uenot; but it is doubtful if we have
wholly realized the importance of the part played by that stern and
virile people, the Irish whose preachers taught the creed of Knox and
Calvin. These Irish representatives of the Covenanters were in the west
almost what the Puritans were in the northeast, and more than the
Cavaliers were in the south. Mingled with the descendants of many other
races, they nevertheless formed the kernel of the distinctively and
intensely American stock who were the pioneers of our people in their
march westward, the vanguard of the army of fighting settlers, who with
axe and rifle won their way from the Alleghanies to the Rio Grande and
the Pacific.[2]

The Presbyterian Irish were themselves already a mixed people. Though
mainly descended from Scotch ancestors--who came originally from both
lowlands and highlands, from among both the Scotch Saxons and the Scotch
Celts,[3]--many of them were of English, a few of French Huguenot,[4]
and quite a number of true old Milesian Irish[5] extraction. They were
the Protestants of the Protestants; they detested and despised the
Catholics, whom their ancestors had conquered, and regarded the
Episcopalians by whom they themselves had been oppressed, with a more
sullen, but scarcely less intense, hatred.[6] They were a truculent and
obstinate people, and gloried in the warlike renown of their
forefathers, the men who had followed Cromwell, and who had shared in
the defence of Derry and in the victories of the Boyne and Aughrim.[7]

They did not begin to come to America in any numbers till after the
opening of the eighteenth century; by 1730 they were fairly swarming
across the ocean, for the most part in two streams, the larger going to
the port of Philadelphia, the smaller to the port of Charleston.[8]
Pushing through the long settled lowlands of the seacoast, they at once
made their abode at the foot of the mountains, and became the outposts
of civilization. From Pennsylvania, whither the great majority had come,
they drifted south along the foothills, and down the long valleys, till
they met their brethren from Charleston who had pushed up into the
Carolina back-country. In this land of hills, covered by unbroken
forest, they took root and flourished, stretching in a broad belt from
north to south, a shield of sinewy men thrust in between the people of
the seaboard and the red warriors of the wilderness. All through this
region they were alike; they had as lit