orderers themselves bore any part were few and trifling compared
to the contests waged by the adventurers who won Kentucky, Tennessee,
and Texas.

In the Southwest the early settlers acted as their own army, and
supplied both leaders and men. Sevier, Robertson, Clark, and Boon led
their fellow pioneers to battle, as Jackson did afterwards, and as
Houston did later still. Indeed the Southwesterners not only won their
own soil for themselves, but they were the chief instruments in the
original acquisition of the Northwest also. Had it not been for the
conquest of the Illinois towns in 1779 we would probably never have
had any Northwest to settle; and the huge tract between the upper
Mississippi and the Columbia, then called Upper Louisiana, fell into
our hands, only because the Kentuckians and Tennesseeans were
resolutely bent on taking possession of New Orleans, either by bargain
or battle. All of our territory lying beyond the Alleghanies, north
and south, was first won for us by the Southwesterners, fighting for
their own hand. The northern part was afterwards filled up by the
thrifty, vigorous men of the Northeast, whose sons became the real
rulers as well as the preservers of the Union; but these settlements
of Northerners were rendered possible only by the deeds of the nation
as a whole. They entered on land that the Southerners had won, and
they were kept there by the strong arm of the Federal Government;
whereas the Southerners owed most of their victories only to
themselves.

The first-comers around Marietta did, it is true, share to a certain
extent in the dangers of the existing Indian wars; but their trials
are not to be mentioned beside those endured by the early settlers of
Tennessee and Kentucky, and whereas these latter themselves subdued
and drove out their foes, the former took but an insignificant part in
the contest by which the possession of their land was secured.
Besides, the strongest and most numerous Indian tribes were in the
Southwest.

The Southwest developed its civilization on its own lines, for good
and for ill; the Northwest was settled under the national ordinance of
1787, which absolutely determined its destiny, and thereby in the end
also determined the destiny of the whole nation. Moreover, the gulf
coast, as well as the interior, from the Mississippi to the Pacific,
was held by foreign powers; while in the north this was only true of
the country between the Ohio and the Great Lakes