"Hard Neighbors
By Colin G. Calloway
Oxford, 528 pages, $35
Complaining to James Monroe around 1780 about what he considered to be the cause of a deterioration in American politics, the English-born Maj. Gen. Charles Lee of the Continental Army told the future president that a troublesome and degenerate element had usurped the colonies' assemblies. Rather than instruments of democracy, these bodies now reflected "a Mac-ocracy by which I mean a banditti of low Scotch-Irish whose names generally begin with Mac -- and who are either the sons of Imported Servants or themselves imported Servants."
Lee was guilty of hyperbole based on bigotry: The Scotch-Irish, who numbered in the hundreds of thousands, did not run the Continental Congress or state houses. Rather, the vast majority eked out a marginal living farming on the American frontier, where they served as a tool in the dispossession of Native Americans, first in the service of British imperial designs and then of American expansion west of the Appalachians. Most were descendants of Presbyterian Scots whom the Royal government had relocated from the Scottish borders across the Irish Sea to Ulster in the early 17th century to tame the "wild" Catholic Irish. A century later, representing two-thirds of an Irish migration that would eventually approach 400,000, the Scotch-Irish from Ulster flocked to the colonial frontier in search of land, again acting as a buffer, this time against "wild" Native Americans. As Colin G. Calloway tells us in "Hard Neighbors," the Scotch-Irish were "recurrent colonizers" who "perpetually opened new killing grounds."
Mr. Calloway, a professor of history and Native American studies at Dartmouth, is uniquely qualified to dissect the role of the Scotch-Irish in the white conquest of Native American land in the 18th and early 19th centuries. No other historian today has written with greater breadth and insight on the fate of America's native peoples, nor with greater nuance and compassion for these complex, doomed cultures. He brings these same gifts to bear in "Hard Neighbors," which examines the emergence and eventual dominance of the Scotch-Irish as the Woodland Indians' principal antagonists.
On the American borderland, Mr. Calloway discerns what began as a "triangular relationship," of which the Scotch-Irish and the Native Americans formed two points. The third was the government, which the Scotch-Irish came to resent and distrust. "As inhabitants of frontier regions," writes Mr. Calloway, the Scotch-Irish faced Native Americans to the west, "who were neighbors and enemies, and they looked east to the colonial, state, or federal government that positioned them on the frontier, encouraged their incursions on Indian land, then denounced them and failed to defend the frontiers when contestation turned to conflict." The government used the Scotch-Irish "as expendable defensive barriers."
Mr. Calloway's narrative gains particular pathos when it addresses three watershed moments in the Scotch-Irish frontier experience. The first was the French and Indian War, in which the Scotch-Irish served as proxies for the British in battling the Native Americans, who were proxies of the French. "Instances of violence between hard neighbors gave way to unrestrained race war," the author writes. For the Scotch-Irish who suffered through the war, the conflict shaped their identity as killers of Native Americans, often at odds with government -- in this case the British who sought to restrain them from provoking further troubles with the Native Americans at war's end.
The French and Indian War made the Scotch-Irish insular and suspicious of colonial authority. But it was the Revolutionary War, Mr. Calloway convincingly demonstrates, that made them into Americans. Before the revolution, most colonists would have agreed with Charles Lee that the backcountry Scotch-Irish were unruly troublemakers hardly more civilized than their Native American neighbors.
But the revolution depicted all Native Americans "as enemies of American independence" and turned the killing of Native Americans "into a patriotic duty." The Scotch-Irish, Mr. Calloway tells us, "became American by killing Indians."
The third theme in "Hard Neighbors" is the emergence of Andrew Jackson, first as an American Indian-fighting general in the War of 1812 and later as the president and instigator of the Trail of Tears. Although Mr. Calloway considers it "a distortion to suggest that he governed as a Scotch-Irish president," the author does regard the expulsion of Native Americans from the South during Jackson's presidency as the "triumph of Scotch-Irish Indian policy." Ironically, observes Mr. Calloway, the Scotch-Irish lost more than they gained from the Trail of Tears. Land speculators and wealthy slave owners drove up the price of former Native American lands beyond that which the Scotch-Irish farmers could afford.
The westward movement of the Scotch-Irish continued. Thousands migrated first to Missouri and the Ozarks, then southwest to the Texas borderland, where they again became "hard neighbors," the vanguard of dispossessors of Native American country. There the role of the Scotch-Irish as the clearly discernible spearhead of Americana expansion largely ended. Their fierce acquisitiveness, however, found expression in the more generalized white settlement of the American West.
Running as an undercurrent throughout "Hard Neighbors" is Mr. Calloway's belief that the Scotch-Irish experience on the American frontier has shaped contemporary American politics in ways we may be unaware. "Donald Trump won massive support," he notes, "in areas of the country where Scotch-Irish people and their descendants had settled and where the current inhabitants' sense of their identities, their attitudes to others and to government, and their grievances bore remarkable similarities to those of the Scotch-Irish on the backcountry."
One may dispute Mr. Calloway's interpretation of the modern expression of Scotch-Irish identity, or the extent to which many Americans have come to identify with traditional Scotch-Irish traits. There can be no denying, however, that "Hard Neighbors" represents a seminal reappraisal of the early decades of American expansion.
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Mr. Cozzens is the author of "The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West," among other books.” [1]
1. REVIEW --- Books: Home in a Bloody Borderland. Cozzens, Peter. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 08 Mar 2025: C9.
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