Paul Johnson on the "Ulster-Scotch"; A History Of The American People (1997)

"... This northern push consisted mainly of Ulster Protestants, provoked into seeking a new, transatlantic life by an Act prohibiting the export of Irish wool to England, by the enforced payment of tithes to Anglican churches, and by the expiry of the original Ulster plantation leases in 1714-18.

So here were hardy frontier farmers, after three generations of fighting and planting to defend the Protestant enclave against the Catholic-Irish south of Ireland, moving to expand the new frontier in North America.

They came in organised groups, and for the first time the authorities had the resources to take them direct to the frontier, where they founded Blandford, Pelham, and Warren, or settled in Grafton County in New Hampshire, and Orange, Windsor, and Caledonia counties in Vermont.

These were first-class colonists: lawabiding, church-going, hard-working, democratic, anxious to acquire education and to take advantage of self-government. We heard little of them: always a good sign.

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, from the Palatinate, Wurttemberg, Baden, and the north Swiss cantons, 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.

For a time indeed, the population of Pennsylvania was one-third Ulster, one-third German. Land in Pennsylvania cost only £10 a hundred acres, raised to £15 in 1732 (plus annual quitrents of about a halfpenny an acre). But there was plenty of land, and the rush of settlers, and their anxiety to start farming, led many to sidestep the surveying formalities and simply squat.

The overwhelmed chief agent of the Penn family, James Logan, complained that the Ulstermen took over “in an audacious and disorderly manner,’ telling him and other officials 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.”

How could he answer such a heartfelt point, except by speeding up the process of lawful conveyance?..."

- from Paul Johnson, A History Of The American People (1997)