Frontier in American History — XIII - Middle Western Pioneer Democracy - Part 3

The attraction of this new home reached also into the Old World and gave a new hope and new impulses to the people of Germany, of England, of Ireland, and of Scandinavia.

Both economic influences and revolutionary discontent promoted German migration at this time; economic causes brought the larger volume, but the quest for liberty brought the leaders, many of whom were German political exiles.

While the latter urged, with varying degrees of emphasis, that their own contribution should be preserved in their new surroundings, and a few visionaries even talked of a German State in the federal system, what was noteworthy was the adjustment of the emigrants of the thirties and forties to Middle Western conditions; the response to the opportunity to create a new type of society in which all gave and all received and no element remained isolated.

Society was plastic.

In the midst of more or less antagonism between "bowie knife Southerners," "cow-milking Yankee Puritans," "beer-drinking Germans," "wild Irishmen," a process of mutual education, a giving and taking, was at work.

In the outcome, in spite of slowness of assimilation where different groups were compact and isolated from the others, and a certain persistence of inherited _morale_, there was the creation of a new type, which was neither the sum of all its elements, nor a complete fusion in a melting pot.

They were American pioneers, not outlying fragments of New England, of Germany, or of Norway.

The Germans were most strongly represented in the Missouri Valley, in St. Louis, in Illinois opposite that city, and in the Lake Shore counties of eastern Wisconsin north from Milwaukee.

In Cincinnati and Cleveland there were many Germans, while in nearly half the counties of Ohio, the German immigrants and the Pennsylvania Germans held nearly or quite the balance of political power.

The Irish came primarily as workers on turnpikes, canals and railroads, and tended to remain along such lines, or to gather in the growing cities.

The Scandinavians, of whom the largest proportion were Norwegians, founded their colonies in Northern Illinois, and in Southern Wisconsin about the Fox and the head waters of Rock River, whence in later years they spread into Iowa, Minnesota and North Dakota.

By 1850 about one-sixth of the people of the Middle West were of North Atlantic birth, about one-eighth of Southern birth, and a like fraction of foreign birth, of whom the Germans were twice as numerous as the Irish, and the Scandinavians only slightly more numerous than the Welsh, and fewer than the Scotch.

There were only a dozen Scandinavians in Minnesota.

The natives of the British Islands, together with the natives of British North America in the Middle West, numbered nearly as many as the natives of German lands.

But in 1850 almost three-fifths of the population were natives of the Middle West itself, and over a third of the population lived in Ohio.

The cities were especially a mixture of peoples.

In the five larger cities of the section natives and foreigners were nearly balanced.

In Chicago the Irish, Germans and natives of the North Atlantic States about equaled each other.

But in all the other cities, the Germans exceeded the Irish in varying proportions.

There were nearly three to one in Milwaukee.

It is not merely that the section was growing rapidly and was made up of various stocks with many different cultures, sectional and European;

what is more significant is that these elements did not remain as separate strata underneath an established ruling order, as was the case particularly in New England.

All were accepted and intermingling components of a forming society, plastic and absorptive.

This characteristic of the section as "a good mixer" became fixed before the large immigrations of the eighties.

The foundations of the section were laid firmly in a period when the foreign elements were particularly free and eager to contribute to a new society and to receive an impress from the country which offered them a liberty denied abroad.

Significant as is this fact, and influential in the solution of America's present problems, it is no more important than the fact that in the decade before the Civil War, the Southern element in the Middle West had also had nearly two generations of direct association with the Northern, and had finally been engulfed in a tide of Northeastern and Old World settlers.

In this society of pioneers men learned to drop their old national animosities.

One of the Immigrant Guides of the fifties urged the newcomers to abandon their racial animosities.

"The American laughs at these steerage quarrels," said the author.

Thus the Middle West was teaching the lesson of national cross-fertilization instead of national enmities, the possibility of a newer and richer civilization, not by preserving unmodified or isolated the old component elements, but by breaking down the line-fences, by merging the individual life in the common product--a new product, which held the promise of world brotherhood.

If the pioneers divided their allegiance between various parties, Whig, Democrat, Free Soil or Republican, it does not follow that the western Whig was like the eastern Whig.

There was an infiltration of a western quality into all of these.

The western Whig supported Harrison more because he was a pioneer than because he was a Whig.

It saw in him a legitimate successor of Andrew Jackson.

The campaign of 1840 was a Middle Western camp meeting on a huge scale.

The log cabins, the cider and the coonskins were the symbols of the triumph of Middle Western ideas, and were carried with misgivings by the merchants, the bankers and the manufacturers of the East.

In like fashion, the Middle Western wing of the Democratic party was as different from the Southern wing wherein lay its strength, as Douglas was from Calhoun.

It had little in common with the slaveholding classes of the South, even while it felt the kinship of the pioneer with the people of the Southern upland stock from which so many Westerners were descended.

In the later forties and early fifties most of the Middle Western States made constitutions.

The debates in their conventions and the results embodied in the constitutions themselves tell the story of their political ideals.

Of course, they based the franchise on the principle of manhood suffrage.

But they also provided for an elective judiciary, for restrictions on the borrowing power of the State, lest it fall under the control of what they feared as the money power, and several of them either provided for the extinguishment of banks of issue, or rigidly restrained them.

Some of them exempted the homestead from forced sale for debt; married women's legal rights were prominent topics in the debates of the conventions, and Wisconsin led off by permitting the alien to vote after a year's residence.

It welcomed the newcomer to the freedom and to the obligations of American citizenship.

Although this pioneer society was preponderantly an agricultural society it was rapidly learning that agriculture alone was not sufficient for its life.

It was developing manufactures, trade, mining, the professions, and becoming conscious that in a progressive modern state it was possible to pass from one industry to another and that all were bound by common ties.

But it is significant that in the census of 1850, Ohio, out of a population of two millions, reported only a thousand servants, Iowa only ten in two hundred thousand and Minnesota fifteen in its six thousand.

In the intellectual life of this new democracy there was already the promise of original contributions even in the midst of the engrossing toil and hard life of the pioneer.

The country editor was a leader of his people, not a patent-insides recorder of social functions, but a vigorous and independent thinker and writer.

The subscribers to the newspaper published in the section were higher in proportion to population than in the State of New York and not greatly inferior to those of New England, although such eastern papers as the _New York Tribune_ had an extensive circulation throughout the Middle West.

The agricultural press presupposed in its articles and contributions a level of general intelligence and interest above that of the later farmers of the section, at least before the present day.

Farmer boys walked behind the plow with their book in hand and sometimes forgot to turn at the end of the furrow; even rare boys, who, like the young Howells, "limped barefoot by his father's side with his eyes on the cow and his mind on Cervantes and Shakespeare."

Periodicals flourished and faded like the prairie flowers.

Some of Emerson's best poems first appeared in one of these Ohio Valley magazines.

But for the most part the literature of the region and the period was imitative or reflective of the common things in a not uncommon way.

It is to its children that the Middle West had to look for the expression of its life and its ideals rather than to the busy pioneer who was breaking a prairie farm or building up a new community.

Illiteracy was least among the Yankee pioneers and highest among the Southern element.

When illiteracy is mapped for 1850 by percentages there appears two distinct zones, the one extending from New England, the other from the South.

The influence of New England men was strong in the Yankee regions of the Middle West.

Home missionaries, and representatives of societies for the promotion of education in the West, both in the common school and denominational colleges, scattered themselves throughout the region and left a deep impress in all these States.

The conception was firmly fixed in the thirties and forties that the West was the coming power in the Union, that the fate of civilization was in its hands, and therefore rival sects and rival sections strove to influence it to their own types.

But the Middle West shaped all these educational contributions according to her own needs and ideals.

The State Universities were for the most part the result of agitation and proposals of men of New England origin; but they became characteristic products of Middle Western society, where the community as a whole, rather than wealthy benefactors, supported these institutions.

In the end the community determined their directions in accord with popular ideals.

They reached down more deeply into the ranks of the common people than did the New England or Middle State Colleges;

they laid more emphasis upon the obviously useful, and became coeducational at an early date.

This dominance of the community ideals had dangers for the Universities, which were called to raise ideals and to point new ways, rather than to conform.

Challenging the spaces of the West, struck by the rapidity with which a new society was unfolding under their gaze, it is not strange that the pioneers dealt in the superlative and saw their destiny with optimistic eyes.

The meadow lot of the small intervale had become the prairie, stretching farther than their gaze could reach.

All was motion and change.

A restlessness was universal.

Men moved, in their single life, from Vermont to New York, from New York to Ohio, from Ohio to Wisconsin, from Wisconsin to California, and longed for the Hawaiian Islands.

When the bark started from their fence rails, they felt the call to change.

They were conscious of the mobility of their society and gloried in it.

They broke with the Past and thought to create something finer, more fitting for humanity, more beneficial for the average man than the world had ever seen.

"With the Past we have literally nothing to do," said B. Gratz Brown in a Missouri Fourth of July oration in 1850, "save to dream of it.

Its lessons are lost and its tongue is silent.

We are ourselves at the head and front of all political experience.

Precedents have lost their virtue and all their authority is gone.

.

.

.

Experience can profit us only to guard from antequated delusions."

"The yoke of opinion," wrote Channing to a Western friend, speaking of New England, "is a heavy one, often crushing individuality of judgment and action," and he added that the habits, rules, and criticisms under which he had grown up had not left him the freedom and courage which are needed in the style of address best suited to the Western people.

Channing no doubt unduly stressed the freedom of the West in this respect.

The frontier had its own conventions and prejudices, and New England was breaking its own cake of custom and proclaiming a new liberty at the very time he wrote.

But there was truth in the Eastern thought of the West, as a land of intellectual toleration, one which questioned the old order of things and made innovation its very creed.

The West laid emphasis upon the practical and demanded that ideals should be put to work for useful ends; ideals were tested by their direct contributions to the betterment of the average man, rather than by the production of the man of exceptional genius and distinction.

For, in fine this was the goal of the Middle West, the welfare of the average man; not only the man of the South, or of the East, the Yankee, or the Irishman, or the German, but all men in one common fellowship.

This was the hope of their youth, of that youth when Abraham Lincoln rose from rail-splitter to country lawyer, from Illinois legislator to congressman and from congressman to President.

It is not strange that in all this flux and freedom and novelty and vast spaces, the pioneer did not sufficiently consider the need of disciplined devotion to the government which he himself created and operated.

But the name of Lincoln and the response of the pioneer to the duties of the Civil War,--to the sacrifices and the restraints on freedom which it entailed under his presidency, reminds us that they knew how to take part in a common cause, even while they knew that war's conditions were destructive of many of the things for which they worked.

There are two kinds of governmental discipline: that which proceeds from free choice, in the conviction that restraint of individual or class interests is necessary for the common good; and that which is imposed by a dominant class, upon a subjected and helpless people.

The latter is Prussian discipline, the discipline of a harsh machine-like, logical organization, based on the rule of a military autocracy.

It assumes that if you do not crush your opponent first, he will crush you.

It is the discipline of a nation ruled by its General Staff, assuming war as the normal condition of peoples, and attempting with remorseless logic to extend its operations to the destruction of freedom everywhere.

It can only be met by the discipline of a people who use their own government for worthy ends, who preserve individuality and mobility in society and respect the rights of others, who follow the dictates of humanity and fair play, the principles of give and take.

The Prussian discipline is the discipline of Thor, the War God, against the discipline of the White Christ.

Pioneer democracy has had to learn lessons by experience: the lesson that government on principles of free democracy can accomplish many things which the men of the middle of the nineteenth century did not realize were even possible.

They have had to sacrifice something of their passion for individual unrestraint; they have had to learn that the specially trained man, the man fitted for his calling by education and experience, whether in the field of science or of industry, has a place in government; that the rule of the people is effective and enduring only as it incorporates the trained specialist into the organization of that government, whether as umpire between contending interests or as the efficient instrument in the hands of democracy.

Organized democracy after the era of free land has learned that popular government to be successful must not only be legitimately the choice of the whole people; that the offices of that government must not only be open to all, but that in the fierce struggle of nations in the field of economic competition and in the field of war, the salvation and perpetuity of the republic depend upon recognition of the fact that specialization of the organs of the government, the choice of the fit and the capable for office, is quite as important as the extension of popular control.

When we lost our free lands and our isolation from the Old World, we lost our immunity from the results of mistakes, of waste, of inefficiency, and of inexperience in our government.

But in the present day we are also learning another lesson which was better known to the pioneers than to their immediate successors.

We are learning that the distinction arising from devotion to the interests of the commonwealth is a higher distinction than mere success in economic competition.

America is now awarding laurels to the men who sacrifice their triumphs in the rivalry of business in order to give their service to the cause of a liberty-loving nation, their wealth and their genius to the success of her ideals.

That craving for distinction which once drew men to pile up wealth and exhibit power over the industrial processes of the nation, is now finding a new outlet in the craving for distinction that comes from service to the Union, in satisfaction in the use of great talent for the good of the republic.

And all over the nation, in voluntary organizations for aid to the government, is being shown the pioneer principle of association that was expressed in the "house raising."

It is shown in the Red Cross, the Y. M. C. A.

, the Knights of Columbus, the councils and boards of science, commerce, labor, agriculture; and in all the countless other types, from the association of women in their kitchen who carry out the recommendations of the Food Director and revive the plain living of the pioneer, to the Boy Scouts who are laying the foundations for a self-disciplined and virile generation worthy to follow the trail of the backwoodsmen.

It is an inspiring prophecy of the revival of the old pioneer conception of the obligations and opportunities of neighborliness, broadening to a national and even to an international scope.

The promise of what that wise and lamented philosopher, Josiah Royce called, "the beloved community."

In the spirit of the pioneer's "house raising" lies the salvation of the Republic.

This then is the heritage of pioneer experience,--a passionate belief that a democracy was possible which should leave the individual a part to play in free society and not make him a cog in a machine operated from above; which trusted in the common man, in his tolerance, his ability to adjust differences with good humor, and to work out an American type from the contributions of all nations--a type for which he would fight against those who challenged it in arms, and for which in time of war he would make sacrifices, even the temporary sacrifice of individual freedom and his life, lest that freedom be lost forever.

FOOTNOTES:

[335:1] An address delivered at the dedication of the building of the State Historical Society of Minnesota, May 11, 1918. Printed by permission of the Society.

[343:1] See De Tocqueville's interesting appreciation of this American phenomenon.

INDEX

Absentee proprietors, 55, 297 Achievement, 309 Adams, Henry, 213 Adams, J. Q.

, 26, 192, 230 Agriculture, 314, 329;

Middle West, 149, 150 Agriculture, Department of, 320 Alamance, 119, 120 Alaska, 296 Albany, 43, 52 Albany congress of 1754, 15 Algonquin Indians, 130 Aliens, land tenure by, 110 Alleghany Mountains, 9, 18, 67;

as barrier to be overcome, 195 Allen, Ethan, 54 Allen, W. V.

, 220 American Historical Assoc.

, 159 American history, social forces, 311;

survey of recent, 311 American life, distinguishing feature, 2 American people, 339 American spirit, 306, 336, 337 "American System," 171, 172 Americanization, effective, 4 Arid lands, 9, 147, 219, 239, 245, 278 Aristocracy, 250, 254, 257, 275 Army posts, frontier, 16;

prototypes, 47 Asia, 296 Association, voluntary, 343, 344, 358 Astor's American Fur Co. , 6, 143 Atlantic coast, as early frontier, 4;

Mississippi Valley and, 190, 191;

Northern, History, 295 Atlantic frontier, composition, 12 Atlantic states, 207, 208 Augusta, Ga.

, 98 Autocracy, 344 Back country, 68, 70;

democracy of, 248;

New England, 75 Backwoods society, 212 Backwoodsmen, 163, 164 Bacon, Francis, 286 Bacon's Rebellion, 84, 247, 251, 301 Baltimore, trade, 108 Bancroft, George, 168 Bank, 171, 254, 325 Bedford, Pa.

, 5 Beecher, Lyman, 35 Bell, John, 192 Benton, T. H.

, 26, 35, 192, 325, 328 Berkshires, 60, 71, 77 Beverley, Robert, 85, 91;

manor, 92 "Birch seal," 78 Black Hills, 145 Blackmar, F. W.

, 238 Blank patents, 95 Blood-feud, 253 Blount, William, 187 Blue Ridge, 90, 99 Boone, A. J.

, 19 Boone, Daniel, 18, 105, 124, 165, 206 Boston, trade, 108 Boutmy, E. G.

, 211 Braddock, Edward, 181, 324 Brattle, Thomas, 56 British and Middle West, 350 Brown, B. Gratz, 355 Brunswick County, Va.

, 91 Bryan, W. J.

, 204, 236, 237, 246, 281, 327, 329 Bryce, James, 165, 206, 211, 284 Buffalo, N. Y.

, 136, 150, 151 Buffalo herds, 144 Buffer state, 131, 134 Burke, Edmund, 33;

on the Germans, 109 Byrd, Col. William, 84, 87, 98 Calhoun, J. C.

, 2, 105, 141, 174, 206, 241;

on representation, 117;

policy of obtaining western trade for the South, 196 California, 8;

gold, 144 Canada, 53, 226;

barrier between, and the United States, 131;

border warfare, 44;

homesteads, 296;

Middle West and, 128;

wheat fields, 278 Canadians, 227 Canals, deep water, 150 Capital, 276, 305, 325;

concentration and combinations, 245, 261, 266, 280, 305-306 "Capitalistic classes," 285 Capitalists, 20;

"expectant," 343 Capitals, state, transfers, 121 Captains of industry, 258, 259, 260 Carnegie, Andrew, 260, 265 Caroline cow-pens, 16 Catron, John, 345 Cattle raising in Virginia, 88, 89, 92 Census, first, frontier at, 5 Census of 1820, frontier, 6 Census of 1890, extinction of frontier, 1, 9, 38, 39, 297 Center of nation, 222 Channing, W. E.

, 355 Charleston, S. C.

, 88, 108, 196 Chase, S. P.

, 104, 142 Cherry Valley, 104 Chicago, 137, 150, 151, 180, 350;

character, 232 Chillicothe, 133, 223 Cincinnati, 133, 151, 162, 223, 231, 232 Cincinnati and Charleston R. R.

, 174 Cities, 297, 316-317;

northeastern, 294-295;

seaboard, 194, 195, 196;

three periods of development, 195 Civil War, 356;

Middle West and, 142;

Mississippi Valley and, 201;

Northwest and, 217 Clark, G. R.

, 131, 167, 186 Clark, J. B.

, 332 Class distinctions, 280, 285 Clay, Henry, 26, 168, 171, 172, 173, 174, 192, 197, 206, 213, 216, 226, 241, 304, 325 Cleaveland, Gen. Moses, 133, 222, 257 Cleveland, 133, 150, 223, 231, 232 Clinton, De Witt, 195, 196 Coal supply, 313 Coast, Atlantic, 206;

destiny, 295;

interior and, antagonisms, 110 Coeducation, 353 Colden, Cadwallader, 80 Colonial life, 11 Colonial system, 127 Colonization, 312;

English and French contrasted, 13-14;

peaceful, 169 Colony of free humanity, 337-338 Columbus, Ohio, 162, 229 Combinations of capital and of labor, 245 Commencement seasons, 290 Commons, J. R.

, 327 Community, "beloved community," 358;

life, 347;

type of settlement, 73, 74, 125 Competition, 154, 203, 277, 308, 312 Compromise, 174, 198, 230, 236;

slavery, 140, 142 Concentration of power and wealth, 245, 261, 266, 280 Concord, Mass.

, 39 Concurrent majority, 118 Congregational church, 74, 112 Congress and frontiersmen, 252-253 Connecticut, frontier towns, 42, 45, 53;

land policy, 76 Connecticut River, 52, 53, 72 Connecticut Valley, 63, 73 Conquest, 269 Conscience, American, 328 Constitution, U. S.

, 209, 244 Constitutional convention of 1787, 249 Constitutions, state, 121, 252, 352;

reconstruction, 192 Cooperation, voluntary, 165, 257, 258 Corn, areas, 149;

belt, 151 Corporations, 265, 328 Cotton culture, 28, 139, 255;

early extension, 7;

transfer from the East to Mississippi Valley, 194 "Cotton Kingdom," 174, 189, 194, 198 Coureurs de bois, 182 Cow pens, 16, 88 Crockett, Davy, 105 Crops, migration, 149 Currency, 148;

evil, 32;

expansion, 210 Cutler, Manasseh, 141 Dairy interests in Wisconsin, 234, 236 Dakotas, settlement, 145, 146 Darien, Ga.

, 98 Davis, Jefferson, 105, 139, 174 De Bow, J. D. B.

, 197 De Bow's _Review_, 217 Debs, E. V.

, 281 Dedham, 40, 58 Deerfield, 48, 52, 58, 70 Democracy, 32, 54, 306;

doubts of, 280;

established in Old West, 107;

free land and, 274;

frontier, early, 106;

frontier and, 30, 31, 247, 249;

Godkin on, 307;

in early 18th century, 98;

Jacksonian, 192, 302, 342-343;

Jeffersonian, 250, 251;

magnitude of achievement in the West, 258;

Middle West, 154;

Mississippi Valley, 183;

neighborhood, 346;

new type in West, 210, 216;

Ohio Valley, influence, 172;

Ohio Valley and, 175;

organized, 357;

origin, 293;

outcome of American experiences, 266;

pressure on the universities, 283;

significance of Mississippi Valley in promoting, 190;

Upland South, 165;

Western contributions, 243;

Western ideals, 261;

_see also_ Pioneer democracy Democratic party, 327, 330;

basis, 248;

Middle Western wing, 352 Democratic-Republican party, 250 Denver, Colo.

, 19 De Tocqueville.

_See_ Tocqueville Detroit, 135, 150 Development, American, 205, 221;

four changes, 244;

personal, 271;

significant decade, 246-247;

study of, 10;

true point of view, 3;

Western, 218 D'Iberville.

_See_ Iberville Discovery, 271, 293, 301, 306 Doddridge, Joseph, 115 Dogs for hunting Indians, 45 Douglas, S. A.

, 140;

Lincoln debates, 230 Douglas, William, 109 Down east, 79 Dracut, 111 Dreams, 301, 339 Duel, 253 Duluth, 150, 151, 234 Dunkards, 263 Dunstable, 48, 56 Duquesne, Abraham, 14 Dwight, Timothy (1752-1817), 63;

fears of pioneer class, 251 East, efforts to restrict advance of frontier, 33, 34;

fears of the West, 208;

out of touch with West, 18 Economic forces and political institutions, 243 Economic historian, 332 Economic legislation and Ohio Valley, 170 Education, 282;

Middle West, 156 Edwards, Jonathan, 63 Egleston, Melville, 55 Eliot, C. W.

, on corporation, 265;

on democracy and slavery, 256 Emerson, R. W.

, 353;

on Lincoln, 256 England, decrease of dependence on, 23;

Mississippi Valley and, 180, 186;

Old Northwest and, 131, 134 English pioneers, 270 English settlers in Michigan and Wisconsin, 226 English stock and English speech, 23 Equality, 274;

New England, 61, 62, 63;

Western settlers, 212 Erie Canal, 7, 136, 195, 197 Europe, American democracy and, 282;

how America reacted on, 3;

Southeastern, 294, 295, 316 Europeans, 267 Evolution, American, as key to history, 11 Expansion, 206, 219, 304, 345;

Ohio Valley and, 166;

world politics, 246 Experts, 284, 285, 286 "Fall line," 4, 9, 68;

efforts to establish military frontier on, 84 Fairfax, Lord, 92, 123 Far East, 315 Far West, 315, 341 Farm lands, 297 Farm machinery, 276 Farmers, 238, 239 Farmer's frontier, 12, 16, 18 Federal colonial system, 168, 169 Federal Reserve districts, 322 Fertility, 129 Field, Marshall, 265 Finance, 318, 325;

pioneer ideas, 148 Fire-arms and Indians, 13 Firmin, Giles, 56 Food supply, 279, 294, 314 Foreign parentage, Indiana and Illinois, 232;

Michigan, 233;

Western States, 237;

Wisconsin, 233-234 Foreign policy, 168, 219 Forest Service, 320 Forest philosophy, 207 "Foresters," 63 Forests, 270, 293;

Middle West, 130 Fortified houses, 71 Fourierists, 263 France, efforts to revive empire in America, 167;

Middle West and, 131;

Mississippi Valley and, 180, 186;

western exploration, 163;

Franchise, 249-250, 252 Franklin, Benjamin, Mississippi Valley and, 182;

on the Germans, 109 Free Soil party, 141, 173, 217 French explorers, 163 French frontier, 125 French settlers in Michigan and Wisconsin, 226 Frontier, conservative attitude toward advance, 63;

definition, 3, 41;

demand for independent statehood, 248;

efforts to check and restrict it, 33;

evil effects, 32;

extinction, 1, 9, 38, 39, 321;

farmers, 239, 240;

first official, 39, 54;

French, 125;

importance as a military training school, 15;

influence toward democracy, 247, 249;

kinds and modes of advance, 12;

Massachusetts, 65;

military, of Old West, 106-107;

religious aspects, 36;

Spanish, 125;

towns in Massachusetts, 42, 45, 53, 70;

various comparisons, 10 Frontiersmen, 206, 209, 212;

in Congress, 252-253;

Mississippi Valley, 182;

Virginia idea, 86 Fulton, Robert, 171 Fur trade, 13;

England after Revolution, 131;

Hudson River, 80;

Southern, Old West, 87 Gallatin, Albert, 191, 252, 317 Galveston, 202 Garfield, J. A.

, 241 Geographic factors, 329 Geographic provinces, 158 Georgia, 174, 196;

restriction of land tenure, 97;

settlement, 97 Germanic germs, 3, 4 Germans, 263;

in New York in early times, 5;

Middle West and, 137-138, 146;

Palatine, 5, 82, 100, 109, 124;

political exiles, 349;

sectaries, 164;

Wisconsin, 23, 227, 236;

zone of settlement in Great Valley, 102 Glarus, 236 Glenn, James, 23, 108 Godkin, E. L.

, 307 Goochland County, Va.

, 93 Government, 321;

paternal, 328;

popular, 357 Government discipline, 356 Government expeditions, 17 Government intervention, 344 Government ownership, 148 Government powers, 307 Government regulation, 281 Granger movement, 148, 203, 218, 276, 281 Grant, U. S.

, 142 Granville, Lord, 95, 123 Great Lakes, 128, 149, 150, 173, 297 Great Plains, 8, 128, 147;

Indian trade and war, 144 Great Valley, 100;

colonization, 100-101 Greater South, 174 Greeley, Horace, 104 Green Mountain Boys, 78 Greenback movement, 148, 203, 218, 276 Greenway manor, 92 Groseilliers, 180 Groton, 48, 57 Grund, F. J.

, 7 Grundy, Felix, 192 Gulf coast, 295 Gulf States, 141;

occupation, 139 Hammond, J. H.

, on slavery problem in the Mississippi Valley, 198 Hanna, Marcus, 265 Harriman, E. H.

, 280, 318 Harrison, W. H.

, 168, 173, 189, 192, 213, 255 Hart, A. B.

, 177 Hartford, 76 Haverhill, 51, 62 Hayes, R. B.

, 241 Henry, Patrick, 94 Heroes, 254, 256;

Western, 213 High thinking, 287 Higher law, 239 Hill, J. J.

, 260 Historian, 333 Historic ideals, 306, 335 Historical societies, 159-160, 339 History, character, 331-332;

new viewpoints, 330 Holland, J. G.

, 73 Holst, H. E.