t lack truth, but perhaps it somewhat smacks of
fashionable eighteenth-century philosophy. And assuredly no region on
the frontier was more favored than the famous Shenandoah Valley. Little
question that conditions were less idyllic in other places. Missionaries
who preached the Great Awakening in western Pennsylvania and in the
Southern back country were often enough appalled by evidence of
ignorance and low morals. And on the far outer frontier at White Woman's
Creek, Mary Harris, still recalling after forty years' exile that "they
used to be very religious in New England," told Christopher Gist in 1751
that "she wondered how white men could be so wicked as she had seen them
in these woods." Neither the lyric phrase of Burnaby nor the harsh
verdict of Mary Harris fitly describes those interior communities that
stretched from Maine to Georgia. But there, as elsewhere, doubtless, the
practice of men's lives, even among the frontier Puritans of New
England, or the German Protestants and Scotch Presbyterians of the
Middle and Southern colonies, often fell short of their best ideals.
Leaving the sheltered existence of long-settled communities, set down on
a dangerous Indian frontier or at best in a virgin country, where
customary restraints were relaxed, where churches were few and schools
often unknown, where action more readily followed hard on desire and
men's will made all the majesty of the law, the aggressive primary
instincts had freer play, and society could not but take on a strain of
the primitive. Even more than the original colonists, these dwellers on
the second frontier caught something of the wild freedom of the
wilderness, something of the ruthlessness of nature, something also of
its self-sufficiency, something of its somber and emotional influence.

Between this primitive agricultural democracy of the interior and the
commercial and landed aristocracy of the coast, separated geographically
and differing widely in interests and ideals, conflict was inevitable.
When, in 1780, Thomas Jefferson said that "19,000 men below the Falls
give law to more than 30,000 living in other parts of the state," he was
proclaiming that opposition between the older and the newer America
which found expression in provincial politics from the middle of the
eighteenth century, which made a part of the Revolution, and which in
every period since has been so decisive a feature of our history. In the
eighteenth century the frontier