system
and fearlessly denounced these rebellious wild men of the hills. In taking
this position, these conservatives brought down upon their heads all of the
ire that the frontiersmen had felt for the British prior to the American
Revolution. The easterners were regarded in the mountains as a party bent
upon establishing in this country a regime equally as oppressive as the
British government. The frontiersmen saw in slavery the cause of the whole
trouble. They, therefore, hated the institution and endeavored more than
ever to keep their section open to free labor. They hated the slave as
such, not as a man. On the early southern frontier there was more prejudice
against the slaveholder than against the Negro.[20] There was the feeling
that this was not a country for a laboring class so undeveloped as the
African slaves, then being brought to these shores to serve as a basis for
a government differing radically from that in quest of which the
frontiersmen had left their homes in Europe.

This struggle reached its climax in different States at various periods.
In Maryland the contest differed somewhat from that of other Southern
States because of the contiguity of that commonwealth with Pennsylvania,
which early set such examples of abolition and democratic government that
a slave State near by could not go so far in fortifying an aristocratic
governing class. In Virginia the situation was much more critical than
elsewhere. Unlike the other Atlantic States, which wisely provided
roads and canals to unify the diverse interests of the sections, that
commonwealth left the trans-Alleghany district to continue in its own way
as a center of insurgency from which war was waged against the established
order of things.[21] In most States, however, the contest was decided by
the invention of the cotton gin and other mechanical appliances which, in
effecting an industrial revolution throughout the world, gave rise to the
plantation system found profitable to supply the increasing demand for
cotton. In the course of the subsequent expansion of slavery, many of the
uplanders and mountaineers were gradually won to the support of that
institution. Realizing gradually a community of interests with the eastern
planters, their ill-feeling against them tended to diminish. Abolition
societies which had once flourished among the whites of the uplands tended
to decline and by 1840 there were practically no abolitionists in the South
living eas