Note: This post was first posted on Monday April 4 was “sticky” for a couple of days. Scroll down for more recent posts, including a culturally enriched hit-and-run in Molenbeek, a translated article about the willingness of Italian students to convert to Islam if they were threatened by the Islamic State, an addendum to Seneca III’s “Faye on Fate and Futurism”, Viktor Orbán’s speech in Portuguese, two subtitled Italian videos, and last night’s news feed.

Apollon Zamp returns after a long absence with this guest-essay analyzing the contributions of the Scots-Irish to the building of the United States, and their long-time feud with the federal government — which battle the government seems to have won, at least for now.

Modernity Has Not Been Kind to the Celt

by Apollon Zamp

Introduction: Why You’re Not Going to Like Anything I Say

I moved to the mountains of southwestern Virginia in August of 2008. Granted, I was relocating to the New River Valley (i.e. Blacksburg) so I didn’t really get to see the heart and soul of this area until I moved out into the country two years later. Nevertheless, it became clear to me, as I hit the Bedford County line that summer afternoon and saw the Blue Ridge rising up in front of me, that I was entering a different world. As it would turn out, the deep, dark hills of western Virginia are different from the plains and coastline in many ways.

Like many in this part of the world, I’m a big fan of the TV show “Justified.” Not only is it well-written and well-acted (and unlike so many television serials, well-ended), but it evokes rural Appalachia in a way that few forms of media are able to do these days. To quote a song from a different time, “Justified” captures the suffering, the sorrow, the glory, and the shame of the mountain culture that has been sadly degraded by its communion with the larger society around it. Truth be told, though, if you’re a native of the mountainous parts of the rural Southeast, your exit from the physical plane probably won’t be at the hands of a career criminal like Boyd Crowder or some violent Oxycontin addict. It’s much more likely that your departure from this mortal coil will be due to the adipose tissue surrounding one or more of your vital organs.



The men and boys of the infamous Hatfield family, circa 1897 The men and boys of the infamous Hatfield family, circa 1897

Throughout history, the denizens of rural Appalachia have been at a high risk of death from gunshot wounds, stabbings, and blunt force trauma. This is the seeming end result of piling too many Scots-Irishmen together and expecting them to co-exist peacefully (cf. a certain six counties of Ulster). Those causes of death have been replaced by the much less mediapathic,[1] but no less lethal, trio of diabetes, heart disease, and high blood pressure.[2] Fast forward a couple of centuries and the main threat facing a mountaineer is the face he looks at in the mirror every morning. In the immortal words of the comic strip Pogo, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

The singular question any intelligent and curious observer is left with is: Why?

Or, in other words: What happened to the Appalachia of yesteryear? Who’s responsible for its decline? How did it come to this?

The best answers I can provide are, respectively: it’s dead; the Federal government; and the inevitable progress of the welfare state.

Part One: How the Scots-Irish Built America

This isn’t an original idea on my part. Do a quick Google search and you’ll find numerous quotes pertaining to the idea that the Scots-Irish migrations laid the foundation for America. A Hessian officer serving under the British wrote that the American Revolution was “nothing more nor less than a Scots-Irish… revolution.” King George III famously ranted about a “Presbyterian war” in the Colonies. Washington himself supposedly declared, “If defeated everywhere else, I will make my last stand for liberty among the Scotch-Irish of my native Virginia.”

(Years later, during the Whiskey Rebellion, Washington would make a stand for Federalism against the Scots-Irish. It’s the thought that counts, though.)

My purpose here isn’t a complete re-examination of the American Revolution — dammit, Jim, I’m a doctor, not a historian — but rather a re-examination of the role of the Scots-Irishman in colonial America as a whole. For decades the Protestant dissenters had been pushed into the hills by the Anglican establishment that inhabited the flatter, more easily-farmed areas of the Eastern Seaboard. The gentry’s aim was twofold. First, it drove a famously lawless and quarrelsome folk (to wit, the predominantly Celtic Protestant immigrant population) into an area where they could fight amongst themselves without causing untold property damage. Secondly, it pushed what had been a strategic buffer for the British Empire — that is, the Scottish Border peoples — up against the Indians.

The average Ulsterman arrived in America with “an almost pathological thirst for their own land”[3] (to say nothing of whiskey), a fierce sense of individualism, and a well-placed distrust for lawful authority. The promise of his own land made him seek a remote mountain home. His ability to hold that land against all comers strengthened his desire to hold his ground. His tenacity in doing so made him a worthy adversary against any Indian tribes that might try to force his hand.

To put it another way, the Anglican upper class of early America managed to kill three birds, rather than two, with one stone. They shunted aside a rather troublesome thorn in their sides; ensured that said troublesome population would stay put for once; and turned them into a weapon against what they considered to be an even more quarrelsome and violent native enemy.

Unfortunately for them, this had roughly the same result as James I’s meddling did in Northern Ireland. Just a few decades later, the Appalachian Overmountain Men would prove to be the undoing of Cornwallis’ forces and the end of the American Colonial era. In both Ulster and America, the temperamental and contentious Celt was never really able to stay out of Anglo-Saxon hair.

As I said before, this isn’t meant to be simply a history lesson. Suffice it to say that from the arrival of the Scots-Irish on America’s shores is the history of not just Appalachia, but the entire nation, writ large. Their frontier outposts and forts along the Blue Ridge plateau were a line of defense during the French and Indian War. In one particular incident that took place in the summer of 1755, Shawnee Indians from what is now northern Kentucky raided a settlement called Draper’s Meadow, which occupied a part of the modern-day Virginia Tech campus. During their assault, they captured a woman named Mary Draper Ingles, the daughter of immigrants from Donegal. She managed to escape and travel — by foot — five hundred miles through the frontier wilderness back to her home and family.

I refer to this incident not just because it happened close to me, on the very grounds of a school I attended, but because it demonstrates the character of the Scots-Irish settlers. They were a rugged and resilient race, inured to hardship, accustomed to lack. They were a people of blood and iron. What we think of as the “pioneer spirit” is truly the spirit of the Scots-Irish, the settlers of the Appalachian Mountain range from western Pennsylvania to northern Alabama.

What went wrong?

Part Two: Stars, Bars, and Union Jacks

Ever since their migration across the Atlantic, Ulstermen and their descendants have formed the backbone of American warrior culture. Malcolm Gladwell has posited the popular belief that their belligerent nature springs from their heritage in the borderlands, which is to say the lowlands of Scotland and the green hills of Northern Ireland.[4] This is not a new hypothesis. Horace Kephart, the benevolent grandfather of Appalachian cultural anthropology, stated a similar philosophy in his magnum opus, Our Southern Highlanders. He wrote in 1913 that

“…full three-fourths of our mountaineers still live in the eighteenth century, and that in their far-flung wilderness, away from large rivers and railways, the habits, customs, and morals of the people have changed but little from those of our colonial frontier; in essentials they are closely analogous to what we read of lower-class English and Scottish life in Covenanter and Jacobite times.”[5]

Correct as Kephart and Gladwell are in their observations, the Scots-Irish warrior spirit goes back much further than the eighteenth century. The Gael has always been a restless sort, prone to wanderlust, whether at the behest of his own internal flame or the external realities of landlords, debt collectors, and officers of the law. The authors of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer could have been referring to their Celtic bugbears when they described the lot of human existence: “…he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.”

The ancient Celt was, in all likelihood, as afflicted by this itinerant lifestyle as his modern descendants were. In the first millennium B.C., anyone who aimed to play the wild rover had to develop a warlike mentality or else perish. By the time they reached the shores of Hibernia and the highlands of Alba, the Gaelic peoples had achieved the apex of their martial prowess, to such an extent that even the legions of Rome did not prevail against them.

In other words, the borderlands did not shape the Celt entire. Rather, the Celt ended up in the borderlands due to a millennia-old pattern of semi-nomadic and ever-bellicose lifestyle. The Ulstermen who made the trek to America had been steeped in more than two thousand years of wandering and struggle, hardship and strife. Their forebears traveled from Anatolia to the Iberian Peninsula. From there they settled the coast of Gaul and sailed across the channel to Britain, which still bears its Celtic name despite fifteen hundred years of Saxon occupation. Their ancestors stymied the efforts of Roman emperors and English kings, submitting to subjugation only when schisms and clannish factionalism divided them.



Joseph F. Keppler, ‘Uncle Sam’s lodging-house’, 1882 (Click to enlarge) Joseph F. Keppler, ‘Uncle Sam’s lodging-house’, 1882 (Click to enlarge)

This cultural legacy certainly explains the role of the Scots-Irishmen and their opposition to British rule during the American Revolution. One would be tempted to think that the Appalachian mountaineers would have taken a similar stance towards the Union at the outset of the American Civil War. At first glance, it seems surprising that the vast majority of the mountain counties voted against secession.[6] A breakdown of Virginia county votes before and after the battle of Fort Sumter [7] shows that support for the Confederacy increased dramatically only when the fight had actually begun. After all, no self-respecting Celt backs away from a good scuffle.

However, their initial reticence is telling. For the sixty years between Jefferson’s presidency and the War Between the States, the average mountaineer had been free to tend his land and make his whiskey unencumbered by revenue tax. It’s not inconceivable that the aforementioned average mountaineer preferred the status quo of Washington, D.C. to some upstart new government in Richmond. In many ways, the period of time between the turn of the nineteenth century and the election of Abraham Lincoln was an idyll as far as the people of Appalachia were concerned. It would be the last time in American history that the Federal Government truly left them alone, which makes their initial support of the Union all the more heartbreakingly ironic.

That early Unionist sentiment would quickly be replaced by Confederate fervor following the sound-and-fury Battle of Fort Sumter. (The formation of the state of West Virginia was a notable exception to this rule. However, its establishment had less to do with loyalty to the Federal Government and more to do with trans-Appalachian Virginia’s long-standing desire to break away from Richmond’s control.) Scots-Irish culture, like most tribal societies, places a high value on honor. The presumed incursion into Southern territory left the average mountaineer with little choice: not responding would have been akin to witnessing a friend being attacked outside a tavern and responding with a shrug.

Despite their initial reaction to the honor of the South being sullied, the mountaineers’ devotion to the Lost Cause was always a bit tenuous. Yet another close-to-home example exists in the case of Floyd County, Virginia. About forty miles up the mountain from Roanoke, this quiet backwater was such a hotbed of desertion that Jefferson Davis asked the Confederate Congress to suspend habeas corpus within its limits.[8] This further emphasizes the Appalachian citizen’s devotion to family and clan above all else. His duty to nation, whether Union or Confederate, came second to his duty to his kin.

Perhaps this could partially explain a fascinating phenomenon which has cropped up within the last few decades, and which has reached a fever pitch over the last couple of years. There exists a vocal minority of people, largely Protestant, who view themselves as put-upon and marginalized by a government they historically supported. Despite their bitterness and opposition to the current government’s policies, they remain loyal to its ideals. As far as they are concerned, those ideals are enshrined in pure Platonic form in a red, white, and blue flag, quartered diagonally.



Belfast flag rally Belfast flag rally

Those people are called Ulster Loyalists, and they reside in Northern Ireland.



Confederate flag rally Confederate flag rally

In other words, it is impossible to consider the ongoing Confederate flag issue without first examining the culture in which such philosophies arise. It’s worth noting that when the Belfast City Council voted in 2012, not to ban, but simply to limit the instances in which the Union Jack was flown over Belfast City Hall, there were Loyalist riots in the city.[9] Take a moment and imagine the theoretical mainstream media coverage of Confederate riots in Charleston, South Carolina.

The point here is not that the mountaineer’s overarching loyalty is to the Federal Government or the Confederate States of America. It’s worth noting that when he felt bullied by the Federal Government, he resisted, and when he felt bullied by the Confederacy, he deserted. The mountain men who now fly the Army of Northern Virginia’s battle flag are cut from the same ancestral cloth as the Unionist Protestant “fleggers” of Belfast. Their reasons for doing so in both cases are not as simple as wholesale support for the philosophies of the respective entities the flags represent. Rather, it is an emotional reaction to feeling hemmed in, sidelined, and oppressed — regardless of whether those feelings are based in objective truth.

From this, it’s easy to conclude that the Celt not only likes a good fight, but will continue to keep fighting a war he’s already lost. Unfortunately, the Civil War was a war that the mountaineers lost not only in a military sense, but in a societal and economic sense as well. That cultural aspect of the ongoing war has ruined not only the small farms and industry of greater Appalachia, but the family structure of the mountain people.

How did the Federal Government succeed where Great Britain failed?

Part Three: The Lighter Side of (Potato) Famines

The two principal migrations from Ireland to America happened under wildly different circumstances. To be sure, there were quite a few Ulster Scots who arrived in America as indentured servants. It’s difficult to calculate their numbers with any precision. Estimates place the number of European immigrants to America prior to the Revolution at half a million. Of those, 55,000 were involuntary prisoners. Of the 445,000 who came of their own free will, almost half were indentured servants.[10] It’s fair to assume that a good chunk of the quarter-million Scots-Irish that made landfall did so under a condition of voluntary and temporary servitude.

The Irish who landed in New York and Boston in the mid-nineteenth century did so on the heels of a famine of truly Biblical proportions. One could argue that the lot of the average Irish immigrant factory worker in South Boston or Five Points differed in name only from that of an indentured servant. However, in both cases, the vast majority of the Celtic immigrants to America undertook their journey of their own accord. Folks tend not to run when times are good. Both groups of people saw an opportunity to escape a bad situation, and both took it.

There exists to this day a controversy over whether or not the British response, or lack thereof, to the Irish Potato Famine constituted a genocide. Suffice it to say that a complete answer would be much more than a paragraph in the writing. However, it’s fair enough to say that had the British wanted the Irish wiped off the face of the earth, they could have seen to such a deed before, during, or after the Famine. Cromwell and his ilk certainly engaged in more active measures over the centuries. If a genocide it was, it was more of a coincidental and passive version of one.

That being said, the British government maintained a studied indifference to the terrible suffering that left a million Irish dead and another million bound for foreign shores. Sir Charles Trevelyan, assistant secretary of Her Majesty’s Treasury from 1840 to 1859, summed up the attitudes of his Whig peers in this encapsulation of the Famine: “The judgment of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson.” To add insult to injury, many Irish immigrants to America during the 1860s found themselves conscripted into the Union Army — the frying pan of Great Britain replaced by the fire of the Federal Government.

(As an ironic and bitter aside, Trevelyan thought the Irish could survive on maize. It was a crop that the Irish were not accustomed to growing nor preparing. However, it was a crop the Scots-Irish in America had mastered decades beforehand, not simply for the purposes of agriculture but as a base for the spirit which would eventually become known as “white,” “mule,” “blockade whiskey,” or more commonly, “moonshine.”)

Why bring up the Famine when a good chunk of Ulster Protestants got out of Ireland more than a century before that particular tragedy struck? Simply this —

The average Celt functions best on the lean and hungry side of life. As alluded to above, the Gael is accustomed to an existence on the raggedy edge of society. Historically, he reached a pinnacle of sorts when scraping by without being starved, when simply in want rather than being completely malnourished. The inevitable and inescapable cycle of feast and famine kept him hard and sharp. It made him a shrewd farmer and an indomitable warrior, a perceptive mind in times of peace and in times of war.

Please note that I am not advocating a de-industrialization of society. Nor am I arguing for a return to the practices and policies that made the Potato Famine an inevitability rather than a detestable aberration. That being said, throughout history, famines and other such hardships have been situations through which populations test their mettle and their fitness to survive. The Celts that crossed the English Channel, the Irish Sea, and eventually the Atlantic Ocean did so precisely because their ancestors were able to weather two thousand years’ worth of boom-and-bust cycles.

I realize such language may lead to my being accused of Social Darwinism. I cannot state firmly enough that I reject such philosophies as callous and brutal, to say nothing of detrimental towards the human condition and the Christian ideal of charity. That being said, can anyone really posit that the average Appalachian farmer has benefited from his livelihood being taken from him in the form of subsidized industrial farming? Can anyone say with a straight face that the government has helped the small mountain farmer when its statist cronies sell corn for less than it costs the mountaineers to produce it?

Part Four: Sweet Potato Pie and I Shut My Mouth

This brings us to the uncomfortable conclusion, the elephant in the room; that is, the rise of the welfare state killed the Appalachia that the Civil War had merely wounded. The war between the Appalachian corn farmer and the revenue agent is well-established, almost to the point of being a cliché by now. However, it is worth considering at least the partial origin of “blockade whiskey.” Kephart wrote of his conversation with a mountaineer neighbor in 1904:

But, when all’s said and done, the main reason for this ‘moonshining,’ as you-uns calls it, is bad roads…Seven hundred pounds is all the load a good team can haul over [the local] road, when the weather’s good. Hit takes three days to make the round trip, less’n you break an axle, and then hit takes four…Thar’s only one sarviceable wagon in this whole settlement, and you can’t hire it without team and driver, which is two dollars and a half [approximately $66 in 2016 dollars] a day…You see for yourself that corn can’t be shipped outen hyar. We can trade hit for store credit — that’s all. Corn juice is about all we can tote around over the country and git cash money for.[11]

This is, of course, setting aside the Celt’s natural predilection for flouting governmental authority. For more than two centuries the average Appalachian citizen has viewed the revenue as a tax on mountain corn, and rightly so. However, it’s important to consider that he also derives just as much pleasure, if not more, from sticking his finger in the eye of the law as he does from obtaining a fair price for his labor.



Marvin ‘Popcorn’ Sutton, Tennessee moonshiner, 1946-2009, who committed suicide rather than turn himself in to Federal authorities Marvin ‘Popcorn’ Sutton, Tennessee moonshiner, 1946-2009, who committed suicide rather than turn himself in to Federal authorities

In all seriousness, the above mountaineer’s commentary serves only to highlight the rift that had grown between the lowland Southerner — culturally of Cavalier stock — and his highland neighbors. His reference to “store credit” also raises uncomfortable associations with the “company store” of West Virginia and Kentucky coal-mining culture. Hamilton’s revenue tax was really only the opening salvo of what would become the Federal war against the yeoman farmer of Appalachia.



Sign that greeted would-be visitors to Sutton’s land Sign that greeted would-be visitors to Sutton’s land

Granted, that war experienced a fairly long hiatus between the cessation of hostilities in 1865 and the start of Prohibition in 1920. Just as Hamilton needed money to fill young America’s coffers, the Civil War had brought with it a burning need for money to feed the military budget. This led in turn to the reinstatement of the excise tax. Revenue enforcement throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century was certainly nuisance enough to inspire future generations of blockaders and still operators. However, it was Prohibition that really brought the small corn farmer into his own. Before, he’d had to compete with legal distillers and saloon owners. When alcohol became completely illegal, the market changed, as did the nature of corn farming.

The period of time between the beginning of Prohibition in early 1920 and the beginning of the Depression in late 1929 was a relatively decent time to be a small corn farmer in Appalachia. The demand for liquor was at a peak theretofore unprecedented in the history of a nation even as famously thirsty as America. More importantly, buyers from points north — such as New York, Boston, and Chicago — were willing to pay good money for corn liquor from the South, which they doctored with vanilla and caramel coloring (to say nothing of less-benign adulterants) and passed off as brand-name whiskeys.

One of the more evocative images of Prohibition in the rural mountain territories is the cover of The Wettest County in the World by Matt Bondurant. It’s a mostly-biographical account of the author’s grandfather and two granduncles and their adventures and tribulations running moonshine in the 1920s and 1930s. The photograph on the front of the book shows a grinning Jack Bondurant, a boy from Franklin County, Virginia who was barely into his twenties, wearing a fine coat and leather riding boots while sitting on the hood of a Ford. The money to pay for such luxuries came from the liquid produce of the rolling cornfields that fill the seventh-largest county in the Commonwealth. As with all other such enterprises, though, most of that money was going to fill the coffers of the middlemen, not the producers themselves.



A family of mountaineers making moonshine, 1929(?) A family of mountaineers making moonshine, 1929(?)

If the pre-Depression era was a comparatively good time to be a corn farmer, post-Depression America was one of the worst times. Even with the demand for moonshine and the relative value of corn in that particular illicit market, agricultural surpluses had sent prices plummeting throughout the Hoover administration. By 1933, the low point of the Great Depression, corn farmers in Appalachia had already seen a decade’s worth of their depression. Across the country, six million Americans left rural farms for work in mines and factories. Despite that, mountain communities had one of the higher population retention rates in the country, most likely because people in mountain communities had no other refuge to flee to.

Unfortunately, the Depression eventually spelled a decrease in mine and factory labor as well. Mountaineers who had fled the poverty and want of their own homes were forced back into an even greater privation than they had known before. Small wonder that many men who had rarely, if ever, stilled in their lives put on the mantle of moonshiner. However, even that would soon become less profitable than it had been. With the advent of Repeal in 1933, the alcohol market returned to what it had been before Prohibition.

In the midst of all of this, the New Deal faction that Franklin D. Roosevelt had ushered into power was doing its level best to address the rampant problems facing small farmers across America. In a now-typical mixture of bureaucratic presumption and progressive ardor, the Department of Agriculture under Secretary Henry Wallace instituted the Agricultural Adjustment Act. This act limited production and raised prices. Despite good intentions, as is so often the case with state-sponsored initiatives, the large farms benefited at the cost of the small ones. Industrial farms in the Midwest signed up for the AAA, then put fertilizer on their worst land and laid off more and more workers even as their output increased. In the end, the net result was a rise in industrial farm acreage and a drop in farm worker population. Eventually, the Federal Government stopped enforcing limits on production. This had predictable results for the small mountain farmer who had seen little, if any, benefits from the measures designed to protect him in the first place.[12]

One of the enduring ironies of the New Deal is that it bankrupted the Southern small farmer and left him reliant on the Federal Government in order to survive, while simultaneously managing to make him a lifelong supporter of the party that destroyed him and put a ring in his nose. For the past two generations, the South has enjoyed a solid base of Democratic Party support. This is despite the fact that the New Deal subsidized large farms in the Midwest while driving grain prices so low they put smaller producers in the Southeast out of business. Not only did the Democratic Party of the 1930s rob the Appalachian corn farmer of his livelihood, they made him dependent on government handouts as well as the cheap produce of their political allies.

(The above paragraph should in no way be taken as an endorsement of the modern Republican Party, which has proven time and again that it is quite willing to do everything the Democratic Party does, only more slowly and while lying about its intentions.)



A Harlan County, Kentucky coal miner surrounded by National Guardsmen, circa 1939 A Harlan County, Kentucky coal miner surrounded by National Guardsmen, circa 1939

Conclusion: You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive

This past year, I started volunteering at a local food bank in the county where I live. A good number of the folks who came in were obviously of local stock. The remnants of the original Scots-Irish dialect that filled these hills nine generations ago still pop up here and there. Any number of native mountaineers can remember their parents and grandparents “rais[ing] most of what they ate and ma[king] ninety percent of what they used.”[13] Without fail, these people were the ones taking canned food instead of fresh produce. The little produce they did take tended to be potatoes and tomatoes, peaches and apples — starchy, sweet, carbohydrate-laden stuff. The pole beans and zucchini, basil and spinach went unheeded as though they didn’t exist.

It’s not an original idea to note that the Celt has a long history with starchy grains and tubers. The potato farmers of Ireland and the corn farmers of ancestral Appalachia are a clear enough case in point. However, as noted previously, the self-sufficient farmer of yore has been replaced with the indolent mountaineer of today. Just this afternoon I watched a rural family at the local grocery buy over a hundred dollars’ worth of sweet desserts, processed wheat pasta, and high-carb snacks at the grocery store.

Of course, it’s easy to lay the blame at the feet of the consumer. After all, they could make better choices and eat healthier. Vegetables are cheap and it’s relatively easy to grow a garden this far out in the country, et cetera, et cetera. For once in our modern era, though, I would like to indict those who are responsible for the degradation of the Southern Celt.

Horace Kephart could be called a prophet for his encapsulation of the plight of the Appalachian mountain citizens over one hundred years ago. It’s probably more accurate to say that he simply saw clearly and earlier what it’s taken recent observers much longer to recognize:

The worst enemies of the mountain people are those public men who, knowing the true state of things, yet conceal or deny the facts in order to salve a sore local pride, encourage the supine fatalism of “what must be will be,” and so drug the highlanders back into their Rip Van Winkle sleep.[14]

The Danes have a legend regarding their cultural hero, Holger Danske. As with other “king in the mountain” figures, it is believed that Holger sleeps beneath a castle until such a time as Denmark is in great and mortal peril. Then, and then only, will he rise and save the nation from its enemies.

It is worth recalling King George III and the unnamed Hessian officer, and their understanding that the American Revolution was actually a Presbyterian and a Scots-Irish one. It is worth remembering that the Appalachian honor culture turned the tide from Unionism to Secessionism in the battleground state of Virginia. It is worth noting that despite one hundred fifty years of revenue tax, the moonshiner’s trade has never been stamped out in the hills and hollers of greater Appalachia.

Like their distant cousins in County (London)Derry, the spirits of the mountaineers were bruised but never broken. Some of them — perhaps a great number of them — have grown fat, apathetic, and content on the Federal dole. However, we forget at our peril that in 1775, 1792, 1861 and points forward that the determination and wrath of the mountain people are not to be tossed aside lightly.

One day, perhaps not tomorrow or the next decade or even the next century, the fierce Gaels who settled the southeastern Alleghenies will awaken. When they do, the reckoning will be very great indeed. The question that remains unanswered is: what new epoch of American history will they usher in this time?



‘Bound for the fiddlers’ convention, Raleigh’ ‘Bound for the fiddlers’ convention, Raleigh’

Notes: