FREE ESSAY ON THE WEST

THE WEST

The West was a form of society rather than an area. It is the term applied to the region
whose social conditions result from the application of older institutions and ideas to
the transforming influences of free land. By this application, a new environment is
suddenly entered, freedom of opportunity is opened, the cake of custom is broken, and new
activities, new lines of growth, new institutions and new ideals, are brought into
existence. The wilderness disappears, the West proper passes on to a new frontier and, in
the former area, and a new society has emerged from this contact with the backwoods.
Gradually this society loses its primitive conditions, and assimilates itself to the type
of the older social conditions of the East; but it bears within it enduring and
distinguishing survivals of its frontier experience. Decade after decade, West after
West, this rebirth of American society had gone on, and left its traces behind it, which
reacted on the East. The history of our political institutions, our democracy, is not a
history of imitation, of simple borrowing; it is a history of the evolution and
adaptation of organs in response to changed environment, a history of the origin of new
political species. In this sense, therefore, the West has been a constructive force of
the highest significance in our life. 
The West, as a phase of social organization, began with the Atlantic coast, and passed
across the continent. But the colonial tidewater area was in close touch with the Old
World, and soon lost its Western aspects. In the middle of the eighteenth century, the
newer social conditions appeared along the upper waters of the tributaries of the
Atlantic. Here it was that the West took on its distinguishing features, and transmitted
frontier traits and ideals to this area in later days. On the coast were the fishermen
and skippers, the merchants and planters, with eyes turned toward Europe. Beyond the
falls of the rivers were the pioneer farmers, largely of non-English stock, Scotch-Irish
and German. They constituted a distinct people, and may be regarded as an expansion of
the social and economic life of the middle region into the backcountry of the South.
These frontiersmen were the ancestors of Boone, Andrew Jackson, Calhoun, Clay, and
Lincoln. Washington and Jefferson were profoundly affected by these frontier conditions.
The forest clearings have been the seed plots of American character. 
Here then, is the problem of the West, as it looked to New England leaders of thought in
the beginning and at the end of this century. From the first, it was recognized that a
new type was growing up beyond the mountains, and that the time would come when the
destiny of the nation would be in Western hands. The divergence of these societies became
clear in the struggle over the ratification of the federal constitution. The interior
agricultural region, the communities that were in debt and desired paper money, opposed
the instrument; but the areas of intercourse and property carried the day. 
The most obvious fact regarding the man of the Western waters is that he had placed
himself under influences destructive to many of the gains of civilization. Remote from
the opportunity for systematic education, substituting a log hut in the forest clearing
for the social comforts of the town, he suffered hard-ships and privations, and reverted
in many ways to primitive conditions of life. Engaged in a struggle to subdue the forest,
working as an individual, and with little specie or capital, his interests were with the
debtor class. At each stage of its advance, the West has favored an expansion of the
currency. The pioneer had boundless confidence in the future of his own community, and
when seasons of financial contraction and depression occurred, he, who had staked his all
on confidence in Western development, and had fought the savage for his home, was
inclined to reproach the conservative sections and classes. To explain this antagonism
requires more than denunciation of dishonesty, ignorance, and boorishness as fundamental
Western traits. Legislation in the United States has had to deal with two distinct social
conditions. In some portions of the country there was, and is, an aggregation of
property, and vested rights are in the foreground. That in the conflict between these two
ideals the government has always held an even hand would be difficult to show. 
But free lands and the consciousness of working out their social destiny did more than
turn the Westerner to material interests and devote him to a restless existence. They
promoted equality among the Western settlers, and reacted as a check on the aristocratic
influences of the East. Where everybody could have a farm, almost for taking it, economic
equality easily resulted, and this involved political equality. 
Western democracy included individual liberty, as well as equality. The frontiersman was
impatient of restraints. He knew how to preserve order, even in the absence of legal
authority. If there were cattle thieves, lynch law was sudden and effective: the
regulators of the Carolinas were the predecessors of the claims associations of Iowa and
the vigilance committees of California. But the individual was not ready to submit to
complex regulations. Population was sparse; there was no multitude of jostling interests,
as in older settlements, demanding an elaborate system of personal restraints. Society
became atomic. There was a reproduction of the primitive idea of the personality of the
law; a crime was more an offense against the victim than a violation of the law of the
land. Substantial justice, secured in the most direct way, was the ideal of the
backwoodsman. He had little patience with finely drawn distinctions or scruples of
method. If the thing was one proper to be done, then the most immediate, rough and ready,
effective way was the best way. 
It followed from the lack of organized political life, from the atomic conditions of the
backwoods society, that the individual was exalted and given free play. The West was
another name for opportunity. Here were mines to be seized, fertile valleys to be
preempted; all the natural resources open to the shrewdest and the boldest. The United
States is unique in the extent to which the individual has been given an open field,
unchecked by restraints of an old social order, or of scientific administration of
government. The self-made man was the Western man's ideal, was the kind of man that all
men might become. Out of his wilderness experience, out of the freedom of his
opportunities, he fashioned a formula for social regeneration, --the freedom of the
individual to seek his own. He did not consider that his conditions were exceptional and
temporary. 
Under such conditions, leadership easily develops, --a leadership based on the possession
of the qualities most serviceable to the young society. In the history of Western
settlement, we see each forted village following its local hero. Clay, Jackson, Harrison,
Lincoln, were illustrations of this tendency in periods when the Western hero rose to the
dignity of national hero. 
The Western man believed in the manifest destiny of his country. On his border, and
checking his advance, were the Indian, the Spaniard, and the Englishman. He was indignant
at eastern indifference and lack of sympathy with his view of his relations to these
peoples, at the shortsightedness of eastern policy. The closure of the Mississippi by
Spain, and the proposal to exchange our claim of freedom of navigating the river, in
return for commercial advantages to New England, nearly led to the withdrawal of the West
from the Union. It was the Western demands that brought about the purchase of Louisiana,
and turned the scale in favor of declaring the War of 1812. Militant qualities were
favored by the annual expansion of the settled area in the face of hostile Indians and
the stubborn wilderness. The West caught the vision of the nation's continental destiny.

It is important to bear this idealism of the West in mind. The very materialism that has
been urged against the West was accompanied by ideals of equality, of the exaltation of
the common man, of national expansion, that make it a profound mistake to write of the
West as though it were engrossed in mere material ends. It has been, and is, preeminently
a region of ideals, mistaken or not. 
It is obvious that these economic and social conditions were so fundamental in Western
life that they might well dominate whatever accessions came to the West by immigration
from the coast sections or from Europe. Nevertheless, the West cannot be understood
without bearing in mind the fact that it has received the great streams from the North
and from the South, and that the Mississippi compelled these currents to intermingle.
Here it was that sectionalism first gave way under the pressure of unification.
Ultimately the conflicting ideas and institutions of the old sections struggled for
dominance in this area under the influence of the forces that made for uniformity, but
this is merely another phase of the truth that the West must become unified, that it
could not rest in sectional groupings. For precisely this reason the struggle occurred.
In the period from the Revolution to the close of the War of 1812, the democracy of the
Southern and Middle States contributed the main streams of settlement and social
influence to the West. Even in Ohio the New England leaders soon lost political power.
The democratic spirit of the Middle region left an indelible impress on the West in this
its formative period. After the War of 1812, New England, its supremacy in the carrying
trade of the world having vanished, became a beehive from which swarms of settlers went
out to western New York and the remoter regions. These settlers spread New England ideals
of education and character and political institutions, and acted as a leaven of great
significance in the Northwest. But it would be a mistake to believe than an unmixed New
England influence took possession of the Northwest. These pioneers did not come from the
class that conserved the type of New England civilization pure and undefiled. They
represented a less contented, less conservative influence. Moreover, by their sojourn in
the Middle region, on their westward march, they underwent modification, and when the
farther West received them, they suffered a forest-change, indeed. The Westernized New
England man was no longer the representative of the section that he left. He was less
conservative, less provincial, more adaptable, and approachable, less rigorous in his
Puritan ideals, less a man of culture, more a man of action. 
As might have been expected, therefore, the Western men, in the era of good feeling, had
much homogeneity throughout the Mississippi 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 older 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 backcountry 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 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 West had furnished the leading general of the war. 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 was carved into checker-board 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. 
We are now in a position to see clearly some of the factors involved in the Western
problem. For nearly three centuries the dominant fact in American life has been
expansion. With the settlement of the pacific coast and the occupation of the free lands,
this movement has come to a check. That these energies of expansion will no longer
operate would be a rash prediction; and the demands for a vigorous foreign policy, for an
interoceanic canal. For a revival of our power upon the seas, and for the extension of
American influence to outlying islands and adjoining countries, are indications that the
movement will continue. The stronghold of these demands lies west of the Alleghenies. 
In the remoter West, the restless, rushing wave of settlement has broken with a shock
against the arid plains. The free lands are gone, the continent is crossed, and all this
push and energy is turning into channels of agitation. Failures in one area can no longer
be made good by taking up land on a new frontier; the conditions of a settled society are
being reached with suddenness and with confusion. The West has been built up with
borrowed capital, and the question of the stability of gold, as a standard of deferred
payments, is eagerly agitated by the debtor West, profoundly dissatisfied with the
industrial conditions that confront it, and actuated by frontier directness and rigor in
its remedies. For the most part, the men who built up the West beyond the Mississippi,
and who are now leading the agitation, came as pioneers from the old Northwest, in the
days when it was just passing from the stage of a frontier section. And now the frontier
opportunities are gone. Discontent is demanding an extension of governmental activity in
its behalf. In these demands, it finds itself in touch with the depressed agricultural
classes and the workingmen of the South and East. The Western problem is no longer a
sectional problem; it is a social problem on a national scale. The greater West,
extending from the Alleghenies to the Pacific, cannot be regarded as a unit; it requires
analysis into regions and classes. But its area, its population, and its material
resources would give force to its assertion that if there is a sectionalism in the
country, the sectionalism is Eastern. The old West, united to the new South, would
produce not a new sectionalism, but a new Americanism. It would not mean sectional
disunion, as some have speculated, but it might mean a drastic assertion of national
government and imperial expansion under a popular hero.