West From Shenandoah

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

The humour of going to America still continues, and the scarcity of provisions certainly makes many quit us. The humour has spread like a contagious distemper ... it affects only Protestants, and reigns chiefly in the north. -Archbishop Boulter, Primate of Ireland, 1728

FROM ITS BEGINNING, this story is about the land.

The mob that came for John Lewis on a day in 1729, in County Donegal in the Province of Ulster in what is today Northern Ireland, was after his land. We do not know the hour or the day it happened, and indeed we cannot be sure of the season or the year. Most of the story is long lost, its details shrunken in memory even as its concept was enlarged to mythical dimensions, eventually recalled in fragments by elderly grandchildren nearly a century after it happened (when at last someone thought to write it down). They chiseled a reference to it on John Lewis's gravestone, because what happened that day made his life legendary and led to everything else, but stone-carvers are necessarily cryptic, and they referred only to a conflict with an "Irish Lord."

The man who led the mob was armed with a musket and most likely self-medicated with rage and whiskey. He was not a lord of the realm, as the tombstone half a world away wouldlater imply, but one Sir Mungo Campbell, John Lewis's landlord. Campbell was most likely a baronet (a rank roughly equivalent to that of knight) who had inherited his father's land and minor title, but not his father's character.

John Lewis's father, Andrew Lewis, and Mungo's father, Hugh Campbell, had passed a generation in a settled and prosperous relationship. Lewis had a leasehold on a portion of Campbell's Donegal County land, and as the tenants were diligent and reliable, so the landlord was fair and responsive. Thus John Lewis had grown to manhood, there he had eventually brought his wife, Margaret Lynn, there he had seen his parents into the grave and five children into the world. There his family had enjoyed a remarkable island of stability and peace, in a country that all the while had been seething with ancient hatreds and sparking with sudden violence.

About 1725 things had started to unravel for the Lewises. Hugh Campbell died, leaving his land to his self-indulgent son just as a long drought settled in, withering the crops year after year. Meanwhile nothing reduced the taxes or relaxed the tithes that every resident, regardless of religion, owed to the established Church of England. To these burdens one was now added that was common elsewhere in Ireland but had not affected John Lewis while Hugh Campbell was alive. It had long been the habit of the English landlords, most of whom were living in England, to raise rents on their Irish properties whenever they needed money, regardless of the effects on their tenants. Apparently Mungo Campbell liked this idea and decided to impose the rack rents, as they were called, on John Lewis.

Just as Campbell was no lord of the realm, so Lewis was no downtrodden serf. He had a good lease-"for three lifetimes," as his grandchildren would recall it-had met his obligations, and knew his rights. He took the case to court, according to one version of the story, and won. Perhaps he thought that with the dispute thus settled, he could go back to his home and resume his life. But Mungo Campbell was not to be dissuaded by a court. He had become overly impressed, apparently, with the ways of imperious English aristocrats. Forgetting that he was no lord and his tenant no vassal, the young Campbell decided to impose his will by force. He collected a band of supporters, either hired hands or raucous friends, and marched out to eject the Lewises from their home.

Forewarned, John Lewis gathered his family in the house, shuttered the windows, and barred the door. He had living with him at the time his brother, who was ill and bedridden, in addition to his wife, Margaret Lynn, and five children: Ann, an infant; Margaret, a toddler; William, five years old; Andrew, nine; and Thomas, the eldest at eleven. Mungo pounded on the door and demanded that the Lewises leave the premises. Hotly, John Lewis refused. The ruffians surrounded the house and tried to break down the door, but succeeded only in splintering it. Inside, disbelieving, John Lewis waited for his young landlord to come to his senses.

Instead, Mungo Campbell stuck through the cracked door a musket loaded with buck and ball, and fired. The ball struck John Lewis's brother where he lay in his sickbed, wounding him mortally. A pellet of buckshot tore through Margaret Lynn's hand. With his wife and brother wounded and bleeding, the one dying and the other no doubt shrieking with pain and fright, John Lewis was transformed. He wrenched open the door, charged outside, and with his shillelagh split open the skull of the young Mungo Campbell.

Deprived of leadership and of the prospect of reward, the other outlaws fled, leaving Lewis to comfort his wife and children, bury his brother, and contemplate his hollow victory. Knowing there could be no justice in Ireland for any tenant rising up against any landlord, he prepared to flee for his life.

* * *

A strong wind was blowing through Europe as the eighteenth century began. The pressure gradient ran away from the tyranny, religious oppression, frequent wars, and grinding poverty of the corrupt old monarchies, westward toward a fresh New World where, it was said, one could speak and worship as one chose, own land, improve one's lot in life, make a safe place for a family, and live to see it grow. Those who had something solid in Europe-land or money or family or maybe just a title-hung on to it and let the wind blow. Of the multitudes who could claim neither possessions nor hope, only a small minority would try to sail this wind to a new life, and most of those who tried, as was the case with John Lewis, were pushed by circumstances into an adventure they would as soon have missed. The wind they tried to ride was strong and cruel; those who lacked strength or character or cunning, whatever their dreams, could be dashed to destruction before it.

A paradigm shift-any vast new idea-begins in the hearts of individual people who act anew because of a powerful notion or circumstance. Often they are spurred to action by what they find unacceptable in their world; often they are led to change by religious fervor or by greed. Individuals who tack across the prevailing winds of culture can be dismissed as merely eccentric; if small groups join them, they will still be seen as aberrant malcontents; but when like-minded groups grow to critical mass (not necessarily an overwhelming majority-not even, necessarily, a majority-just enough) then culture itself is suddenly transformed.

This family's crisis was created by the forces that had shaped them and their world; their reaction to their crisis would help reshape those forces and that world. Andrew Lewis, nine years old when he saw his father kill, his uncle killed, and his family uprooted, would live to consider, embrace, and then powerfully enact into the history of the world a new paradigm of human entitlement and personal freedom embodied in a new republic that would bestride the world. Yet for all that new paradigm and that new republic would ennoble human history and enable human progress, it would embody as well significant evils. It would do so, as most cultures do, without discussion, dismissing the wrong it felt required to do with simplistic rationalizations followed by a profound forgetting. And yet, ignored, two of these offenses-a virulent form of racism and a new kind of greed-would continue to irritate the body politic to the point of abscess, even cancer.

To understand the end of a story we need to comprehend how it begins. Our story begins with that strong wind blowing toward the west, taking certain sailors with it.

* * *

By the time Andrew Lewis was born in County Donegal, the English had been trying to subdue the tribes of Ireland for five and a half centuries, King Henry II making the first attempt with an invasion in 1171. British overlords regarded the emerald isle, as they would later view the New World, as a country with some interesting economic prospects that was unfortunately infested with natives. English armies were able to correct this situation and maintain the crown's authority in Dublin, on the nearby east coast, but beyond the city and its immediate environs, beyond the area called the Pale, the authority-and the armies-had a way of dissolving.

During the first half of the sixteenth century, Henry VIII had been able to gain somewhat tenuous control of the whole country of Ireland, and in the latter decades of the century, Elizabeth's armies had crushed the organized resistance of most of the native chieftains. Yet when James I took the English throne in 1603 (to become famous for establishing a new version of the Bible, for espousing the divine right of kings, and for persecuting Catholics), Ireland was still in turmoil.

Francis Bacon, a principal advisor to King James and an advocate of England's manifest destiny to rule the British Isles and the world, had nothing but contempt for Ireland. He did not know which was worst: "the ambition and absoluteness of the chiefs," the "licentious idleness" of their soldiers, or the "barbarous laws, customs, their brehon laws, habits of apparel, their poets or heralds that enchant them in savage manners, and sundry other dregs of barbarism and rebellion." The crown was motivated not merely by a desire to export law and order, but by national security: England's enemies-the Catholic pope, the crowns of Spain and France-saw in any Irish insurrection an opportunity to gain a foothold on British soil for their priests and their generals.

As James took the throne, a bloody, eight-year insurrection by the clans of Ulster had just been brought to an end. The last stand of the Gaelic chieftains against the English juggernaut had been ground down by a scorched-earth policy that had left Ulster, the northernmost of Ireland's four provinces, largely depopulated. Yet the principal leaders of the revolt, Hugh O'Neill of County Tyrone and Rory O'Donnell of Tyrconnel (the ancient name for Donegal), had been allowed to retain their vast real estate holdings and their titles (they had been made earls by Queen Elizabeth in an attempt at pacification). Both were soon involved in new intrigues and, learning that they had been found out, fled the country in September of 1607, an event remembered in Irish history as the Flight of the Earls. The crown confiscated their estates and those of the chieftains who went into exile with them, an area of land extending over much of the province of Ulster. The earls were soon replaced as chief rebel in Ireland by one Sir Cahir O'Dogherty of Innishowen, who was in his turn hunted down and killed in 1608. King James, perplexed, wanted a final solution to the Irish problem. Francis Bacon and other advisors thought they had one.

They focused on Ulster, the source of most of the recent troubles. As the English historian Thomas Babington Macaulay would observe, the Irish "were distinguished by qualities which tend to make men interesting rather than prosperous. They were an ardent and an impetuous race, easily moved to tears or laughter, to fury or to love." Such men did not pull well under a yoke.

Sir Arthur Chichester, Lord Deputy of Ireland, proposed that establishing law and order in Ulster would require planting among the wild Irishmen "colonies of civil people of England or Scotland." (By "civil," Chichester did not mean polite, but civilized, a word not yet in general use.) By "planting," he meant what had been undertaken in 1607 at Jamestown in Virginia: the forceful establishment, in an area populated by primitive tribes, of an English system of plantation agriculture, common law, established religion, and pitiless subjugation of the natives. In 1609 King James ordered the plantation of six of the nine counties of Ulster.

Four times before, in the 1560s and 1570s, Queen Elizabeth had given adventurers large tracts of Irish land on condition they settle them with civil English farmers. All three had failed in the face of fierce opposition from the natives, just as Sir Walter Raleigh (who had come to the queen's attention by putting down an Irish rebellion in 1580) had failed to establish Roanoke Island in the New World.

This time the Ulster plantation was better organized. Those taking up estates (offered in three sizes, of 1,000, 1,500, and 2,000 acres) were required to live on the land and improve it with buildings and fences. Additional lands were set aside for churches, schools, and villages; everything was properly surveyed and recorded. If a native pressed a prior claim to ownership, some treason was rooted out of recent history and another tract of land was confiscated. By 1610 half a million acres of land were made available to planters, who were sternly cautioned to avoid relationships with the natives. Hiring "mere Irish," as the Catholic residents were called, renting land to them, and, above all, marrying them were strictly forbidden.

On Francis Bacon's recommendation, "to allure by all means fit undertakers," the king created a new order of baronet. Gentlemen who agreed to take up Ulster land, and who paid £1,000 into a fund for the support of troops in Ireland, were permitted to assume a dignity roughly on a par with a knight although a baronet remained a commoner.

The offers of Irish land and titles did not raise unqualified enthusiasm in England. Established gentlemen there were "a great deal more tenderly bred," recorded the Reverend Andrew Stewart at the time of the plantation, "and entertained in better quarters than they could find here in Ireland." Those who did leave the comforts of home and the intrigues of court for the hard and remote circumstances of Ireland often found the "marshiness and fogginess of this Island unwholesome to English bodies." Many, according to Stewart, died "of a flux, called here the country disease, at their first entry." But the perspective was quite different from the hardscrabble farms of lowland Scotland, whose tenants were also British subjects and eligible for the offer of free land. From the beginning of the plantation, more Scots than Englishmen moved into Ulster, where they presented the king with a new population that was fully as bull-headed as the old.

It was a community set apart not only by the circumstances of its origins and by surrounding events, but by hard-won and vigorously defended religious and political ideas. To a remarkable degree, in a world just emerging from feudalism, these people (who left feudalism behind when they left Scotland) had a sense of personal worth.

Continues...

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Excerpted from West From Shenandoah by Thomas A. Lewis Excerpted by permission.
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