The Frontier in American History Part 13

It is important that the Middle West should accomplish this; the future of the Republic is with her. Politically she is dominant, as is ill.u.s.trated by the fact that six out of seven of the Presidents elected since 1860 have come from her borders. Twenty-six million people live in the Middle West as against twenty-one 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, while private munificence 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.

FOOTNOTES:

[126:1] With acknowledgments to the _International Monthly_, December, 1901.

[129:1] 1901.

[132:1] See F. J. Turner, "Western State-Making in the Revolutionary Era," in _Am. Historical Review_, i, pp. 70 _et seq._

V

THE OHIO VALLEY IN AMERICAN HISTORY[157:1]

In a notable essay Professor Josiah Royce has a.s.serted 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 a.s.similate 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 pa.s.sion of the mob, tend in our day to sweep across the nation.

Against these surges of national feeling Professor Royce would erect dikes 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 philosopher's 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 sh.o.r.es 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, contended with the representatives of other sections, and arranged compromises between sections in national legislation and policy, almost as amba.s.sadors 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 a.s.sumptions and emotions.

In short, the real federal aspect of the nation, if we penetrate beneath const.i.tutional 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 fulfil their duties, might fall into decay, while the national government engrossed their former power. But even if the States disappeared altogether as effective factors in our national life, the sections might, in my opinion, gain from that very disappearance a strength and activity that would prove effective limitations upon the nationalizing process.

Without pursuing the interesting speculation, I may note as evidence of the development of sectionalism, the various gatherings of business men, 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 a.s.sociation 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 the 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 to-day, but we would be short-sighted, indeed, who failed to perceive in the formation of the Pacific Coast Historical a.s.sociation, the Mississippi Valley Historical a.s.sociation, and the Ohio Valley Historical a.s.sociation, for example, genuine and spontaneous manifestations of a sectional consciousness.

These a.s.sociations spring in large part from the recognition in each of a common past, a common body of experiences, traditions, inst.i.tutions and ideals. It is not necessary now to raise the question whether all of these a.s.sociations 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 a.s.sert that American life will be enriched and safe-guarded 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 the Valley in the brief compa.s.s 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 Alleghany 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 members.h.i.+p 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 backwoodsmen.

But, after all, the unity of the section and its place in 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 Alleghanies bound it 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 warder of the falls; the cities of the "Old National Road," Columbus, Indianapolis; the cities of the Blue Gra.s.s 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 const.i.tuted 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 are 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 archeology 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 mounds of the valley indicate a special type of development intermediate between that of 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 the "Sea of the West," 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 of the American backwoodsmen in the center 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 backwood 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, that the messenger of English civilization, who summoned the French to evacuate the Valley and its approaches, and whose men near the forks of the Ohio fired the opening gun of the world-historic conflict that wrought the doom of New France in America, was George Was.h.i.+ngton, the first American to win a national position in the United States. The father of his country was the prophet of the Ohio Valley.

Into this dominion, in the next scene of this drama, came the backwoodsmen, 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 eighteenth century in the Great Valley of Pennsylvania and its lateral extensions was the nursery of the American backwoodsmen. Between about 1730 and the Revolution, successive tides of pioneers ascended the Shenandoah, occupied the Piedmont, or up-country 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 eighteenth 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 Alleghany 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 sects, but withal deeply responsive to the call of the religious spirit, and the English Quakers all furnish 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 the later Campbellites, as well as by Presbyterians. Mr.

Bryce has well characterized the South as a region of "high religious voltage," but this characterization is especially applicable to the Upland South, and its colonies in the Ohio Valley. It is not necessary to a.s.sert that this religious spirit resulted in the kind of conduct a.s.sociated 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 moreover 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 pa.s.s into the Ohio Valley when Daniel Boone, and the pioneers a.s.sociated with his name, followed the "Wilderness Trace" from the Upland South to the Blue Gra.s.s 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 a.s.similate the upland section. We cannot think of the South as a unit through much of its ante-bellum history without doing violence to the facts. The struggle between the men of the up-country 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 in the East. On the other hand, its children, who placed the wall of the Alleghanies 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, triumphant democracy. A new section was added to the American nation, a new element was infused into the combination which we call the United States, a new flavor 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 const.i.tuted 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, Was.h.i.+ngton 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 Alleghanies and the Rocky Mountains for a revived French Empire in America, are among the fascinating chapters of American, as well as of Ohio Valley, history. This 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 att.i.tude 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 definite 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 leaders.h.i.+p of a group of men from 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 Tennesseeans 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 inst.i.tutions. 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 to the Ordinance of 1787 and to the leaders.h.i.+p 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 att.i.tude imposed it, of necessity, upon the nation. The great Ordinance only perfected the system.[168:1]

Under the belief that all men going into vacant lands have the right to shape their own political inst.i.tutions, the riflemen of western Virginia, western Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Tennessee, during the Revolution, protested against the rule of governments east of the mountains, and a.s.serted with manly independence their right to self-government. But it is significant that in making this a.s.sertion, they at the same time pet.i.tioned 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 the paramount authority of congress and this demand for self-government under that authority, const.i.tute 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 a.s.sertion of either State or national power over these remote communities might result in their loss to the nation. The importance of the result can hardly be overestimated. It insured 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 a 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 in 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 in the area 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 ca.n.a.ls for the internal improvement of a nation which was separated into East and West by the Alleghany Mountains; the formation of a tariff system for the protection of home industries and to supply a market for the surplus of the West which no longer found an outlet in warring 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 pa.s.sage 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 and 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.

When one names the tariff, internal improvements and the bank, he is bound to add the t.i.tle "The American System," and to think of Henry Clay of Kentucky, the captivating young statesman, who fas.h.i.+oned 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 one hundredth anniversary of Fulton's invention of the steamboat, and the Hudson river has been ablaze 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 s.h.i.+ps has had a vaster influence upon our national life than 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 manufactures, 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 in 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 Alleghany barrier by a national system of roads and ca.n.a.ls. If we a.n.a.lyse the congressional votes by which the tariff and internal improvement acts were pa.s.sed, 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 favor 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 backwoods, and which entered the Union one after the other with manhood suffrage, greatly recruited the effective forces of democracy in the Union. Not only did they add new recruits, but by their compet.i.tive 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.