Black Rednecks and White Liberals
At last, by act of Parliament in 1746, a uniform system of naturalization was established on the basis of seven years' residence, an oath of allegiance and profession of the Protestant faith. Of the inhabitants of the British Isles, by far the largest contribution next to that of England, was from Ireland.
This immigration, though somewhat spasmodic, had reached a vast but indeterminate total before the Revolution. The Irish settled all the way from New Hampshire, where Londonderry was founded in 1719 by a colony of about one hundred families from Ulster to Carolina, where a colony of five hundred arrived as early as 1715. However, Bancroft says that a small colony under Ferguson had preceded them, arriving as early as 1683. Burke speaks of the population of Virginia in 1750-54 as "growing every day more numerous by the emigration of the Irish, who, not succeeding so well in Pennsylvania as the more industrious and frugal Germans, sell their lands in that province to the latter and take up new ground in the remote counties of Virginia, Maryland and North Carolina, especially in the northwestern counties." " Hildrith these," he adds, " are chiefly Presbyterians from the north of Ireland, who in America are generally called the Scotch-Irish. It is probably to some colony thus planted that Jefferson referred when he wrote (Op. VI., 485) of the wild Irish, who had gotten possession of the valley between the Blue Ridge and the North mountains, forming a barrier over which none ventured to leap, and could still less venture to settle among." Source
