Conceived in Liberty Volume 2 - Ludwig von Mises Institute

The first great wave of Ulster Scot immigration came after the agricultural
failures of 1716-17, and further great waves came in the late 1720s, the early
1740s, and the mid-l75Os. By 1776, a quarter of a million Scots had come to
America from Ulster.
The Ulster Scots flooded into Pennsylvania, where newcomers were particularly
welcomed, and generally found their way to the western frontier, at that
time in southeast Pennsylvania. The bulk of the Scots, being poor, came to
America as indentured servants, and after their term of servitude had ended,
received the customary allowance of land as an incongruous form of compensation.
Most of the Ulster Scots thus became small farmers or squatters in
such areas as the Susquehanna and Cumberland valleys. Eventually, many
filtered southward down the Shenandoah Valley to become backwoods frontiersmen
in Virginia and Piedmont farmers in the Carolinas. Quite a few
Scots, however—mainly those from Scotland itself—became businessmen and
tobacco warehousemen in Virginia and Maryland. Some Jacobite Highlanders
also came to America after the unsuccessful Stuart rebellions of 1715 and
1745, but these too were Presbyterians rather than Roman Catholics.
The brawling, hard-drinking Scot frontiersmen, though often fur traders
with the Indians, adopted a violent, aggressive, and contemptuous course
toward the natives, and tended to drive them out of their lands. This attitude
brought them into sharp conflict with the pacific Quakers, concerned with justice
toward the Indians. It must be recognized, however, that the bulk of
Indian-claimed land was not settled and transformed by the Indians, and that,
therefore, the Scots were at least justified in ignoring vague, abstract claims,
whether by government or by Indian tribes, to the lands they knew that they
were settling.
Many of the Ulster Scots were squatters on frontier land. Lacking money to
pay the prices asked by the feudal proprietary, they reasoned that they were
entitled to own virgin land that they themselves had cleared and tilled. They
needed no acquaintance with John Locke to sense that such land was their
rightful property. The Pennsylvania government tried for a long while to collect
quitrents and purchase payments from the squatters, but to little avail.
Several times, provincial secretary Richard Peters tried to dispossess squatters
by arriving with a party of officials to burn down the cabins of the settlers,
only to have the squatters rebuild the cabins and farm the land again after
they had gone. At other times, the squatters fought back against government
aggression.
By the mid-eighteenth century, the Ulster Scots dominated the Shenandoah
Valley of Virginia and the upcountry Piedmont farm region of North Carolina
and South Carolina. The valley settlers, remote at first from the seat of
government authority at Williamsburg, developed their own customary law of
settlement, which granted original property rights to land on the basis of certain
marks of settlement. These marks conferring ownership included "corn
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