Nowhere in the world, though, have I ever encountered a more brutal, tribal and violent race of people than the Scots-Irish

I have just finished Thomas Sowell's Black Rednecks and White Liberals. Probably a needlessly provocative title. As usual with Sowell, crammed with information and intriguing insights. In a series of essays, he covers a history of slavery, the question of German cultural fallibility, treatment of minority traders across geographies and time, a history of black education and other topics. However, the anchor essay is the eponymous Black Rednecks and White Liberals.

Sowell's argument is that the distinctive aspects of Southern Appalachian Scots-Irish culture such as honor society, aggressiveness, licentiousness, extravagance, etc. are largely rooted in the cultures of those regions in the British Isles from whence the bulk of those immigrants originated; northern England, Scotland and Wales. He outlines the common and contemporaneous judgments of observers on the morals and manners of both populations pointing out how the conditions of one led to the other.

From this foundation, which seems reasonably established, he then goes further to argue that the negative aspects of those cultures eventually died out in the British Isles (though I note that one of the striking comments in one of Niall Ferguson's earlier books, probably The Pity of War, was Ferguson's observation of the ferocity and reckless courage of Scots in World War I, resulting in disproportionately high casualty rates). This is probably true, but Sowell doesn't document or discuss this demise of the original British Isles redneck culture.

He also alludes to the gradual erosion of some of the more destructive aspects of redneck culture in the American South among the white population. I suspect this is true to a degree but I would have wished for better evidence of the degree to which these elements have moderated over time and by what means.

The next step in his chain of argument is that what we now regard as black urban culture is really the most current version of that redneck culture originating from the border regions of the British Isles and transferred to the Appalachian Mountains. He points out many commonalities in terms of speech, presentation, sexual mores, violence, etc. The argument makes sense to a degree but there are a couple of weak links. How did the violent Appalachian Scots-Irish culture of the mountains reach into the plains and plantations of the low lands where the slaves were located? Given the travel limitations on blacks pre-Civil War by law and post-Civil War by economics, how did the Scots-Irish honor culture of the mountains spread apparently uniformly across the whole black population of the South?

Those two questions aren't necessarily insurmountable but they ought to be answered for Sowell's thesis to rest on a reasonably solid foundation.

I think Sowell, manages to make a case that his thesis is plausible and he presents some compelling information but ultimately I think his argument is incomplete. Possible that it is true but not yet compellingly true.

I'll post some excerpts over the next few days but I mention all this now because on the day I finished Black Rednecks and White Liberals, I came across a humorous article, Graveyard of Peaches: How Tennessee Will Win Its War Against Georgia by Andrew Exum. This is very much tongue-in-cheek; but cautioningly so.

The arcane context is that with its prolonged rapid growth, Georgia has begun to bump up against water constraints for manufacturing, agriculture and cities. Politicians, being the lesser cognitive life form that they too frequently are, have spent two decades arguing and negotiating with Alabama, Tennessee and Florida about access to their water resources instead of actually making the hard trade-off decisions to either pay to make more available within Georgia or to reduce demand. The politicians take these irresponsible postponing actions principally and regrettably because they accurately assess that the electorate, while mocking their moral courage, also willfully punish any politician who attempts to bridle the actions of the voters.

Pertinent to Sowell's argument about the aggressive nature of Scots-Irish culture, Exum, himself of that extraction, mentions:

The War Between the States ended almost 150 years ago, but the Georgia state senate is making threatening noises against its neighbor. It should think twice. Occupying Iraq and Afghanistan is a cakewalk compared to the hellscape that southeast Tennessee poses for an invading army.

Last week, the Georgia state senate voted to sue the state of Tennessee in order to claim a sliver of land that would grant Georgia access to the Tennessee River. Georgia, readers must understand, has mismanaged its own water resources to the point where it now struggles to supply enough water for the residents of Atlanta (and its sprawling suburbs and exurbs) to fill their above-ground pools and wash the TruckNutz on their mini-vans. Dangerously, the state is actually seeking to redraw a border that has kept the peace for over 200 years, and all over a crucial resource — a resource belonging, rightfully, to the Tennessee of my ancestors.

[snip]

Invading Tennessee is easy enough, militarily. Occupying and governing Tennessee is vastly more difficult.

As a soldier, I fought in both Iraq and Afghanistan; as a scholar, I performed most of the fieldwork for my doctoral dissertation in southern Lebanon. Nowhere in the world, though, have I ever encountered a more brutal, tribal and violent race of people than the Scots-Irish of East Tennessee. Any Georgian occupation force would inevitably get sucked into our petty politics and family vendettas. We might share a language, but Georgia would struggle to relate to its new foreign subjects, let alone entrench its authority over us.

All of which, while humorously delivered, kind of calls into question just how reformed are those "brutal, tribal and violent" Scots-Irish.

For more reading on the Scots-Irish, see James Webb's Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America.