University of Virginia Library

VII
The Problem of the West[1]

The problem of the West is nothing less than the problem
of American development. A glance at the map of the United
States reveals the truth. To write of a "Western sectionalism,"
bounded on the east by the Alleghanies, is, in itself, to
proclaim the writer a provincial. What is the West? What
has it been in American life? To have the answers to these
questions, is to understand the most significant features of
the united States of to-day.

The West, at bottom, is a form of society, rather than an
area. It is the term applied to the region whose social conditions
result from the application of older institutions and
ideas to the transforming influences of free land. By this
application, a new environment is suddenly entered, freedom
of opportunity is opened, the cake of custom is broken, and
new activities, new lines of growth, new institutions and new
ideals, are brought into existence. The wilderness disappears,
the "West" proper passes on to a new frontier, and in the
former area, a new society has emerged from its contact with
the backwoods. Gradually this society loses its primitive conditions,
and assimilates itself to the type of the older social
conditions of the East; but it bears within it enduring and distinguishing
survivals of its frontier experience. Decade after
decade, West after West, this rebirth of American society has
gone on, has left its traces behind it, and has reacted on the
East. The history of our political institutions, our democracy,
is not a history of imitation, of simple borrowing; it is

a history of the evolution and adaptation of organs in response
to changed environment, a history of the origin of new political
species. In this sense, therefore, the West has been a
constructive force of the highest significance in our life. To
use the words of that acute and widely informed observer, Mr.
Bryce, "The West is the most American part of America.
. . . What Europe is to Asia, what America is to England,
that the Western States and Territories are to the Atlantic
States."

The West, as a phase of social organization, began with the
Atlantic coast, and passed across the continent. But the colonial
tide-water area was in close touch with the Old World,
and soon lost its Western aspects. In the middle of the eighteenth
century, the newer social conditions appeared along
the upper waters of the tributaries of the Atlantic. Here it
was that the West took on its distinguishing features, and transmitted
frontier traits and ideals to this area in later days.
On the coast, were the fishermen and skippers, the merchants
and planters, with eyes turned toward Europe. Beyond the
falls of the rivers were the pioneer farmers, largely of nonEnglish
stock, Scotch-Irish and German. They constituted a
, distinct people, and may be regarded as an expansion of the
social and economic life of the middle region into the back
country of the South. These frontiersmen were the ancestors
of Boone, Andrew Jackson, Calhoun, Clay, and Lincoln.
Washington and Jefferson were profoundly affected by these
frontier conditions. The forest clearings have been the seed
plots of American character.

In the Revolutionary days, the settlers crossed the Alleghanies
and put a barrier between them and the coast. They
became, to use their phrases, "the men the Western waters,"
the heirs of the "Western world." In this era, the backwoodsmen,

all along the western slopes of the mountains with a
keen sense of the difference between them and the dwellers on
the coast, demanded organization into independent States of
the Union. Self-government was their ideal. Said one of
their rude, but energetic petitions for statehood: "Some of
our fellow-citizens may think we are not able to conduct our
affairs and consult our interests; but if our society is rude,
much wisdom is not necessary to supply our wants, and a
fool can sometimes put on his clothes better than a wise man
can do it for him." This forest philosophy is the philosophy
of American democracy. But the men of the coast were not
ready to admit its implications. They apportioned the State
legislatures so that the property-holding minority of the tidewater
lands were able to outvote the more populous back countries.
A similar system was proposed by Federalists in the
constitutional convention of 1787. Gouverneur Morris, arguing
in favor of basing representation on property as well as
numbers, declared that "he looked forward, also, to that range
of new States which would soon be formed in the West. He
thought the rule of representation ought to be so fixed, as to
secure to the Atlantic States a prevalence in the national councils."
"The new States," said he," will know less of the public
interest than these; will have an interest in many respects
different; in particular will be little scrupulous of involving
the community in wars, the burdens and operations of which
would fall chiefly on the maritime States. Provision ought,
therefore, to be made to prevent the maritime States from
being hereafter outvoted by them." He added that the Western
country "would not be able to furnish men equally
enlightened to share in the administration of our common
interests. The busy haunts of men, not the remote wilderness,
was the proper school of political talents. If the Western
people get power into their hands, they will ruin the Atlantic
interest. The back members are always most averse to the
best measures." Add to these utterances of Gouverneur Morris
the impassioned protest of Josiah Quincy, of Massachusetts, in
the debates in the House of Representatives, on the admission
of Louisiana. Referring to the discussion over the slave votes
and the West in the constitutional convention, he declared,
" Suppose, then, that it had been distinctly foreseen that, in
addition to the effect of this weight, the whole population of a
world beyond the Mississippi was to be brought into this and
the other branch of the legislature, to form our laws, control
our rights, and decide our destiny. Sir, can it be pretended
that the patriots of that day would for one moment have
listened to it? . . . They had not taken degrees at the hospital
of idiocy. . . . Why, sir, I have already heard of six States,
and some say there will be, at no great distant time, more. I
have also heard that the mouth of the Ohio will be far to the
east of the center of the contemplated empire. . . . You have
no authority to throw the rights and property of this people
into 'hotch-pot' with the wild men on the Missouri, nor with
the mixed, though more respectable, race of Anglo-Hispano-Gallo-Americans
who bask on the sands in the mouth of the
Mississippi. . . . Do you suppose the people of the Northern
and Atlantic States will, or ought to, look on with patience
and see Representatives and Senators from the Red River and
Missouri, pouring themselves upon this and the other floor,
managing the concerns of a seaboard fifteen hundred miles, at
least, from their residence; and having a preponderancy in
councils into which, constitutionally, they could never have
been admitted? "

Like an echo from the fears expressed by the East at the
close of the eighteenth century come the words of an eminent
Eastern man of letters[2] at the end of the nineteenth century, in

warning against the West: "Materialized in their temper; with
few ideals of an ennobling sort; little instructed in the lessons
of history; safe from exposure to the direct calamities and
physical horrors of war; with undeveloped imaginations and
sympathies—they form a community unfortunate and dangerous
from the possession of power without a due sense of
its corresponding responsibilities; a community in which the
passion for war may easily be excited as the fancied means by
which its greatness may be convincingly exhibited, and its
ambitions gratified. . . . Some chance spark may fire the
prairie."

Here, then, is the problem of the West, as it looked to New
England leaders of thought in the beginning, and at the end
of this century. From the first, it was recognized that a new
type was growing up beyond the seaboard, and that the time
would come when the destiny of the nation would be in
Western hands. The divergence of these societies became
clear in the struggle over the ratification of the federal constitution.
The up-country agricultural regions, the communities
that were in debt and desired paper money, with some Western
exceptions, opposed the instrument; but the areas of intercourse
and property carried the day.

It is important to understand, therefore, what were some
of the ideals of this early Western democracy. How did the
frontiersman differ from the man of the coast?"

The most obvious fact regarding the man of the Western
Waters is that he had placed himself under influences destructive
to many of the gains of civilization. Remote from the
opportunity for systematic education, substituting a log hut
in the forest-clearing for the social comforts of the town, he
suffered hardships and privations, and reverted in many ways
to primitive conditions of life. Engaged in a struggle to subdue
the forest, working as an individual, and with little specie

or capital, his interests were with the debtor class. At each
stage of its advance, the West has favored an expansion of
the currency. The pioneer had boundless confidence in the
future of his own community, and when seasons of financial
contraction and depression occurred, he, who had staked his
all on confidence in Western development, and had fought the
savage for his home, was inclined to reproach the conservative
sections and classes. To explain this antagonism requires
more than denunciation of dishonesty, ignorance, and boorishness
as fundamental Western traits. Legislation in the United
States has had to deal with two distinct social conditions. In
some portions of the country there was, and is, an aggregation
of property, and vested rights are in the foreground: in others,
capital is lacking, more primitive conditions prevail, with
different economic and social ideals, and the contentment of
the average individual is placed in the foreground. That in
the conflict between these two ideals an even hand has always
been held by the government would be difficult to show.

The separation of the Western man from the seaboard, and
his environment, made him in a large degree free from European
precedents and forces. He looked at things independently
and with small regard or appreciation for the best Old
World experience. He had no ideal of a philosophical, eclectic
nation, that should advance civilization by "intercourse
with foreigners and familiarity with their point of view, and
readiness to adopt whatever is best and most suitable in their
ideas, manners, and customs." His was rather the ideal of
conserving and developing what was original and valuable
in this new country. The entrance of old society upon free
lands meant to him opportunity for a new type of democracy
and new popular ideals. The West was not conservative:
buoyant self-confidence and self-assertion were distinguishing
traits in its composition. It saw in its growth nothing less

than a new order of society and state. In this conception
were elements of evil and elements of good.

But the fundamental fact in regard to this new society was
its relation to land. Professor Boutmy has said of the United
States, "Their one primary and predominant object is to cultivate
and settle these prairies, forests, and vast waste lands.
The striking and peculiar characteristic of American society is
that it is not so much a democracy as a huge commercial company
for the discovery, cultivation, and capitalization of its
enormous territory. The United States are primarily a commercial
society, and only secondarily a nation." Of course,
this involves a serious misapprehension. By the very fact of
the task here set forth, far-reaching ideals of the state and of
society have been evolved in the West, accompanied by loyalty
to the nation representative of these ideals. But M. Boutmy's
description hits the substantial fact, that the fundamental
traits of the man of the interior were due to the free lands of
the West. These turned his attention to the great task of subduing
them to the purposes of civilization, and to the task of
advancing his economic and social status in the new democracy
which he was helping to create. Art, literature, refinement,
scientific administration, all had to give way to this
Titanic labor. Energy, incessant activity, became the lot of
this new American. Says a traveler of the time of Andrew
Jackson, "America is like a vast workshop, over the door of
which is printed in blazing characters, 'No admittance here,
except on business.'" The West of our own day reminds Mr.
Bryce "of the crowd which Vathek found in the hall of Eblis,
each darting hither and thither with swift steps and unquiet
mien, driven to and fro by a fire in the heart. Time seems too
short for what they have to do, and the result always to come
short of their desire."
But free lands and the consciousness of working out their

social destiny did more than turn the Westerner to material
interests and devote him to a restless existence. They promoted
equality among the Western settlers, and reacted as a
check on the aristocratic influences of the East. Where everybody
could have a farm, almost for taking it, economic equality
easily resulted, and this involved political equality. Not
without a struggle would the Western man abandon this ideal,
and it goes far to explain the unrest in the remote West to-day.

Western democracy included individual liberty, as well as
equality. The frontiersman was impatient of restraints. He
Knew how to preserve order, even in the absence of legal
authority. If there were cattle thieves, lynch law was sudden
and effective: the regulators of the Carolinas were the
predecessors of the claims associations of Iowa and the vigilance
committees of California. But the individual was not
ready to submit to complex regulations. Population was
sparse, there was no multitude of jostling interests, as in older
settlements, demanding an elaborate system of personal
restraints. Society became atomic. There was a reproduction
of the primitive idea of the personality of the law, a
crime was more an offense against the victim than a violation
of the law of the land. Substantial justice, secured in the
most direct way, was the ideal of the backwoodsman. He had
little patience with finely drawn distinctions or scruples of
method. If the thing was one proper to be done, then the
most immediate, rough and ready, effective way was the best
way

It followed from the lack of organized political life, from
the atomic conditions of the backwoods society, that the individual
was exalted and given free play. The West was another
name for opportunity. Here were mines to be seized, fertile
valleys to be preëmpted, all the natural resources open to the
shrewdest and the boldest. The United States is unique in the

extent to which the individual has been given an open field,
unchecked by restraints of an old social order, or of scientific
administration of government. The self-made man was the
Western man's ideal, was the kind of man that all men might
become. Out of his wilderness experience, out of the freedom
of his opportunities, he fashioned a formula for social
regeneration,—the freedom of the individual to seek his
own. He did not consider that his conditions were exceptional
and temporary.

Under such conditions, leadership easily develops,—a
leadership based on the possession of the qualities most serviceable
to the young society. In the history of Western settlement,
we see each forted village following its local hero.
Clay, Jackson, Harrison, Lincoln, were illustrations of this
tendency in periods when the Western hero rose to the dignity
of national hero.

The Western man believed in the manifest destiny of his
country. On his border, and checking his advance, were
the Indian, the Spaniard, and the Englishman. He was indignant
at Eastern indifference and lack of sympathy with his
view of his relations to these peoples; at the short-sightedness
of Eastern policy. The closure of the Mississippi by Spain,
and the proposal to exchange our claim of freedom of navigating
the river, in return for commercial advantages to New
England, nearly led to the withdrawal of the West from the
Union. It was the Western demands that brought about the
purchase of Louisiana, and turned the scale in favor of declaring
the War of 1812. Militant qualities were favored by the
annual expansion of the settled area in the face of hostile Indians
and the stubborn wilderness. The West caught the vision
of the nation's continental destiny, Henry Adams, in his History
of the United States, makes the American of 1800 exclaim
to the foreign visitor, "Look at my wealth! See these solid

mountains of salt and iron, of lead, copper, silver, and gold.
See these magnificent cities scattered broadcast to the Pacific!
See my cornfields rustling and waving in the summer breeze
from ocean to ocean, so far that the sun itself is not high
enough to mark where the distant mountains bound my golden
seas. Look at this continent of mine, fairest of created worlds,
as she lies turning up to the sun's never failing caress her
broad and exuberant breasts, overflowing with milk for her
hundred million children." And the foreigner saw only
dreary deserts, tenanted by sparse, ague-stricken pioneers and
savages. The cities were log huts and gambling dens. But
the frontiersman's dream was prophetic. In spite of his
rude, gross nature, this early Western man was an idealist
withal. He dreamed dreams and beheld visions. He had
faith in man, hope for democracy, belief in America's destiny,
unbounded confidence in his ability to make his dreams come
true. Said Harriet Martineau in 1834, "I regard the American
people as a great embryo poet, now moody, now wild,
but bringing out results of absolute good sense: restless and
wayward in action, but with deep peace at his heart; exulting
that he has caught the true aspect of things past, and the
depth of futurity which lies before him, wherein to create
something so magnificent as the world has scarcely begun to
dream of. There is the strongest hope of a nation that is
capable of being possessed with an idea."

It is important to bear this idealism of the West in mind.
The very materialism that has been urged against the West
was accompanied by ideals of equality, of the exaltation of
the common man, of national expansion, that makes it a
profound mistake to write of the West as though it were
engrossed in mere material ends. It has been, and is, preëminently
a region of ideals, mistaken or not.

It is obvious that these economic and social conditions were

so fundamental in Western life that they might well dominate
whatever accessions came to the West by immigration
from the coast sections or from Europe. Nevertheless, the
West cannot be understood without bearing in mind the fact
that it has received the great streams from the North and
from the South, and that the Mississippi compelled these currents
to intermingle. Here it was that sectionalism first gave
way under the pressure of unification. Ultimately the conflicting
ideas and institutions of the old sections struggled
for dominance in this area under the influence of the forces
that made for uniformity, but this is merely another phase of
the truth that the West must become unified, that it could not,
rest in sectional groupings. For precisely this reason the
struggle occurred. In the period from the Revolution to the
close of the War of 1812, the democracy of the Southern and
Middle States contributed the main streams of settlement and
social influence to the West. Even in Ohio political power
was soon lost by the New England leaders. The democratic
spirit of the Middle region left an indelible impress on the
West in this its formative period. After the War of 1812,
New England, its supremacy in the carrying trade of the
world having vanished, became a hive from which swarms
of settlers went out to western New York and the remoter
regions.

These settlers spread New England ideals of education and
character and political institutions, and acted as a leaven
of great significance in the Northwest. But it would be a
mistake to believe that an unmixed New England influence
took possession of the Northwest. These pioneers did not
come from the class that conserved the type of New England
civilization pure and undefiled. They represented a less contented,
less conservative influence. Moreover, by their sojourn
in the Middle Region, on their westward march, they underwent

modification, and when the farther West received them, they
suffered a forest-change, indeed. The Westernized New England
man was no longer the representative of the section that he
left. He was less conservative, less provincial, more adaptable
and approachable, less rigorous in his Puritan ideals,
less a man of culture, more a man of action.

As might have been expected, therefore, the Western men,
in the "era of good feeling," had much homogeneity throughout
the Mississippi Valley, and began to stand as a new national
type. Under the lead of Henry Clay they invoked the national
government to break down the mountain barrier by internal
improvements, and thus to give their crops an outlet to the
coast. Under him they appealed to the national government
for a protective tariff to create a home market. A group of
frontier States entered the Union with democratic provisions
respecting the suffrage, and with devotion to the nation that
had given them their lands, built their roads and canals, regulated
their territorial life, and made them equals in the sisterhood
of States. At last these Western forces of aggressive
nationalism and democracy took possession of the government
in the person of the man who best embodied them,
Andrew Jackson. This new democracy that captured the country
and destroyed the ideals of statesmanship came from no
theorist's dreams of the German forest. It came, stark and
strong and full of life, from the American forest. But the
triumph of this Western democracy revealed also the fact that
it could rally to its aid the laboring classes of the coast,
then just beginning to acquire self-consciousness and organization

The next phase of Western development revealed forces of
division between the northern and southern portions of the
West. With, the spread of the cotton culture went the slave
system and the great plantation. The small farmer in his log

cabin, raising varied crops, was displaced by the planter
raising cotton. In all except the mountainous areas the Industrial
organization of the tidewater took possession of the
Southwest, the unity of the back country was broken, and the
solid South was formed. In the Northwest this was the era
of railroads and canals, opening the region to the increasing
stream of Middle State and New England settlement, and
strengthening the opposition to slavery. A map showing the
location of the men of New England ancestry in the Northwest
would represent also the counties in which the Free Soil
party cast its heaviest votes. The commercial connections of
the Northwest likewise were reversed by the railroad. The
result is stated by a writer in De Bow's Review in 1852 in
these words:—

"What is New Orleans now? Where are her dreams of
greatness and glory? . . . Whilst she slept, an enemy has
sowed tares in her most prolific fields. Armed with energy,
enterprise, and an indomitable spirit, that enemy, by a system
of bold, vigorous, and sustained efforts, has succeeded in
reversing the very laws of nature and of nature's God,—
rolled back the mighty tide of the Mississippi and its thousand
tributary streams, until their mouth, practically and commercially,
is more at New York or Boston than at New Orleans."

The West broke asunder, and the great struggle over the
social system to be given to the lands beyond the Mississippi
followed. In the Civil War the Northwest furnished the
national hero,—Lincoln was the very flower of frontier training
and ideals,—and it also took into its hands the whole
power of the government. Before the war closed, the West
could claim the President, Vice-President, Chief Justice,
Speaker of the House, Secretary of the Treasury, Postmaster-General,
Attorney-General, General of the army, and Admiral
of the navy. The leading generals of the war had been furnished

by the West. It was the region of action, and in the
crisis it took the reins.

The triumph of the nation was followed by a new era of
Western development. The national forces projected themselves
across the prairies and plains. Railroads, fostered by
government loans and land grants, opened the way for settlement
and poured a flood of European immigrants and restless
pioneers from all sections of the Union into the government
lands. The army of the United States pushed back the Indian,
rectangular Territories were carved into checkerboard States,
creations of the federal government, without a history, without
physiographical unity, without particularistic ideas. The
later frontiersman leaned on the strong arm of national power.

At the same time the South underwent a revolution. The
plantation, based on slavery, gave place to the farm, the gentry
to the democratic elements. As in the West, new industries,
of mining and of manufacture, sprang up as by magic. The
New South, like the New West, was an area of construction, a
debtor area, an area of unrest; and it, too, had learned the
uses to which federal legislation might be put.

In the meantime the Old Northwest[3] passed through an
economic and social transformation. The whole West furnished
an area over which successive waves of economic development
have passed. The State of Wisconsin, now much like
parts of the State of New York, was at an earlier period like
the State of Nebraska of to-day; the Granger movement and
Greenback party had for a time the ascendancy; and in the
northern counties of the State, where there is a sparser population,
and the country is being settled, its sympathies are still
with the debtor class. Thus the Old Northwest is a region
where the older frontier conditions survive in parts, and where

the inherited ways of looking at things are largely to be traced
to its frontier days. At the same time it is a region in many
ways assimilated to the East. It understands both sections.
It is not entirely content with the existing structure of economic
society in the sections where wealth has accumulated and corporate
organizations are powerful; but neither has it seemed
to feel that its interests lie in supporting the program of the
prairies and the South. In the Fifty-third Congress it voted
for the income tax, but it rejected free coinage. It is still
affected by the ideal of the self-made man, rather than by the
ideal of industrial nationalism. It is more American, but less
cosmopolitan than the seaboard.

We are now in a position to see clearly some of the factors
involved in the Western problem. For nearly three centuries
the dominant fact in American life has been expansion. With
the settlement of the Pacific coast and the occupation of the
free lands, this movement has come to a check. That these
energies of expansion will no longer operate would be a rash
prediction; and the demands for a vigorous foreign policy, for
an interoceanic canal, for a revival of our power upon the
seas, and for the extension of American influence to outlying
islands and adjoining countries, are indications that the move
ment will continue. The stronghold of these demands lies
west of the Alleghanies.

In the remoter West, the restless, rushing wave of settlement
has broken with a shock against the arid plains. The free
lands are gone, the continent is crossed, and all this push and
energy is turning into channels of agitation. Failures in one
area can no longer be made good by taking up land on a new
frontier; the conditions of a settled society are being reached
with suddenness and with confusion. The West has been built
up with borrowed capital, and the question of the stability of
gold, as a standard of deferred payments, is eagerly agitated

by the debtor West, profoundly dissatisfied with the industrial
conditions that confront it, and actuated by frontier directness
and rigor in its remedies. For the most part, the men who
built up the West beyond the Mississippi, and who are now
leading the agitation,[4] came as pioneers from the old Northwest,
in the days when it was just passing from the stage of a
frontier section. For example, Senator Allen of Nebraska,
president of the recent national Populist Convention, and a
type of the political leaders of his section, was born in Ohio
in the middle of the century, went in his youth to Iowa, and
not long after the Civil War made his home in Nebraska. As
a boy, he saw the buffalo driven out by the settlers; he saw
the Indian retreat as the pioneer advanced. His training is
that of the old West, in its frontier days. And now the frontier
opportunities are gone. Discontent is demanding an
extension of governmental activity in its behalf. In these
demands, it finds itself in touch with the depressed agricultural
classes and the workingmen of the South and East. The
Western problem is no longer a sectional problem: it is a
social problem on a national scale. The greater West, extending
from the Alleghanies to the Pacific, cannot be regarded
as a unit; it requires analysis into regions and classes. But
its area, its population, and its material resources would give
force to its assertion that if there is a sectionalism in the
country, the sectionalism is Eastern. The old West, united
to the new South, would produce, not a new sectionalism, but
a new Americanism. It would not mean sectional disunion,
as some have speculated, but it might mean a drastic assertion
of national government and imperial expansion under a popular
hero.

This, then, is the real situation: a people composed of
heterogeneous materials, with diverse and conflicting ideals

and social interests, having passed from the task of filling up
the vacant spaces of the continent, is now thrown back upon
itself, and is seeking an equilibrium. The diverse elements are
being fused into national unity. The forces of reorganization
are turbulent and the nation seems like a witches' kettle.

But the West has its own centers of industrial life and culture
not unlike those of the East. It has State universities, rivaling
in conservative and scientific economic instruction those of any
other part of the Union, and its citizens more often visit the
East, than do Eastern men the West. As time goes on, its
industrial development will bring it more into harmony with
the East.

Moreover, the Old Northwest holds the balance of power,
and is the battlefield on which these issues of American development
are to be settled. It has more in common with all
parts of the nation than has any other region. It understands
the East, as the East does not understand the West. The
White City which recently rose on the shores of Lake Michigan
fitly typified its growing culture as well as its capacity for
great achievement. Its complex and representative industrial
organization and business ties, its determination to hold fast
to what is original and good in its Western experience, and its
readiness to learn and receive the results of the experience of
other sections and nations, make it an open-minded and safe
arbiter of the American destiny.

In the long run the "Center of the Republic" may be
trusted to strike a wise balance between the contending ideals.
But she does not deceive herself; she knows that the problem
of the West means nothing less than the problem of working
out original social ideals and social adjustments for the American
nation.