USA > Mississippi > The pioneers, preachers and people of the Mississippi Valley > Part 24
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Across the northern portion of the great Valley, if you glance upon the map, you can easily trace two great lines of cities dotting, like great jewels, the chain of trade and intercourse between East and West. The northern line, from Buffalo by Cleveland and Detroit, ends at Chicago; the southern line begins with Pittsburg, and extends, by Cincinnati and Louisville, to St. Louis. The nine cities of the first have increased their total population, during the last ten years, from 159,000 to 454,000 ; and the nine of the second line, during the same period, from
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335,000 to 600,000. The most wondrous of them all, Chicago, which in 1840 had 4,800 inhabitants- which in 1830 had 70 inhabitants-had last year 125,000.
In what other way could I set before you what the Mississippi Valley now is? Mere statistics, you will say ; uninteresting figures ; dry bones of information. But, as I said before, it is these very figures which are, if rightly viewed, instinct with whatever is grand and marvellous. Within this brief period-for one human life, long though it may be, is brief enough compared with the age of this world-within this brief period, the Nation of the Valley has grown up with such a portentous speed and strength as reminds us of that gigantic fountain which pours suddenly a full-grown river from the unknown caverns of the lower earth : from nothing, to myriads of souls ; from nothing, to millions of money ; from nothing, to an infinity of strength and power, and to a high grade of culture and excellence. Thus I state the summary, by comparisons, in general terms. But it is the series of arithmetical numbers that affords the most tangible basis for thought-the firmest and clearest, and, indeed, the only valuable conceptions, upon such a point as this.
And now I have passed over two parts of this sum- ming up. I have examined this western race, and inquired what is it by blood and by constituent parts ;
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and I have sought to indicate, by dint of some mathe- matical totals, some general idea of what it is now, in number, strength, and attainment. And it remains to essay a more dangerous task-to speak of its future. I am no prophet, either, to promise good things, or to threaten evil; nor do I pretend to any wonderful measure, even of merely human prescience. All that I venture to attempt is, to state obvious meanings of visible phenomena-of those indications which the great Master of Life has given to us on purpose that we might reason on them and conclude from them.
The Valley is to be, as it has been, a great harbor of refuge for the poor and oppressed of other lands. It is the rightful glory of our Anglo-American race to have opened welcoming arms to the refugees of every nation. No thought of selfish isolation ever entered the hearts of the men that inhabit the unparalleled region of the West. They justly felt that union and cooperation, not isolation and exelu- siveness, is the principle of human progress. The Gentile Tyrian, ever under the stern and uncom- promising polity of the Jewish theocracy, brought his tribute of skill and of splendid gifts to the great temple of Solomon ; Ophir sent its gold, the far Indies their precious stones; and Candace, queen of Ethiopia, from the furthest ends of the earth, came on an acceptable pilgrimage to the shrine of the
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Hebrews' God and the throne of the Hebrew king All commerce, all agriculture, all art, laid their con- tributions upon the hallowed mount where God's home was builded of old. And thus to-day, in this vaster and immeasurably more wondrous temple- this great edifice of free civil and religious polity the strength and beauty of the wealthy Valley-shall all people and all tongues worship, and offer upon its altars their various offerings, of all the good gifts with which God has endowed them. Principally, these thronging thousands contribute of their physical strength. Canals are to be digged; railroads to be builded ; all that mass of material improvements to be perfected, which is the dream of the practical statesmanship of our Union. These are needed before our land shall attain its ideal condition of a totality of natural gifts and forees, modified by human skill-ere it will yield the greatest possible amount of fruits to its people. And thus have long been pouring in the legions of a great industrial army, from Ireland, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Holland ; the men whose strong arms and laborious habits render them competent to execute precisely those masses of merc detail and drudgery so neees- sary to the broad schemes of the Anglo-American brain, but so distasteful to his preferences for mental labor, for organizing, for directing; for thinking, in short, that others may do. It is this long succession
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of immigrants which most singularly marks the wis- dom of that mighty Hand which guides the fates of the Valley. The first generation furnishes laborers. But their children, half-children of the soil, and receiving the powerful impress of the invigorating new world, and of its active minds, at once rise upward and become farmers or mechanics; while the cohorts of the railroad and the scattered ranks of hired laborers are recruited from new arrivals.
Yet, again, the same over-ruling wisdom provided that this innumerable host of people, of strange man- ners and religion, would not find the portals of the Valley thrown open to them until the great pillars of its commonwealth-its religious and political forms-were powerfully and permanently adjusted. Not until the proper and distinctive Anglo-American forms of worship and of society were already received and vigorously in operation, did the foreign bands find room for the soles of their feet. Then, after the new people had grown large enough and strong enough for the action of the peculiar power of absorption and integration with itself which marks the Anglo-Saxon race, came the gradual influx of the strangers, pour- ing steadily in, fusing and disappearing within the ranks of the host already there.
Nearly four-fifths of the foreign population of our country has arrived upon our shores since 1830; and more than half of its total of three millions, since
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1S±0 Yet how few are those who apprehend any dang ¿ to our nation or to its valuable traits or pri- vileg. 3, from this great transfusion of new blood ! Who needs to doubt or to fear for our future ? Many, at different times, have been terrified at the ruin sup- posed to await the land from the spread of Romanism and of its attendant civil despotisms among us. But how groundless an apprehension ! When Jesuitism had the land all to itself, it was unable to keep it. Rome, unopposed, backed by the throne of France, aided by the subtlest diplomacy, the greatest generals, the wisest statesmen, long endeavored to retain her hold upon the soil-but in vain. And when she thus failed, is it for a moment to be supposed that she could succeed now ? Instead of the scattered super- stitious barbarians, herded into the priestly fold by the Catholic missionaries, and with but little more consciousness of why it was done than so many cat- tle would have had, they must now encounter a population ten thousand fold greater, intelligent, acute, trained in beliefs and-what is much more- in feelings, instincts and modes of thought and action expressly opposed or utterly foreign to them ; large, broad modes of mental action which their little hier- archie formulas can neither contain nor cope with ; the vivid force of that shrewd circumspect self-relf- ance which has been nurtured by the strong youth and toilsome adventurous manhood of the West ; the
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unwearied, incessant, increasing flow of knowledge, of goodness, of purity, of intellectual force, supplied from so many thousands of fountains, in school-house, college, and church. Is it to be feared that such men as the Romanists will reduce the West beneath the sway of the Papacy ? Shall we not rather ingulf and assimilate them, priests, churches, com- municants and all ? Can the Roman Bishop rule the huge and rapid waves of this great ocean of human life? It was only Christ whose word made the winds to cease and the sea to be calm ;- even the apostle, essaying to pass to his Master, would have sunk for lack of faith ;- and surely, surely these deceived apostles of a mistaken faith will quickly disappear beneath the swelling flood.
For my own part, I have no fear. It is true that once I spoke in the usual glowing terms, of the great battle of Armageddon that was to be fought in the Valley of the Mississippi, and of the dangers to which freedom was then to be exposed from the on- slaughts and invasions of foreigners and Romanists. But study and observation have convinced me to the contrary. How frequent is the remark, even among Romanists themselves, that their church only keeps the immigrating generation ! The first comers may themselves ever remain faithful and subservient sons of the church. But the attachment of their children is feeble and wavering; the grandchildren almost
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always lapse from their connection with it, and the fourth generation are commonly embosomed within some Protestant organization. No; Romanists will
never change us. We shall assimilate them, and shall do good both to them and to ourselves in the process. The religious formulas of Europe can no more be established upon the soil of this country than could the structure of one of its mediaval des- potisms be transported hither and maintained among us. Facts forbid such a belief; reason, forbids it; Faith, Hope, and Charity, all three, forbid it.
Let them come, therefore; there is room for them all, and we need them all. They will not defile or lower us; we shall purify and elevate them. They come into a purer atmosphere, upon a higher plane of life; their necessary and unavoidable movement will be upward. Even Mormonism, which occupies one of the outlying suburbs of the Valley of the Miss- issippi-Mormonism, one of the greatest if not the most important fact of our age and country-dark, debasing and fearful as its politics and morality may be-I believe to be a real step in advance for most of those who remove to its desert home. And it seems to me that few will fail to reach the same conclusion, who shall carefully consider whence these people come, what their characteristics and qualities are, what the new circumstances are in which they find them- selves placed, and the fact that for the first time in
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their history or that of their ancestors, they are here brought into approximately true, healthy and legi- timate relations with the earth and labor. For God's great earthly instrument for elevating man in the scale of social being is labor. Men must set out from earth, to reach heaven. He is the true son of Earth-the true Antæus ; he gains new and ever greater strengtli by being dashed into rude forcible contact with her rugged bosom, and every rebound carries him further upward. And these Mormons, however isolated from our institutions, from the aids of our social, intellectual, religious influences, are at least starting from the right point. They are with few exceptions an industrious and even laborious peo- ple, frugal and honest and honorable within the important range of the minor practical ethics. Now God leaves none of his children alone; and thus we are in duty bound to hope and believe that in pro- cess of time old mother Earth, and their labor and industry and economy in dealing with her, will little by little lift them upward until at last they will come to the full and perfect stature of American Christian citizens. Therefore it is that I have not the least objection to have hundreds, thousands, and tens of thousands, flocking to the Great Salt Lake. Through whatever ill-favored or perilous phases, the movement must and will result in good.
Of all the various races whose blood mingles in the
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Great Valley, or whose members inhabit it, one only remains hopelesly untamed, untamable, savage. The Indian alone defies the operation of the great princi- ciple of interfusion of bloods. Amidst the countless thousands of whites, or rather, just before their advancing line, he remains an isolated, solitary being. He stalks across the stage of thought or of history alone. "Indian file," we say ; and it is singly, as we thus describe single physical movements, that we ever think of him, either in journeying, in character, or action. The Indian can never be civilized. He has not the faculties by which civilization lays hold upon a man to modify and to cultivate him. For we im- prove, through persistent patient labor, and through the affections. Were it not for the power and the liabit of constant industry, were it not for the sweet fetters of love and duty to parents, family, children, friends, what would make you and me stronger or wiser, or better, or more useful-if we are so-from year to year? Scarcely would the united strength of religious obligation and of self-love avail to accom- plish it without these balancing encircling forces. These supply us with the quiet incessant stimulus which holds us steadily, though with unperceived strength, to our destined line of labor. But these the solitary Indian scarcely feels at all; and, there- fore, the Indian must perish. We cannot absorb him, cannot render him an integral part of our own
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society. We drive him further westward, fight him, murder him with whisky. Our missionaries labor amongst his decreasing bands with praiseworthy per- severance, but with an utterly hopeless prospect. God's law is against him. He cannot enter into our laborious civilization, he cannot live amongst it ; and he must needs disappear.
I need scarcely refer to the outlandish barbarism and self-sufficient brutality of the strange incursion of Chinamen into California. That distant State is no part nor outgrowth of the Valley of the Missis- sippi, except in a very indirect and distant sense ; and if it were otherwise I could only say that perhaps this Chinese race has the least good and the most evil in it of any which might endeavor to unite with our own. But it is entirely improbable, and scarce possible that such a union should happen, in any mea- sure whatever.
In thus recapitulating the admixture of races in the West, I must not omit to refer to the mingling of the eastern and southern Anglo-Americans with each other there, and with those of the northern half of the West. A quarter, almost, of the whole popula- tion of New England, has been drained out of it into new settlements. Her sons and daughters are ever moving westward, insomuch that whole villages may be found left with a strange over-proportion of elderly people in them. Over the mountains they go,
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teaching or trading, farming or preaching. The young maidens intermarry with the southerners or westerners, and the young men take to themselves wives of the daughters of the land. And thus are fused together the comparatively stiff and formal, though strong, practical, straightforward, acute and resolute qualities of the New Englander, with the fiery, impulsive generosity, the passionate fervor, the indolence, the semi-tropical ease, of the far South, or the broad, strong, open, hearty geniality, some- times coarse, but always kind, of the more northern part of the West.
To speculate on future numerical totals would be lost time. There is no arithmetic of the future. Let us glance at data of a sort from which we can reason forward. Observe the material and physiological conditions for an improvable race, which are possessed by the people of the Valley.
A territory all but boundless ; a climate and a soil exuberant beyond all measure, in geniality and rich- ness ; a means of internal communication unprece- dented and unequalled in human history ; resources for material wealth utterly incalculable ; a freedom almost ideal, of thought, expression and action ; a predominant hereditary blood the best in the world ; a national training adapted to develop all the strong- est and best powers of humanity ; a gradual afflux of other races, so ordered and adjusted that the genial
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cheerfulness of one, the stern morality and strength of principle and shrewd practical energy of another, the gaiety and tireless industry of another, the lofty honor and daring bravery of another, shall all mingle together in the formation of one vast homogeneous race, a compound of many various human qualities- and thus form the truest representative man on earth. Look, lastly, at the various instrumentalities and institutions which human experience has elabo- rated or Divine wisdom has ordained, as best for communicating and increasing and diffusing know- ledge, and goodness, and culture. Observe all this, and then say whether the nation of the great valley is not destined-so far as human foresight can deter- mine-to become a controlling force in our own great commonwealth, a wise, and just, and strong, and good community, happy at home, honored by all, sanctified and blessed by God-the foremost and high- est among the sons of men, the latest, noblest expo- sition of the magnificent symmetry and beauty and strength of a rightly cultured humanity?
No doubt the careful searcher may discern faults in the western character; eccentricity, extravagance, materialism, recklessness, insubordination. But these errors may be shown to be the necessary logical conclusions of the long series of actual premises ; of the wild and dangerous training of this people, received while, as a people, yet in their early youth.
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They are faults very like those of a great, overgrown boy ; a creature often awkward, uncomfortable, even ridiculous, but who will speedily spread and harden into a stately and powerful man ; faults of strongly growing and vigorous youth, such as will often, by a singularly small modification, become the main vir- tues of manhood. They need not discourage the admirer of the western character, any more than should the dust of the race-course on the garment of the victor distress his congratulating friends. It is not on this earth, it is true, that anything can be per- fect, or can escape the small objections of the dilet- tante traveller, or come up to the rigid unpractical standard of that peculiarly ignorant man the theo- retical moralist. Nor can the Great Valley nor its people. But when the circumstances are considered which have attended the growth of that people, and the results which it has achieved within these few years, the philanthropist, the statesman, the patriot will find very much greater cause to rejoice and be glad, than to lament and to fear.
So far as human foresight can discern, a future of marvellous grandeur and power awaits the Nation of the Valley. Its thronging, busy millions, masters of a wealth beyond counting, a nation well and wisely trained, pouring abroad, over all the world, by many channels, fabulous masses of rich products, and gathering in the various wealth of all the world in
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return, may well look forward to the day when they shall rule the destinies of all the nation-nay, it may be, of all the continent. And while it is thus the seat of a vast political dominion, it may likewise, with no less reason, aspire to stand among the nations, a beautiful and noble monument of richly-cultured intellect -- of strong, deep love-of true and lovely Christian goodness. It may justly and hopefully aspire to become the first, loftiest, grandest example in all the long panorama of human history, of that grand and shapely thing which God would have every nation become: a fabric of beauty, strength and grace, far beyond any of the fanciful Utopias of philosophic schemers, or heathen or unchristian legis- lators ; in truth and soberness, the crown and glory of the whole earth.
What dispensations the mysterious Governor of nations may have reserved for it, we know not. We must wait for, and submit to the decrees of God; even should lie have determined that the whole vast Valley, like that dimly-fabled island of Atlantis, of which ancient geographers seem to speak, shall sink suddenly away, and give place to the dreary, barren fields of the ocean. Of this we know not; of such things we cannot reason. There seems to be but one single event whose form we can imagine to see within the dim shadows of the com- ing years; but one single occurrence of which wo
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may speak in anticipation, and to which we need to look with any fears, either for its own ugly linea- ments, or the baleful blight which it may possibly be fated to cast over the future fortunes of the multitudes in the Valley.
This is that hateful thing, whose name is to-day unfilially and impiously heard ever and anon, mut- tered in secret treason, or howled in the frenzy of public treason, by fools or traitors, North and South -the vile name of disunion. Let this Union be dis- solved, and farewell to all those fair dreams which my feeble words have so imperfectly and briefly striven to paint. If the Union is dissolved, no human power will ever reconstruct it; farewell to these United States, and, with them, to our grand pos- sessions of patriotic memories; to the hard-fought Revolution ; to the wise counsels of Washington ; the inspiring oratory of so many heaven-gifted speakers ; to the warlike fame of so many glorious soldiers ; to the undying wisdom of Jefferson and of Hamilton, and so many more statesmen and legislators; to all the historic treasures of the nation. For, I pray you, which of the mobs of little, feeble, squabbling States -" Sovereign States," forsooth !- would own them all? Or by what rule should a dividend of them be made ? or what distribution would be consented to?
Is it indeed true that our nation cannot last one century ? Is our cohesive power already destroyed ?
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Are we already rotten ? Are our forbearance, our kindness, our brotherly love, so soon exhausted ? Have we so quickly squandered our inheritance of traditions, of common blood, of common suffering and labor, of common interest, of common glory and prosperity, and must we so soon be scattered into a contemptible chaos of amorphous, disintegrated, strengthless, political atoms ?
I cannot believe it. I have heard-I still hear- all the miserable outcries of the villain horde that would do this devil's work. I have not patience, nor is it necessary to recite them here. But I still have faith unshaken in the trustworthiness of the American people-in their ability, with God's help, to govern themselves. I still believe that they see and feel the unimaginable grandeur and beauty of the great and holy office which God has set them to fill-the office of demonstrating the excellency of intelligent and sanctified freedom in a nation; that they recognize and contemn the paltry selfishness of the dogs that yelp against the fair edifice of our republic; and that they will speedily send them howling to their dens, or disappointed to their graves.
There may be many perils along our path-much suffering in store for us. Perhaps the seal must be dipped in blood that is still to be set to the record of our final and assured prosperity as a nation. But
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even though it be thus, shall we for that turn shame- fully back from the great work that is set before us to do? Shall we ignobly refuse to do the office to which God has set us apart, in the sight of all the world ? I say, no. I am yet to be forced to believe that our people are so fallen backward toward a dark . barbarism as to acquiesce in such an abject abnega- tion ; and I am yet to be forced to believe that the God of our fathers has so utterly rejected us that in his hot anger he will thus cast us out and leave us a jest and a scoff among the crowned tyrants of the earth. I believe better things. I believe that he will still lead us, as he has thus far led us, along the path toward the glorious object of our natural life; I believe that better days will come; and that in the sunshine of prosperity, and our good God still leading us, we shall in future years rise still higher and more gloriously in the scale of being; that the voice of our glory and our rejoicing shall, in louder and still louder tones, announce its wondrous lesson to the nations, proclaiming liberty throughout all the land, even unto all the inhabitants thereof.
THE END.
HUS.
M6383p
196614
William Henry
Author Milburn,
The pioneers, preachers and people of the
Title
Mississippi Valley.
DATE
University of Toronto Library
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