efforts were made even to continue in a different form the Established Church against which the dissenting frontiersmen had fought for more than a century.  In the other Atlantic States where such distinctions were not made in framing their constitutions, the conservatives resorted to other schemes to keep the power in the hands of the rich planters near the sea.  When the Appalachian Americans awoke to the situation then they were against a stone wall.  The so-called rights of man were subjected to restrictions which in our day could not exist.  The right to hold office and to vote were not dependent upon manhood qualifications but on a white skin, religious opinions, the payment of taxes, and wealth.  In South Carolina a person desiring to vote must believe in the existence of a God, in a future state of reward and punishment, and have a freehold of fifty acres of land.  In Virginia the right of suffrage was restricted to freeholders possessing one hundred acres of land.  Senators in North Carolina had to own three hundred acres of land; representatives in South Carolina were required to have a 500 acre freehold and 10 Negroes; and in Georgia 250 acres and support the Protestant religion.[18] In all of these slave States, suffering from such unpopular government, the mountaineers developed into a reform party persistently demanding that the sense of the people be taken on the question of calling together their representatives to remove certain defects from the constitutions.  It was the contest between the aristocrats and the progressive westerner.  The aristocrats’ idea of government was developed from the “English Scion—­the liberty of kings, lords, and commons, with different grades of society acting independently of all foreign powers.”  The ideals of the westerners were principally those of the Scotch-Irish, working for “civil liberty in fee simple, and an open road to civil honors, secured to the poorest and feeblest members of society."[19]

The eastern planters, of course, regarded this as an attack on their system and fearlessly denounced these rebellious wild men of the hills.  In taking this position, these conservatives brought down upon their heads all of the ire that the frontiersmen had felt for the British prior to the American Revolution.  The easterners were regarded in the mountains as a party bent upon establishing in this country a regime equally as oppressive as the British government.  The frontiersmen saw in slavery the cause of the whole trouble.  They, therefore, hated the institution and endeavored more than ever to keep their section open to free labor.  They hated the slave as such, not as a man.  On the early southern frontier there was more prejudice against the slaveholder than against the Negro.[20] There was the feeling that this was not a country for a laboring class so undeveloped as the African slaves, then being brought to these shores to serve as a basis for a government differing radically from that in quest of which the frontiersmen had left their homes in Europe.