market found its strongest support beyond the Alleghenies. Internal
improvements and lower rates of transportation were essential to the
prosperity of the westerners. Largely a debtor class, in need of
capital, credit, and an expansion of the currency, they resented
attempts to restrain the reckless state banking which their optimism
fostered.

But the political ideals and actions of the west are explained by
social quite as much as by economic forces. It was certain that this
society, where equality and individualism flourished, where
assertive democracy was supreme, where impatience with the old order
of things was a ruling passion, would demand control of the
government, would resent the rule of the trained statesmen and
official classes, and would fight nominations by congressional
caucus and the continuance of presidential dynasties. Besides its
susceptibility to change, the west had generated, from its Indian
fighting, forest-felling, and expansion, a belligerency and a
largeness of outlook with regard to the nation's territorial
destiny. As the pioneer, widening the ring-wall of his clearing in
the midst of the stumps and marshes of the wilderness, had a vision
of the lofty buildings and crowded streets of a future city, so the
west as a whole developed ideals of the future of the common man,
and of the grandeur and expansion of the nation.

The west was too new a section to have developed educational
facilities to any large extent. The pioneers' poverty, as well as
the traditions of the southern interior from which they so largely
came, discouraged extensive expenditures for public schools.
[Footnote: McMaster, United States, V., 370-372.] In Kentucky and
Tennessee the more prosperous planters had private tutors, often New