Massachusetts had a definite policy at this time of encouraging, if not requiring, immigrants of this sort to settle on the frontiers. They furnished less competition in this way and played a useful part in keeping off the Indians.
The emigration of the Scotch and North English who had been in Ulster for a generation or two or at the most for three generations, was due to discontent with their situation there. They had built up an important manufacture of woollens and linens which has ever since been famous throughout the world; but in 1698 the jealousy of rival industrialists in England led to Parliamentary legislation which crippled the industries in Ulster and threw many men out of employment. In 1704 and the following years a religious persecution of these Presbyterians was also carried on. These economic and religious handicaps were so great that after a few years of patient waiting the population gave up hope, and within half a century about half of the entire number had moved to the New World. The most important stream went into the middle and southern colonies and will be traced later.
This exodus was a cause of alarm in the old country as well as in the new. "The rumour [of going to America] has spread like a contagious distemper," laments an Irish letter writer in 1728; "and the worst is that it affects only Protestants, and reigns chiefly in the North"; while another laments that "there are now seven ships at Belfast, that are carrying off about 1000 passengers thither; and if we knew how to stop them, as most of them can get neither victuals nor work at home, it would be cruel to do it."
Reference will recur frequently to this immigration of Ulster Scots. At this point it is necessary to emphasize in the first place that it was little different in racial background from the preceding English settlement, both groups being definitely Nordic in their make-up. In the second place it was a valuable addition to the colonies in the quality and energy of its members. In the third place it was always small in proportion to the English element.
New England in 1790, regardless of numerous non-English groups, many of them of good individual quality though insignificant in total numbers, is to be considered definitely as a transplanted English population, most of which had been settled in North America so long that its habits of thought and action had become differentiated—one might say definitely American rather than English.
A third source of New England settlers during this period, small in numbers but valuable in quality, is represented by the French Huguenots who arrived for the most part in the decade or two following the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
The Huguenot migration to America falls in two general epochs. From 1555, when Admiral Coligny had a vision of a Protestant France in the New World, to the Revocation in 1685 of the Edict of Nantes, the French charter of Protestant liberty, is the first epoch, during which the immigration was scattering. From 1685 up to about 1750 is the second epoch, when the Huguenots, fleeing from oppression and death, sought refuge in many countries. During this period their immigration to North America reached considerable proportions. Providence and Boston were points of entry for many, though more went to the Southern colonies, and to them many an American family of the present day is proud to trace its ancestry.
These French Huguenots seem to have come pre-dominantly from the middle class or artisan stratum of the population with a mixture of the lesser gentry. But their energy, ability, and character earned for them an important rôle in their adopted country, out of proportion to their small numbers. Unlike some of the other non-English groups they did not tend to establish colonies or settlements of their own, but scattered widely and merged freely into the general population. This was the less difficult in that they came from the most Nordic parts of France and in racial composition are scarcely to be distinguished from the English.
In the same way those northern and eastern counties of England, which supplied a large part of the migration to America, had, during the preceding century, received a continuous infusion of continental Huguenots to a total sometimes estimated as high as 250,000, who there also became by admixture and hereditary similitude indistinguishable from their neighbors.
The Indian population of New England though never great was largely exterminated by war, disease, whiskey, and the breaking up of their cultural and economic background. In the century before the settlement of Plymouth, smallpox, introduced from the Spanish Main, had flickered up and down the New England coast and had so decimated the natives that only a weakened remnant remained to oppose the Whites.