The Armstrong Brothers: One Pennsylvania Family's Contribution to Victory in the American Revolution

By David O. Smith

This is the story of James, John, and Hamilton Armstrong, three sons of a yeoman farmer living on the Pennsylvania frontier at the outset of the American Revolution. James and John joined the Continental Army in 1776, rose from the ranks to become officers, and served until the army was disbanded in 1783. Hamilton remained home to work the farm, protect the family, and serve in militia and “ranger” units to defend the frontier from repeated attacks from hostile Indian tribes. Their combined wartime experiences encompassed almost the totality of the American Revolution, from Canada in the north to South Carolina in the south and along the western frontier. James and John fought in most of the major battles of the revolution, including Princeton, Brandywine, Germantown, Monmouth, Guilford Courthouse, Eutaw Springs, and Yorktown, where they distinguished themselves in the eyes of generals like the Marquis de Lafayette, Mad Anthony Wayne, Light- Horse Harry Lee, Nathanael Greene, and George Washington.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 10, 2021
• ISBN: 9781664159068

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Copyright © 2021 by David O. Smith.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,

recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,

without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Maps courtesy of the History Department, United States Military Academy,

and the Northumberland County (PA) Historical Society.

Rev. date: 03/08/2021

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CONTENTS

Preface

Chapter 1 Out of the Mists of Caledonia: The Long Road to America

Chapter 2 The Revolution Comes to Northumberland County

Chapter 3 James Armstrong Goes to War in Canada

Chapter 4 John Armstrong Goes to War in New Jersey

Chapter 5 The Brothers Together at Brandywine and Germantown

Chapter 6 Officers and Gentlemen: Valley Forge

Chapter 7 The Road to Monmouth Courthouse

Chapter 8 Hamilton Armstrong Goes to War at Home

Chapter 9 Elite Soldiers: Stony Point and Paulus Hook

Chapter 10 The Two Winters of Discontent at Jockey Hollow

Chapter 11 James Armstrong and Lee’s Legion in the Carolinas

Chapter 12 John Armstrong and Victory in Virginia

Chapter 13 Ending Not with a Bang but a Whimper

Chapter 14 Epilogue: Postrevolutionary Lives of the Armstrong Brothers

Bibliography

I think continually of those who were truly great… .

The names of those who in their lives fought for life,

Who wore at their hearts the fire’s centre.

Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sun

And left the vivid air signed with their honour.

Stephen Spender, Collected Poems 1928-1953

To the descendants of three unsung heroes of the American Revolution:

James, John, and Hamilton Armstrong.

But especially to three descendants of John Armstrong:

Susan Denning Hinton, Richard Allen

Denning, and Ellen Denning Smith.

PREFACE

In one of his last acts as commander in chief of the Continental Army, George Washington sent a list of sixteen officers to Congress, then meeting in Annapolis. He had long urged that body to consider raising a small peacetime military establishment for the newly independent nation and wished before resigning his commission to recommend who should serve in it. In addition to the testimony which accompanies them, he wrote, I can only add mine, that most of the gentlemen, whose names are on the list, are personally known to me as some of the best officers who were in the Army.¹ Included in the list of sixteen names were James and John Armstrong of Northumberland County, Pennsylvania. Who were they, and what had they done to merit the approbation of such a man? Both men joined the Continental Army in 1776 and served until the very end in 1783. Their younger brother, Hamilton, initially remained home to work the farm and protect the family but later established his credentials as an Indian fighter on the Pennsylvania frontier, a wartime experience at times more arduous than those of his two elder brothers. All three men were undistinguished sons of a yeoman farmer scraping out a meager living on the Pennsylvania frontier; all three became soldiers in the revolution and officers and gentlemen in the United States Army that was organized afterward.

This book is their story. It is not intended to be a comprehensive history of the American Revolution. My intention is simply to tell the story of three brothers from Northumberland County, Pennsylvania—James, John, and Hamilton Armstrong—who answered the call to arms during the American Revolution and to describe what they saw and did during their service in the Continental Army and militia units that defended the Pennsylvania frontier from Indian attack.

My interest in the American Revolution came late in life. Not long after marrying my wife, I noticed a miniature old portrait hanging in the hallway leading to the guest bedroom of her parents’ house. The portrait was of an elderly man wearing a frock coat with an ostentatious military decoration. I was told the man’s name was John Armstrong and that the medal in the portrait was the insignia of the Society of the Cincinnati, a veterans group founded after the American Revolution by officers who had served in the Continental Army. He had a prominent Roman nose that could be readily discerned in some members of her family, a feature that was laughingly referred to as the Armstrong nose. At family gatherings, my mother-in-law occasionally retrieved articles belonging to Armstrong that were kept in a bank safety-deposit box. These included the medal so prominently featured in the miniature portrait, a small flintlock pistol, a broken powder horn that had been repaired by wrapping a fresh squirrel skin around it and allowing it to dry, a leather wallet with the words Continental Army tooled on it, and a variety of old glasses frames. In their basement was another artifact, a medium-sized wooden trunk that Armstrong reputedly had used in the revolution and his subsequent military career.

Armstrong’s later military accomplishments seemed more interesting than what he had done in the American Revolution, which no one in the family knew much about anyway. He had been a junior officer—one of only a couple of dozen—in the First Regiment of the United States Army organized after the revolution; he had gone west to fight Indians in the Northwest Territory, the area now comprising Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois; he had almost been killed in one engagement with hostile Indians in one campaign; and he was purported to have been something of an explorer. After leaving the army, he also became a prominent early settler in Ohio and Indiana.

Having long been an avid reader of military history and especially a fan of Stephen E. Ambrose, I purchased a copy of his book about the Lewis and Clark expedition, Undaunted Courage, and was flabbergasted to discover that Lt. John Armstrong had been selected by Secretary of War Henry Knox in 1790 to make a covert reconnaissance of the Missouri River and the territory west of Mississippi River that belonged to Spain. Apparently, Armstrong gave it a good try but never got west of the Mississippi River. He wrote afterward to Knox that such a trip was a business much easier planned than executed and provided a detailed list of items that any future expedition would need to carry to be successful, advice that was useful thirteen years later to Lewis and Clark.² When I mentioned this to my wife, she patiently replied that everyone in the family knew this, and that according to family folklore, Armstrong had actually gone a little ways up the Missouri River before turning back when he realized how difficult it would be for one man to make a successful reconnaissance while the area was under the control of a hostile Spanish government.

Much later, I once again became fascinated by the exploits of John Armstrong. Having retired from her career as a speech and language clinician the year before, my wife decided as a retirement hobby to write a biography of her illustrious ancestor. She was able to make a good start by building on the earlier work done by another Armstrong descendant, Charles F. Cochran, who had made an exhaustive search of the surviving Armstrong records and papers in the early decades of the twentieth century. Cochran had visited several other Armstrong relatives and managed to collect from them many letters and documents that had long been moldering in attics and basements. These he deposited in the Indiana State Historical Society in Indianapolis, where they are accessible today to anyone interested in researching the history of the Northwest Territory. She became a regular visitor to this treasure trove of documents, often returning with photocopies of some of the more interesting ones—his commission as an ensign in the First Regiment of Infantry signed by Secretary of War Henry Knox, subsequent commissions (on promotion) signed by Pres. George Washington, and still other documents or letters signed by early American military luminaries like Gens. Anthony Wayne and William Henry Harrison. These were interesting, of course, but it was her project, not mine—her ancestor, not mine. It was only after she specifically asked for my assistance that I joined in the hunt for John Armstrong as we jokingly referred to it.

The archive in Indianapolis was quite comprehensive in covering the latter stages of Armstrong’s military career and civilian life but contained little from the American Revolution. The sole surviving documents from that period included one badly deteriorating notebook that contained, in his own handwriting, a copy of the general orders published in July 1781 by the Marquis de Lafayette about the Battle of Green Spring, which preceded by almost three months the siege of Yorktown. This was followed by a copy of the minutes of the founding of the Society of the Cincinnati. In another folder were a few documents about a 1783 court-martial that included a summary of the proceedings, a draft of the remarks Armstrong made in his own defense, and copies of three letters submitted on his behalf by character witnesses, one of whom was Capt. Allan McLane, a legendary cavalry leader under Washington. McLane explained in the letter that Armstrong was introduced to him by the Marquis de Lafayette and commended as an exceptional young officer. That was it; nothing else about his role in the revolution had survived. But now I was hooked. When she asked me to write a chapter for her book about Armstrong’s experiences in the revolution, I agreed at once. So began my long journey back in time to relearn everything I thought I knew about the American Revolution.

A cursory outline of Armstrong’s service was relatively easy to find since his career was summarized on the Pennsylvania Society of the Cincinnati website. But no personal letters, diaries, or journals by Armstrong during the revolution existed. I decided that I would have to track his military career through the history of the regiments in which he served and by using letters, diaries, and journals of other young officers who had lived and fought side by side with him. Fortunately, there is an abundance of these sources as well as more detailed records of his service in the National Archives, the Pennsylvania Archives, and the papers of George Washington.³ I realized I could never know with certainty what he thought about his experiences in the Continental Army, but I could at least find out where he went and when and what he generally saw and did and make educated guesses about his reaction to events based on his family background and what his comrades in similar positions felt and thought about their experiences. Thus began a series of field trips to battlefields and winter encampments of the Continental Army, where my wife and I walked the ground he had trodden as a soldier; visits to county courthouses in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida to search for property records, marriages, and wills; visits to county and the state historical societies in each of those states to find local histories and other genealogical information; and visits to public libraries in other states that held perhaps the only surviving copy of a document or book we had been looking for. We also discovered several helpful online databases containing links to Revolutionary War–era publications. Other websites got a lot of our business as well.

Early on, I learned Armstrong had two brothers who were also of military age during the revolution. Their experiences had never been of interest to my wife’s family because they were not direct ancestors, but I began to wonder what they had done during the revolution. James, the elder brother, had also been an officer in the Continental Army and a member of the Society of the Cincinnati, so the outline of his military career was easy to find. I quickly discovered that his revolutionary service not only was longer than John’s, it was more heroic. Even more interesting was the discovery that the military careers of the two brothers were closely intertwined. Both had served in different regiments of the Third Pennsylvania Brigade of Gen. William Alexander’s (Lord Stirling) division at the Battles of Brandywine, Germantown, and Monmouth and during the terrible winter of 1777–1778 at Valley Forge. For a brief period, they even served side by side in the Third Pennsylvania Regiment. Their paths briefly diverged in early 1779, when James was accepted into the cavalry regiment led by the legendary Light Horse Henry Lee, but they were reunited in the last two years of the war at Charleston, South Carolina, serving under the command of Gen. Nathanael Greene.

James became a cavalry troop commander in Lee’s legion and participated in the Battles of Guilford Courthouse and Eutaw Springs, as well as in several face-to-face skirmishes with Lord Cornwallis’s famed (and notorious) cavalry leader Banastre Tarleton. At Quinby Bridge in South Carolina, he performed one of the most singularly heroic acts of the revolution, one that in a later time would likely have merited the Medal of Honor. He was subsequently captured by the British but, after a brief period of imprisonment on a British ship in Charleston Harbor, was exchanged and returned to the battlefield until the final British evacuation of Charleston. He settled in Georgia, where he was granted land for his service during the revolution; fought the Creek Indians; and when war loomed with France in 1798, was selected to be a major in the United States Army, then commanded by Washington and Alexander Hamilton.

The life of the youngest brother, Hamilton, was much more elusive. Eighteen years old in 1775, he remained at home probably because at least one son was needed to work the farm and protect the family from the ever-present danger of hostile Indian attack. His contribution to the war effort, however, was no less arduous than that of his elder siblings. He served in a variety of militia companies in Northumberland County, including ranger companies and militia units that typically served for extended periods deep in the frontier and fought Indians in the same manner and often with the same degree of savagery associated with their foe. This was significant because, in 1778 and 1779, hostile Indians operating under British influence struck hard at the Pennsylvania frontier in the Wyoming Valley, barely fifty miles north of the Armstrong family farm. This attack triggered the Great Runaway, a massive evacuation of all farms and towns in the northern part of Northumberland County, including that of the Armstrongs. The danger to the Pennsylvania and New York frontier was so severe during this time that Washington was compelled to divert several regiments of the Continental Army in 1779 to securing both states from further depredations by the Six Nations of the Iroquois. After the revolution, Hamilton followed his brother John into the newly organized United States Army and fought Indians in the Northwest Territory, serving as a battalion commander under Gen. Anthony Wayne at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794 in the campaign that ultimately broke Indian power in the territory.

While tracking the Armstrong brothers, I learned a lot more about the American Revolution than was covered in my public school history lessons. Until the Vietnam War, it was the longest conflict in American history—eight full years—and the second deadliest war, behind only the Civil War in deaths as a percentage of population.⁴ I also discovered the belief among some historians that the patriot victory had been inevitable. According to them, the country was too vast for Britain to conquer and hold and that, even if the Continental Army had been decisively defeated, the war would have continued without Washington, and the final result would have been the same.⁵ Alternative history cannot be proved or disproved, but blithely assuming the inevitability of American independence trivializes Washington’s leadership and the role of the army that he built and sustained over eight long years. Had that army been decisively defeated, a few roving bands of militia fighting a guerrilla war might have kept the spark of revolution alive perhaps for several years. But what kind of country would have resulted? Without the influence of Washington and the other founders, who almost certainly would have been hunted down and hanged,⁶ would the United States have emerged in its present form? I think not. Had independence been delayed and then granted later by Britain, what kind of Constitution, if any, would have emerged? Would there have been a Louisiana Purchase? What would have been the impact on America of the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1807? Would there have been an earlier Civil War? Whatever might have happened, my hunch is that our country would be a lot more like Canada or Australia than the present-day United States of America.

One thing certain is that the well-dressed gentlemen in Philadelphia who declared independence in that hot summer of 1776 were not the ones who actually achieved it. It was a relatively small army of gaunt men in rags—often shoeless, always hungry, and mostly unpaid for years on end—who wrested the great prize from Great Britain. The fate of the revolution rested squarely in the hands of Washington and the Continental Army that he created. The officers of that army served from a variety of motivations. In the beginning, their primary loyalty was to states. But the longer they served and fought, the more they saw and suffered, the more they began to understand that the reality of their situation was that no state, however large or wealthy, was strong enough to obtain the result for which they were contending. Only by sublimating their loyalties to a greater good could independence be attained. Their service in that army transformed these patriots over time into a distinct class of citizens who put loyalty to a united American nation ahead of everything else.

As I learned more about the three Armstrong brothers and their experiences during and after the revolution, two other things became evident. First, their combined service in the revolution encompassed nearly every major battle—not all but most of the big ones—and in every theater of operations—the Northern, Middle, Southern, and Western Departments. Beginning with the Battle of Trois-Rivières in Canada near Quebec in June 1776, James and John—sometimes individually and sometimes side by side—participated in the defense of Fort Ticonderoga (and possibly the naval action at nearby Valcour Island) and the Battles of Princeton, Brandywine, Germantown, Monmouth, Stony Point, Paulus Hook, Springfield, Bergen Blockhouse, Guilford Courthouse, Green Spring, Yorktown, and Eutaw Springs, as well as in many lesser engagements and far too many skirmishes to name. They endured the agonizing 1776 retreat from Canada, two brutal winters at Valley Forge and Morristown, and several mutinies of their own Pennsylvania soldiers. Hamilton Armstrong, meanwhile, protected the home front and fought Indians in its defense.

The second thing that became evident was a common desire to redeem the family’s lost honor and diminished social status. All three men eventually concluded that service as an officer in the Continental Army, or in the new republic’s army that followed it, might allow each one to regain the status that the family once had in Ulster and subsequently lost in America. Such a motivation enabled them to endure unendurable hardships year after agonizing year during the revolution, where they often served for months without pay and went without proper food and clothing. It was almost certainly the reason that James and John, instead of going back to the family farm in Pennsylvania, chose to pursue military careers after the revolution and for Hamilton to follow them as soon as he could.

When victory at long last seemed assured, Washington wrote this about his soldiers on February 6, 1783: [I]t is more than probable that posterity will bestow on their labors the epithet and marks of fiction; for it will not be believed that such a force as Great Britain has employed for eight years in this country could be baffled in their plan of subjugating it by numbers infinitely less, composed of men oftentimes half starved; always in rags, without pay, and experiencing, at times, every species of distress which human nature is capable of undergoing.⁷ A similar observation had been made eighteen months earlier by a Hessian officer surrendering at Yorktown. It is an even more poignant summary of the fruits of the Armstrong brothers’ labors during the revolution by one of their staunchest enemies:

I have seen many soldiers of this army without shoes, with tattered breeches and uniforms patched with all sorts of colored cloth, without neckband and only the lid of a hat, who marched and stood their guard as proudly as the best uniformed soldier in the world, despite the raw weather and hard rain in October… . With what soldiers in the world could one do what was done by these men, who go about nearly naked and the greatest privation? Deny the best-disciplined soldiers in Europe what is due them and they will run away in droves, and the general will soon be alone. But from these one can perceive what an enthusiasm—which these poor fellows call Liberty—can do.⁸

It is only because of the fidelity, determination, and fortitude of a very small number of relatively unknown but honorable and courageous men like the three Armstrong brothers that we are able to enjoy a country as free and prosperous as the United States of America. I earnestly hope that the present and future generations of Americans learn to more fully appreciate what a near-run thing the American Revolution really was, to understand how many times the final outcome hung in the balance by a thread, and to remember how few were those who saw it through to the end, thereby giving every American living today the opportunity for life and liberty and the ability to pursue happiness in a free land.

One final note: for the ease of modern readers, I have taken the liberty of correcting, with only a few exceptions mostly in the first chapter, the eighteenth-century spelling, capitalization, and punctuation conventions commonly used in letters, journal entries, and other documents of the period.

David O. Smith

Alexandria, Virginia

CHAPTER 1

Out of the Mists of Caledonia:

The Long Road to America

Geography is destiny. This is true for nations as well as the peoples who inhabit them. Geographic location largely determines whether the climate of a country is temperate and invigorating, hot and innervating, or too cold for all but the most modest level of civilization. Soil composition determines whether a people will be agriculturists, herders, or mariners. Topography determines whether they will be unified and cohesive or isolated and fragmented. Natural resources determine whether they will be rich or poor, predators or prey. The German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder observed that history is geography set into motion, meaning that all historical problems ought to be studied geographically and that all geographic problems should be studied historically.⁹ So it is with the history of Scotland and its people.

Scotland comprises about one-third of the land area of the island of Great Britain that it shares with England and Wales. Blessed with a relatively temperate climate, thanks to the moderating influence of the Gulf Stream, it is also cursed with rough mountains and steep uplands, mostly thin soil, and poorly drained lowlands that sharply limit the amount of area that can be cultivated productively. Today after two millennia of development, less than 10 percent of Scotland’s land can be used for agriculture.¹⁰ Its coastline is deeply pierced by numerous inlets that allow easy access to the North and Irish Seas but inhibit easy movement between the northern and southern parts of the country and, in the past, have facilitated invasions from both east and west. These features divide the country into two distinct geographic zones, mountainous Highlands in the north and west and Lowlands in the south and east.

Because of geography, Scotland is a hard country in which to live, and hard countries produce hard people—people who are poor, tough, independent, xenophobic, and unyielding. This stark reality is reflected in Scotland’s national emblem, the thistle, and in the national motto: Nemo me impune lacessit—no one attacks me with impunity.¹¹ Its steep mountains, deep hollows, and water barriers fragmented the earliest inhabitants of the country, making it difficult for any single clan or tribe to unite and rule but equally difficult for any external force to conquer. The first to try were the Romans, who came to Britain in 55 BC. They moved slowly and steadily northward until AD 71, when they tried to wrest the Scottish Lowlands from the local inhabitants and their allies, a fierce and warlike people who inhabited the mountainous north. The latter have since become known as the Picts, but the Romans called them Caledonians. Roman historian Cassius Dio described them both:

There are two principal races of the Britons, the Caledonians and the Meatae… . The Maeatae live next to the cross-wall which cuts the island in half, and the Caledonians are beyond them. Both tribes inhabit wild and waterless mountains and desolate and swampy plains, and possess neither walls, cities, nor tilled fields, but live on their flocks, wild game, and certain fruits; for they do not touch the fish which are there in found in immense and inexhaustible quantities… . Their form of rule is democratic for the most part, and they are very fond of plundering; consequently they choose their boldest men as leaders… . They can endure hunger and cold and any kind of hardship; for they plunge into the swamps and exist there for many days with only their heads above water, and in the forests they support themselves on bark and roots, and for all emergencies they prepare a certain kind of food, the eating of a small portion of which, the size of a bean, prevents them from feeling either hunger or thirst.

The Romans defeated both tribes decisively in a pitched battle near an unknown site in the Lowlands called Mons Graupius, killing possibly as many as thirty thousand of them, but they struggled afterward to hold on to their conquest. They were the first to learn the lesson that all other would-be conquerors eventually would learn that the resources and revenues squeezed from such a poor land did not compensate for the enormous cost of conquering and garrisoning it.¹²

Near the time of the accession of the emperor Hadrian in AD 120, an entire Roman legion of five thousand men, the Ninth, disappeared without a trace while attempting to quell a tribal uprising in the north. The defeat was so stunning that the emperor felt it necessary to visit Britannia, the forty-fifth province of the empire and the most distant, to personally assess the situation. He determined to go no farther north. For the next five years, his troops labored to construct between the Tyne and Solway Rivers a seventy-three-mile-long fortification that still bears his name. Hadrian’s Wall was made of stone walls eight to ten feet thick and twelve feet high. It was guarded by eighty castles, one every mile, and sustained by seventeen large forts. In front of and slightly behind the wall were thirty-foot ditches wherever the terrain allowed. A later emperor, Antoninus Pius, made one final effort to expand the empire northward and built another wall at the narrowest part of country roughly between Glasgow and Edinburgh, but eventually, the Romans were forced to withdraw southward. Hadrian’s Wall effectively separated Scotland from the rest of Britannia for the next four centuries.¹³

After Rome fell, parts of Scotland were infiltrated by various Celtic, Germanic, Britannic, and Scandinavian peoples over the next one thousand years, but no serious attempt to conquer the land was undertaken until the end of the thirteenth century. During this millennium, the Scottish people slowly evolved from the amalgamation of five distinct peoples: the Picts, the original inhabitants who had remained strong in the Highlands; the Scots or Scotti, a Celtic, Gaelic-speaking people from Ireland who came in the fourth century AD; the Britons, who inhabited part of the Lowlands and were descended from the Romano-Celtic world that remained when the legions withdrew; the Angles, of Germanic extraction, who established influence in Northumbria and began to expand northward in the seventh century; and finally, assorted groups of Scandinavians that invaded parts of the British Isles at the end of the eighth century and had occupied the Orkney Islands and other islands on the western coast.¹⁴ Scotland became divided in race, in speech, and in culture, according to Churchill.

The rift between the Highlands and Lowlands was more than a geographic distinction. The Lowlands formed part of the feudal world, and except in the southwest in Galloway, English was generally spoken. The Highlands preserved a social order much older than feudalism. In the Lowlands, the king of Scots was a feudal magnate; but in the Highlands, he was merely the chief of a loose confederation of clans. The loyalty of the inhabitants living there, as well as their military service, was not the result of a feudal demand. It was freely given by an individual as a matter of personal honor and kinship to the leader of his extended family and wider kinship group, now familiarly known as a clan.¹⁵ Into this polyglot society strode Edward I, the king of England known to history as the Hammer of the Scots, who was so determined to add Scotland to his English holdings that he unknowingly instituted a hundred years of warfare. Edward’s ambition fanned the flames of an emerging Scottish nationalism and kindled a firestorm of hatred that produced a new nation implacably hostile to England and English rule.

Near the end of the thirteenth century arose an opportunity to unite the thrones of Scotland and England. A quirk of history in 1286 made three-year-old Margaret, known as the Maid of Norway as that was her home, the only direct heir of King Alexander III of Scotland. Edward I secured an arrangement for her to marry his eldest son when she came of age. The unfortunate Margaret died on a sea voyage from Norway in 1290, leaving Edward I to fall back on a hastily engineered alternative plan. He seated the weakest claimant, John Balliol, on the Scottish throne and proceeded to humiliate him by claiming large chunks of Scottish territory. When Balliol appealed to France for aid, Edward marched on Scotland in a campaign reminiscent of the worst excesses of the Romans. Entering the seaport of Berwick with five thousand cavalry and thirty thousand infantry, he slaughtered seventeen thousand of the port’s inhabitants in a thirteenth-century version of shock and awe. But like the Romans before him, he had not reckoned on the savage reaction of the Scots. They were neither shocked nor awed, just grimly determined to avenge their dead and resist the English invader. In the words of Churchill, he awakened a race as stern and resolute as any bred among men.

Led by men like William Wallace, the Braveheart of the 1995 movie, who defeated Edward I at Stirling in 1297, and by Robert the Bruce, who decisively defeated Edward II (his father having died earlier in the campaign) and the flower of the English army at Bannockburn in 1314, Scotland emerged after several more years of fighting as the surprising victor. According to Professor Smout, the war was a crucible in which all lost their old ethnic loyalties and became part of a coherent Scottish nation, assertive, warlike, resilient, patriotic, and freedom-loving. That Scotland was born fighting is an old saying and a true one: no one can read the language of official documents in the fourteenth century without realizing the extent and depth of the new national pride that the wars called forth.¹⁶ The intensity of Scottish anger was communicated to the pope in 1329 by the abbot of Arbroath, Bruce’s chancellor, in these immortal words: For so long as one hundred of us shall remain alive we shall never in any wise consent to submit to the rule of the English. For it is not for glory we fight, for riches, or for honours, but for freedom alone, which no good man loses but with his life.¹⁷ It took four centuries before the breach between the two countries was healed.¹⁸

Although minor cultural and social differences always persisted between Highlanders and Lowlanders and later between them and a group of ex-patriates known as the Ulster Scots (or Scotch Irish), a distinctive Scottish national character gradually emerged. Philosopher Thomas Carlyle described it as that venerable structure of social and moral life which mind has through long ages been building up in us [in our stern motherland]. Among its traits was the sure knowledge that, because they lived in a land that was often desperately poor, nothing would ever be easy and that the fruits of one’s labor often would be uncertain. Another element that penetrated deeply into the national psyche was a distinctive ideal and set of practices that emphasized education as the primary instrument for achieving the good life in both the private and public spheres of activity. By the end of the eighteenth century, with a population of barely a million people, Scotland had five universities. England, with five or six times the population, had only two—or three if Trinity College in Dublin is included. A third distinctive element became the essentially democratic character of the people, not in the sense of popular participation in government but in the absence of rigid lines of demarcation between social classes. A final element was the tendency, particularly noticeable in the Ulster Scots, to embrace modernity and reject traditionalism. This was manifested in a propensity to look toward the future rather than dwell on the past. This produced in successive generations a remarkable resiliency, an ability to endure hard times, a zest for innovation, and a willingness to accept change and new ways of doing things.¹⁹

The Rise and Fall of Clan Armstrong

The tragedy of the endless Anglo-Scottish wars was that no side ever completely won or lost and that the next one was always likely to break out soon. The border between the two nations, running roughly southwest from Berwick-on-Tweed on the east coast to Solway Firth on the west coast, derived its principal cultural characteristic from one decisive historical fact: For seven centuries, the kings of Scotland and England could not agree who owned it, and meddled constantly in each other’s affairs. From the year 1040 to 1745, every English monarch but three suffered a Scottish invasion, or became an invader in his turn.²⁰ Thus, according to Sir Walter Scott, while the wars with England ended favorably for Scotland with national independence, an unintended consequence was to convert the borderlands of both countries into wildernesses, only inhabited by soldiers and robbers. The Borders, as the region is still known today, became a poor and desolate area because it was made deliberately to be less desirable for an invader to possess. Rather than building new fortresses along the border, the existing ones were pulled down so as not to allow an invader to seize and hold them as a way to strengthen his grip on the surrounding countryside. Cattle, the only remaining source of wealth in the area, were carefully hidden away in remote locations in its glens, burns, sykes, and such of the forests that remained.²¹

From the beginning of the fourteenth century until the end of the reign of Elizabeth I in 1603, the Borders constituted a de facto third definable region of Scotland along with the Highlands and Lowlands. Parts of it were a no-man’s-land dominated by raiders and free-booters, plunderers and rustlers, Border lords and outlaw riders… . because the border ballads and legends have cast a gloss of romance over it, there is a tendency to regard the high midnight of the Border reiver as a stirring, gallant episode in British history. It was not like that; it was as cruel and horrible in its way as Biafra and Vietnam. ²² For the ordinary folk who lived there, the difference between peace and war was ephemeral at best. There were no schools or churches and little in the way of traditional commerce or agriculture. There was no point in trying to lead a settled existence, even in the so-called times of peace. Why plant and till crops when they might be burned before harvest? Why build a decent house when it might be burned down the next week?²³ Why bother to teach children the trades of peace when their society depended for its existence on raiding and depredation? In short, the Borders was a place that might have served as the inspiration for the great English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. In his masterwork Leviathan, he famously described the condition of man in a state of nature lacking the benefits of government:

In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.²⁴

An English visitor to the area in 1600 observed that southwestern Scotland was a bleak and bare solitude, destitute of trees, abounding in heather and morass and barren hills; soil where cultivation was found only in dirty patches of crops, on ground surrounded by heather and bog.²⁵ In this miserable and bleak world, Clan Armstrong not only survived but also prospered rather handsomely for two centuries.

On both sides of the Borders, the clans and nobility were nominally loyal to their respective sovereigns, but the farther one was from the seats of power in Edinburgh and London, the weaker that allegiance became. On the Scottish side, large clans like the Humes, Armstrongs, Scotts, Chisholms, and Maxwells ruled in contempt of the central authorities except when it suited their purpose to feign a show of loyalty to the king.²⁶ Most of them focused on preying on the population on the other side—reiving it was called—while some clans specialized in the theft of livestock—rustling being the Border term for this practice.²⁷ By the beginning of the sixteenth century, the words road and raid were synonymous in the Borders as were raiding and riding. When the Armstrongs were described as ever riding, it meant simply that they never ceased raiding. There were at least twenty-one major riding clans and fifty-eight minor ones. Nearly all of them would have agreed with the statement ascribed to the Armstrongs that they were reivers first, Armstrongs second, and Scottish or English a long way third. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, they were one of the largest and most feared clans with the ability to field as many as three thousand mounted men. It was said they probably did as much damage during their forays than any two other clans combined.²⁸ The clan motto is Invictus maneo, I remain unvanquished.

The surname of Armstrong is said to have originated in the English county of Cumberland near Berwick on Tweed in 1235. It obviously implies great physical strength. According to the legend surrounding its origin, a Scottish king was unhorsed during a battle and was unable to remount. His armor-bearer, one Fairbane by name, lifted the king by the thigh with one arm and set him back on his saddle as the battle swirled around them. For this timely assistance, the grateful king rewarded him with lands along the border between Scotland and England; bestowed on him the appellation of Armstrong, Fortinbras in Latin; and assigned him a crest showing an armored left hand and arm grasping a leg and foot also encased in armor. It was not until 1362 and 1363 that written records can be found showing that letters of safe conduct were granted to a William Armstrong and not until 1376 that the Armstrong clan was identified as belonging to the area of Liddesdale, the traditional seat of the clan.²⁹ The Armstrong clan had a greater presence in the Borders than just the Liddesdale area. According to a 1563 report, the clan consisted of four main subclans, or graynes: Mangerton, Whithaugh, Ailmore, and Chingils. The seat of the clan was considered to be in Liddesdale, where a castle at Mangerton had existed since the fourteenth century and where the clan chief resided. The Whithaugh grayne also lived in Liddesdale, but there was also a significant Armstrong presence in the West March near land mostly controlled by the Maxwell clan. Another branch of the family lived in the English Middle March.³⁰

Beginning in the first decade of the sixteenth century, several Armstrongs moved into an area of the Borders known as the Debatable Land. From time immemorial, this small patch of land had served as an unofficial but universally acknowledged border between the land that became Scotland and the land that became England. No archaeological trace of any prehistoric or pre-Roman civilization has been discovered there, and the land seems by common consent of all parties in all eras to have been a common land used to graze animals and to protect the spawning grounds of salmon runs on the Liddel River. Illegal settlements by the Armstrongs and other clans began to appear in the early 1510s, perhaps to take advantage of the Crown’s weakness after the death of Scottish monarch James IV at Flodden in 1513.³¹ To clear them out, the parliaments of both Scotland and England decreed in 1537 and reaffirmed in 1551, From the date of this proclamation, all Englishmen and Scottsmen are and shall be free to rob, burn, spoil, slay, murder, and destroy, all and every such person and persons, their bodies, property, goods and livestock, which remain or inhabit any part of the said Debatable Land except for the purpose of pasturing animals between sunrise and sunset, in accordance with the ancient practice custom applied to all Englishmen and Scottsmen who do not take up permanent residence there.³² The Debatable Land became ground zero for the reivers. From thence onward for nearly a century, there were at times three simultaneous wars going on: England against Scotland, both countries against the reivers, and the reivers against both countries.

Border clans like the Armstrongs usually rode in family groups, but sometimes they rode with their Liddesdale neighbors—the Elliots, Croziers, and Nixons—and on occasion even with English reivers, possibly as a form of professional courtesy. The riding culture that evolved resembled that of organized crime families in the United States, with the chief border clans acting as the major gangs of New York City or Philadelphia in the middle of the twentieth century. While the riding clans occasionally feuded and fought with one another, they also developed a well-understood and accepted set of rules for reiving, as well as a common code of conduct that passed for professional ethics. For all of the Armstrongs’ ferociousness, having once pledged their faith, even to an enemy, they were very strict in observing it, insomuch that they thought nothing could be more heinous than violated fidelity. All the clans demanded protection money or black rents—also known as blackmail—from inhabitants on both sides of the Borders. But once a clan chief received the demanded tribute, he was honor bound not only to desist from plundering the lands of those from whom he had received it but also to protect them from the incursions of other reivers and see that any property stolen from them was returned.³³ Thus, a great deal of riding was devoted not to reiving but to hot trods to protect their clan clients from other reivers who had plundered them. This code of honor did not necessarily apply to the clans’ relationship with their sovereign. Though nominally loyal to the king of Scotland, Sir Walter Scott noted that the Liddesdale clans, particularly the Armstrongs and Elliots, were apt in an emergency to don the red cross of England and temporarily become English subjects if it suited their purpose.³⁴

Religion was virtually nonexistent as a moderating force on clan behavior.³⁵ The Reformation had not the slightest impact on the border clans that remained culturally Roman Catholic even while they plundered churches and abbeys on both sides of the Borders. It was said that most men in the Middle March could not recite the Lord’s Prayer, and the sanctity of church property was of so little concern to the Armstrongs that they were complicit in the destruction of fifty-two church buildings.³⁶ Understandably, the administration of religious rites were irregular in Liddesdale and the nearby dales of the Esk and Ewe Rivers. Typically, only a single monk from Melrose Abbey, forty miles away, dared to visit those areas once a year to solemnize marriages and baptisms. In the absence of priests, the custom of handfasting substituted for the sacrament of marriage. This was a trial marriage in which a couple agreed to live as man and wife for one year. No dowry was required, and at the end of that period, unless a priest visited to perform the sacrament of marriage, the union was considered permanent. If either party objected to the union before that time, it was dissolved, with any children having been conceived considered legitimate.³⁷

To the chagrin (or perhaps the pride) of their modern descendants, there is no escaping the fact that the Armstrongs of Liddesdale were the worst of a very bad lot. Their story survives not only in plentiful Scottish and English government archives documenting their depredations but also in the form of ballads that constitute an oral history passed down from one clan generation to the next. These ballads are more than just a sixteenth-century antecedent of today’s Spanish language corridos or hip-hop music glorifying drug lords and violence against women and the police. They are a rich body of romantic literature in their own right. Historian George Macaulay Trevelyan writes, The Border people wrote the Border ballads. Like the Homeric Greeks, they were cruel, coarse savages, slaying each other as beasts of the forest, and yet they were poets who could express in the grand style the inexorable fate of the individual man and woman. One example is the story of Sandy Armstrong of Rowanburn, known as Lang Sandy for his great height, who was caught and hanged along with eleven of his sons by English wardens. In a ballad known as Armstrong’s Goodbye, he admits his crimes, refrains from asking for mercy, and wishes his executioners joy and a good night:

This night is my departing night,

For here nae maun I stay;

There’s neither friend nor foe o’ mine

But wishes me away.

What I hae done through lack o’ wit

I never, never can recall;

I hope ye’re a’ my friends as yet

Goodnight, and joy be wi’ ye all.³⁸

Another ballad provides the point of view of Border clans like the Armstrongs’ about their lives of reiving:

On the border was the Armstrangs, able men;

Somewhat unruly and very ill to tame;

I would have none think that I call them thieves;

For if I did, it would be errant lies;

* * * *

The freebooter ventures both life and limb,

Good wife and bairn, and every other thing;

He must do so, or else must starve and die;

For all his lively-hood comes of the enemie:³⁹

But lest we overromanticize the life of the Border clans, still another ballad calls out the Armstrongs for what they really were: He is weil kend, John of the Syde / A greater thief did never ride. ⁴⁰

But there was at least one greater thief than John of the Syde riding the Borders. William Armstrong of Kinmont, or Kinmont Willie, raided on a larger scale than almost anyone else, forgoing attacks on single farms or villages to lay waste to entire areas, usually riding at the head of three hundred or more raiders. A favorite target was the Tynedale region of the English East March, and in one August 1583 raid when he was well into his forties—very old for a Border reiver—he attacked eight villages in a single foray, burning several houses, rustling eight hundred cattle, killing six men, wounding eleven more, and carrying off thirty prisoners. The next year, in cooperation with the Crozier clan, he returned to the same area where he rustled one thousand three hundred cattle and sixty horses, killed ten men, and burned sixty houses. In 1585, he decided to raid deep into Scotland, accompanying the Earl of Angus in a campaign against the Earl of Arran near Stirling. This raid made his name a byword for lawlessness and excess throughout Scotland, but it didn’t match his biggest raid in Tynedale eight years later in 1593 when, at the head of one thousand men, he rustled two thousand livestock. Though age eventually slowed him down, he continued these depredations for another decade. Having never been brought to justice and living well into his sixties, Kinmont Willie is said to have died peacefully in his bed.⁴¹

Why was plundering on such a scale allowed to continue for so long? Despite a near-total disregard for royal law, the riding clans occasionally served the purposes of both the Scottish and the English monarchs who alternately encouraged or suppressed them. Their utility was that they provided early warning of invasion and served on both sides of the Borders as the first responders to attacks by the other side. Occasionally, however, it became necessary to curb the worst of their excesses, and this was the motivation for the creation of the Marches. The linchpins of border law and order were the wardens of the Marches. There were six wardens, three on either side of the frontier governing the East, Middle, and West Marches. There was a fourth warden on the Scottish side, the Keeper of Liddesdale. Because this area was home to the Armstrongs, it was so violent and lawless that it required a full-time warden all its own.⁴²

The pervasive criminal culture of the Borders made it difficult for any warden to enforce justice against the principal riding clans. Sir William Hutton, in a letter to the Earl of Cumberland in 1611 when the power of the riding clans had finally been broken, described the reivers as void of conscience, the fear of God; and of all honesty, and so linked in friendship by marriage, and all or most of them of one flesh, ending to make their gain by stealing, that of a hundred felonies scarcely one shall be proved.⁴³ Therefore, whenever the riding clans needed to be taught a lesson or brought to justice, extraordinary measures on the part of monarchs of both sides of the Borders were required. Several riding clans, the Armstrongs arguably being the strongest and most lawless, had by the early decades of the sixteenth century grown too powerful to be awed or disciplined by the forces available to the wardens of the Middle Marches. In such cases, punitive judicial expeditions were mounted by one monarch or the other, and sometimes the two acted in temporary cooperation to restore tranquility to the Borders. These judicial expeditions often took on the size and character of military campaigns.

It required a series of such campaigns to deal with Johnnie Armstrong, named John of Gilnockie for the stone tower he built on the banks of the Esk River in the Debatable Land.⁴⁴ He was the brother of the laird of Mangerton and considered by locals to be the Robin Hood of the Borders. His raids into the English Middle March eventually became so bothersome and brutal that he was considered a national menace to both England and Scotland. In 1528, William, Lord Dacre, warden of the English West March, assembled a force of two thousand riders in secret to take him prisoner, but Armstrong was tipped off and evaded capture. Two years later, seventeen-year-old king James V of Scotland assembled ten thousand men and descended on Liddesdale and the Armstrongs. Luring Armstrong into a trap, he captured and executed him along with several kinsmen at Carlenrigg in Ewesdale. Armstrong swore he had never raided in Scotland or despoiled a Scot, but James was adamant that he should die. Realizing his fate was sealed, Johnnie fearlessly replied to his sovereign, I am but a fool to seek grace at a graceless face. But had I known sir that you would have taken my life this day, I should have lived on the border in spite of King Harry (Henry VIII) and you both, for I know King Harry would down-weigh my best horse with gold to know that I were condemned to die this day. This was likely an apocryphal statement created by a sympathetic Scottish balladeer. English chroniclers, on the other hand, expressed great joy that he was finally dead. As Fraser explains, So might America have received the death of Al Capone. The Armstrongs got a measure of revenge twelve years later, however, when they and their retainers refused to come to James’s assistance when his Scottish forces were defeated by the English at the Battle of Solway Moss. Thus, although such judicial expeditions were not uniformly successful, they provided a fairly regular reminder that a king’s authority occasionally could make itself felt on the Borders.⁴⁵

The reiver era finally ended with the ascension of James VI of Scotland to the throne of England in 1603, when Elizabeth I died without an heir. It had been the dream of Edward I three centuries earlier to unite the two crowns. This was achieved ironically by a Scottish monarch taking his place on the throne of England. As James was traveling to London for his coronation as James I of England, Archibald Armstrong—the tenth laird of Mangerton—along with his son and two hundred riders penetrated into England as far south as Penrith apparently with the object of starting a war and preventing the union of the two crowns. An embarrassed and angered James dispatched a large force under Sir William Selby to bring the raiders to justice and, in the process, to kill as many of them as possible.⁴⁶ This objective was accomplished in an exemplary manner as nearly every Armstrong stronghold along the Liddel River was razed to its foundation. So many clan members were put to death that the other border clans grudgingly accepted the fact that James actually intended border raiding to cease. Archibald was the last Armstrong proprietor of Mangerton, and his grayne virtually ceased to exist. His cousin Lancie was the last Armstrong proprietor of nearby Whithaugh although members of his grayne continued to maintain a tenuous presence in Liddesdale afterward.

After his coronation and now determined to pacify an area that was no longer needed as a buffer between two hostile kingdoms, James ordered the destruction of all the strongholds of every riding clan, forbade the use of the term Borders, ordered that no one in the region except a nobleman or a gentleman should carry weapons, and compelled the clans to return to agricultural pursuits. He established border commissions to examine the land titles of broken clans like the Armstrongs and Johnstones. Eventually, many clans were declared to be despoiled and their lands given to the Buccleuchs, Douglases, and Murrays, all staunch Protestants.⁴⁷

There had long been a saying in the Borders, Comes Liddesdale’s peace / When the Armstrongs cease. This was achieved in the first decade of the seventeenth century. In historical terms, the power of the riding clans ended in the blink of an eye. The formal process took seven years to complete, but the back of the Armstrong clan was broken between 1603 and 1607. In the decade between 1610 and 1620, Armstrongs all but disappeared from Liddesdale. Many were killed outright by the king’s forces sent to arrest them, those who survived capture were tried and executed, others were ordered to serve in the king’s army on the continent, and a few were simply banished outright to James’s new plantation colony in Ulster. Few Armstrongs remained in Scotland thereafter.⁴⁸

Starting over in Ulster

The island of Ireland was colonized by Celtic tribes in around 350 BC, probably about fifty years after other Celts went to Britain and became the Britons who were conquered by Rome. Although some British Celts might have migrated to Ireland, Thomas Cahill believes the original colonizers were from the Iberian Peninsula because their language differed slightly from that of the British invaders. They became the Irish people over time, and today Ireland is the only remaining Celtic nation-state, all the others having been absorbed over time into other polities.⁴⁹

After being converted to Christianity in the fifth century by St. Patrick, Ireland evolved into a loose confederation of rural principalities dominated by clan patriarchs nominally pledging allegiance to the high king of Tara. Invading Norsemen in the eighth and ninth centuries wrecked the social fabric, impoverished the country, and destroyed many of the monasteries that had contributed so much to saving the west’s cultural patrimony. Despite their destructiveness, these invaders also established the towns of Dublin, Waterford, Limerick, and Cork. In 1155, the only English pope ever to be seated on the throne of St. Peter in Rome, Adrian IV, granted the overlordship of Ireland to King Henry II. Shortly afterward, Richard de Clare, the Earl of Pembroke known to history as Strongbow, invaded the island and broke Irish military power. He married the daughter of the king of Leinster to secure his conquest and proffered the new realm to Henry, who briefly visited the island in 1171 to accept the submission of his new vassals. But because England was more concerned with Scotland and France than with Ireland, English monarchs for centuries allowed the Irish to be governed by a small number of Anglo-Norman nobles. In practice, English authority was accepted in the Norse towns on the southern and western coasts and in the districts surrounding Dublin. This small area became known as the Pale, and the rest of the island, like the Borders in Scotland, degenerated into a wild, ungoverned space known as beyond the Pale.⁵⁰

Scotland had long been a major thorn in England’s side; under the sixteenth-century Tudor monarchs, Ireland became another. The first Tudor king, Henry VII, managed to quell any challenges to his authority; and when his son, Henry VIII, assumed the title of king of Ireland, he gave English titles to the Irish clan chiefs in the hope of controlling them. This hope was misplaced because the Protestant Reformation prompted a Counter-Reformation that resulted in the implacable opposition by the Irish Catholic population to the newly Protestant English monarchy. This created a strategic problem for the English Crown since any hostile European state could easily leverage Irish discontent and foment rebellion in England’s backyard. During the first thirty years of the reign of Elizabeth I, Ireland was shaken by no fewer than three rebellions against the Crown. A fourth uprising led by Hugh O’Neill, the Earl of Tyrone, erupted in 1599. Spain, England’s traditional European enemy at the time, allied itself with Tyrone and landed four thousand troops at Kinsale in 1601. Fortunately, Elizabeth’s commander on the island, Lord Mountjoy, defeated Tyrone and his Spanish allies and brought Ireland firmly back under English control.⁵¹

For the first three centuries of English control in Ireland, there