Pioneers of the Old Southwest [2]
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 to 1752, that he had shown no joy over the King's "glorious victory of Culloden" and that "he had appointed one William McGregor, who had been in the Rebellion in the year 1715 a Justice of the Peace during the last Rebellion [1745] and was not himself without suspicion of disaffection to His Majesty's Government." It is indeed possible that Gabriel Johnston, formerly a professor at St. Andrew's University, had himself not always been a stranger to the kilt. He induced large numbers of highlanders to come to America and probably influenced the second George to moderate his treatment of the vanquished Gaels in the Old Country and permit their emigration to the New World.
In contrast with the Ulstermen, whose secular ideals were dictated by the forms of their Church, these Scots adhered still to the tribal or clan system, although they, too, in the majority, were Presbyterians, with a minority of Roman Catholics and Episcopalians. In the Scotch Highlands they had occupied small
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 to 1752, that he had shown no joy over the King's "glorious victory of Culloden" and that "he had appointed one William McGregor, who had been in the Rebellion in the year 1715 a Justice of the Peace during the last Rebellion [1745] and was not himself without suspicion of disaffection to His Majesty's Government." It is indeed possible that Gabriel Johnston, formerly a professor at St. Andrew's University, had himself not always been a stranger to the kilt. He induced large numbers of highlanders to come to America and probably influenced the second George to moderate his treatment of the vanquished Gaels in the Old Country and permit their emigration to the New World.
In contrast with the Ulstermen, whose secular ideals were dictated by the forms of their Church, these Scots adhered still to the tribal or clan system, although they, too, in the majority, were Presbyterians, with a minority of Roman Catholics and Episcopalians. In the Scotch Highlands they had occupied small