In Kentucky the old frontiersmen were losing their grip on the governmental machinery of the district.  The great flood of immigration tended to swamp the pioneers; and the leading parts in the struggle for statehood were played by men who had come to the country about the close of the Revolutionary War, and who were often related by ties of kinship to the leaders of the Virginia legislatures and conventions.

    The Frontiersmen of the Upper Tennessee.

On the waters of the upper Tennessee matters were entirely different.  Immigration had been slower, and the people who did come in were usually of the type of those who had first built their stockaded hamlets on the banks of the Watauga.  The leaders of the early pioneers were still the leaders of the community, in legislation as in warfare.  Moreover North Carolina was a much weaker and more turbulent State than Virginia, so that a separatist movement ran less risk of interference.  Chains of forest-clad mountains severed the State proper from its western outposts.  Many of the pioneer leaders were from Virginia—­backwoodsmen who had drifted south along the trough-like valleys.  These of course felt little loyalty to North Carolina.  The others, who were North Carolinians by birth, had cast in their lot, for good or for evil, with the frontier communities, and were inclined to side with them in any contest with the parent State.

    North Carolina Indifferent to Her Western Settlements.

North Carolina herself was at first quite as anxious to get rid of the frontiersmen as they were to go.  Not only was the central authority much weaker than in Virginia, but the people were less proud of their State and less jealously anxious to see it grow in power and influence.  The over-mountain settlers had increased in numbers so rapidly that four counties had been erected for them; one, Davidson, taking in the Cumberland district, and the other three, Washington, Sullivan, and Greene, including what is now eastern Tennessee.  All these counties sent representatives to the North Carolina legislature, at Hillsborough; but they found that body little disposed to consider the needs of the remote western colonists.

The State was very poor, and regarded the western settlements as mere burdensome sources of expense.  In the innumerable Indian wars debts were contracted by the little pioneer communities with the faith that the State would pay them; but the payment was made grudgingly or not at all, and no measures were taken to provide for the protection of the frontier in the future.  No provisions were made for the extension of the jurisdiction of the State courts over the western counties, and they became a refuge for outlaws, who could be dealt with only as the Indians were—­that is, by the settlers acting on their own initiative, without the sanction of law.  In short the settlers were left to themselves, to work out their own salvation as they best might, in peace or war; and as they bore most of the burdens of independence, they began to long for the privileges.