We have hitherto considered only the earliest period of North Carolina history. From about 1720 marked changes began to be visible. There was such a change in the character of the immigration as by and by to result in more or less displacement of population. Since the barbarous devastation of the Rhenish Palatinate by French troops in 1688-93 there had been much distress among those worthy Germans, and after a while they sought to mend their fortunes by coming to America. This migration continued for many years. Some of these Germans settled in the Mohawk valley, where their mark was placed upon the map in such town names as Minden, Frankfort, and Oppenheim, and where they contributed to our Revolutionary War one of its most picturesque figures in Nicholas Herkimer. A great many came to the Susquehanna valley in what was then the western part of Pennsylvania, where their descendants still speak and write that sweet old-fashioned language which we ought hardly to call Pennsylvania Dutch, since it is a dialect of High German besprinkled with English. From Pennsylvania large numbers followed the valleys between the Blue Ridge and the Alleghanies and made their way as far as South Carolina. We have already noted the arrival of Germans, Swiss, and Huguenots on the North Carolina seaboard early in the century. Later on, in 1745, after the suppression of the Jacobite rebellion, there came to North Carolina a powerful reinforcement of Scotch Highlanders, among them many of the clan Macdonald, including the romantic Flora Macdonald, who had done so much for the young fugitive prince. But more important and far more numerous than all the other elements in the population were the Scotch-Irish from Ulster, who—goaded by unwise and unjust laws—began coming in large numbers about 1719, and have played a much greater and more extensive part in American history than has yet been recognized. There was hardly one of the thirteen colonies upon which these Scotch-Irish did not leave their mark. To the story of their coming I shall revert in my concluding chapter, where it forms the most important part of the story of the westward advance of Virginia. For the present it may suffice to point out that in North Carolina they had come, before the Revolutionary War, to be the strongest element in the population of the colony. Under the influence of these various and excellent streams of immigration, the character of the colony was gradually but effectively altered. Industry and thrift came to prevail in the wilderness, and various earnest Puritanic types of religion flourished side by side on friendly terms.
Displacement and further dispersal of poor whites.
As society in North Carolina became more and more orderly and civilized, the old mean white element, or at least the more intractable part of it, was gradually pushed out to the westward. This stream that had started from Old Virginia flowed for a while southwestward into the South Carolina back-country. But the southerly movement was gradually turned more and more to the westward.
“Crackers,” etc.
Always clinging to the half-savage frontier, these poor white people made their way from North Carolina westward through Tennessee, and their descendants may still be found here and there in Arkansas, southern Missouri, and what is sometimes known as the Egyptian extremity of Illinois. From the South Carolina back-country, through Georgia, they were scattered here and there among the states on the Gulf of Mexico. Taken at its worst, this type of American citizen is portrayed in Martin Chuzzlewit’s unwelcome visitor, the redoubtable Hannibal Chollop. Specimens of him might have been found among the border ruffians led by the savage Quantrell in 1863 to the cruel massacre at Lawrence, and among the desperadoes whose dark deeds used forty years ago to give such cities as Memphis an unenviable prominence in the pages of the “Police Gazette.” But in the average specimens of the type one would find not criminality of disposition so much as shiftlessness. Of the stunted, gaunt, and cadaverous “sand-hillers” of South Carolina and Georgia, a keen observer says that “they are incapable of applying themselves steadily to any labour, and their habits are very much like those of the old Indians.”[290] The “clay-eaters,” who are said to sustain life on crude whiskey and aluminous earth, are doubtless of similar type, as well as the “conches,” “crackers,” and “corn-crackers” of various Southern states. All these seem to represent a degraded variety or strain of the English race. Concerning the origin of this degraded strain, detailed documentary evidence is not easy to get; but the facts of its distribution furnish data for valid inferences such as the naturalist entertains concerning the origin and migrations of some species of animal or plant.
There is, first, the importation of degraded English humanity in large numbers to the two oldest colonies in which there is a demand for wholesale cheap labour; secondly, the substitution of black cheap labour for white; thirdly, the tendency of the degraded white humanity to seek the frontier, as described by Spotswood, or else to lodge in sequestered nooks outside of the main currents of progress. These data are sufficient in general to explain the origin and distribution of the “crackers,” but a word of qualification is needed. It is not to be supposed that the ancestors of all the persons designated as “crackers” were once white freedmen in Virginia and Maryland; it is more probable that this class furnished a nucleus about which various wrecks of decayed and broken-down humanity from many quarters were gradually gathered. Nor are we bound to suppose that every community of ignorant, semi-civilized white people in the Southern states is descended from those white freedmen. Prolonged isolation from the currents of thought and feeling that sway the great world will account for almost any extent of ignorance and backwardness; and there are few geographical situations east of the Mississippi River more conducive to isolation than the southwestern portion of the great Appalachian highlands. All these circumstances should be borne in mind in dealing with what, from whatever point of view, is one of the interesting problems of American history.
Settlers of South Carolina.
The settlement of South Carolina took place under different circumstances from those of the sister colony, and the resulting state of society was very different. In the earliest days there were many settlers of a rough and turbulent character, which their peculiar dealings with pirates, to be recounted in the following chapter, did not tend to improve. But the Huguenots, in whose veins flowed some of the sturdiest blood of France, soon came in great numbers. From the acquaintanceship of the Berkeleys, the Ashleys, the Hydes, and others, there came a certain number of Cavaliers; but at the end of the seventeenth century the impulse which had carried thousands of Cavaliers to Virginia had quite died out, and on the whole the general complexion of South Carolina, as regarded religion and politics, was strongly Puritan.
Churchmen and Dissenters.