Under its early vision of manifest dest successfully resisted the obstacles which checked or restricted its advance. From its early posi tion on the Ohio Valley, as the flying column of the nation, it served as an entering wedge to the possession of the Mississippi Valley. The acquisition of Louisiana, dictated by frontier needs, marked the downfall of a policy of strict construction and furnished a new area for na tional legislation. It furnished new opportuni ties for the rise of younger commonwealths which shook the older ones out of their self centred life, and for the rise of new problems which broadened the processes of nationalization and greatly influenced questions of politics.
In turning the scale in favor of the War of 1812 the West gave voice to the newer nation ality of the newer States. Meantime, the pos sibilities of its great historic waterway furnished the incentive for Fulton's successful invention of the steamboat.
The steady increase of westward extension and the consequent increase of western idea* between 1800 and 1820, alarmed the established classes of the East who—already sighting a new problem in the labor populations of its cities which began to assert a determination to share in government — saw in the democratic tendencies, of the newly-created frontier States, contagious influences which were already blow ing from the West to liberalise the more con servative constitutions of the East.
In the years following the War of 1812, aided by the revolutionizing effect of steam navigation on transportation, and with its prac tical backwoods ideal of democracy, the phe nomenal rise of the new West was the most simaificant fact in American history. For the half decade after 1815 it furnished a new State each year, carrying the wedge of settlement up the Missouri to its bend at the junction with Kansas on the edge of the traditional 'Ameri can desert' where the apex of the frontier lines halted for almost three decades awaiting the ad vance of the right and left flanks which the apex had so far outdistanced.
Thus, by 1820, the West had nine States whose achievement in the extension of more liberal political ideas in American democracy re acted upon the older and more conservative States of the East, both by example and by ac tual pressure from loss of population through emigration resulting from the more attractive conditions of political equality in the West.
On its advancing frontier depended largely the growth of nationalism and the evolution of American political institutions. Its economic
influences after 1815 made it a nationalising force in the field of domestic policy, as shown in a series of congressional legislative acts which increased the power of the Federal gov ernment. In legislative action and in the eco nomic and social characteristics. it stood in op position to the sectionalism of the coast. In the problems of internal development and eco nomic legislation, in the period between 1815 and 1860, it held the balance of power and set the course of national progress.
By 1822 it had a congressional voting power which gave to its interests and ideals a power ful if not a controlling voice in national coun cils, and with its strong nationalistic feeling it had a self-confidence untroubled by any doubts of its capacity to rule. Increasingly reacting upon the older sections, it its competition and attraction for settlers, It gradually became a dominant force upon the economic and political life of the nation. Its rising commerce and de mand for eastern manufactures attracted the attention of eastern ports (New York, Philadel phia, Boston and others) which entered a race of competition for control of trade through de velopment of State systems of internal improve ments in transportation— a rivalry for access to new tributary spheres of influence whose latest phase appeared in railroad legislation.
The result of its influence was liberal con struction of the constitution and a larger na tionality. Its nationalizing tendency trans formed the democracy of Jefferson into the na tional republicanism of Monroe and later into a new democracy which marked the triumph of the frontier as an effective force in the nation.
Finally in 1829, it elected to the Presidency its typical Scotch-Irish representative, Andrew Jackson, who had become the hero of the whole West in the War of 1812 and by subsequent In dian fighting, and who especially became the mouthpiece of the Western popular will in his assaults upon the national bank as an engine of aristocracy and in his denunciation of nullifica tion in South Carolina. Although its triumph marked the end of an old era of trained states men, and a new era of the Spoils system in politics and of lax financial integrity (illustrated by wild-cat banking), it prepared the way for a broader and better democracy whose first great representative was the pioneer rail-splitter. Abraham Lincoln of the old Northwest.