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[76] At home, where the Scottish nation
chap. IV.} 1763.
enjoyed its own religion, the people were loyal: in Ireland, the disfranchised Scotch Presbyterians, who still drew their ideas of Christian government from the Westminster Confession, began to believe that they were under no religious obligation to render obedience to the British government. They could not enter the Irish parliament to strengthen the hands of the patriot party; nor were they taught by their faith to submit in patience, like the Catholic Irish. Had all Ireland resembled them, it could not have been kept in subjection. But what could be done by unorganized men, constituting only about a tenth of the people, in the land in which they were but sojourners? They were willing to quit a soil which was endeared to them by no traditions; and the American colonies opened their arms to receive them. They began to change their abode as soon as they felt oppression;1 and every successive period of discontent swelled the tide of emigrants. Just after the peace of Paris, ‘the Heart of Oak’ Protestants of Ulster, weary of strife with their landlords, came over in great numbers;2 and settlements on the Catawba, in South Carolina, dated from that epoch.3 At different times in the eighteenth century, some had found homes in New-England, but they were most numerous south of New-York, from New-Jersey to

1 Boulter to the Duke of Newcastle, 23 Nov. 1728: ‘The whole North is in a ferment at present, and people every day engaging one another to go the next year to the West Indies. The humor has spread like a contagious distemper; and the people will hardly hear anybody that tries to cure them of their madness. The worst is, that it affects only Protestants, and reigns chiefly in the North.’ Plowden's Historical Review, i. .276. Compare, too, Dean Swift's Letters.

2 James Gordon's History of Ireland, II. 241.

3 The parents of Andrew Jackson, the late President of the United States, reached South Carolina in 1764.

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