themselves do not
want a democracy. There is no virtue in Pearl street, in Wall
street, in Court street, in Chestnut street, in any other
street of great commercial cities, that can save the great
democratic government of ours, when you cease to uphold it
with your intelligent votes, your strong and mighty hands. You
must, therefore, lead us as we heretofore reserved and
prepared the way for you. We resign to you the banner of human
rights and human liberty, on this continent, and we bid you be
firm, bold and onward and then you may hope that we will be
able to follow you.

When we survey the course of the slavery struggle in the United States
it is clear that the form the question took was due to the Mississippi
Valley. The Ordinance of 1787, the Missouri Compromise, the Texas
question, the Free Soil agitation, the Compromise of 1850, the
Kansas-Nebraska bill, the Dred Scott decision, "bleeding Kansas"--these
are all Mississippi Valley questions, and the mere enumeration makes it
plain that it was the Mississippi Valley as an area for expansion which
gave the slavery issue its significance in American history. But for
this field of expansion, slavery might have fulfilled the expectation of
the fathers and gradually died away.

Of the significance of the Mississippi Valley in the Civil War, it is
unnecessary that I should speak. Illinois gave to the North its
President; Mississippi gave to the South its President. Lincoln and
Davis were both born in Kentucky. Grant and Sherman, the northern
generals, came from the Mississippi Valley; and both of them believed
that when Vicksburg fell the cause of the South was lost, and so it must
have been if the Confederacy had been unable, after victories in the
East, to regain the Father of Waters; for, as General Sherman said:
"Whatever power holds that river can govern this continent."

With the close of the war political power passed for many years to the
northern half of the Mississippi Valley, as the names of Grant, Hayes,
Garfield, Harrison, and McKinley indicate. The population of the Valley
grew from about fifteen millions in 1860 to over forty millions in
1900--over half the total population of the United States. The
significance of its industrial growth is not likely to be overestimated
or overlooked. On its northern border, from near Minnesota's boundary
line, through the Great Lakes to Pittsburgh, on its eastern edge,