University of Virginia Library

IV
The Middle West[1]

American sectional nomenclature is still confused. Once
"the West" described the whole region beyond the Alleghanies;
but the term has hopelessly lost its definiteness. The
rapidity of the spread of settlement has broken down old
usage, and as yet no substitute has been generally accepted.
The "Middle West" is a term variously used by the public,
but for the purpose of the present paper, it will be applied
to that region of the United States included in the census
reports under the name of the North Central division, comprising
the States of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and
Wisconsin (the old "Territory Northwest of the River Ohio")
and their trans-Mississippi sisters of the Louisiana Purchase,
—Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota,
and South Dakota. It is an imperial domain. If the
greater countries of Central Europe,—France, Germany, Italy,
and Austro-Hungary,—were laid down upon this area, the
Middle West would still show a margin of spare territory.
Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Buffalo constitute its gateways to the
Eastern States; Kansas City, Omaha, St. Paul-Minneapolis,
and Duluth-Superior dominate its western areas; Cincinnati
and St. Louis stand on its southern borders; and Chicago
reigns at the center. What Boston, New York, Philadelphia,
and Baltimore are to the Atlantic seaboard these cities are to

the Middle West. The Great Lakes and the Mississippi, with
the Ohio and the Missouri as laterals, constitute the vast water
system that binds the Middle West together. It is the economic
and political center of the Republic. At one edge is the Populism
of the prairies; at the other, the capitalism that is typified
in Pittsburgh. Great as are the local differences within
the Middle West, it possesses, in its physiography, in the history
of its settlement, and in its economic and social life, a
unity and interdependence which warrant a study of the area
as an entity. Within the limits of this article, treatment of so
vast a region, however, can at best afford no more than an
outline sketch, in which old and well-known facts must, if
possible, be so grouped as to explain the position of the section
in American history.

In spite of the difficulties of the task, there is a definite
advantage in so large a view. By fixing our attention too
exclusively upon the artificial boundary lines of the States, we
have failed to perceive much that is significant in the westward
development of the United States. For instance, our
colonial system did not begin with the Spanish War; the United
States has had a colonial history and policy from the beginning
of the Republic; but they have been hidden under the
phraseology of "interstate migration "and "territorial organization."

The American people have occupied a spacious wilderness;
vast physiographic provinces, each with its own peculiarities,
have lain across the path of this migration, and each has furnished
a special environment for economic and social transformation.
It is possible to underestimate the importance of
State lines, but if we direct our gaze rather to the physiographic
province than to the State area, we shall be able to see
some facts in a new light. Then it becomes clear that these
physiographic provinces of America are in some respects comparable

to the countries of Europe, and that each has its own
history of occupation and development. General Francis A.
Walker once remarked that "the course of settlement has called
upon our people to occupy territory as extensive as Switzerland,
as England, as Italy, and latterly, as France or Germany,
every ten years." It is this element of vastness in the
achievements of American democracy that gives a peculiar
interest to the conquest and development of the Middle West.
The effects of this conquest and development upon the present
United States have been of fundamental importance.

Geographically the Middle West is almost conterminous
with the Provinces of the Lake and Prairie Plains; but the
larger share of Kansas and Nebraska, and the western part of
the two Dakotas belong to the Great Plains; the Ozark Mountains
occupy a portion of Missouri, and the southern parts of
Ohio and Indiana merge into the Alleghany Plateau. The
relation of the Provinces of the Lake and Prairie Plains to
the rest of the United States is an important element in the
Significance of the Middle West. On the north lies the similar
region of Canada: the Great Lakes are in the center of the
whole eastern and more thickly settled half of North America,
and they bind the Canadian and Middle Western people
together. On the south, the provinces meet the apex of that
of the Gulf Plains, and the Mississippi unites them. To the
west, they merge gradually into the Great Plains; the Missouri
and its tributaries and the Pacific railroads make for them a
bond of union; another rather effective bond is the interdependence
of the cattle of the plains and the corn of the prairies. To
the east, the province meets the Alleghany and New England
Plateaus, and is connected with them by the upper Ohio and by
the line of the Erie Canal. Here the interaction of industrial
life and the historical facts of settlement have produced a close
relationship. The intimate connection between the larger part

of the North Central and the North Atlantic divisions of the
United States will impress any one who examines the industrial
and social maps of the census atlas. By reason of these
interprovincial relationships, the Middle West is the mediator
between Canada and the United States, and between the concentrated
wealth and manufactures of the North Atlantic States
and the sparsely settled Western mining, cattle-raising, and
agricultural States. It has a connection with the South that
was once still closer, and is likely before long to reassert itself
with new power. Within the limits of the United States, therefore,
we have problems of interprovincial trade and commerce
similar to those that exist between the nations of the Old
World.

Over most of the Province of the Lake and Prairie Plains
the Laurentide glacier spread its drift, rich in limestone and
other rock powder, which farmers in less favored sections must
purchase to replenish the soil. The alluvial deposit from
primeval lakes contributed to fatten the soil of other parts of
the prairies. Taken as a whole, the Prairie Plains surpass in
fertility any other region of America or Europe, unless we
except some territory about the Black Sea. It is a land marked
out as the granary of the nation; but it is more than a granary.
On the rocky shores of Lake Superior were concealed copper
mines rivaled only by those of Montana, and iron fields which
now[2] furnish the ore for the production of eighty per cent of
the pig iron of the United States. The Great Lakes afford a
highway between these iron fields and the coal areas of the
Ohio Valley. The gas and oil deposits of the Ohio Valley, the
coal of Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, and eastern Kansas, the lead
and zinc of the Ozark region and of the upper Mississippi
Valley, and the gold of the black Hills,—all contribute underground
wealth to the Middle West.

The primeval American forest once spread its shade over
vast portions of the same province. Ohio, Indiana, southern
Michigan, and central Wisconsin were almost covered with a
growth of noble deciduous trees. In southern Illinois, along
the broad bottom lands of the Mississippi and the Illinois,
and in southern and southwestern Missouri, similar forests
prevailed. To the north, in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota,
appeared the somber white pine wilderness, interlaced
with hard woods, which swept in ample zone along the Great
Lakes, till the deciduous forests triumphed again, and, in their
turn, faded into the treeless expanse of the prairies. In the
remaining portions were openings in the midst of the forested
area, and then the grassy ocean of prairie that rolled to west
and northwest, until it passed beyond the line of sufficient rainfall
for agriculture without irrigation, into the semi-arid
stretches of the Great Plains.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, the forested region
of this province was occupied by the wigwams of many different
tribes of the Algonquin tongue, sparsely scattered in villages
along the water courses, warring and trading through
the vast wilderness. The western edge of the prairie and the
Great Plains were held by the Sioux, chasing herds of bison
across these far-stretching expanses. These horsemen of the
plains and the canoemen of the Great Lakes and the Ohio were
factors with which civilization had to reckon, for they constituted
important portions of perhaps the fiercest native race with
which the white man has ever battled for new lands.

The Frenchman had done but little fighting for this region.
He swore brotherhood with its savages, traded with them, intermarried
with them, and explored the Middle West; but he left
the wilderness much as he found it. Some six or seven thousand
French people in all, about Detroit and Vincennes, and
in the Illinois country, and scattered among the Indian villages

of the remote lakes and streams, held possession when George
Washington reached the site of Pittsburgh, bearing Virginia's
summons of eviction to France. In his person fate knocked
at the portals of a "rising empire." France hurried her commanders
and garrisons, with Indian allies, from the posts about
the Great Lakes and the upper Mississippi; but it was in vain.
In vain, too, the aftermath of Pontiac's widespread Indian
uprising against the English occupation. When she came into
possession of the lands between the Ohio, the Mississippi, and
the Great Lakes, England organized them as a part of the Province
of Quebec. The daring conquest of George Rogers Clark
left Virginia in military possession of the Illinois country
at the conclusion of the Revolutionary War; but over all the
remainder of the Old Northwest, England was in control.
Although she ceded the region by the treaty which closed the
Revolution, she remained for many years the mistress of the
Indians and the fur trade. When Lord Shelburne was
upbraided in parliament for yielding the Northwest to the
United States, the complaint was that he had clothed the
Americans "in the warm covering of our fur trade," and his
defense was that the peltry trade of the ceded tract was not
sufficiently profitable to warrant further war. But the English
government became convinced that the Indian trade demanded
the retention of the Northwest, and she did in fact hold her
posts there in spite of the treaty of peace. Dundas, the English
secretary for the colonies, expressed the policy, when he
declared, in 1792, that the object was to interpose an Indian
barrier between Canada and the United States; and in pursuance
of this policy of preserving the Northwest as an Indian
buffer State, the Canadian authorities supported the Indians
in their resistance to American settlement beyond the Ohio.
The conception of the Northwest as an Indian reserve strikingly
exhibits England's inability to foresee the future of the
region, and to measure the forces of American expansion.

By the cessions of Virginia, New York, Massachusetts, and
Connecticut, the Old Congress had come into nominal possession
of an extensive public domain, and a field for the exercise
of national authority. The significance of this fact in
the development of national power is not likely to be overestimated.
The first result was the completion of the Ordinance
of 1787, which provided a territorial government for the Old
Northwest, with provisions for the admission of States into
the Union. This federal colonial system guaranteed that the
new national possessions should not be governed as dependent
provinces, but should enter as a group of sister States into the
federation.[3] While the importance of the article excluding
slavery has often been pointed out, it is probable that the provisions
for a federal colonial organization have been at least
equally potential in our actual development. The full significance
of this feature of the Ordinance is only appreciated
when, we consider its continuous influence upon the American
territorial and State policy in the westward expansion to the
Pacific, and the political preconceptions with which Americans
approach the problems of government in the new insular possessions.
The Land Ordinance of 1785 is also worthy of attention
in this connection, for under its provisions almost all of
the Middle West has been divided by the government surveyor
into rectangles of sections and townships, by whose lines the
settler has been able easily and certainly to locate his farm,
and the forester his "forty." In the local organization of the
Middle West these lines have played an important part.

It would be impossible within the limits of this paper to
detail the history of the occupation of the Middle West; but
the larger aspects of the flow of population into the region may

be sketched. Massachusetts men had formed the Ohio Company,
and had been influential in shaping the liberal provisions
of the Ordinance. Their land purchase, paid for in
soldiers' certificates, embraced an area larger than the State
of Rhode Island. At Marietta in 1788, under the shelter of
Fort Harmar, their bullet-proof barge landed the first New
England colony. A New Jersey colony was planted soon
after at Cincinnati in the Symmes Purchase. Thus American
civilization crossed the Ohio. The French settlements at
Detroit and in Indiana and Illinois belonged to other times
and had their own ideals; but with the entrance of the American
pioneer into the forest of the Middle West, a new era
began. The Indians, with the moral support of England,
resisted the invasion, and an Indian war followed. The conquest
of Wayne, in 1795, pushed back the Indians to the Greenville
line, extending irregularly across the State of Ohio from
the site of Cleveland to Fort Recovery in the middle point of
her present western boundary, and secured certain areas in
Indiana. In the same period Jay's treaty provided for the
withdrawal of the British posts. After this extension of the
area open to the pioneer, new settlements were rapidly formed.
Connecticut disposed of her reserved land about Lake Erie to
companies, and in 1796 General Moses Cleaveland led the
way to the site of the city that bears his name. This was the
beginning of the occupation of the Western Reserve, a district
about as large as the parent State of Connecticut, a New
England colony in the Middle West, which has maintained,
even to the present time, the impress of New England traits.
Virginia and Kentucky settlers sought the Virginia Military
Bounty Lands, and the foundation of Chillicothe here, in 1796,
afforded a center for Southern settlement. The region is a
modified extension of the limestone area of Kentucky, and
naturally attracted the emigrants from the Blue Grass State.
Ohio's history is deeply marked by the interaction of the New
England, Middle, and Southern colonies within her borders.

By the opening of the nineteenth century, when Napoleon's
cession brought to the United States the vast spaces of the
Louisiana Purchase beyond the Mississippi, the pioneers had
hardly more than entered the outskirts of the forest along the
Ohio and Lake Erie. But by 1810 the government had extinguished
the Indian title to the unsecured portions of the Western
Reserve, and to great tracts of Indiana, along the Ohio
and up the Wabash Valley; thus protecting the Ohio highway
from the Indians, and opening new lands to settlement.
The embargo had destroyed the trade of New England, and
had weighted down her citizens with debt and taxation; caravans
of Yankee emigrant wagons, precursors of the "prairie
schooner," had already begun to cross Pennsylvania on their
way to Ohio; and they now greatly increased in number.
North Carolina back countrymen flocked to the Indiana settlements,
giving the peculiar Hoosier flavor to the State, and
other Southerners followed, outnumbering the Northern immigrants,
who sought the eastern edge of Indiana.

Tecumthe, rendered desperate by the advance into his hunting
grounds, took up the hatchet, made wide-reaching alliances
among the Indians, and turned to England for protection.
The Indian war merged into the War of 1812, and
the settlers strove in vain to add Canadian lands to their empire.
In the diplomatic negotiations that followed the war, England
made another attempt to erect the Old Northwest beyond the
Greenville line into a permanent Indian barrier between Canada
and the United States; but the demand was refused, and
by the treaties of 1818, the Indians were pressed still farther
north. In the meantime, Indian treaties had released additional
in southern Illinois, and pioneers were widening
the bounds of the old French settlements. Avoiding the rich

savannas of the prairie regions, as devoid of wood, remote
from transportation facilities, and suited only to grazing, they
entered the hard woods—and in the early twenties they were
advancing in a wedge-shaped column up the Illinois Valley.

The Southern element constituted the main portion of this
phalanx of ax-bearers. Abraham Lincoln's father joined
the throng of Kentuckians that entered the Indiana woods in
1816, and the boy, when he had learned to hew out a forest
home, betook himself, in 1830, to Sangamon county, Illinois.
He represents the pioneer of the period; but his ax sank
deeper than other men's, and the plaster cast of his great
sinewy hand, at Washington, embodies the training of these
frontier railsplitters, in the days when Fort Dearborn, on the
site of Chicago, was but a military outpost in a desolate country.
While the hard woods of Illinois were being entered, the
pioneer movement passed also into the Missouri Valley. The
French lead miners had already opened the southeastern section,
and Southern mountaineers had pushed up the Missouri;
but now the planters from the Ohio Valley and the upper
Tennessee followed, seeking the alluvial soils for slave labor.
Moving across the southern border of free Illinois, they had
awakened regrets in that State at the loss of so large a body
of settlers.

Looking at the Middle West, as a whole, in the decade from
1810 to 1820, we perceive that settlement extended from the
shores of Lake Erie in an arc, following the banks of the Ohio
till it joined the Mississippi, and thence along that river and
up the Missouri well into the center of the State. The next
decade was marked by the increased use of the steamboat;
pioneers pressed farther up the streams, etching out the hard
wood forests well up to the prairie lands, and forming additional
tracts of settlement in the region tributary to Detroit
and in the southeastern part of Michigan. In the area of the

Galena lead mines of northwestern Illinois, southwestern Wisconsin,
and northeastern Iowa, Southerners had already begun
operations; and if we except Ohio and Michigan, the dominant
element in all this overflow of settlement into the Middle West
was Southern, particularly from Kentucky, Virginia, and North
Carolina. The settlements were still dependent on the rivers
for transportation and the areas between the rivers were but
lightly occupied. The Mississippi constituted the principal
outlet for the products of the Middle West; Pittsburgh furnished
most of the supplies for the region, but New Orleans
received its crops. The Old National road was built piecemeal,
and too late, as a whole, to make a great artery of trade
throughout the Middle West, in this early period; but it
marked the northern borders of the Southern stream of population,
running, as this did, through Columbus, Indianapolis, and
Vandalia.

The twenty years from 1830 to 1850 saw great changes in
the composition of the population of the Middle West. The
opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 was an epoch-making event.
It furnished a new outlet and inlet for northwestern traffic;
Buffalo began to grow, and New York City changed from a
local market to a great commercial center. But even more
important was the place which the canal occupied as the highway
for a new migration.

In the march of the New England people from the coast,
three movements are of especial importance: the advance from
the seaboard up the Connecticut and Housatonic Valleys
through Massachusetts and into Vermont; the advance thence
to central and western New York; and the advance to the
interior of the Old Northwest. The second of these stages
occupied the generation from about 1790 to 1820; after that
the second generation was ready to seek new lands; and these
the Erie Canal and lake navigation opened to them, and to the

Vermonters and other adventurous spirits of New England. It
was this combined New York-New England stream that in the
thirties poured in large volume into the zone north of the
settlements which have been described. The newcomers filled
in the southern counties of Michigan and Wisconsin, the northern
countries of Illinois, and parts of the northern and central
areas of Indiana. Pennsylvania and Ohio sent a similar type
of people to the area adjacent to those States. In Iowa a
stream combined of the Southern element and of these settlers
sought the wooded tributaries of the Mississippi in the
southeastern part of the State. In default of legal authority,
in this early period, they formed squatter governments and
land associations, comparable to the action of the Massachusetts
men who in the first quarter of the seventeenth century
"squatted" in the Connecticut Valley.

A great forward movement had occurred, which took possession
of oak openings and prairies, gave birth to the cities of
Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul, and Minneapolis, as well as
to a multitude of lesser cities, and replaced the dominance of
the Southern element by that of a modified Puritan stock. The
railroad system of the early fifties bound the Mississippi to
the North Atlantic seaboard; New Orleans gave way to New
York as the outlet for the Middle West, and the day of river
settlement was succeeded by the era of inter-river settlement
and railway transportation. The change in the political and
social ideals was at least equal to the change in economic connections,
and together these forces made an intimate organic
union between New England, New York, and the newly settled
West. In estimating the New England influence in the Middle
West, it must not be forgotten that the New York settlers were
mainly New Englanders of a later generation.

Combined with the streams from the East came the German
migration into the Middle West. Over half a million, mainly

from the Palatinate, Würtemberg, and the adjacent regions,
sought America between 1830 and 1850, and nearly a million
more Germans came in the next decade. The larger portion
of these went into the Middle West; they became pioneers in
the newer parts of Ohio, especially along the central ridge,
and in Cincinnati; they took up the hardwood lands of the
Wisconsin counties along Lake Michigan and they came in
important numbers to Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan,
and to the river towns of Iowa. The migration in the
thirties and forties contained an exceptionally large proportion
of educated and forceful leaders, men who had struggled
in vain for the ideal of a liberal German nation, and
who contributed important intellectual forces to the communities
in which they settled. The Germans, as a whole,
furnished a conservative and thrifty agricultural element to
the Middle West. In some of their social ideals they came into
collision with the Puritan element from New England, and the
outcome of the steady contest has been a compromise. Of all
the States, Wisconsin has been most deeply influenced by the
Germans.

By the later fifties, therefore, the control of the Middle West
had passed to its Northern zone of population, and this zone
included representatives of the Middle States, New England,
and Germany as its principal elements. The Southern people,
north of the Ohio, differed in important respects from the
Southerners across the river. They had sprung largely from
the humbler classes of the South, although there were important
exceptions. The early pioneer life, however, was ill-suited
to the great plantations, and slavery was excluded under the
Ordinance. Thus this Southern zone of the Middle West,
particularly in Indiana and Illinois, constituted a mediating
section between the South and the North. The Mississippi
still acted as a bond of union, and up to the close of the War

of 1812 the Valley, north and south, had been fundamentally
of the same social organization. In order to understand what
follows, we must bear in mind the outlines of the occupation
of the Gulf Plains. While settlement had been crossing the
Ohio to the Northwest, the spread of cotton culture and negro
slavery into the Southwest had been equally significant. What
the New England States and New York were in the occupation
of the Middle West, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia were
in the occupation of the Gulf States. But, as in the case of the
Northwest, a modification of the original stock occurred in the
new environment. A greater energy and initiative appeared
in the new Southern lands; the pioneer's devotion to exploiting
the territory in which he was placed transferred slavery
from the patriarchal to the commercial basis. The same
expansive tendency seen in the Northwest revealed itself, with
a belligerent seasoning, in the Gulf States. They had a program
of action. Abraham Lincoln migrated from Kentucky
to Indiana and to Illinois. Jefferson Davis moved from
Kentucky to Louisiana, and thence to Mississippi, in the same
period. Starting from the same locality, each represented the
divergent flow of streams of settlement into contrasted environments.
The result of these antagonistic streams of migration
to the West was a struggle between the Lake and Prairie plainsmen,
on the one side, and the Gulf plainsmen, on the other, for
the possession of the Mississippi Valley. It was the crucial
part of the struggle between the Northern and Southern sections
of the nation. What gave slavery and State sovereignty
their power as issues was the fact that they involved the question
of dominance over common territory in an expanding
nation. The place of the Middle West in the origin and settlement
of the great slavery struggle is of the highest significance.

In the early history of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, a modified

form of slavery existed under a system of indenture of the
colored servant; and the effort of Southern settlers in Indiana
and in Illinois to reintroduce slavery are indicative of the
importance of the pro-slavery element in the Northwest. But
the most significant early manifestation of the rival currents
of migration with respect to slavery is seen in the contest
which culminated in the Missouri Compromise. The historical
obstacle of the Ordinance, as well as natural conditions,
gave an advantage to the anti-slavery settlers northwest of the
Ohio; but when the Mississippi was crossed, and the rival
streams of settlement mingled in the area of the Louisiana Purchase,
the struggle followed. It was an Illinois man, San. Thomas with
constituents in both currents of settlement, who introduced the
Missouri Compromise, which made a modus vivendi for the
Middle West, until the Compromise of 1850 gave to Senator
Douglas of Illinois, in 1854, the opportunity to reopen the
issue by his Kansas-Nebraska bill. In his doctrine of
"squatter-sovereignty," or the right of the territories to determine
the question of slavery within their bounds, Douglas
utilized a favorite Western political idea, one which Cass of
Michigan had promulgated before. Douglas set the love of the
Middle West for local self-government against its preponderant
antipathy to the spread of slavery. At the same time he
brought to the support of the doctrine the Democratic party,
which ever since the days of Andrew Jackson had voiced the
love of the frontier for individualism and for popular power.
In his "Young America" doctrines Douglas had also made
himself the spokesman of Western expansive tendencies. He
thus found important sources of popular support when he
invoked the localism of his section. Western appeals to Congress
for aid in internal improvements, protective tariffs, and
land grants had been indications of nationalism. The doctrine
of squatter-sovereignty itself catered to the love of national
union by presenting the appearance of a non-sectional compromise,
which should allow the new areas of the Middle
West to determine their own institutions. But the Free Soil
party, strongest in the regions occupied by the New York-New
England colonists, and having for its program national
prohibition of the spread of slavery into the territories, had
already found in the Middle West an important center of
power. The strength of the movement far surpassed the actual
voting power of the Free Soil party, for it compelled both
Whigs and Democrats to propose fusion on the basis of concession
to Free Soil doctrines. The New England settlers and
the western New York settlers,—the children of New England,
—were keenly alive to the importance of the issue. Indeed,
Seward, in an address at Madison, Wisconsin, in 1860, declared
that the Northwest, in reality, extended to the base of the
Alleghanies, and that the new States had "matured just in the
critical moment to rally the free States of the Atlantic coast,
to call them back to their ancient principles."

These Free Soil forces and the nationalistic tendencies of the
Middle West proved too strong for the opposing doctrines
when the real struggle came. Calhoun and Taney shaped the
issue so logically that the Middle West saw that the contest
was not only a war for the preservation of the Union, but also
a war for the possession of the unoccupied West, a struggle
between the Middle West and the States of the Gulf Plains.
The economic life of the Middle West had been bound by the
railroad to the North Atlantic, and its interests, as well as its
love of national unity, made it in every way hostile to secession.
When Dr. Cutler had urged the desires of the Ohio Company
upon Congress, in 1787, he had promised to plant in the
Ohio Valley a colony that would stand for the Union. Vinton
of Ohio, in arguing for the admission of Iowa, urged the position
of the Middle West as the great unifying section of the

country: "Disunion," he said, "is ruin to them. They have
no alternative but to resist it whenever or wherever attempted.
. . . Massachusetts and South Carolina might, for aught
I know, find a dividing line that would be mutually satisfactory
to them; but, Sir, they can find no such line to which
the western country can assent." But it was Abraham Lincoln
who stated the issue with the greatest precision, and who
voiced most clearly the nationalism of the Middle West, when
he declared, "A house divided against itself cannot stand.
I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave
and half free."

So it was that when the civil war in Kansas grew into the
Civil War in the Union, after Lincoln's election to the presidency,
the Middle West, dominated by its combined Puritan
and German population, ceased to compromise, and turned
the scale in favor of the North. The Middle West furnished
more than one-third of the Union troops. The names of Grant
and Sherman are sufficient testimony to her leadership in the
field. The names of Lincoln and Chase show that the presidential,
the financial, and the war powers were in the hands of
the Middle West. If we were to accept Seward's own classification,
the conduct of foreign affairs as well belonged to
the same section; it was, at least, in the hands of representatives
of the dominant forces of the section. The Middle West,
led by Grant and Sherman, hewed its way down the Mississippi
and across the Gulf States, and Lincoln could exult in 1863,
"The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea. Thanks
to the great Northwest for it, nor yet wholly to them."

In thus outlining the relations of the Middle West to the
slavery struggle, we have passed over important extensions of
settlement in the decade before the war. In these years, not
only did the density of settlement increase in the older portions
of the region, but new waves of colonization passed

into the remoter prairies. Iowa's pioneers, after Indian cessions
had been secured, spread well toward her western limits.
Minnesota, also, was recruited by a column of pioneers. The
treaty of Traverse de Sioux, in 1851, opened over twenty million
acres of arable land in that State, and Minnesota increased
her population 2730.7 per cent in the decade from 1850 to
1860.

Up to this decade the pine belt of the Middle West, in northern
Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota had been the field of
operations of Indian traders. At first under English companies,
and afterward under Astor's American Fur Company,
the traders with their French and half-breed boatmen skirted
the Great Lakes and followed the rivers into the forests, where
they stationed their posts and spread goods and whiskey among
the Indians. Their posts were centers of disintegration among
the savages. The new wants and the demoralization which
resulted from the Indian trade facilitated the purchases of
their lands by the federal government. The trader was followed
by the seeker for the best pine land "forties"; and by
the time of the Civil War the exploitation of the pine belt had
fairly begun. The Irish and Canadian choppers, followed by
the Scandinavians, joined the forest men, and log drives succeeded
the trading canoe. Men from the pine woods of Maine
and Vermont directed the industry, and became magnates in
the mill towns that grew up in the forests,—millionaires,
and afterwards political leaders. In the prairie country of
the Middle West, the Indian trade that centered at St. Louis
had been important ever since 1820, with an influence upon
the Indians of the plains similar to the influence of the northern
fur trade upon the Indians of the forest. By 1840 the
removal policy had effected the transfer of most of the eastern
tribes to lands across the Mississippi. Tribal names that formerly
belonged to Ohio and the rest of the Old Northwest

were found on the map of the Kansas Valley. The Platte
country belonged to the Pawnee and their neighbors, and to
the north along the Upper Missouri were the Sioux, or Dakota,
Crow, Cheyenne, and other horse Indians, following the
vast herds of buffalo that grazed on the Great Plains. The
discovery of California gold and the opening of the Oregon
country, in the middle of the century, made it necessary to
secure a road through the Indian lands for the procession
of pioneers that crossed the prairies to the Pacific. The organization
of Kansas and Nebraska, in 1854, was the first step in
the withdrawal of these territories from the Indians. A period
of almost constant Indian hostility followed, for the savage
lords of the boundless prairies instinctively felt the significance
of the entrance of the farmer into their empire. In Minnesota
the Sioux took advantage of the Civil War to rise; but the
outcome was the destruction of their reservations in that State,
and the opening of great tracts to the pioneers. When the
Pacific railways were begun, Red Cloud, the astute Sioux
chief, who, in some ways, stands as the successor of Pontiac
and of Tecumthe, rallied the principal tribes of the Great
Plains to resist the march of civilization. Their hostility
resulted in the peace measure of 1867 and 1868, which assigned
to the Sioux and their allies reservations embracing the major
portion of Dakota territory, west of the Missouri River. The
systematic slaughter of millions of buffalo, in the years between
1866 and 1873, for the sake of their hides, put an end to the
vast herds of the Great Plains, and destroyed the economic
foundation of the Indians. Henceforth they were dependent
on the whites for their food supply, and the Great Plains were
open to the cattle ranchers.

In a preface written in 1872 for a new edition of "The
Oregon Trail," which had appeared in 1847, Francis Parkman
said, "The wild cavalcade that defiled with me down

the gorges of the Black Hills, with its paint and war plumes,
fluttering trophies and savage embroidery, bows, arrows,
lances, and shields, will never be seen again." The prairies
were ready for the final rush of occupation. The homestead
law of 1862, passed in the midst of the war, did not reveal
its full importance as an element in the settlement of the
Middle West until after peace. It began to operate most
actively, contemporaneously with the development of the several
railways to the Pacific, in the two decades from 1870 to
1890, and in connection with the marketing of the railroad
land grants. The outcome was an epoch-making extension of
population.

Before 1870 the vast and fertile valley of the Red River, once
the level bed of an ancient lake, occupying the region where
North Dakota and Minnesota meet, was almost virgin soil.
But in 1875 the great Dalrymple farm showed its advantages
for wheat raising, and a tide of farm seekers turned to the
region. The "Jim River" Valley of South Dakota attracted
still other settlers. The Northern Pacific and the Great Northern
Railway thrust out laterals into these Minnesota and
Dakota wheat areas from which to draw the nourishment for
their daring passage to the Pacific. The Chicago, Milwaukee
and St. Paul, the Chicago and Northwestern Railway, Burlington,
and other roads, gridironed the region; and the unoccupied
lands of the Middle West were taken up by a migration
that in its system and scale is unprecedented. The railroads
sent their agents and their literature everywhere, "booming"
the "Golden West"; the opportunity for economic and political
fortunes in such rapidly growing communities attracted
multitudes of Americans whom the cheap land alone would
not have tempted. In 1870 the Dakotas had 14,000 settlers;
in 1890 they had over 510,000. Nebraska's population was
28,000 in 1860; 123,000 in 1870; 452,000 in 1880; and 1,059,000

in 1890. Kansas had 107,000 in 1860; 364,000 in 1870;
996,000 in 1880; and 1,427,000 in 1890. Wisconsin and New
York gave the largest fractions of the native element to Minnesota;
Illinois and Ohio together sent perhaps one-third of the
native element of Kansas and Nebraska, but the Missouri and
Southern settlers were strongly represented in Kansas; Wisconsin,
New York, Minnesota, and Iowa gave North Dakota
the most of her native settlers; and Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois,
and New York did the same for South Dakota.

Railroads and steamships organized foreign immigration on
scale and system never before equaled; a high-water mark of
American immigration came in the early eighties. Germans
and Scandinavians were rushed by emigrant trains out to the
prairies, to fill the remaining spaces in the older States of the
Middle West. The census of 1890 showed in Minnesota 373,000
persons of Scandinavian parentage, and out of the total
million and one-half persons of Scandinavian parentage in
the United States, the Middle West received all but about three
hundred thousand. The persons of German parentage in the
Middle West numbered over four millions out of a total of
less than seven millions in the whole country. The province
had, in 1890, a smaller proportion of persons of foreign parentage
than had the North Atlantic division, but the proportions
varied greatly in the different States. Indiana had the lowest
percentage, 20.38; and, rising in the scale, Missouri had
24.94; Kansas 26.75; Ohio 33.93; Nebraska 42.45; Iowa
43.57; Illinois 49.01; Michigan 54.58; Wisconsin 73.65;
Minnesota 75.37; and North Dakota 78.87.

What these statistics of settlement mean when translated
into the pioneer life of the prairie, cannot be told here. There
were sharp contrasts with the pioneer life of the Old Northwest;
for the forest shade, there was substituted the boundless
prairie; the sod house for the log hut; the continental railway

for the old National Turnpike and the Erie Canal. Life
moved faster, in larger masses, and with greater momentum in
this pioneer movement. The horizon line was more remote.
Things were done in the gross. The transcontinental railroad,
the bonanza farm, the steam plow, harvester, and thresher,
the "league-long furrow," and the vast cattle ranches, all
suggested spacious combination and systematization of industry.
The largest hopes were excited by these conquests of the
prairie. The occupation of western Kansas may illustrate the
movement which went on also in the west of Nebraska and the
Dakotas. The pioneer farmer tried to push into the region
with the old methods of settlement. Deceived by rainy seasons
and the railroad advertisements, and recklessly optimistic,
hosts of settlers poured out into the plains beyond the region
of sufficient rainfall for successful agriculture without irrigation.
Dry seasons starved them back; but a repetition of
good rainfalls again aroused the determination to occupy
the western plains. Boom towns flourished like prairie weeds;
Eastern capital struggled for a chance to share in the venture,
and the Kansas farmers eagerly mortgaged their possessions to
secure the capital so freely offered for their attack on the arid
lands. By 1887 the tide of the pioneer farmers had flowed
across the semi-arid plains to the western boundary of the
State. But it was a hopeless effort to conquer a new province
by the forces that had won the prairies. The wave of settlement
dashed itself in vain against the conditions of the Great
Plains. The native American farmer had received his first
defeat; farm products at the same period had depreciated, and
he turned to the national government for reinforcements.

The Populistic movement of the western half of the Middle
West is a complex of many forces. In some respects it is the
latest manifestation of the same forces that brought on the
crisis of 1837 in the earlier region of pioneer exploitation.

That era of over-confidence, reckless internal improvements,
and land purchases by borrowed capital, brought a reaction
when it became apparent that the future had been over-discounted.
But, in that time, there were the farther free lands
to which the ruined pioneer could turn. The demand for an
expansion of the currency has marked each area of Western
advance. The greenback movement of Ohio and the eastern
part of the Middle West grew into the fiat money, free silver,
and land bank propositions of the Populists across the Mississippi.
Efforts for cheaper transportation also appear in each
stage of Western advance. When the pioneer left the rivers
and had to haul his crops by wagon to a market, the transportation
factor determined both his profits and the extension
of settlement. Demands for national aid to roads and canals
had marked the pioneer advance of the first third of the century.
The "Granger" attacks upon the railway rates, and
in favor of governmental regulation, marked a second advance
of Western settlement. The Farmers' Alliance and the Populist
demand for government ownership of the railroad is a
phase of the same effort of the pioneer farmer, on his latest
frontier. The proposals have taken increasing proportions
in each region of Western Advance. Taken as a whole, Populism
is a manifestation of the old pioneer ideals of the native
American, with the added element of increasing readiness to
utilize the national government to effect its ends. This is not
unnatural in a section whose lands were originally purchased
by the government and given away to its settlers by the same
authority, whose railroads were built largely by federal land
grants, and whose settlements were protected by the United
States army and governed by the national authority until they
were carved into rectangular States and admitted into the
Union. Its native settlers were drawn from many States, many
of them former soldiers of the Civil War, who mingled in new
lands with foreign immigrants accustomed to the vigorous
authority of European national governments.

But these old ideals of the American pioneer, phrased in
the new language of national power, did not meet with the
assent of the East. Even in the Middle West a change of
deepest import had been in progress during these years of
prairie settlement. The agricultural preponderance of the
country has passed to the prairies, and manufacturing has
developed in the areas once devoted to pioneer farming. In
the decade prior to the Civil War, the area of greatest wheat
production passed from Ohio and the States to the east, into
Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin; after 1880, the center of
wheat growing moved across the Mississippi; and in 1890 the
new settlements produced half the crop of the United States.
The corn area shows a similar migration. In 1840 the Southern
States produced half the crop, and the Middle West one-fifth;
by 1860 the situation was reversed and in 1890 nearly
one-half the corn of the Union came from beyond the Mississippi.
Thus the settlers of the Old Northwest and their crops
have moved together across the Mississippi, and in the regions
whence they migrated, varied agriculture and manufacture
have sprung up.

As these movements in population and products have passed
across the Middle West, and as the economic life of the eastern
border has been intensified, a huge industrial organism has
been created in the province,—an organism of tremendous
power, activity, and unity. Fundamentally the Middle West
is an agricultural area unequaled for its combination of space,
variety, productiveness, and freedom from interruption by
deserts or mountains. The huge water system of the Great
Lakes has become the highway of a mighty commerce. The
Sault Ste. Marie Canal, although open but two-thirds of the
year, is the channel of a traffic of greater tonnage than that

which passes through the Suez Canal, and nearly all this commerce
moves almost the whole length of the Great Lakes system;
the chief ports being Duluth, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland,
and Buffalo. The transportation facilities of the Great Lakes
were revolutionized after 1886, to supply the needs of commerce
between the East and the newly developed lands of the
Middle West; the tonnage doubled; wooden ships gave way
to steel; sailing vessels yielded to steam; and huge docks,
derricks, and elevators, triumphs of mechanical skill, were
constructed. A competent investigator has lately declared
that "there is probably in the world to-day no place at tide
water where ship plates can be laid down for a less price than
they can be manufactured or purchased at the lake ports."

This rapid rise of the merchant marine of our inland
seas has led to the demand for deep water canals to connect
them with the ocean road to Europe. When the fleets of the
Great Lakes plow the Atlantic, and when Duluth and Chicago
become seaports, the water transportation of the Middle West
will have completed its evolution. The significance of the
development of the railway systems is not inferior to that of
the great water way. Chicago has become the greatest railroad
center of the world, nor is there another area of like
size which equals this in its railroad facilities; all the forces
of the nation intersect here. Improved terminals, steel rails,
better rolling stock, and consolidation of railway systems
have accompanied the advance of the people of the Middle
West.

This unparalleled development of transportation facilities
measures the magnitude of the material development of the
province. Its wheat and corn surplus supplies the deficit of
the rest of the United States and much of that of Europe.
Such is the agricultural condition of the province of which
Monroe wrote to Jefferson, in 1786, in these words: "A great

part of the territory is miserably poor, especially that near
Lakes Michigan and Erie, and that upon the Mississippi and
the Illinois consists of extensive plains which have not had,
from appearances, and will not have, a single bush on them
for ages. The districts, therefore, within which these fall will
never contain a sufficient number of inhabitants to entitle them
to membership in the confederacy."

Minneapolis and Duluth receive the spring wheat of the
northern prairies, and after manufacturing great portions of
it into flour, transmit it to Buffalo, the eastern cities, and to
Europe. Chicago is still the great city of the corn belt, but
its power as a milling and wheat center has been passing to
the cities that receive tribute from the northern prairies. It
lies in the region of winter wheat, corn, oats, and live stock.
Kansas City, St. Louis, and Cincinnati are the sister cities of
this zone, which reaches into the grazing country of the Great
Plains. The meeting point of corn and cattle has led to the
development of the packing industries,—large business systems
that send the beef and pork of the region to supply the
East and parts of Europe. The "feeding system" adopted
in Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa, whereby the stock is fattened
from the surplus corn of the region, constitutes a species of
varied farming that has saved these States from the disasters
of the failure of a single industry, and has been one solution
of the economic life of the transition belt between the prairies
and the Great Plains. Under a more complex agriculture,
better adapted to the various sections of the State, and with
better crops, Kansas has become more prosperous and less a
center of political discontent.

While this development of the agricultural interests of the
Middle West has been in progress, the exploitation of the pine
woods of the north has furnished another contribution to the
commerce of the province. The center of activity has migrated

from Michigan to Minnesota, and the lumber traffic furnishes
one of the principal contributions to the vessels that ply the
Great Lakes and supply the tributary mills. As the white
pine vanishes before the organized forces of exploitation, the
remaining hard woods serve to establish factories in the former
mill towns. The more fertile denuded lands of the north are
now receiving settlers who repeat the old pioneer life among
the stumps.

But the most striking development in the industrial history
of the Middle West in recent years has been due to the opening
up of the iron mines of Lake Superior. Even in 1873 the
Lake Superior ores furnished a quarter of the total production
of American blast furnaces. The opening of the Gogebic
mines in 1884, and the development of the Vermillion and
Mesabi mines adjacent to the head of the lake, in the early
nineties, completed the transfer of iron ore production to the
Lake Superior region. Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin
together now produce the ore for eighty per cent of the pig
iron of the United States. Four-fifths of this great product
moves to the ports on Lake Erie and the rest to the manufactories
at Chicago and Milwaukee. The vast steel and iron
industry that centers at Pittsburgh and Cleveland, with important
outposts like Chicago and Milwaukee, is the outcome of the
meeting of the coal of the eastern and southern borders of
the province and of Pennsylvania, with the iron ores of the
north. The industry has been systematized and consolidated
by a few captains of industry. Steam shovels dig the ore
from many of the Mesabi mines; gravity roads carry it to
the docks and to the ships, and huge hoisting and carrying
devices, built especially for the traffic, unload it for the railroad
and the furnace. Iron and coal mines, transportation
fleets, railroad systems, and iron manufactories are concentrated
in a few corporations, principally the United States

Steel Corporation. The world has never seen such a consolidation
of capital and so complete a systematization of economic
processes.

Such is the economic appearance of the Middle West a century
after the pioneers left the frontier village of Pittsburgh and
crossed the Ohio into the forests. De Tocqueville exclaimed,
with reason, in 1833: "This gradual and continuous progress
of the European race toward the Rocky Mountains has the
solemnity of a providential event. It is like a deluge of
men, rising unabatedly, and driven daily onward by the hand
of God."

The ideals of the Middle West began in the log huts set in
the midst of the forest a century ago. While his horizon was
still bounded by the clearing that his ax had made, the pioneer
dreamed of continental conquests. The vastness of the wilderness
kindled his imagination. His vision saw beyond the dank
swamp at the edge of the great lake to the lofty buildings and
the jostling multitudes of a mighty city; beyond the rank,
grass-clad prairie to the seas of golden grain; beyond the
harsh life of the log hut and the sod house to the home of his
children, where should dwell comfort and the higher things of
life, though they might not be for him. The men and women
who made the Middle West were idealists, and they had the
power of will to make their dreams come true. Here, also,
were the pioneer's trails,—individual activity, inventiveness,
and competition for the prizes of the rich province that awaited
exploitation under freedom and equality of opportunity. He
honored the man whose eye was the quickest and whose grasp
was the strongest in this contest: it was "every one for himself."

The early society of the Middle West was not a complex,
highly differentiated and organized society. Almost every
family was a self-sufficing unit, and liberty and equality flourished

in the frontier periods of the Middle West as perhaps
never before in history. American democracy came from
the forest, and its destiny drove it to material conquests; but
the materialism of the pioneer was not the dull contented
materialism of an old and fixed society. Both native settler
and European immigrant saw in this free and competitive
movement of the frontier the chance to break the bondage of
social rank, and to rise to a higher plane of existence. The
pioneer was passionately desirous to secure for himself and
for his family a favorable place in the midst of these large
and free but vanishing opportunities. It took a century for
this society to fit itself into the conditions of the whole province.
Little by little, nature pressed into her mold the plastic
pioneer life. The Middle West, yesterday a pioneer province,
is to-day the field of industrial resources and systematization
so vast that Europe, alarmed for her industries in competition
with this new power, is discussing the policy of forming
protective alliances among the nations of the continent. Into
this region flowed the great forces of modern capitalism.
Indeed, the region itself furnished favorable conditions for
the creation of these forces, and trained many of the famous
American industrial leaders. The Prairies, the Great Plains,
and the Great Lakes furnished new standards of industrial
measurement. From this society, seated amidst a wealth of
material advantages, and breeding individualism, energetic
competition, inventiveness, and spaciousness of design, came
the triumph of the strongest. The captains of industry arose
and seized on nature's gifts. Struggling with one another,
increasing the scope of their ambitions as the largeness of the
resources and the extent of the fields of activity revealed
themselves, they were forced to accept the natural conditions
of a province vast in area but simple in structure. Competition
grew into consolidation. On the Pittsburgh border of
the Middle West the completion of the process is most clearly
seen. On the prairies of Kansas stands the Populist, a survival
of the pioneer, striving to adjust present conditions to
his old ideals.

The ideals of equality, freedom of opportunity, faith in the
common man are deep rooted in all the Middle West. The
frontier stage, through which each portion passed, left abiding
traces on the older, as well as on the newer, areas of the province.
Nor were these ideals limited to the native American
settlers: Germans and Scandinavians who poured into the
Middle West sought the country with like hopes and like faith.
These facts must be remembered in estimating the effects of
the economic transformation of the province upon its democracy.
The peculiar democracy of the frontier has passed
away with the conditions that produced it; but the democratic
aspirations remain. They are held with passionate determination.

The task of the Middle West is that of adapting democracy
to the vast economic organization of the present. This
region which has so often needed the reminder that bigness
is not greatness, may yet show that its training has produced
the power to reconcile popular government and culture
with the huge industrial society of the modern world. The
democracies of the past have been small communities, under
simple and primitive economic conditions. At bottom the
problem is how to reconcile real greatness with bigness.

It is important that the Middle West should accomplish this;
the future of the Republic is with her. Politically she is
dominant, as is illustrated by the fact that six out of seven of
the Presidents elected since 1860 have come from her borders.
Twenty-six million people live in the Middle West as against
twenty-one million in New England and the Middle States
together, and the Middle West has indefinite capacity for

growth. The educational forces are more democratic than
in the East, and the Middle West has twice as many students
(if we count together the common school, secondary, and collegiate
attendance), as have New England and the Middle States
combined. Nor is this educational system, as a whole, inferior
to that of the Eastern States. State universities crown the
public school system in every one of these States of the
Middle West, and rank with the universities of the seaboard,
while private munificence has furnished others on an unexampled
scale. The public and private art collections of
Pittsburgh, Chicago, St. Paul, and other cities rival those of
the seaboard. "World's fairs," with their important popular
educational influences, have been held at Chicago, Omaha,
and Buffalo; and the next of these national gatherings is to
be at St. Louis. There is throughout the Middle West a vigor
and a mental activity among the common people that bode well
for its future. If the task of reducing the Province of the
Lake and Prairie Plains to the uses of civilization should for
a time overweigh art and literature, and even high political
and social ideals, it would not be surprising. But if the ideals
of the pioneers shall survive the inundation of material success,
we may expect to see in the Middle West the rise of a
highly intelligent society where culture shall be reconciled
with democracy in the large.