The discussion of genealogy interested several of you, so here's a piece Dad29 sent me yesterday on the Celtic influence on the American South in the early period. The link with the Highland Charge is a frequent claim I have always found persuasive, although that link -- like all of this stuff -- is debatable and subject to alternative explanations.
The Irish did very well in the South compared to the majority of them who migrated north; the South welcomed them as white men, because the deadly threat posed by slavery meant that only the black/white division mattered. In the North, they were often not as readily accepted into the general population.
My ancestors were all in what became the United States before the Revolution, and passed into Tennessee in the first generation of Americans to do so. Most of them came from Scotland, but the names include Welsh, obviously Norse derived names like Thurman, as well as plenty of Duncans and others with obviously Scottish names. Very Celtic, if one accepts that the Scottish Vikings were also strongly Celtic.
The article also admits Joel's consideration that at least part of the Scottish Borders were strongly Anglo-Saxon, which made an additional admixture.
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One book on Irish-American history I read claimed that Southern slave owners would hire Irish immigrants to do dangerous work like drain swamps. Slaves were a long-term investment and they didn't want to lose them to swamp fevers, etc., whereas if you lost some immigrant workers you could always hire more.
A history professor of mine in my MA program named David Gleeson — himself a native Irishman — made a similar claim. He said Irish day labor was often used eg to load cotton bales on ships. The bales weighed hundreds of pounds. If a slave were killed or crippled by one, that was a substantial loss to the owner. A day laborer only cost a day’s wages.
I have always found this subject fascinating. From a very young age it was made known to me that those of us of Scotch-Irish origin (I use Scotch-Irish since that was the term applied to my ancestors when they got here and what my family has always used (me and mine don't care what they say in the UK)) are separate from those that consider themselves of Highland origin. We place great emphasis on the fact that we supported the Patriot cause in the Revolution while the Highlanders supported the Crown.
It should be noted that this difference between the Scotch-Irish and the Highlanders was a religious/political/cultural division that existed long before the settlement of America. I have no doubt that the Scotch-Irish, on an important level, favored the Patriot cause just because the Highlanders chose to support the crown. One can't discount, what my Grandparents called pure cussedness, as the ultimate explanation.
Some Highlanders supported the Crown, but others were important to the Revolution. Lachlan McIntosh was a general of George Washington’s at Valley Forge, who later was given command of the western frontier (then the Ohio River Valley). His brother was also important in the Georgia militia’s fight against the British.
He was the son of John Mohr McInstosh, who was out against the Crown in the 1745 Jacobite rebellion. A whole group of Jacobites under his command was allowed to decamp to Georgia, with their arms, and was settled south of Savannah to defend it against Spanish Florida.
Likewise the Overmountain men who crushed a British force at King’s Mountain included many of Highland extraction. They had sought the mountains because of their similarities to the Highlands.
Indeed I sometimes think that the Jacobites in particular joined the Revolution by a kind of inherent (or inherent) habit. They had rebelled against the central and distant Crown in 1689, 1715, and 1745; and many before that belonged to the Covenanter movement who resisted royal authority in the name of Presbyterianism against the imposition of the Church of England. It was a sort of second nature to resist overweening power; and this may also explain why so many of those from the Appalachian highlands joined the Civil War, as well. Some fought against the distant Union, and some fought their own distant state governments (e.g. “Union County” in Georgia). But generally speaking they were inclined to fight.
It's a persuasive set of arguments, and they don't have to all hold up to be significant nonetheless. We are entering the era of DNA being able to give strong indicators, and sometimes even definitive answers.
As for the Irish being free but hired for the most dangerous jobs, that is mentioned a few times in Frederick Law Olmsted's books about walking across American south and Texas 1852-1857.
One of those “inherent”s was supposed to read inherited , but autocorrect got me again.
Thanks for the primary sources, AVI! I'll be looking those up.
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