er the mountains to flood the Mississippi Valley. Students
of the mountain people maintain that so small an accident as the
breaking of a linchpin fixed one family forever in a mountain cove,
while relatives went on to become the builders of new States in the
interior. Cut off from the world in these mountains, there have been
preserved to this day many of the idioms, folksongs, superstitions,
manners, customs, and habits of mind of Stuart England, as they were
brought over by the early colonists. The steep farms afforded a scanty
living, and though the cattle found luscious pasturage during the
summer, they were half starved during the winter. If by chance the
mountaineers had a surplus of any product, there was no one to whom they
might sell it. They lived almost without the convenience of coinage as a
means of exchange. Naturally in such a society there was no place for
slaves, and to this day negroes are not welcome in many mountain
counties. But though these mountain people have missed contact with the
outside world and have been deprived of the stimulus of new ideas, they
seldom give evidence of anything that can fairly be classed as
degeneracy. Ignorance, illiteracy, and suspended or arrested development
the traveler of today will find among them, and actions which will shock
his present-day standards; but these same actions would hardly have
shocked his own father's great-grandfather. These isolated mountaineers
have been aptly called "our contemporary ancestors."

The same people, it is true, had poured out of their cabins to meet
Ferguson at King's Mountain; they had followed Jackson to New Orleans
and to Florida and they had felt the influence of the wave of
nationalism which swept the country after the War of 1812. But back to
their mountains they had gone, and the great current of national
progress swept by them. The movement toward sectionalism, which
developed after the Missouri Compromise, had left them cold. So the
mountaineers held to the Union. They did not volunteer freely for the
Confederacy, and they resisted conscription. How many were enlisted in
the Union armies it is difficult to discover, certainly over 100,000. It
is not surprising, therefore, that these people became Republicans and
have so continued in their allegiance.

Another element in the population having great influence in the
South--in North Carolina, at least--was the Society of Friends. It was
strong in both the central and the e