siana. The way was preparing for a united South and West.

If the Crawford men of the lower South gave up their hostility to
Jackson and the extreme anti-nationalists of South Carolina submitted
once more to "Calhoun and Jackson," it was by no means certain what the
gentry of the eastern counties of North Carolina would do. They had
supported Crawford in the last campaign, and there was neither Indian
nor land question to compel them to support the Western candidate.
Moreover, there was a bitter struggle between the east and the west of
North Carolina which resembled very much the secession movement in South
Carolina. The eastern men owned most of the slaves and produced the
large staple crops; controlled the lawmaking and the other departments
of the State Government; and its leaders were generally, if not always,
the spokesmen of the State in national affairs. This position and these
advantages were legacies of the constitution of 1776. The fact that they
were in the minority in point of population served only to whet their
appetites for more power. On the other hand, the leaders of the western
section of the State had fought for twenty-five years to reform the
constitution and the laws, to create new counties in order to secure
proportionate representation, and to expand the suffrage in order that
their majorities might be properly counted.

The bitterness of the two sections threatened to result in civil war or
at least a division of the State. But the eastern men yielded and in
1835 a convention met in Raleigh. The planters were in the majority.
They made concessions, however, in the matter of representation and in
the popular election of the governors, which tended to reconcile the
up-country people. But the control of taxation, suffrage, and
representation remained securely in the hands of the legislative
majority of the low-country counties. Slavery and the allied social
system were henceforth immune, and the distinctions, forms, and
realities of a growing aristocracy made steady encroachments upon the
life of the State until the outbreak of the Civil War.

Contrary as it may seem to the ordinary political interests of such men,
the North Carolina gentry accepted Jackson and the Western party in
1828, and the State was almost a unit in support of the more democratic
element in the nation at the very time it was at the point of breaking
to pieces locally because one section of the State was unwilling to
grant t