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