They did not begin to come to America in any numbers till after the opening of the eighteenth century; but by 1730 they were fairly swarming across the ocean, for the most part in two streams, the larger going to the port of Philadelphia, the smaller to the port of Charleston. Pushing through the long settled lowlands of the seacoast, they at once made their abode at the foot of the mountains, and became the outposts of civilization. From Pennsylvania, whither the great majority had come, they drifted south, along the foothills and down the long valleys, till they met their brethren from Charleston who had pushed up into the Carolina back-country. In this land of hills covered by unbroken forests they took root and flourished, stretching in a broad belt from north to south, a shield of sinewy men thrust in between the people of the seacoast and the red warriors of the wilderness. All through this region they were alike; they had as little kinship with the Cavalier as with the Quaker; the west was won by those who have been rightly called the Roundheads of the south, the same men who, before any others, declared for American independence. But indeed they were fitted to be Americans from the very start; they were kinsfolk of the Covenanters: they deemed it a religious duty to interpret their own Bible, and held for a divine right the election of their clergy. For generations their whole ecclesiastical and scholastic systems had been fundamentally democratic. In the hard life of the frontier they lost much of their religion, and they had but scant opportunity to give their children the schooling in which they believed; but what few meeting-houses and school-houses there were on the border were theirs.