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