The scrappy Scots-Irish

Re: History as the product of peoples

In 1829, the man celebrated today as the U.S. nation’s first “populist” president and the father of modern man-in-the-street democracy swept to power. What propelled him—in today’s telling—was the licking he gave “the bloody British” at the Battle of New Orleans, memorialized in Johnny Horton’s 1959 smash rockabilly hit:

"Old Hickory said we could take 'em by surprise
If we didn't fire our muskets
'til we looked 'em in the eye
We held our fire 'til we see'd their faces well.
Then we opened up with squirrel guns and really gave 'em, well—”

At least as important, at the time, were his military victories over natives on the nation’s southern frontiers. The Upper Creeks and Florida Seminoles, Andrew Jackson’s career-boosters, were the product of 100 years of Anglo contact in which the South’s excess population—many of them onetime indentured servants, runaway slaves and other under-classes—formed the leading edge. The dominant ethnic strain of this white rabble: Scots-Irish. “Creek” was a settler name for the assortment of peoples, mostly Muskhogean-speaking, whom they had pushed to western Georgia and Alabama from as far away as the Carolina coast; the Seminoles were wholly the southern settlers’ perverse creation, a mixed society of native refugees and black runaways who had found togetherness in the Florida swamps.

Overlooked, until recently, in this continuing tendency to idealize land grab as “democracy” and to cast Britain and other European nations as the obstacle to U.S. nation building is the reality that Andrew Jackson also was the nation’s first success story for the poor-white Scots-Irish of the Carolinas, Georgia and Tennessee. Ol’ Hickory’s military exploits—he was the first real commander-in-chief after Washington—enabled his own ethnic stock to populate a new U.S. West (in due time, the “New West”) with their kind and culture. His financial and political success (poor boy becomes rich and powerful) showed what they could achieve through grit, combativeness and little or no education: a country. Modern Scots-Irish bard James Webb, senator from Virginia, argues persuasively that the characteristic “American” go-get-’em spirit and fierce patriotism originally were ethnic traits picked up from this tribe.

Today 30-million strong—answering proudly to the once derisive “Redneck” handle—they have emerged from invisibility to being maybe the real power behind conservative political successes from George Wallace to Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush. Country music (a fusion from folk, gospel and blues), its spirit and most of its headliners, from the Carter Family to Jerry Lee Lewis to Toby Keith, are Redneck issue. Dead-set against gun control, the Scots-Irish have been generously endowed with war presidents and scrappers (historian Webb himself is a former U.S. Navy secretary), besides Jackson generating Benjamin Harrison, Ulysses S. Grant, the Roosevelts, Woodrow Wilson, Richard Nixon, Reagan, Bill Clinton, the two presidents Bush, Sen. John McCain—George F. Patton, Sgt. Alvin York, Audie Murphy, Stonewall Jackson, almost the whole Confederate side in the U.S. Civil War, Jack Dempsey and John Wayne (who had the swagger down pat). And they are the power and the glory (Pat Robertson and Jerry Lee’s cousin Jimmy Swaggart) of the Christian Right as well.

Jackson’s career, then, may not have been a triumph so much for “participatory democracy” as for clan traditions, and Jackson himself not so much the modern nation-builder as a founding tribal chieftain along the lines of William Wallace the Scot. Arguing in that direction is the song Horton brought to mainstream popularity—more than a century after Ol’ Hickory’s death—with its tribal spirit fully intact. Horton got the song from a Scots-Irish schoolteacher named James Corbett Morris, who lived on the family farm in Arkansas’ Ozark Mountains and wrote “The Battle of New Orleans” as part of a history lesson for his students. (He also wrote “Tennessee Stud” for Eddy Arnold.) The Morris song and the Jackson presidential campaign song of 1828 sound like separate cuts off the same concept album. Both celebrate Ol’ Hickory in a contest of Us versus Them, and the original identifies the “we” who “opened up with squirrel guns” as “the hunters of Kentucky.” From there to country songwriter Keith’s “angry American” is an equally short distance:

“Justice will be served
And the battle will rage
This big dog will fight
When you rattle his cage
And you’ll be sorry that you messed
With the U.S. of A.
‘Cause we’ll put a boot in your ass
It’s the American way.”
—“Courtesy Of The Red, White And Blue (The Angry American),” 2002

{From Looking for the Bahana © 2008}