The Old Northwest: A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond

by Frederic Austin Ogg

Of the great national issues in the quarter-century following the War of 1812 there were some upon which people of the Northwest, in spite of their differing points of view, could very well agree. Internal improvement was one of these. Roads and canals were necessary outlets to southern and eastern markets, and any reasonable proposal on this subject could be assured of the Northwest's solid support. The thirty-four successive appropriations to 1844 for the Cumberland Road, Calhoun's "Bonus Bill" of 1816, the bill of 1822 authorizing a continuous national jurisdiction over the Cumberland Road, the comprehensive "Survey Bill" of 1824, the Maysville Road Bill of 1830—all were backed by the united strength of the Northwestern senators and representatives.

So with the tariff. The cry of the East for protection to infant industries was echoed by the struggling manufacturers of Cincinnati, Louisville, and other towns; while a protective tariff as a means of building up the home market for foodstuffs and raw materials seemed to the Westerner an altogether reasonable and necessary expedient. Ohio alone in the Northwest had an opportunity to vote on the protective bill of 1816, and gave its enthusiastic support. Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois voted unitedly for the bills of 1820, 1824, 1828, and 1832. The principal western champion of the protective policy was Henry Clay, a Kentuckian; but the Northwest supported the policy more consistently than did Clay's own State and section.

On the National Bank the position of the Northwest was no less emphatic. The people were little troubled by the question of constitutionality; but believing that the bank was an engine of tyranny in the hands of an eastern aristocracy, they were fully prepared to support Jackson in his determination to extinguish that "un-American monopoly."

There were other subjects upon which agreement was reached either with difficulty or not at all. One of these was the form of local government which should be adopted. Southerners and New Englanders brought to their new homes widely differing political usages. The former were accustomed to the county as the principal local unit of administration. It was a relatively large division, whose affairs were managed by elective officers, mainly a board of commissioners. The New Englanders, on the other hand, had grown up under the town-meeting system and clung to the notion that an indispensable feature of democratic local government is the periodic assembling of the citizens of a community for legislative, fiscal, and electoral purposes. The Illinois constitution of 1818 was made by Southerners, and naturally it provided for the county system. But protest from the "Yankee" elements became so strong that in the new constitution of 1848 provision was made for township organization wherever the people of a county wanted it; and this form of government, at first prevalent only in the northern counties, is now found in most of the central and southern counties as well.

The most deeply and continuously dividing issue in the Northwest, as in the nation at large, was negro slavery. Although written by Southern men, the Ordinance of 1787 stipulated that there should be "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory, otherwise than in the punishment of crimes whereof the party shall have been duly convicted." If the government of the Northwest had been one of laws, and not of men, this specific provision would have made the territory free soil and would have relieved the inhabitants from all interest in the "peculiar institution." But the laws never execute themselves—least of all in frontier communities. In point of fact, considerable numbers of slaves were held in the territory until the nineteenth century was far advanced. As late as 1830 thirty-two negroes were held in servitude in the single town of Vincennes. Slavery could and did prevail to a limited extent because existing property rights were guaranteed in the Ordinance itself, in the deed of cession by Virginia, in the Jay Treaty of 1794, and in other fundamental acts. The courts of the Northwest held that slave-owners whose property could be brought under any of these guarantees might retain that property; and although no court countenanced further importation, itinerant Southerners—"rich planters traveling in their family carriages, with servants, packs of hunting-dogs, and trains of slaves, their nightly camp-fires lighting up the wilderness where so recently the Indian hunter had held possession"—occasionally settled in southern Indiana or Illinois and with the connivance of the authorities kept some of their dependents in slavery, or quasi-slavery, for decades.

Of actual slaveholders there were not enough to influence public sentiment greatly. But the people of Southern extraction, although neither slaveholders nor desiring to become such, had no strong moral convictions on the subject. Indeed, they were likely to feel that the anti-slavery restriction imposed an unfortunate impediment in the way of immigration from the South. Hence the persistent demand of citizens of Indiana and Illinois for a relaxation of the drastic prohibition of slavery in the Ordinance of 1787. In 1796 Congress was petitioned from Kaskaskia to extend relief; in 1799 the territorial Legislature was urged to bring about a repeal; in 1802 an Indiana territorial convention at Vincennes memorialized Congress in behalf of a suspension of the proviso for a period of ten years. Not only were violations of the law winked at, but both Indiana and Illinois deliberately built up a system of indenture which partook strongly of the characteristics of slavery. After much controversy, Indiana, in 1816, framed a state constitution which reiterated the language of the Northwest Ordinance, but without invalidating titles to existing slave property; while Illinois was admitted to the Union in 1818 with seven or eight hundred slaves upon her soil, and with a constitution which continued the old system of indenture with slight modification.

In a heated contest in Illinois in 1824 over the question of calling a state convention to draft a constitution legalizing slavery the people of Northern antecedents made their votes tell and defeated the project. But, like other parts of the Northwest, this State never became a unit on the slavery issue. Certainly it never became abolitionist. By an almost unanimous vote the Legislature, in 1837, adopted joint resolutions which condemned abolitionism as "more productive of evil than of moral and political good"; and in Congress in the preceding year the delegation of the State had given solid support to the "gag resolutions," which were intended to deny a hearing to all petitions on the slavery question.

Throughout the great era of slavery controversy the Northwest was prolific of schemes of compromise, for the constant clash of Northern and Southern elements developed an aptitude for settlement by agreement on moderate lines. The people of the section as a whole long clung to popular, or "squatter," sovereignty as the supremely desirable solution of the slavery question—a device formulated and defended by two of the Northwest's own statesmen, Cass and Douglas, and relinquished only slowly and reluctantly under the leadership, not of a New England abolitionist, but of a statesman of Southern birth who had come to the conclusion that the nation could not permanently exist half slave and half free.

Cass, Douglas, Lincoln—all were adopted sons of the Northwest, and the career of every one illustrates not only the prodigality with which the back country showered its opportunities upon men of industry and talent, but the play and interplay of sectional and social forces in the building of the newer nation. Cass and Douglas were New Englanders. One was born at Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1782; the other at Brandon, Vermont, in 1813. Lincoln sprang from Virginian and Kentuckian stocks. His father's family moved from Virginia to Kentucky at the close of the Revolution; in 1784 his grandfather was killed by lurking Indians, and his father, then a boy of six, was saved from captivity only by a lucky shot of an older brother. Lincoln himself was born in 1809. Curiously enough, Cass and Douglas, the New Englanders, played their rôles on the national stage as Jackson Democrats, while Lincoln, the Kentuckian of Virginian ancestry, became a Whig and later a Republican.

Cass and Douglas were well-born. Cass's father was a thrifty soldier-farmer who made for his family a comfortable home at Zanesville, Ohio; Douglas's father was a successful physician. Lincoln was born in obscurity and wretchedness. His father, Thomas Lincoln, was a ne'er-do-well Kentucky carpenter, grossly illiterate, unable or unwilling to rise above the lowest level of existence in the pioneer settlements. His mother, Nancy Hanks, whatever her antecedents may have been, was a woman of character, and apparently of some education. But she died when her son was only nine years of age.