sunion movements
did not gather full force until later, and are properly to be considered
in connection with post-revolutionary events.] they considered the
Confederation as being literally only a lax league of friendship.

Character of the Pioneer Population.

Up to the close of the Revolutionary contest the settlers who were
building homes and States beyond the Alleghanies formed a homogeneous
backwoods population. The wood-choppers, game hunters, and Indian
fighters, who dressed and lived alike, were the typical pioneers. They
were a shifting people. In every settlement the tide ebbed and flowed.
Some of the new-comers would be beaten in the hard struggle for
existence, and would drift back to whence they had come. Of those who
succeeded some would take root in the land, and others would move still
farther into the wilderness. Thus each generation rolled westward,
leaving its children at the point where the wave stopped no less than at
that where it started. The descendants of the victors of King's Mountain
are as likely to be found in the Rockies as in the Alleghanies.

With the close of the war came an enormous increase in the tide of
immigration; and many of the new-comers were of a very different stamp
from their predecessors. The main current flowed towards Kentucky, and
gave an entirely different character to its population. The two typical
figures in Kentucky so far had been Clark and Boon, but after the close
of the Revolution both of them sank into unimportance, whereas the
careers of Sevier and Robertson had only begun. The disappearance of the
two former from active life was partly accidental and partly a resultant
of the forces that assimilated Kentucky so much more rapidly than
Tennessee to the conditions prevailing in the old States. Kentucky was
the best known and the most accessible of the western regions; within
her own borders she was now comparatively safe from serious Indian
invasion, and the tide of immigration naturally flowed thither. So
strong was the current that, within a dozen years, it had completely
swamped the original settlers, and had changed Kentucky from a peculiar
pioneer and backwoods commonwealth into a State differing no more from
Virginia, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina than these differed from one
another.

The men who gave the tone to this great flood of new-comers were the
gentry from the sea-coast country, the planters, the young lawyers, the
men of means who had b