A History
Just as they were the vanguards of civilization in other regions of America west of the Appalachians, the Scots formed the first large group of settlers in Central Texas. This type was indomitable, hard and sometimes ruthless, but always independent, courageous, and had a passionate love of knowledge and freedom. Major Sterling C. Robertson, 2nd generation removed from his Scottish emigrant ancestor, was surveying in Central Texas during the winter of 1823-24. Most of the 600 families that he introduced into Central Texas were of Scottish origin. His friend and helper in the later part of the colony was Alexander Thomson, another Scot. In fact, many Texas counties bear the name of Scots.
In her desire to construct a program under the auspices of the Central Texas Area Museum, Inc., wherein each nationality active in the founding of Central Texas would be honored, Mrs. Sterling C. Robertson, Secretary and Program Chairperson, decided that the Scots, because of the priority of their arrival in the region, should be accorded priority of representation. All Texas became interested in this educational and cultural program.
Therefore the trustees of the Museum, in conjunction with many interested Scots, planned the First Gathering of the Clans. Forty clans answered the call and convened in historic Salado on November 12th 1961. The Tartan banners of each clan waved from poles eight feet tall with the name of the clan on the pole. Well over 1,000 people registered, not to mention many others who visited throughout the day.
In addition to the annual programs, The Museum supplied goods imported from Scotland for the Scots shop. The venture was a great success. So the WEE SCOTS SHOP became a reality, the first in Texas. Books, ties, ladies evening sashes, skirts & kilts tailored in Scotland are obtainable.
TARTAN DAY SPEECH AT THE ALAMO
As presented by
Andrew Morrison, Lord Dunrossil
Honorary British Consul
It is my privilege as the Honorary British Consul to have been asked to remember the Alamo with you tonight, but first I want to go back to the early 14th century and remember the Bruce.
Hindsight has a way of making history look inevitable. It turned out this way and so it HAD to turn out this way. But back in the early 14th century, inevitability and historical necessity seemed to have sided with Edward Plantagenet, King of England. Scotland was an idea without logic, without meaning. It made no sense ethnically, linguistically, socially or culturally. Half the country was a mix of Gael, Norse and Pict and spoke Gaelic, the other half was what the Highlanders called “Sassenach,” Anglo-Saxon, and spoke a form of Northern English. Most of the barons in the south were Norman and spoke French. The very name “Scot” means “Irish” and Wallace, the name of the first hero of the independence movement, means “Welshman.”
The same argument, the same logic, used by Norman French barons in Scotland in absorbing and eradicating the Kingdom of the Isles was now being used by Norman French barons in England to unite the whole island under a single throne. The death of Margaret, the Maid of Norway, looked like the end of the Scottish idea. Scotland would go the way of formerly strong and independent kingdoms like Kent , Mercia and Northumbria and the Principality of Wales.
Then, 700 years ago this spring, one Norman baron, Robert de Brus, who refused to recognize the right of women to the throne, seized his chance by murdering a rival with a better claim, murdering him in a church, and had himself crowned king of a country which existed scarcely even in name let alone in reality, since it was occupied by Bruce’s feudal overlord, Edward.
14 years later, despite some notable victories, he was still excommunicated and desperate to neutralize the Pope’s opposition. This is the backdrop to the Declaration of Arbroath.
Bruce wanted the Pope to believe that he had no option but to fight on. He knew that in his case arguments about his personal merits or the rights of kings would carry no weight, since he’d broken his oath to Edward and murdered his rival to win the throne. He therefore argued (or had his barons appear to argue) that sovereignty rested with the people, a notion with some precedent in Celtic tradition but absolutely foreign to his own feudal Norman culture. It therefore followed that the people could and would replace him if he betrayed their aspirations towards Freedom and self-determination.
A few barons were then persuaded to sign the Declaration and give it the appearance of a spontaneous cry, an El Grito, ostensibly at least the first example of a declaration of popular sovereignty and of national independence in history.
Now, miraculously, the Declaration acquired a life of its own. A people were raised on it and bonded together by it and by this infectious and intoxicating notion of national self-determination, of governments serving at the pleasure of the people, a civil right that superseded all outside authority, temporal and religious.
This was the cultural background which opened the country to the peculiarly Scottish and peculiarly democratic idea of the Presbyterian Kirk and which inspired the Covenanters to resist crown and Parliament. (How ironic that it should all start with an appeal to the Pope!)
Many of these uncompromisingly independent Covenanters later moved to Ulster and then on to the American colonies. Once there they were to be further antagonized and politicized by the limited Catholic emancipation granted as a gesture to the newly conquered Province of Quebec and the rest of formerly French Canada, and they set about asserting their independence all over again.
One Scottish-born and educated lawyer, James Wilson (no relation to Sam Wilson, the original Uncle Sam), wrote the legal opinion that a Parliament in which they were not represented had no authority to legislate over them or to tax them. The roots of this argument can clearly be seen in the Declaration of Arbroath and its notions of popular sovereignty and self-determination. Wilson was not only a signer of the Declaration of Independence, itself inspired by Arbroath, but helped to give the movement its legal framework and justification, and his principle of Judicial Review led to the establishment of the Supreme Court.
Some of the intellectual underpinnings of the Revolution can be traced to the Scottish Enlightenment, which had a particular influence on the part Scottish, part Welsh Jefferson. This was the time, after all, when Edinburgh was known as the Athens of the North. That other famous Virginian, Pat rick Henry, famous for saying “Give me liberty or give me death,” was the son of an immigrant Scot, who taught him Latin and Greek and history and filled him with the passions and prejudices of his native land.
But one needs to look beyond the fine language spoken in the drawing rooms of Edinburgh and Monticello to see the dogged, cussed independent streak, which was Scotland ’s great gift to the American character. Back in London the Revolutionary War was referred to as a “Scotch-Irish rebellion” and by King George himself as a “Presbyterian War.”
As the young country began to take shape, divisions and differences became apparent. At the first census in 1790 people of Scottish descent outnumbered those of English descent 2:1 in the southern states, which led inevitably to a different attitude to central or federal government from that which predominated in New England . They had not kicked out one central Anglo authority based in London just to replace it with another based in Washington DC . The War for States’ Rights can be seen as yet another expression of Covenanter cussedness, only this time the best General of Scottish descent, Grant, was on the other side and his side prevailed.
A couple of generations after the Revolutionary War and a generation before the Civil War, a group of these typically feisty Scotch Irish found their way into Texas at the invitation of fellow Scot Stephen F. Austin. More than half of the land grants he made were to men of Scottish descent. Carl Peterson, born in Greenock and resident in Pennsylvania , has done some wonderful research on these people and the songs they brought with them, songs of Burns, Covenanter and Jacobite songs, which became the songs of Texas with a few words changed. I recommend to all of you his booklet, Now’s the Day and Now’s the Hour, and his CD, Scotland Remembers the Alamo .
Austin, Houston and Bowie were clearly of Scottish descent. Crockett probably. While Travis’ family was from the north of England , it is clear that he drew his inspiration from the novels of Walter Scott, and he modeled his actions and his words on Edward Waverley and the noble but ultimately futile sacrifice of the Highland Scots at Culloden. Altogether it has been estimated that over 80% of those who died at the Alamo were of Scottish descent. The only man who refused to cross the line and chose life over death or glory was not one of them: he was one of the two Frenchmen.
These men were not perfect. Bowie could be a charming and charismatic leader, but he was also a crook, a money-launderer for pirates and a slave-trader. Travis was an inspiring speaker, a fearless leader, but he was also on the run from bankruptcy and a failed marriage. Houston was great tactician and a drunk. But the point is that, like Bruce before them, they have been redeemed and ennobled by an idea, by their willingness to give their lives for a principle, a principle which found its first expression in April 1320 at the Abbey of Arbroath:
“It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for Freedom – for that alone, which no honest man surrenders but with his own life.”
In the dictator Santa Anna and his troops they saw “proud Edward’s army” invading their land. You can almost hear them sing in the evenings before the fight, with the piper MacGregor and the fiddler Autry:
Scots wha hae wi’ Wallace bled
Scots wham Bruce has aften led,
Welcome to your gory bed
Or to Victory!
Now’s the Day and now’s the Hour!
That hour had certainly come at Bannockburn . It came again right here at the Alamo some 500 years later, and it will come again and again. But as long as there are people around the world, ordinary imperfect people who were raised on the songs of Burns and the spirit of Arbroath, there will be people prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice, to do or die, in defense of Freedom, and Freedom will be in very good hands.
TEXAS EVENTS