32 NATHANIEL SOUTHGATE SEALER 



in all the essentials of society than New York and New Orleans 

 now are. There are sundry places in the world where bounds of 

 no more geographic value separate people somewhat diverse 

 in speech and tradition, but none known to me where neighbor- 

 ing folk are so absolutely parted as were these people during the 

 first six decades of the last century. They had nothing in com- 

 mon but their joint share in the English blood and speech and 

 a certain theoretical likeness of religion. Institutionally, they 

 were widely parted. The one represented the motives of the 

 nineteenth century, the other of the sixteenth. For there is 

 essentially all that difference between the motives of free com- 

 munities, where in the one all are of equal rights before the law, 

 and in the other slavery holds. 



The separation of the two communities on either side of the 

 Ohio was intensified by certain accidents of the settlement of 

 this part of the country in the eighteenth century. The northern 

 section had been mainly sold by the United States to settlers 

 coming from a wide range of country, mostly from the north- 

 eastern states. Although in some part owned by the govern- 

 ment of Virginia and sold to settlers in its patent system, most 

 of the territory had been laid out, in the usual manner, into 

 townships, so that there were no large connected holdings; 

 while in Kentucky the Virginia system of land grants or patents, 

 without the preliminary sectionizing process, was adopted ex- 

 cept for the small district to the west of the Tennessee River 

 known as the Jackson Purchase, which was secured after the 

 colony acquired its character and never had any influence on its 

 social system. The result of this difference in the way in which 

 the territory passed into private ownership was, that while in 

 the district north of the Ohio River there were few holdings 

 exceeding a square mile or six hundred and forty acres, and the 

 normal size of farms was much less, being more commonly a 

 half or a quarter of that amount, in Kentucky the larger part 

 of the field had been distributed in tracts averaging several 

 thousand acres. Under this patent system there grew up a form 



