Excellent Book
Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America
http://www.ashbrook.org/publicat/oped/owens/04/webb.html
Excerpt from the review:
Some 95 percent of the Ulster Scots who immigrated to America ended up in the South, so that region and the Scots-Irish are irrevocably linked. And of course, the mythic event for the South, even more than for the rest of the country, is the Civil War and Reconstruction. Despite the fact that poor whites, especially the Scots-Irish, had no stake in the preservation of slavery, the planter class was successful in recruiting them for the war: they formed the core of the Confederate armies that struggled against the odds for four long and costly years. But the impact of the Scots-Irish did not stop here. They also provided the bulk of Union soldiers in the Western armies—Hoosiers, Buckeyes, and other “butternuts” who had immigrated to the southern tier of the Old Northwest from south of the Ohio River as well as making up most of the unionist groups of east Tennessee, Western Virginia and North Carolina, and Northern Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana that resisted central Confederate authority just as assiduously as they had federal.
No matter the cause of the war, the Scots-Irish paid a high price as a result of the Civil War. Studies have shown that the economic status of the Scots-Irish is similar to that of black southerners. But since they are lumped in with other non-ethic whites, they do not benefit from “affirmative action.” America’s elites do not see this. All they see are rednecks waving the Confederate flag.
“Born Fighting” was an interesting book. Went a long way toward explaining the ‘redneck culture’. My Daddy was a product of that culture, with a little Cherokee thrown into the mix. ;o)
Another book on the subject was written by our (ahem) present crapola senator from VA, Jim Webb.
I gave that book as a Christmas present many years ago, and the the recipient loved it. It was also on sale on Amazon..