y to her leadership in the field. The
names of Lincoln and Chase show that the presidential, the financial,
and the war powers were in the hands of the Middle West. If we were to
accept Seward's own classification, the conduct of foreign affairs as
well belonged to the same section; it was, at least, in the hands of
representatives of the dominant forces of the section. The Middle West,
led by Grant and Sherman, hewed its way down the Mississippi and across
the Gulf States, and Lincoln could exult in 1863, "The Father of Waters
again goes unvexed to the sea. Thanks to the great Northwest for it, nor
yet wholly to them."

In thus outlining the relations of the Middle West to the slavery
struggle, we have passed over important extensions of settlement in the
decade before the war. In these years, not only did the density of
settlement increase in the older portions of the region, but new waves
of colonization passed into the remoter prairies. Iowa's pioneers,
after Indian cessions had been secured, spread well toward her western
limits. Minnesota, also, was recruited by a column of pioneers. The
treaty of Traverse de Sioux, in 1851, opened over twenty million acres
of arable land in that State, and Minnesota increased her population
2730.7 per cent in the decade from 1850 to 1860.

Up to this decade the pine belt of the Middle West, in northern
Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota had been the field of operations of
Indian traders. At first under English companies, and afterward under
Astor's American Fur Company, the traders with their French and
half-breed boatmen skirted the Great Lakes and followed the rivers into
the forests, where they stationed their posts and spread goods and
whiskey among the Indians. Their posts were centers of disintegration
among the savages. The new wants and the demoralization which resulted
from the Indian trade facilitated the purchases of their lands by the
federal government. The trader was followed by the seeker for the best
pine land "forties"; and by the time of the Civil War the exploitation
of the pine belt had fairly begun. The Irish and Canadian choppers,
followed by the Scandinavians, joined the forest men, and log drives
succeeded the trading canoe. Men from the pine woods of Maine and
Vermont directed the industry, and became magnates in the mill towns
that grew up in the forests,--millionaires, and afterwards political
leaders. In the prairie country of the Middle West, the Ind