"If they don't like you, they'll cut off your project"- Huey Perry and how the government conspired to stop his anti-poverty community empowerment initiatives in West Virginia

In the aftermath of the 1960s ‘War on Poverty’ campaign by President Lyndon Johnson, and his 'Poverty Tour’ referred to in this recent post, a young man in Mingo County, West Virginia (a county which was particularly Scotch-Irish in composition and outlook) called Huey Perry, pictured above just last year, decided to get involved in helping his local community. (West Virginia is often said to be the most Scotch-Irish of all of the states. Here are some recent posts on the subject - on Governor William Alexander MacCorkle and also this general article).

The context of the initiative was described by Huey in this 1992 interview:

There was total political control over everything and it was a pattern that evolved and developed over a number of years where the local politicians felt that they had to control every aspect of the community and every aspect of people's lives. And, of course, this was an easy system for them 'cause it perpetuated them into office and kept them into office and so, even the welfare recipients, first would go to the county politicians to get themselves placed on the welfare roles. So, they felt that they had to do that first, although they qualified for the welfare system. They would use that passageway into it, and, of course, this pleased the politicians because they knew they had a voter. As long as they could control this person and make them think that they controlled them, then they were subservient to that system.

Well, Huey got organised but was a bit too successful. And so the government, threatened by the community empowerment he had achieved, and how people had become self-sufficient, pulled his program. During his project he uncovered cronyism, electoral fraud, the siphoning of public funds to buy influence and patronage, and colossal abuses of power by those in authority. And so in 1972 Huey published the whole episode in his book They'll Cut Off Your Project: A Mingo County Chronicle, recently republished by West Virginia University Press.

The picture above is a still of Huey just last year explaining the story of the project (the video can't be embedded here so you’ll have to go to YouTube to watch it). 

Here is the intro to Chapter One:

Standing on the streets of Williamson, West Virginia in the winter of 1966, Huey Perry dazzled a New York Times reporter with the achievements of his native Mingo County’s thirty community action programs. Roads into the back hollows had been repaired; schoolhouses had been renovated. Carpenters assisted by men on relief had torn down abandoned shacks and built and painted new homes. Swimming pools had been fixed; a park overlooking the dramatic valleys had been built. As director of the county’s antipoverty program, Perry swelled with his pride in his work. “This must be the most beautiful community action group in the nation,” Perry told the Times. Thanks to Perry’s tour, the reporter noted that six-hundred children now attended Head Start classes, three-hundred teenagers took part in self-help employment projects, and medical checkups had become routine.The crowning achievement, which had garnered the headlines for the story, rested with the new grocery store: “Poor in West Virginia Town, Worried About the High Price of Food, Open Own Grocery.” Perry called it, “poor power.” By taking over an abandoned store and selling shares at ten dollars a shot, unemployed residents in the area had refashioned the shelves into a community grocery store, which ultimately had triggered a sharp reduction in food prices.

For the thirty-year-old Perry, described as “a tall, rangy young man,” by the Times reporter, it was “important for the poor to mobilize their resources collectively.” The story takes a turn here: the reporter did not buy completely into the storybook idealism unfolding on the back streets of Williamson and in the tiny settlements of Big Branch and Cinderella. She had been sent to Mingo County to chronicle the controversy as much as the accomplishments. “Grocers are angry,” the reporter noted. “Other businessmen are uneasy. Old line politicians are upset.” The local state senator and members of the Chamber of Commerce had already gone to Washington, charging that the Mingo County antipoverty program “was attempting to create a political machine by mobilizing the poor.” Federal investigators had already arrived. A local businessman told the Times: “It’s all a Communist plot.”

This community-level grassroots politics is just as much part of the Scotch-Irish story as are the Presidents in the grandeur of the White House. Even in that context, starting with Andrew Jackson, ‘our’ Presidents were men of the people, not from the aristocratic class. I would argue that ours is a 'bottom-up' culture, with genuine 'people-power' as the driver. You can see this in the Scottish Reformation of the early 1500s just as much as in the hills of West Virginia in the 1960s, never mind here in Ulster over successive centuries.

• Here is a recent and thought-provoking post by Elizabeth Catte, linking and contrasting Huey Perry's work and experiences with the JD Vance Hillbilly Elegy view.

• Her article – There is no neutral there: Appalachia as a mythic “Trump Country” – is essential reading.

The Colrain (Massachusetts) Flag, 1812

A SCOTCH-IRISH SETTLEMENT, 1735
The town of Colrain in Franklin County in north west Massachusetts was settled in 1735, having originally been called ‘Boston Township No. 2’, but then renamed in 1743 for the Ulster emigration port town of Coleraine. One of Colrain's early settlers from Ulster was a Matthew Clark, born in Carrickfergus around 1700. Others were called Smith, Ulster-born yet descendants of ‘Scotch Presbyterians’. One source describes these first settlers as ‘intensely Protestant and generally Presbyterians and next to the devil they abominated the king’. In a short history of the town, author Belden Merims wrote that –

'And settled it was, by a hardy band of Scotch-Irish Presbyterians seeking freedom to worship as they wished. They had not found that freedom in eastern Massachusetts, where they had come as early as 1720 from northern Ireland, which they had not found hospitable. However, in 1743 they renamed their town Coleraine after Coleraine, Ireland ...

REVOLUTION AND THE ‘COLRAINE RESOLVES’, 1774
The Boston Tea Party took place on 16 December 1773. About six weeks later, the men of Colrain gathered to author the Colrain Resolves, on 31 January 1774 - so therefore a year earlier than the Fincastle Resolutions. Colrain then only had a population of 297; the leading men of the town were Hezekiah Smith, Daniel Donelson, William Stewart, James Stewart, John Woods, John Morrison, Joseph Caldwell and Thomas Bell – provoked to action because they were convinced that ‘the sole authority of the British Parliament is unjust, arbitrary, inconsistent and unconstitutional … when our valuable liberties and privileges are trod under foot … it is the duty of every true-hearted American to free themselves from impending ruin …’. Merims wrote –

… Colrain’s Scotch-Irish settlers had no love for the English. Resentments festered, and in January, 1774, at (John) Wood’s Tavern the prominent men of the town gathered and drew up what became known as the Colrain Resolves. Predating the Declaration of Independence by 18 months, the six resolves declare the rights of the individual, objection to taxation without representation, legal authority for independence, the right of the group to self-government, the necessity for action, a listing of specific grievances, the necessity for independence rather than mere reform, and the struggle for independence transcending the individual.'

This interesting article says that the Scotch-Irish were more literate than others in the region, and that these Resolves have ‘a clarity which those of other towns lack’. Here they are in full. 

THE COLRAIN FLAG, 1812
A generation later, in May 1812, Colrain was the first place to raise a US flag at a public building, which was the local schoolhouse. The flag was made by two sisters called Rhoda and Lois Shippee, and had 15 stripes and 15 stars, which was the design of the first official US flag up until 1818. A memorial stone marks the spot today.

FURTHER READING:
• Here is an 1844 history of Colrain, lots of great detail included. It is interesting that the minister of the Presbyterian church there in 1769, Rev Daniel McClallen, had been born in Pennsylvania in 1737 but educated in Ireland. He was perhaps related to one of Colrain’s leading citizens, Hugh McClallen who was born in Maghera around 1743. Daniel’s grave can be seen here, Hugh’s can be seen here.

• The Early Settlers of Colrain, Mass. by Charles H. McClellan (1885) is online here. The author proposes that James Stewart of Colrain had been present at the Siege of Derry in 1688

• The Scotch-Irish in Colrain, A Community Study in Eighteenth Century Massachusetts by Nancy Dolberg (published 1976) 

Rev Hugh Knox (1727–90), newspaper advert, late 1700s

He was one of the subjects of a previous post, due to his formative influence on the young American revolutionary Alexander Hamilton. Here’s a newspaper advert for some of his books. Even though in the remote Caribbean, Hugh Knox maintained regular correspondence with prominent people in America and Britain. Yet another potentially brilliant uncovered story.

"We the People" (forget the celebrity President)

As the media world continues to obsess about Trump, one of our own prominent radio journalists told his audience today the every night he watches Fox News just to see what Trump has been up to. (He's a smart guy, I hope he was jesting - but it was a quip with significance, and shows the scale of the Trump personality). It's tragic and yet also perfect - perfect because for our celebrity age we now have the ultimate celebrity villain giving other celebrities opportunity to say publicity-grabbing things about him, which feeds the media machine and a generation of one-time news journalists who have become little more than gossip columnists then sensationalise and excitedly regurgitate the latest remarks and tweets, and invite other semi-celebrities to comment on them too.

Meanwhile, one journalist in particular has stuck to time-honoured methods by getting beyond the spokespeople to the real people. Chris Arnade is a man you need to read. Here is his latest Guardian article. This is what my recent post 'The President's Poverty Tour' was getting at. Arnade has a pile of similar articles, he takes great photographs (shown here) and he will be visiting Britain in a few weeks' time.

• Follow Chris Arnade on Twitter here.

Sidney Edwards Morse on the Scotch-Irish, 1822

Another source,  a good generation before the ‘Famine Irish’ arrived in vast numbers, showing the usage of the term Scotch-Irish, this time in a fairly academic volume entitled A New System of Modern Geography or a View of the Present State of the World (Boston, 1822). The author, Sidney Edwards Morse, was a brother of the inventor Samuel Finley Breese Morse, and the family was of Ulster descent. The book is online here. 

The Morse brothers were both born in the 1790s; their father Jedidiah Morse born in 1761 was a Congregational pastor in New England and a descendant of Armagh-born Ulsterman Rev Dr Samuel Finley, a President of Princeton College. Jedidiah had published similar stuff in 1819, again using the term ‘Scotch Irish” (source here), and even earlier in 1810 (source here) and 1802 (source here). The earliest of his publications with the term seems to be 1789 (source here), where he also describes those in North Carolina as "descendants of people from the North of Ireland, and are exceedlingly attached to the doctrines, discipline and usages of the church of Scotland. They are a regular industrious people".

The breadcrumb trail of usages of the term ‘Scotch-Irish’ seems to be now be pretty much a continuous stream from the 1718 emigration families right up into the 21st century.

The President's "Poverty Tour", Appalachia, April-May 1964

Due to his seemingly endless flow of the bizarre, the incompetent and the ridiculous, since his inauguration Donald J Trump has become even more of a figure of ridicule and hate. I can’t think of a media outlet apart from Breitbart which could be considered anything other than anti-Trump. In some cases I think the media has rushed to exaggerate and misrepresent. But he has made it easy, very easy for them to do so. I am not a fan of Trump, but I am drawn towards the people who put their trust in him at the ballot box, who saw him as being their last opportunity for change in the corporate-political empire.

At least now the media is doing its job again, having been sycophantic Obama-worshippers for the past 8 years (giving only passing coverage to bombing campaigns and drone strikes, for which statistics vary, the destabilisation of other nations through ’springs’, etc), and who right up to the last minute were openly backing Clinton, who was just another establishment candidate. Yes Trump is a billionaire. But the establishment – media, Democrats and Republicans – all openly hate him. And that's a big reason why so many people voted for him.

However, what this media Trump-a-geddon has done is wipe out some of the intelligent journalism which was starting to emerge during 2016, which sought to explain Trump's rise, and which revealed a hidden demographic - a forgotten, abandoned, American underclass far from the urban and coastal élites. The people of last year's bestseller Hillbilly Elegy, which became a bestseller because it connected the journalist class with people they did not know even existed. For a brief few months, those people had a voice, albeit a small one. Now they are once again forgotten as all eyes are focussed on Trump himself. 

So the ‘progressive’ chatterati are virtue-signalling at an industrial scale, every Trump gaffe causing Twitter-tsunamis. Mutual back-slaps of how right on they are. Middle class progressive evangelicals are just as prone to this as anyone else, except they add a bit of Jesus into the mix. They enjoy pointing out online how they are more like Jesus than others are. This used to be called "raising legitimacy to ultimacy", and is a form of Luke 18 Pharisaism. The posturing - whether just to make political points, or when also wrapped in a theological gloss, is tiresome and self-aggrandising.

Well, forget Trump. He is merely the outworking of those forgotten millions. And underneath the fashionable outrage, the progressives are as disinterested in the working class and underclass as ever before - whether Trump voters, UKIP voters, Brexit voters, post-industrial parts of Scotland that I have been to and know people in – or in our own context, people in estates which are still in the grip of paramilitarism. Few of Northern Ireland's 'trendy vicar’ types would be seen dead at a band parade or inside an Orange hall, either through their own choice or the soft policies of those they answer to within their congregations. I have seen many churches on the 12th July and on other parade dates, situated along the parade routes with hundreds of 'unchurched' people standing outside, but with the doors shut and the building deserted. It's not only bad evangelism, it's bad neighbourliness, it's bad community engagement.

Previous Presidents also made publicity capital from these forgotten millions. Below is a film of Lyndon Johnson in the ‘Rust Belt’ and Appalachia in 1964. You can imagine how these images were carefully staged for maximum effect. Just like today. This 2014 retrospective makes for interesting reading.

Whether President or progressive tweeter, they are one and the same, both are merely exploiting the poor for their own publicity advantage.

• PS - I know those who do care, and a number of young ministers who are not scared to get their hands dirty and get stuck in. They're not doing the posturing. They're doing the hard work, far below the radar. Full credit to them.

• PPS - after posting this piece, I see that the Lancashire Post in the north west of England has a similar perspective. I have always had a soft spot for John Pilger’s view of international politics, as this article demonstrates so well.

"We didn't know that Presbyterians had suffered too"

 

Last Friday evening I had the privilege of speaking to West Belfast Historical Society on the subject of the Covenanters in the 1600s. I tend to stick to doing talks in my own local area but one of the Society’s members had heard me give the talk in Newtownards about 18 months ago, and invited me to give it to WBHS. As the date approached I was a bit apprehensive; demographically West Belfast is overwhelmingly Catholic, and the meeting was to be in a Catholic church parish centre. So I made doubly sure that everyone understood the ground I’d be covering, a few weeks beforehand.

Stories of the Reformation, of standing up against successive monarchs (the great majority of whom were 'Established Church'), of defying the state, of being arrested and imprisoned and executed. Of ‘18,000 martyrs” as it says on the grand memorial at Greyfriars Kirkyard. It all went really well, and the conversations afterwards were great. A comment that a number of people made to me at the end, independently of one another, was "We didn't know that Presbyterians had suffered too”. 

There is a lesson here. It is critically important to share stories beyond our own communities. We need to rethink how the 1600s are discussed and understood.

• In 1689 no Presbytery meetings were held from March until September, and when these resumed it was to hold 'a solemn day of thanksgiving for the great mercy of a begun relief from bondage' (source here).

• A deputation of ministers was sent to London to bring a message to the new King William "former and present sufferings, well known to those who lived amongst them ... that all sufferings for nonconformity may be for the future prevented" (source here)

The more I read the more I am convinced that the 'innumerable crowds of people' who greeted William at Carrickfergus 'with continual shouts and acclamations' were expressing their great relief that at least 50 years of struggle against previous monarchs and parliaments had finally come to an end.

Maybe there will one day be scope to re-frame these important stories.

The Revolutionary Knoxes: Ulster-Scots origins of Major-General Henry Knox (1750–1806) and Rev Hugh Knox (1727–1790)

Not long after Newtownards man Rev John Moorehead (previous post here) had emigrated and became the first Presbyterian minister in Boston around 1728, founding the church called “Church of the Presbyterian Strangers”, he conducted a wedding.

It was just the second one he had ever done. The date was 17 February 1736, the happy couple were William Knox (born c. 1712) and Mary Campbell - just like Moorehead they were fresh Ulster emigrants (possibly from near Belfast, but more likely having emigrated from Belfast - although other sources say William was from Londonderry) coming to terms with life in the New World, and from most accounts it seems life as outcasts, unwelcome in English-dominated Boston. A number of early Presbyterian churches had been burned down by “hostile Yankees”, such as nearby Worcester (source here), and I have seen another source - which I can’t put my finger on just now - that describes one being destroyed during its construction.

William Knox appears to have become a soldier, because in the same church records (online here), on 3 August 1749, “Mary Knox, wife to Capt. Wm. Knox, had a son baptised called Henry”. The “Church of the Presbyterian Strangers” was on Bury Street, later Long Lane, now Federal Street, and the Knox family home was at 247 Federal Street.

William had a successful shipbuilding business and bought a wharf at Boston Harbour, but the business failed and he later abandoned the family and went to the Caribbean where he eventually died, on St. Eustatius island, in 1762.

[A Knox relative already in the Caribbean was Rev Hugh Knox, who had been born in Ulster around 1727/28. He was ordained in New York in 1755 and was appointed minister on the remote island of Saba, where he stayed for 16 years, before moving to the island of St Croix around 1772. Some sources say he was a formative influence upon the young Alexander Hamilton, helping to raise the boy after his father had died when he was aged just 11, and his mother just two years later. Hamilton is known today through the biographical musical of his life. Some of Rev Hugh Knox’s sermons were later published, including An Essay on Civil and Religious Liberty in 1777]

Henry Knox was a boyhood friend of David McClure (previous post here), did well at school, got a job in a bookstore, and was embroiled in the Boston Massacre of 1770 when soldiers opened fire on a mob who were attacking them. Henry had tried to intervene and prevent the bloodshed which eventually took place.

Henry went on to become the youngest major-general in George Washington’s army, then chief artillery officer, and when Independence was won, Knox was appointed Washington’s Secretary of War. No doubt he and Alexander Hamilton wold have met many times in Washington’s service, and might have talked about their common Ulster-Scots influences - because Rev Hugh and Henry were correspondents (see here)

Sir John Melville of Carnbee, Fife – buried Inch Abbey, Downpatrick, 1628

 

This man came to Ulster in the early 1600s and once had a grand gravestone at Inch Abbey, Downpatrick (pictured above). It is described in detail in Walter Harris’ The ancient and present state of the county of Down (1744) and also repeated in the footnotes of Rev George Hill's Montgomery Manuscripts. Harris mistakenly called him James rather than John, an error which was repeated by Hill. The inscription is described as follows:

"S. Anno 1628. d.
"Then on the top of the Scutcheon in one quarter,
I.M., and in the other quarter, A. R. At the foot of the
Scutcheon on one side are these words thus placed: —
" Christo et Cruce
In Spero.
and underneath this inscription : —
" INSIGNIS. MILES. MELVILLUS. CARNBIA. PROLES.
MOLE. SUB. HAC. LAPJDUM. MORTUUS. ECCE. JACET.
SCOTIA. NATALEM, CELEBRAVIT. HIBERNIA. FUNUS.
INTUS. HABET. TUMULUM. SPIRITUS. ASTRA. COLIT.
SEXAGINTA. OCTO. FELICES. VIXERAT. ANNOS.
QUADRAGINTA. NOVEM. EX. HIS. ANIMOSUS. EQUES.
MILLE. ET. SEXCENTOS. VICENOS. EGERAT. ANNOS.
ET. OCTO. CHRISTUS. CUM. TUMULATUS. ERAT."

This would suggest he was 68 years old (‘sexaginta octo’), so was therefore born in 1560, and it seems was a knight for 49 years so therefore had been knighted around 1579-80. He is identified as 'Sir John Melville of the Carnbee family at Inch, near Downpatrick' in the 1881 book Scottish Arms being a Collection of Armorial Bearings. It appears that he was a man of some influence; having been knighted by King James VI, Melville assisted in 1593 to revise the means of tax collection in Scotland (source here).

Carnbee is a parish in Fife, where the Melvilles lived for many generations, as far back as the late 1200s. They had been in Scotland since at least 1165 as shown in a charter from King William the Lion of Scotland to Galfrid and Gregory de Melville (source here).

The volume The East Neuk of Fife by Rev Walter Wood (1887) records the Melvilles having arrived at Carnbee by 1296. There is a short biography of Sir John and his second wife Alison Ross (the ‘A.R.’ on the gravestone) which speaks of them having to sell their Granton estate near Edinburgh in 1598. Interestingly, Sir John had been declared a rebel, having begun to build a mill on the land of King James VI at Kingsbarns without royal permission. Perhaps these events were what caused him to move to Ulster. Carnbee was then acquired by the Moncreiff family.

PS: It is worth mentioning that the Echlins and Monypennys, also from Fife, came to east Ulster in this period, both families settling at Portaferry, just a boat trip from Inch. An earlier Melville from Fife was an ally of John Knox’s during the Reformation, and was hanged in 1548 for his involvement in the murder of Cardinal David Beaton.

……………..

PPS: Herman Melville (1819–91), author of Moby Dick, was descended from this Sir John Melville: "Herman Melville, the most powerful of all the great American writers, was born on the 1st August 1819, in New York. His father, Allan, was the fourth child of Major Thomas Melville. The family was of old Scots lineage, being descended from that John Melville of Carnbee who was knighted by James the Sixth”. Allan Melville had visited Scotland on a genealogy visit in the early 1800s, armed with a family tree. He also traced Boston Tea Party patriot Thomas Melvill (1751–1832) and General Robert Melville (1723–1809) to our same Sir John - source here.

 

"The Silent Ulster Vote" - a podcast from 2012

I am thankful to Bruce Carlson of My History Can Beat Up Your Politics for posting this on Twitter earlier. I’m only 15 minutes into it and it’s really excellent - detailed, packed with content, a lot of which I had never heard before. Listen to it here: 

Ulster Historical Foundation - "The Northern Muse" - 60th anniversary

This event next Saturday evening promises to be truly excellent. I'm especially looking forward to seeing inside historic First Presbyterian Church in Rosemary Street in Belfast, and to hearing Nigel and Dianna Boullier playing authentic old-time County Down fiddle tunes. Nigel is the author of the remarkable Handed Down: Country Fiddling and Dancing in East and Central Down (available here).

• Book your ticket online; the Foundation is a charity and donations are suggested at £25 per person. Click here.

"You're Scotch-Irish, aren't you?" - Michael Stipe of REM

I had expected some of this. I had met Stipe before, in Athens, Georgia, at the time when R.E.M. had just signed with Warner Brothers and was about to release Green. At the end of the conversation, he began studying my face. "You're Scotch-Irish, aren't you?" he said.

"No," I said. "I'm not."

"You have a very Scotch-Irish face."

"I'm not Scotch-Irish."

He reached out his hand and touched the back of it to my face. "You have Scotch-Irish cheekbones," he said. "I'll bet you have that somewhere in your background. I'm very good at figuring out where people came from."

(from this 2003 interview in Esquire magazine)

Niall Ferguson on the plantation of Ulster, Virginia, Canada and Australia

There are some drawbacks in the script, but the general approach is pretty good.

"proud of his Scotch-Irish heritage" - Vick's VapoRub & the Richardson family of Greensboro, North Carolina

Lunsford Richardson II (1854–1919; Wikipedia entry here) is a name not many people know today. But his product is a world-famous brand. Here’s an article from the latest edition of the official North Carolina magazine, OurState.com. His original name – Richardson’s Croup and Pneumonia Cure Salve – was too long for the small jar, so he gave the honour to his brother in law, Dr. Joshua Vick.

Richardson’s son Jacob Henry Smith Richardson (1885– 1972) was a successful salesman for the firm, and he is said to have been "proud of his Scotch-Irish heritage” (source here). The Richardson-Vicks Collection is held at Greensboro Historical Museum.

Lunsford was a renowned advocate of African-American rights, borne out in October 1944 by the WW2 liberty ship S.S. Lunsford Richardson being named after him with a plaque affixed stating it had been at the "special request of the leading Negro citizens of North Carolina to honor the memory of a white friend." 71-year-old Watson Law, a Black friend of the Richardsons, was present at the official launch event at Brunswick, Georgia. Henry's attitudes seem to have been similar:

... Richardson was proud of his Scotch-Irish heritage and considered the South more "American" than other regions whose populations included more immigrants. He named North Carolina's racial heritage as one of its assets in an article about how the state could survive the Depression and improve its economy. His correspondence and writings contain numerous references to his racial attitudes, including a letter to the South African Information Service comparing apartheid to segregation in the American South ...

The Richardsons were of course Presbyterians, very involved in First Presbyterian Church in the town. According to this 1980 source, the first Ulster-Scots settlers in the Greensboro area arrived in 1753, a direct 'church plant' from Nottingham Presbyterian Church in present-day Maryland. Rev David Caldwell (bio here) was one of the town's outstanding historical figures - today an Historical Centre stands in his memory.

NB: Lunsford Richardson I (1808–56) had been a Democratic Senator in the North Carolina State Legislature for a time around 1854. He owned a mill on Little River in Johnson County, which was at risk of collapsing during a flood on 14 July 1856. He tried to save it but was drowned, a tragedy witnessed by his wife and daughter, and some men who were trying in vain to rescue him. A general biography of the family is included in Makers of America; biographies of leading men of thought and action which is online here. It traces the Richardsons to England and Scotland; the Scotch-Irish element must have been intermingled through the generations. The same book says this:

… the men have proven themselves capable, combining the shrewdness of the Scotch and the wit of the Irish. For two hundred years and more, the Scotch-Irish race has been a potential and beneficent factor in the development of the American Republic. All things considered, it seems probable that the people of this race have given color, to a great extent, to the history of the United States ...

 

The Avett Brothers - Away in a Manger

The words have been attributed to Martin Luther, the other more familiar tune written by Ulster-born William James Kirkpatrick. Here are the wonderful Avett Brothers of North Carolina playing it. It is a bit of a cliché perhaps, like most Christmas songs it has been over-done and the familiarity can breed contempt. Yet underlying the schmaltz is a deep eternal truth - that through Jesus Christ, God provides what He demands. And through faith alone in Christ alone we are made right with God. He didnt come as a moral teacher. He came to be Mediator and Substitute. The Gospel is truly ‘Good News’ because the pressure is off. Christ has done it all. Amazing grace.

Duncan MacNab (1820–96) and Saint Patrick's Scottish origins

Duncan MacNab (also spelled McNab) was a Catholic missionary to the Australian aborigines. Born in Morven in the Scottish Highlands, nearly 100 miles north of Inverness, he arrived in Melbourne on 29 July 1867 along with the Archbishop of Sydney, John Bede Polding, on board the ship Chariot of Fame. McNab became a great champion for aboriginal rights and he features in the Australian Dictionary of Biography.

His entry there gives a clue as to his departure from what had been 20 years of parish life in Scotland – "He dabbled in Gaelic literature and at Airdrie in 1862 fell foul of Irish parishioners, probably by arguing the Scottish birth of St Patrick”.

There is a huge full-page letter from McNab in the 28 June 1862 edition of the Glasgow Free Press newspaper where he lays out his case and counters his critics. Some weeks previously McNab had been accused in the pages of the paper by a fellow Catholic priest as follows – “I know well he hates everything Irish … [he is] a fair type of his Scottish order, in his contempt for, and opposition to, everything Irish: people, politics, habits, all except the Irish faith … an anti-Hibernian spirit in our Scottish friends? And yet where would they have a church today … were it not for the always open purse of poor despised and sneered-at Pat?" It is pretty rough stuff.

If the subject was controversial, McNab wasn’t going to lie down as he gave a lengthy ‘archaeological dissertation’ address on the subject in St Margaret’s schoolroom in Airdrie on 25 September 1865, which was published in Dublin by James Duffy the year after (online edition here). According to the history section of the church’s website, McNab had given a similar talk in Bathgate too.

Matters came to a head after he published a pamphlet to prove that St. Patrick was born in Scotland, and followed this with a lecture at Bathgate that was seen as being anti-Irish. Certainly rivalry between Scots and Irish Catholics was common at the time, among the clergy as well as the laity, and Father McNab was undoubtedly one of its victims.

There are some other brilliant stories about McNab there:

He dealt with repeated rumours that the Orangemen were preparing to attack his church and raze it to the ground, by letting it be known that he kept gunpowder in the house and would blow the church up rather than have it desecrated. It appears that this was no idle threat either, as Father Van Stiphout records that he found a small keg of gunpowder in a press in the house when he came there in 1893. 

• A 1989 thesis about McNab can be found here.
• His Wikipedia entry is here.

I really do need to pull together all of the Patrick-related Scottish and Ulster-Scots material I have gathered up over the years and get it published as a booklet or online.

NB: Many other writers, before and after McNab (such as Professor James H Todd of Trinity College Dublin and the Royal Irish Academy, who was also a Treasurer of St Patrick’s Cathedral in the city) have agreed with him that Kilpatrick near Dumbarton is the most plausible birth place for Patrick. However, the birth place issue is just one small part of a larger collection of Scottish Patrick traditions which today’s storytellers and tourism initiatives choose to ignore.

William McKeague and "The Star Spangled Banner", 1750

Music travels. It turns out that around 1750 a Fermanagh man, William McKeague of the Sixth Enniskillen Fusiliers, composed a tune called “The March of the Royal Inniskillings”, probably based on an earlier Irish tune called “Squire Bumper Jones” from 1723. “The March of the Royal Inniskillings” was later picked up by John Stafford Smith in England and travelled across the Atlantic where it went on to become a world-famous anthem. Article here.

Ballyrawer, 1930s

My Wilson ancestors lived in a wee house at Ballyrawer/Ballyraer outside Carrowdore for generations. It was sold out of the family and was bulldozed just a few months ago. My aunt Betty supplied me with these photos just a few weeks ago. One shows the house, photographed from just across the Woburn Road within the old Crommelin ‘plantin’ of Carrowdore Castle which I mentioned here before in this post, around 1930. My great uncle Henry Wilson (1923–2003) and his sister Rhoda Wilson (1927-201?) are standing at the front gate, then just weans. Also below are the Wilsons’ maternal grandmother, Lizzie Kerr (1889–1966, who married Hugh Wilson, 1886–1967) and her mother Mary Kerr (d. 1945), presumably photographed around the same time.

My thanks are due to distant relative John Blair from Ajax in Canada (he is a descendant of these same Kerrs) who was able to confirm for me the tradition of a generation of our ancestors living in the house at no rent for a generation. John has pinned that down to a timeframe from 1879 (the houses were described as 'free for 17 years) until at least 1930 (described as 'free').

'Roots and Wings" - Reformed University Fellowship, Nashville, Tennessee

I posted about these folks years ago, and have just recently been reminded of them thanks to Sandra McCracken's new album entitled God's Highway. She has an earlier song called 'Portadown Station', inspired by, yes, our very own Portadown railway station. In 2015 she released Psalms, a collection of her own reworking of some of the Psalms. She has a certain Iris DeMent or Emmylou Harris quality; she is one of the Indelible Grace collective, whose album Live at the Ryman Auditorium is absolutely superb. Listen to the whole 18 track concert here; documentary film is below.

Cool heads and sharp minds

I like having friends with all sorts of opinions. It is good to stretch a bit to listen to what others think. It's even more impressive when somebody leaves a former opinion and changes their mind. A high-profile person who has done just that recently is Glasgow-born economic historian Niall Ferguson - recent Boston Globe article here.

Back in September he intriguingly suggested that the incoming President of the USA should appoint a 'Council of Historians', because history is the only example we can learn from, and understanding history and culture is very very important - article here. People in high office in Northern Ireland would do well to pay attention.

Ferguson was pro-Remain, an advisor to the Remain campaign, but has now changed his mind and is publicly announcing that on reflection he should have supported 'Brexit', the campaign to Leave the European Union. Here are some video clips from YouTube.

Denis Kearney was a new name to me but the parallels are fascinating; Kearney's great rival in Irish-American Californian politics was Frank Roney, someone who has featured on this blog previously. Niall Ferguson is a man worth listening to.

"the greatest realignment in modern politics could take place rather quickly if the right national leader found a way to bring the Scotch-Irish and African-Americans to the same table"

After the circus that was the US Presidential election, here's a man with something to say. This might be the best speech I've heard from any American politician in a very very long time. Former Senator James Webb is the author of Born Fighting (2005) and has visited Northern Ireland on many occasions.

"...I think of a great friend of mine, a fellow marine named Mac McDowell, who served in my company in Vietnam. In fact, we were wounded on the same day. Mac has been very loyal to me, even though he was a conservative Republican. He runs a gun shop on a shooting range in Erie, Pennsylvania.

When I decided not to continue the attempt at the presidency, he sent me an email. He said, “This guy Donald Trump,” he says, “the Republicans hate him, the Democrats hate him, the media hates him, I think I found my guy.”

His sentiment of uniting Scotch-Irish and African Americans will seem to some like pie-in-the-sky. That is until you read Carter G Woodson of course. And Barack Obama. And Rosa Parks. And Gianno Caldwell. And I suspect many many others. Values can unite above ethnicity.

Rosa Parks' Scotch-Irish great-grandfather, James Percival

Yes, that Rosa Parks. As this article from 1992 about her autobiography entitled Rosa Parks, My Story, states that her "Scotch-Irish great-grandfather was imported to Charleston, S.C., as an indentured servant". Similar comments are here in an article in The Washington Post in 1995.

He was James Percival (1832–1920), an indentured servant on the Wright estate of the town of Pine Level, Montgomery County, Alabama. He married African-American Mary Jane Nobels, who was a midwife and slave on the same estate. They had nine children.

Like everyone, Rosa Parks would have had 8 great-grandparents, of which James Percival was only one. Yet James Webb saw fit to mention her in his book Born Fighting, because, like Barack Obama, she apparently mentioned her Scotch-Irish ancestry in her own writings. That is surely significant. If anybody out there has the original source I would be very interested.

NB: There can however be an unhelpful 'elasticity' with the usage of the term Scotch-Irish, so it's always important to verify the sources. Sometimes it has been used too broadly, being used to mean someone whose ancestry was from either Scotland or Ireland, so not necessarily Ulster at all.

Alexander Mahood (1878–1968) - from Portavogie to Kansas

Emigration to America is a constant stream. People I went to school with live there, I have two cousins who live there. Obviously they emigrated within the past generation, not in the 1700s. They’ve never shot a musket or fought in a Revolution but they are just as important (maybe more important) than earlier migrations. We should try to connect better with those folk. I wonder if stats exist somewhere?

Outgoing President Barack Obama has re-stated his Scotch-Irish roots in a major interview in The New Yorker magazine. Here's the extract, and it's even more direct than the speech he ave back in the summer:

Obama will go down in history as the first African-American President, and he derives immense pride from that, but he never fails to insist on the complexity of his story. “I’m half Scotch-Irish, man!” he said. “When folks like Jim Webb write about Scotch-Irish stock in West Virginia and Kansas and so on, those are my people! They don’t know it, always, but they are.” (full article here)

Kansas is in the Mid-West, disparagingly described as 'flyover country' to the urban elites on the west and east coasts. Our people live there too. Below are two clippings reporting on a Portavogie man who was born around 1878 who emigrated to the USA around the turn of the century I assume, and lived in Kansas City. I am pretty sure my ancestors would have know him before he left. I wonder did Mahood ever encounter Obama's grandparents?...

Dorchester and the 'Eagle Wing' association

In February 1634 our Eagle Wing minister Rev. John Livingstone and his former schoolteacher William Wallace travelled to Dorchester on the south coast of England to meet with Rev John White (1575–1648). White was an enthusiastic supporter of emigration to America and organised a number of voyages. Around 1623, just two years after the famous 'Thanksgiving' arrival tradition, White became actively involved with the 'Dorchester Adventurers'.

He secured a patent from King Charles I for a tract of land about 40 miles long, stretching from the Charles River at Boston up to and just beyond the Merrimack River at Newburyport, which is where later documents show Eagle Wing was bound for. In 1629 the Massachusetts Bay Company was formed, its shareholders including John Winthrop who would become the first Governor of the colony and whose son came to Ulster at least twice during 1635 to help with the planning of Eagle Wing, meeting with Livingstone & co at Sir John Clotworthy's castle in Antrim in October of that year.

The first ship White's company was associated with, the George Bonaventura, sailed in May 1629. A fleet of 11 ships was soon assembled. By 1640 about 10,000 people emigrated. So, rather than a one-off ‘solo run’ episode (which is how I have heard it described) Eagle Wing was in fact very carefully planned to be part of a large organised and successful wave of emigration from Britain to America.

White was one of those at the Westminster Assembly of 1643 and a firm advocate of the Solemn League and Covenant, a role which would have renewed his acquaintance with the Ulster ministers and Eagle Wing would-be emigrants.

• Dorset County Museum in Dorchester is near White's rectory, his church - Holy Trinity and St Peter's - is still in the town, and the doorway of his birthplace at Manor Farm in Oxford has his name inscribed above the doorway.

Before 'Literally Hitler' – meet 'Bluidy Clavers', John Graham of Claverhouse (1648–89)

‘Literally Hitler’ has become the tired insult of 2016. Everybody who ‘progressives’ in particular don’t like is described in impassioned tone as ‘Literally Hitler’. Often for relatively minor things such as a difference of opinion, not the actual invading of neighbouring countries and suchlike. Whilst many are getting excited about ‘post-truth’ being the buzz-term of the year, for me it pales in comparison with this very worn-out Adolfian accusation. It is little more than Godwin’s Law 2.0. It’s pretty grotesque to belittle the slaughter of the millions who were rounded up, gassed and burned in ovens during the Holocaust in particular. I’ve been to Auschwitz and Birkenau.

Before the arrival of Hitler on the national and world stage in 1933, there must have been other commonly-understood personalities who were up until then regarded as the embodiment of unimaginable evil. For Lowland Scots and Ulster-Scots, the obvious one that springs to mind is John Graham of Claverhouse (1648–89), a.k.a ‘Bonnie Dundee’ by his supporters, and ‘Bloody Dundee’ by his opponents and victims. In Scots he was ‘Bluidy Clavers’. 

He was the first Viscount Dundee, prior to which he had been the 7th Laird of Claverhouse. At some point in the 1680s King James II gave him military command of all of the King’s forces in Scotland. In James’ previous office as Duke of York he had announced that:

"there would never be peace in Scotland till the whole of the country south of the Forth was turned into a hunting field.” (source here)

Not hunting for stag or pheasants, hunting for humans - Covenanter Presbyterians. And Claverhouse got the job. His name occurs time and again on the gravestones of Covenanter martyrs across Scotland. A now-deceased friend of mine told me of having been at a folk music event in Wigtown in the south coast of Galloway some years ago, and a visiting singer began a rendition of the old Jacobite song in praise of Claverhouse called ‘Bonnie Dundee’. He told me that there was shall we say a heated reaction. No wonder.

Claverhouse was killed in the Battle of Killiecrankie in 1689 when the Jacobites famously defeated the forces of King William III (William of Orange) which were led by General Hugh Mackay. Claverhouse was buried at the church of nearby Blair Castle. There have been attempts to rewrite Claverhouse as maybe not having been as bad as his legend has painted, but the legendary image has stuck. Of the many soldiers who were tasked throughout the 1661-1688 period to hunt down Covenanters, his name stands above them all - according to Professor Michael Montgomery's exhaustive research, even as far as County Tyrone and also America with the warning to errant children that 'the Clavers will get you' (source here). James Leyburn’s landmark volume The Scotch-Irish: A Social History has further examples of the same expression (see here).

In the early 1900s, Millisle-born missionary Amy Carmichael wrote of one of her maternal Dalzell ancestors, probably the notorious Thomas Dalzell of Binns, being “a friend of Claverhouse, who persecuted the Covenanters. My father’s people were Covenanters”. I know an elderly couple who live outside Portaferry, the wife of whom told me one night at a talk I was giving in Portavogie that her family tradition was that her ancestors had fled from Scotland to Ulster to get away from Claverhouse.

PS: I remember being on school Scripture Union summer camps in the picturesque town of Moffat on three occasions in the late 1980s (when I was 14, then 17 and finally 18) at a place now called the Well Road Centre, and being pretty horrified that the Black Bull Hotel had a plaque on the wall which told some of Claverhouse's story, a photo of which I’ve added below.

Rural Virginia knows us best - Joseph A Waddell's account of 'The Scotch-Irish' (1902)

The Annals of Augusta County, published in 1902, has a very good summary of Ulster-Scots history. Its introduction is simply entitled 'The Scotch-Irish’ which in 15 pages sweeps through two centuries of history from the late 1500s up to the late 1700s when Ulster-Scots emigrant families - who he described on page 5 as ‘Ulster Scotch’ - were making an impression upon frontier Virginia. Page 8 includes a long footnote about the Covenanter slave/prisoner shipwreck of the Crown of London in 1679 (click here).

The author, Joseph A Waddell (1847–1925), claimed descent from one of the men who survived and fled to Ulster for refuge, a William Waddell. This biography says that the Waddells lived in County Down for three generations and emigrated to Pennsylvania in 1739.

Another account traces the family specifically to Newry where Rev James Waddell, known as ‘The Blind Preacher’ had been born also in 1739, presumably just before the family emigrated (Wikipedia entry here). James’ parents were Thomas Waddell (b 1707) and Janet Bruce (b 1710). The Covenanter William Waddell was Thomas’ father. Some of this genealogy is included in the Annals on page 329 (click here).

• The Annals of Augusta County is available online here
• Rev James Waddell was tutor to Donegal-born Rev Charles Cummings, the author of Virginia’s 1775 Fincastle Resolutions (see previous post here)
• Rev James Waddell had been tutored by Armagh-born Rev Samuel Finley at the famous ‘Log College’ (Wikipedia entry here)
• He was the subject of a story by William Wirt, who was fascinated by the power of his oratory (link here) 

"... Guess my surprise, when, on my arrival at Richmond, and mentioning the name of this man, I found not one person who had ever before heard of JAMES WADDELL! IS IT NOT strange that such a genius as this, so accomplished a scholar, so divine an orator, should be permitted to languish and die in obscurity within eighty miles of the metropolis of Virginia! ..." 

A tablet, containing the following inscription, in commemoration of the Rev. James Waddell, was erected in the Courthouse of Lancaster County, Virginia, in 1905:

IN MEMORIAM Rev. James Waddell, D. D. Son of Thomas and Janet Waddell, of the County Down, Ireland. Born on the Atlantic Ocean, in 1739, when his parents emigrated to America. Died in Lousia County, Virginia, Sept. 17, 1805. Licensed as a Probationer April 2, 1741, by the old Presbytery of Hanover.

Resided on Corratoman River, Lancaster County, Virginia, in 1762, and had three preaching places, viz: Lancaster C. H., the Forest Meet- inghouse, and the Northumberland Meetinghouse.

In 1768 married Mary Gordon, daughter of Col. James Gordon, of Lancaster County, an elder in the church, and a member of the Court, and the maternal grandfather of Gen. William F. Gordon, of Albemarle.

Taught Meriwether Lewis and Governor James Barbour.

Was at one time minister of the Tinkling Spring Church, Augusta Co., Va., and as a patriot, in the Revolution, addressed Tate's Com- pany at Midway, Rockbridge County, Virginia.

Immortalized in Wirt's British Spy, when in a sermon of thrilling oratory and magic eloquence on the passion of our Saviour, he electrified his hearers by the beautiful and sublime quotation from Rousseau: "Socrates died like a philosopher, but Jesus Christ like a God."

This tablet is presented to Lancaster County through the Circuit Court, by Capt. Geo, P. Squires, Ocran, Lancaster, County, Virginia.

 

 

The return of satire?

It's about time that somebody started to make fun of what has happened to western culture. These are three recent videos which folk have been sharing online, and which I hope ware just the start of a tidal wave that sweeps all of the stupid away.

Women of the Revolution – Jane White of County Antrim

"... The anecdote of her in the sketch of Mrs. Wylie illustrates this trait of character. Major Kennedy, who is still living, mentions another. In the war of 1812, he wished to raise recruits for his troop of horse, and knowing that Mrs. White had a fine supply of sons, he rode to her house to make known his business. All her sons were in the field at work except the youngest, whom she called, and in her broad Scotch-Irish dialect, bade him "rin awa' ta the fiel' an' tell his brithers ta cum in an' gang an' fight for their counthry, like their father afore them." ..."

Rev William Martin sermon extract, South Carolina, Sunday 11 June 1780: "unresisting Americans, praying for quarter, were chopped to pieces.”

The content of this sermon is very grim. The appeal back to the times a century before of the Covenanters in Scotland is deeply significant. You can read more about the incident here, with the memorial monument shown above. A young Andrew Jackson was among those who tended to the wounded and mutilated survivors who were brought to the church:

'... At eleven o'clock precisely, the venerable form of Martin, the preacher, came in sight. He was about sixty years of age, and had a high reputation for learning and eloquence. He was a large and powerful man, with a voice which it is said might have been heard at the distance of half a mile. As he walked from the place where he had hitched his horse, towards the stand, it being customary, when the congregation was too large to be accommodated in the meeting-house, to have the service in the open air, the loud and angry words of the speakers must have reached his ears. The voices ceased as he approached, and the congregation was soon seated in silence upon the logs around the stand.

When he arose to speak, every eye was fixed upon him. Those who had been most noisy expected a reproof for their desecration of the Sabbath, for their faithful pastor was never known to fail of rebuking those whose deportment was unsuited to the solemnity of the day. But at this time he too seemed absorbed with the subject that agitated every bosom.

"My hearers," he said, in his broad Scotch-Irish dialect— "talk and angry words will do no good. We must fight! As your pastor—in preparing a discourse suited to this time of trial—I have sought for all light, examined the Scriptures and other helps in ancient and modern history, and have considered especially the controversy between the United Colonies and the mother country. Sorely have our countrymen been dealt with, till forced to the declaration of their independence—and the pledge of their lives and sacred honor to support it. Our forefathers in Scotland made a similar one, and maintained that declaration with their lives; it is now our turn, brethren, to maintain this at all hazards."

After the prayer and singing of the Psalms—he calmly opened his discourse. He cited many passages from Scripture to show that a people may lawfully resist wicked rulers ; pointed to historical examples of princes trampling on the people's rights; painted in vivid colors the rise and progress of the Reformation—the triumph of truth over the misrule and darkness of ages—and finally applied the subject by fairly stating the merits of the Revolutionary controversy. Giving a brief sketch of the events of the war from the first shedding of blood at Lexington, and warming with the subject as he went on, his address became eloquent with the fiery energy of a Demosthenes. In a voice like thunder, frequently striking with his clenched fist the clapboard pulpit, he appealed to the excited concourse, exhorting them to fight valiantly in defence of their liberties. As he dwelt on the recent horrid tragedy—the butchery of Buford's men, cut down by the British dragoons while crying for mercy—his indignation reached its height. Stretching out his hand towards Waxhaw—

"Go see," he cried— "the tender mercies of Great Britain! In that church you may find men, though still alive, hacked out of the very semblance of humanity: some deprived of their arms—mutilated trunks: some with one arm or leg, and some with both legs cut off. Is not this cruelty a parallel to the history of our Scottish fathers, driven from their conventicles, hunted like wild beasts? Behold the godly youth, James Nesbit—chased for days by the British for the crime of being seen on his knees upon the Sabbath morning!" etc.

To this stirring sermon the whole assembly responded. Hands were clenched and teeth set in the intensity of feeling; every uplifted face expressed the same determination, and even the women were filled with the spirit that threatened vengeance on the invaders. During the interval of divine worship they went about professing their resolution to do their part in the approaching contest; to plough the fields and gather the crops in the absence of the men—aye, to fight themselves, rather than submit. In the afternoon the subject was resumed and discussed with renewed energy—while the appeals of the preacher were answered by even more energetic demonstrations of feeling. When the worship was concluded, and the congregation separating to return homeward, the manly form of Ben Land was seen walking among the people, shaking hands with every neighbor and whispering in his ear the summons to the next day's work...'

- from The Women of the American Revolution. v.3 by EF Ellet (1848). All three volumes have tonnes of great Scotch-Irish material.

.........

• the quote in the post title is from an account published just 5 years later by David Ramsay in his History of the Revolution of South Carolina. Ramsay's parents were both from Ulster.

North Down Museum Covenanters talk - women and slaves // 350th anniversary of the Pentland Rising a.k.a the Battle of Rullion Green

I gave an illustrated (by Powerpoint) talk last week at North Down Museum for Bangor Historical Society on the Covenanters, covering mainly 150 years and broken into 5 chapters:

1. Background 1560-1606

2. The Ulster Dimension 1606–1638

3. The 2 Covenants: 1638–1644

4. Persecution: 1661-1688

5. Legacy: 1688-present

Almost 100 people turned up, and all were attentive and quiet throughout. Most acknowledged that they were shocked by the story - both by the barbaric actions of the state at that time, and also shock that a story which was once so well-known was fairly new to many of them.

Two important questions from the audience at the end were:

a) Did women experience similar sufferings as men did? The answer is yes, and a good book on the subject is the 1862 book Ladies of the Covenant (online here) which gives 23 biographies of women of the Scottish gentry. I had of course told the story of the Two Margarets, and touched on other stories featuring women throughout.

b) Slavery. One man objected to the idea that the 257 male prisoners who had been onboard the ship The Crown Of London (which was shipwrecked at Orkney in 1679 en route to the plantations of Barbados and the Carolinas) were actually experiencing ‘slavery’. He was concerned at an implicit drawing of equivalence between the Covenanters’ experience with the scale and experience of African slavery.

A 1908 book entitled Exiles of the Covenant by WH Carslaw is a good source on the topic, but I can’t find it online anywhere. J.K. Hewison’s two volume set The Covenanters (1913: Vol I here / Vol 2 here) contains numerous references – for example to John Mathieson of Closeburn, a slave-master called Malloch who wanted the young Patrick Walker as his personal slave, that there was even a ‘white slave mart in Scotland’ and that 'inscribed slave-collars were still in use in Scotland’. And many more references in Hewison alone.

There’s no equivalence between Covenanters and Africans. But neither should the Scottish experience be disregarded. Later editions of A Cloud of Witnesses, first published in 1714, include a section entitled ‘A List of the Banished’ (see here), with numerous women mentioned throughout the lists of men.

.........

On 28 November it will be 350 years since the atrocity at Pentland or Rullion Green. In 1866, the young Robert Louis Stevenson made this one of his first stories. The two ministers named on the ancient memorial stone which still stands there today were from Ulster - McCormick from Magherally and Crookshanks from Raphoe. They were hacked down by troops led by Thomas Dalzell who was the only man to refuse to sign the Solemn League and Covenant at Carrickfergus in 1642. They were led by Colonel James Wallace, a former Sovereign of Belfast and resident of Ballycarry in County Antrim.

Why was a group of 900 civilians set upon by 3000 troops? What was the threat of something which today we might call a 'civil rights march'?

• Charles Terry Sanford's 1905 book on the subject is online here • Description of The Pentland Rising by the Scottish Covenanter Memorials Association • a more detailed account can be read here • Wikipedia entry here • the site is an historic battlefield, according to Historic Scotland

Re-digging the old wells

A recent sermon at Millisle Baptist was based on a passage from Genesis 26. Verse 18 jumped off the page at me:

'And Isaac dug again the wells of water that had been dug in the days of Abraham his father, which the Philistines had stopped after the death of Abraham. And he gave them the names that his father had given them.'

The recovery and restoration of old things is a endless task, but an important one. They get forgotten or purposely neglected, and with the extraordinary pace of change in the past say 50 years or so a lot has been almost lost.

There remains a lot of really strong oral history among the older generation. It constantly hits me that unless these things are recorded, written down, then to future generations the stories may as well never have existed at all - they will be completely lost. It is hard to do, as with recording stories of older people there is an implicit message to them of their own mortality. It's one of the sensitivities that prevented me from recording my own mother in her latter years, body wrecked but mind pin-sharp. I wish now I had done it, but I knew at the time I just couldn't.

Keep reading old things. Keep bringing the stories back. Keep re-digging the wells.

 

(ps the sermon was theological, the need to re-visit the old foundational Gospel truths – not about recording local history!)

America's cultural blend: Scotch-Irishness as a broader influence

So we wake up today and the world looks different. Everyone's talking about Trump.

I sat up last night to watch the coverage, reflecting on our 3 week trip to the USA back in the summer. One of the things that struck me then - especially in Washington DC - was the enormous ethnic diversity. Whites, Blacks, Hispanics, Indian Asians and Chinese Asians all there in pretty much equal proportions, visiting the great heritage sites of the nation such as the White House, the Washington Monument, the Smithsonian Museums and so on. Yet all very much American. It was also the case at Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia for the 4th July fireworks celebrations (which included the best flute band parade I have ever seen - in period costume carrying flaming torches).

Last night's coverage on Sky showed that again. The pic above shows a commentator who is African-American, with an Italian first name and a Scottish/Scotch-Irish surname. All of these cultural influences coming together.

I think that we in Northern Ireland make a mistake when we look back to an America of yesteryear, to say around 100 years ago when the Scotch-Irish Society was in its heyday, and Ulster had provided a long list of Presidents. Scotch-Irishness was probably more 'distinct' back then, more easily identified, for all sorts of social reasons.

Today, over a century on, multiple waves of immigration have added Italians, Eastern Europeans, Hispanics to name but three, social barriers have broken down - and so Scotch-Irishness, whilst probably more 'diluted', is also more widespread as an influence. And not just in terms of surnames or ethnicity or geographical settlement areas, but in terms of general core values, attitudes, and so on.

We need to widen our view - and open up to this far broader story of the Scotch-Irish influence in the present and future, and so not rely solely on narrow somewhat ethno-centric impressions of how the past once was. When we're narrow we leave too many people out. When we're broad we tell our true story.

There are millions and millions and millions of people like Gianno. They have many influences and ancestries, but Scotch-Irishness is an important part of their mix.

So not just Appalachia, not just the South, not just rural, not just Presbyterian, not just bluegrass, not just religious, not just by surname, not just 1700s, not just caucasian. Think bigger.

"I don’t think we don’t place a high enough value on what we’ve inherited."

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, has been described as the ‘Paris of Appalachia’. Here’s an interview with journalist Brian O’Neill, author of a book of the same name. William Crawley’s Brave New World series is once again on BBC television, exploring the Scotch-Irish story in America, and last night’s episode touched on Pittsburgh. This is now another town I’ve gotta see. Next time I do Appalachia it’ll be the northern states, and on up into New Hampshire and Massachusetts. 

Baptists and Burns in Tennessee, 1800s.

 

 

The photograph above is of a classic Appalachian river baptism. Much colder than the warm immersion-heated indoor baptismal tank I experienced in a gospel hall in Bangor when I was 18! The Presbyterians get far too much coverage and it’s about time the Baptists got a look in. 

The flamboyantly-named Jesse Montreville Lafayette Burnett was born near Asheville in North Carolina in 1829. His paternal grandfather was known to be ‘of Scotch descent’ and his mother was a Montgomery, described as ‘partly Irish’. The family - two parents and 13 children - moved westwards to Cocke County, Tennessee, in 1835. J.M.L. was converted aged 13 and preached his first sermon at Pleasant Grove on the Pigeon River near today’s Pigeon Forge.

In Illustrated Sketches of Tennessee’s Pioneer Baptist Preachers, 1775–1875, by James Jehu Burnett D.D. (1919), it says that J.M.L. took delight in the poems of Robert Burns -

“he had the ability too to read the great poet in dialect… it was a revelation to me to hear him recite "Tam O’ Shanter” … I have never since heard anybody who could do it in his style … I sometimes hear his tones through these long years as he would say

Ah Tam! Ah Tam!
Thou’ll get thy fairin’
In hell they’ll roast thee
Like a herrin"

The extract continues ‘a charming interpreter of the Scotch poet and a delightful lecturer on “Bobby Burns”’. Now the abbreviation ‘Bobby Burns’ is prone to send a purist into orbit with rage, but it is significant that Burns’ works were so admired in rural Tennessee. 

Illustrated Sketches of Tennessee’s Pioneer Baptist Preachers, 1775–1875 contains biographies of maybe 100 preachers, many of whom are described as Scotch-Irish. I suspect that in fact the great majority of them were. Those who are specified as such have the surnames Anderson, McGinnia, M’Carrell, Smith, Russell, Love, Moore, Snead, Craig, Taylor, Montgomery, Bryan, Baker, McCallen, Snead, Ross,