Seventy-six years ago this day, a handful of Frenchmen sorrowfully
evacuated a fort, which stood on the point of land where the Alleghany
and Monongahela mingle their waters to form the Ohio. The French, with
their faithful allies the Indians, had made a vigourous resistance;
they had defeated the expedition sent against them in 1754, and
compelled Washington, then a lieutenant-colonel in the Virginia
militia, to surrender Fort Necessity. They had routed the troops of
the boastful Braddock, and spread terror, of which the memory is not
yet effaced, through the English colonies. But the destiny of France
was then in the hands of him, who of all her kings will be most
severely judged by the tribunal of history. Under that most dissolute
and selfish prince, France, sacrificed to the paltry intrigues of the
bed-chamber, humbled at home, could not triumph abroad. The French
were, therefore, obliged to abandon Fort Duquesne; on that day,
November 24, 1758, one of the most magnificent schemes ever projected,
was annihilated.
France had then possession of Canada and Louisiana; we were then
masters of the two finest rivers, the two largest and richest
basins of North America, that of the St. Lawrence and that of the
Mississippi.[AT] Between these two basins nature has raised no barrier,
so that in the rainy seasons, canoes can pass from Lake Michigan into
the bed of the Illinois, and continue their course thence without any
obstruction to the Gulf of Mexico. The plan of our heroic pioneers,
priests, sailors, and soldiers, had been to found the empire of New
France in this great valley. It is beyond a doubt, that this idea
had attracted the attention of Louis XIV., and that its execution
was already begun by the erection of a chain of posts, the sites
of which were admirably chosen. There is no country in the world
which comprises such an amount of so highly fertile land; none which
offers natural routes of communication comparable to the net-work of
navigable rivers and streams spread over this great region. There is
none more healthy, for with the exception of a few points or tracts
subject to autumnal fevers, but which rapidly lose this character
when brought under cultivation, there are only two infected spots,
New Orleans and Natchez, in which the yellow fever occasionally makes
its appearance, during a few months in the year. The sums swallowed
up by one of the foolish wars of Louis XV., would probably have been
amply sufficient to accomplish this noble project. But the enterprise,
although pushed forward by the local agents with admirable zeal and
sagacity, encountered only indifference from the ministers at home, the
great point of whose policy was to know, who was to be the favourite
mistress of his Most Christian Majesty on the morrow. The capture of
Fort Duquesne was soon followed by the conquest of all Canada by the
English; and in 1763, by the treaty of Paris (these treaties of Paris
never bode us any good), France, exhibiting an example of that complete
submission and flat despair, of which our annals exhibit so many
instances, and the English so few, ceded the basin of the St. Lawrence
and the left bank of the Mississippi to England, with one hand, and the
right bank of that great river to Spain, with the other.
Thus it came to pass, that the empire of New France, like so many other
magnificent schemes conceived in our country, existed only on paper,
or in the visions of youthful officers, full of sagacity and boldness,
and intrepid missionaries, heroes alike without a name, whose memory is
honoured only in the wigwam of some poor exiled Sachem. Fort Duquesne
is now become Pittsburg; in vain did I piously search for some relics
of the French fortress; there is no longer a stone, a brick, on the
Ohio, to attest that France bore sway here.[AU]
Pittsburg is at present essentially pacific; if cannon and balls are
seen here, it is because a trading people make it a rule to supply the
market with whatever is wanted. The cannon are new, fresh from the
mould, and equally at the disposition of the Sultan Mahmoud, or the
Emperor of Morocco, or the government of the States, whichever will pay
for them. Pittsburg is a manufacturing town, which will one day become
the Birmingham of America; one of its suburbs has already received that
name. It is surrounded, like Birmingham and Manchester, with a dense,
black smoke, which, bursting forth in volumes from the founderies,
forges, glass-houses, and the chimneys of all the manufactories and
houses, falls in flakes of soot upon the dwellings and persons of the
inhabitants; it is, therefore, the dirtiest town in the United States.
Pittsburg is far from being as populous as Birmingham, but it exhibits
proportionally a greater activity. Nowhere in the world is everybody so
regularly and continually busy as in Pittsburg; I do not believe there
is on the face of the earth, including the United States, where in
general very little time is given to pleasure, a single town in which
the idea of amusement so seldom enters the heads of the inhabitants.
Pittsburg is, therefore, one of the least amusing cities in the
world; there is no interruption of business for six days in the week,
except during the three meals, the longest of which occupies hardly
ten minutes, and Sunday in the United States, instead of being, as
with us, a day of recreation and gaiety, is, according to the English
custom, carried to a greater degree of rigour by the Anglo-Americans,
consecrated to prayer, meditation, and retirement. By means of this
energetic assiduity in work, which is common to all ages and classes,
and by the aid of numerous steam-engines which labour like humble
slaves, the inhabitants of Pittsburg create an amount of products,
altogether disproportioned to their number. The nature, bulk, and
weight of the articles make this disproportion more striking; for,
whether it be that American art, yet a novice, cannot give the finish
required for articles of luxury and ornament, or that the Americans
have the good sense to discern at a glance, that the manufacture of
objects of the first necessity or of essential use, is more profitable
than that of the trinkets with which civilisation seeks to adorn
herself wherever there is wealth, and even where there is none, only
the ruder and coarser kinds of work are done in Pittsburg.
Although Pittsburg is at this moment the first manufacturing town in
the Union, it is yet far from what it is destined one day to become.
It stands in the midst of an extensive coal-formation, the beds of
which are very easily worked. The district east of Pittsburg furnishes
much pig-iron, which is brought hither to be converted into malleable
iron, or into all kinds of machines, tools, and utensils. Pittsburg
has then coal and iron within reach; that is to say, power, and the
lever by which the power is to be applied. The vent for its wares is
still more vast than its means, for the whole basin of the Mississippi,
with all its lateral valleys, which on our continent would be basins
of the first class, lies open to it. The population, which improves in
its condition, as rapidly as it increases in numbers,[AV] creates an
indefinite demand for the engines and machines, hollow-ware, nails,
horse-shoes, glass, tools and implements, pottery, and stuffs of
Pittsburg. It needs axes to fell the primitive forests, saws to convert
the trees into boards, plough-shares and spades to turn up the soil
once cleared. It requires steam-engines for the fleet of steamers,
which throng the western waters. It must have nails, hinges, latches,
and other kinds of hardware for houses; it must have white lead to
paint them, glass to light them; and all these new households must have
furniture and bed linen, for here every one makes himself comfortable.
Thus Pittsburg is beginning to be what Birmingham and St Etienne are,
and what several places in the departments of the Aveyron and Gard will
become, when we become more enterprising, and use the proper exertions
to develop all the resources now buried in the bowels of our _belle
France_, for so it is called everywhere abroad. Pittsburg is beside and
must be a commercial city, a great mart. Standing at the head of steam
navigation on the Ohio, it is, directly or indirectly, that is through
the medium of the more central cities of Cincinnati and Louisville,
the natural _entrepôt_ between the upper and lower country, the North
and the South. Pennsylvania has spared no pains to secure and extend
the advantages resulting from this situation. It has made Pittsburg
one of the pivots of its great system of internal improvements, which
was undertaken with such boldness, and has been pursued with such
perseverance. Pittsburg is connected with Philadelphia by a line of
railroads and canals nearly four hundred miles in length, and the
numerous branches of the Pennsylvania Canal give it a communication
with all the most important points in the State. A direct communication
with Lake Erie is, indeed, wanting, but it will soon have a double
and triple one. A railroad, 300 miles in length is projected between
Baltimore and the Ohio, and one third of the distance is already
completed; the legislature of Pennsylvania have made it a condition
that the western terminus of this work shall be at Pittsburg. A canal,
for which the plans and drawings were furnished by General Bernard, is
to connect Chesapeake Bay by the way of Washington with the Ohio, and
the same condition in favour of Pittsburg has been prescribed in this
case.
Pittsburg is one of the few American towns, which owe their birth
to war; it was at first one of the chain of French forts, and was
afterward occupied by the English as a frontier post against the
savages. In 1781, Pittsburg consisted of a few houses under the
protection of the cannon of Fort Pitt. The origin of Cincinnati was
similar; both commenced with a fortress, but more fortunate than some
of our great commercial towns, such as Havre, which is stifled in the
embrace of its fortifications, Pittsburg and Cincinnati have caused all
traces of their original destination to disappear. Of Fort Pitt, which
the English constructed just above the site of Fort Duquesne, nothing
remains but a small magazine which has been converted into a dwelling
house; another trace of the martial epoch (which here forms the
mythological ages), is the name of Redoubt Alley, which is taken from
a battery once erected there, to sweep the Monongahela. At Cincinnati,
Fort Washington has been razed, and on its site now stands a bazaar
built by Mrs Trollope. Not one of the least singular changes that have
taken place in America within a half century, is the difference between
the old mode of founding a town, and the manner in which they are at
present made to rise out of the ground.
Some weeks ago I visited the anthracite coal district in Pennsylvania
(see _Note 18_); the Anthracite, the most convenient kind of fuel, is
at present in general use all along the Atlantic coast from Washington
to Boston, and its introduction has made a revolution in household
matters. Six or seven years since, when the demand for it was suddenly
very much increased, the district which contains the coal-beds became
the subject of speculation, at first prudently conducted, but finally
growing wild and extravagant. The speculators vied with each other
in tracing out town-plots; I have seen detailed plans, with straight
streets and fine public squares scrupulously reserved, of cities which
do not actually consist of a single street, of towns which hardly
contain three houses. This frenzy gave birth, however, to one town of
3,000 inhabitants, Pottsville, to ten or twelve railroads, great and
small, to several canals, basins, and mining explorations, that have
proved pretty successful. As for the great cities, several of them
have really become flourishing villages, although the dreams of their
founders have not proved true.
In this anthracite region, in the manufacturing districts of the North
East, along the New York canals, and in all parts of the West, a
traveller often has an opportunity of seeing the process of building
towns. First rises a huge hotel with a wooden colonnade, a real
barrack, in which all the movements, rising, breakfasting, dining, and
supping, are regulated by the sound of a bell with military precision,
uniformity, and rapidity, the landlord being, as a matter of course,
a general or, at least, a colonel of the militia. The bar-room is
at once the exchange, where hundreds of bargains are made under the
influence of a glass of whiskey or gin, and the club-room, which
resounds with political debate, and is the theatre of preparations for
civil and military elections. At about the same time a post-office is
established; at first the landlord commonly exercising the functions of
postmaster. As soon as there are any dwelling-houses built, a church
or meeting-house is erected at the charge of the rising community;
then follow a school-house and a printing press with a newspaper, and
soon after appears a bank, to complete the threefold representation of
religion, learning, and industry.
A European of continental Europe, in whose mind the existence of a
bank is intimately associated with that of a great capital, is very
much surprised even for the hundredth time, at finding one of these
institutions in spots yet in an intermediate state between a village
and the primitive forest inhabited by bears and rattle-snakes. On the
banks of the Schuylkill, which has lately been canalled, and which,
flowing from the coal-region, empties itself into the Delaware near
Philadelphia, may be seen the beginnings of a town, built during the
time of the mining speculations, at the head of navigation. Port
Carbon, for that is its name, consists of about thirty houses standing
on the declivity of a valley, and disposed according to the plan of the
embryo city. Such was the haste in which the houses were built, that
there was no time to remove the stumps of the trees that covered the
spot; the standing trees were partially burnt and then felled with the
axe, and their long, charred trunks still cumber the ground. Some of
them have been converted into piles for supporting the railroads that
bring down the coal to the boats; the blackened stumps, four or five
feet high, are still standing, and you make your way from one house
to another by leaping over the prostrate trunks and winding round the
standing stumps. In the midst of this strange scene, appears a large
building with the words, OFFICE OF DEPOSIT AND DISCOUNT. SCHUYLKILL
BANK. The existence of a bank amidst the stumps of Port Carbon,
surprised me as much as the universal neatness and elegance of the
peaceful Philadelphia, or the vast fleet which is constantly receiving
and discharging at the quays of New York, the products of all parts of
the world.
I return to the triple emblem of the church, the school with the
printing-press, and the bank. A society which is formed by accretion
around such a nucleus, must differ more and more from the present
European society, which was formed chiefly under the auspices of
war, and by a succession of conquests, following one upon another.
American society, taking for its point of departure labour, based
upon a condition of general ease on one side, and on a system of
common elementary education on the other, and moving forward with
the religious principle for its lode-star, seems destined to reach
a degree of prosperity, power, and happiness, much superior to what
we have attained with our semi-feudal organisation, and our fixed
antipathy against all moral rule and all authority. It presents,
doubtless, especially in the newer States, many imperfections, and it
will have to submit to various modifications; this is the lot of all
unfinished works, even when God himself is the maker. But a few errors
and follies are of little import in the eyes of those whose thoughts
are occupied with the great interests of the future rather than with
the paltry troubles of the present hour. Of little moment are the
disgust and disappointment that a European of delicate nerves may have
to encounter, if, for the purpose of killing time, he ventures upon
a western steamboat, or into a western tavern; so much the worse for
him, if he has fallen into a country where there is no place for an
idle tourist, seeking only for amusement! Let the foreigner smile at
the simplicity and extravagance of national vanity. That patriotic
pride, rendered excusable by brilliant success, will be moderated; the
errors and the follies are daily correcting themselves; the unavoidable
rudeness of the backwoodsman will be softened, as soon as there are no
more forests to fell, no more swamps to drain, no more wild beasts to
destroy. The evil will pass away, and is passing away; the good remains
and grows and spreads, like a grain of mustard.