The Conquest of the Old Southwest | Page 7

greatly aggravated by the
imposition of religious disabilities upon the Presbyterians, who, in
addition to having to pay tithes for the support of the established church,
were excluded from all civil and military office (1704), while their
ministers were made liable to penalties for celebrating marriages.
This pressure upon a high-spirited people resulted inevitably in an
exodus to the New World. The principal ports by which the Ulsterites
entered America were Lewes and Newcastle (Delaware), Philadelphia

and Boston. The streams of immigration steadily flowed up the
Delaware Valley; and by 1720 the Scotch-Irish began to arrive in
Bucks County. So rapid was the rate of increase in immigration that the
number of arrivals soon mounted from a few hundred to upward of six
thousand, in a single year (1729); and within a few years this number
was doubled. According to the meticulous Franklin, the proportion
increased from a very small element of the population of Pennsylvania
in 1700 to one fourth of the whole in 1749, and to one third of the
whole (350,000) in 1774. Writing to the Penns in 1724, James Logan,
Secretary of the Province, caustically refers to the Ulster settlers on the
disputed Maryland line as "these bold and indigent strangers, saying as
their excuse when challenged for titles, that we had solicited for
colonists and they had come accordingly." The spirit of these defiant
squatters is succinctly expressed in their statement to Logan that it "was
against the laws of God and nature that so much land should be idle
while so many Christians wanted it to work on and to raise their bread."
The rising scale of prices for Pennsylvania lands, changing from ten
pounds and two shillings quit-rents per hundred acres in 1719 to fifteen
pounds ten shillings per hundred acres with a quit-rent of a halfpenny
per acre in 1732, soon turned the eyes of the thrifty Scotch-Irish settlers
southward and southwestward. In Maryland in 1738 lands were offered
at five pounds sterling per hundred acres. Simultaneously, in the Valley
of Virginia free grants of a thousand acres per family were being made.
In the North Carolina piedmont region the proprietary, Lord Granville,
through his agents was disposing of the most desirable lands to settlers
at the rate of three shillings proclamation money for six hundred and
forty acres, the unit of land-division; and was also making large free
grants on the condition of seating a certain proportion of settlers. "Lord
Carteret's land in Carolina," says North Carolina's first American
historian, "where the soil was cheap, presented a tempting residence to
people of every denomination. Emigrants from the north of Ireland, by
the way of Pennsylvania, flocked to that country; and a considerable
part of North Carolina . . . is inhabited by those people or their
descendants." From 1740 onward, attracted by the rich lure of cheap
and even free lands in Virginia and North Carolina, a tide of
immigration swept ceaselessly into the valleys of the Shenandoah, the
Yadkin, and the Catawba. The immensity of this mobile, drifting mass,

which sometimes brought "more than 400 families with horse waggons
and cattle" into North Carolina in a single year (1752-3), is attested by
the fact that from 1732 to 1754, mainly as the result of the Scotch-Irish
inundation, the population of North Carolina more than doubled.
The second important racial stream of population in the settlement of
the same region was composed of Germans, attracted to this country
from the Palatinate. Lured on by the highly colored stories of the
commercial agents for promoting immigration--the "newlanders," who
were thoroughly unscrupulous in their methods and extravagant in their
representations--a migration from Germany began in the second decade
of the eighteenth century and quickly assumed alarming proportions.
Although certain of the emigrants were well-to-do, a very great number
were "redemptioners" (indentured servants), who in order to pay for
their transportation were compelled to pledge themselves to several
years of servitude. This economic condition caused the German
immigrant, wherever he went, to become a settler of the back country,
necessity compelling him to pass by the more expensive lands near the
coast.
For well-nigh sixty years the influx of German immigrants of various
sects was very great, averaging something like fifteen hundred a year
into Pennsylvania alone from 1727 to 1775. Indeed, Pennsylvania, one
third of whose population at the beginning of the Revolution was
German, early became the great distributing center for the Germans as
well as for the Scotch-Irish. Certainly by 1727 Adam Miller and his
fellow Germans had established the first permanent white settlement in
the Valley of Virginia. By 1732 Jost Heydt, accompanied by sixteen
families, came from York, Pennsylvania, and settled on the Opeckon
River, in the neighborhood of the present Winchester. There is no
longer any doubt that "the portion