A Personal Story of Why I See Immigrants As Patriots

In May of 1775 as a set of my 4th and 5th great grandparents set sail for America from Belfast on a 350-ton brig named The Pennsylvania Farmer, they already knew what civil war was like.

But they probably hadn’t heard yet about the clash less than two weeks earlier on Lexington Green between colonial militiamen and British Army regulars.

Nor were they aware that the makings of the revolution and even after, in places such as North Carolina where they planned to settle was already more like a civil war.

Four years earlier, in the Battle of Alamance, North Carolinians fighting as colonial militia on behalf of the Royal Governor defeated North Carolinian rebels known as Regulators.

The ship my ancestors were on had meant to dock in Charleston, South Carolina.

But cross-Atlantic voyages at the time, even aboard a ship as fast and maneuverable as a two-masted brig were often blown off course and forced to land at other ports.

So on July 1, 1775 The Pennsylvania Farmer (similar to the brig shown in the image in this essay) dropped my ancestors off in Baltimore instead.

Soon Thomas and Hannah McCrory along with my 17-year-old 4th great grandfather James plus some other relatives began trekking down the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia on the Great Wagon Road.

They were at the tail end of the Great Migration of 200,000 Scots-Irish who immigrated here between 1717 and 1775, most settling inland along the Appalachians and western Piedmont.

They were Presbyterians of differing factions whose lowland Scottish ancestors had been transplanted to Northern Ireland by the British.  Even in religious, they understood civil war.

It is from their folk music, by the way, that country music spawned.

Initially it was successive droughts in Northern Ireland that drove them to leave.  My ancestors, though, were weavers who also left because the linen market had collapsed and British estates had cancelled the land they leased.

Shortly after passing through the relatively new Moravian settlement of Salem, North Carolina (part of present-day Winston-Salem,) they planned to cut south on the Georgia Road to their final destination Waxhaw, North Carolina.

It was an area just south of the village of Charlotte where the month after their departure from Belfast, the defiant Mecklenburg Resolves had been signed as one of the earliest declarations of Independence.

But it may have been at Salem, that one of my 4th great grandfathers, James McCrory, decided to settle 28 miles east instead at a new crossroads that had sprung up around the Guilford Courthouse the year before, while Thomas and Hannah continued a hundred miles further south to Waxhaw.

After less than a year as Americans, Thomas enlisted as a captain overseeing a company of troops in the 9th North Carolina Regiment of the Continental Army commanded by Col. John P. Williams.

James also enlisted first under his father and then seemingly transferred to another company in the same regiment under Captain Ramsey.

Ironically, this is also when North Carolina purchased their old ship The Pennsylvania Farmer in New Bern and began to arm her as the centerpiece of the colony-soon-to-be-state’s Navy.

The regiment soon marched north to join General Washington in Middlebrook, NJ.  They soon engaged the British Army in battles at Brandywine and Germantown where my 5th great grandfather was apparently mortally wounded in action.

His body must have been taken home to Waxhaw because he is buried near there on Mint Hill.

James eventually served in nearly every major battle in the Southern campaign including at Guildford Courthouse before marrying after the war and heading over the mountains in 1783 into Tennessee and eventually down along the Tombigbee River.

But why leave North Carolina?  After Generals Greene and Cornwallis left the state, the nearly seven year Revolutionary War soon concluded in victory of Americans.

But in North Carolina, the vacuum meant the civil war continued to rage on between loosely organized gangs of armed men terrorized Tar Heels while presenting themselves as either revolutionaries or loyalists.

Totally undisciplined, according to the late Dr. William S. Powell in his book entitled, North Carolina Through Four Centuries, they were more like “robbers.”

These partisan gangs “burned houses, murdered men, and attacked women indiscriminately,” terrorizing large areas of the state while taking hundreds of prisoners hostage.

Normalcy wouldn’t come to North Carolina for nearly a decade.

Powell reminds us that during this period there were almost 350,000 people living here, a quarter in bondage with no hope of freedom and a third of those who were white still loyal to Great Britain.

Even after the war, only 40% of Tar Heels were un-ambivalent about Independence.  A faction known as “conservatives” wanted a return to prewar ideals and conditions including renewal of trade with England.

Back then they even wanted to “tap the breaks” on Independence.  Another known as “radicals” or “rioters” wanted even more change.

Sound familiar?  I obviously come from a long line of moderates.  But during that time Tennessee was part of North Carolina which had been granting land their to soldiers and their families.

My McCrory ancestors were close to the family of later US President Andrew Jackson both because they lived in the same Waxhaw district but also because Jackson’s brother married a Crawford relative of James’ mother Hannah.’'

Judging by the year, Jackson, my 4th great grandparents James and Jane McCrory along with his brother Thomas, Jackson’s friend, all migrated to Tennessee together in 1783, during this period of anarchy.

But life there was anything but peaceful.

While living on land along Cripple Creek, James was fired on by Indians just north of the Cumberland River in 1792.

By 1811 when my 3rd great grandmother Sarah Ann McCrory was born, her parents had purchased land down in the recently opened Mississippi Territory, along the Tombigbee near the western border of what five years later would become Alabama.

It was a still a tense time for the young family.  A civil war soon broke out within the Creek Nation of Native Americans due to a hostile faction known as the “Red Sticks” because of of the red war clubs they used.

It soon spilled over with the massacre of settlers.  In addition, there was the threat of invasion by the British via New Orleans as war broke out again in 1812.

This in turn drew General Andrew Jackson’s troops down from Tennessee in defense, along his friend my 4th great grandfather’s brother, Col. Thomas McCrory, who had built a two story cabin in 1790 along what is now Old Hickory Blvd. in Forest Hills, Tennessee.

The cabin is now on the National Register of History Places.

When the old solider, James McCrory finally died in his 80s, my great-great-grandmother Sarah Ann headed to Illinois and then across Iowa with her family hoping to make it into my native Rockies.

She died in route, just south of Des Moines, in the harsh winter of 1847 but it is in part from her daughter Amanda, who was five at the time, that I draw my 5th generation Idaho roots.

McCrorys were late comers compared to all but a couple of lines of ancestors who immigrated to America in the 1850s and 60s.  Most had been here since the 1600s.

But uncovering their story and placing it in context makes me even more proud to be an American.

Lakeside Context

If it clears due diligence, I may be writing some of these essays at a retreat on Mayo Lake which, as I will describe, is very unique.

By the way, being drawn to lakeside getaways, like being a morning person, is probably one of those contexts that researchers have found to be predictors of relationship longevity.

Even if you didn’t grow up along lakes, as each of us did, like being a morning person or a night owl, it is just something in your nature.

Mayo Lake lies 35 miles and change north of our house in Durham.  The most scenic route, for me, will often be astride the Harley Crossbones up and over Mt. Tirza.

That will add a couple of miles to the route but will be well worth it after cutting up Moores Mill Road from Quail Roost in Durham.

Mt. Tirza is the location and namesake of a church where good friends of mine, Eddie and Nita Hill, were first posted after he graduated from Duke Divinity.

Nita helped us jumpstart Durham’s community destination marketing organization 26 years ago.

But the crossroads there predates the church by three or four decades, when it was established by a Revolutionary War veteran, Lt. Colonel Stephen Moore, in 1777 and 1778, two years before he famously led the Caswell County Regiment at the Battle of Camden in a losing cause.

The rest of Moore’s family had sided with the British so after the war he inherited the family’s estate at West Point overlooking the Hudson in New York, which he negotiated to sell to the newly created U.S. government beginning in the late 1780s for use as a military academy.

The Battle of Camden has significance to me because along with Moore, my fourth great grandfather, James McCrory, was captured there after seeing earlier combat at Brandywine and Germantown and serving a stint in General Washington’s select guard.

At Camden, he and Moore along with 1,000 other American soldiers were captured during the battle.  Moore was imprisoned on a prison ship in Charleston Bay while my fourth great grandfather was imprisoned on a ship near Wilmington.

Moore was held until a prisoner exchange in late summer 1781, but after only four months as a POW, my great (x4) grandfather was earlier released in only his underwear and without shoes upon taking a vow that he would never again take up arms against the British Crown.

Moore returned to a noncombatant commission in Hillsborough, a 20 mile ride from his home on Mt. Tirza and retook his seat in the North Carolina legislature there, then the capital.

But instead, just four months after his release, my fourth great grandfather McCrory rejoined the war in combat at the Battle of Cowpens where his British captor Tarleton was thoroughly routed, marking a turning point in the war.

A few months later he was fighting in the Battle of Guilford Courthouse, a place to which he had immigrated from Northern Ireland just as the Revolutionary War began.

The British Army retreated to the Virginia coast and seven months later surrendered to American General Washington bringing the Revolutionary War to an end.

While Moore was settled back on Mt. Tirza, my fourth great grandparents McCrory headed up and over the Appalachians, eventually settling on the frontier along the Tombigbee River southwest of Tuscaloosa.

The old soldier lived until 1840 at which time his daughter and son-in-law, whose grandparents had migrated from North to South Carolina before ending up on the Tombigbee, headed into the Rockies.

James McCrory’s great grandaughter, my great grandmother was claimed by the Great Influenza Epidemic in 1919 while visiting the ancestral Idaho ranch where I would be born three decades later and spend my early years.

It is from her parents and two other lines of ancestors that I derive my 5th generation Idaho roots.

Moore, who had been in the lumber trade in Canada before the war, was proud that his home on Mt. Tirza was “where the ax had never been laid to a tree.”

He would be greatly dismayed today by clear-cut timbering now laying waste along Mt. Tirza’s northern slopes not far from his home.  It is a lazy way to timber, fueled by technology, compared to the equally lucrative but more sustainably way of selective cutting.

Moore had a grist mill on the Flat River, just over what would become the Durham County line, thus the name Moores Mill Road, which I will take past Hill Forest and Mt. Tirza.

He died in 1799 while visiting friends in Durham at Stagville Plantation, now a state historic site, and is buried up on Mt. Tirza in a family cemetery along the route to Mayo Lake that bears his name.

Like the lakes that dot northern Durham - two to provide the city’s water and one to provide for Raleigh’s further to the south and east -Mayo is a reservoir, but not just for drinking.

It has 85 miles of shoreline that encompass its 2,800 acres lined with homes on the southern half that are very secluded compared to other lakes.

The shoreline while accessible for boating and swimming has been uniquely set aside as a wildlife habitat dating back to the late 1970s when Mayo Lake was created to cool a steam power plant on the far northern end near the Virginia border.

It finished filling in the 1980s, a few years before I arrived in Durham.

Mayo, both the lake and the stream that was dammed to create it, are named for Major William Mayo, an Englishman who immigrated first to Barbados in the early 1700s and then Virginia.

He led the survey teams that mapped the gaps in the Blue Ridge Mountains through which my Messersmith ancestors traveled soon after immigrating to settle along a creek feeding the South Fork of the Holston River.

It is where the southern and northern tips of the Jefferson and Cherokee national forests, respectively, nearly touch today.

In 1728, Mayo also led one of the teams jointly surveying along each side to map the border between Virginia and North Carolina, guided, in part, through the area north of what is now Mayo Lake.

It was a prequel to officially dividing North and South Carolina the following year.  Mayo was guided by Native Americans in that area known as the Sappony (aka Sapponi) who had migrated down from the foothills to avoid Iroquoian raiders.

Sappony is derived from Monasusapanough, one of three villages they inhabited.

They were thought to be eastern Siouan cousins to the Eno and Shoccoree in what is now Durham and the nearby Occaneechi who had also migrated down from Virginia.

All of these tribes traded with the Catawba nation down the “Great Trading Path” remnants of which can still be seen where it cut diagonally across northern Durham near Stagville.

It is actually a spine or mainline for a network of countless other tributary trading paths along its route.  It was created first by buffalo, then by Indians following game, then for trade.  Then came pack horses and settlers, followed by wagons.

Signaling the road building savvy of buffalo, today, it is roughly the route of Interstate 85.

However, it appears the Sappony didn’t really migrate permanently across into North Carolina around Mayo Lake until after the Revolutionary War, in which they had fought on behalf of the colonists against the British Crown.

Their slow migration down into North Carolina had begun after the 1676 Bacon’s Rebellion.

At the time, only coastal counties in Virginia had been organized along with only a handful in the very northeast corner of North Carolina, including Bath near where my eighth great grandmother had been born twenty-six years before.

Yes, my Tar Heel bonafides stretch back to when there were fewer than 1,000 settlers in all of what became North Carolina, long before there were counties.

But a line of my ancestors, the Sheltons, had already moved into the interior along the border northwest of what is now Mayo Lake.

The migration of the Sappony had hastened by 1746: nine years after Mayo had laid out the city of Richmond and two years after his death, when Lunenburg County was created along the Virginia side.

At the time Granville spanned along the North Carolina side.

Their flow had quickened even more by 1752, when Halifax was carved from Lunenburg in Virginia across from Mayo Lake, while Orange County spanned North Carolina side by then.

At the time, there were fewer than 53,000 white settlers in all of North Carolina and another 19,000 enslaved African Americans.

In 1761, my fifth great grandmother Miller was born in Orange County before relocating with her family to a point in South Carolina along the Old Trading Path.

It was her grandson, my third great grandfather Graham who had later married a McCrory on the Tombigbee before heading westward to the Rockies.

The crossover by the Sappony into North Carolina had begun in earnest six years later just as western Halifax in Virginia was divided to create Pittsylvania.

It had become a steady stream by 1776 when my ancestors, the Shelton’s, petitioned to carve off Henry County further west along the border of Pittsylvania.

The next year Caswell County was carved from Orange on the North Carolina side which is why Lt. Col. Moore led a regiment from that county.

Person County, where both Mayo Lake and Mt. Tirza are located today wasn’t carved from Caswell until 1791; the year after Moore had sold West Point to the government.

It was five years later that the town of South Boston, Virginia was created in Halifax County just across the border from Mayo Lake. 

As with other nations of Native Americans across the country, we didn’t keep our agreements with the Sappony regarding land.

By the time Mayo Lake was created, the bottom land for the reservoir, which averages 30 feet in depth as well as the surrounding embankments were purchased from subsequent settlers.

There will be a lot to contemplate from lakeside and a lot to learn, but all of this is to say that it will seem like coming home.

The Revolution Behind Our Revolution

Ideologies evolve.  In a documentary aired a few months ago, a North Carolina conservative spokesman dismissed the participants in Moral Mondays by claiming comparisons with the civil rights movement were laughable.

More sincerely and without revealing any sense of irony, he questioned “those who equate it with the 60s and 50s and some of the great struggles in history,” movements that were opposed by conservatives at the time.

To an Independent like me, it seems ideologies on the right or left tend to make progress in a circular, two steps forward and one step back but usually moving forward.

Two books that I read in 1991 and 1992, shortly after moving to Durham, seem even more relevant today.  One was entitled The United States of Ambition: Politicians, Power, and the Pursuit of Office by journalist Alan Ehrenhalt.

It traced a number of localities as case studies where a relatively few members of an ideology - both on the right and left – were out of step with the general local electorate at the time, but still able to assume power and execute change.

His latest book, The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City, is a particularly good read in light of recent efforts in the North General Assembly to override this progress, including a new effort this week by a powerful state senator to strip away tree ordinances.

The other book I read in the early 1990s is entitled, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, by Dr. Gordon S. Brown.

Packed with citations and statistics, the book makes the argument that what we view as the American Revolution in the narrow sense was really the culmination of more than two decades of social and cultural disruption here.

In fact, the war was in opposition to a conservative effort to turn back those changes.  Following Independence, the founders made a concerted effort to evolve a new, more modern set of social and cultural adhesives to hold the new society together.

Conservative resistance to social and cultural change may go back at least to two thousand BC and the requirement for people to have last names, something more broadly but gradually implemented in the English-speaking world after the Norman invasion of William The Conqueror.

But this was nothing like the reaction to the wholesale changes in the American colonies leading up to the Revolution.  There was a breakdown in vertical social strata among classes.  Wealth was no longer viewed as trickle down.

Land ownership and working for a living became the standard across classes along with rampant land speculation.  The patriarchal family devolved including introduction of divorce laws and inheritance changes.  Hundreds of evangelical religions surfaced.

The population, which doubled in 25 years (six-fold in North Carolina,) included hundreds of thousands of immigrants.  Manners gave way to defiance of authority.  People no longer stayed in place and transience and poverty increased.  No longer did “everyone belong somewhere.”

People began to run for office regardless of their station in life and voting increased.  Entrepreneurism took hold and people began to produce surplus for trade rather than subsistence.  Contracts replaced handshakes.

Gone was the notion held by social conservatives that “only poverty and starvation would induce common people to work.” Hierarchal structure was eaten away or transformed by classical style republicanism which became used as a pejorative much as the label “liberal” has been made today.

In general, there was a radical, two-decade long, counter-cultural desacralization in America that makes the 1960s seem very tame by comparison.

Conservatives responded back then by desperately trying to make it hard to move, harder to vote and run for office and advocating a general return to cultural norms.

This was the period from around 1750 until 1775, a time of great anxiety and change like none other witnessed before or since in such a concentrated span.

As a society we seem to work best when those reluctant about change serve as a soft brake on the pace of change rather than a dogmatic regression.  The genius of the American Revolution set the stage for eventual emancipation and the full extension of equal rights.

The founders did not limit their development of social and cultural adhesives to just government institutions.  They set about through promotion of a liberal arts education to socially re-engineer America, including using utensils to eat, brushing your teeth and not talking loudly in public to name a few.

By the second decade of the 1800s, Americans were “already referring to themselves as a society dominated by the ‘middling” sort’, a term for the middle class.

But the founders were never able to resolve an issue that raised its head almost immediately and still plagues democracy today.  They were unable to protect government for the common good from self-interests which has become overwhelming since the bicentennial of the Revolution in the mid-1970s.

Those who profiteered during the Revolutionary War pushed to see that continued, overwhelming the wishes by the founders to focus government on the collective, common good.

It is painful to read Brown’s account of the debate over special interest group politics, especially in light of its predominance today.  In the lament of President George Washington:

“the few, therefore, who act upon Principles of disinterestedness are comparatively speaking, no more than a drop in the Ocean.”

Today, we’re still locked into what The Economist magazine’s Lexington Blog calls “zero sum politics” where we hear and believe only the worst each political party says about the other:

“the Right has done a fine job of convincing lots of Americans that Democrats are the party for the undeserving poor…The Left, meanwhile, has successfully portrayed Republicans as the party for the heartless rich.”

As an Independent, I just want to rid government of self-interests.  Period.

The Same Ole’ Enemy – 239 Years Later

Taking a long-view of economic history is another way to pinpoint the fact that climate change is a direct result of human activity.

Years before it would be confirmed by Berkley Earth by scientists who were skeptical about climate change but who found the link after going over data from the last 250 years, one could see the link pinpointed in the work of economic historians such as the late Dr. Angus Maddison in his book entitled Contours of The World Economy 1-2030 AD.

Berkley Earth reconstructed climate data to make their link, while Maddison reconstructed economic growth over three millenniums to find a pattern.  He learned that between the years 1 and 1000 AD, around the time that another era of climate change spawned Viking conquests, people had actually become slightly poorer overall.

Between 1000 AD and 1820, economic growth was stagnant even in western Europe and spinoffs such as the American colonies and fledgling United States of America.  The surge following 1820 was brought about as the industrial revolution kicked into ever higher gears.

Ironically, the seminal Boston Tea Party protest was not over unfair taxes but a revolt against a tax loop-hole created by the British for a “too-big-to-fail” corporation at the disadvantage of small independent merchants, some of them smugglers, as noted in this excellent TED Presentation  published on “Black Friday” by Stacy Mitchell, a senior researcher for the Institute for Local Reliance.

I agree with Republican lawmakers that there is something wrong with government but, in my opinion, size isn’t the real issue.  Making government more nimble and responsive seems much more important. Nor do I buy the part of their tightly-woven narrative that this group’s frequent stalemating is on behalf of small businesses.

I am far more persuaded that the policies that have marginalized the middle class over the last thirty years and eroded small business by consolidating almost every part of the economy into the control of a few top-heavy players has been engineered not by government or the free market but by those on whose behalf lobbyists have rigged the system.

Even the process of devising regulations has been polluted by special interests; and those who argue that regulations should be simplified are far too often only fronting for interests, such as outdoor billboard companies, eager to see these regulations further rigged to their exclusive benefit.

“Rent-seeking,” the term economists give this loathsome activity probably dates back to the 1879 book Progress and Poverty, written by economist Henry George in the early years of the Gilded Age.  George observed that poverty occurred back then when policies permitted absurd “economic rents” to be charged by monopolists including landowners resulting in an over-concentration of unearned wealth.

George proposed solutions he believed would benefit both capitalism and labor while curbing these rent-seekers.  Seven years after the book was published, George sought the office of mayor of New York City but finished behind a Tammany Hall candidate.

However, the coalition forged by George caught the attention of the third place finisher, Republican candidate Theodore Roosevelt.

Henry George had forged a coalition of groups that in a few years would become nationwide force known as the Progressive Era, which sought, in part, to curb the excesses of the Guided Age.  A variation would elect President Theodore Roosevelt and inspire the Square Deal including conservation and anti-trust.

It isn’t easy being a Republican right now.  A social network feedback-loop has the party torn between a “circle the wagons” approach and a desire to open up to alternatives.  A new poll for ABC, Washington Post and the Pew Center shows that by 53% to 27% Americans will blame Republicans if the current impasse persists.

The party would do well to study T.R., one of its greatest Presidents.  The real enemy isn’t government or taxes and it isn’t Democrats or women or minorities.  Just as it was in Boston harbor as the dawn of the American Revolution, the common enemy is still economic rent-seekers.

This issue isn’t about the 1% or the wealthy, although many didn’t earn their wealth but used rent-seeking instead.  The issue economic rent-seeking, as Joshua Brown, who blogs at The Reformed Broker, put it so eloquently a year ago is about the fact that:

• “America hates unjustified privilege,
• it hates an unfair playing field and crony capitalism …,
• it hates privatized gains and socialized losses,
• it hates people who have been bailed out and don't display even the slightest bit of remorse or humbleness in the presence of so much suffering in the aftermath
• it hates rule changes that benefit the few at the expense of the many…”

Our Moderate Heritage

Maybe ideologically, we’ve always been a closely divided nation.  Using estimates from various experts, during the years of our Revolutionary War 45% of Americans  were “neutral” or leaning neutral while 40% were patriots and 15% were loyalists.

Even patriots were divided between those seeking protection from pro-British Indian nations, those seeking economic equality and those seeking independence from British laws.  Maybe we only think we’re more divided now than 230 years ago because much of our historical narrative has been rewritten due to what psychologists call a need for cognitive coherence, especially among ideological conservatives.

However, back at the dawning of this country, only 1 in 4 served in the Continental Army or for a few weeks or so in the various local and state militias and at any given time the war actively involved only 8% of all who were patriots.  According to a 2010 article in The Smithsonian:

“After 1777, the average Continental soldier was young, single, propertyless, poor and in many cases an outright pauper.”

Many today forget that in the southern colonies, the war was as much a civil war as a revolutionary one and providence came as much in the form of treasure, soldiers, sailors, ships and endorsement from France and Spain as it did from above.

Even fighting on behalf of colonies divided over race at the time, a quarter of those fighting in the war as victory was achieved were Blacks, which made up 20% of the population at the time.  Many were in front line combat units and fought with distinction.

I like to think I would have been as patriotic as some of my ancestors, who fit the description above and fought not only in Virginia militias but in the 9th North Carolina, 5th Pennsylvania and 4th Massachusetts of the Continental Army some in the north under General Washington and some also during several pivotal battles in the south.

However, I don’t think of those who remained neutral back then as unpatriotic, nor do I believe they were all neutral due to religion such as many Quakers and Amish were, nor were they any more likely than patriots did to seek to profit from the war, something that galled Washington.

I think many who were neutral back then may have been moderates who were very aptly defined last week by conservative columnist David Brooks when he wrote, “Just as the founding fathers tried a mixed form of government, moderates like pluralistic agendas, mixing and matching from columns A, B and C. They try to create harmonious blends of policies that don't, at first glance, go together.”

George Washington himself was a conservative among revolutionaries but a moderate conservative.  In his excellent biography Washington A Life, published two years ago, acclaimed author Ron Chernow repeatedly illustrates that even while he was spearheading the effort to achieve independence – “It took courage for Washington, instead of simply demonizing Great Britain, to study the secrets of its strength.” 

What would eventually emerge as the United States of America that we know today was not at all apparent during the Revolutionary War and partisanship such as we have today was nearly its downfall before it was even formed.

Moderates back then were probably not neutral about independence, just less inclined in the words of Brooks “to know what their solutions are before they define the problems.”  Even the founders admitted to having more questions than answers and were given to much thought and revision and compromise.

According to a scientific poll updated last week by university researchers on behalf of The Associated Press, Americans today are as divided as they were at the time of independence by issues of race.

More than half of all Americans now express explicit anti-black and anti-Hispanic attitudes, 79% among Republicans; but when tested implicitly, the anti-black sentiments are also held by 55% of Democrats and 49% of Independents, much of it refueled, in my opinion, by uncivil discourse and coded rhetoric stoked after the election of the first black President of the United States.

It is no wonder, as reported recently by columnist Charles Blow from a new ABC News/Washington Post poll, that the Republican challenger to become President of the United States has the support of 59% of whites, including 65% of white men while the President, an African American has 79% among nonwhites overall.

Looking deeper into the results by region of the country, these trends among whites are even more pronounced in the South.  Made in his farewell address 216 years ago at the completion of his terms as the first US President, George Washington’s warning about partisanship rings true today as we wonder whether there is any hope for a long-overdue national conversation about race as well as solutions to any number of problems facing this nation.

Any hope of success may lie in the ability of neutrals and moderates to organize themselves again into an effective force. As Brooks describes of moderates in his column:

“The animating principle doesn’t mean that all Americans think alike.  It means that we have a tradition of conflict…over the centuries…

The moderate doesn’t try to solve those arguments.  There are no ultimate solutions.  The moderate tries to preserve the tradition of conflict, keeping the opposing sides in balance…

In most great arguments, there are two partially true points of view, which sit in tension.  The moderate tries to maintain a rough proposition between them, to keep her country along its historic trajectory.”

In a few days, half of the country will be disappointed in the outcome of the election, but regardless of who is elected, (and I have already voted as nearly half have in Durham NC where I live) solutions will only be made possible by a resurgence of moderates.

As a moderate myself, I am deeply disturbed by the stereotypes and bigotry around race.  But I believe much of that intolerance is merely a surrogate for other even harder to discuss issues.

If we don't discuss them openly, rather than in terms of scapegoats, our descendants may be facing another revolution.

Paying Respects To Revolutionary Roots

It isn’t unusual for Americans today to have ancestors who lived here during the Revolutionary War.  Of the 60% who do according to Ancestry.com, 6.3 million or 2% have ancestors who fought with the revolutionaries in that War of Independence.

I paid respects to great-grandparents (3-5) on each side of my family who fought in that war during several segments of my nearly 8,000 miles of road trips this summer.  They were named McCrory, Shumway, Messersmith, Shelton and Bowman.

They were Scots-Irish, Welsh, French, German, Swiss and English.  Some were already third and fourth generation Americans when Independence was declared from Great Britain, but one took up a rifle for the cause just months after arriving in the colonies.

They represented Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Virginia and North Carolina, and coincidentally, three, two less than an hour away, making their homes not far from Durham NC where I have made mine for the last quarter century after having grown up and living until then in the Rocky Mountains and along the Pacific Mountains of South-central Alaska.

Two were militia and three served as regulars in line regiments of the Continental Army.

Two fought mostly in the northern theater, two mostly in the southern and one in the west, but they also fought side by side in some battles with at least three encamped during the turning point at Valley Forge that infamous winter of 1777 with General Washington.

One of the later even served a stint in the Commander-In-Chief’s special guard after General Von Steuben broadened rotations to include soldiers from units outside Virginia. (huts shown in this blog)

Two others who were too old to serve in combat headed local committees of safety in Massachusetts and Virginia that helped form units in which their sons served, provided supplies and adjudicated proceedings for neighbors who remained loyalists during the war.

Two served under or with other family members including fathers, brothers and uncles.  They fought with units such as the 4th Massachusetts, the 5th Pennsylvania, the 9th North Carolina and various units of Virginia Militia.

Two served much of the war, other enlisted for shorter periods or when called, and one was with the tough “over the mountain men” who marched through the Blue Ridge to fight when needed.

After research has revealed this information along with documents, I am now even more reverent at the mention of conflicts such as Bunker Hill, Dorchester Heights, Saratoga, Long Island, New York, Princeton, Rhode Island, Brandywine, Germantown, Monmouth, Trenton, Stono Ferry, Cowpens, King’s Mountain and Guilford Courthouse.

They all survived the war, one after being a prisoner of war.  They were only privates and sergeants and ensigns, although the uncle under which one served became a general.  After the war, they returned to their lives as farmers.

But they all witnessed and participated in the creation of a nation.  Some of them or their descendants moved west or south and west, often on lands granted for their service, and to settle new territories such as Tennessee, Ohio, Illinois, Missouri and Alabama and eventually, Utah, Idaho, Arizona and California.

Eventually descendants of all five ended up at some point in time living in or along the western slopes of the Rocky Mountains with unions to each other through my parents and heritage passed down to me and my two sisters, to my daughter and her cousins and my two grandsons and their cousins, with whom I will leave more detail.

I had heard hints about one or two of these ancestors from grandparents and relatives who did this kind of research the old fashioned way.  Fortunately, the advent of the Internet and digitalization of military records, pension records, records curated for membership applications, minutes of town hall meetings, unit rosters, census records, family bibles etc. have made it possible to dig much deeper.

I am proud of what these ancestors did, but humbled is probably a better description of how I feel.  Hopefully, this gives me the courage and patience to fight through the obfuscation created by bitter partisanship, mind-numbing ideologues, anonymously-fueled ad onslaughts, repetitive sound bits and tons of misinformation.

These ancestors also inspire me to remain a political Independent, stay moderate and seek pragmatic solutions.

And to that end the least I can do pay my respects for their service is to vote my conscience.

Trees And Patriots

At the time of the Revolutionary War there were still a billion acres of forestland carpeting what would become the United States of America. Symbolically, Patriots met under the “Liberty Tree” in Boston before heading to the docks to witness the original tea party protest.

In 1775, as an anti-Patriot object lesson, the British viciously chopped down the 129-year-old Liberty Tree, making it even more ironic that a modern-day Tea Partier is drawing support from the outdoor billboard industry in an attempt to try to unseat a Hendersonville NC Republican State House member who dares to side with the 9 out of 10 North Carolinians who object to the destruction of any more trees along roadsides.

Fourteen turbulent years after that Liberty Tree was mutilated, North Carolina, where I now live, was finally ratifying the new Constitution of the United States of America and broke off the part west of the Appalachian Mountains in December of 1789 to cede it to the newly created federal government in exchange for covering its Revolutionary War debts.

Six years later that territory was accepted into the Union as the 16th state, Tennessee.  And just less than two hundreds years after the British desecration of the Liberty Tree, North Carolina voters embedded protection of forests and trees into the State Constitution.

Over the last several months, I have taken four different road trips across different parts of Tennessee and among my favorites was a detour off I 40 down to Shiloh, the site of a pivotal Civil War battle in which two future US presidents fought to resolve some unfinished business and preserve the Union.

Four months after that trip, I had another unexpected pleasure as I dropped down from Kentucky along a stretch of I 24 through north central Tennessee and the Land Between The Lakes region on my way back from another 6,000-mile cross-country trip.

Today, North Carolina and Tennessee each retains nearly the same overall tree canopy, 60% to 57% respectively but with 30% more land area, North Carolina has 18.6 million acres of non-urban forestland which is about a third more than Tennessee.

While North Carolina also has 50% more population, the two states  have preserved or reforested virtually the same number of acres of urban trees at 1.4 and 1.3 million respectively.

But Tennessee just got a much better handle on its urban forest area thanks to a newly released study by the National Forest Service that may also provide some insight to North Carolina.

Tennessee has an estimated 284 million urban trees broken down as follows:

• 66.4% in forest
• 15.5% along streets and other transportation corridors
• 13.2% on residential land
• 7.7% on “other” land uses
• 5% on agricultural lands and
• 2.2% on commercial or industrial lands.

Studies such as this one done by the National Forest Service for Tennessee have yet to measure the greatest value of urban trees which is as an invaluable contribution to sense of place and economic development, both to demand-side tourism and to the more traditional and more land intensive supply-side.

The Tennessee study does benchmark the structural or “replacement value” of the state’s urban trees at $80 billion.  It also measures another $639 million of annual value generated from these urban trees in the form of carbon storage and sequestration, pollution removal and energy reduction.

But it fails to build on the work of other Forest Service researchers who have linked urban trees to better health outcomes, reductions in domestic violence and increased private property values to name a few.

In addition to the blight of outdoor billboards, the threats undermining the value of these trees include disease, poor development practices including those related to parking lots, utility lines and vegetation screens, disrespectful state highway maintenance practices as well as ignorance of this sort of information which is prevalent among local and state elected officials.

As noted so eloquently at the end of an excellent article that appeared last week in Urban Land magazine entitled The Distinctive City, planning veteran Edward T. McMahon asks the question: “Do you want the character of your city to shape the new development, or do you want the new development to shape the character of the city?”

Especially for anyone who views trees only through the lens of dollars and cents, studies by the U.S. Forest Service such as the one documenting the value of urban forests in Tennessee are invaluable.