From the point of view of the West, the rise of the South is significant because the process drew away part of the West from the section bearing this name, and although not entirely altering its interests identified it primarily with the States bordering upon the Gulf of Mexico. It was after the second war with England (1812-14) that this differentiation became most apparent, and before the election of Andrew Jackson the result was both visible and ominous. The South stretched across the continent from the tidewater bases in Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia. ! It thrust itself into the open lands of the public domain as far as these were capable of normal agriculture, and came to an end only along the eastern margin of the high plains of western Texas. It did not provide for the area of the West a precise southern limit, for there was developed a twilight zone running , from Kentucky and Tennessee into Missouri where there was a clash of West and South that has not yet subsided. Here, men groped for the key to American politics during the middle third of the i9th century. By its outspoken southern preferences it encouraged the leaders of the South when they thought of seces sion ; by its essential western interests it discouraged them when the issue came to a head in the Civil War. It is to-day so southern that it cannot fairly be described as Middle West ; but it is so Western that it is no longer a dependable ally of the solid South.
At the outbreak of the Civil War the dominant American sec tions were East, South and West; and beyond the West there stretched to the Pacific a zone of plain and mountain sparsely sprinkled with inhabitants and not yet organized to any type. When during and after the Civil War this region developed into another new West there was confusion in terminology for it was nearly as different from the West of the middle period as the West was from the East or South. Time brought the nomen clature. The plains and the cow country, the mining camps, and the Pacific slope became the Far West; and Middle West came haltingly into use to describe what had before been West.
There is a topographic unity that helped to shape the old West, and that has not ceased to operate now that it has become the Middle West. The unity began to have an influence when the earliest pioneers crossed the Appalachians. These were not en tirely free to choose their crossings. At two or three places the valley roads were designated by easy passes across the moun tains. The military leaders of the colonial period had discovered one of them; and in the wake of the armies of Braddock (1755) and Forbes (1758) a procession of homeseekers advanced up the tributaries of the Potomac and Susquehanna until among the hills they met the southern tributaries of the Ohio river, the Youghio gheny and the Monongahela. Half a century later the Cumberland road, following this trail, was the first great Federal venture in internal improvements. It was a venture that had no real rivals until the Erie canal (1825) became effective through New York, and the central trunk line railroads reached the Ohio river at Pittsburgh and Wheeling a quarter-century later. The other great gateway to the Middle West was blazed by Daniel Boone for a land company in 1775, and emptied through Cumberland Gap into the Blue Grass region of Kentucky, the social overflow from Virginia and the Carolinas. Once through these gateways, the
pioneer of the Middle West found himself cut off from easy access east by a mountain wall, and thrown into local alignment west by the fact that the rivers of the western slope of the Appalachians start separately as Allegheny and Monongahela. Kanawha, Cumberland and Tennessee, only to end as the Ohio river and to pass as a single stream into the Mississippi. From the Great Lakes to Muscle Shoals of the Tennessee river there was a necessary unity of need, a set of agricultural and climatic similarities, and a fact of separateness from the East. The moun tain wall was not too high for the migrant ; but it was too high, and the road was too long, for the farm surplus of the West to reach an Eastern market. The uniformities that thus resulted may be studied in detail from the time of the rebellion of Western farmers against the whisky excise (1794) until the time of their demand that greenback money be used to pay the debts of the Civil War (1868) ; they show themselves in the conspiracies for the opening of the Mississippi river to up-river trade, and in the zest for the conquest of Canada and the control of the St. Law rence route. In the decade after the war of 1812, their greatest leader, Henry Clay, developed a theory of national integration for their special benefit, but called his programme the "American System," because both he and they genuinely fancied themselves to be America. Never, until the railroad cut across the natural routes indicated by topography, did the West free itself from the coercive control over its destinies, resources and ideas exercised by the Ohio river and the Mississippi. And when at last the rail roads brought geographical dominance to an end, the Middle West had acquired a habit of thinking alike; and found a con tinuing influence to uniformity in a debtor relationship that could not easily be shaken off.