was the home of a primitive radicalism.
Where offenses were elemental and easily detected, legal technicalities
and the chicanery of courts seemed but devices for the support of idle
lawyers; where debtors were most numerous and specie most scarce, few
could understand why paper money would not prove a panacea for poverty;
where every man earned his own bread and where submission to the
inevitable was the only kind of conformity that was deemed essential,
slavery and a state church were thought to be but the bulwark of class
privilege and the tyranny of kings. After the French wars the interior
communities of the Middle and Southern colonies, finding themselves
unfairly represented in the assemblies, were first made aware that their
interests were little likely to be seriously regarded either by the
king's ministers or the merchants and landlords who shaped legislation
at Williamsburg, Philadelphia, or New York. For defending the border in
the desolating war that drove the French out of America, it now seemed
that they were to be rewarded by land laws made for the rich, an
administration of justice burdensome for sparsely settled communities, a
money system that penalized them for being debtors, or taxes levied for
the support of a church which they never entered. And so, before the
Revolution opened, the Western imagination had conjured up the specter
of a corrupt and effete "East": land of money-changers and self-styled
aristocrats and a pliant clergy, the haunt of lawyers and hangers-on,
proper dwelling-place of "servants" and the beaten slave: a land of
cities, scorning the provincial West, and bent on exploiting its
laborious and upright people. And who could doubt that men who bought
their clothes in London would readily crook the knee to kings? Who could
question that special privilege in the colonies was fostered by the
laws of trade, or that aristocracy in America was the reward of
submission to England?

III

The appearance before the Revolution of class and sectional conflict
within the colonies was no more incompatible then than it has been since
with a growing sense of solidarity against the outside world. And in
developing this sense of Americanism, this national consciousness, the
frontier was itself an important influence. Physiographically separated
from the coast region, untouched by its social traditions, often hostile
to its political activities, the people of the back country had but
little of t