of England under Charles I, who
attempted to force them to conform to the English established religion.
Such a rugged schooling in Ireland made of them a very aggressive, hardy
people, Protestants of the Protestants, so accustomed to contests and
warfare that they accepted it as the natural state of man.

These Ulstermen came to Pennsylvania somewhat later than the first
German sects; and not many of them arrived until some years after 1700.
They were not, like the first Germans, attracted to the colony by any
resemblance of their religion to that of the Quakers. On the contrary
they were entirely out of sympathy with the Quakers, except in the
one point of religious liberty; and the Quakers were certainly out of
sympathy with them. Nearly all the colonies in America received a share
of these settlers. Wherever they went they usually sought the frontier
and the wilderness; and by the time of the Revolution, they could be
found upon the whole colonial frontier from New Hampshire to Georgia.
They were quite numerous in Virginia, and most numerous along the edge
of the Pennsylvania wilderness. It was apparently the liberal laws
and the fertile soil that drew them to Pennsylvania in spite of their
contempt for most of the Quaker doctrines.

The dream of their life, their haven of rest, was for these Scotch-Irish
a fertile soil where they would find neither Irish "papists" nor Church
of England; and for this reason in America they always sought the
frontier where they could be by themselves. They could not even get on
well with the Germans in Pennsylvania; and when the Germans crowded
into their frontier settlements, quarrels became so frequent that the
proprietors asked the Ulstermen to move farther west, a suggestion which
they were usually quite willing to accept. At the close of the colonial
period in Pennsylvania the Quakers, the Church of England people, and
the miscellaneous denominations occupied Philadelphia and the region
round it in a half circle from the Delaware River. Outside of this
area lay another containing the Germans, and beyond that were the
Scotch-Irish. The principal stronghold of the Scotch-Irish was the
Cumberland Valley in Southern Pennsylvania west of the Susquehanna, a
region now containing the flourishing towns of Chambersburg, Gettysburg,
Carlisle, and York, where the descendants of these early settlers are
still very numerous. In modern times, however, they have spread out
widely; they are now