party politics in general. These contests are
also intimately connected with the political philosophy of the
Revolution and with the development of American democracy. In nearly
every colony prior to the Revolution, struggles had been in progress
between the party of privilege, chiefly the Eastern men of property
allied with the English authorities, and the democratic classes,
strongest in the West and the cities.

This theme deserves more space than can here be allotted to it; but a
rapid survey of conditions in this respect, along the whole frontier,
will at least serve to bring out the point.

In New England as a whole, the contest is less in evidence. That part of
the friction elsewhere seen as the result of defective local government
in the back country, was met by the efficiency of the town system; but
between the interior and the coast there were struggles over
apportionment and religious freedom. The former is illustrated by the
convention that met in Dracut, Massachusetts, in 1776, to petition the
States of Massachusetts and New Hampshire to relieve the financial
distress and unfair legislative representation. Sixteen of the border
towns of New Hampshire sent delegates to this convention. Two years
later, these New Hampshire towns attempted to join Vermont.[111:1] As a
Revolutionary State, Vermont itself was an illustration of the same
tendency of the interior to break away from the coast. Massachusetts in
this period witnessed a campaign between the paper money party which was
entrenched in the more recently and thinly-settled areas of the interior
and west, and the property-holding classes of the coast.[111:2] The
opposition to the constitutions of 1778 and 1780 is tinctured with the
same antagonism between the ideas of the newer part of the interior and
of the coast.[112:1] Shays' Rebellion and the anti-federal opposition of
1787-88 found its stronghold in the same interior areas.[112:2]

The religious struggles continued until the democratic interior, where
dissenting sects were strong, and where there was antagonism to the
privileges of the congregational church, finally secured complete
disestablishment in New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. But
this belongs to a later period.[112:3]

Pennsylvania affords a clear illustration of these sectional
antagonisms. The memorial of the frontier "Paxton Boys," in 1764,
demanded a right to share in political privileges with the older part of
the colon