f bold,
vigorous, and sustained efforts, has succeeded in reversing
the very laws of nature and of nature's God,--rolled back the
mighty tide of the Mississippi and its thousand tributary
streams, until their mouth, practically and commercially, is
more at New York or Boston than at New Orleans."

The West broke asunder, and the great struggle over the social system to
be given to the lands beyond the Mississippi followed. In the Civil War
the Northwest furnished the national hero,--Lincoln was the very flower
of frontier training and ideals,--and it also took into its hands the
whole power of the government. Before the war closed, the West could
claim the President, Vice-President, Chief Justice, Speaker of the
House, Secretary of the Treasury, Postmaster-General, Attorney-General,
General of the army, and Admiral of the navy. The leading generals of
the war had been furnished by the West. It was the region of action,
and in the crisis it took the reins.

The triumph of the nation was followed by a new era of Western
development. The national forces projected themselves across the
prairies and plains. Railroads, fostered by government loans and land
grants, opened the way for settlement and poured a flood of European
immigrants and restless pioneers from all sections of the Union into the
government lands. The army of the United States pushed back the Indian,
rectangular Territories were carved into checkerboard States, creations
of the federal government, without a history, without physiographical
unity, without particularistic ideas. The later frontiersman leaned on
the strong arm of national power.

At the same time the South underwent a revolution. The plantation, based
on slavery, gave place to the farm, the gentry to the democratic
elements. As in the West, new industries, of mining and of manufacture,
sprang up as by magic. The New South, like the New West, was an area of
construction, a debtor area, an area of unrest; and it, too, had learned
the uses to which federal legislation might be put.

In the meantime the Old Northwest[218:1] passed through an economic and
social transformation. The whole West furnished an area over which
successive waves of economic development have passed. The State of
Wisconsin, now much like parts of the State of New York, was at an
earlier period like the State of Nebraska of to-day; the Granger
movement and Greenback party had for a time the ascendanc