Becoming a Region: Slavery, Capitalism, and Nation Building in the Mississippi Valley

The editors of the Mississippi Valley Historical Review, first published in 1914, justified their new journal by invoking their region’s “unity of development, differing in many ways from that of either the East or the far West.”  They believed that the “great middle valley” of America, a vast expanse from the Appalachian to the Rocky Mountains, required its own history.  This essay revisits the idea of the Mississippi Valley as a region in light of recent historiography on slavery, capitalism, and nation building in the 19^th century United States.  It will trace the development of the Mississippi Valley from times of heterogeneous sovereignties (Spanish, French, Anglo-American, and indigenous), riverine commerce, and expanding slavery on the eve of the Louisiana Purchase, to the consolidation of U.S. national sovereignty, railroad capital, and “free labor.” The transformation required the extension the United States’ federal system of governance, the expulsion of native people, the continued expansion of slavery and then its overthrow in Civil War (a conflict that challenged the unity of the Valley and the nation)—all in the context of an expanding industrial capitalist economy. The complex and contested development the Mississippi Valley ultimately tilted the regional balance of power from New Orleans and the Deep South to Chicago and the Midwest as the nation turned from slave power to industrial capitalism. All this was reflected in the Mid-western origins of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association.