APPENDIX B—TO CHAPTER V.
In Mr. Shaler's entertaining "History of Kentucky," there is an account of the population of the western frontiers, and Kentucky, interesting because it illustrates some of the popular delusions on the subject. He speaks (pp. 9, 11, 23) of Kentucky as containing "nearly pure English blood, mainly derived through the old Dominion, and altogether from districts that shared the Virginian conditions." As much of the blood was Pennsylvanian or North Carolinian, his last sentence means nothing, unless all the "districts" outside of New England are held to have shared the Virginian conditions. Turning to Marshall (I., 441) we see that in 1780 about half the people were from Virginia, Pennsylvania furnishing the next greatest number; and of the Virginians most were from a population much more like that of Pennsylvania than like that of tide-water Virginia; as we learn from twenty sources, such as Waddell's "Annals of Augusta County." Mr. Shaler speaks of the Huguenots and of the Scotch immigrants, who came over after 1745, but actually makes no mention of the Presbyterian Irish or Scotch Irish, much the most important element in all the west; in fact, on p. 10, he impliedly excludes any such immigration at all. He greatly underestimates the German element, which was important in West Virginia. He sums up by stating that the Kentuckians come from the "truly British people," quite a different thing from his statement that they are "English."
The "truly British people" consists of a conglomerate of as distinct races as exist anywhere in Aryan Europe. The Erse, Welsh, and Gaelic immigrants to America are just as distinct from the English, just as "foreign" to them, as are the Scandinavians, Germans, Hollanders, and Huguenots—often more so. Such early families as the Welsh Shelbys, and Gaelic McAfees are no more English than are the Huguenot Seviers or the German Stoners. Even including merely the immigrants from the British Isles, the very fact that the Welsh, Irish, and Scotch, in a few generations, fuse with the English instead of each element remaining separate, makes the American population widely different from that of Britain; exactly as a flask of water is different from two cans of hydrogen and oxygen gas. Mr. Shaler also seems inclined to look down a little on the Tennesseeans, and to consider their population as composed in part of inferior elements; but in reality, though there are very marked differences between the two commonwealths of Kentucky and Tennessee, yet they resemble one another more closely, in blood and manners, than either does any other American State; and both have too just cause for pride to make it necessary for either to sneer at the other, or indeed at any State of our mighty Federal Union. In their origin they were precisely alike; but whereas the original pioneers, the hunters and Indian fighters, kept possession of Tennessee as long as they lived,—Jackson, at Sevier's death, taking the latter's place with even more than his power,—in Kentucky, on the other hand, after twenty years' rule, the first settlers were swamped by the great inrush of immigration, and with the defeat of Logan for governor the control passed into the hands of the same class of men that then ruled Virginia. After that date the "tide-water" stock assumed an importance in Kentucky it never had in Tennessee; and of course the influence of the Scotch-Irish blood was greatly diminished.
Mr. Shaler's error is trivial compared to that made by another and even more brilliant writer. In the "History of the People of the United States," by Professor McMaster (New York, 1887), p. 70, there is a mistake so glaring that it would not need notice, were it not for the many excellencies and wide repute of Professor McMaster's book. He says that of the immigrants to Kentucky, most had come "from the neighboring States of Carolina and Georgia," and shows that this is not a mere slip of the pen, by elaborating the statement in the following paragraphs, again speaking of North and South Carolina and Georgia as furnishing the colonists to Kentucky. This shows a complete misapprehension not only of the feeding-grounds of the western emigration, but of the routes it followed, and of the conditions of the southern States. South Carolina furnished very few emigrants to Kentucky, and Georgia practically none; combined they probably did not furnish as many as New Jersey or Maryland. Georgia was herself a frontier community; she received instead of sending out immigrants. The bulk of the South Carolina emigration went to Georgia.