i Valley,
and began to stand as a new national type. Under the lead of Henry Clay
they invoked the national government to break down the mountain barrier
by internal improvements, and thus to give their crops an outlet to the
coast. Under him they appealed to the national government for a
protective tariff to create a home market. A group of frontier States
entered the Union with democratic provisions respecting the suffrage,
and with devotion to the nation that had given them their lands, built
their roads and canals, regulated their territorial life, and made them
equals in the sisterhood of States. At last these Western forces of
aggressive nationalism and democracy took possession of the government
in the person of the man who best embodied them, Andrew Jackson. This
new democracy that captured the country and destroyed the ideals of
statesmanship came from no theorist's dreams of the German forest. It
came, stark and strong and full of life, from the American forest. But
the triumph of this Western democracy revealed also the fact that it
could rally to its aid the laboring classes of the coast, then just
beginning to acquire self-consciousness and organization.

The next phase of Western development revealed forces of division
between the northern and southern portions of the West. With the spread
of the cotton culture went the slave system and the great plantation.
The small farmer in his log cabin, raising varied crops, was displaced
by the planter raising cotton. In all except the mountainous areas the
industrial organization of the tidewater took possession of the
Southwest, the unity of the back country was broken, and the solid South
was formed. In the Northwest this was the era of railroads and canals,
opening the region to the increasing stream of Middle State and New
England settlement, and strengthening the opposition to slavery. A map
showing the location of the men of New England ancestry in the Northwest
would represent also the counties in which the Free Soil party cast its
heaviest votes. The commercial connections of the Northwest likewise
were reversed by the railroad. The result is stated by a writer in _De
Bow's Review_ in 1852 in these words:--

"What is New Orleans now? Where are her dreams of greatness
and glory? . . . Whilst she slept, an enemy has sowed tares in
her most prolific fields. Armed with energy, enterprise, and
an indomitable spirit, that enemy, by a system o