The Ulster Presbyterians, or "Scotch-Irish," to whom history has ascribed the dominant role among the pioneer folk of the Old Southwest, began their migrations to America in the latter years of the seventeenth century. It is not known with certainty precisely when or where the first immigrants of their race arrived in this country, but soon after 1680 they were to be found in several of the colonies. It was not long, indeed, before they were entering in numbers at the port of Philadelphia and were making Pennsylvania the chief center of their activities in the New World. By 1726 they had established settlements in several counties behind Philadelphia. Ten years later they had begun their great trek southward through the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia and on to the Yadkin Valley of North Carolina. There they met others of their own race--bold men like themselves, hungry after land--who were coming in through Charleston and pushing their way up the rivers from the seacoast to the "Back Country," in search of homes.

These Ulstermen did not come to the New World as novices in the shaping of society; they had already made history. Their ostensible object in America was to obtain land, but, like most external aims, it was secondary to a deeper purpose. What had sent the Ulstermen to America was a passion for a whole freedom.

They were lusty men, shrewd and courageous, zealous to the death for an ideal and withal so practical to the moment in business that it soon came to be commonly reported of them that "they kept the Sabbath and everything else they could lay their hands on," though it is but fair to them to add that this phrase is current wherever Scots dwell. They had contested in Parliament and with arms for their own form of worship and for their civil rights.

They were already frontiersmen, trained in the hardihood and craft of border warfare through years of guerrilla fighting with the Irish Celts. They had pitted and proved their strength against a wilderness; they had reclaimed the North of Ireland from desolation. For the time, many of them were educated men; under the regulations of the Presbyterian Church every child was taught to read at an early age, since no person could be admitted to the privileges of the Church who did not both understand and approve the Presbyterian constitution and discipline. They were brought up on the Bible and on the writings of their famous pastors, one of whom, as early as 1650, had given utterance to the democratic doctrine that "men are called to the magistracy by the suffrage of the people whom they govern, and for men to assume unto themselves power is mere tyranny and unjust usurpation." In subscribing to this doctrine and in resisting to the hilt all efforts of successive English kings to interfere in the election of their pastors, the Scots of Ulster had already declared for democracy.

It was shortly after James VI of Scotland became James I of England and while the English were founding Jamestown that the Scots had first occupied Ulster; but the true origin of the Ulster Plantation lies further back, in the reign of Henry VIII, in the days of the English Reformation. In Henry's Irish realm the Reformation, though proclaimed by royal authority, had never been accomplished; and Henry's more famous daughter, Elizabeth, had conceived the plan, later to be carried out by James, of planting colonies of Protestants in Ireland to promote loyalty in that rebellious land. Six counties, comprising half a million acres, formed the Ulster Plantation. The great majority of the colonists sent thither by James were Scotch Lowlanders, but among them were many English and a smaller number of Highlanders. These three peoples from the island of Britain brought forth, through intermarriage, the Ulster Scots.

The reign of Charles I had inaugurated for the Ulstermen an era of persecution. Charles practically suppressed the Presbyterian religion in Ireland. His son, Charles II, struck at Ireland in 1666 through its cattle trade, by prohibiting the exportation of beef to England and Scotland. The Navigation Acts, excluding Ireland from direct trade with the colonies, ruined Irish commerce, while Corporation Acts and Test Acts requiring conformity with the practices of the Church of England bore heavily on the Ulster Presbyterians.

It was largely by refugees from religious persecution that America in the beginning was colonized. But religious persecution was only one of the influences which shaped the course and formed the character of the Ulster Scots. In Ulster, whither they had originally been transplanted by James to found a loyal province in the midst of the King's enemies, they had done their work too well and had waxed too powerful for the comfort of later monarchs. The first attacks upon them struck at their religion; but the subsequent legislative acts which successively ruined the woolen trade, barred nonconformists from public office, stifled Irish commerce, pronounced non-Episcopal marriages irregular, and instituted heavy taxation and high rentals for the land their fathers had made productive--these were blows dealt chiefly for the political and commercial ends of favored classes in England.

These attacks, aimed through his religious 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.