Another important element that went to make up the Pennsylvania population consisted of the Scotch-Irish.They were descendants of Scotch and English Presbyterians who had gone to Ireland to take up the estates of the Irish rebels confiscated under Queen Elizabeth and James I.This migration of Protestants to Ireland, which began soon after 1600, was encouraged by the English Government.Towards the middle of the seventeenth century the confiscation of more Irish land under Cromwell's regime increased the migration to Ulster.Many English joined the migration, and Scotch of the Lowlands who were largely of English extraction, although there were many Gaelic or Celtic names among them.
These are the people usually known in English history as Ulstermen--the same who made such a heroic defense of Londonderry against James II, and the same who in modern times have resisted home rule in Ireland because it would bury them, they believe, under the tyranny of their old enemies, the native Irish Catholic majority.They were more thrifty and industrious than the native Irish and as a result they usually prospered on the Irish land.
At first they were in a more or less constant state of war with the native Irish, who attempted to expel them.They were subsequently persecuted by the Church 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 to be found all over the State, and they no longer desire so strongly to live by themselves.
The Ulstermen, owing to the circumstances of their earlier life, had no sympathy whatever with the Quaker's objection to war or with his desire to deal fairly with the Indians and pay them for their land.As Presbyterians and Calvinists, they belonged to one of the older and more conservative divisions of the Reformation.
The Quaker's doctrine of the inward light, his quietism, contemplation, and advanced ideas were quite incomprehensible to them.As for the Indians, they held that the Old Testament commands the destruction of all the heathen; and as for paying the savages for their land, it seemed ridiculous to waste money on such an object when they could exterminate the natives at less cost.The Ulstermen, therefore, settled on the Indian land as they pleased, or for that matter on any land, and were continually getting into difficulty with the Pennsylvania Government no less than with the Indians.They regarded any region into which they entered as constituting a sovereign state.
It was this feeling of independence which subsequently prompted them to organize what is known as the Whisky Rebellion when, after the Revolution, the Federal Government put a tax on the liquor which they so much esteemed as a product, for corn converted into whisky was more easily transported on horses over mountain trails, and in that form fetched a better price in the markets.
After the year 1755, when the Quaker method of dealing with the Indians no longer prevailed, the Scotch-Irish lived on the frontier in a continual state of savage warfare which lasted for the next forty years.War, hunting the abundant game, the deer, buffalo, and elk, and some agriculture filled the measure of their days and years.They paid little attention to the laws of the province, which were difficult to enforce on the distant frontier, and they administered a criminal code of their own with whipping or "laced jacket," as they called it, as a punishment.
