Born Fighting (18 page)

The over-mountain men responded, gathering their militia troops and pouring from their settlements in and beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains, its trails covered with an early snow. Four different militia groups descended on Sycamore Shoals, just east of modern-day Johnson City, Tennessee, and no more than twenty miles south of Big Moccasin Gap. Some came down from Virginia. Some traveled from the far Tennessee settlements near modern-day Knoxville. Some followed the trails out of the North Carolina settlements near modern-day Asheville. Their uniforms were buckskin hunting shirts or homemade linen blouses, belted at the waist and reaching to their knees. In contrast to the Redcoats, who were traveling with a supply train of seventeen wagons, they carried their own bedrolls, rations, and ammunition. And they brought their own well-tended and accurate long rifles, for which many of them were famed.

Under the militia concept their command structure fell somewhere between loose and nonexistent—John Sevier, one of their leaders, “gave his commands as to equals, and, because these orders appealed to his men as being wise and practical, they gave unquestioned obedience.”
⁶²
Another commander, Isaac Shelby, told the militiamen that once combat ensued, “don’t wait for the word of command. Let each one of you be your own officers . . . availing yourselves of every advantage that chance might throw your way.”
⁶³

From their gathering point at Sycamore Shoals, the over-mountain militias headed southeast, toward the North Carolina Piedmont. In early October they picked up the trail of Ferguson’s meandering battalion and began tracking him. Shortly, other militia units joined them, one coming up from South Carolina, another traveling down from North Carolina’s Piedmont. They now numbered more than 1,000, almost even in size with Ferguson’s 1,300 Redcoats. And on October 7, 1780, they found Ferguson on a narrow ridge that the locals called King’s Mountain.

Ferguson, learning from two deserters that he was being tracked, had sent vainly for reinforcements and then decided to head toward Cornwallis farther inland. Sensing that it was too late, he finally decided to circle his forces into an impregnable defense. Against a traditional European army, the steep slopes and bare rocks of King’s Mountain might have proved effective, as his soldiers could use the rocks for cover and also see clearly down the mountain in order to fire at their attackers. But for mountain men who had now been fighting Cherokee and Shawnee war parties for more than twenty-five years, the Redcoat commander had done little more than offer them their own kind of war. They dismounted, carefully forming into eight attacking sections, and encircled the mountain. And then they fought him Indian-style.

The battlefield was small; the length of six football fields on top of a mountain a few hundred feet high. The numbers involved were not huge; a thousand or so on each side. The battle did not last long; little more than an hour. But the victory was so stunning and the differences in military style so complete that one can say without exaggeration that Colonial America, with all its stylistic dependence on European forms of propriety, began conclusively to die along with Ferguson’s soldiers on King’s Mountain. And it was being replaced by the raw individualism of an uneducated and testy group that the Europeans, perhaps always, would quizzically view as “mongrels.” This was not the carefully replicated English society along the coast that was mangling Ferguson on the mountain. Rather, it was something fresh and new, occasionally even ugly, that could not yet even be defined.

Ferguson put forward a classic defense, calmly—and bravely—controlling his battalion while riding on a horse, using a silver whistle to blast instructions to his soldiers. They followed his commands, firing “in volley” at the advancing frontiersmen and even racing down the slopes three times in time-honored bayonet charges that caused some of the attackers to retreat to the base of the mountain and regroup. The Scottish major seemed to be everywhere along the ridge, shouting instructions, blowing his whistle, commanding a relocation of his besieged soldiers to a tighter perimeter as the backwoodsmen moved forward, and even slashing down several white flags of surrender with his sword.

But while inside the Redcoat perimeter there was a whistle and a determined commander, along the steep slopes of the mountain were a thousand Indian war whoops, every one of them coming from fighting men who knew the battle plan and were their own commanders. Virginian William Campbell, the senior militiaman among them, had simply told his men to “shout like hell and fight like devils,” and Ferguson could not keep up with the relentless, decentralized attack that used no “volley” firing and needed no orders from on high. Rock by rock, slope by slope, fighting sometimes so close that a rifle went off into the belly of a Redcoat whose bayonet had pierced the same rifleman’s arm, the buckskin and linen-clad militiamen used every skill that a generation of Indian warfare had taught them. The volleys of Ferguson’s ever more nervous soldiers went repeatedly high, over their heads, while the individual shots from well-used long rifles were seldom off the mark.

Ferguson fought bravely to the end, at the last moment leading a small group of officers in an attempt to break through the militiamen’s lines and escape. His sword snapped in two as he hacked at an attacker. They turned their guns on him, and no fewer than eight bullets hit him. He died in the saddle, head-shot, one foot caught in a stirrup as his body sagged to the ground. And with him died not only the left flank of Cornwallis’s vaunted sweep through Carolina, but also the ill-founded fantasy of those loyalists still sitting out the war in London who had intoned that a British sweep through the Southern colonies might somehow bring a revolution to heel.

The over-mountain men had not merely defeated the Redcoats at King’s Mountain, they had totally destroyed them. At a cost of 28 killed and 62 wounded, “Ferguson’s detachment of 1,100 men was annihilated.”
⁶⁴
Indeed, “only 200 Tories sent out earlier on a foraging expedition were able to escape. Hearing of Ferguson’s defeat, Cornwallis began backpedaling into South Carolina.”
⁶⁵

The victorious mountaineers spent a few days marching Redcoat prisoners to a collection point, growing increasingly restless and violent during the slow, rain-soaked journey. But they were warriors rather than professional soldiers. Their work was done and they did not take well to further discipline. And the anger still ran deep, not only in remembrance of friends killed in the battle, but also of the threats the arrogant British command had sent their way only weeks before. Mindful of Tarleton’s butchery and Cornwallis’s early promise to hang them, they held court on a number of Redcoats who were recognized as local Tory leaders, sentencing thirty-six to death and hanging nine of them before growing tired of the killing. Other prisoners were shot in individual incidents, and still others were left on the trail to die. And then the militiamen who had changed the course of the Revolutionary War simply went home. There were Indian war parties to worry about, and rough settlements in the crags and hollows of distant mountains where their families needed their help.

But other militiamen soon filled their void. The victory at King’s Mountain solidified resistance against the British throughout the South. Three months later, on January 17, 1781, the hated Tarleton, commanding 1,100 legion cavalrymen and highlander dragoons, would get his due at Cowpens, hardly twenty miles away. A small force of Continental soldiers and Virginia militiamen used deception, maneuver, and decentralized command to destroy his army and send him into full retreat. On two separate occasions the Americans lured Tarleton’s forces into a devastating crossfire by feigning withdrawals while other units laid in ambush, in one instance driving his vaunted cavalry from the battle with fifteen empty horses after one volley, where it refused to reengage. Cowpens, “the glittering gem of the Revolution, was brought off by an American backwoodsman [Daniel Morgan] who, like the great Hannibal himself, was merely adapting himself to men and terrain.” At a cost of 12 Americans killed and 60 wounded, the British lost nine-tenths of their force killed or captured.
⁶⁶

Two months later the Americans met Cornwallis in a larger fight at Guilford Courthouse in North Carolina, using tactics similar to those at Cowpens. Fighting the determined British commander to a tactical draw, they nonetheless forced him to withdraw and regroup. And by the end of that year the British would be defeated at Yorktown, finally forcing an end to the Revolutionary War.

One who is descended from these acts of courage inevitably must remember them with a special emotion. Samuel Cochran of the 14th Virginia Regiment crossed the Delaware with Washington and fought at Brandywine, Germantown, and Monmouth Courthouse, walked with bleeding feet wrapped in rags through the desolate camps at Valley Forge, and then fought again at Guilford Courthouse. Tidence Lane and John Smith and John Condley rode out of the east Tennessee over-mountain settlements and helped finish off Ferguson and his New York, New Jersey, and Carolina Tory Redcoats at King’s Mountain. William Miller, a scion of those who stood at Londonderry, made the trek from Natural Bridge, Virginia, to Cowpens and helped deliver Tarleton and the British a deserved and telling blow. These men and others, great-great-great-grandfathers all, fought with purpose on behalf of concepts that were older than the Scottish Kirk, views of human dignity that in time, in many places, became America itself.

History becomes personal. And the personal becomes history.

PART FIVE

Rise and Fall:
The Heart of the South
                              

When I grew tall as the Indian corn,
My father had little to lend me,
But he gave me his great, old powder-horn
And his woodsman’s skill to befriend me.
. . .
We cleared our camp where the buffalo feed,
Unheard-of streams were our flagons;
And I sowed my sons like the apple-seed,
On the trail of the western wagons.

—
STEPHEN VINCENT BEN
é
T,
“The Ballad of William Sycamore, 1790–1871”

                              

1

Westward, Ho
                              

A NEW COUNTRY
had been formed. Forests were hacked away. Mud trails widened and hardened, becoming packed roads. The wagons poured westward through gaps in the mountains, especially down the Wilderness Road that had been pioneered by the daring Scots-Irish explorer Daniel Boone, funneling thousands of settlers into Kentucky, Tennessee, and beyond. In 1803 the Louisiana Purchase opened up the new nation on the far side of the Mississippi River, although it would take more than another decade for viable settlements to reach Arkansas, Missouri, northern Louisiana, Texas, and areas farther west. In 1814, soldiers led by Gen. Andrew Jackson forced the Treaty of Fort Jackson, moving American territory farther south into lands once held by the Creek Indians, including three-fifths of Alabama, an additional one-fifth of Georgia, and an open road from western Tennessee to the Gulf of Mexico. In early 1815, Jackson humiliated the British in a stunning, brutal defeat at New Orleans, forcing them once and for all to abandon dreams of regaining their hold on American interests. By 1818, Jackson had driven the Spanish out of Florida, opening up further avenues into the Deep South, including the coastal areas of Alabama and Mississippi, which had been in Spanish hands.

As the new land began to fill with fresh settlers, the generation that followed those who had fought the Revolution remembered Cowpens and King’s Mountain and even New Orleans more clearly than those old battles at Londonderry or the Boyne, and cared more deeply about whoever wheeled or walked into their latest isolated settlement than they did about arcane and distant national labels. Past ethnic identities were quickly falling away in favor of a new and special word—American.

Some historians, such as James Leyburn, claim that the story of the Scots-Irish ends here. “After independence the Scotch-Irish were integral parts of the American nation, making no distinction between themselves and any other Americans, nor having them made, either for praise or for blame. If a man made his impress on American life he did it as the individual he was.”
¹
To be sure, if this were merely a story about ethnic purity, focusing on a homogeneous national group, such observations would be at least partially correct. But the impact of the Scots-Irish culture on America was so deep and profound that it transcended its own people. And in many ways the Scots-Irish had no need to distinguish their ethnic heritage from the dominant tenets in the new lands of the South and the Ohio Valley, because in those areas their culture came to define the very essence of what it meant to be American.

The Scots-Irish culture lived on in the mountains of Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. It continued to impact heavily in Pennsylvania, especially along the southern boundaries and in the mountains. It was already traveling along with the wagons to Texas, Missouri, and points beyond. But in the mid-South and the Ohio Valley it was clearly dominant. In this part of America, those of Scots-Irish descent still made up the largest numbers of settlers. From the beginning of the Revolution until well into the 1800s, the population of the United States grew primarily through reproduction, with very small rates of immigration. Even in the 1820s, annual immigration never reached 10,000 in a country that now numbered 10 million people, and that small immigrant stream continued to be heavily northern British. In 1820 there were a total of only thirty immigrants from Italy, five from Poland, five from all of Asia, and one from Mexico.
²
Importantly, those who had traveled over several generations from Ulster through the Appalachian Mountains and then westward did so not as individuals but in families, and not merely as families but in groups of families that frequently intermarried, thus extending the center of their culture into the next generation and frequently into the one after that.

The Scots-Irish culture’s emphasis on collateral rather than lineal descent bound these groups of families together, both in reality and in emotion, even as those families extended out in different directions. This heightened sense of family affiliation created the tendency cited by Professor Ned Landsman in the previous section to tightly connect many settlements through a system of interlocking family networks, comprising an unconscious but very real “oil slick” theory of cultural expansion. Similarly, Wilbur Cash pointed out in his perennially well-regarded book
The Mind of the South
that “by 1800 any given individual was likely to be cousin, in one degree or another, to practically everybody within a radius of thirty miles about him. And his circle of kin, of course, overlapped more or less with the next, and that in turn with the next beyond, and so on in an endless web, through the whole South.”
³
And the culture, like its ancestors before it, was with a few notable exceptions willing to assimilate others into it rather than exclude family members who married men or women who were not Scots-Irish. This brought an ever increasing number of English, ethnic Irish, Welsh, French Huguenots, Germans, Dutch, Swiss, and even Indians (including one of my great-great-grandmothers) into the Scots-Irish community.

And most important, the Scots-Irish, along with their ethnic and historic kin from Scotland and the English border areas, were laying out this cultural tapestry on an empty slate, in frontier settlements devoid of civilization that had no conflicting tenets to be overcome. As David Hackett Fischer points out, “90 percent of the backsettlers were either English, Irish, or Scottish; and an actual majority came from Ulster, the Scottish lowlands, and the north of England.” He goes on to point out that, “These emigrants from North Britain established in the southern highlands a cultural hegemony that was even greater than their proportion in the population.” This vast area extended “800 miles south from Pennsylvania to Georgia, and several hundred miles west from the Piedmont plateau to the banks of the Mississippi.” Fischer indicates that “The borderers were more at home than others in this anarchic environment, which was well suited to their family system, their warrior ethic, their farming and herding economy, their attitudes toward land and wealth and their ideas of work and power. So well adapted was the border culture to this environment that other ethnic groups tended to copy it.”
⁴

Thus began a trend that would repeat itself over the decades in many other parts of America, particularly among the working classes from a variety of nations that would later come into contact with the Scots-Irish and their converted “kin.” True to its Scottish and Irish roots, the culture that dominated this region was openly unafraid of higher authority, intent on personal honor, quick to defend itself against attack of any sort, and deeply patriotic. It was also oddly paradoxical, managing to be at the same time both intensely populist and yet indifferent to wealth. The measure of a man was not how much money he made or how much land he held, but whether he was bold—often to the point of recklessness—whether he would fight, and whether he could lead. Even from the outset it was expected that the Great Captains, just as the clan chieftains of old, would on the one hand own more land, but on the other would put themselves at immediate risk by providing leadership in times of wider crisis.

Physical courage fueled this culture, and an adamant independence marked its daily life. Success itself was usually defined in personal reputation rather than worldly goods. A survey of eight sample counties in Tennessee in 1850 “showed that more than half of all adult males (free and slave together) owned no land at all,” and even as recently as 1983 “the top 1 percent of landowners possessed half of the land in Appalachia. The top 5 percent owned nearly two-thirds.”
⁵
One of this culture’s great strengths is that it persistently refuses to recognize human worth in terms of personal income and assets. But as the country grew more sophisticated and cosmopolitan, this strength at some level also became a tragic flaw as other individuals and cultures that measured power and influence through the ownership of property would devalue Scots-Irish contributions, and even take advantage of the simplicity of this view as it applied to business and politics.

This formula would also mutate rather harshly where it combined with the false aristocracy that evolved out of the eastern Virginia plantation system in the so-called Black Belt of lower Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, western Tennessee, and eastern Arkansas. In this sense, as later pages will address, the South writ large would continue to perpetuate a widely misunderstood but pervasive three-tiered class structure that in many ways still exists to this day. Suffice it to say that from the outset, “poor but proud” was an unapologetic and uncomplaining way of life. Nor, on the other side, did modern liberals invent the term “redneck,” although it is only in recent decades that the term has been uttered by American elitists with such an arrogant, condescending sneer. In truth “redneck” is an ethnic slur, however ignorant those who use it may be of that reality. The moniker was used to earmark the rough-hewn Scots-Irish Presbyterians as early as 1830 in North Carolina and had its roots in the north of Britain long before that. Similarly, the term “cracker” was used pejoratively by the English upper classes even before the Revolution in referring to the “lawless set of rascals on the frontiers of Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas and Georgia.”
⁶

The difference between this culture and most others is that its members don’t particularly care what others think of them. To them, the joke has always been on those who utter the insult. As a country song happily puts it, “It’s alright to be a redneck.” In recent years, comedian Jeff Foxworthy has made a prosperous career out of inventing insulting “redneck” jokes aimed at an audience of his own people. Not long ago, during a debate in which Native Americans were denouncing the Washington Redskins for the supposedly demeaning nature of their team name, a listener from West Virginia called into a local radio station. “Screw this,” he said. “Let’s call them the Washington Rednecks and we’ll ALL come to the games.”

It was indeed alright to be a redneck, even from the beginning. A tremendous energy percolated inside these remote and fiercely independent communities. A hypnotic and emotionally powerful musical style evolved from its Celtic origins until “country music” became a uniquely American phenomenon. The famed Scottish talent for inventiveness and adaptability showed itself on the frontier regions again and again. Settlers had long studied the Indian ways, learning how to hunt, what to eat, and how to turn animal skins into clothes. They applied modern lessons as well—as one example, within a few miles of each other in Rockbridge County, Virginia, in the early and mid-1800s, Cyrus McCormick invented the reaper, thereby revolutionizing American farming techniques, and James Gibbs invented the Willcox & Gibbs sewing machine. And the culture’s most important contributions during this early era came from the courage and innovative talents of its soldiers and pioneers as well as the evolution of an adamantly independent style of democracy that forever changed the face of American politics.

The power—and ultimately the attractiveness—of the Scots-Irish culture stemmed from its insistence on the dignity of the individual in the face of power, regardless of one’s place or rank in society. This infectious egalitarianism had bound its people together from the earliest days after the Romans built a different sort of nation on the southern side of Hadrian’s Wall. The ideas that fueled the concept had been adapted into its religious base through the Scottish Kirk and were then further refined in Ireland as the notions of nonconformity evolved, asserting that every individual had the moral right to resist any government that did not respect his beliefs. This was not a concept that had to be learned in a book or taught in a classroom. It emanated directly and viscerally from the daily functioning of the culture itself. In America, and particularly in the mountain South, this streak of independence transcended narrow definitions of ethnicity and religion, extending to concepts of individualism and then to political philosophies that provided the roots of a powerful and unrelenting populism.

To most of the American political elite of the early 1800s, the thought of empowering a mass of uneducated, seemingly half-wild backwoodsmen was not simply preposterous; the economic implications of watering down a system built on the privileges that attended the ownership of property were nothing short of alarming. The seeds of this political shift were sown in 1791 and 1792 when Vermont and Kentucky were granted statehood, both of them having eliminated the requirement that one own property or pay taxes in order to vote. But a true widening of the electorate and a fairer distribution of the benefits of government would not become a part of the American political process without the benefit of an unusual leader, one whose political instincts were adept enough to face down the entrenched political machines and whose leadership credentials were relevant enough to hold great sway with the common man.

There was, in truth, only one such leader. His name was Andrew Jackson. This combative, self-made lawyer and military commander, whose parents had emigrated from Ulster, became the first president who was neither a product of the landed English-American aristocracy of Virginia nor of the intellectual English-American elite of New England. “Irish Andy” changed the chemistry of American politics more profoundly than any other president. And—which is difficult to even comprehend in this age of preening, blow-dried, self-important career politicians—he did so with no other motivation than a passion for the common good. The oft-overlooked Jackson was the quintessential “tribal chieftain” Scots-Irish leader, melding together the two ancient concepts of the warrior aristocracy and populist egalitarianism that had always earmarked Celtic culture as it had evolved in the north of Britain. And, more than any other president in American history, he was indeed a self-made man of the people.