e Southerners across the river. They had
sprung largely from the humbler classes of the South, although there
were important exceptions. The early pioneer life, however, was
ill-suited to the great plantations, and slavery was excluded under the
Ordinance. Thus this Southern zone of the Middle West, particularly in
Indiana and Illinois, constituted a mediating section between the South
and the North. The Mississippi still acted as a bond of union, and up to
the close of the War of 1812 the Valley, north and south, had been
fundamentally of the same social organization. In order to understand
what follows, we must bear in mind the outlines of the occupation of the
Gulf Plains. While settlement had been crossing the Ohio to the
Northwest, the spread of cotton culture and negro slavery into the
Southwest had been equally significant. What the New England States and
New York were in the occupation of the Middle West, Virginia, the
Carolinas, and Georgia were in the occupation of the Gulf States. But,
as in the case of the Northwest, a modification of the original stock
occurred in the new environment. A greater energy and initiative
appeared in the new Southern lands; the pioneer's devotion to exploiting
the territory in which he was placed transferred slavery from the
patriarchal to the commercial basis. The same expansive tendency seen in
the Northwest revealed itself, with a belligerent seasoning, in the Gulf
States. They had a program of action. Abraham Lincoln migrated from
Kentucky to Indiana and to Illinois. Jefferson Davis moved from Kentucky
to Louisiana, and thence to Mississippi, in the same period. Starting
from the same locality, each represented the divergent flow of streams
of settlement into contrasted environments. The result of these
antagonistic streams of migration to the West was a struggle between the
Lake and Prairie plainsmen, on the one side, and the Gulf plainsmen, on
the other, for the possession of the Mississippi Valley. It was the
crucial part of the struggle between the Northern and Southern sections
of the nation. What gave slavery and State sovereignty their power as
issues was the fact that they involved the question of dominance over
common territory in an expanding nation. The place of the Middle West in
the origin and settlement of the great slavery struggle is of the
highest significance.

In the early history of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, a modified form of
slavery existed under a sy