♪ Voice: The spirit of emigration to America, which seems to be epidemic through Great Britain, is likely to depopulate the Mother Country, and leave our ancient kingdom the resort of owls and dragons, and other solitary animals, who shun the light, and seem displeased at the human race.

"The Edinburgh Amusement."

[Bell tolling] Narrator: The steadily rising tensions between England and its North American colonies did not slow the steady stream of English, Scots-Irish, German, and a small number of Jewish immigrants eager to carve out new lives within the North American interior.

Christopher Brown: Part of what really sets the North American experience apart is just how many European settlers are coming to North America.

[Horse nickers] And they keep coming.

15,000 a year.

A kind of empire was already in view.

Narrator: Thousands of new arrivals and American-born colonists poured down the Great Wagon Road that ran all the way from Philadelphia to the Carolinas.

The backcountry there was already the home of Native peoples, including the Catawbas and Cherokees.

Voice: Upon the whole, it is the best country in the world for a poor man to go to and do well.

And the farther they go back in the country, the land turns richer and better.

Here, a man of small substance, if upon a precarious footing at home, can, at once, secure to himself a handsome, independent living, and do well for himself and posterity.

All modes of Christian worship are here tolerated.

"Scotus Americanus."

Taylor: Colonial America is a very Protestant place.

And it's founded when the norm in Europe was that whoever your sovereign was got to set what the religion should be.

Narrator: Congregationalism was the established church in nearly all New England colonies.

The official religion in much of the South was the Church of England.

But those who belonged to other faiths resented being forced by colonial legislatures to pay the salaries of clergymen who did not minister to them.

None were more resentful than the backcountry settlers in the Carolinas-- Baptists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Methodists.

Taylor: And what they hear from their ministers about whether resisting their sovereign or supporting their sovereign is the right thing to do as a Christian duty, that will matter a lot.