OUR COUNTRY IN 1790
%185. The States.%--What sort of a country, and what sort of people,
was Washington thus chosen to rule over? When, he was elected, the Union
was composed of eleven states, for neither Rhode Island nor North
Carolina had accepted the Constitution.[1] Vermont had never been a
member of the Union, because the Continental Congress would not
recognize her as a state.
[Footnote 1: The states ratified the Constitution on the dates given below:
1. Delaware Dec. 7, 1787
2. Pennsylvania Dec. 12, 1787
3. New Jersey Dec. 18, 1787
4. Georgia Jan. 2, 1788
5. Connecticut Jan. 9, 1788
6. Massachusetts Feb. 7, 1788
7. Maryland April 28, 1788
8. South Carolina May 23, 1788
9. New Hampshire June 21, 1788
10. Virginia June 26, 1788
11. New York July 26, 1788
12. North Carolina Nov. 21, 1789
13. Rhode Island May 29, 1790]
[Illustration: The %UNITED STATES% March 4, 1789]
%186. Only a Part inhabited.%--Three fourths of our country was then
uninhabited by white men, and almost all the people lived near the
seaboard. Had a line been drawn along what was then the frontier, it
would (as the map on p. 177 shows) have run along the shore of Maine,
across New Hampshire and Vermont to Lake Champlain, then south to the
Mohawk valley, then down the Hudson River, and southwestward across
Pennsylvania to Pittsburg, then south along the Blue Ridge Mountains to
the Altamaha River in Georgia, and by it to the sea. How many people
lived here was never known till 1790. The Constitution of the United
States requires that the people shall be counted once in each ten years,
in order that it may be determined how many representatives each state
shall have in the House of Representatives; and for this purpose
Congress ordered the first census to be taken in 1790. It then appeared
that, excluding Indians, there were living in the eleven United States
3,380,000 human beings, or less than half the number of people who now
live in the single state of New York.
%187. How the People were scattered.%--More were in the Southern than
in the Eastern States. Virginia, then the most populous, contained one
fifth. Pennsylvania had a ninth, while in the five states of Maryland,
Virginia, the two Carolinas, and Georgia were almost one half of the
English-speaking people of the United States. These were the planting
states, and, populous as they were, they had but two cities--Baltimore
and Charleston. Savannah, Wilmington, Alexandria, Norfolk, and
Richmond were small towns. Not one had 8000 people in it. Indeed, the
inhabitants of the six largest cities of the country (Boston, New York,
Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston, and Salem) taken together were
but 131,000.
[Illustration: DISTRIBUTION OF THE POPULATION OF THE UNITED STATES FIRST
CENSUS, 1790/]
[Illustration: Boston in 1790[1]]
[Footnote 1: From the _Massachusetts Magazine_, November, 1790.]
%188. The Cities.%--And how different these cities were from those of
our day! What a strange world Washington would find himself in if he
could come back and walk along the streets of the great city which now
stands on the banks of the Potomac and bears his name! He never in his
life saw a flagstone sidewalk, nor an asphalted street, nor a pane of
glass six feet square. He never heard a factory whistle; he never saw a
building ten stories high, nor an elevator, nor a gas jet, nor an
electric light; he never saw a hot-air furnace, nor entered a room
warmed by steam.
In the windows of shop after shop would be scores of articles familiar
enough to us, but so unknown to him that he could not even name them. He
never saw a sewing machine, nor a revolver, nor a rubber coat, nor a
rubber shoe, nor a steel pen, nor a piece of blotting paper, nor an
envelope, nor a postage stamp, nor a typewriter. He never struck a
match, nor sent a telegram, nor spoke through a telephone, nor touched
an electric bell. He never saw a railroad, though he had seen a rude
form of steamboat. He never saw a horse car, nor an omnibus, nor a
trolley car, nor a ferryboat. Fancy him boarding a street car to take a
ride. He would probably pay his fare with a "nickel." But the "nickel"
is a coin he never saw. Fancy him trying to understand the
advertisements that would meet his eye as he took his seat! Fancy him
staring from the window at a fence bright with theatrical posters, or at
a man rushing by on a bicycle!
[Illustration: Philadelphia in 1800 (Arch Street)]
%189. Newspapers and Magazines.%--A boy enters the car with half a
dozen daily newspapers all printed in the same city. In Washington's day
there were but four daily papers in the United States! On the news
counter of a hotel, one sees twenty illustrated papers, and fifty
monthly magazines. In his day there was no illustrated paper, no
scientific periodical, no trade journal, and no such illustrated
magazines as _Harper's, Scribner's_, the _Century, St. Nicholas_. All
the printing done in the country was done on presses worked by hand.
To-day the Hoe octuple press can print 96,000 eight-page newspapers an
hour. To print this number on the hand press shown in the picture would
have taken so long that when the last newspaper was printed the first
would have been three months old!
[Illustration: A Franklin press]
[Illustration: A fire bucket [1]]
[Footnote 1: Original in the Pennsylvania Historical Society.]
%190. The Fire Service.%--the ambulance, the steam fire engine, the
hose cart, the hook and ladder company, the police patrol, the police
officer on the street corner, the letter carrier gathering the mail, the
district messenger boy, the express company, the delivery wagon of the
stores, have all come in since Washington died. In his day the law
required every householder in the city to be a fireman. His name might
not appear on the rolls of any of the fire companies, he might not help
to drag through the streets the lumbering tank which served as a fire
engine, but he must have in his hall, or beneath the stairs, or hanging
up behind his shop door, at least one leathern bucket inscribed with his
name, and a huge bag of canvas or of duck. Then, if he were aroused at
the dead of night by the cry of fire and the clanging of every church
bell in the town, he seized this bucket and his bag, and, while his
wife put a lighted candle in the window to illuminate the street, set
off for the fire. The smoke or the flame was his guide, for the custom
of indicating the place by a number of strokes on a bell had not yet
come in. When at last he arrived at the scene he found there no idle
spectators. Every one was busy. Some hurried into the building and
filled their sacks with such movable goods as came nearest to hand. Some
joined the line that stretched away to the water, and helped to pass the
full buckets to those who stood by the fire. Others took posts in a
second line, down which the empty buckets were hastened to the pump. The
house would often be half consumed when the shouting made known that the
engine had come. It was merely a pump mounted over a tank. Into the tank
the water from the buckets was poured, and it was pumped thence by the
efforts of a dozen men.
[Illustration: Fire engine of 1800[1]]
[Footnote 1: From an old cut]
%191. The Post Office.%--Washington sees a great wagon or a white
trolley car marked United States Mail, and on inquiry is told that the
money now spent by the government each year for the support of the post
offices would have more than paid the national debt when he was
President. He hears with amazement that there are now 75,000 post
offices, and recalls that in 1790 there were but seventy-five. He picks
up from the sidewalk a piece of paper with a little pink something on
the corner. He is told that the portrait on it is his own, that it is a
postage stamp, that it costs two cents, and will carry a letter to San
Francisco, a city he never heard of, and, if the person to whom it is
addressed cannot be found, will bring the letter back to the sender, a
distance of over 5000 miles. In his day a letter was a single sheet of
paper, no matter how large or small, and the postage on it was
determined not by weight, but by distance, and might be anything from
six to twenty-five cents.
At that time postage must always be prepaid, and as the post office must
support itself, letters were not sent from the country towns till enough
postage had been deposited at the post office to pay the expense of
sending them. Newspapers and books could not be sent by mail.
%192. The Franchise.%--Taking the country through, the condition of
the people was by no means so happy as ours. They had government of the
people, but it was not by the people nor for the people. Everywhere the
right to vote and to hold office was greatly restricted. The voter must
have an estate worth a certain sum, or a specified number of acres, or
an annual income of so many dollars. But the right to vote did not carry
with it the right to hold office. More property was required for office
holding than for voting, and there were besides certain religious
restrictions. In New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Carolina, South
Carolina, and Georgia, the governor, the members of the legislature, and
the chief officers of state must be Protestants. In Massachusetts and
Maryland they must be Christians. All these restrictions were long since
swept away.
%193. Cruel Punishments.%--The humane spirit of our times was largely
wanting. The debtor was cast into prison. The pauper might be sold to
the highest bidder. The criminal was dragged out into open day and
flogged or branded. From ten to nineteen crimes were punishable with
death. No such thing as a lunatic asylum, or a deaf and dumb asylum, or
a penitentiary existed. The prisons were dreadful places. Men came out
of them worse than they went in.
%194. The Condition of the Laborer; of the well to do.%--Men worked
harder and for less money then than now. A regular working day was from
sunrise to sunset, with an hour for breakfast and an hour for dinner.
Sometimes the laborer was fed and lodged by the employer, in which case
he was paid four dollars a month in winter and six in summer. Two
shillings (30 cents) a day for unskilled labor was thought high wages.
[Illustration: %Washington's flute and Miss Custis's harpsichord at
Mount Vernon%]
Even the houses of the well to do were much less comfortable places than
are such abodes in our day. There were no furnaces, no gas, no
bathrooms, no plumbing. Wood was the universal fuel. Coal from Virginia
and Rhode Island was little used. All cooking was done in "Dutch ovens,"
or in "out ovens," or in the enormous fireplaces to be found in every
household. Wood fuel made sooty chimneys, and sooty chimneys took fire.
In every city, therefore, were men known as "sweeps," whose business it
was to clean chimneys.
[Illustration: %Earthenware stove--Moravian%]
[Illustration: %Dutch oven%[1]]
[Footnote 1: The bread, or meat, to be baked was put into the pot, and
hot coals were heaped all around the sides and on the lid, which had a
rim to keep the coals on it.]
[Illustration: a foot stove]
Washington was a farmer, yet he never in his life beheld a tomato, nor a
cauliflower, nor an eggplant, nor a horserake, nor a drill, nor a reaper
and binder, nor a threshing machine, nor a barbed wire fence.
[Illustration: Kitchen in Washington's headquarters in Morristown,
N.J.[1]]
[Footnote 1: This shows a fine specimen of the old-fashioned fireplace.
Notice the andirons, the bellows, the lamp, the spinning wheel, the old
Dutch clock, and the kettles hanging on the crane over the logs.]
[Illustration: A plow used in 1776]
His land was plowed with a wooden plow partly shod with iron. His seed
was sown by hand; his hay was cut with scythes; his grain was reaped
with sickles, and threshed on the barn floor with flails in the hands of
his slaves.
%195. Negro Slavery.%--No living person under thirty years of age has
ever seen a negro slave in our country. When Washington was President
there were 700,000 slaves. When the Revolution opened, slavery was
permitted by law in every colony. But the feeling against it in the
North had always been strong, and when the war ended, the people began
the work of abolition. In Massachusetts and New Hampshire the
constitutions of the states declared that "all men are born free and
equal," and that "all men are born equally free," and this was
understood to abolish slavery. In Pennsylvania, slavery was abolished in
1780. In Rhode Island and Connecticut gradual abolition laws were passed
which provided that all children born of slave parents after a certain
day should be free at a certain age, and that their children should
never be slaves. The Ordinance of 1787 had prohibited slavery in the
Northwest Territory. But in 1790 New York, New Jersey, Delaware,
Maryland, and all the states south of these were slave states. (See map
on the next page.)
Though slaves were men and women and children, they had no civil rights
whatever. They could be bought and sold, leased, seized for a debt,
bequeathed by will, given away. If they made anything, or found
anything, or earned anything, it belonged not to them, but to their
owners. They were property just as oxen or horses were in the North. It
was unlawful to teach them to read or write. They were not allowed to
give evidence against a white man, nor to travel in bands of more than
seven unless a white man was with them, nor to quit the plantation
without leave.
If a planter provided coarse food, coarse clothes, and a rude shelter
for his slaves, if he did not work them more than fifteen hours out of
twenty-four in summer, nor more than fourteen in winter, and if he gave
them every Sunday to themselves, he did quite as much for their comfort
as the law required he should.
[Illustration: MAP SHOWING THE AREA OF %SLAVE AND FREE SOIL IN 1790%]
If the slave committed any offense, if he stole anything, or refused to
work, or ran away, it was lawful to load him with irons, to confine him
for any length of time in a cell, and to beat him and whip him till the
blood ran in streams from the wounds, and he grew too weak to stand.
Old advertisements are still extant in which runaway blacks are
described by the scars left upon their bodies by the lash. When such
lashings were not prescribed by the court, they were commonly given
under the eye of the overseer, or inflicted by the owner himself.
%196. Six Days from Boston to New York.%--Our country was small when
Washington was President. The people lived on the seaboard. The towns
and cities were not actually very far apart; but the means of travel
were so poor, the time consumed in going even fifty miles was so great,
that the country was practically immense in extent. Now we step into a
beautifully fitted car, heated by steam, lighted by electricity, richly
carpeted, and provided with most comfortable seats and beds, and are
whirled across the continent from Philadelphia to San Francisco in less
time than it took Washington to go from New York to Boston.
[Illustration: Old mill at West Falmouth, Mass.[1]]
[Footnote 1: In many parts of the country where there was no water
power, as Cape Cod, Long Island, Nantucket, etc., flour was ground at
windmills. The windmill shown in the picture was built in 1787, and is
still in use.]
If you had lived in 1791 and started, say, from Boston, to go to
Philadelphia to see the President and the great city where independence
had been declared, you would very likely have begun by making your will,
and bidding good-by to your friends. You would then have gone down to
the office of the proprietor of the stagecoach, and secured a seat to
New York. As the coach left but twice a week, you would have waited
till the day came and would then have presented yourself, at three
o'clock in the morning, at the tavern whence the coach started.
The stagecoach was little better than a huge covered box mounted on
springs. It had neither glass windows, nor door, nor steps, nor closed
sides. The roof was upheld by ten posts which rose from the body of the
vehicle, and the body was commonly breast high. From the top were hung
curtains of leather, to be rolled up when the day was fine, and let down
and buttoned when it was rainy and cold. Within were four seats. Without
was the baggage. Fourteen pounds of luggage were allowed to be carried
free by each passenger. But if your portmanteau or your
brass-nail-studded hair trunk weighed more, you would have paid for it
at the rate per mile that you paid for yourself. Under no circumstances,
however, would you be permitted to take on the journey more than 150
pounds. When the baggage had all been weighed and strapped on the coach,
when the horses had been attached, and the waybill, containing the names
of the passengers, made out, the passengers would clamber to their seats
through the front of the stage and sit down with their faces toward the
driver's seat.
One pair of horses usually dragged the coach eighteen miles, when a
fresh pair would be attached, and if all went well, you would be put
down about ten at night at some wayside inn or tavern after a journey of
forty miles. Cramped and weary, you would eat a frugal supper and hurry
off to bed with a notice from the landlord to be ready to start at three
the next morning. Then, no matter if it rained or snowed, you would be
forced to make ready by the dim light of a horn lantern, unknown now,
for another ride of eighteen hours.
If no mishaps occurred, if the coach was not upset by the ruts, if storm
or flood did not delay you at Springfield, where the road met the
Connecticut, or at Stratford, where it met the Housatonic, each of which
had to be crossed on clumsy flatboats, the stage would roll into New
York at the end of the sixth day.
%197. Two Days from New York to Philadelphia.%--And here a serious
delay was almost certain to occur, for even in the best of weather it
was no easy matter to cross the Hudson to New Jersey. When the wind was
high and the water rough, or the river full of ice, the boldest did not
dare to risk a crossing. Once over the river, you would again go on by
coach, and at the end of two more days would reach Philadelphia. In our
time one can travel in eight hours the entire distance between Boston
and Philadelphia, a distance which Washington could not have traversed
in less than eight days.
[Illustration: Stagecoach and inn[1]]
[Footnote 1: From a print of 1798.]
%198. The Roads and the Inns.%--The newspapers and the travelers of
those days complained bitterly of the roads and the inns. On the best
roads the ruts were deep, the descents precipitous, and the passengers
were often forced to get out and help the driver pull the wheels out of
the mud. Breakdowns and upsets were of everyday occurrence. Yet bad as
the roads were, the travel was so considerable that very often the inns
and taverns even in the large cities could not lodge all who applied
unless they slept five or six in a room.
%199. A Steamboat on the Delaware.%--Rude as this means of travel
seems to us, the men of 1790 were quite satisfied with it, and
absolutely refused to make use of a better one. Had you been in
Philadelphia during the summer of 1790 and taken up a copy of _The
Pennsylvania Packet_, you could not have failed to notice this
advertisement of the first successful steamboat in the world:
%The Steam-Boat
Is now ready to take Passengers, and is intended to
set off from Arch Street Ferry in Philadelphia every
_Monday, Wednesday_ and _Friday_, for _Burlington,
Bristol, Bordentown_ and _Trenton_, to return on _Tuesdays,
Thursdays_ and _Saturdays_--Price for Passengers, 2/6 to
Burlington and Bristol, 3/9 to Bordentown, 5/. to
Trenton. June 14. tu.th ftf.%
This boat was the invention of John Fitch, and from June to September
ran up and down the Delaware; but so few people went on it that he could
not pay expenses, and the boat was withdrawn.
%200. To the Great West.%--From Philadelphia went out one of the
great highways to what was then the far West, but to what we now know as
the valley of the Ohio. The traveler who to-day makes the journey from
Philadelphia to Pittsburg is whisked on a railroad car through an
endless succession of cities and villages and rich farms, and by great
factories and mills and iron works, which in the days of Washington had
no existence. He makes the journey easily between sunrise and sunset. In
1790 he could not have made it in twelve days.
%201. Towns beyond the Alleghany Mountains.%--Though the country
between the Alleghany Mountains and the Mississippi had been closed to
settlement from 1763 to 1776 by the King's proclamation, it was by no
means without population in 1790. At Detroit and Kaskaskia and Vincennes
were old French settlements, made long before France was driven out of
Louisiana. But there were others of later date. The hardy frontiersman
of 1763 cared no more for the King's proclamation than he did for the
bark of the wolf at his cabin door. The ink with which the document was
written had not dried before emigrants from Maryland and Virginia and
Pennsylvania were hurrying into the valley of the Monongahela.
In 1769 William Bean crossed the mountains from North Carolina, and,
building a cabin on the banks of Watauga Creek, began the settlement of
Tennessee. James Robertson and a host of others followed in 1770, and
soon the valleys of the Clinch and the Holston were dotted with cabins.
In 1769 Daniel Boone, one of the grandest figures in frontier history,
began his exploits in what is now Kentucky, and before 1777 Boonesboro,
Harrodsburg, and Lexington were founded.
[Illustration: %Model of Fitch's steamboat%[l]]
[Footnote 1: Now in the National Museum, Washington.]
%202. State of Franklin.%--Before the Revolution closed, emigrants
under James Robertson and John Donelson planted Nashville and half a
dozen other settlements on the Cumberland, in middle Tennessee. After
the Revolution ended, so many settlers were in eastern Tennessee that
they tried to make a new state. North Carolina, following the example
of her Northern sisters, ceded to Congress her claim to what is now
Tennessee in 1784. But the people on the Watauga no sooner heard, of it
than under the lead of John Sevier they organized the state of Franklin,
whereupon North Carolina repealed the act of cession and absorbed the
new state by making the Franklin officials her officials for the
district of Tennessee. In 1789 she again ceded the district, and in May
of that year Tennessee became part of the public domain.
%203. Squatters in Ohio.%--The cession to Congress of the land north
of the Ohio led to an emigration from Virginia and Kentucky to what is
now the state of Ohio. As this territory was to be sold to pay the
national debt, Congress was forced to order the squatters away, and when
they refused to go, sent troops to burn their cabins, destroy their
crops, and drive them across the Ohio. The lawful settlement of the
territory began after the Ohio and Scioto companies bought their lands
in 1787, and John C. Symmes purchased his in 1788.
%204. Pittsburg in 1790.%--At Pittsburg, then the greatest town in
the United States west of the Alleghany Mountains, were some 200 houses,
mostly of logs, and 2000 people, a newspaper, and a few rude
manufactories. The life of the town was its river trade. Pittsburg was
the place where emigrants "fitted out" for the West. A settler intending
to go down the Ohio valley with his family and his goods would lay in a
stock of powder and ball, buy flour and ham enough to last him for a
month, and secure two rude structures which passed under the name
of boats.
[Illustration: %The first millstones and salt kettle in Ohio%]
%205. A Trip down the Ohio in 1790.%--In the long keel boat he would
put his wife, his children, and such travelers as had been waiting at
Pittsburg for a chance to go down the river. In the flatboat would be
his cattle or his stores. Two dangers beset the voyager on the Ohio. His
boat might become entangled in the branches of the trees that overhung
the river, or be fired into by the Indians who lurked in the woods. The
cabin of the keel boat, therefore, was low, that it might glide under
the trees, and the roof and sides were made as nearly bullet-proof as
possible. The whole craft was steered by a huge oar mounted on a pivot
at the stern.[1]
[Footnote 1: See the boats in the pictures on next page.]
[Illustration: Map of Ohio]
%206. Towns along the Ohio.%--As the emigrant in such an ark floated
down the river, he would come first to Wheeling, a town of fifty log
cabins, and then to Marietta, a town planted in Ohio in 1788 by settlers
sent by the Ohio Company. Below Marietta were Belpre and Gallipolis, a
settlement made by Frenchmen brought there by the Scioto Company. Yet
farther down, on the Kentucky side, were Limestone (now Maysville) and
Newport, opposite which some settlers were founding the city of
Cincinnati. Once past Cincinnati, all was unbroken wilderness till one
reached Louisville in Kentucky, beyond which few emigrants had yet
ventured to go.
[Illustration: %Cincinnati in 1802 (Fort Washington)%]
%207. Cotton Planting.%--The South, in 1790, was on the eve of a
great industrial revolution. The products of the states south of
Virginia had been tar, pitch, resin, lumber, rice, and indigo. But in
the years following the peace the indigo plants had been destroyed year
after year by an insect. As the plant was not a native of our country,
but was brought from the West Indies, it became necessary either to
import more seed plants, or to raise some other staple. Many chose the
latter course, and about 1787 began to grow cotton.
[Illustration: %Farmers' Castle (Belpre) in 1791%]
%208. Whitney and the Cotton Gin.%--The experiment succeeded, but a
serious difficulty arose. The cotton plant has pods which when ripe
split open and show a white woolly substance attached to seeds. Before
the cotton could be used, these seeds must be picked out, and as the
labor of cleaning was very great, only a small quantity could be sent to
market. It happened, however, that a young man from Massachusetts, named
Eli Whitney, was then living in Georgia, and he, seeing the need of a
machine to clean cotton, invented the cotton gin.[1] Till then, a negro
slave could not clean two pounds of cotton in a day. With the gin the
same slave in the same time could remove the seeds from a hundred
pounds. This solved the difficulty, and gave to the United States
another staple even greater in value than tobacco. In 1792 one hundred
and ninety-two thousand pounds of cotton were exported to Europe; in
1795, after the gin was invented, six million pounds were sent out of
the country. In 1894 no less than 4275 million pounds were raised and
either consumed or exported. Of all the marvelous inventions of our
countrymen, this produced the very greatest consequences. It made
cotton planting profitable; it brought immense wealth to the people of
the South every year; it covered New England with cotton mills; and by
making slave labor profitable it did more than anything else to fasten
slavery on the United States for seventy years, and finally to bring on
the Civil War, the most terrible struggle of modern times.
[Footnote 1: The word "gin" is a contraction of "engine."]
[Illustration: %The cotton gin% _A_. Whitney's original gin. _B_. A
later form.]
SUMMARY
1. When Washington was inaugurated, the United States consisted of
eleven states, with a population of about 3,380,000.
2. These people lived not far from the Atlantic coast. Few cities
existed; not one had 50,000 inhabitants. Even the largest was without
many conveniences which we consider necessaries.
3. Travel was slow and difficult, and though a steamboat had been
invented and used, it was too far ahead of the times to succeed.
4. West of the Alleghany Mountains a few settlements had been made
between 1763 and 1783. But it was after 1783, when streams of emigrants
poured over the mountains, that settlement really began.
6. In the South cotton was just beginning to be cultivated; there all
labor was done by slaves. In the North slavery was dying out, and in
five of the states had been abolished.
State of the Country in 1790
- _On the Seaboard._
The population. {Number.
{Distribution.
{Movement west.
The cities {Size.
{Absence of many conveniences known to us.
{Newspapers and magazines.
Communication between states. {Bad roads. Slow travel.
{The post offices.
{The stagecoaches. The inns.
{The early steamboat.
- _In the Ohio Valley._ {Population. Squatters.
{Pittsburg in 1790.
{A trip down the Ohio.
{Towns in the valley.
- _In the South._ {Slavery.
{Cotton planting.
{Whitney and the cotton gin.