CHAPTER I

FROM THE GREEN MOUNTAINS TO THE PRAIRIES


The dramatic moments in the colonizing of coastal New England have
passed into song, story, and sober chronicle; but the farther
migration of the English people, from tide-water to interior, has been
too prosaic a theme for poets and too diverse a movement for
historians. Yet when all the factors in our national history shall be
given their full value, none will seem more potent than the great
racial drift from the New England frontier into the heart of the
continent. The New Englanders who formed a broad belt from Vermont and
New York across the Northwest to Kansas, were a social and political
force of incalculable power, in the era which ended with the Civil
War. The New Englander of the Middle West, however, ceased to be
altogether a Yankee. The lake and prairie plains bred a spirit which
contrasted strongly with the smug provincialism of rock-ribbed and
sterile New England. The exultation born of wide, unbroken, horizon
lines and broad, teeming, prairie landscapes, found expression in the
often-quoted saying, "Vermont is the most glorious spot on the face of
this globe for a man to be born in, _provided_ he emigrates when he is
very young." The career of Stephen Arnold Douglas is intelligible only
as it is viewed against the background of a New England boyhood, a
young manhood passed on the prairies of Illinois, and a wedded life
pervaded by the gentle culture of Southern womanhood.

In America, observed De Tocqueville two generations ago, democracy