ighteenth
century, and during the early years of the nineteenth, the important
fact to be remembered in treating of the Westerners was their
fundamental unity, in blood, in ways of life, and in habits of thought.
[Footnote: Prof. Frederick A. Turner, of the University of Michigan,
deserves especial credit for the stress he has laid upon this point.]
They were predominantly of Southern, not of Northern blood; though it
was the blood of the Southerners of the uplands, not of the low coast
regions, so that they were far more closely kin to the Northerners than
were the seaboard planters. In Kentucky and Tennessee, in Indiana and
Mississippi, the settlers were of the same quality. They possessed the
same virtues and the same shortcomings, the same ideals and the same
practices. There was already a considerable Eastern emigration to the
West, but it went as much to Kentucky as to Ohio, and almost as much to
Tennessee and Mississippi as to Indiana. As yet the Northeasterners were
chiefly engaged in filling the vacant spaces in New England, New York,
and Pennsylvania. The great flood of Eastern emigration to the West, the
flood which followed the parallels of latitude, and made the Northwest
like the Northeast, did not begin until after the War of 1812. It was
no accident that made Harrison, the first governor of Indiana and long
the typical representative of the Northwest, by birth a Virginian, and
the son of one of the Virginian signers of the Declaration of
Independence. The Northwest was at this time in closer touch with
Virginia than with New England.

Homogeneity of the West.
Slavery in the West.

There was as yet no hard and fast line drawn between North and South
among the men of the Western waters. Their sense of political cohesion
was not fully developed, and the same qualities that at times made them
loose in their ideas of allegiance to the Union at times also prevented
a vivid realization on their part of their own political and social
solidarity; but they were always more or less conscious of this
solidarity, and, as a rule, they acted together. Most important of all,
the slavery question, which afterwards rived in sunder the men west of
the Alleghanies as it rived in sunder those east of them, was of small
importance in the early years. West of the Alleghanies slaves were
still to be found almost everywhere, while almost every where there
were also frequent and open expressions of hostility to slavery.