of the vigorous
energy that marks the true pioneer spirit, he determined to cast in his
lot with the frontier folk. He walked through Maryland and Virginia,
driving before him an old "flea-bitten grey" horse, loaded with a
sackful of books; crossed the Alleghanies, and came down along blazed
trails to the Holston settlements. The hardy people among whom he took
up his abode were able to appreciate his learning and religion as much
as they admired his adventurous and indomitable temper; and the stern,
hard, God-fearing man became a most powerful influence for good
throughout the whole formative period of the southwest. [Footnote: See
"East Tennessee a Hundred Years Ago," by the Hon. John Allison,
Nashville, 1887, p. 8.]

Not only did he found a church, but near it he built a log high-school,
which soon became Washington College, the first institution of the kind
west of the Alleghanies. Other churches, and many other schools, were
soon built. Any young man or woman who could read, write, and cipher
felt competent to teach an ordinary school; higher education, as
elsewhere at this time in the west, was in the hands of the clergy.

As elsewhere, the settlers were predominantly of Calvinistic stock; for
of all the then prominent faiths Calvinism was nearest to their feelings
and ways of thought. Of the great recognized creeds it was the most
republican in its tendencies, and so the best suited to the
backwoodsmen. They disliked Anglicanism as much as they abhorred and
despised Romanism--theoretically at least, for practically then as now
frontiersmen were liberal to one another's religious opinions, and the
staunch friend and good hunter might follow whatever creed he wished,
provided he did not intrude it on others. But backwoods Calvinism
differed widely from the creed as first taught. It was professed by
thorough-going Americans, essentially free and liberty-loving, who would
not for a moment have tolerated a theocracy in their midst. Their
social, religious, and political systems were such as naturally
flourished in a country remarkable for its temper of rough and
self-asserting equality. Nevertheless the old Calvinistic spirit left a
peculiar stamp on this wild border democracy. More than any thing else,
it gave the backwoodsmen their code of right and wrong. Though they were
a hard, narrow, dogged people, yet they intensely believed in their own
standards and ideals. Often warped and twisted, mentally and morally, by