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Archiver > Scotch-Irish > 1999-10 > 0939464788


From: "Edward Andrews" <>
Subject: Re: What We Are
Date: Sat, 9 Oct 1999 11:26:28 +0100


----- Original Message -----
From: Horatio Paul McAfee <>
To: <>
Sent: Saturday, October 09, 1999 5:02 AM
Subject: What We Are


About this "Scotch Irish" terminology - I detest that usage. I refuse
to identify my ancestors or myself as a beverage. The correct term
would be "Scots Irish" but even that is not good. The Protestant people
we are talking about had almost nothing in common with the Catholic
Irish and vice versa - the distrust continues to this day in Northern
Ireland.

I am not sure that this is really right. If you look at the archives of this
list I think that you will find that there was much more in common than we
have allowed ourselves to believe.

I like the term "Anglo Celt" for that usage distances us from all the
trappings associated with what is Irish. T.R. Fehrenbach, the fine
historian, uses that terminology a lot. His exquisite history of Texas,
Lone Star, is about the best description of the Anglo Celt (ok, Scots
Irish) that I have seen and I recommend it to anyone wishing to get a
measure of how their ancestors thought and acted and the hell they went
through because of their Calvinist beliefs. If you are "Scotch Irish"
and read Fehrenbach, you will come away with a heightened appreciation
for our remarkable kin.

The problem with the idea of Anglo Celt is the word Anglo means English.
Its use by definition suggests that there was an Englishness about the
people involved which is not necessarily so.
While I am not keen on Scotch Irish as a term. Anglo Celt is however much
worse, especially as the terms is already claimed by descendants of the
English who became the Irish Establishment.
The fact is that there is no name which genuinely reflects the mixture of
roots of the people who went to Ireland and then moved on to America.
What the group is called is however an American Preoccupation and you are
welcome to it.

Two things are important in any consideration of our people: (1) The
complete and often savage hatred they bore for the English. Yes, they
were often the first to volunteer to fight as patriots in the
revolutionary war, but study the Battle of Kings Mountain. What our
Overmountain ancestors did to the body of the British Colonel Patrick
Ferguson after they killed him is a measure of just how complete their
hatred was.

How do you tie in this statement with the desire to call them English?

Another important consideration is (2) the religious element - the Anglo
Celts' Calvinisn brought them all sorts of persecution. They were denied
basic civil liberties everywhere they went because their religion
differed so greatly from the established religions. No wonder that they
clamored for freedom of religion and insisted on it as a basic right in
the new American constitition. Their Calvinism insisted that each man,
woman and child learn to read and make decisions on their own. Each
father was considered capable of interpreting the Bible himself without
benefit of a clergy that would tell him what to think. This was a
dangerous and revolutionary concept in a world ruled by priests and
bishops and popes. In colonial Virginia one of Greenwood ancestors went
to jail for preaching an "unauthorized religion." Other Scots Irish
fared no better when they refused to pay the tithes required to support
the authorized church.

I have to disagree violently with the above analysis. It restates a folk
history view, which simply does not reflect the reality of the time.
Historically the "religion of the Prince is the religion of the people". I
have noticed that Americans with their tradition of the separation of Church
and state have great problems with this concept. It was not their Calvinism
which brought the S-I into conflict with the state - and it is not true to
say that their religion differed from the Established Religion, it depended
where you were - it was the fact that they belonged to a different tradition
and they were not going to conform to the Public Polity.
New England was extremely inhospitable to Presbyterianism and the Puritans
were coming from almost the same place as the Presbyterians theologically.
The statement that in Calvinism "Each
father was considered capable of interpreting the Bible himself without
benefit of a clergy that would tell him what to think. " is not true. It is
far more complicated than that.
There were those developments from Calvinism in this position, but
certainly it is a view which neither Calvin or any of the reformers (with
the possible exception of Zwingli) would have responded to positively.
Presbyterianism was very much a community religion. It worked fine when
there were communities which were essentially Presbyterian. The ideas which
Mr McAfee puts forward as the hallmarks of Calvinism were in fact condemned
when the Brownists came to Scotland in the early 17th Century. However they
became part of an American understanding of religion as the frontier
expanded. (And was probably then reimported into Scotland with the concept
of Voluntaryism)

I hope that this clarifies the situation

Our ancestors were restless, energetic people who kept moving on -
moving on. As they moved down into Tennessee and on West they pulled the
American nation behind them. This is some of the stuff that animates my
pride in my forefathers. My McAfee, Chisholm, Young, McMahon,
McFarland, Whiteside, Witcher, McKenzie and countless other Anglo Celt
fathers made a nation. Ain't that something?

Horatio Paul McAfee

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