oubled the income of the West from exports down the
Mississippi. When all is told, however, these isolated people were in
the main very poor, as the narratives of travelers and the journals of
preachers attest on every page.

Yet every year added thousands to the numbers of Eastern men who
migrated West to enjoy some of the liberty of a region where lands were
cheap and the social life unconventional; every decade added new voices
and able leaders to the Western group in Congress, who clamored
unceasingly for the enactment of laws aimed at the rapid development of
that section. New England, where the rise of industrial towns
necessitated an increasing number of laborers, took fright, or had never
ceased to be alarmed, at the westward movement of population; and
Eastern members of Congress, under one pretext or another, opposed every
demand which came up from the West, every petition of the "squatters" on
the public domain. In the Middle States the building of numerous
canals, turnpikes, and railways called for both skilled and unskilled
laborers. But if everybody ran off to the West when wages were
unsatisfactory, these improvements could not be made and the old
communities would languish and decay.

Virginia and the South were less disturbed at the growth of the West,
because of their system of slavery, and because the votes of the new
States could be relied on to support Virginian and Southern policies in
Congress--a legacy of the old Jeffersonian alliance of the South with
the early West; and also because of the similar economic and social life
of the two sections. But even the Old Dominion in the sore economic
distress of the late twenties, due in the main to the desertion of her
tobacco-fields and workshops by thousands of her most energetic sons,
who went to the rich cotton country, wavered in her loyalty to the
younger States of the West. John Randolph ridiculed in merciless fashion
the "sharp-witted" Westerners, whom he would avoid in the highway as
"one would a pickpocket"; and in both the Carolinas there was a fear and
a dread of the growing West, whose ideals were too Jeffersonian and
whose power waxed greater with the passing years. Yet Calhoun, Hayne,
and other able Southerners remained true to the new region and supported
Benton in his debates with Foote and Webster in 1830, perhaps because
the whole Jackson program of 1829 was based upon the alliance of these
forces in the national life.

If the politi