Page:Southern Life in Southern Literature.djvu/414

396 never impressed himself upon the South as his neighbors on the Atlantic coast have done. He seems to hold partly by the Georgian and partly by the Virginian (with whom he is often connected by ties of blood), and has many of the best qualities of both. He is either a "limbered-up" Virginian or a mellowed Georgian. He is also a much less strenuous type of man than his neighbor to the west of him, although in their dates of settlement and in their physiographical features the two states do not present striking points of difference, As for the Mississippian, he too possesses well-defined but mixed characteristics. He seems to hold by the South Carolinian on the one hand, and by the Tennesseean on the other, which is another way of saying that he is a Southwesterner whose natural democratic proclivities have been somewhat modified by institutions and customs of an aristocratic cast. On his large plantation, amid his hundreds of slaves, it was a matter of course that he should develop some of the South Carolinian's masterful traits, while his position as a frontiersman and pioneer necessarily gave him a basis of character not dissimilar to that of the hardy settler on the Watauga or the Cumberland. To understand the Mississippian, then, or indeed any Southwesterner as far as the Rio Grande, we must know something about the Tennesseean.

This stalwart citizen of a state which has already played an important part in our history, and which from its position and resources ought to play a still more important part in the future, naturally holds by the North Carolinian in many of his characteristics. He can generally point to Scotch-Irish ancestors from whom he has inherited the love of independence and the sturdy democratic virtues that characterize the people of the mountain sections of the states on his eastern border, but he owes to these ancestors something that differentiates him from his kins-people east of the Alleghenies. The latter have been somewhat abashed, somewhat kept in check, by their contact with the