TARTAN
DAY SPEECH AT THE ALAMO 2006
As
presented by
Andrew
Morrison, Lord Dunrossil
Honorary
British Consul
It is my privilege as the Honorary British Consul to have been
asked to remember the
Alamo
with you tonight, but first I want to go back to the early 14th
century and remember the Bruce.
Hindsight has a way of making history look inevitable. It
turned out this way and so it HAD to turn out this way. But
back in the early 14th century, inevitability and
historical necessity seemed to have sided with Edward
Plantagenet, King of England.
Scotland
was an idea without logic, without meaning. It made no sense
ethnically, linguistically, socially or culturally. Half the
country was a mix of Gael, Norse and Pict and spoke Gaelic,
the other half was what the Highlanders called
“Sassenach,” Anglo-Saxon, and spoke a form of Northern
English. Most of the barons in the south were
Norman
and spoke French. The very name “Scot” means “Irish”
and Wallace, the name of the first hero of the independence
movement, means “Welshman.”
The same argument, the same logic, used by Norman French
barons in
Scotland
in absorbing and eradicating the Kingdom of the Isles was now
being used by Norman French barons in
England
to unite the whole island under a single throne. The death of
Margaret, the Maid of Norway, looked like the end of the
Scottish idea.
Scotland
would go the way of formerly strong and independent kingdoms
like
Kent
,
Mercia
and
Northumbria
and the Principality of Wales.
Then, 700 years ago this spring, one Norman baron, Robert de
Brus, who refused to recognize the right of women to the
throne, seized his chance by murdering a rival with a better
claim, murdering him in a church, and had himself crowned king
of a country which existed scarcely even in name let alone in
reality, since it was occupied by Bruce’s feudal overlord,
Edward.
14 years later, despite some notable victories, he was still
excommunicated and desperate to neutralize the Pope’s
opposition. This is the backdrop to the Declaration of
Arbroath.
Bruce wanted the Pope to believe that he had no option but to
fight on. He knew that in his case arguments about his
personal merits or the rights of kings would carry no weight,
since he’d broken his oath to Edward and murdered his rival
to win the throne. He therefore argued (or had his barons
appear to argue) that sovereignty rested with the people, a
notion with some precedent in Celtic tradition but absolutely
foreign to his own feudal Norman culture. It therefore
followed that the people could and would replace him if he
betrayed their aspirations towards Freedom and
self-determination.
A few barons were then persuaded to sign the Declaration and
give it the appearance of a spontaneous cry, an El Grito,
ostensibly at least the first example of a declaration of
popular sovereignty and of national independence in history.
Now, miraculously, the Declaration acquired a life of its own.
A people were raised on it and bonded together by it and by
this infectious and intoxicating notion of national
self-determination, of governments serving at the pleasure of
the people, a civil right that superseded all outside
authority, temporal and religious.
This was the cultural background which opened the country to
the peculiarly Scottish and peculiarly democratic idea of the
Presbyterian Kirk and which inspired the Covenanters to resist
crown and Parliament. (How ironic that it should all start
with an appeal to the Pope!)
Many
of these uncompromisingly independent Covenanters later moved
to
Ulster
and then on to the American colonies. Once there they were to
be further antagonized and politicized by the limited Catholic
emancipation granted as a gesture to the newly conquered
Province
of
Quebec
and the rest of formerly French Canada, and they set about
asserting their independence all over again.
One
Scottish-born and educated lawyer, James Wilson (no relation
to Sam Wilson, the original Uncle Sam), wrote the legal
opinion that a Parliament in which they were not represented
had no authority to legislate over them or to tax them. The
roots of this argument can clearly be seen in the Declaration
of Arbroath and its notions of popular sovereignty and
self-determination.
Wilson
was not only a signer of the Declaration of Independence,
itself inspired by Arbroath, but helped to give the movement
its legal framework and justification, and his principle of
Judicial Review led to the establishment of the Supreme Court.
Some
of the intellectual underpinnings of the Revolution can be
traced to the Scottish Enlightenment, which had a particular
influence on the part Scottish, part Welsh Jefferson. This was
the time, after all, when
Edinburgh
was known as the
Athens
of the North. That other famous Virginian,
Pat
rick Henry, famous for saying “Give me liberty or give me
death,” was the son of an immigrant Scot, who taught him
Latin and Greek and history and filled him with the passions
and prejudices of his native land.
But
one needs to look beyond the fine language spoken in the
drawing rooms of
Edinburgh
and
Monticello
to see the dogged, cussed independent streak, which was
Scotland
’s great gift to the American character. Back in
London
the Revolutionary War was referred to as a “Scotch-Irish
rebellion” and by King George himself as a “Presbyterian
War.”
As
the young country began to take shape, divisions and
differences became apparent. At the first census in 1790
people of Scottish descent outnumbered those of English
descent 2:1 in the southern states, which led inevitably to a
different attitude to central or federal government from that
which predominated in
New England
. They had not kicked out one central Anglo authority based in
London
just to replace it with another based in
Washington
DC
. The War for States’ Rights can be seen as yet another
expression of Covenanter cussedness, only this time the best
General of Scottish descent, Grant, was on the other side and
his side prevailed.
A couple of
generations after the Revolutionary War and a generation
before the Civil War, a group of these typically feisty Scotch
Irish found their way into Texas at the invitation of fellow
Scot Stephen F. Austin. More than half of the land grants he
made were to men of Scottish descent. Carl Peterson, born in
Greenock and resident in
Pennsylvania
, has done some wonderful research on these people and the
songs they brought with them, songs of Burns, Covenanter and
Jacobite songs, which became the songs of
Texas
with a few words changed. I recommend to all of you his
booklet, Now’s the Day and Now’s the Hour, and his CD,
Scotland Remembers the
Alamo
.
Austin,
Houston and Bowie were clearly of Scottish descent. Crockett
probably. While Travis’ family was from the north of
England
, it is clear that he drew his inspiration from the novels of
Walter Scott, and he modeled his actions and his words on
Edward Waverley and the noble but ultimately futile sacrifice
of the Highland Scots at Culloden. Altogether it has been
estimated that over 80% of those who died at the
Alamo
were of Scottish descent. The only man who refused to cross
the line and chose life over death or glory was not one of
them: he was one of the two Frenchmen.
These men were not
perfect.
Bowie
could be a charming and charismatic leader, but he was also a
crook, a money-launderer for pirates and a slave-trader.
Travis was an inspiring speaker, a fearless leader, but he was
also on the run from bankruptcy and a failed marriage.
Houston
was great tactician and a drunk. But the point is that, like
Bruce before them, they have been redeemed and ennobled by an
idea, by their willingness to give their lives for a
principle, a principle which found its first expression in
April 1320 at the Abbey of Arbroath:
“It
is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are
fighting, but for Freedom – for that alone, which no honest
man surrenders but with his own life.”
In
the dictator Santa Anna and his troops they saw “proud
Edward’s army” invading their land. You can almost hear
them sing in the evenings before the fight, with the piper
MacGregor and the fiddler Autry:
Scots
wha hae wi’ Wallace bled
Scots
wham Bruce has aften led,
Welcome
to your gory bed
Or
to Victory!
Now’s
the Day and now’s the Hour!
That hour had
certainly come at
Bannockburn
. It came again right here at the
Alamo
some 500 years later, and it will come again and again. But as
long as there are people around the world, ordinary imperfect
people who were raised on the songs of Burns and the spirit of
Arbroath, there will be people prepared to make the ultimate
sacrifice, to do or die, in defense of Freedom, and Freedom
will be in very good hands.
|
