religious refugees continued to come to America in
such vast shoals they found the settlements along the Atlantic coast
already well occupied by Huguenots who had been driven from France, by
Quakers, Puritans, and Catholics from England, Palatine Germans escaping
the scourge of the Thirty Years' War. Here too were Dunkers, Mennonites,
Moravians from Holland and Germany. Among them also were followers of
Cromwell who had fled the vengeance of Charles II, Scots of the
Highlands who could not be loyal to the Stuarts and at the same time
friends to King George.
The Scotch-Irish among the newcomers wanted land of their
own--independence. Above all independence. So they drifted down the
coast to the western fringe of settlement and established themselves in
the foothills east of the Blue Ridge in what is now the Carolinas.
Migration might just as well have moved west from Virginia and across
the Alleghenies. However, not only did the mountains themselves present
an impenetrable barrier, but settlers were forbidden to cross by
"proclamation of the authorities" on account of the hostility of the
Indians on the west of the mountain range. Then too there were inviting
fertile valleys on this eastern side of the Blue Ridge, where they might
dwell.
But these newcomers, at least the Scotch-Irish among them, were not
primarily men who wanted to till the soil. They were not by nature
farmers like the Germans in Pennsylvania. And they did not intend to
become underlings of their more prosperous predecessors and neighbors
who had already taken root in the valleys and who had set up projects to
further their own gains. Furthermore, being younger in the new world
they were more adventurous. The wilderness with its hunting and
exploring beckoned. And so they pressed on deeper into the mountains.
There was always more room the higher up they climbed. And as they moved
on they carried along with them, as a surging stream gathers up the life
along its course, a sprinkling of all the various denominations whose
lives they touched among the settlements along the coast.
In that day many men were so eager for freedom and a chance to get a
fresh start that before sailing, through the enterprises set up by
shipowners and emigration agents, they bound themselves by written
indentures to work for a certain period of time. These persons were
called Indents. Their labor was sold, so that in reality they were
little more than slaves. When finally they had worked out their time
they had earned their freedom, and were called Redemptioners. The
practice of selling Redemptioners continued until the year 1820, all of
forty-four years after "Honest" John Hart had signed his name to the
Declaration of Independence. It is said that a lineal descendant of
Emperor Maximilian was so bound in Georgia.
Many were imposed upon in another way. Their baggage and possessions
were often confiscated and even though friends waited on this side ready
to pay their passage, innocent men and women were duped into sale.
Then there were the so-called convicts among the pioneers of the Blue
Ridge. It must be remembered that in those days offense constituting
crime was often a mere triviality. Men were imprisoned for debt; even so
they were labeled convicts. But, as Dr. James Watt Raine assures us in
his _The Land of Saddle-Bags_, the few such convicts who were sent by
English judges to America could scarcely have produced the five million
or more people who today are known as southern mountain people.
Widely different though they were in blood, speech, and customs, there
was an underlying similarity in the nature of these pioneers. It was
their love of independence. Independence that impelled them to give up
the security of civilization to brave the perils of uncharted seas, the
hazards of warfare with hostile Indians, to seek homes in an untamed
wilderness.