Rise of the New West, 1819-1829
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Title: Rise of the New West, 1819-1829
Author: Frederick Jackson Turner
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Language: English
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THE AMERICAN NATION
A HISTORY
FROM ORIGINAL SOURCES BY ASSOCIATED SCHOLARS
EDITED BY
ALBERT BUSHNELL HART, L.L.D.
PROFESSOR OF HISTORY IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY
ADVISED BY
VARIOUS HISTORICAL SOCIETIES
THE AMERICAN NATION
A HISTORY
LIST OF AUTHORS AND TITLES
GROUP I
FOUNDATIONS OF THE NATION
Vol. 1 European Background of American History, by Edward Potts
Cheyney, A.M., Prof. European Hist., Univ. of Pa.
Vol. 2 Basis of American History, by Livingston Farrand, LL.D.,
President Univ. of Colo.
Vol. 3 Spain in America, by the late Edward Gaylord Bourne, Ph.D.,
formerly Prof. Hist., Yale Univ.
Vol. 4 England in America, by Lyon Gardiner Tyler, LL.D., President
William and Mary College.
Vol. 5 Colonial Self-Government, by Charles McLean Andrews, Ph.D.,
Prof. Am. History, Yale University.
GROUP II
TRANSFORMATION INTO A NATION
Vol. 6 Provincial America, by Evarts Boutell Greene, Ph.D., Prof.
Hist, and Dean of College, Univ. of Ill.
Vol. 7 France in America, by the late Reuben Gold Thwaites, LL.D.,
formerly Sec. Wisconsin State Hist. Soc.
Vol. 8 Preliminaries of the Revolution, by George Elliott Howard,
Ph.D., Prof. Polit. Science Univ. of Neb.
Vol. 9 The American Revolution, by Claude Halstead Van Tyne, Ph.D.,
Head Prof. Hist. Univ. of Michigan.
Vol. 10 The Confederation and the Constitution, by Andrew Cunningham
McLaughlin, A.M., Head Prof. Hist., Univ. of Chicago.
GROUP III
DEVELOPMENT OF THE NATION
Vol. II The Federalist System, by John Spencer Bassett, Ph.D., Prof.
Am. Hist., Smith College.
Vol. 12 The Jeffersonian System, by Edward Channing, Ph.D., Prof.
Ancient and Modern Hist., Harvard Univ.
Vol. 13 Rise of American Nationality, by Kendric Charles Babcock,
Ph.D., Dean Col. Arts and Sciences, Univ. of Illinois.
Vol. 14 Rise of the New West, by Frederick Jackson Turner, Ph.D.,
Prof. Hist., Harvard University.
Vol. 15 Jacksonian Democracy, by William MacDonald, LL.D., Prof.
Government, Univ. of California.
GROUP IV
TRIAL OF NATIONALITY
Vol. 16 Slavery and Abolition, by Albert Bushnell Hart, LL.D., Prof.
Government, Harvard Univ.
Vol. 17 Westward Extension, by the late George Pierce Garrison,
Ph.D., formerly Prof. Hist., Univ. of Texas.
Vol. 18 Parties and Slavery, by Theodore Clarke Smith, Ph.D., Prof.
Am. Hist., Williams College.
Vol. l9 Causes of the Civil War, by Rear-Admiral French Ensor
Chadwick, U.S.N., retired former Pres. of Naval War College.
Vol. 20 The Appeal to Arms, by James Kendall Hosmer, LL.D., formerly
Librarian Minneapolis Pub. Lib.
Vol. 21 Outcome of the Civil War, by James Kendall Hosmer, LL.D.
GROUP V
NATIONAL EXPANSION
Vol. 22 Reconstruction, Political and Economic, by William Archibald
Dunning, Ph.D., Prof. Hist, and Political Philosophy, Columbia Univ.
Vol. 23 National Development, by Edwin Erie Sparks, Ph.D., Pres. Pa.
State College.
Vol. 24 National Problems, by Davis R. Dewey, Ph.D., Professor of
Economics, Mass. Inst. of Technology.
Vol. 25 America as a World Power, by John H. Latane, Ph.D., Prof.
Am. Hist., John Hopkins University.
Vol. 26 National Ideals Historically Traced, by Albert Bushnell
Hart, LL.D., Prof. Government, Harvard University.
Vol. 27 National Progress--1907-1917, by Frederic Austin Ogg, Ph.D.,
Prof. Political Science, Univ. of Wisconsin.
Vol. 28 Index to the Series, by David Maydole Matteson, A.M.,
Harvard College Library.
COMMITTEES ORIGINALLY APPOINTED TO ADVISE AND CONSULT WITH THE
EDITOR
THE MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL SOCIETY
Charles Francis Adams, LL.D., President
Samuel A. Green, M.D., Vice-President
James Ford Rhodes, LL.D., ad Vice-President
Edward Channing, Ph.D., Prof. History Harvard University
Worthington C. Ford, Chief of Division of MSS., Library of Congress,
THE WISCONSIN HISTORICAL SOCIETY
Reuben G. Thwaites, LL.D., Secretary and Superintendent
Frederick J. Turner, Ph.D., Prof. of American History, Wisconsin
University
James D. Butler, LL.D., formerly Prof. Wisconsin University
William W. Wight, President
Henry E. Legler, Curator
THE VIRGINIA HISTORICAL SOCIETY
William Gordon McCabe, Litt. D., President Lyon G. Tyler, LL.D.,
Pres. of William and Mary College
Judge David C. Richardson
J. A. C. Chandler, Professor Richmond College Edward Wilson James
THE TEXAS HISTORICAL SOCIETY
Judge John Henninger Reagan, President
George P. Garrison, Ph.D., Prof. of History, University of Texas
Judge C. W. Raines Judge Zachary T. Fullmore
THE AMERICAN NATION: A HISTORY
VOLUME 14
RISE OF THE NEW WEST
1819-1829
BY
FREDERICK JACKSON TURNER, PH.D.
PROFESSOR OF AMERICAN HISTORY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN
WITH MAPS
NEW YORK AND LONDON HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
Copyright, 1906, by HARPER & BROTHERS.
Printed in the United States of America
TO
THE MEMORY OF ANDREW JACKSON TURNER
MY FATHER
CONTENTS
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii
AUTHOR'S PREFACE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xviii
I. NATIONALISM AND SECTIONALISM (1815-1830). . . . . . . 3
II. NEW ENGLAND (1820-1830) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
III. THE MIDDLE REGION (1820-1830) . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
IV. THE SOUTH (1820-1830) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
V. COLONIZATION OF THE WEST (1820-1830) . . . . . . . . 67
VI. SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT OF THE
WEST (1820-1830) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
VII. WESTERN COMMERCE AND IDEALS (1820-1830) . . . . . . . 96
VIII. THE FAR WEST (1820-1830) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
IX. THE CRISIS OF 1819 AND ITS RESULTS (1819-1820) . . . 134
X. THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE (1819-1821) . . . . . . . . . 149
XI. PARTY POLITICS (1820-1822) . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172
XII. THE MONROE DOCTRINE (1821-1823) . . . . . . . . . . . 199
XIII. INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS (1818-1824) . . . . . . . . . . 224
XIV. THE TARIFF OF 1824 (1820-1824) . . . . . . . . . . . 236
XV. THE ELECTION OF 1824 (1822-1825) . . . . . . . . . . 245
XVI. PRESIDENT ADAMS AND THE OPPOSITION (1825-1827). . . . 265
XVII. INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS AND FOREIGN TRADE (1825-1829) . 286
XVIII. REACTION TOWARDS STATE SOVEREIGNTY (1816-1829) . . . 299
XIX. THE TARIFF OF ABOMINATIONS AND THE SOUTH CAROLINA
EXPOSITION (1827-1828) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 314
XX. CRITICAL ESSAY ON AUTHORITIES . . . . . . . . . . . . 333
[Proofreaders note: Index and Maps omitted]
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION
In many previous volumes of the series, the region beyond the
Alleghenies has been recognized as an influence and a potentiality
in American history. Thwaites, in his "France in America," shows how
the French opened up the country and prepared the way; the Tennessee
and Kentucky settlements are described in Howard's "Preliminaries of
the Revolution"; Van Tyne's "American Revolution" goes into the
earliest western governments; McLaughlin's "Confederation and
Constitution" deals with the organization of the new communities by
Congress; Bassett's "Federalist System" and Channing's "Jeffersonian
System" show how the diplomacy and politics of the country were
affected by the appearance of a new group of equal states; while
Babcock's "Rise of American Nationality" carries the influence of
those states into a broader national life. Professor Turner takes up
the west as an integral part of the Union, with a self-consciousness
as lively as that of the east or south, with its own aims and
prejudices, but a partner in the councils and the benefits of the
national government which, as a whole, it is the aim of this volume
to describe.
In a way the west is simply a broader east, for up to the end of the
period covered by this volume most of the grown men and women in the
west came across the mountains to found new homes--the New-Englander
in western New York; the Pennsylvanian diverging westward and
southwestward; the Virginian in Kentucky; the North-Carolinian in
Tennessee and Missouri and, along with the South-Carolinian and
Georgian, in the new southwestern states; while north of the Ohio
River the principal element up to 1830 was southern.
To describe such a movement and its effects, Professor Turner has
the advantage to be a descendant of New-Yorkers, of New England
stock, but native to the west, and living alongside the most
complete collection of materials upon the west which has ever been
brought together--the Library of the Wisconsin State Historical
Society. His point of view is that the west and east were always
interdependent, and that the rising power of the western states in
national affairs was a wholesome and natural outcome of forces at
work for half a century. The transformation of the west from a rude
and boisterous frontier to a group of states, soon rivaling their
parent communities in population and wealth, was not unlike the
process through which Massachusetts and Pennsylvania and Virginia
passed as colonies, except that the inland people accepted ideals
and standards originally English, but worked out and put into shape
by their colonist fathers.
As the volume treats of the nation, and not simply of any section,
it contains three chapters (i., ii., iii.) on the social and
political life in New England, the middle region, and the south. The
next four chapters are a systematic account of the west as the
settler and the traveler saw it. between 1820 and 1830. In chapter
v., on Colonization, the settlers are traced from their old homes to
their new ones by road and river. Chapter vi., off Social and
Economic Development, is a picture of frontier life in the forest
and on the farm; chapter vii. brings into relief the need of a
market and the difficulty of reaching tide-water with western
products--a subject taken up again in the two later chapters on
internal improvements; chapter viii., on The Far West, goes with the
trapper into the mountains and then across the continent to
California and to Oregon, which were included in the ambitions of
the buoyant westerner.
Chapters ix. to xi. are a narrative of a succession of national
questions involving all sections--the commercial crisis of 1819; the
Missouri Compromise, which was in good part a western question; and
the slow recrystallization of political parties after 1820. Chapter
xii. is on the Monroe Doctrine, which included eastern questions of
commerce, southern questions of nearness to Cuba, and western
questions of Latin-American neighbors. Chapters xiii. and xvii.
describe the efforts by internal improvements to help all the
states, and especially to bind the eastern and western groups
together by the Cumberland Road and by canals. Chapters xiv. to xvi.
take up the tariff of 1824, the presidential election of that year,
and its political results. Chapter xviii. brings into clear light
the causes for the reaction from the ardent nationalism described in
Babcock's American Nationality. With chapter xix., on the tariff of
1828 and the South Carolina protest, the narrative part of the
volume closes. The Critical Essay on Authorities and a wealth of
foot-notes carry the reader back to materials little studied
hitherto, and prepare the way for many detailed investigations.
The aim of the volume is not to show the Rise of the New West as
though it were a separate story, but to show how the nation found
itself in the midst of questions involving the west, and how all
parts of the Union were enriched and stimulated by the appearance of
a new section. It opens up new vistas of historical study.
AUTHOR'S PREFACE
In the present volume I have kept before myself the importance of
regarding American development as the outcome of economic and social
as well as political forces. To make plain the attitude and
influence of New England, the middle region, the south, and the
west, and of the public men who reflected the changing conditions of
those sections in the period under consideration, has been my
principal purpose.
The limits of the volume have prevented the elaboration of some
points well worthy of fuller treatment; and, by the plan of the
series, certain aspects of the period have been reserved for other
writers.
I desire to express my cordial appreciation of the friendly
criticism and assistance I have received from the editor, Professor
Hart. To Professor Carl R. Fish, Professor A. A. Young, and Dr. U.
B. Phillips, my colleagues, I am indebted for a critical reading of
several chapters. I have drawn on the manuscript sources possessed
by Dr. Phillips for information on many points of southern history.
Several of the topics dealt with in the volume have been
investigated by graduate students in my seminary; particularly I
have profited by the papers of Professor Homer C. Hockett on the
Missouri Compromise and the rise of Jacksonian democracy; of Mr.
Royal B. Way, now instructor in history in Northwestern University,
on internal improvements; and of Dr. W. V. Pooley and Mr. A. C.
Boggess on the settlement of Illinois. Mr. S. J. Buck, my assistant
in American history, prepared under my direction some of the maps,
particularly those of congressional votes.
The map of western fur-trading posts in Captain Chittenden's
excellent History of the American Fur Trade furnished the basis for
the map of western posts and trails. In the construction of the map
of highways and waterways, I have used the map of H. S. Tanner,
1825, and Hewett's American Traveller (Washington, 1825). From the
maps in the Eighteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology have
been drawn the data for the map of Indian cessions. The editor
kindly supplied the map of Russian settlements and claims.
For the portrait of Henry Clay, which forms the frontispiece, thanks
are due to Mr. Charles Henry Hart, of Philadelphia, the owner of the
life-mask made by J. H. Browere.
FREDERICK J. TURNER.
RISE OF THE NEW WEST
CHAPTER I
NATIONALISM AND SECTIONALISM (1815-1830)
The history of the United States is the history of a growing nation.
Every period of its life is a transitional period, but that from the
close of the War of 1812 to the election of Andrew Jackson was
peculiarly one of readjustment. It was during this time that the new
republic gave clear evidence that it was throwing off the last
remnants of colonial dependence. The Revolution had not fully
severed the United States from the European state system; but now
the United States attained complete independence and asserted its
predominance in the western continent. It was in this period that
the nation strengthened its hold on the Gulf of Mexico by the
acquisition of Florida, recognized the independence of the revolting
Spanish-American colonies, and took the leadership of the free
sisterhood of the New World under the terms of the Monroe Doctrine.
The joyous outburst of nationalism which at first succeeded the
dissensions of the period of war revealed itself in measures passed
in Congress, under the leadership of Calhoun and Clay; it spoke
clearly in the decisions of Judge Marshall; and in the lofty tone of
condemnation with which the country as a whole reproached New
England for the sectionalism exhibited in the Hartford Convention.
[Footnote: Babcock, Am. Nationality (Am. Nation, XIII.), chaps, ix.,
xviii.; Gallatin, Writings, I., 700.]
It was not only in the field of foreign relations, in an aroused
national sentiment, and in a realization that the future of the
country lay in the development of its own resources that America
gave evidence of fundamental change. In the industrial field
transportation was revolutionized by the introduction of the
steamboat and by the development of canals and turnpikes. The
factory system, nourished by the restrictions of the embargo and the
war, rapidly developed until American manufactures became an
interest which, in political importance, outweighed the old
industries of shipping and foreign commerce. The expansion of
cotton-planting transformed the energies of the south, extended her
activity into the newer regions of the Gulf, and gave a new life to
the decaying institution of slavery.
From all the older sections, but especially from the south and its
colonies in Kentucky and Tennessee, a flood of colonists was
spreading along the waters of the west. In the Mississippi Valley
the forests were falling before the blows of the pioneers, cities
were developing where clearings had just let in the light of day,
and new commonwealths were seeking outlets for their surplus and
rising to industrial and political power. It is this vast
development of the internal resources of the United States, the
"Rise of the New West," that gives the tone to the period. "The
peace," wrote Webster in later years, "brought about an entirely new
and a most interesting state of things; it opened to us other
prospects and suggested other duties. We ourselves were changed, and
the whole world was changed. . . . Other nations would produce for
themselves, and carry for themselves, and manufacture for
themselves, to the full extent of their abilities. The crops of our
plains would no longer sustain European armies, nor our ships longer
supply those whom war had rendered unable to supply themselves. It
was obvious, that, under these circumstances, the country would
begin to survey itself, and to estimate its own capacity of
improvement." [Footnote: Webster, Writings (National ed.), VI., 28.]
These very forces of economic transformation were soon followed by a
distinct reaction against the spirit of nationalism and
consolidation which had flamed out at the close of the War of 1812.
This was shown, not only in protests against the loose-construction
tendencies of Congress, and in denunciations of the decisions of the
great chief-justice, but more significantly in the tendency of the
separate geographical divisions of the country to follow their own
interests and to make combinations with one another on this basis.
From one point of view the United States, even in this day of its
youth, was more like an empire than a nation. Sectionalism had been
fundamental in American history before the period which we have
reached. The vast physiographic provinces of the country formed the
basis for the development of natural economic and social areas,
comparable in their size, industrial resources, and spirit, to
nations of the Old World. In our period these sections underwent
striking transformations, and engaged, under new conditions, in the
old struggle for power. Their leaders, changing their attitude
towards public questions as the economic conditions of their
sections changed, were obliged not only to adjust themselves to the
interests of the sections which they represented, but also, if they
would achieve a national career, to make effective combinations with
other sections. [Footnote: Turner. "Problems of American History,"
in Congress of Arts and Sciences, St. Louis, II.]
This gives the clew to the decade. Underneath the superficial calm
of the "Era of Good Feeling," and in contradiction to the apparent
absorption of all parties into one, there were arising new issues,
new party formations, and some of the most profound changes in the
history of American evolution.
The men of the time were not unaware of these tendencies. Writing in
1823, Henry Clay declared that it was a just principle to inquire
what great interests belong to each section of our country, and to
promote those interests, as far as practicable, consistently with
the Constitution, having always an eye to the welfare of the whole.
"Assuming this principle," said he, "does any one doubt that if New
York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and the Western
States constituted an independent nation, it would immediately
protect the important interests in question? And is it not to be
feared that, if protection is not to be found for vital interests,
from the existing systems, in great parts of the confederacy, those
parts will ultimately seek to establish a system that will afford
the requisite protection?" [Footnote: Clay, Works, IV., 81, 82;
Annals of Cong., 18 Cong., 1 Sess., II., 1997, 2423.]
While the most prominent western statesman thus expressed his
conviction that national affairs were to be conducted through
combinations between sections on the basis of peculiar interests,
Calhoun, at first a nationalist, later the leader of the south,
changed his policy to a similar system of adjustments between the
rival sections. John Quincy Adams, in 1819, said of Calhoun: "he is
above all sectional and factious prejudices more than any other
statesman of this union with whom I have ever acted." [Footnote:
Adams, Memoirs, V., 361, VI., 75.] But Calhoun, by the close of the
decade, was not only complaining that the protective policy of
certain sections set a dangerous example "of separate
representation, and association of great Geographical interests to
promote their prosperity at the expense of other interests," but he
was also convinced that a great defect in our system was that the
separate geographical interests were not sufficiently guarded.
[Footnote: Am. Hist. Assoc., Report 1899, II., 250.] Speaking, in
1831, of the three great interests of the nation--the north, the
south, and the west--he declared that they had been struggling in a
fierce war with one another, and that the period was approaching
which was to determine whether they could be reconciled or not so as
to perpetuate the Union. [Footnote: Am. Hist. Rev., VI., 742; cf.
J.Q. Adams, in Richardson, Messages and Papers. II., 297; J. Taylor,
New Views, 261; [Turnbull]. The Crisis, No. 2.]
We see, therefore, that, in the minds of some of the most
enlightened statesmen of this decade, American politics were
essentially a struggle for power between rival sections. Even those
of most enlarged national sympathies and purposes accepted the fact
of sectional rivalries and combinations as fundamental in their
policies. To understand the period, we must begin with a survey of
the separate sections in the decade from 1820 to 1830, and determine
what were the main interests shown in each and impressed upon the
leaders who represented them. For the purposes of such a survey, the
conventional division into New England, middle region, south, and
west may be adopted. It is true that within each of these sections
there were areas which were so different as to constitute almost
independent divisions, and which had close affiliations with other
sections. Nevertheless, the conventional grouping will reveal
fundamental and contrasted interests and types of life between the
various sections. In the rivalries of their leaders these sectional
differences found political expression. By first presenting a
narrative of forces in the separate sections, the narrative of
events in the nation will be better understood.
A sectional survey, however, cannot fully exhibit one profound
change, not easy to depict except by its results. This was the
formation of the self-conscious American democracy, strongest in the
west and middle region, but running across all sections and tending
to divide the people on the lines of social classes. This democracy
came to its own when Andrew Jackson triumphed over the old order of
things and rudely threw open the sanctuary of federal government to
the populace.
CHAPTER II
NEW ENGLAND (1820-1830)
By geographical position, the land of the Puritans was devoted to
provincialism. While other sections merged into one another and even
had a west in their own midst, New England was obliged to cross
populous states in order to reach the regions into which national
life was expanding; and her sons who migrated found themselves under
conditions that weakened their old affiliations and linked their
fortunes with the section which they entered. The ocean had
dominated New England's interests and connected her with the Old
World; the fisheries and carrying--trade had engrossed her attention
until the embargo and the War of 1812 gave importance to her
manufactures. In spirit, also, New England was a section apart, The
impress of Puritanism was still strong upon her, and the unity of
her moral life was exceptional. Moreover, up to the beginning of the
decade with which we have to deal, New England had a population of
almost unmixed English origin, contrasting sharply, in this respect,
with the other sections. [Footnote: For the characteristics of New
England in colonial times, see Tyler, England in America, chaps,
xviii., xix.; Andrews, Colonial Self-Government, chaps, xviii.,
xix.; Greene, Provincial America, chaps, xii., xiii., xvi.-xviii.;
Bassett, Federalist System, chaps, xi., xiii. (Am. Nation, IV., V.,
VI., XI.)].
With these peculiarities, New England often played an important
sectional role, not the least effective instance of which had been
her independent attitude in the War of 1812. [Footnote: Babcock, Am.
Nationality (Am. Nation, XIII.), chap. ix.] By 1820, not only were
profound economic and social changes affecting the section, but its
relative importance as a factor in our political life was declining.
[Footnote: Adams, United States, IX., chaps, iv., vii.] The trans-
Allegheny states, which in 1790 reported only a little over one
hundred thousand souls, at a time when New England's population was
over one million, had in 1820 reached a population of nearly two
millions and a quarter, while New England had not much over a
million and a half. Ten years later, the latter section had less
than two millions, while the western states beyond the Alleghenies
had over three millions and a half, and the people northwest of the
Ohio River alone numbered nearly a million and a half. In 1820 the
total population of New England was about equal to the combined
population of New York and New Jersey; but its increase between 1820
and 1830 was hardly three hundred thousand, not much over half that
of New York, and less than the gain of Ohio. If Maine, the growing
state of the group, be excluded, the increase of the whole section
was less than that of the frontier state of Indiana. "Our New
England prosperity and importance are passing away," wrote Webster
at the beginning of the period. [Footnote: McMaster, Webster, 90.]
Were it not that New England was passing through a series of
revolutionary economic changes, not fully appreciated at that time,
doubtless the percentage of her growth would have been even more
unfavorable. As it was, the rise of new manufactures helped to save
her from becoming an entirely stationary section. In the course of
the preceding two decades, New England's shipping industry had
reached an extraordinary height, by reason of her control of the
neutral trade during the European wars. The close of that period saw
an apparent decline in her relative maritime power in the Union, but
the shipping and commercial interests were still strong. New England
possessed half the vessels owned in the United States and over half
the seamen. Massachusetts alone had a quarter of the ships of the
nation and over a third of the sailors. [Footnote: Pitkin,
Statistical View (ed. of 1835), 350.] Of the exports of the United
States in 1820, the statistics gave to New England about twenty per
cent., nine-tenths of which were from Massachusetts. [Footnote:
Shaler, United States, I., chap, x.; MacGregor, Commercial
Statistics of America, 41, 58, 63, 72, 126, 133.] This is rather an
under-estimate of the share of New England, because a portion of the
commerce fitted out by her capital and her ships sought the harbor
of New York.
Great as was New England's interest in the commercial policy of the
United States, the manufactures of the section rose to such
importance in the course of this decade that the policy of the
section was divided. The statistics of the manufactures of the
United States at the beginning and at the end of the period were so
defective that little dependence can be placed upon them for
details. But the figures for New England were more complete than for
the other regions; the product of her cotton mills increased in
value from two and one-half million dollars in 1820 to over fifteen
and one-half millions in 1831; and her woolen products rose from
less than a million dollars to over eleven million dollars. In
Massachusetts alone, in the same years, the increase in cottons was
from about seven hundred thousand dollars to over seven million
seven hundred thousand dollars; and in woolens, from less than three
hundred thousand dollars to over seven million three hundred
thousand dollars. [Footnote: See Secretary of Treasury, Report,
1854-1855, PP-, 87-92; "Treasury Report," in House Exec. Docs., 22
Cong., i Sess., I., No. 308.]
In brief, the period witnessed the transfer of the industrial center
of gravity from the harbors to the water-falls, from commerce and
navigation to manufactures. Besides the textile mills of Rhode
Island and Connecticut, the Merrimac mills grew rapidly around
Lowell, Massachusetts; the water-powers of New Hampshire became the
sites of factory towns, and the industrial revolution which, in the
time of the embargo, began to transfer industries from the household
to the factory, was rapidly carried on. A labor class began to
develop, farmers moved into towns, the daughters worked in the
mills. It was not long before Irish immigrants found their way to
the section and replaced the natives in the mills. The old social
and racial unity began to break down. [Footnote: Woollen, "Labor
Troubles between 1834 and 1837," in Yale Review, I., 87; Martineau,
Society in America, II., 227, 243, 246; Chevalier, Society, Manners,
and Politics, 137; Addison, Lucy Larcom, 6; Clay, Works, V., 467.]
Agriculture still occupied the larger number of New England people,
but it was relatively a declining interest. As early as 1794, Tench
Coxe had characterized New England as a completely settled region,
with the exception of Maine and Vermont. The generation that
followed saw an expansion of agricultural population until the best
valley lands were taken and the hill-sides were occupied by
struggling farmers. By 1830 New England was importing corn and flour
in large quantities from the other sections. The raising of cattle
and sheep increased as grain cultivation declined. The back-country
of Maine particularly was being occupied for cattle farms, and in
Vermont and the Berkshires there was, towards the close of the
decade, a marked tendency to combine the small farms into sheep
pastures. Thus, in the tariff agitation of the latter part of the
decade, these two areas of western New England showed a decided
sympathy with the interests of the wool-growers of the country at
large. This tendency also fostered emigration from New England,
since it diminished the number of small farms. By the sale of their
lands to their wealthier neighbors, the New England farmers were
able to go west with money to invest. [Footnote: Niles' Register,
XLIX., 68; Smith and Rann, Rutland County [Vt.], 166; Goodhue, Hist.
of Shoreham [Vt.], 59; Nat. Assoc. of Wool Manufacturers, Bulletin,
XXX., 47, 242, 261.]
In the outlying parts, like the back-country of Vermont, farmers
still lived under primitive industrial conditions, supporting the
family largely from the products of the farm, weaving and spinning
under the conditions of household industry that had characterized
the colonial period, slaughtering their cattle and hogs, and packing
their cheese. When the cold weather set in, caravans of Vermont
farmers passed, by sledges, to the commercial centers of New
England. [Footnote: Heaton, Story of Vermont, chap. vi.] But the
conditions of life were hard for the back-country farmer, and the
time was rapidly approaching when the attractions of the western
prairies would cause a great exodus from these regions.
While New England underwent the economic changes that have been
mentioned, a political revolution was also in progress. The old
Federalist party and Federalist ideas gradually gave way. Federalism
found its most complete expression in Connecticut, "the land of
steady habits," where "Innovation" had always been frowned upon by a
governing class in which the Congregational clergy were powerful.
Permanence in office and the influence of the clergy were prominent
characteristics of the Connecticut government. [Footnote: Dwight,
Travels, I., 262, 263, 291; Welling, "Conn. Federalism," in N. Y.
Hist. Soc., Address, 1890, pp. 39-41.] The ceremonies of the
counting of votes for governor indicated the position of the
dominant classes in this society. This solemnity was performed in
the church. "After the Representatives," wrote Dwight, the president
of Yale College, "walk the Preacher of the Day, and the Preacher of
the succeeding year: and a numerous body of the Clergy, usually more
than one hundred, close the procession." He notes that there were
several thousand spectators from all over the state, who were
perfectly decorous, not even engaging in noisy conversation, and
that a public dinner was regularly given by the state to the clergy
who were present at the election. [Footnote: Dwight, Travels, I.,
267.]
After the War of 1812, this dominance of the Congregational clergy
throughout the section was attacked by a combination of religious
and political forces. [Footnote: Schouler, United States, II., 282,
511, III., 52; Adams, United States, IX., 133.] There had been a
steady growth of denominations like the Baptists and Methodists in
New England. As a rule, these were located in the remoter and newer
communities, and, where they were strongest, there was certain to be
a considerable democratic influence. Not only did these
denominations tend to unite against the Federalists and the
Congregationalists, but they found useful allies in the members of
the old and influential Episcopal church, who had with them a common
grievance because of the relations between the state and
Congregationalism. Although the original support of the
Congregational clergy by public taxation had been modified by
successive acts of legislation in most of these states, so that
persons not of that church might make their legal contributions for
the support of their own clergy, [Footnote: Fearon, Sketches of
America, 114.] yet this had been achieved only recently and but
incompletely.
We find, therefore, that the alliance of Episcopalians and
Dissenters against the dominant clergy and the Federalists was the
key to internal politics at the opening of our period. "The old
political distinctions," wrote the editor of the Vermont Journal,
"seem to have given place to religious ones." But the religious
contentions were so closely interwoven with the struggle of New
England's democracy to throw off the control of the established
classes, that the contest was in reality rather more political and
social than religious. By her constitutional convention of 1818,
Connecticut practically disestablished the Congregational church and
did away with the old manner of choosing assistants. [Footnote:
Baldwin, "The Three Constitutions of Conn.," in New Haven Colony
Hist. Soc., Papers, V., 210-214.] In the election of 1820 the
Republican candidate for governor was elected by a decisive vote,
and all of Connecticut's representation in the lower house of
Congress was Republican, [Footnote: Niles' Register, XVIII., 128.]
although, in 1816, the Federalist candidate had been chosen by a
small majority. [Footnote: Adams, United States, IX., 133.] New
Hampshire's toleration act was passed in 1819, but she had achieved
her revolution as early as 1816, when a union of the anti-
Congregational denominations with the Republicans destroyed the
ascendancy of the Federalists and tried to break that party's
control of the educational center at Dartmouth College. [Footnote:
P. B. Sanborn, New Hampshire, 251 et seq.; Barstow, New Hampshire,
chaps, xi., xii.; Plumer, William Plumer, 437-460.]
The contest was not so clearly marked in Massachusetts as in the
other states, for the old centers of Congregational power, notably
Harvard College, had already begun to feel the liberalizing
influence of the Unitarian movement. Congregationalism in
Massachusetts divided into warring camps [Footnote: Walker, Cong.
Churches in the U.S., 303-308.] and was not in a position to
exercise the political power it had shown in other states of New
England. The discussion in that state between the Unitarian and
orthodox wings of the Congregational churches tended, on the whole,
to moderate the extreme views of each, as well as to prevent their
united domination. In her constitutional convention of 1820,
Massachusetts refused to do away with the advantage which the
Congregational church had in the matter of public support, and it
was not until 1833 that the other denominations secured the complete
separation of church and state. The moderate attitude of the
Federalists of the state lengthened their tenure of power. Governor
Brooks, elected by the Federalists in 1817, was a friend of Monroe,
and a moderate who often took Republicans for his counselors, a
genuine representative of what has been aptly termed the "Indian
summer of Federalism in Massachusetts."
The Republican party controlled the other states of the section, but
there was in New England, as a whole, a gradual decline and
absorption, rather than a destruction, of the Federalist party,
while, at the same time, marked internal political differences
constituted a basis for subsequent political conflicts. Just before
he took his seat in Congress in 1823, Webster lamented to Judge
Story that New England did not get out of the "dirty squabble of
local politics, and assert her proper character and consequence."
"We are disgraced," he said, "beyond help or hope by these things.
There is a Federal interest, a Democratic interest, a bankrupt
interest, an orthodox interest, and a middling interest; but I see
no national interest, nor any national feeling in the whole
matter."[Footnote: McMaster, Webster, 99.]
In general, northern New England--Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont-
-showed a distinct tendency towards Democracy; in southern New
England the fortifications of Federalism and Congregational power
lay in a wide belt along the Connecticut River, while along the sea-
coast and in the Berkshire region the Democratic forces showed
strength.
From the outlying rural forces, where Democracy was strong, the
settlement of New-Englanders in the middle west was to come. To
Timothy Dwight, the president of Yale, who voiced the extreme
conservatism of Federal New England, the pioneers seemed unable to
live in regular society. "They are impatient of the restraints of
law, religion, and morality; grumble about the taxes, by which
Rulers, Ministers, and School-masters, are supported; and complain
incessantly, as well as bitterly, of the extortions of mechanics,
farmers, merchants, and physicians; to whom they are always
indebted. At the same time, they are usually possessed, in their own
view, of uncommon wisdom; understand medical science, politics, and
religion, better than those, who have studied them through life."
These restless men, with nothing to lose, who were delighted with
innovation, were, in his judgment, of the type that had ruined
Greece and Rome. "In mercy, therefore," exclaimed Dwight, "to the
sober, industrious, and well-disposed inhabitants, Providence has
opened in the vast western wilderness a retreat, sufficiently
alluring to draw them away from the land of their nativity. We have
many troubles even now; but we should have many more, if this body
of foresters had remained at home." [Footnote: Dwight, Travels, II.,
458-463.]
Perhaps the most striking feature of New England life was its
organization into communities. What impressed the traveler from
other sections or from the Old World was partly the small farms,
divided into petty fields by stone fences, but, above all, "the
clustering of habitations in villages instead of dispersing them at
intervals of a mile over the country." The spires of the white
churches of separate hamlets dotted the landscape. Simple comfort
and thrift were characteristic of the region. "Here," wrote a
Virginia planter, traveling in New England in the early thirties,
"is not apparent a hundredth part of the abject squalid poverty that
our State presents." [Footnote: "Minor's Journal," in Atlantic
Monthly, XXVI., 333.]
The morale of New England was distinctive. Puritanism had founded
the section, and two centuries of Calvinistic discipline had molded
the New England conscience. That serious self-consciousness, that
self-scrutiny, almost morbid at times, by which the Puritan tried to
solve the problem of his personal salvation, to determine whether he
was of the elect, [Footnote: Wendell, Cotton Mather, 6.] was
accompanied by an almost equal anxiety concerning the conduct of his
neighbors. The community life of New England emphasized this trait.
Tudor, who was not friendly to the ideals of the "land of steady
habits," criticized "the narrowing influence of local policy," and
lamented the "sort of habitual, pervading police, made up of
Calvinistic inquisition and village scrutiny" in Connecticut.
[Footnote: Tudor, Letters on the Eastern States (ed. of 1821), 60.]
Not to be one's brother's keeper and not to assent to the dictates
of community sentiment were indications of moral laxity. This long
training in theological inquiry, this continued emphasis upon
conduct, and this use of community sentiment as a means of enforcing
certain moral and political ideals, led the New-Englander to war
with opposing conceptions wherever he went.
A test of the ideals of New England is found in the attitude of
those who spread into new regions. The migrating Yankee was a
reformer. A considerable proportion of the New-Englanders who left
the section were "come-outers" in religion as in politics; many of
the Vermonters and the pioneers who went west were radicals. But the
majority of these dissenters from the established order carried with
them a body of ideas regarding conduct and a way of looking at the
world that were deeply influenced by their old Puritan training. If,
indeed, they revolted from the older type of Calvinism in the freer
air of a new country, they were, by this sudden release from
restraint, likely to develop "isms" of their own, which revealed the
strong underlying forces of religious thinking. Lacking the
restraining influence of the old Congregational system, some of them
contented themselves with placing greater emphasis upon emotional
religion and eagerly embraced membership in churches like the
Baptist or Methodist, or accepted fellowship with Presbyterians and
welcomed the revival spirit of the western churches.
Others used their freedom to proclaim a new order of things in the
religious world. Most noteworthy was Mormonism, which was founded by
a migrating New England family and was announced and reached its
first success among the New-Englanders of New York and Ohio.
Antimasonry and spiritualism flourished in the Greater New England
in which these emancipated Puritans settled. Wherever the New-
Englander went he was a leader in reform, in temperance crusades, in
abolition of slavery, in Bible societies, in home missions, in the
evangelization of the west, in the promotion of schools, and in the
establishment of sectarian colleges.
Perhaps the most significant elements in the disintegration of the
old Congregationalism in New England itself, however, were furnished
by the Unitarians and the Universalists. For nearly a generation the
liberal movement in religion had been progressing. The Unitarian
revolt, of which Channing was the most important leader, laid its
emphasis upon conduct rather than upon a plan of salvation by
atonement. In place of original sin and total depravity, it came
more and more to put stress upon the fatherhood of God and the
dignity of man. The new optimism of this faith was carried in still
another direction by the Universalist movement, with its gospel of
universal salvation.
The strength of the Unitarian movement was confined to a limited
area about Boston, but within its own sphere of influence it
contested successfully with the old Congregational power, captured
Harvard College, and caught the imaginations of large numbers of the
best educated and prosperous classes of the community. Attempting to
adjust themselves between the old order of things on the one side,
and the new forces of evangelism and liberalism on the other,
another great body of Congregationalists found a middle ground in a
movement of modified Calvinism, which sustained the life of
Congregationalism in large areas of New England. By these movements
of conflict and readjustment, whatever of unity the older
Congregational faith had possessed was gradually broken down and a
renaissance of religious and moral ideas was ushered in.
This change was soon to find expression in a new literary movement
in New England, a movement in which poetry and prose were to take on
a cheerful optimism, a joy in life, and an idealism. This new
literature reflected the influence of the Unitarian movement, the
influence of European romantic literature, and the influence of
German philosophy. Before long the Transcendentalists proclaimed the
new idealism that was showing itself about Boston. [Footnote:
Wendell, Literary Hist. of America, book V., chaps. iv., v.] Bryant,
Longfellow, Whittier, Hawthorne, and Emerson were all prophesied in
the forces of intellectual change that now spread over the section.
Even New England's statesmen were deeply influenced by the literary
spirit. Daniel Webster, although the son of a New Hampshire pioneer
whose log cabin was on the edge of the vast forest that stretched
north to Canada, had won an education at the "little college" at
Dartmouth; and, after his removal to Boston, he captivated New
England by his noble commemorative orations and enriched his
arguments before the courts by the splendor of his style. He united
the strong, passionate nature of his backwoods father with a mind
brought under the influences of the cultured society of Boston. John
Quincy Adams, also, had been professor of rhetoric and oratory at
Harvard, and he found in the classics a solace when the political
world grew dark around him. Edward Everett represented even more
clearly the union of the man of letters with the political leader.
If we except the brilliant but erratic John Randolph, of Roanoke, no
statesman from other sections showed this impress of literature.
While these forces were developing, a liberalizing of the colleges,
and particularly of Harvard, by the introduction of new courses in
literature and science, was in progress. Reform movements, designed
to give fuller expression to common-school public education, began,
and already in 1821 Boston had established the first English high-
school, precursor of a movement of profound importance in the
uplifting of the masses. Lyceums and special schools for the
laborers flourished in the new centers of manufacturing. The smaller
educational centers, like Dartmouth, Bowdoin, Amherst, and Williams,
where the farmer boys of New England worked their way through
college, sent out each year men to other sections to become leaders
at the bar, in the pulpit, in the press, and in the newer colleges.
The careers of Amos Kendall, Prentiss, and others illustrate these
tendencies. In short, New England was training herself to be the
school-mistress of the nation. Her abiding power was to lie in the
influence which she exerted in letters, in education, and in reform.
She was to find a new life and a larger sphere of activity in the
wide-spread western communities which were already invaded by her
sons. In furnishing men of talent in these fields she was to have an
influence out of all relation to her population.[Footnote: Century
Mag., XLVII., 43.]
CHAPTER III
THE MIDDLE REGION (1820-1830)
The middle states formed a zone of transition between the east and
the west, the north and the south [Footnote: For earlier discussions
of the middle colonies and states, see Tyler, ENGLAND IN AMERICA,
chap, xvii.; Andrews, COLONIAL SELF-GOVERNMENT, chaps, v., vii.,
xviii., xix.; Greene, PROVINCIAL AMERICA, chaps. xvi.-xviii. (AM.
NATION, IV., V., VI.)]. Geographically, they lay on the line of the
natural routes between the Atlantic on the one side, and the Ohio
and the Great Lakes on the other. [Footnote: Gallatin, WRITINGS,
III., 49; Clinton, in LAWS OF THE STATE OF N.Y. IN RELATION TO ERIE
AND CHAMPLAIN CANALS, I., 140.] The waters of the Susquehanna,
rising near the lake region of central New York, flowed to
Chesapeake Bay, which opened into the Atlantic far down Virginia's
coast-line. The Great Valley ran through eastern Pennsylvania,
across Maryland, and, in the form of the Shenandoah Valley, made a
natural highway to the interior of North Carolina. New York City and
Philadelphia saw in an intimate connection with the rising west the
pledge of their prosperity; and Baltimore, which was both a
metropolis of the south and of the middle region, extended her trade
north to central New York, west to the Ohio, and south into
Virginia, and, like her rivals, sent her fleets to garner the
commercial harvest of the sea. In the composition of its population,
also, the middle region was a land of transitions between sections,
and a prototype of the modern United States, composite in its
nationality. In New York an influential Dutch element still
remained; the New England settlers had colonized the western half of
the state and about equaled the native population. In Pennsylvania,
Germans and Scotch-Irishmen had settled in such numbers in the
course of the eighteenth century that, by the time of the
Revolution, her population was almost evenly divided between these
stocks and the English. [Footnote: See Lincoln, Revolutionary
Movement in Pa., in University of Pa., Publications, I., 24, 35.]
There was also a larger proportion of recent immigrants than in any
other state, for by 1830 Pennsylvania had one unnaturalized alien to
every fifty inhabitants.
Following the Great Valley in the middle of the same century, the
Scotch-Irish and German settlers had poured into the up-country of
the south, so that these interior counties of Virginia and the
Carolinas were like a peninsula thrust down from Pennsylvania into
the south, with economic, racial, social, and religious connections
which made an intimate bond between the two sections. A multitude of
religious sects flourished in tolerant Pennsylvania, and even the
system of local government was a combination of the New England town
and the southern county.
This region, therefore, was essentially a mediating, transitional
zone, including in its midst an outlying New England and a west, and
lacking the essential traits of a separate section. It was
fundamentally national in its physiography, its composition, and its
ideals--a fighting-ground for political issues which found their
leaders in the other sections.
Compared with New England, the middle region was a rapidly growing
section. The population of New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and
Delaware combined was about two and three-quarter millions in 1820,
and three and two-third millions in 1830. By that date New York
alone balanced all New England in the number of its people. But it
was its western half that permitted this growth of the middle
section. During the decade 1820-1830, New York west of Oneida Lake
increased in population by a percentage more than twice as great,
and by an amount almost as great, as that of the populous eastern
half of the state. By the end of the decade, about one-third of
Pennsylvania's population was found west of her central counties. At
that time New York and Pennsylvania became the most populous states
in the Union. Virginia and Massachusetts, which in 1790 held the
lead, had now fallen to third and eighth place respectively. New
Jersey, meanwhile, lagged far behind, and Delaware's rate of
increase was only five and one-half per cent. In 1829 a member of
the Virginia constitutional convention asked: "Do gentlemen really
believe, that it is owing to any diversity in the principles of the
State Governments of the two states, that New York has advanced to
be the first state in the Union, and that Virginia, from being the
first, is now the third, in wealth and population? Virginia ceded
away her Kentucky, to form a new state; and New York has retained
her Genessee--there lies the whole secret." [Footnote: Va.
Constitutional Convention, Debates (1829-1830), 405.]
In the closing years of the eighteenth century and the first decade
of the nineteenth the New York lands beyond the sources of the
Mohawk had been taken up by a colonization characteristically
western. New England farmers swarmed into the region, hard on the
heels of the retreating Indians. Scarcely more than a decade before
1820 western New York presented typically frontier conditions. The
settlers felled and burned the forest, built little towns, and
erected mills, and now, with a surplus of agricultural products,
they were suffering from the lack of a market and were demanding
transportation facilities. Some of their lumber and flour found its
way by the lakes and the St. Lawrence to Montreal, a portion went by
rafts down the Allegheny to the waters of the Ohio, and some
descended the upper tributaries of the Susquehanna and found an
outlet in Baltimore or Philadelphia; but these routes were
unreliable and expensive, and by one of them trade was diverted from
the United States to Canada. There was a growing demand for canals
that should give economic unity to New York and turn the tide of her
interior commerce along the Mohawk and Lake Champlain into the
waters of the Hudson and so to the harbor of New York City. The Erie
and the Champlain canals were the outcome of this demand.
It is the glory of De Witt Clinton that he saw the economic
revolution which the Erie Canal would work, and that he was able to
present clearly and effectively the reasons which made the
undertaking practicable and the financial plan which made it
possible. He persuaded the legislature by the vision of a greater
Hudson River, not only reaching to the western confines of the
state, but even, by its connection with Lake Erie, stretching
through two thousand miles of navigable lakes and rivers to the very
heart of the interior of the United States. To him the Erie Canal
was a political as well as an economic undertaking. "As a bond of
union between the Atlantic and western states," he declared, "it may
prevent the dismemberment of the American empire. As an organ of
communication between the Hudson, the Mississippi, the St. Lawrence,
the great lakes of the north and west, and their tributary rivers,
it will create the greatest inland trade ever witnessed. The most
fertile and extensive regions of America will avail themselves of
its facilities for a market. All their surplus productions, whether
of the soil, the forest, the mines, or the water, their fabrics of
art and their supplies of foreign commodities, will concentrate in
the city of New-York, for transportation abroad or consumption at
home. Agriculture, manufactures, commerce, trade, navigation, and
the arts, will receive a correspondent encouragement. That city
will, in the course of time become the granary of the world, the
emporium of commerce, the seat of manufactures, the focus of great
moneyed operations, and the concentrating point of vast, disposable,
and accumulating capitals, which will stimulate, enliven, extend,
and reward the exertions of human labor and ingenuity, in all their
processes and exhibitions. And before the revolution of a century,
the whole island of Manhattan, covered with habitations and
replenished with a dense population, will constitute one vast city."
[Footnote: View of the Grand Canal (N. Y., 1825), 20.]
Sanguine as were Clinton's expectations, the event more than
justified his confidence. By 1825 the great canal system, reaching
by way of Lake Champlain to the St. Lawrence, and by way of the
Mohawk and the lakes of central New York to Lake Erie, was opened
for traffic throughout its whole length. The decrease in
transportation charges brought prosperity and a tide of population
into western New York; villages sprang up along the whole line of
the canal; the water-power was utilized for manufactures; land
values in the western part of the state doubled and in many cases
quadrupled; farm produce more than doubled in value. Buffalo and
Rochester became cities. [Footnote: J. Winden, Influence of the Erie
Canal (MS. Thesis, University of Wisconsin); U. S. Census of 1900,
Population, I., 430, 432; Callender, in Quarterly Journal of
Economics, XVII., 22; Hulbert, Historic Highways, XIV., chap. v.]
The raw products of the disappearing forests of western New York--
lumber, staves, pot and pearl ashes, etc., and the growing surplus
of agricultural products, began to flow in increasing volume down
this greater Hudson River to New York City. The farther west was
also turning its streams of commerce into this channel. The tolls of
the canal system were over half a million dollars immediately upon
its completion; for 1830 they were over a million dollars.
[Footnote: McMaster, United States, V., 135; Canal Commissioners of
N. Y., Report (January 17, 1833), App. A.] By 1833 the annual value
of the products sent by way of the Erie and Champlain canals was
estimated at thirteen million dollars. [Footnote: Pitkin,
Statistical View (ed. of 1835), 577.] At the close of this decade
the Ohio system of canals, inspired by the success of the Erie
Canal, had rendered a large area of that state tributary to New
York. The Great Lake navigation grew steadily, the Western Reserve
increased its population, and the harbor of Cleveland became a
center of trade.
The effect of all this upon New York City was revolutionary. Its
population increased from 123,000 in 1820 to 202,000 in 1830. Its
real and personal estate rose in value from about seventy million
dollars in 1820 to about one hundred and twenty-five million dollars
in 1830. [Footnote: U. S. Census of 1900, Population, I., 432;
MacGregor, Commercial Statistics of America, 145.] The most
significant result of the canal was the development of the commerce
of New York City, which rose from a market town for the Hudson River
to be the metropolis of the north. The value of the imports of New
York state in 1821 was twenty-four million dollars; in 1825, the
year of the completion of the canal, it was fifty million dollars.
This was an exceptional year, however, and in 1830 the value of the
imports was thirty-six million dollars. In 1821 New York had thirty-
eight per cent. of the total value of imports into the United
States; in 1825, over fifty per cent.; and this proportion she
maintained during our period. In the exports of domestic origin, New
York was surpassed in 1819 by Louisiana, and in 1820 by South
Carolina, but thereafter the state took and held the lead.
[Footnote: Compiled from Pitkin, Statistical View.] In 1823 the
amount of flour sent from the western portion of New York by the
Erie Canal equaled the whole amount which reached New Orleans from
the Mississippi Valley in that year. [Footnote: Based on statistics
in Report on Internal Commerce, 1887, p. 196; Canal Commissioners of
N. Y., Annual Report (February 20, 1824), 33.] The state of New York
had by a stroke achieved economic unity, and its metropolis at once
became the leading city of the country.
Philadelphia lost power as New York City gained it. Though the
counties tributary to Philadelphia constituted the old center of
population and political power, the significant fact of growth in
Pennsylvania was the increasing importance of Pittsburgh at the
gateway to the Ohio Valley. In the Great Valley beyond the Blue
Ridge lived the descendants of those early Germans and Scotch-
Irishmen who early occupied the broad and level fields of this
fertile zone, the granary of Pennsylvania. Beyond this rock-walled
valley lay the mountains in the west and north of the state, their
little valleys occupied by farmers, but already giving promise of
the rich yield of iron and coal on which the future greatness of the
state was to rest. The anthracite mines of the northeastern corner
of the state, which have given to their later possessors such
influence over the industries of the country, were just coming into
use. The iron ores of the middle mountain counties found their way
to the forges at Pittsburgh. Already the bituminous coals of the
western counties were serving to generate steam-power for the mills
upon the upper waters of the Ohio, but, as yet, the iron
manufacturers of the state depended on the abundant forests for the
production of coke for smelting.
The problem of transportation pressed hard upon Pennsylvania from
the beginning. While Philadelphia was obliged to contest with
Baltimore the possession of the eastern half of the state, she saw
the productions of the western counties descending the Ohio and
Mississippi to New Orleans. Even the trade in manufactured goods
which she had formerly sent to the western rivers was now menaced
from two quarters: the development of steam navigation on the
Mississippi enabled New Orleans to compete for this trade; and the
construction of the Erie Canal, with the projected system of
tributary canals in Ohio, made it plain to Pennsylvania that New
York was about to wrest from her the markets of the west. It had
taken thirty days and cost five dollars a hundred pounds to
transport goods from Philadelphia to Columbus, Ohio; the same
articles could be brought in twenty days from New York, by the Erie
Canal, at a cost of two dollars and a half a hundred. [Footnote:
McMaster, United States, V., 136.] To Pennsylvania the control of
the western market, always an important interest, had led in 1800 to
the construction of a system of turnpikes to connect Philadelphia
with Pittsburgh over the mountains, which developed a great wagon
trade. But the days of this wagon trade were now numbered, for the
National Road, joining the Ohio and the Potomac and passing south of
Pittsburgh, diverted a large share of this overland trade to
Baltimore. The superior safety, rapidity, and cheapness of canal
communication showed Pennsylvania that she must adjust her
transportation to the new conditions.
The way was prepared by the experience of corporations attempting to
reach the coal-fields of northeastern Pennsylvania. In 1820
practically the whole output from the anthracite fields came from
the Lehigh Valley and amounted to three hundred and sixty-five tons-
-an equivalent of one for each day of the year. By the end of the
decade the output of the anthracite fields was about one hundred and
seventy-five thousand tons, and the retail price was reduced to six
dollars and a half a ton. Navigation had been secured by the coal
companies between the mines and Philadelphia by the Schuylkill; the
Union Canal connected the Schuylkill and Susquehanna, and New York
City was supplied by the Delaware Canal. [Footnote: McCulloch,
Commercial Dictionary (ed. of 1852), I., 366; U.S. Census of 1880,
IV.; Worthington, Finances of Pa.]
This activity in Pennsylvania in the improvement of navigation so
far had been the work of corporations; but now, with the growth of
population in the west and the completion of the Erie Canal, a
popular demand arose for state construction of inland waterways. In
1825 the legislature passed an act under which an extensive system
of canals was begun, to connect Philadelphia with Pittsburgh, the
Allegheny River with Lake Erie, and Philadelphia with the central
counties of New York at the head of the Susquehanna. [Footnote: See
chap. xvii., below.] Obstacles speedily developed in the jealousies
of the various sections of the state. The farmers of the Great
Valley, whose interests lay in the development of a communication
with Baltimore, were not enthusiastic; the southern counties of the
state, along the line of the turnpikes, found their interests
threatened; and the citizens of the northwestern counties were
unwilling to postpone their demands for an outlet while the trunk-
line was building. These jealousies furnish issues for the politics
of the state during the rest of the decade. [Footnote: McCarthy,
'Antimasonic Party,' in Am. Hist. Assoc., Report 1902, I., 427.]
Nevertheless, Pennsylvania was growing rich through the development
of her agriculture and her manufactures. The iron industry of the
state was the largest in the Union. Although the industry was only
in its infancy, Pittsburgh was already producing or receiving a
large part of the pig-iron that was produced in Pennsylvania. The
figures of the census of 1820 give to the middle states over forty
per cent, of the product of pig-iron and castings and wrought iron
in the United States, the value of the latter article for
Pennsylvania being one million one hundred and fifty-six thousand
dollars as against four hundred and seventy-two thousand dollars for
New York. [Footnote: Secretary of Treasury, 'Report,' 1854-1855, p.
90.] The influence of this industry upon Pennsylvania politics
became apparent in the discussions over the protective tariff during
the decade.
Together, New York and Pennsylvania constituted a region dominated
by interest in the production of grain and the manufacture of iron.
Vast as was the commerce that entered the port of New York, the
capital and shipping for the port were furnished in part by New
England, and the real interest of the section was bound up with the
developing resources of the interior of the nation.
It must not be forgotten that, in these years of entrance upon its
industrial career, the middle region was also the scene of
intellectual movements of importance. These were the days when the
Knickerbocker school in New York brought independence and reputation
to American literature, when Irving, although abroad, worked the
rich mine of Hudson River traditions, and Cooper utilized his early
experience in the frontier around Lake Otsego to write his
"Leatherstocking Tales." Movements for social amelioration abounded.
The lighting of New York City and Philadelphia by gas diminished
crime. Reform movements with regard to imprisonment for debt and the
improvement of the condition of prisons, temperance movements,
improvements in the administration of the public schools, and the
increase in the number of high-schools were all indicative of the
fact that this new democracy was not unresponsive to ideals. Among
the New England element of western New York, as has already been
pointed out, there arose some of the most interesting religious and
political movements of the period, such as Mormonism, Spiritualism,
and Antimasonry. The Presbyterians and Baptists found a sympathetic
constituency in the new regions. It is easy to see that the traits
of these western counties of the middle states were such that
idealistic political movements, as antislavery, would find in them
effective support.
Obviously, the political traits of this section would have a
significance proportionate to the power of its population and
resources. On the whole, the middle region was the most democratic
section of the seaboard, but it was managed by the politicians under
a system of political bargaining for the spoils of office. The old
ascendancy which the great families exercised over New York politics
[Footnote: Becker, "Nominations in Colonial New York" (Am. Hist.
Rev., VI., 261).] was on the wane. The rise of the western half of
the state diminished the influence of the successors to the
patroons; but, nevertheless, family power continued to make itself
felt, and a group of new men arose, around whom factions formed and
dissolved in a kaleidoscope of political change.
During the colonial period, executive patronage and land grants had
been used to promote the interests of the men in power, and the
reaction against executive corruption resulted in a provision in New
York's constitution of 1777 whereby the executive was limited by the
Council of Appointment. The state was divided into four districts,
and one senator from each was selected by the House of
Representatives to serve in this council. [Footnote: Fish, Civil
Service, 87.] By 1821 the council appointed 8287 military officers
and 6663 civil officers. Nearly all the state officers, all the
mayors, militia officers, and justices of the peace fell under its
control.[Footnote: Hammond, Political Parties in N.Y., II., 65.]
This concentration of the appointive power in the hands of the
dominant faction brought the system of rotation in office, and the
doctrine that to the victors belong the spoils of war, to a climax.
It led to the building up of political machines by the use of
offices, from the lowest to the highest, as the currency for
political trading. The governor was checked, but the leaders of the
party in power held despotic control over the offices of the state.
This bargaining was facilitated by the extension of the system of
nominating conventions. From the local units of town and county
upwards, the custom of sending delegates to conventions had early
developed in the state. It had become a settled practice for the
representatives of one local unit to agree with those of another
regarding the order in which their favorite sons should receive
office. Town bargained with town, county with county, district with
district. In place of the system of control by the established
classes, New York's democracy was learning to elaborate the
machinery of nomination by the people; but in the process there was
developed a race of managing politicians, and the campaigns tended
to become struggles between personal elements for power rather than
contests on political issues.
The finished product of New York politics is shown in Van Buren, the
devotee of "regularity" in party and the adroit manager of its
machinery. Shrewdness, tact, and self-reliant judgment, urbane good-
humor, mingled with a suspicious and half-cynical expression, were
written on his face. "Little Van" was an affable, firm, and crafty
politician. Although he was not a creative statesman, neither was he
a mere schemer. He had definite ideas, if not convictions, of the
proper lines of policy, and was able to state them with incisive and
forcible argument when occasion demanded. To him, perhaps, more than
to any other of the politicians, fell the task of organizing the
campaign of Crawford, and afterwards of making the political
combinations that brought in the reign of Andrew Jackson. He was the
leader of that element of New York politics known as the Bucktails,
from the emblem worn by the Tammany Society. Clinton, his opponent,
exercised an influence somewhat akin to the Livingstons, the
Schuylers, the Van Rensselaers, and the other great family leaders
in the baronial days of New York politics. Brusque, arrogant, and
ambitious, he combined the petty enmities of a domineering
politician with flashes of statesman-like insight, and he crushed
his way to success by an exterminating warfare against his enemies.
Around him gathered a personal following embracing one wing of the
Republicans, aided by a large fraction of the old Federal party. For
the most part, his strength lay along the line of the Erie Canal and
in the regions where the New England element was strong.
About these New York rivals were grouped many lesser lights, for the
political organization tended to create a multitude of able
political leaders, many of them capable of holding high position,
but few of them swayed by compelling ideas or policies.
In Pennsylvania, where the spoils system and the nominating
convention developed contemporaneously with the movement in New
York, there were even fewer men of the highest political rank.
Gallatin's effective career belongs to an earlier period, and he had
no successor, as a national figure, among the Pennsylvania party
chieftains.
CHAPTER IV
THE SOUTH (1820-1830)
In the decade which forms the subject of this volume, no section
underwent more far-reaching changes than did the group of South
Atlantic states made up of Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, and
Georgia, with which this chapter will deal under the name of the
south. Then it was that the south came to appreciate the effect of
the westward spread of the cotton-plant upon slavery and politics.
The invention of the cotton-gin by Eli Whitney, [Footnote: Am. Hist.
Review, III., 99.] in 1793, made possible the profitable cultivation
of the short-staple variety of cotton. Before this, the labor of
taking the seeds by hand from this variety, the only one suited to
production in the uplands, had prevented its use; thereafter, it was
only a question of time when the cotton area, no longer limited to
the tidewater region, would extend to the interior, carrying slavery
with it. This invention came at an opportune time. Already the
inventions of Arkwright, Hargreaves, and Cartwright had worked a
revolution in the textile industries of England, by means of the
spinning-jenny, the power-loom, and the factory system, furnishing
machinery for the manufacture of cotton beyond the world's
supply.[Footnote: M. B. Hammond, Cotton Industry, chaps, i., ii.;
Von Halle, "Baumwollproduktion," in Schmoller, Staats und Social-
wissenschaftliche Forschungen, XV.] Under the stimulus of this
demand for cotton, year by year the area of slavery extended towards
the west. In the twenties, some of the southern counties of Virginia
were attempting its cultivation; [Footnote: Va. Const. Conv.,
Debates (1829-1830), 333, 336; Martin, Gazetteer of Va. and D. C.
(1836), 99.] interior counties of North Carolina were combining
cotton-raising with their old industries; in South Carolina the area
of cotton and slavery had extended up the rivers well beyond the
middle of the state; [Footnote: Schaper, "Sectionalism and
Representation in S. C.," in Am. Hist. Assoc. Report, 1900, I., 387-
393.] while in Georgia the cotton planters, so long restrained by
the Indian line, broke through the barriers and spread over the
newly ceded lands. [Footnote: Phillips, "Georgia and State Rights,"
in Ibid., 1901, II. 140 (map).] The accompanying table shows the
progress of this crop: It is evident from the figures that tidewater
South Carolina and Georgia produced practically all of the cotton
crop in 1791, when the total was but two million pounds. By 1821 the
old south produced one hundred and seventeen million pounds, and,
five years later, one hundred and eighty millions. But how rapidly
in these five years the recently settled southwest was overtaking
the older section cotton crop (in million pounds)[Footnote: Based on
MacGregor, Commercial Statistics, 462; cf. De Bow's Review, XVII.,
428; Von Halle, Baumwollproduktion, 169; Secretary of Treasury,
Report, 1855-1856, p. 116. There are discrepancies; the figures are
to be taken as illustrative rather than exact; e.g., De Bow gives
seventy million pounds for Mississippi in 1826.] [Table omitted] is
shown by its total of over one hundred and fifty millions. By 1834
the southwest had distanced the older section. What had occurred was
a repeated westward movement: the cotton-plant first spread from the
sea-coast to the uplands, and then, by the beginning of our period,
advanced to the Gulf plains, until that region achieved supremacy in
its production.
How deeply the section was interested in this crop, and how
influential it was in the commerce of the United States, appears
from the fact that, in 1820, the domestic exports of South Carolina
and Georgia amounted to $15,215,000, while the value of the whole
domestic exports for all the rest of the United States was
$36,468,000. [Footnote: Pitkin, Statistical View (ed. of 1835), p.
57.] This, however, inadequately represents the value of the exports
from these two cotton states, because a large fraction of the cotton
was carried by the coastwise trade to northern ports and appeared in
their shipments. Senator William Smith, of South Carolina, estimated
that in 1818 the real exports of South Carolina and Georgia amounted
to "more than half as much as that of the other states of the Union,
including the vast and fertile valley of the Mississippi." The
average annual amount of the exports of cotton, tobacco, and rice
from the United States between 1821 and 1830 was about thirty-three
million dollars, while all other domestic exports made a sum of but
twenty million dollars. [Footnote: Ibid., 518.] Even greater than
New England's interest in the carrying-trade was the interest of the
south in the exchange of her great staples in the markets of Europe.
Never in history, perhaps, was an economic force more influential
upon the life of a people. As the production of cotton increased,
the price fell, and the seaboard south, feeling the competition of
the virgin soils of the southwest, saw in the protective tariff for
the development of northern manufactures the real source of her
distress. The price of cotton was in these years a barometer of
southern prosperity and of southern discontent. [Footnote: See chap,
xix., below; M. B. Hammond, Cotton Industry, part i., App. i.;
Donnell, Hist. of Cotton; Watkins, Production and Prices of Cotton.]
Even more important than the effect of cotton production upon the
prosperity of the south was its effect upon her social system. This
economic transformation resuscitated slavery from a moribund
condition to a vigorous and aggressive life. Slowly Virginia and
North Carolina came to realize that the burden and expense of
slavery as the labor system for their outworn tobacco and corn
fields was partly counteracted by the demand for their surplus
Negroes in the cotton-fields of their more southern neighbors. When
the lower south accepted the system as the basis of its prosperity
and its society, the tendency in the states of the upper south,
except in the pine barrens and the hill country, to look upon the
institution as a heritage to be reluctantly and apologetically
accepted grew fainter. The efforts to find some mode of removing the
Negro from their midst gradually came to an end, and they adjusted
themselves to slavery as a permanent system. Meanwhile, South
Carolina and Georgia found in the institution the source of their
economic well-being and hotly challenged the right of other sections
to speak ill of it or meddle with it in any way, lest their domestic
security be endangered. [Footnote: See Hart, Slavery and Abolition
(Am. Nation, XVI.)] When the south became fully conscious that
slavery set the section apart from the rest of the nation, when it
saw in nationalizing legislation, such as protection to manufactures
and the construction of a system of internal improvements, the
efforts of other sections to deprive the cotton states of their
profits for the benefit of an industrial development in which they
did not share, deep discontent prevailed. With but slight
intermission from the days of Washington to those of Monroe, the
tobacco planters under the Virginia dynasty had ruled the nation.
But now, when the center of power within the section passed from the
weakening hands of Virginia to those of South Carolina, the
aggressive leader of the Cotton Kingdom, the south found itself a
minority section in the Union. When it realized this, it denied the
right of the majority to rule, and proceeded to elaborate a system
of minority rights as a protection against the forces of national
development, believing that these forces threatened the foundations
of the prosperity and even the social safety of the south.
From the middle of the eighteenth century the seaboard planters had
been learning the lesson of control by a fraction of the population.
The south was by no means a unified region in its physiography. The
Blue Ridge cut off the low country of Virginia from the Shenandoah
Valley, and beyond this valley the Alleghenies separated the rest of
the state from those counties which we now know as West Virginia. By
the time of the Revolution, in the Carolinas and Georgia, a belt of
pine barrens, skirting the "fall line" from fifty to one hundred
miles from the coast, divided the region of tidewater planters of
these states from the small farmers of the up-country. This
population of the interior had entered the region in the course of
the second half of the eighteenth century. Scotch-Irishmen and
Germans passed down the Great Valley from Pennsylvania into
Virginia, and through the gaps in the Blue Ridge out to the Piedmont
region of the Carolinas, while contemporaneously other streams from
Charleston advanced to meet them. [Footnote: Bassett, in Am. Hist.
Assoc., Report 1894, p. 141; Schaper, ibid., 1900, I., 317;
Phillips, ibid., 1901, II., 88.] Thus, at the close of the
eighteenth century, the south was divided into two areas presenting
contrasted types of civilization. On the one side were the planters,
raising their staple crops of tobacco, rice, and indigo, together
with some cultivation of the cereals. To this region belonged the
slaves. On the other side was this area of small farmers, raising
livestock, wheat, and corn under the same conditions of pioneer
farming as characterized the interior of Pennsylvania.
From the second half of the eighteenth century down to the time with
which this volume deals, there was a persistent struggle between the
planters of the coast, who controlled the wealth of the region, and
the free farmers of the interior of Maryland, Virginia, the
Carolinas, and Georgia. The tidewater counties retained the
political power which they already possessed before this tide of
settlement flowed into the back-country. Refusing in most of these
states to reapportion on the basis of numbers, they protected their
slaves and their wealth against the dangers of a democracy
interested in internal improvements and capable of imposing a tax
upon slave property in order to promote their ends. In Virginia, in
1825, for example, the western men complained that twenty counties
in the upper country, with over two hundred and twenty thousand free
white inhabitants, had no more weight in the government than twenty
counties on tidewater, containing only about fifty thousand; that
the six smallest counties in the state, compared with the six
largest, enjoyed nearly ten times as much political power.
[Footnote: Alexandria Herald, June 13, 1825.] To the gentlemen
planters of the seaboard, the idea of falling under the control of
the farmers of the interior of the south seemed intolerable.
It was only as slavery spread into the uplands, with the cultivation
of cotton, that the lowlands began to concede and to permit an
increased power in the legislatures to the sections most nearly
assimilated to the seaboard type. South Carolina achieved this end
in 1808 by the plan of giving to the seaboard the control of one
house, while the interior held the other; but it is to be noted that
this concession was not made until slavery had pushed so far up the
river-courses that the reapportionment preserved the control in the
hands of slave-holding counties. [Footnote: Calhoun, Works, I., 401;
Schaper, Sectionalism and Representation in S. C., in Am. Hist.
Assoc., Report 1900, I., 434-437.] A similar course was followed by
Virginia in the convention of 1829-1830, when, after a long
struggle, a compromise was adopted, by which the balance of power in
the state legislature was transferred to the counties of the
Piedmont and the Valley. [Footnote: Va. Const. Conv., Debates (1829-
1830); Chandler, Representation in Va., in Johns Hopkins Univ.
Studies, XIV., 286-298.] Here slave-holding had progressed so far
that the interest of those counties was affiliated rather with the
coast than with the trans-Allegheny country. West Virginia remained
a discontented area until her independent statehood in the days of
the Civil War. These transmontane counties of Virginia were, in
their political activity during our period, rather to be reckoned
with the west than with the south. Thus the southern seaboard
experienced the need of protecting the interests of its slave-
holding planters against the free democracy of the interior of the
south itself, and learned how to safeguard the minority. This
experience was now to serve the south, when, having attained unity
by the spread of slavery into the interior, it found itself as a
section in the same relation to the Union which the slave-holding
tidewater area had held towards the more populous up-country of the
south.
The unification of the section is one of the most important features
of the period. Not only had the south been divided into opposing
areas, as we have seen, but even its population was far from
homogeneous. By the period of this volume, however, English, French-
Huguenots, Scotch-Irish, and Germans had become assimilated into one
people, and the Negroes, who in 1830 in the South Atlantic states
numbered over a million and a half in a white population of not much
over two millions, were diffusing themselves throughout the area of
the section except in West Virginia and the mountains.
Contemporaneously the pioneer farming type of the interior of the
section was replaced by the planter type. [Footnote: Niles'
Register, XXI., 132; cf. p. 55 below.] As cotton-planting and slave-
holding advanced into the interior counties of the old southern
states, the free farmers were obliged either to change to the
plantation economy and buy slaves, or to sell their lands and
migrate. Large numbers of them, particularly in the Carolinas, were
Quakers or Baptists, whose religious scruples combined with their
agricultural habits to make this change obnoxious. This upland
country, too distant from the sea-shore to permit a satisfactory
market, was a hive from which pioneers earlier passed into Kentucky
and Tennessee, until those states had become populous commonwealths.
Now the exodus was increased by this later colonization.[Footnote:
See chap. v. below.] The Ohio was crossed, the Mississippi-Missouri
ascended, and the streams that flowed to the Gulf were followed by
movers away from the regions that were undergoing this social and
economic reconstruction. This industrial revolution was effective in
different degrees in the different states. Comparatively few of
Virginia's slaves, which by 1830 numbered nearly half a million,
were found in her trans-Allegheny counties, but the Shenandoah
Valley was receiving slaves and changing to the plantation type. In
North Carolina the slave population of nearly two hundred and fifty
thousand, at the same date, had spread well into the interior, but
cotton did not achieve the position there which it held farther
south. The interior farmers worked small farms of wheat and corn,
laboring side by side with their Negro slaves in the fields.
[Footnote: Bassett, Slavery in N. C., in Johns Hopkins Univ.
Studies, XVII., 324, 399.] South Carolina had over three hundred
thousand slaves-more than a majority of her population--and the
black belt extended to the interior. Georgia's slaves, amounting to
over two hundred thousand, somewhat less than half her population,
steadily advanced from the coast and the Savannah River towards the
cotton-lands of the interior, pushing before them the less
prosperous farmers, who found new homes to the north or south of the
cotton-belt or migrated to the southwestern frontier.[Footnote:
Phillips, Georgia and State Rights, in Am. Hist. Assoc., Report
1901, II., 106.] Here, as in North Carolina, the planters in the
interior of the state frequently followed the plough or encouraged
their slaves by wielding the hoe. [Footnote: Phillips, Georgia and
State Rights, in Am. Hist. Assoc., Report 1901, II., 107.] Thus this
process of economic transformation passed from the coast towards the
mountain barrier, gradually eliminating the inharmonious elements
and steadily tending to produce a solidarity of interests. The south
as a whole was becoming, for the first time since colonial days, a
staple-producing region; and, as diversified farming declined, the
region tended to become dependent for its supplies of meat products,
horses, and mules, and even hay and cereals, upon the north and
west.
The westward migration of its people checked the growth of the
south. It had colonized the new west at the same time that the
middle region had been rapidly growing in population, and the result
was that the proud states of the southern seaboard were reduced to
numerical inferiority. Like New England, it was an almost stationary
section. Prom 1820 to 1830 the states of this group gained little
more than half a million souls, hardly more than the increase of the
single state of New York. Virginia, with a population of over a
million, increased but 13.7 per cent., and the Carolinas only 15.5
per cent. In the next decade these tendencies were even more clearly
shown, for Virginia and the Carolinas then gained but little more
than 2 per cent.
Georgia alone showed rapid increase. At the beginning of the decade
the Indians still held all of the territory west of Macon, at the
center of the state, with the exception of two tiers of counties
along the southern border; and, when these lands were opened towards
the close of the decade, they were occupied by a rush of settlement
similar to the occupation of Oklahoma and Indian Territory in our
own day. What Maine was to New England, that Georgia was to the
southern seaboard, with the difference that it was deeply touched by
influences characteristically western. Because of the traits of her
leaders, and the rude, aggressive policy of her people, Georgia
belonged at least as much to the west as to the south. From colonial
times the Georgia settlers had been engaged in an almost incessant
struggle against the savages on her border, and had the instincts of
a frontier society. [Footnote: Ibid., II., 88; Longstreet, Georgia
Scenes; Gilmer, Sketches; Miss. Hist. Soc., Publications, VIII.,
443.]
From 1800 to 1830, throughout the tidewater region, there were clear
evidences of decline. As the movement of capital and population
towards the interior went on, wealth was drained from the coast;
and, as time passed, the competition of the fertile and low-priced
lands of the Gulf basin proved too strong for the outworn lands even
of the interior of the south. Under the wasteful system of tobacco
and cotton culture, without replenishment of the soil, the staple
areas would, in any case, have declined in value. Even the corn and
wheat lands were exhausted by unscientific farming. [Footnote:
Gooch, Prize Essay on Agriculture in Va., in Lynchburg Virginian,
July 4, 1833; Martin, Gazetteer of Va., 99, 100.] Writing in 1814 to
Josiah Quincy, [Footnote: E Quincy, Josiah Quincy, 353.] John
Randolph of Roanoke lamented the decline of the seaboard planters.
He declared that the region was now sunk in obscurity: what
enterprise or capital there was in the country had retired westward;
deer and wild turkeys were not so plentiful anywhere in Kentucky as
near the site of the ancient Virginia capital, Williamsburg. In the
Virginia convention of 1829, Mr. Mercer estimated that in 1817 land
values in Virginia aggregated two hundred and six million dollars,
and Negroes averaged three hundred dollars, while in 1829 the land
values did not surpass ninety millions, and slaves had fallen in
value to one hundred and fifty dollars. [Footnote: Va. Const. Conv.,
Debates (1829-1830), 178; Collins, Domestic Slave Trade, 26.]
In a speech in the Virginia House of Delegates, in 1832, Thomas
Marshall [Footnote: Collins, Domestic Slave Trade, 24, cited from
Richmond Enquirer, February, 2, 1832.] asserted that the whole
agricultural product of Virginia did not exceed in value the exports
of eighty or ninety years before, when it contained not one-sixth of
the population. In his judgment, the greater proportion of the
larger plantations, with from fifty to one hundred slaves, brought
the proprietors into debt, and rarely did a plantation yield one and
a half per cent. profit on the capital. So great had become the
depression that Randolph prophesied that the time was coming when
the masters would run away from the slaves and be advertised by them
in the public papers. [Footnote: Collins, Domestic Slave Trade, 26.]
It was in this period that Thomas Jefferson fell into such financial
embarrassments that he was obliged to request of the legislature of
Virginia permission to dispose of property by lottery to pay his
debts, and that a subscription was taken up to relieve his distress.
[Footnote: Randall, Jefferson, III., 527, 561.] At the same time,
Madison, having vainly tried to get a loan from the United States
Bank, was forced to dispose of some of his lands and stocks;
[Footnote: Hunt, Madison, 380.] and Monroe, at the close of his term
of office, found himself financially ruined. He gave up Oak Hill and
spent his declining years with his son-in-law in New York City. The
old-time tide-water mansions, where, in an earlier day, everybody
kept open house, gradually fell into decay.
Sad indeed was the spectacle of Virginia's ancient aristocracy. It
had never been a luxurious society. The very wealthy planters, with
vast cultivated estates and pretentious homes, were in the minority.
For the most part, the houses were moderate frame structures, set at
intervals of a mile or so apart, often in park like grounds, with
long avenues of trees. The plantation was a little world in itself.
Here was made much of the clothing for the slaves, and the mistress
of the plantation supervised the spinning and weaving. Leather was
tanned on the place, and blacksmithing, wood-working, and other
industries were carried on, often under the direction of white
mechanics. The planter and his wife commonly had the care of the
black families whom they possessed, looked after them when they were
sick, saw to their daily rations, arranged marriages, and determined
the daily tasks of the plantation. The abundant hospitality between
neighbors gave opportunity for social cultivation, and politics was
a favorite subject of conversation.
The leading planters served as justices of the peace, but they were
not dependent for their selection upon the popular vote. Appointed
by the governor on nomination of the court itself, they constituted
a kind of close corporation, exercising local judicial, legislative,
and executive functions. The sheriff was appointed by the governor
from three justices of the peace recommended by the court, and the
court itself appointed the county clerk. Thus the county government
of Virginia was distinctly aristocratic. County-court day served as
an opportunity for bringing together the freeholders, who included
not only the larger planters, but the small farmers and the poor
whites--hangers-on of the greater plantations. Almost no large
cities were found in Virginia. The court-house was hardly more than
a meeting-place for the rural population. Here farmers exchanged
their goods, traded horses, often fought, and listened to the stump
speeches of the orators. [Footnote: Johnson, Robert Lewis Dabney,
14-24; Smedes, A Southern Planter, 34-37.]
Such were, in the main, the characteristics of that homespun
plantation aristocracy which, through the Virginia dynasty, had
ruled the nation in the days of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and
Monroe. As their lands declined in value, they naturally sought for
an explanation and a remedy. [Footnote: Randall, Jefferson, III.,
532.] The explanation was found most commonly in the charge that the
protective tariff was destroying the prosperity of the south; and in
reaction they turned to demand the old days of Jeffersonian rural
simplicity, under the guardianship of state rights and a strict
construction of the Constitution. Madison in vain laid the fall in
land values in Virginia to the uncertainty and low prices of the
crops, to the quantity of land thrown on the market, and the
attractions of the cheaper and better lands beyond the mountains.
[Footnote: Madison, Writings (ed. of 1865), III., 614.]
Others called attention to the fact that the semi-annual migration
towards the west and southwest, which swept off enterprising
portions of the people and much of the capital and movable property
of the state, also kept down the price of land by the great
quantities thereby thrown into the market. Instead of applying a
system of scientific farming and replenishment of the soil, there
was a tendency for the planters who remained to get into debt in
order to add to their possessions the farms which were offered for
sale by the movers. Thus there was a flow of wealth towards the west
to pay for these new purchases. The overgrown plantations soon began
to look tattered and almost desolate. "Galled and gullied hill-sides
and sedgy, briary fields" [Footnote: Lynchburg Virginian, July 4,
1833.] showed themselves in every direction. Finally the planter
found himself obliged to part with some of his slaves, in response
to the demand from the new cotton-fields; or to migrate himself,
with his caravan of Negroes, to open a new home in the Gulf region.
During the period of this survey the price for prime field-hands in
Georgia averaged a little over seven hundred dollars. [Footnote:
Phillips, in Pol. Sci. Quart., XX., 267.] If the estimate of one
hundred and fifty dollars for Negroes sold in family lots in
Virginia is correct, it is clear that economic laws would bring
about a condition where Virginia's resources would in part depend
upon her supply of slaves to the cotton-belt. [Footnote: Collins,
Domestic Slave Trade, 42-46.] It is clear, also, that the Old
Dominion had passed the apogee of her political power.
It was not only the planters of Virginia that suffered in this
period of change. As the more extensive and fertile cotton-fields of
the new states of the southwest opened, North Carolina and even
South Carolina found themselves embarrassed. With the fall in cotton
prices, already mentioned, it became increasingly necessary to
possess the advantages of large estates and unexhausted soils, in
order to extract a profit from this cultivation. From South Carolina
there came a protest more vehement and aggressive than that of the
discontented classes of Virginia. Already the indigo plantation had
ceased to be profitable and the rice planters no longer held their
old prosperity.
Charleston was peculiarly suited to lead in a movement of revolt. It
was the one important center of real city life of the seaboard south
of Baltimore. Here every February the planters gathered from their
plantations, thirty to one hundred and fifty miles away, for a month
in their town houses. At this season, races, social gayeties, and
political conferences vied with one another in engaging the
attention of the planters. Returning to their plantations in the
early spring, they remained until June, when considerations of
health compelled them either again to return to the city, to visit
the mountains, or to go to such watering-places as Saratoga in New
York. Here again they talked politics and mingled with political
leaders of the north. It was not until the fall that they were able
to return again to their estates. [Footnote: Hodgson, Letters from
North America, I.,50.] Thus South Carolina, affording a combination
of plantation life with the social intercourse of the city, gave
peculiar opportunities for exchanging ideas and consolidating the
sentiment of her leaders.
The condition of South Carolina was doubtless exaggerated by Hayne,
in his speech in the Senate in 1832, when he characterized it as
"not merely one of unexampled depression, but of great and all-
pervading distress," with "the mournful evidence of premature
decay," "merchants bankrupt or driven away--their capital sunk or
transferred to other pursuits--our shipyards broken up--our ships
all sold!" "If," said he, "we fly from the city to the country, what
do we there behold? Fields abandoned; the hospitable mansions of our
fathers deserted; agriculture drooping; our slaves, like their
masters, working harder, and faring worse; the planter striving with
unavailing efforts to avert the ruin which is before him." He drew a
sad picture of the once thriving planter, reduced to despair,
gathering up the small remnants of his broken fortune, and, with his
wife and little ones, tearing himself from the scenes of his
childhood and the bones of his ancestors to seek in the wilderness
the reward for his industry of which the policy of Congress had
deprived him. [Footnote: Register of Debates, VIII., pt. i., 80; cf.
Houston, Nullification in S.C., 46; McDuffie, in Register of
Debates, 18th Cong., 2 Sess., 253.]
The genius of the south expressed itself most clearly in the field
of politics. If the democratic middle region could show a multitude
of clever politicians, the aristocratic south possessed an abundance
of leaders bold in political initiative and masterful in their
ability to use the talents of their northern allies. When the
Missouri question was debated, John Quincy Adams remarked "that if
institutions are to be judged by their results in the composition of
the councils of this Union, the slave-holders are much more ably
represented than the simple freemen." [Footnote: Adams, Memoirs,
IV., 506.]
The southern statesmen fall into two classes. On the one side was
the Virginia group, now for the most part old men, rich in the
honors of the nation, still influential, but, except for Monroe, no
longer directing party policy. Jefferson and Madison were in
retirement in their old age; Marshall, as chief-justice, was
continuing his career as the expounder of the Constitution in
accordance with Federalist ideals; John Randolph, his old
eccentricities increased by disease and intemperance, remained to
proclaim the extreme doctrines of southern dissent and to impale his
adversaries with javelins of flashing wit. A maker of phrases which
stung and festered, he was still capable of influencing public
opinion somewhat in the same way as are the cartoonists of modern
times. But "his course through life had been like that of the arrow
which Alcestes shot to heaven, which effected nothing useful, though
it left a long stream of light behind it." [Footnote: Lynchburg
Virginian, May 9, 1833.] In North Carolina, the venerable Macon
remained to protest like a later Cato against the tendencies of the
times and to raise a warning voice to his fellow slave-holders
against national consolidation.
In the course of this decade, the effective leadership of the south
fell to Calhoun and Crawford. [Footnote: See chap. xi. below.] About
these statesmen were grouped energetic and able men like Hayne,
McDuffie, and Hamilton of South Carolina, and Cobb and Forsyth of
Georgia--men who sometimes pushed their leaders on in a sectional
path which the latter's caution or personal ambitions made them
reluctant to tread. Nor must it be forgotten that early in the
decade the south lost two of her greatest statesmen, the wise and
moderate Lowndes, of South Carolina, and Pinkney, the brilliant
Maryland orator. In the course of the ten years which we are to
sketch, the influence of economic change within this section
transformed the South Carolinians from warm supporters of a liberal
national policy into the straightest of the sect of state-
sovereignty advocates, intent upon raising barriers against the
flood of nationalism that threatened to overwhelm the south. In
relating the changing policy of the southern political leaders, we
shall again observe the progress and the effects of the economic
transformations which it has been the purpose of this chapter to
portray.
CHAPTER V
COLONIZATION OF THE WEST (1820-1830)
The rise of the new west was the most significant fact in American
history in the years immediately following the War of 1812. Ever
since the beginnings of colonization on the Atlantic coast a
frontier of settlement had advanced, cutting into the forest,
pushing back the Indian, and steadily widening the area of
civilization in its rear. [Footnote: Three articles by F.J. Turner,
viz.: "Significance of the Frontier in American History," in Am.
Hist. Assoc., Report 1893, 199-227; "Problem of the West," in
"Atlantic Monthly, LXXVIII, 289; "Contributions of the West to
American Democracy, ibid, XCI., 83.] There had been a west even in
early colonial days; but then it lay close to the coast. By the
middle of the eighteenth century the west was to be found beyond
tide-water, advancing towards the Allegheny Mountains. When this
barrier was crossed and the lands on the other side of the mountains
were won, in the days of the Revolution, a new and greater west,
more influential on the nation's destiny, was created. [Footnote:
Howard, Preliminaries of Revolution, chap. xiii.; Van Tyne, Am.
Revolution, chap. xv.; McLaughlin, Confederation and Constitution,
chap. viii. (Am. Nation, VIII., IX., X.).]
The men of the "Western Waters" or the "Western World," as they
loved to call themselves, developed under conditions of separation
from the older settlements and from Europe. The lands, practically
free, in this vast area not only attracted the settler, but
furnished opportunity for all men to hew out their own careers. The
wilderness ever opened a gate of escape to the poor, the
discontented, and the oppressed. If social conditions tended to
crystallize in the east, beyond the Alleghenies there was freedom.
Grappling with new problems, under these conditions, the society
that spread into this region developed inventiveness and
resourcefulness; the restraints of custom were broken, and new
activities, new lines of growth, new institutions were produced. Mr.
Bryce has well declared that "the West is the most American part of
America.... What Europe is to Asia, what England is to the rest of
Europe, what America is to England, that the Western States and
Territories are to the Atlantic States." [Footnote: Bryce, American
Commonwealth (ed. of 1895), II., 830.] The American spirit--the
traits that have come to be recognized as the most characteristic--
was developed in the new commonwealths that sprang into life beyond
the seaboard. In these new western lands Americans achieved a
boldness of conception of the country's destiny and democracy. The
ideal of the west was its emphasis upon the worth and possibilities
of the common man, its belief in the right of every man to rise to
the full measure of his own nature, under conditions of social
mobility. Western democracy was no theorist's dream. It came, stark
and strong and full of life, from the American forest. [Footnote: P.
J. Turner, "Contributions of the West to American Democracy," in
Atlantic Monthly, XCL, 83, and "The Middle West," in International
Monthly, IV., 794.]
The time had now come when this section was to make itself felt as a
dominant force in American life. Already it had shown its influence
upon the older sections. By its competition, by its attractions for
settlers, it reacted on the east and gave added impulse to the
democratic movement in New England and New York. The struggle of
Baltimore, New York City, and Philadelphia for the rising commerce
of the interior was a potent factor in the development of the middle
region. In the south the spread of the cotton-plant and the new form
which slavery took were phases of the westward movement of the
plantation. The discontent of the old south is partly explained by
the migration of her citizens to the west and by the competition of
her colonists in the lands beyond the Alleghenies. The future of the
south lay in its affiliation to the Cotton Kingdom of the lower
states which were rising on the plains of the Gulf of Mexico.
Rightly to understand the power which the new west was to exert upon
the economic and political life of the nation in the years between
1820 and 1830, it is necessary to consider somewhat fully the
statistics of growth in western population and industry.
The western states ranked with the middle region and the south in
respect to population. Between 1812 and 1821 six new western
commonwealths were added to the Union: Louisiana (1812), Indiana
(1816), Mississippi (1817), Illinois (1818), Alabama (1819), and
Missouri (1821). In the decade from 1820 to 1830, these states, with
their older sisters, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio, increased their
population from 2,217,000 to nearly 3,700,000, a gain of about a
million and a half in the decade. The percentages of increase in
these new communities tell a striking story. Even the older states
of the group grew steadily. Kentucky, with 22 per cent., Louisiana,
with 41, and Tennessee and Ohio, each with 61, were increasing much
faster than New England and the south, outside of Maine and Georgia.
But for the newer communities the percentages of gain are still more
significant: Mississippi, 81 per cent.; Alabama, 142; Indiana, 133;
and Illinois, 185. The population of Ohio, which hardly more than a
generation before was "fresh, untouched, unbounded, magnificent
wilderness," [Footnote: Webster, Writings (National ed.), V., 252.]
was now nearly a million, surpassing the combined population of
Massachusetts and Connecticut.
A new section had arisen and was growing at such a rate that a
description of it in any single year would be falsified before it
could be published. Nor is the whole strength of the western element
revealed by these figures. In order to estimate the weight of the
western population in 1830, we must add six hundred thousand souls
in the western half of New York, three hundred thousand in the
interior counties of Pennsylvania, and over two hundred thousand in
the trans-Allegheny counties of Virginia, making an aggregate of
four million six hundred thousand. Fully to reckon the forces of
backwoods democracy, moreover, we should include a large fraction of
the interior population of Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, North
Carolina, and Georgia, and northern New York. All of these regions
were to be influenced by the ideals of democratic rule which were
springing up in the Mississippi Valley.
In voting-power the western states alone--to say nothing of the
interior districts of the older states--were even more important
than the figures for population indicate. The west itself had, under
the apportionment of 1822, forty-seven out of the two hundred and
thirteen members of the House of Representatives, while in the
Senate its representation was eighteen out of forty-eight--more than
that of any other section. Clearly, here was a region to be reckoned
with; its economic interests, its ideals, and its political leaders
were certain to have a powerful, if not a controlling, voice in the
councils of the nation.
At the close of the War of 1812 the west had much homogeneity. Parts
of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio had been settled so many years that
they no longer presented typical western conditions; but in most of
its area the west then was occupied by pioneer farmers and stock-
raisers, eking out their larder and getting peltries by hunting, and
raising only a small surplus for market. By 1830, however,
industrial differentiation between the northern and southern
portions of the Mississippi Valley was clearly marked. The northwest
was changing to a land of farmers and town-builders, anxious for a
market for their grain and cattle; while the southwest was becoming
increasingly a cotton-raising section, swayed by the same impulses
in respect to staple exports as those which governed the southern
seaboard. Economically, the northern portion of the valley tended to
connect itself with the middle states, while the southern portion
came into increasingly intimate connection with the south.
Nevertheless, it would be a radical mistake not to deal with the
west as a separate region, for, with all these differences within
itself, it possessed a fundamental unity in its social structure and
its democratic ideals, and at times, in no uncertain way, it showed
a consciousness of its separate existence.
In occupying the Mississippi Valley the American people colonized a
region far surpassing in area the territory of the old thirteen
states. The movement was, indeed, but the continuation of the
advance of the frontier which had begun in the earliest days of
American colonization. The existence of a great body of land,
offered at so low a price as to be practically free, inevitably drew
population towards the west. When wild lands sold for two dollars an
acre, and, indeed, could be occupied by squatters almost without
molestation, it was certain that settlers would seek them instead of
paying twenty to fifty dollars an acre for farms that lay not much
farther to the east--particularly when the western lands were more
fertile. The introduction of the steamboat on the western waters in
1811, moreover, soon revolutionized transportation conditions in the
West. [Footnote: Flint, Letters, 260; Monette, in Miss. Hist. Soc.,
Publications, VII., 503; Hall, Statistics of the West, 236, 247;
Lloyd, Steamboat Disasters (1853), 32, 40-45; Preble, Steam
Navigation, 64; McMaster, United States, IV., 402; Chittenden, Early
Steamboat Navigation on the Missouri, chap. ix.] At the beginning of
the period of which we are treating, steamers were ascending the
Mississippi and the Missouri, as well as the Ohio and its
tributaries. Between the close of the War of 1812 and 1830,
moreover, the Indian title was extinguished to vast regions in the
west. Half of Michigan was opened to settlement; the northwestern
quarter of Ohio was freed; in Indiana and Illinois (more than half
of which had been Indian country prior to 1816) all but a
comparatively small region of undesired prairie lands south of Lake
Michigan was ceded; almost the whole state of Missouri was freed
from its Indian title; and, in the Gulf region, at the close of the
decade, the Indians held but two isolated islands of territory, one
in western Georgia and eastern Alabama, and the other in northern
and central Mississippi. These ceded regions were the fruit of the
victories of William Henry Harrison in the northwest, and of Andrew
Jackson in the Gulf region. They were, in effect, conquered
provinces, just opened to colonization.
The maps of the United States census, giving the distribution of
population in 1810, 1820, and 1830, [Footnote: See maps of
population; compare U. S. Census of 1900, Statistical Atlas, plates
4, 5, 6.] exhibit clearly the effects of the defeat of the Indians,
and show the areas that were occupied in these years. In 1810
settlement beyond the mountains was almost limited to a zone along
the Ohio River and its tributaries, the Cumberland and the
Tennessee. In the southwest, the vicinity of Mobile showed sparse
settlement, chiefly survivals of the Spanish and English occupation;
and, along the fluvial lands of the eastern bank of the lower
Mississippi, in the Natchez region, as well as in the old province
of Louisiana, there was a considerable area occupied by planters.
By 1820 the effects of the War of 1812 and the rising tide of
westward migration became manifest. Pioneers spread along the river-
courses of the northwest well up to the Indian boundary. The zone of
settlement along the Ohio ascended the Missouri, in the rush to the
Boone's Lick country, towards the center of the present state. From
the settlements of middle Tennessee a pioneer farming area reached
southward to connect with the settlements of Mobile, and the latter
became conterminous with those of the lower Mississippi.
By 1830 large portions of these Indian lands, which were ceded
between 1817 and 1829, received the same type of colonization. The
unoccupied lands in Indiana and Illinois were prairie country, then
deemed unsuited for settlement because of the lack of wood and
drinking-water. It was the hardwoods that had been taken up in the
northwest, and, for the most part, the tracts a little back from the
unhealthful bottom-lands, but in close proximity to the rivers,
which were the only means of transportation before the building of
good roads. A new island of settlement appeared in the northwestern
portion of Illinois and the adjacent regions of Wisconsin and Iowa,
due to the opening of the lead-mines. Along the Missouri Valley and
in the Gulf region the areas possessed in 1820 increased in density
of population. Georgia spread her settlers into the Indian lands,
which she had so recently secured by threatening a rupture with the
United States. [Footnote: MacDonald, Jacksonian Democracy (Am.
Nation, XV.), chap. x. ]
Translated into terms of human activity, these shaded areas,
encroaching on the blank spaces of the map, meant much for the
history of the United States. Even in the northwest, which we shall
first describe, they represent, in the main, the migration of
southern people. New England, after the distress following the War
of 1812 and the hard winter of 1816-1817, had sent many settlers
into western New York and Ohio; the Western Reserve had increased in
population by the immigration, of Connecticut people; Pennsylvania
and New Jersey had sent colonists to southern and central Ohio, with
Cincinnati as the commercial center. In Ohio the settlers of middle-
state origin were decidedly more numerous than those from the south,
and New England's share was distinctly smaller than that of the
south. In the Ohio legislature in 1822 there were thirty-eight
members of middle-state birth, thirty-three of southern (including
Kentucky), and twenty-five of New England. But Kentucky and
Tennessee (now sufficiently settled to need larger and cheaper farms
for the rising generation), together with the up-country of the
south, contributed the mass of the pioneer colonists to most of the
Mississippi Valley prior to 1830. [Footnote: See, for Ohio, Niles'
Register, XXI., 368 (leg. session of 1822), and Nat. Republican,
January 2, 1824; for Illinois in 1833, Western Monthly Magazine, I.,
199; for Missouri convention of 1820, Niles' Register, XVIII., 400;
for Alabama in 1820, ibid., XX., 64. Local histories, travels,
newspapers, and the census of 1850 support the text.] Of course, a
large fraction of these came from the Scotch-Irish and German stock
that in the first half of the eighteenth century passed from
Pennsylvania along the Great Valley to the up-country of the south.
Indiana, so late as 1850, showed but ten thousand natives of New
England, and twice as many persons of southern as of middle states
origin. In the history of Indiana, North Carolina contributed a
large fraction of the population, giving to it its "Hoosier" as well
as much of its Quaker stock. Illinois in this period had but a
sprinkling of New-Englanders, engaged in business in the little
towns. The southern stock, including settlers from Kentucky and
Tennessee, was the preponderant class. The Illinois legislature for
1833 contained fifty-eight from the south (including Kentucky and
Tennessee), nineteen from the middle states, and only four from New
England. Missouri's population was chiefly Kentuckians and
Tennesseeans.
The leaders of this southern element came, in considerable measure,
from well-to-do classes, who migrated to improve their conditions in
the freer opportunities of a new country. Land speculation, the
opportunity of political preferment, and the advantages which these
growing communities brought to practitioners of the law combined to
attract men of this class. Many of them, as we shall see, brought
their slaves with them, under the systems of indenture which made
this possible. Missouri, especially, was sought by planters with
their slaves. But it was the poorer whites, the more democratic,
non-slaveholding element of the south, which furnished the great
bulk of the settlers north of the Ohio. Prior to the close of the
decade the same farmer type was in possession of large parts of the
Gulf region, whither, through the whole of our period, the slave-
holding planters came in increasing numbers.
Two of the families which left Kentucky for the newer country in
these years will illustrate the movement. The Lincoln family
[Footnote: Tarbell, Lincoln, I., chaps, i.-iv.; Herndon, Lincoln,
I., chaps, i.-iv.; Nicolay and Hay, Lincoln, I., chaps, i.-iii.] had
reached that state by migration from the north with the stream of
backwoodsmen which bore along with it the Calhouns and the Boones.
Abraham Lincoln was born in a hilly, barren portion of Kentucky in
1809. In 1816, when Lincoln was a boy of seven, his father, a poor
carpenter, took his family across the Ohio on a raft, with a capital
consisting of his kit of tools and several hundred gallons of
whiskey. In Indiana he hewed a path into the forest to a new home in
the southern part of the state, where for a year the family lived in
a "half-faced camp," or open shed of poles, clearing their land. In
the hardships of the pioneer life Lincoln's mother died, as did many
another frontier woman. In 1830 Lincoln was a tall, strapping youth,
six feet four inches in height, able to sink his axe deeper than
other men into the opposing forest. At that time his father moved to
the Sangamon country of Illinois with the rush of land-seekers into
that new and popular region. Near the home of Lincoln in Kentucky
was born, in 1808, Jefferson Davis [Footnote: Mrs. Davis, Jefferson
Davis, I., 5.], whose father, shortly before the War of 1812, went
with the stream of southward movers to Louisiana and then to
Mississippi. Davis's brothers fought under Jackson in the War of
1812, and the family became typical planters of the Gulf region.
Meanwhile, the roads that led to the Ohio Valley were followed by an
increasing tide of settlers from the east. "Old America seems to be
breaking up, and moving westward," wrote Morris Birkbeck in 1817, as
he passed on the National Road through Pennsylvania. "We are seldom
out of sight, as we travel on this grand track, towards the Ohio, of
family groups, behind and before us. ... A small waggon (so light
that you might almost carry it, yet strong enough to bear a good
load of bedding, utensils and provisions, and a swarm of young
citizens,--and to sustain marvellous shocks in its passage over
these rocky heights) with two small horses; sometimes a cow or two,
comprises their all; excepting a little store of hard-earned cash
for the land office of the district; where they may obtain a title
for as many acres as they possess half-dollars, being one fourth of
the purchase-money. The waggon has a tilt, or cover, made of a
sheet, or perhaps a blanket. The family are seen before, behind, or
within the vehicle, according to the road or the weather, or perhaps
the spirits of the party. ... A cart and single horse frequently
affords the means of transfer, sometimes a horse and packsaddle.
Often the back of the poor pilgrim bears all his effects, and his
wife follows, naked-footed, bending under the hopes of the family."
[Footnote: Birkbeck, Notes on a Journey from Va. to Ill., 25, 26.]
The southerners who came by land along the many bad roads through
Tennessee and Kentucky usually traveled with heavy, long-bodied
wagons, drawn by four or six horses. [Footnote: Hist. of Grundy
County, Ill., 149.] These family groups, crowding roads and fords,
marching towards the sunset, with the canvas-covered wagon, ancestor
of the prairie-schooner of the later times, were typical of the
overland migration. The poorer classes traveled on foot, sometimes
carrying their entire effects in a cart drawn by themselves.
[Footnote: Niles' Register, XXI., 320.] Those of more means took
horses, cattle, and sheep, and sometimes sent their household goods
by wagon or by steamboat up the Mississippi. [Footnote: Howells,
Life in Ohio, 1813-1840, 86; Jones, Ill. and the West, 31; Hist, of
Grundy County, Ill., 149.] The routes of travel to the western
country were numerous. [Footnote: See map, page 226.] Prior to the
opening of the Erie Canal the New England element either passed
along the Mohawk and the Genesee turnpike to Lake Erie, or crossed
the Hudson and followed the line of the Catskill turnpike to the
headwaters of the Allegheny, or, by way of Boston, took ship to New
York, Philadelphia, or Baltimore, in order to follow a more
southerly route. In Pennsylvania the principal route was the old
road which, in a general way, followed the line that Forbes had cut
in the French and Indian War from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh by way
of Lancaster and Bedford. By this time the road had been made a
turnpike through a large portion of its course. From Baltimore the
traveler followed a turnpike to Cumberland, on the Potomac, where
began the old National Road across the mountains to Wheeling, on the
Ohio, with branches leading to Pittsburgh. This became one of the
great arteries of western migration and commerce, connecting, as it
did at its eastern end, with the Shenandoah Valley, and thus
affording access to the Ohio for large areas of Virginia. Other
routes lay through the passes of the Alleghenies, easily reached
from the divide between the waters of North Carolina and of West
Virginia. Saluda Gap, in northwestern South Carolina, led the way to
the great valley of eastern Tennessee. In Tennessee and Kentucky
many routes passed to the Ohio in the region of Cincinnati or
Louisville.
When the settler arrived at the waters of the Ohio, he either took a
steamboat or placed his possessions on a flatboat, or ark, and
floated down the river to his destination. From the upper waters of
the Allegheny many emigrants took advantage of the lumber-rafts,
which were constructed from the pine forests of southwestern New
York, to float to the Ohio with themselves and their belongings.
With the advent of the steamboat these older modes of navigation
were, to a considerable extent, superseded. But navigation on the
Great Lakes had not sufficiently advanced to afford opportunity for
any considerable movement of settlement, by this route, beyond Lake
Erie.
In the course of the decade the cost of reaching the west varied
greatly with the decrease in the transportation rates brought about
by the competition of the Erie Canal, the improvement of the
turnpikes, and the development of steamboat navigation. The expense
of the long overland journey from New England, prior to the opening
of the Erie Canal, made it extremely difficult for those without any
capital to reach the west. The stage rates on the Pennsylvania
turnpike and the old National Road, prior to the opening of the Erie
Canal, were about five or six dollars a hundred-weight from
Philadelphia or Baltimore to the Ohio River; the individual was
regarded as so much freight. [Footnote: Evans, Pedestrians Tour,
145.] To most of the movers, who drove their own teams and camped by
the wayside, however, the actual expense was simply that of
providing food for themselves and their horses on the road. The cost
of moving by land a few years later is illustrated by the case of a
Maryland family, consisting of fifteen persons, of whom five were
slaves. They traveled about twenty miles a day, with a four-horse
wagon, three hundred miles, to Wheeling, at an expense of seventy-
five dollars. [Footnote: Niles' Register, XLVIII., 242.] The expense
of traveling by stage and steamboat from Philadelphia to St. Louis
at the close of the decade was about fifty-five dollars for one
person; or by steamboat from New Orleans to St. Louis, thirty
dollars, including food and lodging. For deck-passage, without food
or lodging, the charge was only eight dollars. [Footnote: Ill.
Monthly Magazine, II., 53.] In 1823 the cost of passage from
Cincinnati to New Orleans by steamboat was twenty-five dollars; from
New Orleans to Cincinnati, fifty dollars. [Footnote: Niles'
Register, XXV., 95.] In the early thirties one could go from New
Orleans to Pittsburgh, as cabin passenger, for from thirty-five to
forty-five dollars. [Footnote: Emigrants' and Travelers' Guide
through the Valley of the Mississippi, 341.]
CHAPTER VI
SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT OF THE WEST (1820-1830)
Arrived at the nearest point to his destination on the Ohio, the
emigrant either cut out a road to his new home or pushed up some
tributary of that river in a keel-boat. If he was one of the poorer
classes, he became a squatter on the public lands, trusting to find
in the profits of his farming the means of paying for his land. Not
uncommonly, after clearing the land, he sold his improvements to the
actual purchaser, under the customary usage or by pre-emption laws.
[Footnote: Hall, Statistics of the West, 180; Kingdom, America, 56;
Peck, New Guide for Emigrants to the West (1837), 119-132.] With the
money thus secured he would purchase new land in a remoter area, and
thus establish himself as an independent land-owner. Under the
credit system [Footnote: Emerick, Credit and the Public Domain.]
which existed at the opening of the period, the settler purchased
his land in quantities of not less than one hundred and sixty acres
at two dollars per acre, by a cash payment of fifty cents per acre
and the rest in installments running over a period of four years;
but by the new law of 1820 the settler was permitted to buy as small
a tract as eighty acres from the government at a minimum price of a
dollar and a quarter per acre, without credit. The price of labor in
the towns along the Ohio, coupled with the low cost of provisions,
made it possible for even a poor day-laborer from the East to
accumulate the necessary amount to make his land-purchase.
[Footnote: See, for example, Peck, New Guide for Emigrants to the
West (1837), 107-134; Bradbury, Travels, 286.]
Having in this way settled down either as a squatter or as a land-
owner, the pioneer proceeded to hew out a clearing in the midst of
the forest. [Footnote: Kingdom, America, 10, 54, 63; Flint, Letters,
206; McMaster, United States, V., 152-155; Howells, Life in Ohio,
115.] Commonly he had selected his lands with reference to the value
of the soil, as indicated by the character of the hardwoods, but
this meant that the labor of clearing was the more severe in good
soil. Under the sturdy strokes of his axe the light of day was let
into the little circle of cleared ground. [Footnote: Hall,
Statistics of the West, 98, 101, 145.] With the aid of his
neighbors, called together under the social attractions of a
"raising," with its inevitable accompaniment of whiskey and a
"frolic," he erected his log-cabin. "America," wrote Birkbeck, "was
bred in a cabin." [Footnote: Birkbeck, Notes on Journey, 94.]
Having secured a foothold, the settler next proceeded to "girdle" or
"deaden" an additional forest area, preparatory to his farming
operations. This consisted in cutting a ring through the bark around
the lower portion of the trunk, to prevent the sap from rising. In a
short time the withered branches were ready for burning, and in the
midst of the stumps the first crop of corn and vegetables was
planted. Often the settler did not even burn the girdled trees, but
planted his crop under the dead foliage.
In regions nearer to the east, as in western New York, it was
sometimes possible to repay a large portion of the cost of clearing
by the sale of pot and pearl ashes extracted from the logs, which
were brought together into huge piles for burning. [Footnote: Life
of Thurlow Weed (Autobiography), I., ii.] This was accomplished by a
"log-rolling," under the united efforts of the neighbors, as in the
case of the "raising." More commonly in the west the logs were
wasted by burning, except such as were split into rails, which, laid
one above another, made the zig-zag "worm-fences" for the protection
of the fields of the pioneer.
When a clearing was sold to a later comer, fifty or sixty dollars,
in addition to the government price of land, was commonly charged
for forty acres, enclosed and partly cleared. [Footnote: Kingdom,
America, 10, 54.] It was estimated that the cost of a farm of three
hundred and twenty acres at the edge of the prairie in Illinois, at
this time, would be divided as follows: for one hundred and sixty
acres of prairie, two hundred dollars; for fencing it into four
forty-acre fields with rail-fences, one hundred and sixty dollars;
for breaking it up with a plough, two dollars per acre, or three
hundred and twenty dollars; eighty acres of timber land and eighty
acres of pasture prairie, two hundred dollars. Thus, with cabins,
stables, etc., it cost a little over a thousand dollars to secure an
improved farm of three hundred and twenty acres. [Footnote: J.M.
Peck, Guide for Emigrants (1831), 183-188; cf. Birkbeck (London,
1818), Letters, 45, 46, 69-73; S.H. Collins, Emigrant's Guide;
Tanner (publisher), View of the Valley of the Miss. (1834), 232; J.
Woods, Two Years' Residence, 146, 172.] But the mass of the early
settlers were too poor to afford such an outlay, and were either
squatters within a little clearing, or owners of eighty acres, which
they hoped to increase by subsequent purchase. Since they worked
with the labor of their own hands and that of their sons, the cash
outlay was practically limited to the original cost of the lands and
articles of husbandry. The cost of an Indiana farm of eighty acres
of land, with two horses, two or three cows, a few hogs and sheep,
and farming utensils, was estimated at about four hundred dollars.
The peculiar skill required of the axeman who entered the hardwood
forests, together with readiness to undergo the privations of the
life, made the backwoodsman in a sense an expert engaged in a
special calling. [Footnote: J. Hall, Statistics of the West, 101;
cf. Chastellux, Travels in North America (London, 1787), I., 44.]
Frequently he was the descendant of generations of pioneers, who, on
successive frontiers, from the neighborhood of the Atlantic coast
towards the interior, had cut and burned the forest, fought the
Indians, and pushed forward the line of civilization. He bore the
marks of the struggle in his face, made sallow by living in the
shade of the forest, "shut from the common air," [Footnote:
Birkbeck, Notes on Journey, 105-114.] and in a constitution often
racked by malarial fever. Dirt and squalor were too frequently found
in the squatter's cabin, and education and the refinements of life
were denied to him. Often shiftless and indolent, in the intervals
between his tasks of forest-felling he was fonder of hunting than of
a settled agricultural life. With his rifle he eked out his
sustenance, and the peltries furnished him a little ready cash. His
few cattle grazed in the surrounding forest, and his hogs fed on its
mast.
The backwoodsman of this type represented the outer edge of the
advance of civilization. Where settlement was closer, co-operative
activity possible, and little villages, with the mill and retail
stores, existed, conditions of life were ameliorated, and a better
type of pioneer was found. Into such regions circuit-riders and
wandering preachers carried the beginnings of church organization,
and schools were started. But the frontiersmen proper constituted a
moving class, ever ready to sell out their clearings in [Footnote:
Babcock, Forty Years of Pioneer Life ("Journals and Correspondence
of J.M. Peck"), 101.] order to press on to a new frontier, where
game more abounded, soil was reported to be better, and where the
forest furnished a welcome retreat from the uncongenial
encroachments of civilization. If, however, he was thrifty and
forehanded, the backwoodsman remained on his clearing, improving his
farm and sharing in the change from wilderness life.
Behind the type of the backwoodsman came the type of the pioneer
farmer. Equipped with a little capital, he often, as we have seen,
purchased the clearing, and thus avoided some of the initial
hardships of pioneer life. In the course of a few years, as saw-
mills were erected, frame-houses took the place of the log-cabins;
the rough clearing, with its stumps, gave way to well-tilled fields;
orchards were planted; live-stock roamed over the enlarged clearing;
and an agricultural surplus was ready for export. Soon the
adventurous speculator offered corner lots in a new town-site, and
the rude beginnings of a city were seen.
Thus western occupation advanced in a series of waves: [Footnote:
J.M. Peck, New Guide to the West (Cincinnati, 1848), chap. iv.; T.
Flint, Geography and Hist. of the Western States, 350 et seq.; J.
Flint, Letters from America, 206; cf. Turner, Significance of the
Frontier in American History, in Am. Hist. Assoc., Report 1893, p.
214; McMaster, United States, V., 152-160.] the Indian was sought by
the fur-trader; the fur-trader was followed by the frontiersman,
whose live-stock exploited the natural grasses and the acorns of the
forest; next came the wave of primitive agriculture, followed by
more intensive farming and city life. All the stages of social
development went on under the eye of the traveler as he passed from
the frontier towards the east. Such were the forces which were
steadily pushing their way into the American wilderness, as they had
pushed for generations.
While thus the frontier folk spread north of the Ohio and up the
Missouri, a different movement was in progress in the Gulf region of
the west. In the beginning precisely the same type of occupation was
to be seen: the poorer classes of southern emigrants cut out their
clearings along rivers that flowed to the Gulf and to the lower
Mississippi, and, with the opening of this decade, went in
increasing numbers into Texas, where enterprising Americans secured
concessions from the Mexican government. [Footnote: Garrison, Texas,
chaps, xiii., xiv.; Wooten (editor), Comprehensive Hist. of Texas,
I., chaps. viii., ix.; Texas State Hist. Assoc., Quarterly, VII.,
29, 289; Bugbee, "Texas Frontier," in Southern Hist. Assoc.,
Publications, IV., 106.]
Almost all of the most recently occupied area was but thinly
settled. It represented the movement of the backwoodsman, with axe
and rifle, advancing to the conquest of the forest. But closer to
the old settlements a more highly developed agriculture was to be
seen. Hodgson, in 1821, describes plantations in northern Alabama in
lands ceded by the Indians in 1818. Though settled less than two
years, there were within a few miles five schools and four places of
worship. One plantation had one hundred acres in cotton and one
hundred and ten in corn, although a year and a half before it was
wilderness. [Footnote: Hodgson, Letters from North Am., I., 269; see
Riley (editor), "Autobiography of Lincecum," in Miss. Hist. Soc.,
Publications, VIII., 443, for the wanderings of a southern pioneer
in the recently opened Indian lands of Georgia and the southwest in
these years.]
But while this population of log-cabin pioneers was entering the
Gulf plains, caravans of slave-holding planters were advancing from
the seaboard to the occupation of the cotton-lands of the same
region. As the free farmers of the interior had been replaced in the
upland country of the south by the slaveholding planters, so now the
frontiersmen of the southwest were pushed back from the more fertile
lands into the pine hills and barrens. Not only was the pioneer
unable to refuse the higher price which was offered him for his
clearing, but, in the competitive bidding of the public land sales,
[Footnote: Northern Ala. (published by Smith & De Land), 249; Brown,
Hist. of Ala., 129-131; Brown, Lower South, 24-26.] the wealthier
planter secured the desirable soils. Social forces worked to the
same end. When the pioneer invited his slave-holding neighbor to a
"raising," it grated on his sense of the fitness of things to have
the guest appear with gloves, directing the gang of slaves which he
contributed to the function. [Footnote: Smedes, A Southern Planter,
67.] Little by little, therefore, the old pioneer life tended to
retreat to the less desirable lands, leaving the slave-holder in
possession of the rich "buck-shot" soils that spread over central
Alabama and Mississippi and the fat alluvium that lined the eastern
bank of the Mississippi. Even to-day the counties of dense Negro
population reveal the results of this movement of segregation.
By the side of the picture of the advance of the pioneer farmer,
bearing his household goods in his canvas-covered wagon to his new
home across the Ohio, must therefore be placed the picture of the
southern planter crossing through the forests of western Georgia,
Alabama, and Mississippi, or passing over the free state of Illinois
to the Missouri Valley, in his family carriage, with servants, packs
of hunting-dogs, and a train of slaves, their nightly camp-fires
lighting up the wilderness where so recently the Indian hunter had
held possession. [Footnote: Hodgson, Letters from North Am., I.,
138; Niles' Register, XLIV., 222; Smedes, A Southern Planter, 52-54;
Flint, Geography and History of the Western States, II., 350, 379;
Bernhard, Duke of Saxe-Weimar, Travels, II., chaps. xvi., xvii.]
But this new society had a characteristic western flavor. The old
patriarchal type of slavery along the seaboard was modified by the
western conditions in the midst of which the slave-holding interest
was now lodged. Planters, as well as pioneer farmers, were
exploiting the wilderness and building a new society under
characteristic western influences. Rude strength, a certain
coarseness of life, and aggressiveness characterized this society,
as it did the whole of the Mississippi Valley. [Footnote: Baldwin,
Flush Times in Ala.; cf. Gilmer, Sketches of Georgia, etc.] Slavery
furnished a new ingredient for western forces to act upon. The
system took on a more commercial tinge: the plantation had to be
cleared and made profitable as a purely business enterprise.
The slaves were purchased in considerable numbers from the older
states instead of being inherited in the family. Slave-dealers
passed to the southwest, with their coffles of Negroes brought from
the outworn lands of the old south. It was estimated in 1832 that
Virginia annually exported six thousand slaves for sale to other
states. [Footnote: Collins, Domestic Slave Trade, 50.] An English
traveler reported in 1823 that every year from ten to fifteen
thousand slaves were sold from the states of Delaware, Maryland, and
Virginia, and sent to the south. [Footnote: Blane, Excursion through
U.S., 226; Hodgson, Letters from North Am., I., 194.] At the same
time, illicit importation of slaves through New Orleans reached an
amount estimated at from ten to fifteen thousand a year. [Footnote:
Collins, Domestic Slave Trade, 44.] It was not until the next decade
that this incoming tide of slaves reached its height, but by 1830 it
was clearly marked and was already transforming the southwest.
Mississippi doubled the number of her slaves in the decade, and
Alabama nearly trebled hers. In the same period the number of slaves
of Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina increased but slightly.
As the discussion of the south has already made clear, the
explanation of this transformation of the southwest into a region of
slave-holding planters lies in the spread of cotton into the Gulf
plains. In 1811 this region raised but five million pounds of
cotton; ten years later its product was sixty million pounds; and in
1826 its fields were white with a crop of over one hundred and fifty
million pounds. It soon outstripped the seaboard south. Alabama,
which had practically no cotton crop in 1811, and only ten million
pounds in 1821, had in 1834 eighty-five million pounds, [Footnote:
See table of cotton crop, ante, p. 47.] a larger crop than either
South Carolina or Georgia.
Soon after 1830 the differences between the northern and southern
portions of the Mississippi Valley were still further accentuated.
(1) From New York and New England came a tide of settlement, in the
thirties, which followed the Erie Canal and the Great Lakes, and
began to occupy the prairie lands which had been avoided by the
southern axemen. This region then became an extension of the greater
New England already to be seen in New York. (2) The southern
pioneers in the northwest formed a transitional zone between this
northern area and the slave states south of the Ohio. (3) In the
Gulf plains a greater south was in process of formation, but by no
means completely established. As yet it was a mixture of pioneer and
planter, slave and free, profoundly affected by its western traits.
[Footnote: Curry, "A Settlement in East Ala.," in Am. Hist.
Magazine, II., 203.]
The different states of the south were steadily sending in bands of
colonists. In Alabama, for example, the Georgians settled, as a
rule, in the east; the Tennesseeans, moving from the great bend of
the Tennessee River, were attracted to the northern and middle
section; and the Virginians and Carolinians went to the west and
southwest, following the bottom-lands near the rivers. [Footnote:
Brown, Hist. of Ala., 129, 130; Northern Ala. (published bv Smith &
De Land), pt. iv., 243 et seq.]
CHAPTER VII
WESTERN COMMERCE AND IDEALS (1820-1830)
By 1820 the west had developed the beginnings of many of the cities
which have since ruled over the region. Buffalo and Detroit were
hardly more than villages until the close of this period. They
waited for the rise of steam navigation on the Great Lakes and for
the opening of the prairies. Cleveland, also, was but a hamlet
during most of the decade; but by 1830 the construction of the canal
connecting the Cuyahoga with the Scioto increased its prosperity,
and its harbor began to profit by its natural advantages. [Footnote:
Whittlesey, Early Hist. of Cleveland, 456; Kennedy, Hist. of
Cleveland, chap. viii.] Chicago and Milwaukee were mere fur-trading
stations in the Indian country. Pittsburgh, at the head of the Ohio,
was losing its old pre-eminence as the gateway to the west, but was
finding recompense in the development of its manufactures. By 1830
its population was about twelve thousand. [Footnote: Thurston,
Pittsburg and Allegheny in the Centennial Year, 61.] Foundries,
rolling-mills, nail-factories, steam-engine shops, and distilleries
were busily at work, and the city, dingy with the smoke of soft
coal, was already dubbed the "young Manchester" or the "Birmingham"
of America. By 1830 Wheeling had intercepted much of the overland
trade and travel to the Ohio, profiting by the old National Road and
the wagon trade from Baltimore. [Footnote: Martin, Gazetteer of Va.,
407.]
Cincinnati was rapidly rising to the position of the "Queen City of
the West." Situated where the river reached with a great bend
towards the interior of the northwest, in the rich farming country
between the two Miamis, and opposite the Licking River, it was the
commercial center of a vast and fertile region of Ohio and Kentucky;
[Footnote: Melish, Information to Emigrants, 108.] and by 1830, with
a population of nearly twenty-five thousand souls, it was the
largest city of the west, with the exception of New Orleans. The
center of steamboat-building, it also received extensive imports of
goods from the east and exported the surplus crops of Ohio and
adjacent parts of Kentucky. Its principal industry, however, was
pork-packing, from which it won the name of "Porkopolis" [Footnote:
Drake and Mansfield, Cincinnati in 1826, p. 70; Winter in the West,
I., 115.] Louisville, at the falls of the Ohio, was an important
place of trans-shipment, and the export center for large quantities
of tobacco. There were considerable manufactures of rope and
bagging, products of the Kentucky hemp-fields; and new cotton and
woolen factories were struggling for existence. [Footnote: Durrett,
Centenary of Louisville (Filson Club, Publications, No. 8), 50-101;
Louisville Directory, 1832, p. 131.] St. Louis occupied a unique
position, as the entrepot of the important fur-trade of the upper
Mississippi and the vast water system of the Missouri, as well as
the outfitting-point for the Missouri settlements. It was the
capital of the far west, and the commercial center for Illinois. Its
population at the close of the decade was about six thousand.
Only a few villages lay along the Mississippi below St. Louis until
the traveler reached New Orleans, the emporium of the whole
Mississippi Valley. As yet the direct effect of the Erie Canal was
chiefly limited to the state of New York. The great bulk of western
exports passed down the tributaries of the Mississippi to this city,
which was, therefore, the center of foreign exports for the valley,
as well as the port from which the coastwise trade in the products
of the whole interior departed. In 1830 its population was nearly
fifty thousand.
The rise of an agricultural surplus was transforming the west and
preparing a new influence in the nation. It was this surplus and the
demand for markets that developed the cities just mentioned. As they
grew, the price of land in their neighborhood increased; roads
radiated into the surrounding country; and farmers, whose crops had
been almost worthless from the lack of transportation facilities,
now found it possible to market their surplus at a small profit.
While the west was thus learning the advantages of a home market,
the extension of cotton and sugar cultivation in the south and
southwest gave it a new and valuable market. More and more, the
planters came to rely upon the northwest for their food supplies and
for the mules and horses for their fields. Cotton became the
engrossing interest of the plantation belt, and, while the full
effects of this differentiation of industry did not appear in the
decade of this volume, the beginnings were already visible.
[Footnote: Callender, "Early Transportation and Banking Enterprises
of the States," in Quarterly Journal of Econ., XVII., 3-54.] In
1835, Pitkin [Footnote: Pitkin, Statistical View (1835), 534.]
reckoned the value of the domestic and foreign exports of the
interior as far in excess of the whole exports of the United States
in 1790. Within forty years the development of the interior had
brought about the economic independence of the United States.
During most of the decade the merchandise to supply the interior was
brought laboriously across the mountains by the Pennsylvania
turnpikes and the old National Road; or, in the case of especially
heavy freight, was carried along the Atlantic coast into the gulf
and up the Mississippi and Ohio by steamboats. The cost of
transportation in the wagon trade from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh
and Baltimore to Wheeling placed a heavy tax upon the consumer.
[Footnote: Niles' Register, XX., 180.] In 1817 the freight charge
from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh was sometimes as high as seven to
ten dollars a hundredweight; a few years later it became from four
to six dollars; and in 1823 it had fallen to three dollars. It took
a month to wagon merchandise from Baltimore to central Ohio.
Transportation companies, running four-horse freight wagons,
conducted a regular business on these turn-pikes between the eastern
and western states. In 1820 over three thousand wagons ran between
Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, transporting merchandise valued at
about eighteen million dollars annually. [Footnote: Birkbeck,
Journey from Va., 128; Ogden, Letters from the West, 8; Cobbett,
Year's Residence, 337; Evans, Pedestrious Tour, 145; Philadelphia in
1824, 45; Searight, Old Pike, 107, 112; Mills, Treatise on Inland
Navigation (1820), 89, 90, 93, 95-97; Journal of Polit. Econ.,
VIII., 36.]
The construction of the National Road reduced freight rates to
nearly one-half what they were at the close of the War of 1812; and
the introduction of steam navigation from New Orleans up the
Mississippi cut water-rates by that route to one-third of the former
charge. [Footnote: Annals of Cong., 18 Cong., I Sess., I., 991; cf.
Fearon, Sketches, 260; Niles' Register, XXV., 95; Cincinnati
Christian Journal, July 27, 1830.] Nevertheless, there was a crying
need for internal improvements, and particularly for canals, to
provide an outlet for the increasing products of the west. "Even in
the country where I reside, not eighty miles from tidewater," said
Tucker, [Footnote: Annals of Cong., 15 Cong., I Sess., I., 1126.] of
Virginia, in 1818, "it takes the farmer one bushel of wheat to pay
the expense of carrying two to a seaport town."
The bulk of the crop, as compared with its value, practically
prevented transportation by land farther than a hundred miles.
[Footnote: McMaster, United States, III., 464.] It is this that
helps to explain the attention which the interior first gave to
making whiskey and raising live-stock; the former carried the crop
in a small bulk with high value, while the live-stock could walk to
a market. Until after the War of 1812, the cattle of the Ohio Valley
were driven to the seaboard, chiefly to Philadelphia or Baltimore.
Travelers were astonished to see on the highway droves of four or
five thousand hogs, going to an eastern market. It was estimated
that over a hundred thousand hogs were driven east annually from
Kentucky alone. Kentucky hog-drivers also passed into Tennessee,
Virginia, and the Carolinas with their droves. [Footnote: Life of
Ephraim Cutler, 89; Birkbeck, Journey, 24.; Blane, Excursion through
U. S. (London, 1824), 90; Atlantic Monthly, XXVI., 170.] The swine
lived on the nuts and acorns of the forest; thus they were
peculiarly suited to pioneer conditions. At first the cattle were
taken to the plantations of the Potomac to fatten for Baltimore and
Philadelphia, much in the same way that, in recent times, the cattle
of the Great Plains are brought to the feeding-grounds in the corn
belt of Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa. [Footnote: Michaux, Travels,
191: Palmer, Journal of Travels, 36] Towards the close of the
decade, however, the feeding-grounds shifted into Ohio, and the
pork-packing industry, as we have seen, found its center at
Cincinnati, [Footnote: Hall, Statistics of the West (1836), 145-
147.] the most important source of supply for the hams and bacon and
salt pork which passed down the Mississippi to furnish a large share
of the plantation food. From Kentucky and the rest of the Ohio
Valley droves of mules and horses passed through the Tennessee
Valley to the south to supply the plantations. Statistics at
Cumberland Gap for 1828 gave the value of live-stock passing the
turnpike gate there at $1,167,000. [Footnote: Emigrants' and
Travellers' Guide to the West (1834), 194.] Senator Hayne, of South
Carolina, declared that in 1824 the south was supplied from the
west, through Saluda Gap, with live-stock, horses, cattle, and hogs
to the amount of over a million dollars a year. [Footnote: Speech in
Senate in 1832, Register of Debates in Cong., VIII., pt. i., 80; cf.
Annals of Cong., 18 Cong., i Sess., I., 1411.]
But the outlet from the west over the roads to the east and south
was but a subordinate element in the internal commerce. Down the
Mississippi floated a multitude of heavily freighted craft: lumber
rafts from the Allegheny, the old-time arks, with cattle, flour, and
bacon, hay-boats, keel-boats, and skiffs, all mingled with the
steamboats which plied the western waters. [Footnote: Flint,
Recollections of the Last Ten Years, 101-110; E. S. Thomas,
Reminiscences, I., 290-293; Hall, Statistics of the West (1836),
236; Howells, Life in Ohio, 85; Schultz, Travels, 129; Hulbert,
Historic Highways, IX., chaps, iii., iv., v.] Flatboatmen, raftsmen,
and deck-hands constituted a turbulent and reckless population,
living on the country through which they passed, fighting and
drinking in true "half-horse, half-alligator" style. Prior to the
steamboat, all of the commerce from New Orleans to the upper country
was carried on in about twenty barges, averaging a hundred tons
each, and making one trip a year. Although the steamboat did not
drive out the other craft, it revolutionized the commerce of the
river. Whereas it had taken the keel-boats thirty to forty days to
descend from Louisville to New Orleans, and about ninety days to
ascend the fifteen hundred miles of navigation by poling and warping
up-stream, the steamboat had shortened the time, by 1822, to seven
days down and sixteen days up. [Footnote: Annals of Cong., 17 Gong.,
2 Sess., 407; McMaster, United States, V., 166; National Gazette,
September 26, 1823 (list of steamboats, rates of passage, estimate
of products); Blane, Excursion through the U. S., 119; Niles'
Register, XXV., 95.] As the steamboats ascended the various
tributaries of the Mississippi to gather the products of the growing
west, the pioneers came more and more to realize the importance of
the invention. They resented the idea of the monopoly which Pulton
and Livingston wished to enforce prior to the decision of Chief-
Justice Marshall, in the case of Gibbons vs. Ogden--a decision of
vital interest to the whole interior. [Footnote: Thomas, Travels
through the Western Country, 62; Alexandria Herald, June 23, 1817.]
They saw in the steamboat a symbol of their own development. A
writer in the Western Monthly Review, [Footnote: Timothy Flint's
Western Monthly Review (May, 1827), I., 25; William Bullock, Sketch
of a Journey, 132.] unconsciously expressed the very spirit of the
self-contented, hustling, materialistic west in these words: "An
Atlantic cit, who talks of us under the name of backwoodsmen, would
not believe, that such fairy structures of oriental gorgeousness and
splendor, as the Washington, the Florida, the Walk in the Water, the
Lady of the Lake, etc. etc., had ever existed in the imaginative
brain of a romancer, much less, that they were actually in
existence, rushing down the Mississippi, as on the wings of the
wind, or plowing up between the forests, and walking against the
mighty current 'as things of life,' bearing speculators, merchants,
dandies, fine ladies, every thing real, and every thing affected, in
the form of humanity, with pianos, and stocks of novels, and cards,
and dice, and flirting, and love-making, and drinking, and
champagne, and on the deck, perhaps, three hundred fellows, who have
seen alligators, and neither fear whiskey, nor gun-powder. A
steamboat, coming from New Orleans, brings to the remotest villages
of our streams, and the very doors of the cabins, a little Paris, a
section of Broadway, or a slice of Philadelphia, to ferment in the
minds of our young people, the innate propensity for fashions and
finery. Within a day's journey of us, three distinct canals are in
respectable progress towards completion. . . . Cincinnati will soon
be the center of the 'celestial empire,' as the Chinese say; and
instead of encountering the storms, the sea sickness, and dangers of
a passage from the gulf of Mexico to the Atlantic, whenever the Erie
canal shall be completed, the opulent southern planters will take
their families, their dogs and parrots, through a world of forests,
from New Orleans to New York, giving us a call by the way. When they
are more acquainted with us, their voyage will often terminate
here."
By 1830 the produce which reached New Orleans from the Mississippi
Valley amounted to about twenty-six million dollars. [Footnote:
Quarterly Journal of Economics, XVII., 20; Pitkin, Statistical View
(ed. of 1835), 534-536.] In 1822 three million dollars' worth of
goods was estimated to have passed the Falls of the Ohio on the way
to market, representing much of the surplus of the Ohio Valley. Of
this, pork amounted to $1,000,000 in value; flour to $900,000;
tobacco to $600,000; and whiskey to $500,000. [Footnote: National
Republican, March 7, 1823; cf. National Gazette, September 26, 1823;
Blane, Excursion through the U. S., 119.] The inventory of products
reveals the Mississippi Valley as a vast colonial society, producing
the raw materials of a simple and primitive agriculture. The
beginnings of manufacture in the cities, however, promised to bring
about a movement for industrial independence in the west. In spite
of evidences of growing wealth, there was such a decline in
agricultural prices that, for the farmer who did not live on the
highways of commerce, it was almost unprofitable to raise wheat for
the market.
An Ohio pioneer of this time relates that at the beginning of the
decade fifty cents a bushel was a great price for wheat at the
river; and as two horses and a man were required for four days to
make the journey of thirty-five miles to the Ohio, in good weather,
with thirty-five or forty bushels of wheat, and a great deal longer
if the roads were bad, it was not to be expected that the farmer
could realize more than twenty-five cents in cash for it. But there
was no sale for it in cash. The nominal price for it in trade was
usually thirty cents. [Footnote: Howells, Life in Ohio, 138; see
M'Culloch, Commercial Dictionary, I., 683,684; Hazard, U.S.
Commercial and Statistical Register, I., 251; O'Reilly, Sketches of
Rochester, 362.] When wheat brought twenty-five cents a bushel in
Illinois in 1825, it sold at over eighty cents in Petersburg,
Virginia, and flour was six dollars a barrel at Charleston, South
Carolina. [Footnote: Niles' Register, XXIX, 165.]
These are the economic conditions that assist in understanding the
political attitude of western leaders like Henry Clay and Andrew
Jackson. The cry of the east for protection to infant industries was
swelled by the little cities of the west, and the demand for a home
market found its strongest support beyond the Alleghenies. Internal
improvements and lower rates of transportation were essential to the
prosperity of the westerners. Largely a debtor class, in need of
capital, credit, and an expansion of the currency, they resented
attempts to restrain the reckless state banking which their optimism
fostered.
But the political ideals and actions of the west are explained by
social quite as much as by economic forces. It was certain that this
society, where equality and individualism flourished, where
assertive democracy was supreme, where impatience with the old order
of things was a ruling passion, would demand control of the
government, would resent the rule of the trained statesmen and
official classes, and would fight nominations by congressional
caucus and the continuance of presidential dynasties. Besides its
susceptibility to change, the west had generated, from its Indian
fighting, forest-felling, and expansion, a belligerency and a
largeness of outlook with regard to the nation's territorial
destiny. As the pioneer, widening the ring-wall of his clearing in
the midst of the stumps and marshes of the wilderness, had a vision
of the lofty buildings and crowded streets of a future city, so the
west as a whole developed ideals of the future of the common man,
and of the grandeur and expansion of the nation.
The west was too new a section to have developed educational
facilities to any large extent. The pioneers' poverty, as well as
the traditions of the southern interior from which they so largely
came, discouraged extensive expenditures for public schools.
[Footnote: McMaster, United States, V., 370-372.] In Kentucky and
Tennessee the more prosperous planters had private tutors, often New
England collegians, for their children. For example, Amos Kendall,
later postmaster-general, was tutor in Henry Clay's family. So-
called colleges were numerous, some of them fairly good. In 1830 a
writer made a survey of higher education in the whole western
country and reported twenty-eight institutions, with seven hundred
and sixty-six graduates and fourteen hundred and thirty
undergraduates. Less than forty thousand volumes were recorded in
the college and "social" libraries of the entire Mississippi Valley.
[Footnote: Am. Quarterly Register (November, 1830), III., 127-131.]
Very few students went from the west to eastern colleges; but the
foundations of public education had been laid in the land grants for
common schools and universities. For the present this fund was
generally misappropriated and wasted, or worse. Nevertheless, the
ideal of a democratic education was held up in the first
constitution of Indiana, making it the duty of the legislature to
provide for "a general system of education, ascending in a regular
graduation from township schools to a State university, wherein
tuition shall be gratis, and equally open to all." [Footnote: Poore,
Charters and Constitutions, pt. i., 508 (art. ix., sec. 2 of
Constitution of Ind., 1816).]
Literature did not flourish in the west, although the newspaper
press [Footnote: W. H. Perrin, Pioneer Press of Ky. (Filson Club
Publications).] followed closely after the retreating savage; many
short-lived periodicals were founded, [Footnote: Venable, Beginnings
of Literary Culture in the Ohio Valley, chap, iii.; W. B. Cairns,
Development of American Literature from 1815 to 1833, in University
of Wis., Bulletin (Phil, and Lit. Series), I., 60-63.] and writers
like Timothy Flint and James Hall were not devoid of literary
ability. Lexington, in Kentucky, and Cincinnati made rival claims to
be the "Athens of the West." In religion, the west was partial to
those denominations which prevailed in the democratic portions of
the older sections. Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians took the
lead. [Footnote: Am. Quarterly Register, III., 135 (November, 1830);
Schermerhorn and Mills, View of U. S. West of the Alleghany
Mountains (Hartford, 1814); Home Missionary, 1829, pp. 78, 79; 1830,
p. 172; McMaster, United States, IV., 550-555.]
The religious life of the west frequently expressed itself in the
form of emotional gatherings, in the camp-meetings and the revivals,
where the rude, unlettered, but deeply religious backwoods preachers
moved their large audiences with warnings of the wrath of God.
Muscular Christianity was personified in the circuit-rider, who,
with his saddle-bags and Bible, threaded the dreary trails through
the forest from settlement to settlement. From the responsiveness of
the west to religious excitement, it was easy to perceive that here
was a region capable of being swayed in large masses by enthusiasm.
These traits of the camp-meeting were manifested later in political
campaigns.
Thus this society beyond the mountains, recruited from all the older
states and bound together by the Mississippi, constituted a region
swayed for the most part by common impulses. By the march of the
westerners away from their native states to the public domain of the
nation, and by their organization as territories of the United
States, they lost that state particularism which distinguished many
of the old commonwealths of the coast. The section was nationalistic
and democratic to the core. The west admired the self-made man and
was ready to follow its hero with the enthusiasm of a section more
responsive to personality than to the programmes of trained
statesmen. It was a self-confident section, believing in its right
to share in government, and troubled by no doubts of its capacity to
rule.
CHAPTER VIII
THE FAR WEST (1820-1830)
In the decade of which we write, more than two-thirds of the present
area of the United States was Indian country--a vast wilderness
stretching from the Great Lakes to the Pacific Ocean. East of the
Mississippi, the pioneers had taken possession of the hardwoods of
the Ohio, but over the prairies between them and the Great Lakes the
wild flowers and grasses grew rank and undisturbed. To the north,
across Michigan and Wisconsin, spread the somber, white-pine
wilderness, interlaced with hardwoods, which swept in ample zone
along the Great Lakes, and, in turn, faded into the treeless expanse
of the prairies beyond the Mississippi. To the south, in the Gulf
plains, Florida was, for the most part, a wilderness; and, as we
have seen, great areas of Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia were
still unoccupied by civilization.
West of the Mississippi lay a huge new world--an ocean of grassy
prairie that rolled far to the west, till it reached the zone where
insufficient rainfall transformed it into the arid plains, which
stretched away to the foot-hills of the Rocky Mountains. Over this
vast waste, equal in area to France, Germany, Spain, Portugal,
Austria-Hungary, Italy, Denmark, and Belgium combined, a land where
now wheat and corn fields and grazing herds produce much of the food
supply for the larger part of America and for great areas of Europe,
roamed the bison and the Indian hunter. Beyond this, the Rocky
Mountains and the Sierra Nevadas, enclosing high plateaus, heaved up
their vast bulk through nearly a thousand miles from east to west,
concealing untouched treasures of silver and gold. The great valleys
of the Pacific coast in Oregon and California held but a sparse
population of Indian traders, a few Spanish missions, and scattered
herdsmen.
At the beginning of Monroe's presidency, the Pacific coast was still
in dispute between England, Spain, Russia, and the United States.
Holding to all of Texas, Spain also raised her flag over her
colonists who spread from Mexico along the valley of the Rio Grande
to Santa Fe, and she claimed the great unoccupied wilderness of
mountain and desert comprising the larger portion of Colorado,
Arizona, Utah, and Nevada, as well as California. In the decade of
1820-1830, fur-traders threaded the dark and forbidding defiles of
the mountains, unfolded the secrets of the Great Basin, and found
their way across the Rockies to California and Oregon; the
government undertook diplomatic negotiations to safeguard American
rights on the Pacific, and extended a line of forts well into the
Indian country; while far-seeing statesmen on the floor of Congress
challenged the nation to fulfill its destiny by planting its
settlements boldly beyond the Rocky Mountains on the shores of the
Pacific. It was a call to the lodgment of American power on that
ocean, the mastery of which is to determine the future relations of
Asiatic and European civilizations. [Footnote: Cf. Babcock, Am.
Nationality (Am. Nation, XIII.), chap. xv.]
A survey of the characteristics of the life of the far west shows
that, over Wisconsin and the larger part of Michigan, the Indian
trade was still carried on by methods introduced by the French.
[Footnote: Masson, Le Bourgeois de Nordwest; Parkman. Old Regime.]
Aster's American Fur Company practically controlled the trade of
Wisconsin and Michigan. It shipped its guns and ammunition,
blankets, gewgaws, and whiskey from Mackinac to some one of the
principal posts, where they were placed in the light birch canoes,
manned by French boatmen, and sent throughout the forests to the
minor trading-posts. Practically all of the Indian villages of the
tributaries of the Great Lakes and of the upper Mississippi were
regularly visited by the trader. The trading-posts became the nuclei
of later settlements; the traders' trails grew into the early roads,
and their portages marked out the location for canals. Little by
little the fur-trade was undermining the Indian society and paving
the way for the entrance of civilization. [Footnote: Turner,
Character and Influence of the Fur Trade in Wis., in Wis. Hist.
Soc., Transactions, 1889.]
In the War of 1812, all along the frontier of Indiana, Illinois, and
Missouri, as well as in the southwest, the settlers had drawn back
into forts, much as in the early days of the occupation of Kentucky
and Tennessee, and the traders and the Indians had been entirely
under the influence of Great Britain. In the negotiations at Ghent,
that power, having captured the American forts at Mackinac, Prairie
du Chien, and Chicago, tried to incorporate in the treaty a
provision for a neutral belt, or buffer state, of Indian territory
in the northwest, to separate Canada from the United States.
[Footnote: Cf. Babcock, Am. Nationality (Am. Nation, XIII.), chap.
x.] Taught by this experience, the United States, at the close of
the war, passed laws excluding aliens from conducting the Indian
trade, and erected forts at Green Bay, Prairie du Chien, Chicago,
and Fort Snelling. By order of Secretary of War Calhoun, Governor
Cass, of Michigan, made an expedition in 1820 along the south shore
of Lake Superior into Minnesota, to compel the removal of English
flags and to replace British by American influence. [Footnote:
Schoolcraft, Hist, of Indian Tribes, VI., 422; ibid., Narrative
Journal; "Doty's Journal," in Wis. Hist. Soc., Collections, XIII.,
163.] At the same time, an expedition under Major Long visited the
upper waters of the Minnesota River on a similar errand. [Footnote:
Keating, Long's Expedition.] An agent who was sent by the government
to investigate the Indian conditions of this region in 1820,
recommended that the country now included in Wisconsin, northern
Michigan, and part of Minnesota should be an Indian reservation,
from which white settlements should be excluded, with the idea that
ultimately the Indian population should be organized as a state of
the Union. [Footnote: Morse, Report on Indian Affairs in 1820.]
The Creeks and Cherokees, Choctaws, and Chickasaws of the Gulf
region were more advanced towards civilization than the Indians of
the northwest. While the latter lived chiefly by hunting and
trapping, the southwestern Indians had developed a considerable
agriculture and a sedentary life. For that very reason, however,
they were the more obnoxious to the pioneers who pressed upon their
territory from all sides; and, as we shall see, strenuous efforts
were made to remove them beyond the Mississippi.
Throughout the decade the problem of the future of the Indians east
of this river was a pressing one, and the secretaries of war, to
whose department the management of the tribes belonged, made many
plans and recommendations for their civilization, improvement, and
assimilation. But the advance of the frontier broke down the efforts
to preserve and incorporate these primitive people in the dominant
American society. [Footnote: Am. State Paps., Indian, II., 275, 542,
et passim; J. Q. Adams, Memoirs, VII., 89, 90, 92; Richardson,
Messages and Papers, II., 234, et seq.]
Across the Mississippi, settlement of the whites had, in the course
of this decade, pushed up the Missouri well towards the western
boundary of the state, and, as the map of the settlement shows, had
made advances towards the interior in parts of Arkansas as well. But
these were only narrow wedges of civilization thrust into the Indian
country, the field of operations of the fur-traders. Successors to
the French traders who had followed the rivers and lakes of Canada
far towards the interior, the Hudson's Bay Company, and the
Northwest Company under British charters had carried their
operations from the Great Lakes to the Pacific long before Americans
entered the west. As early as 1793, Alexander Mackenzie reached the
Pacific from the Great Lakes by way of Canada. [Footnote: Mackenzie,
Travels.] The year before, an English ship under Vancouver explored
the northwestern coast in the hope of finding a passage by sea to
the north and east. He missed the mouth of the Columbia, which in
the following month was entered by an American, Captain Gray, who
ascended the river twenty miles. The expedition of Lewis and Clark,
1804-1806, made the first crossing of the continent from territory
of the United States, and strengthened the claims of that country to
the region of the Columbia. [Footnote: Cf. Charming, Jeffersonian
System (Am. Nation, XII.), chap vii.]
John Jacob Astor's attempt to plant a trading-post at Astoria
[Footnote: Irving, Astoria.] had been defeated by the treachery of
his men, who, at the opening of the War of 1812, turned the post
over to the British Northwest fur-traders. The two great branches of
the Columbia, the one reaching up into Canada, and the other pushing
far into the Rocky Mountains, on the American side, constituted
lines of advance for the rival forces of England and the United
States in the struggle for the Oregon country. The British traders
rapidly made themselves masters of the region. [Footnote: Coues
(editor), Greater Northwest.] By 1825 the Hudson's Bay Company
monopolized the English fur-trade and was established at Fort George
(as Astoria was rechristened), Fort Walla-Walla, and Fort Vancouver,
near the mouth of the Willamette. Here, for twenty-two years, its
agent, Dr. John McLoughlin, one of the many Scotchmen who have built
up England's dominion in the new countries of the globe, ruled like
a benevolent monarch over the realms of the British traders.
[Footnote: Schafer, Pacific Northwest, chap. viii.] From these
Oregon posts as centers they passed as far south as the region of
Great Salt Lake, in what was then Mexican territory.
While the British traders occupied the northwest coast the Spaniards
held California. Although they established the settlement of San
Francisco in the year of the declaration of American independence,
settlement grew but slowly. The presidios, the missions, with their
Indian neophytes, and the cattle ranches feebly occupied this
imperial domain. Yankee trading-ships gathered hides and tallow at
San Diego, Monterey, and San Francisco; Yankee whalers, seal-
hunters, and fur-traders sought the northwest coast and passed on to
China to bring back to Boston and Salem the products of the far
east. [Footnote: R. H. Dana, Two Years before the Mast.] But Spain's
possession was not secure. The genius for expansion which had
already brought the Russians to Alaska drew them down the coast even
to California, and in 1812 they established Fort Ross at Bodega Bay,
a few miles below the mouth of Russian River, north of San
Francisco. This settlement, as well as the lesser one in the
Farallone Islands, endured for nearly a generation, a menace to
Spain's ascendancy in California in the chaotic period when her
colonies were in revolt. [Footnote: H. H. Bancroft, Hist. of
California, II., 628; Hittel, Hist. of California.]
In the mean time, from St. Louis as a center, American fur-traders,
the advance-guard of settlement, were penetrating into the heart of
the vast wilderness between the Mississippi and the Pacific coast.
[Footnote: Chittenden, Am. Fur Trade of the Far West] This was a
more absolute Indian domain than was the region between the
Alleghenies and the Mississippi at the end of the seventeenth
century--an empire of mountains and prairies, where the men of the
Stone Age watched with alarm the first crawling waves of that tide
of civilization that was to sweep them away. The savage population
of the far west has already been described in an earlier volume of
this series.[Footnote: Farrand, Basis of Am. Hist. (Am. Nation,
II.), chaps, viii., ix., xii.; see also chap. iv. On the location of
the Indians, see map, p. 309; Chittenden, Am. Fur Trade, II., pt.
v., chaps, viii., ix., x.; Bureau of Ethnology, Seventh Annual
Report.]
With the development of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, the most
flourishing period of the St. Louis trade in the far west began. The
founder of this company was William H. Ashley, a Virginian. Between
the autumn of 1823 and the spring of the next year, one of his
agents erected a post at the mouth of the Bighorn, and sent out his
trappers through the Green River valley, possibly even to Great Salt
Lake. A detachment of this party found the gateway of the Rocky
Mountains, through the famous South Pass by way of the Sweetwater
branch of the north fork of the Platte. This pass commanded the
routes to the great interior basin and to the Pacific Ocean. What
Cumberland Gap was in the advance of settlement across the
Alleghenies, South Pass was in the movement across the Rocky
Mountains; through it passed the later Oregon and California trails
to the Pacific coast.
On the lower Missouri and at various places in the
interior,[Footnote: See map, p. 114; Chittenden, Am. Fur Trade, I.,
44-51 (describes posts, etc.).] stockaded trading-posts were erected
by the Rocky Mountain Fur Company and its rival, the American Fur
Company. In these posts the old fur-trade life of the past went on,
with French half-breed packmen and boatmen, commanded by the
bourgeois. But in some of the best trading-grounds, the savages
declined to permit the erection of posts, and so, under Ashley's
leadership, bands of mounted American trappers, chiefly Kentuckians,
Tennesseeans, and Missourians, were sent out to hunt and trade in
the rich beaver valleys of the mountains. The Rocky Mountain
trappers were the successors to the Allegheny frontiersmen, carrying
on in this new region, where nature wrought on a vaster plan, the
old trapping life which their ancestors had carried on through
Cumberland Gap in the "dark and bloody ground" of Kentucky.
Yearly, in June and July, a rendezvous was held in the mountains, to
which the brigades of trappers returned with the products of their
hunt, to receive the supplies for the coming year. Here, also, came
Indian tribes to trade, and bands of free trappers, lone wanderers
in the mountains, to sell their furs and secure supplies. [Footnote:
Irving, Bonneville, chap. i.] The rendezvous was usually some
verdure-clad valley or park set in the midst of snow-capped
mountains, a paradise of game. Such places were Jackson's Hole, at
the foot of the lofty Tetons, Pierre's Hole, not far away, and
Ogden's Hole, near the present site of Ogden, in Utah. Great Salt
Lake was probably first visited by Bridger in 1824, and the next
year a party of Hudson Bay trappers were expelled by Americans who
took possession of their furs. In 1826, Ashley carried a six-pounder
cannon on wheels to Utah Lake for the defense of his post.
A new advance of the American fur-trader was made when Jedediah
Smith succeeded Ashley as the leader in Rocky Mountain trade and
exploration. In 1826 he left the Salt Lake rendezvous with a party
of trappers to learn the secrets of the lands between the Rocky
Mountains and the Pacific Ocean. Proceeding to the southwest along
the Virgin River, Smith descended it to the Colorado, and crossed
the desert to San Diego, California. Here, by the intercession of a
Yankee captain then in that port, he obtained supplies from the
Spaniards, and turned to the northwest, traveling parallel to the
coast for some three hundred miles to wintering grounds on the
headwaters of the San Joaquin and the Merced. Leaving most of his
party behind, he crossed the mountains, by a route south of the
Humboldt, and returned to Great Salt Lake.
Almost immediately he set out again for California by the previous
route, and in 1827 reached the San Jose mission. Here he was
arrested by the Spanish authorities and sent under guard to
Monterey, where another Yankee skipper secured his release.
Wintering once more in California, this time on the American Fork,
he reached the coast in the spring of 1828, and followed the Umpquah
River towards the Oregon country. While he was absent, his camp was
attacked by the Indians and fifteen of his men killed. Absolutely
alone, Smith worked his way through the forest to Fort Vancouver,
where he enjoyed the hospitality of Dr. McLoughlin through the
winter. In the following spring he ascended the Columbia to the
Hudson Bay posts among the Flatheads, and made his way in the summer
of 1829 to the rendezvous of his company at the Tetons. In three
years this daring trader, braving the horrors of the desert and
passing unscathed from Indian attacks which carried off most of his
companions, opened to knowledge much of the vast country between
Great Salt Lake and the Pacific. [Footnote: H. H. Bancroft,
California, III., 152-160, citing the sources.] In 1831, while on
the Santa Fe trail, Smith and his companions lost their way.
Perishing with thirst, he finally reached the Cimaron, where, as he
was digging for water in its sandy bed, he was shot by an Indian.
Thus the active men of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, in the decade
between 1820 and 1830, revealed the sources of the Platte, the
Green, the Yellowstone, and the Snake rivers, and the
characteristics of the Great Salt Lake region; they pioneered the
way to South Pass, descended Green River by boat, carried cannon
into the interior basin; showed the practicability of a wagon route
through the Rockies, reached California from Salt Lake, crossed the
Sierras and the deserts of Utah and Nevada, and became intimately
acquainted with the activity of the British traders of the northwest
coast. [Footnote: Chittenden, Am. Fur Trade, I., 306.]
Already an interest in Oregon and the Rocky Mountain region was
arising on the eastern seaboard. In 1832, Captain Bonneville, an
officer in the United States army, on leave of absence, passed with
a wagon-train into the Rocky Mountains, where for nearly three years
he trapped and traded and explored. [Footnote: Irving, Bonneville.]
Walker, one of his men, in 1833, reached California by the Humboldt
River (a route afterwards followed by the emigrants to California),
and made known much new country. A New England enthusiast, Hall
Kelley, had for some years been lecturing on the riches of the
Oregon country and the need of planting an agricultural colony
there. It was natural that Boston should be interested in the Oregon
country, which was visited by so many vessels from that port. In
1820, New England missionaries settled in the Hawaiian Islands,
closely connected by trade with the coast. In 1832, Nathaniel Wyeth,
of Cambridge, Massachusetts, led a party of New-Englanders west,
with the plan of establishing a trading and fishing post on the
waters of the Columbia. [Footnote: Chittenden, Am. Fur Trade, I.,
435; Wyeth's "Journals" are published by the Oregon Hist. Soc.; cf.
Irving, Bonneville, chap. vi.]
With Wyeth, on a second expedition in 1834, went the Reverend Jason
Lee and four Methodist missionaries. Two years later came Dr. Marcus
Whitman and another company of missionaries with their wives; they
brought a wagon through South Pass and over the mountains to the
Snake River, and began an agricultural colony. Thus the old story of
the sequence of fur-trader, missionary, and settler was repeated.
The possession of Oregon by the British fur-trader was challenged by
the American farmer.
Contemporaneously with the development of the fur-trade in the Rocky
Mountains, a trade was opened between St. Louis and the old Spanish
settlements at Santa Fe. Although even in the days of Washington
adventurous frontiersmen like George Rogers Clark had set their eyes
on Santa Fe and the silver-mines of the southwest, it was not until
the Mexican revolution (1821), when Spain's control was weakened
throughout her whole domain, that systematic trade was possible. In
1822, Becknell, of Missouri, took a wagon-train to Santa Fe, to
trade for horses and mules and to trap en route. Year after year
thereafter, caravans of Missouri traders found their way across the
desert, by the Santa Fe trail, with cottons and other dry-goods
furnished from St. Louis, and brought back horses, mules, furs, and
silver. The trade averaged about one hundred and thirty thousand
dollars a year, and was an important source of supply of specie for
the west; and it stimulated the interest of St. Louis in the Mexican
provinces. The mode of handling the wagon--trains that passed
between Missouri and Santa Fe furnished the model for the caravans
that later were to cross the plains in the rush to the gold-fields
of California.[Footnote: Gregg, Commerce of the Prairies;
Chittenden, Am. Fur Trade, II., chap. xxix.] By 1833 the important
western routes were clearly made known.[Footnote: Semple, Am. Hist.
and its Geographic Conditions, chap, x.] The Oregon trail, the Santa
Fe trail, the Spanish trail, and the Gila route [Footnote: Personal
Narrative of James O. Pattie; H. H. Bancroft, Hist. of California,
III., 162.] had been followed by frontiersmen into the promised land
of the Pacific coast and the southwest. In the course of ten years,
not only had the principal secrets of the topography of the Rocky
Mountains, the Great Basin, the passes across the Sierra Nevadas
been revealed, but also the characteristics of the Spanish-American
settlements of California and the Rio Grande region. Already
pioneers sought Texas, and American colonization was preparing for
another and greater conquest of the wilderness.
The interest of the United States government in the far west in this
period was shown in exploration and diplomacy. Calhoun projected an
extension of the forts of the United States well up the Missouri
into the Indian country, partly as protection to the traders and
partly as a defense against English aggressions. Two Yellowstone
expeditions [Footnote: Chittenden, Am. Fur Trade, II., 562; Long's
Expedition (Early Western Travels, XIV.-XVII.).] were designed to
promote these ends. The first of these, 1819-1820, was a joint
military and scientific undertaking; but the military expedition,
attempting to ascend the Missouri in steamboats, got no farther than
Council Bluffs. Mismanagement, extravagance, and scandal attended
the undertaking, and the enterprise was made an occasion for a
political onslaught on Calhoun's management of the war department.
The scientific expedition, under Major Long, of the United States
Engineering Corps, ascended the Missouri in the Western Engineer,
the first steamboat which navigated those waters above St. Louis--a
stern-wheeler, with serpent-mouthed figure-head, through which the
steam escaped, bringing terror to the savages along the banks. The
expedition advanced far up the South Platte, discovered Long's Peak,
and camped near the site of Denver. Thence the party passed to La
Junta, Colorado, whence it broke into two divisions, one of which
descended the Arkansas; the other reached the Canadian River (which
it mistook for the Red) and descended to its junction with the
Arkansas. The effort to push the military power of the government to
the mouth of the Yellowstone failed, and the net result, on the
military side, was a temporary post near the present site of Omaha.
The most important effect of the expedition was to give currency to
Long's description of the country through which he passed as the
"Great American Desert," unfit for cultivation and uninhabitable by
agricultural settlers. The whole of the region between the Missouri
River and the Rocky Mountains seemed to him adapted as a range for
buffalo, "calculated to serve as a barrier to prevent too great an
extension of our population westward," and to secure us against the
incursions of enemies in that quarter. [Footnote: Long's Expedition
(Early Western Travels, XVII.), 147, 148.] A second expedition, in
1825, under General Atkinson and Major O'Fallon, reached the mouth
of the Yellowstone, having made treaties with various Indian tribes
on the way.
In the mean time, Congress and the president were busy with the
question of Oregon. By the convention of 1818, with Great Britain,
the northern boundary of the United States was carried from the Lake
of the Woods to the Rocky Mountains, along the forty-ninth parallel.
Beyond the mountains, the Oregon country was left open, for a period
of ten years, to joint occupation of both powers, without prejudice
to the claims of either. Having thus postponed the Oregon question,
the secretary of state, John Quincy Adams, turned to his Spanish
relations. Obliged by Monroe to relinquish our claim to Texas in the
treaty of 1819, by which we obtained Florida, he insisted on so
drawing our boundary-line in the southwest as to acquire Spain's
title to the Pacific north of the forty-second parallel, and to the
lands that lay north and east of the irregular line from the
intersection of this parallel with the Rocky Mountains to the
Sabine. Adams was proud of securing this line to the Pacific Ocean,
for it was the first recognition by an outside power of our rights
in the Oregon country.[Footnote: Treaties and Conventions (ed. of
1889), 416, 1017; Babcock, Am. Nationality (Am. Nation, XIII.),
chap, xvi.; J. Q. Adams, Memoirs, IV., 275.]
Although Russia put forward large and exclusive claims north of the
fifty-first parallel, which we challenged, the contest for Oregon
lay between England and the United States. At the close of 1820,
Floyd, of Virginia, moved in the House of Representatives to inquire
into the feasibility of the occupation of the Columbia River; and
early the next year [Footnote: Annals of Cong., 16 Cong., 2 Sess.,
945; J. Q. Adams, Memoirs, V., 238, 243-260.] a committee report was
brought in, discussing the American rights. Floyd's bill provided
for the military occupation of the Columbia River, donation of lands
to actual settlers, and control of the Indians. No vote was reached,
however, and it was not until the close of 1822 that the matter
secured the attention of Congress.
Whatever may have been his motives, Floyd stated with vividness the
significance of western advance in relation to the Pacific coast. He
showed that, while in 1755, nearly a hundred and fifty years after
the foundation of Jamestown, the population of Virginia had spread
but three hundred miles into the interior of the country, during the
last forty-three years population had spread westward more than a
thousand miles. He recalled the days when more than a month was
required to furnish Kentucky with eastern goods, by way of
Pittsburgh, and when it required a voyage of over a month to pass
from Louisville to New Orleans and nearly three months for the
upward voyage. This had now been shortened by steamboat to seven
days down and sixteen days up. From these considerations and the
time from St. Louis to the mouth of the Columbia by steamboat and
wagon, he argued that Oregon was no more distant from St. Louis in
1822 than St. Louis was twenty years before from Philadelphia. The
fur-trade, the whale and seal fisheries, the trade with China, and
the opportunity for agricultural occupation afforded by Oregon were
all set forth.[Footnote: Annals of Cong., 17 Cong., 2 Sess., 397.]
Against the proposal, his opponents argued inexpediency rather than
our treaties with Great Britain. Tracy, of New York, doubted the
value of the Oregon country, and, influenced perhaps by Long's
report, declared that "nature has fixed limits for our nation; she
has kindly introduced as our Western barrier, mountains almost
inaccessible, whose base she has skirted with irreclaimable deserts
of sand."[Footnote: Ibid., 590.] In a later debate, Smyth, of
Virginia, amplified this idea by a proposal to limit the boundaries
of the United States, so that it should include but one or two tiers
of states beyond the Mississippi. He would remove the Indians beyond
this limit, and, if American settlements should cross it, they might
be in alliance with, or under the protection of, the United States,
but outside of its bounds. [Footnote: Register of Debates, 18 Cong.,
2 Sess., I., 37.]
Baylies, of Massachusetts, declared that there were living witnesses
"who have seen a population of scarcely six hundred thousand swelled
into ten millions; a population which, in their youth, extended
scarcely an hundred miles from the ocean, spreading beyond the
mountains of the West, and sweeping down those mighty waters which
open into regions of such matchless fertility and beauty." "Some now
within these walls may, before they die, witness scenes more
wonderful than these; and in aftertimes may cherish delightful
recollections of this day, when America, almost shrinking from the
'shadows of coming events,' first placed her feet upon untrodden
ground, scarcely daring to anticipate the grandeur which awaited
her." Tucker, of Virginia, agreed that settlement "marches on, with
the increasing rapidity of a fire, and nothing will stop it until it
reaches the shores of the Pacific," which he estimated would be by
1872. But he was loath to see it accelerated, believing that the
people on the east and the west side of the Rocky Mountains would
have a permanent separation of interests. [Footnote: Annals of
Cong., 17 Cong., 2 Sess., 422.] Nor were even western men sanguine
that the nation could retain the Pacific coast as an integral part
of its vast empire. Senator Benton, of Missouri, was the
congressional champion of the far west. Born in interior North
Carolina, he had followed the frontier to Tennessee, and then, after
killing his man in a duel and exchanging pistol-shots in a free
fight with Jackson, he removed to the new frontier at St. Louis.
Pedantic and ponderous, deeply read in curious historical lore, in
many ways he was not characteristic of the far west, but in the
coarse vigor with which he bore down opposition by abuse, and in the
far horizon line of the policies he advocated, he thoroughly
represented its traits.
Familiar as he was with frontier needs and aspirations, he urged the
United States to block England's control of the northwest, and to
assert title to the Oregon territory, with the idea of ultimately
founding a new and independent American nation there. It is true
that he admitted that along the ridge of the Rocky Mountains "the
western limit of this republic should be drawn, and the statue of
the fabled god Terminus should be raised upon its highest peak,
never to be thrown down." [Footnote: Register of Debates, I., 712.]
Nevertheless, in his utterances the ideal of expansion was not to be
mistaken. He spoke bravely in favor of the protection and extension
of the fur-trade, [Footnote: Annals of Cong., 17 Cong., 1 Sess., I.,
416; cf. ibid., 18 Cong., I Sess., I., 456.] pointing out that
inasmuch as England occupied Oregon, she would, under the law of
nations, have the right of possession until the question of
sovereignty were decided. He warned his countrymen, in 1823, that
Great Britain would monopolize the Pacific Ocean, and by obtaining
control of the Rocky Mountain fur-trade would be able to launch the
Indians of the north and west against the frontiers of Missouri and
Arkansas, Illinois and Michigan, upon the first renewal of
hostilities between the United States of America and the king of
Great Britain. [Footnote: Ibid., 17 Cong., 2 Sess., 246-251.]
Benton believed that, within a century, a population greater than
that of the United States of 1820 would exist on the west side of
the Rocky Mountains; and he saw in the occupation of the northwest
coast the means of promoting a trade between the valley of the
Mississippi, the Pacific Ocean, and Asia. Upon the people of eastern
Asia, he thought, the establishment of a civilized power on the
opposite coast of America would produce great benefits. "Science,
liberal principles in government, and the true religion, might cast
their lights across the intervening sea. The valley of the Columbia
might become the granary of China and Japan, and an outlet to their
imprisoned and exuberant population.... Russia and the legitimates
menace Turkey, Persia, Ch
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