influx of the Ulster Scots coming along the foot of the mountains from
the north after the middle of the eighteenth century. The upcountry
thus became quite different from the tidewater, so different, that in
South Carolina as in North Carolina and Virginia it was a question
whether the State might not split on slavery a few years before the
Civil War, and the Upland population was only whipped into line for
secession by sharp practice on the part of the political leaders in the
slave-holding regions.
Other small elements were incorporated easily in the Nordic population
of the State, but the loss to the colony was heavy when the Loyalists
left after the Revolution. On the 13th and 14th of December, 1782, 300
ships set sail from Charleston carrying not merely the soldiery but
more than 9000 civilians and slaves. Half of these went to the West
Indies, and most of the others to Florida where such of them as had not
subsequently removed were presumably reincorporated into the United
States a generation later. On the other hand, hundreds of Hessian
deserters stayed in the community, as also occurred in others of the
colonies, thus introducing the first noticeable immigration of Nordic
Germans into the State. As previously noted, most of the so-called
Palatine immigration of Germans in the eighteenth century was Alpine,
in sharp contrast to the North German Nordics, who came to this
country in large numbers in the middle of the nineteenth century after
the futile revolutions of 1848.
* * * * *
Georgia was the last of the thirteen colonies to be settled. Even
at the Revolution it was so weak that it was regarded by many of
the Colonial leaders as more of a liability than an asset to the
confederation. Its establishment in 1732 by Oglethorpe was on a basis
appealing more to sentiment than to practical views. As in the case
of some other similar schemes in contemporary times, Parliament was
persuaded to appropriate nearly a hundred thousand pounds to aid the
oppressed of all countries. Most of the few thousand persons who were
settled by the original trustees were English, and were selected with
as much care as possible from among those who were apparently "down on
their luck," and who might prosper if relieved of their debts and put
back on land. Many of these insolvent debtors were doubtless victims of
political and economic changes, but it soon transpired that in too many
cases the man who did not have sufficient capacity to make a living in
England, likewise lacked sufficient capacity to make a living in the
newer and more difficult conditions of Georgia.
In addition to these English debtors, Oglethorpe enlisted on the
Continent small bodies of oppressed Protestants and established several
other little settlements. Waldenses from Piedmont in Italy were
settled in one place, a colony of Scots in another, German Moravians
at still a third point, and a few French families elsewhere, as well
as a colony from Salzburg, made up of a pre-dominantly Alpine stock
that had suffered for its religious principles enough to deserve all
the sympathy it received. The hardy Nordics (Scotch Presbyterian
Highlanders) who had been settled on the southern frontier, to afford
protection for Georgia from the Spaniards and Indians, were almost
exterminated by the Spaniards and of all these various undertakings
Savannah was the only one that prospered.
It was necessary to abandon the attempt to create a prosperous colony
by means of establishing a refuge for the oppressed. Unfortunately
the change was accompanied by the introduction of Negro slavery.
Nevertheless, when Georgia became open to outside settlers, there
was a valuable accession from colonies to the north, one of the most
interesting of the groups being the Dorchester Society, which came in
1752. This Protestant congregation had left England in 1630 and founded
Dorchester in Massachusetts. In 1695 a part of them had moved to South
Carolina and, two generations later, some of these went still farther
south to midland Georgia.
Their example was followed, or perhaps indeed preceded, by many other
Carolina planters, so that the influx from this source became a real
element of strength to the more southerly colony. Shortly thereafter
the flood of Ulster Scots, rolling along the Piedmont, began to reach
the uplands of Georgia and assured its future.
[Illustration: THE THIRTEEN COLONIES]
The Georgians of the present day are descendants of the Oglethorpe
colonists in only insignificant proportions. The Nordic settlers who
came in through North Carolina, English from the tidewater region, and
Ulster Scots from the Uplands, are the real founders of the State.
After the Revolution, Georgia benefited by the prevalent unrest and the
tide of migration that flowed in all directions. It received settlers
from all of the Southern States and some of the Northern ones, as well
as new arrivals direct from Europe.
* * * * *
Kentucky for a generation prior to the Revolution had become known
through hunters of game bringing back glowing accounts of the beauty
and fertility of the level lands of central Kentucky. Access in the
one case was down the Ohio River by boat, and in the other by a long
and hazardous trip through the mountains, entering by the Cumberland
Gap, the most practicable of several difficult passes. The danger
from Indians was so great on the Ohio River that most of the invaders
preferred those dangers of a different type to be encountered by the
Cumberland Gap entry. It was the route which Daniel Boone, acting for
a land company, had blazed: the narrow trail, six hundred miles long,
that has become famous as the Wilderness Road.
By the time of the Revolution several hundred people were in Kentucky,
and more were coming each year from the inland portion of Virginia,
and, to a less extent, from Pennsylvania. During the Revolution the
population rose and fell in accordance with local conditions on the
frontier and the ravages of the Indians. With the end of the Revolution
a great tide of immigration set in, composed in part of soldiers who
were given land grants by the Virginia Government. With them was an
element of Loyalists, as well as many families from Maryland, both
seeking to get away from unpleasant associations in the East.
From 1780 onward the route down the Ohio began to be more used. The
Indians were driven back or the boatmen learned how to cope with their
ruses, and the annual migration began to be counted in thousands. In
the year 1786 as many as 3000 went down the river, in 1788, 10,000, and
in 1789, 20,000. Meanwhile, the immigration through the Cumberland Gap
continued steadily. The growth of Kentucky was on a scale unparalleled
in North America up to that time. Within a few decades from the
day when the first cabins were erected in the region, a population
of 70,000 people had entered the State, and it had half as many
inhabitants as Massachusetts.
Compared with the Scotch tone of Tennessee, Kentucky was overwhelmingly
English in aspect. Virginia was definitely its progenitor, a large part
of its early population having come through the Shenandoah Valley. Next
as feeders were Pennsylvania and North Carolina, while other regions
contributed but small minorities, those from Maryland being probably
the most numerous. The government of Virginia was seriously concerned
by its losses of population from this cause. After the Revolution,
officers who had served with the Virginia forces were compensated
by allotments of land in the Kentucky region. The State attracted
other settlers of a superior social and economic status. These gave a
tone to its society and laid the foundation of a local aristocracy.
Kentucky long remained distinctive because of its conspicuously English
atmosphere and the social refinements which it showed in contrast to
some of its neighbors. Kentucky remained part of Virginia until 1792
when it was admitted as a State.
* * * * *
Tennessee was, in fact, only the western part of North Carolina which
originally stretched beyond the Appalachians as far as the Mississippi.
The French had established a trading post on the site of Nashville as
early as 1714. But the State was actually settled from the East rather
than from the West, and, indeed, its western third was not settled
until well into the nineteenth century. The first area of settlement
was in the river valleys near the North Carolina border, and this
remained the principal area during the period here considered. A second
and less important point of growth was in the center of the State. In
northeastern Tennessee the earlier settlements were from Virginia, and
the settlers supposed that they were still within the limits of the Old
Dominion.
The settlers from North Carolina soon began to push through the
mountain passes and established the groupings that go in history
by the name of the Holston and Watauga settlements. Many of the
early settlers, of whom some hundreds were present before the
Revolution, were, as noted, from the upland portion of Virginia,
and were Presbyterians from Scotland, often by way of Ulster, while
the principal early influx from North Carolina was connected with
the uprising in the Piedmont section of that colony about 1770. An
insurgent element known as the Regulators put itself in opposition to
the royal governor, and, being beaten, fled over the mountains for
safety. A large proportion of these were from Wake County. They brought
in an element of Baptists contrasting with the Presbyterianism which,
on the whole, characterized the State from the beginning and still does
so owing to the predominance of the Scotch in its settlement.
While the eastern community was growing, settlement began in the
central portion of the State in what is known as the Cumberland
district. This was for years almost isolated from the neighboring
settlement to the east, the center of which was Nashville, while the
eastern settlement headed in Knoxville, which became the capital.
During the Revolution the settlement of this territory continued
steadily until the State had 10,000 or 12,000 inhabitants. North
Carolina made liberal allotments of Tennessee lands to its soldiers
who had fought in the Revolution, and this continued the stream of
immigration. By the time that President Washington was inaugurated
the eastern section of the State had some 30,000 inhabitants, the
Cumberland district about 7000, and both were growing steadily. Western
Tennessee was still Indian territory.
The population of Tennessee in 1790 was typical of the upland
population of the South in its racial make-up. It is definitely a mere
extension of the western part of North Carolina, though its inhabitants
were often born in Virginia, and to a less extent in other States, as
was true of the inhabitants of North Carolina itself.
In the Mississippi Valley at this period there were a few settlements
established under the French and Spanish regimes, which had attracted
a miscellaneous crowd of adventurers and traders. Since this territory
did not become part of the United States until the Louisiana Purchase
of 1803, it will be dealt with more fully in the next section. In this
period we are dealing with comparatively small numbers for this entire
region.
Of nearly 4,000,000 people, both white and black, in the United States
in 1790, at the time of the first census, 95 per cent were living east
of the Appalachians.
In territories of the present United States other than the settlements
already covered, there were three little islands of population. One
lay along the Mississippi in southwest Illinois, a remnant of the old
French settlements with some English and American additions. A second
was around Vincennes, Indiana, with a population like that of the
Illinois settlements but more strongly American. A third was in Ohio,
where settlement was just beginning, the first serious colonization
being that made in 1788 at Marietta by New Englanders.
Although the Revolution grew out of economic and political causes, it
represents primarily one of those costly and unfortunate internecine
wars in which the Nordics have been prone to indulge at intervals for
two or three thousand years, and which have done so much to weaken them
as a race.
Had there been no complications the effects of the Revolutionary War
might have been less permanent. Winner and loser would have lived
on terms of peace with each other, as they did in England after the
Civil War and in the United States after the Rebellion. But the hard
feeling that goes with any conflict was intensified by several factors.
The Ulster Scots, in particular, had reason to feel themselves badly
treated by England, and they carried into, and through, the Revolution,
an unusual animosity. This feeling of resentment was shared and kept
alive by many other Americans through the injudicious behavior in
Canada of a number of the English governments after the Revolution.
The tradition of one hundred and fifty years of common action of the
colonies and the mother country in opposing France was forgotten
overnight and a sentimental attitude for which there was astonishingly
little actual basis led to a glorification of France and everything
French for a generation or more--an attitude that has not entirely
disappeared to this day. The antagonism toward Great Britain was
maintained for political reasons during the next century mostly by
Irish agitators. This ill feeling prevented the close co-operation
between the two greatest sections of the English-speaking races, which
would have meant so much for world peace and harmony, and which would
have laid the basis for a closer co-operation of all the nations of
predominant Nordic stock, in the interest of the progressive evolution
of mankind. A first object of statesmanship should now be to regain
that solidarity of the Nordics, in the interests not merely of world
progress, but of the very survival of civilization.
Denominational questions in the United States were scarcely an issue
after the Revolution, for the bitter sectarian feeling that had
existed earlier was rapidly disappearing, and the Roman Catholics had
not yet been able to raise the issue of bigotry, for the country was
overwhelmingly Protestant. Of approximately 4,000,000 persons in the
United States in 1790, Catholic writers make varying claims running
as high as 35,000 or 45,000 persons of their faith. Without stopping
to inquire how many of those claimed for Rome were merely nominal
adherents, and how many were Negroes, one may remark that at the most,
about one American in each one hundred might have had some affiliation
with the Roman Church. When the Catholic hierarchy was established for
the first time in the United States by the appointment of the Jesuit
John Carroll as bishop of Baltimore in 1789, he reported to his
superiors that there were about 16,000 Catholics in Maryland, including
children and Negroes; something over 7000 in Pennsylvania, some 3000
French around Detroit, and about 4000 scattered through the rest of the
country. To this total of 30,000 might be added the unknown but small
number of nominal Catholics on the frontier, in the Mississippi Valley,
and in other regions where there were no priests to minister to them,
and where their children, at least, were fairly sure to grow up outside
the church. It is probably accurate to say that there never has been
a nation which was so completely and definitely Protestant as well as
Nordic as was the United States just after the American Revolution.
The total white population found in the United States by the first
census (1790) was 3,172,444. To this should be added, for the present
purpose, the population of parts of the continent that are now, but
were not then, in the United States, that is Louisiana and Florida.
The latter had but a few thousand inhabitants. The Louisiana Purchase
territory may be credited with 36,000, of whom nearly one-half were
Negroes. The French are estimated at about 12,000. Professor Hansen
gives the figure of Whites only for the Louisiana Purchase area in
1790 as 20,000. The addition of Negroes would probably increase these
population figures considerably. Texas may be allotted 5000 (Spanish)
Whites, New Mexico and Arizona 15,000, and California 1000 at this
period. But it will be shown later that the use of the word "White"
in these Spanish-American lands is frequently largely a "courtesy
title." Finally, the census enumerators did not reach the Old Northwest
Territory, where there were already some 11,000 residents, about
equally divided between American and French. The total white population
of the territory now comprised in the continental United States may
therefore be put at approximately 3,250,000 in 1790.
Disregarding the French and Spanish in the outlying regions, the only
race, aside from the Nordic, that was important enough to be counted
at this period was the Alpine, represented by the Germans. In Maine
one in a hundred of the population might have been German, but in the
other New England states the Alpines were negligible.[9] In the middle
colonies they were an important element, perhaps one in every ten
or twelve in such States as New York, New Jersey, and Maryland, and
one-third of the whole population in Pennsylvania. Through the Southern
States they formed perhaps one in twenty of the population, confined
mainly to the upland regions and, having spread over from these uplands
and from Pennsylvania into the west, they amounted to about one in
seven in Kentucky and Tennessee.
Nine-tenths of the whole white population of 1790 was therefore
Nordic in race, and ninety-nine hundredths of it Protestant in
religion. It was all English-speaking, save for the little island of
Pennsylvania Dutch, and for the French and Spanish on the frontiers.
It was all living under a political and cultural tradition that was
characteristically British.
At the time of the Revolution there were about 6,000,000 people in
England and about half that number in the colonies.
* * * * *
The preceding pages have been devoted to describing the conditions in
the English colonies at the end of the Colonial Period. Let us now
consider the situation of the continent as a whole.
Never before in the history of the Nordic race had there been an event
comparable in importance to this occupation of North America, north of
the Rio Grande, by the English and Scotch. The Canadian French were too
few to be a serious obstacle to the development of the country and, as
will be seen in the following pages, the rest of Canada was in race,
language, religion, and cultural traditions identical with the original
British colonies.
Thus we have the most vigorous race in existence, with a few outside
elements which were entirely in sympathy with the dominant type, in
possession of the richest and most salubrious continent in the world.
That this country was healthy and well fitted to breed a highly
selected race is shown by the comparison of the fate of the colonists
who went to the West Indies with those who went to New England.
These Puritan migrations were in their general nature identical,
but the enervating climate of the Caribbean Sea proved fatal to the
Nordics who went there, while the vigor of the New Englanders as a
body was increased by the elimination of weaklings through a harsh but
beneficent climate.
To appreciate how highly selected a race the Americans were at that
time, one has only to consider the extraordinary group of men of
talent and ability, some fifty-five in number, who represented the
colonies at the Convention of 1787 at Philadelphia. Those men framed
the Constitution of the United States, which after a hundred and fifty
years of stress and strain still remains the model for such documents
throughout the world.
Let the reader consider whether our 110,000,000 whites of today could
produce the same number of men with corresponding ability and equally
high motive, in spite of the fact that our population is more than
thirty times as large as in 1787.
So we find in 1790 a practically empty continent, its eastern half
buried under a mantle of forest, with a coast line broken by ports
and short navigable rivers. Across low mountain ranges we first find
a vast central valley traversed for hundreds of miles by wide rivers;
then a belt of treeless plains covered with succulent buffalo grass;
next a region long called the "Great American Desert"; then a range
of mountains dimly known to the Colonials as the "Stony Mountains";
beyond them a great alkaline desert, next the Sierra range, and lastly
the genial Pacific Coast. The western half of the continent abounded
in mineral wealth, while in the central valley the virgin soil awaited
the plow. These conditions had their counterpart in Canada. Wild game
abounded, inviting the fur traders to explore the remoter places and
enabling the settler to find ready food, while he built his log cabin
and planted his crop.
Such was the continent and such the opportunity. In the following pages
we shall see what has been done with these opportunities by the British
race.
* * * * *
Before leaving the Colonial Period, it is well to call attention, once
more, to the history of the frontier. For a hundred years and more the
frontier was beset by savages often instigated by the French in Canada.
The Indians killed and tortured the lonely settlers and burned their
log cabins. This desultory warfare cost the English many hundreds, if
not thousands of lives along the frontiers of New England as well as of
Pennsylvania and Virginia.
The Indians found by English settlers on their arrival in America were
probably, as to many of their tribes, the most formidable fighting
men of any native race encountered by the Whites. Not only were they
redoubtable warriors in their own surroundings, but they were beyond
question the cruelest of mankind. The Assyrians, of all ancient
peoples, were reputed to be the most fiendishly cruel, but bad as they
were, they did not compare with the American Indian. The details of
the torture of prisoners taken in open warfare are too revolting to
describe. These tortures were carried out by the squaws while the bucks
sat around and laughed at the agony of their victims. There is nothing
like it in history in any part of the world and the result was that
the aboriginal Indians were regarded as ravening wolves or worse and
deprived of all sympathy, while the Whites stole their lands and killed
their game. No one who knew the true nature of the Indian felt any
regret that they were driven off their hunting grounds. This attitude
was found wherever the Whites came in conflict with them and explains
why they were scarcely regarded as human beings.
The effect of the existence of the Indians on the frontier was to
slow down the advance westward of the settlements and to compel the
backwoodsman to keep in touch with his countrymen in the rear. If
there had been no hostile Indians, the settlers would have scattered
widely and would have established independent communities, such as
were attempted in Kentucky and Tennessee after the Revolution. In this
respect the Indians were a benefit to the Whites.
At the close of the period ending in 1790, despite the loss of many
valuable elements at the time of the Revolution, the American race was
homogeneous and Scotch and English to the core. It was bursting the
bonds of the old frontier and ready to pour a human deluge over the
mountains and inundate the West.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 9: Studying the percentage of various nationalities in
Colonial times, and later, one is guided partly by records of
immigration, partly by the names of the inhabitants, as recorded
in census and other returns. There was always a tendency, in an
Anglo-Saxon region, to corrupt names of other nationalities,
occasionally in such a way as to make them appear English. This fact
must be allowed for in all calculations in this field.]
VIII
THE OLD NORTHWEST TERRITORY