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As already said, a strong
stream of Scotch-Irish emigration flowed over the Alleghenies into
southwestern Pennsylvania before the Revolutionary War. During the
continuance of that war, it slackened somewhat, as the times were
troublous, and men's minds were full of doubt. Besides, owing to the
dispute between Pennsylvania and Virginia as to which had jurisdiction
over that territory, titles were very uncertain. But as the war drew to a
close, and particularly, immediately after its close, the flow greatly
increased, and within a very few years large numbers of these people
followed their friends over the mountains. Many of them had been soldiers
in the war, and came out to locate their land warrants. It is hardly too
much to say that they were the pick of their people. They exhibited in an
intensified degree the typical traits of their race. They were
venturesome, fearless, hungry for good land, and bound to get on in the
world; not learned in the schools as a rule, but clear-eyed, level-headed,
with what one might call, enormous common sense, practical sagacity and
understanding of the times; deeply serious, even stern in their piety;
resolute and unfaltering in their belief of the gospel of our Lord as
expounded by John Calvin and John Knox; not underestimating the
difficulties in their way and the dangers that beset them, and yet not in
the least intimidated by them, nor by the certainty of hard toil, severe
privations and manifold perils in their front, — these were the people who
redeemed southwestern Pennsylvania from the wilderness and the savage.
They pushed out boldly to the extreme frontier and plunged into the deep
forest, where there were no settlements, no clearings, no roads, no
conveniences, where nature was utterly wild and the woods swarming with
savages. They were the buffer between the Indians in front, and the Quaker
and German who crept along quietly in the rear, and who thus saved their
hands from rough toil and their hides from being punctured with arrors by
keeping well in the background. These were quite content to follow softly
in the rear and take quiet possession of lands that braver men had to
fight for. What wonder that these hardy pioneers should have had so hearty
a contempt for the stolid "Pennsylvania Dutchman," and sleek and oily
Quaker? They reasoned that if nobody but these and their like had come to
the country, it would have continued to be a howling wilderness. The
Quakers did not like the Scotch-Irish, and no doubt the feeling was
reciprocated with interest. Col. M'Clure says, "The Quakers wanted the
Scotch-Irish immigration stopped, and sent a petition to the council of
Pennsylvania asking for this, and declaring that these Scotch-Irish were a
pernicious and pugnacious people." The Quakers provoked warfare, and then
left the Scotch-Irish to fight it out. They would go among the Indians and
trade with them, giving them firearms with which to kill the Scotch-Irish,
who settled many counties on the border simply because they wanted to get
away from the Quakers. The Quakers complained that the Scotch-Irish wanted
to dominate everything round them. Well, of course they did. There never
was a Scotch-Irish community anywhere that did not want to dominate
everything round about it. They dominated simply because in the nature of
things it could not be otherwise.
These southwestern
settlements for a number of years, had much trouble with the Indians. Even
after they had been driven across the Ohio, the Indians made frequent
return forays, burning the cabins, laying waste the settlements, and
massacring the people. I have heard my grandfather tell of such an
invasion as late as 1784, when within a few miles of the present city of
Pittsburgh, the whole country was devastated by a sudden incursion of
savages. He was a little fellow of five, and, with his two elder sisters
and three little cousins, was playing in the edge of the clearing, while
the parents were scutching flax across a ravine. The Indians broke from
the woods, barbarously tomahawked two of his little cousins, and took
their sister, a girl of fifteen, prisoner, while he and his sisters by
swift flight escaped. The poor girl was kept in captivity, taken to
Canada, there redeemed, brought back to Philadelphia and turned loose to
find her way home across the mountains as best she could. She reached home
after an absence of three years. As places of refuge in times of danger,
large block-houses were built at various points, into which the settlers
could run when the Indians made a foray, and there the women and children
were safe, while the men went out to fight the savages off. Yet despite
all these hardships and perils the people stuck to their clearings, and
their posterity are there today. Probably there is no other section of
this country which for a century and a third has been so completely
dominated by this race as has the region round Pittsburgh, including that
great city itself. Judge Chambers, a high authority, says, "The great
district of Pennsylvania for the development of the Scotch-Irish
character, in its energies, and enterprises, religious and moral
principles, as well its educational tendencies and usefulness, was
southwestern Pennsylvania." They took that region at the beginning, and
their image and superscription are on it to-day. The city of Pittsburgh,
with all its mighty and world-embracing industries, carries most clearly
to-day the type given it by its Scotch-Irish founders. Its standing as a
city of solid wealth, of commercial integrity, of vast but sane and
substantial enterprise, is surpassed by no other city on the continent or
in the world. Its banks seldom break, its great merchants do not fail, its
huge mills, factories and other immense industries very rarely fall into
bankruptcy. To an unusual extent, the business remains in the family, and
things pass on from sire to son without change, except in growth and
scope, the same in principle, policy and method. That city and its
immediate environs make up a community which is not surpassed on the
continent in those things which are essential to the material,
intellectual, and moral well-being of any community. The like is true of
the entire region round about. True enough, within the last few years,
there has been a fearful invasion of aliens and foreigners, many of them
of the vilest class, who have brought a new and very great peril to all
that is most valuable and precious, but it still remains true that in the
homes, the churches, the schools, the business methods, the social
customs, the individual characteristics, the very vernacular and
provincialisms of the substantial and really governing classes, the type
so deeply set a century and more ago, is still distinctly marked. That
section of Pennsylvania is one of extraordinary natural resources, and
while our fathers did not know half the truth, they knew enough to satisfy
them that the land was well worth holding. When they invaded it they found
a broken country, made up of hills and valleys, and wholly covered with
magnificent forests of hard wood, at that time of no value to them, but
only a fearful incumbrance; extremely fertile soil, underlaid with stratum
on stratum of sandstone and limestone rock; beneath that, immense
treasures of coal; still lower, vast reservoirs of natural gas and oil; a
land abounding in springs, brooks, creeks and rivers. Of course they did
not see all its treasures, but they saw enough to make them determined to
seize and hold it.
I select that section of
the country, especially Washington county, as a sample of a large
community from the first dominated by the Scotch-Irish, and where the
idiosyncrasies of this race, personal, social, educational, industrial,
political, and especially religious, are exhibited, and for more than a
century have been exhibited, more strikingly than in any other populous
section of this land. What is true of that section is true of every other
where these people have settled and remained in sufficient numbers to
secure control of things. And they do not require a majority to gain
control, for they make up in force what they lack in numbers.
These people have
invariably given a decided and characteristic type to every section in
which they have been dominant, and that type is a reproduction of the one
so strongly set in Washington county, Pennsylvania. Hence in describing
this race in that county, I am describing it wherever it is found in
force. The mines and other great industries have of late years drawn to
that section a horde of ignorant, debased and reckless people, alien in
race, religion, habits and ethical ideas, with their lawlessness,
debauchery and crime, and already they have worked great changes in the
conditions that formerly existed. It is to be hoped, however, that there
is stamina enough left in the posterity of our forefathers to beat back
this peril, and to preserve to that community the type it has so long
borne. |
