farmers, free labor, town-building,
and diversified manufactures and trade. A very large chapter of American
history hinges on this wedging apart of Southwest and Northwest. To this
day the two great divisions have never wholly come together in their
ways of thinking.

But neither of these western segments was itself entirely a unit. The
Northwest, in particular, had been settled by people drawn from every
older portion of the country, and as the frontier receded and society
took on a more matured aspect, differences of habits and ideas were
accentuated rather than obscured. Men can get along very well with one
another so long as they live apart and do not try to regulate their
everyday affairs on common lines.

The great human streams that poured into the Northwest flowed from
two main sources--the nearer South and New England. Ohio, Indiana, and
Illinois were first peopled by men and women of Southern stock. Some
migrated directly from Virginia, the Carolinas, and even Georgia.
But most came from Kentucky and Tennessee and represented the second
generation of white people in those States, now impelled to move on to
a new frontier by the desire for larger and cheaper farms. Included
in this Southern element were many representatives of the well-to-do
classes, who were drawn to the new territories by the opportunity for
speculation in land and for political preferment, and by the opening
which the fast-growing communities afforded for lawyers, doctors, and
members of other professions. The number of these would have been larger
had there been less rigid restrictions upon slaveholding. It was rather,
however, the poorer whites--the more democratic, non-slaveholding
Southern element--that formed the bulk of the earlier settlers north of
the Ohio.

There was much westward migration from New England before the War
of 1812, but only a small share of it reached the Ohio country, and
practically none went beyond the Western Reserve. The common goal was
western New York. Here again there was some emigration of the well-to-do
and influential. But, as in the South, the people who moved were mainly
those who were having difficulty in making ends meet and who could see
no way of bettering their condition in their old homes. The back country
of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and western Massachusetts was
filled with people of this sort--poor, discontented, restless, without
political influence, and needing only the incentive of