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✜ C H A P T E R S I X ✜ “The Christian White Savages of Peckstang and Donegall” SURVEYING THE FRONTIERS OF AN ATLANTIC WORLD DURING THESE formative years, patterns of adaptation had emerged that had profound implications for the subsequent experience of Ulster’s New World settlers. Chief among these was ongoing movement. By 1750, the upper and lower ends of Pennsylvania’s frontier had become migration depots, as thousands moved to, from, and through the southeastern section of the colony. As places like Donegal became more settled, some of the sons and daughters of original settlers struck out south for the back parts of Virginia. Others crossed the mountains to take their chances on Indian lands to the west and north. New arrivals from Ulster, immigrants fleeing famine and a failing linen economy for a promising New World, added to this landhungry , giddy multitude. After working as indentured servants on the upper and lower ends of the Pennsylvania frontier, many of these men and women would also head to new backcountry regions. Later generations of Ulster Presbyterian settlers made sense of an ever-changing frontier by adopting the practices and traditions the earliest migrants had employed in their years of settlement. In no instance was this dynamic more evident than in the continuing religious experience of Ulster’s men and women in America. Just as those on the edges of frontier society had embraced a vital piety to make sense of change, new immigrants from Ireland in similar straits flocked to hear New Side preachers. Although such revivals enjoyed little success in Ulster, on the American frontier they continued to attract the young, mobile, and poor. While new arrivals to Pennsylvania faced the challenge of assimilating to codes of behavior in a settled society, those moving south confronted a wilderness beyond the 157 C H A P T E R S I X reach of law and church. But those who left Pennsylvania for Virginia in the 1750s also followed established patterns of adaptation. As their mothers and fathers had, settlers in the Shenandoah Valley pleaded with Presbyterian Church officials to send ministers and help in organizing congregations in the scramble to bring order to frontier chaos. In a short period of time, economic and social change gripped this new frontier in much the same way it had the old. As the construction of roads to places like Donegal and Nottingham and thence to Philadelphia tied Virginia into a greater Pennsylvania, some prospered, while others did not. In these circumstances, evangelical piety flared up once again, leading to an awakening reminiscent of the earlier one that had struck the Pennsylvania backcountry. Once again, divergent visions of the reformed Protestant tradition armed those trying to make sense of a rapidly changing world with the means to do so. Legacies from the past, however, were not static blueprints; they represented tools that people reinvented in new contexts. Take the case of those who remained in southeastern Pennsylvania. By the 1760s, these men and women achieved elusive unity after years of socioeconomic and religious strife. They overcame division by rallying around a familiar concept, Britishness. Ulster’s Presbyterians, of course, had employed the discourse in the past at critical junctures, such as in the years after the Glorious Revolution and during the push to repeal the Test Act. The 1750s and 1760s presented similar challenges for the group in America. In these years, the frontier was in disarray. As British and French armies engaged in history’s first global war, settlers on the upper and lower ends withstood raids by vengeful Indians from the west. After the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War, men and women along the Pennsylvania frontier bore the brunt of an Indian confederacy intent on rolling the region of white settlement back to the east. Like most colonists in the years immediately after the war, settlers in Ulster enclaves—wealthy and poor, Old and New Side—celebrated their participation in a larger empire and confirmed their attachment to a unifying Britishness. But for these people holed up in small forts in times of danger on a bleeding frontier or fleeing east from dispossessed Indians, British liberty took on new, troubling meanings. Britishness underscored a right to life and property, a lib158 04-25 05:13 GMT) F R O N T I E R S O F A N A T L A N T I C W O R L D erty that negligent...

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