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Selina, the Dowager Countess of Huntingdon, was a descendant of the Washington family in England; daughter of one earl (Washington Shirley, Earl Ferrers), widow of another, and mother of a third; a patroness of early Methodism; a Calvinistic opponent of Wesley’s; and, in the end, being forced out of the C of E to become a Dissenter, a woman who established (and very much ran) her own Nonconformist denomination of Calvinistic Methodists: The Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion.

In the 1780s, culminating in 1785, she corresponded with her distant cousin in America, George Washington, regarding her proposal to ship over whole communities and parishes of her followers – who were mostly artisans, small tradesmen, and leading farmers – to be established on land grants on the frontier, so as to evangelize the Native Americans and act as a buffer and bulwark for the American settlements.

Washington was sympathetic, but the Congress was too broke to be sympathetic.

The plan did not come to fruition, and instead, America became, on its first frontier and for a good part of the early Westward expansion, essentially Ulster West.

What if the Huntingdon Plan had worked: that is, had at least been given a try?
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