ax-bearers. Abraham Lincoln's father joined the throng of Kentuckians
that entered the Indiana woods in 1816, and the boy, when he had learned
to hew out a forest home, betook himself, in 1830, to Sangamon county,
Illinois. He represents the pioneer of the period; but his ax sank
deeper than other men's, and the plaster cast of his great sinewy hand,
at Washington, embodies the training of these frontier railsplitters, in
the days when Fort Dearborn, on the site of Chicago, was but a military
outpost in a desolate country. While the hard woods of Illinois were
being entered, the pioneer movement passed also into the Missouri
Valley. The French lead miners had already opened the southeastern
section, and Southern mountaineers had pushed up the Missouri; but now
the planters from the Ohio Valley and the upper Tennessee followed,
seeking the alluvial soils for slave labor. Moving across the southern
border of free Illinois, they had awakened regrets in that State at the
loss of so large a body of settlers.
Looking at the Middle West, as a whole, in the decade from 1810 to 1820,
we perceive that settlement extended from the shores of Lake Erie in an
arc, following the banks of the Ohio till it joined the Mississippi, and
thence along that river and up the Missouri well into the center of the
State. The next decade was marked by the increased use of the steamboat;
pioneers pressed farther up the streams, etching out the hard wood
forests well up to the prairie lands, and forming additional tracts of
settlement in the region tributary to Detroit and in the southeastern
part of Michigan. In the area of the Galena lead mines of northwestern
Illinois, southwestern Wisconsin, and northeastern Iowa, Southerners had
already begun operations; and if we except Ohio and Michigan, the
dominant element in all this overflow of settlement into the Middle West
was Southern, particularly from Kentucky, Virginia, and North Carolina.
The settlements were still dependent on the rivers for transportation,
and the areas between the rivers were but lightly occupied. The
Mississippi constituted the principal outlet for the products of the
Middle West; Pittsburgh furnished most of the supplies for the region,
but New Orleans received its crops. The Old National road was built
piecemeal, and too late, as a whole, to make a great artery of trade
throughout the Middle West, in this early period; but it marked the
northern borders of the Southern stream of population, running, as this
did, through Columbus, Indianapolis, and Vandalia.
The twenty years from 1830 to 1850 saw great changes in the composition
of the population of the Middle West. The opening of the Erie Canal in
1825 was an epoch-making event. It furnished a new outlet and inlet for
northwestern traffic; Buffalo began to grow, and New York City changed
from a local market to a great commercial center. But even more
important was the place which the canal occupied as the highway for a
new migration.
In the march of the New England people from the coast, three movements
are of especial importance: the advance from the seaboard up the
Connecticut and Housatonic Valleys through Massachusetts and into
Vermont; the advance thence to central and western New York; and the
advance to the interior of the Old Northwest. The second of these stages
occupied the generation from about 1790 to 1820; after that the second
generation was ready to seek new lands; and these the Erie Canal and
lake navigation opened to them, and to the Vermonters and other
adventurous spirits of New England. It was this combined New York-New
England stream that in the thirties poured in large volume into the zone
north of the settlements which have been described. The newcomers filled
in the southern counties of Michigan and Wisconsin, the northern
countries of Illinois, and parts of the northern and central areas of
Indiana. Pennsylvania and Ohio sent a similar type of people to the area
adjacent to those States. In Iowa a stream combined of the Southern
element and of these settlers sought the wooded tributaries of the
Mississippi in the southeastern part of the State. In default of legal
authority, in this early period, they formed squatter governments and
land associations, comparable to the action of the Massachusetts men who
in the first quarter of the seventeenth century "squatted" in the
Connecticut Valley.
A great forward movement had occurred, which took possession of oak
openings and prairies, gave birth to the cities of Chicago, Milwaukee,
St. Paul, and Minneapolis, as well as to a multitude of lesser cities,
and replaced the dominance of the Southern element by that of a modified
Puritan stock. The railroad system of the early fifties bound the
Mississippi to the North Atlantic seaboard; New Orleans gave way to New
York as the outlet for the Middle West, and the day of river settlement
was succeeded by the era of inter-river settlement and railway
transportation. The change in the political and social ideals was at
least equal to the change in economic connections, and together these
forces made an intimate organic union between New England, New York, and
the newly settled West. In estimating the New England influence in the
Middle West, it must not be forgotten that the New York settlers were
mainly New Englanders of a later generation.
Combined with the streams from the East came the German migration into
the Middle West. Over half a million, mainly from the Palatinate,
Wuertemberg, and the adjacent regions, sought America between 1830 and
1850, and nearly a million more Germans came in the next decade. The
larger portion of these went into the Middle West; they became pioneers
in the newer parts of Ohio, especially along the central ridge, and in
Cincinnati; they took up the hardwood lands of the Wisconsin counties
along Lake Michigan; and they came in important numbers to Missouri,
Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan, and to the river towns of Iowa. The
migration in the thirties and forties contained an exceptionally large
proportion of educated and forceful leaders, men who had struggled in
vain for the ideal of a liberal German nation, and who contributed
important intellectual forces to the communities in which they settled.
The Germans, as a whole, furnished a conservative and thrifty
agricultural element to the Middle West. In some of their social ideals
they came into collision with the Puritan element from New England, and
the outcome of the steady contest has been a compromise. Of all the
States, Wisconsin has been most deeply influenced by the Germans.
By the later fifties, therefore, the control of the Middle West had
passed to its Northern zone of population, and this zone included
representatives of the Middle States, New England, and Germany as its
principal elements. The Southern people, north of the Ohio, differed in
important respects from the Southerners across the river. They had
sprung largely from the humbler classes of the South, although there
were important exceptions. The early pioneer life, however, was
ill-suited to the great plantations, and slavery was excluded under the
Ordinance. Thus this Southern zone of the Middle West, particularly in
Indiana and Illinois, constituted a mediating section between the South
and the North. The Mississippi still acted as a bond of union, and up to
the close of the War of 1812 the Valley, north and south, had been
fundamentally of the same social organization. In order to understand
what follows, we must bear in mind the outlines of the occupation of the
Gulf Plains. While settlement had been crossing the Ohio to the
Northwest, the spread of cotton culture and negro slavery into the
Southwest had been equally significant. What the New England States and
New York were in the occupation of the Middle West, Virginia, the
Carolinas, and Georgia were in the occupation of the Gulf States. But,
as in the case of the Northwest, a modification of the original stock
occurred in the new environment. A greater energy and initiative
appeared in the new Southern lands; the pioneer's devotion to exploiting
the territory in which he was placed transferred slavery from the
patriarchal to the commercial basis. The same expansive tendency seen in
the Northwest revealed itself, with a belligerent seasoning, in the Gulf
States. They had a program of action. Abraham Lincoln migrated from
Kentucky to Indiana and to Illinois. Jefferson Davis moved from Kentucky
to Louisiana, and thence to Mississippi, in the same period. Starting
from the same locality, each represented the divergent flow of streams
of settlement into contrasted environments. The result of these
antagonistic streams of migration to the West was a struggle between the
Lake and Prairie plainsmen, on the one side, and the Gulf plainsmen, on
the other, for the possession of the Mississippi Valley. It was the
crucial part of the struggle between the Northern and Southern sections
of the nation. What gave slavery and State sovereignty their power as
issues was the fact that they involved the question of dominance over
common territory in an expanding nation. The place of the Middle West in
the origin and settlement of the great slavery struggle is of the
highest significance.
In the early history of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, a modified form of
slavery existed under a system of indenture of the colored servant; and
the effort of Southern settlers in Indiana and in Illinois to
reintroduce slavery are indicative of the importance of the pro-slavery
element in the Northwest. But the most significant early manifestation
of the rival currents of migration with respect to slavery is seen in
the contest which culminated in the Missouri Compromise. The historical
obstacle of the Ordinance, as well as natural conditions, gave an
advantage to the anti-slavery settlers northwest of the Ohio; but when
the Mississippi was crossed, and the rival streams of settlement mingled
in the area of the Louisiana Purchase, the struggle followed. It was an
Illinois man, with constituents in both currents of settlement, who
introduced the Missouri Compromise, which made a _modus vivendi_ for the
Middle West, until the Compromise of 1850 gave to Senator Douglas of
Illinois, in 1854, the opportunity to reopen the issue by his
Kansas-Nebraska bill. In his doctrine of "squatter-sovereignty," or the
right of the territories to determine the question of slavery within
their bounds, Douglas utilized a favorite Western political idea, one
which Cass of Michigan had promulgated before. Douglas set the love of
the Middle West for local self-government against its preponderant
antipathy to the spread of slavery. At the same time he brought to the
support of the doctrine the Democratic party, which ever since the days
of Andrew Jackson had voiced the love of the frontier for individualism
and for popular power. In his "Young America" doctrines Douglas had also
made himself the spokesman of Western expansive tendencies. He thus
found important sources of popular support when he invoked the localism
of his section. Western appeals to Congress for aid in internal
improvements, protective tariffs, and land grants had been indications
of nationalism. The doctrine of squatter-sovereignty itself catered to
the love of national union by presenting the appearance of a
non-sectional compromise, which should allow the new areas of the Middle
West to determine their own institutions. But the Free Soil party,
strongest in the regions occupied by the New York-New England colonists,
and having for its program national prohibition of the spread of slavery
into the territories, had already found in the Middle West an important
center of power. The strength of the movement far surpassed the actual
voting power of the Free Soil party, for it compelled both Whigs and
Democrats to propose fusion on the basis of concession to Free Soil
doctrines. The New England settlers and the western New York
settlers,--the children of New England,--were keenly alive to the
importance of the issue. Indeed, Seward, in an address at Madison,
Wisconsin, in 1860, declared that the Northwest, in reality, extended to
the base of the Alleghanies, and that the new States had "matured just
in the critical moment to rally the free States of the Atlantic coast,
to call them back to their ancient principles."
These Free Soil forces and the nationalistic tendencies of the Middle
West proved too strong for the opposing doctrines when the real struggle
came. Calhoun and Taney shaped the issue so logically that the Middle
West saw that the contest was not only a war for the preservation of the
Union, but also a war for the possession of the unoccupied West, a
struggle between the Middle West and the States of the Gulf Plains. The
economic life of the Middle West had been bound by the railroad to the
North Atlantic, and its interests, as well as its love of national
unity, made it in every way hostile to secession. When Dr. Cutler had
urged the desires of the Ohio Company upon Congress, in 1787, he had
promised to plant in the Ohio Valley a colony that would stand for the
Union. Vinton of Ohio, in arguing for the admission of Iowa, urged the
position of the Middle West as the great unifying section of the
country: "Disunion," he said, "is ruin to them. They have no
alternative but to resist it whenever or wherever attempted. . . .
Massachusetts and South Carolina might, for aught I know, find a
dividing line that would be mutually satisfactory to them; but, Sir,
they can find no such line to which the western country can assent." But
it was Abraham Lincoln who stated the issue with the greatest precision,
and who voiced most clearly the nationalism of the Middle West, when he
declared, "A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this
government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free."
So it was that when the civil war in Kansas grew into the Civil War in
the Union, after Lincoln's election to the presidency, the Middle West,
dominated by its combined Puritan and German population, ceased to
compromise, and turned the scale in favor of the North. The Middle West
furnished more than one-third of the Union troops. The names of Grant
and Sherman are sufficient testimony to her leadership in the field. The
names of Lincoln and Chase show that the presidential, the financial,
and the war powers were in the hands of the Middle West. If we were to
accept Seward's own classification, the conduct of foreign affairs as
well belonged to the same section; it was, at least, in the hands of
representatives of the dominant forces of the section. The Middle West,
led by Grant and Sherman, hewed its way down the Mississippi and across
the Gulf States, and Lincoln could exult in 1863, "The Father of Waters
again goes unvexed to the sea. Thanks to the great Northwest for it, nor
yet wholly to them."
In thus outlining the relations of the Middle West to the slavery
struggle, we have passed over important extensions of settlement in the
decade before the war. In these years, not only did the density of
settlement increase in the older portions of the region, but new waves
of colonization passed into the remoter prairies. Iowa's pioneers,
after Indian cessions had been secured, spread well toward her western
limits. Minnesota, also, was recruited by a column of pioneers. The
treaty of Traverse de Sioux, in 1851, opened over twenty million acres
of arable land in that State, and Minnesota increased her population
2730.7 per cent in the decade from 1850 to 1860.
Up to this decade the pine belt of the Middle West, in northern
Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota had been the field of operations of
Indian traders. At first under English companies, and afterward under
Astor's American Fur Company, the traders with their French and
half-breed boatmen skirted the Great Lakes and followed the rivers into
the forests, where they stationed their posts and spread goods and
whiskey among the Indians. Their posts were centers of disintegration
among the savages. The new wants and the demoralization which resulted
from the Indian trade facilitated the purchases of their lands by the
federal government. The trader was followed by the seeker for the best
pine land "forties"; and by the time of the Civil War the exploitation
of the pine belt had fairly begun. The Irish and Canadian choppers,
followed by the Scandinavians, joined the forest men, and log drives
succeeded the trading canoe. Men from the pine woods of Maine and
Vermont directed the industry, and became magnates in the mill towns
that grew up in the forests,--millionaires, and afterwards political
leaders. In the prairie country of the Middle West, the Indian trade
that centered at St. Louis had been important ever since 1820, with an
influence upon the Indians of the plains similar to the influence of the
northern fur trade upon the Indians of the forest. By 1840 the removal
policy had effected the transfer of most of the eastern tribes to lands
across the Mississippi. Tribal names that formerly belonged to Ohio and
the rest of the Old Northwest were found on the map of the Kansas
Valley. The Platte country belonged to the Pawnee and their neighbors,
and to the north along the Upper Missouri were the Sioux, or Dakota,
Crow, Cheyenne, and other horse Indians, following the vast herds of
buffalo that grazed on the Great Plains. The discovery of California
gold and the opening of the Oregon country, in the middle of the
century, made it necessary to secure a road through the Indian lands for
the procession of pioneers that crossed the prairies to the Pacific. The
organization of Kansas and Nebraska, in 1854, was the first step in the
withdrawal of these territories from the Indians. A period of almost
constant Indian hostility followed, for the savage lords of the
boundless prairies instinctively felt the significance of the entrance
of the farmer into their empire. In Minnesota the Sioux took advantage
of the Civil War to rise; but the outcome was the destruction of their
reservations in that State, and the opening of great tracts to the
pioneers. When the Pacific railways were begun, Red Cloud, the astute
Sioux chief, who, in some ways, stands as the successor of Pontiac and
of Tecumthe, rallied the principal tribes of the Great Plains to resist
the march of civilization. Their hostility resulted in the peace measure
of 1867 and 1868, which assigned to the Sioux and their allies
reservations embracing the major portion of Dakota territory, west of
the Missouri River. The systematic slaughter of millions of buffalo, in
the years between 1866 and 1873, for the sake of their hides, put an end
to the vast herds of the Great Plains, and destroyed the economic
foundation of the Indians. Henceforth they were dependent on the whites
for their food supply, and the Great Plains were open to the cattle
ranchers.
In a preface written in 1872 for a new edition of "The Oregon Trail,"
which had appeared in 1847, Francis Parkman said, "The wild cavalcade
that defiled with me down the gorges of the Black Hills, with its paint
and war plumes, fluttering trophies and savage embroidery, bows, arrows,
lances, and shields, will never be seen again." The prairies were ready
for the final rush of occupation. The homestead law of 1862, passed in
the midst of the war, did not reveal its full importance as an element
in the settlement of the Middle West until after peace. It began to
operate most actively, contemporaneously with the development of the
several railways to the Pacific, in the two decades from 1870 to 1890,
and in connection with the marketing of the railroad land grants. The
outcome was an epoch-making extension of population.
Before 1870 the vast and fertile valley of the Red River, once the level
bed of an ancient lake, occupying the region where North Dakota and
Minnesota meet, was almost virgin soil. But in 1875 the great Dalrymple
farm showed its advantages for wheat raising, and a tide of farm seekers
turned to the region. The "Jim River" Valley of South Dakota attracted
still other settlers. The Northern Pacific and the Great Northern
Railway thrust out laterals into these Minnesota and Dakota wheat areas
from which to draw the nourishment for their daring passage to the
Pacific. The Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul, the Chicago and
Northwestern Railway, Burlington, and other roads, gridironed the
region; and the unoccupied lands of the Middle West were taken up by a
migration that in its system and scale is unprecedented. The railroads
sent their agents and their literature everywhere, "booming" the "Golden
West"; the opportunity for economic and political fortunes in such
rapidly growing communities attracted multitudes of Americans whom the
cheap land alone would not have tempted. In 1870 the Dakotas had 14,000
settlers; in 1890 they had over 510,000. Nebraska's population was
28,000 in 1860; 123,000 in 1870; 452,000 in 1880; and 1,059,000 in
1890. Kansas had 107,000 in 1860; 364,000 in 1870; 996,000 in 1880; and
1,427,000 in 1890. Wisconsin and New York gave the largest fractions of
the native element to Minnesota; Illinois and Ohio together sent perhaps
one-third of the native element of Kansas and Nebraska, but the Missouri
and Southern settlers were strongly represented in Kansas; Wisconsin,
New York, Minnesota, and Iowa gave North Dakota the most of her native
settlers; and Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, and New York did the same for
South Dakota.
Railroads and steamships organized foreign immigration on scale and
system never before equaled; a high-water mark of American immigration
came in the early eighties. Germans and Scandinavians were rushed by
emigrant trains out to the prairies, to fill the remaining spaces in the
older States of the Middle West. The census of 1890 showed in Minnesota
373,000 persons of Scandinavian parentage, and out of the total million
and one-half persons of Scandinavian parentage in the United States, the
Middle West received all but about three hundred thousand. The persons
of German parentage in the Middle West numbered over four millions out
of a total of less than seven millions in the whole country. The
province had, in 1890, a smaller proportion of persons of foreign
parentage than had the North Atlantic division, but the proportions
varied greatly in the different States. Indiana had the lowest
percentage, 20.38; and, rising in the scale, Missouri had 24.94; Kansas
26.75; Ohio 33.93; Nebraska 42.45; Iowa 43.57; Illinois 49.01; Michigan
54.58; Wisconsin 73.65; Minnesota 75.37; and North Dakota 78.87.
What these statistics of settlement mean when translated into the
pioneer life of the prairie, cannot be told here. There were sharp
contrasts with the pioneer life of the Old Northwest; for the forest
shade, there was substituted the boundless prairie; the sod house for
the log hut; the continental railway for the old National Turnpike and
the Erie Canal. Life moved faster, in larger masses, and with greater
momentum in this pioneer movement. The horizon line was more remote.
Things were done in the gross. The transcontinental railroad, the
bonanza farm, the steam plow, harvester, and thresher, the "league-long
furrow," and the vast cattle ranches, all suggested spacious combination
and systematization of industry. The largest hopes were excited by these
conquests of the prairie. The occupation of western Kansas may
illustrate the movement which went on also in the west of Nebraska and
the Dakotas. The pioneer farmer tried to push into the region with the
old methods of settlement. Deceived by rainy seasons and the railroad
advertisements, and recklessly optimistic, hosts of settlers poured out
into the plains beyond the region of sufficient rainfall for successful
agriculture without irrigation. Dry seasons starved them back; but a
repetition of good rainfalls again aroused the determination to occupy
the western plains. Boom towns flourished like prairie weeds; Eastern
capital struggled for a chance to share in the venture, and the Kansas
farmers eagerly mortgaged their possessions to secure the capital so
freely offered for their attack on the arid lands. By 1887 the tide of
the pioneer farmers had flowed across the semi-arid plains to the
western boundary of the State. But it was a hopeless effort to conquer a
new province by the forces that had won the prairies. The wave of
settlement dashed itself in vain against the conditions of the Great
Plains. The native American farmer had received his first defeat; farm
products at the same period had depreciated, and he turned to the
national government for reinforcements.