=The English.=—­In leadership and origin the thirteen colonies, except New York and Delaware, were English.  During the early days of all, save these two, the main, if not the sole, current of immigration was from England.  The colonists came from every walk of life.  They were men, women, and children of “all sorts and conditions.”  The major portion were yeomen, or small land owners, farm laborers, and artisans.  With them were merchants and gentlemen who brought their stocks of goods or their fortunes to the New World.  Scholars came from Oxford and Cambridge to preach the gospel or to teach.  Now and then the son of an English nobleman left his baronial hall behind and cast his lot with America.  The people represented every religious faith—­members of the Established Church of England; Puritans who had labored to reform that church; Separatists, Baptists, and Friends, who had left it altogether; and Catholics, who clung to the religion of their fathers.

New England was almost purely English.  During the years between 1629 and 1640, the period of arbitrary Stuart government, about twenty thousand Puritans emigrated to America, settling in the colonies of the far North.  Although minor additions were made from time to time, the greater portion of the New England people sprang from this original stock.  Virginia, too, for a long time drew nearly all her immigrants from England alone.  Not until the eve of the Revolution did other nationalities, mainly the Scotch-Irish and Germans, rival the English in numbers.

The populations of later English colonies—­the Carolinas, New York, Pennsylvania, and Georgia—­while receiving a steady stream of immigration from England, were constantly augmented by wanderers from the older settlements.  New York was invaded by Puritans from New England in such numbers as to cause the Anglican clergymen there to lament that “free thinking spreads almost as fast as the Church.”  North Carolina was first settled toward the northern border by immigrants from Virginia.  Some of the North Carolinians, particularly the Quakers, came all the way from New England, tarrying in Virginia only long enough to learn how little they were wanted in that Anglican colony.

=The Scotch-Irish.=—­Next to the English in numbers and influence were the Scotch-Irish, Presbyterians in belief, English in tongue.  Both religious and economic reasons sent them across the sea.  Their Scotch ancestors, in the days of Cromwell, had settled in the north of Ireland whence the native Irish had been driven by the conqueror’s sword.  There the Scotch nourished for many years enjoying in peace their own form of religion and growing prosperous in the manufacture of fine linen and woolen cloth.  Then the blow fell.  Toward the end of the seventeenth century their religious worship was put under the ban and the export of their cloth was forbidden by the English Parliament.  Within two decades twenty thousand Scotch-Irish left Ulster alone, for America; and all during the eighteenth century the migration continued to be heavy.  Although no exact record was kept, it is reckoned that the Scotch-Irish and the Scotch who came directly from Scotland, composed one-sixth of the entire American population on the eve of the Revolution.