It was so much of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont,
etc., translated into the broader and freer West. It has been
said that the Yankee, like a certain vegetable, heads best when
transplanted. It was the old thing over, under new and trying
circumstances. The same old ideas and notions, habits of thought and
life; poor, economical and thrifty folk, with the same reverence
for religion and law, love of education, and restless desire for
improvement, and to better the present condition. In the West the
Yankee developed his best qualities in the second generation. He
became a little straighter and less angular, and wider between the
eyes. In the first generation he lived out his life scarcely refracted
by the new atmosphere. This crop still stood firm and hardy on the
Reserve, and they often turned homesick eyes, talked lovingly and
lingeringly of "down country," as they all called loved and cherished
New England. Most of the first settlers were poor, but hardy and
enterprising. The two last qualities were absolutely necessary to take
them through the long, wearisome journey to Ohio, the then far West.
They took up lands, built cabins, and forced a subsistence from the
newly-cleared, stumpy virgin soil. This homogeneous people constituted
a practical and thorough democracy. Their social relations were based
on personal equality, varied only by the accident of superior talents,
address or enterprise, and as yet but little modified by wealth or its
adventitious circumstances.
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