The fighting Scots-Irish.

I recently reread a passage in The Road to Guilford Courthouse by John Buchanan. Page 87.

Many of the Lowland Scots who went to Ulster in large numbers to escape poverty had exchanged one border for another. In Scotland they had fought with their fellow borderers the English in a barbarous manner for 400 years. Raid and counter-raid and butchery had succeeded each other in dreary procession. Yet, ironically, if the Lowlanders bore a cultural resemblance to any people, it was to their enemies the English of the border counties, and in America they would mix easily with them, fight shoulder to shoulder, even follow and lead them into battle. In the borderlands of Ulster incessant and savage war was waged with the “wild Irish,” as the Celtic Irish were then commonly called. The Lowlanders who became Ulster Scots mingled and intermarried with the English and with French Huguenots, but so rarely with the Celtic Irish Catholics that the two distinctive communities remained bitter enemies. At the same time the settlers prospered as farmers, weavers, and in the woolen and linen trades. Their prosperity, however, caused English protests, and late-seventeenth-century laws restricting their trade brought them economic distress. Anti-Presbyterian laws, taxation to support the Church of England, rapacious and absentee English landlords, and throughout the eighteenth century a series of severe economic depressions led to massive discontent. Poverty, often desperate, once more became their lot. Beginning about 1715 and ending in 1775 when the Revolution temporarily blocked immigration, about a quarter of a million Scotch Irish fled Ulster for America. The Celtic Irish Catholics were not part of this movement. There were few of them in colonial America.

They were “strangers to our laws and customs,” complained the Philadelphia Quaker James Dickinson of the Scotch Irish, and this has a ring of familiarity to twentieth-century ears. But the strangers’ descendants became lawmakers themselves in their new land, and for good and ill their customs and characteristics would become deeply woven into the American fabric. Once here, they never looked back. They had arrived in the promised land. They never cared to see Ulster again. Among them were a sprinkling of yeoman farmers and a thin upper stratum of provincial gentry known as the Ascendancy. The latter included such families as Polk, Calhoun, and Jackson: to the young Republic they would supply national leaders.

As a group, however, the Scotch Irish were overwhelmingly poor. Some early arrivals went to Massachusetts, but they and the Puritans were incompatible, and they pushed on to western Massachusetts and north to Maine and New Hampshire. Although there were more Scotch Irish in the colonies north of Pennsylvania than generally supposed, they made their greatest colonial impact in central and western Pennsylvania and the southern Back Country. They poured in largely through the ports of Philadelphia and New Castle, Delaware, and from there struck out for the Back Country. From Lancaster County west, Pennsylvania became their American homeland, and they treated it as they did every place they went, as theirs to take and keep. They introduced to America the tradition of squatting on unused property and daring anyone to put them off. They handled Indians roughly and were little less gentle with white authorities. Once when officials including a sheriff and surveyor tried to intimidate some Scotch Irish, “A body of some seventy joined circlewise around Mr. Parsons’ instrument, and began narrowing in upon it, the front ones on foot, the rear ones on horseback.” The official party left. Their attitude toward land as reported by the Provincial Secretary of Pennsylvania was simple: they “alleged that it was against the laws of God and nature, that so much land should be idle, while so many Christians wanted it to labor on, and to raise their bread.”

Their numbers increased dramatically by immigration and a lively fertility. From Pennsylvania the Scotch Irish spread southward by means of the Great Philadelphia Wagon Road, across the Potomac and through Maryland to the Great Valley of Virginia, the beautiful Shenandoah. German settlers dominated the Valley’s northern reaches, but many Scotch Irish stopped in the central and southern parts, some for good, others until the urge to seek something better prodded them onward. The irrepressible Charles Lee lived in the Shenandoah before the war, and is reported to have said that Virginia was neither a democracy nor an aristocracy but a macocracy. Those who went into the far southwestern mountains of Virginia we will meet again during one of the most dramatic episodes of the war. Nor are we finished with the people who chose to continue south to Wachovia in North Carolina, from whence they followed the Catawba Trading Path to Waxhaw Creek, where the first handful of white “settlers arrived in May 1751. They and their progeny and kindred folk spread out over the fertile, well-watered, rolling uplands in that large swath of land between Charlotte and Camden called the Waxhaws and claimed it as their own.  These were the people who buried Buford’s dead soldiers where they died, nursed the wounded at the Waxhaws Presbyterian Church, and plotted dark deeds of revenge.

These were the people who in the blackest time for the cause would bend but never break. They were hard men and women, accustomed to privation, travail their normal lot, mercy to an enemy never uppermost in their thoughts.

As it happened, I was at the same time working on some genealogical records related to my mother's Young family who were Clan Lamont.  The Lamont castle and land in Scotland were sacked by the Campbells and the survivors escaped across to Northern Ireland for a few generations, successful as millers in the wool trade, before coming into Virginia by 1747.  They entered through Philadelphia in 1740 and made their way southwest to Augusta County, Virginia.  Just as Buchanan describes above.

Just to the west of the Youngs was an area of settlement which had many attractions and one negative of which the Scots-Irish settlers were unaware.  From The Kerr Creek Massacres and their Lasting Effects on the Clinch Valley of Virginia by Lawrence J. Fleenor, Jr..  

Some of the Scots-Irish who settled on the Pennsylvania frontier were run out of the colony by William Pitt because they had settled on forbidden Indian land. They moved down the Valley of Virginia, and in 1736 resettled in a beautiful valley six miles or so to the northwest of Lexington. The site was part of the Benjamin Burden (Borden) Patent. An earlier name for the valley was Tea’s (Tee’s) Creek, but the name soon changed to Kerr’s Creek (sometimes referred to as Carr’s Creek). A more dangerous place could not have been chosen. Two of the main war trails in North America east of the Mississippi River intersected at Lexington. The Great Warrior’s Path originating in the Hudson River Valley of New York ran down the Valley of Virginia to end in the Blue Grass of Kentucky. The Midland trail originated at Hampton Rhodes at the mouth of the James River, and followed US 60 to the Ohio River at Huntington, West Virginia. There is no indication that the settlers had any idea of the strategic location that they occupied. 

It is possible that there was an Indian attack at Kerr Creek as early as 1759 with perhaps ten people killed.  There certainly was an attack in 1763 with perhaps fifty settler deaths but few or none taken captive.  The final attack occurred in 1764 or 1765 with several dozen deaths as well as thirty captives taken into the Ohio Territory (some of whom were later ransomed and returned.)  

John Young (1737-1824) was born in Antrim County Ireland, emigrated with his family to Pennsylvania colony in 1740 and was settled in Augusta, Virginia by at least 1747.  John Young and his older, and only, brother, Thomas, served in the Augusta County, Virginia Militia during the Indian War of 1764 and were part of the three companies of militia sent to Kerr's Creek after the second massacre.  

The brothers have been described in some accounts as scouts.  Possibly they were the two scouts sent ahead by Captain Christian who led a company against the Indians after the 1764 Kerr Creek attack.  Nearing an Indian encampment, supposedly, the scouts surprised two braves, one leading a horse, the other holding a buck across the back of the horse.  The scouts fired on the two Indians.  

With the early discharge, most Indians in the encampment were alerted.  Christian’s company charged and a general melee ensued.  Thomas Young was engaged with two warriors when he was struck down from behind by a third with an axe blow to the head.  He died instantly and was subsequently scalped.  Thomas's body was buried at the battlefield.  

After the brief engagement, the main body of Indians broke away and escaped.  John Young and the three militia companies joined together and pursued the Indians for three days catching up with the Shawnee at Straight Fork, four miles below the present West Virginia border.  Perhaps twenty Indians were killed during this fight.  

A story is told, recorded some hundred years after the events, by John Young's great-grandson, that in the final battle, John Young spotted the warrior who had killed his brother.  In fury, he attacked the warrior with his sword, wounding him.  As Young moved in to deliver the coup de grace, the warrior blocked the sword blow with his rifle, and in so doing, shattered Young's sword.  Enraged, Young slew his foe with what remained of his sword, nearly dismembering him.  

John Young was able to retrieve his brother's scalp which he buried in the family graveyard when he returned from battle.  

All this connected for me with

These were the people who in the blackest time for the cause would bend but never break. They were hard men and women, accustomed to privation, travail their normal lot, mercy to an enemy never uppermost in their thoughts.

Family, fighting, revenge, and strength through endurance against all tragedies and circumstances.  

And hard work, perseverance and success.  Eleven years later at beginning of the American Revolution, John Young was commissioned on 14 Nov 1775 as a Captain of a Company of the Augusta County Virginia Militia by the Committee of Public Safety for the Colony of Virginia. He served for three years through 1778.  

He and his descendant became successful planters, merchants, inn keepers, doctors, lawyers, soldiers, and held numerous political offices.  Again, just as Buchanan describes.  And as James Webb describes in his book of the Scots-Irish and their influence on America - Born Fighting.