continental altitude with its apex in New England, bounded on the
east by the Atlantic, and on the west by the Appalachian range,
lay the settlements, divided into two zones--tidewater and
piedmont. As no break occurred in the great mountain system south
of the Hudson and Mohawk valleys, the difficulties of cutting a
passage through the towering wall of living green long proved an
effective obstacle to the crossing of the grim mountain barrier.

In the beginning the settlements gradually extended westward from
the coast in irregular outline, the indentations taking form
around such natural centers of attraction as areas of fertile
soil, frontier posts, mines, salt-springs, and stretches of
upland favorable for grazing. After a time a second advance of
settlement was begun in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Maryland,
running in a southwesterly direction along the broad terraces to
the east of the Appalachian Range, which in North Carolina lies
as far as two hundred and fifty miles from the sea. The Blue
Ridge in Virginia and a belt of pine barrens in North Carolina
were hindrances to this advance, but did not entirely check it.
This second streaming of the population thrust into the long,
narrow wedge of the piedmont zone a class of people differing in
spirit and in tendency from their more aristocratic and
complacent neighbors to the east.

These settlers of the Valley of Virginia and the North Carolina
piedmont region--English, Scotch-Irish, Germans, Scotch, Irish,
Welsh, and a few French--were the first pioneers of the Old
Southwest. From the joint efforts of two strata of population,
geographically, socially, and economically distinct--tidewater
and piedmont, Old South and New South--originated and flowered