If you’ve seriously studied or written about the Midwest in
the last, say, decade, you owe something to Jon K. Lauck. Starting in 2013 with The Lost Region—not a history of the
region but of its historians—he has tirelessly promoted Midwestern history.
Both through an impressive string of books and by helping to found the
Midwestern History Association, he has worked to revive and reorganize the
study of a region that sometimes forgets it has a history, a culture, or even,
famously, an accent. (Pronounce that first syllable through your nose.)

Now Lauck has given us the fullest articulation yet of his
vision of the Midwest. His new one-volume history, The Good Country: A History of the American Midwest 1800-1900,
presents the nineteenth-century Midwest as “the most advanced democratic
society that the world had seen to date.” He argues for the recovery of this
history, a story of “democratic vigor, cultural strength, racial and gender
progress, and civic energy,” which should be remembered not only for the sake
of accuracy but also for “our own wellbeing.”

In some ways, the case Lauck puts forward is persuasive. He
cites a record of progressive legislation that at least puts the early Midwest
ahead of the rest of the United States and Europe. Ohio, the first Midwestern
state, banned slavery and debtor’s prisons in its 1802 constitution. Indiana
banned slavery in 1816, Iowa in 1846. (Six years later, Iowa became the third
state in the union to allow interracial marriage.) Illinois partially banned it
in 1818 but allowed both indentured servitude and—up through 1825—the use of
slaves in the state salt springs. My own state, Michigan, banned slavery in its
1837 constitution; our current constitution, ratified in 1963, allows it as a
form of punishment. Progress is a vulnerable thing.

Ohio also set a healthy pattern with regard to voting. In
1803, Ohioans universalized white male suffrage, and failed to extend the
franchise to Black men by only one vote. In the South or the Northeast, at that
time, a would-be voter still generally needed to hold property, or to qualify
for what we’d now call a high tax bracket, while other comparable
countries—Lauck mentions England, Russia, Brazil, and France—were,
respectively, a Tory oligarchy with an extremely restricted suffrage, an
autocracy, a colony, and a mess.

But voting, instructive as it is, also exemplifies how hard
such comparisons are to make, how much we are fighting—as historians, as
citizens—over the meaning of the very terms we seek to compare for. Some
readers will already be asking, for example, why Lauck does not compare
Midwestern democracy to Native American practices, given that these polities
were just down the road apiece. But Lauck is talking specifically about voting,
and the Iroquois League, for example, neither voted nor was voted upon. When a
chief died, a group of women decided on his replacement; this replacement would
then gather to discuss any given issue with the other members of the League
until a consensus was reached. One can see at a glance that this process was
not “democratic” in Lauck’s sense, and that, at the same time, it more fully
enfranchised women than did universal white-male suffrage. Ranking varying
degrees of democratic-ness is indeed a complex exercise.

All the states Lauck writes about benefited from the
liberality of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. That law covered the territory
from Pennsylvania west as far as the upper Mississippi River. In addition to
banning slavery in these places, it also protected religious and press freedom,
and encouraged the building of schools. The Midwest thus had a mini–Bill of
Rights in 1787, before the U.S. as a whole did, and the freedoms it proclaimed
went further than did the federal Bill of Rights.

Yet the Ordinance was barely enforceable since there was
not yet a central government powerful enough to do the job. Settlers in
unincorporated parts of the territory brought enslaved people with them, and
Illinois and Michigan, under French r