The
railroads made a real prophecy of his fear that these men of the western
rivers would some day be "managing the concerns of a seaboard fifteen
hundred miles from their residences, and having a preponderance in the
councils," into which, as he contended, "they should never have been
admitted." [Footnote: Speech on the bill to admit Orleans Territory into
the Union. Annals of Congress, 11th Cong., 3d Sess., 1810-11, pp. 524-
542.]
He was thinking and speaking rather of the southwest than of the
northwest, but it was the east-and-west lines of railroad that prevented
the vital interest of that northern valley from flowing with the water
along parallels of longitude to where the gulf currents would catch its
commerce, instead of over the mountains along the sterner parallels of
latitude and in straighter course to Europe.
The force of gravity, the temptation of the tropics, the indifference of
the east, the freedom from eastern and puritanical restraints, were all on
the side of a "republic of the western waters" and against that larger,
continent-wide nationalism which now has its most ardent support in that
valley through which the iron shuttles fly from sea to sea, weaving the
waters as strands of color into a unified pattern of sublimer import.
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