They were a people of pure habits, for it was because of their religion that they suffered banishment.

In little patriarchal groups of sixty, seventy, or eighty families, they made their way to different parts of America; and with the conscious poverty of their own members, were generally received with open arms by those whom they found in possession of the soil.

The English, as they beheld the dependent and destitute condition of the fugitives, forgot, for a season, their usual national animosities; and assigning ample tracts of land for their occupation, beheld them, without displeasure, settling down in exclusive colonies, in which they sought to maintain, as far as possible, the pious habits and customs of the mother country.

One of these communities, comprising from seventy to eighty families, found their way to the banks of the Santee in South Carolina.* From this point they gradually spread themselves out so as to embrace, in partial settlements, the spacious tract of country stretching to the Winyah, on the one hand, and the sources of Cooper River on the other; extending upward into the interior, following the course of the Santee nearly to the point where it loses its identity in receiving the descending streams of the Wateree and Congaree.

These settlers were generally poor.