Selena Zito writes that all of the remaining presidential candidates are Scots-Irish.
Really? This is the first I’d heard that Hillary! was of Scots-Irish descent. I’d always assumed that she was from Puritan stock. That’s the way she’s always acted. And Obama is obviously, at best, only half Scots-Irish.
Zito doesn’t seem to quite get the concept, either:
How can there be such scant understanding of a 30 million-strong ethnic group that has produced so many leaders and swung most elections?
Perhaps because political academics and pollsters parse the Scottish half off with the WASP vote and define the Irish-Catholic half as blue-collar Democrats. They are neither.
There is no “Irish-Catholic half” of the Scots-Irish. Scots-Irish aren’t Irish at all. Neither are they Scottish. They were mostly Anglo-Saxon, not Celtic. They were also a violent people with an honor culture, mercenaries from the border area between England and Scotland. As the article notes, they were sent by the English to colonize Ulster, to get them out of Britain after the war between England and Scotland was settled and they had no more need for them. The ones too violent for Ulster were shipped off to America, so they’re a double distillation of the most violent culture that the British Isles produced. After they fought (mostly for the South) in the Civil War, many of them headed out west.
People who think that America is too violent blame it on the proliferation of guns. But they confuse cause and effect. We have a lot of guns because we have a lot of Scots-Irish (aka rednecks). But it comes in pretty handy during war time.
I think I’ll wade into what is sure to be the quagmire thread of the day. As I understand it, the “scotch-irish” consist of a mix of disreputables from both sides of the Scotland-England border. For a couple of centuries or so leading up to the unification of the two kingdoms (under James II of Scotland), the border was a place of legendary lawlessness where parties on both sides of the border freely stole from each other. Related crimes like murder, arson, and rape were commonplace. I believe the general term for this activity was “reaving”.
For some people, whether you were an Englishman or Scotsman depended on which category was more legally convenient that day. And there was considerable back and forth migration across the border. So it’s difficult, if not impossible, to figure out some peoples’ ancestry. I certainly would say that there is some Scottish in there (I recall some of the clans were known to get involved in border disputes to support relatives), but there’s also English, Celt, and who knows what else. But surprisingly little Irish as Rand noted.
I recall that once Scotland and England became united, there no longer was a place for the “reavers” to run. The politically unconnected ones got rounded up and sent to Ireland. From there, they proved inconvenient enough that they were eventually sent elsewhere. I imagine Georgia (of the US) was a popular destination since it was originally intended as a prison colony.
The split in the Civil War was probably more like 50-50. That’s how West Virginia got into the Union, after all – – East Tennessee would have joined if they could have. And parts of Pennsylvania and other “Northern” states were heavily Scots-Irish (British Borderers.)
But they confuse cause and effect. We have a lot of guns because we have a lot of Scots-Irish (aka rednecks).
I knew I had Scottish ancestors, But I never got
this connection.
But they confuse cause and effect. We have a lot of guns because we have a lot of Scots-Irish (aka rednecks).
I knew I had Scottish ancestors, But I never got
this connection.
Let’s be a little more precise about the history of the Scots-Irish, please. They were indeed borderers between England and Scotland for over 600 years. They were not shipped to Ireland, between 1605 and 1640, for the most part, but enticed there with offers of land, if they would just clear off the meddlesome Irish catholics into the bargain.
Once ensconced in the North of Ireland, they were staunch defenders of any protestant English government there. They famously held Derry for William through a long siege that kept Irish Catholics preoccupied while William III organized to conquer Ireland from James II & VII. Then, he allowed the English Parliament to destroy the highly competitive textile industry that Scots-Irish had previously built by taxing it and them into penury, between 1695 and 1715, because William owed the English Parliament even more than he did the Scots-Irish.
That was what drove so many of the Scots-Irish to emigrate to N. America, once again looking for land. They were on the frontier from almost the beginning, and their habits of not relying on government stood them in good stead there. Their memory of the punitive taxes back in Derry and Belfast was most of what gave us the revolutionary war slogan of “no taxation without representation!” Though they never formed more than 5 percent of US population, they formed about 60 percent of the fur brigades, and nearly 90 percent of the leaders of those enterprises.
Regards,
Tom Billings
Yep, they are handy in war. Like my kin Genral George S. Patton.
The cultural heritage of several hundred years of war, as elucidated by Fisher, is a good deal more telling than the genetic heritage, which turns out to be not much like the way it’s usually portrayed; see my review (spoiler alert!) of Saxons, Vikings, and Celts: The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland.
My maternal grandfather is kin to the so-called “Scots-Irish”. He was born in Durham, making him one of the border folk who didn’t move on to Ulster. I had his DNA tested and his Y chromosome is Celtic.
On that (eastern) side of the border, there wouldn’t be many true Scots (Gaelic speaking); mostly you had Anglo-Normans and Vikings over there. But off in the hills (and that border has lots of hills) there were enclaves of Welsh dialect well into the Middle Ages, some (like Rheged) rather important.
This is interesting. “Scots-Irish” is sounds like what Thomas Sowell is talking about in the title essay of “Black Rednecks and White Liberals” when he talks about “redneck culture”, though I wonder why he didn’t refer to it by that name (as far as I can remember). Having read that, I feel like I should read James Webb’s “Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America” to get a more positive side of the picture. Thanks for putting that puzzle together for me.
“Scots-Irish” is sounds like what Thomas Sowell is talking about in the title essay of “Black Rednecks and White Liberals” when he talks about “redneck culture”, though I wonder why he didn’t refer to it by that name (as far as I can remember).
Yes, that’s exactly what he’s talking about. The blacks in the south absorbed a lot (though not all) of the white culture there, including the honor part, which is partially responsible for attitudes in “the ‘hood.”
The history I have read is that the Scots-Irish were Celts. In any case, it was not unusual for the Scots-Irish and the Catholic Irish to intermingle over in the US… I myself am a product of exactly such a mingling with Marshall and O’Neill having joined up in my old Pennsyltucky home.