asters are supported. . . . After exposing the
injustice of the community in neglecting to invest persons of
such superior merit in public offices, in many an eloquent
harangue uttered by many a kitchen fire, in every blacksmith
shop, in every corner of the streets, and finding all their
efforts vain, they become at length discouraged, and under the
pressure of poverty, the fear of the gaol, and consciousness
of public contempt, leave their native places and betake
themselves to the wilderness.

Such was a conservative's impression of that pioneer movement of New
England colonists who had spread up the valley of the Connecticut into
New Hampshire, Vermont, and western New York in the period of which he
wrote, and who afterwards went on to possess the Northwest. New England
Federalism looked with a shudder at the democratic ideas of those who
refused to recognize the established order. But in that period there
came into the Union a sisterhood of frontier States--Ohio, Indiana,
Illinois, Missouri--with provisions for the franchise that brought in
complete democracy.

Even the newly created States of the Southwest showed the tendency. The
wind of democracy blew so strongly from the West, that even in the older
States of New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Virginia,
conventions were called, which liberalized their constitutions by
strengthening the democratic basis of the State. In the same time the
labor population of the cities began to assert its power and its
determination to share in government. Of this frontier democracy which
now took possession of the nation, Andrew Jackson was the very
personification. He was born in the backwoods of the Carolinas in the
midst of the turbulent democracy that preceded the Revolution, and he
grew up in the frontier State of Tennessee. In the midst of this region
of personal feuds and frontier ideals of law, he quickly rose to
leadership. The appearance of this frontiersman on the floor of Congress
was an omen full of significance. He reached Philadelphia at the close
of Washington's administration, having ridden on horseback nearly eight
hundred miles to his destination. Gallatin, himself a Western man,
describes Jackson as he entered the halls of Congress: "A tall, lank,
uncouth-looking personage, with long locks of hair hanging over his face
and a cue down his back tied in an eel-skin; his dress singular; his
manners those of a rough