Opening paragraphs......................

     Beginning in Summer 1717 there arrived upon American shores a new breed of immigrant from the British Isles, far different from the Puritans, Quakers, and Cavaliers who had already settled in their chosen locales.  The new arrivals came from the borderlands of northern England, northern Ireland, and the Scottish Highlands, and they emerged in undulating waves that deposited a quarter-million souls in the New World over nearly sixty years.  The borderland migrants were a rustic folk, largely Presbyterian in religious provenance.  The men were lanky and fit, with faces leathered through outdoor toil.  They displayed distinctive habits of dress - hats made of felt, loose-fitting shirts made of sackcloth, wood shoes.  The young women displayed a frolicsome sensuousness that seemed shocking to many of the earlier arrivals.  They wore tight-fitting dresses with short skirts.  Men and women alike showed a notable casualness and openness toward sex and nudity, and social sanctions against wayward personal behavior were mild compared to those earlier migrants.  The menfolk displayed a liberal attitude toward spirituous liquors and a fighting spirit more intense than their work ethic.  There was a strain of cultural conservatism among these people;  they were strongly attached to their ancestral ways.
     The borderland migrants arrived not seeking religious freedom, as their predecessors had done, but rather to escape economic travail.  Hence they came largely from a lower socioeconomic station than the folks who had settled earlier in Massachusetts, Delaware, and Virginia.  The vast majority were small farmers, farm laborers, and mechanics.  But they displayed a defiant pride that would have far-reaching political impact in the New World, particularly in the lush western regions beyond the Alleghenies that would become their favored frontier destination.   As one historian would later put it, "Extreme inequalities of material condition were joined to an intense concern of equality of esteem."  They demanded respect, often with a social insolence that surprised and irritated those who considered themselves of higher rank..  Ultimately this trait would manifest itself in a powerful strain of political populism - a suspicion of entrenched elites, hostility toward wealth and power, a conviction that the new American democracy should be guided by the virtue and wisdom of ordinary folk.  This was the heritage, outlook, and politics of Andrew Jackson - and also of his protege, James K. Polk, twenty-eight years younger than his mentor.

Robert W. Merry,  A Country of Vast Designs:  James K. Polk, The Mexican War, and the Conquest of the American Continent