The Yankee scorned the
Southerner, who reciprocated with a double measure of dislike.
The New England settlers were, as a rule, people of some
education; not one of their communities long went without a
schoolmaster. They were pious, law-abiding, industrious; their
more easygoing neighbors were likely to consider them over-
sensitive and critical. But the quality that made most impression
upon others was their shrewdness in business transactions. They
could drive a bargain and could discover loopholes in a contract
in a fashion to take the average backwoodsman off his feet.
"Yankee tricks" became, indeed, a household phrase wherever New
Englander and Southerner met. Whether the Yankee talked or kept
silent, whether he was generous or parsimonious, he was always
under suspicion.
What of the "Long Knives" from Virginia, the Carolinas, and
Kentucky who also made the Ohio lands their goal? Of books they
knew little; they did not name their settlements in honor of
classic heroes. They were not "gentlemen"; many of them, indeed,
had sought the West to escape a society in which distinctions of
birth and possessions had put them at a disadvantage.
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