188 HISTORY OF AMERICA 



to the much studied earlier colonization of the Puritans in New 

 England proper. These later colonists carried New England men, 

 institutions, and ideas into regions which far excelled the area from 

 which they came in size, in productiveness, and ultimately in political 

 influence. The area of the northern counties of Illinois entered 

 by New England settlers constitutes in itself a level region of solid 

 fertility equal to the combined area of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, 

 and Connecticut, with all their unproductive hills. The influence of 

 New England upon the political history of the Middle West, and 

 through it upon the nation, has been profound. Its effect in forming 

 the social and moral ideas of the central region of the republic can 

 hardly be overstated. But we really know but little about this 

 colonization compared with the detailed information which historical 

 investigators have given us about the location of the homes of the 

 Pilgrims. We cannot even state with approximate correctness the 

 periods when the various Western states received their largest 

 numbers of New England settlers. Nor has the replacement of this 

 New England stock in the parent region by immigration been ade- 

 quately studied. We shall not understand the New England of to-day 

 until we have a fuller account of the industrial, social, political, and 

 religious effect of this transformation of New England by replace- 

 ment of its labor population and by the revolution in its industrial 

 life, with the accompaniments of social stratification, loss of homo- 

 geneity, and changed ideals in respect to democracy. 



Not to dwell too long upon this region, let us turn for a moment 

 to indicate a few of the problems that arise when the South is con- 

 sidered from this same point of view. The term South as a sectional 

 designation is misleading. Through a long period of our history the 

 "Solid South" did not exist. We must bear in mind not only the 

 differences between the various states of the Southern seaboard, but 

 also the more fundamental differences between the up-country (the 

 Piedmont region) and the Atlantic Plains. The interior of the South 

 needs treatment as a unit. State historians of Virginia and the 

 Carolinas, for example, recognize the fundamental contrasts in 

 physiography, colonization, stock, and economic and social charac- 

 teristics, between the lowlands and the uplands in their respective 

 states. But as yet no one has attacked the problem of the settle- 

 ment, development, and influence of the Piedmont Plains as a 

 whole. This peninsula, as we may conceive it, thrust down through 

 the Great Valley from Pennsylvania, between the mountains and the 

 seaboard, the land that received the German, Scotch-Irish, and 

 poorer white English settlers, developed, in the second half of the 

 eighteenth century, an independent social, economic, and political 

 character. It was a region of free labor upon small farms. It was 

 devoted to cereals rather than to the great staple crops of the sea- 



