Ohio History Journal

THE PLACE OF THE OHIO VALLEY

IN AMERICAN HISTORY.

 

 

FREDERICK JACKSON TURNER.

Professor of History, University of Wisconsin.

[Mr. Turner, until the fall of 1910, was professor of American His-

tory in the University of Wisconsin. He is now professor of Western

American History at Harvard University and the past year (1910) was

president of the American Historical Association. He delivered the ad-

dress herewith published at the meeting of the Ohio Valley Historical

Association, held at Frankfort, Kentucky, October 16, 1909.-EDITOR.]

In a notable essay Professor Josiah Royce, of Harvard

University, has asserted the salutary influence of a highly organ-

ized provincial life in order to counteract certain evils arising

from the tremendous development of nationalism in our own

day. Among these evils he enumerates:     First, The frequent

changes of dwelling place, whereby the community is in danger

of losing the well knit organization of a common life; second,

the tendency to reduce variety in national civilization to assim-

ilate all to a common type and thus discourage individuality, and

produce a "remorseless mechanism-vast, irrational;" third, the

evils arising from the fact that waves of emotion, the passion

of the mob, tend in our day to sweep across the nation.

Against these national surges of feeling Professor Royce

would erect dikes in the form of provincialism, the resistance of

separate sections each with its own traditions, beliefs and aspira-

tions. "Our national unities have grown so vast, our forces of

social consolidation so paramount, the resulting problems, con-

flicts, evils, have become so intensified, he says, that we must

seek in the province renewed strength, usefulness and beauty

of American life.

Whatever may be thought of this philosopher's appeal for

a revival of sectionalism, on a higher level, in order to check

the tendencies to a deadening uniformity of national consolidation

and to me this appeal, under the limitations which he gives it,

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The Ohio Valley in American History.       33

 

seems warranted by the conditions)-it is certainly true that in

the history of the United States sectionalism holds a place too

little recognized by the historians.

By sectionalism I do not mean the struggle between North

and South which culminated in the Civil War. That extreme

and tragic form of sectionalism indeed has almost engrossed the

attention of historians, and it is no doubt the most striking and

painful example of the phenomenon in our history. But there

are older, and perhaps in the long run more enduring examples

of the play of sectional forces than the slavery struggle, and

there are various sections besides North and South.

Indeed the United States is, in size and natural resources,

an empire, a collection of potential nations, rather than a single

nation. It is comparable in area to Europe. If the coast of

California be placed along the coast of Spain, Charleston, S. C.,

would fall near Constantinople, the northern shore of Lake Su-

perior would touch the Baltic, and New Orleans would lie in

southern Italy. Within this vast empire there are geographic

provinces, separate in physical conditions, into which American

colonization has flowed, and in each of which a special society

has developed, with an economic, political and social life of its

own. Each of these provinces, or sections, has developed its

great leaders, who in the public life of the nation have voiced

the needs of their section, contended with the representatives of

other sections, and arranged compromises between sections in

national legislation and policy, as ambassadors from separate

countries in a European Congress might make treaties.

Between these sections commercial relations have sprung up,

and economic combinations and contests may be traced by the

student who looks beneath the surface of our national life to the

actual grouping of States in congressional votes on tariff, inter-

nal improvement, currency and banking, and all the varied legis-

lation in the field of commerce. American industrial life is the

outcome of the combinations and contests of groups of States

or sections. And the intellectual, the spiritual life of the nation

is the result of the interplay of the sectional ideals, fundamen-

tal assumptions and emotions.

Vol. XX.-3.

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34        Ohio Arch. and Hist. Society Publications.

 

In short the real federal aspect of the nation, if we pene-

trate beneath constitutional forms to the deeper currents of social,

economic and political life, will be found to lie in the relation

of sections and nation, rather than in the relation of States and

nation.

Recently Ex-Secretary Root emphasized the danger that the

States, by neglecting to fulfill their duties, might fall into decay,

while the national government engrossed their former power.

But even if the States disappeared altogether as effective factors

in our national life, the sections might, in my opinion, gain from

that very disappearance a strength and activity that would prove

effective limitations upon the nationalizing process.

Without pursuing the interesting speculation I may note as

evidence of the development of sectionalism, the various gather-

ings of business men, religious denominations and educational

organizations in groups of States. Among the signs of growth of

a healthy provincialism is the formation of sectional historical

societies. While the American Historical Association has been

growing vigorously and becoming a genuine gathering of histor-

ical students from all parts of the nation there have also arisen

societies in various sections to deal with the particular history

of the groups of States. In part this is due to the great distances

which render difficult attendance upon the meetings of the

national body today, but he would be short-sighted, indeed, who

failed to perceive in the formation of the Pacific Coast Histor-

ical Association, the Mississippi Valley Historical Association,

and the Ohio Valley Historical Association, for example, gen-

uine and spontaneous manifestations of a sectional consciousness.

These associations spring in large part from the recognition

in each of a common past, a common body of experiences, tradi-

tions, institutions and ideals.

It is not necessary now to raise the question whether all of

these associations are based on a real community of historical

interest, whether there are overlapping areas, whether new com-

binations may not be made? They are at least substantial at-

tempts to find a common sectional unity, and out of their interest

in the past of the section, increasing tendencies to common sec-

tional ideas and policies are certain to follow.

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The Ohio Valley in American History.       35

 

I do not mean to prophesy any disruptive tendency in Amer-

ican life by the rejuvenation of sectional self-consciousness; but

I do mean to assert that American life will be enriched and

safe-guarded by the development of the greater variety of in-

terests, purposes and ideals which seem to be arising. A meas-

ure of local concentration seems necessary to produce healthy,

intellectual and moral life. The spread of social forces over

too vast an area makes for monotony and stagnation.

Let us then raise the question of how far the Ohio Valley

has had a part of its own in the making of the nation. I have

not the temerity to attempt a history of this Valley in the brief

compass of this address. Nor am I confident of my ability even

to pick out the more important features of the history of the

Ohio Valley in our common national life. But I venture to put

the problem, to state some familiar facts from the special point

of view, with the hope of arousing interest in the theme among

the many students who are advancing the science of history in

the Ohio Valley.

To the physiographer this section is made up of the province

of the Allegheny Plateaus and the southern portion of the Prairie

Plains. In the region lie those rich mineral deposits which are

changing the life of the section and of the nation. Although you

reckon in your membership, only the States that touch the Ohio

River-parts of those States are, from the point of view of their

social origins, more closely connected with the Northwest on

the Lake Plains, than with the Ohio Valley; and on the other

hand, the Tennessee Valley, though it sweeps far toward the

lower south, and only joins the Ohio at the end of its course,

has been through much of the history of the region an essen-

tial part of this society. Together these rivers made up the

Western World of the pioneers of the Revolutionary era; the

western waters of the backwoodsmen.

But, after all, the unity of the section and its place in his-

tory were determined by the "beautiful river," as the French

explorers called it-the Ohio, which pours its flood for over a

thousand miles, a great highway to the West; a historic artery

of commerce, a wedge of advance between powerful Indian con-

federacies, and rival European nations, to the Mississippi Valley;

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36       Ohio Arch. and Hist. Society Publications.

 

a home for six mighty States, now in the heart of the nation,

rich in material wealth, richer in the history of American de-

mocracy; a society that holds a place midway between the indus-

trial sections of the seaboard and the plains and prairies of the

agricultural west; between the society that formed later along

the prairies about the Great Lakes, and the society that arose

in the lower south on the plains of the Gulf of Mexico. The

Alleghenies bound it on the East, the Mississippi on the West.

At the forks of the great river lies Pittsburg, the historic gate-

way to the West, the present symbol and embodiment of the

age of steel, the type of modern industrialism. Near its western

border is St. Louis, looking toward the prairies, the Great Plains

and the Rocky Mountains, the land into which the tide of modern

colonization turns.

Between these old cities for whose sites European nations

contended, stand the cities whose growth pre-eminently repre-

sents the Ohio Valley: Cincinnati, the historic queen of the

river; Louisville, the warder of the falls; the cities of the old

National road, Columbus, Indianapolis; the cities of the Blue

Grass Land, which made Kentucky the goal of the pioneers and

the cities of that young Commonwealth, whom the Ohio River

by force of its attraction tore away from an uncongenial con-

trol by the Old Dominion, and joined it to the social section

where it belonged.

The Ohio Valley is, therefore, not only a commercial high-

way, it is a middle Kingdom between the East and the West,

between the Northern area, which was occupied by a greater

New England and emigrants from Northern Europe, and the

Southern area of the Cotton Kingdom. As Pennsylvania and

New York constituted the middle region in our earlier history,

between New England and the seaboard South, so the Ohio

Valley became the middle region of a later time. In its position

as a highway and a middle region are found the keys to its place

in American history.

From the beginning the Ohio Valley seems to have been a

highway for migration, and the home of a culture of its own.

The science of American archaeology and ethnology are too new

to enable us to speak with confidence upon the origins and earlier

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The Ohio Valley in American History.     37

distribution of the aborigines, but it is at least clear that the

Ohio River played an important part in the movements of the

earlier men in America, and that the mounds of the Valley indi-

cate a special type of development intermediate between that of

the Northern hunter folk, and the Pueblo building races of the

South. This dim and yet fascinating introduction to the history

of the Ohio will afford ample opportunity for later students of

the relations between geography and population to contribute to

our history.

The French explorers saw the river but failed to grasp its

significance as a strategic line in the conquest of the West. En-

tangled in the water labyrinth of the vast interior, and kindled

with aspirations to reach the sea of the West, their fur traders

and explorers pushed their way through the forests of the North

and the plains of the South, from river to farther lake, from lake

to river, until they met the mountains of the West. But while they

were reaching the upper course of the Missouri and the Spanish

outposts of Santa Fe, they missed the opportunity to hold the

Ohio Valley, and before France could settle the Valley, the long

and attenuated line of French posts in the West, reaching from

Canada to Louisiana, was struck by the advancing column of

the American backwoodsmen in the center by the way of the

Ohio Valley. Parkman, in whose golden pages is written the

epic of the American wilderness, found his hero in the wander-

ing Frenchman. Perhaps because he was a New Englander he

missed a great opportunity and neglected to portray the formation

and advance of the backwoods society that was finally to erase

the traces of French control in the great interior of North

America.

It is not without significance in a consideration of the

national aspects of the history of the Ohio Valley, that the mes-

senger of English civilization, who summoned the French to

evacuate the Valley and its approaches, and whose men near the

forks of the Ohio fired the opening guns of the world historic

conflict that wrought the doom of New France in America, was

George Washington, the first American to win a national position

in the United States. The Father of his country, was the prophet

of the Ohio Valley.

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38       Ohio Arch. and Hist. Society Publications.

 

Into this dominion in the next scene of this drama, came

the backwoodsmen, the men who began the formation of the

society of the Valley. I wish to consider the effects of the forma-

tion of this society upon the nation. And first let us consider the

stock itself.

The Ohio Valley was settled, for the most part (though

with important exceptions, especially in Ohio), by men of the

upland South, and this determined a large part of its influence

in the nation through for a long period. As the Ohio Valley,

as a whole, was an extension of the upland South, so the upland

South was, broadly speaking, an extension from the old middle

region, chiefly from  Pennsylvania. The society of pioneers,

English, Scotch-Irish, Germans, and other nationalities which

formed in the beginning of the Eighteenth Century in the Great

Valley of Pennsylvania and its lateral extensions was the

nursery of the American backwoodsmen. Along the Valley be-

tween about 1730 and the Revolution, successful tides of

pioneers passed, ascending the Shenandoah, occupying the

Piedmont, or up-country of Virginia and the Carolinas, and re-

ceiving recruits of similar peoples who came by eastward ad-

vances from the coast toward this old West. Thus by the mid-

dle of the Eighteenth Century a new section had been created

in America, a kind of peninsula thrust down from Pennsylvania

between the falls of the rivers bounding the tide water South

on the one side, and the Allegheny mountains on the other.

This population was a mixture of nationalities and re-

ligions. Less English than the colonial coast, it was built on a

basis of religious feeling different from that of Puritan New

England, and still different from the conservative, Anglicans of

the Southern seaboard. The Scotch-Irish Presbyterians with

the fires of the covenant in their veins; German Sectaries with

serious-minded devotion to one or another of a multiplicity of

sects, but withal deeply responsive to the call of the religious

spirit; and the English Quakers all furnish a foundation of

emotional responsiveness to religion and a readiness to find a

new heaven and a new earth in politics as well as in religion.

In spite of all the influence of the backwoods in diminishing the

religious impulse, this upland society was a fertile field for

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The Ohio Valley in American History.       39

tillage by such democratic and emotional sects as the Baptists,

Methodists and the later Campbellites, as well as by Pres-

byterians. Mr. Bryce has well characterized the South as a

region of "High Religious Voltage," but this characterization

is especially applicable to the upland South, and its colonies in

the Ohio Valley. It is not necessary to assert that this re-

ligious spirit resulted in the kind of conduct, associated with the

religious life by the Puritans. What I wish to point out is the

responsiveness of the upland South to emotional religious and

political appeal.

Besides its variety of stocks and its religious sects respon-

sive to emotion, the upland South was intensely democratic and

individualistic. It believed also that government was a con-

tract and for the benefit of the individual. It was a naturally

radical society. It was moreover a rural section not of the

planter or merchant type, but characterized by the small farmer,

building his log cabin in the wilderness, raising a little crop and

a few animals for family use. It was this stock which began

to pass into the Ohio Valley when Daniel Boone, and the

pioneers associated with his name, followed the Wilderness

Trace from the upland South to the Blue Grass land in the

midst of the Kentucky hills, on the Ohio River. In the open-

ing years of the Revolution these pioneers were recruited by

westward extensions from Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

With this colonization of the Ohio Valley, begins a new chapter

in American history.

This settlement contributed a new element to our national

development and raised new national problems. It took a long

time for the seaboard South to assimilate the upland section.

We cannot think of the South as a unit, certainly not through

much of its ante-bellum history without doing violence to the

facts. The struggle between the men of the up-country and

the men of the tide-water, made a large part of the domestic

history of the "Old South." Nevertheless, the upland South

as slavery and cotton cultivation extended westward from the

coast, gradually lost its individuality. On the other hand, its

children, who placed the wall of the Alleghenies between them

and the East, gave thereby a new life to the conditions and

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40       Ohio Arch. and Hist. Society Publications.

ideals which were lost in their former home. Nor was this all.

Beyond the mountains new conditions, new problems aroused

new ambitions and new social ideals. Its entrance into the West-

ern World was a tonic to this stock. Its crossing put new fire

into its veins-fires of militant expansion, creative social en-

ergy, triumphant democracy. A new section was added to the

American nation, a new element was infused into the combina-

tion which we call the United States, a new flavor was given to

the American spirit.

Let us rapidly note some of the results, and first the na-

tional effects of the settlement of this new social type in the

Ohio Valley upon the expansion and diplomacy of the nation.

Almost from the first the Ohio Valley had constituted the

problem of Westward expansion. It was the entering wedge

to the possession of the Mississippi Valley, and, however re-

luctantly, the Eastern colonies and then the Eastern States,

were compelled to join in the struggle, first to possess the Ohio,

then to retain it, and finally to enforce its demand for the pos-

session of the whole Mississippi Valley and the basin of the

Great Lakes as a means of outlet for its crops and of defense

for its settlements. The part played by the pioneers of the Ohio

Valley as a flying column of the nation, sent across the moun-

tains and making a line of advance between hostile Indians and

English on the North, and hostile Indians and Spaniards on

the South, is itself too extensive a theme to be more than men-

tioned. In the State which was the home of George Rogers

Clark it is not necessary to dwell upon his clear insight and

courage in carrying American arms into the Northwest. From

the first, Washington also grasped the significance of the Ohio

Valley as a rising empire, whose population and trade were es-

sential to the nation, but which found its natural outlet down the

Mississippi where Spain blocked the river and which was in

danger of withdrawing from the weak confederacy. The in-

trigues of England to attract the Valley to herself and those of

Spain to add the settlements to the Spanish Empire, the use of

the Indians by these rivals, and the efforts of France to use the

pioneers of Kentucky to win New Orleans and the whole Val-

ley between the Alleghenies and the Rocky Mountains for a re-

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The Ohio Valley in American History.        41

 

vived French Empire in America, are among the fascinating

chapters of American, as well as of Ohio Valley, history. This

position of the Valley explains much of the Indian wars, the

foreign relations, and, indirectly, the domestic politics of the

period from the Revolution to the purchase of Louisiana. In-

deed, that purchase was in large measure due to the pressure of

the settlers of the Ohio Valley to secure this necessary outlet.

It was the Ohio Valley which forced the nation away from a

narrow colonial attitude into its career as a nation among other

nations with an adequate physical basis for future growth.

In this development of a foreign policy in connection with

the Ohio Valley, we find the germs of the Monroe doctrine, and

the beginnings of the definite independence of the United States

from the state system of the Old World, the beginning, in fact,

of its career as a world power. This expansive impulse went

on into the War of 1812, a war which was in no inconsiderable

degree, the result of the aggressive leadership of a group of men

from Kentucky and Tennessee, and especially of the daring and

lofty demands of Henry Clay, who even thus early voiced the

spirit of the Ohio Valley. That in this war, William Henry

Harrison and the Kentucky troops achieved the real conquest

of the northwest province and Andrew Jackson, with his Ten-

nesseans, the real conquest of the Gulf Plains is in itself

abundant evidence of the part played in the expansion of the

nation by the section which formed on the Ohio and its tribu-

taries. Nor was this the end of the process, for the annexation

of Texas and the Pacific Coast was in a very real sense only an

aftermath of the same movement of expansion.

While the Ohio Valley was leading the way to the building

of a greater nation, it was also the field wherein was formed

an important contribution of the United States to political in-

stitutions. By this I mean what George Bancroft has well called

Federal Colonial System, that is our system of territories and

new States. It is a mistake to attribute this system to the Or-

dinance of 1787 and to the leadership of New England. It was

in large measure the work of the communities of the Ohio Val-

ley who wrought out the essentials of the system for them-

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42       Ohio Arch. and Hist. Society Publications.

 

selves, and by their attitude imposed it, of necessity, upon the

nation. The great Ordinance only perfected the system.

Under the belief that all men going into vacant lands have

the right to shape their own political institutions, the riflemen

of Western Virginia, Western Pennsylvania, Kentucky and

Tennessee, during the Revolution, protested against the rule of

governments beyond the mountains, and asserted with manly in-

dependence their right to self government. But it is significant

that in making this assertion, they at the same time petitioned

Congress to admit them to the Sisterhood of States. Even when

leaders like Wilkinson were attempting to induce Kentucky to

act as an independent nation, the national spirit of the people

as a whole led them to delay until at last they found themselves

a State of the new Union. This recognition of the paramount

authority of Congress and this demand for self-government un-

der that authority, constitute the foundations of the Federal

Territorial System, as expressed in congressional resolutions,

worked out tentatively in Jefferson's Ordinance of 1784, and

finally shaped in the Ordinance of 1787. Thus the Ohio Valley

was not only the area to which this system was applied, but it

was itself instrumental in shaping the system by its own de-

mands and by the danger that too rigorous an assertion

of either State or national power over these remote com-

munities might result in their loss to the nation.  The im-

portance of this result can hardly be overestimated. It insured

the peaceful and free development of the great West and gave

it political organization not as the result of the wars of hostile

States, nor by arbitrary government of distant powers, but by

territorial government combined with large local autonomy.

These governments in turn were admitted as equal States of

the Union. By this peaceful process of colonization a whole

continent has been filled with free and orderly Commonwealths

so quietly, so naturally, that we can only appreciate the pro-

found significance of the process by comparing it with the

spread of European conquests through conquests and oppres-

sion.

Next let me invite your attention to the part played by the

Ohio Valley in the economic legislation which shaped our his-

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The Ohio Valley in American History.        43

 

tory in the years of the making of the legislation between the

War of 1812 and the rise of the slavery struggle. It needs but

slight reflection to discover that in the area in question, the man

and measures of the Ohio Valley held the balance of power and

set the course of our national progress. The problems before

the nation at that time were problems of internal development:

the mode of dealing with the public domain; the building of

roads and digging of canals for the internal improvement of a

nation which was separated into East and West by the Alle-

gheny Mountains; the formation of a tariff system for the pro-

tection of home industries and to supply a market for the sur-

plus of the West which no longer found an outlet in warring

Europe; the framing of a banking and currency system which

should meet the needs of the new interstate commerce produced

by the rise of the Western surplus.

In the Ohio Valley, by the initiative of Ohio Valley men,

and often against the protest of Eastern sections, the public land

policy was developed by laws which subordinated the revenue

idea to the idea of the upbuilding of a democracy of small land-

holders. The squatters of the Ohio Valley forced the passage

of pre-emption laws and these laws in their turn led to the

homestead agitation. There has been no single element more in-

fluential in shaping American democracy and its ideals than this

land policy. And whether the system be regarded as harmful

or helpful, there can be, I think, no doubt that it was the out-

come of conditions imposed by the settlers of the Ohio Valley.

When one names the tariff, internal improvements and the

bank, he is bound to add the title "The American System" and

to think of Henry Clay of Kentucky, the captivating young

statesman, who fashioned a national policy, raised issues and

disciplined a party to support them and who finally imposed the

system upon the nation. But however clearly we recognize the

genius and originality of Henry Clay as a political leader; how-

ever we recognize that he has a national standing as a construc-

tive statesman, we must perceive, if we probe the matter deep-

ly enough, that his policy and his power grew out of the

economic and social conditions of the people whose needs be

voiced-the people of the Ohio Valley. It was the fact that in

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44       Ohio Arch. and Hist. Society Publications.

 

this period they had begun to create an agricultural surplus,

which made the necessity for this legislation. The nation has

just celebrated the anniversary of Fulton's invention of the

steamboat and the Hudson River has been ablaze in his honor,

but in truth it is on the Ohio and the Mississippi that the fires

of celebration should really burn in honor of Fulton, for the

historic significance to the United States of the invention of the

steamboat does not lie in its use on Eastern rivers; not even in

its use on the ocean; for our own internal commerce carried in

our own ships has had a vaster influence upon our national life

than has our foreign commerce. And this internal commerce

was at first, and for many years, the commerce of the Ohio

Valley carried by way of the Mississippi. When Fulton's steam-

boat was applied in 1811 to the Western waters, it became pos-

sible to develop agriculture and to get the Western crops rapid-

ly and cheaply to a market. The result was a tremendous growth

in the entire Ohio Valley, but this invention did not solve the

problem of cheap supplies of Eastern manufacturers, nor sat-

isfy the desire of the West to build up its own factories in or-

der to consume its own products. The Ohio Valley had seen the

advantage of home markets, as her towns grew up with their

commerce and manufacturers close to the rural regions. Lands

had increased in value in proportion to their nearness to these

cities, and crops were in higher demand near them. Thus Henry

Clay found a whole section standing behind him when he de-

manded a protective tariff to create home markets on a national

scale, and when he urged the breaking of the Allegheny barrier

by a national system of roads and canals. If we analyze the

Congressional votes by which the great tariff and internal im-

provement act were passed, we shall find that there was an al-

most unbroken South against them, a middle region largely for

them, a New England divided, and the Ohio Valley almost a

unit, holding the balance of power and casting it in favor of the

American system.

The next topic to which I ask your attention is the influence

of the Ohio Valley in the promotion of democracy. On this I

shall by reason of lack of time be obliged merely to point out

that the powerful group of Ohio Valley States, which sprang

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The Ohio Valley in American History.  45

out of the democracy of the backwoods, and which entered the

Union one after the other with manhood suffrage, greatly re-

cruited the effective forces of democracy in the Union. Not

only did they add new recruits, but by their competitive pressure

for population they forced the older States to break down their

historic restraints upon the right of voting, unless they were

to lose their people to the freer life of the West. But in the era

of Jacksonian Democracy, Henry Clay and his followers en-

gaged the great Tennessean in a fierce political struggle out of

which was born the rival Whig and Democratic parties. This

struggle was in fact reflective of the conditions which had arisen

in the Ohio Valley. As the section had grown in population

and wealth, as the trails changed into roads, the cabins into

well-built houses, the clearings into broad farms, the hamlets

into towns; as barter became commerce and all the modern pro-

cesses of industrial development began to operate in this rising

region, the Ohio Valley broke apart into the rival interests of

the industrial forces (the town-makers and the business-build-

ers), on the one side and the old rural democracy of the up-

lands on the other. This division was symbolical of national

processes.  In the contest between  these forces, Andrew

Jackson  was the champion of the cause of the upland

democracy. He denounced the money power, banks and the

whole credit system and sounded a fierce tocsin of danger

against the increasing influence of wealth in politics. Henry

Clay, on the other hand, represented these new industrial forces

along the Ohio. It is certainly significant that in the rivalry

between the great Whig of the Ohio Valley and the great Demo-

crat of its Tennessee tributary lay the issues of American poli-

tics almost until the slavery struggle.

The responsiveness of the Ohio Valley to leadership and its

enthusiasm in action are illustrated by the Harrison campaign

of 1840; in that log cabin campaign the Ohio Valley carried its

spirit as well as its political favorite throughout the nation.

Meanwhile, on each side of the Ohio Valley, other sections

were forming. New England and the children of New England

in Western New York and an increasing flood of German immi-

grants were pouring into the Great Lake Basin and the Prairies,

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46       Ohio Arch. and Hist. Society Publications.

 

north of the upland peoples who had chopped out homes in the

forests along the Ohio. This section was tied to the East by the

Great Lake navigation and the Erie Canal, it became in fact

an extension of New England and New York. Here the Free

Soil Party found its strength and New York newspapers fur-

nished the political ideas. Although this section tried to attach

the Ohio River interests to itself by canals and later by railroads,

it was in reality for a long time separate in its ideals and its

interests and never succeeded in dominating the Ohio Valley.

On the South along the Gulf Plains there developed the

Cotton Kingdom, a greater South with a radical program of

slavery expansion mapped out by bold and aggressive leaders.

Already this Southern section had attempted to establish increas-

ing commercial relations with the Ohio Valley. The staple-

producing region was the principal consumer of the live stock

and food products of the Ohio Valley. South Carolina leaders

like Calhoun tried to bind the Ohio Valley to the chariot of the

South by the Cincinnati and Charleston Railroad, designed to

make an outlet for the Ohio Valley products to the Southeast.

Georgia in her turn was a rival with South Carolina in plans to

drain this commerce to the Gulf. In all of these plans to connect

the Ohio Valley commercially with the South, the political object

was quite as prominent as the commercial.

In short, the radical areas were bidding for the support of

the zone of population along the Ohio River. The Ohio Valley

recognized its old relationship to the South, but its people were

by no means champions of slavery. In the southern portion of

the States north of the Ohio where indented servitude for many

years opened a way to a semi-system of slavery, there were

divided counsels. Kentucky also spoke with no certain voice.

As a result, it is in these regions that we find the stronghold of

the compromising movement in the slavery struggle. In spite of

the fact that Kentucky furnished Abraham Lincoln to Illinois,

and Jefferson Davis to Mississippi, Kentucky was in reality the

very center of the region of adjustment between these rival in-

terests. Senator Thomas, of Southern Illinois, moved the Mis-

souri Compromise, but Henry Clay was the most effective cham-

pion of that compromise, as he was the architect of the Com-

• 15
 

The Ohio Valley in American History.        47

 

promise of 1850. The Crittenden Compromise Proposals at the

eve of the Civil War came also from Kentucky and represent

the persistence of the spirit of Henry Clay. In short, as I pointed

out in the beginning, the Ohio Valley was a middle region with

a strong national allegiance, striving to hold apart with either

hand the sectional combatants in this struggle. In the cautious

development in his policy of Emancipation, we may see the pro-

found influence of the Ohio Valley upon Abraham Lincoln-

Kentucky's greatest son. No one can understand his presidency

without proper appreciation of the deep influence of the Ohio

Valley, its ideals and its prejudices upon this great man.

Ladies and gentlemen, enough has been said to make it clear,

I trust, that the Ohio Valley has not only a local history worthy

of study, a rich heritage to its people, but also that it has been

an independent and powerful force in shaping the development

of a nation. Of the late history of this valley, the rise of its vast

industrial power, its far-reaching commercial influence, it is not

necessary that I should speak. You know its great men and

their influence upon our own time; you know the relation of Ohio

to the office of President of the United States; nor is it necessary

that I should attempt to prophesy concerning the future which

the Ohio Valley will hold in the nation.

In that new age of inland water transportation, which is

certain to supplement the age of the railroad, there can be no

more important region than the Ohio Valley. Let us hope that

its old love of democracy may endure, and that this section, where

the first trans-Allegheny pioneers struck blows at the forests,

there may be brought to blossom and to fruit the ripe civilization

of a people who know that whatever the glories of prosperity

may be, there are greater glories of the spirit of man; who know

that in the ultimate record of history, the place of the Ohio Val-

ley will depend upon the contribution which her people and her

leaders make to the cause of an enlightened a cultivated, a God-

fearing and a free, as well as a comfortable democracy.

• 16