Every bold, lawless, ambitious leader among the frontier folk dreamed of wresting from the Spaniard some portion of his rich and ill-guarded domain.
Relations of the Frontiersmen to the Central Government.
It was not alone the attitude of the frontiersmen towards Spain that was novel, and based upon a situation for which there was little precedent.
Their relations with one another, with their brethren of the seaboard, and with the Federal Government, likewise had to be adjusted without much chance of profiting by antecedent experience.

Many phases of these relations between the people who stayed at home, and those who wandered off to make homes, between the frontiersmen as they formed young States, and the Central Government representing the old States, were entirely new, and were ill-understood by both parties.

Truths which all citizens have now grown to accept as axiomatic were then seen clearly only by the very greatest men, and by most others were seen dimly, if at all.

What is now regarded as inevitable and proper was then held as something abnormal, unnatural, and greatly to be dreaded.

The men engaged in building new commonwealths did not, as yet, understand that they owed the Union as much as did the dwellers in the old States.