ndsman into an
industrious freeholder. Nor were all the settlers of the Virginia back
country emancipated servants. In 1732 Peter Jefferson patented a
thousand acres at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was in this
frontier community above the Fall Line that Patrick Henry and Thomas
Jefferson were born; here they grew to manhood; here they were inspired
with those ideals of society so inimical alike to the imperial designs
of the British Government and to the complacent pretensions of the
slave-owning aristocracies of the tide-water.

Yet the first distinctive American frontier was not created alone by the
movement of population westward from the older settlements; like every
successive frontier in our history, it became the mecca of emigrants
from British and continental lands. Before 1700, exiled Huguenots and
refugees from the Palatinate began to seek the New World; and during the
eighteenth century men of non-English stock poured by the thousands into
the up-country of Pennsylvania and of the South. In 1700 the foreign
population in the colonies was slight; in 1775 it is estimated that
225,000 Germans and 385,000 Scotch-Irish, together nearly one fifth of
the entire population, lived within the provinces that won independence.
Persecution and the ravages of war, taxes that were heavy at any time
and intolerable in time of famine, were among the causes that disposed
many thousands of Protestant families from Ulster, and from the thickly
populated districts of Switzerland and the Rhine country, to seek new
homes in a land of better promise. To cross the ocean was no slight
undertaking for unlettered and home-keeping people. But since the
founding of Pennsylvania knowledge of America had spread among the
peasants of Germany, and there was no lack of "Neulanders"--the emigrant
agents of that day--who described the New World in glowing terms, and
stood ready for a consideration to carry any who wished to be
transported to its shores. And the way was facilitated by the English
and colonial Governments: to forestall the French in settling the
interior, secure the trade of the Indians in time of peace, and erect a
barrier against them in time of war, foreigners were accorded
naturalization, land was offered on easy terms, and toleration granted
to all Protestant sects.

Foreigners were not attracted to New England, where the Puritans
scrutinized all newcomers with a jealous eye; while New York was avoided
on accoun