t of the
Republic would find itself almost cut in two by the northward projection
of Virginia to within 100 miles of Lake Erie. It would be again nearly
cut in two by the projection of the northeast corner of Missouri to
within 200 miles of Lake Michigan.

In those days substantially all travel and commerce was along the lines
of the rivers. For the country between the Alleghany Mountains and
the Mississippi the Ohio River was the great artery. Into it empty the
Alleghany, Monongahela, Muskingum, the Kanawhas, Big Sandy, Scioto,
the Miamis, Licking, Kentucky, Green, Wabash, Cumberland and Tennessee
Rivers, each draining great valleys, and bringing with its volume of
waters a proportionate quota of travel and commerce. The Illinois River
also entered the Mississippi from the east with the commerce of a great
and fruitful region.

5

West of the Mississippi the mighty Missouri was the almost sole highway
for thousands of miles.

The State was made unusually large--68,735 square miles, where the
previous rule for States had been about 40,000 square miles--stretching
it so as to cover the mouths of the Ohio and the Illinois, and to lie on
both sides of the great Missouri for 200 miles. A glance at the map will
show how complete this maneuver seemed to be. Iowa and Minnesota were
then unbroken and unvisited stretches of prairie and forest, railroads
were only dreamed of by mechanical visionaries, and no man in Ohio,
Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky or Tennessee could send a load of produce
to market without Missouri's permission; he could make no considerable
journey without traversing her highways, while all of the imperial
area west of the Mississippi was made, it seemed, forever distinctly
tributary to her.

New Orleans was then the sole mart of the West, for the Erie Canal had
not been dug to convert the Great, Lakes into a colossal commercial
highway.

Out of a country possessing the unusual combination of surpassing
agricultural fertility with the most extraordinary mineral wealth they
carved a State larger in area than England and Wales and more than
one-fourth the size of France or Germany.

All ordinary calculations as to the development of such a favored region
would make of it a barrier which would effectively stay the propulsive
waves of Free Soilism.

6

So far as man's schemes could go there would never be an acre of free
soil west of Illinois.

The Anti-Slavery men were keenly alive to this strat