If I was right about this, and the Angus who was sued by Thomas Campbell was the same man as my Angus, then I was probably looking at a new ancestor. Because John McDonald, Sr. seemed to be the father of the other two men—John, Jr. and Angus—who were named in Campbell’s lawsuit.
That took me back to a passage I’d uncovered in a book called The Troublesome MacDonalds. Written by Angus Henry McDonald, descendant of my ancestor Angus, the book didn’t say much about my Angus’ origins in Scotland, but it revealed a family story: The author’s father, born in 1851, often “talked about our ancestors, about John or Andreas McDonald, who came over from the Highlands before the American Revolution. He must have meant Aeneas or Angus.”
John or Angus McDonald. Why was the author’s father unsure? Maybe because Angus’ father was named John, and they immigrated together? I could see how, over a few generations, the family story could shift shape, but retain the right names.
Looking for more McDonald defendants in Frederick County, I went back to the earlier records, the ones from the 1740s and 1750s. Here, in 1750, was a case that read: “On the complaint of William Cochran against his servant Angers McDonnald for striking him…it is thereupon ordered by the court that the said Angers serve his said master one whole year after his time by Indenture, Custom or Order of Court be expired for the same.” This indentured servant Angus McDonald had punched his master, and he would have to serve an extra year for it.
The court date? February 13th.
The library was about to close, and this Richmond trip was done. Back in New York, over the next few weeks, I looked everywhere online for some clues about my Angus, about the John McDonald I suspected was his father, but couldn’t find that proof I was looking for.
Then a reference at Ancestry.com took me to a University of Virginia site called The Papers of George Washington. Letters to and from Washington were reprinted here as images, and one of those letters was from a man named Daniel Campbell, in Falmouth. On June 28, 1754, Campbell wrote to Washington: “I sincerely thank you for the countenance you showed Angus McDonald on my account. I have been lately surprised with a story that he was shot for striking one of his officers, which I hope is false. If not, I pity his fate, and rather wish he had died as a soldier in the field of battle. If he is alive, please desire him to write me under your cover.”
This Angus McDonald was definitely Uncle Angus—he was the only Angus McDonald serving under Washington in 1754. Daniel Campbell of Falmouth, Virginia had somehow taken Uncle Angus under his wing, connecting him to the rising star Washington. In this letter, Campbell almost wrote like a mentor.
I looked, and found that Daniel Campbell was a prominent Glasgow merchant and a cousin of the Campbell chiefs, the Earls and Dukes of Argyll. His partner Alexander Campbell was a cousin, as well. In the 1740s, 1750s and 1760s, Alexander and Daniel Campbell ran their trading business out of Falmouth and Fredericksburgh, two towns across the river from one another in northern Virginia.
Now I really wanted to go back to Richmond.
And once I was there, searching through the microfilm rolls and the books, I found out that Alexander and Daniel Campbell had loaned money to William Cochran of Frederick County—the same man who sued his young servant Angus McDonald on February 13, 1750. Record after record showed the trading links between Frederick County and the port towns of Falmouth and Fredericksburgh to the east.
It took a few more days of looking, though, before I found this record from Spotsylvania County, whose county seat was Fredericksburgh. On August 2, 1748, the court reported: “Angus McDonnald, a Servant belonging to Alexander and Daniel Campbell, was this day adjudged to be fourteen years of age towards payment of levies.” They brought Uncle Angus into court to prove that he was under sixteen, so that they wouldn’t have to pay any taxes on him.
Maybe I wouldn’t discover anything more about the family of my ancestors Angus and Martha, and maybe I’d never know for certain that John McDonald was the father of my Angus. But now I knew how my Angus came to America. He was following his uncle, who had come to Virginia as a boy, the indentured servant of the Duke of Argyll’s cousins.
CHAPTER 26
BEANNACHD
LEIBH
B’ e Donnchadh MacFhraing a’ chiad dhiubh.
The first one was Duncan Rankin.
He was beside the River Coe in the early morning, before 5:00. Everyone else in the glen was yet asleep. A blizzard had arisen overnight, so that Duncan scarcely could see, and the wind froze against his skin, biting.
In the distance, he thought he could see the colour of red against the white of the driving snow. He waited a few moments, squinted his eyes again, and soon could see that a few redcoats were walking toward him.
They stabbed him in the chest with their bayonets. His body washed away down the river and into the loch.
Nearby, in a warm house, Robert Campbell and his lieutenants rose from their beds of heather. As our tacksman of Inverrigan awoke, Campbell’s men grabbed him, and then grabbed his wife and children. The soldiers tied rope around all of their hands and feet, so that they could not move. The soldiers tied strips of cloth about their mouths, so that they could not scream. Then Campbell’s men began to prepare their weapons. The children cried quietly.
Close by was the house of John, the elder son of Alasdair MacIain, and he awoke when he heard soldiers walking outside. He wrapped his plaid about him and walked to Inverrigan’s house, knowing that Campbell was staying there. Through a window, Campbell saw him approaching, and quickly stepped outside so that he could meet John in front of the house.
John suspected the truth, and so Campbell made certain to greet him with warmth. Campbell said, “We at last have received our orders to proceed to Glen Garry, just as planned.” Sensing that this was not enough, he looked at John and added, “Really, do you think that I would move against Glen Coe without warning my own niece and nephew, your brother?” Campbell’s words rang true, for no Gael could murder his own kin. John turned and went back to his house.
Several minutes later, Campbell’s watch struck 5:00, the hour that had been specified in his orders. Campbell nodded. The father, the mother, and their children were dragged outside and lined up. The soldiers shot them, and then ran their bayonets into them. The soldiers threw their bodies on a pile of animal dung.
A twelve-year-old boy living nearby was able to run over and approach Campbell without being harmed. He threw himself at Campbell’s feet and begged for mercy. He said, “Please, sir, I will go anywhere with you if only you will spare me.” The soldiers shot the boy as he lay on the ground.
Throughout the glen now, the soldiers were firing their muskets and stabbing their bayonets into our people. A few hundred yards away from Inverrigan, they pushed old Archibald MacDonald to the ground. They turned their muskets around and clubbed him. But they didn’t kill him right then. Instead, they watched him crawl into a nearby house, and then they set fire to it.
Coming to another house, they listened. Fourteen people were inside, and parents were holding the mouths of their young children to keep them from making any noise. Yet someone made a sound. The soldiers blocked off the door and set fire to the thatched roof. The people inside tried to leave, pounding on the door and screaming to be let out. The soldiers watched the house burn down with everyone inside.
They killed a child, and all that would ever be found of her was her hand, lying in the snow. They saw an old man limping from a burning house and shot him down. They aimed their fire at the backs of people who were fleeing into the mountains.
At Achnacon, where a group of them under the command of Sergeant Robert Barber had been staying, Angus MacDonald was sitting at home with his wife and children and his older brother John, the tacksman of Achtriachtan. Soldiers came and stuck their rifles into the open windows. They fired. They ran into the house to find that they had killed ev
eryone except Angus.
Before they could bayonet him, Angus said to them, “If you are going to kill me, please do it outside of my home.” Sergeant Barber sneered and said, “Since I have eaten your meat, yes, I will do you the favour.”
The soldiers brought Angus out and let him stand in front of his house. They walked away for a distance, turned, and rushed toward him with their bayonets. But at the last moment, he threw his plaid over their heads and escaped toward Sgorr nam Fiannaidh. The soldiers grabbed his brother John’s body and dragged it outside. They smeared animal dung on it.
Down the river, soldiers knocked on the door of Alasdair MacIain, and a servant answered. They told the servant that they now had to leave for Glen Garry, but had come to thank Alasdair for the hospitality he had shown them. The servant asked them to remain at the door, and he walked upstairs to the bedroom, where Alasdair and Lady Glen Coe were asleep. He woke them and passed on the message. Both of them rose from bed, and Alasdair asked that a dram of whisky be prepared for each of the soldiers, so that they could be shown on their way.
At that moment, the soldiers rushed up the stairs and into the bedroom. Alasdair stood in front of them, in his bed clothes. They shot him in the head, and then again in the back as he turned away. They stepped over his body to get to Lady Glen Coe. They stripped off her night gown. They grabbed her.
As she stood naked before them, they seized her hands. They forced her fingers into their mouths, and with their tongues and teeth, they pulled off each ring. They forced her down the stairs and out into the blizzard, where her heart soon stopped.
Nearby, her son John and his wife Eiblin handed their baby boy Alexander to a nurse, who wrapped the child in her plaid and ran into the darkness. John helped to guide the survivors as they went toward the mountain passes in the snow and wind, but the way to the nearest hearth was long. Many of those who were shivering and numb became pale after a short while. As they continued to walk, they became confused, stopping, unwilling to go farther. Then their skin became blue, and they began to speak of such odd things. Soon they could not talk or weep. They remained on the ground, and the strong ones tried to carry them, but the breath was gone.
Just after the survivors arrived into Appin, into Glen Creran and elsewhere, word spread throughout the Highlands and the Isles of what had happened. Before the 13th of February, many chiefs had not yet given the oath, but this changed very quickly, for no chief would put his people in danger. One after one, they came to the sheriffs and submitted to King William, to Dalrymple, until not a single clan opposed the government any longer.
Yet among the survivors was the baby boy Alexander, kept warm in his nurse’s plaid, and it was he who represented our people during those days, fifty-three years later, when our hopes finally rose again.
Prince Charles Stuart, grandson of our King James, began the rebellion of 1745 by landing in the Isles in July. He was called Bonnie Prince Charlie, and his army grew throughout the summer, drawing many of the Gaels. The MacDonalds of Glen Coe were among the first to join him, marching behind a bunch of heather held aloft on a pike.
In short order, our army took Perth in the Highlands, Linlithgow in the Lowlands, and soon Edinburgh itself, where Prince Charles was welcomed with the cheers of the crowds in the middle of September. He held court there, at Holyrood Palace, for several weeks. On the 21st of September, we met a government army at Prestonpans, near Edinburgh, and routed them. Our men watched redcoats run in fear, taking hundreds of them prisoner.
After securing the Lowlands, the Gaels marched into England, taking Carlisle and Manchester and coming as far south as Derby, a little over one hundred miles from London, in early December. Yet Prince Charles’ war council decided to return to Scotland in order to regroup and bolster our forces. A government army followed from the south, led by King George’s son William.
So it was that on the 16th of April, 1746, upon the moor of Culloden, the MacDonalds of Glen Coe lined up on the left flank with our swords and muskets. The Highlanders’ bagpipes wailed, and the government’s drums banged. After a short while, the government’s artillery began their fire. They had 122 cannons, while the Gaels had only 12. The cannon fire picked off the clansmen, slowly, again and again, as we waited for the order to charge.
No order came from Prince Charles for thirty minutes, and when finally it did, the Highland men ran across the moor into massive cannon volleys, then short-range gunfire. As more clansmen fell, the remaining men tried to regroup, and then ran.
After the battle, government troops came into Highland towns and villages. They shot and bayoneted many. They burned houses and farms and took away livestock. Out of one hundred Glen Coe men who were of fighting age, fifty-two were killed during the rebellion.
The English now did all in their power to unravel us. Their government in London made it illegal for us to wear a kilt. They made it illegal for us to play the bagpipe. Their Parliament passed laws to prevent Gaelic children from being “educated in disaffected or rebellious principles.” Since those days, our children often have been taught in English, learning about the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which brought the blessings of liberty to our United Kingdom.
Some of the departures, in those first few years, were men who had been captured at Culloden, or who had been arrested after the battle for their support of Prince Charles. So many were convicted in England and Edinburgh, and those who were not executed were forced onto ships bound for the West Indies and the American colonies. Too, there were the boys and young men who were sold into indentured servitude, and were shipped away from us, to the ports that served the tobacco trade.
The chief of Glen Coe, and all of the other chiefs, could do nothing, for the laws passed by the English had taken away their power. Our chiefs became mere landlords, with many of them moving to London. Clansmen and clanswomen have become mere tenants, with no claim to our own homes, and in the decades since Culloden, many of the Gaels have been forced from our lands.
I was a young boy when our men returned from Culloden, when the first of our people left, and I have seen many more go away since those times. I am old now, but I have stayed in the place where my mother and father are buried. I have stayed in the place where my memories lie.
There are the times when I hear that another one of our families is preparing to leave, and I wish I might say to them: Please do not go. Please do not leave. Remain here with us.
I wish I might say to them: There is yet a chance that we will come to our strength again, and give our last resistance. There is yet a chance that we will gain the freedom to keep to our ways.
But they speak only of green fields to the horizon, of the growing farms of Ohio and Virginia, of Ontario and the Carolinas. A man and woman might own hundreds of acres, they say, and leave wealth behind for their children. New machines await, with the spreading cities.
I bid them farewell, and as they go away from us, I pray they will always remember that they are the children of MacIain, who should drink from the waters of the Coe. I pray they will remember our fathers, who fell so that we could remain here in our glen. I pray that our strength will remain in them, for all of their days, even while they are so far away across the sea.
They believe, and they say, that their grandchildren and great-grandchildren will know of us. They believe that the young ones will hold on to us.
Yet I know those young ones will not. They will sing only the songs of their new world, and every corner of their hearts will owe allegiance to their new country. They will speak only the language of the British Empire. They will never gaze upon the snowed peak of Buachaille Etive Mòr and know, in that moment, that they are at home.
With each generation, we will fade away from them, more and yet more. Then the time will arrive, some day, when they forget us at last.
CHAPTER 27
REUNION
The church bell in
Glencoe was ringing as my family and I arrived. We stepped out of our cars, and saw the peaks of Sgorr na Cìche and Sgorr nam Fiannaidh above us in the distance, and then walked through the old door.
Here, sitting in the pews, were the descendants of the MacDonalds of Glencoe.
Here was Colin from New Zealand, descendant of Alasdair MacIain, who was just a few days late in giving the oath. Here was Lachie from the Isle of Lismore, the probable descendant of Angus MacDonald of Achnacon, who stood outside his house and escaped into the mountains by throwing his kilt over the heads of soldiers. Here was Brundage from Nova Scotia, descendant of another Angus MacDonald, whose children all departed for Canada.
Alistair from down the street was ill today, but his son Alexander was here. So were his wife Rosalin and her sister Jeanette, descendants of Duncan Rankin, who was the first one killed. There were so many others, too—cousins I was sure to meet soon.
We walked out after the service and gathered behind the bagpiper at the front of the church. The piper began to play, and we followed him, walking through the village and past the old bridge until we came to the memorial, a Celtic cross on a hill.
We stood together around it. Mountains were on all sides. The minute of silence began, and we bowed our heads and closed our eyes. In those first few seconds, the wind picked up a bit, then tapered off. Somebody was clearing his throat, somebody was whispering.
But I was thinking about her, the new one. She was just nine months old, daughter of my brother David and his wife Sarah. She was the first of the next generation, the first of Grandma and Grandpa’s great-grandchildren, and I was thinking of her big eyes. I was thinking of her crib and her grin. And I was thinking of what I wanted to tell her right now:
You have breathing lungs, and a name.
You get to exist.
You are here, to have a beating heart, to squint at the sun. You are here to hear every note, to go running and grinning while your mom and dad chase after you. You are here to grow into new clothes, and then to go to the dance, and then to hold your diploma.
Reunion: A Search for Ancestors Page 20
