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c h a p t e r s i x Whose West?—Alternative Visions If Clay and Webster could have structured society as they wished, based on the nationalist political economy of the American System, there might have been far more westerners like Dr. Daniel Drake and more profusions of capital growth like that of Cincinnati. Drake was one of the premier physicians in the West, if not the entire country. The English travel writer Harriet Martineau met him when she visited Cincinnati during her mid-1830s tour of the United States and was charmed right away. “He is a complete and favourable specimen of a Westerner,” she gushed.¹ Drake, born in New Jersey, had moved to frontier Ohio in the late-1780s when the region that would become the “Queen City” was languishing—as just “one expanse of canebrake, infested by Buffalo,” Martineau wrote—and populated by little more than one hundred white settlers, mostly French. During the following fourand -a-half decades, he had witnessed the rise of a river metropolis—35,000 people, marketing annually some six million dollars’ worth of produce and manufactures. Cincinnati was a place as distinguished for its economic and cultural institutions as for its rapid population growth. For the year 1835 alone, Martineau reported, the city could boast more than a dozen common school buildings, the new Church of St. Paul, two new banking houses, and 150 “handsome private dwellings,” recently constructed. It featured four daily and six weekly newspapers, a bustling street life encumbered neither by “the apathy of the South nor the disorder consequent on the presence of a pauper class,” and a vibrant river commerce spearheaded by craft of every type, including steamboats moored “six or more abreast” at any given time. Bostonian David Henshaw found the booming Ohio River city “beautiful,” its private homes “furnished as sumptuously as the best houses in the Atlantic cities.” Still another traveler in the mid-1830s, Frederick Hall of Washington, D.C., exclaimed to his wife back home: “I must say, that Cincinnati, so far as related to refinement of manners, intellectual culture, and hospitality to strangers, is more like Boston than any other city.” The same was true, he added, of “the attention it Whose West?—Alternative Visions 171 pays to the education of its youth, and the diffusion of useful information among the different classes of its citizens.”² Before 1850, Cincinnati would be the sixth-largest city in America, and during Drake’s time there its growth outstripped them all. German immigrants accounted for most of the swelling of its population, but the Irish, driven by a series of potato famines in their native land, would quickly surpass the Germans in number: 14,000 sons and daughters of Erin crowded the city by 1850, and many more settled throughout the Northwest. About half of all manufacturing in the West centered in Cincinnati, and half of all capital investments. Cincinnati became famous for its pork-packing industry—“Porkopolis,” the locals called it. Herds of swine constantly infested the streets, on their way to slaughter from the rich farmlands of Indiana and Ohio. Residents could scarcely go out for a stroll without bumping into a hog or two, allowed to roam freely, consuming the scraps of garbage dumped every day from peoples’ doorsteps into the roads and alleyways.³ Physicians on the frontier spent a lot of time traveling to see their patients. While doing so, Drake reflected on what he saw and the people he met. Amid the plethora of Welsh, Irish, English, Germans, New Englanders, and others transplanted to southern Ohio, he knew and treated all types. As his reputation increased , so did invitations to speak publicly. Drake knew Clay personally and believed in the American System, especially as it might apply to the West. Asked to speak before the Literary Convention of Kentucky, Drake presented a vision of western unity scarcely distinguishable from speeches Clay had made before similar audiences in the early 1830s. Differences between slave and free states notwithstanding , the people of the trans-Appalachian “commonwealths” shared much in common: “the hills of Western Virginia and Kentucky cast their morning shadows on the plains of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri. . . . Thus connected by nature in the great [Ohio] valley, we must live in the bonds of companionship,” he declared. There was no “middle destiny.” Therefore, the West’s people of culture— “teachers, professors, lawyers, physicians, divines, and men of letters, from its remotest...

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