204 Manhood and Statehood 



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ting the communities growing up along the Ohio to 

 a full equality with the older States ; and when Lou 

 isiana was given Statehood, they insisted that that 

 very fact dissolved the Union. When our people had 

 begun to settle in the Mississippi Valley, Jefferson 

 himself accepted with equanimity the view that 

 probably it would not be possible to keep regions so 

 infinitely remote as the Mississippi and the Atlantic 

 Coast in the same Union. Later even such a stanch 

 Union man and firm believer in Western growth as 

 fearless old Tom Benton of Missouri thought that 

 it would be folly to try to extend the national limits 

 westward of the Rocky Mountains. In 1830 our 

 then best-known man of letters and historian, Wash 

 ington Irving, prophesied that for ages to come the 

 country upon which we now stand would be inhab 

 ited simply by roving tribes of nomads. 



The mental attitude of all these good people need 

 not surprise anybody. There was nothing in the 

 past by which to judge either the task before this 

 country, or the way in which that task was to be 

 done. As Lowell finely said, on this continent we 

 have made new States as Old World men pitch tents. 

 Even the most far-seeing statesmen, those most 

 gifted with the imagination needed by really great 

 statesmen, could not at first grasp what the process 

 really meant Slowly and with incredible labor the 

 backwoodsmen of the old colonies hewed their way 



