University of Virginia Library

VI
The Significance of the Mississippi Valley in American History[1]

The rise of a company of sympathetic and critical students
of history in the South and in the West is bound to revolutionize
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:

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:

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 interior. 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
two thousand miles of navigable waters of the Mississippi
itself, two thousand miles of the tawny flood of the Missouri,
and a thousand miles of the Ohio—five thousand miles of
main water highways open to the steamboat, nearly two and
a half million square miles of drainage basin, a land greater
than all Europe except Russia, Norway, and Sweden, a land of
levels, marked by essential 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 aurora of a comet's train, portentous
and fleeting.

Out of the darkness of the primitive history of the conand
tinent 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 in 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 Groseilliers 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 La Salle was inspired with the vision of a huge interior
empire reaching from the Gulf to the Great Lakes. Before
the close of the seventeenth century, Perrot's influence was
supreme in the Upper Mississippi, while D'Iberville was laying
the foundations of Louisiana toward the mouth of the
river. Nor is it without significance that while the Verendryes
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 Platte,
crossing the Colorado plains to Santa Fé and so revealing the
natural boundaries toward the southwest.

To the English the great Valley was a land beyond the
Alleghanies. Spotswood, the far-sighted 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 St. 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 cession 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
axmen 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 far-stretching rivers upon her colonial
system, timorous in the presence of the fierce peoples who
held the vast domain beyond the Alleghanies. It seems clear,
however, that the Proclamation of 1763, forbidding settlement
and the patenting of lands beyond the Alleghanies, 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 might 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 the triumph over France.
The Ohio Company and the Loyal Land Company indicate
the interest at the outbreak of the war, while the Mississippi
Company, headed by the Washingtons and Lees, organized to
occupy southern Illinois, Indiana, and western Kentucky,
mark 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 a strength there which 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."[4]

The Mississippi Valley had been the despair of France in
the matter of governmental control. The coureurs de 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
Alleghanies they escaped from the control of mother colonies
as well as of the mother country. If the Mississippi Valley
revealed to the statesmen of the East, in the exultation of the
war with France, an opportunity for new empire building, it
revealed to the frontiersmen, who penetrated the passes of the
Alleghanies, 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 Alleghanies furnished an opportunity and an incentive
to develop American society on independent and unconventional
lines. 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 Alleghanies and the Atlantic, and proclaimed the ideal of
democracy for the vast country which they had entered. Not
with the mercurial 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 realized the
meaning of the new forces that had entered the Valley.

In 1794 the Governor of Louisiana wrote:

In fact, the pioneers who had occupied the uplands of the
South, the backwoods stock with its Scotch-Irish leaders which
had formed on the eastern edge of the Alleghanies, separate
and distinct from the type of tidewater and 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 Alleghanies
placed a veto toward the east, 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.

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 régime. 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 Porto Rico—the Southwest and Pacific
coast, and even the Philippines and the Isthmian Canal, 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 between the Atlantic
and the Alleghanies. The ancient Bourbon monarchy, the
revolutionary republic, and the Napoleonic empire—all contemplated
the acquisition of the whole Valley of the Mississippi
from the Alleghanies to the Rocky Mountains.[5]

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 for the breaking
of the fragile bonds of the thirteen 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: "Embraced
from St. Croix 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." And that,
he thought, must result in "bloody and eternal war or indissoluble
confederacy" with England.

None of these nations deemed it impossible that American
settlers in the Mississippi Valley might be won to accept
another flag than that of the United States. Gardoqui had
the effrontery in 1787 to suggest to Madison that the Kentuckians
would make good Spanish subjects. France enlisted the
support of frontiersmen led 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; that Governor Sevier of
Franklin, afterwards Senator from Tennessee and its first Governor
as a State, Robertson the founder of Cumberland, and
Blount, 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 in answer to Fisher Ames'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 cede 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." He
added that if Congress did not afford due protection also to
these western settlers they might turn to England or Spain.[6]

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,
"as the key the lock, or the citadel the outworks," 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 in view of 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 sea-board were a commercial appanage of
Europe. The significance of the Mississippi Valley was
clearly seen by Jefferson. Writing to Livingston in 1802 he
declared:

The acquisition of Louisiana was a recognition of the essential
unity of the Mississippi Valley. The French engineer
Collot reported to his government after an investigation in
1796:

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 important in the economic life
of the nation and so pregnant with the issue of slavery.[8] 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 opened 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 prophet. The old conception
of historic sovereign States, makers of a federation,

was shattered by this vast addition 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 composite 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 especial 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 Alleghanies 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 counsels
prevailed. In the first debates upon the public lands, also,
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:

Gallatin showed his comprehension of the basis of the
prosperous American democracy in the same debate when he
said:

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,
Vice President R. M. Johnson, Grundy, the chairman of the
Finance committee, and Benton, the champion of western radicalism.

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 attacks upon monopoly and privilege." It is now
plain," wrote Jackson in 1837, "that the war is to be carried
on by the monied 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."

By this time the Mississippi Valley had grown in population
and political power so that it ranked with the 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 1970) 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 lift 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 ten, the
Middle States ten, and the South eight. By 1840 the Mississippi
Valley had twenty-two 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 any 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 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. After the War of 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 manufactures. 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
competition of the virgin 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 almost exclusive cultivation of the great staples
resulted in a lack of foodstuffs and livestock.

At the same time the great river and its affluents 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
Fé 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 Alleghanies
by internal improvements. The movement became
especially active after the War of 1812, when New York carried
out De Witt 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:

He, then, classifies the periods of city development into
three: (1) the provincial, limited to the Atlantic seaboard;
(2) that of canal and turnpike connected with the Mississippi
Valley; and (3) 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 to Virginia's
political interests; and as De Witt Clinton wished to attach
it to New York, so Calhoun and Hayne would make "Georgia
and Carolina the commercial center of the Union, and the
two most powerful and influential members of the confederacy,"
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 cession
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 Clay's Whole system of internal improvements
and tariff 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 interests
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,
industrially and socially connected with New England, was
forming. The railroad reinforced the Erie Canal and, as
De Bow 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 planters
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,[9] in a speech
in the Senate on March 4, 1858:

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:[10]

Appealing to the Northwest on the slavery issue Seward
declared:

When we survey 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 plain 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 and Davis were both born in Kentucky.
Grant and Sherman, the northern generals, came from the
Mississippi Valley; and both, of them believed that when Vicks
burg 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: "Whatever power holds that river can govern
this continent."

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
fifteen millions in I860 to over forty 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 the Great Lakes to Pittsburgh, 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 her 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. Its 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 manufactures,
portions of the Mississippi Valley have become assimilated
with the East. With the end of the era of free lands 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 twentieth 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 the
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, Bryan 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.