Customer Reviews

Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South

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Dr McWhiney's book is a classic. It states the obvious, i.e. in the course of early American history and the movement of Europeans into the New World,the Celtic fringe of the British archipelago peopled the American South; which has had a profound influence of Southern society. Native Irish, Ulster Scots, Welsh, Border English, Hebrideans, etc., sort of a Celtic soup of sorts, peopled the early South. His book is only controversial to Anglo-centric historians who are still in denial that Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, etc., are actually part of our history and who like to pretend they are just footnotes of English history. And also, controversial to politically minded people who use 'history' to further political objectives. The book is great; a good read, with quantitative research and anecdotal research. It is just pure research with no agenda, a pleasant change in fact. It can be read straight through or by jumping around by topic. Great nighttime reading, full of full facts and oddities of the Old South. One wishes more histories were like this.

Why is the South so different from the rest of the country? It wasn't always so. In our revolutionary period, Southerners were just as angry at British offenses in the North as Northerners were, while Northerners cheered South Carolina's victory at Sullivan's Island just as passionately as Southrons did. Virginians like George Washington and Daniel Morgan fought in the North while the greatest general of the Southern theater was the Rhode Islander Nathaniel Greene.

Why did Northern and Southern unity quickly become mutual suspicion and eventually dissolve into hostility? Was race the only reason? To Grady McWhiney, the question is largely a cultural one. McWhiney feels that Southern culture was and is Celtic. Most of the original settlers in the North came from England, while most of the South's early settlers came from the most Celtic regions of the British Isles(Ulster, Scotland, Cumberland, the West Country, etc). These settlers put a Celtic stamp on the South, influenced all who settled there, Celt or not, and brought with them their age-old hostility to the English, a hostility that was(and continues to be)reciprocated by the "English" of the North.

Celtic influence on Southern culture cannot be seriously disputed. Anyone who has ever heard bluegrass or country music can hear just one aspect of it. And that North and South are still mutually hostile is also unarguable. The uneducated bigot in the movies usually has a Southern accent and prominently displays a Confederate flag. But I think McWhiney oversimplifies. Celtic influence was there, but it was not alone. As Charles Hudson pointed out in The Southeastern Indians, Native American influence on Southern culture(which McWhiney ignores)was considerable, a fact well known to many of us with families from the southeastern US who have unsuccessfully tried to untangle our genealogies.

In short, Cracker Culture is worth your time. Just don't stop with it.

This book more or less takes the position that the civil war between the north and south was more a conflict of cultures than anything else. The yankees being predominently of English stock were industrious, money grubbing, uptight dullards and the people of the south having more people of Celtic ancestry were a tempermental, emotional lot who would rather spend their days screwing their women and running through the woods with their hound dogs than working their fingers to the bone from sun up till sun down. Being a southerner of celtic ancestry maybe I should have gotten offended by some of the stereotypes laid out in this book but I found it interesting and entertaining instead.

As anyone from the South, or who knows anything of the South's demography, can attest, up through about the 1950s it was less true to say that the South was Celtic than that the _mountainous_ areas of the South were; the valleys tended to be populated by 'flatlanders' (as my grandparents called 'em) who were much more likely of English stock than of Celtic.

The Civil War was more essentially between the flatlanders and the North, than between us hillbillies and any other region. When mostly-flatland Virginia seceded from the North, 12 counties of hillbilly (and still largely Welsh and Scotch-Irish) folks seceded from Virginia back into the Union in (as state documents in Virginia still call it) the 'So-called state' of West Virginia. In Tennessee and North Carolina, the mountain areas tended to split in favor of staying in the Union or at least split more evenly between the two sentiments than the flatlands did.

Why's this? - slavery. And a centuries-old mutual distrust between flatlanders and hillbillies. (My old granny told me, as a child, never to trust a flatlander OR an Englishman, right in there while telling ancestor-stories of how some of our forebears came across the ocean because the English destroyed their homes.) And class distinction. (Hillbillies are overwhelmingly poor; though not all flatlanders are rich, the overwhelming majority of the money was in the valleys.)

Why didn't the author make this distinction, between the hill South and the valley South? - anybody's guess. But it's pretty poor pickings without even that minimal level of care in labeling.

My Irish ancestors came to the US between 1836-1861 and settled in East Texas. "Cracker Culture" has given me an insight to their behavior patterns that is totally to the point and accurate as well. Anyone doing Irish genealogy will find in this book the reasons our Irish ancestors were the way they were. Also, an explanation why there was such bitterness between the Yankees and the Southerners in the Civil War

Although I highly recommend this book to anyone intested in understanding the culture of the American South, it is especially indispensable to Southerners seeking to understand why their ancestors did the things they did. Cracker Culture is the culmination of many years of research into what has become known as "The Celtic Thesis" (which says that Northerners and Southerners had different cultural origins and that this explained their many divisions and disagreements in the 18th and 19th centuries), and the distillation and continuation of many journal articles published by McWhiney and his frequent collaborator, Forrest McDonald. This is one of the earliest scholarly books to take the South down from its "stool of everlasting repentance" (to use Robert Penn Warren's phrase) and to investigate the cultural origins of poor white Southerners - a group that is still understudied by academic historians to this day. Although it sometimes exaggerates to get its point across, and is completely mistaken in its insistence that Celts and the Scots-Irish knew little about farming, it is a major contribution to Southern history by a major Southern historian. Perhaps McWhiney's greatest contribution in this book is when he explains the importance of open-range herding to Celts - including those from Scotland, Ireland, and the American South. In fact, as he points out (according to the 1860 agricultural census), livestock raising and herding was worth twice that year's cotton crop! That is revolutionary, and shows that the poor white yeomen farmers of the South not only kept their Scottish and Irish traditions, but also participated in the United States' predominately agricultural economy in large numbers. To top it all off, Cracker Culture, though filled with historical footnotes, was written for the layman and is a rousing and fun book to read!

This book seeks to create a separate ethnic identity for the south, by inventing a mythical "celtic" identity for southerners, and comparing it to an alleged "Anglo-Saxon" character in the northern states. This is based solely on Scots-Irish emigration to the American colonies during the 18th century. This ignores the fact that the Scots Irish settled on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line (the traditional heartland of the Scots-Irish was actually in Pennsylvania) and were overwhelmingly located in the back country (most areas outside the backcountry were settled by a range of emigrants from England and a smaller number from Scotland). Available sources do not suggest any significant differences in the distribution of "celtic" speaking peoples between north and south.

One irony is that the Scots Irish themselves, descendants of Ulster protestants, were not particularly "celtic" at least in any kind of historical sense. They spoke English, were mostly from England, the Anglicized lowland areas of Scotland and at least 20% of them were the descendants of French Hugenots. They were specifically settled on land seized from the native Irish to act as a garrison community in order to keep the rebellious Celtic clans in Ireland disenfranchised, and were generally considered industrious, forward thinking, and more modern then their Irish neighbors. In short, the author tries to make the case that the Scots-Irish were more like their Gaelic enemies, and his description of "cracker culture" (violent, fond of drink and dismissive of domestic industry) is strangely akin to the derogatory attitudes the Scots-Irish held regarding the native Irish!

James I specifically avoided recruiting Celtic speaking highland Scots for Ulster because he suspected that they would make common cause with the Irish catholics. The Scots-Irish were essentially surrogates for crown forces holding Ireland, the same way lowland dissenter Scots created a constituency for union with England. This history is diametrically opposed to the authors contention that the Scots-Irish were an oppressed Celtic people, hostile to the British. Although there was some resentment toward London, In fact they were representatives of modern Britain, worked and fought to create the United Kingdom, and brought their industry and talent to the United States.

What's sad is that the Scots-Irish have a wonderful, much more interesting history then is suggested by this book. They were in many cases pro-Union, and suspicious of Tidewater planters and slavery. Their education level was much higher then is recognized by pop history, and were hard workers and good business people. In short, they were excellent Americans. By reducing them to a type of caricature, the author does them, and their descendants, a disservice. A better history of them is James Leyburn's "The Scotch Irish", which is still the best reference on the subject.

I believe that this is one of the most important books written on the social and cultural schism between the northern and southern states. The author's insight that the basic problem between the two sections is based on early colonization patterns, smells like the truth.

It can be argued that there were plenty of English descendants in the South and there were plenty of Scots-Irish in the north. Therefore a cultural divide between Celt and Anglo is unlikely. In my opinion, this is not the right angle to look at it. It is the very EARLY patterns of immigration that are, by far, the most important. Once an area is stamped with a certain culture, later immigrants drink it in like mother's milk. This may or may not be a conscious thing.

This happens everywhere. I've lived in South Louisiana and have watched how quickly Ango/Celt and even Mexican peoples are absorbed into the prevailing Cajun culture. Granted, if there is a mass migration of a certain cultural group into an area with a lesser number of individuals of a different culture, the more recent culture may swamp the earlier culture. This is not what happened in the South.

One of the South's problems is precisely that, following the initial immigration from the British Isles, immigration was relatively low in comparison to the north. Southerners therefore maintained the laid back culture of their Scots' ancestors. It's a comfortable,sociable existence and later Anglo immigrants to the South liked it. This was evidenced during the Civil War by the many northern men--men who had previously lived in the south--who joined the Confederate Army. I'm reminded of a boy who was killed on Culp's hill in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. He was wearing a Confederate uniform and his last name was Culp. He was a son from the family for which the hill was named. He went South before the war and, judging by his fatal allegiance, became an ardent southerner--and bearer of Celtic culture.

Certainly the roots of secession are multiple, but culture has to be at the top. Slavery was also important but slavery was abolished 150 years ago. Despite this, Southerners and Northerners are still suspicious of each other. Culture.

Ron Braithwaite, author of Mexican Conquest novels, "Skull Rack" and "Hummingbird God"

The controversy here is the labeling of cracker culture as "Celtic" in origin. That is too broad a label even though many of the crackers probably do have some Celtic blood. McWhiney's book seems to be a study of one of the four British folkways examined in "Albion's Seed" by David Hackett Fischer, specifically what Fischer terms the backcountry migration of the Britsh border people: northern English, low country Scots, and Irish. They came over mostly in 1675-1750 and settled upcountry, away from tidewater areas, most prominently in Appalachia, and their ways became the ways of the interior south.

Once you get past the whole Celtic question, you can enjoy the wealth of primary sources cited by McWhiney, travel journals and diaries of both northerners and southerners. These first-hand accounts made me laugh out loud numerous times since I am a lifelong southerner but have made the acquaintance of many northerners in my corporate career.

An error appears in the prologue where the Roman historian Livy is described as writing in the third century B.C. This same mistake appears in another McWhiney book, "Attack and Die."

Just what I said. And what's more, the work done here opens the door for more specific studies of different aspects of the situation. I especially admire Dr. McGrady's use of primary sources. This is truly a groundbreaking work, a truly major one.

Kevin McGowin