rtunity 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
McG