“Possessed of a character as stern and uncompromising as the granite of their native mountains, this little colony did not concern itself in the affairs of its neighbors. Indeed there was no occasion to do so. They had brought with them the things they needed, and had inherent in their nature that which made them a people separate and apart from the communities by which they were surrounded. In their lives and characters was a declaration of independence that in itself nourished the spirit of freedom, which was to carry these people into the thick of the fight when the time arrived to bid defiance to the mother country.

“This spirit was further augmented by their independence and resources in the development of the material affairs of the colony. As previously stated, there were among the first settlers men of every trade and calling calculated to make the colony self-sustaining. There were husbandmen, weavers, smiths, masons, joiners, cord-wainers, millers and tradesmen, whose industry and thrift made it possible for the schoolmaster and preacher to devote himself exclusively to the intellectual and spiritual needs of the community. But with true Scotch economy, the teacher and preacher were often one and the same. As an illustration may be cited the founding of Tennent’s famous Log College as an adjunct to the Neshaminy Church, of which he was pastor.

“The stimulus given to civil and religious freedom by the uninterrupted exercise of these liberties, in strong contrast to the repression and persecution in the old country, cannot be overestimated. Princeton, as well as like institutions elsewhere, had its inception in our own Log College; and Finley, its first president, was akin to those of the same name in Warrington.

“The sons of Bucks County’s sturdy pioneers were constantly pushing on beyond our frontiers, carrying with them the lessons of frugality, piety and independence learned in this primitive community. They formed new colonies and engendered therein the love of freedom, which, when the Revolutionary War broke out, easily made the Scotch-Irish element the dominant party in the struggle for national independence in our state. Independence accomplished, they returned to their homes and again took up the business of self-government, broadened and refined by contact with the outside world, the primitive characteristics of their early life gone, but retaining the independence and courage of their forebears which had developed in them the best elements of citizenship.”

[6] Warren S. Ely, of Doylestown, Pa.
[7] The Pennsylvania historian might also have given us some word of that Col. George Morgan, some of whose descendants reside even now at Morganza, in Pennsylvania. Col. George Morgan had passed westward over the Alleghanies some years in advance of Daniel Boone’s first visit to Kentucky. Mr. James Morris Morgan, of Washington, D. C., in correspondence has this to say in regard to certain early voyagings of his ancestor, which were undertaken while the Quakers of Pennsylvania were still quietly dropping down from the hills of Pennsylvania into the eastern portions of Virginia and the Carolinas: “Col. George Morgan embarked at the village of Kaskaskia, on the Kaskaskia River, for his voyage down the Mississippi on the 21st of November, 1766. Butler, in his history of Kentucky, gives the credit of being the first American citizen to descend the Mississippi to Col. Taylor, in 1769. Col. Morgan was the first American citizen to found a colony in the Territory of Louisiana. Under a grant of King Carlos IV, he built the city of New Madrid, March, 1789. The grant embraced some 15,000,000 acres of land. (Gayarré; ‘History of Louisiana.’) On June 20, 1788, Congress ordered the annulment of Col. Morgan’s Indian claim to a greater portion of the state of Illinois, ‘claiming the land bordering on the Mississippi, from the mouth of the Ohio to a determined station on the Mississippi that shall be sixty or eighty miles north from the mouth of the Illinois River, and extending from the Mississippi as far eastward as may.’ The treaty meeting held under the auspices of Sir William Johnson at Fort Stanwix, when the Indians deeded the territory of Indiana to George Morgan, his father-in-law John Boynton, and his partner Samuel Wharton, (Boynton, Wharton & Morgan) and several other minor traders whose goods had been despoiled, was held on November 3, 1768. The state of Virginia claimed the territory after the Revolutionary War, and bullied the national government into compliance with her claims, the United States accepting the property as a present from Virginia, immediately after deciding in her favor. (See Journal of Congress, 1784, Feb. 26.)”

CHAPTER VIII
DANIEL BOONE

In preceding chapters we have taken up in general and in particular the origin, the purpose and the progress of the early American frontiersman. We have seen how this man, impelled by one reason or another, began to push outward on his way over the Appalachian range into the valley of the Mississippi. We have seen that the course of west-bound civilization was at first not wholly along the easiest way, but over barriers that had apparently been established by nature as insurmountable.