tenant farmers who created compact, permanent villages. They created a dense rural settlement in upstate New York, but they did not push westward. Areas in the north that were in the frontier stage by 1700 generally had poor transportation facilities, so the opportunity for commercial agriculture was low. These areas remained primarily in subsistence agriculture, and as a result, by the 1760s these societies were highly egalitarian, as explained by historian Jackson Turner Main: In the South, frontier areas that lacked transportation, such as the Appalachian Mountains region, remained based on subsistence farming and resembled the egalitarianism of their northern counterparts, although they had a larger upper-class of slaveowners. North Carolina was representative. However, frontier areas of 1700 that had good river connections were increasingly transformed into plantation agriculture. Rich men came in, bought up the good land, and worked it with slaves. The area was no longer "frontier". It had a stratified society comprising a powerful upper-class white landowning gentry, a small middle-class, a fairly large group of landless or tenant white farmers, and a growing slave population at the bottom of the social pyramid. Unlike the North, where small towns and even cities were common, the South was overwhelmingly rural. From British peasants to American farmers The seaboard colonial settlements gave priority to land ownership for individual farmers, and as the population grew they pushed westward for fresh farmland. Unlike Britain, where a small number of landlords owned most of the land, ownership in America was cheap, easy and widespread. Land ownership brought a degree of independence as well as a vote for local and provincial offices. The typical New England settlements were quite compact and small, under a square mile. Conflict with the Native Americans arose out of political issues, namely who would rule. Early frontier areas east of the Appalachian Mountains included the Connecticut River valley, and northern New England (which was a move to the north, not the west). Wars with French and with Natives Settlers on the frontier often connected isolated incidents to indicate Indian conspiracies to attack them, but these lacked a French diplomatic dimension after 1763, or a Spanish connection after 1820. Most of the frontiers experienced numerous conflicts. The French and Indian War broke out between Britain and France, with the French making up for their small colonial population base by enlisting Native war parties as allies. The series of large