Methodists, and Presbyterians had begun to dot the country with small
colleges. Literature developed slowly. But newspapers appeared almost
before there were readers; and that the new society was by no means
without cultural, and even aesthetic, aspiration is indicated by the
long-continued rivalry of Cincinnati and Lexington, Kentucky, to be
known as "the Athens of the West."

Chapter X. Sectional Cross Current

The War of 1812 did much in America to stimulate national pride and to
foster a sense of unity. None the less, the decade following the Peace
of Ghent proved the beginning of a long era in which the point of view
in politics, business, and social life was distinctly sectional. New
England, the Middle States, the South, the West all were bent upon
getting the utmost advantages from their resources; all were viewing
public questions in the light of their peculiar interests. In the days
of Clay and Calhoun and Jackson the nation's politics were essentially a
struggle for power among the sections.

There was a time when the frontier folk of the trans-Alleghany country
from Lakes to Gulf were much alike. New Englanders in the Reserve,
Pennsylvanians in central Ohio, Virginians and Carolinians in Kentucky
and southern Indiana, Georgians in Alabama and Mississippi, Kentuckians
and Tennesseeans in Illinois and Missouri--all were pioneer farmers
and stock-raiser's, absorbed in the conquest of the wilderness and all
thinking, working, and living in much the same way, but by 1820 the
situation had altered. The West was still a "section," whose interests
and characteristics contrasted sharply with those of New England or the
Middle States. Yet upon occasion it could act with very great effect,
as for instance when it rallied to the support of Jackson and bore him
triumphantly to the presidential chair. Great divergences, however, had
grown up within this western area; differences which had existed from
the beginning had been brought into sharp relief. Under play of climatic
and industrial forces, the West had itself fallen apart into sections.

Foremost was the cleavage between North and South, on a line marked
roughly by the Ohio River. Climate, soil, the cotton gin, and slavery
combined to make of the southern West a great cotton-raising area,
interested in the same things and swayed by the same impulses as the
southern seaboard. Similarly, economic conditions combined to make of
the northern West a land of small