Frontier in American History — IV - The Middle West - Part 3

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, 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.

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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.