Each culture was, or became, inventive in its own way. Life on the frontier demanded creativity. Settlements which lacked resourcefulness often disappeared.
Some of these groups were quite different from one another, which led at times to frictions, and at other times to a fruitful complementarity. The groups cooperated and collaborated when necessary, but often ridiculed each other when times were easier. Many of the stereotypes and cliches which still circulate in American society about these ethnicities come from this era — from the mid-1600s onward.
The Germans and the Scotch-Irish were two contrasting groups who moved into the frontier regions, as historian Thomas Sowell writes:
As the German farming communities spread down through the Appalachian valley near the frontier, they found themselves often near the Scotch-Irish, who were frontiersmen par excellence. The Scotch-Irish often led the way into the untamed wilderness, hunting, fishing, clearing land, and fighting Indians, with the Germans and others following after the area became more settled.
The Scotch-Irish were rugged people who cared little for form and propriety. They were “pioneers” in the etymological sense: they were foot soldiers, if not literally, then at least in their attitudes.
The Germans were methodical, precise, and process-oriented. German families operated on mottos like “a place for everything, and everything in its place.” The value they placed on organization meant that not only were there correct things to do, but correct ways to do them. Thomas Sowell contrasts the two:
The Germans and the Scotch-Irish were very different in temperament and behavior and generally kept quite separate from each other, even in adjacent settlements. The Germans were noted for their order, quietness, friendliness, steady work, frugality, and their ability to get along with the Indians. The Scotch-Irish were just the opposite — quick-tempered, hard drinking, working intermittently, saving little, washing little, and constantly involved in feuds among themselves or with the Indians.
As recently as the first decade of the twentieth century, small German villages in Missouri retained the language, customs, and social patterns of Germany. They preserved the Germany they’d left in the early 1800s. To walk into the village of Frohna, Missouri in 1914 was like walking into a German village of a century earlier. The residents spoke German, and the children were exposed to the English language only when they were old enough to go to school. They brewed their own beer, and made their own wine, in accord with the methods which had been used in Germany for centuries. Once every few weeks, a family might venture to a neighboring village to “trade with the English” — meaning to buy from the marchants in the English-speaking villages.
The Scotch-Irish, meanwhile, made their own whiskey, were crude and vulgar by the standards of any of America’s ethnic immigrant groups, and fiercely independent. It is no coincidence that the most radical of the leaders in the American Revolution were not Germans. The Germans contributed more to the moderate aspects of the Revolution, like sorting out the details of representative government and refining the manufacture of weapons.
Religion, too, was a metric by which the differences between these groups could be measured, as Thomas Sowell reports:
Religious differences also divided them. The early German settlers were usually pious Lutherans, Calvinists, and other strict Protestant sects that avoided strong language or strong drink, while the Scotch-Irish were Presbyterians and were given to hard liquor and language that pious people considered blasphemous. After a century of sharing hundreds of miles of the great valleys of the Appalachian range, there was still little racial intermixture between the Germans and the Scotch-Irish.
Examples of the Scotch-Irish social patterns include the McCoy-Hatfield feud, which included both violence and whiskey (1863 - 1891); and the Whiskey Rebellion (1791 - 1794). Both these examples are predominately, but not purely, Scotch-Irish. Individuals of English ancestry were also involved.
Examples of the German influence include Concordia Publishing House, whose roots and antecedents reach back to 1844, making it one of the earliest publishers, if not the earliest publisher, in the state of Missouri and on the western frontier in general. The Germans also led the way in founding commercial beer breweries, e.g., Pabst (in the 1840s) and Yuengling (in the 1820s). Yuengling was originally spelled Jüngling. Germans planted vineyards and made wine on a commercial scale throughout the United States, especially in Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois. Apart from large-scale operations, individual German farmers around America routinely made their own wine and brewed their own beer.
The cultural contrasts between the two groups are clear. Yet in the course of the American Revolution, and in the process of creating an American civilization and an American society, they both contributed, without surrendering their cultures and ethnicities.