ABSTRACT
New England had always liked to consider itself the driver of the American coach, and the old die-hard Federalists there fought tooth and nail against the upbuilding of a new section which might threaten its dying influence. By 1820 there were two and a half million people instead of one million over the mountains — one quarter of the whole population of the United States, and a million more than there were in New England. There has never been a more devoted patriot than the man he defeated, but the lofty vision of Americanism in the mind of John Quincy Adams was not the Americanism of the masses. He did not envisage America as standing for wealth only, and certainly not as standing for culture; still more certainly not as a reproduction of European classes and conditions.
