Many of whom were still Presbyterian but in 1775 rarely Princetonians

From The Road to Guilford Courthouse by John Buchanan. Page 94.

Describing the efforts of the patriots to excite support in the back country of North Carolina, the area of sttlement which would become Tennessee, and the South Carolina piedmont. An area populated by heterogeneous communities by ethnicity, religion, and culture.

“The Reverend William Tennent was a native of Northern Ireland, a noted Presbyterian preacher whose father was one of the founders of the College of New Jersey, later Princeton, from which William graduated. It was thought by the Council of Safety that he was best equipped to address the concerns of the Scotch Irish, many of whom were still Presbyterian but in 1775 rarely Princetonians. Tennant had helped draft the Association. Because the Baptists had made dramatic inroads in the Back Country’s religious mosaic, South Carolina’s leading Baptist preacher, the Reverend Oliver Hart, accompanied Drayton and Tennent. The need to include Hart is a clue to what was going on beyond the genteel Anglican spirituality of the Low Country. In the Back Country were Germans Lutheran and Reformed, Scotch Irish Presbyterians, French Huguenots, Independents, Baptists, Seventh-Day Baptists, New Light Baptists, and “an hundred other sects,” wrote the Reverend Charles Woodmason. In a splendid sentence Lieutenant Governor William Bull described the denominations to Lord Hillsborough in 1770 as “subdivided ad infinitum in the back parts, as illiterate enthusiasm or wild imagination can misinterpret the scripture,” while “every circle of Christian knowledge grows fainter as more removed from the center."

“Drayton and the preachers were joined by Colonel Richard Richardson, who had migrated from Virginia and established himself in the Back Country of the upper Santee as a successful planter, militia officer, and man of affairs; and Joseph Kershaw, an important merchant from Camden who along with Richardson had been elected to the First Provincial Congress. But the fiery William Henry Drayton was the key member of the mission.