Stories From Texas

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Document Type

Article

Publication Date

9-30-2026

Abstract

If you spend just five minutes listening to Texas political ads, you’ll likely hear the word “freedom” a great deal. It’s baked into our state identity, a currency we deal in daily. But compared to the people who actually built the foundations of the Anglo Texas culture, our cries of freedom are rather tepid.

To understand why, you have to go back four hundred years to a lawless, 96-mile strip of land between Scotland and England. It was called the border country.

For generations, these people — for some of us, our ancestors — were caught in a violent struggle between rival kings. They learned that the government couldn’t protect them, that taxes there were state-sanctioned theft and that survival meant relying on your clan and your weapons. They answered to no king.

When the British crown tried to “civilize” them, it didn’t take. Instead, they were pushed into Northern Ireland — hence the name “Scotch-Irish.”

But they didn’t stay long. By the 1700s, they were sailing for America. When they arrived, they didn’t settle in the quiet orderly towns along the eastern seaboard. Seemed too organized. Too much government. They headed straight for the ungoverned freedom of the Appalachian Mountains.

In his brilliant book, Albion’s Seed, David Hackett Fischer notes just how fiercely anti-government these folks were.

In the 1790s, the newly-formed U.S. government passed a tax on whiskey. The immigrants thought this was outrageous. That tax was too much government for them. They either attacked the tax collectors or packed their wagons and moved further into the wilderness.

By 1820, a steady stream of these Scotch-Irish were moving to Texas for cheap land, where no one could tell them what to do. They were a people on the move. One man said, “When I get ready to move, I just shut the door, call the dogs, and start.”

Throughout the 1800s, they flooded into Texas. Sam Houston and Jim Bowie were Scotch-Irish.  Davy Crokett was Scotch-Irish and French.

This wave of immigrants brought with them their poetic borderland language. When we say “I reckon” or call our family “kinfolk” or say someone’s “plumb crazy,” we are speaking the exact dialect of these 17th-century borderlands ancestors.

Our grammar outs us, too. If you’ve ever said, “I might could do that,” you are using a double-modal grammatical form born on the Scottish border, preserved in the Appalachian hollers, and taken on tongues right into Texas.

Here are a few more words and pronunciations that came from that time and remain in use by some today:

Y’all

Whar for Where

Thar for There

Hard for Hired

Critter for Creature

A-goin’ for Going

Fixin’, as in Fixin’ to

Far for Fire

Nekkid for Naked

Wrassle for Wrestle

Winder for Window

Widder for Widow

Younguns for Young ones

Author David Hackett Fischer says that this became the language of “country music, truck drivers, cinematic cowboys and backcountry politicians.”

Now, back to the idea of “freedom.” Today, when Texans talk about freedom, they often mean freedom from federal regulation, freedom from high property taxes, or freedom to drive massive lifted trucks or ride motorcycles without a helmet. It’s a corporate, comfortable kind of liberty.

But to our Scotch-Irish ancestors, freedom didn’t mean a lower tax bracket. It meant absolute, radical autonomy.

Their idea was more in keeping with oil man Eddie Chiles’s advertised mantra, “The government should deliver the mail and stay the hell out of my business.”

Next time you see a bumper sticker celebrating Texas freedom, remember those Scotch-Irish, those fiercely independent and freedom-loving souls who helped give Texas its swagger and vocabulary.

Given this perspective, some of y’all might could be feeling the urge to shut the door and call the dogs.

Format

.MP3, 192 kbps

Length

00:04:37

Language

English

Notes

https://texasstandard.org/stories/wf-strong-texas-standard-freedom-history/

Comments

© 2026 William F. Strong. Uploaded with permission of copyright holder.

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