secondly, that, except for those in the Carolinas who came from
Charleston, the immigrants of this stock were mostly from the north,
from their great breeding-ground and nursery in western
Pennsylvania.[10]

That these Irish Presbyterians were a bold and hardy race is proved by
their at once pushing past the settled regions, and plunging into the
wilderness as the leaders of the white advance. They were the first and
last set of immigrants to do this; all others have merely followed in
the wake of their predecessors. But, indeed, they were fitted to be
Americans from the very start; they were kinsfolk of the Covenanters;
they deemed it a religious duty to interpret their own Bible, and held
for a divine right the election of their own clergy. For generations
their whole ecclesiastic and scholastic systems had been fundamentally
democratic. In the hard life of the frontier they lost much of their
religion, and they had but scant opportunity to give their children the
schooling in which they believed; but what few meeting-houses and
school-houses there were on the border were theirs.[11] The numerous
families of colonial English who came among them adopted their religion
if they adopted any. The creed of the backwoodsman who had a creed at
all was Presbyterianism; for the Episcopacy of the tide-water lands
obtained no foothold in the mountains, and the Methodists and Baptists
had but just begun to appear in the west when the Revolution broke
out.[12]

These Presbyterian Irish were, however, far from being the only settlers
on the border, although more than any others they impressed the stamp of
their peculiar character on the pioneer civilization of the west and
southwest. Great numbers of immigrants of English descent came among
them from the settled districts on the east; and though these later