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The mìorun mòr nan Gall—the “great malice” of the English speaker toward the Gaelic language and culture—took legal form in 1595 with the Privy Council act of James VI of Scotland (James I of England), which provided “for the erecting of English schools for rooting out the Irish language and…to wear it out, and learn the people the English tongue” (as cited in MacLean, 1995, p. 201). But when James VI passed this ordinance, Gaelic had already passed from being the preeminent language in Scotland to being the language of a troublesome minority: the Highland clans, who were long feared and despised by the people who lived in the more mercantile and industrial Lowlands of the South. The Gaels were considered a breed apart. They lived by different customs, followed different leaders, listened to different music, and spoke a strange and alien tongue.
Gaelic was once the language of the royal court. For instance, the famous warrior king, Robert the Bruce—who had driven the English invaders out of the country in the early 14th century, largely with the help of these same Highland clans—spoke Gaelic fluently. However, the language was superseded first by Normanized French, and then English, albeit an English with a Scots accent. Forgotten was the fact that the country had begun in the western kingdom of Dal Riata with the transplantation of Irish Gaels who brought their language with them. By the early modern period, the language of these people in the North was referred to as “Erse,” or Irish, and was considered not only different, but foreign and barbaric (MacLean, 1995).
This hostility to the Celts has not been bounded by the shores of Britain. In his books Cracker Culture (1988) and Attack and Die (1982), McWhiney charted a long history of conflict between the Teutons (Anglo-Saxons) and the Celts, even to the point of seeing the American Civil War as a continuation of this cultural war. In his writings, McWhiney made a convincing case that the underlying tension between the American North and the South during the early days of the 19th century and leading up to the Civil War was cultural hostility between the “Celtic fringe” and Scots-Irish agrarian culture of the South on the one hand, and the essentially Anglo-Saxon (Germanic) mercantile society of the