staken or not.

It is obvious that these economic and social conditions were so
fundamental in Western life that they might well dominate whatever
accessions came to the West by immigration from the coast sections or
from Europe. Nevertheless, the West cannot be understood without bearing
in mind the fact that it has received the great streams from the North
and from the South, and that the Mississippi compelled these currents to
intermingle. Here it was that sectionalism first gave way under the
pressure of unification. Ultimately the conflicting ideas and
institutions of the old sections struggled for dominance in this area
under the influence of the forces that made for uniformity, but this is
merely another phase of the truth that the West must become unified,
that it could not rest in sectional groupings. For precisely this reason
the struggle occurred. In the period from the Revolution to the close of
the War of 1812, the democracy of the Southern and Middle States
contributed the main streams of settlement and social influence to the
West. Even in Ohio political power was soon lost by the New England
leaders. The democratic spirit of the Middle region left an indelible
impress on the West in this its formative period. After the War of 1812,
New England, its supremacy in the carrying trade of the world having
vanished, became a hive from which swarms of settlers went out to
western New York and the remoter regions.

These settlers spread New England ideals of education and character and
political institutions, and acted as a leaven of great significance in
the Northwest. But it would be a mistake to believe that an unmixed New
England influence took possession of the Northwest. These pioneers did
not come from the class that conserved the type of New England
civilization pure and undefiled. They represented a less contented, less
conservative influence. Moreover, by their sojourn in the Middle Region,
on their westward march, they underwent modification, and when the
farther West received them, they suffered a forest-change, indeed. The
Westernized New England man was no longer the representative of the
section that he left. He was less conservative, less provincial, more
adaptable and approachable, less rigorous in his Puritan ideals, less a
man of culture, more a man of action.

As might have been expected, therefore, the Western men, in the "era of
good feeling," had much homogeneity throughout the Mississipp