Sectional Cross Current
The War of 1812 did much in America to stimulate national pride and to
foster a sense of unity. None the less, the decade following the Peace
of Ghent proved the beginning of a long era in which the point of view
in politics, business, and social life was distinctly sectional. New
England, the Middle States, the South, the West--all were bent upon
getting the utmost advantages from their resources; all were viewing
public questions in the light of their peculiar interests. In the days
of Clay and Calhoun and Jackson the nation's politics were essentially a
struggle for power among the sections.
There was a time when the frontier folk of the trans-Alleghany country
from Lakes to Gulf were much alike. New Englanders in the Reserve,
Pennsylvanians in central Ohio, Virginians and Carolinians in Kentucky
and southern Indiana, Georgians in Alabama and Mississippi, Kentuckians
and Tennesseeans in Illinois and Missouri--all were pioneer farmers and
stock-raisers, absorbed in the conquest of the wilderness and all
thinking, working, and living in much the same way. But by 1820 the
situation had altered. The West was still a "section," whose interests
and characteristics contrasted sharply with those of New England or the
Middle States. Yet upon occasion it could act with very great effect, as
for instance when it rallied to the support of Jackson and bore him
triumphantly to the presidential chair. Great divergences, however, had
grown up within this western area; differences which had existed from
the beginning had been brought into sharp relief. Under play of climatic
and industrial forces, the West had itself fallen apart into sections.
Foremost was the cleavage between North and South, on a line marked
roughly by the Ohio River. Climate, soil, the cotton gin, and slavery
combined to make of the southern West a great cotton-raising area,
interested in the same things and swayed by the same impulses as the
southern seaboard. Similarly, economic conditions combined to make of
the northern West a land of small farmers, free labor, town-building,
and diversified manufactures and trade. A very large chapter of American
history hinges on this wedging apart of Southwest and Northwest. To this
day the two great divisions have never wholly come together in their
ways of thinking.
But neither of these western segments was itself entirely a unit. The
Northwest, in particular, had been settled by people drawn from every
older portion of the country, and as the frontier receded and society
took on a more matured aspect, differences of habits and ideas were
accentuated rather than obscured. Men can get along very well with one
another so long as they live apart and do not try to regulate their
everyday affairs on common lines.
The great human streams that poured into the Northwest flowed from two
main sources--the nearer South and New England. Ohio, Indiana, and
Illinois were first peopled by men and women of Southern stock. Some
migrated directly from Virginia, the Carolinas, and even Georgia. But
most came from Kentucky and Tennessee and represented the second
generation of white people in those States, now impelled to move on to a
new frontier by the desire for larger and cheaper farms. Included in
this Southern element were many representatives of the well-to-do
classes, who were drawn to the new territories by the opportunity for
speculation in land and for political preferment, and by the opening
which the fast-growing communities afforded for lawyers, doctors, and
members of other professions. The number of these would have been larger
had there been less rigid restrictions upon slaveholding. It was rather,
however, the poorer whites--the more democratic, non-slaveholding
Southern element--that formed the bulk of the earlier settlers north of
the Ohio.
There was much westward migration from New England before the War of
1812, but only a small share of it reached the Ohio country, and
practically none went beyond the Western Reserve. The common goal was
western New York. Here again there was some emigration of the well-to-do
and influential. But, as in the South, the people who moved were mainly
those who were having difficulty in making ends meet and who could see
no way of bettering their condition in their old homes. The back country
of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and western Massachusetts was filled
with people of this sort--poor, discontented, restless, without
political influence, and needing only the incentive of cheap lands in
the West to sever the slender ties which bound them to the stony
hillsides of New England.
After 1815 New England emigration rose to astonishing proportions, and
an increasing number of the homeseekers passed--directly or after a
sojourn in the Lower Lake country of New York--into the Northwest. The
opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 made the westward journey easier and
cheaper. The routes of travel led to Lakes Ontario and Erie, thence to
the Reserve in northern Ohio, thence by natural stages into other
portions of northern Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, and eventually into
southern Michigan and Wisconsin. Not until after 1830 did the stalwart
homeseekers penetrate north of Detroit; the great stretches of prairie
between Lakes Erie and Michigan, and to the south--left quite untouched
by Southern pioneers--satisfied every desire of these restless farmers
from New England.
For a long time Southerners determined the course of history in the Old
Northwest. They occupied the field first, and they had the great
advantage of geographical proximity to their old homes. Furthermore,
they lived more compactly; the New Englanders were not only spread over
the broader prairie stretches of the north, but scattered to some extent
throughout the entire region between the Lakes and the Ohio. ¹ But by
the middle of the century not only had the score of northern counties
been inundated by the "Yankees" but the waves were pushing far into the
interior, where they met and mingled with the counter-current. Both
Illinois and Indiana became, in a preëminent degree, melting-pots in
which was fused by slow and sometimes painful processes an amalgam which
Bryce and other keen observers have pronounced the most American thing
in America.
¹ In 1820 the population of Indiana was confined almost entirely to the
southern third of the State, although the removal of the capital, in
1825, from Corydon to Indianapolis was carried out in the confidence
that eventually that point would become the State's populational as it
was its geographical center. When, in 1818, Illinois was admitted to the
Union its population was computed at 40,000. The figure was probably
excessive; at all events, contemporaries testify that so eager were the
people for statehood that many were counted twice, and even emigrants
were counted as they passed through the Territory. But the census of
1820 showed a population of 55,000, settled almost wholly in the
southern third of the State, with narrow tongues of inhabited land
stretching up the river valleys toward the north. Two slave States
flanked the southern end of the commonwealth; almost half of its area
lay south of a westward prolongation of Mason and Dixon's line. Save for
a few Pennsylvanians, the people were Southern; the State was for all
practical purposes a Southern State. As late as 1833 the Legislature
numbered fifty-eight members from the South, nineteen from the Middle
States, and only four from New England.
Of the great national issues in the quarter-century following the War of
1812 there were some upon which people of the Northwest, in spite of
their differing points of view, could very well agree. Internal
improvement was one of these. Roads and canals were necessary outlets to
southern and eastern markets, and any reasonable proposal on this
subject could be assured of the Northwest's solid support. The
thirty-four successive appropriations to 1844 for the Cumberland Road,
Calhoun's "Bonus Bill" of 1816, the bill of 1822 authorizing a
continuous national jurisdiction over the Cumberland Road, the
comprehensive "Survey Bill" of 1824, the Maysville Road Bill of
1830--all were backed by the united strength of the Northwestern
senators and representatives.
So with the tariff. The cry of the East for protection to infant
industries was echoed by the struggling manufacturers of Cincinnati,
Louisville, and other towns; while a protective tariff as a means of
building up the home market for foodstuffs and raw materials seemed to
the Westerner an altogether reasonable and necessary expedient. Ohio
alone in the Northwest had an opportunity to vote on the protective bill
of 1816, and gave its enthusiastic support. Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois
voted unitedly for the bills of 1820, 1824, 1828, and 1832. The
principal western champion of the protective policy was Henry Clay, a
Kentuckian; but the Northwest supported the policy more consistently
than did Clay's own State and section.
On the National Bank the position of the Northwest was no less emphatic.
The people were little troubled by the question of constitutionality;
but believing that the bank was an engine of tyranny in the hands of an
eastern aristocracy, they were fully prepared to support Jackson in his
determination to extinguish that "un-American monopoly."
There were other subjects upon which agreement was reached either with
difficulty or not at all. One of these was the form of local government
which should be adopted. Southerners and New Englanders brought to their
new homes widely differing political usages. The former were accustomed
to the county as the principal local unit of administration. It was a
relatively large division, whose affairs were managed by elective
officers, mainly a board of commissioners. The New Englanders, on the
other hand, had grown up under the town-meeting system and clung to the
notion that an indispensable feature of democratic local government is
the periodic assembling of the citizens of a community for legislative,
fiscal, and electoral purposes. The Illinois constitution of 1818 was
made by Southerners, and naturally it provided for the county system.
But protest from the "Yankee" elements became so strong that in the new
constitution of 1848 provision was made for township organization
wherever the people of a county wanted it; and this form of government,
at first prevalent only in the northern counties, is now found in most
of the central and southern counties as well.
The most deeply and continuously dividing issue in the Northwest, as in
the nation at large, was negro slavery. Although written by Southern
men, the Ordinance of 1787 stipulated that there should be "neither
slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory, otherwise than
in the punishment of crimes whereof the party shall have been duly
convicted." If the government of the Northwest had been one of laws, and
not of men, this specific provision would have made the territory free
soil and would have relieved the inhabitants from all interest in the
"peculiar institution." But the laws never execute themselves--least of
all in frontier communities. In point of fact, considerable numbers of
slaves were held in the territory until the nineteenth century was far
advanced. As late as 1830 thirty-two negroes were held in servitude in
the single town of Vincennes. Slavery could and did prevail to a limited
extent because existing property rights were guaranteed in the Ordinance
itself, in the deed of cession by Virginia, in the Jay Treaty of 1794,
and in other fundamental acts. The courts of the Northwest held that
slave-owners whose property could be brought under any of these
guarantees might retain that property; and although no court
countenanced further importation, itinerant Southerners--"rich planters
traveling in their family carriages, with servants, packs of
hunting-dogs, and trains of slaves, their nightly camp-fires lighting up
the wilderness where so recently the Indian hunter had held
possession"--occasionally settled in southern Indiana or Illinois and
with the connivance of the authorities kept some of their dependents in
slavery, or quasi-slavery, for decades.
Of actual slaveholders there were not enough to influence public
sentiment greatly. But the people of Southern extraction, although
neither slaveholders nor desiring to become such, had no strong moral
convictions on the subject. Indeed, they were likely to feel that the
anti-slavery restriction imposed an unfortunate impediment in the way of
immigration from the South. Hence the persistent demand of citizens of
Indiana and Illinois for a relaxation of the drastic prohibition of
slavery in the Ordinance of 1787. In 1796 Congress was petitioned from
Kaskaskia to extend relief; in 1799 the territorial Legislature was
urged to bring about a repeal; in 1802 an Indiana territorial convention
at Vincennes memorialized Congress in behalf of a suspension of the
proviso for a period of ten years. Not only were violations of the law
winked at, but both Indiana and Illinois deliberately built up a system
of indenture which partook strongly of the characteristics of slavery.
After much controversy, Indiana, in 1816, framed a state constitution
which reiterated the language of the Northwest Ordinance, but without
invalidating titles to existing slave property; while Illinois was
admitted to the Union in 1818 with seven or eight hundred slaves upon
her soil, and with a constitution which continued the old system of
indenture with slight modification.
In a heated contest in Illinois in 1824 over the question of calling a
state convention to draft a constitution legalizing slavery the people
of Northern antecedents made their votes tell and defeated the project.
But, like other parts of the Northwest, this State never became a unit
on the slavery issue. Certainly it never became abolitionist. By an
almost unanimous vote the Legislature, in 1837, adopted joint
resolutions which condemned abolitionism as "more productive of evil
than of moral and political good"; and in Congress in the preceding year
the delegation of the State had given solid support to the "gag
resolutions," which were intended to deny a hearing to all petitions on
the slavery question.
Throughout the great era of slavery controversy the Northwest was
prolific of schemes of compromise, for the constant clash of Northern
and Southern elements developed an aptitude for settlement by agreement
on moderate lines. The people of the section as a whole long clung to
popular, or "squatter," sovereignty as the supremely desirable solution
of the slavery question--a device formulated and defended by two of the
Northwest's own statesmen, Cass and Douglas, and relinquished only
slowly and reluctantly under the leadership, not of a New England
abolitionist, but of a statesman of Southern birth who had come to the
conclusion that the nation could not permanently exist half slave and
half free.
Cass, Douglas, Lincoln--all were adopted sons of the Northwest, and the
career of every one illustrates not only the prodigality with which the
back country showered its opportunities upon men of industry and talent,
but the play and interplay of sectional and social forces in the
building of the newer nation. Cass and Douglas were New Englanders. One
was born at Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1782; the other at Brandon,
Vermont, in 1813. Lincoln sprang from Virginian and Kentuckian stocks.
His father's family moved from Virginia to Kentucky at the close of the
Revolution; in 1784 his grandfather was killed by lurking Indians, and
his father, then a boy of six, was saved from captivity only by a lucky
shot of an older brother. Lincoln himself was born in 1809. Curiously
enough, Cass and Douglas, the New Englanders, played their rôles on the
national stage as Jackson Democrats, while Lincoln, the Kentuckian of
Virginian ancestry, became a Whig and later a Republican.
Cass and Douglas were well-born. Cass's father was a thrifty
soldier-farmer who made for his family a comfortable home at Zanesville,
Ohio; Douglas's father was a successful physician. Lincoln was born in
obscurity and wretchedness. His father, Thomas Lincoln, was a
ne'er-do-well Kentucky carpenter, grossly illiterate, unable or
unwilling to rise above the lowest level of existence in the pioneer
settlements. His mother, Nancy Hanks, whatever her antecedents may have
been, was a woman of character, and apparently of some education. But
she died when her son was only nine years of age.
Cass and Douglas had educational opportunities which in their day were
exceptional. Both attended famous academies and received instruction in
the classics, mathematics, and philosophy. Both grew up in an
environment of enlightenment and integrity. Lincoln, on the other hand,
got a few weeks of instruction under two amateur teachers in Kentucky
and a few months more in Indiana--in all, hardly as much as one year;
and as a boy he knew only rough, coarse surroundings. When, in 1816, the
restless head of the family moved from Kentucky to southern Indiana, his
worldly belongings consisted of a parcel of carpenters' tools and
cooking utensils, a little bedding, and about four hundred gallons of
whiskey. No one who has not seen the sordidness, misery, and apparent
hopelessness of the life of the "poor whites" even today, in the
Kentucky and southern Indiana hills, can fully comprehend the chasm
which separated the boy Lincoln from every sort of progress and
distinction.
All three men prepared for public life by embracing the profession that
has always, in this country, proved the surest avenue to preferment--the
law. But, whereas Cass arrived at maturity just in time to have an
active part in the War of 1812, and in this way to make himself the most
logical selection for the governorship of the newly organized Michigan
Territory, Douglas saw no military service, and Lincoln only a few weeks
of service during the Black Hawk War, and both were obliged to seek fame
and fortune along the thorny road of politics. Following admission to
the bar at Jacksonville, Illinois, in 1834, Douglas was elected public
prosecutor of the first judicial circuit in 1835; elected to the state
Legislature in 1836; appointed by President Van Buren registrar of the
land office at Springfield in 1837; made a judge of the supreme court of
the State in 1841; and elected to the national House of Representatives
in 1843. Resourceful, skilled in debate, intensely patriotic, and
favored with many winning personal qualities, he drew to himself men of
both Northern and Southern proclivities and became an influential
exponent of broad and enduring nationalism.
Meanwhile, after a first defeat, Lincoln was elected to the Illinois
Legislature in 1834, and again in 1836. When he gathered all of his
worldly belongings in a pair of saddle-bags and fared forth to the new
capital, Springfield, to settle himself to the practice of law, he had
more than a local reputation for oratorical power; and events were to
prove that he had not only facility in debate and familiarity with
public questions, but incomparable devotion to lofty principles. In the
subsequent unfolding of the careers of Lincoln and Douglas--especially
in the turn of events that brought to each a nomination for the
presidency by a great party in 1860--there was no small amount of good
luck and sheer accident. But it is equally true that by prodigious
effort Kentuckian and Vermonter alike hewed out their own ways to
greatness.
It was the glory of the Northwest to offer a competence to the needy,
the baffled, the discouraged, the tormented of the eastern States and of
Europe. The bulk of its fast-growing population consisted, it is true,
of ordinary folk who could have lived on in fair comfort in the older
sections, yet who were ambitious to own more land, to make more money,
and to secure larger advantages for their children. But nowhere else was
the road for talent so wide open, entirely irrespective of inheritance,
possessions, education, environment. Nowhere outside of the
trans-Alleghany country would the rise of a Lincoln have been possible.