Synod acting on the Governor's protest, and so persecuted in Virginia that he had at last fled to the North Carolina Back Country. There, during the remaining years of his life, as the sole preacher and teacher in the settlements between the Yadkin and the Catawba rivers he found willing soil in which to sow the seeds of Liberty.

There was another branch of the Scottish race which helped to people the Back Country. The Highlanders, whose loyalty to their oath made them fight on the King's side in the Revolutionary War, have been somewhat overlooked in history. Tradition, handed down among the transplanted clans—who, for the most part, spoke only Gaelic for a generation and wrote nothing—and latterly recorded by one or two of their descendants, supplies us with all we are now able to learn of the early coming of the Gaels to Carolina. It would seem that their first immigration to America in small bands took place after the suppression of the Jacobite rising in 1715—when Highlanders fled in numbers also to France—for by 1729 there was a settlement of them on the Cape Fear River. We know, too, that in 1748 it was charged against Gabriel Johnston, Governor of North Carolina from 1734 to 1752, that he had shown no joy over the King's glorious victory of Culloden and that he had appointed one William McGregor, who had been in the Rebellion in the year 1715 a Justice of the Peace during the last Rebellion [1745] and was not himself without suspicion of disaffection to His Majesty's Government. It is indeed possible that Gabriel Johnston, formerly a professor at St. Andrew's University, had himself not always been a stranger to the kilt. He induced large numbers of Highlanders to come to America and probably influenced the second George to moderate his treatment of the vanquished Gaels in the Old Country and permit their emigration to the New World.

In contrast with the Ulstermen, whose secular ideals were dictated by the forms of their Church, these Scots adhered still to the tribal or clan system, although they, too, in the majority, were Presbyterians, with a minority of Roman Catholics and Episcopalians. In the Scotch Highlands they had occupied small holdings on the land under the sway of their chief, or Head of the Clan, to whom they were bound by blood and fealty but to whom they paid no rentals. The position of the Head of the Clan was hereditary, but no heir was bold enough to step forward into that position until he had performed some deed of worth. They were principally herders, their chief stock being the famous small black cattle of the Highlands. Their wars with each other were cattle raids. Only in war, however, did the Gael lay hands on his neighbor's goods. There were no highwaymen and housebreakers in the Highlands. No Highland mansion, cot, or barn was ever locked. Theft and the breaking of an oath, sins against man's honor, were held in such abhorrence that no one guilty of them could remain among his clansmen in the beloved glens. These Highlanders were a race of tall, robust men, who lived simply and frugally and slept on the heath among their flocks in all weathers, with no other covering from rain and snow than their plaidies. It is reported of the Laird of Keppoch, who was leading his clan to war in winter time, that his men were divided as to the propriety of following him further because he rolled a snowball to rest his head upon when he lay down. Now we despair of victory, they said, since our leader has become so effeminate he cannot sleep without a pillow!¹

The King's glorious victory of Culloden was followed by a policy of extermination carried on by the orders and under the personal direction of the Duke of Cumberland. When King George at last restrained his son from his orgy of blood, he offered the Gaels their lives and exile to America on condition of their taking the full oath of allegiance. The majority accepted his terms, for not only were their lives forfeit but their crops and cattle had been destroyed and the holdings on which their ancestors had lived for many centuries taken from them. The descriptions of the scenes attending their leave-taking of the hills and glens they loved with such passionate fervor are among the most pathetic in history. Strong men who had met the ravage of a brutal sword without weakening abandoned themselves to the agony of sorrow. They kissed the walls of their houses. They flung themselves on the ground and embraced the sod upon which they had walked in freedom. They called their broken farewells to the peaks and lochs of the land they were never again to see; and, as they turned their backs and filed down through the passes, their pipers played the dirge for the dead.

Such was the character, such the deep feeling, of the race which entered North Carolina from the coast and pushed up into the wilderness about the headwaters of Cape Fear River. Tradition indicates that these hillsmen sought the interior because the grass and pea vine which overgrew the inner country stretching towards the mountains provided excellent fodder for the cattle which some of the chiefs are said to have brought with them. These Gaelic herders, perhaps in negligible numbers, were in the Yadkin Valley before 1730, possibly even ten years earlier. In 1739 Neil MacNeill of Kintyre brought over a shipload of Gaels to rejoin his kinsman, Hector MacNeill, called Bluff Hector from his residence near the bluffs at Cross Creek, now Fayetteville. Some of these immigrants went on to the Yadkin, we are told, to unite with others of their clan who had been for some time in that district. The exact time of the first Highlander on the Yadkin cannot be ascertained, as there were no court records and the offices of the land companies were not then open for the sale of these remote regions. But by 1753 there were not less than four thousand Gaels in Cumberland County, where they occupied the chief magisterial posts; and they were already spreading over the lands now comprised within Moore, Anson, Richmond, Robeson, Bladen, and Sampson counties. In these counties Gaelic was as commonly heard as English.

In the years immediately preceding the Revolution and even in 1776 itself they came in increasing numbers. They knew nothing of the smoldering fire just about to break into flames in the country of their choice, but the Royal Governor, Josiah Martin, knew that Highland arms would soon be needed by His Majesty. He knew something of Highland honor, too; for he would not let the Gaels proceed after their landing until they had bound themselves by oath to support the Government of King George. So it was that the unfortunate Highlanders found themselves, according to their strict code of honor, forced to wield arms against the very Americans who had received and befriended them—and for the crowned brother of a prince whose name is execrated to this day in Highland song and story!

They were led by Allan MacDonald of Kingsborough; and tradition gives us a stirring picture of Allan's wife—the famous Flora MacDonald, who in Scotland had protected the Young Pretender in his flight—making an