* See Hoyt, "The Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence"; and
"American Archives," Fourth Series. vol. II, p. 855.
There was another branch of the Scottish race which helped to
people the Back Country. The Highlanders, whose loyalty to their
oath made them fight on the King's side in the Revolutionary War,
have been somewhat overlooked in history. Tradition, handed down
among the transplanted clans--who, for the most part, spoke only
Gaelic for a generation and wrote nothing--and latterly recorded
by one or two of their descendants, supplies us with all we are
now able to learn of the early coming of the Gaels to Carolina.
It would seem that their first immigration to America in small
bands took place after the suppression of the Jacobite rising in
1715--when Highlanders fled in numbers also to France--for by
1729 there was a settlement of them on the Cape Fear River. We
know, too, that in 1748 it was charged against Gabriel Johnston,
Governor of North Carolina from 1734 to 1752, that he had shown
no joy over the King's "glorious victory of Culloden" and that
"he had appointed one William McGregor, who had been in the
Rebellion in the year 1715 a Justice of the Peace during the last
Rebellion [1745] and was not himself without suspicion of
disaffection to His Majesty's Government.
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