pine barrens, skirting the "fall line" from fifty to one hundred
miles from the coast, divided the region of tidewater planters of
these states from the small farmers of the up-country. This
population of the interior had entered the region in the course of
the second half of the eighteenth century. Scotch-Irishmen and
Germans passed down the Great Valley from Pennsylvania into
Virginia, and through the gaps in the Blue Ridge out to the Piedmont
region of the Carolinas, while contemporaneously other streams from
Charleston advanced to meet them. [Footnote: Bassett, in Am. Hist.
Assoc., Report 1894, p. 141; Schaper, ibid., 1900, I., 317;
Phillips, ibid., 1901, II., 88.] Thus, at the close of the
eighteenth century, the south was divided into two areas presenting
contrasted types of civilization. On the one side were the planters,
raising their staple crops of tobacco, rice, and indigo, together
with some cultivation of the cereals. To this region belonged the
slaves. On the other side was this area of small farmers, raising
livestock, wheat, and corn under the same conditions of pioneer
farming as characterized the interior of Pennsylvania.

From the second half of the eighteenth century down to the time with
which this volume deals, there was a persistent struggle between the
planters of the coast, who controlled the wealth of the region, and
the free farmers of the interior of Maryland, Virginia, the
Carolinas, and Georgia. The tidewater counties retained the
political power which they already possessed before this tide of
settlement flowed into the back-country. Refusing in most of these
states to reapportion on the basis of numbers, they protected their
slaves and their wealth against the dangers of a democracy
interested in internal improvements and capable of imposing a tax
upon slave property in order to promote their ends. In Virginia, in