By adopting a remarkably liberal code of laws, which welcomed insolvent debtors by cancelling their indebtedness, this colony attracted an element which the more conservative Virginians regarded with suspicion. A continual infiltration of landseekers led to steady colonization, and gradually the tidewater section of North Carolina developed as a separate region, not very thickly settled, not very prosperous, not very distinguished in any way. A few French Huguenots drifted in after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. In 1710 a group of Palatines, who had left their German homes because of religious persecution, and had sought refuge in England, was passed on to North Carolina through the enterprise of a couple of Swiss promoters who were looking for colonists. As a courtesy to the promoters the settlement was given the name of New Bern, which has led to a general supposition that the population were Swiss. In fact, they were nearly all German Alpines.
Another immigration, this time of Nordics, began a few years later when Scotch Highlanders, disappointed at the results of the 1715 uprising on behalf of the Old Pretender, fled the country and came to North Carolina, starting a settlement on the Cape Fear River. Later, following the collapse of the Young Pretender in 1745, the Highlanders again found themselves in a bad situation at home. Shipload after shipload landed at Wilmington in 1746 and 1747. This emigration of Scotch Highlanders continued until the Revolution, during which time they showed themselves, strangely enough, loyal to the Hanoverian dynasty and mostly fought as Loyalists against the Continentals.
The general breakup of the clan system with the accompanying distress in the Highlands caused most of this emigration, although some of the Scots were deported as prisoners of war. Campbelltown was the centre of their settlement, and it is unfortunate that its present name of Fayetteville conceals its interesting history. Some of the Highlanders are said to have brought cattle with them, and they pushed on into the interior of the State because of the great areas of succulent grass and peavine stretching toward the mountains which provided excellent fodder for their herds.
The sympathetic patronage of Gabriel Johnston, the Governor of the Province from 1734 to 1752, was largely responsible for the welcome extended to these Highlanders. Himself a Scotchman, he was under strong suspicion of not being too loyal to the Crown. At any rate, his hospitality to the Highlanders brought to North Carolina the largest group of Highland Scotch that came to the colonies. These men of the purest Nordic blood form a selected group anthropologically. It is no mere coincidence that the tallest average height of a population in the United States at the present time is in these North Carolina counties that were settled by the Scotch Highlanders after "Bonnie Prince Charlie" ceased to be a political possibility.
While the back country of North Carolina was thus being penetrated from the seacoast by the Highland Scots, the Lowland Scots were drifting into it along the foot of the mountains from Pennsylvania and Maryland through Virginia. This was the principal source of increase of the population during the eighteenth century, and still gives to the State its characteristic complexion. Along with the Ulster Scots came, as said above, some of the German settlers, thus bringing a small Alpine element to the State. The southern tidewater region also developed at the same time as a northern extension of settlement from South Carolina.
South Carolina was settled only a little later than North Carolina by the establishment of Old Charles Town in 1665. This settlement, shortly moved across and up the river to a better location, prospered and expanded until it became South Carolina.
Originally a sort of offshoot from the West Indies, this region caught the attention of the Huguenot refugees a few years later, perhaps because Coligny had marked it out a century before as a desirable home for them. It attracted a larger proportion of the French refugees than any other colony; and although they were unwelcome at first to the English who were in possession, they soon assimilated themselves to the Anglo-Saxon population with which they were racially identical and became an important element in the upbuilding of the State. In Colonial and Revolutionary times, Gendron, Huger, LeSerrurier, deSaussure, Laurens, Lanier, Sevier, and Ravenel were all Huguenots who distinguished themselves in the service of the State.
The establishment of large-scale agriculture with plantations devoted to rice or indigo sharply limited the possibilities of settlement in the tidewater region of South Carolina, and it became a country of large holdings worked by Negro slaves in charge of overseers. Meanwhile the owners largely made their homes in or near Charleston, and brought it to the position of the fourth city of the colonies in importance.
The growth of the colony would have been slow had it not been for the influx of the Ulster Scots coming along the foot of the mountains from the north after the middle of the eighteenth century. The upcountry thus became quite different from the tidewater, so different, that in South Carolina as in North Carolina and Virginia it was a question whether the State might not split on slavery a few years before the Civil War, and the Upland population was only whipped into line for secession by sharp practice on the part of the political leaders in the slave-holding regions.