Old Northwest Territory

“ And yet in important historical ideals—in the process of expansion, in the persistence of agricultural interests, in impulsiveness, in imperialistic ways of looking at the American destiny, in hero-worship, in the newness of its present social structure—the Old Northwest has much in common with the South and the Far West.
Behind her is the old pioneer past of simple democratic conditions, and freedom of opportunity for all men. Before her is a superb industrial development, the brilliancy of success as evinced in a vast population, aggregate wealth, and sectional power. ”

“ Two decades hence no man will question the quality of Northwestern civilization. If the East is losing something of its distinctive Americanism through the influx of foreign elements and the decay of its old-time farming communities, the growth of the Northwest, largely upon the basis of New England blood and New England ideas, will make full compensation. ”

“ It was the glory of the Northwest to offer a competence to the needy, the baffled, the discouraged, the tormented of the eastern States and 188 of Europe. The bulk of its fast-growing population consisted, it is true, of ordinary folk who could have lived on in fair comfort in the older sections, yet who were ambitious to own more land, to make more money, and to secure larger advantages for their children. ”

“ The Northwest, in particular, had been settled by people drawn from every older portion of the country, and as the frontier receded and society took on a more matured aspect, differences of habits and ideas were accentuated rather than obscured. Men can get along very well with one another so long as they live apart and do not try to regulate their everyday affairs on common lines.
The great human streams that poured into the Northwest flowed from two main sources—the nearer South and New England. Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois were first peopled by men and women of Southern stock. ”

“ Furthermore, the Mississippi had ceased to be a boundary. A magnificent vista reaching off to the remoter West and Northwest had been opened up; the frontier had been pushed far out upon the plains of Minnesota and Iowa. Decade after decade the powerful epic of westward expansion, shot through with countless tales of heroism and sacrifice, had steadily unfolded before the gaze of an astonished world ”

“ For the most part, the men who built up the West beyond the Mississippi, and who are now leading the agitation, [4] came as pioneers from the old Northwest, in the days when it was just passing from the stage of a frontier section. For example, Senator Allen of Nebraska, president of the recent national Populist Convention, and a type of the political leaders of his section, was born in Ohio in the middle of the century, went in his youth to Iowa, and not long after the Civil War made his home in Nebraska. ”

“ The conception of the Northwest as an Indian reserve strikingly exhibits England's inability to foresee the future of the [132] region, and to measure the forces of American expansion.
By the cessions of Virginia, New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, the Old Congress had come into nominal possession of an extensive public domain, and a field for the exercise of national authority. The significance of this fact in the development of national power is not likely to be overestimated. ”

“ He hoped thus to build up a stronghold and seat of government that would brook no rivalry. The colonists came and settled at Fort Garry, at the forks of the Red River; but matters grew worse instead of better. Each company claimed to be in the right, and was resolved to drive the other out of existence. During the next few years the men of the Northwest Company and of the Hudson Bay Company came to blows more than once, and finally, in October of 1814, the Northwest Company were ordered to remove from the territory within six months—a mandate which they treated with contempt and derision. ”

“ It has State universities, rivaling in conservative and scientific economic instruction those of any other part of the Union, and its citizens more often visit the East, than do Eastern men the West. As time goes on, its industrial development will bring it more into harmony with the East.
Moreover, the Old Northwest holds the balance of power, and is the battlefield on which these issues of American development are to be settled. It has more in common with all parts of the nation than has any other region. It understands the East, as the East does not understand the West. ”

“ The Ordinance's arrangement for expansion included opening settlement of the area known as the Northwest Territory, providing civil government, and ensuring settlers the protection of Common Law under territorial government until permanent State governments could be created. ”

“ The only other considerable centers of white population in the Northwest were the old French posts on the Wabash, Ouiatanon and Vincennes, and, most populous of all, the settlements along the eastern shore of the Mississippi from the mouth of the Missouri to the mouth of the Ohio, on what later came to be known as the "American Bottom." At Ouiatanon, at the beginning of the Revolution there were about a dozen French families. ”

“ In going westward, the region we are traversing beyond the Pennsylvania boundary gradually changes 404 from coal and iron to a rich agricultural section. As we move away from the influence of the Allegheny ranges, the hills become gentler, and the rolling surface is more and more subdued, until it is smoothed out into an almost level prairie, heavily timbered where not yet cleared for cultivation. This was the Northwest Territory, first explored by the French, who were led by the Sieur de la Salle in his original discoveries in the seventeenth century. ”

“ The establishment of homes in this beautiful region therefore meant sacrifices, hardships and ofttimes death, but there were some men, however, brave enough to meet the red man in his own familiar haunts and undertake the task of reclaiming the district for purposes of civilization. The rich mineral stores of the northwest were thus added to the wealth of the nation, its magnificent forests contributed to the lumber industry and its fertile valleys added to the opportunities of the farmer and stock raiser; and today the northwest is one of the most productive sections of the entire country. ”

“ The changes since the war are of more social importance, in many respects, than those in the years commonly referred to as the formative period. As a result, the Northwest finds herself again between contending forces, sharing the interests of East and West, as once before those of North and South, and forced to give her voice on issues of equal significance for the destiny of the republic. ”

“ The most potent single element of population in the Northwest is of New England origin, although more than half of it has found its way into Iowa, Minnesota, the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Kansas, by filtration through the intermediate States of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Illinois. ”

“ The uncontrolled initiative of the individual, which was the chief force in the settlement of the Southwest, was given comparatively little play in the settlement of the Northwest. The Northwest owed its existence to the action of the nation as a whole. ”

“ Looking at the Northwest as a whole, one sees, in the character of its industries and in the elements of its population, it is identified on the east with the zone of States including the middle region and New England. Cotton culture and the negro make a clear line of division between the Old Northwest and the South. ”

“ The memory of some of us goes back to the time when, all over the great free Northwest, the people seemed to have forgotten to what they owed their own prosperity. The Northwest had been the gift of Freedom to the Republic on her birthday. In each of her million homes dwells Liberty, a perpetual guest. But yet that people in Illinois and Michigan and Indiana and Ohio seemed for a time to have forgotten their own history, and to be unworthy of their fair and mighty heritage. ”

“ There were few if any wage-earners, the accommodating method of exchanging work among neighbors being generally in vogue.
Such, in brief, were the daily customs of the early settlers of the middle West, whose children wandered still farther westward in the forties and fifties, carrying with them the habits in which they had been reared to the distant Territory afterwards known as the “Whole of Oregon,” which originally comprised the great Northwest Territory, where now flourish massive blocks of mighty States. ”

“ While the fate of the Northwest still hung in the balance, emigration from the eastern States became the rage. "Every small farmer whose barren acres were covered with mortgages, whose debts pressed heavily upon him, or whose roving spirit gave him no peace, was eager to sell his homestead for what it would bring and begin life anew on the banks of the Muskingum or the Ohio." 1 Land companies were then just as optimistic and persuasive as they are today, and the attractions of the western country lost nothing in the telling. ”

“ The two military posts farthest advanced in this direction were Detroit and Mackinac. Neither of these was advantageously situated for the administration of the country stretching from the upper lakes to the Mississippi.
With every passing year the necessity of exercising a firmer control over this region became greater. The settlers must be protected from Indian depredations, and the lawlessness of the traders and other frontiersmen must be curbed. One fact of great importance pertained to the British control of the Indian trade of the Northwest. ”

“ The Northwest presents a series of very interesting race problems. The first one, chronologically at least, is the problem that the American Indian presents. It is not so long ago since the Indian was in possession of a very large portion of the region we are now considering. A number of tribes were gradually removed further West, or were assigned to districts in the Indian Territory. But most of them were concentrated in large reservations in Minnesota, Nebraska, North and South Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming. ”

“ The period of territorial government was one of growth along all lines. Trouble with the Indians, increase of population, development of industrial life, and the various needs of a growing community, made many drafts upon the new government. It was not long before the largeness of the territory made a division desirable. The peeple north of the Columbia, separated from those to the south by geographical boundaries, and possessing interests of their own, voted to request the formation of the Washington Territory. ”

“ 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. ”

“ That portion of the Northwest coast which was long known as the "Oregon territory" enjoys the distinction of having been fathered by more men with a greater variety of purposes and ambitions than any other of the family of commonwealths under the United States flag. First, there were the English and the American explorers, Gray and Vancouver, and Lewis and Clark, in the employ of their respective companies or governments, whose acts formed the foundation of opposing claims to the northwest, and particularly the region drained by the Columbia River. These form a class by themselves. ”

“ Yet greater danger threatened the Northwest, in the event of war, than any other portion of the United States. Of the territories Michigan was the most defenseless and exposed to attack. There were in all ten settlements scattered over a wide extent of country, the distance between the closest of them being thirty miles and that between the two extremes over ten times as great. [527] The entire population, counting British, French, Americans, negroes, and the troops of the garrison at Detroit,- 197 - was less than five thousand, four-fifths of them being of French-Canadian descent. ”

“ There is nothing to connect "the dark backward and abysm" of mound-building times with those of the red race of the Northwest; and all that is known of the latter dating earlier than their first discovery, is exceedingly dim and shadowy. Upon the extended area bounded by Lake Superior on the north, Lake Michigan on the east, wide-spreading prairies on the south, and the Mississippi river on the west, there met and mingled two distinct Indian families—Algonquins [viii] and Dakotas. Concerning the various tribes of these families, nothing of importance could be gleaned by the earliest explorers ”

“ In the democracy of the Southwest, industrial development and city life were only minor factors, but to the democracy of the Northwest they were its very life. To widen the area of the clearing, to contend with one another for the mastery of the industrial resources of the rich provinces, to struggle for a place in the ascending movement of society, to transmit to one's offspring the chance for education, for industrial betterment, for the rise in life which the hardships of the pioneer existence denied to the pioneer himself, these were some of the ideals of the region to which Lincoln came. ”