dren of New England in western New York and an
increasing flood of German immigrants were pouring into the Great Lake
basin and the prairies, north of the upland peoples who had chopped out
homes in the forests along the Ohio. This section was tied to the East
by the Great Lake navigation and the Erie canal, it became in fact an
extension of New England and New York. Here the Free Soil party found
its strength and New York newspapers expressed the political ideas.
Although this section tried to attach the Ohio River interests to itself
by canals and later by railroads, it was in reality for a long time
separate in its ideals and its interests and never succeeded in
dominating the Ohio Valley.

On the south along the Gulf Plains there developed the "Cotton Kingdom,"
a Greater South with a radical program of slavery expansion mapped out
by bold and aggressive leaders. Already this Southern section had
attempted to establish increasing commercial relations with the Ohio
Valley. The staple-producing region was a principal consumer of its live
stock and food products. South Carolina leaders like Calhoun tried to
bind the Ohio to the chariot of the South by the Cincinnati and
Charleston Railroad, designed to make an outlet for the Ohio Valley
products to the southeast. Georgia in her turn was a rival of South
Carolina in plans to drain this commerce itself. In all of these plans
to connect the Ohio Valley commercially with the South, the political
object was quite as prominent as the commercial.

In short, various areas were bidding for the support of the zone of
population along the Ohio River. The Ohio Valley recognized its old
relationship to the South, but its people were by no means champions of
slavery. In the southern portion of the States north of the Ohio where
indented servitude for many years opened a way to a system of
semi-slavery, there were divided counsels. Kentucky also spoke with no
certain voice. As a result, it is in these regions that we find the
stronghold of the compromising movement in the slavery struggle.
Kentucky furnished Abraham Lincoln to Illinois, and Jefferson Davis to
Mississippi, and was in reality the very center of the region of
adjustment between these rival interests. Senator Thomas, of southern
Illinois, moved the Missouri Compromise, and Henry Clay was the most
effective champion of that compromise, as he was the architect of the
Compromise of 1850. The Crittenden compromise proposals