Page:Annals of Augusta County.djvu/20

 of the stringent laws against Dissenters failed, and in 1719 the Protestant emigration to America recommenced. In addition to the restrictions on religion, Irish industry and commerce had been systematically repressed. Twenty thousand people left Ulster on the destruction of the woollen trade in 1698. Many more were driven away by the first passage of the Test Act. The stream had slackened in the hope of some relief. When this hope expired, men of spirit and energy refused to remain in the country. Thenceforward, for more than fifty years, annual shiploads of families poured themselves out from Belfast and Londonderry. England paid dearly for her Irish policy. The fiercest enemies she had, in 1776, were the descendants of the Scotch-Irish who had held Ulster against James II. The earlier emigrants were nearly all Protestants. The emigration of Catholics from Ireland to America, in large numbers, did not begin till the nineteenth century. Previously, when the Irish people of this class emigrated it was to France, Spain, or other European Catholic country. "There was," says Froude, "first a Protestant exodus to America, and then a Catholic, each emigrant carrying away a sense of intolerable wrong."

The people of Ulster had heard of Pennsylvania, and the religious liberty there enjoyed and promised to all comers, and to that province they came in large numbers. They were mainly farmers, tradesmen and artisans. But jealousies arose in the minds of the original settlers of Pennsylvania, and restrictive measures were adopted by the proprietary government against the Scotch-Irish and German immigrants. Hence many of both these races were the more disposed, in 1732 and afterwards, to seek homes within the limits of Virginia, and run the risk of the church establishment existing there. The Scotch-Irish drifted on in the wake of John Lewis to the present county of Augusta; the German people generally located in the region now known as Shenandoah, Page, and Rockingham. The two races did not keep entirely apart, and there was some commingling of them in the various settlements, and in a short time a few people distinct from either came into the Valley from lower Virginia.

Many of our people are descendants of the defenders of Derry. And to go back a little further, the list of prisoners captured at