Note 284 — Chapter V · —Geographical Location

Every geographical region of strongly marked character possesses a certain polarity, by reason of which it attracts certain racial or economic elements of population, and repels others. The predatory tribes of the desert are constantly reinforced by refugee outlaws from the settled agricultural communities along its borders.284 The mountains which offer a welcome asylum for the persecuted Waldenses have no lure for the money-making Jew, who is therefore rarely found there. The negroes of the United States are more and more congregating in the Gulf States, making the "Black Belt" blacker. The fertile tidewater plains of ante-bellum Virginia and Maryland had a rich, aristocratic white population of slave-holding planters; the mountain backwoods of the Appalachian ranges, whose conditions of soil and relief were ill adapted for slave cultivation, had attracted a poorer democratic farmer class, who tilled their small holdings by their own labor and consequently entertained little sympathy for the social and economic system of the tidewater country. This is the contrast between mountain and plain which is as old as humanity. It presented problems to the legislation of Solon, and caused West Virginia to split off from the mother State during the Civil War.285