with which
Spotswood had to struggle, and of which he so bitterly complained, was a
democracy made up of small landholders, of the newer immigrants, and of
indented servants, who at the expiration of their time of servitude
passed into the interior to take up lands and engage in pioneer farming.
The "War of the Regulation," just on the eve of the American Revolution,
shows the steady persistence of this struggle between the classes of the
interior and those of the coast. The Declaration of Grievances which the
back counties of the Carolinas then drew up against the aristocracy that
dominated the politics of those colonies exhibits the contest between
the democracy of the frontier and the established classes who
apportioned the legislature in such fashion as to secure effective
control of government. Indeed, in a period before the outbreak of the
American Revolution, one can trace a distinct belt of democratic
territory extending from the back country of New England down through
western New York, Pennsylvania, and the South.[248:1]

In each colony this region was in conflict with the dominant classes of
the coast. It constituted a quasi-revolutionary area before the days of
the Revolution, and it formed the basis on which the Democratic party
was afterwards established. It was, therefore, in the West, as it was in
the period before the Declaration of Independence, that the struggle for
democratic development first revealed itself, and in that area the
essential ideas of American democracy had already appeared. Through the
period of the Revolution and of the Confederation a similar contest can
be noted. On the frontier of New England, along the western border of
Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the Carolinas, and in the communities beyond
the Alleghany Mountains, there arose a demand of the frontier settlers
for independent statehood based on democratic provisions. There is a
strain of fierceness in their energetic petitions demanding
self-government under the theory that every people have the right to
establish their own political institutions in an area which they have
won from the wilderness. Those revolutionary principles based on
natural rights, for which the seaboard colonies were contending, were
taken up with frontier energy in an attempt to apply them to the lands
of the West. No one can read their petitions denouncing the control
exercised by the wealthy landholders of the coast, appealing to the
record of their con