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SKETCHES OF NORTH CAROLINA.

CHAPTER VII.
THE EAGLE WING—OR FIRST ATTEMPT AT EMIGRATION FROM IRELAND TO AMERICA, 1636.

IN the spring of the year 1631, the presbyterians of Ulster, wearied out by the intolerance of Charles I., and Archbishop Laud, and the consequent exactions of the ministers of the crown, particularly the Lord Deputy Wentworth, afterwards Earl of Stafford, by which their cup of bitterness was made to overflow, turned their eyes to the new settlements in the wilds of America. The Puritans of England, who were contending and suffering for the same rights of conscience, had planted colonies in Massachusetts, which cheered them with the expectation of a refuge from the ills they could neither be freed from, nor endure, in their native land. The flourishing colony had been planted at Salem, in the year 1628, and had been even more successful than Plymouth. These prosperous efforts to secure the enjoyment of liberty of conscience, turned the attention of the distressed congregations of Ireland to seek, in the deeper solitudes of distant America, what had been promised, and sought for in vain, in depopulated Ireland; or enjoyed only while they reclaimed the desolations of the previous rebellion.

The ministers that had come over from Scotland, whose names have been enumerated, had not attempted to form a Presbytery. The whole country had been laid off into parishes and bishoprics of the Church of England; and as the emigrants from England or Scotland found their residences, they were consequently included in some parish, and the ministers that came over to preach to them were admitted to occupy parish churches, and enjoy their own forms and ceremonies. Archbishop Usher was most mild and tolerant in his views of church order and government; and so, for a time at least, were some of his bishops; and in the different Dioceses of Ulster might be seen priests and deacons of the Established Church, and here and there intermingled a Presbyterian or Puritan minister, with a flock of their own peculiar creed and forms, under the bishop's supervision. The great revival had broken up some of this quietness and order that had