The Conquest of a Continent; or, The Expansion of Races in America

by Madison Grant

At the time of the Revolution Vermont was very much of a frontier, in which a lawless and defiant lot known as the Green Mountain Boys held possession and yielded allegiance to no one. Within six weeks after the collapse of Shays's Rebellion, more than 700 families are said to have migrated from western Massachusetts into Vermont. Many New England soldiers who had fought over this ground in the Revolution had marked it as offering desirable home sites, and came into it to take up land and clear it, to bring their families, and establish isolated settlements which gradually coalesced into something like a settled country. The increasing influx of New Englanders led to the surrender of New York's claims on the territory, so that it took its place as an independent State in 1791, the first to be added to the original thirteen.

The picture of New England then is that of a community which received the bulk of its foundation stock in a very short period of time, 1620 to 1640, and almost wholly from a single source; that is, England, and specifically from the most Nordic districts of England. It was no mere figure of speech when Captain John Smith bestowed upon the region the prophetic name of New England. During the eighteenth century, scattered groups of other origins came to add themselves to the descendants of these early settlers; but in most cases they represented only drops in the bucket. Doubtless one of the reasons why the study of genealogy and the pride of ancestry have flourished most conspicuously in New England is that so large a proportion of the old population traces its ancestry back to the same period and to the same group of people. Even as early as the Revolution, the great bulk of the settlers of New England represented families that had been four or five generations on American soil.

If there was a conspicuous absence of immigrants of very distinguished families into New England at that time, it may be said, on the other hand, that the general level was sound and intelligent. The immigrant population of New England was composed of a small group of families dominant in business and the professions, and an overwhelming proportion of representatives of the English yeomanry, owners of small freeholds, whose sons often sailed ships or went to the fisheries. This same type made up the bulk of the population of the middle colonies and peopled the back country of the southern colonies. As most of the settlers in New England in the early migration were men who brought their families, the foundation stock thus established was on a better level than that in some other colonies where men arrived without bringing wives and therefore were forced to marry women of any kind whom the colony could furnish. The definitely Nordic character of New England stock, its early establishment, and the survival of the able and vigorous in a region where nature took a heavy toll of weaklings, have produced in New England a population that has left its stamp on subsequent American history as has no other group.

As to the Ulster Scots we must bear in mind that the Irish question was as serious a thorn in the side of English statesmen in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as it was before or since, and numerous attempts were made to alleviate the situation, if not to end it, by the colonization of Protestant people in Ireland. In 1611, James I began to encourage the emigration of people from the lowlands of Scotland, particularly from the western part, and from the north of England, into Ulster. He looked forward to establishing in Ireland a staunch Protestant population that might ultimately outnumber the Catholics and become the controlling element politically. For this reason the settlers were picked with some care. The plan succeeded so well that in a generation or a little more, about 300,000 people had been colonized in the northern part of the island, and by the end of a century their number had risen to nearly a million.

These are the "Scotch Irish" of American history. The name is a grotesque misnomer suggesting to the popular mind a sort of hybrid origin and hybrid character which has no basis in reality. They were not Irish in any sense of the word, and while most of them were Scotch a great many were English. They are designated in this book as "Ulster Scots."

Following the planting of Ulster in the north of Ireland, there was a heavy British emigration into the east of Ireland. This was due partly to economic factors and partly to the desire of Cromwell, in his turn, to solve the Irish problem by colonization, after the precedent which James I had established. These English Protestants in eastern Ireland have too often been ignored. They, too, had nothing in common with the older Roman Catholic population of the eastern part of the Island. Many of the Protestant "Irish" were Quakers.

These adopted children of Ireland also migrated freely to the American colonies and have been assumed far too easily to have been Roman Catholics. While it is extremely difficult to arrive at exact figures on this point, there is some reason to believe that the number of Protestant English in the east of Ireland during the seventeenth century was as large as the number of Protestant Scotch in the north, and this former group contributed its quota of English population to the colonies. It was this group which imposed the English language on the Irish. Until the later 1840's the Leinster Protestants and the Ulster Presbyterians were practically the only immigrants from Ireland to this country.

The great movement of Ulster Scots to America, although of an entirely different degree of magnitude, has been perhaps second only to that from the English counties in its influence on the subsequent history of the Continent. It began in the latter part of the seventeenth century but did not reach its height until the first quarter of the eighteenth. Five shiploads arrived in the summer of 1718, giving Cotton Mather the chance to note in his diary with anticipatory pleasure the merit that would accrue to him from showing "kindness to ye indigent." Thereafter, one finds in most histories such items as "In 1719 there came one hundred and twenty Presbyterian families from the north of Ireland who settled in Massachusetts" or "In the years 1719 and 1720 more than one hundred Presbyterian families came from the north of Ireland and settled at Londonderry in New Hampshire," and so on.

The Congregationalists of the seaboard were not too hospitable to these Presbyterians, and forced them to move inland in almost every case, away from the long-settled territory over which the Boston theocracy attempted to maintain its rule, and mostly to New Hampshire and Connecticut. Londonderry recalls its origin by its name and the Scotch who settled it not only introduced their manufactures into New Hampshire but brought along with them a still more valuable importation, the so-called Irish potato, which, having been taken from South America to Ireland long before, had, in this round-about way, been brought back to its own hemisphere. Other groups went to Worcester, to Pelham, to Palmer, to Andover, and to other communities in small numbers; while many others went to Maine. The total numbers, however, were very small.