The Georgians of the present day are descendants of the Oglethorpe colonists in only insignificant proportions. The Nordic settlers who came in through North Carolina, English from the tidewater region, and Ulster Scots from the Uplands, are the real founders of the State.
After the Revolution, Georgia benefited by the prevalent unrest and the tide of migration that flowed in all directions. It received settlers from all of the Southern States and some of the Northern ones, as well as new arrivals direct from Europe.
Kentucky for a generation prior to the Revolution had become known through hunters of game bringing back glowing accounts of the beauty and fertility of the level lands of central Kentucky. Access in the one case was down the Ohio River by boat, and in the other by a long and hazardous trip through the mountains, entering by the Cumberland Gap, the most practicable of several difficult passes. The danger from Indians was so great on the Ohio River that most of the invaders preferred those dangers of a different type to be encountered by the Cumberland Gap entry. It was the route which Daniel Boone, acting for a land company, had blazed: the narrow trail, six hundred miles long, that has become famous as the Wilderness Road.
By the time of the Revolution several hundred people were in Kentucky, and more were coming each year from the inland portion of Virginia, and, to a less extent, from Pennsylvania. During the Revolution the population rose and fell in accordance with local conditions on the frontier and the ravages of the Indians. With the end of the Revolution a great tide of immigration set in, composed in part of soldiers who were given land grants by the Virginia Government. With them was an element of Loyalists, as well as many families from Maryland, both seeking to get away from unpleasant associations in the East.
From 1780 onward the route down the Ohio began to be more used. The Indians were driven back or the boatmen learned how to cope with their ruses, and the annual migration began to be counted in thousands. In the year 1786 as many as 3000 went down the river, in 1788, 10,000, and in 1789, 20,000. Meanwhile, the immigration through the Cumberland Gap continued steadily. The growth of Kentucky was on a scale unparalleled in North America up to that time. Within a few decades from the day when the first cabins were erected in the region, a population of 70,000 people had entered the State, and it had half as many inhabitants as Massachusetts.
Compared with the Scotch tone of Tennessee, Kentucky was overwhelmingly English in aspect. Virginia was definitely its progenitor, a large part of its early population having come through the Shenandoah Valley. Next as feeders were Pennsylvania and North Carolina, while other regions contributed but small minorities, those from Maryland being probably the most numerous. The government of Virginia was seriously concerned by its losses of population from this cause. After the Revolution, officers who had served with the Virginia forces were compensated by allotments of land in the Kentucky region. The State attracted other settlers of a superior social and economic status. These gave a tone to its society and laid the foundation of a local aristocracy. Kentucky long remained distinctive because of its conspicuously English atmosphere and the social refinements which it showed in contrast to some of its neighbors. Kentucky remained part of Virginia until 1792 when it was admitted as a State.
Tennessee was, in fact, only the western part of North Carolina which originally stretched beyond the Appalachians as far as the Mississippi. The French had established a trading post on the site of Nashville as early as 1714. But the State was actually settled from the East rather than from the West, and, indeed, its western third was not settled until well into the nineteenth century. The first area of settlement was in the river valleys near the North Carolina border, and this remained the principal area during the period here considered. A second and less important point of growth was in the center of the State. In northeastern Tennessee the earlier settlements were from Virginia, and the settlers supposed that they were still within the limits of the Old Dominion.
The settlers from North Carolina soon began to push through the mountain passes and established the groupings that go in history by the name of the Holston and Watauga settlements. Many of the early settlers, of whom some hundreds were present before the Revolution, were, as noted, from the upland portion of Virginia, and were Presbyterians from Scotland, often by way of Ulster, while the principal early influx from North Carolina was connected with the uprising in the Piedmont section of that colony about 1770. An insurgent element known as the Regulators put itself in opposition to the royal governor, and, being beaten, fled over the mountains for safety. A large proportion of these were from Wake County. They brought in an element of Baptists contrasting with the Presbyterianism which, on the whole, characterized the State from the beginning and still does so owing to the predominance of the Scotch in its settlement.