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The French element in the coast counties, however, numbered scarcely more than two per cent of the whole, and the Germans - like the Swiss in the same colony - were isolated and politically unimportant. Throughout the period the center of the social and political life of South Carolina was at Charleston. Georgia had very few foreigners, though she stood unique among her sister colonies in possessing a small settlement of Greeks and another of Salzburgers or Austrian Germans.

Here and there among the colonies as a whole were a few Italians, employed as gardeners, botanists, or miniature painters; a few hundred Irishmen, perhaps, though most of the Irish Celts began their careers in America as indentured servants; and once in a while a Czech or Bohemian, though the identification is often doubtful. There were Irish and Welsh Quakers in Pennsylvania, and a few Danes are said to have come into New Hampshire with imported Danish cattle. Following the Acadian Expulsion (1755), the French Neutrals or Acadians were distributed among the cities from Portsmouth to Savannah. These exiles presented a pathetic picture of desolation and despair. They were undesired, and were frequently charged with

crimes and misdemeanors by those who wished to get rid of them.

In time the colonists of the southern groups, with Virginians in the lead, pushed their settled area across the "fall line" and cut slowly and with great labor into the dense forests. Here they established farms and plantations and began the growing of wheat, a staple destined to become a dangerous competitor of the tobacco produced on lower levels. The upcountry was much healthier than the lowland and combined forest, pastu and a wonderfully fertile arable soil with go water facilities and an equable climate. What had been in the seventeenth century but a camping ground for warriors, traders, and herders, became in the eighteenth century the seat of busy settlement and agriculture.

As the frontier was gradually pushed back by the movement of settlers from the coast, the newly won regions came under the control of the coast dwellers and reproduced much of the life of the older settlements. But such was not the case in Maryland nor in the far mountain valleys of Virginia and North Carolina. These regions did not receive their pioneers from the tidewater settlements. Central Maryland remained a wilderness

until the Germans from Pennsylvania, carrying the goods in wagons and driving their cattle before them, entered the territory, took up tenancies under the land speculators of Annapolis, and began an era of small farms and diversified staples essentially different from the plantation life of the Chesapeake. As these pioneers passed on, they found homes along the Blue Ridge and in the Shenandoah and Yadkin valleys. And as the stream of homeseekers advanced southward, following the e of the mountains, farther and farther away

the coast and the older civilization, there a ose a new community of American settlers living on small farms and tenancies and imbued with all the individualistic notions characteristic of the dweller on the frontier.

While the Virginians were clearing away the forests of their own back country and the Germans and Scotch-Irish, with the help of occasional pioneers from the coast, were filling the slopes and valleys of the lower Appalachian ranges with the hum and bustle of a frontier civilization, the old settlers of the Carolinas and Georgia remained little influenced by the call of the West. The old Albemarle settlement of North Carolina, founded by wanderers from Virginia in 1653, remained a

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