Carl Lotus Becker

Beginnings of the American People Carl Lotus Becker

A mtterdam and the Catbolios of Maryland, oould hardly be expected to merge into a single state without violent struggle. Nor oould the hundreds of thousands of Scotch Calvinists, militant enemies of England and all her ways, who seized and held the fex -tile highlands of the Middle and Southern colonies, submit quietly to any program not of their own making. And again, in the thirties and fifties of the nineteenth century, millions of people speaking a strange tongue sought asylum in the Mississippi Valley an isokted region whose early inhabitants, of whatsoever national strain, were strongly inclined to secession or revolt against the older Eastern communities. Never was a nation composed of more diverse ethnic groups and elements. And the geographical environments of these groups and segments of older civilizations were quite as dissimilar as those among which the nations of Europe developed. The cold and bleak hills of New England no more resemble the rich river bottoms of the South than the sand dunes of Prussia resemble the fertile plains of A ndalusia. Geographical differences tend to produce economic differences. If to these be added inherited antagonisms like those of Puritan and Cav alier, one wonders how the East and the South of the United States ever became integral parts of one great social unit. A dding to this apparent impossibility the new antagonism of the West toward the Eastas a whole, the historian wonders at the statecraft that oould hold the diverse elements together till certain economic and social factors became powerful enough to conquer in a long and bloody war.
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)

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