Pioneers of the Old Southwest | Page 4

It was not
long, indeed, before they were entering in numbers at the port of
Philadelphia and were making Pennsylvania the chief center of their
activities in the New World. By 1726 they had established settlements
in several counties behind Philadelphia. Ten years later they had begun
their great trek southward through the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia
and on to the Yadkin Valley of North Carolina. There they met others
of their own race--bold men like themselves, hungry after land--who
were coming in through Charleston and pushing their way up the rivers
from the seacoast to the "Back Country," in search of homes.
These Ulstermen did not come to the New World as novices in the

shaping of society; they had already made history. Their ostensible
object in America was to obtain land, but, like most external aims, it
was secondary to a deeper purpose. What had sent the Ulstermen to
America was a passion for a whole freedom. They were lusty men,
shrewd and courageous, zealous to the death for an ideal and withal so
practical to the moment in business that it soon came to be commonly
reported of them that "they kept the Sabbath and everything else they
could lay their hands on," though it is but fair to them to add that this
phrase is current wherever Scots dwell. They had contested in
Parliament and with arms for their own form of worship and for their
civil rights. They were already frontiersmen, trained in the hardihood
and craft of border warfare through years of guerrilla fighting with the
Irish Celts. They had pitted and proved their strength against a
wilderness; they had reclaimed the North of Ireland from desolation.
For the time, many of them were educated men; under the regulations
of the Presbyterian Church every child was taught to read at an early
age, since no person could be admitted to the privileges of the Church
who did not both understand and approve the Presbyterian constitution
and discipline. They were brought up on the Bible and on the writings
of their famous pastors, one of whom, as early as 1650, had given
utterance to the democratic doctrine that "men are called to the
magistracy by the suffrage of the people whom they govern, and for
men to assume unto themselves power is mere tyranny and unjust
usurpation." In subscribing to this doctrine and in resisting to the hilt all
efforts of successive English kings to interfere in the election of their
pastors, the Scots of Ulster had already declared for democracy.
It was shortly after James VI of Scotland became James I of England
and while the English were founding Jamestown that the Scots had first
occupied Ulster; but the true origin of the Ulster Plantation lies further
back, in the reign of Henry VIII, in the days of the English Reformation.
In Henry's Irish realm the Reformation, though proclaimed by royal
authority, had never been accomplished; and Henry's more famous
daughter, Elizabeth, had conceived the plan, later to be carried out by
James, of planting colonies of Protestants in Ireland to promote loyalty
in that rebellious land. Six counties, comprising half a million acres,
formed the Ulster Plantation. The great majority of the colonists sent

thither by James were Scotch Lowlanders, but among them were many
English and a smaller number of Highlanders. These three peoples from
the island of Britain brought forth, through intermarriage, the Ulster
Scots.
The reign of Charles I had inaugurated for the Ulstermen an era of
persecution. Charles practically suppressed the Presbyterian religion in
Ireland. His son, Charles II, struck at Ireland in 1666 through its cattle
trade, by prohibiting the exportation of beef to England and Scotland.
The Navigation Acts, excluding Ireland from direct trade with the
colonies, ruined Irish commerce, while Corporation Acts and Test Acts
requiring conformity with the practices of the Church of England bore
heavily on the Ulster Presbyterians.
It was largely by refugees from religious persecution that America in
the beginning was colonized. But religious persecution was only one of
the influences which shaped the course and formed the character of the
Ulster Scots. In Ulster, whither they had originally been transplanted by
James to found a loyal province in the midst of the King's enemies,
they had done their work too well and had waxed too powerful for the
comfort of later monarchs. The first attacks upon them struck at their
religion; but the subsequent legislative acts which successively ruined
the woolen trade, barred nonconformists from public office, stifled Irish
commerce, pronounced non-Episcopal marriages irregular, and
instituted heavy taxation and high rentals for the land their fathers had
made productive--these were blows dealt chiefly for the political and
commercial ends of favored classes in England.
These attacks, aimed through his religious conscience at the