Sunday, March 09, 2008
Hillary’s appeal to the Scots Irish…
Whilst we’re on the subject of Hillary, there’s an interesting line here from Jonathan Martin at the Politico website:
Her success tends to mirror the population centers of those of Scotch-Irish ancestry who settled in the more mountainous parts of the east and south.
Yes, they tend to be the whitest part of each state, too. But Obama’s success in rural Wisconsin underscores that he can appeal to the right sort of blue-collar white voter (say, those in the Upper Midwest with Scandinavian roots).
But Clinton’s strength in the highlands is undeniable. Which is why she’ll do well in Pennsylvania on April 22 and then very well in West Virginia and Kentucky on May 13. And in between, she’ll probably win every county in North Carolina west of Winston-Salem and Charlotte (except possibly in Buncombe, home to bohemian Asheville).
H/T to reader Heck.
Mick Fealty @ 05:41 PM
I’ve seen similar analyses, in various analogues, before.
A recent appearance was when Jim Webb, in 2006, took the Virginia Senate place from incumbent George Allen:
“Virginia is a microcosm of the United States,” he said. “Northern Virginia ... is becoming more and more cosmopolitan. Far southwest Virginia is as red as any red state. The northern part of the state has become more aligned with the recent traditions of the Democratic party. What I said on Day One when I started running is the real test for the Democratic Party of the future is this huge swing group of which I’m a part, characterized by the Scotch-Irish. Are [Democrats] going to let the Reagan Democrats come home again?”
Webb has described these voters as being alienated by the Democratic Party. In a 2004 commentary in the Wall Street Journal, he wrote, “The GOP strategy is heavily directed toward keeping peace with this [working-class Scotch-Irish] culture, which every four years is seduced by the siren song of guns, God, flag, opposition to abortion and success in war. By contrast, over the past generation the Democrats have consistently alienated this group, to their detriment.” ...
“The Scotch-Irish — this is the core ethnic group around which red-state America is built. It’s very inclusive culturally,” he said. “If you could get this cultural group — largely red-state, working-class whites — if you can bring them to the same table with African-Americans, you can remake the dynamics of the American political system.”
“I strongly believe that the interests between urban blacks and rural whites are more shared than probably any two ethnic groups in the whole country,” he said. “The story of the American South has never been black against white; it’s always been a veneer at the top manipulating black against white. If you can break that barrier down, you can change American politics.”
Posted by on Mar 09, 2008 @ 08:02 PMThose fighting Scots-Irish - Jim Webb, Hillary Clinton, Mike Huckabee, John McCain and Barack Obama - and George Bush :)
Posted by on Mar 09, 2008 @ 08:25 PMRemember Nelson Macausland getting interviewed once on why it was Scots irish in america and ulster scots here!!
Needless to say he couldn`t explain but he did ssay he wasn`t scots irish!!!
Posted by on Mar 09, 2008 @ 08:50 PMTwinbrook
Read “The People with No Name” by Patrick Griffin. The term Scotch-Irish was the name others gave to them by others (usually those who disliked them) rather than what they chose for themselves - they used a range of names. It was not until the mid/late 1800’s that they accepted the term.
Here the term more generally used has been Ulster-Scots. IIRC in the written record the term Ulster-Scots predates the term Scotch-Irish. It was first used in the 17th century and Scotch-irish the 18th century.
US is more accurate as it is more geographically correct. Plus self-identification means a community gets to pick its own terminology.
Posted by on Mar 09, 2008 @ 09:19 PMOne for Nelson, a pillar of the Ulster-Scots fraternity:
“Little is known of its usage in Ireland in the 1600s except that Irish students matriculating at the University of Glasgow, etc, were identified in Latin as Scoti hibernicus: Scotch Irish. The term has been found in early America, specifically New Jersey, where it was used to distinguish native Irish from ethnic Ulster Scots—meaning people who were, by that time, almost exclusively Presbyterian and who believed their ancestors were from Scotland.”
Posted by on Mar 09, 2008 @ 09:22 PMA variation: “Professor James G. Leyburn located in the 1675 register of the University of Glasgow records and enrollment of one Francis Makemie from Ramelton. It included a notation that he was Scoto-Hibernicus. That is, of course, Scotch-Irish. This Franciscus Makemius was later to emigrate to North America where he founded the Presbyterian Church on that continent, and organized the first Presbytery in Philadelphia in 1706.”
Posted by on Mar 09, 2008 @ 09:42 PMThat would be the highly efficient ‘Native American’
killers. The Ulster Scots.Posted by on Mar 09, 2008 @ 10:12 PM>> the highly efficient ‘Native American’ killers
They got a lot of training beforehand using the Irish natives…
Posted by on Mar 09, 2008 @ 10:17 PMHer success tends to mirror the population centers of those of Scotch-Irish ancestry who settled in the more mountainous parts of the east and south.
So… you’re saying that Obama (a black man) doesn’t do so well among Democratic voters who, shall we say, are commonly identified as the natural constituency of the KKK?
What a shock. Someone give Jonathan Martin a PhD…
Posted by on Mar 09, 2008 @ 10:40 PMI hear the vote was close, but white barely won over orange for the klan favorite form of dress.
Posted by on Mar 09, 2008 @ 10:45 PMScotch-Irish main contribution to American culture are rednecks and hillbillies (King Billy would be proud), ‘the only good injun is a dead injun’, eating mountain oysters and a slew of conservative Presidents. Their influence is still found in mountainspeak - words such as y’all (a truncated ye all), youen and hisen, and putting “a” before words like ‘thon lambs are a-springin’, ‘those critters are a-hootin and a-hollerin.’
Posted by on Mar 09, 2008 @ 10:49 PMI can see this thread going to hell in a handcart, and soon too.
The reference to Patrick Griffin (from fair_deal @ 10:19 PM) is spot-on. His definition, see note 7 on page 176, is very precise:
To call the Presbyterians, who had migrated from Scotland to Ulster over the course of the seventeenth century, “Ulster Scots” smacks of anachronism. The term, coupling ethnic and geographical designations, came into use in Ireland only after the eighteenth century.
With all due respect, I do net see how Scottish usage helps us to define a sense of identity in Ulster or the American colonies. Griffin seems consistent in using the term “Ulster Presbyterians”, as when he is discussing the “strange humour” than led to mass emigration in 1718-9 and the late 1720s (see page 66):
The Ulster Presbyterians’ larger world embraced America ... While the migrant trade developed as an extension of the linen and flax trades, making the imaginative leap to the New World possible, Pennsylvania appeared to men and women of the north as a perfect Ulster, one where opportunity coexisted with religious freedom. In those years, therefore, as they looked inward to make sense of profound change, they also looked outward to reconstruct their vision of Ulster.
At the other end of the emigration, there were different motivations. It needs to be remembered that a substantial proportion of the emigrants from Ulster went as “indentured servants”: one was George Taylor, who later signed the Declaration of Independence as a delegate from Pennsylvania. That brings us to the troubled topic of “white servitude”:
Just imported from Ireland and
to be sold on Board the Ship
Virue, John Seymour, Master, now
in the Harbour of Boston, a parcel
of healthy men Servants chiefly
Tradesmen.Michael Fry [“How the Scots Made America”] has an intriguing (if somewhat muddled) thought about loyalties, and how this was reflected in the link between the American Revolution and the Irish Volunteers and 1798 (see page 27):
Another interesting comparison is between the Scots of Scotland and the Scots of Ulster. The Scots of Scotland had everything to lose by siding with the Americans; the Scots of Ulster had nothing to lose. To them, England’s difficulty was Ireland’s opportunity. They found their opportunity as the transatlantic conflict turned into a general European war, after France, Spain and Holland entered on the American side. British resources became overstretched and a militia was raised ...
The same spirit of independence was at work among the Ulstermen’s kith and kin on the other side of the ocean. To begin with, the war did not affect them much, because most lived in the back country far from where the hostilities first broke out in New England.Fry then specifically points to the unfortunate actions of “a Scotsman, Patrick Ferguson”:
Ferguson led his troops inland. By October 1780 he reached King’s Mountain on the border between North and South Carolina. He knew that the Scotch-Irish settled beyond in the Appalachian valleys were, now war had come to them, organising resistance. He meant to overawe them ... But 3,000 of them came to meet him. while he was camped on the mountain, they surrounded him and attacked ... His terrified and disordered soldiers gave up at once. But the raging rebels ran amok and massacred a quarter of them as they tried to surrender. Many of these were doubtless loyal Scots, falling to the blades and bullets of Scotch-Irish patriots. Nothing brings out the contrast between them so clearly.
So a line was drawn between the Ulstermen got on with being Americans, and the Scots who stayed loyal (Flora MacDonald, she of Bonnie Prince Charlie fame, was one of the returned emigrants who returned to Scotland from America after Independence). The Scots loyalists and many soldiers from Scots regiments were settled in Canada.
Posted by on Mar 09, 2008 @ 11:20 PM*That would be the highly efficient ‘Native American’killers. The Ulster Scots.* (BfB)
I understood that the ratio of casualities was initially 50:1 in favour of the Native Americans.
Presumably the Scotch Irish displayed that same unbending fortitude that would serve them so well much later against the Provos.
Posted by on Mar 10, 2008 @ 05:34 AM“Presumably the Scotch Irish displayed that same unbending fortitude that would serve them so well much later against the Provos.”
Did they agree to share power with the Amerinds?
Posted by on Mar 10, 2008 @ 07:00 AM>> Did they agree to share power with the Amerinds?
I am sure there are some Unionists who (had they thought of it) would have put those pesky Taigs and other Republicans into a reservation or two - located in the most inhospitable and infertile parts of NI of course.
Posted by on Mar 10, 2008 @ 09:10 AMOur old mucker Harry Flashman once did a post on this theme that was so spot-on that I cut ‘n pasted it into a word doc for posterity…in light of some the snidey, contemptuous and clearly sectarian-minded posts on here, I hope Harry won’t mind me quoting from it here:
“….enjoy the richness of your own culture, revel in it, pass it on to your children, but don’t treat it like a football team where it has to be better than the other fella’s. As a simple matter of fact a huge amount of what makes up the history and culture of the modern United States derives directly from the Ulster prod tradition; staunch individualism and self reliance, a visceral distrust of English aristocratic governance, frontier spirit, plain speaking, simple local level democracy, antipathy to central control etc. Now you might not approve of these traits and might comment that modern Ulstermen have hardly maintained them but to deny that they did not originate in the fields and hamlets of Ulster is fallacious.
Read James Webb’s “Born Fighting”, it shows clearly how so much of what it means to be an American is directly descended from the Scots Irish. These Hill Billys (note they weren’t Hill Tristrams or Hill Gunthers or Hill Giovannis) did produce the modern bluegrass country music which undoubtedly underpins modern rock n’ roll. They made up the core of the US Army and of US political parties and thinkers and general scoundrels. Examine the names Samuel Adams, Davy Crockett, Billy the Kid, Ulysses Simpson Grant, Kitt Carson, Woodrow Wilson, General George Patton, heck even Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon. The US constitution wasn’t just printed by a wee man from Strabane it was written and brought to life by them. I never even thought about Hunter S Thompson, when you think about it he sounds like a Limavady grocer!
…you have to get over this narrow, parochial vision of culture as being a particular type of dancing or fiddle playing, culture means a lot more than that and the Ulster prods have a fair bit to be proud of their contribution.”Amen to that, Harry
Posted by on Mar 10, 2008 @ 09:48 AMMR
“The term, coupling ethnic and geographical designations, came into use in Ireland only after the eighteenth century.”
Since the book was written earlier usage has been found.
Also as I pointed out earlier its up to a community (and individuals) to pick what it want to call itself (themselves.
Posted by on Mar 10, 2008 @ 10:05 AMSCI
“Scotch-Irish main contribution to American culture are rednecks and hillbillies “
So the churches, newspapers, and universities etc they founded made no contribution?
Posted by on Mar 10, 2008 @ 10:09 AMWhat about the influence of that ‘New Light’ Presbyterian, Francis Hutcheson, the man from Drumalig?
“Your silly son, Frank, has fashed a’ the congregation with his idle cackle”, one of the elders reported to his father, “for he has been babblin’ this ‘oor about a good and benevolent God, and that the sauls of the heathen themselves wll gang tae heaven if they follow the licht o’ their ain consciences. Not a word does the daft boy ken, speer nor say about the gude auld comfortable doctrines of election, reprobation, original sin and faith” .. Barkley quoted in Finlay Holmes “Our Irish Presbyterian Heritage
Posted by on Mar 10, 2008 @ 10:40 AMfair_deal @ 11:05 AM:
Yes, I noted the point that was made by Nevin @ 10.22 and 10.42 PM.
This is a debate about identity. I’d like Nevin to confirm his grammar here, because the University of Glasgow, by identifying students as “Scoti hibernicus” (Irishman of Scot), rather than as “Scoto-hibernicus” (Scots-Irish), seems to be making the issue for me. As one who has spent his adult life being told by the Irish that he was English (because of place of birth) and by the English that he was Irish (because of education and background), I see this as Glasgow telling Francis Mackemie, “You’re not really one of us”.
So, my argument stands: this business of being “Ulster Scots” or (in the US) “Scots-Irish” is a comparatively recent attempt to discover an identity. What it does is say, “We’re not Irish”. In the US it came about because the Irish immigration of the nineteenth century was Catholic: I’ve dealt with that aspect in previous threads, commending
Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White.I wonder if I can now trespass on everybody’s tolerance by drawing attention to James G Leyburn’s The Scotch-Irish, a Social History? It’s not going to fit into a single post, be warned.
Leyburn, writing back in 1962, makes as good an effort as I’ve seen to define why and how the Ulster Scot differs from a native Scot (this from the start of Chapter 11, pages 140-3):
FOR AN UNDERSTANDING OF THE SCOTCH-IRISH in America, the important question is whether the Scot in Ulster differed in any clear way from the Lowland Scot at the time of the migration to America. Were the Scotch-Irish true Scots in culture and outlook, in character and temperament, or had the experience in Ulster significantly changed them?
In three important aspects of life the Ulsterman of 1717 was recognizably different from his cousins in Scotland: social distinctions had changed their character; his loyalties were now centered in Ulster rather than in Scotland; and his religion had subtly hardened.
The quiet and unheralded disappearance of feudalism at the inception of the Ulster Plantation had done more than mark the end of an ancient institution. By releasing men from attachment to a particular locality for life it had given individuals a freedom of choice as to where they would live, for whom they would work, whether they must follow the age-old occupation of farming. The growth of the woolen and linen industries offered considerable alternatives to traditional agriculture, while the very prosperity of manufacture and trade provided the inducements to desert tenant farming. There were, quite simply, no traditional families in the new Ulster, and consequently no ties to bind a man to lord, laird, and locality. In any community there might be families from various parts of the Lowlands; this in itself meant that leadership would have to reveal itself by a person’s performance, not by his family’s accustomed status through the centuries.
Posted by on Mar 10, 2008 @ 11:55 AMContinuation of extract from James G Leyburn’s The Scotch-Irish, a Social History, chapter 11, pages 140-3):
The complete disappearance of feudalism can best be perceived by the unchallenged assumption, within the very century of migration from Scotland, of a man’s right to leave his farm to become a factor in the woolen and linen industries or to set up a business for himself in a town. Here were, for the Scot, distinctly new economic phenomena: free labor, freedom of movement, the opportunity to achieve a new social status. These are everywhere regarded as the first steps toward the emergence of new order of capitalism. More than this, society in Ulster was not based upon kinship, on the place a man’s family had always held in a traditional community. Such links to the conservative past had been broken by crossing to Ireland. Now a man was a free agent. Society consequently began to develop new distinctions based upon property, income, and leadership, all of which are marks of the modern rather than the feudal world. Even the word “laird” disappeared from the Ulsterman’s vocabulary, and with it the idea of an ascribed status of social relationships.
It would be too much to suggest that ambition had as yet become a dominant motive of life, as it is in capitalistic society; yet the very transferral from Scotland to Ulster proved that men responded to the economic motive. If, therefore, new opportunities appeared whereby one might gain increased income, a better home, and new comforts in life, these attractions provided an incentive unknown in contemporary Scotland. Many of the people responded. As their wealth increased, they were recognized as substantial citizens. New men became elders in the church and leaders in the community; business enterprise required traveling and the broadening of horizons. Quite simply, many people who in Scotland would have remained tenant farmers, and thus members of the lowest social class, now in Ulster rose in the social scale and were accorded all the more prestige because of the very limited number of men in the highest positions of traditional class society, the lords and gentry. In fact, Ulster made her own gentry, although they might have been thought upstarts by the conventional gentry of England and Scotland at the time.
This social transformation showed itself clearly during the period of migration to America. Thousands of those who went to the New World were so poor that they had to pay for their passage by becoming indentured servants for a period of time; these people were generally those who had remained tenant farmers in Ulster. But numbers of those who left had so risen from the ranks that they were, by any standards, middle class: they could pay their own fare and have enough left over to purchase land in the New World. Because they were known as substantial citizens in their Ulster communities, they normally assumed similar leadership in the farming communities established on the American frontier. Their example and their success induced emulation. The seed of ambition had been well planted on Ulster soil; it was to bear fruit in America.
The second difference that distinguished the Ulsterman of 1717 from the Scot was the shift in loyalty to place. British historians often write of the “Ulster Scot.” This designation, while it accurately notes the ancestry of the people, is misleading, for the Ulsterman of Scottish descent was now a person of a new and different nationality. While his experience in northern Ireland and his Presbyterianism led him to make a clear distinction between himself and the native Catholic Irish, nevertheless the home of the Ulstermen was in Ireland, not Scotland. Having lived for generations in Tyrone or one of the other northern counties of Ireland, they knew no other homeland. When they left for America, the Irish countryside lingered in their memory as familiar and dear because of personal associations. It was in Ireland that they had had their troubles and had won their struggles. Here their fathers had made their farms and built their homes, shed blood for the defense of their families, developed their industries; here generations of their people were buried.
More ...
Posted by on Mar 10, 2008 @ 12:06 PMAnd finally, from Leyburn:
Scotland, on the other hand, was a folk memory and little more, since few of the Scotch-Irish immigrants to America had ever seen it. The Scottish tales of their elders were vivid and could arouse the imagination; but the people were Irish-with a difference. The situation was parallel to that of the second and third generations of immigrants to America: these are no longer Polish or Greek or German, but American. In this sense, then, the Ulstermen of Scottish descent were not truly Ulster Scots, but people of a new nationality with its own traditions and culture and points of reference. That many American colonial officials called them Irish did not offend them, unless by that designation they were confused with the Catholic Irish. They were only dimly concerned with contemporary developments in Scotland, unless these impinged upon their common Presbyterian faith.
The difference in nationality was still further marked because of the intermarriage in Ulster of people of Scottish ancestry with those who had come from England. The puritan from York¬shire or Somerset now living in Derry or Down would find a Presbyterian church more congenial to him than the Anglican church, and so would identify himself with the Scottish element. Children in a home with parents or grandparents from both British countries were unlikely to develop a purely Scottish patriotism. What they knew best and loved was northern Ireland.
A third distinctive characteristic of the Ulstermen who be¬came Scotch-Irish was the quality of their Presbyterianism. While Scotland itself, in the determinative years of the seven¬teenth century, was developing degrees of religious usage rang¬ing from rigid narrowness to a more genial acceptance of neces¬sary compromise, Ulster Presbyterianism remained almost uni¬formly puritan and conservative. Some have said that the experience in Ulster not only strengthened the religious con¬viction of the Presbyterians; it actually made them bigots. Such derogatory terms do little more than emphasize a particular frame of mind, one in which religion is considered highly im¬portant, providing criteria by which other aspects of life may be judged. Ulster Presbyterianism tended to resemble more the Covenanting faith of the western Lowlands (from which, indeed, it drew many of its elements) than the less exigent faith of other parts of Scotland.
Posted by on Mar 10, 2008 @ 12:10 PMMalcolm, I would also recommend “God’s People” by Donald Harmen Akenson, for the similarities with, and differences between the Afrikaaners, Israelis, and Ulster Presbyterians, with particular reference to the key concept of covenant.
Posted by on Mar 10, 2008 @ 01:24 PMMalcolm, that’s the first time I’ve seen Scoti used in this context so it may well be suspect:
“Francis Makemie or McKemey, the ‘father of American Presbyterianism’, was born of Scottish parents near in Fanad ca. 1658, but moved with his parents to Ramelton as a child. His decision to opt for the ministry was, in his own words “wrought on my heart, at fifteen years of age, by, and from the pains of a godly schoolmaster”. Having studied at Glasgow University, where he enrolled as Franciscus Makemius Scoto Hyburnus, and a period of trial in the Lagan in East Donegal, he was licensed as a minister in the Autumn of 1681, and ordained with a view to going to the Maryland Colony in 1683.”
I wonder how familiar Leyburn was with Scottish and Ulster history. Those of the 1717 era might well have been first generation emigrants from Scotland. Up on the Causeway Coast they are just as likely to have come from the Highlands and Islands as from the Lowlands and their Presbyterianism may have been acquired here rather than being transplanted. Leyburn appears to me to lack nuance but my own knowledge of local history is quite limited.
Posted by on Mar 10, 2008 @ 04:10 PMNevin @ 05:10 PM:
Yes: “Scoto Hybernus”, I have to concede, seems to be the usual term for a class of aliens at a Scottish University. I see that Google, in its wisdom, has digitised the class lists for Edinburgh from the 1590s to 1858. This includes “Scoto-Hibernus” among some other nationalities and descriptions: “Anglus”; “Gallus”; “minister verbi apud Hibernos”; “ex Insula Manniae”; and (a personal favourite, if only because it caused me a second’s thought, “Bervico-Britannus”).
My point stands, though: these are terms by which the Scots were differentiating others. I do not see any evidence from this that “Scoto-Hibernus” was a term in common use in Ulster.
Then you imply that there was continuing immigration from Scotland to north-eastern Ireland over an extended period. Again, the evidence is not obviously there. Of course, some population movement happened; but all the evidence is of a surge in the early decades of the seventeenth century, then a tapering off. Captain Nicholas Pynnar, in 1618, found “at least 8,000 Men of Brittish Birth and Descent to do his Majesty’s Service for Defence thereof” in the Plantation. These are men of fighting age, so the usual estimate is to quadruple the number for wives and families, with another 18,000 in Antrim and Down from the Montgomery and Hamilton settlements, plus more in the colonies in Monaghan. Lecky reckons 100,000 by 1640, derived from Carte’s estimate of 120,000 and Latimer’s of 100,000.
On the other hand, the Londonderry Plantation continued as a near-disaster. The Irish Society thought they were getting 40,000 acres: they got more than half-a-million; and simply could not plant them, ending up with “meere Irish” occupying many of the tenancies.
Francis Makemie was, as you point out, in Maryland in 1683, coincidental with (and, probably, for the same reason as) the arrival in Pennsylvania of German Pietists, Mennonites, Amish and the other sects, led by their ministers. Penn himself was recruiting settlers in the Rhineland in 1677; and he published a prospectus in London in 1681, Some Account of the Province of Pennsylvania in America. So Makemie, and other Presbyterians, had established 13 congregations in Delaware, Cecil County (Maryland) and around Philadelphia before the Scots-Irish migration which started in 1717.
I reckon, on that basis, I’ll stick with the outline of Leyburn’s appreciation.
Posted by on Mar 10, 2008 @ 07:23 PM
