The expansion of the United States over the Appalachian Mountains raised questions about who should benefit from the new lands Thomas Jefferson, author or the Declaration of Independence and later president of the United States, believed that the country, including the West, should be composed primarily of independent yeome farmers. Although his vision never became a reality, he nonetheless offered perhaps the most eloquent defense of American farming. "Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which he keeps alive that sacred fire, which otherwise might escape from the face of the earth Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an...