e Kennebec, Concord and Hinsdale on the Merrimac and the
Connecticut, Pittsfield and Great Barrington on the Housatonic--which
formed a newer New England, less lettered and scriptural than the old,
where class distinctions were little known, where contact with the
Indian and the wilderness had added a secular ruthlessness and ingenuity
to the harsh Puritan temper, and where the individual, freed from an
effective "village moral police," learned in the rough school of nature
a new kind of conformity unknown to the ancient Hebrew code.

In the Middle and Southern colonies, even more than in New England,
expansion of population into the interior was a notable feature of the
eighteenth century. In 1700 the estate of William Byrd at the James
River Falls was on the Indian frontier; North Carolina was unoccupied
south of Albemarle Sound or west of the Nottaway River; there were few
settlers in South Carolina north of the Santee, or south or west of it
except the Charleston planters who had appropriated all the land within
sixty miles of the coast and within twenty of every navigable river.
Sixty years later the unoccupied coast regions were settled, and the
surplus population of Virginia and Maryland, excluded from the
tide-water by the engrossers of great estates, or oppressed by its
restricted social conditions, had occupied the cheap lands of eastern
North Carolina, or, following the James and the Rappahannock, had
settled in the up-country between the "Fall Line" and the Blue Ridge.
Cattle-raisers, learning from Indian traders of the fertile interior,
followed the trails with their "cowpens," which in turn gave place to
permanent farms. In this back country, the great plantation was not
often found, and slavery played little part. There were few superiors
where farms were comparatively small, and where most men worked with
their hands and consumed provisions raised by their own labor. Of those
who came from the older settlements to occupy the up-country, many were
"such as have been transported hither as servants, and being out of
their time ... settle themselves where land is to be taken up that will
produce the necessities of life with little labor." William Byrd
described with engaging wit the ne'er-do-wells who maintained a
precarious existence below the Dividing Line; and Governor Spotswood
deplored the shiftless servants who lived on the Virginia frontier. Yet
we may suppose that freedom often transformed the idle bo