Ulster Protestants were first-class colonists: law-abiding, church-going, hard-working, democratic, anxious to acquire education and to take advantage of self-government.
This was only the beginning of the Ulster-Scotch migration. From 1720, for the next half-century, about 500,000 men, women, and children from northern Ireland and lowland Scotland went into Pennsylvania. A similar wave of Germans and Swiss, also Protestants, began to wash into America from 1682 and went on to the middle of the 18th century, most of them being deposited in New York, though 100,000 went to Pennsylvania. The Ulstermen said that 'it was against the laws of God and nature that so much land should be idle while so many Christians wanted it to labor on and raise their bread.'
From the 1720s onward, Germans, Swiss, Irish, Scotch, and others, moved down from the northeast along the rich inland valleys of the mountain area - the Cumberland, Shenandoah, and Hagertown valleys, then through the passes into what is now North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee.
In the Lake Plains - parts of Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan - a vast glacier known as the Wisconsin Drift had in prehistoric times laid down a deep layer of rich soil containing all the elements needed for intensive agriculture. The settlers, steeped in the Old Testament, called it Canaan, God's country, because it yielded a third more then the rest, known as 'Egypt.'
