h, is itself too extensive a theme to be more than
mentioned.

Here in historic Kentucky, in the State which was the home of George
Rogers Clark it is not necessary to dwell upon his clear insight and
courage in carrying American arms into the Northwest. From the first,
Washington also grasped the significance of the Ohio Valley as a "rising
empire," whose population and trade were essential to the nation, but
which found its natural outlet down the Mississippi, where Spain blocked
the river, and which was in danger of withdrawing from the weak
confederacy. The intrigues of England to attract the Valley to herself
and those of Spain to add the settlements to the Spanish Empire, the use
of the Indians by these rivals, and the efforts of France to use the
pioneers of Kentucky to win New Orleans and the whole Valley between the
Alleghanies and the Rocky Mountains for a revived French Empire in
America, are among the fascinating chapters of American, as well as of
Ohio Valley, history. This position of the Valley explains much of the
Indian wars, the foreign relations, and, indirectly, the domestic
politics of the period from the Revolution to the purchase of Louisiana.
Indeed, the purchase was in large measure due to the pressure of the
settlers of the Ohio Valley to secure this necessary outlet. It was the
Ohio Valley which forced the nation away from a narrow colonial attitude
into its career as a nation among other nations with an adequate
physical basis for future growth.

In this development of a foreign policy in connection with the Ohio
Valley, we find the germ of the Monroe doctrine, and the beginnings of
the definite independence of the United States from the state system of
the Old World, the beginning, in fact, of its career as a world power.
This expansive impulse went on into the War of 1812, a war which was in
no inconsiderable degree, the result of the aggressive leadership of a
group of men from Kentucky and Tennessee, and especially of the daring
and lofty demands of Henry Clay, who even thus early voiced the spirit
of the Ohio Valley. That in this war William Henry Harrison and the
Kentucky troops achieved the real conquest of the northwest province and
Andrew Jackson with his Tennesseeans achieved the real conquest of the
Gulf Plains, is in itself abundant evidence of the part played in the
expansion of the nation by the section which formed on the Ohio and its
tributaries. Nor was this the end of the p