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As already intimated, these
pioneers of southwestern Pennsylvania seem to have had in unusual degree
the marked characteristics of their race; great energy and general force
of character, with uncommon intelligence, practical wisdom, self-command,
and, above all, deep and controlling piety. Their mood was earnest, and
they took life seriously. In their minds human life under the sun was not
sport; it was very unlike sport; it was no mere holiday, no carouse, or
frolic. It was earnest business. No man could play, or laugh, or dance his
way through this world and come to anything good. And yet they were not a
gloomy, morose, or ascetic people. If that had been their mood, they never
could have done the work they did. They were cheery, hopeful, brave,
steadfast. There was in them a rich vein of humor too, rather coarse in
texture and rough on the edges, but not bitter or malicious. The younger
sort of them was much given to practical jokes. The people were
hospitable, social, neighborly. There was far more sunshine in their lives
than is commonly supposed, and this despite the hard conditions under
which they lived. Considering the close limitations of their lives and
their isolation from the currents of the populous world, they were highly
intelligent as a rule. They had not the training of the schools, but they
had the training of practical life, and of much reflection. They had great
respect for real learning. They would not listen to a minister who had not
a classical and theological education. They cared but little for the
trimmings, the mere filigree, but for solid learning they had very high
regard. Especially did they exhibit in a high degree what we call
practical wisdom and common sense. They searched out the good lands and
were not backward in laying hold of them with a hand that could not be
shaken loose. It never was found an easy job to "jump" the claim of a
Scotch-Irishman, whether in Pennsylvania or California. Ex-Gov. Proctor
Knott once said, "The Scotch-Irishman is one who keeps the commandments of
God, and every other good thing he can get his hands on." In undaunted
courage, inflexible resolution, and unwearied industry, they have never
been surpassed by any people. They had great patience too, and were
willing to work hard and wait long, believing that while they might have
to die in faith without entering into the promises, God was preparing some
better thing for those who were to come after them. They practised the
closest economy in everything. To them waste was sin. However ample the
table, everybody was expected to clean up his plate, else he ought not to
have taken so much. They dug every smallest potato from the row, and
wrenched every least nubbin from the husk. They gleaned their grainfields
and raked their meadows clean. Men who would turn out their last dollar at
some call of religion or humanity, would stoop to pick up a pin, and would
patch their garments as long as they could be made to hold together.
Their family feeling was
intensely strong and enduring, while there was but little effusive
expression of it in words or caresses. Men were seldom seen kissing their
wives or fondling their children, and almost never heard indulging in warm
expressions of affection. They practised a stern repression of these
emotional exhibitions. At the same time these very men shrank from no toil
or exposure for their wives and children, and if called upon, as they
sometimes were, to risk and give up their lives in their defense, they
would not hesitate a moment.
No doubt they were a
"pugnacious" people, as the Quakers said they were; quick to take offence
and to resent an injury, and slow to be appeased and reconciled. Hence
their feuds were many, bitter and lasting. If they had not been restrained
by religion they would have been the terror of their neighbors, as their
forefathers before their conversion were. Our far-away ancestors must have
been very uncomfortable people to live with or near to. Their inclination
to take whatever they wanted was extremely strong, and the fighting
element was deep and hot in their blood. Until they were tamed by
Christianity, they were grasping, aggressive, fierce. They were not much
given to bargaining and trafficing for what they wanted; if strong enough,
they simply took it, and left the trading to the Jew. Originally and
constitutionally, they acted on the principle that might makes right, that
the strong must rule, that the real king is the man who can. Christianity
tamed this wild spirit, and yet at bottom, the christianized
Scotch-Irishman even retains some of the basal elements of his original
nature. Andrew Jackson, for example, was a typical Scotch-Irishman. There
was nothing of the boodler, the grafter, the sneak-thief in his nature.
Whatever he did, he did boldly, and openly. He had a sovereign contempt
for the low fellow who did business in politics, or anything else, behind
the door, or in a back room. The creature who crawled in the dirt, was the
despicable one. Jackson was always ready to take the consequences. When he
broke the United States Bank, and when he killed Dickinson, alike, he
stood out in the open, and took the consequences. When the typical
Scotch-Irishman does wrong, he does it openly and fearlessly. He does not
believe in the sneak-thief. If he commits larceny at all, as he seldom
does, it is always grand larceny, never petty. His crimes are those of
force and violence; never of cowardice, meanness and treachery. If he
breaks the law at all, he usually breaks it openly enough and badly enough
to be hanged for it. Besides, there was native chivalry in these people.
When once an enemy gave up they would treat him with princely magnanimity.
But he must give up, give up completely. The weak and helpless for whom
they were in any way responsible, they would protect and avenge at
whatever cost. Whoever wronged the wife, the child, or even the slave of a
genuine Scotch-Irishman did it at peril of his life. These people had
their faults, many and grievous faults, but they were faults of force and
sometimes of violence, and never of cowardice and treachery.
They had extraordinary
tenacity in holding on to good lands when once they got possession of
them. In the immediate vicinity of my birth-place many of the farms to-day
are in the hands of the lineal descendants of the men who drove out the
Indians and levelled the forests. There to-day on the same acres are
living the fifth, and in some cases, the sixth generation of the original
settlers, sitting under the same great oaks, drinking out of the same
spring, and in some instances, dwelling under the same roof that refreshed
and sheltered their great-great-grandfathers. This is quite unusual in
this country. Even in Massachusetts and Virginia, the examples of the
sixth generation living on the same land and in the same house are
extremely rare. I can point to many such examples in the old neighborhood
of my birth and of my fathers. If a family had several sons, some of them
would strike out into the world, and thus the race was widely scattered,
but nearly always one at least would cling to the estate and abide by the
graves of his ancestors. Consequently the type so strongly set at the
beginning is distinctly marked today. In whatever is soundest, strongest
and best in the current life of that whole region, the genius of the
Scotch-Irish pioneer is still living and ruling.
They had exceedingly stiff
and strenuous notions touching strict integrity in business transactions.
They are charged with being hard at a bargain, close-fisted, and exacting
to the last penny, but when once the bargain was fairly made it was
carried out to the letter. Failure to pay his debts or to stand by his
agreement, was enough to make one disreputable among his neighbors. Unless
his failure was plainly due to the act of God and to no fault of his own,
he could hardly live longer with comfort in the community. Of course their
transactions were small in comparison with modern standards, but they
always showed, as their descendants show to-day, very strict ideas of
commercial integrity. There are not a few bank and mercantile
establishments in that general region which have been in the same family
for several generations, and whose reputation for the highest integrity
has never been questioned.
In their spirit of
independence, their passionate devotion to liberty civil and religious,
and in their unflinching loyalty to Christ and His truth as they saw it,
they reached the highest levels of heroism. They bowed down to the earth
in adoring worship before Jesus Christ, but they would be ground to powder
before they would bend the knee to any other being or thing on earth or
under it. They hated tyrants with all the strength of their powerful
nature, whether the badge of that tyrant was the cowl of a priest or the
coronet of a lord. This was not a merely superficial sentiment with them,
nor was it wholly the result of education: it was constitutional, a fiery
passion in the blood and marrow.
In our time, they are often
mocked at as narrow-minded and bigoted. Very well: all strong and
overcoming men, men who are girded by the tense sinews of strenuous
convictions, are apt to be mocked at by easy-going Saducees to whom the
truth and a lie are pretty much the same. These people in their inmost
souls really believed that certain things were revealed to them by the
High God, and they were ready to stand for these things unto death. In
their judgment it made an infinite difference whether a man believed God's
truth or the devil's lie. Possibly they were too much inclined to contend
for what we deem the trivialities of religion, for the mere punctuation
points of creed and catechism. They would divide on what seem to us very
small issues. This is the reason there are so many divisions of our common
Presbyterianism. But after all, and considering the work they had to do,
this was not an unmixed evil. Many of the vitalest and most important
movements of history have had their origin in what might be deemed
trivialities. Very often movements of immense consequence to the Church of
God have swung on what seemed a very small hinge. The question as to
whether a single Greek letter should be kept in or put out of one word in
the creed, gave the early Church three hundred years of controversy, and
it was not unimportant either, for it involved the whole question of the
Deity of our Blessed Lord. Later, the question as to whether one word, —
filioque, — should be retained in the creed, led to bloody wars, vast
changes in the map of Europe, and to the cleavage of Christendom into two
great divisions, a
cleavage which twelve centuries have not healed. This tenacity, not to say
stubbornness of conviction even as to small matters, was a most valuable
trait in the character of men who were called to do the work our fathers
had in hand. They had to make a fight at the outposts, on the picket line,
if the fortress was to be saved. No doubt this proclivity to divide on
trivial issues was sometimes misguided, and at times it has been the
weakness and scandal of Presbyterianism. Our fathers would stand unto
death for what seems to us but a punctuation point, but to them the
punctuation point was important as part of God's teaching. They believed
that no revealed truth of God was small; that nothing He ever said to men
was unimportant. The fact that He thought worth while to say it made it
worth while for men to give heed to it, to stand for it, to die for it, if
need be. They had vital convictions in their heart of hearts, and they
could be neither wheedled, bribed nor bullied into smothering them. These
convictions could be torn out of them only with their lives. They were
Calvinists and Presbyterians of the old-fashioned John Knox type. They
were not only deeply devout and almost sternly pious, but they were
minutely, intensely and strenuously theological. A congregation might be
very drowsy of a warm Sabbath afternoon, but an Arminian squint or a
heretical suggestion in the sermon would rouse them like a pistol shot.
With them it was a matter of small moment comparatively, how one stood
with men, but it was of infinite moment how he stood with God. It was not
of supreme importance that he gain the world, but it was of supreme
importance that he save his own soul alive. The first necessity of life
after the cabin, was the meeting-house, and forthwith the school-house.
They settled at first in colonies, because this secured mutual help
against the Indians, and enabled them to establish their churches and
schools. The last clap-board had not been put in place on the roof of the
cabin when the log meeting-house was going up. The war-whoop of the savage
had not died away in the forest when there were a half dozen churches and
three classical schools established in what is now Washington county. |
