Presbyterians in North Carolina: Race, Politics, and Religious Identity in Historical Perspective

2. Atlantic World Bonds and Backcountry Settlers

Chapter 2 Atlantic World Bonds and Backcountry settlers The heartland of Presbyterianism in colonial North Carolina was the central portion of the present state, a broad swath of gently rolling upland running diagonally from northeast to southwest. from its eastern boundary beginning at the fall line some 125 to 150 miles from the coast, the Piedmont plateau extends westward to the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, encompassing 35 percent of the state’s land mass. Currently, this central region comprises forty-one counties and parts of counties, as well as the bulk of the state’s population and most of the state’s larger cities. During the eighteenth century the colony’s population grew from about 35,000 in 1730 to around 250,000 by the 1770s, with much of the settlement occurring in this initially isolated part of the colony commonly called the back country. from its first european settlers through the mid-nineteenth century, self-sufficient farming predominated in the region, though not always successfully. frontier unrest flashed in the Regulator controversy, while broader political issues arose with the American Revolution, two movements in which the Presbyterians of the Piedmont were intimately involved. Scots-Irish Immigration Into this inviting area in the early eighteenth century came a diversity of european groups, including Reformed and lutheran Germans, Moravians, and some english Quakers. The most numerous, however, were the Presbyterians from the northern part of Ireland (commonly referred to as Ulster). These Ulster Presbyterians shared the Westminster Confession and the Presbyterian form of church governance with their kinsmen in scotland. There was, however, an important difference between the two groups. Presbyterianism in scotland, in the Atlantic World Bonds and Backcountry settlers 32 form of the Church of scotland, had been the officially sanctioned faith since 1690; its ministers enjoyed state support and were allowed by law to fulfill all ministerial functions, and its adherents were free not only to worship, but also to serve in government and the military. similarly, the compulsory tithes in theory paid by all subjects in scotland were for the support of Presbyterianism, not its historical rival, episcopalianism. such was not the case with their coreligionists across the Irish sea. Presbyterians in Ireland were mostly descendants of the Ulster Plantation of the early seventeenth century, the scheme of King James I of england (who was also King James vI of scotland) to replace the indigenous and chronically rebellious Roman Catholic landowners with what he hoped would be less troublesome Protestants from scotland. Here, as throughout Ireland, the established church was the Church of england (or Church of Ireland, as it came to be called there). Presbyterians in Ireland, along with Roman Catholics, suffered under various restrictions; for example, marriages performed by their clerics were not lawfully valid (which meant that couples joined in matrimony by a Presbyterian minister were technically fornicators and their children bastards, who were thereby barred from inheriting land). Additionally, after 1704 the Test Act required all holders of civil and military office to take Communion according to the usage of the Church of Ireland, which Presbyterians refused to do. The Test Act remained on the statute books for years to come, but with the accession of the first of the Hanoverians, George I, in 1714, the act was enforced with sharply diminishing rigor. As in scotland, Presbyterianism in eighteenth-century Ulster was divided between “subscribers,” who believed that before receiving ordination ministers should be required to affirm publicly the tenets of the faith as set forth in the Westminster Confession of faith, and “Nonsubscribers,” who thought the contrary. Another fissure developed in Presbyterianism between the more traditionally Calvinistic “old lights,” and those less wedded to creedal and confessional formulations and more open to direct inspiration of the Holy spirit, the “New lights.” Tens of thousands of men, women, and children emigrated from the British Isles to America during the colonial era, underscoring again their submersion in an Atlantic world of assumptions, rituals, and habits. Generations of historians have debated motivations for successive waves of this transatlantic migration , with interpretations emphasizing at various times a desire to live free from tyrannical government, a craving to worship according to the dictates of conscience, hunger for land, lack of employment, and crop failures, among oth- 33 Atlantic World Bonds and Backcountry settlers ers. Individual motivations were undoubtedly an amalgam difficult even for the immigrants themselves to comprehend fully. Not all of the...