TERRITORIAL GROWTH of the UNITED STATES
Seeking newer and freer land, the Scotch together with some Germans began to follow the mountain valleys trending southwestward from Pennsylvania. They not only filled the Shenandoah Valley in a few years, but filtered down to the back country of the southern colonies and to the eastern portion of what is now Tennessee.
A good illustration of this migration is Daniel Boone, himself of English stock, who was born on the Delaware only a few miles above Philadelphia. The Boone family soon moved to Reading. Thence drifting southwestward with his compatriots, Daniel Boone settled in the North Carolina uplands, along the valley of the Yadkin, then passed beyond into Kentucky, and, after that location began to be civilized, went on as a pioneer to Missouri. His son appears a little later as one of the early settlers of Kansas, his grandson as a pioneer in Colorado.
When the land west of the Alleghanies was opened for settlement about 1768, the Ulster Scots began to throng the mountain passes. In addition to their aptitude for frontier life, and the insatiable desire to find new and cheap land, they wanted to get away from their neighbors, the Pennsylvania Dutch, with whom they usually did not live on very good terms. Pittsburgh rapidly became a Nordic territory settled mainly by the Ulster Scots.
These streams of immigration were sufficient by 1740 to enable Pennsylvania to overtake and pass the population of every other colony except Maryland, Massachusetts, and Virginia, although most of them had been started a generation earlier than Penn's settlement. A decade later Maryland was passed and just after the Revolution Massachusetts was outstripped, while Philadelphia remained the metropolis of the United States until finally excelled by New York City in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Benjamin Franklin's offhand estimate that at the end of the Colonial period one-third of the population of his adopted State was English, one-third Scotch, and one-third German, was not far from the truth. Though the population was then by a safe majority British in origin and English-speaking, the Germans remained an element impossible to assimilate, so long as they continued to be segregated in their own communities of which Lancaster was the largest inland town in the thirteen colonies.
Such of the Germans as went to the frontier States were assimilated by the Nordic groups without much difficulty; but the experience of the Pennsylvania Dutch farming communities is like that of some of the city slum districts of the last century, in presenting groups almost impossible to Americanize. Even at the present time this Alpine island of population still retains many of its alien characteristics. For this, among other reasons, the German element in Pennsylvania at the time of the Revolution played a relatively unimportant part in the affairs of the State, as suggested by the quotation from Franklin above. The dominant element was formed by the group around Philadelphia composed mainly of the original English Quakers; but the Pennsylvania-Dutch, on their farms, and the Scots on the frontier, furnished a large contingent with which the politicians had to deal, though they were seldom represented in the government and leadership of the colony. The German element was inclined to follow the leadership of the Quakers under whose invitation it had come to Pennsylvania. The Scots, on the other hand, were apt to be in a state of rebellion when occasion arose, as conspicuously in the Whiskey Rebellion, which formed one of the first tests of the power of the Federal Government under Washington's presidency.
The claim that half of the Ulstermen were adherents of the Established Church, rather than Presbyterians, is doubtless extreme, but emphasizes the typically non-Irish and Protestant character of this whole element of the population, as also the fact that many of the Ulstermen were not Scots, nor even Lowland Scots, whose ancestors had moved northward across the border from England; but were direct emigrants from England to Ireland, some indeed as late as and even after the time of Cromwell.
Delaware has been dealt with incidentally in what has been said concerning Pennsylvania, because it was part of Pennsylvania during the first period of colonization. Unimportant attempts had been made by the Dutch and Swedes, of whom the Swedes are the best known, to settle there but the population of the region when Penn arrived was mainly composed of English who had moved in under the regime of the Duke of York.
In 1633, an English nobleman, Lord Baltimore, who had for years been seeking favor with the Stuart monarchy, announced that he had become a convert to the papacy, and, with the zeal of a new convert, desired to establish a colony in the New World where Catholics, then laboring under heavy disabilities in Great Britain, could enjoy religious freedom. He applied for, and Charles I granted, a charter for the foundation of a semi-feudal proprietorship, with the stipulation that freedom of worship should prevail.