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The Ohio Valley in American History1
1 An address before the Ohio Valley Historical Association, October
16,1909.
The frontier in American history |  |
V
The Ohio Valley in American History[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 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
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, contended 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
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
beneath 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 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
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 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 Association, the
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. It is 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 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 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 Alleghany Plateaus and the southern portion of the
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 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 preëminently 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 Grass 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 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
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 Fé, 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 backswoodsmen
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 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.
Into this dominion, in the next scene of this drama, came
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
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 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 coöperation 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 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 Blue Grass lands in the midst of the Kentucky hills, on the
Ohio river. In the opening years of the Revolution these
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 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 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
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
setlements 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 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 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 leadership 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
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
to the Ordinance 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.[2]
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
petitioned 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, 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 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
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 canals 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 passage of preëmption 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
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
who 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
ships 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
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 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 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 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 Tennesseean 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
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 tocsin 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 to leadership and its enthusiasm in action are illustrated
by the Harrison campaign of 1840; in that "log cabin campaign"
when the Whigs "stole the thunder" of pioneer Jacksonian
democracy for another backwoods 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 interests to itself by canals
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
live stock 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 her turn 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 Ohio 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 where indented servitude
for many years opened a way to a system of semi-slavery,
there were divided counsels. 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 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
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 contribution 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 a 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 its statesmen 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-Alleghany pioneers struck blows
at the forests, there may be 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
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.
| V
The Ohio Valley in American History1
1 An address before the Ohio Valley Historical Association, October
16,1909.
The frontier in American history | |