took possession of oak
openings and prairies, gave birth to the cities of Chicago, Milwaukee,
St. Paul, and Minneapolis, as well as to a multitude of lesser cities,
and replaced the dominance of the Southern element by that of a modified
Puritan stock. The railroad system of the early fifties bound the
Mississippi to the North Atlantic seaboard; New Orleans gave way to New
York as the outlet for the Middle West, and the day of river settlement
was succeeded by the era of inter-river settlement and railway
transportation. The change in the political and social ideals was at
least equal to the change in economic connections, and together these
forces made an intimate organic union between New England, New York, and
the newly settled West. In estimating the New England influence in the
Middle West, it must not be forgotten that the New York settlers were
mainly New Englanders of a later generation.

Combined with the streams from the East came the German migration into
the Middle West. Over half a million, mainly from the Palatinate,
Wuertemberg, and the adjacent regions, sought America between 1830 and
1850, and nearly a million more Germans came in the next decade. The
larger portion of these went into the Middle West; they became pioneers
in the newer parts of Ohio, especially along the central ridge, and in
Cincinnati; they took up the hardwood lands of the Wisconsin counties
along Lake Michigan; and they came in important numbers to Missouri,
Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan, and to the river towns of Iowa. The
migration in the thirties and forties contained an exceptionally large
proportion of educated and forceful leaders, men who had struggled in
vain for the ideal of a liberal German nation, and who contributed
important intellectual forces to the communities in which they settled.
The Germans, as a whole, furnished a conservative and thrifty
agricultural element to the Middle West. In some of their social ideals
they came into collision with the Puritan element from New England, and
the outcome of the steady contest has been a compromise. Of all the
States, Wisconsin has been most deeply influenced by the Germans.

By the later fifties, therefore, the control of the Middle West had
passed to its Northern zone of population, and this zone included
representatives of the Middle States, New England, and Germany as its
principal elements. The Southern people, north of the Ohio, differed in
important respects from th