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
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