"As My Father's Child
Has": The Political
Culture of the Ohio
Valley in the Nineteenth
Century
Nicole Etcheson
Nicole Etcheson, Associate Professor of History at the
University of Texas at El Paso, received her doctorate
from Indiana University. Her book, The Emerging
Republic: Upland Southerners and the Political Culture of
the Old Northwest 1787-1861, was published by Indiana
University in 1996.
argued, the Ohio Valley was the "Valley of
Democracy," the Turnerian frontier where settlers
forged an individualistic society that rejected elitist
politics of the East.^ Thomas's son would later epitomize that dream of upward political mobility and the
ideals of a democratic society when he told Ohio soldiers at the end of the Civil War, "I happen, temporarily, to occupy this big White House. I am a living witness that any one of your children may look to
come here as my father's child has."4
Scholars now dispute Barnhart's conclusion that
political culture paid as much attention to democracy as contemporaries claimed. This may have been
true during the frontier period, as Elizabeth A.
Perkins suggests for settlers in Kentucky, but as the
frontier receded, the elite came to dominate politics.
Perkins's important book looks at the backcountry
from the settlers' point of view. She finds an informal
backwoods political culture of "shared civic responsibility," created by distance from governmental centers and on-going conflict with local indigenous peoples. Early experiments in democracy could not be
totally erased even as Kentucky became more settled
and drew its leaders from the elite. The new political
culture praised the frontier virtues of bravery and
endurance and enjoined men of property and birth to
demonstrate those qualities to legitimize elite leadership.5
Andrew R. L. Cayton and Donald J. Ratcliffe
have debated the nature of the "Frontier Republic" in
the case of early Ohio. Both recognize the importance
of "democracy" to the development of political culture. While Cayton sees a compromise emerging
between settlers' desire for local sovereignty and the
territorial government's desire for stability and order,
Ratcliffe argues for the early ascendancy of organized
political parties. For almost a generation, Cayton's
Winter 2001
"As My Father's Child Has"
In 1816, Thomas Lincoln moved his wife and
two children across the Ohio River from Kentucky
into Indiana. Lincoln followed the path of many
other settlers.
Born in Virginia during the
Revolution, his family had moved to Kentucky when
he was five. There Indians killed his father. With
only a minimum of education, but able to sign his
own name, Thomas worked as a hired laborer, a
skilled carpenter, and eventually bought his own
farm. That purchase garnered him political rights as
well as property and he served as a juryman and
patroller against the Indians. Thomas was a "respected citizen of a growing community" in Kentucky
when he moved his family.1
In Indiana, Lincoln sought secure title to his
land. Like many in Kentucky, he had found himself
involved in constant litigation over land titles. He
may also have been uncomfortable in a slave owning
society. North of the Ohio River, Lincoln made his
land payments and took astute advantage of the laws
to get the best deal possible on public lands. In
Indiana, he succeeded in getting one hundred acres,
legally his and free of debt. He was a solid citizen, a
church member and Clay Whig, remembered by a relative as strong, at six feet and 200 pounds, goodnatured, God-fearing, temperate, with a taste for story
telling.2
The political culture that men like Thomas
Lincoln created in the Jacksonian period emphasized
the primacy of the common man. As John Barnhart
work has been the standard treatment of early Ohio.
According to Cayton, Federalist officials sought to
keep territorial settlers as wards of the federal government until they achieved the discipline and orderliness the backcountry seemed to lack. Jeffersonian
settlers fought a protracted battle for local control
against this Federalist "aristocracy/' only to find the
charge of aristocracy hurled at them when they
achieved statehood. Although Cayton's settlers and
territorial officials thought in terms of "democracy"
and "aristocracy," they did not engage in organized
party activity in the modern sense of "mass participation in choosing a government." In two recent
books, Ratcliffe argues that organized partisanship
existed long before the second party system. Ratcliffe
finds in the first party system, even in the political
limbo following the War of 1812, the kind of party
organization and partisan loyalty earlier historians
have argued did not emerge until the 1830s.6
This author has argued that regional identity
powerfully shaped political loyalties and ideologies.
My recent book looks at political culture created in
Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois when migrants from the
Upland South met migrants from other regions.
Despite a firm consciousness of themselves as different from New Englanders, these southerners, like the
Lincolns, shared common ground with other
migrants. All adhered to a political system of republicanism, although southerners sometimes defined
republicanism differently, placing greater emphasis
on the necessity of manly political leaders than did
New Englanders, for example. Political parties called
on migrants to forget their regional origins and
remember their commonly held beliefs as Democrats
or Whigs. And all migrants increasingly came to see
each other as westerners until the sectional crisis of
Civil War reminded some, but not all, of earlier
regional ties.7
Thomas Lincoln and his son could only have
achieved the level of political influence they did in a
society that offered expanded political power to nonelite white men as Perkins and Barnhart argue. The
younger Lincoln remained sensitive to the sectional
identities of Illinoisans, as demonstrated when his
opponent in the 1858 senatorial race, Stephen A.
Douglas, taunted him for tempering his views on race
to suit the audiences in different parts of the state.8
Both Lincoln and his father took democracy as seriously as Cayton and Ratcliffe. Through a combination of sectional politics, organized partisanship, and
enhanced status of the common man, Thomas's son
became president.
Gustav Philipp Koerner was far from a common
man. Born in Frankfurt-am-Main in 1809, the son of
a bookseller, publisher, and art dealer, Gustav studied
law at three German universities, eventually receiving his doctorate and pursuing a legal career in
Frankfurt. His family was immersed in liberal politics. His father named Gustav for a Swedish King
who opposed Napoleon. While at university, he
joined the Burschenschaft, the liberal student movement, and became involved with revolutionary politics. He helped to guard Leipzig when the July 1830
revolution in France promised to spread to Germany.
Later that year, Koerner spent four months in a
Munich jail when authorities overreacted to students
drinking, carousing and singing revolutionary songs
on Christmas eve and imprisoned thirty people on
suspicion of an attempt to overthrow the monarchy.
Koerner was involved in such a plot two years later in
28
Ohio Valley History
Abraham Lincoln (From CHS Photograph Collection)
i833/ the April 3 Franfurter Attentat. Koerner and
thirty-two other men attacked the guard house but
found the authorities prepared to quickly suppress
the uprising. Wounded in the scuffle at the guardhouse, Koerner went home. His sister smuggled him
out of town in women's clothes and he fled the country for France.
Although reluctant to leave his family permanently, Koerner realized that he could never campaign for change effectively in Germany now that his
identity as a revolutionary was well known to the
government. In May, he sailed for the United States,
landing at New York City in the summer of 1833.
Gustav traveled with other German exiles, eventually marrying the daughter of another refugee family.
They intended to settle in Missouri, among the substantial German population of St. Louis, but the sight
of slaves being sold and lashed in the city persuaded
them to settle on a farm in St. Clair County, Illinois,
where another German colony, known as the "Latin
settlement," existed. To learn English and the nature
of American jurisprudence, he studied law for a year
in the United States before taking up practice in
Belleville, Illinois.9 Although Koerner's route to the
United States was unique, he was only a small part of
an enormous trans-Atlantic migration taking place in
the early 1800s.10
By the early 1840s, Koerner had become
involved in politics. He became a Democrat, persuaded of their "far more liberal views" than the
"money-power" Whigs. He was elected to the Illinois
legislature, the first German to serve in the state legislature of either Illinois or Missouri. He served as a
justice of the Illinois supreme court and lieutenant
governor of Illinois. In the 1850s, he switched from
the Democratic party to the Republican. His friend
on the Illinois bar, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas's son,
made Koerner minister to Spain, succeeding another
German immigrant, Carl Schurz. Although Koerner
retired from public life in the 1870s, his career illustrates the political power available to white immigrants in the age of the common man. Koerner certainly saw it thus, for he responded in 1884 to the
toast "Our Country" by saying, "our Republican
institutions, securing us political and religious liberty, giving every man an equal chance to get along in
the world, weld us together in an incredibly short
time, while still allowing for individual and even
national differences in non-essentials."11
Winter 2001
Frederick C. Luebke points out that the
Germans were not considered as politically active as
the Irish, with their long history of anti-English
activism and their concentrated settlement in cities.
Ethnic groups did not necessarily vote as a bloc, especially on economic issues where class might have
trumped ethnicity. Certain issues, such as drink,
tended to solidify the immigrant vote when economic issues were in abeyance. Luebke sees a self-conscious ethnic identity emerging in response to the
Know-Nothing anti-immigrant reaction in the
1850s.12 Scholars of the late nineteenth-century
Midwest have emphasized such ethnocultural divisions as central to the politics of that period. Richard
Jensen, using then-innovative quantitative methods,
argues religion as the basis of party loyalty and political behavior. Morality, such as the century-long crusade against alcohol, potentially disrupted partisan
division over economic issues. Paul Kleppner agrees
with Jensen in de-emphasizing economic factors and
stressing religion. Kleppner's "pietists" sought to
impose moral values on "sinners" through government action. According to Kleppner, Republican
politicians of the 1850s hoped to widen their appeal
to immigrant Germans such as Koerner by submerging the pietistic values of the party, which repelled
German American voters. Luebke, Jensen, and
Kleppner debate whether moral or economic issues
mattered most to the nineteenth-century Midwest's
political culture. They assume, of course, that political culture was open to both the native-born such as
Thomas Lincoln and the immigrant such as Gustav
Koerner. But it was not open to everyone.13
Opportunity for white men such as Thomas
Lincoln and Gustav Koerner came at a price. Native
inhabitants of the Ohio Valley were first conquered in
warfare and then removed from the region en masse
in order to make room for new settlers. After the
defeat of the western tribes in the Battle of Fallen
Timbers in 1794, indigenous people of the Ohio
Valley came under increased political pressure to
make land cessions, suffered the erosion of their cultures from alcohol abuse and trade dependency, and
endured frequent harassment from white settlers.
Territorial governors in Ohio and Indiana noted that
whites who murdered Indians could not be prosecuted; such crimes occurred with impunity and frequently with little cause.14
A year before Gustav Koerner's birth, a Shawnee
"As My Father's Child Has"
29
named Tenskwatawa founded a settlement in northeast Indiana called Prophetstown. Tenskwatawa,
himself a reformed alcoholic, preached a message of
religious revitalization which called upon the Ohio
Valley tribes to reject Americans as "children of the
Evil Spirit." Although white leaders failed to recognize the Prophet's movement as an indigenous reaction to the pressure of white settlement, preferring to
blame the British, Tenskwatawa and his brother, the
war leader Tecumseh, intended their alliance with
the British to serve native political ends—a halt to
further land cessions to the United States.
Ultimately, Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh failed
to unite the tribes. They failed also to suppress the
government chiefs who willingly bargained away
land to whites. In November 1811, Indiana territorial governor William Henry Harrison led a militia
force against Prophetstown. In Tecumseh's absence,
Tenskwatawa gambled that his military leadership
would suffice. Defeated in the Battle of Tippecanoe,
Tenskwatawa lost both religious and political power
among his people. The Shawnee became dependent
on their alliance with Britain. During the War of
1812, Tenskwatawa followed the British army, fleeing
from the defeat at the Battle of the Thames in 1814,
in which Tecumseh died.
After the war,
Tenskwatawa remained in exile in Canada. When he
returned to the Ohio Valley a decade later, it was at
the request of white territorial officials who wanted
to use him to persuade the native peoples to be
removed. Perhaps cherishing some return to political
power, Tenskwatawa allowed himself to be a white
tool. He headed the removal of the Shawnee to
Kansas and died there in 1836, still an exile from his
home and never having regained the political influence of the pre-war period.IS
In R. David Edmunds's biography of
Tenskwatawa, the Shawnee confronted white political and military power head-on and suffered near total
defeat. As Robert F. Berkhofer points out, "Probably
the most significant turning point in the acculturative history of an Indian tribe was the loss of political
autonomy." After that, the tribe was no longer free to
choose those portions of white culture it would
accept or reject."1 That historians of the Jacksonian
period have paid little attention to the Ohio Valley
tribes after the War of 1812 testifies to the Indian loss
of political and military power. Historians of the
removal era and government Indian policy have
Tecumseh (From CHS Photograph Collection)
instead focused on southern tribes such as the
Cherokee.'7
Although defeat cannot help but be a part of the
story of Indian resistance, Edmunds and other authors
make clear the skill and resourcefulness with which
the Shawnee fought. Gregory Evans Dowd places the
Shawnee in the context of revitalization and resistance movements from Pontiac's rebellion to the
Cherokee struggle against removal.'8 In both his
work on Tenskwatawa and a short biography of
Tecumseh, Edmunds seeks to emphasize the centrality of the Prophet's religious revitalization movement
to Indian resistance and to remove Tenskwatawa
from the shadow of his brother, who is more admired
among whites because of the familiarity of his political and military form of resistance.'9 John Sugden
acknowledges both continuity and defeat but points
out that Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa used the British
and Americans as much as whites used Indians. He
credits Tenskwatawa with having fundamentally
influenced Shawnee religious tradition and argues
Ohio Valley History
that Tecumseh's military leadership in the War of
1812 saved Canada for Britain even though the movement the brothers constructed could not save the
Ohio Valley for the Shawnee.20
Another population could neither be completely
removed, nor completely accepted as political equals:
free blacks. Free Frank, a Kentucky slave, was born in
South Carolina during the Revolution. Throughout
his life, Frank exploited the loopholes in white society to grasp the greatest opportunity possible for himself and his family. Allowed to hire out some of his
own time, Frank saved money to buy, first his wife,
and then his children and even grandchildren from
slavery. Frank and his wife skillfully manipulated the
legal system. Since slaves could not buy or free other
slaves, Frank's purchase of his wife was off-therecord, but he did ensure that the white owner registered her emancipation. When sued for debt, Frank's
defense was that slaves could not make contracts.
When the creditor sued Frank's wife, now a free
woman, her defense was that, as a married woman,
she could not be held liable for her husband's debts.
The creditor found himself in a no-win situation,
unable legally to recover from either debtor.21
Older histories have argued that slavery in
Kentucky, with its small farms, was "in its mildest
form compared to the plantation states of the Deep
South."22 More recent works, such as Steven
Weisenburger's account of the Margaret Garner case,
indicate Kentucky bondpeople saw the full share of
slavery's horrors. Margaret Garner, the historical figure upon whom Toni Morrison's novel Beloved is
based, cut the throat of one of her children and perhaps drowned another rather than see the family
return to their Kentucky master.2' Marion B. Lucas's
comprehensive treatment of blacks in Kentucky documents both the institutional disadvantage suffered
by both free and slave African Americans and their
resistance to those disadvantages.24 Free Frank well
illustrates Lucas's thesis.
In 1830, Frank moved his family to Pike County,
Illinois. Such a move did not bring equality. Illinois
free blacks, like free blacks in many northern states,
could not vote, serve as jurors or as witnesses against
a white, serve in the militia, or attend the public
schools. Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, although free
under the Northwest Ordinance, had restrictions on
black settlement.
Illinois required African
Americans to register a certificate of freedom and to
post a $1,000 bond. Leon Litwack's classic study of
northern free blacks details the disabilities under
which men such as Free Frank operated. They faced
segregation in jobs, education, housing, and public
accommodations. Although northern racism shared
many assumptions with the southern version,
Litwack notes discrimination was not slavery and the
North offered certain opportunities to free blacks that
southern slaves could not enjoy. Illinois law might
constrain Free Frank far more than it would Thomas
Lincoln or Gustav Koerner, but it was not as coercive
as slavery. Frank proved adept at exploiting any
opportunity and he found one in the laws on establishing towns.2'
Illinois did not prohibit African Americans from
founding towns. Frank, who "never hesitated to take
advantage of state and federal laws, especially when
the possibility existed that additional money could be
earned to buy his family from slavery," platted a town
in Pike County. But town founding did not endow
Frank with the lobbying power to secure his town's
future. In 1840, Free Frank lost a political battle
when the Illinois legislature relocated a road so that it
Winter 2001
"As My Father's Child Has"
Kate Chase Sprague, on the right (From CHS Photograph
Collection)
ran on the outskirts of Frank's town, rather than
down its main street, and through the main part of
another, white-platted, town.26
When Frank died in 1854, he left a substantial
legacy, not just of property but of a love of freedom,
education, and pride in his family's accomplishments.
Like Stephen A. Vincent's study of black settlements
in Hamilton and Rush counties, Indiana, a town itself
may decline, but the memory of the black community
enshrines the meaning of the settlement's successes.27
Unlike Free Frank, Kate Chase was the daughter
of privilege and position. Born in 1840 to the lawyer
and politician Salmon P. Chase and his second wife,
Eliza Ann Smith, Kate was known for her willfulness,
intelligence, beauty, and devotion to her father.
While Salmon Chase became a senator, governor of
Ohio, Secretary of the Treasury, Supreme Court Chief
Justice, and perennial aspirant for the presidency, his
daughter was his hostess, loyal supporter, and political confidant. Educated at a New York City school
for girls, Kate learned the accomplishments prescribed for young ladies of her social class. She spent
summers at her father's farm near Cincinnati, but
Kate Chase preferred the world of society. At sixteen,
she presided over the governor's residence in
Columbus and at twenty she became leader of a social
circle in Washington, D.C., that rivaled that of Mary
Lincoln, earning the first lady's jealousy.
In 1863, she married William Sprague, the
wealthy former governor of Rhode Island and Union
army officer. Sprague was not her intellectual equal,
causing gossip that Kate valued his money and political position more than his talent. The marriage was
an unhappy one, marred by infidelity, violence, and
scandal. The couple divorced in 1880. Kate retreated
for a few years to Europe but returned to Ohio in 1886
to oversee the reburial of her father. Her later years
were marked by tragedy: the suicide of her only son,
the care of a mentally handicapped daughter, and the
search for funds to sustain herself and her other two
daughters. Upon her death in 1899, President
William McKinley, another Ohio politician, provided
a special train to transport her body from her father's
Washington, D.C., home, where she had lived her last
years, to burial next to her father in Cincinnati.2"
At the end of her life Kate Chase Sprague
endorsed the woman suffrage movement; she had
practiced politics all her life, even though denied the
male privilege of voting. Her biographers disagree on
the extent of her political activity and a good modern
biography is lacking. The sentimental account of
Mary Merwin Phelps emphasizes Kate's political
ambition, channeled though it was through her
father's career. Phelps reports that Kate arranged a
dinner party for undecided senators during the
impeachment of President Andrew Johnson, trying to
sway them toward acquittal. She attended the 1868
Democratic convention, following the proceedings
closely in hopes her father would receive the nomination. She allegedly influenced Roscoe Conkling,
reputed to be her lover, not to support Samuel Tilden
in the 1877 election controversy. Even after her supposed retirement from politics, she campaigned for
anti-saloon legislation in the Washington suburbs
where she lived. Alice Hunt Sokoloff disputes
Phelps's contention that Kate played as close a role in
these affairs. Many of these political events coincided with the breakup of her marriage, which consumed
her attention to the exclusion even of politics.
Sokoloff contends Kate was actually absent from
Washington during much of the impeachment hearings because of arguments with her husband. But
Sokoloff does not deny Kate's active interest in politics: she maneuvered to help her father gain the 1868
nomination, she wrote letters to General William T.
Sherman
concerning
the
army's role
in
Reconstruction, and even while in Europe, United
States diplomats sought her out for information and
advice. Unable to vote or stand for office, Kate Chase
Sprague's keen intelligence and political skills found
other outlets.29
Kate Chase Sprague lived when domesticity, the
care of household and children, was supposed to be a
woman's primary concern. Nancy Cott, Mary P.
Ryan, and Kathryn Kish Sklar have detailed this
"woman's sphere" of home and family.'" Unlike
some middle-class women, Kate did not form close
female bonds at school or at home that might have
challenged the patriarchal society. Carroll SmithRosenberg has noted the importance of "female bonds
of love and ritual," while Keith E. Melder has found
the "beginnings of sisterhood" in women's schooling
and participation in moral reform movements. 1 '
Kate's mother and stepmother died in her childhood.
Unlike the women studied by Smith-Rosenberg,
Melder, or Cott, Kate Chase found no female tic to
supersede love of her father. Her aptitude for politics
could express itself through his career and she
Ohio Valley History
showed no interest in moral reform efforts, or even
nursing during the Civil War, that brought other
women into the public sphere. Cott judiciously
assesses the conflicting arguments over whether
domesticity victimized or empowered women.32 Kate
Chase shone in women's sphere as a society hostess,
impressing her circle with her wit, poise, and intelligence. She was a devoted mother, concerned with the
education of her children. But her talents could only
find outlet through the career of others, her father and
husband, and her political influence declined with
her scandalous divorce. Like many other women of
her time, Kate Chase Sprague found herself destitute
without a male breadwinner because there were few
occupations women, especially women of her class,
could profitably pursue.33
Ellen Carol DuBois has documented why the
demand for full political rights was too radical for
many nineteenth-century men and women to
accept.14 But there is a growing literature demonstrating that women found other ways to be politically active. Mary P. Ryan has challenged the rigid
boundaries between men's public sphere and
women's private sphere by finding women present,
either in symbolic or actual form, in public. Female
deities represented the Republic in parades, women
entered public debates over prostitution, and
endorsed or condemned male political behavior.35
Glenna Matthews finds "public" a much more
ambiguous term for women because of its connotations. A "public woman" was a prostitute and
women who sought to enter the male sphere were
charged with immorality.36 Kate Chase's experience
bears out Matthews's cautionary tale. Her interest in
public affairs and in public men, such as Conkling,
was deemed unseemly and became the subject of
nasty speculation. Kate chose to use her influence
indirectly, passing notes to speakers on the floor of
Congress, holding dinner parties, prodding her
father's male campaign managers, rather than speak
in public herself Kate Chase Sprague more nearly followed the pattern of elite Virginia women described
by Elizabeth Varon who wielded political power
despite their political disabilities. These women petitioned, participated in reform associations, published
their political views, and campaigned. Southern society accepted an "ideal of female civic duty" and
southern women conducted politics despite the
seeming "paradox" of "a commitment to the tradi-
Winter 2001
tional gender order, in which women deferred to the
leadership of men" and women's own "passion for
politics and a desire to be heard."37 Like Varon's
Virginians, Kate Chase Sprague lived within the constraints of this paradox.
Thomas Lincoln's son, Abraham, attended Kate
Chase's wedding, one of the most anticipated events
of Washington society. Abraham Lincoln had come
far from his father's frontier origins. A successful corporate lawyer, the younger Lincoln had entered the
highest political and social circles. His native Middle
West had become the most solidly middle-class section of the country. Lincoln's career bears out
Andrew R. L. Cayton's and Peter S. Onuf's argument
for "the triumph of bourgeois culture" in the
Midwest. According to Cayton and Onuf, settlement
of the Ohio Valley occurred at the same time as the
economic changes of the market revolution. The
result was the emergence of a middle-class society
based on capitalist institutions. Like other nineteenth-century Americans, middle westerners
resolved their ambivalence about these economic
changes by stressing the benefits of prosperity.38
Charles Sellers, who has described the market revolution in a comprehensive survey of the early nineteenth century, calls Lincoln a "rustic convert to
bourgeois orthodoxy."39 His father, a Clay Whig,
shared some of the same assumptions about the
necessity for economic growth and the availability of
opportunity.
The son, born in the proverbial log cabin, came
to symbolize the unlimited political opportunities
the republic offered its citizens. But expanded economic and political opportunity could not disguise
the fissures that still divided United States society. It
was a society that offered greater political opportunity to the sons of Thomas Lincoln, or even Gustav
Koerner, than it did to the sons of Free Frank or
Tenskwatawa or even the daughter of an elite man
such as Salmon P. Chase. Unlike Kate Chase Sprague,
or Free Frank or Tenskwatawa, Abraham Lincoln and
Gustav Koerner did not have to exercise political
power indirectly. John D. Barnhart's "Valley of
Democracy" was one in which white men forged the
political culture that those who were neither white
nor male confronted.
"As My Father's Child Has"
33
1 Louis A. Warren, Lincoln's Youth: Indiana Years Seven to
Twenty-One, 1816-1830 (Indianapolis, 1991), 12-14, 4-6, 10,
139-40, xvi. Biographers now dismiss the old description
New History of Kentucky (Lexington, 1997); Eugene H.
Roseboom and Francis P. Weisenburger, A History of Ohio
(Columbus, 1953).
of Thomas Lincoln as a slothful layabout. Stephen B. Oates,
With Malice Toward None: The Life of Abraham Lincoln (New
York, 1977) and David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York,
4 Warren, Lincoln's Youth, xxii.
1995)On the expansion out of the southern backcountry, see
David Hackett Fischer and James C. Kelly, Away I, 'm Bound
Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement (Richmond,
X
993)/ 65-124. For migration and settlement of New
Englanders, see Virginia E. McCormick and Robert W.
McCormick, New Englanders on the Ohio Frontier: Migration
and Settlement of Worthington, Ohio (Kent, 1998). On migration and politics, see Kenneth J. Winkle, The Politics of
Community: Migration and Politics in Antebellum Ohio
(Cambridge, Eng., 1988).
2 Warren, Lincoln's Youth, 12-14, !58-59/ 189-90, 206, 84-86.
3 John D. Barnhart, Valley of Democracy: The Frontier versus
the Plantation in the Ohio Valley, 1775-1818 (Bloomington,
1953). Nineteenth-century politicians argued that, even if they
were now wealthy, they had once been poor. Like his father,
Abraham Lincoln flatboated down the Mississippi as a common riverman, an experience shared and boasted of by other
politicians such as Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay. Warren,
Lincoln's Youth, 4-6. On the riverboat experience, see Michael
Allen, Western Rivermen 1763-1861: Ohio and Mississippi
Boatmen and the Myth of the Alligator Horse (Baton Rouge,
1990), esp. 170-71.
There are numerous histories of the Ohio Valley states in
the nineteenth century which emphasize political development. The best include, on Ilinois: Clarence Walworth Alvord,
The Illinois Country, 1673-1818 (Springfield, 1920); Theodore
Calvin Pease, The Frontier State, 1818-1848 (Springfield, 1918);
Arthur C. Cole, The Era of the Civil War, 1848-1878
(Springfield, 1919); on Indiana: John D. Barnhart and Dorothy L.
Riker, Indiana to 1816: The Colonial Period (Indianapolis,
1971); Donald F. Carmony, Indiana, 1816-1850: The Pioneer
Era (Indianapolis, 1998); Emma Lou Thornbrough, Indiana in
the Civil War Era 1850-1880 (Indianapolis, 1965); on Kentucky:
F. Gavin Davenport, Ante-bellum Kentucky: A Social History,
1800-1860 (Oxford, Ohio, 1943); E. Merton Coulter, The Civil
War and Readjustment in Kentucky (Chapel Hill, 1926); on
Ohio: Randolph Chandler Downes, Frontier Ohio, 1788-1803
(Columbus, 193s); William T. Utter, The Frontier State: 18031825 (Columbus, 1942); Francis P. Weisenburger, The Passing
of
the Frontier,
1825-1850
(Columbus,
1941);
Eugene
Roseboom, The Civil War Era, 1850-1873 (Columbus, 1944);
Henry Clyde Hubbard, The Older Middle West, 1840-1880: Its
Social, Economic, and Political Life, and Sectional Tendencies
Before, During, and After the Civil War (New York, 1936).
5 Elizabeth A. Perkins, Border Life: Experience and Memory in
the Revolutionary Ohio Valley (Chapel Hill, 1998), 117-50. For
older studies of the frontier period, see Thomas D. Clark, The
Rampaging Frontier: Manners and Humors of Pioneer Days in
the South and Middle West (Indianapolis, 1939); Everett Dick,
The Dixie Frontier: A Social History of the Southern Frontier
from the First Transmontane Beginnings to the Civil War (New
York, 1948); Arthur K. Moore, The Frontier Mind: A Cultural
Analysis of the Kentucky Frontiersman (Lexington, 1957);
Thomas Perkins Abernethy, Three Virginia Frontiers (Baton
Rouge, 1940). Malcolm J. Rohrbaugh, The Trans-Appalachian
Frontier: People, Societies, and Institutions, 1775-1850 (New
York, 1978) and Reginald Horsman, The Frontier in the
Formative Years, 1783-1815 (New York, 1970) are good surveys
of western settlement.
6 Andrew R. L. Cayton, The Frontier Republic: Ideology and
Politics in the Ohio Country, 1780-1825 (Kent, 1986), ix-xi;
Donald J. Ratcliffe, Party Spirit in a Frontier Republic:
Democratic Politics in Ohio, 1793-1821 (Columbus, 1998) and
The Politics of Long Division: The Birth of the Second Party
System in Ohio, 1818-1828 (Columbus, 2000).
7 Nicole Etcheson, The Emerging Midwest:
Upland
Southerners and the Political Culture of the Old Northwest
1787-1861 (Bloomington, 1996). Richard Lyle Power argued for
the importance of regional identity as well in Planting Corn
Belt Culture: The Impress of the Upland Southerner and
Yankee in the Old Northwest (Indianapolis, 1953). For a comprehensive discussion of the society and culture of the Old
Northwest, see R. Carlyle Buley, The Old Northwest: Pioneer
Period, 1815-1840 (2 vols., Indianapolis, 1950). Ralph W.
Wooster, Politicians, Planters and Plain Folk: Courthouse and
Statehouse in the Upper South, 1850-1860 (Knoxville, 1975)
discusses upland southern political culture. For superb community studies, see John Mack Faragher, Sugar Creek: Life on
the Illinois Prairie (New Haven, 1986) and Don Harrison
Doyle, The Social Order of a Frontier
Community:
Jacksonville, Illinois, 1825-1870 (Urbana, 1978). Studies of the
Midwest in the Civil War have frequently noted the regional
basis for conflict between anti-war Democrats and the
Republican administration. See Frank L. Klement, The
Copperheads in the Middle West and The Limits of Dissent:
Clement L. Vallandigham and the Civil War (Lexington, 1970);
G. R. Tredway, Democratic Opposition to the Lincoln
Administration in Indiana (Indianapolis, 1973); and Kenneth
M. Stampp, Indiana
Politics during the Civil War
(Bloomington, 1949).
8 Robert W. Johannscn, ed., The Lincoln-Douglas Debates of
1858 (New York, 1965), 12.
Single volume state histories include Robert D. Howard,
Illinois: A History of the Prairie State (Grand Rapids, 1972);
Richard Jensen, Illinois: A Bicentennial History (New York,
1978); James H. Madison, The Indiana Way: A State History
(Bloomington, 1986); Thomas D. Clark, A History of Kentucky
(Lexington, 1937); Lowell Harrison and James C. Klotter, A
9 Thomas J. McCormack, ed., Memoirs of Gustave Koerner,
1809-1896: Life-sketches Written at the Suggestion of His
Children (2 vols., Cedar Rapids, 1909), vol. I, 1-296. For another memoir of settlement in the early Ohio Valley, written by an
English immigrant, see Morris Birkbeck, Notes on a Journey in
34
Ohio Valley History
America (Ann Arbor, 1966, orig. 1818). Helen I. Cowan, British
Emigration to British North America: The First Hundred Years
(Toronto, 1961) discusses emigrants such as Birkbeck.
10 See Marcus Lee Hanson, The Atlantic Migration, 16071860: A History of the Continuing Settlement of the United
States (New York, 1961) and Maldwyn Allen Jones, American
Immigration (Chicago, i960) for standard treatments of immigration in the nineteenth century. See Mack Walker, Germany
and the Emigration, 1816-1885 (Cambridge, Mass., 1964) on
German immigration. On the more famous German migration
of 1848, see Carl Wittke, Refugees of Revolution: The German
Forty-Eighters in America (Philadelphia, 1952) and A. E.
Zucker, ed., The Forty-Eighters: Political Refugees of the
German Revolution of 1848 (New York, 1950). On the Irish, see
Lawrence J. McCaffrey, Textures of Irish America (Syracuse,
1992); Joseph P. O'Grady, How the Irish Became Americans
(New York, 1973); William V. Shannon, The American Irish
(New York, 1963); and Carl Wittke, The Irish in America
(Baton Rouge, 1956).
11 Memoirs of Gustave Koerner, vol.I, 332; vol. 11, 730.
12 Frederick C. Luebke, Germans in the New World: Essays in
the History of Immigration (Urbana, 1990), 79-92, 161-63. On
the Irish in politics, see Steven P. Erie, Rainbow's End: IrishAmericans and the Dilemmas of Urban Machine Politics,
1840-1985 (Berkeley, 1988).
13 Richard Jensen, The Winning of the Midwest: Social and
Political Conflict, 1888-1896 (Chicago, 1971), xi-xvii and Paul
Kleppner, The Cross of Culture: A Social Analysis of
Midwestern Politics, 1850-1900 (New York, 1970), 369-75.
14 Stephen Aron describes the conflict between Indians and
whites in Kentucky in How the West Was Lost: The
Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay
(Baltimore, 1996).
15 R. David Edmunds, The Shawnee Prophet (Lincoln, 1983).
See also James H. Howard, Shawnee! The Ceremonialism of a
Native Indian Tribe and Its Cultural Background (Athens,
Ohio, 1981) for a discussion of religion, ceremony, economy,
and culture. Randolph C. Downes, Council Fires on the Upper
Ohio: A Narrative of Indian Affairs in the Upper Ohio Valley
until 1795 (Pittsburgh, 1940); Michael Connell, A Country
Between: The Upper Ohio Valley and Its Peoples, 1724-1774
(Lincoln, 1992); and Eric Hinderaker, Elusive
Empires:
Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley 1673-1800 (New
York, 1997) discusses the Ohio Valley tribes before the nineteenth century.
Tribal histories include Hiram Beckwith, The Illinois
and Indiana Indians (Chicago, 1884); Jerry E. Clark, The
Shawnee (Lexington, 1977); Bert Anson, The Miami Indians
(Norman, 1970); R. David Edmunds, The
Potawatomis:
Keepers of the Fire (Norman, 1978); A. M. Gibson, The
Kickapoos: Lords of the Middle Border (Norman, 1963); Clifton
A. Weslager, The Delaware Indians: A History (New
Brunswick, 1972). For an account of U. S. policy toward the
Indians during the period of the Shawnee struggle, see Reginald
Horsman, Expansion and American Indian Policy, 1783-1812
(East Lansing, Mich., 1967).
16 Robert F. Berkhofer, Salvation and the Savage: An Analysis
26 Walker, Free Frank, 105.
27 Stephen A. Vincent, Southern Seed: Northern Soil: AfricanAmerican Farm Communities in the Midwest, 1765-1900
(Bloomington, 1999).
28 Mary Merwin Phelps, Kate Chase, Dominant Daughter:
The Life Story of a Brilliant Woman and Her Famous Father
(New York, 1935); Alice Hunt Sokoloff, Kate Chase for the
Defense (New York, 1971).
29 Phelps, Kate Chase, 198-99, 204-11, 244-51; Sokoloff, Kate
Chase for the Defense, 108, 138, 144-50, 206-7, 229, 265, 267.
See also Frederick J. Blue, Salmon P. Chase: A Life in Politics
(Kent, Ohio, 1987) which records Kate's interest and involvement in her father's career.
30 Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood:
"Woman's
Sphere" in New England, 1780-183 5 (New Haven, 1997); Mary
P. Ryan, The Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida
County, New York, 1790-1865 (Cambridge, Eng., 1981);
Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American
Domesticity (New Haven, 1973).
31 Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of
Winter 2001
"As My Father's Child Has"
of Protestant Missions and American Indian Response, 17871862 (Lexington, 1965), x.
17 Ronald N. Satz, American Indian Policy in the Jacksonian
Era (Lincoln, 1974) and Francis Paul Prucha, American Indian
Policy in the Formative Years: The Indian Trade and
Intercourse Acts, 1780-1834 (Cambridge, Mass., 1962).
18 Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North
American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745-1815 (Baltimore,
1992).
19 R. David Edmunds, Tecumseh and the Quest for Indian
Leadership (Boston, 1984), 223-25.
20 John Sugden, Tecumseh: A Life (New York, 1998).
21 Juliet E. K. Walker, Free Frank: A Black Pioneer on the
Antebellum Frontier (Lexington, 1983).
22 J. Winston Coleman, Jr., Slavery Times in Kentucky
(Chapel Hill, 1940), vii. See also Ivan E. McDougle, Slavery in
Kentucky, 1792-1865 (Westport, 1970).
23 Steven Weisenburger, Modern Medea: A Family Story of
Slavery and Child-Murder from the Old South (New York,
1998); Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York, 1987).
24 Marion B. Lucas, A History of Blacks in Kentucky, vol.i:
From Slavery to Segregation, 1760-1891 (Frankfort, 1992).
25 Leon F. Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free
States, 1790-1860 (Chicago, 1961), vii-x. Eugene H. Berwanger
discusses the effect of racism on white expansion into the west,
including the Ohio Valley, and the slavery issue in The Frontier
against Slavery: Western Anti-Negro Prejudice and the Slavery
Extension Controversy (Urbana, 1967). V. Jacque Voegeli examines how the Civil War affected midwestern race relations in
Free But Not Equal: The Midwest and the Negro during the
Civil War (Chicago, 1967). Emma Lou Thornbrough, The Negro
in Indiana: A Study of a Minority (Indianapolis, 1957) and
Charles T. Hickok, The Negro in Ohio, 1802-1870 (Cleveland,
1896) are state case studies. For a discussion of the free black
community, see James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, In
Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community, and Protest among
Northern Free Blacks, 1700-1860 (New York, 1997).
35
Gender in Victorian America (New York, 1985); Keith E. Melder,
Beginnings of Sisterhood: The American Women's Rights
Movement, 1800-1850 (1977). For a comprehensive survey of
women's education, see Thomas A. Woody, A History of Women's
Education in the United States (New York, 1929), vol. 1.
32 Cott, Bonds of Womanhood, 197-206.
33 Alice Kessler Harris, Out to Work: A History of WageEarning Women in the United States (New York, 1982) is the
standard history of women's work and is mostly concerned
with industrial labor. Cott, Bonds of Womanhood, 19-62, and
Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class, 198- 210, discuss the nature
of women's work under separate spheres.
34 Ellen Carol DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The
Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in
America, 1848-1869 (Ithaca, 1978). See Eleanor Flexner,
Century of Struggle: The Woman's Rights Movement in the
United States (New York, 1959) for an overview of the movement for suffrage. Steven M. Buechler, The Transformation of
THE
the Woman Suffrage Movement: The Case of Illinois, 18501920 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1986) studies the evolution of the
suffrage movement in one state.
35 Mary P. Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and
Ballots, 1825-1880 (Baltimore, 1990), 3-18.
36 Glenna Matthews, The Rise of Public Woman: Woman's
Power and Woman's Place in the United States, 1630-1970
(New York, 1992), 3-11.
37 Elizabeth R. Varon, We Mean to Be Counted: White Women
& Politics in Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill, 1998), 1-9.
38 Andrew R. L. Cayton and Peter S. Onuf, The Midwest and
the Nation: Rethinking the History of an American Region
(Bloomington, 1990), xvii. Timothy R. Mahoney explores the
creation of that middle-class society in the Upper Mississippi
River Valley in Provincial Lives: Middle Class Experience in
the Antebellum Middle West (Cambridge, Eng., 1999).
39 Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian
America, 1815-1846 (New York, 1991), 395.
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