13, fearing it would give the
state a hold on their land.

But to get back to the settling of the Blue Ridge Country.

When political and religious refugees continued to come to America in
such vast shoals they found the settlements along the Atlantic coast
already well occupied by Huguenots who had been driven from France, by
Quakers, Puritans, and Catholics from England, Palatine Germans escaping
the scourge of the Thirty Years' War. Here too were Dunkers, Mennonites,
Moravians from Holland and Germany. Among them also were followers of
Cromwell who had fled the vengeance of Charles II, Scots of the
Highlands who could not be loyal to the Stuarts and at the same time
friends to King George.

The Scotch-Irish among the newcomers wanted land of their
own--independence. Above all independence. So they drifted down the
coast to the western fringe of settlement and established themselves in
the foothills east of the Blue Ridge in what is now the Carolinas.
Migration might just as well have moved west from Virginia and across
the Alleghenies. However, not only did the mountains themselves present
an impenetrable barrier, but settlers were forbidden to cross by
"proclamation of the authorities" on account of the hostility of the
Indians on the west of the mountain range. Then too there were inviting
fertile valleys on this eastern side of the Blue Ridge, where they might
dwell.

But these newcomers, at least the Scotch-Irish among them, were not
primarily men who wanted to till the soil. They were not by nature
farmers like the Germans in Pennsylvania. And they did not intend to
become underlings of their more prosperous predecessors and neighbors
who had already taken root in the valleys and who had set up projects to
further their own gains. Furthermore, being younger in the new world
they were more adventurous. The wilderness with its hunting and
exploring beckoned. And so they pressed on deeper into the mountains.
There was always more room the higher up they climbed. And as they moved
on they carried along with them, as a surging stream gathers up the life
along its course, a sprinkling of all the various denominations whose
lives they touched among the settlements along the coast.

In that day many men were so eager for freedom and a chance to get a
fresh start that before sailing, through the enterprises set up by
shipowners and emigration agents, they bound themselves by written
indentures to work for a certain