These
mountaineers coming later to the colonies had to go to the hills and
mountains because the first comers from Europe had taken up the land near
the sea. Being of the German and Scotch-Irish Presbyterian stock, they had
ideals differing widely from those of the seaboard slaveholders.[31] The
mountaineers believed in "civil liberty in fee simple, and an open road to
civil honors, secured to the poorest and feeblest members of society." The
eastern element had for their ideal a government of interests for the
people. They believed in liberty but that of kings, lords, and commons,
not of all the people.[32]
Settled along the Appalachian highland, these new stocks continued to
differ from those dwelling near the sea, especially on the slavery
question.[33] The natural endowment of the mountainous section made
slavery there unprofitable and the mountaineers bore it grievously that
they were attached to commonwealths dominated by the radical pro-slavery
element of the South, who sacrificed all other interests to safeguard
those of the peculiar institution. There developed a number of clashes in
all of the legislatures and constitutional conventions of the Southern
States along the Atlantic, but in every case the defenders of the
interests of slavery won. When, therefore, slaves with the assistance of
anti-slavery mountaineers began to escape to the free States, they had
little difficulty in making their way through the Appalachian region,
where the love of freedom had so set the people against slavery that
although some of them yielded to the inevitable sin, they never made any
systematic effort to protect it.
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