Pioneers of the Old Southwest: a chronicle of the dark and bloody ground

Constance Lindsay Skinner

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• Publié par: indroi
• Publié le: 08 décembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 18
• Langue: English

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Constance Lindsay Skinner
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Title: Pioneers of the Old Southwest
A Chronicle of the Dark and Bloody Ground
Author: Constance Lindsay Skinner
Release Date: February 21, 2009 [EBook #3073]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PIONEERS OF THE OLD SOUTHWEST ***
Produced by The James J. Kelly Library of St. Gregory's
University, Alev Akman, Doris Ringbloom, and David Widger
PIONEERS OF THE OLD
SOUTHWEST,
A CHRONICLE OF THE DARK AND
BLOODY GROUND
Volume 18 In The Chronicles Of America Series
By Constance Lindsay Skinner
Acknowledgment
This narrative is founded largely on original sources—on the writings and
journals of pioneers and contemporary observers, such as Doddridge and
Adair, and on the public documents of the period as printed in the ColonialRecords and in the American Archives. But the author is, nevertheless,
greatly indebted to the researches of, other writers, whose works are cited in
the Bibliographical Note. The author's thanks are due, also, to Dr. Archibald
Henderson, of the University of North Carolina, for his kindness in reading the
proofs of this book for comparison with his own extended collection of
unpublished manuscripts relating to the period.
C. L. S.
April, 1919.
Contents
PIONEERS OF THE OLD SOUTHWEST
Chapter I. The Tread Of Pioneers
Chapter II. Folkways
Chapter III. The Trader
Chapter IV. The Passing Of The French Peril
Chapter V. Boone, The Wanderer
Chapter VI. The Fight For Kentucky
Chapter VII. The Dark And Bloody Ground
Chapter VIII. Tennessee
Chapter IX. King's Mountain
Chapter X. Sevier, The Statemaker
Chapter XI. Boone's Last Days
PIONEERS OF THE OLD
SOUTHWEST
Chapter I. The Tread Of PioneersThe Ulster Presbyterians, or "Scotch-Irish," to whom history has ascribed
the dominant role among the pioneer folk of the Old Southwest, began their
migrations to America in the latter years of the seventeenth century. It is not
known with certainty precisely when or where the first immigrants of their race
arrived in this country, but soon after 1680 they were to be found in several of
the colonies. It was not long, indeed, before they were entering in numbers at
the port of Philadelphia and were making Pennsylvania the chief center of
their activities in the New World. By 1726 they had established settlements in
several counties behind Philadelphia. Ten years later they had begun their
great trek southward through the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia and on to the
Yadkin Valley of North Carolina. There they met others of their own race—
bold men like themselves, hungry after land—who were coming in through
Charleston and pushing their way up the rivers from the seacoast to the "Back
Country," in search of homes.
These Ulstermen did not come to the New World as novices in the shaping
of society; they had already made history. Their ostensible object in America
was to obtain land, but, like most external aims, it was secondary to a deeper
purpose. What had sent the Ulstermen to America was a passion for a whole
freedom. They were lusty men, shrewd and courageous, zealous to the death
for an ideal and withal so practical to the moment in business that it soon
came to be commonly reported of them that "they kept the Sabbath and
everything else they could lay their hands on," though it is but fair to them to
add that this phrase is current wherever Scots dwell. They had contested in
Parliament and with arms for their own form of worship and for their civil
rights. They were already frontiersmen, trained in the hardihood and craft of
border warfare through years of guerrilla fighting with the Irish Celts. They had
pitted and proved their strength against a wilderness; they had reclaimed the
North of Ireland from desolation. For the time, many of them were educated
men; under the regulations of the Presbyterian Church every child was taught
to read at an early age, since no person could be admitted to the privileges of
the Church who did not both understand and approve the Presbyterian
constitution and discipline. They were brought up on the Bible and on the
writings of their famous pastors, one of whom, as early as 1650, had given
utterance to the democratic doctrine that "men are called to the magistracy by
the suffrage of the people whom they govern, and for men to assume unto
themselves power is mere tyranny and unjust usurpation." In subscribing to
this doctrine and in resisting to the hilt all efforts of successive English kings
to interfere in the election of their pastors, the Scots of Ulster had already
declared for democracy.
It was shortly after James VI of Scotland became James I of England and
while the English were founding Jamestown that the Scots had first occupied
Ulster; but the true origin of the Ulster Plantation lies further back, in the reign
of Henry VIII, in the days of the English Reformation. In Henry's Irish realm the
Reformation, though proclaimed by royal authority, had never been
accomplished; and Henry's more famous daughter, Elizabeth, had conceived
the plan, later to be carried out by James, of planting colonies of Protestants
in Ireland to promote loyalty in that rebellious land. Six counties, comprising
half a million acres, formed the Ulster Plantation. The great majority of the
colonists sent thither by James were Scotch Lowlanders, but among them
were many English and a smaller number of Highlanders. These three
peoples from the island of Britain brought forth, through intermarriage, the
Ulster Scots.
The reign of Charles I had inaugurated for the Ulstermen an era of
persecution. Charles practically suppressed the Presbyterian religion inIreland. His son, Charles II, struck at Ireland in 1666 through its cattle trade,
by prohibiting the exportation of beef to England and Scotland. The
Navigation Acts, excluding Ireland from direct trade with the colonies, ruined
Irish commerce, while Corporation Acts and Test Acts requiring conformity
with the practices of the Church of England bore heavily on the Ulster
Presbyterians.
It was largely by refugees from religious persecution that America in the
beginning was colonized. But religious persecution was only one of the
influences which shaped the course and formed the character of the Ulster
Scots. In Ulster, whither they had originally been transplanted by James to
found a loyal province in the midst of the King's enemies, they had done their
work too well and had waxed too powerful for the comfort of later monarchs.
The first attacks upon them struck at their religion; but the subsequent
legislative acts which successively ruined the woolen trade, barred
nonconformists from public office, stifled Irish commerce, pronounced non-
Episcopal marriages irregular, and instituted heavy taxation and high rentals
for the land their fathers had made productive—these were blows dealt chiefly
for the political and commercial ends of favored classes in England.
These attacks, aimed through his religious conscience at the sources of his
livelihood, made the Ulster Scot perforce what he was—a zealot as a citizen
and a zealot as a merchant no less than as a Presbyterian. Thanks to his
persecutors, he made a religion of everything he undertook and regarded his
civil rights as divine rights. Thus out of persecution emerged a type of man
who was high-principled and narrow, strong and violent, as tenacious of his
own rights as he was blind often to the rights of others, acquisitive yet self-
sacrificing, but most of all fearless, confident of his own power, determined to
have and to hold.
Twenty thousand Ulstermen, it is estimated, left Ireland for America in the
first three decades of the eighteenth century. More than six thousand of them
are known to have entered Pennsylvania in 1729 alone, and twenty years
later they numbered one-quarter of that colony's population. During the five
years preceding the Revolutionary War more than thirty thousand Ulstermen
crossed the ocean and arrived in America just in time and in just the right
frame of mind to return King George's compliment in kind, by helping to
deprive him of his American estates, a domain very much larger than the
acres of Ulster. They fully justified the fears of the good bishop who wrote
Lord Dartmouth, Secretary for the Colonies, that he trembled for the peace of
the King's overseas realm, since these thousands of "phanatical and hungry
Republicans" had sailed for America.
The Ulstermen who entered by Charleston were known to the inhabitants of
the tidewater regions as the "Scotch-Irish." Those who came from the north,
lured southward by the offer of cheap lands, were called the "Pennsylvania
Irish." Both were, however, of the same race—a race twice expatriated, first
from Scotland and then from Ireland, and stripped of all that it had won
throughout more than a century of persecution. To these