South, but also because with no
barriers to shut out its frontiers from its settled region, and with a
system of connecting waterways, the Middle region mediated between East
and West as well as between North and South. Thus it became the
typically American region. Even the New Englander, who was shut out from
the frontier by the Middle region, tarrying in New York or Pennsylvania
on his westward march, lost the acuteness of his sectionalism on the
way.[28:1]

The spread of cotton culture into the interior of the South finally
broke down the contrast between the "tide-water" region and the rest of
the State, and based Southern interests on slavery. Before this process
revealed its results the western portion of the South, which was akin to
Pennsylvania in stock, society, and industry, showed tendencies to fall
away from the faith of the fathers into internal improvement legislation
and nationalism. In the Virginia convention of 1829-30, called to revise
the constitution, Mr. Leigh, of Chesterfield, one of the tide-water
counties, declared:

One of the main causes of discontent which led to this
convention, that which had the strongest influence in
overcoming our veneration for the work of our fathers, which
taught us to contemn the sentiments of Henry and Mason and
Pendleton, which weaned us from our reverence for the
constituted authorities of the State, was an overweening
passion for internal improvement. I say this with perfect
knowledge, for it has been avowed to me by gentlemen from the
West over and over again. And let me tell the gentleman from
Albemarle (Mr. Gordon) that it has been another principal
object of those who set this ball of revolution in motion, to
overturn the doctrine of State rights, of which Virginia has
been the very pillar, and to remove the barrier she has
interposed to the interference of the Federal Government in
that same work of internal improvement, by so reorganizing the
legislature that Virginia, too, may be hitched to the Federal
car.

It was this nationalizing tendency of the West that transformed the
democracy of Jefferson into the national republicanism of Monroe and the
democracy of Andrew Jackson. The West of the War of 1812, the West of
Clay, and Benton and Harrison, and Andrew Jackson, shut off by the
Middle States and the mountains from the coast sections, had a
solidarity of its own wit