onal appeals. The circuit rider,
with his intense conviction of sin and his equally strong conviction of
salvation through repentance, wrought great crowds in camp meetings into
ecstasies of religious excitement. Odd religious sects and strange
"isms" were to be found in the back-country. At New Harmony on the
Wabash River were the Rappites, a sect of German peasants who came first
to Pennsylvania under their leader George Rapp, and who afterward
returned thither. At Zoar in Ohio was the Separatist community led by
Joseph Baumeler. Shaker societies were formed at many places; and
Mormonism was just beginning its strange history through the revelations
of Joseph Smith in western New York.

The intellectual horizon of the Western world was necessarily limited.
Absorbed in the stern struggle for existence, the people had no leisure
and no heart to enjoy the finer aspects of life. Education was a luxury
which only the prosperous might possess. The purpose to make elementary
education a public charge developed tardily. Outside of New England,
indeed, a public school system did not exist. Throughout the older
portions of the West the traveler might find academies and so-called
colleges, but none supported at public expense. The State of Indiana,
it is true, entered the Union with a constitution which made it the duty
of the legislature to provide, as soon as circumstances permitted, "for
a general system of education, ascending in a regular gradation from
township schools to a State University, wherein tuition shall be gratis,
and equally open to all." But years passed before circumstances
permitted the realization of this ideal. Meantime, the prosperous
planters of the Southwest employed tutors for their children, and the
well-to-do farmers of the Northwest paid tuition for their boys at
academies. But young Abraham Lincoln had to teach himself Euclid and to
cipher on the back of a wooden shovel, by the flickering embers of a
log-cabin fire.

The new Commonwealths entered the Union as self-confessed democracies.
In all the States formed after the War of 1812, with one exception,
property qualifications such as prevailed in the older States were swept
away and the right to vote was accorded to every adult white male. In
Mississippi alone there was the additional qualification that a voter
should be enrolled in the militia or have paid a state or county tax.
Everywhere, too, the principle was accepted that representation shou