THE PENN MONTHLY. JUNE, 1870. ULSTER IN AMERICA. AT the era when English cavaliers and Puritans were colonizing our Southern and Eastern States respectively, another work of colonization and settlement was going on within the British Islands themselves. The northern part of Ireland, by the defeat of the O'Neills, had largely fallen, as the spoils of war, to the British government, and King James was granting and bestowing its lands upon his favorites and his troublesome friends. His own countrymen and first subjects (as might be expected) were favored with large slices, as the first taste of the delights of the union of the two crowns. "The Plantation of Ulster" is the name which the transaction bears in history, a name which indicates its general likeness to cotemporary proceedings in America. Such plantations of Ireland were no new thing. For centuries, colonies of Normans and other Englishmen had been planting in Ireland: some, as in the Pale around Dublin, remaining faithful and serviceable to the mother country; others in the farther west being cut off by civil troubles, and becoming assimilated to the pure Irish in self-defence, or, as an old act of Parliament expressed it in a Latin phrase now proverbial, becoming "Hiberniores Hibernis ipsis." To so great an extent was the colonizing process carried on in the west, that it has been disputed whether fully one-half or only one-third of the people of Connaught are of Norman blood. Many families that now bear euphonious Irish names were founded by Normans who translated their family names into Irish: thus, the McMahons were founded by that Fitzurse who assisted at the slaughter of Thomas á Beckett. What little distinction continued between these southern plantations and their Irish neighbors was finally obliterated at the Reformation, when they both repudiated the Protestantism of England and of the Dublin "Pale," and held fast to the old faith. The Protestant and largely Scotch colony of Ulster, however, approximated but little to Irish customs and ways. The native Irish were not, indeed, wholly driven from their lands in Ulster, although the possessions obtained by conquest were increased by peaceable purchase. The new colony was on a large scale, extending over whole counties and enlisting the services of the corporation of London in its erection. Its growth and history-civil, ecclesiastical and economical-it is not our present purpose to trace, but only its indirect influence upon the settlement and character of the American nation. Two points in its constitution we would especially note. It was a colony, and it was, in the main, a Scotch colony. The great body of its members had torn themselves from home and old association to go forth into a land of strangers, for whose past they had no regard, whose future they were to create. They were among the boldest and most venturesome of the Scottish nation, a people of strong will and decided convictions. These facts have impressed themselves on every page of the history of Ulster, and, since their advent to this country, upon the history of America. They, of all classes in the British Islands, stand in a position most analogous to that ▾ of the American people, being least overawed by traditional associations and historical memories, least slow to adapt themselves to the genius of a new land and a new people. The emigration from Ulster to America began at a very early date. In 1635, we find Rev. Robert Blair sailing for the new world with a shipload of his people, and although he was driven back by contrary winds, and became a prominent man in the civil troubles which followed in Scotland, yet, probably, others were more successful voyagers. The first settlers of New Hampshire, and the ancestors of her Greeleys and Websters, were from Ulster, and brought with them the linen manufacture of their native province. In the following century the movement westward became more general, and the immigrants covered the whole western interior of Pennsylvania, Virginia and the Carolinas, which were at that time frontier districts, till then unoccupied. In this region, which might be called the Ulster of America, almost the entire population is of this sturdy stock. From above Pittsburg, down through Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, a part of South Carolina, Eastern Tennessee, Northern Georgia and Alabama, from above Pittsburg, we say, to Huntsville, the region is settled from the northern and least Irish province of Ireland. Farther east and farther west, from Boston to the Pacific shore, this element appears in sporadic groups, marked by its own idiosyncrasies and exerting its special influence, but in this great mountain region of the Appalachian chain it predominates over all others. The first appearance of these Ulster Protestants in American history is not so creditable. They were the first to break our Pennsylvania treaties with the Indians, insisting that, as Pagans could have no rights which Christians are bound to respect, it was sheer waste to leave so much good land in the hands of the aborigines, while they themselves were in need of farms. The very Quakers took arms to put down these originators of our later Indian policy, who were too much in advance of their time to be appreciated. The Mecklenburgh Declaration of Independence was published by the Ulstermen of North Carolina in convention assembled at Mecklenburgh, in 1756, anticipating thus the action of the Continental Congress by several years, and evincing the sturdy independence and forwardness which has always belonged to the class from which it originated. So manifestly has Jefferson borrowed from it in the preparation of the later and more national Declaration, that several of his partizans have cast doubt upon the genuineness and priority of the Mecklenburgh document; but investigations made at the instance of the State of North Carolina fully vindicate these. The record thus opened in the struggle for Independence by the Ulster colonists was worthily sustained, in so far as their peculiar and dangerous position, for the most part, on the frontier, permitted. An Ulsterman, General Montgomery, led the Continental troops against Canada, and only his death at the storming of Quebec prevented its complete success. In North Carolina, they were the strength and staple of the State which never allowed the British forces any permanent resting-place within its borders. The battle of King's Mountain in that State was a specimen of the style in which these border settlers waged impromptu warfare. Several of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were of the Ulster stock, as was Charles Thompson, the Clerk of the Continental Congress. The first group of statesmen who directed the affairs of the new Republic after the Revolution were mostly of English stock and aristocratic training. Washington, their highest type and noblest representative, was not the style of man that Republican institutions are likely to foster. During this period, American Ulster appears only in the miserable Whiskey Rebellion, which was suppressed as well as begun by men of this stock. When, however, the Federalists passed away and a more characteristically American class of statesmen took their places, we find, at once, Ulster strongly represented. Jefferson, Madison and Monroe are all from the region of the Ulster colonization, and two of them, at least, represent the intensity and fervor of the stock. New England furnished the President who followed them, but Ulster again appears in its best and most characteristic representative, Andrew Jackson, of East Tennessee, who stood forward in all the force and vigor of the Ulster character, to represent and embody the growing conviction of national unity. His great antagonist, however, and the great embodiment of the "States Rights" idea, was also of the Ulster stock. John C. Calhoun (originally spelled Colquohoun and always pronounced Ca'hoon) was the antagonist who stood forward prominently through the same imperious qualities as were possessed by General Jackson. When, again, we find Calhoun fighting the same battle in the United States Senate, then, too, his opponent, and the great popular representative of the idea of unity, is Daniel Webster, who bears an Ulster name and comes from New Hampshire, the New England colony of Ulster. Among the late Presidents, three at least are branches of this wide-spread Ulster tree. Polk, Buchanan, and Johnson are not her proudest representatives, but they all three evince the quality of the rock whence they were hewn, especially the last. The tenacity with which General Grant's predecessor clung to an opinion, the unbending firmness and decision of his whole political course after he had taken the bearings of his position as President, the perfection of his indifference to hostile logic or hostile opinion, are all merely the impracticability of an Ulsterman when in the wrong. Those who knew the stuff whereof the man was made knew that no election results would alter his course one jot, and that he would go out of office with the conviction that he was a wise statesman who had vainly striven to hold back a blind nation from rushing to its ruin. Put General Jackson in the same place, and with the same views he would have adopted the same course and policy. During the late Rebellion, all parts and sections were so cordially and heartily one in the support of the common cause, that it may seem invidious to emphasize the share of any. If New England, however, may boast of her sons, and the West of her soldiers, let us not forget what yeoman service the men of the Ulster stock rendered. Theirs was the first blood shed during the war, for General Crawford, who was wounded in the defence of Fort Sumter, is one of them by descent. Their sturdy arms drove the bayonets of the Pittsburg Roundheads to the front, and Stonewall Jackson, who fell lamented by North as well as South, was as truly an Ulsterman in character as in blood. Most notable, however, was their influence in the loyal and semi-loyal districts of the South, which lay-one and all-in the region settled from Ulster. Their West Virginia cut loose from the Confederate Old Dominion. Their Western North Carolina was always a thorn in the side of the Confederate government, an unfailing refuge to our escaped prisoners. Who shall write the story of East Tennessee, when stubborn Andrew Johnson was the right man in the right place, and when the whole region was proscribed as hostile to the Southern cause! With it stand Northern Alabama and Georgia, also loyal in secret, and, as far as they dare, openly. The Ulster settlers of the South were saved by their comparative poverty and the hilly character of their country from the temptations and corruptions of the slave-holding and plantation districts. They were consequently the only middle class of the South, standing far above the poor whites, and thus coming at once into sympathy with the great middle class of the North. As the want of such a middle class was the South's greatest need, the loyalty of the inhabitants of the Appalachian chain was most fortunate for the North. They held, too, the key of the whole military position, as Fremont saw at the very opening of the struggle; and when the Union forces had seized Lookout Mountain and Chattanooga, they found themselves intrenched among friends in a secure and commanding position, with the whole South lying open before their gigantic mountain base. The |