This argument doesn’t seem to make much sense in 2014.
That’s an exceedingly detailed family history. You should write a story about it.
Yes. A desire to stop British treaty-making with Native Americans, ceding them that land, was one of the causes of the American Revolution.
Another cause was fear that the 1772 English legal ruling against slavery (Scotland followed in 1778) would be applied to colonies. I recommend:
Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution
Which was a democratic vote by 18th century standards.
No. It’s about creating new ones. Scotland’s national interests differ from those of the United Kingdom of England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. So there will be a clash of interests in negotiations over the terms of dissolution. And then, whatever economic problems ensue, for at least the next few decades, will be blamed on England.
This is one reason why a Yes vote won’t be easily reversed. If it goes well, the Scots would have no reason to change back. But if, as I think more likely, there is some economic decline, the terms of dissolution will be blamed, and this will fuel national feeling.
And I could steal it, write a play, and become as famous as Shakespeare!
Tell that to the Scots who do actually still weep when Bird on a Wing or Loch Lomond or the one about the English led ambush slaughter attack by Campbells on McKenzies in 1696…Many Scots love to denigrate the English, esp. when they know the English aren’t listening.
No, I don’t think that historical atrocities against a group of people should be important to the people who suffered them centuries ago…but, in fact, they often are.
It is said that the Tempest was based on the recollections of a particular passenger on a Bermuda shipwreck. I doubt my particular ancestor was the author, but I do think he was on the boat.
The particular incentive for the Proctors to respond to the call to help defend the Kentucky settlements was likely thinking they could get some land. Kentucky was never something that the British could have ‘ceded’ to the natives, no natives lived there.
Anyway, whichever way the Scot vote goes, the pressure won’t soon subside. Something like that is never really settled, once and for all.
That song is called The Skye Boat Song
It was against the MacDonalds. In 1692.
Maybe this was a whoosh, but there certainly there were natives nearby. Sounds like you know a lot about this, but here’s an entertaining and, it seems, well-researched account of Scot-Indian relations (including much intermarriage) in various parts of the now-US between about 1740 and 1840. Scroll down to “McGillivray” for the bit about Kentucky:
http://www.electricscotland.com/history/america/american_indians.htm
brainfreeze. interesting how this matter is portrayed in different tourist guide materials. First, let me say I’d never heard of it until touring Scotland last month. The tourguide and some written materials said that hundreds of MacDonald’s were killed in their beds or frozen in the snow when the Campbells, having been housed by the MacDonalds on a ruse, attacked them in the middle of a winter night.
The basis for the attack was, supposedly, that the MacDonald clan leader had been tardy in pledging his fealty to the English crown, having gone to Inverness to register that sentiment instead of Inverary. The English wanted to make an example of what happens to recalcitrant clans if their leaders don’t cooperate, so they hatched the plan to wipe out the MacDonalds.
So, the real version seems to be that under the leadership of a half-dozen English officers, Campbell men were enlisted to go up to Glencoe to perpetrate this evil deed. The real story seems to be that when the signal was given to attack, most of, if not all of, the Campbells refused to kill their MacDonald hosts and tried to chase them away from the carnage of the English officers killing as many MacDonald’s as they could.
the final tally, I think, was around 30 killed outright, 40-50 dying in the weather as they escaped to safety in other villages.
Was it worth it? Did England produce a nation of Scots ready and willing to do their bidding as a result of the slaughter of the MacDonalds? Of course not. Just as we create terrorists today by bombing their homes, the English created far more enemies than they created docile populations of peaceful people.
English policy toward the Scots has been far more enlightened since the late 1700’s, for sure. They still have a bit of a problem with the Irish, though.
The soldiers who carried out the massacre were a company of The Earl of Argyll’s Regiment of Foot, and they were all Scots and mostly not Campbells. Actually, the wiki article on the Massacre is pretty good, and gives a fair bit of context. As usual, along with the likes of the '45 uprising, Culloden, the Clearances etc it’s not a straight English vs. Scots thing.
I’ve read a little bit about the Massacre of Glencoe, and English involvement doesn’t seem to have been that high. It seems the order to kill MacDonalds came from an English officer who wasn’t present, but I can’t find any evidence of English officers being directly involved - the leader of the men doing the killing was Scottish. It seems to be mostly Lowlanders attacking Highlanders, and fighting between those two groups seems to have been as much a theme as any English v Scottish fighting. But that doesn’t make such a good story.
As for “the English crown”, England and Scotland shared a monarch at the time, William of Orange (who was not English). I can’t find out for sure if the oath was to the English Crown, Scottish Crown or to William personally. It seems it was an oath to William personally, as it was required in order to receive a pardon for rebellion. Not that it excuses murder, but I would say there’s a difference between “swear an oath to me or die” and “I’ll pardon you for treason if you swear an oath to me, otherwise you’ll be punished”.
I’d be happy to be corrected on any of this. I’m just going by what I can find online.
Read it. I was aware of a lot of this material from other readings, but not so much of the Scot influence on Indian ways and how closely some of the cultural practices seemed to be.
One of my sons is the proud husband of a lady whose father was born on the Rosebud reservation in the Dakotas. In that case, the ‘mixed’ blood involved the marriage of the ‘indian agent’ at the fort to a Sioux woman, a lifelong marriage.
Implicit in the facts presented in the material you referenced was the ability of Scots to adapt and to prevail over difficult situations. Scots were always in demand to help manage the problems along the line of frontier as American moved west. That is not just a nice way of saying that they were valiant fighters who could conquer the natives…it is a way of also saying they could learn from the natives and could cooperate with them. And, they could deal with the other backgrounds of ‘settlers’ around them, as well.
Thanks for the reference, part of which demonstrated that Scot enmity for Englishmen still continues to this day.
I think the Glencoe Massacre is so well-remembered for the fact that soldiers accepted the hospitality of the victims for a week or two first. That rankles in a lot of minds as a particularly despicable thing to do. Indeed, many of the soldiers refused their orders, including some of the officers.
And, it may well be correct in all aspects. The clans certainly had no love for each other. Even among my McAlister folks from over in Kintyre, one group of McAlisters (Loup) had nothing but loathing for the other (Tarbert). When the Jacobites rose, many times the McAlisters would not go off to fight anywhere because they rightly felt that if they left their homes, the other group of McAlisters would go steal all their goods and cattle. So they both stayed put and did some minor raids on one another.
One guide told us that the enmity in Britain was english fighting lowlander scots and lowlander scots fighting highlanders, and highlanders fighting one another. Wallace, for example, was a well educated and valiant lowlander, whose fights against the English had nothing to do with, and no help from, the Highland Clans.
One nice lady on Kintyre told us, “We should stay together with the English…if we separate it will go back to the way it always was, with us raiding their farms and burning their kirks, and them doing the same to us. Besides, my mother has a pension from the mail service and if we go independent, she might lose it!”
Add in religious conflict (the story of the Covenanters is interesting if you haven’t seen it before) and it seems that Scotland was all blood and guts back in the day. We did manage an Enlightenment too though, honest, it wasn’t all war in the 17th and 18th centuries.
indeed, what would the world do without Scots? They seem to be the part of us that stitches the rest of us togther.