Part 9

The number of Scotch who thus left Ulster for Pennsylvania is uncertain, but may have exceeded 40,000 or 50,000. Taken in connection with the Palatine immigration at the same period the influx to Pennsylvania in the 1730's formed the largest migration from Europe to the New World that ever took place until the steamship era arrived.

Seeking newer and freer land, the Scotch together with some Germans began to follow the mountain valleys trending southwestward from Pennsylvania. They not only filled the Shenandoah Valley in a few years, but filtered down to the back country of the southern colonies and to the eastern portion of what is now Tennessee.

A good illustration of this migration is Daniel Boone, himself of English stock, who was born on the Delaware only a few miles above Philadelphia. The Boone family soon moved to Reading. Thence drifting southwestward with his compatriots, Daniel Boone settled in the North Carolina uplands, along the valley of the Yadkin, then passed beyond into Kentucky, and, after that location began to be civilized, went on as a pioneer to Missouri. His son appears a little later as one of the early settlers of Kansas, his grandson as a pioneer in Colorado.

When the land west of the Alleghanies was opened for settlement about 1768, the Ulster Scots began to throng the mountain passes. In addition to their aptitude for frontier life, and the insatiable desire to find new and cheap land, they wanted to get away from their neighbors, the Pennsylvania Dutch, with whom they usually did not live on very good terms. Pittsburgh rapidly became a Nordic territory settled mainly by the Ulster Scots.

These streams of immigration were sufficient by 1740 to enable Pennsylvania to overtake and pass the population of every other colony except Maryland, Massachusetts, and Virginia, although most of them had been started a generation earlier than Penn's settlement. A decade later Maryland was passed and just after the Revolution Massachusetts was outstripped, while Philadelphia remained the metropolis of the United States until finally excelled by New York City in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Benjamin Franklin's offhand estimate that at the end of the Colonial period one-third of the population of his adopted State was English, one-third Scotch, and one-third German, was not far from the truth. Though the population was then by a safe majority British in origin and English-speaking, the Germans remained an element impossible to assimilate, so long as they continued to be segregated in their own communities of which Lancaster was the largest inland town in the thirteen colonies.

Such of the Germans as went to the frontier States were assimilated by the Nordic groups without much difficulty; but the experience of the Pennsylvania Dutch farming communities is like that of some of the city slum districts of the last century, in presenting groups almost impossible to Americanize. Even at the present time this Alpine island of population still retains many of its alien characteristics. For this, among other reasons, the German element in Pennsylvania at the time of the Revolution played a relatively unimportant part in the affairs of the State, as suggested by the quotation from Franklin above. The dominant element was formed by the group around Philadelphia composed mainly of the original English Quakers; but the Pennsylvania-Dutch, on their farms, and the Scots on the frontier, furnished a large contingent with which the politicians had to deal, though they were seldom represented in the government and leadership of the colony. The German element was inclined to follow the leadership of the Quakers under whose invitation it had come to Pennsylvania. The Scots, on the other hand, were apt to be in a state of rebellion when occasion arose, as conspicuously in the Whiskey Rebellion, which formed one of the first tests of the power of the Federal Government under Washington's presidency.

The claim that half of the Ulstermen were adherents of the Established Church, rather than Presbyterians, is doubtless extreme, but emphasizes the typically non-Irish and Protestant character of this whole element of the population, as also the fact that many of the Ulstermen were not Scots, nor even Lowland Scots, whose ancestors had moved northward across the border from England; but were direct emigrants from England to Ireland, some indeed as late as and even after the time of Cromwell.

Delaware has been dealt with incidentally in what has been said concerning Pennsylvania, because it was part of Pennsylvania during the first period of colonization. Unimportant attempts had been made by the Dutch and Swedes, of whom the Swedes are the best known, to settle there but the population of the region when Penn arrived was mainly composed of English who had moved in under the regime of the Duke of York.

In 1633, an English nobleman, Lord Baltimore, who had for years been seeking favor with the Stuart monarchy, announced that he had become a convert to the papacy, and, with the zeal of a new convert, desired to establish a colony in the New World where Catholics, then laboring under heavy disabilities in Great Britain, could enjoy religious freedom. He applied for, and Charles I granted, a charter for the foundation of a semi-feudal proprietorship, with the stipulation that freedom of worship should prevail.

If one stops to consider what a howl of outraged virtue would have been raised by the people of Great Britain, and what a hurricane would have descended upon the head of the monarch, had he granted the Catholics a charter without stipulating for freedom of worship, it will be realized that the much-vaunted "toleration" of Lord Baltimore's colony was not entirely an evidence of his own broad-mindedness. However, this toleration had its limits. Disbelief in the doctrine of the Trinity was a capital offense.

In 1634, the little town of St. Mary was established as the center for the new colony. Few Catholics of the home country seem to have been anxious to take advantage of the opportunities offered, and Lord Baltimore began to seek tenants elsewhere. As early as 1634, he was writing to Boston and urging Massachusetts people to emigrate, but the first great invasion of Puritans came in 1649.

Inspired by enthusiasm for the cause of the King, after he had lost his head, the Virginians under the leadership of Governor Berkeley passed ordinances expelling non-conformists from their colony, and a thousand of these who had previously gone from New England to Virginia were driven out and took refuge in Maryland, establishing the settlement which later became Annapolis.

During the next generation most of the arrivals in Maryland were either Puritans or Quakers. The policy of tolerance was not held to apply to Quakers, who, by a law of 1659, were to be whipped out of any town which they entered, but this measure does not seem to have been enforced very long, and English Quakers from other colonies soon formed an important part of the population.

In 1689, word reached the New World of the expulsion of James II, and the occupation of the British throne by the uncompromisingly Protestant House of Orange. While James II was on the throne a general alarm had arisen throughout the colonies over the prospects of Catholic aggression.

Many of the colonies contained a sprinkling of the Huguenot refugees who had been driven out of France only a few years before because of their Protestantism, and there were thus in every colony men who knew the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the terrible persecution which followed. The tragedy of the Thirty Years War was also still fresh in the minds of many.

There was no disposition in America, therefore, to look upon the Catholics as a group who, if in power, would distinguish themselves by a policy of broad toleration, and the one colony in which there was any appreciable number of Catholics, namely, Maryland, naturally felt the situation most keenly. The number of Catholics in the colony at that time, however, even including Negroes, was only a few thousand, and their capital of St. Mary was a hamlet of scarcely sixty houses. Probably eleven-twelfths of the population of Maryland were Protestants, and of them a majority were Puritans. These lost no time in taking steps to protect their freedom which they knew the Catholic church would never tolerate if able to do otherwise, and by a homemade revolution turned out the proprietary government and set up a staunch Protestant regime. Under this new rule, however, the few Catholic residents were subjected to no harm, but were placed under approximately the same disabilities as they had long lived under in Great Britain. Thereupon the little Roman Catholic principality in the United States was at an end, and the then Lord Baltimore, fourth of that title, shortly conformed by returning to his ancestral Protestant faith.

The Revolution of 1689 cost St. Mary its existence, for the Puritans transferred the capital to their own town of Providence (rebaptized Annapolis), and the headquarters of the Roman Catholics soon relapsed into the wilderness.

Maryland continued to be almost wholly an English colony, with more than its share of Negroes and transported convicts, and with a very slight sprinkling of aliens, much as all the colonies had. When the Acadians were transported from Nova Scotia in 1755, a considerable number of them were landed in Maryland.

Baltimore, founded in 1729, languished for a quarter of a century, but in the decade before the Revolution it began to grow with such rapidity that in a few years it was one of the half dozen most considerable towns of the continent.

The back country of Maryland was settled independently from Pennsylvania, to a considerable extent by Ulster Scots and Palatines, though there was also a steady encroachment on this cheap land by men from the tidewater who could not get possession of farms in the more expensive and fashionable as well as prosperous region.

By the Revolution, Maryland had reached a population of 250,000. Perhaps one-seventh of this was in Frederick County, where Palatines had begun to settle as early as 1710, and into which they began to enter in large numbers after about 1730. Despite this back-country element, Maryland must be recognized as being, at the time of the first census, an Anglo-Saxon colony in culture, in traditions, in language, and in population.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 7: He is writing of Pennsylvania.]

[Footnote 8: The French and Indian War.]

VII

VIRGINIA AND HER NEIGHBORS

The settlement of Virginia, beginning with Jamestown in 1607, was of a different character from that of the northern and middle colonies. It was not a colonization project undertaken by families, but an exploitation by adventurers. In a sense it may be compared with the Klondike Gold Rush at the end of the nineteenth century. Men went forth seeking fortune and expecting to return in a few years with newly acquired wealth. The motley array of colonists sent to Jamestown by the Company during the first decade of activity seems to have been drawn from every part of the British Isles and every stratum of society.

After ten or a dozen years, the proprietors recognized that the wealth of their plantations would not consist in gold and pearls but that they were facing an actual colonization project, which could only be built upon the foundations of family life. An early recognition of this fact has been one of the principal sources of strength in all British colonization, and the proprietors of the Virginia colony, while continuing to encourage men of all sorts to go to their settlement on the James River, undertook one of the famous eugenic enterprises of history by sending over several shiploads of young women to make homes for their settlers. The undertaking seems to have been carried out in good faith and with good judgment and the result was notably successful. A little later, however, the continuing demand for wives led to a sort of traffic that probably produced a less carefully selected feminine population for the plantations. On the whole, it would probably be fair to say that the "First Families of Virginia" represented a higher social standard in the male than in the female lines.

The year 1619 was racially eventful. It saw the arrival at Jamestown both of the first shipload of "uncorrupt maydes for wives," and the landing of the first cargo of Negroes. The next half-century brought the development of the plantation system and the spread of Negro slavery and the problem of miscegenation between Negro women and the lowest and most unintelligent type of white servant came into prominence. In this way originated the mulatto group which has ever since been a characteristic feature of the Negroes in the United States. Those admirers of the Mulatto who boast that he carries in his veins the blue blood of the aristocratic families of the South, would do well to read the actual records of Virginia and other colonies during the seventeenth century and see what sort of white stock actually formed the foundation of that half of this hybrid group.

The colony continued to grow for the first quarter of a century by attracting voluntary adventurers from whom the rule of the survival of the fittest exacted so heavy a toll that probably the survivors were a fairly fit lot. The abandonment of the original proprietary company in 1624 led to a marked change in the manner of populating the colony, and for the next generation the bulk of the immigrants were assisted in one way or another to get to Virginia and allowed to work out the money advanced them by their labor after their arrival.

At its best, there was little difference in the colonization plans that British colonies have always used to get desirable settlers from "home." In the case of Virginia it brought a vigorous population of all sorts, and the name of "indentured servant" covers not merely the domestic in the kitchen and the laborer in the tobacco field but artisans' apprentices and medical students. Under the extremely trying conditions many of these immigrants were unable to survive. Governor Berkeley asserted that four out of five died during the first year of residence, while Evelyn, the diarist, declared that five out of six succumbed. Such statements at least point to an excessively high mortality which must have spared most frequently those who were physically and mentally superior and well adapted to be among the founders of a new colony. Hence it seems clear that the importance of these indentured servants in the later development of Virginia, as of other colonies, is not to be reckoned in proportion to the number who arrived, but to be estimated upon the much smaller number who survived and founded families.

Another type of assisted immigrant of which a great deal has been heard was the deported convict. Some of these were evidently men who had cheated the gallows, for the Virginians continually protested against their arrival. Apparently much the larger number, however, were men of superior quality in many respects. When nearly three hundred offenses were punishable by the death penalty in England, many of those convicted were not persons marked by great moral turpitude, and the so-called "transported convict" might have been equally well a pirate, or a preacher who persisted in expounding the gospel without proper license from the ecclesiastical authorities so to do.

Large numbers were political prisoners who found themselves temporarily on the losing side; still more were mere prisoners of war. During the Protectorate, victories like Dunbar and Worcester and the suppression of the Irish Rebellion by Cromwell in 1652 were followed by deportations of prisoners of war to the colonies, and the government felt fully justified in recovering part of the expense of transportation by selling the services of these able-bodied and intelligent men for seven years to the highest bidder. Unquestionably most of the foundation stock of this kind that survived to perpetuate itself would be entirely fit for colonization. During the same period many cavaliers took refuge in Virginia.

When the royalists were again in power after 1660, a similar stream of Commonwealth soldiers and non-conformists began to come into the colonies. The Scotch Rebellion of 1670 brought another accession to Virginia, and in 1685 many of the captives at the Battle of Sedgmoor were exiled here. Such labor was welcomed by the Virginians in marked distinction to the real criminals, of whom there were apparently only a few thousand in all. After about 1700 the spread of Negro slavery reduced the demand for white indentured labor and less of it arrived.

In the great diversity of men and women brought over in these and other ways, there are some who figure in the ancestry of the best families of Virginia at the present time, and others who, from the beginning, were misfits in the colony. Such of the latter as survived the trying ordeal of the tobacco fields either ran away, or, when their term of service expired, drifted out to the borders of the settlement.

The Virginia holdings were large and far beyond the reach of an ordinary man without capital, in marked contrast to conditions in New England, where the great majority of the settlers were small landowners. The freed bondsmen therefore had to go to the frontier or drift down into North Carolina or some other region where they were not handicapped by their lack of funds. The most shiftless and least intelligent of them tended to collect in the less valuable lands at the fringe of civilization, or to drift along to other similar settlements farther west and south. In this way originated one of the peculiar elements of the Southern population, the "poor white trash." Their numbers were recruited generation after generation by others of the same sort while the able, enterprising, and imaginative members were continually drained off to the cities or sought better land elsewhere. These "poor whites" in the Alleghanies and through the swamp lands of North and South Carolina have been an interesting feature of the population for three centuries. Largely of pure Nordic stock, they are a striking example to the eugenist of the results of isolation and undesirable selection.

During the Stuart period Virginia was the refuge of many Puritans. They were, however, looked upon with disfavor by the prevailing royalist sentiment and the activities of Sir William Berkeley as Governor were such that not less than a thousand left the colony. Their place was taken by Royalists, invited by the Governor to find a refuge in Virginia as soon as news arrived of the execution of Charles I. Within the next twelve months probably a thousand Royalists appeared bringing many of the family names which have been conspicuous in the Old Dominion ever since. Richard Lee came a little earlier, in 1642, but it is after the death of Charles I that one begins to meet in Virginia such names as Randolph, Cary, Parke, Robinson, Marshall, Washington, and Ludwell.

The place of origin in Great Britain of most of the Royalists is not so easily traced as is that of the Massachusetts Puritans who came to America in groups, sometimes as entire congregations, but random samples of families which afterwards furnished distinguished leadership show that they came from practically all over England and Scotland: Washingtons from Northamptonshire, Marshalls and Jeffersons from Wales, Lees from the part of Shropshire adjoining Wales, and Randolphs from Warwickshire. James Monroe's ancestors were Scotch and Patrick Henry's father was born in Aberdeen. They had at least one thing in common, that they were of English and Nordic stock. Examination of lists in the land office at Richmond indicates that fully 95 per cent of the names of landowners during the seventeenth century were unmistakably Anglo-Saxon.

The tidewater population was fecund and spread steadily up to the fall-line of the rivers, by its own multiplication. Men and women married early. Colonel Byrd described his daughter, Evelyn, as an "antique virgin" when she was twenty. "Either our young fellows are not smart enough for her or she seems too smart for them," he moaned. With a high death rate second marriages were common. It has been the custom of late for sentimental feminists to refer to the large families of the Colonial period as having been produced by husbands who thus killed off one wife after another. Such nonsense is easily refuted by an examination of genealogies and of tombstones. Many a husband had to marry several wives because of the high death rate, but equally many wives had to marry several husbands apiece for the same reason.

The toll taken by hard work, unhygienic conditions, and childbirth without proper care among pioneer women, was no greater than the toll taken by hard work, unhygienic conditions, and Indian warfare among the men. If Colonel John Carter married five wives successively, in an age when divorce was unknown, Elizabeth Mann married six husbands.

While a purely Nordic population was thus occupying tidewater Virginia east of the Blue Ridge, another Nordic invasion from a wholly different source was entering upland Virginia on the other side of the mountains. The Shenandoah Valley is virtually an extension of the interior valleys of Pennsylvania; and while an occasional pioneer pushed his way to it through the mountains from the eastern front, the real settlement came through the side door beginning about 1725 and reaching the proportions of an invasion about 1732.

Ulster Scots coming down through Pennsylvania began that penetration of the Piedmont from north to south which is such a striking feature of the history of the South Atlantic coast during the next century. With them were some Alpines, mostly Germans from the Palatine, representative of the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch stock.

When General Braddock, whose army was nearly wiped out by the French and Indians in 1755, sighed, "Who would have thought it?" and expired, he nevertheless had cleared a road for the rapid spread of this immigration along the mountain valleys, not merely into Virginia but on through the Carolinas and to Georgia. His road was followed a few years later by General Forbes' road through the same country, and the way was open.

The upland and mountain sections of Virginia therefore came to be represented by a group with a very different outlook from those of the tidewater, dominated as it was by large landholders. This diversity of original settlement, which was of sufficient importance to effect in the Civil War a cleavage of the State and establish West Virginia as free soil, is still apparent and makes itself felt in the twentieth century.

* * * * *

North Carolina represents an overflowing from Virginia to the South. It was a frontier for the Old Dominion where landless men could find new homes more easily than to the westward, where they encountered the Blue Ridge. In 1653 a settlement was begun at Albemarle by Virginians who were not in accord either with the established religion or else with the political control of their colony. Most of these were Quakers.