and tender laws, etc., of this period were strongest in the interior. It was this region that supported Shays' Rebellion; it was (with some important exceptions) the same area that resisted the ratification of the federal constitution, fearful of a stronger government and of the loss of paper money.

IX. The interior later showed its opposition to the coast by the persistent contest against slavery, carried on in the up-country of Virginia, and North and South Carolina. Until the decade 1830-40, it was not certain that both Virginia and North Carolina would not find some means of gradual abolition. The same influence accounts for much of the exodus of the Piedmont pioneers into Indiana and Illinois, in the first half of the nineteenth century. 29

X. These were the regions, also, in which were developed the desire of the pioneers who crossed the mountains, and settled on the "Western waters," to establish new States free from control by the lowlands, owning their own lands, able to determine their own currency, and in general to govern themselves in accordance with the ideals of the Old West. They were ready also, if need be, to become independent of the Old Thirteen. Vermont must be considered in this aspect, as well as Kentucky and Tennessee.

30

XI. The land system of the Old West furnished precedents which developed into the land system of the trans-Alleghany West.81 The squatters of Pennsylvania and the Carolinas

29 See Ballagh, “Slavery in Virginia,” Johns Hopkins Univ. "Studies,” extra, xxiv; Bassett, "Slavery and Servitude in the Colony of North Carolina," Id., xiv, pp. 169-254; Bassett, "Slavery in the State of North Carolina," Id., xvii; Bassett, "Antislavery Leaders in North Carolina," Id., xvi; Weeks, Southern Quakers," Id., xv, extra; Schaper, “Sectionalism in South Carolina,” Amer. Hist. Assoc. Report," 1900; Turner, "Rise of the New West," pp. 54-56, 76-78, 80, 90, 150–152.

30 See F. J. Turner, "State-Making in the West During the Revolutionary Era," in American Historical Review, i, p. 70.

31 Hening, x, p. 35; "Public Acts of N. C.," i, pp. 204, 306; "Revised

found it easy to repeat the operation on another frontier. Preemption laws became established features. The Revolution gave opportunity to confiscate the claims of Lord Fairfax, Lord Granville, and McCulloh to their vast estates, as well as the remaining lands of the Pennsylvania proprietors. The 640 acre (or one square mile) unit of North Carolina for preemptions, and frontier land bounties. became the area awarded to frontier stations by Virginia in 1779, and the "section" of the later federal land system. The Virginia preemption right of four hundred acres on the Western waters, or a thousand for those who came prior to 1778, was, in substance, the continuation of a system familiar in the Old West.

The grants to Beverley, of over a hundred thousand acres in the Valley, conditioned on seating a family for every thousand acres, and the similar grants to Borden, Carter, and Lewis, were followed by the great grant to the Ohio Company. This company, including leading Virginia planters and some frontiersmen, asked in 1749 for two hundred thousand acres on the upper Ohio, conditioned on seating a hundred families in seven years, and for an additional grant of three hundred thousand acres after this should be accomplished. It was proposed to settle Germans on these lands.

The Loyal Land Company, by order of the Virginia council (1749), was authorized to take up eight hundred thousand acres west and north of the southern boundary of Virginia, on condition of purchasing "rights" for the amount within four years. The company sold many tracts for £3 per hundred acres to settlers, but finally lost its claim. The Mississippi Company, including in its membership the Lees, Washingtons, and other great Virginia planters, applied for two and one-half million acres in the West in 1769. Similar land companies

Code of Va., 1819," ii, p. 357; Roosevelt, "Winning of the West," i, p. 261; ii, pp. 92, 220.

of New England origin, like the Susquehanna Company and Lyman's Mississippi Company, exhibit the same tendency of the Old West on the northern side. New England's Ohio Company of Associates, which settled Marietta, had striking resemblances to town proprietors.

These were only the most noteworthy of many companies of this period, and it is evident that they were a natural outgrowth of speculations in the Old West. Washington, securing military bounty land claims of soldiers of the French and Indian War, and selecting lands in West Virginia until he controlled over seventy thousand acres for speculation, is an excellent illustration of the tendency. He also thought of colonizing German Palatines upon his lands. The formation of the Transylvania and Vandalia companies were natural developments on a still vaster scale.32

XII. The final phase of the Old West, which I wish merely to mention, in conclusion, is its colonization of areas beyond the mountains. The essential unity of the movement is brought out by a study of how New England's Old West settled northern Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, the Adirondacks, central and Western New York, the Wyoming Valley (once organized as a part of Litchfield, Connecticut), the Ohio Company's region about Marietta, and Connecticut's Western Reserve on the shores of Lake Erie; and how the pioneers of the Great Valley and the Piedmont region of the South crossed the Alleghanies and settled on the Western Waters. Daniel Boone, going from his Pennsylvania home to the Yadkin, and from the Yadkin to Tennessee and Kentucky, took part in the whole process, and later in its continuation into Missouri.33 The 32 Alden, New Governments West of the Alleghanies (Madison, 1897), gives an account of these colonies. [See the more recent work by C. W. Alvord, “The Mississippi Valley in British Politics, 1763–1774 (1917).]

33 Thwaites, “Daniel Boone" (N. Y., 1902); [A. Henderson, "Con

social conditions and ideals of the Old West powerfully shaped those of the trans-Alleghany West.

The important contrast between the spirit of individual colonization, resentful of control, which the Southern frontiersmen showed, and the spirit of community colonization and control to which the New England pioneers inclined, left deep traces on the later history of the West.34 The Old West diminished the importance of the town as a colonizing unit, even in New England. In the Southern area, efforts to legislate towns into existence, as in Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia, failed. They faded away before wilderness conditions. But in general, the Northern stream of migration was communal, and the Southern individual. The difference which existed between that portion of the Old West which was formed by the northward colonization, chiefly of the New England Plateau (including New York), and that portion formed by the southward colonization of the Virginia Valley and the Southern Piedmont was reflected in the history of the Middle West and the Mississippi Valley.35

quest of the Old Southwest" (N. Y., 1920), brings out the important share of up-country men of means in promoting colonization].

34 Turner, in "Alumni Quarterly of the University of Illinois," ii, 133-136.

35 [It has seemed best in this volume not to attempt to deal with the French frontier or the Spanish-American frontier. Besides the works of Parkman, a multitude of monographs have appeared in recent years which set the French frontier in new light; and for the Spanish frontier in both the Southwest and California much new information has been secured, and illuminating interpretations made by Professors H. E. Bolton, I. J. Cox, Chapman, Father Engelhart, and other California and Texas investigators, although the works of Hubert Howe Bancroft remain a useful mine of material. There was, of course, a contemporaneous Old West on both the French and the Spanish frontiers. The formation, approach and ultimate collision and intermingling of these contrasting types of frontiers are worthy of a special study.]

IV

THE MIDDLE WEST 1

American sectional nomenclature is still confused. Once the West" described the whole region beyond the Alleghanies; but the term has hopelessly lost its definiteness. The rapidity of the spread of settlement has broken down old usage, and as yet no substitute has been generally accepted. The "Middle West" is a term variously used by the public, but for the purpose of the present paper, it will be applied to that region of the United States included in the census. reports under the name of the North Central division, comprising the States of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin (the old "Territory Northwest of the River Ohio "), and their trans-Mississippi sisters of the Louisiana Purchase, - Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota. It is an imperial domain. If the "greater countries of Central Europe, France, Germany, Italy, and Austro-Hungary,- were laid down upon this area, the Middle West would still show a margin of spare territory. Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Buffalo constitute its gateways to the Eastern States; Kansas City, Omaha, St. Paul-Minneapolis, and Duluth-Superior dominate its western areas; Cincinnati and St. Louis stand on its southern borders; and Chicago reigns at the center. What Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore are to the Atlantic seaboard these cities are to

1 With acknowledgments to the International Monthly, December, 1901.

126