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The Emerging Midwest: Upland Southerners and the Political Culture of the Old Northwest, 1787-1861

1996; University of Pennsylvania Press; Volume: 16; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/3124067

1553-0620

Ronald Shaw, Nicole Etcheson,

American Constitutional Law and Politics

Two different streams of migrants, one from the upland South-^Virgirúa, Kentucky, and Termessee-the other from the Middle Atlantic area, originally settled the Old Northwest states of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois.Each stream brought its own distinctive values, commitments, and stereotypes about the other to its new home.The persistent influence of one's origir\s is not unusual.It is a staple of contemporary historiography that we continue to be strongly affected by our origins even as we move on from them, both geographically and otherwise.But, Etcheson suggests, historians of the early Middle West have overemphasized the persistence of these differences and the power of the tensions that grew out of them.Emphasizing the influence of origins underestimates the growth of a new regional identity out of these disparate elements, a regional identity that, while retaining important echoes of different sectional perspectives and values, melded into something new and different in the Ohio Valley.Etcheson focuses on the upland southerners and their political culture, tracing out how they defined themselves and looked at their neighbors, the world they created in their new homes, and the problems they had to resolve.She portrays a group that melded their distinctive political outlooks, values, and prejudices with those of their neighbors from the Northeast in new ways and in new combinations.For example, the emergence of a national two-party system, one that involved important policy differences between the parties, was an important cause of the breakdown of sectional culture and exclusiveness.Upland southerners sharply disagreed among themselves about the specific political issues of Ü\e day.Politically, they were no longer a distinct bloc, whatever the commonalities of their origins.Like their Middle Atlantic neighbors, they now divided along partisan, not sectional, lines.Some became Whigs, others joined the Democrats.At the same time, however, in the complex ways of this identity development, the upland southerners came to these new understandings through different routes than did their northem colleagues, accepting parties for different reasons, using a similar vocabulary that was rooted in different notions.In other words, amid the melding of a different sectional experience many residual traces of the origins remained.But the vestigial traces of their origins were not as im-