Western Democracy.
The West has moulded our national character even more than New England with her far-famed and narrow Puritanism; for the West has been the cauldron into which the nations of the world have poured their streams of immigrants and from which has come the national type. This amalgamation of character began in the oldest West, when Irishmen, Englishmen, Scotch-Irish, and Germans settled in the region between the falls of the seaboard rivers and the mountains, stretching from Vermont to Georgia. Here was moulded the new type of man, who was to populate the greater West across the mountain ridges. In an environment of primeval conditions, in the struggle with the Indians and the forests there was developed a self-reliance of character, differing in many ways from any single European type. This new man of the West admired the doer of deeds, condemned all reliance on traditional or family position, scorned State authority, and loved independence. In the soil of the new West, created by these men, the doctrines of Rousseau flourished luxuriantly. All unconscious, the frontiersmen were putting into practice the most radical philosophy of the French Revolution. It was on the frontier that those conservative traditions of Europe, which lingered years afterwards in the more settled East, were swept away, and American democracy was really bred. It was on the border of the older frontier that the spokesman of this democracy, Thomas Jefferson, lived; and it was out of the new West that the hero of democracy, Andrew Jackson, came.