"Separate Interests" and the Nation-State: The Washington Administration and the Origins of Regionalism in the Trans-Appalachian West

Abstract

Few borders in United States have seemed so natural and so inevitable as Ohio River. By middle of nineteenth century, only a couple of generations after European Americans had begun to conquer, settle, and transform Ohio Valley, it had become commonplace for travelers, politicians, and writers to identify differences between society that had taken shape north of river and society south of it, differences they usually attributed to existence of slavery in one but not other. Alexis de Tocqueville provided classic precis of argument in Democracy in America. But Harriet Beecher Stowe offered most familiar and succinct version in describing Eliza's impossible dash across icy Ohio in Uncle Tom's Cabin. As an admiring Sam explained to a distraught Mrs. Shelby, Eliza had gone clar 'cross Jordan into the land of Canaan.1 More than a river, Ohio was a frontier between two different worlds. There is a persistent historiographical argument about whether differences between societies north and south of Ohio were fundamental or simply matters of degree. In this essay I am less concerned with that debate than with exploring when some people began to believe that interests of two regions had diverged and why that belief arose. My argument is that awareness of distinctive re-