Note 410 — Chapter VII · —Geographical Boundaries

Dissatisfied, oppressed, or persecuted members of a political community are prone to seek an asylum across the nearest border, where happier or freer conditions of life are promised. There they contribute to that mixture of race which characterizes every boundary zone, though as an embittered people they may also help to emphasize any existing political or religious antagonism. The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 was followed by an exodus of Huguenots from France to the Protestant states of Switzerland, the Palatinate of the Rhine, and Holland, as also across the Channel into southern England; just as in recent years the Slav borderland of eastern Germany has received a large immigration of Polish Jews from Russia. When the Polish king in 1571 executed the leader of the Dnieper Cossacks, thousands of these bold borderers left their country and joined the community of the Don; and in 1722 after the Dnieper community had been crushed by Peter the Great, a similar exodus took place across the southern boundary into the Crimea, whereby the Tartar horde was strengthened, just as a few years before, during an unsuccessful revolt of the Don Cossacks, some two thousand of the malcontents crossed the southern frontier to the Kuban River in Circassia.410 The establishment of American independence in 1783 saw an exodus of loyalists from the United States into the contiguous districts of Ontario, New Brunswick, and Spanish Florida, Five years later discontent with the Federal Government for its dilatory opposition to the occlusion of the Mississippi and the lure of commercial betterment sent many citizens of the early Trans-Allegheny commonwealths to the Spanish side of the Mississippi,411 while the Natchez District on the east bank of the river contained a sprinkling of French who had become dissatisfied with Spanish rule in Louisiana and changed their domicile.