ous 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 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
oppo