This Indian problem which Jackson would have to solve was of the utmost importance to all the region from Georgia to northwestern Louisiana, for in that region lived the ambitious and prosperous cotton planters, who were bent on getting possession of all the fertile lands of their section, and the legislatures of Alabama and Mississippi followed the example of Georgia in assuming jurisdiction over all Indians within their boundaries. Jackson entertained no tender scruples about dispossessing the natives, a fact which was well known and widely advertised. When, therefore, Crawford, who had been very popular with the planters of all the South, gave up his antagonism to the Tennessee candidate, and joined with the friends of Calhoun, whom Crawford hated only a little more than he had disliked Jackson, there was no substantial resistance in any of the States, from South Carolina to Louisiana. The way was preparing for a united South and West. If the Crawford men of the lower South gave up their hostility to Jackson and the extreme anti-nationalists of South Carolina submitted once more to "Calhoun and Jackson," it was by no means certain what the gentry of the eastern counties of North Carolina would do. They had supported Crawford in the last campaign, and there was neither Indian nor land question to compel them to support the Western candidate. Moreover, there was a bitter struggle between the east and the west of North Carolina which resembled very much the secession movement in South Carolina. The eastern men owned most of the slaves and produced the large staple crops; controlled the lawmaking and the other departments of the State Government; and its leaders were generally, if not always, the spokesmen of the State in national affairs. This position and these advantages were legacies of the constitution of 1776. The fact that they were in the minority in point of population served only to whet their appetites for more power. On the other hand, the leaders of the western section of the State had fought for twenty-five years to reform the constitution and the laws, to create new counties in order to secure proportionate representation, and to expand the suffrage in order that their majorities might be properly counted. The bitterness of the two sections threatened to result in civil war or at least a division of the State. But the eastern men yielded and in 1835 a convention met in Raleigh. The planters were in the majority. They made concessions, however, in the matter of representation and in the popular election of the governors, which tended to reconcile the up-country people. But the control of taxation, suffrage, and representation remained securely in the hands of the legislative majority of the low-country counties. Slavery and the allied social system were henceforth immune, and the distinctions, forms, and realities of a growing aristocracy made steady encroachments upon the life of the State until the outbreak of the Civil War.