Pennsylvania
This has been a delightful book.
I’m really enjoying reading it so far. This is a story about the time the Quaker Nation – which is the ancestor of “Nation of Immigrants” – and Cracker Nation – which is Scots-Irish nation in the Upper South – came to blows in Pennsylvania. The Scots-Irish Presbyterians would later push down the Appalachian Mountains where they settled the Southern backcountry.
It is ominously reminiscent of a later conflict.
“The Borderlanders may have technically moved into colonies controlled by Tidewater gentry and the great planters of the Deep South, but in cultural terms their Appalachian nation effectively cut Tidewater off from the interior, blocking the West Indian slaveocracy from advancing into the Southern uplands. Not until after the revolution would they control any formal governments; places called Tennessee, Kentucky, and West Virginia did not yet exist.
“Indian wars and other violence in Appalachia had profound effects on the other nations, particular the Midlands. We’ve already seen how the Lenni Lenape invasion in the 1750s forced Quakers to relinquish much of their control over the region, but this was merely a dress rehearsal for a much more destabilizing series of events during a later conflict. In December 1763, a Scots-Irish band from in and around Paxton, Pennsylvania, attacked and burned a peaceful Christianized Indian settlement on Penn family land, killing six individuals on the spot and butchering fourteen more at the Lancaster jail, where Midlanders had brought them for protection. Among the dead were two three-year-old children who had been scalped and an old man who’d been hacked up with an axe in the jail yard. After the killings, these so-called “Paxton Boys” rallied together an armed force of 1,500 Scots-Irish neighbors and marched on Philadelphia, intending to murder more peaceful Native Americans who had fled there for their safety on the invitation of Governor John Penn, the late founder’s grandson.
The result was a tense military showdown between Borderlanders and Midlanders, with control of what was then British North America’s premier city hanging in the balance. When the Paxton Boys arrived outside Philadelphia on a rainy day in February 1764, a thousand Midlanders rallied to defend the State House. The city militia deployed a row of artillery pieces on the parade ground of their garrison, each loaded with grapeshot. As the Borderlander army surrounded the city, 200 Quakers actually set aside their principles and took up arms. On the city outskirts the Paxton Boys, dressed in moccasins and blanket coats, “uttered hideous cries in imitation of the [Indian] war whoop, knocked down peaceable citizens, and pretended to scalp them,” according to an eye witness. With German citizens generally remaining neutral and the Scots-Irish underclass in Philadelphia sympathetic with the invaders, the Midlands stood on the brink of occupation.
In the end Benjamin Franklin saved the day, leading a negotiating team that promised to address the Borderlanders’ grievances if they agreed to go home. A party of them was allowed to inspect the Indian refugees in the city but was unable to identify a single enemy combatant among them. When they later submitted their demands to Penn, foremost among them was to be given proper representation in the provincial assembly. (At the time, Midlander counties had twice as many representatives per capita as Borderlander ones.) Philadelphians were horrified, the governor dallied, and the city was “daily threatened with the return of a more formidable force.” Quakers turned to London for help, and kept a standing military force posted in the city for the first time in Midlands history. Only the end of hostilities with the Indians farther west allowed the situation to normalize. But the Paxton Boys’ actions had revealed fault lines across Pennsylvania and other colonies that would break open during the American Revolution.
General Stonewall Jackson of the Cracker Nation leads the attack on the Union Army at the Battle of Chancellorsville. The Scots-Irish war whoop, which was borrowed from the Indians, was the Rebel Yell.
Far from being a despised underclass, the Cracker Stonewall Jackson is second only to the Cavalier Robert E. Lee in the pantheon of Southern heroes. The Confederate Army was a Cracker Army and the Confederacy would have emerged as the Cracker homeland if the slavery issue hadn’t split the Cracker Nation.
If the Confederacy had won its independence, the Cracker Nation would have ruled over a vast dominion in Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia, Missouri, and likely Arkansas, Texas, and North Carolina within a few decades.
There were so many Crackers in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Texas, and South Carolina – which is why the Upper South chose the Confederacy over the Union – that the slavery issue would have quickly emerged as the fault line of Southern politics in an independent Confederacy.
Through sheer numbers, the Cracker Nation would have prevailed over the Tidewater and Deep South planters (see the fate of Maryland and Delaware), and the race question would have been dealt within Dixie without the interference of Yankees and Quakers whose version of anti-slavery was abolitionism.
The Indians had already been deported to Oklahoma under the Caesar of the Cracker Nation, Andrew Jackson, who is almost singlehandedly responsible for creating Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida.
Old Hickory and Young Hickory (James K. Polk) deported the Indians, dismantled the Second Bank of the United States, defeated Mexico, conquered the Southwest, settled the Oregon Question, and pushed America to the shores of the Pacific.
It is a Yankee myth that Dixie has always been lorded over by a planter slaveocracy. Andrew Jackson was the founder of the Democratic Party.
Every redneck in Dixie identifies with the Confederate flag because it is a nationalist symbol of Scots-Irish backcountry identity. See the image of the deer in front of the Confederate flag above.
Deer hunting, of course, is an excellent example of the merging of the Cracker Nation and the Deep South planter aristocracy which collided in the Western South … both groups loved outdoor sports and created a hybrid society.
Fuck the Quakers. They wouldn’t get their hands dirty clearing Indians from the land, but after the Scots-Irish did the job, the Qs would try to collect rent. They also built the slave ships, and whined about slavery.
“White people” = Crackers = Scots-Irish = Cavaliers = White Southerners.
In Dixie, there was a racial caste system which didn’t exist in the North, which united “Crackers” and “Cavaliers” as “the master race” – “the White race.” In the Yankee tale of American history, which is being told here, the “Cavaliers” were at the top of the Southern racial pecking order, and ruled over the despised white trash underclass whom they ruthlessly exploited.
In reality, this is a distortion of American history: Thomas Jefferson, the Cavalier aristocrat, was the champion of the common man, and the Federalists were behind the Alien and Sedition Acts and were the arrogant champions of elitism and the national bank and corporate welfare.
Jefferson and Jackson founded the Democratic Party which was explicitly the “White Man’s Party” – the Democracy. It was the Democratic Party that was responsible for America’s national expansion to the Pacific.
Andrew Jackson’s reign as president, not to mention the reign of his successors, Martin Van Buren and James K. Polk, were symbolic of the triumph of the Cracker Nation within Dixie, whose ideology of national expansion and white supremacy became the philosophy of the United States while the Cracker Nation controlled the federal government.
In the War Between the States, South Carolina led the secession movement, but the Upper South and Western South was very much dominated by the Cracker Nation, which was also invested in slavery by that time.
It simply wasn’t the case that “Crackers” were non-slaveholders and “Cavaliers” were slaveholders – virtually all non-slaveholders were Crackers, but the vast majority of slaveholders were also Crackers, although they owned fewer slaves than Cavaliers.
The three groups started out as separate colonial enterprises – the Cavaliers in Virginia, the Deep South planters in South Carolina, and the Crackers in Appalachia, but if you drive across the Lower South, you will find Baptist churches, Presbyterian churches, Methodist churches, and Episcopal churches in almost every Southern town in Alabama.
Why are there so many Baptist churches and Presbyterian churches in Alabama and Mississippi? Why is the capital of Mississippi named after Andrew Jackson? Did the Cavaliers conquer Texas, Alabama, and Arkansas?
Most Southerners today are descended from slaveholders and non-slaveholders.
The folks in the Mid State Boonies of PA are called “Coal Crackers”.
I heartifly concurr, Discard- FUCK THE GOD-DAMNED QUAKERS. God damned motherfucking let’s all be Brethern shit for brains love everybody you have nothing to DO on a daily basis Quakers with were the prescursors of the demonic, degenerate, twisted Race Traitor DWL’s of today.
MY dream is to send every last DAMNED one of the modern day variants to live in the Congo. No money from home.
Andrew Jackson is seen as a populist, but he was a hard-money man, and the collapse of the Second Bank of the US led to a massive credit contraction and a long-lasting depression. The Second Bank was a source of credit for people to buy land and become independent farmers. He was an inlander, but a major cotton grower as well. I think the “Tidewater” extended anywhere there was water transportation.
Denise,
The original heartland of the Cracker Nation was South Central Pennsylvania – in other words, Pennsyltucky, wedged between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.
From South Central Pennsylvania, the Cracker Nation spread down the Appalachian Mountains in the South, into the eastern colonies of the South like Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, and into the western states like Kentucky and Tennessee and Arkansas which they settled and still dominate to this day.
The Cracker Nation flooded into the Southern backcountry in the Lower South as far east as the South Carolina upcountry in the vicinity of Greenville and Spartanburg and it was famously the Cracker Nation that settled Texas and launched the Texas Revolution and which incited the Mexican War under James K. Polk.
The planters from the South Carolina and Tidewater Virginia migrated to the Southern lowlands where they collided with the Cracker Nation. The two groups merged in the Western South where they created a hybrid society that shared characteristics of both.
Alabama and Mississippi are quite obviously not cut from the same cloth as South Carolina and Virginia. To be sure, there were planters in the Western South, but there were planters in Tennessee and Kentucky, and slaveowners in the Western South were a mixed group.
The Old Southwest (Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana) was a rough frontier region that has never visibly resembled either Charleston or Tidewater Virginia.
This is a great book … it really shows that there has never been an “American people.” The roots of the “Civil Rights Movement” go back to the Quakers in Pennsylvania and the Unitarians in Massachusetts.
The Quaker influence on organizations like CORE which was behind the “Freedom Riders” is well known – Jim Peck and James Zwerg are two excellent examples of this type of insanity:
“Ironically, its beginnings were far from ordinary. Like Yankeedom, the Midlands were intended to be a model society, a utopia guided by the tenets of an unorthodox religion. In fact, Pennsylvania was created by perhaps the most controversial religious cult of the era, a group contemporaries accused of undermining “peace and order” and “sowing … the seeds of immediate ruin of … religion, Church order … and … the state.” Difficult though it may be to understand today, the Quakers were considered a radical and dangerous force, the late-seventeenth-century equivalent of crossing the hippie movement with the Church of Scientology. Quakers spurned social conventions of the day, refusing to bow or doff their heads to social superiors or to take part in formal religious services of any sort. They rejected the authority of church hierarchies, held women to be spiritually equal to men, and questioned the legitimacy of slavery. Their leaders strode naked on city streets or, daubed with excrement, into Anglican churches in efforts to provide models of humility; one Quaker rode naked on a donkey into England’s second-largest city on Palm Sunday in an unpopular reenactment of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem. Overcome with rapture, they would fall into violent fits, or “quakes,” that frightened nonbelievers. Many embraced martyrdom, repeatedly marching into unfriendly neighborhoods or onto New England town greens to preach or challenge ministers, reveling in the imprisonment, whippings, tongue borings, and executions that followed. “The will of the Lord be done,” martyr Mary Dyer told a Yankee governor after he handed down her death sentence. “Yeah, joyfully shall I go.” …
The Germans and Quakers also shared a strong aversion to slavery, a stance that would set the Midlands apart from New Netherland, Tidewater, and the Deep South. As family farmers, the Germans had little need for slaves, but their antipathy seems to have been a function of cultural values, as well. Small groups of Germans also settled in the Deep South (in places like New Bern, North Carolina, and New Braunfels, Texas) but had markedly lower rates of slave ownership than their Anglo- and Franco-American neighbors, who were also small farmers. Indeed, the first formal protest against slavery in North America was articulated by German Quakers in Germantown, Pennsylvania. “We shall do to all men like we will be done ourselves,” the protesters declared in 1712, “making no difference of what generation, descent or color they are.” Many wealthy Quakers, Penn included, had come to Pennsylvania with slaves, but within a decade, Friends were advising one another that slaveholding violated the Golden Rule. In 1712, the Quaker-run legislature even imposed a prohibitive duty on the import of slaves, but it was overturned by a royal court. With German support, they tried again to suppress slavery in 1773 but were vetoed by the crown. By then most Quaker slaveholders had freed their slaves, and some also tried to compensate them for their past labor. It was a moral stand that would later lead the Midlands to side with Yankeedom against the ambitions of its neighbors to the South.
Early Pennsylvania was an economic success, but its Quaker-run government was a complete disaster …
The Dutch, Swedes, and Finns of the “lower counties” became so desperate for proper government that they broke away to form one of their own, founding the tiny colony of Delaware in 1704. “Pray stop those scurvy quarrels that break out to the disgrace of the province, Penn wrote from London.
From now on, Denise’s theme song shall be “The Warrior” by Patty Smyth.
The French & Indian War was the French Roman Catholics & their Indian allies (some of whom were also Catholics) vs. The English, Scotch-Irish, & Pennsylvania Dutch who were Protestants.
One or more of my Pennsylvania Dutch ancestors were remembered as frontier guides—they also were remembered as being mean to the Indians which I hope is exaggerated. The Pennsylvania Dutch moved West along the Mason Dixon Line, and South through Maryland into the Shenandoah Valley.
This Paxton Boy revolt would have been a combination of English, Scotch-Irish, and Pennsylvania Dutch frontiersman and took place during or right after Pontiac’s War in the 1760’s.
One of my English ancestors was a member of a famous Virginia ranger company during the American Revolution. He is buried in Pennsylvania near Fort Necessity.
During Pontiac’s War the Indians burned and killed everything on the Pennsylvania, Maryland & Virginia frontier.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pontiac%27s_war.png
a ton of links about quakers
http://www.quaker.org/#6a
Equality Testimony
“The testimony of equality, rooted in the basic belief of each person’s ability to seek and find truth, is reflected in Quakers’ long history of religious tolerance, activism in the abolition and civil rights movements, humanitarian relief and gender equality. At Plymouth equality is reflected in the school’s diverse student body and its commitment to providing education to all children without regard to race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, or national origin [without regard to facts], and to provide funds through financial aid to make the school financially accessible.”
http://www.pmfs1780.org/RelId/618890/ISvars/default/Equality_Testimony.htm
The Quakers had been little or no help to the Americans during the French & Indian War, and then had been little or no help during Pontiac’s War.
I like the term Americans, rather than crackers—even the colonial area writers refered to the English, Scotch-Irish & the “Dutch” in general as Americans.
Tabula Raza has it correct. A friend of mine, who just finished the Doctorate in Music, had to study ( as part of the reading for the dissertation) the (ugh) ‘life’ of Ned Rorem, who was raised a Quaker, and whose complete existence has been one search after another for numerous homosexual dalliances, and bragging about them (in print) with all the other sodomite composers of that era, and the next, and then next…… Rorem’s ‘Diaries’ were smut before smut was known, and they only clarify the heterodox anti-theology of the Quakers, who probably consider him a moral Quaker.
I have learned that the advocates of Total Tolerance generally do so in order to pursue whatever their diseased desires compel them, sans any intereference at all.
I dig the no doffing of hats, and the anti-slavery angle – but the rest is just plain mental. I never knew the Quakers were such Stark Ravers. I knew they were kinda goofy – but not totally bonkers. Ewwww. I’m begining to appreciate the burning at the stake for purification purposes tradition.
There is a lot of misunderstanding about Quakers. I recommend reading the following:
http://mises.org/daily/1865
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cary's_Rebellion
Re: “a lot of misunderstanding”:
The key original source is “The Journal of George Fox”.
There really are some conservative, authentic “primitive” Quakers in RURAL Pennsylvania, southeastern Ohio, eastern Indiana, North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee and even Georgia — exhibiting the “historically ‘Celtic’ Christian tendencies” of George Fox and other primitive Quakers — and descending mostly from the original Anglo-Celtic, English and Welsh Quaker settler stock, unlike the liberal majority of Quakers, who may be of diverse backgrounds, including Jewish (as one Rabbi said: “some of my best Jews are Friends”). Here also are links from a conservative Quaker website on supposed relationships of Quakerism to certain aspects of Eastern Orthodoxy: http://www.conservativefriend.org/viewpoints.htm — and this link allows one to view and actually participate in (via Skype) the only primitive Friends meeting still remaining in England itself: http://www.rcquakers.lomaxes.me.uk/PDFs/Meeting_Information.pdf
More on “misunderstanding”: I should have added (above) a link to “The Journal of George Fox” text online: http://www.ccel.org/ccel/fox_g/autobio.viii.html
This book sounds great, have you of Fighting, praying and fucking how the scots Irish ruined American its article from cold type
can anyone explain why Scots Irish so often are climate deniers, anti evolution, pro gun, anti university, anti women’s rights confuse Lincoln with the same republicans as George Bush and don’t understand that civil rights emptied the solid south of democrats and switched them to the repub side?
I like the energy of Scots Irish but I think they should come out as Scots Irish instead of saying that they are Americans. They wear plaid because plaid is like a tartan, and the new tartan for them is camofl because they love war, LOVE WAR. Did you know, you can’t join the KKK unless you are Southern Baptist? That is to say scots Irish, a borderer, a Northumbrian a paranoid whiskey drinking religious war clan. The founding fathers were what the Scots Irish call the Elite, that is to say they are educated. THe Scots Irish were almost as enslaved as the blacks, they were indentured servants. Yet the red states who carry what looks like the Scottish flag but red white and blue because it is the Scottish flag google it vote for the coch brother tea party wackos and want to punish the u.s. for its war of aggression on after the Southy attacked fort sumpter.
“Yet the red states who carry what looks like the Scottish flag but red white and blue because it is the Scottish flag google it vote for the coch brother tea party wackos and want to punish the u.s. for its war of aggression on after the Southy attacked fort sumpter.”
And why shouldn’t they? All Americans should lament the destruction of the Old Republic which was led by lunatic New England Puritans and greedy Northern industrialists of all stripes.