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I found the word in the complete Oxford, but only indirectly. The entry for 'Tuckahoe' has passing reference to 'Quo hee'.
Yes, the Tuckahoes certainly had a low opinion of the Cohees. I have found a great many insults slung their way. I was particularly struck by how many times the insult 'like Indians' was applied to them. They went barefoot 'like Indians.' Their women wore short skirts 'like Indians'. The men wore buckskin leggings 'like Indians' etc.
They are generally described as being whores and rogues (pardon my language, but the original language is even worse); I am not the least bit surprised that the western North Carolinians got fed up with the horrible way they were being treated and rebelled, thus bringing in the era of The Regulation.
Briefly stated, the colonial government of North Carolina was corrupt. Two points will suffice to illustrate the problems: eastern NC counties had one govt rep per 100 white men, western counties had one govt rep per fifteen hundred white men, keeping control of the govt firmly in the hands of the eastern elite. Second, govt officials in the west were routinely charging triple the legally mandated fees for govt functions and pocketing the profit. From 1761 - 1771 various peaceful protests were made, but when those were ignored, violence broke out and the Regulators were defeated at the Battle of Alamance in 1771. Of the 8000 families in western NC at the time it is estimated that 6000 were Regulators. About 1500 families picked up and moved west to the valley of the Holston River, TN -- the earliest large migration to TN (trappers and individuals had gone before).
In South Carolina similiar conditions prevailed; the problems were extensive. For example, the Anglican Church was the established church -- no other church was allowed to perform marriages. Most upcountry settlers were Protestants, commonly Presbyterians and Congregationalists and so on -- and wanted nothing to do with the Anglicans. When they got married by their own ministers the govt refused to recognize their marriages.
As far as SC was concerned they were living in sin and spawning bastards. I don't know too much about VA, I have no idea if the govt refused to recognize the Cohee marriages or not. In NC my ancestor got whopped with a 50 pound marriage bond -- land was valued at about 1 pound per acre of farmland -- I can imagine not many people could afford to put up that kind of bond to get married. Then again, in NC, 50 pounds was the fine for an illegal marriage. So far the only 'illegal' marriages I can discover in NC relate to people of different races marrying... but I have not exhausted the topic of colonial NC marriage law by any means. But anyhow, these various problems getting married probably explain why the Cohee women were characterized as 'whores.'
As to the matter of the short skirts, cloth was expensive, poor women wore short skirts, especially when working. By 'short' I mean calf length or knee length, we're not talking mini skirts here. The weather was very hot as well, and women often worked or even went to church dressed in a simple dress instead of the multiple layers that respectable women wore. (Indian women also wore knee or calf length skirts, which is probably what inspired the Cohee women.) In one notorious incident in NC, a sheriff accosted a poor man's wife to pay taxes, and when she had no money and no thing of value, he stripped the dress off her body and sold it on the spot. You read that right, she was stripped naked and her only dress sold to pay the tax.
Interestingly enough, the western Carolinians were probably healthier than eastern elites... one insult calls them 'browbeating monsters six feet high.' This seems to suggest that Cohee men were taller than Tuckahoe men. This could come about two ways: intermarriage with Indians who were much taller on average that white immigrants. Or through better nutrition, the hunting and farming economy of the west may not have produced a lot of luxuries, but it did put meat on the table.
The Scotch-Irish made up the single largest element of the backwoods settlements, hatred against the Scotch-Irish was widespread. When eastern elites are railing against western settlers, they don't seem to be discriminating, they seem to be lumping westerners, Scotch-Irish, Native Americans, runaways slaves, criminals, and anybody else they didn't like together.
Hence my confusion over whether the term 'Cohee' applies to specific sorts of people, or anybody they didn't happen to like.
I have concluded that the Scotch-Irish are definitely covered by the term ''quo hee" is Scots English, eg, the Lowland dialect, and not from Gaelic spoken by the Highlanders. Scotch-Irish were predominantly Lowlanders who migrated to Ireland and from there to America.
My ancestor, (William) Hamilton McClatchey Sr, was a Regulator. He was Scotch-Irish and married a woman who was apparently part Indian. Her name was Catherine McCollum.
Beau
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