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MANIFEST DESTINY AND THE SEED OF ULSTER Dr. Barry Vann, Ph.D. Nestled in the shadows of the Cumberland Mountain, a quaint village shares a unique location with a world famous natural feature that serves as the boundary for Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia. The Cumberland Gap, made famous by its historic role in providing a western passage for early European pioneers, is actually a low place in the Cumberland Mountain, which forms the north wall of the Powell Valley. The mountain pass was
The Ulster Americans and Manifest Destiny Although the Cherokee had sold Kentucky to a Scots-Irishman named Richard Henderson and his Transylvania Company in 1775, some among the natives, Dragging Canoe in particular, resisted giving up their hunting grounds to the settlers. Adding fuel to the looming fights, French emissaries made an alliance with the Shawnee, who disputed the Cherokee claim of ownership of their long-contested hunting grounds in Kentucky. The memory of those disputes and the fighting associated with them added greatly to Dragging Canoe’s declaration to Daniel Boone on the day of the sale that the whites would find Kentucky to be a “dark and bloody ground”. To help pave the way for European expansion into the North American continent, Henderson had hired Boone and 38 woodsmen to blaze the Wilderness Road along the old Cherokee and Shawnee paths that joined the Great War Path in Virginia to the Great Warriors’ Path in Kentucky. Through the toil of back-breaking work, the descendants of Ulster folk who settled along the Wilderness Road in the Cumberland Gap area began seeing themselves not as British subjects but as part of a new nation of Americans. However, much of their belief system and ways of life had changed little since their grandparents boarded overcrowded ships in Ulster harbors.
The migration of thousands of Ulster families over the Wilderness Road and through the Cumberland Gap enabled southern Appalachia and later the Ozarks of Arkansas and Missouri to become the only Scotch-Irish “ethnic islands” (areas of ethnic concentration) in the United States. The waves of Ulster migrations that created those islands were set in motion when George I (r. 1714-1727) subjected dissenting Protestants such as Baptists, Quakers, and Presbyterians to many of the penal laws that had been used against the native Irish. In 1718, the first of five great waves of Ulster Protestants left the emerald isle for the freedoms they hoped to find in America. By 1775, between 200,000 and 300,000 Scots-Irish people had immigrated to America. Many of them made their way to southern Appalachia and eventually through the Gap and into Kentucky. As Robert McNeil tells us in The Story of English: The Scots-Irish were the frontier fighters of the Thirteen Colonies, The naming of places in the backcountry of Appalachia and in the Cumberland Gap area reflected the hegemony of Anglo-Scottish, Welsh, and Irish populations, who made-up the members of Ulster’s Protestant population. As David Hackett Fischer writes, A large portion of Appalachian place names were drawn from the geography of Britain (the island on which England, Scotland, and Wales sit) -- with a heavy bias toward the border region. The most common county name in Appalachia was Cumberland – the extreme northwestern county in England (on the Scottish border) … There was a Cumberland town in western Maryland, a Cumberland River in Tennessee, the Cumberland Mountains in Kentucky, a Cumberland Knob in North Carolina, (and the) Cumberland Gap through the Appalachians … The name had a double meaning for English borderers (no doubt their Scottish neighbors too), for it also commemorated the Duke of Cumberland who broke their ancient highland enemies at the battle of Culloden.
Curiosity is natural to the soul of man, and interesting objects have What Boone’s comments and the names of places in and around the Cumberland Gap area tell us is that Ulster folk were instrumental in not only blazing western trails, they were also settlers, leaving their names on our landscape. Even more striking is the imagery depicted in Boone’s words. Boone’s insistence that the sovereign Lord was blessing their settlement in a dangerous wilderness is consistent with the reflections of two Ulster ministers who unsuccessfully attempted a transatlantic crossing in 1636 on board a ship they named the Eaglewing. Robert Blair and John Livingstone were inspired by the passage in Exodus 19:4 in which God proclaims: Ye have seen what I did unto the Egyptians, and how I bare you on eagles’ wings, and brought you unto myself”. Given that Ulster folk were instrumental in creating America’s Bible belt, it makes me wonder: What other tangible and intangible aspects of life did they leave us?
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