In the composition of its population,
also, the middle region was a land of transitions between sections,
and a prototype of the modern United States, composite in its
nationality. In New York an influential Dutch element still
remained; the New England settlers had colonized the western half of
the state and about equaled the native population. In Pennsylvania,
Germans and Scotch-Irishmen had settled in such numbers in the
course of the eighteenth century that, by the time of the
Revolution, her population was almost evenly divided between these
stocks and the English. [Footnote: See Lincoln, Revolutionary
Movement in Pa., in University of Pa., Publications, I., 24, 35.]
There was also a larger proportion of recent immigrants than in any
other state, for by 1830 Pennsylvania had one unnaturalized alien to
every fifty inhabitants.
Following the Great Valley in the middle of the same century, the
Scotch-Irish and German settlers had poured into the up-country of
the south, so that these interior counties of Virginia and the
Carolinas were like a peninsula thrust down from Pennsylvania into
the south, with economic, racial, social, and religious connections
which made an intimate bond between the two sections.
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