Pioneers of the Old Southwest | Page 5

sources of
his livelihood, made the Ulster Scot perforce what he was--a zealot as a
citizen and a zealot as a merchant no less than as a Presbyterian.
Thanks to his persecutors, he made a religion of everything he
undertook and regarded his civil rights as divine rights. Thus out of
persecution emerged a type of man who was high-principled and
narrow, strong and violent, as tenacious of his own rights as he was
blind often to the rights of others, acquisitive yet self-sacrificing, but
most of all fearless, confident of his own power, determined to have

and to hold.
Twenty thousand Ulstermen, it is estimated, left Ireland for America in
the first three decades of the eighteenth century. More than six
thousand of them are known to have entered Pennsylvania in 1729
alone, and twenty years later they numbered one-quarter of that
colony's population. During the five years preceding the Revolutionary
War more than thirty thousand Ulstermen crossed the ocean and arrived
in America just in time and in just the right frame of mind to return
King George's compliment in kind, by helping to deprive him of his
American estates, a domain very much larger than the acres of Ulster.
They fully justified the fears of the good bishop who wrote Lord
Dartmouth, Secretary for the Colonies, that he trembled for the peace of
the King's overseas realm, since these thousands of "phanatical and
hungry Republicans" had sailed for America.
The Ulstermen who entered by Charleston were known to the
inhabitants of the tidewater regions as the "Scotch-Irish." Those who
came from the north, lured southward by the offer of cheap lands, were
called the "Pennsylvania Irish." Both were, however, of the same
race--a race twice expatriated, first from Scotland and then from Ireland,
and stripped of all that it had won throughout more than a century of
persecution. To these exiles the Back Country of North Carolina, with
its cheap and even free tracts lying far from the seat of government,
must have seemed not only the Land of Promise but the Land of Last
Chance. Here they must strike their roots into the sod with such
interlocking strength that no cataclysm of tyranny should ever dislodge
them--or they must accept the fate dealt out to them by their former
persecutors and become a tribe of nomads and serfs. But to these Ulster
immigrants such a choice was no choice at all. They knew themselves
strong men, who had made the most of opportunity despite almost
superhuman obstacles. The drumming of their feet along the banks of
the Shenandoah, or up the rivers from Charleston, and on through the
broad sweep of the Yadkin Valley, was a conquering people's challenge
to the Wilderness which lay sleeping like an unready sentinel at the
gates of their Future.

It is maintained still by many, however often disputed, that the
Ulstermen were the first to declare for American Independence, as in
the Old Country they were the first to demand the separation of Church
and State. A Declaration of Independence is said to have been drawn up
and signed in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, on May 20, 1775.*
However that maybe, it is certain that these Mecklenburg Protestants
had received special schooling in the doctrine of independence. They
had in their midst for eight years (1758-66) the Reverend Alexander
Craighead, a Presbyterian minister who, for his "republican doctrines"
expressed in a pamphlet, had been disowned by the Pennsylvania
Synod acting on the Governor's protest, and so persecuted in Virginia
that he had at last fled to the North Carolina Back Country. There,
during the remaining years of his life, as the sole preacher and teacher
in the settlements between the Yadkin and the Catawba rivers he found
willing soil in which to sow the seeds of Liberty.
* See Hoyt, "The Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence"; and
"American Archives," Fourth Series. vol. II, p. 855.
There was another branch of the Scottish race which helped to people
the Back Country. The Highlanders, whose loyalty to their oath made
them fight on the King's side in the Revolutionary War, have been
somewhat overlooked in history. Tradition, handed down among the
transplanted clans--who, for the most part, spoke only Gaelic for a
generation and wrote nothing--and latterly recorded by one or two of
their descendants, supplies us with all we are now able to learn of the
early coming of the Gaels to Carolina. It would seem that their first
immigration to America in small bands took place after the suppression
of the Jacobite rising in 1715--when Highlanders fled in numbers also
to France--for by 1729 there was a settlement of them on the Cape Fear
River. We know, too, that in 1748 it was charged against Gabriel
Johnston, Governor of North Carolina from 1734