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Searching for Status: Virginia’s Irish Tract, 1770s–1790s Katharine L. Brown Kenneth W. Keller The first major literary depiction of the Scotch-Irish in the southern United States was the 1824 novel The Valley of the Shenandoah by George Tucker. In this landmark novel, a gentleman from a bankrupt coastal Virginia family travels to the interior of the commonwealth, searching for a way to improve his declining family’s fortunes. He travels about the Valley of Virginia, being introduced to characters the likes of which he has never encountered, including many people of German and Scotch-Irish descent, most of them having migrated up the Valley of Virginia from Pennsylvania to the north. The story gives author Tucker the opportunity to develop ethnic stereotypes of the Germans and Presbyterians from the north of Ireland, the latter of whom the Americans were beginning to call the “Scotch-Irish.” In Tucker’s depiction , the Germans were generally hard working but culturally impoverished, dull, phlegmatic, small minded, selfish, plodding farmers; the “Scotch-Irish,” who were clearly Tucker’s favorites, were civic minded, impulsive, bold, daring , restless, outgoing, imaginative, ardent, decisive, proud, enterprising, and, though upstarts to the old families of the coast, were likely to rise to elevated station in public life. They were given to extremes. While some would waste their resources on extravagant projects and luxury, others of them may be engaged “in a course of rapid and adventurous speculation.”1 Plainly, according to the novelist, what distinguished the Scotch-Irish from their neighbors on the Virginia frontier is that they were constantly striving, sometimes recklessly , to secure their position in the society of the backcountry. They had recently arrived on the land, sacrificed, and now were willing to take risks to provide a place for themselves and their posterity in an ordered republican society that they would build, free of unmerited privilege and status.2 Like many literary stereotypes, this portrait of the Scotch-Irish on the American frontier has some truth in it, especially in an area of the Valley of 124 Katharine L. Brown and Kenneth W. Keller Virginia known as the Irish Tract, a region of about four hundred square miles between Rockbridge and Augusta counties that straddles the upper James and the upper Shenandoah river valleys (see map 6.1). It is most certainly true that, in this region, the Scotch-Irish were able to establish themselves so that they and their families led the cultural, economic, and political institutions of this part of Virginia. Today the Irish Tract contains one of the highest concentrations of Presbyterian churches in the United States, and the landscape is dotted with colleges and universities founded and supported by the Scotch-Irish, and with businesses and professional interests that families have maintained and prospered from for generations. In the Irish Tract, a Scotch-Irish elite formed early in its history and is still in evidence. Although Virginians to the east identified with the culture and history of the Old Dominion’s motherland of England, the leaders of the Irish Tract looked to a republican and dissenting culture as they strove to build their lives in the New World. The republican society they searched for was one where men would live without a king and without artificial distinctions imposed by aristocratic privilege and an established church, but they lived with limited government and political institutions they controlled through frequent elections. Such a society was supposed to be one where hard work, frugality, honesty, austere dissenting piety, avoidance of luxury, social harmony, and the opportunity to own land and slaves would reward white people like themselves. Recently historians have told the story of the formation of this ScotchIrish elite. Studies by the historians Turk McCleskey and Albert H. Tillson Jr. have documented how before 1790 the early Scotch-Irish of the region accumulated real estate, began to build their fortunes, and created a power structure that maintained their dominance in their region of the upper Shenandoah Valley.3 In the Irish Tract of the upper Valley, the initial landholders were not Ulstermen, but the land quickly fell under the control of the Scotch-Irish. In the late 1730s the Crown disposed of the land by deeding it over to two landholders who were not of Scotch-Irish descent. They were William Beverley, who lived in coastal Virginia, an area known as the Tidewater, and Benjamin Borden Sr., who was from New Jersey and served as a land agent of the only...

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