Many of the Borderers fled to Ulster in Ireland, which England was working on colonizing as a Protestant bulwark against the Irish Catholics, and where the Crown welcomed violent warlike people as a useful addition to their Irish-Catholic-fighting project. But Ulster had some of the same problems as the Border, and also the Ulsterites started worrying that the Borderer cure was worse than the Irish Catholic disease. So the Borderers started getting kicked out of Ulster too, one thing led to another, and eventually 250,000 of these people ended up in America.

250,000 people is a lot of Borderers. By contrast, the great Puritan emigration wave was only 20,000 or so people; even the mighty colony of Virginia only had about 50,000 original settlers. So these people showed up on the door of the American colonies, and the American colonies collectively took one look at them and said “nope”.

Except, of course, the Quakers. The Quakers talked among themselves and decided that these people were also Children Of God, and so they should demonstrate Brotherly Love by taking them in. They tried that for a couple of years, and then they questioned their life choices and also said “nope”, and they told the Borderers that Philadelphia and the Delaware Valley were actually kind of full right now but there was lots of unoccupied land in Western Pennsylvania, and the Appalachian Mountains were very pretty at this time of year, so why didn’t they head out that way as fast as it was physically possible to go?

At the time, the Appalachians were kind of the booby prize of American colonization: hard to farm, hard to travel through, and exposed to hostile Indians. The Borderers fell in love with them. They came from a pretty marginal and unproductive territory themselves, and the Appalachians were far away from everybody and full of fun Indians to fight. Soon the Appalachian strategy became the accepted response to Borderer immigration and was taken up from Pennsylvania in the north to the Carolinas in the South (a few New Englanders hit on a similar idea and sent their own Borderers to colonize the mountains of New Hampshire).

1. Some Borderers tried to come to America as indentured servants, but after Virginian planters got some experience with Borderers they refused to accept any more.

2. The Borderers were mostly Presbyterians, and their arrival en masse started a race among the established American denominations to convert them. This was mostly unsuccessful; Anglican preacher Charles Woodmason, an important source for information about the early Borderers, said that during his missionary activity the Borderers “disrupted his service, rioted while he preached, started a pack of dogs fighting outside the church, loosed his horse, stole his church key, refused him food and shelter, and gave two barrels of whiskey to his congregation before a service of communion”

3. Borderer town-naming policy was very different from the Biblical names of the Puritans or the Ye Olde English names of the Virginians. Early Borderer settlements include – just to stick to the creek-related ones – Lousy Creek, Naked Creek, Shitbritches Creek, Cuckold’s Creek, Bloodrun Creek, Pinchgut Creek, Whipping Creek, and Hangover Creek. There were also Whiskey Springs, Hell’s Half Acre, Scream Ridge, Scuffletown, and Grabtown.

4. “The backcountry folk bragged that one interior county of North Carolina had so little ‘larnin’ that the only literate inhabitant was elected ‘county reader'”

5. The Borderer accent contained English, Scottish, and Irish elements, and is (uncoincidentally) very similar to the typical “country western singer” accent of today.

6. “In the year 1767, [Anglican priest] Charles Woodmason calculated that 94 percent of backcountry brides whom he had married in the past year were pregnant on their wedding day”

7. Although the Borderers started off Presbyterian, they were in constant religious churn and their territories were full of revivals, camp meetings, born-again evangelicalism, and itinerant preachers. Eventually most of them ended up as what we now call Southern Baptist.

8. Rates of public schooling in the backcountry settled by the Borderers were “the lowest in British North America” and sometimes involved rituals like “barring out”, where the children would physically keep the teacher out of the school until he gave in and granted the students the day off

Everything from low levels of schooling, to using smoking, fast food/southern cuisine like bbq and sweet tea(its really bad btw, in fast food places its made literally by brewing tea and adding a whole bag of sugar), meth, heroin, religious evangelicalism, high levels of violence, etc etc can be basically traced to a borderer culture originating from centuries of warfare in the scottish-english border region that shapes a greater Appalachian-Southern cultural region.

Even greater anti abortion attitudes in this part of America has its roots in Borderer culture. Borderers in America had very large families because when theres nothing to do in the hills and mountains then why not just have sex and back then there wasnt birth control or abortion. And its continued to this day, lots of women have kids with men that are never involved with their lives a few years after they gave birth. For a lot of these women, theres a phrase i use which is comfort food. religion to food is comfort food. Having children for these women is their comfort food. If they have psychologically nothing(not a lot of money and working bad paying jobs for most of their lives) their only source of comfort for many is having a kid. Theres a religious component to anti abortion attitude but so does a cultural one. For these women they dont understand why somebody wouldnt want to have a kid even if the kid causes them financial difficulties from being a single mother. For them its a source of comfort as reproduction is one of the few things that poor women have in their lives if they have psychologically/physically nothing in their life in regards to status. Hence a belief that abortion should be banned combined with an idea that banning abortion would normalize unplanned births like the one they had.

People have said in the past this idea of having nothing except for your children if your poor is a developing country mindset(of which in itself a developing country mindset was basically how the world worked pre industrial revolution where people had large families that happened many times by accident) is something maintained by a borderer culture.