One Hundred Years In Illinois CHAPTER I COLUMBIA AND THE SCOTCHMAN In our State hymn the following true and beautiful sentiment will be found: "Not without thy wondrous story, Illinois, Illinois, Could be writ the nation's glory, Illinois, Illinois. So it also with truth might be said that but for the sons of Scotland our great beacon light of Freedom would not have been lighted on this continent, and could not have been kept burning through the storms which, up to now, have spent their fury upon it, only to fan its holy fire into a brighter and more enduring glow. At the close of the Revolutionary War there was a population here of approximately 31⁄2 million people, of which it is estimated that one-third, or over a million, were of Scotch ancestry. The flood tide of this migration came in the century preceding the revolution, and was made up of two streams, one from Scotland, and the other from the province of Ulster, in Ireland, where large numbers of Presbyterians from Scotland had sought an asylum against the persecution directed against them in their native land for "non-conformity" with the forms of worship prescribed by the English Parliament for use in the Protestant Episcopal churches, which were held to represent the true and only religious faith of the realm. Early in his history the Scotchman earned the humorous characterization to the effect that a Scotchman is always positive and sometimes right; so it was not strange that the hard-headed followers of the religious doctrines of John Calvin and John Knox should resent the idea that someone else, least of all the English, could tell them what they might believe or how they should worship, whether standing, sitting or kneeling. With the whole power of an arrogant, aristocratic government arrayed against them to compel observance of the state religion which was so distasteful to them, they found it necessary, just as the Pilgrim Fathers found it necessary, to seek a more congenial habitation. The analogy between the Pilgrims and the Scotch dissenters is remarkable in that both sought relief from a common oppressor; both fled to near-by countries-the Pilgrims to Holland, the Scotch dis senters to Ireland-where, like the children of Israel, they both remained for a generation or two before entering the promised land, and both ultimately found their way to these inviting shores Those who came directly from Scotland settled, for the most part, along the rock-bound coast of New England, that appealing to them, undoubtedly, as being similar to the bleak and forbidding shores from which they had just departed, but which had grown dear to them as their home. The Ulster Scot, or the Scotch-Irish, as they are erroneously termed, seemed inclined more toward the South, settling in great numbers in Pennsylvania and in the southern colonies as far south as Georgia, which bordered on the then Spanish domain of Florida. In describing the arrival of this people, our American historian, Bancroft, says of them: "They brought to America no submissive love In order that the stage may be set properly, even for such an ordinary drama as the events of my life may furnish, and in order that the proper atmos |