They occupied a territory which had in the beginning been part of the national domain.

Their local commonwealths had not antedated the Federal Union, but were in a way children of the central government; and they felt that they belonged to the Union in a way that was rarely shared by an inhabitant of Massachusetts or South Carolina.

Their national feeling did not prevent them from being in some respects extremely local and provincial in their point of view.

It did not prevent them from resenting with the utmost energy any interference of the Federal government in what they believed to be their local affairs.
But they were none the less, first and foremost, loyal citizens of the American Federal state.
II THE NEW NATIONAL DEMOCRACY We must consider carefully this earliest combination of the national with the democratic idea.

The Western Democracy is important, not only because it played the leading part in our political history down to 1850, but precisely because it does offer, in a primitive but significant form, a combination of the two ideas, which, when united, constitute the formative principle in American political and social development.