University of Virginia Library

VIII
Dominant Forces in Western Life[1]

The Old Northwest is a name which tells of the vestiges
which the march of settlement across the American continent
has left behind it. The New Northwest fronts the watery
labyrinth of Puget Sound and awaits its destiny upon the
Pacific. The Old Northwest, the historic Northwest Territory,
is now the new Middle Region of the United States. A century
ago it was a wilderness, broken only by a few French settlements
and the straggling American hamlets along the Ohio
and its tributaries, while, on the shore of Lake Erie, Moses
Cleaveland had just led a handful of men to the Connecticut
Reserve. To-day it is the keystone of the American Commonwealth.
Since 1860 the center of population of the United
States has rested within its limits, and the center of manufacturing
in the nation lies eight miles from President McKinley's
Ohio home. Of the seven men who have been elected to the
presidency of the United States since 1860, six have come
from the Old Northwest, and the seventh came from the kindred
region of western New York. The congressional Representatives
from these five States of the Old Northwest already
outnumber those from the old Middle States, and are three
times as numerous as those from New England.

The elements that have contributed to the civilization of
this region are therefore well worth consideration. To know
the States that make up the Old Northwest—Ohio, Indiana,

Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin—one must understand their
social origins.

Eldest in this sisterhood was Ohio. New England gave the
formative impulses to this State by the part which the Ohio
Company played in securing the Ordinance of 1787, and at
Marietta and Cleveland Massachusetts and Connecticut planted
enduring centers of Puritan influence. During the same period
New Jersey and Pennsylvania sent their colonists to the
Symmes Purchase, in which Cincinnati was the rallying-point,
while Virginians sought the Military Bounty Lands in the region
of Chillicothe. The Middle States and the South, with
their democratic ideas, constituted the dominant element in
Ohio politics in the early part of her history. This dominance
is shown by the nativity of the members of the Ohio legislature
elected in 1820: New England furnished nine Senators and
sixteen Representatives, chiefly from Connecticut; New York,
New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, seventeen Senators and twenty-one
Representatives, mostly from Pennsylvania; while the
South furnished nine Senators and twenty-seven Representatives,
of whom the majority came from Virginia. Five of the
Representatives were native of Ireland, presumably Scotch-Irishmen.
In the Ohio Senate, therefore, the Middle States
had as many representatives as had New England and the
South together, while the Southern men slightly outnumbered
the Middle States men in the Assembly. Together, the emigrants
from the Democratic South and Middle Region outnumbered
the Federalist New Englanders three to one. Although
Ohio is popularly considered a child of New England, it is
clear that in these formative years of her statehood the commonwealth
was dominated by other forces.

By the close of this early period, in 1820, the settlement in
Ohio had covered more or less fully all except the northwest
corner of the State, and Indiana's formative period was well

started. Here, as in Ohio, there was a large Southern element.
But while the Southern stream that flowed into Ohio had its
sources in Virginia, the main current that sought Indiana came
from North Carolina; and these settlers were for the most
part from the humbler classes. In the settlement of Indiana
from the South two separate elements are distinguishable: the
Quaker migration from North Carolina, moving chiefly because
of anti-slavery convictions; the "poor white" stream, made
up in part of restless hunters and thriftless pioneers moving
without definite ambitions, and in part of other classes, such
as former overseers, migrating to the new country with definite
purpose of improving their fortunes.

These elements constituted well-marked features in the Southern
contribution to Indiana, and they explain why she has
been named the Hoosier State; but it should by no means be
thought that all of the Southern immigrants came under these
classes, nor that these have been the normal elements in the
development of the Indiana of to-day. In the Northwest,
where interstate migration has been so continuous and widespread,
the lack of typical State peculiarities is obvious, and
the student of society, like the traveler, is tempted, in his
effort to distinguish the community from its neighbors, to
exaggerate the odd and exceptional elements which give a
particular flavor to the State. Indiana has suffered somewhat
from this tendency; but it is undoubted that these peculiarities
of origin left deep and abiding influences upon the State. In
1820 her settlement was chiefly in the southern counties, where
Southern and Middle States influence was dominant. Her
two United States Senators were Virginians by birth, while
her Representative was from Pennsylvania. The Southern
element continued so powerful that one student of Indiana
origins has estimated that in 1850 one-third of the population
of the State were native Carolinians and their children

in the first generation. Not until a few years before the Civil
War did the Northern current exert a decisive influence upon
Indiana. She had no such lake ports as had her sister States,
and extension of settlement into the State from ports like
Chicago was interrupted by the less attractive area of the northwestern
part of Indiana. Add to this the geological fact that
the limestone ridges and the best soils ran in nearly perpendicular
belts northward from the Ohio, and it will be seen how
circumstances combined to diminish Northern and to facilitate
Southern influences in the State prior to the railroad development.

In Illinois, also, the current of migration was at first preponderantly
Southern, but the settlers were less often from
the Atlantic coast. Kentucky and Tennessee were generous
contributors, but many of the distinguished leaders came from
Virginia, and it is worthy of note that in 1820 the two United
States Senators of Illinois were of Maryland ancestry, while
her Representative was of Kentucky origin. The swarms of
land-seekers between 1820 and 1830 ascended the Illinois
river, and spread out between that river and the Mississippi.
It was in this period that Abraham Lincoln's father, who had
come from Kentucky to Indiana, again left his log cabin and
traveled by ox-team with his family to the popular Illinois
county of Sangamon. Here Lincoln split his famous rails
to fence their land, and grew up under the influences of this
migration of the Southern pioneers to the prairies. They
were not predominantly of the planter class; but the fierce contest
in 1824 over the proposition to open Illinois to slavery was
won for freedom by a narrow majority.

Looking at the three States, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois,
prior to 1850, we perceive how important was the voice of the
South here, and we can the more easily understand the early
affiliation of the Northwest with her sister States to the south

on the Western waters. It was not without reason that the
proposal of the Missouri Compromise came from Illinois, and
it was a natural enthusiasm with which these States followed
Henry Clay in the war policy of 1812. The combination of
the South, the western portion of the Middle States, and the
Mississippi Valley gave the ascendancy to the democratic
ideals of the followers of Jefferson, and left New England a
weakened and isolated section for nearly half a century.
Many of the most characteristic elements in American life in
the first part of the century were due to this relationship
between the South and the trans-Alleghany region. But even
thus early the Northwest had revealed strong predilections
for the Northern economic ideals as against the peculiar institution
of the South, and this tendency grew with the increase
of New England immigration.

The northern two in this sisterhood of Northwestern States
were the first to be entered by the French, but latest by the
English settlers. Why Michigan was not occupied by New
York men at an earlier period is at first sight not easy to
understand. Perhaps the adverse reports of surveyors who
visited the interior of the State, the partial geographical isolation,
and the unprogressive character of the French settlers
account for the tardy occupation of the area. Certain it is
that while the southern tier of States was sought by swarms
of settlers, Wisconsin and Michigan still echoed to Canadian
boating-songs, and voyageurs paddled their birch canoes along
the streams of the wilderness to traffic with the savages. Great
Britain maintained the dominant position until after the War
of 1812, and the real center of authority was in Canada.

But after the digging of the Erie Canal, settlement began
to turn into Michigan. Between 1830 and 1840 the population
of the State leaped from 31,000 to 212,000, in the face
of the fact that the heavy debt of the State and the crisis of

1837 turned from her borders many of the thrifty, debt-hating
Germans. The vast majority of the settlers were New Yorkers.
Michigan is distinctly a child of the Empire State. Canadians,
both French and English, continued to come as the lumber
interests of the region increased. By 1850 Michigan contained
nearly 400,000 inhabitants, who occupied the southern
half of the State.

But she now found an active competitor for settlement in
Wisconsin. In this region two forces had attracted the earlier
inhabitants. The fur-trading posts of Green Bay, Prairie du
Chien, and Milwaukee constituted one element, in which the
French influence was continued. The lead region of the southwest
corner of the State formed the center of attraction for
Illinois and Southern pioneers. The soldiers who followed
Black Hawk's trail in 1832 reported the richness of the soil,
and an era of immigration followed. To the port of Milwaukee
came a combined migration from western New York
and New England, and spread along the southern tier of prairie
counties until it met the Southern settlers in the lead region.
Many of the early political contests in the State were connected,
as in Ohio and Illinois, with the antagonisms between
the sections thus brought together in a limited area.

The other element in the formation of Wisconsin was that
of the Germans, then just entering upon their vast immigration
to the United States. Wisconsin was free from debt; she made
a constitution of exceptional liberality to foreigners, and
instead of treasuring her school lands or using them for internal
improvements, she sold them for almost nothing to attract
immigration. The result was that the prudent Germans, who
loved light taxes and cheap hard wood lands, turned toward
Wisconsin,—another Völkerwanderung. From Milwaukee as
a center they spread north along the shore of Lake Michigan,
and later into northern central Wisconsin, following the belt

of the hardwood forests. So considerable were their numbers
that such an economist as Roscher wrote of the feasibility of
making Wisconsin a German State. "They can plant the vine
on the hills," cried Franz Löher in 1847, "and drink with
happy song and dance; they can have German schools and
universities, German literature and art, German science and
philosophy, German courts and assemblies; in short, they can
form a German State, in which the German language shall be
as much the popular and official language as the English is
now, and in which the German spirit shall rule." By 1860
the German-born were sixteen per cent of the population of
the State. But the New York and New England stream proved
even more broad and steady in its flow in these years before
the war, Wisconsin's population rose from 30,000 in 1840
to 300,000 in 1850.

The New England element that entered this State is probably
typical of the same element in Wisconsin's neighboring
States, and demands notice. It came for the most part, not
from the seaboard of Massachusetts, which has so frequently
represented New England to the popular apprehension. A
large element in this stock was the product of the migration
that ascended the valleys of Connecticut and central Massachusetts
through the hills into Vermont and New York,—a
pioneer folk almost from the time of their origin. The Vermont
colonists decidedly outnumbered those of Massachusetts
in both Michigan and Wisconsin, and were far more numerous
in other Northwestern States than the population of Vermont
warranted. Together with this current came the settlers from
western New York. These were generally descendants of this
same pioneer New England stock, continuing into a remoter
West the movement that had brought their parents to New
York. The combined current from New England and New
York thus constituted a distinctly modified New England stock,

and was clearly the dominant native element in Michigan and
Wisconsin.

The decade of the forties was also the period of Iowa's
rapid increase. Although not politically a part of the Old
Northwest, in history she is closely related to that region.
Her growth was by no means so rapid as was Wisconsin's, for
the proportion of foreign immigration was less. Whereas in
1850 more than one-third of Wisconsin's population was foreign-born,
the proportion for Iowa was not much over one-tenth.
The main body of her people finally came from the
Middle States, and Illinois and Ohio; but Southern elements
were well represented, particularly among her political leaders.

The middle of the century was the turning-point in the transfer
of control in the Northwest. Below the line of the old
national turnpike, marked by the cities of Columbus, Indianapolis,
Vandalia, and St. Louis, the counties had acquired a
stability of settlement; and partly because of the Southern
element, partly because of a natural tendency of new communities
toward Jacksonian ideals, these counties were preponderantly
Democratic. But the Southern migration had turned
to the cotton areas of the Southwest, and the development of
railroads and canals had broken the historic commercial
ascendancy of the Mississippi River; New Orleans was yielding
the scepter to New York. The tide of migration from the
North poured along these newly opened channels, and occupied
the less settled counties above the national turnpike. In
cities like Columbus and Indianapolis, where the two currents
had run side by side, the combined elements were most clearly
marked, but in the Northwest as a whole a varied population
had been formed. This region seemed to represent and understand
the various parts of the Union. It was this aspect
which Mr. Vinton, of Ohio, urged in Congress when he made
his notable speech in favor of the admission of Iowa. He

pleaded the mission of the Northwest as the mediator between
the sections and the unifying agency in the nation, with such
power and pathos as to thrill even John Quincy Adams.

But there are some issues which cannot be settled by compromise,
tendencies one of which must conquer the other.
Such an issue the slave power raised, and raised too late for
support in the upper half of the Mississippi Basin. The
Northern and the Southern elements found themselves in opposition
to each other. "A house divided against itself cannot
stand," said Abraham Lincoln, a Northern leader of Southern
origin. Douglas, a leader of the Southern forces, though
coming from New England, declared his indifference whether
slavery were voted up or down in the Western Territories.
The historic debates between these two champions reveal the
complex conditions in the Northwest, and take on a new meaning
when considered in the light of this contest between the
Northern and the Southern elements. The State that had
been so potent for compromise was at last the battle-ground
itself, and the places selected for the various debates of Lincoln
and Douglas marked the strongholds and the outposts
of the antagonistic forces.

At this time the kinship of western New York and the dominant
element in the Northwest was clearly revealed. Speaking
for the anti-slavery forces at Madison, Wisconsin, in 1860,
Seward said: "The Northwest is by no means so small as you
may think it. I speak to you because I feel that I am, and
during all my mature life have been, one of you. Although
of New York, I am still a citizen of the Northwest. The
Northwest extends eastward to the base of the Alleghany
Mountains, and does not all of western New York lie westward
of the Alleghany Mountains? Whence comes all the inspiration
of free soil which spreads itself with such cheerful voices
over all these plains? Why, from New York westward of

the Alleghany Mountains. The people before me,—who are
you but New York men, while you are men of the Northwest?"
In the Civil War, western New York and the Northwest
were powerful in the forum and in the field. A million
soldiers came from the States that the Ordinance, passed by
Southern votes, had devoted to freedom.

This was the first grave time of trial for the Northwest, and
it did much eventually to give to the region a homogeneity and
self-consciousness. But at the close of the war the region
was still agricultural, only half-developed; still breaking
ground in northern forests; still receiving contributions of
peoples which radically modified the social organism, and
undergoing economic changes almost revolutionary in their
rapidity and extent. The changes since the war are of more
social importance, in many respects, than those in the years
commonly referred to as the formative period. As a result,
the Northwest finds herself again between contending forces,
sharing the interests of East and West, as once before those
of North and South, and forced to give her voice on issues
of equal significance for the destiny of the republic.

In these transforming years since 1860, Ohio, finding the
magician's talisman that revealed the treasury of mineral
wealth, gas, and petroleum beneath her fields, has leaped to a
front rank among the manufacturing States of the Union.
Potential on the Great Lakes by reason of her ports of Toledo
and Cleveland, tapping the Ohio river artery of trade at
Cincinnati, and closely connected with all the vast material
development of the upper waters of this river in western
Pennsylvania and West Virginia, Ohio has become distinctly
a part of the eastern social organism, much like the State of
Pennsylvania. The complexity of her origin still persists.
Ohio has no preponderant social center; her multiplicity of
colleges and universities bears tribute to the diversity of the

elements that have made the State. One-third of her people
are of foreign parentage (one or both parènts foreign-born),
and the city of Cincinnati has been deeply affected by the
German stock, while Cleveland strongly reflects the influence
of the New England element. That influence is still very palpable,
but it is New England in the presence of natural gas,
iron, and coal, New England shaped by blast and forge.
The Middle State ideals will dominate Ohio's future.

Bucolic Indiana, too, within the last decade has come into
the possession of gas-fields and has increased the exploitation
of her coals until she seems destined to share in the industrial
type represented by Ohio. Cities have arisen, like a dream, on
the sites of country villages. But Indiana has a much smaller
proportion of foreign elements than any other State of the
Old Northwest, and it is the Southern element that still differentiates
her from her sisters. While Ohio's political leaders
still attest the Puritan migration, Indiana's clasp hands with
the leaders from the South.

The Southern elements continue also to reveal themselves in
the Democratic southwestern counties of Illinois, grouped like
a broad delta of the Illinois River, while northern Illinois
holds a larger proportion of descendants of the Middle States
and New England. About one-half her population is of foreign
parentage, in which the German, Irish, and Scandinavians
furnish the largest elements. She is a great agricultural State
and a great manufacturing State, the connecting link between
the Mississippi and the Great Lakes. Her metropolis, Chicago,
is the very type of Northwestern development for good and
for evil. It is an epitome of her composite nationality. A
recent writer, analyzing the school census of Chicago, points
out that "only two cities in the German Empire, Berlin and
Hamburg, have a greater German population than Chicago;
only two in Sweden, Stockholm and Göteborg, have more

Swedes; and only two in Norway, Christiana and Bergen, have
more Norwegians"; while the Irish, Polish, Bohemians, and
Dutch elements are also largely represented. But in spite of her
rapidity of growth and her complex elements, Chicago stands
as the representative of the will-power and genius for action
of the Middle West, and the State of Illinois will be the battleground
for social and economic ideals for the next generation.

Michigan is two States. The northern peninsula is cut off
from the southern physically, industrially, and in the history
of settlement. It would seem that her natural destiny was
with Wisconsin, or some possible new State embracing the iron
and copper, forest and shipping areas of Michigan, Wisconsin,
and Minnesota on Lake Superior. The lower peninsula of
Michigan is the daughter of New York and over twelve per
cent of Michigan's present population were born in that State,
and her traits are those of the parent State. Over half her
population is of foreign parentage, of which Canada and
England together have furnished one-half, while the Germans
outnumber any other single foreign element. The State has
undergone a steady industrial development, exploiting her
northern mines and forests, developing her lumber interests
with Saginaw as the center, raising fruits along the lake shore
counties, and producing grain in the middle trough of counties
running from Saginaw Bay to the south of Lake Michigan.
Her state university has been her peculiar glory, furnishing
the first model for the state university, and it is the educational
contribution of the Northwest to the nation.

Wisconsin's future is dependent upon the influence of the
large proportion of her population of foreign parentage, for
nearly three-fourths of her inhabitants are of that class. She
thus has a smaller percentage of native population than any
other of the States formed from the Old Northwest. Of this
foreign element the Germans constitute by far the largest part,

with the Scandinavians second. Her American population
born outside of Wisconsin comes chiefly from New York. In
contrast with the Ohio River States, she lacks the Southern
element. Her greater foreign population and her dairy interests
contrast with Michigan's Canadian and English elements
and fruit culture. Her relations are more Western than Michigan's
by reason of her connection with the Mississippi and
the prairie States. Her foreign element is slightly less than
Minnesota's, and in the latter State the Scandinavians take
the place held by the Germans in Wisconsin. The facility
with which the Scandinavians catch the spirit of Western
America and assimilate with their neighbors is much greater
than is the case with the Germans, so that Wisconsin seems to
offer opportunity for non-English influence in a greater degree
than her sister on the west. While Minnesota's economic
development has heretofore been closely dependent on the
wheat-producing prairies, the opening of the iron fields of the
Mesabi and Vermilion ranges, together with the development
of St. Paul and Minneapolis, Duluth and West Superior, and
the prospective achievement of a deep-water communication
with the Atlantic, seem to offer to that State a new and
imperial industrial destiny. Between this stupendous economic
future to the northwest and the colossal growth of
Chicago on the southeast Wisconsin seems likely to become a
middle agricultural area, developing particularly into a dairy
State. She is powerfully affected by the conservative tendencies
of her German element in times of political agitation and
of proposals of social change.

Some of the social modifications in this State are more or
less typical of important processes at work among the neighboring
States of the Old Northwest. In the north, the men
who built up the lumber interests of the State, who founded
a mill town surrounded by the stumps of the pine forests

which they exploited for the prairie markets, have acquired
wealth and political power. The spacious and well-appointed
home of the town-builder may now be seen in many a northern
community, in a group of less pretentious homes of operatives
and tradesmen, the social distinctions between them emphasized
by the difference in nationality. A few years before, this
captain of industry was perhaps actively engaged in the task
of seeking the best "forties" or directing the operations of
his log-drivers. His wife and daughters make extensive visits
to Europe, his sons go to some university, and he himself is
likely to acquire political position, or to devote his energies to
saving the town from industrial decline, as the timber is cut
away, by transforming it into a manufacturing center for more
finished products. Still others continue their activity among
the forests of the South. This social history of the timber
areas of Wisconsin has left clear indications in the development
of the peculiar political leadership in the northern portion of
the State.

In the southern and middle counties of the State, the original
settlement of the native American pioneer farmer, a
tendency is showing itself to divide the farms and to sell to
thrifty Germans, or to cultivate the soil by tenants, while the
farmer retires to live in the neighboring village, and perhaps
to organize creameries and develop a dairy business. The
result is that a replacement of nationalities is in progress.
Townships and even counties once dominated by the native
American farmers of New York extraction are now possessed
by Germans or other European nationalities. Large portions
of the retail trades of the towns are also passing into German
hands, while the native element seeks the cities, the professions,
or mercantile enterprises of larger character. The nonnative
element shows distinct tendencies to dwell in groups.
One of the most striking illustrations of this fact is the community

of New Glarus, in Wisconsin, formed by a carefully
organized migration from Glarus in Switzerland, aided by the
canton itself. For some years this community was a miniature
Swiss canton in social organization and customs, but of late
it has become increasingly assimilated to the American type,
and has left an impress by transforming the county in which
it is from a grain-raising to a dairy region.

From Milwaukee as a center, the influence of the Germans
upon the social customs and ideals of Wisconsin has been
marked. Milwaukee has many of the aspects of a German
city, and has furnished a stronghold of resistence to native
American efforts to enact rigid temperance legislation, laws
regulative of parochial schools, and similar attempts to bend
the German type to the social ideas of the pioneer American
stock. In the last presidential election, the German area of
the State deserted the Democratic party, and its opposition to
free silver was a decisive factor in the overwhelming victory
of the Republicans in Wisconsin. With all the evidence of
the persistence of the influence of this nationality, it is nevertheless
clear that each decade marks an increased assimilation
and homogeneity in the State; but the result is a compromise,
and not a conquest by either element.

The States of the Old Northwest gave to McKinley a plurality
of over 367,000 out of a total vote of about 3,734,000. New
England and the Middle States together gave him a plurality
of 979,000 in about the same vote, while the farther West
gave to Bryan a decisive net plurality. It thus appears that
the Old Northwest occupied the position of a political middle
region between East and West. The significance of this position
is manifest when it is recalled that this section is the child
of the East and the mother of the Populistic West.

The occupation of the Western prairies was determined by
forces similar to those which settled the Old Northwest. In

the decade before the war, Minnesota succeeded to the place
held by Wisconsin as the Mecca of settlers in the prior decade.
To Wisconsin and New York she owes the largest proportion
of her native settlers born outside of the State. Kansas and
Nebraska were settled most rapidly in the decade following
the war, and had a large proportion of soldiers in their American
immigrants. Illinois and Ohio together furnished about
one-third of the native settlers of these States, but the element
coming from Southern States was stronger in Kansas than in
Nebraska. Both these States have an exceptionally large proportion
of native whites as compared with their neighbors
among the prairie States. Kansas, for example, has about
twenty-six per cent of persons of foreign parentage, while
Nebraska has about forty-two, Iowa forty-three, South Dakota
sixty, Wisconsin seventy-three, Minnesota seventy-five, and
North Dakota seventy-nine. North Dakota's development was
greatest in the decade prior to 1890. Her native stock came
in largest numbers from Wisconsin, with New York, Minnesota,
and Iowa next in order. The growth of South Dakota
occupied the two decades prior to the census of 1890, and she
has recruited her native element from Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois,
and New York.

In consequence of the large migration from the States of
the Old Northwest to the virgin soils of these prairie States
many counties in the parent States show a considerable decline
in growth in the decade before 1890. There is significance
in the fact that, with the exception of Iowa, these prairie States,
the colonies of the Old Northwest, gave Bryan votes in the
election of 1896 in the ratio of their proportion of persons
of native parentage. North Dakota, with the heaviest foreign
element, was carried for McKinley, while South Dakota, with
a much smaller foreign vote, went for Bryan. Kansas and
Nebraska rank with Ohio in their native percentage, and they

were the center of prairie Populism. Of course, there were
other important local economic and political explanations for
this ratio, but it seems to have a basis of real meaning. Certain
it is that the leaders of the silver movement came from
the native element furnished by the Old Northwest. The
original Populists in the Kansas legislature of 1891 were born
in different States as follows: in Ohio, twelve; Indiana, six;
Illinois, five; New York, four; Pennsylvania, two; Connecticut,
Vermont, and Maine, one each,—making a total, for the
Northern current, of thirty-two. Of the remaining eighteen,
thirteen were from the South, and one each from Kansas,
Missouri, California, England and Ireland. Nearly all were
Methodists and former Republicans.[2]

Looking at the silver movement more largely, we find that
of the Kansas delegation in the Fifty-fourth Congress, one
was born in Kansas, and the rest in Indiana, Illinois, Ohio,
Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Maine. All of the Nebraska
delegation in the House came from the Old Northwest or from
Iowa. The biographies of the two Representatives from the
State of Washington tell an interesting story. These men
came as children to the pine woods of Wisconsin, took up
public lands, and worked on the farm and in the pineries.
One passed on to a homestead in Nebraska before settling in
Washington. Thus they kept one stage ahead of the social
transformations of the West. This is the usual training of
the Western politicians. If the reader would see a picture
of the representative Kansas Populist, let him examine the
family portraits of the Ohio farmer in the middle of this
century.

In a word, the Populist is the American farmer who has
kept in advance of the economic and social transformations

that have overtaken those who remained behind. While, doubtless,
investigation into the ancestry of the Populists and "silver
men" who came to the prairies from the Old Northwest would
show a large proportion of Southern origin, yet the center of
discontent seems to have been among the men of the New
England and New York current. If New England looks with
care at these men, she may recognize in them the familiar lineaments
of the embattled farmers who fired the shot heard round
the world. The continuous advance of this pioneer stock from
New England has preserved for us the older type of the pioneer
of frontier New England.

I do not overlook the transforming influences of the wilderness
on this stock ever since it left the earlier frontier
to follow up the valleys of western Connecticut, Massachusetts,
and Vermont, into western New York, into Ohio, into
Iowa, and out to the arid plains of western Kansas and
Nebraska; nor do I overlook the peculiar industrial conditions
of the prairie States. But I desire to insist upon the other
truth, also, that these westward immigrants, keeping for generations
in advance of the transforming industrial and social
forces that have wrought so vast a revolution in the older
regions of the East which they left, could not but preserve
important aspects of the older farmer type. In the arid West
these pioneers have halted and have turned to perceive an
altered nation and changed social ideals. They see the sharp
contrast between their traditional idea of America, as the land
of opportunity, the land of the self-made man, free from class
distinctions and from the power of wealth, and the existing
America, so unlike the earlier ideal. If we follow back the
line of march of the Purnam farmer, we shall see how responsive
he has always been to isms, and how persistently he has
resisted encroachments on his ideals of individual opportunity
and democracy . He is the prophet of the "higher law" in

Kansas before the Civil War. He is the Prohibitionist of
Iowa and Wisconsin, crying out against German customs as
an invasion of his traditional ideals. He is the Granger of
Wisconsin, passing restrictive railroad legislation. He is the
Abolitionist, the Anti-mason, the Millerite, the Woman Suffragist,
the Spiritualist, the Mormon, of Western New
York. Follow him to his New England home in the turbulent
days of Shays' rebellion, paper money, stay and tender
laws, and land banks. The radicals among these New England
farmers hated lawyers and capitalists. "I would not
trust them," said Abraham White, in the ratification convention
of Massachusetts, in 1788, "though every one of them
should be a Moses." "These lawyers," cried Amos Singletary,
"and men of learning and moneyed men that talk so
finely and gloss over matters so smoothly to make us poor
illiterate people swallow the pill, expect to get into Congress
themselves! They mean to get all the money into their hands,
and then they will swallow up all us little folk, like the
Leviathan, Mr. President; yea, just as the whale swallowed up
Jonah."

If the voice of Mary Ellen Lease sounds raucous to the New
England man to-day, while it is sweet music in the ears of the
Kansas farmer, let him ponder the utterances of these frontier
farmers in the days of the Revolution; and if he is still
doubtful of this spiritual kinship, let him read the words of
the levelers and sectaries of Cromwell's army.

The story of the political leaders who remained in the place
of their birth and shared its economic changes differs from
the story of those who by moving to the West continued on a
new area the old social type. In the throng of Scotch-Irish
pioneers that entered the uplands of the Carolinas in the second
quarter of the eighteenth century were the ancestors of Calhoun
and of Andrew Jackson. Remaining in this region,

Calhoun shared the transformations of the South Carolina
interior. He saw it change from the area of the pioneer
farmers to an area of great planters raising cotton by slave
labor. This explains the transformation of the nationalist
and protectionist Calhoun of 1816 into the state-sovereignty
and free-trade Colhoun. Jackson, on the other hand, left the
region while it was still a frontier, shared the frontier life of
Tennessee, and reflected the democracy and nationalism of his
people. Henry Clay lived long enough in the kindred State
of Kentucky to see it pass from a frontier to a settled community,
and his views on slavery reflected the transitional history
of that State. Lincoln, on the other hand, born in Kentucky
in 1809, while the State was still under frontier conditions,
migrated in 1816 to Indiana, and in 1830 to Illinois. The
pioneer influences of his community did much to shape his
life, and the development of the raw frontiersman into the
statesman was not unlike the development of his own State.
Political leaders who experienced the later growth of the
Northwest, like Garfield, Hayes, Harrison, and McKinley,
show clearly the continued transformations of the section. But
in the days when the Northwest was still in the gristle, she
sent her sons into the newer West to continue the views of
life and the policies of the half-frontier region they had left.

To-day, the Northwest, standing between her ancestral connections
in the East and her children in the West, partly
like the East, partly like the West, finds herself in a position
strangely like that in the days of the slavery struggle, when
her origins presented to her a "divided duty." But these
issues are not with the same imperious "Which?" as was the
issue of freedom or slavery.

Looking at the Northwest as a whole, one sees, in the character
of its industries and in the elements of its population,
it is identified on the east with the zone of States including

the middle region and New England. Cotton culture and the
negro make a clear line of division between the Old Northwest
and the South. And yet in important historical ideals—in the
process of expansion, in the persistence of agricultural interests,
in impulsiveness, in imperialistic ways of looking at the
American destiny, in hero-worship, in the newness of its present
social structure—the Old Northwest has much in common
with the South and the Far West.

Behind her is the old pioneer past of simple democratic
conditions, and freedom of opportunity for all men. Before
her is a superb industrial development, the brilliancy of success
as evinced in a vast population, aggregate wealth, and
sectional power.