laughs at
these steerage quarrels," said the author.

Thus the Middle West was teaching the lesson of national
cross-fertilization instead of national enmities, the possibility of a
newer and richer civilization, not by preserving unmodified or isolated
the old component elements, but by breaking down the line-fences, by
merging the individual life in the common product--a new product, which
held the promise of world brotherhood. If the pioneers divided their
allegiance between various parties, Whig, Democrat, Free Soil or
Republican, it does not follow that the western Whig was like the
eastern Whig. There was an infiltration of a western quality into all of
these. The western Whig supported Harrison more because he was a pioneer
than because he was a Whig. It saw in him a legitimate successor of
Andrew Jackson. The campaign of 1840 was a Middle Western camp meeting
on a huge scale. The log cabins, the cider and the coonskins were the
symbols of the triumph of Middle Western ideas, and were carried with
misgivings by the merchants, the bankers and the manufacturers of the
East. In like fashion, the Middle Western wing of the Democratic party
was as different from the Southern wing wherein lay its strength, as
Douglas was from Calhoun. It had little in common with the slaveholding
classes of the South, even while it felt the kinship of the pioneer with
the people of the Southern upland stock from which so many Westerners
were descended.

In the later forties and early fifties most of the Middle Western States
made constitutions. The debates in their conventions and the results
embodied in the constitutions themselves tell the story of their
political ideals. Of course, they based the franchise on the principle
of manhood suffrage. But they also provided for an elective judiciary,
for restrictions on the borrowing power of the State, lest it fall under
the control of what they feared as the money power, and several of them
either provided for the extinguishment of banks of issue, or rigidly
restrained them. Some of them exempted the homestead from forced sale
for debt; married women's legal rights were prominent topics in the
debates of the conventions, and Wisconsin led off by permitting the
alien to vote after a year's residence. It welcomed the newcomer to the
freedom and to the obligations of American citizenship.

Although this pioneer society was preponderantly an agricultural society
it was rapidly learning tha