THE VALLEY ULSTERMAN:
A CHAPTER OF VIRGINIA HISTORY...continued

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After the days when the Saints suffered persecution on the hillsides and among the moss-hags of Galloway for consience' sake; when Claverhouse and his rough riders had made the homes of the hill people a waste place and a desolation; when Richard Cameron had in vain unfurled at Ayrsmoss the broad blue banner of the faith, with the golden inscription, "For Christ's Crown and Covenant," and had been in the heat of battle translated, as the faithful of that day believed, like Elijah in a panoply of fire; when Bothwell Brig and Killiecrankie had been fought and lost by the men of the Covenant, they turned in numbers for refuge from the persecutions of the King's men to the North Country of Ireland. Here in the Revolution of 'Eighty-eight they sided with William of Orange against the Catholic Stuart; and here and at this time the orange ribbon became the Ulsterman's badge, as the Bloody Hand had long been his heraldic device.

Under the rule of William and Mary, Queen Anne and the Georges, the condition of the Scotch Ulstermen is said to have been "endurable only for its contrast with their former sufferings; the equivocal consolation of the companions of Ulysses: Tulimus duriora;" and thus, after the siege of Londonderry, began, and thenceforward continued, that uninterrupted exodus from Ulster which through a score of years poured into Pennsylvania, and thence into the Valley of Virginia thousands of North Country Scotch, seeking, as of old in the Grayfriars Church yard, that freedom of conscience, which whether to Ulsterman or Cavalier is one of the inestimable boons of human liberty:--a boon, the legal recognition of which is fixed for us in an immortal statute, penned by the hand of that cavalier of Virginia who drafted the scarcely greater paper of the Declaration of American Independence.

Into the counties of Augusta and Rockbridge in the upper Valley, long the battleground, according to tradition, of the Indian tribes of the North and South, the Ulstermen followed the lead of John Lewis , soldier and pioneer, of whose line sprung many a subsequently illustrious American citizen; until to-day, as illustrative of the conservatism with which they fostered and preserved their peculiarities of race and religion, their local historian says that "the list of prisoners captured at Bothwell Bridge and herded like cattle in Grayfriars Church yard, Edinburgh, is like a muster roll of Augusta people."

Time would fail me to call the historic American names that trace their ancestry to that muster roll. Upon it is written that of the ancestor of the "Blind Preacher," whose imperishable picture was painted with a master's hand upon the pages of the British Spy. There were inscribed the names of Walker, and Cochran, and Campbell, and Anderson, and Lamb, and Houston and Glasgow. Upon the Scotch-Irish roll, too, is recorded the writer of the petition from the Synod of Philadelphia to the Governor of Virginia in 1738, that the Presbyterians removing from its jurisdiction into the Virginia Valley might--"have the free enjoyment of their civil and religions liberties."--the name of the grandfather of John Caldwell Calhoun. Back to this Scotch Irish ancestry Senators and Vice-Presidents of the Union, and Governors of great states have traced their descent. From the loins of these Valley settlers have sprung statesmen and scholars, and divines, and warriors. One single progenitor gave Virginia five governors in the persons of McDowell, Campbell, Preston and the two Floyds, and a governor each to Kentucky, Missouri and California, in governors Jacobs, Gratz Brown and Miller. The most magnificent in domain and possibilities of the sovereign States of this imperishable Union will this year celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of her independence and freedom, acquired under the splendid leadership of Gen. Samuel Houston, a Scotch Irishman of the Virginia Valley. The names of the Alexanders, of John C. Breckinridge, of Thos. H. Benton, of Wm. C. Preston, of Jno. J. Crittenden, of Wade Hampton, of Jos. E. Johnston, of J. E. B. Stuart, of Stonewall Jackson and of a thousand others less splendid only in degree, are indissolubly linked with the story of Scotch Irish genius and valor in the history of Virginia.

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NOTES

Waddell's Annals of Augusta County, p. 5.

Brock's Virginia and Virginians, Vol, I, p. 132.