tertaining is John Fiske's _The
Critical Period of American History, 1783-1789_ (1888). Valuable
information bearing on the social as well as the political history
of the times is contained in the first volume of J. B. McMaster's
_History of the People of the United States from the Revolution to
the Civil War_ (7 vols., 1883-1913). More recent histories of the
period are A. C. McLaughlin's _The Confederation and the
Constitution, 1783-1789_ (in _The American Nation_, vol. 10,
1905), and Edward Channing's _History of the United States_, vol.
III (3 vols., 1905- ). A vigorous narrative of the exploits of the
pioneers beyond the Alleghanies has been written by Theodore
Roosevelt, _Winning of the West_ (4 vols., 1889-96). A more
restrained account of the beginnings of Western settlement is B.
A. Hinsdale's _The Old Northwest, the Beginnings of our Colonial
System_ (1899).

CHAPTER II

THE MAKING OF THE CONSTITUTION

Notwithstanding the manifold differences between State and State in the
Confederation, there were everywhere groups of men who confronted much
the same economic conditions. Between the farmer who tilled his sterile
hillside acres in the interior of New England and the cultivator of the
richer soil of the Piedmont in Virginia and the Carolinas, a greater
identity of economic interests existed than the casual observer would
have suspected. The feeling of hostility which circumstances bred in the
followers of Daniel Shays toward the merchants of Boston was akin to
that which the farmers of middle and western Pennsylvania harbored
toward the aristocratic and wealthy classes of Philadelphia and the
eastern counties. A similar antagonism appears between the yeomen of the
uplands and the planters of the tidewater farther to the south,
accentuated, no doubt, by religious and racial differences. The
Scotch-Irish or German dissenter, who was treated with contempt as a
foreigner and forced to support a church established by a State
Government which discriminated against numbers and in favor of property,
was not likely to feel kindly toward the tidewater aristocracy. Bad
crops spelled disaster for these farmers, for they had incurred debt to
purchase their lands and had borrowed capital to work them. In hard
times they were the first to suffer, for whether money was scarce or
plentiful, the tax-collector and the money-lender knocked inexorably