HARD NEIGHBORS: The Scotch-Irish invasion of Native America and the making of American identity
By Colin G. Calloway 

Oxford University Press. 528 pages. £24.83. ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0197618417 

Reviewed by Tony Roberts

                                              

 

When the Lord thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thy goest to possess it … [He] shall deliver [thy enemies] before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them.’              Deuteronomy 7: 1-2

With a world of depressing spectacles to witness in the daily news, we are no longer deluded into thinking that America, for one, had been built on some humane model of ‘frontier expansion’, despite Hollywood and countless romanticizing novels to the contrary. To the backcountry ‘Scotch-Irish’* in America, the Old Testament made a serviceable weapon. ‘Indians’ were ‘Canaanites’ and ‘heathen’. Their experience in the days of American settlement is a particularly graphic example of territorial conquest, of what was done to inhabitants and invaders in turn. It is a tale of repetitive acts of racist savagery, of ignorance and dire poverty, fuelled  by greed, grievance and wild rumour. With its implicit contemporary parallels, it is a tale of Hard Neighbors.

The English-born historian Colin G. Calloway, in this fascinating study, has replaced  the tale of 'the frontier spirit’ and ‘the winning of the west’ with a view of the Scotch-Irish as complicit in the nation’s ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Native Americans. To Calloway the ‘settlement’ of frontier America by the Scotch-Irish was an ongoing ‘invasion’ and he explores it in admirable, if a little overwhelming, detail.

 He begins in Ulster in the early seventeenth century, where Presbyterian Scots had settled into their role as a ‘buffer’ (a term used throughout the book) between English interests (landowning and government) and the native Catholic Irish: ‘“Planting” Protestants in the soil of Ulster and binding their loyalty to the Crown was designed to spread the true religion and to strengthen the security of the new British kingdom.’

In the eighteenth century, perhaps 150,000 or more of these Ulster Presbyterians emigrated to America, people of all trades, keen to escape religious sanctions (as dissenters from the Anglican Church of Ireland), rising rents and failed crops. They were attracted by their trade links with America and the promise of prosperity and freedom. (While the number of immigrants constituted as much as a third of the Scotch-Irish population of Ulster, it is not comparable to the numbers of Irish Catholics —upwards of two million — who fled there between 1846 and 1851 as a consequence of the famine. Both go a long way to explaining the close links Ireland continues to have with the U.S.A.)

The early Ulster immigrants were attracted to Pennsylvania and in particular the city of Philadelphia, where their flax/linen trade had thrived, and to New York and Charleston, the other main ports. However, for much of the century, passage across the Atlantic cost up to £10 per person and twice that sum if would-be farmers then needed provisions and internal transport. Consequently impoverished immigrants indentured themselves for four to seven years upon arrival. 

In time they ventured south and then west down the river valleys and through the Appalachians Mountains, backbone of the east, which runs 2000 miles from Canada down to Alabama. A census of 1770 found they and their descendants by now ‘constituted one-eighth of the white population in New York, a quarter in Pennsylvania, more than a quarter in Georgia and South Carolina, between a quarter and a third in Kentucky and Tennessee, and one-sixth in Maryland and Virginia.’ For the small populations of these times, these were serious percentages. In each colony they were encouraged to populate the raw frontier, where they again acted as shifting buffers, this time against Native Americans, among whom they first lived warily.

In his History of the American frontier, 1763-1893 (1924), the Pulitzer prizewinning Frederick L. Paxson noted of the Scotch-Irish, ‘Less than the Germans did they go as directed, or await the order of authority. Perseveringly they pushed their settlements ahead, title or no title. When political conditions of the provinces displeased them, they turned to politics to capture the provincial legislatures.’ There was more to this than recklessness. They had brought with them, not only the virtues of independence and courage which Paxson noted, but other tendencies: racism, aggressiveness and grievance.

Unlike the industrious and more pacific German immigrants, the Scotch-Irish were regularly accused by their contemporaries of indolence, drunkenness and neglect of their homes and the land they worked superficially before moving on. To the authorities they were often uncontrollable ‘squatters’. To one Anglican minister, writing in the 1760s, they were ‘certainly the worst Vermin on earth’. While to another minister, a German, they were ‘lazy, dissipated and poor,’ and ‘live in the most wretched huts and enjoy the same food as their animals’. Calloway writes, ‘They marked their claims by blazing trees (“tomahawk rights”), erecting structures (“cabin rights”), clearing and planting land (“corn rights”), and taking up “vacant” or unused land. In doing so, they clashed with the Native occupants, with colonial, federal, and state governments, and with speculators and absentee landlords who claimed ownership. The Scotch-Irish were hard neighbors to Indians throughout the colonies, and they were hard neighbors to other people as well.’

Yet they had genuine grievances. For one, they were rarely treated with decency. George Washington, himself a landlord with squatter problems, shared the common view that the backcountry Scotch-Irish were barbarians. They arrived improvident and in anticipation of free land and found they were expected to buy or rent it from speculators and land companies that had bought up huge tracts to sell for mixed-grain-livestock farming. And —a matter of life and death —–they were frequently desperate for the colonial authorities to defend them when the frontier blazed, though assistance was often too late or not forthcoming.

Nevertheless the authorities depended upon them, no matter how troublesome they could be. In simple terms, as the Ulster-born Quaker politician and trader James Logan saw it, ‘establishing a buffer of Indians or Scotch-Irish raised the value of the protected lands.’ Even as early as 1701, the Virginia Council, for instance, ‘issued grants of between 10,000 and 30,000 acres of land to companies and societies that would settle one “Christian warlike man” for every 500 acres granted.’ They could also be used in border disputes, like that between Maryland and Pennsylvania. And if the authorities themselves could not check their Ulstermen, they were not above encouraging others to do so. A Native American tribe like the Conestoga might be persuaded to police a land boundary, which neither the government nor the Indians themselves wanted immigrants to cross.

Alliances with these hard settlers initially held some attraction to numbers of native people. Many came to live among them to trade, or for protection, and relationships developed, including marriages: Backcountry settlers told the Philadelphia botanist John Bartram that before The Seven Years War, Indians were “almost daily familiars at their houses, ate, drank, and swore together —were even intimate playmates.’ They could be helpful neighbours; demanding ones, too, when they took what was not offered.

Calloway writes interestingly about kidnapping, for which there has always been an extensive literature. Autobiographical accounts of settler captivity by Indians sold very well. Fearsome as the experience was, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, in his Letters from an American Farmer (1782), wondered why there were instances of freed children who were reluctant to return to their natural families. Calloway confirms his view that Native American communities often offered more freedom, less responsibility and strong kinship to the young, in contrast to the disciplined and arduous life they led in their natural patriarchal families. Another interesting and complicating aspect of the clash of cultures is the different perspectives on crime and punishment. Whereas murder to the Scotch-Irish required retribution, to the Native Americans compensation sometimes sufficed.

The indigenous peoples were rarely naive. They valued trade, their own life skills and especially their land. To control it, they often rented to settlers. Being pragmatists, during stand-offs they would side with the Scotch-Irish immigrants or the authorities, wherever their best interests lay —and later they would ally with the French or the English against both. Things worsened considerably on the frontier with the French and Indian War (1754-63), Pontiac’s Revolt (1763-4) and especially the American Revolutionary War of 1775-83 (called by one Hessian officer, ‘nothing more than a Scotch Irish Presbyterian rebellion’). These led to more widespread chaos and violence: mass murder, rape, arson and scalp hunting on both sides —as well as settler confrontations with the authorities. .

Over the eighteenth century a pattern emerged of Indian land invasion, followed by hostilities, treaties and then renewed invasions: ‘Post-Revolutionary contests for land— between Indians and Americans, between speculators and squatters, between land companies and individual farmers, and between states and the federal government —highlighted the ambivalent relationship between Scotch-Irish people on the frontiers and governing elites in the East.’ At length it dawned on the government that the problem could only be successfully addressed by driving the Native Americans south or further west beyond the Mississippi. It would clear the contested land, as well as being more economically efficient than the failed practice of making treaties. President Andrew Jackson —a man with his own roots in Ireland — made Indian removal government policy. He believed indigenous people to be inherently and inescapably violent and preached that they should therefore be met with violence. In this,  Jackson helped to bring Scotch-Irish thinking into the mainstream of public discourse.

And so, as the new nation moved ever westward in the nineteenth century, it drove Native Americans before it, into the Ozarks and into a Texas republic that had been forcibly carved from Mexico’s far north: ‘The Scotch-Irish, it seemed now, naturally fought in the cause of republicanism, allowing them to redefine their position in American society and to redefine their identity as Americans.’ Their status had improved. The government, having for years dismissed or opposed and certainly marginalized them, had finally relented and adopted their habit.

Later, when it painted its own portrait, however, America did not look to the economically backward Appalachian South of the Scotch-Irish for its image (‘where old patterns of speech, music, and custom endured’), but looked to the West. National identity embraced the rugged idea of Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett and Kit Carson as pragmatists and nation builders, who heroically dispossessed the natives in their path: ‘Scotch-Irish attitudes and actions toward Indians became increasingly indistinguishable from broader American attitudes and actions the further west they went.’  (Presumably this is why the cover of the book under review is a romanticized image of its subject.)

 

Much of the best history writing is thoroughly disillusioning and has contemporary relevance.  So it is with Hard Neighbors. By the end of Colin G. Calloway's book one sees why all this data —the numbers, names and dates which slow the early part of the book—is important beyond itself, for it adds up to an ugly portrait of the roots of reactionary America. Calloway  begins his book with 'the Paxton boys', vigilantes who murdered defenceless and innocent Native Americans in 1763 and who were never brought to account. He returns to them at the end: ‘They struck out in violence against people of color and a government that did more for others than it did for them. They were, they said, fighting for the values that had made America great.’ Now where have we heard that since? Here’s an unnecessary clue:

‘As Tennessee historian Thomas Perkins Abernethy wrote almost one hundred years ago, “Jackson never really championed the cause of the people; he only invited them to champion his.” It is, perhaps, not surprising that Donald Trump placed a portrait of Andrew Jackson in the Oval Office.’

 

(*Both ‘Scotch-Irish’ and ‘Indian’ are historically validated names used throughout the book.)