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First had come the children of the interior of the South, and with ax and rifle in hand had cut their clearings in the forest, raised their log cabins, fought the Indians and by 1830 had pushed their way to the very edge of the prairies along the Ohio and Missouri Valleys, leaving unoccupied most of the Basin of the Great Lakes.
These slashers of the forest, these self-sufficing pioneers, raising the corn and live stock for their own need, living scattered and apart, had at first small interest in town life or a share in markets. They were passionately devoted to the ideal of equality, but it was an ideal which assumed that under free conditions in the midst of unlimited resources, the homogeneous society of the pioneers must result in equality. What they objected to was arbitrary obstacles, artificial limitations upon the freedom of each member of this frontier folk to work out his own career without fear or favor. What they instinctively opposed was the crystallization of differences, the monopolization of opportunity and the fixing of that monopoly by government or by social customs. The road must be open. The game must be played according to the rules. There must be no artificial stifling of equality of opportunity, no closed doors to the able, no stopping the free game before it was played to the end. More than that, there was an unformulated, perhaps, but very real feeling, that mere success in the game, by which the abler men were able to achieve preeminence gave to the successful ones no right to look down upon their neighbors, no vested title to assert superiority as a matter of pride and to the diminution of the equal right and dignity of the less successful.
If this democracy of Southern pioneers, this Jacksonian democracy, was, as its socialist critics have called it, in reality a democracy of "expectant capitalists," it was not one which expected or acknowledged on the part of the successful ones the right to harden their triumphs into the rule of a privileged class. In short, if it is indeed true that the backwoods democracy was based upon equality of opportunity, it is also true that it resented the conception that opportunity under competition should result in the hopeless inequality, or rule of class. Ever a new clearing must be possible. And because the wilderness seemed so unending, the menace to the enjoyment of this ideal seemed rather to be feared from government, within or without, than from the operations of internal evolution.
From the first, it became evident that these men had means of supplementing their individual activity by informal combinations. One of the things that impressed all early travelers in the United States was the capacity for extra-legal, voluntary association.[343:1] This was natural enough; in all America we can study the process by which in a new land social customs form and crystallize into law. We can even see how the personal leader becomes the governmental official. This power of the newly arrived pioneers to join together for a common end without the intervention of governmental institutions was one of their marked characteristics. The log rolling, the house-raising, the husking bee, the apple paring, and the squatters' associations whereby they protected themselves against the speculators in securing title to their clearings on the public domain, the camp meeting, the mining camp, the vigilantes, the cattle-raisers' associations, the "gentlemen's agreements," are a few of the indications of this attitude. It is well to emphasize this American trait, because in a modified way it has come to be one of the most characteristic and important features of the United States of to-day. America does through informal association and understandings on the part of the people many of the things which in the Old World are and can be done only by governmental intervention and compulsion. These associations were in America not due to immemorial custom of tribe or village community. They were extemporized by voluntary action.
The actions of these associations had an authority akin to that of law. They were usually not so much evidences of a disrespect for law and order as the only means by which real law and order were possible in a region where settlement and society had gone in advance of the institutions and instrumentalities of organized society.
Because of these elements of individualistic competition and the power of spontaneous association, pioneers were responsive to leadership. The backwoodsmen knew that under the free opportunities of his life the abler man would reveal himself, and show them the way. By free choice and not by compulsion, by spontaneous impulse, and not by the domination of a caste, they rallied around a cause, they supported an issue. They yielded to the principle of government by agreement, and they hated the doctrine of autocracy even before it gained a name.
They looked forward to the extension of their American principles to the Old World and their keenest apprehensions came from the possibility of the extension of the Old World's system of arbitrary rule, its class wars and rivalries and interventions to the destruction of the free States and democratic institutions which they were building in the forests of America.
If we add to these aspects of early backwoods democracy, its spiritual qualities, we shall more easily understand them. These men were emotional. As they wrested their clearing from the woods and from the savages who surrounded them, as they expanded that clearing and saw the beginnings of commonwealths, where only little communities had been, and as they saw these commonwealths touch hands with each other along the great course of the Mississippi River, they became enthusiastically optimistic and confident of the continued expansion of this democracy. They had faith in themselves and their destiny. And that optimistic faith was responsible both for their confidence in their own ability to rule and for the passion for expansion. They looked to the future. "Others appeal to history: an American appeals to prophecy; and with Malthus in one hand and a map of the back country in the other, he boldly defies us to a comparison with America as she is to be," said a London periodical in 1821. Just because, perhaps, of the usual isolation of their lives, when they came together in associations whether of the camp meeting or of the political gathering, they felt the influence of a common emotion and enthusiasm. Whether Scotch-Irish Presbyterian, Baptist, or Methodist, these people saturated their religion and their politics with feeling. Both the stump and the pulpit were centers of energy, electric cells capable of starting widespreading fires. They felt both their religion and their democracy, and were ready to fight for it.
This democracy was one that involved a real feeling of social comradeship among its widespread members. Justice Catron, who came from Arkansas to the Supreme Court in the presidency of Jackson, said: "The people of New Orleans and St. Louis are next neighbors—if we desire to know a man in any quarter of the union we inquire of our next neighbor, who but the other day lived by him." Exaggerated as this is, it nevertheless had a surprising measure of truth for the Middle West as well. For the Mississippi River was the great highway down which groups of pioneers like Abraham Lincoln, on their rafts and flat boats, brought the little neighborhood surplus. After the steamboat came to the western waters the voyages up and down by merchants and by farmers shifting their homes, brought people into contact with each other over wide areas.
This enlarged neighborhood democracy was determined not by a reluctant admission that under the law one man is as good as another; it was based upon "good fellowship," sympathy and understanding. They were of a stock, moreover, which sought new trails and were ready to follow where the trail led, innovators in society as well as finders of new lands.
By 1830 the Southern inundation ebbed and a different tide flowed in from the northeast by way of the Erie Canal and steam navigation on the Great Lakes to occupy the zone unreached by Southern settlement. This new tide spread along the margins of the Great Lakes, found the oak openings and small prairie islands of Southern Michigan and Wisconsin; followed the fertile forested ribbons along the river courses far into the prairie lands; and by the end of the forties began to venture into the margin of the open prairie.
In 1830 the Middle West contained a little over a million and a half people; in 1840, over three and a third millions; in 1850, nearly five and a half millions. Although in 1830 the North Atlantic States numbered between three and four times as many people as the Middle West, yet in those two decades the Middle West made an actual gain of several hundred thousand more than did the old section. Counties in the newer states rose from a few hundred to ten or fifteen thousand people in the space of less than five years. Suddenly, with astonishing rapidity and volume, a new people was forming with varied elements, ideals and institutions drawn from all over this nation and from Europe. They were confronted with the problem of adjusting different stocks, varied customs and habits, to their new home.
In comparison with the Ohio Valley, the peculiarity of the occupation of the northern zone of the Middle West, lay in the fact that the native element was predominantly from the older settlements of the Middle West itself and from New York and New England. But it was from the central and western counties of New York and from the western and northern parts of New England, the rural regions of declining agricultural prosperity, that the bulk of this element came.
Thus the influence of the Middle West stretched into the Northeast, and attracted a farming population already suffering from western competition. The advantage of abundant, fertile, and cheap land, the richer agricultural returns, and especially the opportunities for youth to rise in all the trades and professions, gave strength to this competition. By it New England was profoundly and permanently modified.
This Yankee stock carried with it a habit of community life, in contrast with the individualistic democracy of the Southern element. The colonizing land companies, the town, the school, the church, the feeling of local unity, furnished the evidences of this instinct for communities. This instinct was accompanied by the creation of cities, the production of a surplus for market, the reaching out to connections with the trading centers of the East, the evolution of a more complex and at the same time a more integrated industrial society than that of the Southern pioneer.
But they did not carry with them the unmodified New England institutions and traits. They came at a time and from a people less satisfied with the old order than were their neighbors in the East. They were the young men with initiative, with discontent; the New York element especially was affected by the radicalism of Locofoco democracy which was in itself a protest against the established order.
The winds of the prairies swept away almost at once a mass of old habits and prepossessions. Said one of these pioneers in a letter to friends in the East:
If you value ease more than money or prosperity, don't come. . . . Hands are too few for the work, houses for the inhabitants, and days for the day's work to be done. . . . Next if you can't stand seeing your old New England ideas, ways of doing, and living and in fact, all of the good old Yankee fashions knocked out of shape and altered, or thrown by as unsuited to the climate, don't be caught out here. But if you can bear grief with a smile, can put up with a scale of accommodations ranging from the soft side of a plank before the fire (and perhaps three in a bed at that) down through the middling and inferior grades; if you are never at a loss for ways to do the most unpracticable things without tools; if you can do all this and some more come on. . . . It is a universal rule here to help one another, each one keeping an eye single to his own business.
They knew that they were leaving many dear associations of the old home, giving up many of the comforts of life, sacrificing things which those who remained thought too vital to civilization to be left. But they were not mere materialists ready to surrender all that life is worth for immediate gain. They were idealists themselves, sacrificing the ease of the immediate future for the welfare of their children, and convinced of the possibility of helping to bring about a better social order and a freer life. They were social idealists. But they based their ideals on trust in the common man and the readiness to make adjustments, not on the rule of a benevolent despot or a controlling class.
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. von, 24
Home markets, 108, 216
Home missions, 36, 354
Homestead law of 1862, 145, 276
Hoosier State, 224
Housatonic River, 71
Housatonic Valley, 72
Houston, Sam, 105
Howells, W. D., 353
Hudson River, 53, 79; frontier, 43; fur trade, 80
Humanitarian movement, 327
Huxley, T. H., on modern civilization, 300
Iberville, P. le M. d', 180
Icarians, 263
Idealists, America the goal, 261; social, 349
Ideals, 239; American, and the West, 290; American, loyalty to, 307; American historic, 306, 335; immigrants, 264; Middle West, 153; Mississippi Valley, 203; pioneer, and the State university, 269; readjustment, 321, 328; Western, 209, 214, 267; Western democracy and, 261
Illinois, composite nationality, 232; elements of settlement, 225; settlement, 135
Illiteracy in Middle West, 353
Immigrants, 277; idealism, 264
Immigration, 146, 215, 316
Indian guides, 17
Indian policy, 10
Indian question, early, 9
Indian reservations, 278
Indian trade, 6, 13, 14; Middle West, 143, 144
Indian wars, 9; New England and, 69; Ohio Valley and, 167
Indiana, character, 232; constitution, 282; elements in settlement, 223-224; settlement, 134
Indianapolis, 162, 229
Indians, buffer state for England, 131, 134; congresses to treat with, 15; effects of trades on, 13; hunting Indians with dogs, 45; influence on Puritans and New England, 44; Middle West and, 133, 134; society, 13
Individualism, 30, 32, 37, 78, 125, 140, 203, 254, 259, 271, 273, 302, 306; in the Old West, 107; reaction against, 307; Upland South, 165
Industrial conditions, 280, 281, 285; Middle West, 149, 154; Mississippi Valley, 194, 201; Ohio Valley and, 175
Industry, captains of, and large undertakings, 258, 259, 260; control, 318
Inland waterways, 202
Insurgent movement, 327
Intellectual life and the frontier, 37
Intercolonial congresses, 15
Interior and coast, antagonisms, 110
Internal commerce, 171, 188
Internal improvements, 27, 28, 29, 111, 170, 172, 216, 257; after 1812 to break down barrier to West, 195; Old West, 109
Internal trade, Old West, 108, 109
Iowa, 141, 143; elements and growth, 229; settlement, 137
Ipswich, 56
Irish, 350
Iron mines in Middle West, 152
Iron ore, 313
Iroquois Indians, 13, 80
Irrigation, 258, 279
Isms, 239
Izard, Ralph, 274
Jackson, Andrew, 105, 168, 173, 189, 206, 213, 216, 241, 252, 253, 268, 326; personification of frontier traits, 252, 254
Jackson, Stonewall, 105
Jacksonian democracy, 192, 302, 342-343
James River, 84, 90; settlement, 93
Jefferson, Thomas, 93, 105, 114, 268; conception of democracy, 250, 251; on England and the Mississippi, 186; on the pioneer in Congress, 253; on the importance of the Mississippi Valley, 188
"Jim River" Valley, 145
Johnson, R. M., 192
Johnson, Sir William, 81, 104
Justice, direct forms in the West, 212
Kansas, 142, 144, 146, 151; Populists, 238; settlers, 237
Kansas City, 151
Kentucky, 19, 122, 162, 167, 168, 169, 192, 225, 253; slavery, 174
King Philip's War 40, 46, 69
Kipling, Rudyard, "Foreloper," 270; "Son of the English," 262
Labor, combinations, 245; composition of laboring class, 316
Labor theorists, 303, 326
Lamar, L. Q. C. (1825-1893), 25
Lancaster, Mass., 48, 57, 61
Land, 328-329; abundance, 274; abundance, as basis of democracy, 191, 192; alien tenure, 110; free, exhausted, 244-245; free Western, 211, 259; fundamental fact in Western society, 211; "mongering," 61; see also Public lands
Land companies, 123, 347
Land grants, 9; for schools and colleges, 74; to railroads, 276
Land Ordinance of 1785, 132
Land policies, 10
Land system, "equality" principle in New England, 61, 62, 63; Georgia, 97; later federal, 123; New England, 54; New England conflicts, 75; New York State, 80; North Carolina, 95; Old West, 122; Pennsylvania, 101; Virginia, 91; Virginia grants to societies, 85
La Salle, 180
Laurentide glacier, 129
Law and order, 298, 344
Leadership, 213, 291, 292, 307; educated, 286
Lease, Mary Ellen, 240
Legislation, 277, 307; frontier and, 24;
Leicester, 59
Leigh, B. W., 115
Lewis and Clark, 13, 17
Liberty, Bacon on, 286; for universities, 287; individual, 213; Western, 212
Life as a whole, 287
Lincoln, Abraham, 105, 135, 142, 174, 206, 213, 217, 225, 241, 268, 304, 356; Douglas debates, 230; embodiment of pioneer period, 255-256; Ohio Valley, influence of, 175
Lincoln, C. H., 113
Litchfield, 71, 76, 124
Livingston manor, 81, 82
Locofocos, 303, 326, 348
Log cabin, 338
"Log cabin campaign," 173
London Company, 301
Loria, Achille, 11
Louisiana, 180, 208
Louisiana Purchase, 25, 34, 140, 167, 213, 251; effect on Mississippi Valley, 189-190
Louisville, 162
Lowell, J. R., on Lincoln, 255
Loyal Land Co., 123, 182
Lumber industry, 152; Wisconsin, 234-235
Lumbermen, 272, 273
Lynch law, 212, 272; New England, 78
McKinley, William, 236, 237, 241
Magnitude, 258, 260, 276
Maine, 52-53
Maine coast, 79
Mallet brothers, 180
Manila, battle of, 247
Manorial practice in New York, 83
Marietta, 124, 133, 223, 257
"Mark colonies," 70
Marquette, Jacques, 180
Martineau, Harriet, 214, 303, 339
Massachusetts, attempt to locate frontier line, 39; frontier, 65; frontier towns, 42, 45, 53, 70; locating towns before settlement, 76
Mather, Cotton, attitude as to advancing frontier, 63
Mesabi mines, 152, 234
Mendon, 57
Methodists, 238
Mexico, 295
Michigan, 135-136, 137; development and resources, 233; settlement, 226, 228
Middle region, 27; in formation of the Old West, 79; typical American, 28
Middle West, agriculture, 150; Canada and, 128; Civil War and, 142; early society, 153-154; education, 282; elements of settlement—Northern and Southern, 346, 351; Europe and, 282; flow of population into, 132-133; forests, 130; Germans and, 137-138; Germans and Scandinavians, 146; idealism, 153; immigrants of varied nationalities, 349; importance, 126, 128; increase of settlement in the fifties, 142-143; industrial organism, 149; meaning of term, 126; nationalism, 142; natural resources, 129; New England element, 137; peculiarity and influence, 347; pioneer democracy, 335; settlement, 135, 342; slavery question and, 139; southern zone, 138
Migration, 21, 237, 337; communal vs. individual, 125; crops, 149; interstate, 224; labor, 62; New England, and land policy, 77
Militant expansive movement, 105
Military frontier, 41, 47; early form, 47; Old West, significance, 106-107; Virginia in later 17th century, 83, 84
Milwaukee, 137, 227, 236, 350
Miner's frontier, 12
Mining camps, 9
Mining laws, 10
Minneapolis, 137, 151, 234
Minnesota, 143, 144, 237; economic development, 234; Historical Society, 335, 338-339
Missions to the Indians, 79
Mississippi Company, 123, 182
Mississippi River, 7, 9, 142, 185, 194, 345
Mississippi Valley, 10, 139, 166-167, 324; beginning of stratification, 197; Civil War and, 201; democracy and, 190; early population, 183; economic progress after 1812, 194; England's efforts to control, 180-181; extent, 179; French explorers in, 180; frontiersmen's allegiance, 186-187; idealism, social order, 203-204; industrial growth after the Civil War, 201-202; political power and growth from 1810 to 1840, 193; primitive history, 179; question of severance from the Union, 187; significance in American history, 177, 185; slavery struggle and, 201; social forces, early, 183
Missouri, 192
Missouri Compromise, 140, 174, 226
Missouri Valley, 135
Mohawk Valley, 68, 82
Monroe, James, 150
Monroe Doctrine, 296; germ, 168
Monticello, 93
Moravians, 95, 102
Morgan, J. P., 318
Mormons, 263
Morris, Gouverneur, 207
Nashaway, 57
National problem, 293
Nationalism, 29; evils of, 157; Middle West and, 142
Nationalities, mixture, 27; replacement in Wisconsin, 235
Naturalization, 110
Nebraska, 144, 145, 220; settlers, 237
Negro, 295
New England, 27, 301; back lands, 75; coast vs. interior, 111; colonies from, 124; culmination of frontier movement, 78; early official frontier line, 43; economic life, 78; effect on the West, 36; foreign element, 294; frontier protection, 46-47; frontier types, 43-44; Greater New England, 66, 70; ideas, and Middle West, 348; Indian wars, 69; land system, 54; Middle West and, 347; Ohio settlement and, 223; Old West and, 68; Old West and interior New England, 70; pioneer type, 239; streams of settlement from, 215; two New Englands of the formative period of the Old West, 78-79
New Englanders in the Middle West, 137; in Wisconsin and the lake region, 228; three movements of advance from the coast, 136; Westernized, 215, 216
New Glarus, 236
New Hampshire, 69, 72, 77, 111
New Hampshire grants, 77
New Northwest, 222
New Orleans, 136, 137, 167, 187, 188, 189, 217, 295
New South, 218; Old West and, 100
New West, 257
New York City, 136, 195, 318
New York State, early frontier, 43; lack of expansive power, 80; land system, 80; settlement from New England, 83; western, 230
Newspapers of the Middle West, 353
Nitrates, 279
Norfolk, 195
North Carolina, 87, 106; coast vs. upland, 116; in Indiana Settlement, 224; public lands, 95; settlement, 94, 95; slavery, 122; taxation, 118, 119
North Central States, 126; region as a whole, 341
North Dakota, development, 237
Northampton, 63
Northfield, 53
Northwest, democracy, 356; Old and New, 222; see also Old Northwest
Northwest Territory, 222
Northwestern boundary, 324
Norton, C. E., 208-209
Norwegians, 232
Nullification, 117, 254
Ohio, diversity of interests, 231-232; elements of settlement, 223; history, 133-134; New England element, 223; Southern contribution to settlement, 223
Ohio Company, 123, 133, 141, 182, 223
Ohio River, 5, 161
Ohio Valley, 104; as a highway, 162; economic legislation and, 170; effects on national expansion, 166; in American history, 157; influence on Lincoln, 175; part in making of the nation, 160; physiography, 160-161; relation to the South, 174; religious spirit, 164, 165; stock and settlement, 164
Oil wells, 297
Oklahoma, 278, 297
Old National road, 136
Old Northwest, 131, 132, 136, 221; as a whole, 241-242; defined, 218; elements of settlement, 222; political position, 236; social origin, 222-223; Southern element in settlement, 223, 225-226; turning point of control, 229
"Old South," 166
Old West, colonization of areas beyond the mountains, 124; consequences of formation, 106; New South and, 100; summary of frontier movement in 17th and early 18th centuries, 98; term defined, 68
Old World, 261, 267, 294, 299, 344, 349; effect of American frontier, 22; West and, 206, 210
Opportunity, 37, 212, 239, 259-260, 261, 263, 271-272, 342, 343
Orangeburg, 96
Ordinance of 1787, 25, 132, 168, 190, 223
Oregon country, 144
Orient, 297
Osgood, H. L., 30
Pacific coast, 168, 219, 304
Pacific Northwest, 296
Pacific Ocean, 297, 315
Packing industries, 151
Palatine Germans, 5, 22, 100, 109, 124; New York State and, 82
Palisades, 71
Panama Canal, 295
Panics, 279-280
Paper money, 32, 111, 121, 122, 209
Parkman, Francis, 70, 72, 144, 163
"Particular plantations," 41
Past, lessons of, 355
Patroon estates, 80
Paxton Boys, 112
Pecks "New Guide to the West," 19
Penn, William, 262
Pennsylvania, 23, 27; coast and interior, antagonisms, 112; German settlement, 82, 100; Great Valley of, 68, 164; land grants, 101; new Pennsylvania of the Great Valley, 100; Scotch-Irish, 103, 104; settlement Of Old West part, 83
Pennsylvania Dutch, 22, 100, 110
Perrot, Nicolas, 180
Philadelphia, 106; trade, 108
Physiographic provinces, 127
Piedmont, 68; Virginia, 87, 89
Pig iron, 152, 313
Pine, 151
Pine belt in Middle West, 143
Pioneer democracy, lessons learned, 357; Middle West, 335
Pioneer farmers, 21, 206, 257
Pioneers, conservative fears about, 251, 252; contest with capitalist, 325; contrast of conditions, 279; deeper significance, 338; essence, 271; ideals and the State university, 269; Middle West, 146, 154; Ohio Valley, 167; old ideals, 148; sketch, 19
Pittsburgh, 104, 127, 136, 154-155, 161, 265, 299, 314, 324
Plain people, 256, 267
Political institutions, 243; frontier and, 24
Political parties, 249, 324
Polk, J. K., 105, 192, 255
Pontiac, 131, 144
Poor whites, 224
Population center, 222
Populists, 32, 127, 147, 155, 203, 220, 247, 277, 281, 305; Kansas, 238
Prairie Plains, 129
Prairie states, 239
Prairies, 218, 236, 276, 348; settlement, 145, 147
Presbyterians, 105, 106, 109, 164
Presidency, 254; Mississippi Valley and, 192; Ohio Valley and, 175; Old Northwest and, 222
Prices, 313
Princeton college, 106
Pritchett, H. S., 282
Privilege, 192; conflict against, 120, 121
Proclamation of 1763, 181
Progressive Republican movement, 321
Prohibitionists, 240
"Proletariat," 285
Property, 210; as basis of suffrage, 249
Prosperity, 281
Protection. See Tariff
Provinces, geographic, 158
Provincialism, desirable, 157, 159
Prussianism, 337, 356
Public lands, 25, 132, 303; policy of America, 26, 170; Western lands, first debates on, 191
Public schools, 266, 282
Puget Sound, 298
Puritan ideals, 73, 75, 78; German conflict with, 138
Puritanism, 27
Puritans and Indians, 44
Purrysburg, 97
Pynchon, John, 51, 52
Quakers, 105, 112, 164; in settlement of Indiana, 224
Quebec, Province of, 131
Quincy, Josiah, 208
Radisson, Sieur de, 180
Railroads, administration by regions, 322; Chicago and, 150; continental, 247; in early fifties, 137; land grants to, 276; Mississippi Valley, 304; northwestern, 145; origin, 14; speculative movement, 276; statistics, 314; western, 218
Rancher's frontier, 12, 16
Ranches, 9, 16; Virginia, 88
Rappahannock River, 84, 90; settlement, 93
Reclamation, 298
Reclamation Service, 320
Red Cloud (Indian), 144
Red River valley, 145
Redemptioners, 22, 90, 97, 100
Reformers, 281, 324; social, 262-263
Regulation, War of the, 248
Regulators, 116, 119, 120, 212
Religion of the Middle West, 345
Religious freedom of the Old West, 121
Religious spirit, Ohio Valley, 164, 165; Upland South, 164, 165
Rensselaerswyck, 80
Representation, 114, 117, 120
Republican party, 327
Research, 284, 287, 331
Revolution, American, 30
Rhodes, J. F., 24
Richmond, Va., 108
Rights, equal, 326-327, 338; of man, 192
Ripley, W. Z., 316
Robertson, James, 105, 187
Rockefeller, J. D., 260, 264-265
Rocky Mountains, 8, 9, 10, 298
Roosevelt, Theodore, 202, 204, 281, 319, 327; on the Mississippi Valley, 178; "Winning of the West," 67
Root, Elihu, 159
Roxbury, 59
Royce, Josiah, 157, 358
Rush, Richard, 317
St. Louis, 151, 161, 229
St. Paul, 137, 234
Salisbury, Mass., 56
Salt, 17; annual pilgrimage to coast for, 17
Salt springs, 17, 18
Salzburgers, 97
Sandys, Sir Edwin, 301
Sault Ste. Marie Canal, 149
Scalps, Massachusetts bounty for, 45
Scandinavians, 263, 350; Middle West, 146; Western life, 232-233, 234
Schools, early difficulties, 107; see also Public schools
Schurz, Carl, 337
Science, 284, 330-331
Scientific farming, 294
Scotch Highlanders, 104; Georgia, 98
Scotch-Irish, 5, 22, 71; migration in Great Valley and Piedmont, 103; Pennsylvania, 104; South Carolina, 97; Virginia, 86, 91-92
Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, 105, 109, 164
Scovillites, 116
Seaboard cities, 194, 195, 196
Seattle, 298
"Section" of land, 123, 132
Sectionalism, 27, 28, 52, 157, 215, 220, 321
Sections, relation, 159
Self-government, 169, 190, 207, 248, 275
Self-made man, 219, 318
Servants, 60, 353
Service to the Union, 358
Settlement, community type, 73, 74
Settler, 20
Sevier, John, 105, 187
Seward, W. H., 141; on the Northwest, 230; on the slavery issue in the Mississippi Valley, 199, 200
Shays' Rebellion, 112, 119, 122, 249
Sheffield, 71
Sheldon, George, 58
Shenandoah Valley, 68, 90, 91, 92, 99, 105
Sherman, W. T., 142
Sibley, H. H. (1811-1891), 272, 273, 328
Silver movement, 238, 239, 329
Simsbury, 63
Singletary, Amos, 240
Sioux Indians, 130
Six Nations, 15, 83
Slavery question, 24, 29, 98, 111, 139, 304, 330; compromise movement, 174; democracy and, 256; expansion, 174; Middle West and, 139; Mississippi Valley and, 198, 201; Northwest and, 230; slaves as property, 115; Virginia and North Carolina, 122
Smith, Major Lawrence, 84
Social control, 277
Social forces, in American history, 311; mode of investigating, 330; on the Atlantic coast, 295; political institutions and, 243
Social mobility, 355
Social order, Mississippi Valley, 203-204; new, 263
Social reformers, 262-263
Socialism, 246, 277, 307, 321
Society, backwoods, 212; rebirth of in the West, 205
Soils, 278, 279; search for, 18
Solid South, 217
South, 27, 166, 218; contribution to settlement of Old Northwest (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois), 223, 225-226; Ohio Valley and, 174; solid, 217; transforming forces, 295; West and, 196, 197; see also Upland South
South Carolina, 174; condition of antagonism between coast and interior, 116; land system, townships, 96; trade, 108
South Dakota, development, 237
Southeastern Europe, 294, 299, 316
Southerners and the Middle West, 133-134, 135, 138
Southwest, 297
Spain, 167, 181, 246; Mississippi Valley and, 184, 185
Spangenburg, A. G., 17
Spanish America 181, 182, 295
Spanish frontier, 125
Spanish War, 246
Speculation, 319
Spoils system, 32, 254
Spotswood, Alexander, 22, 88, 90, 91, 113, 247; Mississippi Valley and, 180
Spotsylvania County, Va., 90
Spreckles, Claus, 265
Squatter-sovereignty, 140
Squatters, 272, 343; doctrines, 273, 328; ideal, 320; Middle West, 137; Ohio Valley, 170; Pennsylvania in 1726, 101
Stark, John, 103-104
State historical societies, 340
State lines, 127
State universities, 221, 354; as safeguard of democracy, 286; Michigan, 233; peculiar power, 283-284; pioneer ideals and, 269, 281
States, checkerboard, 218; frontier pioneers' demand for statehood, 248; groups, 159; new states vs. Atlantic States, 207; System of, 168
Staunton, Va., 92
Steam navigation, 7, 135, 171
Steel, 313
Steel and iron industry, 152
Stockbridge, 79
Stoddard, Solomon, 45
Success, 288, 309
Sudbury, 39
Suffrage, 192, 216; basis, 249; frontier and extension, 30; manhood, 250, 352
Superior, Lake, 180, 314; iron mines, 152
Swedes, 233
Symmes Purchase, 223
Talleyrand, 299
Taney, R. B., 141
Tariff, 25, 27, 170, 172, 197, 216
Taylor, Zachary, 255
Tecumthe, 134, 144
Tennessee, 122, 168, 187, 225, 252, 253; democracy, 192
Tennyson's "Ulysses," 310
Territories, system of, 168, 169
Texas, 168
Thomas, J. B., 174
Tocqueville, A. C. H. C. de, 153, 275, 303, 343
Toledo, Ohio, 231
Toleration, 355
Town meeting, 62
Towns, legislating into existence, 125; locating, Massachusetts, 76; New England and Virginia, 41; new settlements in New England, 55; South Carolina, 96; typical form of establishing in New England, 74; Virginia, 85, 86
Trader's frontier, 12; effects following, 12; rapidity of advance, 12, 13
Trading posts, 14
Transportation, 148; Great Lakes, 150
Tryon, William, 106
Tuscarora War, 94, 95
Ulstermen, 103
Unification of the West, 215
United States, collection of nations, 158; development since 1890, 311; federal aspect, 159; fundamental forces, 311; original contribution to society, 281-282; wealth, 312
U. S. Steel Corporation, 152-153, 247, 265, 313
Universities, duties, 292; function, 287; influence of university men, 285; need of freedom, 287; pressure of democracies on, 283; State and, 286; see also State universities
Upland South, 164; religious spirit, 164, 165
Van Buren, Martin, 254, 326
Van Rensselaer manor, 81
Vandalia, 229
Verendryes, the, 180
Vermont, 69, 72, 77, 78, 111, 122, 136
Vermonters in Wisconsin and Michigan, 228
Vicksburg, 201
Vigilance committees, 212
Vinton, S. F., 141, 229
Virginia, 301; early attempt to establish frontier, 41; Indian wars, 69-70; inequalities, coast vs. interior, 113; interest in Mississippi Valley, 182; land grants, 91; land grants to societies, 85; Piedmont, society, 95; Piedmont portions, 87, 89; settlement in latter part of 17th century, 83; slavery, 122; two Virginias in later 17th century, 94; Western democracy and, 250
Virginia Convention of 1829-30, 28, 31
Visions, 270, 331, 339-340
Voyageurs, 17
Wachovia, 95
Walker, F. A., 128
War of 1812, 168, 213
Washington, George, 92, 124; Mississippi Valley and, 181, 182, 194, 196, 324; Ohio Valley and, 163, 167
Wealth, 213-214, 219, 288, 319; democracy versus, 192; in politics, 173; United States, 312
Wells (town), 47
"Welsh tract," 97
Wentworth, Benning, 77
West, American ideals and, 290; beginning of, 6; center of interest, 327; constructive force, 206; contributions to democracy, 243; factor in American history, 1, 3; ideals, 209, 214, 267; indefiniteness of term, 126; insurgent voice, 319; main streams of settlement, 215; mark of New England, 36; phase of division, 216-217; population, 35; problem of, 205; South and, 196, 197; warnings against, 208, 209; Middle West; see also Old West; Old Northwest
West Virginia, 114
Westchester County, N. Y., 81
Western colleges, 36
Western life, dominant forces, 222
Western Reserve, 124, 133
Western spirit, 310
"Western Waters," 161, 206, 302; men of freedom and independence, 183
"Western World," 161, 166, 206, 302; basis of its civilization, 177
Wheat, 329; areas, 149
Whig party, 27, 173, 304, 351
White, Abraham, 240
White, Hugh, 192
Whitman, Walt, 336
Wilderness, 262, 269, 270, 279
Wilkinson, James, 169, 187
Williams, John (1664-1729), 70
Williams, Roger, 262
Windsor, 76
Winthrop, John, 62
Wisconsin, 137, 138, 218, 294, 341; development and elements, 233-234; German element, 227, 228, 236; New England element, 228; settlement, 226, 227
Wood, Abraham, 98
Woodstock, 59
World's fairs, 156
World-politics, 246, 315
Wyoming Valley, 79, 124
Yemassee War, 95
"Young America" doctrine, 140
* * * * *
Transcriber's Notes:
The following words appear in the text with and without hyphens. They have been left as in the original.
battle-field battlefield coast-wise coastwise cow-pens cowpens head-rights headrights iron-master ironmaster new-comers newcomers non-sectional nonsectional out-vote outvote rail-splitter railsplitters sea-board seaboard slave-holding slaveholding tide-water tidewater un-won unwon
The following corrections have been made to the text:
page 25—as the nation marched westward.[period is missing in original]
page 40, footnote 40:5—"American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century,"[quotation mark missing in original]
page 48, footnote 48:4—Sheldon, "Deerfield,"[quotation mark missing in original]
page 49—your honours [original has opening parenthesis]we haue but litel laft
page 53—the frontier Towns.[original has extraneous quotation mark]
page 68, footnote 68:1—Powell, "Physiographic Regions[original has extraneous single quote]"
page 75, footnote 75:1—Egleston[original has Eggleston], "Land System of the New England Colonies,"
page 86—at least three foot within the ground."[quotation mark missing in original]
page 96, footnote 96:3—(N. Y., 1899)[closing parenthesis missing in original], pp. 149, 151;
page 117, footnote 117:3—pp. 440-447[original has 440-437]
page 118—it was being exploited,[original has period]
page 118, footnote 118:2—N. C.[original has N .C.]
page 123—Preemption and preemptions are hyphenated across line breaks in the original. The diaresis has been reinserted in the rejoined words.
page 163—American backwoodsmen[original has backswoodsmen]
page 167—to add the settlements[original has setlements]
page 171—social conditions of the people whose[original has who] needs
page 236—stronghold of resistance[original has resistence]
page 254—formal law and the subtleties[original has subleties]
page 268—that dwarf [original has extraneous word of] those of the Old World
page 310—to pause, to make an end,[original has period]
page 348—to his own business.[original has extraneous quotation mark]
page 353—at least before [original has extraneous word at] the present day
page 362—Bryan, W. J., 204, 236, 237, 246, 281, 327, 330[original has 329]
page 363, under Democracy—Godkin[original has Gookin] on, 307
page 363—Democratic party, 327, 330[original has 329]
page 363—Discovery, 271[original has 270], 293, 301, 306
page 363—Douglas[original has Douglass], William, 109
page 364—Forest[original has Foreign] Service, 320
page 364, under Germans—Palatine, 5, 82, 100, 109, 124[original also lists page 32 in error]
page 366—Henry, Patrick, 94[original has 95]
page 366, under Indians: hunting Indians with dogs, 45[original has 95]
page 367—Kipling, Rudyard, "Foreloper[original has Toreloper]," 270
page 368—Marietta, 124, 133[original has 132], 223, 257
page 368, under Michigan—development and resources, 233[original has 232]
page 371—Pynchon[original has Pyrichon], John, 51, 52
page 373—Spangenburg[original has Spangenberg], A. G.
Spelling and punctuation errors in quoted material have been left as in the original.
The index entry for James Glenn was after the entry for E. L. Godkin. The two entries were reversed to maintain alphabetical order. Index entries for Leicester and Leigh, B. W., were combined with the Legislation entry. Entries were moved as appropriate.
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