Frontier in American History — V - The Ohio Valley in American History - Part 1

THE OHIO VALLEY IN AMERICAN HISTORY[157:1]

In a notable essay Professor Josiah Royce has asserted the salutary influence of a highly organized 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 assimilate all to a common type and thus to 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 surges of national feeling Professor Royce would erect dikes in the form of provincialism, the resistance of separate sections each with its own traditions, beliefs and aspirations.

"Our national unities have grown so vast, our forces of social consolidation so paramount, the resulting problems, conflicts, 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, 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, South Carolina, would fall near Constantinople; the northern shores of Lake Superior 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 own 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, almost 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, internal improvement, currency and banking, and all the varied legislation in the field of commerce.

American industrial life is the outcome of the combinations and contests of groups of States in sections.

And the intellectual, the spiritual life of the nation is the result of the interplay of the sectional ideals, fundamental assumptions and emotions.

In short, the real federal aspect of the nation, if we penetrate 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 fulfil 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 gatherings 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 historical 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 attendance difficult upon the meetings of the national body to-day, but we would be short-sighted, indeed, who failed to perceive in the formation of the Pacific Coast Historical Association, the Mississippi Valley Historical Association, and the Ohio Valley Historical Association, for example, genuine 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, traditions, 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 combinations may not be made?

They are at least substantial attempts to find a common sectional unity, and out of their interest in the past of the section, increasing tendencies to common sectional ideas and policies are certain to follow.

I do not mean to prophesy any disruptive tendency in American 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 interest, purposes and ideals which seem to be arising.

A measure 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 the Valley in the brief compass of this address.

Nor am I confident of my ability even to pick out the more important features of its history 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 this section.

To the physiographer the section is made up of the province of the Alleghany Plateaus and the southern portion of the Prairie Plains.

In it are found 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 essential 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 history 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 confederacies, and rival European nations, to the Mississippi Valley; a home for six mighty States, now in the heart of the nation, rich in material wealth, richer in the history of American democracy, a society that holds a place midway between the industrial sections of the seaboard and the plains and prairies of the agricultural West; between the society that formed later along the levels about the Great Lakes, and the society that arose in the Lower South on the plains of the Gulf of Mexico.

The Alleghanies bound it on the east, the Mississippi on the west.

At the forks of the great river lies Pittsburgh, the historic gateway 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 preeminently represents 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 lands, 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 control by the Old Dominion, and joined to the social section where it belonged.

The Ohio Valley is, therefore, not only a commercial highway, 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 sciences of American archeology and ethnology are too new to enable us to speak with confidence upon the origins and earlier 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 indicate 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 make contributions 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.

Entangled 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 across the plains of the South, from river to 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.

Parkman, in whose golden pages is written the epic of the American wilderness, found his hero in the wandering Frenchman.

Perhaps because he was a New Englander he missed a great opportunity and neglected to portray the formation and advance of the backwood society which was finally to erase the traces of French control in the 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 messenger 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 gun 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.