Thus the causes of the Federal union were the need of external defense and the need of reconciling the many diverse groups in the population of the new nation. These groups are summarized by Carl R. Fish: [61]There were thirteen distinct and separate state governments, and Vermont had its own local authority which defied the rest.... Differences in the original stock, emphasized by different physical conditions and by the isolated life of the colonial period, had created several great sections or divisions in the country, which had sufficient similarity within themselves and sufficient unlikeness to each other, to make them permanent entities, and to cause sectionalism to be a permanent factor in American history. He then goes on to enumerate the groups: New England, with its Puritan English ancestry and its agriculture and fishing; the South, with its English Episcopalians, its aristocratic ideals, its plantation life; the piedmont country, with its independent small farmers and self-governing townships; and in between the commercial valleys of the Hudson, the Delaware and the Susquehanna. These again had their local differences of character: [62]The Hudson had been settled by the Dutch, although many English, New Englanders, Germans and others had mixed with them. The Delaware region was largely occupied by English and German Quakers. The Susquehanna Valley contained a large proportion of Germans, still using their native tongue, and also many Scotch, Irish and English. There existed well defined interests, the mercantile, the agricultural; the German, the Dutch and the Quakers; the city, the country. Beyond all these was the frontier, with its own natural conditions, type of inhabitants, and economic problems, a democratic community separate from all the rest.