 section 25 of The Frontier in American History. The problem of the West is nothing less than the problem of American development. A glance at the map of the United States reveals the truth. To write of a Western sectionalism bounded on the east by the Alleghenies is, in itself, to proclaim the writer of provincial. What is the West? What has it been in American life? To have the answers to these questions is to understand the most significant features of the United States of today. The West, at bottom, is a form of society rather than an area. It is the term applied to the region whose social conditions result from the application of older institutions and ideas to the transforming influences of free land. By this application, a new environment is suddenly entered, freedom of opportunity is opened, the cake of custom is broken and new activities, new lines of growth, new institutions and new ideals are brought into existence. The wilderness disappears, the West proper passes onto a new frontier and in the former area a new society has emerged from its contact with the backwards. Gradually this society loses its primitive conditions and assimilates itself to the type of the older social conditions of the East, but it bears within it enduring and distinguishing survivals of its frontier experience. Decade after decade, West after West, this rebirth of American society has gone on, has left its traces behind it and has reacted on the East. The history of our political institutions, our democracy, is not a history of imitation, of simple borrowing. It is a history of the evolution and adaptation of organs in response to a changed environment. A history of the origin of new political species. In this sense, therefore, the West has been a constructive force of the highest significance in our life. To use the words of that acute and widely informed observer, Mr. Bryce, the West is the most American part of America. What Europe is to Asia, what America is to England, that the Western states and territories are to the Atlantic states. The West, as a phase of social organization, began with the Atlantic coast and passed across the continent, but the colonial Tidewater area was in close touch with the Old World and soon lost its Western aspects. In the middle of the 18th century the newer social conditions appeared along the upper waters of the tributaries of the Atlantic. Here it was that the West took on its distinguishing features and transmitted frontier traits and ideals to this area in later days. On the coast were the fishermen and skippers, the merchants and planters with eyes turned towards Europe. Beyond the falls of the rivers were the pioneer farmers, largely of non-English stock, Scotch, Irish and German. They constituted a distinct people and may be regarded as an expansion of the social and economic life of the Middle Region into the back country of the South. These frontiersmen were the ancestors of Boone, Andrew Jackson, Calhoun, Clay and Lincoln. Washington and Jefferson were profoundly affected by these frontier conditions. The forest clearings have been the seed plots of American character. In the revolutionary days the settlers crossed the Alleghenies and put a barrier between them and the coast. They became, to use their phrases, the men of the Western waters, the heirs of the Western world. In this era the backwardsmen, all along the western slopes of the mountains, with a keen sense of the difference between them and the dwellers on the coast, demanded organization into the independent states of the Union. Self-government was their ideal. Said one of their rude but energetic petitions for statehood, some of our fellow citizens may think we are not able to conduct our affairs and consult our interests, but if our society is rude, much wisdom is not necessary to supply our wants, and a fool can sometimes put on his clothes better than a wise man can do it for him. This forest philosophy is the philosophy of American democracy. But the men of the coast were not ready to admit its implications. They apportioned the state legislatures so that the property-holding minority of the Tide Waterlands were able to outvote the more populous back countries. A similar system was proposed by Federalists in the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Governor Morris, arguing in favor of basing representation on property as well as numbers, declared that he looked forward also to that range of new states which would soon be formed in the West. He thought the rule of representation ought to be so fixed as to secure to the Atlantic states a prevalence in the national councils. The new states said he will know less of the public interest than these, will have an interest in many respects different, in particular will be little scrupulous of involving the community in wars, the burdens and operations of which would fall chiefly on the maritime states. Provision ought therefore to be made to prevent the maritime states from being hereafter outvoted by them. He added that the Western country would not be able to furnish men equally enlightened to share in the administration of our common interests. The busy haunts of men, not the remote wilderness, was the proper school of political talents. If the Western people get power into their hands they will ruin the Atlantic interest. The back members are always most averse to the best measures. Add to these utterances of Governor Morris the impassioned protest of Josiah Quincy of Massachusetts in the debates in the House of Representatives on the admission of Louisiana. Referring to the discussion over the slave votes and the West in the Constitutional Convention he declared, suppose then that it had been distinctly foreseeing that, in addition to the effect of this weight, the whole population of a world beyond the Mississippi was to be brought into this and the other branch of the legislature to form our laws, control our rights and decide our destiny. Sir, can it be pretended that the patriots of that day would for one moment have listened to it? They had not taken degrees at the hospital of idiocy. Why, sir, I have already heard of six states and some say there will be, at no great distant time, more. I have also heard that the mouth of the Ohio will be far to the east of the center of the contemplated empire. You have no authority to throw the rights and property of this people into a hodgepodge with the wild men on the Missouri, nor with the mixed, though more respectable, race of Anglo-Hispano-Galoe-Americans who bask on the sands in the mouth of the Mississippi. Do you suppose the people of the northern and Atlantic states will, or ought to, look on with patience and see representatives and senators from the Red River and Missouri, pouring themselves upon this and the other floor, managing the concerns of a seaboard fifteen hundred miles at least from their residents, and having a preponderance in councils into which constitutionally they could never have been admitted? Like an echo from the fears expressed by the east at the close of the eighteenth century come the words of an eminent eastern man of letters at the end of the nineteenth century in warning against the west. Materialized in their temper with few ideals of an ennobling sort, little instructed in the lessons of history, safe from exposure to the direct calamities and physical horrors of war, with undeveloped imaginations and sympathies, they form a community unfortunate and dangerous from the possession of power without a due sense of its corresponding responsibilities. A community in which the passion for war may easily be excited as the fancied means by which its greatness may be convincingly exhibited and its ambitions gratified. Some chance spark may fire the prairie. Here then is the problem of the west as it looked to New England leaders of thought in the beginning and at the end of this century. From the first it was recognized that a new type was growing up beyond the seaboard and that the time would come when the destiny of the nation would be in western hands. The divergence of these societies became clear in the struggle over the ratification of the federal constitution. The upcountry agricultural regions, the communities that were in debt and desired paper money, with some western exceptions, opposed the instrument, but the areas of intercourse and property carried the day. It is important to understand therefore what were some of the ideals of this early western democracy. How did the frontiersmen differ from the man of the coast? The most obvious fact regarding the man of the western waters is that he had placed himself under influences destructive to many of the gains of civilization. Remote from the opportunity for systematic education, substituting a log hut in the forest clearing for the social comforts of the town, he suffered hardships and privations and reverted in many ways to primitive conditions of life. Engaged in a struggle to subdue the forest, working as an individual and with little speci or capital, his interests were with the debtor class. At each stage of its advance the west has favored an expansion of the currency. The pioneer had boundless confidence in the future of his own community and when seasons of financial contraction and depression occurred, he, who had staked his all on confidence in western development and had fought the savage for his home, was inclined to reproach the conservative sections and classes. To explain this antagonism requires more than denunciation of dishonesty, ignorance and boorishness as fundamental western traits. Legislation in the United States has had to deal with two distinct social conditions. In some portions of the country there was and is an aggregation of property and vested rights are in the foreground. In others, capital is lacking, more primitive conditions prevail with different economic and social ideals and the contentment of the average individual is placed in the foreground. That in the conflict between these two ideals an even hand has always been held by the government would be difficult to show. The separation of the western man from the seaboard and his environment made him in a large degree free from European precedents and forces. He looked at things independently and with small regard or appreciation for the best old world experience. He had no ideal of a philosophical eclectic nation that should advance civilization by intercourse with foreigners and familiarity with their point of view and readiness to adopt whatever is best and most suitable in their ideas, manners and customs. His was rather the ideal of conserving and developing what was original and valuable in this new country. The entrance of old society upon free lands meant to him opportunity for a new type of democracy and new popular ideals. The West was not conservative. Boyant self-confidence and self-assertion were distinguishing traits in its composition. It saw in its growth nothing less than a new order of society and state. In this conception were elements of evil and elements of good. But the fundamental fact in regard to this new society was its relation to land. Professor Bhutmi has said of the United States, their one primary and predominant object is to cultivate and settle these prairies, forests and vast wastelands. The striking and peculiar characteristic of American society is that it is not so much a democracy as a huge commercial company for the discovery, cultivation and capitalization of its enormous territory. The United States are primarily a commercial society and only secondarily a nation. Of course this involves a serious misapprehension. By the very fact of the task he has set forth, far-reaching ideals of the state and of society have been evolved in the West, accompanied by loyalty to the nation representative of these ideals. But Bhutmi's description hits the substantial fact that the fundamental traits of the man of the interior were due to the free lands of the West. These turned his attention to the great task of subduing them to the purposes of civilization and to the task of advancing his economic and social status in the new democracy which he was helping to create. Art, literature, refinement, scientific administration all had to give way to this titanic labor. Energy, incessant activity became the lot of this new American. Cesar Traveller of the time of Andrew Jackson, America is like a vast workshop over the door of which is printed in blazing characters, no admittance here except on business. The West of our own day reminds Mr. Bryce of the crowd which Vathic found in the hall of Eblis, each darting hither and thither with swift steps and unquiet mean, driven to and fro by a fire in the heart. Time seems too short for what they have to do and the result always to come short of their desire. But free lands in the consciousness of working out their social destiny did more than turn the Westerner to material interests and devote him to a restless existence. They promoted equality among the Western settlers and reacted as a check on the aristocratic influences of the East, where everybody could have a farm, almost for taking it, economic equality easily resulted and this involved political equality. Not without a struggle would the Western man abandon this ideal and it goes far to explain the unrest in the remote West today. Western democracy included individual liberty as well as equality. The Frontiersman was impatient of restraints. He knew how to preserve order even in the absence of legal authority. If there were cattle thieves, lynch law was sudden and effective. The regulators of the Carolinas were the predecessors of the claims associations of Iowa and the vigilance committees of California. But the individual was not ready to submit to complex regulations. Population was sparse. There was no multitude of jostling interests as in older settlements demanding an elaborate system of personal restraints. Society became atomic. There was a reproduction of the primitive idea of the personality of the law. A crime was more an offense against the victim than a violation of the law of the land. Substantial justice, secured in the most direct way, was the ideal of the Backwardsman. He had little patience with finely drawn distinctions or scruples of method. If the thing was one proper to be done, then the most immediate, rough and ready, effective way was the best way. It followed from the lack of organized political life, from the atomic conditions of the Backwards Society, that the individual was exalted in given free play. The West was another name for opportunity. Here were mines to be seized, fertile valleys to be preempted, all the natural resources open to the shrewdest and boldest. The United States is unique in the extent to which the individual has been given an open field, unchecked by restraints of an old social order or of scientific administration of government. The self-made man was the Western man's ideal, was the kind of man that all men might become. Out of his wilderness experience, out of the freedom of his opportunities, he fashioned a formula for social regeneration, the freedom of the individual to seek his own. He did not consider that his conditions were exceptional and temporary. Under such conditions, leadership easily develops, a leadership based on the possession of the qualities most serviceable to the young society. In the history of Western settlement, we see each forted village following its local hero. Clay, Jackson, Harrison, Lincoln were illustrations of this tendency in periods when the Western hero rose to the dignity of national hero. The Western man believed in the manifest destiny of his country. On his border and checking his advance were the Indian, the Spaniard, and the Englishman. He was indignant at the 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, quote, 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, end of quote. And the foreigner saw only dreary deserts tenanted by sparse, agui-stricken pioneers and savages. The cities were log huts and gambling dens, but the frontiersmen's dream was prophetic. In spite of his rude, gross nature, this early Western man was an idealist with all. 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 Martinot in 1834, quote, I regard the American people as a great embryo-pellet, 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, end of quote. 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 to 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 remote regions. These settlers spread New England ideals of education and character and political institutions and acted as eleven 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 ban 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 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 labouring 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 planner raising cotton. In all except the mountainous areas the industrial organization of the tide water 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 Beaux's review in 1852 in these words, quote, What is New Orleans now? Where are her dreams of greatness and glory? Whilst she slept, an enemy has sowed tears 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 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 planes. 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 frontiersmen 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 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 today. 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 is 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 53rd 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 inner oceanic 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 Alleghenies. In the remote or 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 dead or 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 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 on its behalf. In these demands it finds itself in touch with the depressed agricultural classes and the working men 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 Alleghenes 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 his 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 witch's 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. End of section 26. Recording by Colleen McMahon. Section 27 of The Frontier in American History. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Frontier in American History by Frederick Jackson Turner. Chapter 8. Dominant Forces in Western Life. Part 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 Cleveland had just led a handful of men to the Connecticut Reserve. Today 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 in during centers of Puritan influence. During the same period New Jersey and Pennsylvania sent their colonists to the Sims Purchase in which Cincinnati was the rallying point while Virginians sought the military boundary lands in the region of Chilacoth. The middle states in 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 16 representatives chiefly from Connecticut, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania 17 senators and 21 representatives mostly from Pennsylvania while the south furnished nine senators and 27 representatives of whom the majority came from Virginia. Five of the representatives were native of Ireland, presumably Scotch Irishman. 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 statesmen in the assembly. Together the emigrants from the democratic south and the 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 saw 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 today. 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 combine 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 a 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 of 1824 over the proposition to open Illinois to slavery was one 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 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-allagany 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 geographic 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 voting songs and voyagers 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 centre of authority was in Canada. But after the digging of the Erie Canal settlement began to turn into Michigan. Between 1830 and 1840 the population of the state leaped from 31,000 to 212,000 in the face of the fact that the heavy debt of the state and the crisis of 1837 turned from her board as many of the thrifty debt hating Germans. The vast majority of the settlers were New Yorkers. Michigan is distinctly a child of the Empire State. Canadians both French and English continued to come as the lumber interests of the region increased. By 1850 Michigan contained nearly 400,000 inhabitants who occupied the southern half of the state. But she now found an active competitor for settlement in Wisconsin. In this region two forces had attracted the earlier inhabitants the fur trading posts of Green Bay, Prairie Duchyenne and Milwaukee constituted one element in which the French influence was continued. The lead region of the southwest corner of the state formed the centre of attraction for Illinois and southern pioneers. The soldiers who followed Blackhawks trail in 1832 reported the richness of the soil and an era of immigration followed. To the port of Milwaukee came a combined migration from western New York and New England and spread along the southern tier of Prairie counties until it met the southern settlers in the lead region. Many of the early political contests in the state were connected, as in Ohio and Illinois, with the antagonisms between the sections thus brought together in a limited area. The other element in the formation of Wisconsin was that of the Germans, then just entering upon their vast immigration to the United States. Wisconsin was free from debt, she made a constitution of exceptional liberality to foreigners and instead of treasuring her school lands or using them for internal improvements she sold them for almost nothing to attract immigration. The result was that the prudent Germans who loved light taxes in cheap hardwood lands turned toward Wisconsin, another Volcker Wanderung. From Milwaukee as a centre they spread north along the shore of Lake Michigan and later into northern central Wisconsin following the belt of the hardwood forests. So considerable were their numbers that such an economist as Roscha wrote of the feasibility of making Wisconsin a German state. They can plant the vine on the hills cried Franz Lowe in 1847 and drink with happy song and dance. They can have German schools and universities, German literature and art, German science and philosophy, German courts and assemblies. In short they can form a German state in which the German language shall be as much the popular and official language as the English is now and in which the German spirit shall rule. By 1860 the German born were 16% of the population of the state but the New York and New England stream proved even more broad and steady in its flow in these years before the war. Wisconsin's population rose from 30,000 in 1840 to 300,000 in 1850. The New England element that entered this state is probably typical of the same element in Wisconsin's neighboring states and demands notice. It came for the most part not from the seaboard of Massachusetts which has so frequently represented New England to the popular apprehension. A large element in this stock was the product of the migration that ascended the valleys of Connecticut and central Massachusetts through the hills into Vermont and New York, a pioneer folk almost from the time of their origin. The Vermont colonists decidedly outnumbered those of Massachusetts in both Michigan and Wisconsin and were far more numerous in other northwestern states than the population of Vermont-Warranted. Together with this current came the settlers from western New York. These were generally descendants of the same pioneer New England stock continuing into a remote west the movement that had brought their parents to New York. The combined current from New England and New York thus constituted a distinctly modified New England stock and was clearly the dominant native element in Michigan and Wisconsin. The decade of the 40s was also the period of Iowa's rapid increase. Although not politically a part of the Old Northwest, in history she is closely related to that region. Her growth was by no means so rapid as Wisconsin's for the proportion of foreign immigration was less. Whereas in 1850 more than one third of Wisconsin's population was foreign born, the proportion for Iowa was not much over one tenth. The main body of her people finally came from middle states and Illinois and Ohio, but southern elements were well represented, particularly among her political leaders. End of section 27. Part 2 The middle of the century was the turning point in the transfer of control in the northwest. Below the line of the old national turnpike, marked by the cities of Columbus, Indianapolis, Vandalia, and St. Louis, the counties had acquired a stability of settlement, and partly because of the southern element, partly because of a natural tendency of new communities toward Jacksonian ideals, these counties were preponderantly democratic. But the southern migration had turned to the cotton areas of the southwest, and the development of railroads and canals had broken the historic commercial ascendancy of the Mississippi River. New Orleans was yielding the scepter to New York. The tide of migration from the north poured along these newly open channels, and occupied the less settled counties above the national turnpike. In cities like Columbus and Indianapolis, where the two currents had run side by side, the combined elements were most clearly marked, but in the northwest as a whole a varied population had been formed. This region seemed to represent and understand the various parts of the union. It was this aspect which Mr. Vinton of Ohio urged in Congress when he made his notable speech in favor of the admission of Iowa. He pleaded the mission of the northwest as the mediator between the sections, and the unifying agency in the nation, with such power and pathos as to thrill even John Quincy Adams. But there are some issues which cannot be settled by compromise, tendencies one of which must conquer the other. Such an issue the slave power raised, and raised too late for support in the upper half of the Mississippi basin. The northern and southern elements found themselves in opposition to each other. A house divided against itself cannot stand, said Abraham Lincoln, a northern leader of southern origin. Douglas, a leader of the southern forces, though coming from New England, declared his indifference whether slavery were voted up or down in the western territories. The historic debates between these two champions revealed the complex conditions in the northwest, and take on a new meaning when considered in the light of this contest between the northern and southern elements. The state that had been so potent for compromise was at last the battleground itself, and the places selected for the various debates of Lincoln and Douglas marked the strongholds and the outposts of the antagonistic forces. At this time the kinship of western New York and the dominant element in the northwest was clearly revealed. Speaking for the anti-slavery forces at Madison, Wisconsin in 1860, Seward said, quote, the northwest is by no means so small as you may think it. I speak to you because I feel that I am and during all my mature life have been one of you. Although of New York, I am still a citizen of the northwest. The northwest extends eastward to the base of the Allegheny Mountains, and does not all of western New York lie westward of the Allegheny Mountains? Whence comes all the inspiration of free soil which spreads itself with such cheerful voices over all these plains? Why from New York westward of the Allegheny Mountains? The people before me. Who are you but New York men, while you are men of the northwest? End of quote. In the Civil War western New York and the northwest were powerful in the forum and in the field. A million soldiers came from the states that the ordinance passed by southern votes had devoted to freedom. This was the first grave time of trial for the northwest, and it did much eventually to give to the region a homogeneity and self-consciousness. But at the close of the war the region was still agricultural, only half developed, still breaking ground in northern forests, still receiving contributions of peoples, which radically modified the social organism, and undergoing economic changes almost revolutionary in their rapidity and extent. The changes since the war are of more social importance, in many respects, than those in the years commonly referred to as the formative period. As a result the northwest finds herself again between contending forces, sharing the interests of the east and west, as once before those of north and south, and forced to give her voice on issues of equal significance for the destiny of the republic. In these transforming years since 1860, Ohio, finding the magician's talisman that revealed the treasury of mineral wealth, gas and petroleum beneath her fields, has leaped to a front rank among the manufacturing states of the union. Potential on the Great Lakes by reason of reports of Toledo and Cleveland, tapping the Ohio river artery of trade at Cincinnati, and closely connected with all the vast material development of the upper waters of this river in western Pennsylvania and West Virginia, Ohio has become distinctly a part of the eastern social organism, much like the state of Pennsylvania. The complexity of her origin still persists. Ohio has no preponderant social center. Her multiplicity of colleges and universities bears tribute to the diversity of the elements that have made the state. One-third of her people are a foreign parentage, one or both parents foreign born, and the city of Cincinnati has been deeply affected by the German stock, while Cleveland strongly reflects the influence of the New England element. That influence is still very palpable, but it is New England in the presence of natural gas, iron and coal. New England shaped by blast and forge. The middle state ideals will dominate Ohio's future. Bucolic Indiana too within the last decade has come into the possession of gas fields and has increased the exploitation of her coals until she seems destined to share in the industrial type represented by Ohio. Cities have arisen like a dream on the sites of country villages, but Indiana has a much smaller proportion of foreign elements than any other state of the Old Northwest, and it is the southern element that still differentiates her from her sisters, while Ohio's political leaders still attest the Puritan migration. Indianas clasp hands with the leaders from the south. The southern elements continue also to reveal themselves in the democratic southwestern counties of Illinois, grouped like a broad delta of the Illinois River, while northern Illinois holds a larger proportion of descendants of the middle states and New England. About one half her population is a foreign parentage, in which the German, Irish, and Scandinavians furnish the largest elements. She is a great agricultural state and a great manufacturing state, the connecting link between the Mississippi and the Great Lakes. Hermitropolis, Chicago, is the very type of northwestern development for good and for evil. It is an epitome of her composite nationality. A recent writer, analyzing the school census of Chicago, points out that, quote, only two cities in the German empire, Berlin and Hamburg, have a greater German population than Chicago. Only two in Sweden, Stockholm and Göteborg, have more Swedes, and only two in Norway, Christiana and Bergen, have more Norwegians, end of quote. While the Irish, Polish, Bohemians, and Dutch elements are also largely represented. But in spite of her rapidity of growth and her complex elements, Chicago stands as the representative of the willpower and genius for action of the Middle West, and the state of Illinois will be the battleground for social and economic ideals for the next generation. Michigan is two states. The northern peninsula is cut off from the southern physically, industrially, and in the history of settlement. It would seem that her natural destiny was with Wisconsin, or some possible new state embracing the iron and copper, forest, and shipping areas of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota on Lake Superior. The lower peninsula of Michigan is the daughter of New York, and over twelve percent of Michigan's present population were born in that state, and her traits are those of the parent state. Over half her population is a foreign parentage, of which Canada and England together have furnished one half, while the Germans outnumber any other single foreign element. The state is undergone a steady industrial development, exploiting her northern mines and forests, developing her lumber interests with Saginaw as the center, raising fruits along the Lakeshore counties, and producing grain in the middle trough of counties running from Saginaw Bay to the south of Lake Michigan. Her state university has been her peculiar glory, furnishing the first model for the state university, and it is the educational contribution of the northwest to the nation. Wisconsin's future is dependent upon the influence of the large proportion of her population of foreign parentage, for nearly three-fourths of her inhabitants are of that class. She thus has a smaller percentage of native population than any other of the states formed from the Old Northwest. Of this foreign element, the Germans constitute by far the largest part, with the Scandinavians second. Her American population, born outside of Wisconsin, comes chiefly from New York. In contrast with the Ohio River states, she lacks the southern element. Her greater foreign population and her dairy interests contrast with Michigan's Canadian and English elements and fruit culture. Her relations are more western than Michigan's by reason of her connection with the Mississippi and the prairie states. Her foreign element is slightly less than Minnesota's, and in the latter state the Scandinavians take the place held by the Germans in Wisconsin. The facility with which the Scandinavians catch the spirit of western America and assimilate with their neighbors is much greater than is the case with the Germans, so that Wisconsin seems to offer opportunity for non-English influence in a greater degree than her sister on the west. While Minnesota's economic development has heretofore been closely dependent on the wheat-producing prairies, the opening of the iron fields of the Misabi and Vermillion ranges, together with the development of St. Paul and Minneapolis, Duluth and West Superior, and the prospective achievement of a deep-water communication with the Atlantic, seem to offer to that state a new and imperial industrial destiny. Between this stupendous economic future to the northwest and the colossal growth of Chicago on the southeast, Wisconsin seems likely to become a middle agricultural area, developing particularly into a dairy state. She is powerfully affected by the conservative tendencies of her German element in times of political agitation and of proposals of social change. Some of the social modifications in this state are more or less typical of important processes at work among the neighboring states of the Old Northwest. In the north, the men who built up the lumber interests of the state, who founded a mill town surrounded by the stumps of the pine forests which they exploited for the prairie markets, have acquired wealth and political power. The spacious and well-appointed home of the town builder may now be seen in many and northern community, in a group of less pretentious homes of operatives and tradesmen, the social distinctions between them emphasized by the difference in nationality. A few years before, this captain of industry was perhaps actively engaged in the task of seeking the best forties or directing the operations of his log-drivers. His wife and daughters make extensive visits to Europe, his sons go to some university, and he himself is likely to acquire political position, or to devote his energies to saving the town from industrial decline as the timbers cut away by transforming it into a manufacturing center for more finished products. Still others continue their activity among the forests of the south. This social history of the timber areas of Wisconsin has left clear indications in the development of the peculiar political leadership in the northern portion of the state. In the southern and middle counties of the state, the original settlement of the Native American pioneer farmer, a tendency is showing itself to divide the farms and to sell to thrifty Germans, or to cultivate the soil by tenants while the farmer retires to live in the neighboring village and perhaps to organize creameries and develop a dairy business. The result is that a replacement of nationalities is in progress. Townships and even counties once dominated by Native American farmers of New York extraction are now possessed by Germans or other European nationalities. Large portions of the retail trades of the towns are also passing into German hands while the Native element seeks the cities, the professions, or mercantile enterprises of larger character. The non-Native element shows distinct tendencies to dwelling groups. One of the most striking illustrations of this fact is the community of New Glarus in Wisconsin, formed by a carefully organized migration from Glarus in Switzerland aided by the canton itself. For some years this community was a miniature Swiss canton in social organization and customs, but of late it has become increasingly assimilated to the American type and is left in impress by transforming the county in which it is from a grain raising to a dairy region. From Milwaukee as a center the influence of the Germans upon the social customs and ideals of Wisconsin has been marked. Milwaukee has many of the aspects of a German city and has furnished a stronghold of resistance to Native American efforts to enact rigid temperance legislation, laws regulative of parochial schools, and similar attempts to bend the German type to the social ideas of the pioneer American stock. In the last presidential election the German area of the state deserted the Democratic Party and its opposition to free silver was a decisive factor in the overwhelming victory of the Republicans in Wisconsin. With all the evidence of the persistence of the influence of this nationality it is nevertheless clear that each decade marks an increased assimilation and homogeneity in the state, but the result is a compromise and not a conquest by either element. End of section 28. Section 29 of the Frontier in American History by Frederick Jackson Turner. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Colleen McMahon. Chapter 8. Dominant Forces in Western Life Part 3 The states of the Old Northwest gave to McKinley a plurality of over 367,000 out of a total vote of about 3,734,000. New England and the Middle States together gave him a plurality of 979,000 in about the same vote, while the farther west gave to Brian a decisive net plurality. It thus appears that the Old Northwest occupied the position of a political middle region between east and west. The significance of this position is manifest when it is recalled that this section is the child of the east and the mother of the populistic west. The occupation of the western prairies was determined by forces similar to those which settled the Old Northwest. In the decade before the war, Minnesota succeeded to the place held by Wisconsin as the Mecca of settlers in the prior decade. To Wisconsin and New York she owes the largest proportion of her native settlers born outside of the state. Kansas and Nebraska were settled most rapidly in the decade following the war and had a large proportion of soldiers in their American immigrants. Illinois and Ohio together furnished about one-third of the native settlers of these states, but the element coming from southern states was stronger in Kansas than in Nebraska. Both these states have an exceptionally large proportion of native whites as compared with their neighbors among the prairie states. Kansas, for example, has about 26 percent of persons of foreign parentage, while Nebraska has about 42, Iowa 43, South Dakota 60, Wisconsin 73, Minnesota 75, and North Dakota 79. North Dakota's development was greatest in the decade prior to 1890. Her native stock came in largest numbers from Wisconsin, with New York, Minnesota, and Iowa next in order. The growth of South Dakota occupied the two decades prior to the census of 1890, and she has recruited her native element from Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, and New York. In consequence of the large migration from the states of the Old Northwest to the virgin soils of these prairie states, many counties in the parent states show a considerable declining growth in the decade before 1890. There is significance in the fact that with the exception of Iowa, these prairie states, the colonies of the Old Northwest, gave Bryan votes in the election of 1896 in the ratio of their proportion of persons of native parentage. North Dakota, with the heaviest foreign element, was carried for McKinley, while South Dakota, with a much smaller foreign vote, went for Bryan. Kansas and Nebraska rank with Ohio in their native percentage, and they were the center of prairie populism. Of course, there were other important local economic and political explanations for this ratio, but it seems to have a basis of real meaning. Certain it is that the leaders of the silver movement came from the native element furnished by the Old Northwest. The original populists in the Kansas legislature of 1891 were born in different states as follows. In Ohio 12, Indiana 6, Illinois 5, New York 4, Pennsylvania 2, Connecticut, Vermont and Maine one each, making a total for the northern current of 32. Of the remaining 18, 13 were from the south, and one each from Kansas, Missouri, California, England and Ireland. Nearly all were Methodists and former Republicans. Looking at the silver movement more largely, we find that of the Kansas delegation in the 54th Congress, one was born in Kansas and the rest in Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Maine. All of the Nebraska delegation in the house came from the Old Northwest or from Iowa. The biographies of the two representatives from the state of Washington tell an interesting story. These men came as children to the pine woods of Wisconsin, took up public lands, and worked on the farm and in the pinearies. One passed on to a homestead in Nebraska before settling in Washington. Thus they kept one stage ahead of the social transformations of the West. This is the usual training of the Western politicians. If the reader would see a picture of the representative Kansas populist, let him examine the family portraits of the Ohio farmer in the middle of the century. In a word, the populist is the American farmer who is kept in advance of the economic and social transformations that have overtaken those who remained behind. While doubtless, investigation into the ancestry of the populists and silver men who came to the prairies from the Old Northwest would show a large proportion of Southern origin, yet the center of discontent seems to have been among the men of New England and New York current. If New England looks with care at these men, she may recognize in them the familiar lineaments of the embattled farmers who fired the shot heard round the world. The continuous advance of this pioneer stock from New England has preserved for us the older type of the pioneer of frontier New England. I do not overlook the transforming influences of the wilderness on this stock ever since it left the earlier frontier to follow up the valleys of western Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Vermont into western New York, into Ohio, into Iowa, and out to the arid plains of western Kansas and Nebraska. Nor do I overlook the peculiar industrial conditions of the prairie states. But I desire to insist upon the other truth also, that these westward immigrants, keeping for generations in advance of the transforming industrial and social forces that have wrought so vast a revolution in the older regions of the east which they left, could not but preserve important aspects of the older farmer type. In the arid west these pioneers have halted and have turned to perceive an altered nation and changed social ideals. They see the sharp contrast between their traditional idea of America as the land of opportunity, the land of the self-made man, free from class distinctions and from the power of wealth, and the existing America, so unlike the earlier ideal. If we follow back the line of march of the Puritan farmer, we shall see how responsive he has always been to isms, and how persistently he has resisted encroachments on his ideals of individual opportunity and democracy. He is the prophet of the higher law in Kansas before the civil war. He is the prohibitionist of Iowa and Wisconsin, crying out against German customs as an invasion of his traditional ideals. He is the Granger of Wisconsin passing restrictive railroad legislation. He is the abolitionist, the anti-Mason, the Millerite, the woman suffragist, the spiritualist, the Mormon of western New York. Follow him to his New England home in the turbulent days of Shay's Rebellion, paper money, stay and tender laws, and land banks, the radicals among these New England farmers hated lawyers and capitalists. Quote, I would not trust them, said Abraham White in the Ratification Convention of Massachusetts in 1788, though every one of them should be a Moses. End of quote. Quote, these lawyers, cried Amos Singletary, and men of learning and moneyed men that talk so finely and gloss over matters so smoothly to make us poor illiterate people swallow the pill, expect to get into Congress themselves. They mean to get all the money into their hands, and then they will swallow up all us little folk like the Leviathan, Mr. President. Yay, just as the whale swallowed up Jonah. End of quote. If the voice of Mary Ellen Lease sounds raucous to the New England man today, while it is sweet music in the ears of the Kansas farmer, let him ponder the utterances of these frontier farmers in the days of the revolution, and if he is still doubtful of the spiritual kinship, let him read the words of the levelers and sectaries of Cromwell's army. The story of the political leaders who remained in the place of their birth and shared its economic changes differs from the story of those who, by moving to the West, continued on a new area, the old social type. In the throng of Scotch-Irish pioneers that entered the uplands of the Carolinas in the second quarter of the 18th century were the ancestors of Calhoun and of Andrew Jackson. Remaining in this region, Calhoun shared the transformations of the South Carolina Interior. He saw it change from the area of the pioneer farmers to an area of great planners raising cotton by slave labor. This explains the transformation of the nationalist and protectionist Calhoun of 1816 into the state sovereignty and free trade Calhoun. Jackson, on the other hand, left the region while it was still a frontier, shared the frontier life of Tennessee, and reflected the democracy and nationalism of his people. Henry Clay lived long enough in the kindred state of Kentucky to see it pass from a frontier to a settled community, and his views on slavery reflected the transitional history of that state. Lincoln, on the other hand, born in Kentucky in 1809, while the state was still under frontier conditions, migrated in 1816 to Indiana and in 1830 to Illinois. The pioneer influences of his community did much to shape his life, and the development of the raw frontiersmen into the statesmen was not unlike the development of his own state. Political leaders who experienced the later growth of the Northwest, like Garfield Hayes, Harrison, and McKinley, show clearly the continued transformations of the section. But in the days when the Northwest was still in the gristle, she sent her sons into the newer West to continue the views of life and the policies of the half frontier region they had left. Today the Northwest, standing between her ancestral connections in the East and her children in the West, partly like the East, partly like the West, finds herself in a position strangely like that in the days of the slavery struggle, when her origins presented her a divided duty. But these issues are not with the same imperious which, as was the issue of freedom or slavery. Looking at the Northwest as a whole, one sees, in the character of its industries and in the elements of its population, it is identified on the East with the zone of states, including the Middle Region and New England. Cotton culture and the Negro make a clear line of division between the Old Northwest and the South, and yet in important historical ideals, in the process of expansion, in the persistence of agricultural interests, in impulsiveness, in imperialistic ways of looking at the American destiny, in hero worship, in the newness of its present social structure, the Old Northwest has much in common with the South and the Far West. Behind her is the old pioneer past of simple democratic conditions and freedom of opportunity for all men. Before her is a superb industrial development, the brilliancy of success as evinced in a vast population, aggregate wealth, and sectional power. End of Section 29 Section 30 of The Frontier in American History by Frederick Jackson Turner. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Colleen McMahon. Chapter 9 Contributions of the West to American Democracy Part 1 Political thought in the period of the French Revolution tended to treat democracy as an absolute system, applicable to all times and to all peoples, a system that was to be created by the act of the people themselves on philosophical principles. Ever since that era, there has been an inclination on the part of writers on democracy to emphasize the analytical and theoretical treatment to the neglect of the underlying factors of historical development. If, however, we consider the underlying conditions and forces that create the democratic type of government and at times contradict the external forms to which the name democracy is applied, we shall find that under this name there have appeared a multitude of political types radically unlike, in fact. The careful student of history must, therefore, seek the explanation of the forms and changes of political institutions in the social and economic forces that determine them. To know that at any one time a nation may be called a democracy, an aristocracy, or a monarchy is not so important as to know what are the social and economic tendencies of the state. These are the vital forces that work beneath the surface and dominate the external form. It is to changes in the economic and social life of a people that we must look for the forces that ultimately create and modify organs of political action. For the time, adaptation of political structure may be incomplete or concealed. Old organs will be utilized to express new forces and so gradual and subtle will be the change that it may hardly be recognized. The pseudo democracies under the Mediciate Florence and under Augustus at Rome are familiar examples of this type. Or, again, if the political structure be rigid, incapable of responding to the changes demanded by growth, the expensive forces of social and economic transformation may rend it in some catastrophe like that of the French Revolution. In all these changes, both conscious ideals and unconscious social reorganization are at work. These facts are familiar to the student and yet it is doubtful if they have been fully considered in connection with American democracy. For a century at least in conventional expression, Americans have referred to a glorious constitution in explaining the stability and prosperity of their democracy. We have believed as a nation that other peoples had only to will our democratic institutions in order to repeat our own career. In dealing with Western contributions to democracy, it is essential that the considerations which have just been mentioned shall be kept in mind. Whatever these contributions may have been, we find ourselves at the present time in an era of such profound economic and social transformation as to raise the question of the effect of these changes upon the democratic institutions of the United States. Within a decade, four market changes have occurred in our national development. Taken together, they constitute a revolution. First, there is the exhaustion of the supply of free land and the closing of the movement of Western advance as an effective factor in American development. The first rough conquest of the wilderness is accomplished and that great supply of free lands, which year after year has served to reinforce the democratic influences in the United States, is exhausted. It is true that vast tracts of government land are still untaken, but they constitute the mountain and arid regions, only a small fraction of them capable of conquest, and then only by the application of capital and combined effort, the free lands that made the American pioneer have gone. In the second place, contemporaneously with this, there has been such a concentration of capital in the control of fundamental industries as to make a new epoch in the economic development of the United States. The iron, the coal, and the cattle of the country have all fallen under the domination of a few great corporations with allied interests, and by the rapid combination of the important railroad systems and steamship lines in concert with these same forces, even the breadstuffs and the manufacturers of the nation are to some degree controlled in a similar way. This is largely the work of the last decade. The development of the great iron mines of Lake Superior occurred in the early 90s, and in the same decade came the combination by which the coal and the coke of the country and the transportation systems that connect them with the iron mines have been brought under a few concentrated managements. Side by side with this concentration of capital has gone the combination of labor in the same vast industries. The one is in a certain sense the concomitant of the other, but the movement acquires an additional significance because of the fact that during the past 15 years the labor class has been so recruited by a tide of foreign immigration that this class is now largely made up of persons of foreign parentage, and the lines of cleavage which begin to appear in this country between capital and labor have been accentuated by distinctions of nationality. A third phenomenon connected with the two just mentioned is the expansion of the United States politically and commercially into lands beyond the seas. A cycle of American development has been completed. Up to the close of the war of 1812 this country was involved in the fortunes of the European state system. The first quarter of a century of our national existence was almost a continual struggle to prevent ourselves being drawn into the European wars. At the close of that era of conflict the United States set its face toward the West. It began the settlement and improvement of the vast interior of the country. Here was the field of our colonization, here the field of our political activity. This process being completed it is not strange that we find the United States again involved in world politics. The revolution that occurred four years ago when the United States struck down that ancient nation under whose auspices the new world was discovered is hardly yet more than dimly understood. The insular wreckage of the Spanish war, Puerto Rico and the Philippines with the problems presented by the Hawaiian islands, Cuba, the Isthmian canal and China all are indications of the new direction of the ship of state and while we thus turn our attention overseas our concentrated industrial strength has given us a striking power against the commerce of Europe that is already producing consternation in the old world. Having completed the conquest of the wilderness and having consolidated our interests we are beginning to consider the relations of democracy and empire and fourth the political parties of the United States now tend to divide on issues that involve the question of socialism the rise of the populist party in the last decade and the acceptance of so many of its principles by the democratic party under the leadership of Mr. Brian show in striking manner the birth of new political ideas the reformation of the lines of political conflict. It is doubtful if in any 10 years of American history more significant factors in our growth have revealed themselves. The struggle of the pioneer farmers to subdue the arid lands of the great plains in the 80s was followed by the official announcement of the extinction of the frontier line in 1890. The dramatic outcome of the Chicago Convention of 1896 marked the rise into power of the representatives of populistic change. Two years later came the battle of Manila which broke down the old isolation of the nation and started it on a path the goal of which no man can foretell. And finally but two years ago came that concentration of which the billion and a half dollar steel trust and the union of the northern continental railways are stupendous examples. Is it not obvious then that the student who seeks for the explanation of democracy in the social and economic forces that underlie political forms must make inquiry into the conditions that have produced our democratic institutions if he would estimate the effect of these vast changes. As a contribution to this inquiry let us now turn to an examination of the part that the west has played in shaping our democracy. From the beginning of the settlement of America the frontier regions have exercised a steady influence toward democracy. In Virginia to take an example it can be traced as early as the period of Bacon's rebellion a hundred years before our declaration of independence. The small land holders seeing that their powers were steadily passing into the hands of the wealthy planters who controlled church and state and lands rose in revolt. A generation later in the governorship of Alexander Spotswood we find a contest between the frontier settlers and the property holding classes of the coast. The democracy with which Spotswood had to struggle and of which he so bitterly complained was a democracy made up of small land holders of the newer immigrants and of indented servants who at the expiration of their time of servitude passing into the interior to take up lands and engage in pioneer farming. The War of the Regulation just on the eve of the American Revolution shows the steady persistence of the struggle between the classes of the interior and those of the coast. The Declaration of Grievances which the back counties of the Carolinas then drew up against the aristocracy that dominated the politics of those colonies exhibits the contest between the democracy of the frontier and the established classes who apportioned the legislature in such fashion as to secure effective control of the government. Indeed in a period before the outbreak of the American Revolution one can trace a distinct belt of democratic territory extending from the back country of New England down through western New York, Pennsylvania and the south. In each colony this region was in conflict with the dominant classes of the coast. It constituted a quasi-revolutionary area before the days of the revolution and it formed the basis on which the democratic party was afterwards established. It was therefore in the west as it was in the period before the Declaration of Independence that the struggle for democratic development first revealed itself and in that area the essential ideas of American democracy had already appeared. Through the period of the revolution and of the confederation a similar contest can be noted. On the frontier of New England along the western border of Pennsylvania, Virginia and the Carolinas and in the communities beyond the Allegheny Mountains there arose a demand of frontier settlers for independent statehood based on democratic provisions. There's a strain of fierceness in their energetic petitions demanding self government under the theory that every people have the right to establish their own political institutions in an area which they have won from the wilderness. Those revolutionary principles based on natural rights for which the seaboard colonies were contending were taken up with frontier energy in an attempt to apply them to the lands of the west. No one can read their petitions denouncing the control exercised by the wealthy landholders of the coast appealing to the record of their conquest of the wilderness and demanding the possession of the lands for which they have fought the Indians and which they had reduced by their acts to civilization without recognizing in these frontier communities the cradle of a belligerent western democracy. A fool can sometimes put on his coat better than a wise man can do it for him such is the philosophy of its petitioners. In this period also came the contest of the interior agricultural portion of New England against the coast wise merchants and property holders of which Shea's rebellion is the best known though by no means an isolated instance. By the time of the constitutional convention this struggle for democracy had affected a fairly well-defined division into parties. Although these parties did not at first recognize their interstate connections there were similar issues on which they split in almost all the states. The demands for an issue of paper money, the stay of execution against debtors, and the relief against excessive taxation were found in every colony in the interior agricultural regions. The rise of this significant movement weakened the apprehensions of the men of means and in the debates over the basis of suffrage for the House of Representatives and the constitutional convention of 1787 leaders of the conservative party did not hesitate to demand that safeguards to the property should be furnished the coast against the interior. The outcome of the debate left the question of suffrage for the House of Representatives dependent upon the policy of the separate states. This was in effect imposing a property qualification throughout the nation as a whole and it was only as the interior of the country developed that these restrictions gradually gave way in the direction of manhood suffrage. End of section 30 Recording by Colleen McMahon Section 31 of the Frontier in American History by Frederick Jackson Turner. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Colleen McMahon Chapter 9 Contributions of the West to American Democracy, Part 2 All of these scattered democratic tendencies Jefferson combined in the period of Washington's presidency into the Democratic Republican Party. Jefferson was the first prophet of American democracy and when we analyze the essential features of his gospel it is clear that the Western influence was the dominant element. Jefferson himself was born in the frontier region of Virginia on the edge of the Blue Ridge in the middle of the 18th century. His father was a pioneer. Jefferson's notes on Virginia reveal clearly his conception the democracy should have an agricultural basis and that manufacturing development and city life were dangerous to the purity of the body politic. Simplicity and economy and government, the right of revolution, the freedom of the individual, the belief that those who win the vacant lands are entitled to shape their own government in their own way. These are all parts of the platform of political principles to which he gave his adhesion and they are all elements eminently characteristic of the Western democracy into which he was born. In the period of the revolution he had brought in a series of measures which tended to throw the power of Virginia into the hands of the settlers in the interior rather than of the coast-wise aristocracy. The repeal of the laws of entail and primogenitor would have destroyed the great states on which the planning aristocracy based its power. The abolition of the established church would still further have diminished to the influence of the coast-wise party in favor of the dissenting sex of the interior. His scheme of general public education reflected the same tendency and his demand for the abolition of slavery was characteristic of a representative of the West rather than of the old-time aristocracy of the coast. His sympathy with the Western expansion culminated in the Louisiana purchase. In short the tendencies of Jefferson's legislation were to replace the dominance of the planting aristocracy by the dominance of the interior class which had sought in vain to achieve its liberties in the period of Bacon's rebellion. Nevertheless Thomas Jefferson was the John the Baptist of democracy not its Moses only with the slow setting of the tide of settlement farther and farther toward the interior did the democratic influence grow strong enough to take actual possession of the government. The period from 1800 to 1820 saw a steady increase in these tendencies. The established classes in New England and the South began to take alarm. Perhaps no better illustration of the apprehensions of the old-time federal conservative can be given than these utterances of President Dwight of Yale College in the book of travels which he published in that period. Quote the class of pioneers cannot live in regular society they are too idle too talkative too passionate too prodigal and too shiftless to acquire either property or character they are impatient of the restraints of law religion and morality and grumble about the taxes by which the rulers ministers and school masters are supported. After exposing the injustice of the community and neglecting to invest persons of such superior merit in public offices in many an eloquent harangue uttered by many a kitchen fire in every blacksmith shop in every corner of the streets and finding all their efforts vain they become at length discouraged and under the pressure of poverty the fear of the jail and consciousness of public contempt leave their native places and butake themselves to the wilderness. End of quote. Such was a conservative's impression of that pioneer movement of New England colonists who had spread up the valley of the Connecticut into New Hampshire Vermont and Western New York in the period of which he wrote and who afterwards went on to possess the Northwest. New England federalism looked with a shutter at the democratic ideas of those who refused to recognize the established order but in that period there came into the Union a sisterhood of frontier states Ohio Indiana Illinois Missouri with provisions for the franchise that brought in complete democracy. Even the newly created states of the Southwest showed the tendency the 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 800 miles to his destination Gallatin himself a western man describes Jackson as he entered the halls of Congress quote a tall, lank, uncouth looking personage with long locks of hair hanging over his face and a cue down his back tied in an eelskin his dress singular his manners those of a rough backwoodsman end of quote and Jefferson testified quote 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've seen him attempt it repeatedly and as often choke with rage end of quote at last the frontier in the person of its typical man had found a place in the government the six foot backwoodsman with blue eyes that could blaze on occasion this caloric 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 clansmen 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 backwardsman was intolerant of many 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 backwardsman nor is it without significance that this typical man of the new democracy will always be associated with the triumph of the spoil 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 is 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 to the end of the old era of trained statesman 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 Tennessean 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 owed quote for him her old world molds aside she threw and choosing sweet clay from the breast of the unexhausted west with stuff untainted shaped a hero knew wise steadfast in the strength of god and true his was no lonely mountain peak of mind thrusting to thin air or our cloudy bars a sea mark now now lost in vapors blind broad prairie rather genial level-lined fruitful and friendly for all humankind yet also night to heaven and loved of loftiest stars nothing of Europe here or then of Europe fronting mournward still ere any names of surf and peer could natures equal scheme to face new birth of our new soil the first american end quote 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 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 quote he is the true history of the american people in his time end of quote 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 elliott'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 woodsman 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 apematics 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 rhod island the band of kinetic pioneers that followed moses cleveland to the kinetic 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 kinetic and rhod 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 and 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 15 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 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 end of section 31 recording by Colleen McMahon