d the Great Valley from Pennsylvania into the Upland South. In
both the Yankee frontiersmen and the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians of the
South, the Calvinistic conception of the importance of the individual,
bound by free covenant to his fellow men and to God, was a compelling
influence, and all their wilderness experience combined to emphasize the
ideals of opening new ways, of giving freer play to the individual, and
of constructing democratic society.

When the backwoodsmen crossed the Alleghanies they put between
themselves and the Atlantic Coast a barrier which seemed to separate
them from a region already too much like the Europe they had left, and
as they followed the courses of the rivers that flowed to the
Mississippi, they called themselves "Men of the Western Waters," and
their new home in the Mississippi Valley was the "Western World." Here,
by the thirties, Jacksonian democracy flourished, strong in the faith of
the intrinsic excellence of the common man, in his right to make his own
place in the world, and in his capacity to share in government. But
while Jacksonian democracy demanded these rights, it was also loyal to
leadership as the very name implies. It was ready to follow to the
uttermost the man in whom it placed its trust, whether the hero were
frontier fighter or president, and it even rebuked and limited its own
legislative representatives and recalled its senators when they ran
counter to their chosen executive. Jacksonian democracy was essentially
rural. It was based on the good fellowship and genuine social feeling of
the frontier, in which classes and inequalities of fortune played
little part. But it did not demand equality of condition, for there was
abundance of natural resources and the belief that the self-made man had
a right to his success in the free competition which western life
afforded, was as prominent in their thought as was the love of
democracy. On the other hand, they viewed governmental restraints with
suspicion as a limitation on their right to work out their own
individuality.

For the banking institutions and capitalists of the East they had an
instinctive antipathy. Already they feared that the "money power" as
Jackson called it, was planning to make hewers of wood and drawers of
water of the common people.

In this view they found allies among the labor leaders of the East, who
in the same period began their fight for better conditions of the wage
earner. These Locofoco