were unfortunate in that
they lacked constructive leadership adequate to having their ideas
incorporated into the new constitutions. Availing themselves of their
opportunity, the aristocrats of the coast fortified themselves in their
advantageous position by establishing State governments based on the
representation of interests, the restriction of suffrage, and the
ineligibility of the poor to office.[17] Moreover, efforts were made
even to continue in a different form the Established Church against which
the dissenting frontiersmen had fought for more than a century. In the
other Atlantic States where such distinctions were not made in framing
their constitutions, the conservatives resorted to other schemes to keep
the power in the hands of the rich planters near the sea. When the
Appalachian Americans awoke to the situation then they were against a
stone wall. The so-called rights of man were subjected to restrictions
which in our day could not exist. The right to hold office and to vote
were not dependent upon manhood qualifications but on a white skin,
religious opinions, the payment of taxes, and wealth. In South Carolina a
person desiring to vote must believe in the existence of a God, in a future
state of reward and punishment, and have a freehold of fifty acres of land.
In Virginia the right of suffrage was restricted to freeholders possessing
one hundred acres of land. Senators in North Carolina had to own three
hundred acres of land; representatives in South Carolina were required
to have a 500 acre freehold and 10 Negroes; and in Georgia 250 acres
and support the Protestant religion.[18] In all of these slave States,
suffering from such unpopular government, the mountaineers developed into
a reform party persistently demanding that the sense of the people be taken
on the question of calling together their representatives to remove certain
defects from the constitutions. It was the contest between the aristocrats
and the progressive westerner. The aristocrats' idea of government was
developed from the "English Scion--the liberty of kings, lords, and
commons, with different grades of society acting independently of all
foreign powers." The ideals of the westerners were principally those of the
Scotch-Irish, working for "civil liberty in fee simple, and an open road to
civil honors, secured to the poorest and feeblest members of society."[19]

The eastern planters, of course, regarded this as an attack on their