ompelled both Whigs and
Democrats to propose fusion on the basis of concession to Free Soil
doctrines. The New England settlers and the western New York
settlers,--the children of New England,--were keenly alive to the
importance of the issue. Indeed, Seward, in an address at Madison,
Wisconsin, in 1860, declared that the Northwest, in reality, extended to
the base of the Alleghanies, and that the new States had "matured just
in the critical moment to rally the free States of the Atlantic coast,
to call them back to their ancient principles."

These Free Soil forces and the nationalistic tendencies of the Middle
West proved too strong for the opposing doctrines when the real struggle
came. Calhoun and Taney shaped the issue so logically that the Middle
West saw that the contest was not only a war for the preservation of the
Union, but also a war for the possession of the unoccupied West, a
struggle between the Middle West and the States of the Gulf Plains. The
economic life of the Middle West had been bound by the railroad to the
North Atlantic, and its interests, as well as its love of national
unity, made it in every way hostile to secession. When Dr. Cutler had
urged the desires of the Ohio Company upon Congress, in 1787, he had
promised to plant in the Ohio Valley a colony that would stand for the
Union. Vinton of Ohio, in arguing for the admission of Iowa, urged the
position of the Middle West as the great unifying section of the
country: "Disunion," he said, "is ruin to them. They have no
alternative but to resist it whenever or wherever attempted. . . .
Massachusetts and South Carolina might, for aught I know, find a
dividing line that would be mutually satisfactory to them; but, Sir,
they can find no such line to which the western country can assent." But
it was Abraham Lincoln who stated the issue with the greatest precision,
and who voiced most clearly the nationalism of the Middle West, when he
declared, "A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this
government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free."

So it was that when the civil war in Kansas grew into the Civil War in
the Union, after Lincoln's election to the presidency, the Middle West,
dominated by its combined Puritan and German population, ceased to
compromise, and turned the scale in favor of the North. The Middle West
furnished more than one-third of the Union troops. The names of Grant
and Sherman are sufficient testimon