[Illustration: Area of German Settlements and Frontier Line in 1775.]
The description does not 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 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?
