From Historynewsnetwork.org
by Marc Wiseman
Mr. Wiseman is an assistant editor at HNN.
Quotations taken from:
Tartans and Bling: Thomas Sowell’s Tracing of Urban Black Culture to the Grady McWhiney’s 'Celtic Fringe'
“Thomas Sowell is an African-American economist, columnist and historian born in the South (North Carolina), raised and educated in the North (Harvard, Columbia and the University of Chicago) who admittedly found going back to the South painful and awkward. The recently deceased Grady McWhiney, on the other hand, was an influential and controversial historian of the South, both in residence and in specialty, who in his book Cracker Culture referred to the Civil War as the “War of Southern Independence,” and who was the former president of the League of the South, a neo-confederate organization that desires a ‘free and independent Southern republic… Sowell chooses to rely on McWhiney to argue that urban black culture developed from antebellum, southern white culture.”
“In Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South, McWhiney postulates that southern culture is in fact a derivative of the culture of the pre-Anglicized, Celtic-dominated regions of the British Isles, which he calls the “Celtic fringe.””
“The traits McWhiney uses are broad, inexact terms about Celts and southerners which have been rendered by hostile third parties: they are described as pleasure seeking, distrustful of education and institutions, proud to the point of being violent, sensual, and lazy.”
“Sowell builds upon McWhiney’s theory about the Celtic origin of southern culture and takes it a step further. He hypothesizes that the southern “crackers,” or as Sowell refers to them, “rednecks” (a term which McWhiney never uses), are the source of urban black culture.”
Alternate hypothesis: both authors may have conflicts of interest leading them to falsify the record.
What if the similarities both identify come from the Barbary Pirates, who could have had contact with all three cultural groups mentioned, i.e. the “Celtic fringe,” antebellum Southern whites, and Southern blacks?
There were Scotch captains in the Barbary pirates. Perhaps they were allies and cooperated with Scotch and other European pirates?
Perhaps pirates had started establishing bases in the less well settled portions of the Americas such as the Southern Colonies, perhaps even before the English or even Columbus. Perhaps they had even been secretly trading Ottoman captives to the Indians in exchange for gold. The Ottoman invasion of Europe did not progress very much farther after Europeans started confiscating the New World’s gold sources.
Some Western tribes had the belief that gold was useless and should be ignored and left in place because people would come and take it. Perhaps the Eastern Indians, strengthened by Barbary pirate trade and perhaps even leadership or leadership consultation, would try to enslave them to gather gold. They were bigger and stronger even before the alleged trade because it is easier to grow food in the East.
Some Southerners claim they had been there very much longer than the North. Perhaps they are simply referring to the fact that the South was sparsely settled until they started coming in the late 1700s, or perhaps they have an even older ancestral memory of their ancestors having been in the Southeast perhaps even before Columbus. They also claim they made friends with the Indians.
If so, there were probably only a few temporary trading outposts until the British navy started cracking down on Atlantic piracy in the 1710s. At that point, it is possible at least some former Atlantic pirates fled to the sparsely settled Southeast, later to pose as Scots and Irish immigrants.
However, they certainly weren’t the first; those were the people who built that fire in what is now Argentina 30,000 years ago.
Then came the Beringians 15,000 years or so ago. They and perhaps the previously mentioned group settled and populated the two continents.
Then came the Phoenecians. The Bimini Road is too young to have formed in situ and it is shaped like a Phoenecian dock. It may have been an earthen and timber causeway which mineralized where it stuck out of the water, then the rest of the fill washed away.
There was allegedly evidence of a Roman shipwreck with amphorae off Brazil, which was buried with tons of silt by the Brazilian government shortly before they banned offshore exploration. Perhaps it was fake, or perhaps there was still-potent opium in the amphorae.
Then there was Leif Erickson.
Then there was St. Brendan.
Then King Mansa Musa of Mali may have sent a fleet to the rumored New World, only to have it lost at sea.
Then the Ming Chinese, perhaps Zhong He, probably anchored off the coast of California at some point.
None of them were able to establish anything like a permanent presence or trade relations. There is almost no sign left of their presence.
Therein lies the first potential conflict of interest. If the people who started to settle the South and make friends with the natives were Barbary Pirates, or even European pirates, here to sell captives who had been purchased from the Ottomans, then perhaps they were the catalyst which made Europe decide they had no choice but to take the Americas to prevent them from becoming a pirate kingdom which supplied resources to an empire which was conquering Europe. The Ottomans were the Barbary Pirates’ allies. All this would put a far different spin on the stock Southern claim that they were there first and made friends with the natives before England took their land.
The educated Europeans of the 15th Century probably had an inkling unexplored lands lay to the West. There was probably less information sharing in those days so it could have been known by some without being public knowledge. Perhaps only the elites or some sort of sailing trade guilds knew. They may have had the belief that God protected the innocent natives, perhaps reinforced by the rumored disappearance of the Malian fleet. Perhaps disasters were known to have befallen whatever Chinese ship left those stone circular anchors off California, or to Leif Erickson, or any number of unknown explorers.
Then, perhaps it slowly became clear the Ottomans who were invading Europe were better funded than they should have been, and perhaps there were reports of Barbary Pirates sailing West a lot. Perhaps the Basque fishing the Grand Banks heard rumors that had traveled up the eastern seaboard that people from the East with great ships were bringing captives they’d trade for just a few pounds of that useless yellow metal.
Columbus may have been chosen or manipulated into breaking the news to all of Europe. His African pilot is said to have had some inkling of where he was going.
So, perhaps a portion of the South’s claim to its land stems from just a few pirates who were here a little bit before most European explorers, but who brought down a world of trouble upon the natives who they claim as friends.
Consider how many Southerners look more than a little like Muammar Qaddafi. The native on the buffalo nickel, Chief Tecumseh, and Chief Sequoyah look more than a little Middle Eastern. Perhaps when the navies of Europe cut off the pirates who had a foothold on Southeast N. America, some of them intermarried with the natives.
Perhaps the UK granted the newly formed USA the land of the colonies in the Treaty of Paris of 1783 in order to oblige the Americans to “protect” not only the Scots who had been displaced to the colonies by the clearances but pirates who had flocked to the New World to live, perhaps when the British Navy had cracked down on Atlantic piracy in the 1710s-1720s. Perhaps the intention in gifting the US the land had been to oblige the US to make sure the pirates refrained from roving the high seas.
Incidentally, the Yankee mentality probably would have been to leave them be as much as possible and focus on making money. Perhaps the nations of the world had to complain to the US to stop the piracy, and since the US continued to do little, perhaps the world led the South to believe they’d be supported in a bid for independence.
The other conflict of interest is the Barbary Pirates may have been involved in slave trading in sub-Saharan Africa and come here after the Civil War by posing as freedmen. Sowell himself looks vaguely North African as well as sub-Saharan African.
What did all these slave traders do when they lost their gig when slavery started getting banned everywhere in the 19th century, especially when the US passed the 13th Amendment and Brazil’s planters voluntarily ended slavery in 1868? The slave traders must have seen the writing on the wall because they probably followed global trends relevant to their business.
Besides losing their gig, they may have been viewed as outsiders in sub-Saharan Africa because part Berber. They may have had powerful enemies which they had acquired when they had been wealthy and powerful during the heyday of the transatlantic slave trade. They may have still had enough gold to pay Southern officials to look the other way, and the South certainly needed money after the Civil war. If they had been buying up convicts and so forth, for sale to the European slave forts on the African coast, they probably would have been jealous that their descendants were becoming free in a wealthy nation with room.
Where did the actual freedmen go? It’s more than a little possible some of the American slaves were sold for weapon money during the Civil war because there was a shortage of food to feed them and if the South lost the war, they would have to give them away for free. The cotton bond issue may have wrecked the Confederacy’s international credit.
Slaves were easier to run the blockade with than bales of cotton or hogsheads of tobacco because they could launch longboats from any part of the coast and row to Cuba without tall masts or coal smoke giving away their position.
It is at least a little possible that Northern profiteers trafficked some of the slaves out of the country in Northern-occupied places like New Orleans or Port Royal. Slaves would flee to those places.
After the war, General Field order #15 granted freedmen 40 acres…on the Georgia coast. Perhaps some of them were trafficked and had their identities stolen while they were still disorganized and uneducated.
Before the war even started, suppose some of the Underground Railroad was a front for importing paying migrants from the overcrowded British Caribbean or Africa itself. Jamaica and the Bahamas were already staffed but Britain exiled its emancipated slaves there anyway.
Last, there is a chance there was replacement of freedmen descendants by Africans during the Great Migration because when people move, they can wind up where nobody knows them. They could have waylaid migrants and stolen their identities.
