University of Virginia Library

I. THE CONQUEST OF THE OLD
SOUTHWEST

CHAPTER I

THE MIGRATION OF THE PEOPLES

AT the opening of the eighteenth century
the tide of population had swept inland
to the "fall line," the westward boundary of
the established settlements. The actual frontier
had been advanced by the more aggressive
pioneers to within fifty miles of the Blue
Ridge. So rapid was the settlement in North
Carolina that in the interval 1717-32 the population
quadrupled in numbers. A map of the

colonial settlements in 1725 reveals a narrow
strip of populated land along the Atlantic
coast, of irregular indentation, with occasional
isolated nuclei of settlements further in the interior.
The civilization thus established continued
to maintain a close and unbroken communication
with England and the Continent.
As long as the settlers, for economic reasons,
clung to the coast, they reacted but slowly to
the transforming influences of the frontier.
Within a triangle of continental altitude with
its apex in New England, bounded on the
east by the Atlantic, and on the west by the
Appalachian range, lay the settlements, divided
into two zones—tidewater and piedmont.
As no break occurred in the great mountain
system south of the Hudson and Mohawk valleys,
the difficulties of cutting a passage
through the towering wall of living green long
proved an effective obstacle to the crossing
of the grim mountain barrier.

In the beginning the settlements gradually
extended westward from the coast in irregular
outline, the indentations taking form around

such natural centers of attraction as areas of
fertile soil, frontier posts, mines, salt-springs,
and stretches of upland favorable for grazing.
After a time a second advance of settlement
was begun in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and
Maryland, running in a southwesterly direction
along the broad terraces to the east of
the Appalachian Range, which in North Carolina
lies as far as two hundred and fifty miles
from the sea. The Blue Ridge in Virginia
and a belt of pine barrens in North Carolina
were hindrances to this advance, but did not
entirely check it. This second streaming of
the population thrust into the long, narrow
wedge of the piedmont zone a class of people
differing in spirit and in tendency from their
more aristocratic and complacent neighbors to
the east.

These settlers of the Valley of Virginia
and the North Carolina piedmont region
—English, Scotch-Irish, Germans, Scotch,
Irish, Welsh, and a few French—were the first
pioneers of the Old Southwest. From the
joint efforts of two strata of population, geographically,

socially, and economically distinct
—tidewater and piedmont, Old South and New
South—originated and flowered the third and
greatest movement of westward expansion,
opening with the surmounting of the mountain
barrier and ending in the occupation and assumption
of the vast medial valley of the continent.

Synchronous with the founding of Jamestown
in Virginia, significantly enough, was
the first planting of Ulster with the English
and Scotch. Emigrants from the Scotch
Lowlands, sometimes as many as four thousand
a year (1625), continued throughout the
century to pour into Ulster. "Those of the
North of Ireland . . .," as pungently described
in 1679 by the Secretary of State, Leoline
Jenkins, to the Duke of Ormond, "are
most Scotch and Scotch breed and are the
Northern Presbyterians and phanatiques,
lusty, able-bodied, hardy an stout men, where
one may see three or four hundred at every
meeting-house on Sunday, and all the North
of Ireland is inhabited by these, which is the

popular place of all Ireland by far. They are
very numerous and greedy after land." During
the quarter of a century after the English
Revolution of 1688 and the Jacobite uprising
in Ireland, which ended in 1691 with the complete
submission of Ireland to William and
Mary, not less than fifty thousand Scotch,
according to Archbishop Synge, settled in
Ulster. Until the beginning of the eighteenth
century there was no considerable emigration
to America; and it was first set up as
a consequence of English interference with
trade and religion. Repressive measures
passed by the English parliament (16651699),
prohibiting the exportation from Ireland
to England and Scotland of cattle, beef,
pork, dairy products, etc., and to any country
whatever of manufactured wool, had aroused
deep resentment among the Scotch-Irish, who
had built up a great commerce. This discontent
was greatly aggravated by the imposition
of religious disabilities upon the Presbyterians,
who, in addition to having to pay tithes for
the support of the established church, were
excluded from all civil and military office
(1704), while their ministers were made liable
to penalties for celebrating marriages.

This pressure upon a high-spirited people
resulted inevitably in an exodus to the New
World. The principal ports by which the
Ulsterites entered America were Lewes and
Newcastle (Delaware), Philadelphia and Boston.
The streams of immigration steadily
flowed up the Delaware Valley; and by 1720
the Scotch-Irish began to arrive in Bucks
County. So rapid was the rate of increase in
immigration that the number of arrivals soon
mounted from a few hundred to upward of
six thousand, in a single year (1729); and
within a few years this number was doubled.
According to the meticulous Franklin, the
proportion increased from a very small element
of the population of Pennsylvania in
1700 to one fourth of the whole in 1749, and
to one third of the whole (350,000) in 1774.
Writing to the Penns in 1724, James Logan,
Secretary of the Province, caustically refers
to the Ulster settlers on the disputed Maryland

line as "these bold and indigent strangers,
saying as their excuse when challenged for
titles, that we had solicited for colonists and
they had come accordingly." The spirit of
these defiant squatters is succinctly expressed
in their statement to Logan that it "was
against the laws of God and nature that so
much land should be idle while so many Christians
wanted it to work on and to raise their
bread."

The rising scale of prices for Pennsylvania
lands, changing from ten pounds and two shillings
quit-rents per hundred acres in 1719 to
fifteen pounds ten shillings per hundred acres
with a quit-rent of a halfpenny per acre in
1732, soon turned the eyes of the thrifty
Scotch-Irish settlers southward and southwestward.
In Maryland in 1738 lands were
offered at five pounds sterling per hundred
acres. Simultaneously, in the Valley of Virginia
free grants of a thousand acres per family
were being made. In the North Carolina
piedmont region the proprietary, Lord Granville,
through his agents was disposing of the

most desirable lands to settlers at the rate of
three shillings proclamation money for six hundred
and forty acres, the unit of land-division;
and was also making large free grants on the
condition of seating a certain proportion of settlers.
"Lord Carteret's land in Carolina,"
says North Carolina's first American historian,
"where the soil was cheap, presented a
tempting residence to people of every denomination.
Emigrants from the north of Ireland,
by the way of Pennsylvania, flocked
to that country; and a considerable part of
North Carolina . . . is inhabited by those
people or their descendants."[1] From 1740
onward, attracted by the rich lure of cheap
and even free lands in Virginia and North
Carolina, a tide of immigration swept ceaselessly
into the valleys of the Shenandoah,
the Yadkin, and the Catawba. The immensity
of this mobile, drifting mass, which sometimes
brought "more than 400 families with
horse waggons and cattle" into North Carolina
in a single year (1752-3), is attested by the
fact that from 1732 to 1754, mainly as the
result of the Scotch-Irish inundation, the population
of North Carolina more than doubled.

The second important racial stream of population
in the settlement of the same region was
composed of Germans, attracted to this country
from the Palatinate. Lured on by the
highly colored stories of the commercial agents
for promoting immigration—the "newlanders,"
who were thoroughly unscrupulous in
their methods and extravagant in their representations—a
migration from Germany began
in the second decade of the eighteenth century
and quickly assumed alarming proportions.
Although certain of the emigrants were well-to-do,
a very great number were "redemptioners"
(indentured servants), who in order
to pay for their transportation were compelled
to pledge themselves to several years of servitude.
This economic condition caused the
German immigrant, wherever he went, to become
a settler of the back country, necessity
compelling him to pass by the more expensive
lands near the coast.

For well-nigh sixty years the influx of German

immigrants of various sects was very
great, averaging something like fifteen hundred
a year into Pennsylvania alone from 1727
to 1775. Indeed, Pennsylvania, one third of
whose population at the beginning of the Revolution
was German, early became the great
distributing center for the Germans as well
as for the Scotch-Irish. Certainly by 1727
Adam Müller and his fellow Germans had
established the first permanent white settlement
in the Valley of Virginia.[2] By 1732 Jost
Heydt, accompanied by sixteen families, came
from York, Pennsylvania, and settled on the
Opeckon River, in the neighborhood of the
present Winchester.[3] There is no longer any
doubt that "the portion of the Shenandoah
Valley sloping to the north was almost entirely
settled by Germans."

It was about the middle of the century that
these pioneers of the Old Southwest, the
shrewd, industrious, and thrifty Pennsylvania
Germans (who came to be generally called
"Pennsylvania Dutch" from the incorrect
translation of Pennsylvänische Deutsche), began

to pour into the piedmont region of North
Carolina. In the autumn, after the harvest
was in, these ambitious Pennsylvania pioneers
would pack up their belongings in wagons and
on beasts of burden and head for the southwest,
trekking down in the manner of the
Boers of South Africa. This movement into
the fertile valley lands of the Yadkin and the
Catawba continued unabated throughout the
entire third quarter of the century. Owing to
their unfamiliarity with the English language
and the solidarity of their instincts, the German
settlers at first had little share in government.
But they devotedly played their part
in the defense of the exposed settlements and
often bore the brunt of Indian attack.[4]

The bravery and hardihood displayed by the
itinerant missionaries sent out by the Pennsylvania
Synod under the direction of Count
Zinzendorf (1742-8), and by the Moravian
Church (1748-53), are mirrored in the numerous
diaries, written in German, happily preserved
to posterity in religious archives of
Pennsylvania and North Carolina. These

simple, earnest crusaders, animated by pure
and unselfish motives, would visit on a single
tour of a thousand miles the principal German
settlements in Maryland and Virginia (including
the present West Virginia). Sometimes
they would make an extended circuit through
North Carolina, South Carolina, and even
Georgia, everywhere bearing witness to the
truth of the gospel and seeking to carry the
most elemental forms of the Christian religion,
preaching and prayer, to the primitive frontiersmen
marooned along the outer fringe of
white settlements. These arduous journeys in
the cause of piety place this type of pioneer
of the Old Southwest in alleviating contrast
to the often relentless and bloodthirsty figure
of the rude borderer.

Noteworthy among these pious pilgrimages
is the Virginia journey of Brothers Leonhard
Schnell and John Brandmüller (October 12
to December 12, 1749).[5] At the last outpost
of civilization, the scattered settlements in Bath
and Alleghany counties, these courageous missionaries—feasting
the while solely on bear

meat, for there was no bread—encountered
conditions of almost primitive savagery, of
which they give this graphic picture: "Then
we came to a house, where we had to lie on
bear skins around the fire like the rest. . . .
The clothes of the people consist of deer skins,
their food of Johnny cakes, deer and bear
meat. A kind of white people are found here,
who live like savages. Hunting is their chief
occupation." Into the valley of the Yadkin
in December, 1752, came Bishop Spangenberg
and a party of Moravians, accompanied by a
surveyor and two guides, for the purpose of
locating the one hundred thousand acres of
land which had been offered them on easy terms
the preceding year by Lord Granville. This
journey was remarkable as an illustration of
sacrifices willingly made and extreme hardships
uncomplainingly endured for the sake of
the Moravian brotherhood. In the back country
of North Carolina near the Mulberry
Fields they found the whole woods full of
Cherokee Indians engaged in hunting. A
beautiful site for the projected settlement met
their delighted gaze at this place; but they soon
learned to their regret that it had already been
"taken up" by Daniel Boone's future father-in-law,
Morgan Bryan.

On October 8, 1753, a party of twelve single
men headed by the Rev. Bernhard Adam
Grube, set out from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania,
to trek down to the new-found haven in the
Carolina hinterland—"a corner which the
Lord has reserved for the Brethren"—in Anson
County.[6] Following for the most part
the great highway extending from Philadelphia
to the Yadkin, over which passed the
great throng sweeping into the back country
of North Carolina—through the Valley of
Virginia and past Robert Luhny's mill on the
James River—they encountered many hardships
along the way. Because of their "long
wagon," they had much difficulty in crossing
one steep mountain; and of this experience
Brother Grube, with a touch of modest pride,
observes: "People had told us that this hill
was most dangerous, and that we would
scarcely be able to cross it, for Morgan Bryan,

the first to travel this way, had to take the
wheels off his wagon and carry it piecemeal
to the top, and had been three months on the
journey from the Shanidore [Shenandoah] to
the Etkin [Yadkin]."

These men were the highest type of the pioneers
of the Old Southwest, inspired with the
instinct of home-makers in a land where, if idle
rumor were to be credited, "the people lived
like wild men, never hearing of God or His
Word." In one hand they bore the implement
of agriculture, in the other the book of the gospel
of Jesus Christ. True faith shines forth in
the simply eloquent words: "We thanked our
Saviour that he had so graciously led us hither,
and had helped us through all the hard places,
for no matter how dangerous it looked, nor
how little we saw how we could win through,
everything always went better than seemed
possible." The promise of a new day—the
dawn of the heroic age—rings out in the pious
carol of camaraderie at their journey's end: