THE RISING WEST
%301. Rush into the West.%--The settlement of our boundary disputes,
especially with Spain, was most timely, for even then people were
hurrying across the mountains by tens of thousands, and building up new
states in the Mississippi valley. The great demand for ships and
provisions, which from 1793 to 1807 had made business so brisk, had kept
people on the seaboard and given them plenty of employment. But after
1812, and particularly after 1815, trade, commerce, and business on the
seaboard declined, work became scarce, and men began to emigrate to the
West, where they could buy land from the government on the installment
plan, and where the states could not tax their farms until five years
after the government had given them a title deed. Old settlers in
central New York declared they had never seen so many teams and sleighs,
loaded with women, children, and household goods, traveling westward,
bound for Ohio, which was then but another name for the West.
As the year wore away, the belief was expressed that when autumn came it
would be found that the worst was over, and that the good times expected
to follow peace would keep people on the seaboard. But the good times
did not return. The condition of trade and commerce, of agriculture and
manufactures, grew worse instead of better, and the western movement of
population became greater than ever.
%302. Rapid Growth of Towns.%--Fed by this never-ending stream of
newcomers, the West was almost transformed. Towns grew and villages
sprang up with a rapidity which even in these days of rapid and easy
communication would be thought amazing. Mt. Pleasant, in Jefferson
County, Ohio, was in 1810 a little hamlet of seven families living in
cabins. In 1815 it contained ninety families, numbering 500 souls. The
town of Vevay, Ind., was laid out in 1813, and was not much better than
a collection of huts in 1814. But in 1816 the traveler down the Ohio who
stopped at Vevay found himself at a flourishing county seat, with
seventy-five dwellings, occupied by a happy population who boasted of
having among them thirty-one mechanics of various trades; of receiving
three mails each week, and supporting a weekly newspaper called the
_Indiana Register_. Forty-two thousand settlers are said to have come
into Indiana in 1816, and to have raised the population to 112,000.
Letters from New York describe the condition of that state west of Utica
as one of astonishing prosperity. Log cabins were disappearing, and
frame and brick houses taking their place. The pike from Utica to
Buffalo was almost a continuous village, and the country for twenty
miles on either side was filling up with an industrious population.
Auburn, where twenty years before land sold for one dollar an acre, was
the first town in size and wealth west of Utica, and land within its
limits brought $7000 an acre. Fourteen miles west was Waterloo, on the
Seneca River, a village which did not exist in 1814, and which in 1816
had fifty houses. Rochester, the site of which in 1815 was a wilderness,
had a printing press, a bookstore, and a hundred houses in 1817.[1]
[Footnote 1: McMaster's _History of the People of the United States_,
Vol. IV., pp. 381-386.]
%303. Scenes on the Western Highways.%--By 1817 this migration was at
its height, and in the spring of that year families set forth from
almost every village and town on the seaboard. The few that went from
each place might not be missed; but when they were gathered on any one
of the great roads to the West, as that across New York, or that across
Pennsylvania, they made an endless procession of wagons and
foot parties.
A traveler who had occasion to go from Nashville to Savannah in January,
1817, declares that on the way he fell in with crowds of emigrants from
Carolina and Georgia, all bound for the cotton lands of Alabama; that he
counted the flocks and wagons, and that--carts, gigs, coaches, and
wagons, all told--there were 207 conveyances, and more than 3800 people.
At Haverhill, in Massachusetts, a train of sixteen wagons, with 120 men,
women, and children, from Durham, Me., passed in one day. They were
bound for Indiana to buy a township, and were accompanied by their
minister. Within thirteen days, seventy-three wagons and 450 emigrants
had passed through the same town of Haverhill. At Easton, Pa., which lay
on the favorite westward route for New Englanders, 511 wagons, with 3066
persons, passed in a month. They went in trains of from six to fifty
wagons each day. The keeper of Gate No. 2, on the Dauphin turnpike, in
Pennsylvania, returned 2001 families as having passed his gate, bound
west, between March and December, 1817, and gave the number of people
accompanying the vehicles as 16,000. Along the New York route, which
went across the state from Albany to Buffalo, up Lake Erie, and on by
way of Chautauqua Lake to the Allegheny, the reports are just as
astonishing. Two hundred and sixty wagons were counted going by one
tavern in nine days, besides hundreds of people on horseback and
on foot.[1]
[Footnote 1: McMaster's _History_. Vol. IV., pp. 387, 388.]
%304. Life on the Frontier.%--The "mover," or, as we should say, the
emigrant, would provide himself with a small wagon, very light, but
strong enough to carry his family, provisions, bedding, and utensils;
would cover it with a blanket or a piece of canvas or with linen which
was smeared with tar inside to make it waterproof; and with two stout
horses to pull it, would set out for the West, and make his way across
Pennsylvania to Pittsburg, then the greatest city of the West, with a
population of 7000. Some, as of old, would take boats and float down the
Ohio; others would go on to Wheeling, be ferried across the river, and
push into Ohio or Indiana or Illinois, there to "take up" a quarter
section (160 acres) of government land, or buy or rent a "clearing" from
some shiftless settler of an earlier day. Government land intended for
sale was laid out in quarter sections of 160 acres, and after being
advertised for a certain time was offered for sale at public auction.
What was not sold could then be purchased at the land office of the
district at two dollars an acre, one quarter to be paid down, and three
fourths before the expiration of four years. The emigrant, having
gathered eighty dollars, would go to some land office, "enter" a quarter
section, pay the first installment, and make his way in the two-horse
wagon containing his family and his worldly goods to the spot where was
to be his future home. Every foot of it in all probability would be
covered with bushes and trees.
[Illustration: Distribution of the Population of the United States
Fourth Census, 1820]
%305. The Log Cabin.%--In that case the settler would cut down a few
saplings, make a "half-faced camp," and begin his clearing. The
"half-faced camp" was a shed. Three sides were of logs laid one on
another horizontally. The roof was of saplings covered with branches or
bark. The fourth side was open, and when it rained was closed by hanging
up deerskin curtains. In this camp the newcomer and his family would
live while he grubbed up the bushes and cut down trees enough to make a
log cabin. If he were a thrifty, painstaking man, he would smooth each
log on four sides with his ax, and notch it half through at each end so
that when they were placed one on another the faces would nearly touch.
Saplings would make the rafters, and on them would be fastened planks
laid clapboard fashion, or possibly split shingles.
An opening was of course left for a door, although many a cabin was
built without a window, and when the door was shut received no light
save that which came down the chimney, which was always on the outside
of the house. To form it, an opening eight feet long and six feet high
was left at one end of the house, and around this a sort of bay window
was built of logs and lined with stones on the inside. Above the top of
the opening the chimney contracted and was made of branches smeared both
inside and out with clay. Generally the chimney went to the peak of the
roof; but it was by no means unusual for it to stop about halfway up the
end of the cabin.
[Illustration: Log cabin[1]]
[Footnote 1: The birthplace of Abraham Lincoln, restored (reproduced,
together with the first picture on the next page, from Tarbell's _Early
Life of Abraham Lincoln_, by permission of the publishers, S.S.
McClure, Limited).]
If the settler was too poor to buy glass, or if glass could not be had,
the window frame was covered with greased paper, which let in the light
but could not be seen through. The door was of plank with leather
hinges, or with iron hinges made from an old wagon tire by the nearest
blacksmith or by the settler himself. There was no knob, no lock,
no bolt.
In place of them there was a wooden latch on the inside, which could be
lifted by a person on the outside of the door by a leather strip which
came through a hole in the door and hung down. When this latch string
was out, anybody could pull it, lift the latch, and come in. When it was
drawn inside, nobody could come in without knocking. The floor was made
of "puncheons," or planks split and hewn with an ax from the trunk of a
tree, and laid with the round side down. The furniture the settler
brought with him, or made on the spot.
[Illustration: Hand mill [1]]
The household utensils were of the simplest kind. Brooms and brushes
were made of corn husks. Corn was shelled by hand and was then either
carried in a bag slung over a horse's back to the nearest mill, perhaps
fifteen miles away, or was pounded in a wooden hominy mortar with a
wooden pestle, or ground in a hand mill. Chickens and game were roasted
by hanging them with leather strings before the open fire. Cooking
stoves were unknown, and all cooking was done in a "Dutch oven," on the
hearth, or in a clay "out oven" built, as its name implies, out
of doors.
[Illustration: Corn-husk broom [1]]
[Illustration: Kitchen utensils [1]]
[Footnote 1: From originals in the National Museum, Washington.]
%306. Clearing and Planting.%--The land about the cabin was cleared
by grubbing the bushes and cutting down trees under a foot in diameter
and burning them. Big trees were "deadened," or killed, by cutting a
"girdle" around them two or three feet above the ground, deep enough to
destroy the sap vessels and so prevent the growth of leaves.[1]
[Footnote 1: For a delightful account of life in the West, read W. C.
Howells's _Recollections of Life in Ohio_ (edited by his son, William
Dean Howells).]
In the ground thus laid open to the sun were planted corn, potatoes, or
wheat, which, when harvested, was threshed with a flail and fanned and
cleaned with a sheet. At first the crop would be scarcely sufficient for
home use. But, as time passed, there would be some to spare, and this
would be wagoned to some river town and sold or exchanged for
"store goods."
If the settler chose his farm wisely, others would soon settle near by,
and when a cluster of clearings had been made, some enterprising
speculator would appear, take up a quarter section, cut it into town
lots, and call the place after himself, as Piketown, or Leesburg, or
Gentryville. A storekeeper with a case or two of goods would next
appear, then a tavern would be erected, and possibly a blacksmith shop
and a mill, and Piketown or Leesburg would be established. Hundreds of
such ventures failed; but hundreds of others succeeded and are to-day
prosperous villages.
[Illustration: Mississippi produce boat[1]]
[Footnote 1: From a model in the National Museum at Washington.]
%307. The New States._--While the northern stream of population was thus
traveling across New York, northern Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and into
Michigan, the middle stream was pushing down the Ohio. By 1820 it had
greatly increased the population of southern Indiana and Illinois, and
crossing the Mississippi was going up the Missouri River. In the South
the destruction of the Indian power by Jackson in 1813, and the opening
of the Indian land to settlement, led to a movement of the southern
stream of population across Alabama to Mobile. Now, what were some of
the results of this movement of population into the Mississippi valley?
In the first place, it caused the formation and admission into the Union
of six states in five years. They were Indiana, 1816; Mississippi, 1817;
Illinois, 1818; Alabama, 1819; Maine, 1820; Missouri, 1821.
%308. Slave and Free States.%--In the second place, it brought about
a great struggle over slavery. You remember that when the thirteen
colonies belonged to Great Britain slavery existed in all of them; that
when they became independent states some began to abolish slavery; and
that in time five became free states and eight remained slave states.
Slavery was also gradually abolished in New York and New Jersey, so that
of the original thirteen only six were now to be counted as slave
states. You remember again that when the Continental Congress passed the
Ordinance of 1787 for the government of the territory lying between the
Ohio River and the Great Lakes, Pennsylvania and the Mississippi River,
it ordained that in the Northwest Territory there should be no slavery.
In consequence of this, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois were admitted into
the Union as free states, as Vermont had been. Kentucky was originally
part of Virginia, and when it was admitted, came in as a slave state.
Tennessee once belonged to North Carolina, and hence was also slave
soil; and when it was given to the United States, the condition was
imposed by North Carolina that it should remain so. Tennessee,
therefore, entered the Union (in 1796) as a slave state. Much of what is
now Alabama and Mississippi was once owned by Georgia, and when she
ceded it in 1802, she did so with the express condition that it should
remain slave soil; as a result of this, Alabama and Mississippi were
slave states. Louisiana was part of the Louisiana Purchase, and was
admitted (1812) as a slave state because it contained a great many
slaves at the time of the purchase.
Thus in 1820 there were twenty-two states in the Union, of which eleven
were slave, and eleven free. Notice now two things: 1. That the dividing
line between the slave and the free states was the south and west
boundary of Pennsylvania from the Delaware to the Ohio, and the Ohio
River; 2. That all the states in the Union except part of Louisiana lay
east of the Mississippi River. As to what should be the character of our
country west of that river, nothing had as yet been said, because as yet
no state lying wholly in that region had asked admittance to the Union.
%309. Shall there be Slave States West of the Mississippi
River?%--But when the people rushed westward after the war, great
numbers crossed the Mississippi and settled on the Missouri River, and
as they were now very numerous they petitioned Congress in 1818 for
leave to make the state of Missouri and to be admitted into the Union.
The petitioners did not say whether they would make a slave or a free
state; but as the Missourians owned slaves, everybody knew that Missouri
would be a slave state. To this the free states were opposed. If the
tobacco-growing, cotton-raising, and sugar-making states wanted slaves,
that was their affair; but slavery must not be extended into states
beyond the Mississippi, because it was wrong. No man, it was said, had
any right to buy and sell a human being, even if he was black. The
Southern people were equally determined that slavery should cross the
Mississippi. We cannot, said they, abolish slavery; because if our
slaves were set free, they would not work, and as they are very
ignorant, they would take our property and perhaps our lives. Neither
can we stop the increase of negro slave population. We must, then, have
some place to send our surplus slaves, or the present slave states will
become a black America.
%310. The Missouri Compromise.%--Each side was so determined, and it
was so clear that neither would yield, that a compromise was suggested.
The country east of the Mississippi, it was said, is partly slave,
partly free soil. Why not divide the country west of the great river in
the same way? At first the North refused. But it so happened that just
at this moment Maine, having secured the consent of Massachusetts,
applied to Congress for admission into the Union as a free state. The
South, which had control of the Senate, thereupon said to the North,
which controlled the House of Representatives, If you will not admit
Missouri as a slave state, we will not admit Maine as a free state. This
forced the compromise, and after a bitter and angry discussion it
was agreed
1. That Maine should come in as a free, and Missouri as a slave, state.
2. That the Louisiana Purchase should be cut in two by the parallel of
36° 30', and that all north of the line except Missouri should be free
soil[1]. This parallel was thereafter known as the "Missouri
Compromise Line."
[Footnote 1: The Compromise was violated in 1836, when the present
northwest corner of Missouri was taken from the free territory and added
to that state. See maps, pp. 299 and 348]
[Illustration: AREAS OF FREEDOM AND SLAVERY IN 1820]
The admission of Maine and Missouri raised the number of states to
twenty-four.[1] No more were admitted for sixteen years. When Missouri
applied for admission as a state, Arkansas was (1819) organized as a
territory.
[Footnote 1: For the compromise read Woodburn's _Historical Significance
of the Missouri Compromise_ (in _Report American Historical
Association_, 1893, pp. 251-297); McMaster's _History of the People of
the United States_, Vol. IV., Chap. 39.]
%311. The Second Election of Monroe.%--This bitter contest over the
exclusion of slavery from the country west of the Mississippi shows how
completely party lines had disappeared in 1820. In the course of that
year, electors of a President were to be chosen in the twenty-four
states. That slavery would play an important part in the campaign, and
that some candidate would be put in the field by the people opposed to
the compromise, might have been expected. But there was no campaign, no
contest, no formal nomination. The members of Congress held a caucus,
but decided to nominate nobody. Every elector, it was well known, would
be a Republican, and as such would vote for the reëlection of Monroe and
Tompkins. And this almost did take place. Every one of the 229 electors
who voted was a Republican, and all save one in New Hampshire cast votes
for Monroe. But this one man gave his vote to John Quincy Adams. He said
he did not want Washington to be robbed of the glory of being the only
President who had ever received the unanimous vote of the electors.
March 4, 1821, came on Sunday. Monroe was therefore inaugurated on
Monday, March 5.
SUMMARY
1. The dull times on the seaboard, the cheap land in the West, the love
of adventure, and the desire to "do better" led, during 1814-1820, to a
most astonishing emigration westward.
2. The rush of population into the Mississippi valley caused the
admission of six states into the Union between 1816 and 1821.
3. The question of the admission of Missouri brought up the subject of
shutting slavery out of the country west of the Mississippi, which ended
in a compromise and the establishment of the line 36° 30'.
MOVEMENT OF POPULATION.
_Northern Stream._
Effect of hard times in the East.--
Scenes along the highways.--Arrival
of the emigrants in the West.--The
half-faced camp.--The log cabin.--
Household utensils.--Clearing the
land.--Growth of towns.
_Middle Stream._
Moves down the Ohio valley,
across southern Ohio, Indiana,
Illinois, and pushes up
the Missouri.
_Southern Stream._
The defeat of the Creek Indians
opens their lands in
Mississippi Territory to settlement.
* * * * *
This settlement of the West leads to:
Admission into the Union of:
1816. Indiana.
1817. Mississippi.
1818. Illinois.
1819. Alabama.
Admission of these states brings up the question of slavery.
1820. Maine.
1821. Missouri.
Organization of new territories.
1819. Arkansas.
1822. 1823. Florida.
_Status of slavery after 1820_.
FREE STATES.
N.H.,
Vt.,
Mass.,
R.I.,
Conn.
N.Y.,
N.J.,
Pa.,
Ohio,
Ind.,
Ill.,
Maine.
SLAVE STATES.
Del.,
Md.,
Va.,
N.C.,
S.C.,
Ga.,
Ala.,
Miss.
La.,
Ky.,
Tenn.,
Missouri.
_Country west of the Mississippi._
1804. Not settled.
1819. Attempt to make Missouri a slave state.
1820. The compromise.