Two of the most famous Irishmen of Scottish descent are
former MP (Member of Parliament), former IRA (Irish Republican Army) Volunteer,
and Long Kesh prison hunger striker Bobby Sands, and current president of Sinn
Fein and SF deputy to the Irish parliament from Co. Louth, former MP, and
former OC (Officer Commanding) of the IRA’s Northern Command, as well as my very
distant cousin, Gerry Adams.
Not exactly what comes to mind when one hears the term
“Scotch-Irish”, or “Scots-Irish” as most latter day proponents of the phrase
and the idea now write. A reason often
given for the change is that Scotch comes from a bottle while Scots don’t, but
Scots almost always use the word “whisky” (no “e”) when discussing the beverage
rather than the other word.
Bobby was descended from an English family which migrated to
the Lowlands of Scotland in the early 1400’s before relocating to the northern
Irish province of Ulster in the 1600’s.
Gerry descends from some of the MacAdams of Galloway, a sept of the
notorious Clan Gregor, who likewise crossed west over the Irish Sea to Ulster
during the Plantations. According to
Gerry’s bio he is related to the political Adams family of the early United
States which produced the country’s second and sixth presidents, as are the
Adams from whom I am descended that were among the first settlers of the
original Warren County in Tennessee.
Of course, the term “Scots-Irish” refers to those in America
while their counterparts in Northern Ireland most often use the term “Ulster
Scots” to describe themselves. The
problem in both cases is that those referred to are often more English-Irish,
Welsh-Irish, Dutch-Irish, Flemish-Irish, etc., than they are Scots-Irish or Ulster Scots.
In my grammar school years, I grew up thinking of myself as
Scotch-Irish. This is what I was told
when I asked, in spite of the fact that I was also told that the Hicks and the
Buchanans were Dutch. The Hamiltons were
said to be English, and we knew from research done by Uncle Dick that the
Stewarts are of Scottish origin.
Uncle Dick liked to translate the Scottish royal motto,
“Nemo me impune lacessit” as “Don’t let the bastards get you”, but the motto
literally translates as “No one provokes me with impunity”. In Latin, Uncle Dick’s English translation
would actually be “Non illegitimi ite”.
Later I learned from cursory research that the Hamiltons are
from Scotland; research, by the way, inspired by the miniseries “Roots”. I found the same origin for the Buchanans,
and that the Hicks were originally from England. Further research after by an admission of my
grandfather that my putative Hamilton great-grandfather was actually a step-great-grandfather
of sorts led me to the knowledge that my true ancestors (by DNA) were
MacConroys from Co. Galway in the western Ireland province of Connacht, nearly
all of whom anglicized their name to King even in the old country.
But that realization came more than two decades later, and
in the meantime I had thought of myself as Scottish-American. When I saw the 1995 movie “Braveheart”, I
cried when Wallace was hanged, drawn, and quartered, loving the movie so much
that I forgave its numerous historical inaccuracies. I even put “Scottish-American” as my ethnic
identity on the long census form in 2000, which caused a major spat with my
then girlfriend from Co. Clare.
Speaking of inaccuracies, the actual William Wallace
wouldn’t have worn a kilt any more than Abolhassan Banisadr wore women’s
clothing while escaping from the Islamic Republic of Iran ahead of the regime’s
assassins in 1981, as those in power (including many “reformists”) accused him
of doing at the time. Kilts weren’t even
developed until the 1500’s, over two centuries after Wallace’s execution.
Three decades later, the former president of Iran did don a
hijab in support of student activist Majid Tavakoli in December 2009 when the
regime tried to shame Majid by parading him before TV cameras dressed in
women’s clothing. It was part of the
international “I Am Majid” campaign in which I also took part that later morphed
into a “Men In Hijab” campaign in support of equal rights for women in Iran.
Partially inspired by the Braveheart movie, I joined the
Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) in 1997, the year of the 500th
anniversary of Wallace’s and Andrew Murray’s victory against the English at the
Battle of Stirling Bridge. The SNP now
forms the government in the devolved Scotland.
I stayed a member until membership was discontinued for all non-UK
citizens. By the time that happened,
though, I was a member of the Scottish Republican Socialist Movement (SRSM),
which left SNP to join the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) at around the same
time.
After a lot of research during the decade and a half following
my return from the Philippines in 1992, the realization hit me: I’m not Scottish-American at all, but
Irish-American, no matter how many of the families from which I descend
originated in Scotland before migrating to Ireland. Nearly all my European ancestors came to this
hemisphere and to this continent from the Emerald Isle. Where their
ancestors had been before Ireland is irrelevant; here they were considered
Irish-American. They came in two waves,
first, in the Great Migrations of the 18th century, and, second, in
the migrations of the 1840’s during the Great Irish (Potato) Famine.
Being Irish-American rather than Scottish-American does not
mean that I have to give up being proud of the Scottish heritage my ancestors
brought with them to Ireland, however.
Nor does it mean I have to give up activity on behalf of Scottish
independence.
Until the 1840’s, nearly everyone descended from ancestors
from Ireland considered their family Irish, if American. For example, Doc Holliday (upon whom Gone With the Wind author Margaret
Mitchell based Rhett Butler), descended from Irish Presbyterians, considered
himself every bit as much Irish as did his cousin and first love, Mattie Holliday,
descended from Irish Catholics, who later became Sister Mary Melody (upon whom
Mitchell, cousin to both, based Melanie Hamilton).
Irish Protestants formed the backbone of the rebellion in
America that ultimately became a revolution to set up a “new order for the
ages”. While referred to on very rare
occasions as “Scotch-Irish”, these Patriots most often called “ Irish
Protestants” or “Irish Presbyterians” made up anywhere from half to three-quarters
of Patriot forces, just as they made up around two-thirds of the immigrants
from Ireland in the Great Migrations of the 18th century.
Immigrants from Scotland directly, Scottish-Americans, in
particular those Highlanders sentenced to penal “transportation” into
indentured servitude in the New World after the Jacobite Risings of the first
half of the 18th century (1708, 1715, 1719, 1745), were
paradoxically more inclined to be Loyalists during the Revolution. And this was in spite of overtures by
Alexander Hamilton’s circle to Bonnie Prince Charlie and other Jacobites in
Europe.
Take John McDonald and Daniel Ross, for example, along with
John and Henry Stuart, Alexander Cameron, Alexander Macgillivray, and William
Mackintosh, all of whom fought alongside the Cherokee and Creek allied with the
British during the war and then the Spanish in the war’s aftermath.
Back in the mother country, by the way, it was Irish
Protestants (two Anglicans and nine Presbyterians) who founded the Society of
United Irishmen under the mentorship of English-born Thomas Paine, the first
organization of the Irish republicanism to which Bobby Sands and Gerry Adams
are heirs.
Irish-Americans happily and proudly called themselves Irish
within the context of being American (vis-à-vis English-American,
German-American, Dutch-American, etc.) regardless of their ethnic origin within
the Irish context until the poor, despondent, starving Irish fleeing the Great
Irish Potato Famine of the 1840’s began flooding into America’s northern
ports-of-entry. Seeking to distance
themselves from “these” Irish, the descendants of more temporally distant arrivals
began calling themselves “Scotch-Irish”.
But the term stayed in the North until early in the next century.
Meanwhile, the planter aristocracy which dominated the
ante-bellum South became mired in the affectation of itself as the nobility in Walter
Scott’s various historical romances. Given
this influence, the same aristocracy leaned toward the idea that they were
Scottish. That’s how the largest
post-bellum paramilitary group resisting Reconstruction came to be called the
Ku Klux KLAN. Its organization and
practice had more to do with secret fraternities, though, than with anything
Scottish, the sole connection being the third part of the name.
Only in the early 20th century did people in the
South pick up the term Scotch-Irish.
Southern Baptist minister Thomas Dixon’s highly popular Reconstruction
trilogy and the plays adapted from its three novels were then sweeping the
region, and the country. To Dixon’s
trilogy belong the novels The Leopard’s
Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden (1902), The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klu Klan (1905), and The Traitor: A Story of the Fall of the
Invisible Empire (1907).
The trilogy’s central book became a hugely popular play that
pioneering film-maker D. W. Griffith turned into the 1915 ground-breaking epic
“The Birth of a Nation”. The film
amplified many of the myths originating with the novel, such as cross-burning,
the use of white robes, and the idea that the KKK was an altruistic group of
latter day “knights” (in the actual organization ordinary members were called
“ghouls”) fighting for justice against outside oppressors. Its protagonists were the Scottish-origin
Cameron family of South Carolina.
Released in February that year, the movie helped inspire the
organization of the anti-Jewish Knights of Mary Phagan. Phagan was a thirteen-year old mill worker
found strangled and raped in an isolated part of the factory in which she
worked in 1913. A factory
superintendent, Leo Frank, a Jewish-American born in Texas whose family had
come there from Brooklyn, New York, was accused of the crime.
Aware of the books and plays popularity, Georgia politician
and former Representative Thomas Watson, who as a leader of the Populist Party
had previously campaigned for cooperation between poor whites and poor blacks
against the wealthy elite, began crying for a return of the Ku Klux Klan. The case and attacks on Frank as a Jew led,
in turn, to the formation of the Anti-Defamation League of B’Nai Brith.
Prominent Chattanooga attorney Lewis Shepherd, who had
earlier taken part in the defense of Ed Johnson (lynched from the Walnut Street
Bridge in 1906), took part in Frank’s legal defense, by the way. Adolph Ochs, our city’s former resident native
who published The Chattanooga Times
before moving to New York City to take over The
New York Times, became Frank’s staunchest defender in the press.
The Knights of Mary Phagan kidnapped Frank from
Milledgeville Prison and took him to Marietta for his lynching 16 August 1915. Three months later, they met on top of Stone
Mountain outside of Atlanta and burned a cross in imitation of Griffith’s
film. On Thanksgiving, they fired up
another as they inaugurated the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, with a
transplanted Indiana native, William J. Simmons, as their leader.
It was in this time period and with this background that the
term “Scotch-Irish” came into widespread use here in the South. The Knights of the KKK soon spread throughout
the South and then the rest of the country, and even across our northern border
into Canada with the organization of the Royal Riders of the Red Robe. “Scotch-Irish” in the South meant white,
Protestant, non-Catholic, non-Jewish, native-born, prohibitionist, and
Christian Dominionist, the same way the term “Anglo-Saxon” was used in the
North at the time.
Dixon, it should be pointed out, was highly offended by the
new organization, with its anti-Jewish and anti-Catholic positions and publicly
repudiated it. Griffith, taken aback by
what his movie inspired, released the even more elaborate and more expensive
four-part “Intolerance” in 1916. He
became one of the four founders of United Artists (along with Douglas
Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, and Mary Pickford) in 1919.
The term “Scotch-Irish”, or rather “Scots-Irish”, no longer,
or at least only rarely, has such a racist connotation any longer but it is
still not very accurate. For example,
David Crockett, the former Tennessee Congressman who died at the Alamo, is
often called Scots-Irish but his ancestors before Ireland were actually French
Hugenots. Like my Hicks and Tittle and
Case ancestors who came to America from Ulster and are often mistakenly called
Scots-Irish but arrived in Ireland directly from northern England. In any case, the term only has real meaning
only in the context of Ireland, where the currently preferred term is “Ulster
Scots”, often simply a codeword for Protestant (vis-a-vis Catholic).
By contrast, descendants of the Irish who flooded into
Glasgow during its industrial heyday are, accurately, called Irish-Scots. Such as the famous ardent Scottish
nationalist Sean Connery, for example.
Or the Edinburgh native who became a hero to the working people of
Scotland, Ireland, and America and ultimately died for the cause of Irish
independence, James Connolly.
The current popular ethnic buzzword (or phrase) carrying the
same connotations as the early 20th century use of the term “Scotch-Irish”
is “Anglo-Celtic”, a euphemism with even less real concrete meaning than
“Scotch-Irish”.
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