qualities, we shall more easily understand them. These men were
emotional. As they wrested their clearing from the woods and from the
savages who surrounded them, as they expanded that clearing and saw the
beginnings of commonwealths, where only little communities had been, and
as they saw these commonwealths touch hands with each other along the
great course of the Mississippi River, they became enthusiastically
optimistic and confident of the continued expansion of this democracy.
They had faith in themselves and their destiny. And that optimistic
faith was responsible both for their confidence in their own ability to
rule and for the passion for expansion. They looked to the future.
"Others appeal to history: an American appeals to prophecy; and with
Malthus in one hand and a map of the back country in the other, he
boldly defies us to a comparison with America as she is to be," said a
London periodical in 1821. Just because, perhaps, of the usual isolation
of their lives, when they came together in associations whether of the
camp meeting or of the political gathering, they felt the influence of a
common emotion and enthusiasm. Whether Scotch-Irish Presbyterian,
Baptist, or Methodist, these people saturated their religion and their
politics with feeling. Both the stump and the pulpit were centers of
energy, electric cells capable of starting widespreading fires. They
_felt_ both their religion and their democracy, and were ready to fight
for it.
This democracy was one that involved a real feeling of social
comradeship among its widespread members. Justice Catron, who came from
Arkansas to the Supreme Court in the presidency of Jackson, said: "The
people of New Orleans and St. Louis are next neighbors--if we desire to
know a man in any quarter of the union we inquire of our next neighbor,
who but the other day lived by him." Exaggerated as this is, it
nevertheless had a surprising measure of truth for the Middle West as
well. For the Mississippi River was the great highway down which groups
of pioneers like Abraham Lincoln, on their rafts and flat boats, brought
the little neighborhood surplus. After the steamboat came to the western
waters the voyages up and down by merchants and by farmers shifting
their homes, brought people into contact with each other over wide
areas.
This enlarged neighborhood democracy was determined not by a reluctant
admission that under the law one man is as good as another; it was based
upon "good fellowship," sympathy and understanding. They were of a
stock, moreover, which sought new trails and were ready to follow where
the trail led, innovators in society as well as finders of new lands.
By 1830 the Southern inundation ebbed and a different tide flowed in
from the northeast by way of the Erie Canal and steam navigation on the
Great Lakes to occupy the zone unreached by Southern settlement. This
new tide spread along the margins of the Great Lakes, found the oak
openings and small prairie islands of Southern Michigan and Wisconsin;
followed the fertile forested ribbons along the river courses far into
the prairie lands; and by the end of the forties began to venture into
the margin of the open prairie.
In 1830 the Middle West contained a little over a million and a half
people; in 1840, over three and a third millions; in 1850, nearly five
and a half millions. Although in 1830 the North Atlantic States numbered
between three and four times as many people as the Middle West, yet in
those two decades the Middle West made an actual gain of several hundred
thousand more than did the old section. Counties in the newer states
rose from a few hundred to ten or fifteen thousand people in the space
of less than five years. Suddenly, with astonishing rapidity and volume,
a new people was forming with varied elements, ideals and institutions
drawn from all over this nation and from Europe. They were confronted
with the problem of adjusting different stocks, varied customs and
habits, to their new home.
In comparison with the Ohio Valley, the peculiarity of the occupation of
the northern zone of the Middle West, lay in the fact that the native
element was predominantly from the older settlements of the Middle West
itself and from New York and New England. But it was from the central
and western counties of New York and from the western and northern parts
of New England, the rural regions of declining agricultural prosperity,
that the bulk of this element came.
Thus the influence of the Middle West stretched into the Northeast, and
attracted a farming population already suffering from western
competition. The advantage of abundant, fertile, and cheap land, the
richer agricultural returns, and especially the opportunities for youth
to rise in all the trades and professions, gave strength to this
competition. By it New England was profoundly and permanently modified.
This Yankee stock carried with it a habit of community life, in contrast
with the individualistic democracy of the Southern element. The
colonizing land companies, the town, the school, the church, the feeling
of local unity, furnished the evidences of this instinct for
communities. This instinct was accompanied by the creation of cities,
the production of a surplus for market, the reaching out to connections
with the trading centers of the East, the evolution of a more complex
and at the same time a more integrated industrial society than that of
the Southern pioneer.
But they did not carry with them the unmodified New England institutions
and traits. They came at a time and from a people less satisfied with
the old order than were their neighbors in the East. They were the young
men with initiative, with discontent; the New York element especially
was affected by the radicalism of Locofoco democracy which was in
itself a protest against the established order.
The winds of the prairies swept away almost at once a mass of old habits
and prepossessions. Said one of these pioneers in a letter to friends in
the East:
If you value ease more than money or prosperity, don't
come. . . . Hands are too few for the work, houses for the
inhabitants, and days for the day's work to be done. . . .
Next if you can't stand seeing your old New England ideas,
ways of doing, and living and in fact, all of the good old
Yankee fashions knocked out of shape and altered, or thrown by
as unsuited to the climate, don't be caught out here. But if
you can bear grief with a smile, can put up with a scale of
accommodations ranging from the soft side of a plank before
the fire (and perhaps three in a bed at that) down through the
middling and inferior grades; if you are never at a loss for
ways to do the most unpracticable things without tools; if you
can do all this and some more come on. . . . It is a universal
rule here to help one another, each one keeping an eye single
to his own business.
They knew that they were leaving many dear associations of the old home,
giving up many of the comforts of life, sacrificing things which those
who remained thought too vital to civilization to be left. But they were
not mere materialists ready to surrender all that life is worth for
immediate gain. They were idealists themselves, sacrificing the ease of
the immediate future for the welfare of their children, and convinced of
the possibility of helping to bring about a better social order and a
freer life. They were social idealists. But they based their ideals on
trust in the common man and the readiness to make adjustments, not on
the rule of a benevolent despot or a controlling class.
The attraction of this new home reached also into the Old World and gave
a new hope and new impulses to the people of Germany, of England, of
Ireland, and of Scandinavia. Both economic influences and revolutionary
discontent promoted German migration at this time; economic causes
brought the larger volume, but the quest for liberty brought the
leaders, many of whom were German political exiles. While the latter
urged, with varying degrees of emphasis, that their own contribution
should be preserved in their new surroundings, and a few visionaries
even talked of a German State in the federal system, what was noteworthy
was the adjustment of the emigrants of the thirties and forties to
Middle Western conditions; the response to the opportunity to create a
new type of society in which all gave and all received and no element
remained isolated. Society was plastic. In the midst of more or less
antagonism between "bowie knife Southerners," "cow-milking Yankee
Puritans," "beer-drinking Germans," "wild Irishmen," a process of mutual
education, a giving and taking, was at work. In the outcome, in spite of
slowness of assimilation where different groups were compact and
isolated from the others, and a certain persistence of inherited
_morale_, there was the creation of a new type, which was neither the
sum of all its elements, nor a complete fusion in a melting pot. They
were American pioneers, not outlying fragments of New England, of
Germany, or of Norway.
The Germans were most strongly represented in the Missouri Valley, in
St. Louis, in Illinois opposite that city, and in the Lake Shore
counties of eastern Wisconsin north from Milwaukee. In Cincinnati and
Cleveland there were many Germans, while in nearly half the counties of
Ohio, the German immigrants and the Pennsylvania Germans held nearly or
quite the balance of political power. The Irish came primarily as
workers on turnpikes, canals and railroads, and tended to remain along
such lines, or to gather in the growing cities. The Scandinavians, of
whom the largest proportion were Norwegians, founded their colonies in
Northern Illinois, and in Southern Wisconsin about the Fox and the head
waters of Rock River, whence in later years they spread into Iowa,
Minnesota and North Dakota.
By 1850 about one-sixth of the people of the Middle West were of North
Atlantic birth, about one-eighth of Southern birth, and a like fraction
of foreign birth, of whom the Germans were twice as numerous as the
Irish, and the Scandinavians only slightly more numerous than the Welsh,
and fewer than the Scotch. There were only a dozen Scandinavians in
Minnesota. The natives of the British Islands, together with the natives
of British North America in the Middle West, numbered nearly as many as
the natives of German lands. But in 1850 almost three-fifths of the
population were natives of the Middle West itself, and over a third of
the population lived in Ohio. The cities were especially a mixture of
peoples. In the five larger cities of the section natives and foreigners
were nearly balanced. In Chicago the Irish, Germans and natives of the
North Atlantic States about equaled each other. But in all the other
cities, the Germans exceeded the Irish in varying proportions. There
were nearly three to one in Milwaukee.
It is not merely that the section was growing rapidly and was made up of
various stocks with many different cultures, sectional and European;
what is more significant is that these elements did not remain as
separate strata underneath an established ruling order, as was the case
particularly in New England. All were accepted and intermingling
components of a forming society, plastic and absorptive. This
characteristic of the section as "a good mixer" became fixed before the
large immigrations of the eighties. The foundations of the section were
laid firmly in a period when the foreign elements were particularly free
and eager to contribute to a new society and to receive an impress from
the country which offered them a liberty denied abroad. Significant as
is this fact, and influential in the solution of America's present
problems, it is no more important than the fact that in the decade
before the Civil War, the Southern element in the Middle West had also
had nearly two generations of direct association with the Northern, and
had finally been engulfed in a tide of Northeastern and Old World
settlers.
In this society of pioneers men learned to drop their old national
animosities. One of the Immigrant Guides of the fifties urged the
newcomers to abandon their racial animosities. "The American laughs at
these steerage quarrels," said the author.
Thus the Middle West was teaching the lesson of national
cross-fertilization instead of national enmities, the possibility of a
newer and richer civilization, not by preserving unmodified or isolated
the old component elements, but by breaking down the line-fences, by
merging the individual life in the common product--a new product, which
held the promise of world brotherhood. If the pioneers divided their
allegiance between various parties, Whig, Democrat, Free Soil or
Republican, it does not follow that the western Whig was like the
eastern Whig. There was an infiltration of a western quality into all of
these. The western Whig supported Harrison more because he was a pioneer
than because he was a Whig. It saw in him a legitimate successor of
Andrew Jackson. The campaign of 1840 was a Middle Western camp meeting
on a huge scale. The log cabins, the cider and the coonskins were the
symbols of the triumph of Middle Western ideas, and were carried with
misgivings by the merchants, the bankers and the manufacturers of the
East. In like fashion, the Middle Western wing of the Democratic party
was as different from the Southern wing wherein lay its strength, as
Douglas was from Calhoun. It had little in common with the slaveholding
classes of the South, even while it felt the kinship of the pioneer with
the people of the Southern upland stock from which so many Westerners
were descended.
In the later forties and early fifties most of the Middle Western States
made constitutions. The debates in their conventions and the results
embodied in the constitutions themselves tell the story of their
political ideals. Of course, they based the franchise on the principle
of manhood suffrage. But they also provided for an elective judiciary,
for restrictions on the borrowing power of the State, lest it fall under
the control of what they feared as the money power, and several of them
either provided for the extinguishment of banks of issue, or rigidly
restrained them. Some of them exempted the homestead from forced sale
for debt; married women's legal rights were prominent topics in the
debates of the conventions, and Wisconsin led off by permitting the
alien to vote after a year's residence. It welcomed the newcomer to the
freedom and to the obligations of American citizenship.
Although this pioneer society was preponderantly an agricultural society
it was rapidly learning that agriculture alone was not sufficient for
its life. It was developing manufactures, trade, mining, the
professions, and becoming conscious that in a progressive modern state
it was possible to pass from one industry to another and that all were
bound by common ties. But it is significant that in the census of 1850,
Ohio, out of a population of two millions, reported only a thousand
servants, Iowa only ten in two hundred thousand and Minnesota fifteen
in its six thousand.
In the intellectual life of this new democracy there was already the
promise of original contributions even in the midst of the engrossing
toil and hard life of the pioneer.
The country editor was a leader of his people, not a patent-insides
recorder of social functions, but a vigorous and independent thinker and
writer. The subscribers to the newspaper published in the section were
higher in proportion to population than in the State of New York and not
greatly inferior to those of New England, although such eastern papers
as the _New York Tribune_ had an extensive circulation throughout the
Middle West. The agricultural press presupposed in its articles and
contributions a level of general intelligence and interest above that of
the later farmers of the section, at least before the present day.
Farmer boys walked behind the plow with their book in hand and sometimes
forgot to turn at the end of the furrow; even rare boys, who, like the
young Howells, "limped barefoot by his father's side with his eyes on
the cow and his mind on Cervantes and Shakespeare."
Periodicals flourished and faded like the prairie flowers. Some of
Emerson's best poems first appeared in one of these Ohio Valley
magazines. But for the most part the literature of the region and the
period was imitative or reflective of the common things in a not
uncommon way. It is to its children that the Middle West had to look for
the expression of its life and its ideals rather than to the busy
pioneer who was breaking a prairie farm or building up a new community.
Illiteracy was least among the Yankee pioneers and highest among the
Southern element. When illiteracy is mapped for 1850 by percentages
there appears two distinct zones, the one extending from New England,
the other from the South.
The influence of New England men was strong in the Yankee regions of
the Middle West. Home missionaries, and representatives of societies for
the promotion of education in the West, both in the common school and
denominational colleges, scattered themselves throughout the region and
left a deep impress in all these States. The conception was firmly fixed
in the thirties and forties that the West was the coming power in the
Union, that the fate of civilization was in its hands, and therefore
rival sects and rival sections strove to influence it to their own
types. But the Middle West shaped all these educational contributions
according to her own needs and ideals.
The State Universities were for the most part the result of agitation
and proposals of men of New England origin; but they became
characteristic products of Middle Western society, where the community
as a whole, rather than wealthy benefactors, supported these
institutions. In the end the community determined their directions in
accord with popular ideals. They reached down more deeply into the ranks
of the common people than did the New England or Middle State Colleges;
they laid more emphasis upon the obviously useful, and became
coeducational at an early date. This dominance of the community ideals
had dangers for the Universities, which were called to raise ideals and
to point new ways, rather than to conform.
Challenging the spaces of the West, struck by the rapidity with which a
new society was unfolding under their gaze, it is not strange that the
pioneers dealt in the superlative and saw their destiny with optimistic
eyes. The meadow lot of the small intervale had become the prairie,
stretching farther than their gaze could reach.
All was motion and change. A restlessness was universal. Men moved, in
their single life, from Vermont to New York, from New York to Ohio,
from Ohio to Wisconsin, from Wisconsin to California, and longed for the
Hawaiian Islands. When the bark started from their fence rails, they
felt the call to change. They were conscious of the mobility of their
society and gloried in it. They broke with the Past and thought to
create something finer, more fitting for humanity, more beneficial for
the average man than the world had ever seen.
"With the Past we have literally nothing to do," said B. Gratz Brown in
a Missouri Fourth of July oration in 1850, "save to dream of it. Its
lessons are lost and its tongue is silent. We are ourselves at the head
and front of all political experience. Precedents have lost their virtue
and all their authority is gone. . . . Experience can profit us only to
guard from antequated delusions."
"The yoke of opinion," wrote Channing to a Western friend, speaking of
New England, "is a heavy one, often crushing individuality of judgment
and action," and he added that the habits, rules, and criticisms under
which he had grown up had not left him the freedom and courage which are
needed in the style of address best suited to the Western people.
Channing no doubt unduly stressed the freedom of the West in this
respect. The frontier had its own conventions and prejudices, and New
England was breaking its own cake of custom and proclaiming a new
liberty at the very time he wrote. But there was truth in the Eastern
thought of the West, as a land of intellectual toleration, one which
questioned the old order of things and made innovation its very creed.
The West laid emphasis upon the practical and demanded that ideals
should be put to work for useful ends; ideals were tested by their
direct contributions to the betterment of the average man, rather than
by the production of the man of exceptional genius and distinction.
For, in fine this was the goal of the Middle West, the welfare of the
average man; not only the man of the South, or of the East, the Yankee,
or the Irishman, or the German, but all men in one common fellowship.
This was the hope of their youth, of that youth when Abraham Lincoln
rose from rail-splitter to country lawyer, from Illinois legislator to
congressman and from congressman to President.
It is not strange that in all this flux and freedom and novelty and vast
spaces, the pioneer did not sufficiently consider the need of
disciplined devotion to the government which he himself created and
operated. But the name of Lincoln and the response of the pioneer to the
duties of the Civil War,--to the sacrifices and the restraints on
freedom which it entailed under his presidency, reminds us that they
knew how to take part in a common cause, even while they knew that war's
conditions were destructive of many of the things for which they worked.
There are two kinds of governmental discipline: that which proceeds from
free choice, in the conviction that restraint of individual or class
interests is necessary for the common good; and that which is imposed by
a dominant class, upon a subjected and helpless people. The latter is
Prussian discipline, the discipline of a harsh machine-like, logical
organization, based on the rule of a military autocracy. It assumes that
if you do not crush your opponent first, he will crush you. It is the
discipline of a nation ruled by its General Staff, assuming war as the
normal condition of peoples, and attempting with remorseless logic to
extend its operations to the destruction of freedom everywhere. It can
only be met by the discipline of a people who use their own government
for worthy ends, who preserve individuality and mobility in society and
respect the rights of others, who follow the dictates of humanity and
fair play, the principles of give and take. The Prussian discipline is
the discipline of Thor, the War God, against the discipline of the White
Christ.
Pioneer democracy has had to learn lessons by experience: the lesson
that government on principles of free democracy can accomplish many
things which the men of the middle of the nineteenth century did not
realize were even possible. They have had to sacrifice something of
their passion for individual unrestraint; they have had to learn that
the specially trained man, the man fitted for his calling by education
and experience, whether in the field of science or of industry, has a
place in government; that the rule of the people is effective and
enduring only as it incorporates the trained specialist into the
organization of that government, whether as umpire between contending
interests or as the efficient instrument in the hands of democracy.