Born Fighting Quotes

“In such a wild, uncharted place the book of God was vital, for it nourished their spirit and laid boundaries for their conduct. Other subjects simply had no relevance. Trigonometry and calculus would not help them find their way among the mountain trails. Adam Smith's economics were of no consequence in the matter of planting corn and breeding cattle. Nor did they need the essays of Plato or the plays of Shakespeare to teach them how to shoot a rifle, or to make clothes from animal skins, or to clear away the wilderness with their own bare hands.”
― James Webb, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America

“They have become spoilers because in their view America’s political elites, both Republican and Democrat, have grown together into an almost indiscernible “hybrid royalty” that offers them little to choose from in terms of how the nation is actually being governed.”
― James Webb, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America

“They came with nothing, and for a complicated set of reasons, many of them still have nothing. The slurs stick to me, standing on these graves. Rednecks . Trailer-park trash. Racists. Cannon fodder. My ancestors. My people. Me.”
― James Webb, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America

“The Northern army was most often run like a business, solving a problem. The Southern army was run like a family, confronting a human crisis.”
― James Webb, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America

“But to tar the sacrifices of the Confederate soldier as simple acts of racism, and reduce the battle flag under which he fought to nothing more than the symbol of a racist heritage, is one of the great blasphemies of our modern age.”
― James Webb, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America

“The consequence of this reality was that in virtually every major battle of the Civil War, Confederate soldiers who did not own slaves were fighting against a proportion of Union Army soldiers who had not been asked to give theirs up.”
― James Webb, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America

“As the American colonies moved toward declaring independence from Great Britain, the Scots -Irish were all but unanimous in their desire to be free of the English government. Although the trained minds of New England’s Puritan culture and Virginia’s Cavalier aristocracy had shaped the finer intellectual points of the argument for political disunion, the true passion for individual rights emanated from the radical individualism of the Presbyterian and, increasingly, Baptist pulpits.”
― James Webb, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America

“Philadelphia became the Ulster Scots’ most popular port of entry for two reasons. The first was that the Pennsylvania colony had been created with an eye toward accommodating religious freedom and thus largely welcomed the Ulster dissenters , at least initially. And the second— equally as important—was that the communities in New England and New York wanted nothing to do with them.”
― James Webb, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America

“Finally, in August 1607, the cream of Ulster’s Irish aristocracy, including Hugh O’Neill himself, left Ireland for permanent exile. Other Irish were to follow these hundred or so key leaders until by 1614 “there were 300 Irish students and 3,000 Irish soldiers in Spanish territories alone.”
― James Webb, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America

“The complicated formula that allowed these purchases included their assistance in obtaining Con O’Neill’s pardon, his release from prison, and, oddly, a knighthood for O’Neill balanced by a pledge from the two lairds to King James that the land would be “planted with British Protestants.” 6 Almost immediately, Montgomery and Hamilton began arranging the migration of large numbers of lowland Scots into their Ulster lands.”
― James Webb, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America

“The blood feuds of today’s Ulster— and their legacy in the journey of America’s Scots-Irish— have their roots in a decision made in 1610 by King James I of England, who also reigned as James VI of Scotland, to form a Protestant plantation on Irish soil.”
― James Webb, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America

“They fought the Indians and then they fought the British, comprising 40 percent of the Revolutionary War army. They were the great pioneers— Daniel Boone, Lewis and Clark, and Davy Crockett among them— blazing the westward trails into Kentucky , Ohio, Tennessee, and beyond, where other Scots-Irishmen like Kit Carson picked up the slack.”
― James Webb, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America

“Their bloodline was stained by centuries of continuous warfare along the border between England and Scotland, and then in the bitter settlements of England’s Ulster Plantation in Northern Ireland.”
― James Webb, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America

“Until they became the British Empire’s greatest voyagers, indeed its greatest export, settling in odd places all around the world. And for that splinter of them that became my people, the Scots-Irish, this meant the Appalachian Mountains, their first stop on their way to creating a way of life that many would come to call, if not American, certainly the defining fabric of the South and the Midwest as well as the core character of the nation’s working class.”
― James Webb, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America

“Change the fabric of their culture? It hasn’t happened yet, not in two thousand years. And it won’t happen now.”
― James Webb, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America

“it represents a large, independent swing vote—whose key concerns are seldom passionately represented by either side in any election—rather than a force that affirmatively shapes the national agenda.”
― James Webb, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America

“In a nutshell, over the decades the national policies of the Republicans had raped the region while the actions of many state and local Democrats too often were designed to preserve the assets of a select few at the expense of just about everyone else.”
― James Webb, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America

“both tariff rates and domestic charges for the use of railroad freight blatantly discriminated against the South, impeding its ability to grow and compete. The rates charged for shipping goods along the nation’s railways had for decades been rigged to protect Northern markets from Southern goods.”
― James Webb, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America

“Radical Reconstruction was an attempt to impose by force the cultures of New England and the midlands upon the coastal and highland south.”4”
― James Webb, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America

“Benjamin Franklin had predicted as much nearly a century before, commenting that with the introduction of slavery, “the Poor are by this Means deprived of Employment, while a few Families acquire vast Estates; which they spend on Foreign Luxuries, and educating their Children in the Habits of those Luxuries; the same Income is needed for the Support of one that might have maintain’d 100.”57”
― James Webb, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America

“To them, joining a group and putting themselves at the mercy of someone else’s collectivist judgment makes about as much sense as”
― James Webb, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America