This fact of itself tended to make the West homogeneous and to keep it a unit with a peculiar character of its own, neither Northern nor Southern in political and social tendency.

It was the middle West which was first settled, and the middle West stamped its peculiar characteristics on all the growing communities beyond the Alleghanies.

Inasmuch as west of the mountains the Northern communities were less distinctively Northern and the Southern communities less distinctively Southern than was the case with the Eastern States on the seaboard, it followed naturally that, considered with reference to other sections of the Union, the West formed a unit, possessing marked characteristics of its own.

A distinctive type of character was developed west of the Alleghanies, and for the first generation the typical representatives of this Western type were to be found in Kentucky and Tennessee.
The Northwest.
The settlement of the Northwest had been begun under influences which in the end were to separate it radically from the Southwest.

It was settled under Governmental supervision, and because of and in accordance with Governmental action; and it was destined ultimately to receive the great mass of its immigrants from the Northeast; but as yet these two influences had not become strong enough to sunder the frontiersmen north of the Ohio by any sharp line from those south of the Ohio.