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THE LOST TRIBES OF THE IRISH IN THE SOUTH

An Address

by

IRVIN S. COBB

At the
Annual Dinner of the American Irish Historical
Society, Waldorf-Astoria Hotel,
January 6, 1917.

Office of Edward H. Daly, Secretary-General, 52 Wall Street.






New York
1917




THE LOST TRIBES OF THE IRISH IN THE SOUTH.


The after-dinner address of Mr. Irvin S. Cobb of Kentucky--so well
known throughout the length and breadth of the land as an American of
Americans and writer of vivid stories of American life, throbbing with
pathos, alive with infectious humor, keen observation and dramatic
force; as a war correspondent and picturer of the naked horrors of
war; as a lecturer and general publicist--will be hailed with interest
and pleasure everywhere. The American Irish Historical Society does
itself the honor of issuing the address in this form in advance of its
appearance in the Quarterly Review of the Society, that it may be more
widely known and the facts it sets forth more widely grasped. It treats
its subject--the Irish share in the early upbuilding of the Southern
States-in a masterly way, in direct line with the Society’s motto, “To
make better known the Irish chapter in American history.”

Editors are cordially invited to reproduce the address in whole or in
part.

                                              JOSEPH I. C. CLARKE,

                                               President-General,
                                      American-Irish Historical Society.

  NEW YORK, January, 1917.




MR. COBB’S ADDRESS.


MR. PRESIDENT, AND LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: I am speaking but the plain
truth when I tell you that I would rather be here to-night facing an
assemblage of men and women of Irish blood and Irish breeding than in
any other banquet hall on earth. For I am one who is Irish and didn’t
know it; but now that I do know it, I am prouder of that fact than of
any other thing on earth except that I am an American citizen.

I wonder if it ever occurred to you, what differences are to be found
in many a country and in almost any country, between the temperaments
and the spirits and the customs of those who live in the north of it
and those who live in the south of it? To the north, to Prussia, the
German Empire has always looked for its great scientists and its great
mathematicians and its propounders and expounders of a certain cool
and analytical philosophy; but it was to the south, to Bavaria and to
Saxony, that Germany had to turn for its poets and its story-tellers.

It was the north of France that produced and yet produces those men who
have harnessed the forces of nature, who have made the earth tremble
to the pulse-beat of their factories, who took the ore from the earth
and the coal from the hillsides, and with them wrought out the great
steel industries of that country; but it was out of the south of France
that there came its marvelous fiction writers and minstrel-bards, its
greatest poets and its greatest dreamers; and out of that same south
once upon a time there came, too, a fiery outpouring of shock-headed
men and women who wore wooden shoes on their feet and red caps on their
heads and who marched to the words of a song which has become the
fighting song of every nation, craving liberty and daring to march and
to die for it--the “Marseillaise Hymn.” (Applause.)

The names of the Poid Milanaise and the Lombards and the Venetians of
northern Italy are synonymous with frugality in domestic affairs and
energy in commercial pursuits, but it is down in the tip of the toe of
the Latin boot that we find the Italian who loves the hardest and sings
the loudest and fights for the very love of the fighting.

The north of Ireland, as we all know, has fathered the great business
men of that little island, and the great manufacturers and the great
theologians, many of them; and, regretful to say, it has also produced
a spawn of human beings who, in the face of the fact that in every
other land where men have equal opportunities, the Irishman has won his
way to the front and has held his own with prince and potentate, yet
cling to the theory that in Ireland, of all the spots of the world, the
Irishman is not capable of governing himself. But it was to the south
of Ireland, and it is to the south of Ireland to-day, that one must
turn to find the dreamer and the writer, the idealist and the poet. It
is to the south of Ireland also that one must turn to seek for a people
whose literature and whose traditions are saddened by the memory of the
wrongs they have withstood and the persecutions they have endured and
still endure, and yet whose spirits and whose characters are uplifted
and sanctified by that happy optimism which seems everywhere on this
footstool to be the heritage of the true southerner. (Applause.)

In a measure these same things are true of our own country. The north
excels in business, but the south leads in romance. The north opens
wide the door of opportunity to every man who comes to its borders
with willing hands and eager brain, and commands him to get busy. The
south opens a door, too, but it is the door of hospitality, and it bids
the stranger enter in, not so much for what he can give, but for what
he can take in the way of welcome. I think there is a reason, aside
from topography and geography and climate and environment, for these
differences between the common divisions of our great country. And I am
going to come to that reason in a minute.

As a boy, down south, there were two songs that stirred me as no other
songs could--one was a song that I loved and one a song that I hated,
and one of these songs was the battle hymn of the south, “Dixieland,”
and the other was “Marching Through Georgia.” But once upon a time when
I was half-grown, a wandering piper came to the town where I lived, a
man who spoke with a brogue and played with one. And he carried under
his arm a weird contraption which to me seemed to be a compound of two
fishing poles stuck in a hot-water bottle, and he snuggled it to his
breast and it squawked out its ecstasy, and then he played on it a tune
called “Garryowen.” And as he played it, I found that my toes tingled
inside my shoes, and my heart throbbed as I thought it could only throb
to the air of “Dixie.” And I took counsel with myself and I said, “Why
is it that I who call myself a pure Anglo-Saxon should be thrilled by
an Irish air?” So I set out to determine the reason for it. And this is
the kind of Anglo-Saxon I found out I was:

My mother was of the strain, the breed of Black Douglas of Scotland,
as Scotch as haggis, and rebels, all of them, descendants of men who
followed the fortunes of Bonnie Prince Charles, and her mother lived
in a county in North Carolina, one of five counties where up to 1820,
Gaelic was not only the language of the people in the street, but was
the official language of the courts. It was in that selfsame part of
North Carolina that there lived some of the men who, nearly a year
before our Declaration of Independence was drawn up, wrote and signed
the Mecklenburg Declaration, which was the first battle-cry raised for
American independence. On the other side, I found, by investigation,
that my father’s line ran back straight and unbroken to a thatched
cottage on the green side of a hill in the Wicklow Mountains, and his
people likewise had some kinsmen in Galway, and some in Dublin with
whom, following the quaint custom of their land, they were accustomed
to take tea and fight afterwards. (Applause and laughter.) I found I
had a collateral ancestor who was out with the pikes in the ’98 and he
was taken prisoner and tried for high crimes and misdemeanors against
the British Government, and was sentenced to be hanged by the neck
until he was dead and might God have mercy on his soul! And he was
hanged by the neck until he was dead, and I am sure God did have mercy
on his soul, for that soul of his went marching on, transmitting to
his people, of whom I am proud to be one, the desire to rebel against
oppression and tyranny. (Applause.) I had three great grandfathers, two
of them Irish and one of them Scotch, who were Revolutionary soldiers,
and I had a father who was a Confederate soldier. And of these facts,
too, I am quite proud, for I find that my strain, being Irish, is
always intent either on trying to run the government or trying to pull
it down.

You Irish-descended people of the Northern States are proud of Shields,
the son of an Irish emigrant, who, if my memory serves me aright,
helped to direct the destinies of three American commonwealths and was
United States Senator from all three. But I like to think of another
Irishman, Matthew Lyon by name, the son of an humble Wicklow peasant,
who was sold as a slave to the New England plantations because he, an
Episcopalian, dared to raise his voice and his arm in defense of the
rights of his Catholic neighbors and kinsmen in the County of Wicklow;
and he bought his freedom with a black bull, which, according to family
tradition, he first stole, and he became a United States Senator from
Vermont, and cast the vote, against the wishes of his constituents,
which made Thomas Jefferson President of this country over Aaron Burr
and by so doing altered the entire course of our country’s history;
and while he was in jail in a town in Vermont for his attacks on the
odious alien and sedition laws, he issued a challenge for a duel to the
President of the United States, and being released, he moved down to
Kentucky and became a Congressman; and later, having quarreled with all
his neighbors there, he moved on to Arkansas and was named as Arkansas’
first territorial delegate to Washington, and he might have moved still
further west and might have filled still more offices had he not in the
fullness of his maturity, when he was seventy years young, been thrown
from a mule and had his neck broken. I like to think of Matthew Lyon
and his career because he, also, was an ancestor of mine. (Applause and
laughter.)

Well, as I said a bit ago, I set out to trace my Irish ancestry. In
that undertaking I found a ready helper in a distant kinsman who was
not carried away by the fetish that the south was all Anglo-Saxon,
whatever that is; and he worked me early and late on family records.
Indeed, he worked me so hard that sometimes I think I might have
likened my position to that of a colored brother in a little town in
my state who was the only member of his race at the local election who
voted the Democratic ticket. It was felt that such loyalty should be
rewarded, so the incoming administration created a Department of Street
Cleaning--an institution hitherto unknown in that community--to consist
of a boss or foreman, and a staff. Quite naturally the job of foreman
went to a white man, but upon the worthy colored person was conferred
the honor of being the Staff. Now, he held to the theory, common even
among those of the more enlightened races, that a political office
meant much honor and much pay but mighty little work. Nevertheless,
as a matter of form he carried a shovel with him on the morning when
he reported for service. But the white man who was to serve over
him had very different ideas regarding the obligation owing to the
municipality. No sooner had the darkey cleaned up one pile of debris
than the foreman would find another and yet another for him to wrestle
with. It was four o’clock in the afternoon before the darkey so much as
straightened his back or wiped the sweat off his brow or blew on the
new-formed blisters in the palms of his hands. Finally he said: “Boss,
ain’t you got nuthin’ to do but jes’ to think up things fur me to do?”

“Yes,” the white man said; “that’s all my job--just to keep you busy.”

The darky said: “Well, suh, in that case you will be pleased to know
you ain’t goin’ to be workin’ to-morrow.” (Laughter.)

But I kept on working and I discovered a lot of things about the lost
tribes of the Irish in the south. The State of Kentucky from which I
hail has been called the cradle of the Anglo-Saxon race in America,
and it has been said that the mountaineers of that state, with their
feuds and their Elizabethan, Chaucerian methods of speech represent the
purest strains of English blood to be found to-day on this continent.
Now, then, let us see if that is true. I have looked into that matter
and I tell you that fifty per cent, at least, of the dwellers of the
mountains of the South and notably of Kentucky and Virginia are the
lineal descendants of runaway indenture men, Irish rebels mainly, from
the Virginia plantations. I know a mountain county in Kentucky of which
half of the population bear one of three names. They are either Mayos,
or Patricks, or Powers. And I once heard an orator stand up before an
audience of those Mayos and Powers and Patricks and congratulate them
on their pure English descent, and they believed it! (Laughter.)

I wish you would pardon me once more for referring to my line of
ancestry, for it is testimony to prove my claim. On my father’s
side I am descended from a group of men who went from New England
to Kentucky and the names of these men were Lyon and Cobb, which
is a Danish corruption of O’Connor, and Machen, and Clendenin, and
O’Hara, and Glenn, which is a corruption of Glynn. What a hot bunch of
Anglo-Saxons! (Laughter.)

The Congressional District in which I was born and where I used
to live has thirteen counties in it. Listen to the names of these
thirteen counties: Marshall, Calloway, Graves, McCracken, Lyon,
Livingston, Caldwell, Trigg, Crittenden, Ballard, Hickman, Fulton,
Carlise--thirteen counties and all but two of them have Irish names.

What is true of my own section of Kentucky is true of the rest of
the States. Daniel Boone has been called the first explorer of
Kentucky and it has been said he was of English descent. Both of
those statements are wrong. Daniel Boone was not the first explorer
of Kentucky. The first man to explore Kentucky was an Irishman by the
name of John Finley. But before him was still another Irishman by
the name of McBride--James McBride. He lingers in state history as a
shadowy figure, but I like to think of him as a red-haired chap with
a rifle in one hand and possibly a demijohn in the other, coming out
through the trackless wilderness alone and landing from his canoe on
what was afterwards to be known as the Dark and Bloody ground. Aside
from his name, it is proven that he was an Irishman by the legendary
circumstances that immediately after coming ashore he carved his name
in deep and enduring letters in the bark of the largest beech tree of
the forest, and claimed all of the land that lay within his vision as
his own, and shot an Indian or two and went on his way rejoicing. As
for Daniel Boone, the great pathfinder, he really was descended from
the line of Buhun, which is Norman-Irish, and his mother was a Morgan,
and his wife was a Bryan, and his father was an Irish Catholic.

The records show that nearly three-fourths of that dauntless little
band who under the leadership of George Rogers Clark, an Irishman,
waded through the floods to take Vincennes and thereby won all the
great northwest territory away from the British and gave to the
American colonies what to-day is the richest part of the United
States, where Irishmen--not Scotch-Irish, nor English-Irish, but plain
Irish-Irish men who were rebels and patriots by instinct and born
adventurers by reason of the blood which ran in their veins.

The first settlement of English-speaking Catholics beyond the Allegheny
Mountains was not located in the north but in the south, and in my own
State of Kentucky at that. It endures to-day, after having given to
this country one of its greatest and most scholarly churchmen, Bishop
Spaulding. (Applause.) The children of the pioneers of Kentucky, almost
without exception, learned their first lessons in log cabins under the
teachings of that strange but gifted race of men, the wandering Irish
schoolmasters, who founded the old field schools of the South and to
whom the South is largely indebted for the seeds of its culture.

Irishmen from Kentucky, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Maryland bore the
brunt of the western campaigns in 1812 against the British. Irishmen
from Kentucky fell thick at the disastrous battles of the Thames,
and the Raison, and their Irish bones to-day rest in that ground
sanctifying it and making of it an American shrine of patriotism.
It was the hand of a Kentucky Irishman, Colonel Richard Johnson,
afterwards Vice-President of the United States, that slew the great
Tecumseh. A good share of the Kentucky and Tennessee riflemen who
at New Orleans stood behind Andy Jackson’s cotton bale breastworks,
mowing down Packenham’s Peninsular Veterans and making their red coats
redder still with the life blood of those invaders, were Irishmen, real
Irishmen. They proved their Irish lineage by the fact that they fell
out and quarreled with Old Hickory, because he denied them all the
credit for winning the fight, and he quarreled back, for he was by way
of being an Irishman himself. (Laughter and applause.)

It was a Kentucky Irishman, Dr. Ephraim McDowell, who performed the
first operation for ovariotomy--performed it on a kitchen table with
a mad husband standing over him with a drawn revolver, threatening to
shoot him if his wife died under the knife. But he went ahead and it
was a successful operation, and it has brought relief and life and
sanity to millions of women all over the world. It was a Kentucky
Irishman and a soldier, Theodore O’Hara, who penned perhaps the most
beautiful lyric poem, and certainly the sweetest tribute to the brave
in our language, the immortal “Bivouac of the Dead.” It was another
Kentucky Irishman, the saintly poet-priest, Father Ryan, whose hand
wrote those two fondest poems in memory of the Lost Cause, “The
Conquered Banner” and “The Sword of Robert E. Lee.”

In the Civil War it was a Kentuckian of Scotch and Irish descent who
led the North--Abraham Lincoln--and it was another Kentuckian of
mingled Irish and Scotch blood--Jefferson Davis--who was President of
the Confederacy.

The historian Collins said the five greatest lawyers Kentucky ever
produced were Barry, Rowan, Haggin, Breckenridge, and Bledsoe--four
Irish names and one Indian name--and yet these five have been called
Anglo-Saxons, too.

What is true of Kentucky is to a greater or less degree true of the
rest of the South. It was an Irish Virginian, Patrick Henry, who
sounded the first keynote of the American Revolution, and who at the
risk of his life, by his words paved the way for the Declaration of
Independence. The South Carolina Irishman, John C. Calhoun, first
raised the slogan of Nullification, and it was another Irishman, Andrew
Jackson of Tennessee, who swore by the Eternal to hang him higher than
Haman if he carried out his plan.

To-night you have heard a tribute, and a deserved one, to little
Phil Sheridan of the North, but I want to couple his name with that
of a Southern Irishman, the son of an Irish refugee, Pat Cleburne of
Arkansas, one of the most gallant leaders that the Civil War produced.
(Applause.) Pat Cleburne died on one of the bloodiest battlefields
of Christendom in his stocking feet because as he rode into battle
that morning he saw one of his Irish boys from Little Rock tramping
barefooted over the frozen furrows of a wintry cornfield and leaving
tracks of blood behind him. So he drew off his boots and bade the
soldier put them on, and fifteen minutes later he went to his God in
his stocking feet. Raleigh laid down his coat before Good Queen
Bess, and has been immortalized for his chivalry, but I think a more
courtly deed was that of the gallant Irishman, Pat Cleburne. For one
was kowtowing before royalty and the other had in his heart only
thoughtfulness and humanity for the common man afoot.

Sam Houston, the first President of the Lone Star State, was a
Tennessee Irishman. Irish through and through, and the present
President of the United States, a Southerner also, is half Irish.
One of the most distinguished members of the Supreme Court in recent
years was a Kentucky Irishman, John M. Harlan, and to-day two of the
men who sit on that tribunal are Irishmen--White of Louisiana, the
distinguished and honored Chief Justice, and McReynolds of Tennessee.

(Voice) How about McKenna?

MR. COBB: He is not a Southerner, I regret to say. I suppose I could go
on for hours, if your patience held out--and my throat--telling of the
achievements of Irishmen, and of the imperishable records that Irishmen
have left on the history of that part of the Union from which I came,
but to call the roll of the great men who have done great things and
won achievement and fame south of Mason’s and Dixon’s line since there
was such a line, would be almost like running through the parish
registers of the counties of Ireland, both north and south. Indeed, in
my opinion, it is not altogether topography or geography or climate
that has made the South what it is, and given it those distinguishing
characteristics which adorn it. The soft speech of the Southerner; his
warm heart, and his hot head, his readiness to begin a fight, and to
forgive his opponent afterwards; his veneration for women’s chastity
and his love for the ideals of his native land--all these are heritages
of his Irish ancestry, transmitted to him through two generations. The
North has put her heroes on a pension, but the South has put hers on a
pedestal. There is not a Southern hamlet of any size to-day that has
not reared a bronze or marble or granite monument to its own defenders
in the Civil War, and there is scarce a Southern home where at the
knees of the mother the children are not taught to revere the memories
and remember the deeds of Lee and Jackson and Forrest, the Tennessee
Irishman, and Morgan, the Kentucky Irishman, and Washington, and
Light Horse Harry Lee, and Francis Marion, the Irish Swamp Fox of the
Carolinas. I believe as firmly as I believe anything on earth that for
that veneration, for that love of heroism and for that joying in the
ideals of its soil, the South is indebted mainly to the Irish blood
that courses through the veins of its sons and of its daughters.

No, ladies and gentlemen, the lost Irish tribes of the South are not
lost; they are not lost any more than the “wild geese” that flew across
the Channel from Ireland were lost. They are not lost any more than
the McMahons who went to France, or the O’Donnells who went to Spain,
or the Simon Bolivars and the O’Higgins who went to South America,
or the O’Farrells and the O’Briens who went to Cuba. For their Irish
blood is of the strain that cannot be extinguished and it lives to-day,
thank God, in the attributes and the habits and the customs and the
traditions of the Southern people. Most of all it lives in one of their
common characteristics, which, I think, in conclusion, may possibly be
best suggested by the telling of a story that I heard some time ago,
of an Irishman in Mobile. As the story goes, this Irishman on Sunday
heard a clergyman preach on the Judgment Day. The priest told of the
hour when the trumpet shall blow and all peoples of all climes and all
ages shall be gathered before the Seat of God to be judged according
to their deeds done in the flesh. After the sermon he sought out the
pastor and he said, “Father, I want to ask you a few questions touching
on what you preached about to-day. Do you really think that on the
Judgment Day everybody will be there?”

The priest said: “That is my understanding.”

“Will Cain and Abel be there?”

“Undoubtedly.”

“And David and Goliath--will they both be there?”

“That is my information and belief.”

“And Brian Boru and Oliver Cromwell will be there?”

“Assuredly they will be present.”

“And the A. O. H.’s and A. P. A.’s?”

“I am quite positive they will all be there together.”

“Father,” said the parishioner, “there’ll be damn little judgin’ done
the first day!”

(Applause and laughter.)




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Transcriber’s note:

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.