hat bound them to the Union
itself. In the Constitutional Convention prominent Eastern statesmen
expressed their fears of the Western democracy and would have checked
its ability to out-vote the regions of property by limiting its
political power, so that it should never equal that of the Atlantic
coast. But more liberal counsels prevailed. In the first debates upon
the public lands, also, it was clearly stated that the social system of
the nation was involved quite as much as the question of revenue.
Eastern fears that cheap lands in abundance would depopulate the
Atlantic States and check their industrial growth by a scarcity of labor
supply were met by the answer of one of the representatives in 1796:

I question if any man would be hardy enough to point out a
class of citizens by name that ought to be the servants of the
community; yet unless that is done to what class of the People
could you direct such a law? But if you passed such an act
[limiting the area offered for sale in the Mississippi
Valley], it would be tantamount to saying that there is some
class which must remain here, and by law be obliged to serve
the others for such wages as they please to give.

Gallatin showed his comprehension of the basis of the prosperous
American democracy in the same debate when he said:

If the cause of the happiness of this country was examined
into, it would be found to arise as much from the great plenty
of land in proportion to the inhabitants, which their citizens
enjoyed as from the wisdom of their political institutions.

Out of this frontier democratic society where the freedom and abundance
of land in the great Valley opened a refuge to the oppressed in all
regions, came the Jacksonian democracy which governed the nation after
the downfall of the party of John Quincy Adams. Its center rested in
Tennessee, the region from which so large a portion of the Mississippi
Valley was settled by descendants of the men of the Upland South. The
rule of the Mississippi Valley is seen when we recall the place that
Tennessee, Kentucky, and Missouri held in both parties. Besides Jackson,
Clay, Harrison and Polk, we count such presidential candidates as Hugh
White and John Bell, Vice President R. M. Johnson, Grundy, the chairman
of the finance committee, and Benton, the champion of western
radicalism.

It was in this same period, and largely by reason of the drainage