the love of national union by presenting the appearance of a non-sectional compromise, which should allow the new areas of the Middle West to determine their own institutions. But the Free Soil party, strongest in the regions occupied by the New York-New England colonists, and having for its program national prohibition of the spread of slavery into the territories, had already found in the Middle West an important center of power. The strength of the movement far surpassed the actual voting power of the Free Soil party, for it compelled both Whigs and Democrats to propose fusion on the basis of concession to Free Soil doctrines. The New England settlers and the western New York settlers,--the children of New England,--were keenly alive to the importance of the issue. Indeed, Seward, in an address at Madison, Wisconsin, in 1860, declared that the Northwest, in reality, extended to the base of the Alleghanies, and that the new States had "matured just in the critical moment to rally the free States of the Atlantic coast, to call them back to their ancient principles." These Free Soil forces and the nationalistic tendencies of the Middle West proved too strong for the opposing doctrines when the real struggle came. Calhoun and Taney shaped the issue so logically that the Middle West saw that the contest was not only a war for the preservation of the Union, but also a war for the possession of the unoccupied West, a struggle between the Middle West and the States of the Gulf Plains. The economic life of the Middle West had been bound by the railroad to the North Atlantic, and its interests, as well as its love of national unity, made it in every way hostile to secession. When Dr. Cutler had urged the desires of the Ohio Company upon Congress, in 1787, he had promised to plant in the Ohio Valley a colony that would stand for the Union. Vinton of Ohio, in arguing for the admission of Iowa, urged the position of the Middle West as the great unifying section of the country: "Disunion," he said, "is ruin to them. They have no alternative but to resist it whenever or wherever attempted. . . . Massachusetts and South Carolina might, for aught I know, find a dividing line that would be mutually satisfactory to them; but, Sir, they can find no such line to which the western country can assent." But it was Abraham Lincoln who stated the issue with the greatest precision, and who voiced most clearly the nationalism of the Middle West, when he declared, "A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free."