of factories, and to the tillers of the soil; to the wool
growers, and to the wheat, corn, and hog raisers; to the
incipient masters of capital, and to the propertyless
mechanics and farm hands. Most of the perplexing prob-
lems which grow out of rural versus urban interests, of
large property holders versus small property holders, had
already appeared, and their ramifications were coloring
every aspect of that section's political life. Social soli-
darity, if such ever existed, had given way to social
discord--to the tug of divergent economic forces. The
Northwest now held the balance of power in the nation,
but it still had to decide which way to tip the scale.

Indiana, with her wooded hills and fertile prairies
stretching from the Ohio River to Lake Michigan, lay
in the very heart of the Old Northwest and embodied all
of its interests and diversities. Her population had been
drawn from many states, but the largest numbers had
come from Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Virginia,
North Carolina, and Tennessee. Emigrants from the
northern states had exceeded those from the South in the
later decades, but in 1860 Indiana still had more South-
erners than any other state north of the Ohio. By that
time fifty-seven per cent of her population were native-
born Hoosiers; less than ten per cent were foreign born.
There were some eleven thousand negroes in the state. ¹

The roots of the state's social attitudes lay deep in the
past, and the course of her growth had been shaped by
the accidents of natural phenomena: climate, rainfall,
soil, natural resources, and geographic location. As in
her sister states of the West, while her people had many
common interests, they also had important clashing ambi-
tions. Never before had they felt their differences so
keenly as in the years immediately preceding the Civil
War. And these differences were at the roots of Indiana's

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