tic colonies on the
one side and the Alleghany mountains on the other. Its population showed
a mixture of nationalities and religions. Less English than the colonial
coast, it was built on a basis of religious feeling different from that
of Puritan New England, and still different from the conservative
Anglicans of the southern seaboard. The Scotch-Irish Presbyterians with
the glow of the covenanters; German sectaries with serious-minded
devotion to one or another of a multiplicity of sects, but withal deeply
responsive to the call of the religious spirit, and the English Quakers
all furnish a foundation of emotional responsiveness to religion and a
readiness to find a new heaven and a new earth in politics as well as in
religion. In spite of the influence of the backwoods in hampering
religious organization, this upland society was a fertile field for
tillage by such democratic and emotional sects as the Baptists,
Methodists and the later Campbellites, as well as by Presbyterians. Mr.
Bryce has well characterized the South as a region of "high religious
voltage," but this characterization is especially applicable to the
Upland South, and its colonies in the Ohio Valley. It is not necessary
to assert that this religious spirit resulted in the kind of conduct
associated with the religious life of the Puritans. What I wish to point
out is the responsiveness of the Upland South to emotional religious and
political appeal.

Besides its variety of stocks and its religious sects responsive to
emotion, the Upland South was intensely democratic and individualistic.
It believed that government was based on a limited contract for the
benefit of the individual, and it acted independently of governmental
organs and restraints with such ease that in many regions this was the
habitual mode of social procedure: voluntary cooperation was more
natural to the Southern Uplanders than action through the machinery of
government, especially when government checked rather than aided their
industrial and social tendencies and desires. It was a naturally radical
society. It was moreover a rural section not of the planter or merchant
type, but characterized by the small farmer, building his log cabin in
the wilderness, raising a small crop and a few animals for family use.
It was this stock which began to pass into the Ohio Valley when Daniel
Boone, and the pioneers associated with his name, followed the
"Wilderness Trace" from the Upland South