Frontier in American History — V - The Ohio Valley in American History - Part 3

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; however we recognize that he has a national standing as a constructive statesman, we must perceive, if we probe the matter deeply enough, that his policy and his power grew out of the economic and social conditions of the people whose needs he voiced--the people of the Ohio Valley.

It was the fact that in this period they had begun to create an agricultural surplus, which made the necessity for this legislation.

The nation has recently celebrated the one hundredth 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 steamboat was applied in 1811 to the Western Waters, it became possible to develop agriculture and to get the Western crops rapidly 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 manufactures, nor satisfy the desire of the West to build up its own factories in order 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 demanded a protective tariff to create home markets on a national scale, and when he urged the breaking of the Alleghany barrier by a national system of roads and canals.

If we analyse the congressional votes by which the tariff and internal improvement acts were passed, we shall find that there was an almost 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 out of the democracy of the backwoods, and which entered the Union one after the other with manhood suffrage, greatly recruited 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 engaged the great Tennesseean 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 processes 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 builders), on the one side and the old rural democracy of the uplands 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 the 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 Democrat of its Tennessee tributary lay the issues of American politics 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" when the Whigs "stole the thunder" of pioneer Jacksonian democracy for another backwoods hero, 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 immigrants were pouring into the Great Lake basin and the prairies, 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 expressed 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 increasing commercial relations with the Ohio Valley.

The staple-producing region was a principal consumer of its live stock and food products.

South Carolina leaders like Calhoun tried to bind the Ohio 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 of South Carolina in plans to drain this commerce itself.

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, various 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 system of semi-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.

Kentucky furnished Abraham Lincoln to Illinois, and Jefferson Davis to Mississippi, and was in reality the very center of the region of adjustment between these rival interests.

Senator Thomas, of southern Illinois, moved the Missouri Compromise, and Henry Clay was the most effective champion of that compromise, as he was the architect of the Compromise of 1850. The Crittenden compromise proposals on the eve of the Civil War came also from Kentucky and represent the persistence of the spirit of Henry Clay.

In a word, 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 of his policy of emancipation, we may see the profound 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 America's original contribution to the great men of the world.

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 statesmen 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 in this section, where the first trans-Alleghany 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 Valley 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.

FOOTNOTES:

[157:1] An address before the Ohio Valley Historical Association, October 16, 1909. [168:1] See F. J.

Turner, "New States West of the Alleghanies," _American Historical Review_, i, pp. 70 ff.

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