Born Fighting Read Free Page B

religious, and cultural terms.
    And thus the Scots-Irish had nothing in common with either the English aristocracy in Virginia or the New England WASP settlements. Nor, for that matter, did the typical English who made their way into the mountains to join them. Some of the English in the mountain communities had come from Ulster with the Scots-Irish. Some came from the border areas between England and Scotland and were, in contrast to the New England English, heavily Celtic in their origins. And others, such as those depicted by de Tocqueville, drifted into the mountains from the ugly, class-based system that characterized lowland Virginia.
    These three distinctly separate cultural groups approached almost every important issue differently as the nation took shape, and were affected in dramatically different ways by social and economic policies. Analysts who attempt to analyze American history and political views by combining all those with “British Protestant origins” under one rubric will invariably end up with a false understanding as well as a mass of useless and conflicting data.
    Third, there is a tendency in many academic and literary quarters to lump the Scots-Irish in with the Irish themselves. More than 40 million Americans claim Irish descent, exclusive of those Scots-Irish who have self-identified themselves on census reports under other categories such as Scottish or “native American.” Interestingly, more than half of these are of Scots-Irish ancestry. This fact is rarely recognized even by Protestants of Scots-Irish descent, many of whom may be found happily wearing the green and marching in St. Patrick’s Day parades. A considerable number of Scots-Irish immigrant families did carry Irish as well as Scottish blood, just as many of them also carried English blood. My own ancestors included Murphys, Doyles, and Connollys, among others. But at some point they all became Protestant, and the cultural migration as well as the experiences of the Scots-Irish were widely different from their Celtic kin, the Irish Catholics.
    Early America experienced three great “Celtic waves” of migration from Ireland. The first, numbering between 250,000 and 400,000, included many Northern English and Scots, but consisted principally of Scots-Irish Presbyterians emptying out of Ulster. 4 Although the migration began in the late 1690s, its heaviest years were between 1717 and the American Revolution. The second, spurred on by Ireland’s potato famine in the late 1840s, was most heavily, but not exclusively, Catholic. In its peak years during the 1860s, about 100,000 Irish immigrants were flooding into America every year. 5 The third, centering on the two decades that bracketed the beginning of the twentieth century, was in many ways a continuation of the second wave but at about half the immigration rate, with 84 percent of all Irish emigrants from 1876 to 1921 coming to the United States. 6
    Once removed from Ireland, the common Celtic origins of these two groups brought many similarities, especially in their military traditions, their affinity for politics, and their literary prowess. But the timing, geography, and cohesion of these respective migrations resulted in starkly different experiences in America. The first, Protestant wave centered on the Appalachian and Allegheny Mountains. The other, principally Irish Catholic migrations flowed mostly into Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, with a secondary outflow to Chicago. They were not only urban in their first instance, but also competitive with other large ethnic migrations such as those from Italy, Greece, and Eastern Europe. They were also up against a truly dominant WASP establishment that quickly became identified as an adversary to be overcome as well as a benchmark against which to measure their success. However, in contrast to the Scots-Irish, these migrations benefited from having landed smack in the middle of America’s rich and thriving