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 formed by geological processes over eons of time. Deer, bear, and other animals were forced south by advancing sheets of ice during the last ice age (10,000 to 40,000 years ago). They wore a trail through the pass as they searched for hunting and foraging lands. For similar reasons, Cherokee and Shawnee hunters and warriors later followed the well-worn path, which they called the Great Warriors’ Path, through the mountain. As western European societies, including Protestant Ulster, emerged from the medieval times, population pressures coupled with political and religious conflicts and economic inequalities forced millions of their seed to seek a new and better life in America. The Cumberland Gap and Daniel Boone’s Wilderness Trail opened up fertile, yet contested, western lands. What few people realize is how much Ulster folk, often called the Scotch-Irish, influenced Boone and others who paved the way for settling beyond the Appalachian Mountains and even the Mississippi River. To the Irish-American journalist John L. O’Sullivan, it seemed that God had a plan for expanding the United States westward. It was, in his way of thinking, our Manifest Destiny made possible through the sovereign will of God.

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 Cumberland Gap

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,
pushing south and west through the Cumberland Gap, and down the
Ohio and Tennessee rivers, in search of better land and prospects.
Their descendants live on in the hills of Appalachia, the home of
blue grass music, and further west in the Ozark Mountains.

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.

However, Fischer does not point out that the Cumberland Gap is sandwiched between Claiborne County, Tennessee, and Bell County, Kentucky, both decidedly Ulster-Scots names. Also some of the nearest counties have distinct Scottish names like Campbell, Knox, and Scott. Just north of Bell County, Kentucky, sits another Knox County. Like Bell and Claiborne Counties, these places were named after families from Ulster and the Anglo-Scottish border country who may well have lived for a time in Ulster. The same can be said for the people who gave their names to Buchanan, Dickenson, Lee, and Scott Counties in Virginia. The nearby Wilderness Road towns of Ewing and Gibson Station, Virginia, are only a few miles from the Cumberland Gap. They too were named after Scots-Irish families. It is interesting that Ulster’s Protestant population was made up of Irish, Scots, Welsh, English, German, and French dissenting families, so, as with the naming of places in the Cumberland Gap area, it is not surprising that many of the people who influenced Daniel Boone had Ulster connections. Many of the people with whom Boone formed relationships were of Ulster or border Anglo-Scottish descent. It is commonly thought that Daniel Boone was a second-generation Englishmen, but what is often overlooked is that Sarah Morgan, his mother, was Welsh. Boone’s employer Richard Henderson was of Scottish descent, and Boone married a Welsh lassie named Rebecca Bryan. The man who originally piqued Boone’s interest in Kentucky was a Scotch-Irishman named John Finley. Finley led Boone and four others from their homes in the Yadkin Valley of western North Carolina to the Gap in 1769. Of the four men who accompanied Boone on his first visit through the Powell Valley, three were Scots-Irish. Only one was English.

In 1775, Benjamin Logan, a rival Kentucky land developer to Richard Henderson, ignored Henderson’s claim of ownership of Kentucky and followed Skaggs Trace that split off to the northwest from the Wilderness Road about eight miles north of present-day London, Kentucky. The path they followed was named for three Ulster brothers. On May 1, 1775, Logan found a place along the trace to build a settlement that eventually became Stanford, Kentucky. Benjamin Logan was a second generation Scots-Irishman.

Boone and others like him no doubt felt they were bringing God’s light to what they perceived to be the dark lands stretching to the west of European settlement. Although he was unchurched in any formal sense, Boone, perhaps through friends like John Finley expressed a preference for Presbyterianism. In 1784, John Filson published an authorized biography of Boone. In it, we hear Boone express the mindset that John L. O’Sullivan wrote about some 60 years later:

Curiosity is natural to the soul of man, and interesting objects have
a powerful influence on our affections. Lo these influencing powers
actuate, by the permission or disposal of Providence, from selfish or
social views, yet in time the mysterious will of Heaven is unfolded
….Thus we behold Kentucky, lately a howling wilderness … become
a fruitful field; this region, so favorably distinguished by nature, now
become the habitation of civilization….We behold the foundations of
cities laid, that, in all probability, will equal the glory of the greatest on
earth.

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?

Dr. Barry Aron Vann, Ph.D.
Lincoln Memorial University
Author of
Rediscovering the South's
Celtic Heritage

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