Taking Orders

 

One of the things I learned from Albion's Seed, the stunning work of history that I keep recommending but my children keep ignoring is that both of the southern cultures, the coastal Cavalier/Wessex/hierarchical group and the later Scots-Irish/Appalachian/radical independence groups draw a deep distinction between those who give orders and those who take them, which has had cultural ramifications down to the present day.  It is considered shameful in the south to be in a position where other people tell you what to do - dishonorable even if you are making a fortune or otherwise succeeding in some way. I was surprised but not shocked when it showed up in Hillbilly Elegy, that Vance's grandmother was just so outraged even thinking about him in the Marines in basic training, being ordered around and having to obey. Appalachia is a military-sympathetic culture, as in Sen James Webb's Born Fighting, which makes the credible claim that we owe all our victories in war to the Scots-Irish. We would not have won the Revolutionary War without them, certainly.  They were recent immigrants who came out of the hills to fight the English for any reason whatsoever, and often fought under the bonny blue flag of Scotland.

 

There were a few military units that fought under that flag in the Civil War as well, mostly from North Georgia. But the military in Appalachia was not the same as everywhere else. It was much more a system of voluntary attachment to a credible leader, similar to what one sees in Beowulf, than enlistment in the army itself.  Whole units would show up at recruiting stations even in WWI, and very occasionally all leave together whether their contracts were up or not.

 

In the coastal regions that had more slaveholding the poor whites who got out from under indenture moved to the rural areas to turn invisible rather than move to the towns to work for someone else. To have someone else tell you what to do was to be no better than a slave. Because the weather was warm and moist and the soil had not been exhausted they could get away with this, subsistence farming for generations. Up in the mountains it was less of an issue to be "no better than a slave," but still an issue to have anyone other than a thane you (and/or your clan) had chosen yourself be in charge of you. (The word "tanistry," for that societal organisation is related to the word "thane.")

 

In New England this was subtly but significantly different. People were allowed to be in charge of you, but the idea was that everyone could band together and pick new ones at any time. Someone was going to be in charge and that was necessary for the good operation of the group. But that someone was accountable. In the upland south sometimes no one was in charge of anything except on a very temporary basis.  You will notice that they are still dirt poor. In the lowland south people were in charge in a less meritocratic, more hereditary and hierarchical way, just like on the old estates in England, carrying on to the First Families of Virginia.

 

I still detect this all the time in modern political discussions.  I think it is very much part of the lower vaccination rates in the South, because there is a residual disdain for being one of those people who gets told what to do by others. It creeps into some commenter reasoning here, as well as some of the writers and commenters at Chicago Boyz and other sites."No one has the right to tell me what to do about anything" is not even a libertarian value here. It's an anarchist rather than libertarian POV. Eventually, everyone is upstream of someone in some physical or metaphorical way. In colonial Virginia and the coastal south there was the Dismal Swamp, or uplands that were less-desirable, and much of Appalachia was hollers and other subsistence nooks that a person actually could survive without having much to do with others. Kin networks were more powerful than town or other settlement patterns. That's the English Borderer and Scots Lowland pattern pattern of clan accountability rather than neighbor accountability. It has an urban/rural aspect as well. In cities, you can't have no one in charge. Someone is in charge, and if they are incompetent you have to find some way to work around them or get rid of them.  In rural areas, you can have no one in charge and at least get by. We have it in NH in some rural areas, especially Above The Notch. I recall that towns like Unity were still like that even a decade ago, according to the mental health outreach workers.  there were people who lived on no road, sometimes not even on their own land. But anything along the main roads is an organised township.  Perhaps there is something about town versus county being primary organisation of government. 

 

Of course, as in Frederick Law Olmsted's The Cotton Kingdom, this frequently means that the whole place remains impoverished, with no one going to school or building any businesses. It's interesting that this is still a default position when something new comes up, like a new vaccine or rules about distancing.