The natural endowment of the West was so different from that of the East that the former did not attract the people who settled in the Tidewater.  The mountaineers were in the midst of natural meadows, steep hills, narrow valleys of hilly soil, and inexhaustible forests.  In the East tobacco and corn were the staple commodities.  Cattle and hog raising became profitable west of the mountains, while various other employments which did not require so much vacant land were more popular near the sea.  Besides, when the dwellers near the coast sought the cheap labor which the slave furnished the mountaineers encouraged the influx of freemen.  It is not strange then that we have no record of an early flourishing slave plantation beyond the mountains.  Kercheval gives an account of a settlement by slaves and overseers on the large Carter grant situated on the west side of the Shenandoah, but it seems that the settlement did not prosper as such, for it soon passed into the hands of the Burwells and the Pages.[10]

The rise of slavery in the Tidewater section, however, established the going of those settlers in the direction of government for the people.  The East began with indentured servants but soon found the system of slavery more profitable.  It was not long before the blacks constituted the masses of the laboring population,[11] while on the expiration of their term of service the indentured servants went west and helped to democratize the frontier.  Caste too was secured by the peculiar land tenure of the East.  The king and the proprietors granted land for small sums on feudal terms.  The grantees in their turn settled these holdings in fee tail on the oldest son in accordance with the law of primogeniture.  This produced a class described by Jefferson who said:  “There were then aristocrats, half-breeds, pretenders, a solid independent yeomanry, looking askance at those above, yet not venturing to jostle them, and last and lowest, a seculum of beings called overseers, the most abject, degraded and unprincipled race, always cap in hand to the Dons who employed them for furnishing material for the exercise of their price."[12]

In the course of colonial development the people of the mountains were usually referred to as frontiersmen dwelling in the West.  This “West” was for a number of years known as the region beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains and later beyond the Alleghenies.  A more satisfactory dividing line, however, is the historical line of demarcation between the East and West which moved toward the mountains in the proportion that the western section became connected with the East and indoctrinated by its proslavery propagandists.  In none of these parts, however, not even far south, were the eastern people able to bring the frontiersmen altogether around to their way of thinking.  Their ideals and environment caused them to have differing opinions as to the extent, character, and foundations of local self-government, differing conceptions of