wind of democracy blew so strongly from the West, that even in the older
States of New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Virginia,
conventions were called, which liberalized their constitutions by
strengthening the democratic basis of the State. In the same time the
labor population of the cities began to assert its power and its
determination to share in government. Of this frontier democracy which
now took possession of the nation, Andrew Jackson was the very
personification. He was born in the backwoods of the Carolinas in the
midst of the turbulent democracy that preceded the Revolution, and he
grew up in the frontier State of Tennessee. In the midst of this region
of personal feuds and frontier ideals of law, he quickly rose to
leadership. The appearance of this frontiersman on the floor of Congress
was an omen full of significance. He reached Philadelphia at the close
of Washington's administration, having ridden on horseback nearly eight
hundred miles to his destination. Gallatin, himself a Western man,
describes Jackson as he entered the halls of Congress: "A tall, lank,
uncouth-looking personage, with long locks of hair hanging over his face
and a cue down his back tied in an eel-skin; his dress singular; his
manners those of a rough backwoodsman." And Jefferson testified: "When I
was President of the Senate he was a Senator, and he could never speak
on account of the rashness of his feelings. I have seen him attempt it
repeatedly and as often choke with rage." At last the frontier in the
person of its typical man had found a place in the Government. This
six-foot backwoodsman, with blue eyes that could blaze on occasion, this
choleric, impetuous, self-willed Scotch-Irish leader of men, this expert
duelist, and ready fighter, this embodiment of the tenacious, vehement,
personal West, was in politics to stay. The frontier democracy of that
time had the instincts of the clansman in the days of Scotch border
warfare. Vehement and tenacious as the democracy was, strenuously as
each man contended with his neighbor for the spoils of the new country
that opened before them, they all had respect for the man who best
expressed their aspirations and their ideas. Every community had its
hero. In the War of 1812 and the subsequent Indian fighting Jackson made
good his claim, not only to the loyalty of the people of Tennessee, but
of the whole West, and even of the nation. He had the essential traits
of the Kentucky and Tennessee frontier. It was a frontier free from the
influence of European ideas and institutions. The men of the "Western
World" turned their backs upon the Atlantic Ocean, and with a grim
energy and self-reliance began to build up a society free from the
dominance of ancient forms.
The Westerner defended himself and resented governmental restrictions.
The duel and the blood-feud found congenial soil in Kentucky and
Tennessee. The idea of the personality of law was often dominant over
the organized machinery of justice. That method was best which was most
direct and effective. The backwoodsman was intolerant of men who split
hairs, or scrupled over the method of reaching the right. In a word, the
unchecked development of the individual was the significant product of
this frontier democracy. It sought rather to express itself by choosing
a man of the people, than by the formation of elaborate governmental
institutions.
It was because Andrew Jackson personified these essential Western traits
that in his presidency he became the idol and the mouthpiece of the
popular will. In his assault upon the Bank as an engine of aristocracy,
and in his denunciation of nullification, he went directly to his object
with the ruthless energy of a frontiersman. For formal law and the
subtleties of State sovereignty he had the contempt of a backwoodsman.
Nor is it without significance that this typical man of the new
democracy will always be associated with the triumph of the spoils
system in national politics. To the new democracy of the West, office
was an opportunity to exercise natural rights as an equal citizen of the
community. Rotation in office served not simply to allow the successful
man to punish his enemies and reward his friends, but it also furnished
the training in the actual conduct of political affairs which every
American claimed as his birthright. Only in a primitive democracy of the
type of the United States in 1830 could such a system have existed
without the ruin of the State. National government in that period was no
complex and nicely adjusted machine, and the evils of the system were
long in making themselves fully apparent.
The triumph of Andrew Jackson marked the end of the old era of trained
statesmen for the Presidency. With him began the era of the popular
hero. Even Martin Van Buren, whom we think of in connection with the
East, was born in a log house under conditions that were not unlike
parts of the older West. Harrison was the hero of the Northwest, as
Jackson had been of the Southwest. Polk was a typical Tennesseean, eager
to expand the nation, and Zachary Taylor was what Webster called a
"frontier colonel." During the period that followed Jackson, power
passed from the region of Kentucky and Tennessee to the border of the
Mississippi. The natural democratic tendencies that had earlier shown
themselves in the Gulf States were destroyed, however, by the spread of
cotton culture, and the development of great plantations in that region.
What had been typical of the democracy of the Revolutionary frontier and
of the frontier of Andrew Jackson was now to be seen in the States
between the Ohio and the Mississippi. As Andrew Jackson is the typical
democrat of the former region, so Abraham Lincoln is the very embodiment
of the pioneer period of the Old Northwest. Indeed, he is the embodiment
of the democracy of the West. How can one speak of him except in the
words of Lowell's great "Commemoration Ode":--
"For him her Old-World moulds aside she threw,
And, choosing sweet clay from the breast
Of the unexhausted West,
With stuff untainted shaped a hero new,
Wise, steadfast in the strength of God, and true.
* * * * *
His was no lonely mountain-peak of mind,
Thrusting to thin air o'er our cloudy bars,
A sea-mark now, now lost in vapors blind;
Broad prairie rather, genial, level-lined,
Fruitful and friendly for all human kind,
Yet also nigh to heaven and loved of loftiest stars.
Nothing of Europe here,
Or, then, of Europe fronting mornward still,
Ere any names of Serf and Peer,
Could Nature's equal scheme deface;
New birth of our new soil, the first American."
The pioneer life from which Lincoln came differed in important respects
from the frontier democracy typified by Andrew Jackson. Jackson's
democracy was contentious, individualistic, and it sought the ideal of
local self-government and expansion. Lincoln represents rather the
pioneer folk who entered the forest of the great Northwest to chop out a
home, to build up their fortunes in the midst of a continually ascending
industrial movement. In the democracy of the Southwest, industrial
development and city life were only minor factors, but to the democracy
of the Northwest they were its very life. To widen the area of the
clearing, to contend with one another for the mastery of the industrial
resources of the rich provinces, to struggle for a place in the
ascending movement of society, to transmit to one's offspring the chance
for education, for industrial betterment, for the rise in life which the
hardships of the pioneer existence denied to the pioneer himself, these
were some of the ideals of the region to which Lincoln came. The men
were commonwealth builders, industry builders. Whereas the type of hero
in the Southwest was militant, in the Northwest he was industrial. It
was in the midst of these "plain people," as he loved to call them, that
Lincoln grew to manhood. As Emerson says: "He is the true history of the
American people in his time." The years of his early life were the years
when the democracy of the Northwest came into struggle with the
institution of slavery which threatened to forbid the expansion of the
democratic pioneer life in the West. In President Eliot's essay on "Five
American Contributions to Civilization," he instances as one of the
supreme tests of American democracy its attitude upon the question of
slavery. But if democracy chose wisely and worked effectively toward the
solution of this problem, it must be remembered that Western democracy
took the lead. The rail-splitter himself became the nation's President
in that fierce time of struggle, and armies of the woodsmen and pioneer
farmers recruited in the Old Northwest made free the Father of Waters,
marched through Georgia, and helped to force the struggle to a
conclusion at Appomattox. The free pioneer democracy struck down the
slave-holding aristocracy on its march to the West.
The last chapter in the development of Western democracy is the one that
deals with its conquest over the vast spaces of the new West. At each
new stage of Western development, the people have had to grapple with
larger areas, with bigger combinations. The little colony of
Massachusetts veterans that settled at Marietta received a land grant as
large as the State of Rhode Island. The band of Connecticut pioneers
that followed Moses Cleaveland to the Connecticut Reserve occupied a
region as large as the parent State. The area which settlers of New
England stock occupied on the prairies of northern Illinois surpassed
the combined area of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Men
who had become accustomed to the narrow valleys and the little towns of
the East found themselves out on the boundless spaces of the West
dealing with units of such magnitude as dwarfed their former experience.
The Great Lakes, the Prairies, the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains,
the Mississippi and the Missouri, furnished new standards of measurement
for the achievement of this industrial democracy. Individualism began to
give way to cooperation and to governmental activity. Even in the
earlier days of the democratic conquest of the wilderness, demands had
been made upon the government for support in internal improvements, but
this new West showed a growing tendency to call to its assistance the
powerful arm of national authority. In the period since the Civil War,
the vast public domain has been donated to the individual farmer, to
States for education, to railroads for the construction of
transportation lines.
Moreover, with the advent of democracy in the last fifteen years upon
the Great Plains, new physical conditions have presented themselves
which have accelerated the social tendency of Western democracy. The
pioneer farmer of the days of Lincoln could place his family on a
flatboat, strike into the wilderness, cut out his clearing, and with
little or no capital go on to the achievement of industrial
independence. Even the homesteader on the Western prairies found it
possible to work out a similar independent destiny, although the factor
of transportation made a serious and increasing impediment to the free
working-out of his individual career. But when the arid lands and the
mineral resources of the Far West were reached, no conquest was possible
by the old individual pioneer methods. Here expensive irrigation works
must be constructed, cooperative activity was demanded in utilization of
the water supply, capital beyond the reach of the small farmer was
required. In a word, the physiographic province itself decreed that the
destiny of this new frontier should be social rather than individual.
Magnitude of social achievement is the watchword of the democracy since
the Civil War. From petty towns built in the marshes, cities arose whose
greatness and industrial power are the wonder of our time. The
conditions were ideal for the production of captains of industry. The
old democratic admiration for the self-made man, its old deference to
the rights of competitive individual development, together with the
stupendous natural resources that opened to the conquest of the keenest
and the strongest, gave such conditions of mobility as enabled the
development of the large corporate industries which in our own decade
have marked the West.
Thus, in brief, have been outlined the chief phases of the development
of Western democracy in the different areas which it has conquered.
There has been a steady development of the industrial ideal, and a
steady increase of the social tendency, in this later movement of
Western democracy. While the individualism of the frontier, so prominent
in the earliest days of the Western advance, has been preserved as an
ideal, more and more these individuals struggling each with the other,
dealing with vaster and vaster areas, with larger and larger problems,
have found it necessary to combine under the leadership of the
strongest. This is the explanation of the rise of those preeminent
captains of industry whose genius has concentrated capital to control
the fundamental resources of the nation. If now in the way of
recapitulation, we try to pick out from the influences that have gone to
the making of Western democracy the factors which constitute the net
result of this movement, we shall have to mention at least the
following:--
Most important of all has been the fact that an area of free land has
continually lain on the western border of the settled area of the United
States. Whenever social conditions tended to crystallize in the East,
whenever capital tended to press upon labor or political restraints to
impede the freedom of the mass, there was this gate of escape to the
free conditions of the frontier. These free lands promoted
individualism, economic equality, freedom to rise, democracy. Men would
not accept inferior wages and a permanent position of social
subordination when this promised land of freedom and equality was theirs
for the taking. Who would rest content under oppressive legislative
conditions when with a slight effort he might reach a land wherein to
become a co-worker in the building of free cities and free States on the
lines of his own ideal? In a word, then, free lands meant free
opportunities. Their existence has differentiated the American
democracy from the democracies which have preceded it, because ever, as
democracy in the East took the form of highly specialized and
complicated industrial society, in the West it kept in touch with
primitive conditions, and by action and reaction these two forces have
shaped our history.
In the next place, these free lands and this treasury of industrial
resources have existed over such vast spaces that they have demanded of
democracy increasing spaciousness of design and power of execution.
Western democracy is contrasted with the democracy of all other times in
the largeness of the tasks to which it has set its hand, and in the vast
achievements which it has wrought out in the control of nature and of
politics. It would be difficult to over-emphasize the importance of this
training upon democracy. Never before in the history of the world has a
democracy existed on so vast an area and handled things in the gross
with such success, with such largeness of design, and such grasp upon
the means of execution. In short, democracy has learned in the West of
the United States how to deal with the problem of magnitude. The old
historic democracies were but little states with primitive economic
conditions.
But the very task of dealing with vast resources, over vast areas, under
the conditions of free competition furnished by the West, has produced
the rise of those captains of industry whose success in consolidating
economic power now raises the question as to whether democracy under
such conditions can survive. For the old military type of Western
leaders like George Rogers Clark, Andrew Jackson, and William Henry
Harrison have been substituted such industrial leaders as James J. Hill,
John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie.
The question is imperative, then, What ideals persist from this
democratic experience of the West; and have they acquired sufficient
momentum to sustain themselves under conditions so radically unlike
those in the days of their origin? In other words, the question put at
the beginning of this discussion becomes pertinent. Under the forms of
the American democracy is there in reality evolving such a concentration
of economic and social power in the hands of a comparatively few men as
may make political democracy an appearance rather than a reality? The
free lands are gone. The material forces that gave vitality to Western
democracy are passing away. It is to the realm of the spirit, to the
domain of ideals and legislation, that we must look for Western
influence upon democracy in our own days.
Western democracy has been from the time of its birth idealistic. The
very fact of the wilderness appealed to men as a fair, blank page on
which to write a new chapter in the story of man's struggle for a higher
type of society. The Western wilds, from the Alleghanies to the Pacific,
constituted the richest free gift that was ever spread out before
civilized man. To the peasant and artisan of the Old World, bound by the
chains of social class, as old as custom and as inevitable as fate, the
West offered an exit into a free life and greater well-being among the
bounties of nature, into the midst of resources that demanded manly
exertion, and that gave in return the chance for indefinite ascent in
the scale of social advance. "To each she offered gifts after his will."
Never again can such an opportunity come to the sons of men. It was
unique, and the thing is so near us, so much a part of our lives, that
we do not even yet comprehend its full significance. The existence of
this land of opportunity has made America the goal of idealists from the
days of the Pilgrim Fathers. With all the materialism of the pioneer
movements, this idealistic conception of the vacant lands as an
opportunity for a new order of things is unmistakably present.
Kipling's "Song of the English" has given it expression:--
"We were dreamers, dreaming greatly, in the man-stifled town;
We yearned beyond the sky-line where the strange roads go down.
Came the Whisper, came the Vision, came the Power with the Need,
Till the Soul that is not man's soul was lent us to lead.
As the deer breaks--as the steer breaks--from the herd where they
graze,
In the faith of little children we went on our ways.
Then the wood failed--then the food failed--then the last water
dried--
In the faith of little children we lay down and died.
"On the sand-drift--on the veldt-side--in the fern-scrub we lay,
That our sons might follow after by the bones on the way.
Follow after--follow after! We have watered the root
And the bud has come to blossom that ripens for fruit!
Follow after--we are waiting by the trails that we lost
For the sound of many footsteps, for the tread of a host.
"Follow after--follow after--for the harvest is sown:
By the bones about the wayside ye shall come to your own!"
This was the vision that called to Roger Williams,--that "prophetic soul
ravished of truth disembodied," "unable to enter into treaty with its
environment," and forced to seek the wilderness. "Oh, how sweet," wrote
William Penn, from his forest refuge, "is the quiet of these parts,
freed from the troubles and perplexities of woeful Europe." And here he
projected what he called his "Holy Experiment in Government."
If the later West offers few such striking illustrations of the relation
of the wilderness to idealistic schemes, and if some of the designs were
fantastic and abortive, none the less the influence is a fact. Hardly a
Western State but has been the Mecca of some sect or band of social
reformers, anxious to put into practice their ideals, in vacant land,
far removed from the checks of a settled form of social organization.
Consider the Dunkards, the Icarians, the Fourierists, the Mormons, and
similar idealists who sought our Western wilds. But the idealistic
influence is not limited to the dreamers' conception of a new State. It
gave to the pioneer farmer and city builder a restless energy, a quick
capacity for judgment and action, a belief in liberty, freedom of
opportunity, and a resistance to the domination of class which infused a
vitality and power into the individual atoms of this democratic mass.
Even as he dwelt among the stumps of his newly-cut clearing, the pioneer
had the creative vision of a new order of society. In imagination he
pushed back the forest boundary to the confines of a mighty
Commonwealth; he willed that log cabins should become the lofty
buildings of great cities. He decreed that his children should enter
into a heritage of education, comfort, and social welfare, and for this
ideal he bore the scars of the wilderness. Possessed with this idea he
ennobled his task and laid deep foundations for a democratic State. Nor
was this idealism by any means limited to the American pioneer.
To the old native democratic stock has been added a vast army of
recruits from the Old World. There are in the Middle West alone four
million persons of German parentage out of a total of seven millions in
the country. Over a million persons of Scandinavian parentage live in
the same region. The democracy of the newer West is deeply affected by
the ideals brought by these immigrants from the Old World. To them
America was not simply a new home; it was a land of opportunity, of
freedom, of democracy. It meant to them, as to the American pioneer that
preceded them, the opportunity to destroy the bonds of social caste that
bound them in their older home, to hew out for themselves in a new
country a destiny proportioned to the powers that God had given them, a
chance to place their families under better conditions and to win a
larger life than the life that they had left behind. He who believes
that even the hordes of recent immigrants from southern Italy are drawn
to these shores by nothing more than a dull and blind materialism has
not penetrated into the heart of the problem. The idealism and
expectation of these children of the Old World, the hopes which they
have formed for a newer and freer life across the seas, are almost
pathetic when one considers how far they are from the possibility of
fruition. He who would take stock of American democracy must not forget
the accumulation of human purposes and ideals which immigration has
added to the American populace.
In this connection it must also be remembered that these democratic
ideals have existed at each stage of the advance of the frontier, and
have left behind them deep and enduring effects on the thinking of the
whole country. Long after the frontier period of a particular region of
the United States has passed away, the conception of society, the ideals
and aspirations which it produced, persist in the minds of the people.
So recent has been the transition of the greater portion of the United
States from frontier conditions to conditions of settled life, that we
are, over the large portion of the United States, hardly a generation
removed from the primitive conditions of the West. If, indeed, we
ourselves were not pioneers, our fathers were, and the inherited ways of
looking at things, the fundamental assumptions of the American people,
have all been shaped by this experience of democracy on its westward
march. This experience has been wrought into the very warp and woof of
American thought.