Frontier Partisans

The Adventurers, Rangers and Scouts Who Fought the Battles of Empire

Born Fighting

, by

Jim Webb. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Jim Webb.
(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

If you blinked you missed it, but for a couple of minutes there, we actually had a candidate in the presidential race who wouldn’t make a man instinctively reach for his scalping knife. A man of honor and integrity, packing character tested under fire (literally) and a considerable amount of intellectual firepower. Needless to say, with qualifications like that, he got zero traction and was gone before you could say Super PAC.

His name is Jim Webb. Marine, Assistant Secretary of Defense and Secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration, party renegade (he switched from Republican to Democrat as the Rs started their inexorable drift into kookland. Of course he’s a lousy fit as a Dem, too), Virginia Senator, writer of considerable power. The son of Frontier Partisans. One of Webb’s books is “Born Fighting: How The Scots-Irish Shaped America.” The book was turned into a docudrama. Here it is in two parts. The video quality isn’t so great, but it’s watchable — and worth the effort.

 

The Scots-Irish immigrants to the American backcountry in the 18th Century put an indelible stamp on American frontier culture. Tough, resilient, bloody-minded, their lifeways, individualism, pugnacity and folk music defined the character of the American frontiersman. The brand is a bit misleading. They were mostly Protestant Lowland Scots, who were deliberately “planted” in the six northern counties of Ireland in the late 17th Century/early 18th Century to supplant and suppress the native Catholic Irish. Many were descendants of English/Scottish Border Reivers, with bloodlines running hot with centuries of raid and feud. They were a hardbitten bunch before they ever hit the shores of America, where they instinctively headed straight for the backwoods where a man could scratch out a living without much interference from authorities of any sort.

They dispersed through western Pennsylvania and down into the hills and hollers of Virginia and North Carolina, then filtered over the Appalachian barrier into Kentucky and Tennessee and on down into Texas. Some, like my own Scots-Irish ancestors, crossed north over the Ohio River and ended up in southern Indiana, which is as redneck as any place in the South.

It’s one of the great stories of America and Webb tells it only as a proud descendant can speak of his family history.

Ye might want to join some of your fellow Frontier Partisans in writing in James Webb for President in 2016. But, hell, don’t let me nor anybody else tell you what to do. That wouldn’t be the Scots-Irish way, after all.

 

 

Comments

  1. Craig Rullman says

    I just had a stamp made. Jim Webb, it says. I will be using it on all of my ballots. For every office. All of them. I’m considering having another one made. It will say “The Warrior Monk.” I might deface all of my ballots with both stamps because, why not?

    Reply

  2. Thom Eley says

    I knew Jim Webb from the Marines. We were Lieutenants together. He is a great guy, and I have no trouble voting for him.

    Semper Fi

    Reply

  3. Breaker Morant says

    Just read a book on the Revolution (Angel in the Whirlwind) that contained a somewhat surprising factoid. The Highland Scots in the war were mainly Loyalists and only 30 years after Culloden? The Lowland Scots fought for the US.

    Reply

    • JimC says

      That’s true. Highlanders were required to take an oath of loyalty, which they took seriously.

      From VirtualGael:

      The biography of the Reverend David Caldwell, who was a minister of the Cape Fear, which was published in 1842, elaborates a bit more on the reasons that so many Gaels were reluctant to join the insurrection:

      While a number of the Scotch were as good whigs as any in the country, the majority of them, although they had sacrificed much to liberty in their own country [ie, Scotland], supported the claims of Great Britain in America. For this many reasons have been assigned; but the most cogent were such as the following: The older part of them had felt the effects of British power so much in the land of their nativity, particularly at and after the battle of Culloden, that they dreaded to encounter that power again; their nation had for some time previous shared, as they thought, quite liberally in the royal favor for which, with their characteristic generosity and sense of gratitude, they felt themselves under obligations on that account, though personally beyond its reach; and then all their chieftains, or prominent and influential men had taken the oath of allegiance to King George before they crossed the Atlantic. A venerable and excellent old man who had borne a pretty high commission in the British service during the war, remarked in the presence of the writer, some years ago, that he had sworn allegiance to the king of England, when in London, about to take shipping for America; and he felt himself bound by that oath. The obligation of an oath is one which a conscientious people, like the Scotch, especially when left without proper instruction as most of them were at that time, cannot be easily induced to violate…

      More on this later…as we approach the 270th anniversary of Culloden.

      Reply

  4. Pat_h says

    Does anyone know anything about Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse? After Kasich and Cruz dropped out he all be endorsed either a “draft” GOP effort (that has been around for awhile), concerning him, or maybe he’s suggesting he can be coaxed to run as an independent.

    Reply

    • JimC says

      I don’t. An independent third party run from somebody is a distinct possibility, but would seem to be a sure way to put Hillary in the White House.

      Reply

      • Pat_H says

        I’d normally agree, but given that there’s both Trump and Clinton are enormously disliked, this might be the one year that’d be an exception.

        If it happened, I’m sure that Trump would spend a fair amount of time trashing him. Clinton would ignore him. If he could take a fair number of Republicans who don’t like Trump, and maybe a third of the Democrats, he might make it.

        With Clinton almost assured of victory in a Trump v. Clinton race, it might be worth the long shot chance.

        Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *