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.
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