arrivals soon became indistinguishable from the people among whom they
settled, yet they certainly sometimes added a tone of their own to
backwoods society, giving it here and there a slight dash of what we are
accustomed to consider the distinctively southern or cavalier
spirit.[13] There was likewise a large German admixture, not only from
the Germans of Pennsylvania, but also from those of the Carolinas.[14] A
good many Huguenots likewise came,[15] and a few Hollanders[16] and even
Swedes,[17] from the banks of the Delaware, or perhaps from farther off
still.

A single generation, passed under the hard conditions of life in the
wilderness, was enough to weld together into one people the
representatives of these numerous and widely different races; and the
children of the next generation became indistinguishable from one
another. Long before the first Continental Congress assembled, the
backwoodsmen, whatever their blood, had become Americans, one in speech,
thought, and character, clutching firmly the land in which their fathers
and grandfathers had lived before them. They had lost all remembrance of
Europe and all sympathy with things European; they had become as
emphatically products native to the soil as were the tough and supple
hickories out of which they fashioned the handles of their long, light
axes. Their grim, harsh, narrow lives were yet strangely fascinating and
full of adventurous toil and danger; none but natures as strong, as
freedom-loving, and as full of bold defiance as theirs could have
endured existence on the terms which these men found pleasurable. Their
iron surroundings made a mould which turned out all alike in the same
shape. They resembled one another, and they differed from the rest of
the world--even the world of America, and infinitely more the world of
Europe--in dress, in customs, and in mode of life.