PROBLEMS IN AMERICAN HISTORY 189 



board. In its social structure it was more like Pennsylvania than the 

 Southern commonwealths with which it was politically connected. 

 It struggled for just representation in the legislatures, and for ade- 

 quate local self-government. The domestic history of the South 

 is for many years the history of a contest between these eastern 

 and western sections. When the cotton belt, with slavery as its 

 labor element, spread across this Piedmont area, the region became 

 assimilated to the seaboard. The small farmers, raising crops by the 

 labor of their own families, were compelled either to adjust them- 

 selves to the plantation economy, or to migrate. The process of this 

 transformation and its effects constitute a problem not yet worked 

 out in details. A migration of small farmers from the Piedmont 

 across the Ohio and into the Gulf region followed. Many had moral 

 and religious objections to slavery, many were unable to change 

 their agricultural habits to meet the new conditions, many lacked 

 the necessary capital for a slave plantation and preferred to accept 

 the price of their lands offered by the planters, and to migrate to the 

 public lands where they could continue their old industrial and 

 social type of society. In this expansion of the South into the Ohio 

 Valley and the Gulf Plains we have a colonization demanding study. 

 Indeed, the whole industrial and social history of the South has been 

 obscured by the emphasis placed on the political aspects of the 

 slavery struggle. We need a history of the plantation in its various 

 areas and at different periods. Such a study would give us the key 

 to Southern history. The rise and fall of cotton values, the price 

 of slaves, the agrarian history of the South, the relation of its polit- 

 ical demands to these conditions, the distribution of rival political 

 parties in the region, these and similar topics would come into 

 prominence if the historian should select for treatment the Southern 

 provinces of the Atlantic Plains, the Piedmont and the Gulf Plains, 

 their interaction, and the shifting centre of political power between 

 them. 



It is unnecessary to point out that similar advantages would come 

 from attempts to explain the evolution of the social structure of the 

 Lake and Prairie Plains, the Great Plains, the Pacific Coast, etc. 

 We should study the contact of whites and Indians; the history of 

 the occupation of the public lands in these provinces; the move- 

 ment into them of settlers from other sections; the industrial trans- 

 formations of the provinces from primitive farming up to the 

 complex economic conditions of to-day; the development and in- 

 fluence of railroad systems; the rise of cities; the rise of peculiar 

 views of life in the respective sections. Such topics carry with them 

 a rich freightage of problems, essential to explain our own history 

 and capable of casting important light upon the evolution of society 

 as a whole. 



