Its most
striking manifestation occurred not in Kentucky, but in what is now the
State of Tennessee; and was aimed not at the United States, but at the
parent State of North Carolina.
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.
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