mond, Indiana, ventured to ask him what he thought of abolitionism, that Henry Clay made his fatal response, "Go home, Mr. Mendenhall, and mind your own business." The settlers whom the North contributed to the Old Northwest were refusing to mix with those who derived their ideals from the South.

In the summer of 1846, after various attempts at spontaneous statehood had been defeated in Wisconsin, Congress passed an enabling act, and for a third time reduced the area that the eternal compact in the Ordinance of 1787 had assigned to the last State to be constructed in the Old Northwest. The first reduction occurred when Illinois in 1818 was allowed its strip north of Chicago; the second when Michigan was compensated for the Toledo strip of which Ohio despoiled her, by the grant of the upper peninsula, between Lakes Superior and Michigan. Wisconsin was now cut short of the Mississippi River, which had been designed as her western limit, and was instead offered statehood only in case she would accept the St. Croix River as her boundary. This curtailing of Iowa and Wisconsin made room for an additional Mississippi Valley State (Minnesota), but caused real and reasonable disappointments.

4

Like Iowa, Wisconsin made two constitutions before her inhabitants were satisfied, but the reasons for the rejection of the first basic law were different in the two cases. Iowa choked over the boundary. In Wisconsin the different conceptions of the meaning of democracy, that have kept the State in continuous uproar since its creation, occasioned a struggle that was only partly settled when the second constitution was accepted in 1848. "There is a striking dissimilarity between the habits and customs of the people of the Mississippi Valley and the old Eastern States," wrote a well-informed writer in the Wisconsin Democrat in 1846: "the eastern and western portions of our Territory are made up principally of these divisions, hence there must of necessity exist strong prejudices between them which time and intercourse alone can eradicate."

There were noticeable among the delegates of the first convention representatives of the "progressive Democracy," who were Simon-pure Jacksonian extremists; of the "retrograding Demo

F. L. Paxson, "A Constitution of Democracy - Wisconsin, 1847,” in Mississippi Valley Historical Review, vol. II. The State Historical Society of Wisconsin, fortunate in the services of Draper, Thwaites, Kellogg, Quaife, and Schafer, has published voluminous materials on the official and popular debates over the constitutions.

cracy," who were disposed to question the eternal soundness of the Jacksonian financial program; and of the Whigs, who showed an eastern conservatism by being interested in property rights and believing in banks. The progressive Democrats were in control and offered to the territory a constitution forbidding the chartering of banks and the issuance of paper money, providing for elective judges, allowing the farmer to save his homestead from judgment for debts, and securing to married women the possession and control of their property. These were principles by which to test the "ultraism of the age," and they were all embodied in the constitution. There was an additional principle, of more political significance, in the requirement for the franchise of one year's residence and an oath of allegiance to the United States. The eastern sections of Wisconsin were filling so rapidly with immigrants that the western democrats foresaw themselves swallowed by a population of foreign antecedents and strove by this restriction to put off the evil day.

The issues were drawn over the constitution before the convention adjourned and submitted the document to the people at the polls. Marshall M. Strong, of Racine, one of the Lake Michigan communities, was unable to restrain his indignation as the convention inserted one radical article after another. He resigned his seat in the convention in disgust and went home to organize a coalition of "Retrograding Democrats" and Whigs, to fight the ratification of the constitution. He was successful. The alliance opposed with vigor the prohibition of banks and gave moral support to the aliens who wished to vote at once. The progressive Democrats, or "tadpoles" as their opponents called them, converted their sentiments to verse of a sort:

But singing did not help them, and the constitution went down, with only three counties in the territory giving it a majority. The year 1847 was devoted to reflection and party reorganization. Upon post-mortem analysis, it was seen that the definitive

item in the rejection was the prohibition of banks. Every month the streams of immigrants emptied more thousands of eastern and foreign residents into the territory. The population of 30,945, of 1840 swelled to one of 305,391 in 1850. The bank party wanted to make a new constitution, and the radical Democrats gave up their hope of defeating it. A Whig territorial delegate to Congress was chosen in September. Governor Dodge assembled the legislature in special session in October to call a convention once more, and in December this convention met in Madison.

The second constitution, accepted in the spring of 1848, and still in force in 1923, was a sweeping revision of the first. Hardly a phrase came through unchanged. The alterations in intent were fewer, however; and the one of these that carried the new basic law to victory forbade the legislature to charter any bank until after a referendum on the subject; when, should the referendum be affirmative, they might construct a "general banking law," which should be ineffective until ratified by the people at a general election. When, in 1852, this law was enacted and approved, it may be said that the Mississippi Valley had passed through the wave of Jacksonian thought, and had begun to confront the issues of a new generation. Wisconsin became the thirtieth State in May, 1848, and there was an appropriateness in the fact that one of the first senators was Henry Dodge, who found as a colleague at Washington his own son, Augustus Cæsar Dodge, Senator from Iowa.

The fight over the Wisconsin constitutions was a significant struggle that might have taught the politicians of the forties many useful things, had they possessed the insight to understand it. Thus far the settlements north of the Ohio River had been similar to and an outgrowth of those of the old West. The Jackson Democracy, and its imitation, the Harrison Whigs, grounded themselves in the typical frontier experiences and prejudices. The further the frontier penetrated, the greater weight it acquired without changing its fundamental character. The diversion of its tendencies, due to the plantation and slave labor conditions of the cotton country, had attracted notice in the early twenties, and the Gulf States became a group apart. The diversion due to the flooding of the northern slope of the Old Northwest with northern and foreign immigrants was less promptly appreciated, for it was tak ing place within the older States of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. There were few who realized that in a few years the control of these

States would be in contest, and that they would be forever lost to southern political manipulations. In Wisconsin, in 1848, there was eastern influence enough to defeat the banking prohibition, which had come to be regarded as typical among the Jacksonian constitutions. Every western State north of Kentucky under these Jacksonian influences made a constitutional revision after 1837. Wisconsin gave the first decisive check. It was still possible in both Iowa and Wisconsin to send two Democrats to the Senate upon the first election, but the votes that wanted banks were growing and could not be permanently satisfied with Democrats. In the presidential election of 1848, Taylor, the Whig, was elected without getting the electoral vote of any of the five Northwest States, or of Iowa. Yet Lincoln, in 1860, carried every one of them. The struggle in Wisconsin was merely an opening skirmish in the political battle that was to increase in deadly intensity for a dozen years.

Although the Mississippi Valley was largely unconscious of the changes in political balance that were impending, it felt that it was growing away from the primitive conditions of the first migrations. The rivers were crowded with steamboats, and the politicians had given up preaching that turnpikes would be the economic salvation of the country. The canal period had come and gone. The high hopes that surrounded the completion of the Erie Canal (1825), and the Ohio Canal (1832), had evaporated before the Illinois-Michigan Canal became an accomplished fact, in the year of the Wisconsin admission. A new era was opening dazzling promises of wealth and growth. In the same year, 1848, what may be regarded as the first through railroad of the West made a complete line of communication between Lake Erie and the Ohio, from Sandusky to Cincinnati. The railroad age became a reality in the same decade in which the party of Andrew Jackson lost its grip.

CHAPTER XLIV

THE RAILROAD AGE

"The Valley of the Mississippi: The greatest in the world, take it all in all. Situated as it is, between the two oceans, it will yet command the commerce of the world, and that commerce may be centred in New Orleans." This was the toast that John C. Calhoun gave at a banquet in the St. Charles Hotel at New Orleans, in the fall of 1845, before he took passage on the S.S. Marie to ascend the Mississippi to Memphis. At Memphis he was due to attend the great railroad convention where politicians and business men of the Middle West and South dazzled themselves with glimpses of the future and sought to find ways and means to bring the West in line with the railroad movement that was at the moment sweeping the world.

It was an anachronism of some interest that the statesman of reaction should have thought to attach himself to the forefront of progress. A constructive politician in his youth, Calhoun in middle life devoted his logical intellect to building a defensive philosophy around States' rights and slavery; and felt bound, therefore, to oppose whatever development of society seemed likely to interfere with State sovereignty. Yet in 1845 he thought it worth while to make the laborious journey from his South Carolina home to Mississippi, to New Orleans, and to Memphis, to engage in railroad propaganda. He was for the moment at leisure. With the termination of the Tyler Administration in March, he had vacated the office of Secretary of State, and he was not yet returned by his loyal State to his seat in the United States Senate. Some thought that he was looking forward to the presidential nomination of 1848, and a cynic wrote from Washington a little later: "Suppose you get up a great North Western convention [at Chicago], and invite him [Calhoun] to attend it," he will find a constitutional way to improve not only the Mississippi, but the northern lakes and harbors. Certainly he was not blind to the hold that the railroad movement had acquired over the western mind, or to the fact that no southern statesman was likely to be elected President unless he could capture the imagination or interest of the West. It was no new thing for transportation to be close to western