Page:The Yankee and the Teuton in Wisconsin.djvu/54

 element although wanting in the intellectual and religious training, the political morale, and perhaps the heroism which distinguished the original planters of Massachusetts Bay. They had the spirit of the revolutionary New Englanders, who were described, not inaptly, as "hard, stubborn, and indomitably intractable." They were the backbone of Shays's rebellion. In many ways they illustrate the qualities which, at various times in our later history, have served as the fulcrum of revolutionary change.

Dwight's foresters were merely the extreme manifestation, the caricature, of a much larger class of heady, self sufficient, opinionated, and troublesome persons who equally with the sober, church going, instructed, conformist type were the product of New England conditions. The cords of restraint were drawn so taut in the parishes and towns, that the person who was determinedly "different" was compelled to break them and become a kind of social pariah in order to gain the freedom his soul craved. It was not an accident that so large a proportion of that class went to the frontier. They found there a less rigorous church discipline, freedom from taxes for the support of the established church, and a more flexible state of society in the midst of which they might hope to function. In western Massachusetts and Connecticut, in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, they were numerous at the opening of the National period. Soon large numbers emigrated to western New York, to northern Pennsylvania, to Ohio, thence throughout the West. They made up an appreciable part of the thronging Yankee immigration which seized upon Wisconsin's prairies and oak openings between 1835 and 1850, and their presence has left its impress upon our social history. Still the experiences of older frontiers, such as western New York, had already modified the type.

When all necessary deductions have been made, however, the church remained equally with the school a dominant