2,000 who left annually.
Altogether, in the half century just preceding the American Revolution,
200,000[9] persons, or one-third of the Protestant population of Ulster,
are said to have emigrated, and the majority came to America. This was
by far the largest contribution of any race to the population of America
during the eighteenth century, and the injustice they suffered at the
hands of England made them among the most determined and effective
recruits to the armies that won our independence.

Before the Scotch-Irish moved to America the Atlantic coast line had
been well occupied. Consequently, in order to obtain land for
themselves, they were forced to go to the interior and to become
frontiersmen. They found in Massachusetts a state church to which they
must conform in order to be admitted to citizenship. But what they had
left Ireland to escape they would not consent in a new country to do.
The Puritans were willing that they should occupy the frontier as a
buffer against the Indians, and so they took up lands in New Hampshire,
Vermont, Western Massachusetts, and Maine. Only a few congregations,
however, settled in New England--the bulk of the immigrants entered by
way of Philadelphia and Baltimore and went to the interior of
Pennsylvania surrounding and south of Harrisburg. They spread through
the Shenandoah valley and in the foothill regions of Virginia and
North and South Carolina. Gradually, they pushed farther west, across
the mountains into Western Pennsylvania about Pittsburg, and into Ohio,
Kentucky, and Tennessee. In all of these regions they fought the
Indians, protected the older inhabitants from inroads, and developed
those pioneer qualities which for one hundred years have characterized
the "winning of the West."

[Illustration: ANGLO-SAXON MOUNTAINEERS, BEREA COLLEGE, KENTUCKY]

The Scotch-Irish occupied a peculiar place in the new world. More than
any other race they served as the amalgam to produce, out of divergent
races, a new race, the American. The Puritans of New England, the
Quakers of Pennsylvania, the Cavaliers of Virginia, were as radically
different as peoples of different races, and they were separated from
each other in their own exclusive communities. The Germans were
localized in Pennsylvania and Maryland, the Dutch in New York, but the
Scotch-Irish "alone of the various races in America were present in
sufficient numbers in all of the colonies to make their influence count;
an