border, and checking his advance, were the Indian, the Spaniard, and the
Englishman. He was indignant at Eastern indifference and lack of
sympathy with his view of his relations to these peoples; at the
short-sightedness of Eastern policy. The closure of the Mississippi by
Spain, and the proposal to exchange our claim of freedom of navigating
the river, in return for commercial advantages to New England, nearly
led to the withdrawal of the West from the Union. It was the Western
demands that brought about the purchase of Louisiana, and turned the
scale in favor of declaring the War of 1812. Militant qualities were
favored by the annual expansion of the settled area in the face of
hostile Indians and the stubborn wilderness. The West caught the vision
of the nation's continental destiny. Henry Adams, in his History of the
United States, makes the American of 1800 exclaim to the foreign
visitor, "Look at my wealth! See these solid mountains of salt and
iron, of lead, copper, silver, and gold. See these magnificent cities
scattered broadcast to the Pacific! See my cornfields rustling and
waving in the summer breeze from ocean to ocean, so far that the sun
itself is not high enough to mark where the distant mountains bound my
golden seas. Look at this continent of mine, fairest of created worlds,
as she lies turning up to the sun's never failing caress her broad and
exuberant breasts, overflowing with milk for her hundred million
children." And the foreigner saw only dreary deserts, tenanted by
sparse, ague-stricken pioneers and savages. The cities were log huts and
gambling dens. But the frontiersman's dream was prophetic. In spite of
his rude, gross nature, this early Western man was an idealist withal.
He dreamed dreams and beheld visions. He had faith in man, hope for
democracy, belief in America's destiny, unbounded confidence in his
ability to make his dreams come true. Said Harriet Martineau in 1834, "I
regard the American people as a great embryo poet, now moody, now wild,
but bringing out results of absolute good sense: restless and wayward in
action, but with deep peace at his heart; exulting that he has caught
the true aspect of things past, and the depth of futurity which lies
before him, wherein to create something so magnificent as the world has
scarcely begun to dream of. There is the strongest hope of a nation that
is capable of being possessed with an idea."
It is important to bear this idealism of the West in mind. The very
materialism that has been urged against the West was accompanied by
ideals of equality, of the exaltation of the common man, of national
expansion, that makes it a profound mistake to write of the West as
though it were engrossed in mere material ends. It has been, and is,
preeminently a region of ideals, mistaken or not.
It is obvious that these economic and social conditions were so
fundamental in Western life that they might well dominate whatever
accessions came to the West by immigration from the coast sections or
from Europe. Nevertheless, the West cannot be understood without bearing
in mind the fact that it has received the great streams from the North
and from the South, and that the Mississippi compelled these currents to
intermingle. Here it was that sectionalism first gave way under the
pressure of unification. Ultimately the conflicting ideas and
institutions of the old sections struggled for dominance in this area
under the influence of the forces that made for uniformity, but this is
merely another phase of the truth that the West must become unified,
that it could not rest in sectional groupings. For precisely this reason
the struggle occurred. In the period from the Revolution to the close of
the War of 1812, the democracy of the Southern and Middle States
contributed the main streams of settlement and social influence to the
West. Even in Ohio political power was soon lost by the New England
leaders. The democratic spirit of the Middle region left an indelible
impress on the West in this its formative period. After the War of 1812,
New England, its supremacy in the carrying trade of the world having
vanished, became a hive from which swarms of settlers went out to
western New York and the remoter regions.
These settlers spread New England ideals of education and character and
political institutions, and acted as a leaven of great significance in
the Northwest. But it would be a mistake to believe that an unmixed New
England influence took possession of the Northwest. These pioneers did
not come from the class that conserved the type of New England
civilization pure and undefiled. They represented a less contented, less
conservative influence. Moreover, by their sojourn in the Middle Region,
on their westward march, they underwent modification, and when the
farther West received them, they suffered a forest-change, indeed. The
Westernized New England man was no longer the representative of the
section that he left. He was less conservative, less provincial, more
adaptable and approachable, less rigorous in his Puritan ideals, less a
man of culture, more a man of action.
As might have been expected, therefore, the Western men, in the "era of
good feeling," had much homogeneity throughout the Mississippi Valley,
and began to stand as a new national type. Under the lead of Henry Clay
they invoked the national government to break down the mountain barrier
by internal improvements, and thus to give their crops an outlet to the
coast. Under him they appealed to the national government for a
protective tariff to create a home market. A group of frontier States
entered the Union with democratic provisions respecting the suffrage,
and with devotion to the nation that had given them their lands, built
their roads and canals, regulated their territorial life, and made them
equals in the sisterhood of States. At last these Western forces of
aggressive nationalism and democracy took possession of the government
in the person of the man who best embodied them, Andrew Jackson. This
new democracy that captured the country and destroyed the ideals of
statesmanship came from no theorist's dreams of the German forest. It
came, stark and strong and full of life, from the American forest. But
the triumph of this Western democracy revealed also the fact that it
could rally to its aid the laboring classes of the coast, then just
beginning to acquire self-consciousness and organization.
The next phase of Western development revealed forces of division
between the northern and southern portions of the West. With the spread
of the cotton culture went the slave system and the great plantation.
The small farmer in his log cabin, raising varied crops, was displaced
by the planter raising cotton. In all except the mountainous areas the
industrial organization of the tidewater took possession of the
Southwest, the unity of the back country was broken, and the solid South
was formed. In the Northwest this was the era of railroads and canals,
opening the region to the increasing stream of Middle State and New
England settlement, and strengthening the opposition to slavery. A map
showing the location of the men of New England ancestry in the Northwest
would represent also the counties in which the Free Soil party cast its
heaviest votes. The commercial connections of the Northwest likewise
were reversed by the railroad. The result is stated by a writer in _De
Bow's Review_ in 1852 in these words:--
"What is New Orleans now? Where are her dreams of greatness
and glory? . . . Whilst she slept, an enemy has sowed tares in
her most prolific fields. Armed with energy, enterprise, and
an indomitable spirit, that enemy, by a system of bold,
vigorous, and sustained efforts, has succeeded in reversing
the very laws of nature and of nature's God,--rolled back the
mighty tide of the Mississippi and its thousand tributary
streams, until their mouth, practically and commercially, is
more at New York or Boston than at New Orleans."
The West broke asunder, and the great struggle over the social system to
be given to the lands beyond the Mississippi followed. In the Civil War
the Northwest furnished the national hero,--Lincoln was the very flower
of frontier training and ideals,--and it also took into its hands the
whole power of the government. Before the war closed, the West could
claim the President, Vice-President, Chief Justice, Speaker of the
House, Secretary of the Treasury, Postmaster-General, Attorney-General,
General of the army, and Admiral of the navy. The leading generals of
the war had been furnished by the West. It was the region of action,
and in the crisis it took the reins.
The triumph of the nation was followed by a new era of Western
development. The national forces projected themselves across the
prairies and plains. Railroads, fostered by government loans and land
grants, opened the way for settlement and poured a flood of European
immigrants and restless pioneers from all sections of the Union into the
government lands. The army of the United States pushed back the Indian,
rectangular Territories were carved into checkerboard States, creations
of the federal government, without a history, without physiographical
unity, without particularistic ideas. The later frontiersman leaned on
the strong arm of national power.
At the same time the South underwent a revolution. The plantation, based
on slavery, gave place to the farm, the gentry to the democratic
elements. As in the West, new industries, of mining and of manufacture,
sprang up as by magic. The New South, like the New West, was an area of
construction, a debtor area, an area of unrest; and it, too, had learned
the uses to which federal legislation might be put.
In the meantime the Old Northwest[218:1] passed through an economic and
social transformation. The whole West furnished an area over which
successive waves of economic development have passed. The State of
Wisconsin, now much like parts of the State of New York, was at an
earlier period like the State of Nebraska of to-day; the Granger
movement and Greenback party had for a time the ascendancy; and in the
northern counties of the State, where there is a sparser population, and
the country is being settled, its sympathies are still with the debtor
class. Thus the Old Northwest is a region where the older frontier
conditions survive in parts, and where the inherited ways of looking at
things are largely to be traced to its frontier days. At the same time
it is a region in many ways assimilated to the East. It understands both
sections. It is not entirely content with the existing structure of
economic society in the sections where wealth has accumulated and
corporate organizations are powerful; but neither has it seemed to feel
that its interests lie in supporting the program of the prairies and the
South. In the Fifty-third Congress it voted for the income tax, but it
rejected free coinage. It is still affected by the ideal of the
self-made man, rather than by the ideal of industrial nationalism. It is
more American, but less cosmopolitan than the seaboard.
We are now in a position to see clearly some of the factors involved in
the Western problem. For nearly three centuries the dominant fact in
American life has been expansion. With the settlement of the Pacific
coast and the occupation of the free lands, this movement has come to a
check. That these energies of expansion will no longer operate would be
a rash prediction; and the demands for a vigorous foreign policy, for an
interoceanic canal, for a revival of our power upon the seas, and for
the extension of American influence to outlying islands and adjoining
countries, are indications that the movement will continue. The
stronghold of these demands lies west of the Alleghanies.
In the remoter West, the restless, rushing wave of settlement has broken
with a shock against the arid plains. The free lands are gone, the
continent is crossed, and all this push and energy is turning into
channels of agitation. Failures in one area can no longer be made good
by taking up land on a new frontier; the conditions of a settled society
are being reached with suddenness and with confusion. The West has been
built up with borrowed capital, and the question of the stability of
gold, as a standard of deferred payments, is eagerly agitated by the
debtor West, profoundly dissatisfied with the industrial conditions that
confront it, and actuated by frontier directness and rigor in its
remedies. For the most part, the men who built up the West beyond the
Mississippi, and who are now leading the agitation,[220:1] came as
pioneers from the old Northwest, in the days when it was just passing
from the stage of a frontier section. For example, Senator Allen of
Nebraska, president of the recent national Populist Convention, and a
type of the political leaders of his section, was born in Ohio in the
middle of the century, went in his youth to Iowa, and not long after the
Civil War made his home in Nebraska. As a boy, he saw the buffalo driven
out by the settlers; he saw the Indian retreat as the pioneer advanced.
His training is that of the old West, in its frontier days. And now the
frontier opportunities are gone. Discontent is demanding an extension of
governmental activity in its behalf. In these demands, it finds itself
in touch with the depressed agricultural classes and the workingmen of
the South and East. The Western problem is no longer a sectional
problem: it is a social problem on a national scale. The greater West,
extending from the Alleghanies to the Pacific, cannot be regarded as a
unit; it requires analysis into regions and classes. But its area, its
population, and its material resources would give force to its assertion
that if there is a sectionalism in the country, the sectionalism is
Eastern. The old West, united to the new South, would produce, not a new
sectionalism, but a new Americanism. It would not mean sectional
disunion, as some have speculated, but it might mean a drastic assertion
of national government and imperial expansion under a popular hero.
This, then, is the real situation: a people composed of heterogeneous
materials, with diverse and conflicting ideals and social interests,
having passed from the task of filling up the vacant spaces of the
continent, is now thrown back upon itself, and is seeking an
equilibrium. The diverse elements are being fused into national unity.
The forces of reorganization are turbulent and the nation seems like a
witches' kettle.
But the West has its own centers of industrial life and culture not
unlike those of the East. It has State universities, rivaling in
conservative and scientific economic instruction those of any other part
of the Union, and its citizens more often visit the East, than do
Eastern men the West. As time goes on, its industrial development will
bring it more into harmony with the East.
Moreover, the Old Northwest holds the balance of power, and is the
battlefield on which these issues of American development are to be
settled. It has more in common with all parts of the nation than has any
other region. It understands the East, as the East does not understand
the West. The White City which recently rose on the shores of Lake
Michigan fitly typified its growing culture as well as its capacity for
great achievement. Its complex and representative industrial
organization and business ties, its determination to hold fast to what
is original and good in its Western experience, and its readiness to
learn and receive the results of the experience of other sections and
nations, make it an open-minded and safe arbiter of the American
destiny.
In the long run the "Center of the Republic" may be trusted to strike a
wise balance between the contending ideals. But she does not deceive
herself; she knows that the problem of the West means nothing less than
the problem of working out original social ideals and social adjustments
for the American nation.
FOOTNOTES:
[205:1] _Atlantic Monthly_, September, 1896. Reprinted by permission.
[208:1] Charles Eliot Norton.
[218:1] The present States of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and
Wisconsin.
[220:1] [Written in the year of Mr. Bryan's first presidential
campaign.]
VIII
DOMINANT FORCES IN WESTERN LIFE[222:1]
The Old Northwest is a name which tells of the vestiges which the march
of settlement across the American continent has left behind it. The New
Northwest fronts the watery labyrinth of Puget Sound and awaits its
destiny upon the Pacific. The Old Northwest, the historic Northwest
Territory, is now the new Middle Region of the United States. A century
ago it was a wilderness, broken only by a few French settlements and the
straggling American hamlets along the Ohio and its tributaries, while,
on the shore of Lake Erie, Moses Cleaveland had just led a handful of
men to the Connecticut Reserve. To-day it is the keystone of the
American Commonwealth. Since 1860 the center of population of the United
States has rested within its limits, and the center of manufacturing in
the nation lies eight miles from President McKinley's Ohio home. Of the
seven men who have been elected to the presidency of the United States
since 1860, six have come from the Old Northwest, and the seventh came
from the kindred region of western New York. The congressional
Representatives from these five States of the Old Northwest already
outnumber those from the old Middle States, and are three times as
numerous as those from New England.
The elements that have contributed to the civilization of this region
are therefore well worth consideration. To know the States that make up
the Old Northwest--Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin--one
must understand their social origins.
Eldest in this sisterhood was Ohio. New England gave the formative
impulses to this State by the part which the Ohio Company played in
securing the Ordinance of 1787, and at Marietta and Cleveland
Massachusetts and Connecticut planted enduring centers of Puritan
influence. During the same period New Jersey and Pennsylvania sent their
colonists to the Symmes Purchase, in which Cincinnati was the
rallying-point, while Virginians sought the Military Bounty Lands in the
region of Chillicothe. The Middle States and the South, with their
democratic ideas, constituted the dominant element in Ohio politics in
the early part of her history. This dominance is shown by the nativity
of the members of the Ohio legislature elected in 1820: New England
furnished nine Senators and sixteen Representatives, chiefly from
Connecticut; New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, seventeen Senators
and twenty-one Representatives, mostly from Pennsylvania; while the
South furnished nine Senators and twenty-seven Representatives, of whom
the majority came from Virginia. Five of the Representatives were native
of Ireland, presumably Scotch-Irishmen. In the Ohio Senate, therefore,
the Middle States had as many representatives as had New England and the
South together, while the Southern men slightly outnumbered the Middle
States men in the Assembly. Together, the emigrants from the Democratic
South and Middle Region outnumbered the Federalist New Englanders three
to one. Although Ohio is popularly considered a child of New England, it
is clear that in these formative years of her statehood the commonwealth
was dominated by other forces.
By the close of this early period, in 1820, the settlement in Ohio had
covered more or less fully all except the northwest corner of the State,
and Indiana's formative period was well started. Here, as in Ohio,
there was a large Southern element. But while the Southern stream that
flowed into Ohio had its sources in Virginia, the main current that
sought Indiana came from North Carolina; and these settlers were for the
most part from the humbler classes. In the settlement of Indiana from
the South two separate elements are distinguishable: the Quaker
migration from North Carolina, moving chiefly because of anti-slavery
convictions; the "poor white" stream, made up in part of restless
hunters and thriftless pioneers moving without definite ambitions, and
in part of other classes, such as former overseers, migrating to the new
country with definite purpose of improving their fortunes.
These elements constituted well-marked features in the Southern
contribution to Indiana, and they explain why she has been named the
Hoosier State; but it should by no means be thought that all of the
Southern immigrants came under these classes, nor that these have been
the normal elements in the development of the Indiana of to-day. In the
Northwest, where interstate migration has been so continuous and
widespread, the lack of typical State peculiarities is obvious, and the
student of society, like the traveler, is tempted, in his effort to
distinguish the community from its neighbors, to exaggerate the odd and
exceptional elements which give a particular flavor to the State.
Indiana has suffered somewhat from this tendency; but it is undoubted
that these peculiarities of origin left deep and abiding influences upon
the State. In 1820 her settlement was chiefly in the southern counties,
where Southern and Middle States influence was dominant. Her two United
States Senators were Virginians by birth, while her Representative was
from Pennsylvania. The Southern element continued so powerful that one
student of Indiana origins has estimated that in 1850 one-third of the
population of the State were native Carolinians and their children in
the first generation. Not until a few years before the Civil War did the
Northern current exert a decisive influence upon Indiana. She had no
such lake ports as had her sister States, and extension of settlement
into the State from ports like Chicago was interrupted by the less
attractive area of the northwestern part of Indiana. Add to this the
geological fact that the limestone ridges and the best soils ran in
nearly perpendicular belts northward from the Ohio, and it will be seen
how circumstances combined to diminish Northern and to facilitate
Southern influences in the State prior to the railroad development.
In Illinois, also, the current of migration was at first preponderantly
Southern, but the settlers were less often from the Atlantic coast.
Kentucky and Tennessee were generous contributors, but many of the
distinguished leaders came from Virginia, and it is worthy of note that
in 1820 the two United States Senators of Illinois were of Maryland
ancestry, while her Representative was of Kentucky origin. The swarms of
land-seekers between 1820 and 1830 ascended the Illinois river, and
spread out between that river and the Mississippi. It was in this period
that Abraham Lincoln's father, who had come from Kentucky to Indiana,
again left his log cabin and traveled by ox-team with his family to the
popular Illinois county of Sangamon. Here Lincoln split his famous rails
to fence their land, and grew up under the influences of this migration
of the Southern pioneers to the prairies. They were not predominantly of
the planter class; but the fierce contest in 1824 over the proposition
to open Illinois to slavery was won for freedom by a narrow majority.
Looking at the three States, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, prior to 1850,
we perceive how important was the voice of the South here, and we can
the more easily understand the early affiliation of the Northwest with
her sister States to the south on the Western waters. It was not
without reason that the proposal of the Missouri Compromise came from
Illinois, and it was a natural enthusiasm with which these States
followed Henry Clay in the war policy of 1812. The combination of the
South, the western portion of the Middle States, and the Mississippi
Valley gave the ascendancy to the democratic ideals of the followers of
Jefferson, and left New England a weakened and isolated section for
nearly half a century. Many of the most characteristic elements in
American life in the first part of the century were due to this
relationship between the South and the trans-Alleghany region. But even
thus early the Northwest had revealed strong predilections for the
Northern economic ideals as against the peculiar institution of the
South, and this tendency grew with the increase of New England
immigration.
The northern two in this sisterhood of Northwestern States were the
first to be entered by the French, but latest by the English settlers.
Why Michigan was not occupied by New York men at an earlier period is at
first sight not easy to understand. Perhaps the adverse reports of
surveyors who visited the interior of the State, the partial
geographical isolation, and the unprogressive character of the French
settlers account for the tardy occupation of the area. Certain it is
that while the southern tier of States was sought by swarms of settlers,
Wisconsin and Michigan still echoed to Canadian boating-songs, and
voyageurs paddled their birch canoes along the streams of the wilderness
to traffic with the savages. Great Britain maintained the dominant
position until after the War of 1812, and the real center of authority
was in Canada.