" They were
not welcome, and had, evidently, no intention of burdening the towns.
Most of them promptly moved on beyond the New England settlements.
The great mass of Scotch-Irish, however, came to Pennsylvania, and in
such large numbers that James Logan, the Secretary of the Province,
wrote to the Proprietors in 1729: "It looks as if Ireland is to send
all its inhabitants hither, for last week not less than six ships
arrived, and every day two or three arrive also."[1] These colonists
did not remain in the towns but, true to their traditions, pushed on
to the frontier. They found their way over the mountain trails into
the western part of the colony; they pushed southward along the
fertile plateaus that terrace the Blue Ridge Mountains and offer a
natural highway to the South; into Virginia, where they possessed
themselves of the beautiful Shenandoah Valley; into Maryland and the
Carolinas; until the whole western frontier, from Georgia to New York
and from Massachusetts to Maine, was the skirmish line of the
Scotch-Irish taking possession of the wilderness.
The rebellions of the Pretenders in Scotland in 1715 and 1745 and the
subsequent break-up of the clan system produced a considerable
migration to the colonies from both the Highlands and the Lowlands.
These new colonists settled largely in the Carolinas and in Maryland.
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