Founding Greater Appalachia
World. As rents on newly expired leases doubled, cattle prices fell by half, and more crop failures occurred, the initial group of emigrants would be followed by tens of thousands and, later, hundreds of thousands of countrymen.
By the early 1770s the exodus had grown so enormous that London authorities feared that Ireland the Scottish borderlands would be economically crippled. "They emigrate in swarms to America," one official in Ireland warned. "Something must be done to give the Irish poor a means of getting bread. If the cow is to be milked, she must be fed." A land agent on the Isle of Skye reported that the manor estates were becoming a "wasteland." The bishop of Derry in Northern Ireland told imperial officials that "the rebellious spirit" then brewing in the American backcountry was due to the emigration from Ireland of 33,000 "fanatical and hungry republicans in the course of a very few year." Newspapers and magazines across Britain carried worried predictions of a deserted kingdom.
When the American Revolution broke out, British officials were still debating how best to restrict the emigration of the Borderlanders."
While small groups of Borderlanders settled in New England, the Deep South and, later, British Canada, the vast majority
arrived in North America via the Midlands: over 100,000 by 1775. The Midland-governed colonies were attractive because official Quaker policy was to welcome immigrants of all nation and let them practice their faith unmolested Still, Midlanders were alarmed by the newcomers' rough manners and clannish loyalties, Philadelphia newspapers accused them of a litany of misdeeds: counterfeiting of currency, murder, the rape of a six-year-old child, and making " threatening words against authority" should the government dare execute one of their countrymen as punishment for his crimes. Officials did their best to get them out of town and onto the frontier, where they could serve as a buffer against French or Native American attack.
Destitute and land hungry, the vast majority were indeed happy to move straight to the back country, where they seized, in the words of a senior colonial official." any sort of vacant land they can find without asking questions." Some had a little money left from their passage and could have rented land in settled areas closer to Philadelphia but chose not to