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.[34]

The development of the movement in these mountains was more than
interesting. During the first quarter of the nineteenth century there were
many ardent anti-slavery leaders in the mountains. These were not
particularly interested in the Negro but were determined to keep that soil
for freedom that the settlers might there realize the ideals for which
they had left their homes in Europe. When the industrial revolution with
the attendant rise of the plantation cotton culture made abolition in the
South improbable, some of them became colonizationists, hoping to destroy