The Scots in Carolina - North Carolina

Contemporary Review, Oct, 1993 by R.D. Kernohan

I came across a striking with visible example of that when I went to see the grave at Lexington of Stonewall Jackson, often thought of as the archetypal Scotch-Irish Presbyterian assimilated in Virginia, though it was by marriage that he came into his Church. Nearby is a striking nineteenth-century Celtic cross, apparently modelled in one of the ancient crosses of Iona, with a Confederate veteran's marker at its foot and carrying an inscription worded with typical English-speaking piety of its time. But the family names, on both sides, seem pure Italian.

Such encounters instil a mood of caution when a modern Scot meets the passionate Scots by descent (or sometimes by adoption) in the United States. I am polite but unmoved when I hear of 'the kirkin' o' the tartans', even asked for guidance on its procedures, for that is a rite of American origin and -- except where visiting Americans have enthused over it -- unknown in its 'homeland'. But to visit Glasgow Va., close to the Natural Bridge, even to gaze from afar on the oddly-spelled vineyards of Edinburg, or to be asked these endless, earnest, enthusiastic questions, to rule on the specialised areas where 'Scotch' is still an appropriate adjective, or be trapped over the Bourbon into reading Lorimer's New Testament in Scots on a warm Southern mountain night; and, for a Presbyterian, to find the form and mood of service no more distant than the one in the next parish at home: these are moving things that can thraw the thrawnest spirit and turn a cynic back into a romantic. For their sake I even forgive the local paper in the Mountain country that misreported me as predicting the early triumph of Scottish nationalism and speaking -- as no Scots royalist would ever do -- of the 'English' Royal Family, that source of insatiable curiosity and fascination in the Great Republic.

Such practical matters sometimes show just how for ethnic enthusiasts in America can be from trans-Atlantic realities, more notably, of course, in the case of the Irish Republican lobby than of any Scots societies. For some Americans an assertion of ethnic identity as a necessity, for others somewhere between a luxury and an enriching affirmation that shades naturally int a little harmless make-believe, like parading tartans down the church aisles.

It can be hard for the visiting ethnic affiliate to known which is which, or when which is what. Within the American identity -- or should it now be identities? -- it is easy to recognise the distinctive white Southern one, even to appreciate the Georgia joke (possibly now being adapted in Arkansas) that 'Jimmy Carter maybe wasn't a very good President but at least he didn't have an accent'. In the same way it does not take long to sense that while most of Appalachia is of the South it is not quite like the rest of the South.

The difficulty comes in weighing the significance of one of the matters which makes Appalachia distinctive. More than any other part of the Union it remains the Kingdom -- or Republic, I suppose -- of the WASSPS, as properly spelled: white Anglo-Saxon-Scots (or Irish) Protestants. Yet it lacks most of the characteristics, attitudes, and styles which are conventionally associated with that once-dominant and still powerful strain in American life. Parts of it remain relatively poor. Most of it will till recently as unfairly despised and rejected as the President most associated with the region: Lincoln's Scotch-Irish successor, Andrew Johnson. (The visitor soars in the estimation of Greenville, Tennessee if he knows who Johnson was and still higher if he has a good word for him.) Much of the region retains lifestyles and beliefs unfashionable among American trendsetters and opinion-formers.