In North Carolina, the Presbyterians joined with the royal Governour (Tryon) to persecute Baptists, Quakers, and other groups, and to try to force them to pay taxes to the king to support the religious establishment.
The Presbyterians were the reason the articulation of a right to freedom of religion was necessary for the Constitution to be ratified. Less than 100 years before the Declaration of Independence it was illegal to be Catholic in many of the colonies and as late as 1654 Massachusetts actually executed 10 people for being Catholic. Although only 1.6% of colonists were Catholic estimates were that over 5% of all colonial troops were Catholic. Ironically, it was the contributions of heavily Catholic Pennsylvania militia, the intervention of Catholic France and Spain and the assistance of de Kalb and Pulaski that secured our independence.