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20

BULLETIN

OF THE

UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN

ECONOMICS, POLITICAL SCIENCE, AND HISTORY SERIES

VOLUME I
(1894-1896)

FREDERICK J. TURNER, PH. D., Editor
Professor of American History

PUBLISHED BY AUTHORITY OF LAW AND WITH THE APPROVAL OF

THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY

MADISON, WIS.

PUBLISHED BY THE UNIVERSITY

1897

EDITOR'S NOTE.

The following paper is one of a series of studies carried on in my seminary in American history, with the design of contributing to an understanding of the relations between the political history of the United States, and the physiographic, social, and economic conditions underlying this history. A preliminary paper by the editor, indicating some aspects of the proposed work, has already been published under the title, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History." (Proceedings of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, December 14, 1893; and Annual Report of the American Historical Association for 1893, Senate Misc. Doc. No. 104, 53d Cong., 2d Sess., in press).

It is believed that many phases of our political history have been obscured by the attention paid to state boundaries, and to the sectional lines of North and South. At the same time the economic interpretation of our history has been neglected. In the study of the persistence of the struggle for state particularism in American constitutional history, it was inevitable that writers should make prominent the state as a political factor. But, from the point of view of the rise and growth of sectionalism and of nationalism, it is much more important to note the existence of great social and economic areas, independent of state lines, which have acted as units in political history, and which have changed their political attitude as they changed their economic organization, and divided into new groups.

American growth has exhibited not only the evolution of the Atlantic coast from sparse settlement to concen

trated city life, with all the changes in political sentiments involved in these economic and social transformations; it has also exhibited the spread of population steadily westward, with areas of sparse settlement on the borders of this advancing society, contemporaneous with the complex and concentrated settlements of the older regions. Thus the United States has been at once a developed country and a primitive one. The same political questions have been put to a society, advanced in some regions, and undeveloped in others. More than this, each area of settlement has been undergoing continual modifications. Physiographic conditions have facilitated the rapid evolution of some areas and have retarded others, so that the complexity of this grouping has been increased. We have also the peculiar transformation of the South and the slave system the changes involved in the substitution of cotton culture for rice and tobacco culture, the changes resulting from the Civil War, emancipation, and the gradual development of diversified industry in the South similar to that in the North.

Within the United States there have been exhibited contemporaneously all the stages of social progress, from the hunting to the manufacturing stage. Each of these social conditions has been exhibited on a determinable geographical area. Each of these areas has been evolving into a higher stage of social advance; the grain raising region becomes a region with diversified farming; the region with diversified farming becomes the region of manufacture; the hunting or pastoral region of the arid tracts, is turned by irrigation into a varied agricultural region, with corresponding social transformations. On specific political questions each economic area has reflected its peculiar interests. At a subsequent period, when the geographical area occupied by this stage of economic developement has evolved into a higher economic stage, the change is made apparent in changed views on similar political questions. Thus

Wisconsin, once a "Granger state," has now little sympathy with the western Populists.

The effects of these differences in organic areas upon specific political questions has been noted with more or less insight into the real economic territorial divisions, by occasional writers. But no writer has as yet brought out the importance of these groups and their transformations as continuous factors in our history. Since the present paper was completed, I have noted, in Mr. Hildreth's History of the United States, an important example of the use of economic divisions to explain political action, in a limited period. It seen will be that the statement is dogmatic and from the point of view of a Federalist, but the opinion of Mr. Hildreth is of weight, and as it goes to confirm the correctness of the results embodied in the present paper, I quote the passage.

"The Federal party with Washington and Hamilton at its head, represented the experience, the prudence, the practical wisdom, the discipline, the conservative reason and instincts of the country. The opposition headed by Jefferson, expressed its hopes, wishes, theories, many of them enthusiastic and impracticable, more especially its. passions, its sympathies and antipathies, its impatience of restraint. The Federalists had their strength in those narrow districts where a concentrated population had produced and contributed to maintain that complexity of institutions and that reverence for social order, which, in proportion as men are brought into contiguity, become more absolutely necessaries of existence. The ultra-democratical ideas of the opposition prevailed in all that more extensive region in which the dispersion of population, and the despotic authority vested in individuals over families of slaves, kept society in a state of immaturity, and made legal rerestraints the more irksome in proportion as their necessity was the less felt. Massachusetts and Connecticut stood at the head of the one party, supported, though not always without some wavering by the rest of New England. The

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