to the Blue Grass lands in the
midst of the Kentucky hills, on the Ohio river. In the opening years of
the Revolution these pioneers were recruited by westward extensions
from Pennsylvania and West Virginia. With this colonization of the Ohio
Valley begins a chapter in American history.

This settlement contributed a new element to our national development
and raised new national problems. It took a long time for the seaboard
South to assimilate the upland section. We cannot think of the South as
a unit through much of its ante-bellum history without doing violence to
the facts. The struggle between the men of the up-country and the men of
the tide-water, made a large part of the domestic history of the "Old
South." Nevertheless, the Upland South, as slavery and cotton
cultivation extended westward from the coast, gradually merged in the
East. On the other hand, its children, who placed the wall of the
Alleghanies between them and the East, gave thereby a new life to the
conditions and ideals which were lost in their former home. Nor was this
all. Beyond the mountains new conditions, new problems, aroused new
ambitions and new social ideals. Its entrance into the "Western World"
was a tonic to this stock. Its crossing put new fire into its
veins--fires of militant expansion, creative social energy, triumphant
democracy. A new section was added to the American nation, a new element
was infused into the combination which we call the United States, a new
flavor was given to the American spirit.

We may next rapidly note some of the results. First, let us consider the
national effects of the settlement of this new social type in the Ohio
Valley upon the expansion and diplomacy of the nation. Almost from the
first the Ohio valley had constituted the problem of westward expansion.
It was the entering wedge to the possession of the Mississippi Valley,
and, although reluctantly, the Eastern colonies and then the Eastern
States were compelled to join in the struggle first to possess the Ohio,
then to retain it, and finally to enforce its demand for the possession
of the whole Mississippi Valley and the basin of the Great Lakes as a
means of outlet for its crops and of defense for its settlements. The
part played by the pioneers of the Ohio Valley as a flying column of the
nation, sent across the mountains and making a line of advance between
hostile Indians and English on the north, and hostile Indians and
Spaniards on the sout