Albion’s Seed: The Backcountry Folkway Part 1

The men were tall and lean, with hard weather-beaten faces…even in their poverty they carried themselves with a fierce stubborn pride that warned others to treat them with respect.

In the 18^th century, over a million men of this sort came to the Colonies from Ulster and the Anglo-Scottish borderlands. Few came as ‘indentured servants’ (slaves), despite the fact that almost all of them were poor and left their home primarily to escape poverty. Unlike immigrants from the south of England, the Borderlanders still retained the old Nordic spirit of natural freedom. Life in the northern borderlands—the wildest and least civilized part of Britain—had made them unruly, proud and unsuitable for servitude in the new world.

Their English neighbors back home in Britain reported the much same, Their pride was a source of irritation to their English neighbors, who could not understand what they had to feel proud about. It was said of one Scots-Irishman that ‘his looks spoke out that he would not fear the devil, should he meet him face to face’…

This audacity carried over into their religious life. The Scots-Irish believed in free grace; the Calvinist idea that one didn’t need to be ‘well behaved’ or accomplish ‘good works’ in order to receive God’s salvation. A pray that epitomizes the attitude of this folk was ‘Lord, grant that I may always be right, for thou knowest I am hard to turn’. They scorned establishment clergy, often violently so. ‘Church’ services were held outside in what they called ‘field meetings’, in the tradition of their Nordic ancestors. The tone of their spiritual life was aggressive, independent and war-like.

They were called Borderlanders or backcountry folk in the 18^th century, but we know them today in America as the Scotch-Irish. However, Scotch-Irish is confusing, as they were neither Irish nor Scottish as we understand those terms in America. They came not from the Scottish Highlands or from the deep interior of Erie. They hailed from the borderlands between Scotland and England. In fact, many of those who were called Scots-Irish were simply northern English. If they were ‘Irish’ at all, it was only because they had recently settled there from their previous home in northern Britain.

Scholars of American ethnography often claim these people are the source of the American South’s supposed ‘Celtic identity’. This is not true. The Borderlanders were not Celtic, but rather maintained their own (ancient) kind of Germanic culture.

By the 18^th century, the culture of this region bore little resemblance to the customs of the ancient Celts. The dominant language was English [and previously Scots, another German tongue]—unlike the Gaelic-speaking Irish Catholics peasants, Scottish highlanders, welsh cottagers, and Cornish miners. The borderers have comparatively little contact (much of it hostile) with these Celtic people. In the 17^th and 18^th centuries it was observed that “the Ulster settlers mingled freely with the English puritans and Huguenots,” but married very rarely with the Gaelic-speaking people of Ireland and Scotland.

In fact, almost all the British folk who came to America in the colonial period—the ones who gave ‘America’ its original character—were Germanic. America is, in a very deep sense, a Germanic nation at heart.

Look forward to The Backcountry Folkway Part 2 next week