Creative Books

By 1830, however,
industrial differentiation between the northern and southern
portions of the Mississippi Valley was clearly marked. The northwest
was changing to a land of farmers and town-builders, anxious for a
market for their grain and cattle; while the southwest was becoming
increasingly a cotton-raising section, swayed by the same impulses
in respect to staple exports as those which governed the southern
seaboard. Economically, the northern portion of the valley tended to
connect itself with the middle states, while the southern portion
came into increasingly intimate connection with the south.
Nevertheless, it would be a radical mistake not to deal with the
west as a separate region, for, with all these differences within
itself, it possessed a fundamental unity in its social structure and
its democratic ideals, and at times, in no uncertain way, it showed
a consciousness of its separate existence.
In occupying the Mississippi Valley the American people colonized a
region far surpassing in area the territory of the old thirteen
states.


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