In 1764, Hugh’s sons, John, a captain in the Augusta County militia, and Thomas, fought a brief skirmish with Indians in the Battle of Back Creek. Thomas was killed and scalped. Like his descendants, Captain Young was not one to suffer such an insult quietly. He tracked the killers for three days, fought them again, killed a number of them, and recovered his brother’s scalp, burying it with Thomas’s body.
It was John Young who, as a militia captain during the Revolutionary War, caught the attention of George Washington, joined the infantry, and was welcomed to the general’s staff. Valorous and exceedingly diligent about safeguarding his family’s honor, John Young set an example emulated by generations of Youngs and McCains who eagerly reinforced the family reputation for quick tempers, adventurous spirits, and love for the country’s uniform.
John Young’s three elder sons all died in childhood. His fourth son, David Young, held the rank of captain in the United States Army and fought in the War of 1812. David’s son, Samuel Hart Young, moved the family to Mississippi, where Samuel’s eldest son, Dr. John William Young, fought for the Confederacy.
The fifth of Samuel Young’s eight children, Elizabeth Ann, united the McCain and Young families by her marriage to my great-grandfather, and their union gave life to two renowned fighters, my great-uncle Wild Bill and my grandfather Sid McCain.
Wild Bill joined the McCain name to an even more distinguished warrior family. His wife, Mary Louise Earle, was descended from royalty. She claimed as ancestors Scottish kings back to Robert the Bruce. But her family took their greatest pride in their direct descent from Emperor Charlemagne.
Although it was his brother’s children who extended the Charlemagne line, I suspect my grandfather felt justified in borrowing the distinction for the rest of the family. He took considerable pride in the McCains’ association with the distinguished conqueror, thinking it only fitting that his descendants share in the reflected glory.
As a boy and young man, I may have pretended not to be affected by the family history, but my studied indifference was a transparent mask to those who knew me well. As it was for my forebears, my family’s history was my pride. When I heard my father or one of my uncles refer to an honored ancestor or a notable event from our family’s past, my boy’s imagination would conjure up some future day of glory when I would add my own paragraph to the family’s legend. My father was a member of the Society of the Cincinnati, an association of direct descendants of General Washington’s officers. His evident pride in claiming such distinguished ancestry gave me the sense not only that I had a claim on my country’s history, but that it would fall to me to represent the family when the history of my generation was recorded. As a teenager, I would occasionally show my closest friends the picture of the surrender ceremony aboard the USS Missouri and point with pride to the McCain who stood among the conquerors.
At a point early in my own naval career, I was stationed as a flight instructor at McCain Field, an air station in Meridian, Mississippi, named for my grandfather. One day, as I made my approach to land, I was waved off. Radioing the tower, I demanded, “Let me land, or I’ll take my field and go home,” earning a rebuke from the commanding officer for disrespectfully invoking the family history.
It is a formidable history, not easily escaped even today by descendants who might wish to pursue some interest outside the family business.
My grandfather was born and raised on his father’s plantation in Carroll County, Mississippi. The property had been in our family since 1848, when William Alexander McCain moved there from the family estate in North Carolina. My great-grandmother had named the place Waverly, after Walter Scott’s Waverly novels, but it was always called Teoc, after a Choctaw Indian name for the surrounding area that meant “Tall Pines.”
I spent some time there as a boy and loved the place. The house, which had once belonged to a former slave, became the family’s home after their first manor burned down, and was a more modest structure than the white-columned antebellum mansions of popular imagination. But I spent many happy summer days in outdoor recreation on the property in the congenial company of my grandfather’s younger brother, Joe, who ran the plantation. The house still stands, I have been told, uninhabited and dilapidated, with no McCain in residence since my Uncle Joe died in 1952.
I have been told that the McCains of Teoc were clannish, devoted to one another and to their traditions. They never lamented the South’s fall, although they had been loyal to its flag, nor did they discuss the war much, even among themselves. Neither did they curse the decline in the family’s fortunes, the lot they shared with many plantation families in the defeated South. By all accounts, they were lively, proud, and happy in their world on the Mississippi Delta. Yet my uncle and grandfather left the comfort of the only world they knew, never to be rooted to one location again.
I am second cousin to the gifted writer Elizabeth Spencer. She is the daughter of my grandfather’s sister and was raised in Carrollton, Mississippi, near the family estate. In her graceful memoir, Landscapes of the Heart, she wrote affectionately of her two uncles and the first stirring of their lifelong romance with military adventures.
What could they do around farms and small towns in an impoverished area, not yet healed from a civil war? The law? The church? Nothing there seemed to challenge them.
I wonder if their dreams were fed by their reading. They favored bold adventure stories and poems—Kipling, Scott, Stevenson, Henty, Macaulay, Browning. Stuck away in trunks in the attic in Carrollton, school notebooks I came across when exploring were full not only of class notes but also of original verses that spoke of heroism and daring deeds. Their Latin texts with Caesar’s Gallic Wars were in our bookshelves. They were cavalier….
I thought of my uncles years later, when I read in Henry James’ The Bostonians how Basil Ransom of Mississippi had gone to Boston in the post–Civil War years because he was bored sitting around a plantation.
After two years at “Ole Miss,” my grandfather decided to follow his older brother to West Point. At his brother’s urging, my grandfather prepared for the exacting entrance exams by taking for practice the Naval Academy exams that were given some weeks earlier at the post office in the state capital. His scores were high enough to earn him an appointment to Annapolis, which, with little reflection, he accepted.
He was a popular midshipman but a less than serious student, graduating in the bottom quarter of his class. That rank, however, exceeded the grasp of his son and grandson, who graduated well beneath it and were lucky to receive their commissions at all.
In his third year at Annapolis, he failed his annual physical. In a report to the Academy Superintendent, the examining medical officer rejected him for further service “on account of defective hearing.” The superintendent responded by noting the “great need of officers at the present time, and the fact that this Midshipman has nearly completed his course at the Naval Academy at great expense to the Government,” and recommended to the Surgeon General that “this physical disability be waived until the physical examination, prior to graduation, next year.” The Surgeon General approved the waiver.
Whether or not his hearing recovered by the time he graduated is unknown. I can find no record of his last physical examination at the Academy. I can only assume that if the hearing defect persisted the following year, the examining physician overlooked it. In his quarterly fitness report of June 30, 1906, all that is noted on the single line describing the midshipman’s health is “very good.”