The Farmers Beyond The Appalachians
The nationalism of Hamilton was undemocratic. The democracy of Jefferson
was, in the beginning, provincial. The historic mission of uniting
nationalism and democracy was in the course of time given to new leaders
from a region beyond the mountains, peopled by men and women from all
sections and free from those state traditions which ran back to the
early days of colonization. The voice of the democratic nationalism
nou
ished in the West was heard when Clay of Kentucky advocated his
American system of protection for industries; when Jackson of Tennessee
condemned nullification in a ringing proclamation that has taken its
place among the great American state papers; and when Lincoln of
Illinois, in a fateful hour, called upon a bewildered people to meet the
supreme test whether this was a nation destined to survive or to perish.
And it will be remembered that Lincoln's party chose for its banner that
earlier device--Republican--which Jefferson had made a sign of power.
The "rail splitter" from Illinois united the nationalism of Hamilton
with the democracy of Jefferson, and his appeal was clothed in the
simple language of the people, not in the sonorous rhetoric which
Webster learned in the schools.
PREPARATION FOR WESTERN SETTLEMENT
The West and the American Revolution
The excessive attention devoted
by historians to the military operations along the coast has obscured
the role played by the frontier in the American Revolution. The action
of Great Britain in closing western land to easy settlement in 1763 was
more than an incident in precipitating the war for independence.
Americans on the frontier did not forget it; when Indians were employed
by England to defend that land, zeal for the patriot cause set the
interior aflame. It was the members of the western vanguard, like Daniel
Boone, John Sevier, and George Rogers Clark, who first understood the
value of the far-away country under the guns of the English forts, where
the Red Men still wielded the tomahawk and the scalping knife. It was
they who gave the East no rest until their vision was seen by the
leaders on the seaboard who directed the course of national policy. It
was one of their number, a seasoned Indian fighter, George Rogers Clark,
who with aid from Virginia seized Kaskaskia and Vincennes and secured
the whole Northwest to the union while the fate of Washington's army was
still hanging in the balance.
Western Problems at the End of the Revolution
The treaty of peace,
signed with Great Britain in 1783, brought the definite cession of the
coveted territory west to the Mississippi River, but it left unsolved
many problems. In the first place, tribes of resentful Indians in the
Ohio region, even though British support was withdrawn at last, had to
be reckoned with; and it was not until after the establishment of the
federal Constitution that a well-equipped army could be provided to
guarantee peace on the border. In the second place, British garrisons
still occupied forts on Lake Erie pending the execution of the terms of
the treaty of 1783--terms which were not fulfilled until after the
ratification of the Jay treaty twelve years later. In the third place,
Virginia, Connecticut, and Massachusetts had conflicting claims to the
land in the Northwest based on old English charters and Indian treaties.
It was only after a bitter contest that the states reached an agreement
to transfer their rights to the government of the United States,
Virginia executing her deed of cession on March 1, 1784. In the fourth
place, titles to lands bought by individuals remained uncertain in the
absence of official maps and records. To meet this last situation,
Congress instituted a systematic survey of the Ohio country, laying it
out into townships, sections of 640 acres each, and quarter sections. In
every township one section of land was set aside for the support of
public schools.
The Northwest Ordinance
The final problem which had to be solved
before settlement on a large scale could be begun was that of governing
the territory. Pioneers who looked with hungry eyes on the fertile
valley of the Ohio could hardly restrain their impatience. Soldiers of
the Revolution, who had been paid for their services in land warrants
entitling them to make entries in the West, called for action.
Congress answered by passing in 1787 the famous Northwest Ordinance
providing for temporary territorial government to be followed by the
creation of a popular assembly as soon as there were five thousand free
males in any district. Eventual admission to the union on an equal
footing with the original states was promised to the new territories.
Religious freedom was guaranteed. The safeguards of trial by jury,
regular judicial procedure, and habeas corpus were established, in order
that the methods of civilized life might take the place of the
rough-and-ready justice of lynch law. During the course of the debate on
the Ordinance, Congress added the sixth article forbidding slavery and
involuntary servitude.
This Charter of the Northwest, so well planned by the Congress under the
Articles of Confederation, was continued in force by the first Congress
under the Constitution in 1789. The following year its essential
provisions, except the ban on slavery, were applied to the territory
south of the Ohio, ceded by North Carolina to the national government,
and in 1798 to the Mississippi territory, once held by Georgia. Thus it
was settled for all time that "the new colonies were not to be exploited
for the benefit of the parent states (any more than for the benefit of
England) but were to be autonomous and cooerdinate commonwealths." This
outcome, bitterly opposed by some Eastern leaders who feared the triumph
of Western states over the seaboard, completed the legal steps necessary
by way of preparation for the flood of settlers.
The Land Companies, Speculators, and Western Land Tenure
As in the
original settlement of America, so in the opening of the West, great
companies and single proprietors of large grants early figured. In 1787
the Ohio Land Company, a New England concern, acquired a million and a
half acres on the Ohio and began operations by planting the town of
Marietta. A professional land speculator, J.C. Symmes, secured a million
acres lower down where the city of Cincinnati was founded. Other
individuals bought up soldiers' claims and so acquired enormous holdings
for speculative purposes. Indeed, there was such a rush to make fortunes
quickly through the rise in land values that Washington was moved to cry
out against the "rage for speculating in and forestalling of land on the
North West of the Ohio," protesting that "scarce a valuable spot within
any tolerable distance of it is left without a claimant." He therefore
urged Congress to fix a reasonable price for the land, not "too
exorbitant and burdensome for real occupiers, but high enough to
discourage monopolizers."
Congress, however, was not prepared to use the public domain for the
sole purpose of developing a body of small freeholders in the West. It
still looked upon the sale of public lands as an important source of
revenue with which to pay off the public debt; consequently it thought
more of instant income than of ultimate results. It placed no limit on
the amount which could be bought when it fixed the price at $2 an acre
in 1796, and it encouraged the professional land operator by making the
first installment only twenty cents an acre in addition to the small
registration and survey fee. On such terms a speculator with a few
thousand dollars could get possession of an enormous plot of land. If he
was fortunate in disposing of it, he could meet the installments, which
were spread over a period of four years, and make a handsome profit for
himself. Even when the credit or installment feature was abolished in
1821 and the price of the land lowered to a cash price of $1.75 an acre,
the opportunity for large speculative purchases continued to attract
capital to land ventures.
The Development of the Small Freehold
The cheapness of land and the
scarcity of labor, nevertheless, made impossible the triumph of the huge
estate with its semi-servile tenantry. For about $45 a man could get a
farm of 160 acres on the installment plan; another payment of $80 was
due in forty days; but a four-year term was allowed for the discharge of
the balance. With a capital of from two to three hundred dollars a
family could embark on a land venture. If it had good crops, it could
meet the deferred payments. It was, however, a hard battle at best. Many
a man forfeited his land through failure to pay the final installment;
yet in the end, in spite of all the handicaps, the small freehold of a
few hundred acres at most became the typical unit of Western
agriculture, except in the planting states of the Gulf. Even the lands
of the great companies were generally broken up and sold in small lots.
The tendency toward moderate holdings, so favored by Western conditions,
was also promoted by a clause in the Northwest Ordinance declaring that
the land of any person dying intestate--that is, without any will
disposing of it--should be divided equally among his descendants.
Hildreth says of this provision: "It established the important
republican principle, not then introduced into all the states, of the
equal distribution of landed as well as personal property." All these
forces combined made the wide dispersion of wealth, in the early days of
the nineteenth century, an American characteristic, in marked contrast
with the European system of family prestige and vast estates based on
the law of primogeniture.
THE WESTERN MIGRATION AND NEW STATES
The People
With government established, federal arms victorious over
the Indians, and the lands surveyed for sale, the way was prepared for
the immigrants. They came with a rush. Young New Englanders, weary of
tilling the stony soil of their native states, poured through New York
and Pennsylvania, some settling on the northern bank of the Ohio but
most of them in the Lake region. Sons and daughters of German farmers in
Pennsylvania and many a redemptioner who had discharged his bond of
servitude pressed out into Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, or beyond. From
the exhausted fields and the clay hills of the Southern states came
pioneers of English and Scotch-Irish descent, the latter in great
numbers. Indeed one historian of high authority has ventured to say that
"the rapid expansion of the United States from a coast strip to a
continental area is largely a Scotch-Irish achievement." While native
Americans of mixed stocks led the way into the West, it was not long
before immigrants direct from Europe, under the stimulus of company
enterprise, began to filter into the new settlements in increasing
numbers.
The types of people were as various as the nations they represented.
Timothy Flint, who published his entertaining Recollections in 1826,
found the West a strange mixture of all sorts and conditions of people.
Some of them, he relates, had been hunters in the upper world of the
Mississippi, above the falls of St. Anthony. Some had been still farther
north, in Canada. Still others had wandered from the South--the Gulf of
Mexico, the Red River, and the Spanish country. French boatmen and
trappers, Spanish traders from the Southwest, Virginia planters with
their droves of slaves mingled with English, German, and Scotch-Irish
farmers. Hunters, forest rangers, restless bordermen, and squatters,
like the foaming combers of an advancing tide, went first. Then followed
the farmers, masters of the ax and plow, with their wives who shared
every burden and hardship and introduced some of the features of
civilized life. The hunters and rangers passed on to new scenes; the
home makers built for all time.
The Number of Immigrants
There were no official stations on the
frontier to record the number of immigrants who entered the West during
the decades following the American Revolution. But travelers of the time
record that every road was "crowded" with pioneers and their families,
their wagons and cattle; and that they were seldom out of the sound of
the snapping whip of the teamster urging forward his horses or the crack
of the hunter's rifle as he brought down his evening meal. "During the
latter half of 1787," says Coman, "more than nine hundred boats floated
down the Ohio carrying eighteen thousand men, women, and children, and
twelve thousand horses, sheep, and cattle, and six hundred and fifty
wagons." Other lines of travel were also crowded and with the passing
years the flooding tide of home seekers rose higher and higher.
The Western Routes
Four main routes led into the country beyond the
Appalachians. The Genesee road, beginning at Albany, ran almost due west
to the present site of Buffalo on Lake Erie, through a level country. In
the dry season, wagons laden with goods could easily pass along it into
northern Ohio. A second route, through Pittsburgh, was fed by three
eastern branches, one starting at Philadelphia, one at Baltimore, and
another at Alexandria. A third main route wound through the mountains
from Alexandria to Boonesboro in Kentucky and then westward across the
Ohio to St. Louis. A fourth, the most famous of them all, passed through
the Cumberland Gap and by branches extended into the Cumberland valley
and the Kentucky country.
Of these four lines of travel, the Pittsburgh route offered the most
advantages. Pioneers, no matter from what section they came, when once
they were on the headwaters of the Ohio and in possession of a flatboat,
could find a quick and easy passage into all parts of the West and
Southwest. Whether they wanted to settle in Ohio, Kentucky, or western
Tennessee they could find their way down the drifting flood to their
destination or at least to some spot near it. Many people from the South
as well as the Northern and Middle states chose this route; so it came
about that the sons and daughters of Virginia and the Carolinas mingled
with those of New York, Pennsylvania, and New England in the settlement
of the Northwest territory.
The Methods of Travel into the West
Many stories giving exact
descriptions of methods of travel into the West in the early days have
been preserved. The country was hardly opened before visitors from the
Old World and from the Eastern states, impelled by curiosity, made their
way to the very frontier of civilization and wrote books to inform or
amuse the public. One of them, Gilbert Imlay, an English traveler, has
given us an account of the Pittsburgh route as he found it in 1791. "If
a man ... " he writes, "has a family or goods of any sort to remove, his
best way, then, would be to purchase a waggon and team of horses to
carry his property to Redstone Old Fort or to Pittsburgh, according as
he may come from the Northern or Southern states. A good waggon will
cost, at Philadelphia, about L10 ... and the horses about L12 each; they
would cost something more both at Baltimore and Alexandria. The waggon
may be covered with canvass, and if it is the choice of the people, they
may sleep in it of nights with the greatest safety. But if they dislike
that, there are inns of accommodation the whole distance on the
different roads.... The provisions I would purchase in the same manner
[that is, from the farmers along the road]; and by having two or three
camp kettles and stopping every evening when the weather is fine upon
the brink of some rivulet and by kindling a fire they may soon dress
their own food.... This manner of journeying is so far from being
disagreeable that in a fine season it is extremely pleasant." The
immigrant once at Pittsburgh or Wheeling could then buy a flatboat of a
size required for his goods and stock, and drift down the current to his
journey's end.
The Admission of Kentucky and Tennessee
When the eighteenth century
drew to a close, Kentucky had a population larger than Delaware, Rhode
Island, or New Hampshire. Tennessee claimed 60,000 inhabitants. In 1792
Kentucky took her place as a state beside her none too kindly parent,
Virginia. The Eastern Federalists resented her intrusion; but they took
some consolation in the admission of Vermont because the balance of
Eastern power was still retained.
As if to assert their independence of old homes and conservative ideas
the makers of Kentucky's first constitution swept aside the landed
qualification on the suffrage and gave the vote to all free white males.
Four years later, Kentucky's neighbor to the south, Tennessee, followed
this step toward a wider democracy. After encountering fierce opposition
from the Federalists, Tennessee was accepted as the sixteenth state.
Ohio
The door of the union had hardly opened for Tennessee when
another appeal was made to Congress, this time from the pioneers in
Ohio. The little posts founded at Marietta and Cincinnati had grown into
flourishing centers of trade. The stream of immigrants, flowing down the
river, added daily to their numbers and the growing settlements all
around poured produce into their markets to be exchanged for "store
goods." After the Indians were disposed of in 1794 and the last British
soldier left the frontier forts under the terms of the Jay treaty of
1795, tiny settlements of families appeared on Lake Erie in the "Western
Reserve," a region that had been retained by Connecticut when she
surrendered her other rights in the Northwest.
At the close of the century, Ohio, claiming a population of more than
50,000, grew discontented with its territorial status. Indeed, two years
before the enactment of the Northwest Ordinance, squatters in that
region had been invited by one John Emerson to hold a convention after
the fashion of the men of Hartford, Windsor, and Wethersfield in old
Connecticut and draft a frame of government for themselves. This true
son of New England declared that men "have an undoubted right to pass
into every vacant country and there to form their constitution and that
from the confederation of the whole United States Congress is not
empowered to forbid them." This grand convention was never held because
the heavy hand of the government fell upon the leaders; but the spirit
of John Emerson did not perish. In November, 1802, a convention chosen
by voters, assembled under the authority of Congress at Chillicothe,
drew up a constitution. It went into force after a popular ratification.
The roll of the convention bore such names as Abbot, Baldwin, Cutler,
Huntington, Putnam, and Sargent, and the list of counties from which
they came included Adams, Fairfield, Hamilton, Jefferson, Trumbull, and
Washington, showing that the new America in the West was peopled and led
by the old stock. In 1803 Ohio was admitted to the union.
Indiana and Illinois
As in the neighboring state, the frontier in
Indiana advanced northward from the Ohio, mainly under the leadership,
however, of settlers from the South--restless Kentuckians hoping for
better luck in a newer country and pioneers from the far frontiers of
Virginia and North Carolina. As soon as a tier of counties swinging
upward like the horns of the moon against Ohio on the east and in the
Wabash Valley on the west was fairly settled, a clamor went up for
statehood. Under the authority of an act of Congress in 1816 the
Indianians drafted a constitution and inaugurated their government at
Corydon. "The majority of the members of the convention," we are told by
a local historian, "were frontier farmers who had a general idea of what
they wanted and had sense enough to let their more erudite colleagues
put it into shape."
Two years later, the pioneers of Illinois, also settled upward from the
Ohio, like Indiana, elected their delegates to draft a constitution.
Leadership in the convention, quite properly, was taken by a man born in
New York and reared in Tennessee; and the constitution as finally
drafted "was in its principal provisions a copy of the then existing
constitutions of Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana.... Many of the articles
are exact copies in wording although differently arranged and
numbered."
Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama
Across the Mississippi to the
far south, clearing and planting had gone on with much bustle and
enterprise. The cotton and sugar lands of Louisiana, opened by French
and Spanish settlers, were widened in every direction by planters with
their armies of slaves from the older states. New Orleans, a good market
and a center of culture not despised even by the pioneer, grew apace. In
1810 the population of lower Louisiana was over 75,000. The time had
come, said the leaders of the people, to fulfill the promise made to
France in the treaty of cession; namely, to grant to the inhabitants of
the territory statehood and the rights of American citizens. Federalists
from New England still having a voice in Congress, if somewhat weaker,
still protested in tones of horror. "I am compelled to declare it as my
deliberate opinion," pronounced Josiah Quincy in the House of
Representatives, "that if this bill [to admit Louisiana] passes, the
bonds of this Union are virtually dissolved ... that as it will be the
right of all, so it will be the duty of some [states] to prepare
definitely for a separation; amicably if they can, violently if they
must.... It is a death blow to the Constitution. It may afterwards
linger; but lingering, its fate will, at no very distant period, be
consummated." Federalists from New York like those from New England had
their doubts about the wisdom of admitting Western states; but the party
of Jefferson and Madison, having the necessary majority, granted the
coveted statehood to Louisiana in 1812.
When, a few years later, Mississippi and Alabama knocked at the doors of
the union, the Federalists had so little influence, on account of their
conduct during the second war with England, that spokesmen from the
Southwest met a kindlier reception at Washington. Mississippi, in 1817,
and Alabama, in 1819, took their places among the United States of
America. Both of them, while granting white manhood suffrage, gave their
constitutions the tone of the old East by providing landed
qualifications for the governor and members of the legislature.
Missouri
Far to the north in the Louisiana purchase, a new
commonwealth was rising to power. It was peopled by immigrants who came
down the Ohio in fleets of boats or crossed the Mississippi from
Kentucky and Tennessee. Thrifty Germans from Pennsylvania, hardy farmers
from Virginia ready to work with their own hands, freemen seeking
freemen's homes, planters with their slaves moving on from worn-out
fields on the seaboard, came together in the widening settlements of the
Missouri country. Peoples from the North and South flowed together,
small farmers and big planters mingling in one community. When their
numbers had reached sixty thousand or more, they precipitated a contest
over their admission to the union, "ringing an alarm bell in the night,"
as Jefferson phrased it. The favorite expedient of compromise with
slavery was brought forth in Congress once more. Maine consequently was
brought into the union without slavery and Missouri with slavery. At the
same time there was drawn westward through the rest of the Louisiana
territory a line separating servitude from slavery.
THE SPIRIT OF THE FRONTIER
Land Tenure and Liberty
Over an immense western area there developed
an unbroken system of freehold farms. In the Gulf states and the lower
Mississippi Valley, it is true, the planter with his many slaves even
led in the pioneer movement; but through large sections of Tennessee and
Kentucky, as well as upper Georgia and Alabama, and all throughout the
Northwest territory the small farmer reigned supreme. In this immense
dominion there sprang up a civilization without caste or class--a body
of people all having about the same amount of this world's goods and
deriving their livelihood from one source: the labor of their own hands
on the soil. The Northwest territory alone almost equaled in area all
the original thirteen states combined, except Georgia, and its system of
agricultural economy was unbroken by plantations and feudal estates. "In
the subdivision of the soil and the great equality of condition," as
Webster said on more than one occasion, "lay the true basis, most
certainly, of popular government." There was the undoubted source of
Jacksonian democracy.
The Characteristics of the Western People
Travelers into the
Northwest during the early years of the nineteenth century were agreed
that the people of that region were almost uniformly marked by the
characteristics common to an independent yeomanry. A close observer thus
recorded his impressions: "A spirit of adventurous enterprise, a
willingness to go through any hardship to accomplish an object....
Independence of thought and action. They have felt the influence of
these principles from their childhood. Men who can endure anything; that
have lived almost without restraint, free as the mountain air or as the
deer and the buffalo of their forests, and who know they are Americans
all.... An apparent roughness which some would deem rudeness of
manner.... Where there is perfect equality in a neighborhood of people
who know little about each other's previous history or ancestry but
where each is lord of the soil he cultivates. Where a log cabin is all
that the best of families can expect to have for years and of course can
possess few of the external decorations which have so much influence in
creating a diversity of rank in society. These circumstances have laid
the foundation for that equality of intercourse, simplicity of manners,
want of deference, want of reserve, great readiness to make
acquaintances, freedom of speech, indisposition to brook real or
imaginary insults which one witnesses among people of the West."
This equality, this independence, this rudeness so often described by
the traveler as marking a new country, were all accentuated by the
character of the settlers themselves. Traces of the fierce, unsociable,
eagle-eyed, hard-drinking hunter remained. The settlers who followed the
hunter were, with some exceptions, soldiers of the Revolutionary army,
farmers of the "middling order," and mechanics from the towns,--English,
Scotch-Irish, Germans,--poor in possessions and thrown upon the labor of
their own hands for support. Sons and daughters from well-to-do Eastern
homes sometimes brought softer manners; but the equality of life and the
leveling force of labor in forest and field soon made them one in spirit
with their struggling neighbors. Even the preachers and teachers, who
came when the cabins were raised in the clearings and rude churches and
schoolhouses were built, preached sermons and taught lessons that
savored of the frontier, as any one may know who reads Peter
Cartwright's A Muscular Christian or Eggleston's The Hoosier
Schoolmaster.
THE WEST AND THE EAST MEET
The East Alarmed
A people so independent as the Westerners and so
attached to local self-government gave the conservative East many a rude
shock, setting gentlemen in powdered wigs and knee breeches agog with
the idea that terrible things might happen in the Mississippi Valley.
Not without good grounds did Washington fear that "a touch of a feather
would turn" the Western settlers away from the seaboard to the
Spaniards; and seriously did he urge the East not to neglect them, lest
they be "drawn into the arms of, or be dependent upon foreigners."
Taking advantage of the restless spirit in the Southwest, Aaron Burr,
having disgraced himself by killing Alexander Hamilton in a duel, laid
wild plans, if not to bring about a secession in that region, at least
to build a state of some kind out of the Spanish dominions adjoining
Louisiana. Frightened at such enterprises and fearing the dominance of
the West, the Federalists, with a few conspicuous exceptions, opposed
equality between the sections. Had their narrow views prevailed, the
West, with its new democracy, would have been held in perpetual tutelage
to the seaboard or perhaps been driven into independence as the thirteen
colonies had been not long before.
Eastern Friends of the West
Fortunately for the nation, there were
many Eastern leaders, particularly from the South, who understood the
West, approved its spirit, and sought to bring the two sections together
by common bonds. Washington kept alive and keen the zeal for Western
advancement which he acquired in his youth as a surveyor. He never grew
tired of urging upon his Eastern friends the importance of the lands
beyond the mountains. He pressed upon the governor of Virginia a project
for a wagon road connecting the seaboard with the Ohio country and was
active in a movement to improve the navigation of the Potomac. He
advocated strengthening the ties of commerce. "Smooth the roads," he
said, "and make easy the way for them, and then see what an influx of
articles will be poured upon us; how amazingly our exports will be
increased by them; and how amply we shall be compensated for any trouble
and expense we may encounter to effect it." Jefferson, too, was
interested in every phase of Western development--the survey of lands,
the exploration of waterways, the opening of trade, and even the
discovery of the bones of prehistoric animals. Robert Fulton, the
inventor of the steamboat, was another man of vision who for many years
pressed upon his countrymen the necessity of uniting East and West by a
canal which would cement the union, raise the value of the public lands,
and extend the principles of confederate and republican government.
The Difficulties of Early Transportation
Means of communication
played an important part in the strategy of all those who sought to
bring together the seaboard and the frontier. The produce of the
West--wheat, corn, bacon, hemp, cattle, and tobacco--was bulky and the
cost of overland transportation was prohibitive. In the Eastern market,
"a cow and her calf were given for a bushel of salt, while a suit of
'store clothes' cost as much as a farm." In such circumstances, the
inhabitants of the Mississippi Valley were forced to ship their produce
over a long route by way of New Orleans and to pay high freight rates
for everything that was brought across the mountains. Scows of from five
to fifty tons were built at the towns along the rivers and piloted down
the stream to the Crescent City. In a few cases small ocean-going
vessels were built to transport goods to the West Indies or to the
Eastern coast towns. Salt, iron, guns, powder, and the absolute
essentials which the pioneers had to buy mainly in Eastern markets were
carried over narrow wagon trails that were almost impassable in the
rainy season.
The National Road
To far-sighted men, like Albert Gallatin, "the
father of internal improvements," the solution of this problem was the
construction of roads and canals. Early in Jefferson's administration,
Congress dedicated a part of the proceeds from the sale of lands to
building highways from the headwaters of the navigable waters emptying
into the Atlantic to the Ohio River and beyond into the Northwest
territory. In 1806, after many misgivings, it authorized a great
national highway binding the East and the West. The Cumberland Road, as
it was called, began in northwestern Maryland, wound through southern
Pennsylvania, crossed the narrow neck of Virginia at Wheeling, and then
shot almost straight across Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, into Missouri.
By 1817, stagecoaches were running between Washington and Wheeling; by
1833 contractors had carried their work to Columbus, Ohio, and by 1852,
to Vandalia, Illinois. Over this ballasted road mail and passenger
coaches could go at high speed, and heavy freight wagons proceed in
safety at a steady pace.
Canals and Steamboats
A second epoch in the economic union of the
East and West was reached with the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825,
offering an all-water route from New York City to the Great Lakes and
the Mississippi Valley. Pennsylvania, alarmed by the advantages
conferred on New York by this enterprise, began her system of canals and
portages from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh, completing the last link in
1834. In the South, the Chesapeake and Ohio Company, chartered in 1825,
was busy with a project to connect Georgetown and Cumberland when
railways broke in upon the undertaking before it was half finished.
About the same time, Ohio built a canal across the state, affording
water communication between Lake Erie and the Ohio River through a rich
wheat belt. Passengers could now travel by canal boat into the West with
comparative ease and comfort, if not at a rapid speed, and the bulkiest
of freight could be easily handled. Moreover, the rate charged for
carrying goods was cut by the Erie Canal from $32 a ton per hundred
miles to $1. New Orleans was destined to lose her primacy in the
Mississippi Valley.
The diversion of traffic to Eastern markets was also stimulated by
steamboats which appeared on the Ohio about 1810, three years after
Fulton had made his famous trip on the Hudson. It took twenty men to
sail and row a five-ton scow up the river at a speed of from ten to
twenty miles a day. In 1825, Timothy Flint traveled a hundred miles a
day on the new steamer Grecian "against the whole weight of the
Mississippi current." Three years later the round trip from Louisville
to New Orleans was cut to eight days. Heavy produce that once had to
float down to New Orleans could be carried upstream and sent to the East
by way of the canal systems.
Thus the far country was brought near. The timid no longer hesitated at
the thought of the perilous journey. All routes were crowded with
Western immigrants. The forests fell before the ax like grain before the
sickle. Clearings scattered through the woods spread out into a great
mosaic of farms stretching from the Southern Appalachians to Lake
Michigan. The national census of 1830 gave 937,000 inhabitants to Ohio;
343,000 to Indiana; 157,000 to Illinois; 687,000 to Kentucky; and
681,000 to Tennessee.
With the increase in population and the growth of agriculture came
political influence. People who had once petitioned Congress now sent
their own representatives. Men who had hitherto accepted without
protests Presidents from the seaboard expressed a new spirit of dissent
in 1824 by giving only three electoral votes for John Quincy Adams; and
four years later they sent a son of the soil from Tennessee, Andrew
Jackson, to take Washington's chair as chief executive of the
nation--the first of a long line of Presidents from the Mississippi
basin.