Starting in the 1970s, a group of Southern professors and writers began to challenge the long-standing view of Southern people and culture as being predominantly English in origin, what Governor George Wallace famously referred to as the ‘great Anglo-Saxon Southland.’ These professors began writing books and publishing articles which focused on the ‘Celtic’ aspects of the South, especially Appalachia and the Backcountry. This Celtic-centric view of the South coincided with the re-birth of the Southern nationalist movement, upon which it has had a strong influence. Dr Jimmy Cantrell, who specialises in Southern fiction, wrote about this Celtic-Southern thesis and used it as a lens through which to analyse Western films in an article on LRC back in 2001:
Perhaps the most controversial thesis in contemporary Southern historiography is the best way to understand the diversity in Southern culture, a diversity not restricted to simplistic black and white conflicts. Until the last decade, the cultural origins of the white South were accepted almost unquestioningly as exclusively English with borrowings from African-Americans. White Southerners were said to be Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-Norman, and any aspects of their cultural ways that did not seem to fit with English patterns were attributed to African or Amer-Indian origin. This long unchallenged belief began to be disputed in the early 1980s by historians Grady McWhiney and Forrest McDonald, who developed the Celtic-Southern Thesis: that the majority white Southern culture, the one planted in the Piedmont and Appalachian foothills areas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and from there migrated west, is of Celtic origin (Irish, Scottish, and Welsh), not English. Implicit in the Celtic-Southern thesis is the Anglo-Norman cultural origin of the coastal white South from the Chesapeake to Charleston, and that the conflicts between these two principal white Southern cultural groups underlie all of Southern history and provide much of its tension.
Aware that Southern literature is essentially a folklore based story-telling, that the Faulkners, Gordons, Weltys, and Styrons are inspired by the tales of peoples and times past heard on porches and store and courtyard benches, that the best of Southern literature has been created “out of the rag-tag and bob-ends of old tales and talking” (Faulkner 303), I decided to read Southern novels to determine whether they supported the Celtic-Southern thesis. In short, they do. From the prolific antebellum writer William Gilmore Simms to the Southern Renaissance giants Ellen Glasgow and William Faulkner to the contemporary best-seller Pat Conroy, many Southern novelists, I have found, recognize the indispensable roles of Celtic immigrants and their descendants to the development, expansion, and perpetuation of Southern culture.
As I was concluding my study of Celtic heritage in Southern literature, I decided that the next step in my research must be American Western literature. Considering the myopic geographical tendencies in Southern studies, this may sound strange, but culture, as Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris note, is not bound by political lines drawn to facilitate government or defend imperialism. Culture is fluid, and Southern culture is found outside the geographic South in such areas as the “little Dixies” north of the Ohio River and in parts of southern California. I chose the American West because the original “wild west” had been the old Southwest, which is today’s Southeast: the trans-Appalachian South of Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. In a recent study of the literature of the Old Southwest, Ritchie Watson suggests that history and politics have combined to skew our view of the development of American Western culture so that we no longer recognize what antebellum Americans took for granted: that the American West and the trans-Appalachian South shared a “unified western consciousness. Even stranger to Americans living today would be the commonly accepted assumption that the roots of this new western culture were southern”.
Furthermore, McWhiney and McDonald have suggested obliquely that their Crackers, the majority white Southerners of Celtic ancestry, were a determining factor in the formation of an Old West culture. In “Celtic Origins of Southern Herding Practices,” they praise Terry Jordan’s Trails To Texas: Southern Roots of Western Cattle Ranching as “an excellent account of how open-range cattle raising moved steadily from its ‘hearth’ in the seventeenth-century Carolinas to the Texas of the 1870s” (165). Accepting Jordan’s contention that the livestock raising and herding practices of the Old West, which were integral to the development of a Western identity and remain central to its mythology, did not spring from Western soils without forerunners but were borrowings from the South, McWhiney and McDonald reveal that those animal husbandry folkways had been practiced in Celtic lands for centuries. Here, then, is an implied link from Celtic lands first to the colonial and antebellum South, and finally to the Old West of the post-War Between the States era. Just as Southern literature suggests that immigrants from Celtic lands and their descendants determined the folk culture of the majority white Southerners, American Western literature, if the corollary to the Celtic-Southern thesis proves true, will reveal the importance of Southerners, especially those of Celtic heritage, to the Old West.
Also see: Podcast: Celtic Dixie?, Grady McWhiney, Southern nationalist and Celtic culture in the colonial upcountry South
Terrific post! One side of my family came from Ireland in the 1820′s, and settled for a while in Tennessee, finally moving to Missouri. So much of what was written in this essay is so much like my family’s perspectives on life. There is a great program on the AMC tv channel that also looks at this very time frame and the people involved called “Hell on Wheels.” It is about the building of the Transcontinental Railroad, with the main protagonist being a confederate soldier whose wife and child were killed by Union troops. (http://www.amctv.com/shows/hell-on-wheels) Part of the camp is made up of Irish laborers and the freed blacks, as well as former Union soldiers. If anyone has an interest in this period I highly recommend they check out this show. They have worked very hard to make it “historically” accurate. The man who plays the main character “Cullen Bohannon” is a native Southerner.
The 70s were very questionable, in terms of the “New Narratives” they introduced. Given the timing and University Origins, clearly this “new narrative” was part and parcel of the revisionist history that came into the school systems, (films, etc.) in the aftermath of the passing of JFK, Vatican II, the open border Immigration Policies of 1965, the acts impoverishing the south (such as the 1965 Tobacco Acts, laws that affected the coal industry, in appalachia) and so on .
The question with any “new narrative,” is “Who benefits?” And “Why is this information being produced at this time?”
How does this narrative work with this other narratives introduced at that time?
Simultaneously, with PTB (“university professors”) “calling into question” the English group in the South— their church was also on the chopping block, with seeming paid activists coming into services, breaking up the church. The Episcopal church all but folded in the south— pushed to ordain women, to have the gay ministers, (the first of whom wound up a mess and in rehab, etc.)
So—- the question is Why was that produced at that time? Who benefits? HOw does the “university narrative” calling into question any legitimacy of a certain people, tie in with the other Attacks to their group identity?
As their group identity was attacked, it is obvious their numbers are greatly depleted. It is genocide.
That was unclear, maybe…
Was trying to say that the attacks on the English in the South in the 70s, was clearly multi-fold, clearly orchestrated, across the university, the attack on the churches, the at-the-ready solutions (“problem-reaction-solution”) once their church was broken (the papacy’s 2009 deal to let in the American Anglicans), and so on.
Simultaneous to the Revisionism you mention, and the church attacks on Episcopalians/ Anglicans, the hit to identity were being enacted in their areas, as well as the “Liberation Theology” rhetoric and narratives degrading “anglos” (code for southern and western wasp) for “slavery” (neatly leaving out how very little percentage-wise they had to do with the slave trade, really).
One could go on—- the attack on the Southern English-descent was very orchestrated and across many sectors (historical, religious, ethnic, and so on).
While it’s “neat” for others in the south, as the post above—- it’s sad to see people care so little about this orchestrated attack on a large group of southerners.
If a nation is formed out of an ethnic group with a common origin and cultural heritage — then how can the ‘Southern Celts’ and the English Southrons coexist? Does this antagonism help Southern nationalism?
And it seems as though the believers in the Celtic South are coming to dominate, as more people choose to identify, if they have both English and Ulster Scots heritage, as ”Celtic”. There is more cachet these days for groups who can claim to be the intended victims of a ‘genocide’, as the linked pieces say of the Ulster Scots or the Irish vis-a-vis the English. It appears to me that the emphasis placed on past victimization is something that will weaken the cohesiveness of the South. How can groups who have a history of bitter conflict bond together, especially if their past differences are dredged up anew?
Those are good questions, VA. The answer, as I see it, is that European history never got in the way of Southern nationalism in the past. The reluctance on the part of some Appalachian folks (in Eastern TN, for example) to secede in 1861 had nothing really to do with the differences of the Ulster-Scots and English and everything to do with the cultural, economic and political differences between the mountainous areas and the lowland areas.
You may be correct that the Celtic South identity is winning out. I don’t know. A lot of folks in the movement strongly identify with the Anglo-Saxon South identity. I am of both Anglo-Saxon and Celtic ancestry (with a sizable amount of German thrown in as well). I don’t have any problem getting along with either kind of folks. We’re all Southern. You’re right that victimhood does play a role in binding folks together (I posted on this recently) but our shared victimhood over the last century and a half, expecially the victimhood of the White South since the 1960s (and more so every day) is much stronger and fresher (present, even) in people’s minds than anything that happened back in Europe.
That said, part of my goal at SNN is to explore the origins and nature of Southern nationalism. One large section of the site is historical articles and those are popular with readers. So, I will continue to post stories about the different Southern groups and our origins. I don’t see this as dredging up old differences though or as harming Southern unity. We are effectively a besieged people today who are being exterminated culturally and replaced physically as a matter of government policy – that should unify us more than anything.
One final thing I would mention is that the League, for example, uses the term Anglo-Celtic. That joins both groups. Any such term is fraught with problems (it leaves out the Cajun French or the Texas and South Carolina German folks) but it does probably cover the vast majority of White Southerners. Of course, the term White South or White Southerner would probably work better. Who knows what will eventually emerge. But as we come more and more under fire I don’t see divisions from back in Europe many hundreds of years ago continuing to divide us today.
We also tend to think of the CSA as a Southern version of the USA. It is not. It was a confederacy of sovereign States, banded for unity against an aggressor, but in times of peace, separate trading partners. Separate because of distinctive and cultural differences.