shaped these people and helped spur them on into a new and sometimes fearsome wilderness.
In their words, I can sense them looking coolly at the pretenses and attempted restrictions placed upon them by yet another branch of an Anglican establishment that they imagined they had left behind in Ulster, a pervasive aristocracy that in America controlled most of the “flatlands” along the colonial coast. They were told that they could practice their religion in the mountains even if it was not “lawful,” so long as they did not seek to infect the more ordered societies along the coast. And they were expected to reciprocate by both staying in the mountains and keeping the Indians at bay. These memories burned like fire among people who knew, even nearly three centuries ago, that the Eastern Establishment looked down on them, openly demeaning their religion and their cultural ways, and at bottom sought to use them toward its own ends.
Their answer, then as now, was to tell the Eastern Establishment to go to hell. A deal was a deal—they would fight the Indians, although many of them would also trade with them and even intermarry. But at bottom they would not forget the duplicity that followed Londonderry, or the Test Acts that fell on the heels of their contributions at the Boyne. Nonconformity as well as a mistrust of central power was now in their blood. America was a far larger place than Ireland, a land in which they could live as they wished and move as freely as they dared whether or not the established government liked what they were doing and were about to do, so long as they did not move too conspicuously toward the east.
So they made their own world in the mountains. And most of them knew that their future was not along the coast anyway, but ever westward, where they might meet fierce challenges, but where they also could create a new kind of society more akin to their own traditions.
PART FIVE
Rise and Fall:
The Heart of the South
When I grew tall as the Indian corn,
My father had little to lend me,
But he gave me his great, old powder-horn
And his woodsman’s skill to befriend me.
. . .
We cleared our camp where the buffalo feed,
Unheard-of streams were our flagons;
And I sowed my sons like the apple-seed,
On the trail of the western wagons.
— STEPHEN VINCENT BEN é T,
“The Ballad of William Sycamore, 1790–1871”
1
Westward, Ho
A NEW COUNTRY had been formed. Forests were hacked away. Mud trails widened and hardened, becoming packed roads. The wagons poured westward through gaps in the mountains, especially down the Wilderness Road that had been pioneered by the daring Scots-Irish explorer Daniel Boone, funneling thousands of settlers into Kentucky, Tennessee, and beyond. In 1803 the Louisiana Purchase opened up the new nation on the far side of the Mississippi River, although it would take more than another decade for viable settlements to reach Arkansas, Missouri, northern Louisiana, Texas, and areas farther west. In 1814, soldiers led by Gen. Andrew Jackson forced the Treaty of Fort Jackson, moving American territory farther south into lands once held by the Creek Indians, including three-fifths of Alabama, an additional one-fifth of Georgia, and an open road from western Tennessee to the Gulf of Mexico. In early 1815, Jackson humiliated the British in a stunning, brutal defeat at New Orleans, forcing them once and for all to abandon dreams of regaining their hold on American interests. By 1818, Jackson had driven the Spanish out of Florida, opening up further avenues into the Deep South, including the coastal areas of Alabama and Mississippi, which had been in Spanish hands.
As the new land began to fill with fresh settlers, the generation that followed those who had fought the Revolution remembered Cowpens and
In their words, I can sense them looking coolly at the pretenses and attempted restrictions placed upon them by yet another branch of an Anglican establishment that they imagined they had left behind in Ulster, a pervasive aristocracy that in America controlled most of the “flatlands” along the colonial coast. They were told that they could practice their religion in the mountains even if it was not “lawful,” so long as they did not seek to infect the more ordered societies along the coast. And they were expected to reciprocate by both staying in the mountains and keeping the Indians at bay. These memories burned like fire among people who knew, even nearly three centuries ago, that the Eastern Establishment looked down on them, openly demeaning their religion and their cultural ways, and at bottom sought to use them toward its own ends.
Their answer, then as now, was to tell the Eastern Establishment to go to hell. A deal was a deal—they would fight the Indians, although many of them would also trade with them and even intermarry. But at bottom they would not forget the duplicity that followed Londonderry, or the Test Acts that fell on the heels of their contributions at the Boyne. Nonconformity as well as a mistrust of central power was now in their blood. America was a far larger place than Ireland, a land in which they could live as they wished and move as freely as they dared whether or not the established government liked what they were doing and were about to do, so long as they did not move too conspicuously toward the east.
So they made their own world in the mountains. And most of them knew that their future was not along the coast anyway, but ever westward, where they might meet fierce challenges, but where they also could create a new kind of society more akin to their own traditions.
PART FIVE
Rise and Fall:
The Heart of the South
When I grew tall as the Indian corn,
My father had little to lend me,
But he gave me his great, old powder-horn
And his woodsman’s skill to befriend me.
. . .
We cleared our camp where the buffalo feed,
Unheard-of streams were our flagons;
And I sowed my sons like the apple-seed,
On the trail of the western wagons.
— STEPHEN VINCENT BEN é T,
“The Ballad of William Sycamore, 1790–1871”
1
Westward, Ho
A NEW COUNTRY had been formed. Forests were hacked away. Mud trails widened and hardened, becoming packed roads. The wagons poured westward through gaps in the mountains, especially down the Wilderness Road that had been pioneered by the daring Scots-Irish explorer Daniel Boone, funneling thousands of settlers into Kentucky, Tennessee, and beyond. In 1803 the Louisiana Purchase opened up the new nation on the far side of the Mississippi River, although it would take more than another decade for viable settlements to reach Arkansas, Missouri, northern Louisiana, Texas, and areas farther west. In 1814, soldiers led by Gen. Andrew Jackson forced the Treaty of Fort Jackson, moving American territory farther south into lands once held by the Creek Indians, including three-fifths of Alabama, an additional one-fifth of Georgia, and an open road from western Tennessee to the Gulf of Mexico. In early 1815, Jackson humiliated the British in a stunning, brutal defeat at New Orleans, forcing them once and for all to abandon dreams of regaining their hold on American interests. By 1818, Jackson had driven the Spanish out of Florida, opening up further avenues into the Deep South, including the coastal areas of Alabama and Mississippi, which had been in Spanish hands.
As the new land began to fill with fresh settlers, the generation that followed those who had fought the Revolution remembered Cowpens and
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