engaged the great Tennesseean in a fierce political struggle out of
which was born the rival Whig and Democratic parties. This struggle was
in fact reflective of the conditions which had arisen in the Ohio
Valley. As the section had grown in population and wealth, as the trails
changed into roads, the cabins into well-built houses, the clearings
into broad farms, the hamlets into towns; as barter became commerce and
all the modern processes of industrial development began to operate in
this rising region, the Ohio Valley broke apart into the rival interests
of the industrial forces (the town-makers and the business builders), on
the one side and the old rural democracy of the uplands on the other.
This division was symbolical of national processes. In the contest
between these forces, Andrew Jackson was the champion of the cause of
the upland democracy. He denounced the money power, banks and the whole
credit system and sounded a fierce tocsin of danger against the
increasing influence of wealth in politics. Henry Clay, on the other
hand, represented the new industrial forces along the Ohio. It is
certainly significant that in the rivalry between the great Whig of the
Ohio Valley and the great Democrat of its Tennessee tributary lay the
issues of American politics almost until the slavery struggle. The
responsiveness of the Ohio Valley to leadership and its enthusiasm in
action are illustrated by the Harrison campaign of 1840; in that "log
cabin campaign" when the Whigs "stole the thunder" of pioneer Jacksonian
democracy for another backwoods hero, the Ohio Valley carried its spirit
as well as its political favorite throughout the nation.
Meanwhile, on each side of the Ohio Valley, other sections were forming.
New England and the children of New England in western New York and an
increasing flood of German immigrants were pouring into the Great Lake
basin and the prairies, north of the upland peoples who had chopped out
homes in the forests along the Ohio. This section was tied to the East
by the Great Lake navigation and the Erie canal, it became in fact an
extension of New England and New York. Here the Free Soil party found
its strength and New York newspapers expressed the political ideas.
Although this section tried to attach the Ohio River interests to itself
by canals and later by railroads, it was in reality for a long time
separate in its ideals and its interests and never succeeded in
dominating the Ohio Valley.
On the south along the Gulf Plains there developed the "Cotton Kingdom,"
a Greater South with a radical program of slavery expansion mapped out
by bold and aggressive leaders. Already this Southern section had
attempted to establish increasing commercial relations with the Ohio
Valley. The staple-producing region was a principal consumer of its live
stock and food products. South Carolina leaders like Calhoun tried to
bind the Ohio to the chariot of the South by the Cincinnati and
Charleston Railroad, designed to make an outlet for the Ohio Valley
products to the southeast. Georgia in her turn was a rival of South
Carolina in plans to drain this commerce itself. In all of these plans
to connect the Ohio Valley commercially with the South, the political
object was quite as prominent as the commercial.
In short, various areas were bidding for the support of the zone of
population along the Ohio River. The Ohio Valley recognized its old
relationship to the South, but its people were by no means champions of
slavery. In the southern portion of the States north of the Ohio where
indented servitude for many years opened a way to a system of
semi-slavery, there were divided counsels. Kentucky also spoke with no
certain voice. As a result, it is in these regions that we find the
stronghold of the compromising movement in the slavery struggle.
Kentucky furnished Abraham Lincoln to Illinois, and Jefferson Davis to
Mississippi, and was in reality the very center of the region of
adjustment between these rival interests. Senator Thomas, of southern
Illinois, moved the Missouri Compromise, and Henry Clay was the most
effective champion of that compromise, as he was the architect of the
Compromise of 1850. The Crittenden compromise proposals on the eve of
the Civil War came also from Kentucky and represent the persistence of
the spirit of Henry Clay.
In a word, as I pointed out in the beginning, the Ohio Valley was a
Middle Region with a strong national allegiance, striving to hold apart
with either hand the sectional combatants in this struggle. In the
cautious development of his policy of emancipation, we may see the
profound influence of the Ohio Valley upon Abraham Lincoln--Kentucky's
greatest son. No one can understand his presidency without proper
appreciation of the deep influence of the Ohio Valley, its ideals and
its prejudices upon America's original contribution to the great men of
the world.
Enough has been said to make it clear, I trust, that the Ohio Valley has
not only a local history worthy of study, a rich heritage to its people,
but also that it has been an independent and powerful force in shaping
the development of a nation. Of the late history of this Valley, the
rise of its vast industrial power, its far-reaching commercial
influence, it is not necessary that I should speak. You know its
statesmen and their influence upon our own time; you know the relation
of Ohio to the office of President of the United States! Nor is it
necessary that I should attempt to prophesy concerning the future which
the Ohio Valley will hold in the nation.
In that new age of inland water transportation, which is certain to
supplement the age of the railroad, there can be no more important
region than the Ohio Valley. Let us hope that its old love of democracy
may endure, and that in this section, where the first trans-Alleghany
pioneers struck blows at the forests, there may be brought to blossom
and to fruit the ripe civilization of a people who know that whatever
the glories of prosperity may be, there are greater glories of the
spirit of man; who know that in the ultimate record of history, the
place of the Ohio Valley will depend upon the contribution which her
people and her leaders make to the cause of an enlightened, a
cultivated, a God-fearing and a free, as well as a comfortable,
democracy.
FOOTNOTES:
[157:1] An address before the Ohio Valley Historical Association,
October 16, 1909.
[168:1] See F. J. Turner, "New States West of the Alleghanies,"
_American Historical Review_, i, pp. 70 ff.
VI
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY IN AMERICAN HISTORY[177:1]
The rise of a company of sympathetic and critical students of history in
the South and in the West is bound to revolutionize the perspective of
American history. Already our Eastern colleagues are aware in general,
if not in detail, of the importance of the work of this nation in
dealing with the vast interior, and with the influence of the West upon
the nation. Indeed, I might take as the text for this address the words
of one of our Eastern historians, Professor Albert Bushnell Hart, who, a
decade ago, wrote:
The Mississippi Valley yields to no region in the world in
interest, in romance, and in promise for the future. Here, if
anywhere, is the real America--the field, the theater, and the
basis of the civilization of the Western World. The history of
the Mississippi Valley is the history of the United States;
its future is the future of one of the most powerful of modern
nations.[177:2]
If those of us who have been insisting on the importance of our own
region are led at times by the enthusiasm of the pioneer for the
inviting historical domain that opens before us to overstate the
importance of our subject, we may at least plead that we have gone no
farther than some of our brethren of the East; and we may take comfort
in this declaration of Theodore Roosevelt:
The states that have grown up around the Great Lakes and in
the Valley of the Upper Mississippi, [are] the states which
are destined to be the greatest, the richest, the most
prosperous of all the great, rich, and prosperous
commonwealths which go to make up the mightiest republic the
world has ever seen. These states . . . form the heart of the
country geographically, and they will soon become the heart in
population and in political and social importance. . . . I
should be sorry to think that before these states there loomed
a future of material prosperity merely. I regard this section
of the country as the heart of true American sentiment.[178:1]
In studying the history of the whole Mississippi Valley, therefore, the
members of this Association are studying the origins of that portion of
the nation which is admitted by competent Eastern authorities to be the
section potentially most influential in the future of America. They are
also studying the region which has engaged the most vital activities of
the whole nation; for the problems arising from the existence of the
Mississippi Valley, whether of movement of population, diplomacy,
politics, economic development, or social structure, have been
fundamental problems in shaping the nation. It is not a narrow, not even
a local, interest which determines the mission of this Association. It
is nothing less than the study of the American people in the presence
and under the influence of the vast spaces, the imperial resources of
the great interior. The social destiny of this Valley will be the social
destiny, and will mark the place in history, of the United States.
In a large sense, and in the one usually given to it by geographers and
historians, the Mississippi Valley includes the whole interior basin, a
province which drains into nearly two thousand miles of navigable waters
of the Mississippi itself, two thousand miles of the tawny flood of the
Missouri, and a thousand miles of the Ohio--five thousand miles of main
water highways open to the steamboat, nearly two and a half million
square miles of drainage basin, a land greater than all Europe except
Russia, Norway, and Sweden, a land of levels, marked by essential
geographic unity, a land estimated to be able to support a population of
two or three hundred millions, three times the present population of the
whole nation, an empire of natural resources in which to build a noble
social structure worthy to hold its place as the heart of American
industrial, political and spiritual life.
The significance of the Mississippi Valley in American history was first
shown in the fact that it opened to various nations visions of power in
the New World--visions that sweep across the horizon of historical
possibility like the luminous but unsubstantial aurora of a comet's
train, portentous and fleeting.
Out of the darkness of the primitive history of the continent are being
drawn the evidences of the rise and fall of Indian cultures, the
migrations through and into the great Valley by men of the Stone Age,
hinted at in legends and languages, dimly told in the records of mounds
and artifacts, but waiting still for complete interpretation.
Into these spaces and among the savage peoples, came France and wrote a
romantic page in our early history, a page that tells of unfulfilled
empire. What is striking in the effect of the Mississippi Valley upon
France is the pronounced influence of the unity of its great spaces. It
is not without meaning that Radisson and Groseilliers not only reached
the extreme of Lake Superior but also, in all probability, entered upon
the waters of the Mississippi and learned of its western affluent; that
Marquette not only received the Indians of the Illinois region in his
post on the shores of Lake Superior, but traversed the length of the
Mississippi almost to its mouth, and returning revealed the site of
Chicago; that La Salle was inspired with the vision of a huge interior
empire reaching from the Gulf to the Great Lakes. Before the close of
the seventeenth century, Perrot's influence was supreme in the Upper
Mississippi, while D'Iberville was laying the foundations of Louisiana
toward the mouth of the river. Nor is it without significance that while
the Verendryes were advancing toward the northwest (where they
discovered the Big Horn Mountains and revealed the natural boundaries of
the Valley) the Mallet brothers were ascending the Platte, crossing the
Colorado plains to Santa Fe and so revealing the natural boundaries
toward the southwest.
To the English the great Valley was a land beyond the Alleghanies.
Spotswood, the far-sighted Governor of Virginia, predecessor of frontier
builders, grasped the situation when he proposed western settlements to
prevent the French from becoming a great people at the back of the
colonies. He realized the importance of the Mississippi Valley as the
field for expansion, and the necessity to the English empire of
dominating it, if England would remain the great power of the New World.
In the war that followed between France and England, we now see what
the men of the time could not have realized: that the main issue was
neither the possession of the fisheries nor the approaches to the St.
Lawrence on the one hemisphere, nor the possession of India on the
other, but the mastery of the interior basin of North America.
How little the nations realized the true meaning of the final victory of
England is shown in the fact that Spain reluctantly received from France
the cession of the lands beyond the Mississippi, accepting it as a means
of preventing the infringement of her colonial monopoly in Spanish
America rather than as a field for imperial expansion.
But we know now that when George Washington came as a stripling to the
camp of the French at the edge of the great Valley and demanded the
relinquishment of the French posts in the name of Virginia, he was
demanding in the name of the English speaking people the right to occupy
and rule the real center of American resources and power. When
Braddock's axmen cut their road from the Potomac toward the forks of the
Ohio they were opening a channel through which the forces of
civilization should flow with ever increasing momentum and "carving a
cross on the wilderness rim" at the spot which is now the center of
industrial power of the American nation.
England trembled on the brink of her great conquest, fearful of the
effect of these far-stretching rivers upon her colonial system, timorous
in the presence of the fierce peoples who held the vast domain beyond
the Alleghanies. It seems clear, however, that the Proclamation of 1763,
forbidding settlement and the patenting of lands beyond the Alleghanies,
was not intended as a permanent creation of an Indian reservation out of
this Valley, but was rather a temporary arrangement in order that
British plans might mature and a system of gradual colonization be
devised. Already our greatest leaders, men like Washington and
Franklin, had been quick to see the importance of this new area for
enlarged activities of the American people. A sudden revelation that it
was the West, rather than the ocean, which was the real theater for the
creative energy of America came with the triumph over France. The Ohio
Company and the Loyal Land Company indicate the interest at the outbreak
of the war, while the Mississippi Company, headed by the Washingtons and
Lees, organized to occupy southern Illinois, Indiana, and western
Kentucky, mark the Virginia interest in the Mississippi Valley, and
Franklin's activity in promoting a colony in the Illinois country
illustrates the interest of the Philadelphians. Indeed, Franklin saw
clearly the possibilities of a settlement there as a means of breaking
up Spanish America. Writing to his son in 1767 he declared that a
"settlement should be made in the Illinois country . . . raising a
strength there which on occasions of a future war might easily be poured
down the Mississippi upon the lower country and into the Bay of Mexico
to be used against Cuba, the French Islands, or Mexico itself."[182:1]
The Mississippi Valley had been the despair of France in the matter of
governmental control. The coureurs de bois escaping from restraints of
law and order took their way through its extensive wilderness, exploring
and trading as they listed. Similarly, when the English colonists
crossed the Alleghanies they escaped from the control of mother colonies
as well as of the mother country. If the Mississippi Valley revealed to
the statesmen of the East, in the exultation of the war with France, an
opportunity for new empire building, it revealed to the frontiersmen,
who penetrated the passes of the Alleghanies, and entered into their new
inheritance, the sharp distinctions between them and the Eastern lands
which they left behind. From the beginning it was clear that the lands
beyond the Alleghanies furnished an opportunity and an incentive to
develop American society on independent and unconventional lines. The
"men of the Western Waters" broke with the old order of things,
subordinated social restraint to the freedom of the individual, won
their title to the rich lands which they entered by hard fighting
against the Indians, hotly challenged the right of the East to rule
them, demanded their own States, and would not be refused, spoke with
contempt of the old social order of ranks and classes in the lands
between the Alleghanies and the Atlantic, and proclaimed the ideal of
democracy for the vast country which they had entered. Not with the
mercurial facility of the French did they follow the river systems of
the Great Valley. Like the advance of the glacier they changed the face
of the country in their steady and inevitable progress, and they sought
the sea. It was not long before the Spaniards at the mouth of the river
realized the meaning of the new forces that had entered the Valley.
In 1794 the Governor of Louisiana wrote:
This vast and restless population progressively driving the
Indian tribes before them and upon us, seek to possess
themselves of all the extensive regions which the Indians
occupy between the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, the Gulf of
Mexico, and the Appalachian Mountains, thus becoming our
neighbors, at the same time that they menacingly ask for the
free navigation of the Mississippi. If they achieve their
object, their ambitions would not be confined to this side of
the Mississippi. Their writings, public papers, and speeches,
all turn on this point, the free navigation of the Gulf by the
rivers . . . which empty into it, the rich fur trade of the
Missouri, and in time the possession of the rich mines of the
interior provinces of the very Kingdom of Mexico. Their mode
of growth and their policy are as formidable for Spain as
their armies. . . . Their roving spirit and the readiness with
which they procure sustenance and shelter facilitate rapid
settlement. A rifle and a little corn meal in a bag are
enough for an American wandering alone in the woods for a
month. . . . With logs crossed upon one another he makes a
house, and even an impregnable fort against the Indians. . . .
Cold does not terrify him, and when a family wearies of one
place, it moves to another and settles there with the same
ease.
If such men come to occupy the banks of the Mississippi and
Missouri, or secure their navigation, doubtless nothing will
prevent them from crossing and penetrating into our provinces
on the other side, which, being to a great extent unoccupied,
can oppose no resistance. . . . In my opinion, a general
revolution in America threatens Spain unless the remedy be
applied promptly.
In fact, the pioneers who had occupied the uplands of the South, the
backwoods stock with its Scotch-Irish leaders which had formed on the
eastern edge of the Alleghanies, separate and distinct from the type of
tidewater and New England, had found in the Mississippi Valley a new
field for expansion under conditions of free land and unrestraint. These
conditions gave it promise of ample time to work out its own social
type. But, first of all, these men who were occupying the Western Waters
must find an outlet for their surplus products, if they were to become
a powerful people. While the Alleghanies placed a veto toward the east,
the Mississippi opened a broad highway to the south. Its swift current
took their flat boats in its strong arms to bear them to the sea, but
across the outlet of the great river Spain drew the barrier of her
colonial monopoly and denied them exit.
The significance of the Mississippi Valley in American history at the
opening of the new republic, therefore, lay in the fact that, beyond the
area of the social and political control of the thirteen colonies, there
had arisen a new and aggressive society which imperiously put the
questions of the public lands, internal communication, local
self-government, defense, and aggressive expansion, before the
legislators of the old colonial regime. The men of the Mississippi
Valley compelled the men of the East to think in American terms instead
of European. They dragged a reluctant nation on in a new course.
From the Revolution to the end of the War of 1812 Europe regarded the
destiny of the Mississippi Valley as undetermined. Spain desired to
maintain her hold by means of the control given through the possession
of the mouth of the river and the Gulf, by her influence upon the Indian
tribes, and by intrigues with the settlers. Her object was primarily to
safeguard the Spanish American monopoly which had made her a great
nation in the world. Instinctively she seemed to surmise that out of
this Valley were the issues of her future; here was the lever which
might break successively, from her empire fragments about the
Gulf--Louisiana, Florida and Texas, Cuba and Porto Rico--the Southwest
and Pacific coast, and even the Philippines and the Isthmian Canal,
while the American republic, building itself on the resources of the
Valley, should become paramount over the independent republics into
which her empire was to disintegrate.
France, seeking to regain her former colonial power, would use the
Mississippi Valley as a means of provisioning her West Indian islands;
of dominating Spanish America, and of subordinating to her purposes the
feeble United States, which her policy assigned to the lands between the
Atlantic and the Alleghanies. The ancient Bourbon monarchy, the
revolutionary republic, and the Napoleonic empire--all contemplated the
acquisition of the whole Valley of the Mississippi from the Alleghanies
to the Rocky Mountains.[186:1]
England holding the Great Lakes, dominating the northern Indian
populations and threatening the Gulf and the mouth of the Mississippi by
her fleet, watched during the Revolution, the Confederation, and the
early republic for the breaking of the fragile bonds of the thirteen
States, ready to extend her protection over the settlers in the
Mississippi Valley.
Alarmed by the prospect of England's taking Louisiana and Florida from
Spain, Jefferson wrote in 1790: "Embraced from St. Croix to St. Mary's
on one side by their possessions, on the other by their fleet, we need
not hesitate to say that they would soon find means to unite to them all
the territory covered by the ramifications of the Mississippi." And
that, he thought, must result in "bloody and eternal war or indissoluble
confederacy" with England.
None of these nations deemed it impossible that American settlers in the
Mississippi Valley might be won to accept another flag than that of the
United States. Gardoqui had the effrontery in 1787 to suggest to Madison
that the Kentuckians would make good Spanish subjects. France enlisted
the support of frontiersmen led by George Rogers Clark for her attempted
conquest of Louisiana in 1793. England tried to win support among the
western settlers. Indeed, when we recall that George Rogers Clark
accepted a commission as Major General from France in 1793 and again in
1798; that Wilkinson, afterwards commander-in-chief of the American
army, secretly asked Spanish citizenship and promised renunciation of
his American allegiance; that Governor Sevier of Franklin, afterwards
Senator from Tennessee and its first Governor as a State, Robertson the
founder of Cumberland, and Blount, Governor of the Southwest Territory
and afterwards Senator from Tennessee, were all willing to accept the
rule of another nation sooner than see the navigation of the Mississippi
yielded by the American government we can easily believe that it lay
within the realm of possibility that another allegiance might have been
accepted by the frontiersmen themselves. We may well trust Rufus Putnam,
whose federalism and devotion to his country had been proved and whose
work in founding New England's settlement at Marietta is well known,
when he wrote in 1790 in answer to Fisher Ames's question whether the
Mississippi Valley could be retained in the Union: "Should Congress give
up her claim to the navigation of the Mississippi or cede it to the
Spaniards, I believe the people in the Western quarter would separate
themselves from the United States very soon. Such a measure, I have no
doubt, would excite so much rage and dissatisfaction that the people
would sooner put themselves under the despotic government of Spain than
remain the indented servants of Congress." He added that if Congress did
not afford due protection also to these western settlers they might turn
to England or Spain.[187:1]