To America

aunt minverva collection
The Foster Family by W.T. Foster cont.

TO AMERICA
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The English tariff laws were purposely made to break down the people of Ulster and this new Scotch-Irish race was compelled to emigrate. From 1700 to 1730 about 100,000 landed in Philadelphia. They were welcomed in Pennsylvania because the Quakers would not defend their people against the Indians. The Scotch-Irish were wanted as frontier guards. Those Quakers believed in the fool idea that when an enemy smites you on the one cheek you must turn the other so that he may smite that also. For that reason the Governor of Pennsylvania sent the Scotch-Irish west of the Susquehenna River adn would not permit them to settle on the east side of that river. They made excellent advance guards and the raids of the Indians were checked.
Being a hill people, used to the mountains, their ancestors having lived forty years in the highlands of Scotland and forty-five years in the hill country of Ulster, they were pleased with the rough country of the Alleganies, of Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and North Carolina. They moved slowly westward, driving back the Indians till they had possession of all that country, 400 miles east to west and 1000 miles northeast to southwest; From northern Pennsylvania to northern Georgia, including the Blue Ridge and the Alleganies.
Of this new Scotch-Irish race of America, Charles A. Hanna, the American Historian says:-"People of the Scotch-Irish race, mostly born in the north of Ireland-their children and grand-children comprised nearly one-fourth of the total white population of the American colonies at the outbreak of the Revolution. In proportion to their relative strength they took a more important part in that struggle and in all the leading events connected with American history since that time, than any other race. They furnished more than one-fourth of Washington's generals and more than one-half of the leading officers of the great Civil War, on both sides, as well as a large proportion of the leading statesmen of the country since 1776, including eleven Presidents out of twenty-four, most of the great editors of the country, nearly all the great inventors and a very large proportion of the Juiciary of the federal courts. To the Scotch-Irish race in America belongs such men as Grant, Webster, Calhoun, Greeley, Fulton, Morse, Edison, Paul Jones, Perry, Andrew Jackson, Washington Irving, Poe, Blaine, Legan, Hendricks, Sam Houston, Davy Crockett, Alexander G. Bell, President Monroe, Watterson, C.H. McCormack, James Gordon Bennett, President McKinley and the cabinent officers, John W. and Charles Foster."
The American descendants of the Norman-French include the French Huguenots who defended themselves in France in twelve great ward, brought on by the Latin-French Catholics, and after winning their rights to worship in their own way they came to America. Those Norman-French of England and France took an active and leading part for 200 years in the Crusades to the Holy Land and that long experience established in them the principlies now in the higher degrees of Masonry. They are now the largest and most powerful element in American affairs and this accounts for two other important facts:-They caused the separation of Church and State in our government and their influence elad to America being the home of seventy percent of all the masons in the world. American masons oppose the union of Church and State.