Society divided, not unified

Some 50 years ago I read the book ‘White Over Black’ by historian Winthrop Jordan. The book is about English-speaking peoples attitudes towards blacks and slavery in the English colonies of North America. Also covered are English attitudes towards non-English immigrants and how immigrants were settled in the hinterlands as a buffer against Indians.

On page 86 Jordan says, “It seems almost as if Englishmen possessed a view of other people which placed the English nation at the centre of widening concentric circles each of which contained a people more alien that the one inside it” — a divided and not unified society.

Page 102 lists the three largest non-English immigrant groups: (1) Africans, the largest group, are largely located in the southern colonies; (2) the Germans, especially in Pennsylvania where by 1750 Germans constitute one third of the population; and (3) Scots-Irish, also called UlsterScots. Jordan says “the Scots-Irish pushed through to frontier regions where they rapidly established a reputation for bellicosity among themselves and towards the Indians”. 40 percent of the American Revolutionary Army were ScotsIrish.

While war criminal Amherst’s subordinates were busy conducting search and destroy missions on P.E.I. and were fixated on ethnic cleansing and killing Indians, God’s antinomian frontiersmen were busy from Pennsylvania to present day Tennessee expanding British North America and were fixated on similar business.

Five years later George III issued, ‘The Proclamation of 1763’ which “prohibited all white settlement west of the Appalachian ridge.” Too late, George.

Tony Lloyd,

Mount Stewart