In this congenial atmosphere the eastern people were content to dwell. the East had the West in mind and said much about its inexhaustible resources, but with the exception of obtaining there grants of land nothing definite toward the conquest of this section was done because of the handicap of slavery which precluded the possibility of a rapid expansion of the plantation group in the slave States.  Separated thus by high ranges of mountains which prevented the unification of the interests of the sections, the West was left for conquest by a hardy race of European dissenters who were capable of a more rapid growth.[2] these were the Germans and Scotch-Irish with a sprinkling of Huguenots, Quakers and poor whites who had served their time as indentured servants in the east.[3] The unsettled condition of Europe during its devastating wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries caused many of foreign stocks to seek homes in America where they hoped to realize political liberty and religious freedom.  Many of these Germans first settled in the mountainous district of Pennsylvania and Maryland and then migrated later to the lower part of the Shenandoah Valley, while the Scotch-Irish took possession of the upper part of that section.  Thereafter the Shenandoah Valley became a thoroughfare for a continuous movement of these immigrants toward the south into the uplands and mountains of the Carolinas, Georgia, Kentucky, and Tennessee.[4]

Among the Germans were Mennonites, Lutherans, and Moravians, all of whom believed in individual freedom, the divine right of secular power, and personal responsibility.[5] The strongest stock among these immigrants, however, were the Scotch-Irish, “a God-fearing, Sabbath-keeping, covenant-adhering, liberty-loving, and tyrant-hating race,” which had formed its ideals under the influence of philosophy of John Calvin, John Knox, Andrew Melville, and George Buchanan.  By these thinkers they had been taught to emphasize equality, freedom of conscience, and political liberty.  These stocks differed somewhat from each other, but they were equally attached to practical religion, homely virtues, and democratic institutions.[7] Being a kind and beneficent class with a tenacity for the habits and customs of their fathers, they proved to be a valuable contribution to the American stock.  As they had no riches every man was to be just what he could make himself.  Equality and brotherly love became their dominant traits.  Common feeling and similarity of ideals made them one people whose chief characteristic was individualism.[8] Differing thus so widely from the easterners they were regarded by the aristocrats as “Men of new blood” and “Wild Irish,” who formed a barrier over which “none ventured to leap and would venture to settle among."[9] No aristocrat figuring conspicuously in the society of the East, where slavery made men socially unequal, could feel comfortable on the frontier, where freedom from competition with such labor prevented the development of caste.