"And who were these people?" - Edward Burgett Welsh (1881-1968)

"... And who were these people? Huguenots from France; men of Reformed faith—continental Presbyterians, that is, from the Palatinate and Switzerland and the Low Countries; Lutherans who remembered the agonies of the Thirty Years' War; German Baptist groups who had suffered at the hands of all the others in Europe; Presbyterians and Seceders (who also were ultra-Presbyterians) from Scotland and Ulster. To a lesser degree the same was true of the Congregationalists from England. Of all those who came to America as victims of religious persecution and settled outside New England, the Scots from Ulster were by far the most numerous.

In Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas, they were either predominant or holding a balance of power when the Revolution came on. The events following the killing time in Scotland, which ended in 1688, and those following the siege of Londonderry and the Battle of the Boyne, 1689 and 1690, started a flood of emigration to America.

This went on in increasing volume for half a century, and after a lull it started again in 1773. The great port of entry for the Scotch-Irish was not Boston, New York, Baltimore, Charleston, or even Philadelphia, though many did land at each of these places, but little old Newcastle, Delaware. There are old tombstones here in Allegheny County on which the proud inscription, "landed at Newcastle on the Delaware," can still be deciphered.

These American Presbyterians of 1776 were at most only three generations removed from the hideous miseries of Londonderry and of Lord Claverhouse and his dragoons. By every fireside the hate and fear of religious and civil oppression was kept alive. My mother was born in Ohio in 1843. Her mother had come from County Down as a little child. Yet even my mother was fed in her childhood with those stories of the killing time, and to her the names of Claverhouse and Satan were then synonyms. The defiance John Knox had flung in the face of Queen Mary, and those brave words of his spoken in behalf of his people, "if princes exceed their bounds, Madam, they may be resisted and even deposed," had had no little to do with shaping the convictions and nerving the arms of rough backwoodsmen on the American frontier.

And stung by the lash of the Stamp Act, the closing of Boston harbor, and the like, convictions began to shape themselves into words and deeds..."

- From Some Presbyterian Backgrounds of the Declaration of Independence (1941; online here)