254 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 
conquest of the Rockies. Rot every section, however, had it in 
itself, to acquire in a short ten years a complete system of lines, 
extending from border to border, and changing the whole out¬ 
look of social and economic life. 
Before 1848, the line of the old Rational Road, from * 1 * Wheel¬ 
ing to Columbus, Indianapolis, Vandalia, and St. Louis, split 
the five northwestern states into uneven halves of discordant 
social tone. 3 The southern half was reached by navigable- 
streams tributary to the Ohio River. It had been peopled by 
the rush of pioneers in the years following the war of 1812. 
The parents of many of its citizens were from the Blue Grass 
or the Tennessee. Their parents, in turn, had come from Old 
Dominion or Carolina, bringing from tidewater the ideals of 
the southern states. The southern element in the Scioto Valley 
had been a permanent factor in the politics of Ohio. In Indi¬ 
ana, the struggle for slavery had been tense for nearly two dec¬ 
ades. In Illinois, the inhabitants of “Egypt” never lost hope 
of. winning their state for slavery until 1824. The southern 
counties of the Old Rorthwest were never unanimous for slav¬ 
ery, but they were thoroughly impregnated with the ideals of 
the South before the northern tiers of counties had been sur¬ 
veyed or cleared of Indians. 
Rorth of the Rational Road, roughly speaking, was the zone 
of the Erie Canal. 1 After 1825, in increasing volume, emigrants 
from Rew York and Rew England flooded the Lake shores. 
The Ohio Valley was well started before the growth began, but 
by 1840 a new Rew England stood rival to a northern South 
within the three oldest states of the Old Rorthwest. Eor an¬ 
other twenty years, from the election of Harrison to that of 
Lincoln, the political future of the section was indeterminate. 
With two great classes of inhabitants, possessing different an¬ 
cestry and divergent trade,—for the one did business in Rew 
Orleans and the other in Rew York,—it was too much to ask 
that a homogeneous population should have appeared at once. 
splint, H. M., Railroads of the United States; their History and Sta¬ 
tistics, (Philadelphia, John E. Potter and Co., 1868), 239. 
i Mathews, L. K., Expansion of New England, (Boston and N. Y., 
Houghton Mifflin Co., 1909). 
