Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South

Prologue

PROLOGUE THE Celtic interpretation of southern history, to which this volume is a major contribution, can be summed up in two general propositions. One is that, by virtue of historical accident, the American colonies south and west of Pennsylvania were peopled during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries mainly by immigrants from the "Celtic fringe" of the British archipelago-the western and northern uplands of England, Wales, the Scottish Highlands and Borders, the Hebrides, and Ireland-and that the culture these people brought with them and to a large extent retained in the New World accounts in considerable measure for the differences between them and the Yankees of New England, most of whom originated in the lowland southeastern half of the island of Britain. The second is that the material culture underlying the traditional folkways, values, norms, and attitudes both in the upland areas prior to the eighteenth century and in the antebellum South was primarily related to herding, in contrast to the commercial mixed agriculture that was the norm both in southeastern Britain and in New England. For a number of years Grady McWhiney and I have been investigating various aspects of this thesis, sometimes jointly, sometimes separately. Jointly, for example, we have studied immigration history and devised methods of estimating the ethnic makeup of the American population through name analysis (see Chapter I below). The results of such study are necessarily imprecise, but they tend to bear out the first proposition: in each of the decennial censuses from 1790 through 1860, about half of the white population of the South was of Irish, Scottish, or Welsh extraction, and about half of the remainder had originated in the western and northern English uplands . Upwards of three-quarters of the population of New England was of English lowlands extraction and continued to be so until the massive influx of Irish immigrants after the Great Famine of the 1840S. XXI Prologue Similarly, we have worked together in exploring the relevant literature from such other disciplines as cultural geography, anthropology , and historical sociology. Much of this literature, when considered in a comparative perspective, documents the persistence of Old World habits in America, often in spite of radical changes in the physical environment. Housing affords a good example. ScotchIrish immigrants to America (who made up the largest component of the population in the southern backcountryl were inexperienced in building with wood, the most readily available material in frontier America, for the Irish woods had been stripped by the English during the seventeenth century; they learned the techniques, especially of corner timbering for log structures, from the Germans in Pennsylvania. But otherwise their dwellings were reproductions of what they had been accustomed to in Ulster and in western Scotland. The internal dimensions of the houses were sixteen feet by twenty-two feet, as compared to fifteen by twenty-one in the Ulster houses; the external dimensions were the same as in Ulster. The dimensions had originally been set by the limits on roof sizes imposed by the shortage of wood and were retained in America out of habit despite the abundance of wood. The dog-trot house that evolved later was simply a structure that comprised two of the traditional houses placed a few feet apart and enclosed under a single roof.l But a great deal of the research has taken place on an individual basis. The most important direct primary sources by which one can compare Old World ways with southern ways are the recorded observations of contemporaries. Professor McWhiney has made an almost exhaustive examination of them, having studied such records in collections of manuscripts and rare books in Scotland, Ireland , and England as well as in repositories throughout the United States. It is primarily upon that study that the present work is based: 1. Data on housing are derived from E. Estyn Evans, "The Scotch·Irish: Their Cultural Adaptation and Heritage in the American Old West," in Essays in Scotch·Irish History, ed. E. R. R. Green (London, 1969),78-80. For examples of other work by geographers, sociologists , and anthropologists, see Fred B. Kniffen and Henry Glassie, "Building in Wood in the Eastern United States: A Time·Place Perspective," Geographi· cal Review 56 (19661, 40-66; John Fraser Hart, "Land Rotation in Appalachia," ibid. 67 (19771, 148-5 I; John Solomon Otto and Nain Estelle Anderson, "Slashand -Burn Cultivation in the Highlands South: A Problem in Comparative Agricultural History," Comparative Studies in Society and History 24 (1982), 13147 ; Duane G...