lowed that courage and skill in
arms were in the West not merely virtues and accomplishments to be
admired, but necessities which a man must acquire or perish. The
Westerner was born a fighter, trained as a fighter, and the fighting
instinct was ever dominant in him. So also was the instinct of loyalty
to his fellow-citizens, a desperate, necessary loyalty as to comrades in
a besieged city--as, indeed, they often were.

The other condition was the product partly of natural circumstances and
partly of that wise stroke of statesmanship which had pledged the new
lands in trust to the whole Confederacy. The Westerner was
American--perhaps he was the first absolutely instinctive American. The
older States looked with much pride to a long historical record which
stretched back far beyond the Union into colonial times. The
Massachusetts man would still boast of the Pilgrim Fathers. The
Virginian still spoke lovingly of the "Old Plantation." But Kentucky and
Tennessee, Ohio and Indiana were children of the Union. They had grown
to statehood within it, and they had no memories outside it. They were
peopled from all the old States, and the pioneers who peopled them were
hammered into an intense and instinctive homogeneity by the constant
need of fighting together against savage nature and savage man. Thus,
while in the older settlements one man was conscious above all things
that he was a New Englander, and another that he was a Carolinian, the
Western pioneer was primarily conscious that he was a white man and not
a Red Indian, nay, often that he was a man and not a grizzly bear. Hence
grew up in the West that sense of national unity which was to be the
inspiration of so many celebrated Westerners of widely different types
and opinions, of Clay, of Jackson, of Stephen Douglas, and of Abraham
Lincoln.

But this was not to take place until the loyalty of the West had first
been tried by a strange and sinister temptation.

Aaron Burr had been elected Vice-President coincidently with Jefferson's
election as President; but his ambition was far from satisfied. He was
determined to make another bid for the higher place, and as a
preliminary he put himself forward as candidate for the Governorship of
New York State. It was as favourable ground as he could find to try the
issue between himself and the President, for New York had been the
centre of his activities while he was still an official Democrat, and
her favour had given him his