earth was literally fulfilled. Maria Hazard, for example, born in Rhode Island, lived to the ripe old age of a hundred years, and "could count five hundred children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren. When she died, two hundred and five of them were alive; a grand-daughter of hers had already been a grandmother near fifteen years." Through the fecundity of such families the colonies were in time dominated by generations reared on American soil, who knew not England and whose affections were fixed upon this country as their native land. With few exceptions, the leaders of the nation that waged the war of independence were of the oldest stock. The founder of the Adams family landed in Massachusetts about 1636; the first Washington came to the shores of Virginia in 1656; the original Franklin took up his humble labors on this continent in 1685.
Later additions to the colonial population were, in the main, from peoples who were either hostile to the administration at London or who at least felt no thrill of patriotism when they saw the flag of England waving above their heads. The Scotch-Irish, next in numbers to the English, had, like the Puritans, fled from the regimen of the government of Great Britain. Their ancestors, in the seventeenth century, had moved from Scotland to the north of Ireland—a fertile region vacated by the natives as they were scourged and driven before the sword and torch of Cromwell. There the Scotch kept alive their Presbyterian faith and grew prosperous on the manufacture of linen and woolen cloth until their industry and their religion brought them also into conflict with the authorities of England. On complaints arising from English competition, Parliament forbade the export of their cloth and, in the acts intended to establish the supremacy of the Anglican Church, laid their worship too under the ban. It was in despair of relief from oppression in Ireland that they then turned to America as a refuge.
About the end of the seventeenth century, a tide of
