democracy, its spiritual
qualities, we shall more easily understand them. These men were
emotional. As they wrested their clearing from the woods and from the
savages who surrounded them, as they expanded that clearing and saw the
beginnings of commonwealths, where only little communities had been, and
as they saw these commonwealths touch hands with each other along the
great course of the Mississippi River, they became enthusiastically
optimistic and confident of the continued expansion of this democracy.
They had faith in themselves and their destiny. And that optimistic
faith was responsible both for their confidence in their own ability to
rule and for the passion for expansion. They looked to the future.
"Others appeal to history: an American appeals to prophecy; and with
Malthus in one hand and a map of the back country in the other, he
boldly defies us to a comparison with America as she is to be," said a
London periodical in 1821. Just because, perhaps, of the usual isolation
of their lives, when they came together in associations whether of the
camp meeting or of the political gathering, they felt the influence of a
common emotion and enthusiasm. Whether Scotch-Irish Presbyterian,
Baptist, or Methodist, these people saturated their religion and their
politics with feeling. Both the stump and the pulpit were centers of
energy, electric cells capable of starting widespreading fires. They
_felt_ both their religion and their democracy, and were ready to fight
for it.

This democracy was one that involved a real feeling of social
comradeship among its widespread members. Justice Catron, who came from
Arkansas to the Supreme Court in the presidency of Jackson, said: "The
people of New Orleans and St. Louis are next neighbors--if we desire to
know a man in any quarter of the union we inquire of our next neighbor,
who but the other day lived by him." Exaggerated as this is, it
nevertheless had a surprising measure of truth for the Middle West as
well. For the Mississippi River was the great highway down which groups
of pioneers like Abraham Lincoln, on their rafts and flat boats, brought
the little neighborhood surplus. After the steamboat came to the western
waters the voyages up and down by merchants and by farmers shifting
their homes, brought people into contact with each other over wide
areas.

This enlarged neighborhood democracy was determined not by a reluctant
admission that under the law one man is as goo