THE ORIGINS OF THE OTHER SOUTH

With the increased conversation regarding the creation of a “New Confederacy” - I was amazed yesterday that the article I wrote over three days before posting on that topic managed to precede three different reports on the same exact topic on MSNBC’s Sunday discussion shows - I think it is important to understand that there is a very real Other South that is not the political stew we read about every day, the world of Governor DeSantis taking on Disney for being willing to support the progressive views of its employees and passing legislation attacking the LGBTQ community because they are weak and he can score points with his horrible supporters, or the execrable Governor Greg Abbot of Texas announcing he intends to pardon the murderer of a Black Lives Matter protestor found guilty by a jury of his peers, before the case even goes to appeal.

I first became aware of what I call “The Other South” in 1968, when I went to Killeen, Texas, to work at The Oleo Strut coffeehouse outside Fort Hood as part of the GI Resistance to the Vietnam War.

We were fortunate to have an attorney, Davis Bragg, who was local. He took care of everything we ran into and I can say his work was instrumental in my not spending 20 years in Huntsville Prison.

My meeting with the New South came the night he and his wife invited we of The Oleo Strut staff out to have dinner with them. He lived outside of town, on a remote county road - a two-lane blacktop - through the Hill Country prairie. We found his gate, identified by a mailbox with the route number on it, and turned up the driveway. We drove what seemed a very long time up that narrow lane till we came around a curve, and there, behind a line of trees that shielded it from the county road, was the house. While we were having drinks before dinner, I mentioned to him that I had never driven up a driveway as long as his.

He replied, “Yes, we’re out of range here.”

That caught me short. And then I thought about the Goat Ropers, the local redneck losers we dealt with late on Friday and Saturday nights when they showed up, drunk, to protest the presence of “communists” in their town. The pickup trucks with gun racks in the rear window (often filled with rifles) I saw driving around town with “Wallace for President” stickers on their bumpers. Yeah, putting up with them throwing rocks though our front window (till Davis Bragg got us a window made of bullet - and rock - resistant glass) was bad enough; I wouldn’t want them shooting up my living room.

The Braggs were fourth-generation Texans; Davis Bragg had come to Killeen during World War II with the Army after Fort Hood was established, and decided to stay after realizing the soldiers needed a lawyer on their side. He traced his “Texas Liberal” roots back three generations to his great-great grandfather who had been a member of the Texas state legislature and had voted against secession in 1861. He and I talked several times about this side of Texas society and politics and he once explained that he used “Texas Liberal” for northerners to understand, but that what he really was, was a “Southern Unionist.” That was the first time I heard about the indigenous resistance to the Confederacy, which he told me about in the history of his family.

Most of what we know of the South and the Civil War is the product of the mythology of the “Lost Cause,” which made its way into schoolbooks across the country and most of what passed for “Civil War scholarship” as late as 30 years ago; the mythology was The Story of the Civil War when I was in public school.

All of that was bullshit, as is most of the mythology that passes for “official” American History.

To understand the real history, one has to go back a few centuries and cross the Atlantic to the British Isles. And then go back a thousand years to the first Norman invasions of Ireland, and the constant battle of England versus Scotland on the island of Britain. It’s a story of wars of imperial aggression, religion-fueled civil war, and the first war of national liberation against European colonialism.

In fact, if you want to be fully aware, it’s story that goes back to the Aryan invasion of Europe 4,000 years ago, and the destruction of the Indigenous Europeans, the Celts, in battle with the Aryan invaders, leaving the Celts living on the “difficult edges” of Europe - Brittany in France, Catalonia in Spain, Britain, Scotland and Ireland. It’s a story very similar to the European invasion of the New World, with the Celts playing the role of the Native Americans. But I digress.

Over the first 600 years of the Norman invasion of Ireland, the invaders settled and became the “Anglo-Irish,” which is more accurately the Norman Irish - their descendants are identifiable today by their Norman surnames. Some of the most prominent Norman families were the FitzMaurices, FitzGeralds, Burkes (de Burghs), Butlers, Fitzsimmons and Wall. One of the most common Irish surnames, Walsh, derives from the Normans from Wales who arrived in Ireland as part of this group.

By the late 16th Century, the Anglo (Norman) Irish were an increasingly-embattled minority as they sought to keep their position in the face of the relentless Indigenous Irish resistance. The Tudors had instituted a new colonization wave there beginning in the mid 16th century under both Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, to strengthen English colonial rule.

At the same time, England and Scotland were about to become a United Kingdom due to the family dynastic convolutions of the Tudors following the death of Elizabeth I without heirs. The nearest male in line of blood succession was James VI of Scotland, who acceded to the English - now British - throne as James I on Elizabeth’s death.

The Stuart line of the Tudors had remained Catholic while Henry VIII and Elizabeth became Protestants. The Stuart reluctance to change religions for political reasons would ultimately come to a head in the English revolution and civil war brought on by James I’s son Charles I. The Stuarts derived their power in Scotland from the support of the highland clans and their mutual Catholicism.

James I, needing to maintain his base of support in Scotland, while also needing to show himself to the Protestant English as a “defender of the faith,” decided to use the ancient imperial strategy of “divide and conquer” to achieve his goal. He established the Plantation of Ulster, largest of the “plantations” that had been founded by the Tudors, and the Lowland Scots were “encouraged” to go there. This was the first time the English used “transportation” as both a criminal punishment and instrument of imperial rule. Lowland Scots who were convicted of the many offenses for which “transportation” was one punishment, found themselves transported to Ulster Plantation beginning in 1606; other lowland Scots were encouraged to emigrate by being granted the confiscated lands of the Gaelic Chiefs who had fled to Europe following their defeat in the Nine Years’ War (1594-1603) against the English; the province that is now Northern Ireland had been the center of indigenous Irish resistance to English colonization over several hundred years of struggle - the most Gaelic and most independent part of Ireland.

The Protestant Lowland Scots were immediately embroiled in conflict with the Catholic Irish, first in the Rebellion of 1641, which set Ulster as Protestant and adamantly opposed to the Catholic Irish. The Scottish famine of 1690 brought more Scottish settlers and solidified Scottish rule.

In the mid-18th century, pushed out of Ireland by religious conflicts, lack of political autonomy and dire economic conditions, immigrants from Ulster, called "Scotch-Irish," came to the British colonies in North America, attracted by the promise of land ownership and greater religious freedom.

They came with two beliefs: they were “anti-papist” in religion, and desired to be as far from the reach of government as they could find.

The original settlement was in Pennsylvania as settlement of the colony expanded west. Here they found what we call today Appalachia. With the discovery of the Cumberland Gap that allowed further settlement in what is now eastern Kentucky and Tennessee, the Scotch-Irish eventually settled all of Appalachia. This “mountain South” was different in every way from the “lowland South” founded in the early 17th century, where the agricultural economy led to an enslaver economy.

The Scotch-Irish, who settled western Virginia, eastern Kentucky and Tennessee, western North Carolina, northern Georgia and eventually northern Alabama and Mississippi were a separate culture from the “traditional South,” who they viewed as “English” and opposed. They did not own slaves. Eventually, the lowland South termed them “Hill Billies,” an ethnic slur.

The Scotch-Irish were strongly attracted to the American concept of local democracy, which was close to the social organization of classical Celtic society going back into pre-history. Before the Aryan invasion, European communities did not have walls; they worshiped The Goddess, and research shows that their societies were egalitarian in organization with a large component of sexual equality. Like the Africans who arrived as slaves and still managed to maintain much of African social organization in their communities, the Celts of Scotland and Ireland were the unknowing inheritors of this earlier tradition, which they brought with them to America.

By the time of the American Revolution, the Scotch-Irish were a significant part of the population, and they rallied to the revolution; a majority of those who served in the Continental Army were Scotch-Irish.

With the example of the American Revolution and the French Revolution, the last Irish rebellion of the 18th Century - known as “The ‘99" for the fact it began in 1799 - was the only “bipartisan” Irish revolution; both Scotch-Irish and Indigenous Irish fought together against English oppression. When the rebellion failed, a greater wave of Scotch-Irish emigrated to America, among them 18-year old James McKelvey, who arrived in New York City in 1800; according to later family lore, he “took ship to America a skip ahead of Lord Cornwallis’ rope.”

In the new century, the Scotch-Irish population of Appalachia followed the campaigns of General Andrew Jackson in the War of 1812. The Scotch-Irish, despite not being slave owners, were Jackson’s political base and strong supporters of “Jacksonian Democracy.” Their allegiance to “the old flag” would sabotage the Confederacy.

Tomorrow, I will write about The Civil War To Fight A Civil War: Southern Patriots Versus The Confederacy.

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