for an independent empire, in spite of the fact that its population
would inevitably be drawn from the Eastern States. Its natural outlet
was down the current to the Gulf. New Orleans controlled the Valley, in
the words of Wilkinson, "as the key the lock, or the citadel the
outworks." So long as the Mississippi Valley was menaced, or in part
controlled, by rival European states, just so long must the United
States be a part of the state system of Europe, involved in its
fortunes. And particularly was this the case in view of the fact that
until the Union made internal commerce, based upon the Mississippi
Valley, its dominant economic interest, the merchants and sailors of the
northeastern States and the staple producers of the southern sea-board
were a commercial appanage of Europe. The significance of the
Mississippi Valley was clearly seen by Jefferson. Writing to Livingston
in 1802 he declared:
There is on the globe one single spot, the possessor of which
is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans, through
which the produce of three-eights of our territory must pass
to market, and from its fertility it will ere long yield more
than half of our whole produce and contain more than half of
our inhabitants. . . . The day that France takes possession of
New Orleans fixes the sentence which is to restrain her within
her low-water mark. It seals the union of two nations who in
conjunction can maintain exclusive possession of the ocean.
From that moment we must marry ourselves to the British fleet
and nation . . . holding the two continents of America in
sequestration for the common purposes of the united British
and American nations.[188:1]
The acquisition of Louisiana was a recognition of the essential unity of
the Mississippi Valley. The French engineer Collot reported to his
government after an investigation in 1796:
All the positions on the left [east] bank of the Mississippi
. . . without the alliance of the Western states are far from
covering Louisiana. . . . When two nations possess, one the
coasts and the other the plains, the former must inevitably
embark or submit. From thence I conclude that the Western
States of the North American republic must unite themselves
with Louisiana and form in the future one single compact
nation; or else that colony to whatever power it shall belong
will be conquered or devoured.
The effect of bringing political unity to the Mississippi Valley by the
Louisiana Purchase was profound. It was the decisive step of the United
States on an independent career as a world power, free from entangling
foreign alliances. The victories of Harrison in the Northwest, in the
War of 1812 that followed, ensured our expansion in the northern half of
the Valley. Jackson's triumphal march to the Gulf and his defense of New
Orleans in the same war won the basis for that Cotton Kingdom, so
important in the economic life of the nation and so pregnant with the
issue of slavery.[189:1] The acquisition of Florida, Texas, and the Far
West followed naturally. Not only was the nation set on an independent
path in foreign relations; its political system was revolutionized, for
the Mississippi Valley now opened the way for adding State after State,
swamping the New England section and its Federalism. The doctrine of
strict construction had received a fatal blow at the hands of its own
prophet. The old conception of historic sovereign States, makers of a
federation, was shattered by this vast addition of raw material for an
indefinite number of parallelograms called States, nursed through a
Territorial period by the Federal government, admitted under conditions,
and animated by national rather than by State patriotism.
The area of the nation had been so enlarged and the development of the
internal resources so promoted, by the acquisition of the whole course
of the mighty river, its tributaries and its outlet, that the Atlantic
coast soon turned its economic energies from the sea to the interior.
Cities and sections began to struggle for ascendancy over its industrial
life. A real national activity, a genuine American culture began. The
vast spaces, the huge natural resources, of the Valley demanded
exploitation and population. Later there came the tide of foreign
immigration which has risen so steadily that it has made a composite
American people whose amalgamation is destined to produce a new national
stock.
But without attempting to exhaust, or even to indicate, all the effects
of the Louisiana Purchase, I wish next to ask your attention to the
significance of the Mississippi Valley in the promotion of democracy and
the transfer of the political center of gravity in the nation. The
Mississippi Valley has been the especial home of democracy. Born of free
land and the pioneer spirit, nurtured in the ideas of the Revolution and
finding free play for these ideas in the freedom of the wilderness,
democracy showed itself in the earliest utterances of the men of the
Western Waters and it has persisted there. The demand for local
self-government, which was insistent on the frontier, and the
endorsement given by the Alleghanies to these demands led to the
creation of a system of independent Western governments and to the
Ordinance of 1787, an original contribution to colonial policy. This was
framed in the period when any rigorous subjection of the West to Eastern
rule would have endangered the ties that bound them to the Union
itself. In the Constitutional Convention prominent Eastern statesmen
expressed their fears of the Western democracy and would have checked
its ability to out-vote the regions of property by limiting its
political power, so that it should never equal that of the Atlantic
coast. But more liberal counsels prevailed. In the first debates upon
the public lands, also, it was clearly stated that the social system of
the nation was involved quite as much as the question of revenue.
Eastern fears that cheap lands in abundance would depopulate the
Atlantic States and check their industrial growth by a scarcity of labor
supply were met by the answer of one of the representatives in 1796:
I question if any man would be hardy enough to point out a
class of citizens by name that ought to be the servants of the
community; yet unless that is done to what class of the People
could you direct such a law? But if you passed such an act
[limiting the area offered for sale in the Mississippi
Valley], it would be tantamount to saying that there is some
class which must remain here, and by law be obliged to serve
the others for such wages as they please to give.
Gallatin showed his comprehension of the basis of the prosperous
American democracy in the same debate when he said:
If the cause of the happiness of this country was examined
into, it would be found to arise as much from the great plenty
of land in proportion to the inhabitants, which their citizens
enjoyed as from the wisdom of their political institutions.
Out of this frontier democratic society where the freedom and abundance
of land in the great Valley opened a refuge to the oppressed in all
regions, came the Jacksonian democracy which governed the nation after
the downfall of the party of John Quincy Adams. Its center rested in
Tennessee, the region from which so large a portion of the Mississippi
Valley was settled by descendants of the men of the Upland South. The
rule of the Mississippi Valley is seen when we recall the place that
Tennessee, Kentucky, and Missouri held in both parties. Besides Jackson,
Clay, Harrison and Polk, we count such presidential candidates as Hugh
White and John Bell, Vice President R. M. Johnson, Grundy, the chairman
of the finance committee, and Benton, the champion of western
radicalism.
It was in this same period, and largely by reason of the drainage of
population to the West, and the stir in the air raised by the Western
winds of Jacksonian democracy, that most of the older States
reconstructed their constitutions on a more democratic basis. From the
Mississippi Valley where there were liberal suffrage provisions (based
on population alone instead of property and population), disregard of
vested interests, and insistence on the rights of man, came the
inspiration for this era of change in the franchise and apportionment,
of reform of laws for imprisonment for debt, of general attacks upon
monopoly and privilege. "It is now plain," wrote Jackson in 1837, "that
the war is to be carried on by the monied aristocracy of the few against
the democracy of numbers; the [prosperous] to make the honest laborers
hewers of wood and drawers of water . . . through the credit and paper
system."
By this time the Mississippi Valley had grown in population and
political power so that it ranked with the older sections. The next
indication of its significance in American history which I shall
mention is its position in shaping the economic and political course of
the nation between the close of the War of 1812 and the slavery
struggle. In 1790 the Mississippi Valley had a population of about a
hundred thousand, or one-fortieth of that of the United States as a
whole; by 1810 it had over a million, or one-seventh; by 1830 it had
three and two-thirds millions, or over one-fourth; by 1840 over six
millions, more than one-third. While the Atlantic coast increased only a
million and a half souls between 1830 and 1840, the Mississippi Valley
gained nearly three millions. Ohio (virgin wilderness in 1790) was, half
a century later, nearly as populous as Pennsylvania and twice as
populous as Massachusetts. While Virginia, North Carolina, and South
Carolina were gaining 60,000 souls between 1830 and 1840, Illinois
gained 318,000. Indeed, the growth of this State alone excelled that of
the entire South Atlantic States.
These figures show the significance of the Mississippi Valley in its
pressure upon the older section by the competition of its cheap lands,
its abundant harvests, and its drainage of the labor supply. All of
these things meant an upward lift to the Eastern wage earner. But they
meant also an increase of political power in the Valley. Before the War
of 1812 the Mississippi Valley had six senators, New England ten, the
Middle States ten, and the South eight. By 1840 the Mississippi Valley
had twenty-two senators, double those of the Middle States and New
England combined, and nearly three times as many as the Old South; while
in the House of Representatives the Mississippi Valley outweighed any
one of the old sections. In 1810 it had less than one-third the power of
New England and the South together in the House. In 1840 it outweighed
them both combined and because of its special circumstances it held the
balance of power.
While the Mississippi Valley thus rose to superior political power as
compared with any of the old sections, its economic development made it
the inciting factor in the industrial life of the nation. After the War
of 1812 the steamboat revolutionized the transportation facilities of
the Mississippi Valley. In each economic area a surplus formed,
demanding an outlet and demanding returns in manufactures. The spread of
cotton into the lower Mississippi Valley and the Gulf Plains had a
double significance. This transfer of the center of cotton production
away from the Atlantic South not only brought increasing hardship and
increasing unrest to the East as the competition of the virgin soils
depressed Atlantic land values and made Eastern labor increasingly dear,
but the price of cotton fell also in due proportion to the increase in
production by the Mississippi Valley. While the transfer of economic
power from the Seaboard South to the Cotton Kingdom of the lower
Mississippi Valley was in progress, the upper Mississippi Valley was
leaping forward, partly under the stimulus of a market for its surplus
in the plantations of the South, where almost exclusive cultivation of
the great staples resulted in a lack of foodstuffs and livestock.
At the same time the great river and its affluents became the highway of
a commerce that reached to the West Indies, the Atlantic Coast, Europe,
and South America. The Mississippi Valley was an industrial entity, from
Pittsburgh and Santa Fe to New Orleans. It became the most important
influence in American politics and industry. Washington had declared in
1784 that it was the part of wisdom for Virginia to bind the West to the
East by ties of interest through internal improvement thereby taking
advantage of the extensive and valuable trade of a rising empire.
This realization of the fact that an economic empire was growing up
beyond the mountains stimulated rival cities, New York, Philadelphia,
and Baltimore, to engage in a struggle to supply the West with goods
and receive its products. This resulted in an attempt to break down the
barrier of the Alleghanies by internal improvements. The movement became
especially active after the War of 1812, when New York carried out De
Witt Clinton's vast conception of making by the Erie Canal a greater
Hudson which should drain to the port of New York all the basin of the
Great Lakes, and by means of other canals even divert the traffic from
the tributaries of the Mississippi. New York City's commercial
ascendancy dates from this connection with interior New York and the
Mississippi Valley. A writer in Hunt's _Merchants' Magazine_ in 1869
makes the significance of this clearer by these words:
There was a period in the history of the seaboard cities when
there was no West; and when the Alleghany Mountains formed the
frontier of settlement and agricultural production. During
that epoch the seaboard cities, North and South, grew in
proportion to the extent and fertility of the country in their
rear; and as Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia
were more productive in staples valuable to commerce than the
colonies north of them, the cities of Baltimore, Norfolk,
Charleston, and Savannah enjoyed a greater trade and
experienced a larger growth than those on the northern
seaboard.
He, then, classifies the periods of city development into three: (1) the
provincial, limited to the Atlantic seaboard; (2) that of canal and
turnpike connected with the Mississippi Valley; and (3) that of railroad
connection. Thus he was able to show how Norfolk, for example, was shut
off from the enriching currents of interior trade and was outstripped
by New York. The efforts of Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston, and
Savannah to divert the trade of the Mississippi system to their own
ports on the Atlantic, and the rise or fall of these cities in
proportion as they succeeded are a sufficient indication of the meaning
of the Mississippi Valley in American industrial life. What colonial
empire has been for London that the Mississippi Valley is to the
seaboard cities of the United States, awakening visions of industrial
empire, systematic control of vast spaces, producing the American type
of the captain of industry.
It was not alone city rivalry that converged upon the Mississippi Valley
and sought its alliance. Sectional rivalry likewise saw that the balance
of power possessed by the interior furnished an opportunity for
combinations. This was a fundamental feature of Calhoun's policy when he
urged the seaboard South to complete a railroad system to tap the
Northwest. As Washington had hoped to make western trade seek its outlet
in Virginia and build up the industrial power of the Old Dominion by
enriching intercourse with the Mississippi Valley, as Monroe wished to
bind the West to Virginia's political interests; and as De Witt Clinton
wished to attach it to New York, so Calhoun and Hayne would make
"Georgia and Carolina the commercial center of the Union, and the two
most powerful and influential members of the confederacy," by draining
the Mississippi Valley to their ports. "I believe," said Calhoun, "that
the success of a connection of the West is of the last importance to us
politically and commercially. . . . I do verily believe that Charleston
has more advantages in her position for the Western trade, than any city
on the Atlantic, but to develop them we ought to look to the Tennessee
instead of the Ohio, and much farther to the West than Cincinnati or
Lexington."
This was the secret of Calhoun's advocacy in 1836 and 1837 both of the
distribution of the surplus revenue and of the cession of the public
lands to the States in which they lay, as an inducement to the West to
ally itself with Southern policies; and it is the key to the readiness
of Calhoun, even after he lost his nationalism, to promote internal
improvements which would foster the southward current of trade on the
Mississippi.
Without going into details, I may simply call your attention to the fact
that Clay's whole system of internal improvements and tariff was based
upon the place of the Mississippi Valley in American life. It was the
upper part of the Valley, and especially the Ohio Valley, that furnished
the votes which carried the tariffs of 1816, 1824, and 1828. Its
interests profoundly influenced the details of those tariffs and its
need of internal improvement constituted a basis for sectional
bargaining in all the constructive legislation after the War of 1812.
New England, the Middle Region, and the South each sought alliance with
the growing section beyond the mountains. American legislation bears the
enduring evidence of these alliances. Even the National Bank found in
this Valley the main sphere of its business. The nation had turned its
energies to internal exploitation, and sections contended for the
economic and political power derived from connection with the interior.
But already the Mississippi Valley was beginning to stratify, both
socially and geographically. As the railroads pushed across the
mountains, the tide of New England and New York colonists and German
immigrants sought the basin of the Great Lakes and the Upper
Mississippi. A distinct zone, industrially and socially connected with
New England, was forming. The railroad reinforced the Erie Canal and, as
De Bow put it, turned back the tide of the Father of Waters so that its
outlet was in New York instead of New Orleans for a large part of the
Valley. Below the Northern zone was the border zone of the Upland
South, the region of compromise, including both banks of the Ohio and
the Missouri and reaching down to the hills on the north of the Gulf
Plains. The Cotton Kingdom based on slavery found its center in the
fertile soils along the Lower Mississippi and the black prairies of
Georgia and Alabama, and was settled largely by planters from the old
cotton lands of the Atlantic States. The Mississippi Valley had
rejuvenated slavery, had given it an aggressive tone characteristic of
Western life.
Thus the Valley found itself in the midst of the slavery struggle at the
very time when its own society had lost homogeneity. Let us allow two
leaders, one of the South and one of the North, to describe the
situation; and, first, let the South speak. Said Hammond, of South
Carolina,[198:1] in a speech in the Senate on March 4, 1858:
I think it not improper that I should attempt to bring the
North and South face to face, and see what resources each of
us might have in the contingency of separate organizations.
Through the heart of our country runs the great Mississippi,
the father of waters, into whose bosom are poured thirty-six
thousand miles of tributary streams; and beyond we have the
desert prairie wastes to protect us in our rear. Can you hem
in such a territory as that? You talk of putting up a wall of
fire around eight hundred and fifty thousand miles so
situated! How absurd.
But in this territory lies the great valley of the
Mississippi, now the real and soon to be the acknowledged seat
of the empire of the world. The sway of that valley will be as
great as ever the Nile knew in the earlier ages of mankind.
We own the most of it. The most valuable part of it belongs to
us now; and although those who have settled above us are now
opposed to us, another generation will tell a different tale.
They are ours by all the laws of nature; slave labor will go
to every foot of this great valley where it will be found
profitable to use it, and some of those who may not use it are
soon to be united with us by such ties as will make us one and
inseparable. The iron horse will soon be clattering over the
sunny plains of the South to bear the products of its upper
tributaries to our Atlantic ports, as it now does through the
ice-bound North. There is the great Mississippi, bond of union
made by nature herself. She will maintain it forever.
As the Seaboard South had transferred the mantle of leadership to
Tennessee and then to the Cotton Kingdom of the Lower Mississippi, so
New England and New York resigned their command to the northern half of
the Mississippi Valley and the basin of the Great Lakes. Seward, the
old-time leader of the Eastern Whigs who had just lost the Republican
nomination for the presidency to Lincoln, may rightfully speak for the
Northeast. In the fall of 1860, addressing an audience at Madison,
Wisconsin, he declared:[199:1]
The empire established at Washington is of less than a hundred
years' formation. It was the empire of thirteen Atlantic
states. Still, practically, the mission of that empire is
fulfilled. The power that directs it is ready to pass away
from those thirteen states, and although held and exercised
under the same constitution and national form of government,
yet it is now in the very act of being transferred from the
thirteen states east of the Alleghany mountains and on the
coast of the Atlantic ocean, to the twenty states that lie
west of the Alleghanies, and stretch away from their base to
the base of the Rocky mountains on the West, and you are the
heirs to it. When the next census shall reveal your power, you
will be found to be the masters of the United States of
America, and through them the dominating political power of
the world.
Appealing to the Northwest on the slavery issue Seward declared:
The whole responsibility rests henceforth directly or
indirectly on the people of the Northwest. . . . There can be
no virtue in commercial and manufacturing communities to
maintain a democracy, when the democracy themselves do not
want a democracy. There is no virtue in Pearl street, in Wall
street, in Court street, in Chestnut street, in any other
street of great commercial cities, that can save the great
democratic government of ours, when you cease to uphold it
with your intelligent votes, your strong and mighty hands. You
must, therefore, lead us as we heretofore reserved and
prepared the way for you. We resign to you the banner of human
rights and human liberty, on this continent, and we bid you be
firm, bold and onward and then you may hope that we will be
able to follow you.
When we survey the course of the slavery struggle in the United States
it is clear that the form the question took was due to the Mississippi
Valley. The Ordinance of 1787, the Missouri Compromise, the Texas
question, the Free Soil agitation, the Compromise of 1850, the
Kansas-Nebraska bill, the Dred Scott decision, "bleeding Kansas"--these
are all Mississippi Valley questions, and the mere enumeration makes it
plain that it was the Mississippi Valley as an area for expansion which
gave the slavery issue its significance in American history. But for
this field of expansion, slavery might have fulfilled the expectation of
the fathers and gradually died away.