to the national government. The pioneers had in a measure
outgrown the colonialism of the thirteen original commonwealths. They
occupied a territory which had in the beginning been part of the
national domain. Their local commonwealths had not antedated the
Federal Union, but were in a way children of the central government; and
they felt that they belonged to the Union in a way that was rarely
shared by an inhabitant of Massachusetts or South Carolina. Their
national feeling did not prevent them from being in some respects
extremely local and provincial in their point of view. It did not
prevent them from resenting with the utmost energy any interference of
the Federal government in what they believed to be their local affairs.
But they were none the less, first and foremost, loyal citizens of the
American Federal state.

II

THE NEW NATIONAL DEMOCRACY

We must consider carefully this earliest combination of the national
with the democratic idea. The Western Democracy is important, not only
because it played the leading part in our political history down to
1850, but precisely because it does offer, in a primitive but
significant form, a combination of the two ideas, which, when united,
constitute the formative principle in American political and social
development. The way had been prepared for this combination by the
Republican acceptance of the Federal organization, after that party had
assumed power; but the Western Democrats took this alliance much more
innocently than the older Republican leaders. They insisted, as we have
seen, on a declaration of war against Great Britain; and humiliating as
were the results of that war, this vigorous assertion of the national
point of view, both exposed in clear relief the sectional disloyalty of
the Federalists of New England and resulted later in an attempted
revival of a national constructive policy. It is true that the
regeneration of the Hamiltonian spirit belongs rather to the history of
the Whigs than to the history of the Democrats. It is true, also, that
the attempted revival at once brought out the inadequacy of the
pioneer's conceptions both of the national and the democratic ideas.
Nevertheless, it was their assertion of the national interest against a
foreign enemy which provoked its renewed vitality in relation to our
domestic affairs. Whatever the alliance between nationality and
democracy, represented by the pioneers, lacked in fruitful understanding
of