part of its own in the making of the nation. I have not the temerity to
attempt a history of the Valley in the brief compass of this address.
Nor am I confident of my ability even to pick out the more important
features of its history in our common national life. But I venture to
put the problem, to state some familiar facts from the special point of
view, with the hope of arousing interest in the theme among the many
students who are advancing the science of history in this section.
To the physiographer the section is made up of the province of the
Alleghany Plateaus and the southern portion of the Prairie Plains. In
it are found rich mineral deposits which are changing the life of the
section and of the nation. Although you reckon in your membership only
the states that touch the Ohio River, parts of those states are, from
the point of view of their social origins, more closely connected with
the Northwest on the Lake Plains, than with the Ohio Valley; and, on the
other hand, the Tennessee Valley, though it sweeps far toward the Lower
South, and only joins the Ohio at the end of its course, has been
through much of the history of the region an essential part of this
society. Together these rivers made up the "Western World" of the
pioneers of the Revolutionary era; the "Western Waters" of the
backwoodsmen.
But, after all, the unity of the section and its place in history were
determined by the "beautiful river," as the French explorers called
it--the Ohio, which pours its flood for over a thousand miles, a great
highway to the West; a historic artery of commerce, a wedge of advance
between powerful Indian confederacies, and rival European nations, to
the Mississippi Valley; a home for six mighty States, now in the heart
of the nation, rich in material wealth, richer in the history of
American democracy, a society that holds a place midway between the
industrial sections of the seaboard and the plains and prairies of the
agricultural West; between the society that formed later along the
levels about the Great Lakes, and the society that arose in the Lower
South on the plains of the Gulf of Mexico. The Alleghanies bound it on
the east, the Mississippi on the west. At the forks of the great river
lies Pittsburgh, the historic gateway to the West, the present symbol
and embodiment of the age of steel, the type of modern industrialism.
Near its western border is St. Louis, looking toward the Prairies, the
Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains, the land into which the tide of
modern colonization turns.
Between these old cities, for whose sites European nations contended,
stand the cities whose growth preeminently represents the Ohio valley;
Cincinnati, the historic queen of the river; Louisville, the warder of
the falls; the cities of the "Old National Road," Columbus,
Indianapolis; the cities of the Blue Grass lands, which made Kentucky
the goal of the pioneers; and the cities of that young commonwealth,
whom the Ohio river by force of its attraction tore away from an
uncongenial control by the Old Dominion, and joined to the social
section where it belonged.
The Ohio Valley is, therefore, not only a commercial highway, it is a
middle kingdom between the East and the West, between the northern area,
which was occupied by a greater New England and emigrants from northern
Europe, and the southern area of the "Cotton Kingdom." As Pennsylvania
and New York constituted the Middle Region in our earlier history,
between New England and the seaboard South, so the Ohio Valley became
the Middle Region of a later time. In its position as a highway and a
Middle Region are found the keys to its place in American history.
From the beginning the Ohio Valley seems to have been a highway for
migration, and the home of a culture of its own. The sciences of
American archeology and ethnology are too new to enable us to speak with
confidence upon the origins and earlier distribution of the aborigines,
but it is at least clear that the Ohio river played an important part in
the movements of the earlier men in America, and that the mounds of the
valley indicate a special type of development intermediate between that
of the northern hunter folk, and the pueblo building races of the south.
This dim and yet fascinating introduction to the history of the Ohio
will afford ample opportunity for later students of the relations
between geography and population to make contributions to our history.
The French explorers saw the river, but failed to grasp its significance
as a strategic line in the conquest of the West. Entangled in the water
labyrinth of the vast interior, and kindled with aspirations to reach
the "Sea of the West," their fur traders and explorers pushed their way
through the forests of the North and across the plains of the South,
from river to lake, from lake to river, until they met the mountains of
the West. But while they were reaching the upper course of the Missouri
and the Spanish outposts of Santa Fe, they missed the opportunity to
hold the Ohio Valley, and before France could settle the Valley, the
long and attenuated line of French posts in the west, reaching from
Canada to Louisiana, was struck by the advancing column of the American
backwoodsmen in the center by the way of the Ohio. Parkman, in whose
golden pages is written the epic of the American wilderness, found his
hero in the wandering Frenchman. Perhaps because he was a New Englander
he missed a great opportunity and neglected to portray the formation and
advance of the backwood society which was finally to erase the traces of
French control in the interior of North America.
It is not without significance in a consideration of the national
aspects of the history of the Ohio Valley, that the messenger of English
civilization, who summoned the French to evacuate the Valley and its
approaches, and whose men near the forks of the Ohio fired the opening
gun of the world-historic conflict that wrought the doom of New France
in America, was George Washington, the first American to win a national
position in the United States. The father of his country was the prophet
of the Ohio Valley.
Into this dominion, in the next scene of this drama, came the
backwoodsmen, the men who began the formation of the society of the
Valley. I wish to consider the effects of the formation of this society
upon the nation. And first let us consider the stock itself.
The Ohio Valley was settled, for the most part (though with important
exceptions, especially in Ohio), by men of the Upland South, and this
determined a large part of its influence in the nation through a long
period. As the Ohio Valley, as a whole, was an extension of the Upland
South, so the Upland South was, broadly speaking, an extension from the
old Middle Region, chiefly from Pennsylvania. The society of pioneers,
English, Scotch-Irish, Germans, and other nationalities which formed in
the beginning of the eighteenth century in the Great Valley of
Pennsylvania and its lateral extensions was the nursery of the American
backwoodsmen. Between about 1730 and the Revolution, successive tides of
pioneers ascended the Shenandoah, occupied the Piedmont, or up-country
of Virginia and the Carolinas, and received recruits from similar
peoples who came by eastward advances from the coast toward this Old
West.
Thus by the middle of the eighteenth century a new section had been
created in America, a kind of peninsula thrust down from Pennsylvania
between the falls of the rivers of the South Atlantic colonies on the
one side and the Alleghany mountains on the other. Its population showed
a mixture of nationalities and religions. Less English than the colonial
coast, it was built on a basis of religious feeling different from that
of Puritan New England, and still different from the conservative
Anglicans of the southern seaboard. The Scotch-Irish Presbyterians with
the glow of the covenanters; German sectaries with serious-minded
devotion to one or another of a multiplicity of sects, but withal deeply
responsive to the call of the religious spirit, and the English Quakers
all furnish a foundation of emotional responsiveness to religion and a
readiness to find a new heaven and a new earth in politics as well as in
religion. In spite of the influence of the backwoods in hampering
religious organization, this upland society was a fertile field for
tillage by such democratic and emotional sects as the Baptists,
Methodists and the later Campbellites, as well as by Presbyterians. Mr.
Bryce has well characterized the South as a region of "high religious
voltage," but this characterization is especially applicable to the
Upland South, and its colonies in the Ohio Valley. It is not necessary
to assert that this religious spirit resulted in the kind of conduct
associated with the religious life of the Puritans. What I wish to point
out is the responsiveness of the Upland South to emotional religious and
political appeal.
Besides its variety of stocks and its religious sects responsive to
emotion, the Upland South was intensely democratic and individualistic.
It believed that government was based on a limited contract for the
benefit of the individual, and it acted independently of governmental
organs and restraints with such ease that in many regions this was the
habitual mode of social procedure: voluntary cooperation was more
natural to the Southern Uplanders than action through the machinery of
government, especially when government checked rather than aided their
industrial and social tendencies and desires. It was a naturally radical
society. It was moreover a rural section not of the planter or merchant
type, but characterized by the small farmer, building his log cabin in
the wilderness, raising a small crop and a few animals for family use.
It was this stock which began to pass into the Ohio Valley when Daniel
Boone, and the pioneers associated with his name, followed the
"Wilderness Trace" from the Upland South to the Blue Grass lands in the
midst of the Kentucky hills, on the Ohio river. In the opening years of
the Revolution these pioneers were recruited by westward extensions
from Pennsylvania and West Virginia. With this colonization of the Ohio
Valley begins a chapter in American history.
This settlement contributed a new element to our national development
and raised new national problems. It took a long time for the seaboard
South to assimilate the upland section. We cannot think of the South as
a unit through much of its ante-bellum history without doing violence to
the facts. The struggle between the men of the up-country and the men of
the tide-water, made a large part of the domestic history of the "Old
South." Nevertheless, the Upland South, as slavery and cotton
cultivation extended westward from the coast, gradually merged in the
East. On the other hand, its children, who placed the wall of the
Alleghanies between them and the East, gave thereby a new life to the
conditions and ideals which were lost in their former home. Nor was this
all. Beyond the mountains new conditions, new problems, aroused new
ambitions and new social ideals. Its entrance into the "Western World"
was a tonic to this stock. Its crossing put new fire into its
veins--fires of militant expansion, creative social energy, triumphant
democracy. A new section was added to the American nation, a new element
was infused into the combination which we call the United States, a new
flavor was given to the American spirit.
We may next rapidly note some of the results. First, let us consider the
national effects of the settlement of this new social type in the Ohio
Valley upon the expansion and diplomacy of the nation. Almost from the
first the Ohio valley had constituted the problem of westward expansion.
It was the entering wedge to the possession of the Mississippi Valley,
and, although reluctantly, the Eastern colonies and then the Eastern
States were compelled to join in the struggle first to possess the Ohio,
then to retain it, and finally to enforce its demand for the possession
of the whole Mississippi Valley and the basin of the Great Lakes as a
means of outlet for its crops and of defense for its settlements. The
part played by the pioneers of the Ohio Valley as a flying column of the
nation, sent across the mountains and making a line of advance between
hostile Indians and English on the north, and hostile Indians and
Spaniards on the south, is itself too extensive a theme to be more than
mentioned.
Here in historic Kentucky, in the State which was the home of George
Rogers Clark it is not necessary to dwell upon his clear insight and
courage in carrying American arms into the Northwest. From the first,
Washington also grasped the significance of the Ohio Valley as a "rising
empire," whose population and trade were essential to the nation, but
which found its natural outlet down the Mississippi, where Spain blocked
the river, and which was in danger of withdrawing from the weak
confederacy. The intrigues of England to attract the Valley to herself
and those of Spain to add the settlements to the Spanish Empire, the use
of the Indians by these rivals, and the efforts of France to use the
pioneers of Kentucky to win New Orleans and the whole Valley between the
Alleghanies and the Rocky Mountains for a revived French Empire in
America, are among the fascinating chapters of American, as well as of
Ohio Valley, history. This position of the Valley explains much of the
Indian wars, the foreign relations, and, indirectly, the domestic
politics of the period from the Revolution to the purchase of Louisiana.
Indeed, the purchase was in large measure due to the pressure of the
settlers of the Ohio Valley to secure this necessary outlet. It was the
Ohio Valley which forced the nation away from a narrow colonial attitude
into its career as a nation among other nations with an adequate
physical basis for future growth.
In this development of a foreign policy in connection with the Ohio
Valley, we find the germ of the Monroe doctrine, and the beginnings of
the definite independence of the United States from the state system of
the Old World, the beginning, in fact, of its career as a world power.
This expansive impulse went on into the War of 1812, a war which was in
no inconsiderable degree, the result of the aggressive leadership of a
group of men from Kentucky and Tennessee, and especially of the daring
and lofty demands of Henry Clay, who even thus early voiced the spirit
of the Ohio Valley. That in this war William Henry Harrison and the
Kentucky troops achieved the real conquest of the northwest province and
Andrew Jackson with his Tennesseeans achieved the real conquest of the
Gulf Plains, is in itself abundant evidence of the part played in the
expansion of the nation by the section which formed on the Ohio and its
tributaries. Nor was this the end of the process, for the annexation of
Texas and the Pacific Coast was in a very real sense only an aftermath
of the same movement of expansion.
While the Ohio Valley was leading the way to the building of a greater
nation, it was also the field wherein was formed an important
contribution of the United States to political institutions. By this I
mean what George Bancroft has well called "federal colonial system,"
that is, our system of territories and new States. It is a mistake to
attribute this system to the Ordinance of 1787 and to the leadership of
New England. It was in large measure the work of the communities of the
Ohio Valley who wrought out the essentials of the system for themselves,
and by their attitude imposed it, of necessity, upon the nation. The
great Ordinance only perfected the system.[168:1]
Under the belief that all men going into vacant lands have the right to
shape their own political institutions, the riflemen of western
Virginia, western Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Tennessee, during the
Revolution, protested against the rule of governments east of the
mountains, and asserted with manly independence their right to
self-government. But it is significant that in making this assertion,
they at the same time petitioned congress to admit them to the
sisterhood of States. Even when leaders like Wilkinson were attempting
to induce Kentucky to act as an independent nation, the national spirit
of the people as a whole led them to delay until at last they found
themselves a State of the new Union. This recognition of the paramount
authority of congress and this demand for self-government under that
authority, constitute the foundations of the federal territorial system,
as expressed in congressional resolutions, worked out tentatively in
Jefferson's Ordinance of 1784, and finally shaped in the Ordinance of
1787.
Thus the Ohio Valley was not only the area to which this system was
applied, but it was itself instrumental in shaping the system by its own
demands and by the danger that too rigorous an assertion of either State
or national power over these remote communities might result in their
loss to the nation. The importance of the result can hardly be
overestimated. It insured the peaceful and free development of the great
West and gave it political organization not as the outcome of wars of
hostile States, nor by arbitrary government by distant powers, but by
territorial government combined with large local autonomy. These
governments in turn were admitted as equal States of the Union. By this
peaceful process of colonization a whole continent has been filled with
free and orderly commonwealths so quietly, so naturally, that we can
only appreciate the profound significance of the process by contrasting
it with the spread of European nations through conquest and oppression.
Next let me invite your attention to the part played by the Ohio Valley
in the economic legislation which shaped our history in the years of the
making of the nation between the War of 1812 and the rise of the slavery
struggle. It needs but slight reflection to discover that in the area in
question, the men and measures of the Ohio Valley held the balance of
power and set the course of our national progress. The problems before
the country at that time were problems of internal development: the mode
of dealing with the public domain; the building of roads and digging of
canals for the internal improvement of a nation which was separated into
East and West by the Alleghany Mountains; the formation of a tariff
system for the protection of home industries and to supply a market for
the surplus of the West which no longer found an outlet in warring
Europe; the framing of a banking and currency system which should meet
the needs of the new interstate commerce produced by the rise of the
western surplus.
In the Ohio Valley, by the initiative of Ohio Valley men, and often
against the protest of Eastern sections, the public land policy was
developed by laws which subordinated the revenue idea to the idea of the
upbuilding of a democracy of small landholders. The squatters of the
Ohio Valley forced the passage of preemption laws and these laws in
their turn led to the homestead agitation. There has been no single
element more influential in shaping American democracy and its ideals
than this land policy. And whether the system be regarded as harmful or
helpful, there can be, I think, no doubt that it was the outcome of
conditions imposed by the settlers of the Ohio Valley.
When one names the tariff, internal improvements and the bank, he is
bound to add the title "The American System," and to think of Henry Clay
of Kentucky, the captivating young statesman, who fashioned a national
policy, raised issues and disciplined a party to support them and who
finally imposed the system upon the nation. But, however clearly we
recognize the genius and originality of Henry Clay as a political
leader; however we recognize that he has a national standing as a
constructive statesman, we must perceive, if we probe the matter deeply
enough, that his policy and his power grew out of the economic and
social conditions of the people whose needs he voiced--the people of the
Ohio Valley. It was the fact that in this period they had begun to
create an agricultural surplus, which made the necessity for this
legislation.
The nation has recently celebrated the one hundredth anniversary of
Fulton's invention of the steamboat, and the Hudson river has been
ablaze in his honor; but in truth it is on the Ohio and the Mississippi
that the fires of celebration should really burn in honor of Fulton, for
the historic significance to the United States of the invention of the
steamboat does not lie in its use on Eastern rivers; not even in its use
on the ocean; for our own internal commerce carried in our own ships has
had a vaster influence upon our national life than has our foreign
commerce. And this internal commerce was at first, and for many years,
the commerce of the Ohio Valley carried by way of the Mississippi. When
Fulton's steamboat was applied in 1811 to the Western Waters, it became
possible to develop agriculture and to get the Western crops rapidly and
cheaply to a market. The result was a tremendous growth in the entire
Ohio Valley, but this invention did not solve the problem of cheap
supplies of Eastern manufactures, nor satisfy the desire of the West to
build up its own factories in order to consume its own products. The
Ohio Valley had seen the advantage of home markets, as her towns grew
up with their commerce and manufacturers close to the rural regions.
Lands had increased in value in proportion to their nearness to these
cities, and crops were in higher demand near them. Thus Henry Clay found
a whole section standing behind him when he demanded a protective tariff
to create home markets on a national scale, and when he urged the
breaking of the Alleghany barrier by a national system of roads and
canals. If we analyse the congressional votes by which the tariff and
internal improvement acts were passed, we shall find that there was an
almost unbroken South against them, a Middle Region largely for them, a
New England divided, and the Ohio Valley almost a unit, holding the
balance of power and casting it in favor of the American system.
The next topic to which I ask your attention is the influence of the
Ohio Valley in the promotion of democracy. On this I shall, by reason of
lack of time, be obliged merely to point out that the powerful group of
Ohio Valley States, which sprang out of the democracy of the backwoods,
and which entered the Union one after the other with manhood suffrage,
greatly recruited the effective forces of democracy in the Union. Not
only did they add new recruits, but by their competitive pressure for
population they forced the older States to break down their historic
restraints upon the right of voting, unless they were to lose their
people to the freer life of the West.