Annals of Augusta County/Introduction

ANNALS

OF

Augusta County, Virginia.

INTRODUCTION.

THE SCOTCH-IRISH.

At different periods subsequent to the Reformation, many lowland Scotch people emigrated to the province of Ulster, north Ireland. There they prospered greatly, and maintained unimpaired the manners and customs and the religious faith of the country from which they came. They and their posterity regarded themselves—and were regarded by the Irish of Celtic blood—as Scotch in all essential particulars. Some of these settlers, before leaving their native land, goaded by persecution under the Stuart Kings, had borne arms against the British government, and were among the prisoners captured at Bothwell Bridge, in 1679. When the Revolution of 1688 occurred, the Scotch-Irish sided with William of Orange. The siege of Londonderry, in 1689, is one of the most remarkable events in history. Upon the march northward of the army of James II, says Macaulay, "All Lisburn fled to Antrim, and, as the foes drew nearer, all Lisburn and Antrim together came pouring into Londonderry. Thirty thousand Protestants, of both sexes and of every age, were crowded behind the bulwarks of the City of Refuge." The ordinary population of the town and suburbs furnished only about six hundred fighting men; but when the siege began there were 7,300 men armed for defence. Dissenters having been excluded from offices in the army, none of that class were fitted by previous military experience for command. Therefore a majority of the higher officers were of the Church of England. A majority of the inferior officers, captains and others, were Presbyterians; and of the soldiers and people generally, the Dissenters outnumbered the others by fifteen to one.

"Now," says Froude, in his History of Ireland, "was again witnessed what Calvinism—though its fires were waning—could do in making common men into heroes. Deserted by the English regiments, betrayed by their own commander, without stores and half armed, the shopkeepers and apprentices of a commercial town prepared to defend an unfortified city against a disciplined army of 25,000 men, led by trained officers, and amply provided with artillery. They were cut off from the sea by a boom across the river. Fever, cholera and famine came to the aid of the besiegers. Rats came to be dainties, and hides and shoe leather were the ordinary fare. They saw their children pine away and die—they were wasted themselves, till they could scarce handle their firelocks on their ramparts." Still they held on through more than three miserable months. Finally a frigate and two provision ships came in, and Derry was saved after a siege of eight months. The garrison had been reduced to about three thousand men. The Rev. Mr. Walker, a minister of the Church of England, was one of the prominent leaders. Enniskillen was successfully defended in like manner.

Yet, notwithstanding their loyalty to the Crown, as settled by the Revolution, and their heroic services, the Scotch Irish received no favors from the British government, except a miserable pittance doled out to their clergy after a time. They were proscribed because of their religion, being excluded from the army, the militia, the civil service, and seats in municipal corporations. Dissenters from the Irish Episcopal church were not allowed to teach school. Presbyterian marriages were declared illegal. The laws against Catholics were even more severe than those against Protestant dissenters—so severe, indeed, that they were not generally executed, public officers revolting at their harshness. Presbyterians, however, were pursued unrelentingly to the extent of the law. The Presbyterian magistrates in Ulster, says Froude, were cleared out. Men having nothing to recommend them but their going to church, were appointed in their places. The power being now in their hands, the bishops fell upon the grievance of the Presbyterian marriages. CathoHc marriages did not trouble them; but, in their view, a marriage ceremony by a Protestant dissenting minister was only a license to sin. It was announced that the children of all Protestants not married in a church should be treated as bastards, and in 1704 many persons of undoubted reputation were prosecuted in the bishop's courts as fornicators for cohabiting with their own wives. Ministers, for the offence of preaching the gospel outside of certain bounds, were arrested and held for trial, while their hearers were threatened with the stocks.

Yet the loyalty of the people to the Crown was unshaken, doubtless owing to the fact that the sovereigns generally were opposed to measures of persecution. William III had opposed them, and George I in vain urged the repeal of the obnoxious laws. Therefore when, in 1715, the rebellion in behalf of the Pretender, son of James II, began in Scotland, and an insurrection in Ireland was looked for, the Irish Presbyterians tendered their services to the government. In the emergency military commissions were distributed to them, although contrary to law, and many regiments were speedily raised. After the danger was over they were threatened with prosecution for even that service.

The chief agents of persecution were the bishops of the established church. Some of these prelates, during the earlier part of the eighteenth century, were not only High Churchmen of the most ultra sort, but at heart it was believed partisans of the Stuart dynasty. Dean Swift, no friend to Dissenters, sarcastically described the nominees to the Episcopal bench of Ireland, "as waylaid and murdered by highwaymen on Hounslow Heath, who stole their letters patent, came to Dublin, and were consecrated in their places." All the Irish prelates, however, did not deserve Swift's wholesale denunciation, notably Bishop Berkeley; and many of the parish clergy were worthy of all honor.

Every effort of enlightened statesmen to obtain a relaxation of the stringent laws against Dissenters failed, and in 1719 the Protestant emigration to America recommenced. In addition to the restrictions on religion, Irish industry and commerce had been systematically repressed. Twenty thousand people left Ulster on the destruction of the woollen trade in 1698. Many more were driven away by the first passage of the Test Act. The stream had slackened in the hope of some relief. When this hope expired, men of spirit and energy refused to remain in the country. Thenceforward, for more than fifty years, annual shiploads of families poured themselves out from Belfast and Londonderry. England paid dearly for her Irish policy. The fiercest enemies she had, in 1776, were the descendants of the Scotch-Irish who had held Ulster against James II. The earlier emigrants were nearly all Protestants. The emigration of Catholics from Ireland to America, in large numbers, did not begin till the nineteenth century. Previously, when the Irish people of this class emigrated it was to France, Spain, or other European Catholic country. "There was," says Froude, "first a Protestant exodus to America, and then a Catholic, each emigrant carrying away a sense of intolerable wrong."

The people of Ulster had heard of Pennsylvania, and the religious liberty there enjoyed and promised to all comers, and to that province they came in large numbers. They were mainly farmers, tradesmen and artisans. But jealousies arose in the minds of the original settlers of Pennsylvania, and restrictive measures were adopted by the proprietary government against the Scotch-Irish and German immigrants. Hence many of both these races were the more disposed, in 1732 and afterwards, to seek homes within the limits of Virginia, and run the risk of the church establishment existing there. The Scotch-Irish drifted on in the wake of John Lewis to the present county of Augusta; the German people generally located in the region now known as Shenandoah, Page, and Rockingham. The two races did not keep entirely apart, and there was some commingling of them in the various settlements, and in a short time a few people distinct from either came into the Valley from lower Virginia.

Many of our people are descendants of the defenders of Derry. And to go back a little further, the list of prisoners captured at Bothwell Bridge and herded like cattle for months in Grayfriars' Churchyard, Edinburgh, is like a muster-roll of Augusta people.^[1]

↑ An Appendix to the old Scotch book called "A Cloud of Witnesses," says: "Anno, 1679, of the prisoners taken at Bothwell, were banished to America 250, who were taken away by——Paterson, merchant at Leith, who transacted for them with Provost Milns, Laird of Barnton, the man that first burnt the covenant, whereof 200 were drowned by shipwreck at a place called the Mulehead of Darness, near Orkney, being shut up by the said Paterson's order beneath the hatches; 50 escaped." The following were a part of the 250, the names of those who escaped being printed in italics: James Clark and John Clark, of the parish of Kilbride; John Thomson and Alexander Walker, of Shots; William, Waddel, William Miller, James Waddel and John Gardner, of Monkland; John Cochran, John Watson and Thomas Brownlee, of Evandale; Thomas Wilson, of Cathkin; John Miller and John Craig, of Glassford; David Currie, Robert Tod, John White and Robert Wallace, of Fenwick; Hugh Cameron, of Dalnulhington; William Reid, of Mauchline; John Campbell and Alexander Paterson, of Muirkirk; James Young and George Campbell, of Galston; Thomas Finlay, William Brown, Robert Anderson and James Anderson, of Kilmarnock; William Caldwell, of Girvan; Mungo Eccles, of Maybole; Alexander Lamb and George Hutcheson, of Straiton; Robert Ramsey and John Douglas, of Kirkmichael; John White, of Kirkeswald; Thomas Miller, of Largo; Thomas Miller, Thomas Brown and James Buchanan, of Gargrennock; Thomas Thomson and Andrew Thomson, of St. Ninians ; Andrew Young, John Morison and Hugh Montgomery, of Airlt; Thomas Ingles, Patrick Hamilton, John Bell, Patrick Wilson and William Henderson, of Dalmannie; James Steel and John Brown, of Calder; William Reid, of Musselburgh; James Tod, of Dunbar; James Houston, of Balmaghie; Robert Brown and Samuel Beck, of Kilmackbrick, John Martin, of Borque; Andrew Clark, of Luckrictan; John Scott, of Ettrick; John Glascow, William Glascow, Richard Young and James Young, of Cavers; Walter Waddel, of Sprouston; William Scott and Alexander Waddel, of Castletown. The fifty men who escaped from the shipwreck made their way to the north of Ireland, and were not further troubled.

[1] An Appendix to the old Scotch book called "A Cloud of Witnesses," says: "Anno, 1679, of the prisoners taken at Bothwell, were banished to America 250, who were taken away by——Paterson, merchant at Leith, who transacted for them with Provost Milns, Laird of Barnton, the man that first burnt the covenant, whereof 200 were drowned by shipwreck at a place called the Mulehead of Darness, near Orkney, being shut up by the said Paterson's order beneath the hatches; 50 escaped." The following were a part of the 250, the names of those who escaped being printed in italics: James Clark and John Clark, of the parish of Kilbride; John Thomson and Alexander Walker, of Shots; William, Waddel, William Miller, James Waddel and John Gardner, of Monkland; John Cochran, John Watson and Thomas Brownlee, of Evandale; Thomas Wilson, of Cathkin; John Miller and John Craig, of Glassford; David Currie, Robert Tod, John White and Robert Wallace, of Fenwick; Hugh Cameron, of Dalnulhington; William Reid, of Mauchline; John Campbell and Alexander Paterson, of Muirkirk; James Young and George Campbell, of Galston; Thomas Finlay, William Brown, Robert Anderson and James Anderson, of Kilmarnock; William Caldwell, of Girvan; Mungo Eccles, of Maybole; Alexander Lamb and George Hutcheson, of Straiton; Robert Ramsey and John Douglas, of Kirkmichael; John White, of Kirkeswald; Thomas Miller, of Largo; Thomas Miller, Thomas Brown and James Buchanan, of Gargrennock; Thomas Thomson and Andrew Thomson, of St. Ninians ; Andrew Young, John Morison and Hugh Montgomery, of Airlt; Thomas Ingles, Patrick Hamilton, John Bell, Patrick Wilson and William Henderson, of Dalmannie; James Steel and John Brown, of Calder; William Reid, of Musselburgh; James Tod, of Dunbar; James Houston, of Balmaghie; Robert Brown and Samuel Beck, of Kilmackbrick, John Martin, of Borque; Andrew Clark, of Luckrictan; John Scott, of Ettrick; John Glascow, William Glascow, Richard Young and James Young, of Cavers; Walter Waddel, of Sprouston; William Scott and Alexander Waddel, of Castletown. The fifty men who escaped from the shipwreck made their way to the north of Ireland, and were not further troubled.

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