 Section 17 of the Frontier in American History This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Frontier in American History by Frederick Jackson Turner, Chapter 4, Part 3 In the early history of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, a modified form of slavery existed under a system of indenture of the colored servant, and the effort of southern settlers in Indiana and in Illinois to reintroduce slavery are indicative of the importance of the pro-slavery element in the northwest. But the most significant early manifestation of the rival currents of migration with respect to slavery is seen in the contest which culminated in the Missouri Compromise. The historical obstacle of the ordinance, as well as natural conditions, gave an advantage to the anti-slavery settlers northwest of the Ohio. But when the Mississippi was crossed and the rival streams of settlement mingled in the area of the Louisiana Purchase, the struggle followed. It was an Illinois man with constituents in both currents of settlement who introduced the Missouri Compromise, which made a modus vivendi for the Middle West until the Compromise of 1850 gave to Senator Douglas of Illinois in 1854 the opportunity to reopen the issue by his Kansas and Nebraska bill. In his doctrine of squatter sovereignty, or the right of the territories to determine the question of slavery within their bounds Douglas utilised a favourite western political idea, one which Cass of Michigan had promulgated before. Douglas set the love of the Middle West for local self-government against its preponderant antipathy to the spread of slavery. At the same time he brought to the support of the doctrine the Democratic Party which ever since the days of Andrew Jackson had voiced the love of the frontier for individualism and for popular power. In his Young America doctrines, Douglas had also made himself the spokesman of western expansive tendencies. He thus found important sources of popular support when he invoked the localism of his section. Western appeals to Congress for aid in internal improvements, protective tariffs and land grants had been indications of nationalism. The doctrine of squatter sovereignty itself catered to the love of national union by presenting the appearance of a non-sectional compromise which should allow the new areas of the Middle West to determine their own institutions. But the Free Soil Party, strongest in the regions occupied by the New York New England colonists and having for its program national prohibition of the spread of slavery into the territories had already found in the Middle West an important centre of power. The strength of the movement far surpassed the actual voting power of the Free Soil Party for it compelled both Whigs and Democrats to propose fusion on the basis of concession to Free Soil doctrines. The New England settlers and the Western New York settlers, the children of New England, were keenly alive to the importance of the issue. Indeed, Seward, in an address at Madison, Wisconsin in 1860, declared that the Northwest, in reality, extended to the base of the Alleghenies and that the new states had matured just in the critical moment to rally the Free States of the Atlantic coast to call them back to their ancient principles. These Free Soil forces and the nationalistic tendencies of the Middle West proved too strong for the opposing doctrines when the real struggle came. Calhoun and Taney shaped the issue so logically that the Middle West saw that the contest was not only a war for the preservation of the Union, but also a war for the possession of the unoccupied West, a struggle between the Middle West and the states of the Gulf Plains. The economic life of the Middle West had been bound by the railroad to the North Atlantic and its interests, as well as its love of national unity, made it in every way hostile to secession. When Dr. Cutler had urged the desires of the Ohio Company upon Congress in 1787, he had promised a plant in the Ohio Valley a colony that would stand for the Union. Vinton of Ohio, in arguing for the admission of Iowa, urged the position of the Middle West as the great unifying section of the country. Disunion, he said, is to ruin them. They have no alternative but to resist it whenever or wherever attempted. Massachusetts and South Carolina might, for ought I know, find a dividing line that would be mutually satisfactory to them, but, sir, they can find no such line to which the Western country can assent. But it was Abraham Lincoln who stated the issue with the greatest precision, and who voiced most clearly the nationalism of the Middle West when he declared, a house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. So it was that when the Civil War in Kansas grew into the Civil War in the Union, after Lincoln's election to the presidency, the Middle West, dominated by its combined Puritan and German population, ceased to compromise and turned the scale in favor of the North. The Middle West furnished more than one third of the Union troops. The names of Grant and Sherman are sufficient testimony to her leadership in the field. The names of Lincoln and Chase show that the presidential, the financial, and the war powers were in the hands of the Middle West. If we were to accept Seward's own classification, the conduct of foreign affairs as well belonged to the same section. It was, at least, in the hands of representatives of the dominant forces of the section. The Middle West, led by Grant and Sherman, hewed its way down the Mississippi and across the Gulf states, and Lincoln could exalt in 1863. The father of waters again goes unvext to the sea, thanks to the great Northwest for it, nor yet holy to them. In thus outlining the relations of the Middle West to the slavery struggle, we have passed over important decisions of settlement in the decade before the war. In these years not only did the density of settlement increase in the older portions of the region, but new waves of colonization passed into the remote of Prairies. Iowa's pioneers, after Indian sessions had been secured, spread well toward her western limits. Minnesota also was recruited by a column of pioneers. The Treaty of Traverse de Sioux in 1851 opened over 20 million acres of arable land in that state, and Minnesota increased her population 2,730.7% in the decade from 1850 to 1860. Up to this decade, the pine belt of the Middle West in Northern Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota had been the field of operations of Indian traders. At first under English companies, and afterward under Aster's American Fur Company, the traders with their French and half-breed boatmen skirted the Great Lakes and followed the rivers into the forests, where they stationed their posts and spread goods and whisky among the Indians. Their posts were centres of disintegration among the savages. The nuance and the demoralization which resulted from the Indian trade facilitated the purchases of their lands by the federal government. The trader was followed by the seeker for the best pine land forties, and by the time of the Civil War the exploitation of the pine belt had fairly begun. The Irish and Canadian choppers, followed by the Scandinavians, joined the forest men and log drives succeeded the trading canoe. Men from the pine woods of Maine and Vermont directed the industry and became magnates in the mill towns that grew up in the forests, millionaires, and afterwards political leaders. In the prairie country of the Middle West, the Indian trade that centered at St. Louis had been important ever since 1820, with an influence upon the Indians of the plains similar to the influence of the northern fur trade upon the Indians of the forest. By 1840 the removal policy had affected the transfer of most of the eastern tribes to lands across the Mississippi. Tribal names that formerly belonged to Ohio and the rest of the Old Northwest were found on the map of the Kansas Valley. The Platt country belonged to the Pawnee and their neighbours, and to the north along the upper Missouri were the Sioux, or Dakota, Crow, Cheyenne, and other horse Indians, following the vast herds of buffalo that grazed on the Great Plains. The discovery of California gold and the opening of the Oregon country in the middle of the century made it necessary to secure a road through the Indian lands for the procession of pioneers that crossed the prairies to the Pacific. The organisation of Kansas and Nebraska in 1854 was the first step in the withdrawal of these territories from the Indians. A period of almost constant Indian hostility followed, for the savage lords of the boundless prairies instinctively felt the significance of the entrance of the farmer into their empire. In Minnesota the Sioux took advantage of the Civil War to rise, but the outcome was the destruction of their reservations in that state and the opening of great tracks to the pioneers. When the Pacific railways were begun, Red Cloud, the astute Sioux chief, who in some ways stands as the successor of Pontiac and of Takumthi, rallied the principal tribes of the Great Plains to resist the march of civilisation. Their hostility resulted in the peace measure of 1867 and 1868, which assigned to the Sioux and their allies reservations embracing the major portion of Dakota Territory west of the Missouri River. The systematic slaughter of millions of buffalo in the years between 1866 and 1873 for the sake of their hides put an end to the vast herds of the Great Plains and destroyed the economic foundation of the Indians. Henceforth they were dependent on the whites for their food supply and the Great Plains were up into the cattle ranches. In a preface written in 1872 for a new edition of the Oregon Trail, which had appeared in 1847, Francis Parkman said, the wild cavalcade that defiled with me down the gorges of the Black Hills with its paint and war plumes, fluttering trophies and savage embroidery, bows, arrows, lances and shields will never be seen again. The prairies were ready for the final rush of occupation. The homestead law of 1862 passed in the midst of the war did not reveal its full importance as an element in the settlement of the Middle West until after peace. It began to operate most actively, contemporaneously with the development of the several railways to the Pacific in the two decades from 1870 to 1890 and in connection with the marketing of the railroad land grants. The outcome was an epoch-making extension of population. Before 1870 the vast and fertile valley of the Red River, once the level bed of an ancient lake occupying the region where North Dakota and Minnesota meet, was almost virgin soil. But in 1875 the Great Dalrymple Farm showed its advantages for wheat raising and a tide of farm seekers turned to the region. The Jim River Valley of South Dakota attracted still other settlers. The Northern Pacific and the Great Northern Railway thrust out laterals into these Minnesota and Dakota wheat areas from which to draw the nourishment for their daring passage to the Pacific. The Chicago-Milwaukee and St. Paul, the Chicago and Northwestern Railway, Burlington and other roads gridironed the region and the unoccupied lands of the Middle West were taken up by a migration and in its system and scale is unprecedented. The railroads set their agents and their literature everywhere, booming the Golden West. The opportunity for economic and political fortunes in such rapidly growing communities attracted multitudes of Americans whom the cheap land alone would not have tempted. In 1870 the Dakotas had 14,000 settlers. In 1890 they had over 510,000. Nebraska's population was 28,000 in 1860, 123,000 in 1870, 452,000 in 1880 and 1,059,000 in 1890. Kansas had 170,000 in 1860, 364,000 in 1870, 996,000 in 1880 and 1,427,000 in 1890. Wisconsin and New York gave the largest fractions of the native element to Minnesota. Illinois and Ohio together sent perhaps one-third of the native element of Kansas and Nebraska, but the Missouri and southern settlers were strongly represented in Kansas. Wisconsin, New York, Minnesota and Iowa gave North Dakota the most of her native settlers and Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois and New York did the same for South Dakota. Railroads and steamships organized foreign immigration on scale and system never before equaled. A high-water mark of American immigration came in the early 80s. Germans and Scandinavians were rushed by immigrant trains out to the prairies to fill the remaining spaces in the older states of the Middle West. The census of 1890s showed in Minnesota 373,000 persons of Scandinavian parentage and out of the total million and one-half persons of Scandinavian parentage in the United States the Middle West received all but about 300,000. The persons of German parentage in the Middle West numbered over 4,000,000 out of a total of less than 7,000,000 in the whole country. The province had in 1890 a smaller proportion of persons of foreign parentage than had the North Atlantic region, but the proportions varied greatly in the different states. Indiana had the lowest percentage, 20.38, and rising in the scale, Missouri had 24.94, Kansas 26.75, Ohio 33.93, Nebraska 42.45, Iowa 43.57, Illinois 49.01, Michigan 54.58, Wisconsin 73.65, Minnesota 75.37, and North Dakota 78.87. What these statistics of settlement mean when translated into the pioneer life of the prairie cannot be told here. There was sharp contrast with the pioneer life of the Old Northwest. For the forest shade there was substituted the boundless prairie, the sod house for the log hut, the continental railway for the Old National Turnpike and the Erie Canal. Life moved faster in larger masses and with greater momentum in this pioneer movement. The horizon line was more remote, things were done in the gross. The transcontinental railroad, the Bonanza farm, the steam plow, harvester and thresher, the league long furrow and the vast cattle ranchers all suggested spacious combination and systematization of industry. The largest hopes were excited by these conquests of the prairie. The occupation of western Kansas may illustrate the movement which went on also in the western Nebraska and the Dakotas. The pioneer farmer tried to push into the region with the old methods of settlement. Deceived by rainy seasons and the railroad advertisements and recklessly optimistic, hosts of settlers poured out into the plains beyond the region of sufficient rainfall for successful agriculture without irrigation. Dry seasons starved them back, but a repetition of good rainfall again aroused the determination to occupy the western plains. Boom towns flourished like prairie weeds. Eastern capitals struggled for a chance to share in the venture and the Kansas farmers eagerly mortgaged their possessions to secure the capitals so freely offered for their attack on the arid lands. By 1887 the tide of the pioneer farmers had flowed across the semi-arid plains to the western boundary of the state, but it was a hopeless effort to conquer a new province by the forces that had won the prairies. The wave of settlement dashed itself in vain against the conditions of the great plains. The Native American farmer had received his first defeat. Farm products at the same period had depreciated and he turned to the national government for reinforcements. End of section 17. Section 18 of The Frontier in American History by Frederick Jackson Turner. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Colleen McMahon. Chapter 4 The Middle West Part 4 The populistic movement of the western half of the middle west is a complex of many forces. In some respects it is the latest manifestation of the same forces that brought on the crisis of 1837 in the earlier region of pioneer exploitation. That era of overconfidence, reckless internal improvements and land purchases by borrowed capital brought a reaction when it became apparent that the future had been over-discounted. But in that time there were the farther free lands to which the ruined pioneer could turn. The demand for an expansion of the currency has marked each area of western advance. The greenback movement of Ohio and the eastern part of the middle west grew into the fiat money, free silver and land bank propositions of the populists across the Mississippi. Efforts for cheaper transportation also appear in each stage of western advance. When the pioneer left the rivers and had to haul his crops by wagon to a market the transportation factor determined both his profits and the extension of settlement. Demands for national aid to roads and canals had marked the pioneer advance of the first third of the century. The Granger attacks upon the railway rates and in favor of governmental regulation marked a second advance of western settlement. The farmers alliance and the populist demand for government ownership of the railroad is a phase of the same effort of the pioneer farmer on his latest frontier. The proposals have taken increasing proportions in each region of western advance. Taken as a whole populism is a manifestation of the old pioneer ideals of the Native American with the added element of increasing readiness to utilize the national government to affect its ends. This is not unnatural in a section whose lands were originally purchased by the government and given away to its settlers by the same authority whose railroads were built largely by federal land grants and whose settlements were protected by the United States Army governed by the national authority until they were carved into rectangular states and admitted into the Union. Its native settlers were drawn from many states many of them former soldiers of the Civil War who mingled in new lands with foreign immigrants accustomed to the vigorous authority of European national governments. But these old ideals of the American pioneer phrased in the new language of national power did not meet with the ascent of the east. Even in the Middle West a change of deepest import had been in progress during these years of prairie settlement. The agricultural preponderance of the country has passed to the prairies and manufacturing has developed in the areas once devoted to pioneer farming. In the decade prior to the Civil War the area of greatest wheat production passed from Ohio and the states to the east into Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin. After 1880 the center of wheat growing moved across the Mississippi and in 1890 the new settlements produced half the crop of the United States. The corn area shows a similar migration. In 1840 the southern states produced half the crop and the Middle West one fifth. By 1860 the situation was reversed and in 1890 nearly one half the corn of the Union came from beyond the Mississippi. Thus the settlers of the Old Northwest and their crops have moved together across the Mississippi and in the regions once they migrated varied agriculture and manufacture have sprung up. As these movements in population and products have passed across the Middle West and as the economic life of the eastern border has been intensified a huge industrial organism has been created in the province an organism of tremendous power, activity and unity. Fundamentally the Middle West is an agricultural area unequaled for its combination of space, variety, productiveness and freedom from interruption by deserts or mountains. The huge water system of the Great Lakes has become the highway of a mighty commerce. The Sault Ste. Marie Canal although open but two thirds of the year is the channel of a traffic of greater tonnage than that which passes through the Suez Canal and nearly all this commerce moves almost the whole length of the Great Lakes system. The chief ports being Duluth, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland and Buffalo. The transportation facilities of the Great Lakes were revolutionized after 1886 to supply the needs of commerce between the East and the newly developed lands of the Middle West. The tonnage doubled, wooden ships gave way to steel, sailing vessels yielded to steam and huge docks, derricks and elevators triumphs of mechanical skill were constructed. A competent investigator has lately declared that quote there is probably in the world today no place at Tidewater where ship plates can be laid down for a less price than they can be manufactured or purchased at the lake ports. End of quote. This rapid rise of the merchant marine of our inland seas has led to the demand for deep water canals to connect to them with the ocean road to Europe. When the fleets of the Great Lakes plow the Atlantic and when Duluth and Chicago become seaports the water transportation of the Middle West will have completed its evolution. The significance of the development of the railway systems is not inferior to that of the Great Waterway. Chicago has become the greatest railroad center of the world nor is there another area of like size which equals this in its railroad facilities. All the forces of the nation intersect here. Improved terminals, steel rails, better rolling stock and consolidation of railway systems have accompanied the advance of the people of the Middle West. This unparalleled development of transportation facilities measures the magnitude of the material development of the province. Its wheat and corn surplus supplies the deficit of the rest of the United States and much of that of Europe. Such is the agricultural condition of the province of which Monroe wrote to Jefferson in 1786 in these words. A great part of the territory is miserably poor especially that near Lake Michigan and Erie and that upon the Mississippi and the Illinois consists of extensive plains which have not had from appearances and will not have a single bush on them for ages. The districts therefore within which these fall will never contain a sufficient number of inhabitants to entitle them to membership in the Confederacy. Minneapolis and Duluth receive the spring wheat of the northern prairies and after manufacturing great portions of it into flour transmitted to Buffalo, the eastern cities and to Europe. Chicago is still the great city of the Corn Belt but its power as a milling and wheat center has been passing to the cities that receive tribute from the northern prairies. It lies in the region of winter wheat, corn, oats and livestock. Kansas City, St. Louis and Cincinnati are the sister cities of this zone which reaches into the grazing country of the Great Plains. The meeting point of corn and cattle has led to the development of the packing industries, large business systems that send the beef and pork of the region to supply the east and parts of Europe. The feeding system adopted in Kansas, Nebraska and Iowa whereby the stock is fattened from the surplus corn of the region constitutes a species of varied farming that has saved these states from the disasters of the failure of a single industry and has been one solution of the economic life of the transition belt between the prairies and the Great Plains. Under a more complex agriculture, better adapted to the various sections of the state and with better crops, Kansas has become more prosperous and less a center of political discontent. While this development of the agricultural interests of the Middle West has been in progress, the exploitation of the pine woods of the north has furnished another contribution to the commerce of the province. The center of activity has migrated from Michigan to Minnesota and the lumber traffic furnishes one of the principal contributions to the vessels that ply the Great Lakes and supply the tributary mills. As the white pine vanishes before the organized forces of exploitation, the remaining hardwoods served to establish factories in the former mill towns. The more fertile, denuded lands of the north are now receiving settlers who repeat the old pioneer life among the stumps. But the most striking development in the industrial history of the Middle West in recent years has been due to the opening up of the iron mines of Lake Superior. Even in 1873, the Lake Superior ores furnished a quarter of the total production of American blast furnaces. The opening of the gogebic mines in 1884 and the development of the vermilion and misabi mines adjacent to the head of the lake in the early 90s completed the transfer of iron ore production to the Lake Superior region. Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin together now produce the ore for 80% of the pig iron of the United States. Four-fifths of this great product moves to the ports on Lake Erie and the rest to the manufactures at Chicago and Milwaukee. The vast steel and iron industry that centers at Pittsburgh and Cleveland with important outposts like Chicago and Milwaukee is the outcome of the meeting of the coal of the eastern and southern borders of the province and of Pennsylvania with the iron ores of the north. The industry has been systematized and consolidated by a few captains of industry. Steam shovels dig the ore for many of the misabi mines. Gravity roads carry it to the docks and to the ships and huge hoisting and carrying devices built especially for the traffic unloaded for the railroad and the furnace. Iron and coal mines, transportation fleets, railroad systems and iron manufactures are concentrated in a few corporations, principally the United States Steel Corporation. The world has never seen such a consolidation of capital and so complete a systematization of economic processes. Such is the economic appearance of the Middle West a century after the pioneers left the frontier village of Pittsburgh and crossed the Ohio into the forests. Detoke Felix claimed with reason in 1833, quote, this gradual and continuous progress of the European race toward the Rocky Mountains has the solemnity of a providential event. It is like a deluge of men rising unabatedly and driven daily onward by the hand of God, end of quote. The ideals of the Middle West began in the log huts set in the midst of the forest a century ago. While his horizon was still bounded by the clearing that his acts had made, the pioneer dreamed of continental conquests. The vastness of the wilderness kindled his imagination. His vision saw beyond the dank swamp at the edge of the Great Lake to the lofty buildings and the jostling multitudes of a mighty city, beyond the rank grass-clad prairie to the seas of golden grain, beyond the harsh life of the log hut and the sod house to the home of his children, where should dwell comfort in the higher things of life, though they might not be for him. The men and women who made the Middle West were idealists and they had the power of will to make their dreams come true. Here also were the pioneers' traits, individual activity, inventiveness and competition for the prizes of the rich province that awaited exploitation under freedom and equality of opportunity. He honored the man whose eye was the quickest and whose grasp was the strongest in this contest. It was everyone for himself. The early society of the Middle West was not a complex, highly differentiated and organized society. Almost every family was a self-sufficing unit, and liberty and equality flourished in the frontier periods of the Middle West as perhaps never before in history. American democracy came from the forest, and its destiny drove it to material conquests. But the materialism of the pioneer was not the dull, contented materialism of an old and fixed society. Both native settler and European immigrant saw in this free and competitive movement of the frontier the chance to break the bondage of social rank and to rise to a higher plane of existence. The pioneer was passionately desirous to secure for himself and for his family a favorable place in the midst of these large and free but vanishing opportunities. It took a century for this society to fit itself into the conditions of the whole province. Little by little, nature pressed into her mold the plastic pioneer life. The Middle West, yesterday a pioneer province, is today the field of industrial resources and systematization so vast that Europe, alarmed for her industries in competition with this new power, is discussing the policy of forming protective alliances among the nations of the continent. Into this region flowed the great forces of modern capitalism. Indeed, the region itself furnished favorable conditions for the creation of these forces and trained many of the famous American industrial leaders. The prairies, the Great Plains and the Great Lakes furnished new standards of industrial measurement. From this society, seated amidst a wealth of material advantages and breeding individualism, energetic competition, inventiveness and spaciousness of design came the triumph of the strongest. The captains of industry arose and seized on nature's gifts. Struggling with one another, increasing the scope of their ambitions as the largeness of the resources and the extent of the fields of activity revealed themselves, they were forced to accept the natural conditions of a province, vast an area but simple in structure. Competition grew into consolidation. On the Pittsburgh border of the Middle West, the completion of the process is most clearly seen. On the prairies of Kansas stands the populist, a survival of the pioneer, striving to adjust present conditions to his old ideals. The ideals of equality, freedom of opportunity, faith in the common man, are deep-rooted in all the Middle West. The frontier stage, through which each portion passed, left abiding traces on the older as well as on the newer areas of the province, nor were these ideals limited to the Native American settlers. Germans and Scandinavians who poured into the Middle West sought the country with like hopes and like faith. These facts must be remembered in estimating the effects of the economic transformation of the province upon its democracy. The peculiar democracy of the frontier has passed away with the conditions that produced it, but the democratic aspirations remain. They are held with passionate determination. The task of the Middle West is that of adapting democracy to the vast economic organization of the present. This region, which has so often needed the reminder that bigness is not greatness, may yet show that its training has produced the power to reconcile popular government and culture with the huge industrial society of the modern world. The democracies of the past have been small communities under simple and primitive economic conditions. At bottom, the problem is how to reconcile real greatness with bigness. It is important that the Middle West should accomplish this. The future of the Republic is with her. Politically, she is dominant, as is illustrated by the fact that six out of seven of the presidents elected since 1860 have come from her borders. 26 million people live in the Middle West as against 21 million in New England and the Middle States together, and the Middle West has indefinite capacity for growth. The educational forces are more democratic than in the East, and the Middle West has twice as many students if we count together the common school, secondary, and collegiate attendance, as have New England and the Middle States combined, nor is this educational system as a whole inferior to that of the Eastern States. State universities crown the public school system in every one of these states of the Middle West and rank with the universities of the Seaboard, and private magnificence has furnished others on an unexampled scale. The public and private art collections of Pittsburgh, Chicago, St. Paul, and other cities rival those of the Seaboard. World's fairs, with their important popular educational influences, have been held at Chicago, Omaha, and Buffalo, and the next of these national gatherings is to be at St. Louis. There is throughout the Middle West a vigor and a mental activity among the common people that bode well for its future. If the task of reducing the province of the Lake and Prairie Plains to the uses of civilization should for a time overweigh art and literature, and even high political and social ideals, it would not be surprising. But if the ideals of the pioneers shall survive the inundation of material success, we may expect to see in the Middle West the rise of a highly intelligent society where culture shall be reconciled with democracy in the large. End of Section 18, Recording by Collie McMahon Section 19 of The Frontier in American History This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Frontier in American History by Frederick Jackson Turner, The Ohio Valley in American History, Part 1 In a notable essay, Professor Josiah Royce has asserted the salutary influence of a highly organized provincial life in order to counteract certain evils arising from the tremendous development of nationalism in our own day. Among these evils he enumerates, first, the frequent changes of dwelling place whereby the community is in danger of losing the well-knit organization of a common life. Second, the tendency to reduce variety in national civilization to assimilate all to a common type and thus to discourage individuality and produce a remorseless mechanism, vast, irrational. Third, the evils arising from the fact that waves of emotion, the passion of the mob, tend in our day to sweep across the nation. Against these surges of national feeling, Professor Royce would erect dykes in the form of provincialism, the resistance of separate sections each with its own traditions, beliefs and aspirations. Our national unities have grown so vast, our forces of social consolidation so paramount, the resulting problems, conflicts, evils have become so intensified, he says, that we must seek in the province renewed strength, usefulness and beauty of American life. Whatever may be thought of this philosophy as appeal for a revival of sectionalism on a higher level in order to check the tendencies to a deadening uniformity of national consolidation, and to me this appeal under the limitations which he gives it seems warranted by the conditions, it is certainly true that in the history of the United States sectionalism holds a place too little recognized by the historians. By sectionalism I do not mean the struggle between North and South which culminated in the Civil War. That extreme and tragic form of sectionalism indeed has almost engrossed the attention of historians and it is no doubt the most striking and painful example of the phenomenon in our history. But there are older and perhaps in the long run more enduring examples of the play of sectional forces than the slavery struggle and there are various sections besides North and South. Indeed the United States is in size and natural resources an empire, a collection of potential nations rather than a single nation. It is comparable in area to Europe. If the coast of California be placed along the coast of Spain, Charleston, South Carolina would fall near Constantinople, the northern shores of Lake Superior would touch the Baltic and New Orleans would lie in Southern Italy. Within this vast empire there are geographic provinces separate in physical conditions into which American colonization has flowed and in each of which a special society has developed with an economic, political and social life of its own. Each of these provinces or sections has developed its own leaders who in the public life of the nation have voiced the needs of their section contending with the representatives of other sections and arranged compromises between sections in national legislation and policy almost as ambassadors from separate countries in a European Congress might make treaties. Between these sections commercial relations have sprung up and economic combinations and contests may be traced by the student who looks beneath the surface of our national life to the actual grouping of states in congressional votes on tariff, internal improvement, currency and banking and all the varied legislation in the field of commerce. American industrial life is the outcome of the combinations and contests of groups of states in sections and the intellectual, the spiritual life of the nation is the result of the interplay of the sectional ideals, fundamental assumptions and emotions. In short, the real federal aspect of the nation if we penetrate between constitutional forms to the deeper currents of social, economic and political life will be found to lie in the relation of sections and nation rather than in the relation of states and nation. Recently ex-secretary Root emphasized the danger that the states by neglecting to fulfill their duties might fall into decay while the national government engrossed their former power. But even if the states disappeared all together as effective factors in our national life the sections might, in my opinion, gain from that very disappearance of strength and activity that would prove effective limitations upon the nationalizing process. Without pursuing the interesting speculation I may notice evidence of the development of sectionalism the various gatherings of businessmen, religious denominations and educational organizations in groups of states. Among the signs of growth of a healthy provincialism is the formation of sectional historical societies. While the American Historical Association has been growing vigorously and becoming a genuine gathering of historical students from all parts of the nation there have also arisen societies in various sections to deal with a particular history of the groups of states. In part this is due to the great distances which render attendance difficult upon the meetings of the national body today but we will be short-sighted indeed who failed to perceive in the formation of the Pacific Coast Historical Association the Mississippi Valley Historical Association and the Ohio Valley Historical Association for example genuine and spontaneous manifestations of a sectional consciousness. These associations spring in large part from the recognition in each of a common past a common body of experiences, traditions, institutions and ideals. Is it not necessary now to raise the question whether all of these associations are based on a real community of historical interest whether there are overlapping areas whether new combinations may not be made they are at least substantial attempts to find a common sectional unity and out of their interest in the past of the section increasing tendencies to common sectional ideas and policies are certain to follow. I do not mean to prophesy any disruptive tendency in American life by the rejuvenation of sectional self-consciousness but I do mean to assert that American life will be enriched and safeguarded by the development of the greater variety of interest, purposes and ideals which seem to be arising. A measure of local concentration seems necessary to produce healthy intellectual and moral life. The spread of social forces over too vast an area makes for monotony and stagnation. Let us then raise the question of how far the Ohio valley has had a part of its own in the making of the nation. I have not the temerity to attempt a history of valley in the brief compass of this address nor am I confident of my ability even to pick out the more important features of its history in our common national life. But I venture to put the problem to state some familiar facts from the special point of view with the hope of arousing interest in the theme among the many students who are advancing the science of history in this section. To the physiographer, the section is made up of the province of the Allegheny Plateaus and the southern portion of the Prairie Plains. In it are found rich mineral deposits which are changing the life of the section and of the nation. Although you reckon in your membership only the states that touch the Ohio river, parts of those states are, from the point of view of their social origins, more closely connected with the northwest on the Lake Plains than with the Ohio Valley. And on the other hand, the Tennessee Valley, though it sweeps far toward the lower south and only joins the Ohio at the end of its course, has been through much of the history of the region an essential part of this society. Together these rivers made up the western world of the pioneers of the revolutionary era, the western waters of the Vacuardsmen. But after all, the unity of the section and its placing history were determined by the beautiful river, as the French explorers called it, the Ohio, which pours its flood for over a thousand miles, a great highway to the west, a historic artery of commerce, a wedge of advance between powerful Indian confederacies and rival European nations to the Mississippi Valley, a home for six mighty states now in the heart of the nation, rich in material wealth, richer in the history of American democracy, a society that holds a place midway between the industrial sections of the seaboard and the plains and prairies of the agricultural west, between the society that formed later along the levels about the Great Lakes and the society that arose in the lower south on the plains of the Gulf of Mexico. The Alleghenies bounded on the east, the Mississippi on the west. At the forks of the Great River lies Pittsburgh, the historic gateway to the west, the present symbol and embodiment of the age of steel, the type of modern industrialism. Near its western border is St. Louis, looking toward the prairies, the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains, the land into which the tide of modern colonization turns. Between these old cities, for whose sites European nations contended, stand the cities whose growth preeminently represents the Ohio Valley, Cincinnati, the historic queen of the river, Louisville, the water of the falls, the cities of the old national road, Columbus, Indianapolis, the cities of the bluegrass lands, which made Kentucky the goal of the pioneers, and the cities of that young commonwealth, whom the Ohio River by force of its attraction tore away from an uncongenial control by the old dominion and joined to the social section where it belonged. The Ohio Valley is, therefore, not only a commercial highway, it is a middle kingdom between the east and the west, between the northern area, which was occupied by a greater New England and emigrants from northern Europe, and the southern area of the Cotton Kingdom. As Pennsylvania and New York constituted the middle region in our earlier history, between New England and the seaboard south, so the Ohio Valley became the middle region of a later time. In its position as a highway and a middle region, it found the keys to its place in American history. From the beginning, the Ohio Valley seems to have been a highway for migration and the home of a culture of its own. The sciences of American archaeology and ethnology are too new to enable us to speak with confidence upon the origins and earlier distribution of the aborigines, but it is at least clear that the Ohio River played an important part in the movements of the earlier men in America, and that the mountains of the valley indicate a special type of development intermediate for the northern Hunter folk and the Pueblo building races of the south. This dim and yet fascinating introduction to the history of the Ohio will afford ample opportunity for later students of the relations between geography and population to make contributions to our history. The French explorers saw the river, but failed to grasp its significance as a strategic line in the conquest of the west. Entangled in the water labyrinth of the vast interior, and kindled with aspirations to reach their fur traders and explorers pushed their way through the forests of the north and across the plains of the south, from river to lake, from lake to river, until they met the mountains of the west. But while they were reaching the upper course of the Missouri and the Spanish outposts of Santa Fe, they missed the opportunity to hold the Ohio Valley, and before France could settle the valley, the long and attenuated line of French posts in the west reaching from Canada to Louisiana was struck by the advancing column by the way of the Ohio. Parkman, in whose golden pages is written the epic of the American wilderness, found his hero in the wandering Frenchman. Perhaps because he was a New Englander, he missed a great opportunity and neglected to portray the formation and advance of the backward society which was finally to erase the traces of French control in the interior of North America. It is not without significance in a consideration of the national aspects of the history of the Ohio Valley and of the English civilization who summoned the French to evacuate the valley in its approaches and whose men near the forks of the Ohio fired the opening gun of the World Historic Conflict that brought the doom of New France and America was George Washington, the first American to win a national position in the United States. The father of his country was the prophet of the Ohio Valley. End of section 19 Section 20 of the Frontier in American History This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Frontier in American History by Frederick Jackson Turner Chapter 5 Part 2 Into this dominion in the next scene of this drama came the backwards men, the men who began the formation of the society of the valley. I wish to consider the effects of the formation of this society upon the nation and first let us consider the stock itself. The Ohio Valley was settled for the most part though with important exceptions, especially in Ohio by men of the upland south and this determined a large part of its influence in the nation through a long period. As the Ohio Valley as a whole was an extension of the upland south so the upland south was, broadly speaking, an extension from the old middle region chiefly from Pennsylvania. The society of pioneers English, Scotch, Irish, Germans and other nationalities which formed in the beginning of the 18th century in the great valley of Pennsylvania and its lateral extensions was the nursery of the American backwards men. Between about 1730 and the revolution successive tides of pioneers ascended the Shenandoah occupied the Piedmont or upcountry of Virginia and the Carolinas and received recruits from similar peoples who came by eastward advances from the coast toward this old west. Thus by the middle of the 18th century a new section had been created in America a kind of peninsula thrust down from Pennsylvania between the falls of the rivers of the South Atlantic colonies on the one side and the Allegheny mountains on the other. Its population showed a mixture of nationalities and religions. Less English than the colonial coast it was built on a basis of religious feeling different from that of Puritan New England and still different from the conservative Anglicans of the Southern Seaboard. The Scotch-Irish Presbyterians with the glow of the Covenanters German Sectaries with serious minded devotion to one or another of a multiplicity of sect but with all deeply responsive religious spirit and the English Quakers all furnished a foundation of emotional responsiveness to religion and a readiness to find a new heaven and a new earth in politics as well as in religion. In spite of the influence of the backwoods in hampering religious organization this upland society was a fertile field for tillage by such democratic and emotional sects as the Baptists Methodists and later the Campbellites as well as by Presbyterians. Mr. Bryce has well characterised the South as a region of high religious voltage but this characterisation is especially applicable to the upland south and its colonies in the Ohio Valley. It is not necessary to assert that this religious spirit resulted in the kind of conduct associated with the religious life of the Puritans. What I wish to point out is the responsiveness of the upland south to emotional religious and political appeal. Besides its variety of stocks and its religious sects responsive to emotion, the upland south was intensely democratic and individualistic. It believed that government was based on a limited contract for the benefit of the individual and it acted independently of governmental organs and restraints with such ease that in many regions this was the habitual mode of social procedure. Voluntary cooperation was more natural to the southern uplanders than action through the machinery of government especially when government checked rather than aided their industrial and social tendencies and desires. It was a naturally radical society. It was more over a rural section not of the planter or merchant type but characterized by the small farmer building his log cabin in the wilderness raising a small crop and a few animals for family use. It was this stock which began to pass into the Ohio valley when Daniel Boone and the pioneers associated with his name followed the wilderness trace from the upland south to the bluegrass lands in the midst of the Kentucky Hills on the Ohio River. In the opening years of the revolution these pioneers were recruited by westward extensions from Pennsylvania and West Virginia. With this colonization of the Ohio valley begins a chapter in American history. This settlement contributed a new element to our national development and raised new national problems. It took a long time for the seaboard south to assimilate the upland section. We cannot think of the south as a unit through much of its antebellum history without doing violence to the facts. The struggle between the men of the upcountry and the men of the tide water made a large part of the domestic history of the old south. Nevertheless the upland south as slavery and cotton cultivation extended westward from the coast gradually merged into the east. On the other hand its children who placed the wall of the Alleghenies between them and the east gave thereby a new life to the conditions and ideals which were lost in their former home. Nor was this all. Beyond the mountains new conditions new problems aroused new ambitions and new social ideals. Its entrance into the western world was a tonic to this stock. Its crossing put new fire into its veins fires of militant expansion creative social energy triumphed democracy. A new section was added to the American nation. A new element was infused into the combination which we called the United States. A new flavour was given to the American spirit. We may next rapidly note some of the results. First let us consider the national effects of the settlement of this new social type in the Ohio Valley upon the expansion and diplomacy of the nation. Almost from the first the Ohio Valley had constituted the problem of westward expansion. It was the entering wedge to the possession of the Mississippi Valley and although reluctantly the eastern colonies and then the eastern states were compelled to join in the struggle first to possess the Ohio then to retain it and finally to enforce its demand for the possession of the whole Mississippi Valley and the basin of the Great Lakes as a means of outlet for its crops and of defense for its settlements. The part played by the pioneers of the Ohio Valley as a flying column of the nation sent across the mountains and making a line of advance between hostile Indians and English on the north and hostile Indians and Spaniards on the south is itself too extensive a theme to be more than mentioned. Here in historic Kentucky in the state which was the home of George Rogers Clark it is not necessary to dwell upon his clear insight and courage in carrying American arms into the northwest. From the first Washington also grasped the significance of the Ohio Valley as a rising empire whose population and trade were essential to the nation but which found its natural outlet down the Mississippi where Spain blocked the river and which was in danger of withdrawing from the weak confederacy. The intrigues of England to attract the valley to herself and those of Spain to add the settlements to the Spanish Empire the use of the Indians by these rivals and the efforts of France to use the pioneers of Kentucky to win New Orleans and the whole valley between the Alleghenies and the Rocky Mountains of America are among the fascinating chapters of American as well as of Ohio Valley history. The position of the valley explains much of the Indian wars, the foreign relations and indirectly the domestic politics of the period from the revolution to the purchase of Louisiana. Indeed the purchase was in large measure due to the pressure of the settlers of the Ohio Valley to secure this necessary outlet. It was the Ohio Valley which forced the nation away from a narrow colonial attitude into its career as a nation among other nations with an adequate physical basis for future growth. In this development of a foreign policy in connection with the Ohio Valley we find the germ of the Monroe Doctrine and the beginnings of the definitive independence of the United States from the state system of the old world, the beginning in fact of its career as a world power. This expansive impulse went on into the war of 1812, a war which was in no inconsiderable degree the result of the aggressive leadership of a group in Kentucky and Tennessee and especially of the daring and lofty demands of Henry Clay who even thus early voiced the spirit of the Ohio Valley. That in this war William Henry Harrison and the Kentucky troops achieved the real conquest of the northwest province and Andrew Jackson with his Tennesseans achieved the real conquest of the Gulf Plains is in itself abundant evidence of the part played in the expansion of the nation by the section which formed on the Ohio and its tributaries. Nor was this the end of the process for the annexation of Texas and the Pacific Coast was in a very real sense only an aftermath of the same movement of expansion. While the Ohio Valley was leading the way to the building of a greater nation it was also the field wherein was formed an important contribution of the United States to political institutions. By this I mean what George Bancroft has well called federal colonial system that is our system of territories and new states. It is a mistake to attribute this system of governance of 1787 and to the leadership of New England. It was in large measure the work of the communities of the Ohio Valley who wrought out the essentials of the system for themselves and by their attitude imposed it of necessity upon the nation. The great ordinance only perfected the system. Under the belief that all men going into vacant lands have the right to shape their own political institutions the riflemen of western Virginia, western Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Tennessee during the Revolution, protested against the rule of governments east of the mountains and asserted with manly independence their right to self-government. But it is significant that in making this assertion they at the same time petition Congress to admit them to the sisterhood of states. Even when leaders like Wilkinson were attempting to induce Kentucky to act as an independent nation the national spirit of the people as a whole led them to delay until at last they found themselves a state of the new union. This recognition of Congress and this demand for self-government under that authority constitute the foundations of the federal territorial system as expressed in congressional resolutions worked out tentatively in Jefferson's ordinance of 1784 and finally shaped in the ordinance of 1787. Thus the Ohio Valley was not only the area to which this system was applied but it was itself instrumental in shaping the system by its own demands and by the danger that too rigorous an assertion of either state power over these remote communities might result in their loss to the nation. The importance of the result can hardly be overestimated. It ensured the peaceful and free development of the Great West and gave it political organization not as the outcome of wars of hostile states nor by arbitrary government by distant powers but by territorial government combined with large local autonomy. These governments in turn were admitted as equal states of the union. By this peaceful process of colonization the whole continent has been filled with free and orderly commonwealths so quietly so naturally that we can only appreciate the profound significance of the process by contrasting it with the spread of European nations through conquest and oppression. Next let me invite your attention to the part played by the Ohio Valley and the economic legislation which shaped our history in the years of the making of the nation between the war of 1812 and the rise of the slavery struggle. It needs but slight reflection to discover that when we were in Syria in question the men and measures of the Ohio Valley held the balance of power and set the course of our national progress. The problems before the country at that time were problems of internal development. The mode of dealing with the public domain the building of roads and digging of canals for the internal improvement of a nation which was separated into eastern west by the Allegheny Mountains the formation of a tariff system for the protection of home industries and to supply a market for the surface in Europe. The framing of a banking and currency system which should meet the needs of the new interstate commerce produced by the rise of the western surplus. In the Ohio Valley by the initiative of Ohio Valley men and often against the protest of eastern sections the public land policy was developed by laws which subordinated the revenue idea to the idea of the upbuilding of a democracy of small landholders. The squatters of the Ohio Valley forced the passage of preemption laws and these laws in their turn led to the homestead agitation. There has been no single element more influential in shaping American democracy in its ideals than this land policy. And whether the system be regarded as harmful or helpful there can be I think no doubt that it was the outcome of conditions imposed by the settlers of the Ohio Valley. End of section 20. Section 21 of The Frontier in American History This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Frontier in American History by Frederick Jackson Turner Chapter 5 Part 3 When one names the tariff internal improvements in the bank he is bound to add the title The American System and to think of Henry Clay of Kentucky the captivating young statesman who fashioned a national policy raised issues and disciplined a party to support them and who finally imposed the system upon the nation. But however clearly we recognize the genius and originality of Henry Clay as a political leader however we recognize that he has a national standing as a constructive statesman we must perceive if we probe the matter deeply enough that his policy and his power grew out of the economic and social conditions of the people whose needs he voiced the people of the Ohio Valley. It was the fact that in this period they had begun to create an agricultural surplus which made the necessity for this legislation. The nation has recently celebrated the 100th anniversary of Fulton's invention of the steamboat and the Hudson River has been a blaze in his honor but in truth it is on the Ohio and the Mississippi that the fires of celebration should really burn in honor of Fulton for the historic significance to the United States of the invention of the steamboat does not lie in its use on eastern rivers not even in its use on the ocean for our own internal commerce carried in our own ships has had a vast influence upon our national life and has our foreign commerce and this internal commerce was at first and for many years the commerce of the Ohio Valley carried by way of the Mississippi. When Fulton's steamboat was applied in 1811 to the western waters it became possible to develop agriculture and to get the western crops rapidly and cheaply to a market. The result was a tremendous growth in the entire Ohio Valley but this invention did not solve the problem of cheap supplies of eastern manufacturers nor satisfy the desire of the west to build up its own factories in order to consume its own products. The Ohio Valley had seen the advantage of home markets as her towns grew up with their commerce and manufacturers close to the rural regions. Lands had increased in value and proportion to their nearness to these cities and crops were in higher demand near them. Thus Henry Clay found a whole section standing behind him when he demanded a protective tariff to create home markets on a national scale and when he urged the breaking of the Allegheny barrier by a national system of roads and canals. If we analyse the congressional votes by which the tariff and internal improvement acts were passed, we shall find that there was an almost unbroken south against them a middle region largely for them a New England divided and the Ohio Valley almost a unit holding the balance of power and casting it in favour of the American system. The next topic to which I ask your attention is the influence of the Ohio Valley in the promotion of democracy. On this I shall, by reason of lack of time, be obliged merely to point out that the powerful group of Ohio Valley states which sprang out of the democracy of the backwards and which entered the union one after the other with manhood suffrage greatly recruited the effective forces of democracy in the union. Not only do they add new recruits but by their competitive pressure for population they forced the older states to break down their historic restraints upon the right of voting unless they were to lose their people to the freer life of the west. But in the era of Jacksonian democracy Henry Clay and his followers engaged the great Tennessean in a fierce political struggle out of which was born the rival Whig and Democratic parties. This struggle was in fact reflective of the conditions which had arisen in the Ohio Valley. As the section had grown in population and wealth, as the trails changed into roads, the cabins into well-built houses, the clearings into broad farms, the hamlets into towns as barter became commerce and all the modern processes of industrial development began to operate in this rising region, the Ohio Valley broke apart into the rival interests of the industrial forces, the town makers and the business builders on the one side and the old rural democracy of the uplands on the other. This division was symbolical of national processes. In the contest between these forces, Andrew Jackson was the champion of the cause of the upland democracy. He denounced the money power, banks and the whole credit system and sounded a fierce toxin of danger against the increasing influence of wealth in politics. Henry Clay on the other hand represented the new industrial forces along the Ohio. It is certainly significant that in the rivalry between the great Whig of the Ohio Valley and the great Democrat of its Tennessee tributary lay the issues of American politics almost until the slavery struggle. The responsiveness of the Ohio Valley leadership and its enthusiasm in action are illustrated by the Harrison campaign of 1840. In that log cabin campaign when the Whig stole the thunder of pioneer Jacksonian democracy for another backwards hero, the Ohio Valley carried its spirit as well as its political favorite throughout the nation. Meanwhile on each side of the Ohio Valley, other sections were forming. New England and the children of New England in western New York and an increasing flood of German immigrants were pouring into the Great Lake Basin and the prairies, north of the upland peoples who had chopped out homes in the forests along the Ohio. This section was tied to the east by the Great Lake navigation and the Erie canal. It became in fact an extension of New England and New York. Here the free soil party found its strength and New York newspapers expressed the political ideas. Although this section tried to attach the Ohio River interest to itself by canals and later by railroads in reality for a long time separate in its ideals and its interests and never succeeded in dominating the Ohio Valley. On the south along the Gulf plains there developed the Cotton Kingdom a greater south with a radical program of slavery expansion mapped out by bold and aggressive leaders. Already this southern section had attempted to establish increasing commercial relations with the Ohio Valley. The staple producing region was a principal consumer of its livestock and food products. South Carolina leaders like Calhoun tried to bind the Ohio to the chariot of the south by the Cincinnati and Charleston railroad designed to make an outlet for the Ohio Valley products to the southeast. Georgia in Herton was a rival of South Carolina in plans to drain this commerce itself. In all of these plans to connect the Ohio Valley commercially with the south the political object was quite as prominent as the commercial. In short various areas were bidding for the support of the zone of population along the river. The Ohio Valley recognized its old relationship to the south but its people were by no means champions of slavery. In the southern portion of the states north of the Ohio were indented servitude for many years opened away to a system of semi-slavery there were divided councils. Kentucky also spoke with no certain voice. As a result it is in these regions that we find the stronghold of the compromising movement in the slavery struggle. Kentucky furnished Abraham Lincoln to Illinois and Jefferson Davis to Mississippi and was in the reality the very center of the region of adjustment between these rival interests. Senator Thomas of Southern Illinois moved the Missouri compromise and Henry Clay was the most effective champion of that compromise as he was the architect of the compromise of 1850. The Crittenden compromise proposals on the eve of the Civil War came also from Kentucky and represent the persistence of the spirit of Henry Clay. In a word as I pointed out in the beginning the Ohio Valley was a middle region with a strong national allegiance striving to hold apart with either hand the sectional combatants in this struggle. In the cautious development of his policy of emancipation we may see the profound influence of the Ohio Valley upon Abraham Lincoln, Kentucky's greatest son. No one can understand his presidency without proper appreciation of the deep influence of the Ohio Valley, its ideals and its prejudices upon America's original nation to the great men of the world. Enough has been said to make it clear I trust that the Ohio Valley has not only a local history worthy of study a rich heritage to its people but also that it has been an independent and powerful force in shaping the development of the nation. Of the late history of this valley, the rise of its vast industrial power, its far reaching commercial influence, it is not necessary that I should speak. You know it statesman and their influence upon our own time, you know the relation of Ohio to the office of president of the United States. Nor is it necessary that I should attempt to prophesy concerning the future which the Ohio Valley will hold in the nation. In that new age of inland water transportation which is certain to supplement the age of the railroad there can be no more important region than the Ohio Valley. Let us hope that its old love of democracy may endure and that in this section where the first trans-allegheny pioneers struck blows at the forests, they may brought to blossom and to fruit the ripe civilization of a people who know that whatever the glories of prosperity may be, there are greater glories of the spirit of man. You know that in the ultimate record of history the place of the Ohio Valley will depend upon the contribution which her people and her leaders make to the cause of an enlightened, a cultivated, a god-fearing and a free as well as a comfortable democracy. End of section 21 Section 22 of the Frontier in American History This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Frontier in American History by Frederick Jackson Turner. Chapter 6 The Significance of the Mississippi Valley in American History Part 1 The rise of a company of sympathetic and critical students of history in the south and in the west is bound to revolutionise the perspective of American history. Already our eastern colleagues are aware in general if not in detail of the importance of the work of this nation in dealing with the vast interior and with the influence of the west upon the nation. Indeed, I might take as the text for this address the words of one of our eastern historians Professor Albert Bushnell Hart who, a decade ago, wrote The Mississippi Valley yields to no region in the world in interest, in romance and in promise for the future. Here, if anywhere, is the real America. The field, the theatre and the basis of the civilisation of the western world. The history of the Mississippi Valley is the history of the United States. Its future is the future of one of the most powerful of modern nations. If those of us who have been insisting on the importance of our own region are led at times by the enthusiasm of the pioneer for the inviting historical domain that opens before us to overstate the importance of our subject, we may at least plead that we have gone no farther than some of our brethren of the east, and we may take comfort in this declaration of Theodore Roosevelt. The states that have grown up around the Great Lakes and in the valley of the Upper Mississippi are the states which are destined to be the greatest, the richest, the most prosperous of all the great, rich and prosperous common worlds which go to make up the mightiest republic the world has ever seen. These states form the heart of the country geographically, and they will soon become the heart in population and in political and social importance. I should be sorry to think that before these states they're loomed a future of material prosperity merely. I regard this section of the country as the heart of true American sentiment. In studying the history of the whole Mississippi Valley, therefore, the members of this association are studying the origins of that portion of the nation which is admitted by competent eastern authorities to be the section potentially most influential in the future of America. They are also studying the region which has engaged the most vital activities of the whole nation. For the problems arising from the existence of the Mississippi Valley, whether of movement of population, diplomacy, politics, economic development or social structure have been fundamental problems in shaping the nation. It is not a narrow, not even a local interest which determines the mission of this association. It is nothing less than the study of the American people in the presence and under the influence of the vast spaces the imperial resources of the Great States. The social destiny of this valley will be the social destiny and will mark the place in history of the United States. In a large sense and in the one usually given to it by geographers and historians, the Mississippi Valley includes the whole interior basin, a province which drains into nearly 2,000 miles of navigable waters of the Mississippi itself, 2,000 miles of the tawny flood of the Missouri and 1,000 miles of the Ohio, 5,000 miles of main water highways open to the steamboat, nearly two and a half million square miles of drainage basin and a land greater than all Europe except Russia, Norway and Sweden, a land of levels marked by a central geographic unity, a land estimated to be able to support a population of two or three hundred millions, three times the present population of the whole nation, an empire of natural resources in which to build a noble social structure worthy to hold its place as the heart of American industrial, political and spiritual life. The significance of the Mississippi Valley in American history was first shown in the fact that it opened to various nations visions of power in the new world, visions that sweep across the horizon of historical possibility like the luminous but unsubstantial aura of a comet's train, potentious and fleeting. Out of the darkness of the primitive history of the continent are being drawn the evidences of the rise and fall of Indian cultures, the migrations through and into the great valley by men of the Stone Age, hinted at the legends and languages dimly told in the records of mounds and artifacts but waiting still for complete interpretation. Into these spaces and among the savage peoples came France and wrote a romantic page in our early history a page that tells of unfulfilled empire. What is striking in the effect of the Mississippi Valley upon France is the pronounced influence of the unity of its great spaces. It is not without meaning that Radisson and Grussilier not only reached the extreme of Lake Superior but also in all probability entered upon the waters of the Mississippi and learned of its western affluent. That Marquette not only received the Indians of the Illinois region in his post on the shores of Lake Superior but traversed the length of the Mississippi almost to its mouth and returning revealed the site of Chicago. That LaSalle was inspired with the vision of a huge interior empire reaching from the gulf to the great lakes. Before the close of the 17th century Perot's influence was supreme in the Upper Mississippi while the Iberville was laying the foundations of Louisiana toward the mouth of the river. Nor is it without significance that while the Verendries were advancing toward the northwest where they discovered the big horn mountains and revealed the natural boundaries of the valley the mallet brothers were ascending the plat crossing the Colorado plains to Santa Fe and so revealing the natural boundaries towards the southwest. To the English the great valley was a land beyond the Alleghenies. Spotswood the farsighted governor of Virginia predecessor of frontier builders grasped the situation when he proposed western settlements to prevent the French from becoming a great people at the back of the colonies. He realized the importance of the Mississippi valley as the field for expansion and the necessity to the English empire of dominating it if England would remain the great power of the new world. In the war that followed between France and England we now see what the men of the time could not have realized that the main issue was neither the possession of the fisheries nor the approaches to the Saint Lawrence on the one hemisphere nor the possession of India on the other but the mastery of the interior basin of North America. How little the nations realized the true meaning of the final victory of England is shown in the fact that Spain reluctantly received from France the session of the lands beyond the Mississippi accepting it as a means of preventing the infringement of her colonial monopoly in Spanish America rather than as a field for imperial expansion. But we know now that when George Washington came as a stripling to the camp of the French at the edge of the great valley and demanded the relinquishment of the French posts in the name of Virginia he was demanding in the name of the English speaking people the right to occupy and rule the real center of American resources and power. When Braddock's Axemen cut their road from the Potomac toward the forks of the Ohio they were opening a channel through which the forces of civilization should flow with ever increasing momentum and carving a cross on the wilderness rim at the spot which is now the center of industrial power of the American nation. England trembled on the brink of her great conquest fearful of the effect of these fast-stretching rivers upon her colonial system, timorous in the presence of the fierce peoples who held the vast domain beyond the Alleghenies. It seems clear however that the proclamation of 1763 forbidding settlement and the patenting of lands beyond the Alleghenies was not intended as a permanent creation of an Indian reservation out of this valley but was rather a temporary arrangement in order that British plans mature and a system of gradual colonization be devised. Already our greatest leaders, men like Washington and Franklin, had been quick to see the importance of this new area for enlarged activities of the American people. A sudden revelation that it was the west rather than the ocean which was the real theater for the creative energy of America came with triumph over France. The Ohio Company and the Loyal Land Company indicate the interest at the outbreak of the war while the Mississippi Company and by the Washington's and Lee's organized to occupy southern Illinois Indiana and western Kentucky marked the Virginia interest in the Mississippi Valley and Franklin's activity in promoting a colony in the Illinois country illustrates the interest of the Philadelphians. Indeed Franklin saw clearly the possibilities of a settlement there as a means of breaking up Spanish America. Writing to his son in 1767 he declared that a settlement should be made in the Illinois country raising interest on occasions of a future war might easily be poured down the Mississippi upon the lower country and into the Bay of Mexico to be used against Cuba, the French islands or Mexico itself. The Mississippi Valley had been the despair of France in the matter of governmental control. The Coro's Du Bois escaping from restraints of law and order took their way through its extensive wilderness exploring and trading as they listed. Similarly when the English colonists crossed the Alleghenies they escaped other colonies as well as of the mother country. If the Mississippi Valley revealed to the statesmen of the east in the exaltation of the war with France an opportunity for new empire building it revealed to the frontiersmen who penetrated the passes of the Alleghenies and entered into their new inheritance the sharp distinctions between them and the eastern lands which they left behind. From the beginning it was clear that the lands beyond the Alleghenies furnished an opportunity and an incentive to develop American society on independent and free means. The men of the western waters broke with the old order of things subordinated social restraint to the freedom of the individual, won their title to the rich lands which they entered by hard fighting against the Indians, hotly challenged the right of the east to rule them, demanded their own states and would not be refused, spoke with contempt of the old social order of ranks and classes in the lands between the Alleghenies and the Atlantic, and proclaimed the ideal of democracy for the vast country which they had entered. From the real facility of the French did they follow the river systems of the great valley. Like the advance of the glacier they changed the face of the country in their steady and inevitable progress, and they sought the sea. It was not long before the Spaniards at the mouth of the river realised the meaning of the new forces that had entered the valley. In 1794 the Governor of Louisiana wrote this vast and restless population progressively driving the Indian tribes before them and upon us seek to possess themselves of all the lands which the Indians occupy between the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Appalachian mountains, thus becoming our neighbours at the same time that they menacingly ask for the free navigation of the Mississippi. If they achieved their object their ambitions would not be confined to this side of the Mississippi. Their writings, public papers and speeches all turn on this point, the free navigation of the Gulf by the rivers, which empty into it the rich fur trade of the Missouri and in time the possession of the rich interior provinces of the very Kingdom of Mexico. Their mode of growth and their policy are as formidable for Spain as their armies. Their roving spirit and the readiness with which they procure sustenance and shelter facilitate rapid settlement. A rifle and a little corn meal in a bag are enough for an American wandering alone in the woods for a month. With logs crossed upon one another he makes a house and even an impregnable fort against the Indians. Coal does not terrify him and when a family wearies of one place it moves to another and settles there with the same ease. If such men come to occupy the banks of the Mississippi and Missouri or secure their navigation doubtless nothing will prevent them from crossing and penetrating into our provinces on the other side, which being to a great extent unoccupied can oppose no resistance. In my opinion a general revolution in America threatens Spain unless the remedy be applied properly. In fact the pioneers who had occupied the uplands of the south would stock with its scotch Irish leaders which had formed on the eastern edge of the Alleghenies, separate and distinct from the type of tide water in New England had found in the Mississippi valley a new field for expansion under conditions of free land and unrestraint. These conditions gave it promise of ample time to work out its own social type. But first of all these men who were occupying the western waters must find an outlet for their surplus products if they were to become a powerful people. While the Alleghenies placed a veto the Mississippi opened a broad highway to the south. Its swift current took their flat boats in its strong arms to bear them to the sea, but across the outlet of the Great River Spain drew the barrier of her colonial monopoly and denied them exit. End of Section 22 Section 23 of the Frontier in American History by Frederick Jackson Turner. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain recording by Colleen McMahon. Chapter 6 The Significance of the Mississippi Valley in American History, Part 2 The Significance of the Mississippi Valley in American History at the opening of the New Republic, therefore lay in the fact that beyond the area of the social and political control of the Thirteen Colonies there had arisen a new and aggressive society which imperiously put the questions of the public lands, internal communication, local self-government, defense and aggressive expansion before the legislators of the old colonial regime. The men of the Mississippi Valley compelled the men of the east to think in American terms instead of European. They dragged a reluctant nation on in a new course. From the Revolution to the end of the War of 1812, Europe regarded the destiny of the Mississippi Valley as undetermined. Spain desired to maintain her hold by means of the control given through the possession of the mouth of the river and the Gulf by her influence upon the Indian tribes and by intrigues with the settlers. Her object was primarily to safeguard the Spanish-American monopoly which had made her a great nation in the world. Instinctively she seemed to surmise that out of this valley were the issues of her future. Here was the lever which might break successively from her empire fragments about the Gulf, Louisiana, Florida and Texas, Cuba and Puerto Rico, the Southwest and the Pacific Coast and even the Philippines and the South. While the American Republic building itself on the resources of the valley should become paramount over the independent republics into which her empire was to disintegrate. France, seeking to regain her former colonial power would use the Mississippi Valley as a means of provisioning her west Indian islands of dominating Spanish-America and of subordinating to her purposes the feeble United States which her policy assigned to the lands of the Atlantic and the Alleghenies. The ancient Bourbon monarchy the Revolutionary Republic and the Napoleonic Empire all contemplated the acquisition of the whole valley of the Mississippi from the Alleghenies to the Rocky Mountains. England holding the great lakes dominating the northern Indian populations and threatening the Gulf and the mouth of the Mississippi by her fleet watched during the revolution the confederation and the early republic of the fragile bonds of the 13 states ready to extend her protection over the settlers in the Mississippi Valley. Alarmed by the prospect of England's taking Louisiana and Florida from Spain Jefferson wrote in 1790 quote, embraced from Sancroy to St. Mary's on one side by their possessions on the other by their fleet we need not hesitate to say that they would soon find means to unite to them all the territory covered by the ramifications of the Mississippi. End of quote. And that he thought must result in bloody and eternal war or indecisible confederacy with England. None of these nations deemed it impossible that American settlers in the Mississippi Valley might be one to accept another flag than that of the United States. Gardo Key had the effentry in 1787 to suggest to Madison that the Kentuckians would make good Spanish subjects. France enlisted the support of frontiersmen by George Rogers Clark for her attempted conquest of Louisiana in 1793. England tried to win support among the Western settlers. Indeed, when we recall that George Rogers Clark accepted a commission as Major General from France in 1793 and again in 1798 that Wilkinson, afterwards Commander-in-Chief of the American Army secretly asked Spanish citizenship and promised renunciation of his American allegiance. Governor Sevier Franklin, afterwards Senator from Tennessee and its first governor as a state. Robertson, the founder of Cumberland and Blunt, Governor of the Southwest Territory and afterwards Senator from Tennessee, were all willing to accept the rule of another nation sooner than see the navigation of the Mississippi yielded by the American government. We can easily believe that it lay within the realm of possibility that another allegiance might have been accepted by the frontiersmen themselves. We may well trust Rufus Putnam, whose federalism and devotion to his country had been proved and whose work in founding New England's settlement at Marietta is well known when he wrote in 1790 an answer to Fisher Aime's question whether the Mississippi Valley could be retained in the Union. Should Congress give up her claim to the navigation of the Mississippi or seed it to the Spaniards, I believe the people in the western quarter would separate themselves from the United States very soon. Such a measure, I have no doubt, would excite so much rage and dissatisfaction that the people would sooner put themselves under the despotic government of Spain than remain the indented servants of Congress. End of quote. He added that if Congress did not afford due protection also to these western settlers they might turn to England or Spain. Prior to the railroad the Mississippi Valley was potentially the basis for an independent empire in spite of the fact that its population would inevitably be drawn from the eastern states. Its natural outlet was down the current to the Gulf. New Orleans controlled the Valley in the words of Wilkinson quote, as the key the lock or the citadel the outworks. End of quote. So long as the Mississippi Valley was menaced or in part controlled by rival European states just so long must the United States be a part of the state system of Europe involved in its fortunes. And particularly was this the case although the fact that until the Union made internal commerce based upon the Mississippi Valley its dominant economic interest the merchants and sailors of the northeastern states and the staple producers of the southern seaboard were a commercial appanage of Europe. The significance of the Mississippi Valley was clearly seen by Jefferson. Writing to Livingston in 1802 he declared quote, there is on the globe one single spot the possessor of which is our natural and habitual country. It is New Orleans through which the produce of three-eighths of our territory must pass to market. And from its fertility it will air long yield more than half of our whole produce and contain more than half of our inhabitants. The day that France takes possession of New Orleans fixes the sentence which is to restrain her within her low water mark. It seals the Union of two nations who in conjunction can maintain exclusive possession of the ocean. From that moment we must marry ourselves of the United British fleet and nation holding the two continents of America in sequestration for the common purposes of the United British and American nations end of quote. The acquisition of Louisiana was a recognition of the essential unity of the Mississippi Valley. The French engineer Colau reported to his government after an investigation in 1796 quote all the positions on the left east bank of the Mississippi without the alliance of the western states are far from covering Louisiana. When two nations possess one the coasts and the other the plains the former must inevitably embark or submit. From thence I conclude that the western states of the North American Republic must unite themselves with Louisiana and form in the future one single compact nation or else that colony to whatever power it shall belong will be conquered or devoured. End of quote. The effect of bringing political unity to the Mississippi Valley by the Louisiana purchase was profound. It was the decisive step of the United States on an independent career as a world power free from entangling foreign alliances. The victories of Harrison in the Northwest in the war of 1812 that followed ensured our expansion in the northern half of the valley. Jackson's triumphal march to the Gulf and his defense of New Orleans in the same war won the basis for that cotton kingdom so economic life of the nation and so pregnant with the issue of slavery. The acquisition of Florida, Texas and the far west followed naturally. Not only was the nation set on an independent path in foreign relations its political system was revolutionized for the Mississippi Valley now open to the way for adding state after state swamping the New England section and its federalism. The doctrine of strict construction had received a fatal blow at the hands of its own profit. The old section of historic sovereign states makers of a federation was shattered by this vast edition of raw material for an indefinite number of parallelograms called states nursed through a territorial period by the federal government admitted under conditions and animated by national rather than by state patriotism. The area of the nation had been so enlarged and the development of the internal resources so promoted by the acquisition of the whole course of the mighty river its tributaries and its outlet that the Atlantic coast soon turned its economic energies from the sea to the interior. Cities and sections began to struggle for ascendancy over its industrial life. A real national activity a genuine American culture began the vast spaces the huge natural resources of the valley demanded exploitation and population. Later there came the tide of foreign immigration which has risen so steadily that it has made a American people whose amalgamation is destined to produce a new national stock. But without attempting to exhaust or even to indicate all the effects of the Louisiana purchase I wish next to ask your attention to the significance of the Mississippi Valley in the promotion of democracy and the transfer of the political center of gravity in the nation. The Mississippi Valley has been the special home of democracy. Born of free land and the pioneer spirit nurtured in the ideas of the revolution and finding free play for these ideas in the freedom of the wilderness democracy showed itself in the earliest utterances of the men of the western waters and it has persisted there. The demand for local self-government which was insistent on the frontier and the endorsement given by the Alleghenes to these demands led to the creation of a system of independent western governments and to the ordinance of 1787 an original contribution to colonial policy. This was framed in the period when any rigorous subjection of the west to eastern rule would have endangered the ties that bound them to the union itself. In the constitutional convention prominent eastern statesmen expressed their fears of the western democracy and would have checked its ability to out vote the regions of property by limiting its political power so that it should never equal that of the Atlantic coast. But more liberal councils prevailed. In the first debates upon the public lands it was clearly stated that the social system of the nation was involved quite as much as the question of revenue. Eastern fears that cheap lands in abundance would depopulate the Atlantic states and check their industrial growth by a scarcity of labor supply were met by the answer of one of the representatives in 1796. Quote I question if any man would be hardy enough to point out a class of citizens by name that ought to be the servants of the community. Yet that is done to what class of the people could you direct such a law. But if you pass such an act limiting the area offered for sale on the Mississippi Valley it would be ten amount of saying that there is some class which must remain here and by law be obliged to serve the others for such wages as they pleased to give. End of quote. Galatyn showed his comprehension of the basis of the prosperous American democracy in the same debate when he said quote if the cause of the happiness of this country was examined into it would be found to arise as much from the great plenty of land in proportion to the inhabitants which their citizens enjoyed as from the wisdom of their political institutions end of quote. Out of this frontier democratic society where the freedom and abundance of land in the great valley opened a refuge to the oppressed in all regions came the Jacksonian democracy which governed the nation after the downfall of the party of John Quincy Adams its center rested in Tennessee the region from which so large a portion of the Mississippi Valley was settled by descendants of the men of the upland south. The rule of the Mississippi Valley is seen when we recall the place that Tennessee, Kentucky and Missouri held in both parties besides Jackson Clay, Harrison and Polk we count such presidential candidates as Hugh White and John Bell Grundy the chairman of the finance committee and Benton the champion of capitalism. It was in this same period and largely by reason of the drainage of population to the west and the stir in the air raised by the western winds of Jacksonian democracy that most of the older states reconstructed their constitutions on a more democratic basis from the Mississippi Valley where there were liberal suffrage provisions based on population alone instead of property and population disregard of vested interests and insistence on the rights of man came the inspiration for this era of change in the franchise and apportionment of reform of laws for imprisonment for debt of general tax upon monopoly and privilege. It is now plain wrote Jackson in 1837 that the war is to be carried on by the moneyed aristocracy of the few against the democracy of numbers the prosperous to make the honest laborers hewers of wood and drawers of water through the credit and paper system. End of Section 23 Recording by Colleen McMahon Section 24 of the Frontier in American History by Frederick Jackson Turner. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Colleen McMahon Chapter 6 The Significance of the Mississippi Valley in American History Part 3 By this time the Mississippi Valley had grown in population and political power so that it ranked older sections. The next indication of its significance in American history which I shall mention is its position in shaping the economic and political course of the nation between the close of the War of 1812 and the slavery struggle. In 1790 the Mississippi Valley had a population of about a hundred thousand or one-fortieth of that of the United States as a whole. By 1810 it had over a million or one-seventh. By 1830 it had three and two-thirds millions or over one-fourth. By 1840 over six millions more than one-third. While the Atlantic Coast increased only a million and a half souls between 1830 and 1840 the Mississippi Valley gained nearly three millions. Ohio, Virgin Wilderness in 1790 was half a century later nearly as populous as Pennsylvania and twice as populous as Massachusetts. While Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina were gaining 60,000 souls between 1830 and 1840 Illinois gained 318,000. Indeed the growth of this state alone excelled that of the entire South Atlantic states. These figures show the significance of the Mississippi Valley in its pressure upon the older section by the competition of its cheap lands, its abundant harvests, and its drainage of the labor supply. All of these things meant an upward shift to the eastern wage earner. But they meant also an increase of political power in the valley. Before the war of 1812 the Mississippi Valley had six senators New England 10, the Middle States 10, and the South 8. By 1840 the Mississippi Valley had 22 senators, double those of the Middle States and New England combined and nearly three times as many as the Old South while in the House of Representatives the Mississippi Valley outweighed one of the old sections. In 1810 it had less than one-third the power of New England and the South together in the House. In 1840 it outweighed them both combined and because of its special circumstances it held the balance of the power. While the Mississippi Valley thus rose to superior political power as compared with any of the old sections its economic development made it the inciting factor in the industrial life of the nation. In 1812 the steamboat revolutionized the transportation facilities of the Mississippi Valley. In each economic area a surplus formed, demanding an outlet and demanding returns in manufacturers. The spread of cotton into the lower Mississippi Valley and the Gulf Plains had a double significance. This transfer of the center of cotton production away from the Atlantic South not only brought increasing hardship and increasing unrest to the east as the emergent soils depressed Atlantic land values and made eastern labor increasingly dear, but the price of cotton fell also in due proportion to the increase in production by the Mississippi Valley. While the transfer of economic power from the seaboard south to the cotton kingdom of the lower Mississippi Valley was in progress, the upper Mississippi Valley was leaping forward partly under the stimulus of a market for its surplus in the plantations of the South where an almost exclusive reduction of the great staples resulted in a lack of foodstuffs and livestock. At the same time the Great River and its affluence became the highway of a commerce that reached to the West Indies, the Atlantic Coast, Europe and South America. The Mississippi Valley was an industrial entity from Pittsburgh and Santa Fe to New Orleans. It became the most important influence in American politics and industry. Washington had declared in 1784 that it was the part of wisdom for Virginia to bind the West to the East by ties of interest through internal improvement, thereby taking advantage of the extensive and valuable trade of a rising empire. This realization of the fact that an economic empire was growing up beyond the mountains stimulated rival cities New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore to engage in a struggle to supply the West with goods and receive its products. This resulted in an attempt to break down the barrier of the Alleghenies by internal improvements. The movement became especially active after the War of 1812 when New York carried out DeWitt Clinton's vast conception of making by the Erie Canal a greater Hudson which should drain to the port of New York all the basin of the Great Lakes and by means of other canals even divert the traffic from the tributaries of the Mississippi. New York City's commercial ascendancy dates from this connection with interior New York and the Mississippi Valley. A writer in Hunt's Merchants Magazine in 1869 makes the significance of this clearer by these words. Quote, there was a period in the history of the seaboard cities when there was no West and when the Allegheny Mountains formed the frontier of settlement and agricultural production. During that epoch the seaboard cities north and south grew in proportion to the extent and fertility of the country in their rear and as Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia were more productive in staples valuable to commerce than the colonies north of them the cities of Baltimore, Norfolk, Charleston and Savannah enjoyed a greater trade and experienced a larger growth than those on the northern seaboard. End of quote. He then classifies the periods of city development into three. One, the provincial limited to the Atlantic seaboard. Two, that of Canal and Turnpike connected with the Mississippi Valley that of railroad connection. Thus he was able to show how Norfolk, for example, was shut off from the enriching currents of interior trade and was outstripped by New York. The efforts of Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston and Savannah to divert the trade of the Mississippi system to their own ports on the Atlantic and the rise or fall of these cities in proportion as they succeeded are a sufficient indication of the meaning of the Mississippi Valley in American industrial life. What colonial empire has been for London, that the Mississippi Valley is to the seaboard cities of the United States awakening visions of industrial empire, systematic control of vast spaces, producing the American type of the captain of industry. It was not alone city rivalry that converged upon the Mississippi Valley and sought its alliance. Sectional rivalry likewise saw that the balance of power possessed by the interior furnished an opportunity for combinations. This was a fundamental feature of Calhoun's policy when he urged the seaboard south to complete a railroad system to tap the northwest. As Washington had hoped to make western trade seek its outlet in Virginia and build up the industrial power of the old Dominion by enriching intercourse with the Mississippi Valley, as Monroe wished to bind the west Virginia's political interests and as DeWitt Clinton wished to attach it to New York so Calhoun and Hain would make quote Georgia and Carolina the commercial center of the union and the two most powerful and influential members of the Confederacy end of quote by draining the Mississippi Valley to their ports. I believe said Calhoun that the success of a connection of the west is of the last importance to us politically and commercially. I do verily believe that Charleston has more advantages in her position for the western trade than any city on the Atlantic, but to develop them we ought to look to the Tennessee instead of the Ohio and much farther to the west than Cincinnati or Lexington. This was the secret of Calhoun's advocacy in 1836 and 1837, both of the distribution of the surplus revenue and of the session of the public lands to the states in which they lay as an inducement to the west to ally itself with southern policies and it is the key to the readiness of Calhoun even after he lost his nationalism to promote internal improvements which would foster the southward current of trade on the Mississippi. Without going into details I may simply call your attention to the fact that Calhoun's whole system of internal improvements and tariffs was based upon the place of the Mississippi Valley in American life. It was the upper part of the valley and especially the Ohio Valley that furnished the votes which carried the tariffs of 1816, 1824 and 1828. Its interest profoundly influenced the details of those tariffs and its need of internal improvement constituted a basis for sectional bargaining in all the constructive legislation after the war of 1812. New England, the middle region and the south each sought alliance with the growing section beyond the mountains. American legislation bears the enduring evidence of these alliances. Even the National Bank found in this valley the main sphere of its business. The nation had turned its energies to internal exploitation and sections contended for the economic and political power derived from connection with the interior. But already the Mississippi Valley was beginning to stratify both socially and geographically as the railroads pushed across the mountains, the tide of New England and New York colonists and German immigrants sought the basin of the Great Lakes and the Upper Mississippi. A distinct zone, culturally and socially connected with New England was forming. The railroad reinforced the Erie Canal and as Debeau put it, turned back the tide of the Father of Waters so that its outlet was in New York instead of New Orleans for a large part of the valley. Below the northern zone was the border zone of the upland south, the region of compromise including both banks of the Ohio and the Missouri and reaching down to the hills on the north of the Gulf Plains. The Cotton Kingdom, based on slavery found its center in the fertile soils along the lower Mississippi and the black prairies of Georgia and Alabama and was settled largely by planners from the old Cotton lands of the Atlantic states. The Mississippi Valley had rejuvenated slavery, had given it an aggressive tone characteristic of western life. Thus the valley found itself in the midst of the slavery struggle at the very time when its own society had lost homogeneity. Let us allow two leaders, one of the south and one of the north, to describe the situation and first let the south speak. Said Hammond of South Carolina in a speech in the senate on March 4, 1858, quote, I think it not improper that I should attempt to bring the north and south face to face and see what resources each of us might have in the contingency of separate organizations. Through the heart of our country runs the great Mississippi, the Father of Waters, into whose bosom are poured 36,000 miles of tributary streams, and beyond we have the desert prairie wastes to protect us in our rear. Can you hem in such a territory as that? You talk of putting up a wall of fire around 850,000 miles so situated, how absurd. But in this territory lies the great valley of the Mississippi, now the real and soon to be the acknowledged seat of the empire of the world. The sway of that valley will be as great as ever the Nile New in the earlier ages of mankind. We own the most of it. The most valuable part of it belongs to us now. And although those who have settled above us are now opposed to us another generation will tell a different tale. They are ours by all the laws of nature. Slave labor will go to every foot of this great valley where it will be found profitable to use it. And some of those who may not use it are soon to be united with us by such ties as will make us one and inseparable. The iron horse will soon be clattering over the sunny south to bear the products of its upper tributaries to our Atlantic as it now does through the ice bound north. There is the great Mississippi, bond of union made by nature herself. She will maintain it forever. End of quote. As the seaboard south had transferred the mantle of leadership to Tennessee and then to the cotton kingdom of the lower Mississippi, so New England and New York resigned their command to the northern half of the Mississippi Valley and the basin of the Great Lakes. Seward, the old time leader of the eastern Whigs, who had just lost the Republican nomination for the presidency to Lincoln, may rightfully speak for the northeast. In the fall of 1860 addressing an audience at Madison, Wisconsin, he declared quote, the empire established at Washington is of less than a hundred years formation. It was the empire of thirteen Atlantic states. Still, practically, the mission of that empire is fulfilled. The power that directs it is ready to pass away from those thirteen states and although held and exercised under the same constitution and national form of government yet it is now in the very act of being transferred from the thirteen states east of the Allegheny Mountains and on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean to the twenty states that lie west of the Alleghenies and stretch away from their base to the base of the Rocky Mountains on the west and you are the heirs to it. When the next census shall reveal your power you will be found to be the masters of states of America and through them the dominating political power of the world. End of quote. Appealing to the northwest on the slavery issue, Seward declared, quote, the whole responsibility rests henceforth directly or indirectly on the people of the northwest. There can be no virtue in commercial and manufacturing communities to maintain a democracy when the democracy themselves do not want a democracy. There is no virtue in Pearl Street, in Wall Street, in Chestnut Street, in any other street of great commercial cities that can save the great democratic government of ours when you ceased to uphold it with your intelligent votes, your strong and mighty hands. You must therefore lead us as we here to fore reserved and prepared the way for you. We resigned to you the banner of human rights and human liberty on this continent and we bid you be firm, bold and onward and then you may hope that we will be able to follow you. End of quote. When we surveyed the course of the slavery struggle in the United States, it is clear that the form the question took was due to the Mississippi Valley. The ordinance of 1787, the Missouri Compromise, the Texas Question, the Free Soil Agitation, the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, the Dred Scott Decision, Bleeding Kansas. These are all Mississippi Valley questions and the mere enumeration makes it strange that it was the Mississippi Valley as an area for expansion, which gave the slavery issue its significance in American history. But for this field of expansion, slavery might have fulfilled the expectation of the fathers and gradually died away. Of the significance of the Mississippi Valley in the Civil War, it is unnecessary that I should speak. Illinois gave to the north its president. Mississippi gave to the south its president. Lincoln was born in Kentucky. Grant and Sherman, the northern generals, came from the Mississippi Valley, and both of them believed that when Vicksburg fell, the cause of the south was lost. And so it must have been if the Confederacy had been unable, after victories in the east, to regain the father of waters. For as General Sherman said, quote, whatever power holds that river can govern this continent, end of quote. With the close of the war, political power passed for many years to the northern half of the Mississippi Valley. As the names of Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Harrison, and McKinley indicate, the population of the valley grew from about 15 millions in 1860 to over 40 millions in 1900, over half the total population of the United States. The significance of its industrial growth is not likely to be overestimated or overlooked. On its northern border, from near Minnesota's boundary line, through Vicksburg, on its eastern edge, runs a huge movement of iron, from mine to factory. This industry is basal in American life, and it has revolutionized the industry of the world. The United States produces pig iron and steel in amount equal to or two greatest competitors combined, and the iron ores for this product are chiefly in the Mississippi Valley. It is the chief producer of coal, thereby enabling the United States almost to equal the combined production of Germany and Great Britain, and great oil fields of the nation are in its midst. The huge crops of wheat and corn and its cattle are the main resources for the United States, and are drawn upon by Europe. Its cotton furnishes two-thirds of the world's factory supply. Its railroad system constitutes the greatest transportation network in the world. Again it is seeking industrial consolidation by demanding improvement of its vast water system as a unit. If this design, favored by Roosevelt, shall at some time be accomplished, again the bulk of the commerce of the valley may flow along the old routes to New Orleans and to Galveston by the development of southern railroad outlets after the building of the Panama Canal. For the development and exploitation of these and of the transportation and trade interests of the Middle West, Eastern capital has been consolidated into huge corporations, trusts and combinations, with the influx of capital, and the rise of cities and manufacturers, portions of the Mississippi Valley have become assimilated with the East, with the end of the era of freelance, the basis of its democratic society is passing away. The final topic, on which I shall briefly comment in this discussion of the significance of the Mississippi Valley in American history, is a corollary of this condition. Has the Mississippi Valley a permanent contribution to make to American society, or is it to be adjusted into a type characteristically eastern and European? In other words, has the United States itself an original contribution to make to the history of society? This is what it comes to. The most significant fact in the Mississippi Valley is its ideals. Here has been developed not by revolutionary theory, but by growth among free opportunities the conception of a vast democracy made up of mobile ascending individuals, conscious of their power and their responsibilities. Can these ideals of individualism and democracy be reconciled and applied to the 20th century type of civilization? Other nations have been rich and prosperous and powerful, art loving and empire building. No other nation on a vast scale has been controlled by a self conscious, self restrained democracy in the interests of progress and freedom, industrial as well as political. It is in the vast and level spaces of Mississippi Valley, if anywhere, that the forces of social transformation and the modification of its democratic ideals may be arrested. Beginning with competitive individualism, as well as with belief in equality, the farmers of the Mississippi Valley gradually learned that unrestrained competition and combination meant the triumph of the strongest, the seizure in the interest of a dominant class of the strategic points of the nation's life. They learned that between the ideal of individualism unrestrained by society and the ideal of democracy was an innate conflict, that their very ambitions and forcefulness had endangered their democracy. The significance of the Mississippi Valley in American history has lain partly in the fact that it was a region of revolt. Here have arisen varied, sometimes ill considered, but always devoted, movements for ameliorating the lot of the common man in the interests of democracy. Out of the Mississippi Valley have come successive and related tidal waves of popular demand for real or imagined legislative safeguards to their rights and their social ideals. The Granger movement, the Greenback movement, the Populist movement, Brian Democracy and Roosevelt Republicanism all found their greatest strength in the Mississippi Valley. They were Mississippi Valley ideals in action. Its people were learning by experiment and experience how to grapple with the fundamental problem of creating a just social order that shall sustain the free, progressive individual in a real democracy. The Mississippi Valley is asking what shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul. The Mississippi Valley has furnished a new social order to America. Its universities have set new types of institutions for social service and for the elevation of the plain people. Its historians should recount its old ambitions and inventory its ideals as well as its resources. For the information of the present age to the end that building on its past the mighty valley may have a significance in the life of the nation even more profound than any which I have recounted.