It may seem a mystery to some that “Scotch-Irish” immigrants from the wonderful paradise of the British Isles, sometimes refused Christian rites, even on their deathbed [such as the dozen Duty Boys bought in bondage by Puritan minister William Bradford, who refused to convert to his faith after he had worked them unto death], and often joined with the savage Indians in settling the deep woods away from the Puritan and commercial colonies by the sea. This was the case, and the colonial officials went so far—in many cases—as to incite certain tribes to attack settlers and backwoodsmen, who were often escaped slaves. George Washington's execution of backwoods tax protestors at the end of the Whiskey Rebellion was an extended expression of this colonial imperative to crush members of the restive underclass.

The above is one of Howard’s stock phrases.

Up until the late 20th Century—for perhaps 100 years, between the 1880s and 1980s—authors that wrote for the working class, such as Zane Grey, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, and Louis L’Amour, wrote novels, and in some cases entire cycles of novels, celebrating their ancestors’ breaking of the bonds of their English servitude. This was typified by a constant westward migration, outpacing the British colonial—and later Anglicized American Government—for 300 years. Unfortunately, the government followed the families of the frontiersmen, who were eventually engulfed by the tide of slavery and civilization that followed them into the lonely places of the world.

Defiant frontiersmen, righteous individuals, roving criminals, the evils of slavery, the dwindling of old races and the moral rot of civilization were constant themes in Howard’s fiction. Such themes were brought down through the generations to men like Grey, Howard and L’Amour by family tradition, based as it was on the education of child by the parent. By the time of L-Amour’s death there was scarcely an Irish- Scottish-, or Anglo-American with any recollection that his ancestors were slaves, as public schooling had finally erased the myriad family narratives and raised in its place the fetid lie of The Founding Fathers, telling only the story of the rich slavers and nothing of their slaves, whose descendents now trace their cultural and moral lineage not to their own ancestors, but to the ancestors of the cruel soul-drivers that profited off of their ancestors’ misery.

Like Howard, this author is able to trace his ancestry to white slaves and, due to Howard’s outright obsession with the evils of civilization, the moral rot of slavery, and the kinship between the lower class Scotch-Irish immigrants in the early colonies with the indigenous tribes of North America, likewise begs the ancient question. Howard employed his characters Bran Mac Morn, Kull, and Cormac, in his examination of what he seemed to believe were the blood memories of ancient ancestors who fought against the Romans and the Christian church just as his more recent folk had fought against the British and the Yankees.

Howard was fascinated—indeed haunted—by the prospect that surviving remnants of those Celtic tribes who had resisted Roman expansion in antiquity, as well as those Norse-Irish hybrids who resisted conversion to Christianity, still cried out to him from his very blood, speaking to him in his dreams and dark visions. I shall devote a portion of this book to the factual roots of this mystic Arуan heritage in America, which was largely the result of plantation slavery, and came to a head for Howard, in the novelette published in Weird Tales magazine in the month of his death, Black Canaan.

Solomon Kane takes that concept into the cosmic realm, dressed in the garb of a Puritan but dispensing rough U.S. frontier-style justice in the name of a very Old Testament God. While Howard spent a lot of ink on the fate of his defiant, racially identified protagonists from Conan to Kirby Buckner, Kane was the pure hand of retribution, as much dedicated to freeing blacks from bondage as his own people. Notably, he was infected with a wanderlust that could not keep him in England for more than a month, and, in the long poem, The One Back Stain, he marked Admiral Drake as a traitor to his race. Ironically, when Drake put into Roanoke Island to resupply the colony of slaves and indentures that had been left there by a cabal of investors, he found only a carving indicating that the settlers had gone off to live with the savages.

So, below is a story, that one might well imagine Howard rewriting from the perspective of Solomon Kane.

William Jamieson was a resident of Oldmeldrum, a farming village 12 miles inland from Aberdeen. In 1741, Jamieson’s 10-year-old son was kidnapped by a “spirit-gang” [called in the New World “soul-drivers,” and in the Royal Navy “press-gangs”], employed by “Bonny” John Burnet, a well-known slaver based out of Aberdeen.

So many Scottish children were shipped out of Aberdeen for sale in the Mid-Atlantic region that one wonders if the small Chesapeake Bay port town of Aberdeen drew its name from the fact.

Jamieson asked after his son’s whereabouts. It was common for boys to run errands for rural Scottish parents, and in this way, many were seized on the roads and in the towns.

Hearing that a spirit-gang had been working the area, Jamieson hurried down to Aberdeen and searched the docks and ships for his son. He found his son huddled in a circle of 60 boys being held in the open on the sea shore by a gang of whip-armed “kid-nabbers,” or men who “nabbed kids,” hence the Scottish term kidnappers.

Whenever these boys walked outside the circle the men struck them with the horse whips. Jamieson called to his son to come to him. The boy was whipped to the ground. When Jamieson ran to his side, he too was whipped to the ground.

Jamieson tried to get a writ from the Scottish courts to have his son freed, but was advised, “…it would be vain for him to apply to the magistrates to get his son liberate: because some of the magistrates had a hand in the doings.”

Jamieson never heard from, or of, his son, had no knowledge of where he had been taken and never knew his fate. Jamieson did, however, help a kidnapping victim that had returned and sought redress from the courts, by giving testimony in court about the sad story of his son.

Such stories, when brought to light, are regarded as distorted accounts of apprentices and criminals being bonded out to a colonial employer for a brief term of employment ushering in boundless opportunities. These lies have been told for so long by slave master apologists in academia, that it is probable that our current educators do not even know they perpetrate such old lies. The hard fact was, Jamieson’s boy probably failed to survive the first winter. He either would have been transported to a sugar plantation in Barbados, which killed most white men in their first year, or he would have been sold to an American plantation owner, made to sleep on the dirt floor of a barn with the animals, and to perform hard labor [mostly as a lumberjack] from sunrise to sunset. If the latter were the case, with any luck he might have been abducted by an Indian warrior and raised as a member of a tribe, such as happened to the boy who became Blue Jacket, who became war chief of the Shawnees.

Some such stories remain to us, and more remained in Howard’s time. Some tales of white slave survival will be included through the latter portion of this book, in hopes of further understanding the dark and awful view of life held by Howard, and his addiction to writing about men with the combat ability to knock the floor out of the corrupt social order. His fiction is chock full of monstrous adventurers righting more monstrous wrongs, and understandably so.