the Civil War. These transmontane counties of Virginia were, in
their political activity during our period, rather to be reckoned
with the west than with the south. Thus the southern seaboard
experienced the need of protecting the interests of its slave-
holding planters against the free democracy of the interior of the
south itself, and learned how to safeguard the minority. This
experience was now to serve the south, when, having attained unity
by the spread of slavery into the interior, it found itself as a
section in the same relation to the Union which the slave-holding
tidewater area had held towards the more populous up-country of the
south.

The unification of the section is one of the most important features
of the period. Not only had the south been divided into opposing
areas, as we have seen, but even its population was far from
homogeneous. By the period of this volume, however, English, French-
Huguenots, Scotch-Irish, and Germans had become assimilated into one
people, and the Negroes, who in 1830 in the South Atlantic states
numbered over a million and a half in a white population of not much
over two millions, were diffusing themselves throughout the area of
the section except in West Virginia and the mountains.
Contemporaneously the pioneer farming type of the interior of the
section was replaced by the planter type. [Footnote: Niles'
Register, XXI., 132; cf. p. 55 below.] As cotton-planting and slave-
holding advanced into the interior counties of the old southern
states, the free farmers were obliged either to change to the
plantation economy and buy slaves, or to sell their lands and
migrate. Large numbers of them, particularly in the Carolinas, were
Quakers or Baptists, whose religious scruples combined with their
agricultural habits to make this change obnoxious. This upland