Valley,[105:2] and on to the uplands of the South. In 1738 a delegation
of the Philadelphia Presbyterian synod was sent to the Virginia governor
and received assurances of security of religious freedom; the same
policy was followed by the Carolinas. By 1760 a zone of Scotch-Irish
Presbyterian churches extended from the frontiers of New England to the
frontiers of South Carolina. This zone combined in part with the German
zone, but in general Scotch-Irishmen tended to follow the valleys
farther toward the mountains, to be the outer edge of this frontier.
Along with this combined frontier stream were English, Welsh and Irish
Quakers, and French Huguenots.[105:3]
Among this moving mass, as it passed along the Valley into the Piedmont,
in the middle of the eighteenth century, were Daniel Boone, John Sevier,
James Robertson, and the ancestors of John C. Calhoun, Abraham Lincoln,
Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson, James K. Polk, Sam Houston, and Davy
Crockett, while the father of Andrew Jackson came to the Carolina
Piedmont at the same time from the coast. Recalling that Thomas
Jefferson's home was on the frontier, at the edge of the Blue Ridge, we
perceive that these names represent the militant expansive movement in
American life. They foretell the settlement across the Alleghanies in
Kentucky and Tennessee; the Louisiana Purchase, and Lewis and Clark's
transcontinental exploration; the conquest of the Gulf Plains in the
War of 1812-15; the annexation of Texas; the acquisition of California
and the Spanish Southwest. They represent, too, frontier democracy in
its two aspects personified in Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln. It
was a democracy responsive to leadership, susceptible to waves of
emotion, of a "high religeous voltage"--quick and direct in action.
The volume of this Northern movement into the Southern uplands is
illustrated by the statement of Governor Tryon, of North Carolina, that
in the summer and winter of 1765 more than a thousand immigrant wagons
passed through Salisbury, in that colony.[106:1] Coming by families, or
groups of families or congregations, they often drove their herds with
them. Whereas in 1746 scarce a hundred fighting men were found in Orange
and the western counties of North Carolina, there were in 1753 fully
three thousand, in addition to over a thousand Scotch in the Cumberland;
and they covered the province more or less thickly, from Hillsboro and
Fayetteville to the mountains.[106:2] Bassett remarks that the
Presbyterians received their first ministers from the synod of New York
and Pennsylvania, and later on sent their ministerial students to
Princeton College. "Indeed it is likely that the inhabitants of this
region knew more about Philadelphia at that time than about Newbern or
Edenton."[106:3]
We are now in a position to note briefly, in conclusion, some of the
results of the occupation of this new frontier during the first half of
the eighteenth century--some of the consequences of this formation of
the Old West.
I. A fighting frontier had been created all along the line from New
England to Georgia, which bore the brunt of French and Indian attacks
and gave indispensable service during the Revolution. The significance
of this fact could only be developed by an extended survey of the
scattered border warfare of this era. We should have to see Rogers
leading his New England Rangers, and Washington defending interior
Virginia with his frontiersmen in their hunting shirts, in the French
and Indian War. When all of the campaigns about the region of Canada,
Lake Champlain, and the Hudson, central New York (Oriskany, Cherry
Valley, Sullivan's expedition against the Iroquois), Wyoming Valley,
western Pennsylvania, the Virginia Valley, and the back country of the
South are considered as a whole from this point of view, the meaning of
the Old West will become more apparent.
II. A new society had been established, differing in essentials from the
colonial society of the coast. It was a democratic self-sufficing,
primitive agricultural society, in which individualism was more
pronounced than the community life of the lowlands. The indented servant
and the slave were not a normal part of its labor system. It was engaged
in grain and cattle raising, not in producing staples, and it found a
partial means of supplying its scarcity of specie by the peltries which
it shipped to the coast. But the hunter folk were already pushing
farther on; the cow-pens and the range were giving place to the small
farm, as in our own day they have done in the cattle country. It was a
region of hard work and poverty, not of wealth and leisure. Schools and
churches were secured under serious difficulty,[107:1] if at all; but in
spite of the natural tendencies of a frontier life, a large portion of
the interior showed a distinctly religious atmosphere.
III. The Old West began the movement of internal trade which developed
home markets and diminished that colonial dependence on Europe in
industrial matters shown by the maritime and staple-raising sections.
Not only did Boston and other New England towns increase as trading
centers when the back country settled up, but an even more significant
interchange occurred along the Valley and Piedmont. The German farmers
of the Great Valley brought their woven linen, knitted stockings,
firkins of butter, dried apples, grain, etc., to Philadelphia and
especially to Baltimore, which was laid out in 1730. To this city also
came trade from the Shenandoah Valley, and even from the Piedmont came
peltry trains and droves of cattle and hogs to the same market.[108:1]
The increase of settlement on the upper James resulted in the
establishment of the city of Richmond at the falls of the river in 1737.
Already the tobacco-planting aristocracy of the lowlands were finding
rivals in the grain-raising area of interior Virginia and Maryland.
Charleston prospered as the up-country of the Carolinas grew. Writing in
the middle of the eighteenth century, Governor Glenn, of South Carolina,
explained the apparent diminution of the colony's shipping thus:[108:2]
Our trade with New York and Philadelphia was of this sort,
draining us of all the little money and bills that we could
gather from other places, for their bread, flour, beer, hams,
bacon, and other things of their produce, all which, except
beer, our new townships begin to supply us with which are
settled with very industrious and consequently thriving
Germans.
It was not long before this interior trade produced those rivalries for
commercial ascendancy, between the coastwise cities, which still
continue. The problem of internal improvements became a pressing one,
and the statutes show increasing provision for roads, ferries, bridges,
river improvements, etc.[109:1] The basis was being laid for a national
economy, and at the same time a new source for foreign export was
created.
IV. The Old West raised the issues of nativism and a lower standard of
comfort. In New England, Scotch-Irish Presbyterians had been frowned
upon and pushed away by the Puritan townsmen.[109:2] In Pennsylvania,
the coming of the Germans and the Scotch-Irish in such numbers caused
grave anxiety. Indeed, a bill was passed to limit the importation of the
Palatines, but it was vetoed.[109:3] Such astute observers as Franklin
feared in 1753 that Pennsylvania would be unable to preserve its
language and that even its government would become precarious.[109:4] "I
remember," he declares, "when they modestly declined intermeddling in
our elections, but now they come in droves and carry all before them,
except in one or two counties;" and he lamented that the English could
not remove their prejudices by addressing them in German.[109:5] Dr.
Douglas[109:6] apprehended that Pennsylvania would "degenerate into a
foreign colony" and endanger the quiet of the adjacent provinces. Edmund
Burke, regretting that the Germans adhered to their own schools,
literature, and language, and that they possessed great tracts without
admixture of English, feared that they would not blend and become one
people with the British colonists, and that the colony was threatened
with the danger of being wholly foreign. He also noted that "these
foreigners by their industry, frugality, and a hard way of living, in
which they greatly exceed our people, have in a manner thrust them out
in several places."[110:1] This is a phenomenon with which a succession
of later frontiers has familiarized us. In point of fact the
"Pennsylvania Dutch" remained through our history a very stubborn area
to assimilate, with corresponding effect upon Pennsylvania politics.
It should be noted also that this coming of non-English stock to the
frontier raised in all the colonies affected, questions of
naturalization and land tenure by aliens.[110:2]
V. The creation of this frontier society--of which so large a portion
differed from that of the coast in language and religion as well as in
economic life, social structure, and ideals--produced an antagonism
between interior and coast, which worked itself out in interesting
fashion. In general this took these forms: contests between the
property-holding class of the coast and the debtor class of the
interior, where specie was lacking, and where paper money and a
readjustment of the basis of taxation were demanded; contests over
defective or unjust local government in the administration of taxes,
fees, lands, and the courts; contests over apportionment in the
legislature, whereby the coast was able to dominate, even when its white
population was in the minority; contests to secure the complete
separation of church and state; and, later, contests over slavery,
internal improvements, and party politics in general. These contests are
also intimately connected with the political philosophy of the
Revolution and with the development of American democracy. In nearly
every colony prior to the Revolution, struggles had been in progress
between the party of privilege, chiefly the Eastern men of property
allied with the English authorities, and the democratic classes,
strongest in the West and the cities.
This theme deserves more space than can here be allotted to it; but a
rapid survey of conditions in this respect, along the whole frontier,
will at least serve to bring out the point.
In New England as a whole, the contest is less in evidence. That part of
the friction elsewhere seen as the result of defective local government
in the back country, was met by the efficiency of the town system; but
between the interior and the coast there were struggles over
apportionment and religious freedom. The former is illustrated by the
convention that met in Dracut, Massachusetts, in 1776, to petition the
States of Massachusetts and New Hampshire to relieve the financial
distress and unfair legislative representation. Sixteen of the border
towns of New Hampshire sent delegates to this convention. Two years
later, these New Hampshire towns attempted to join Vermont.[111:1] As a
Revolutionary State, Vermont itself was an illustration of the same
tendency of the interior to break away from the coast. Massachusetts in
this period witnessed a campaign between the paper money party which was
entrenched in the more recently and thinly-settled areas of the interior
and west, and the property-holding classes of the coast.[111:2] The
opposition to the constitutions of 1778 and 1780 is tinctured with the
same antagonism between the ideas of the newer part of the interior and
of the coast.[112:1] Shays' Rebellion and the anti-federal opposition of
1787-88 found its stronghold in the same interior areas.[112:2]
The religious struggles continued until the democratic interior, where
dissenting sects were strong, and where there was antagonism to the
privileges of the congregational church, finally secured complete
disestablishment in New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. But
this belongs to a later period.[112:3]
Pennsylvania affords a clear illustration of these sectional
antagonisms. The memorial of the frontier "Paxton Boys," in 1764,
demanded a right to share in political privileges with the older part of
the colony, and protested against the apportionment by which the
counties of Chester, Bucks, and Philadelphia, together with the city of
Philadelphia, elected twenty-six delegates, while the five frontier
counties had but ten.[112:4] The frontier complained against the failure
of the dominant Quaker party of the coast to protect the interior
against the Indians.[112:5] The three old wealthy counties under Quaker
rule feared the growth of the West, therefore made few new counties, and
carefully restricted the representation in each to preserve the majority
in the old section. At the same time, by a property qualification they
met the danger of the democratic city population. Among the points of
grievance in this colony, in addition to apportionment and
representation, was the difficulty of access to the county seat, owing
to the size of the back counties. Dr. Lincoln has well set forth the
struggle of the back country, culminating in its triumph in the
constitutional convention of 1776, which was chiefly the work of the
Presbyterian counties.[113:1] Indeed, there were two revolutions in
Pennsylvania, which went on side by side: one a revolt against the
coastal property-holding classes, the old dominant Quaker party, and the
other a revolt against Great Britain, which was in this colony made
possible only by the triumph of the interior.
In Virginia, as early as 1710, Governor Spotswood had complained that
the old counties remained small while the new ones were sometimes ninety
miles long, the inhabitants being obliged to travel thirty or forty
miles to their own court-house. Some of the counties had 1,700
tithables, while others only a dozen miles square had 500. Justices of
the peace disliked to ride forty or fifty miles to their monthly courts.
Likewise there was disparity in the size of parishes--for example, that
of Varina, on the upper James, had nine hundred tithables, many of whom
lived fifty miles from their church. But the vestry refused to allow the
remote parishioners to separate, because it would increase the parish
levy of those that remained. He feared lest this would afford
"opportunity to Sectarys to establish their opinions among 'em, and
thereby shake that happy establishment of the Church of England which
this colony enjoys with less mixture of Dissenters than any other of her
Maj'tie's plantations, and when once Schism has crept into the Church,
it will soon create faction in the Civil Government."
That Spotswood's fears were well founded, we have already seen. As the
sectaries of the back country increased, dissatisfaction with the
established church grew. After the Revolution came, Jefferson, with the
back country behind him, was able finally to destroy the establishment,
and to break down the system of entails and primogeniture behind which
the tobacco-planting aristocracy of the coast was entrenched. The desire
of Jefferson to see slavery gradually abolished and popular education
provided, is a further illustration of the attitude of the interior. In
short, Jeffersonian democracy, with its idea of separation of church and
state, its wish to popularize education, and its dislike for special
privilege, was deeply affected by the Western society of the Old
Dominion.
The Virginian reform movement, however, was unable to redress the
grievance of unequal apportionment. In 1780 Jefferson pointed out that
the practice of allowing each county an equal representation in the
legislature gave control to the numerous small counties of the
tidewater, while the large populous counties of the up-country suffered.
"Thus," he wrote, "the 19,000 men below the falls give law to more than
30,000 living in other parts of the state, and appoint all their chief
officers, executive and judiciary."[114:1] This led to a long struggle
between coast and interior, terminated only when the slave population
passed across the fall line, and more nearly assimilated coast and
up-country. In the mountain areas which did not undergo this change, the
independent state of West Virginia remains as a monument of the contest.
In the convention of 1829-30, the whole philosophy of representation was
discussed, and the coast defended its control as necessary to protect
property from the assaults of a numerical majority. They feared that
the interior would tax their slaves in order to secure funds for
internal improvements.
As Doddridge put the case:[115:1]
The principle is that the owners of slave property must be
possessed of all the powers of government, however small their
own numbers may be, to secure that property from the rapacity
of an overgrown majority of white men. This principle admits
of no relaxation, because the weaker the minority becomes, the
greater will their need for power be according to their own
doctrines.
Leigh of Chesterfield county declared:[115:2]
It is remarkable--I mention it for the curiosity of the
fact--that if any evil, physical or moral, arise in any of the
states south of us, it never takes a northerly direction, or
taints the Southern breeze; whereas, if any plague originate
in the North, it is sure to spread to the South and to invade
us sooner or later; the influenza--the smallpox--the
varioloid--the Hessian fly--the Circuit Court
system--Universal Suffrage--all come from the North, _and they
always cross above the falls of the great rivers_; below, it
seems, the broad expanse of waters interposing, effectually
arrests their progress.
Nothing could more clearly bring out the sense of contrast between
upland and lowland Virginia, and the continued intimacy of the bond of
connection between the North and its Valley and Piedmont colonies, than
this unconscious testimony.
In North and South Carolina the upland South, beyond the pine barrens
and the fall line, had similar grievances against the coast; but as the
zone of separation was more strongly marked, the grievances were more
acute. The tide of backwoods settlement flowing down the Piedmont from
the north, had cut across the lines of local government and disarranged
the regular course of development of the colonies from the
seacoast.[116:1] Under the common practice, large counties in North
Carolina and parishes in South Carolina had been projected into the
unoccupied interior from the older settlements along their eastern edge.
But the Piedmont settlers brought their own social order, and could not
be well governed by the older planters living far away toward the
seaboard. This may be illustrated by conditions in South Carolina. The
general court in Charleston had absorbed county and precinct courts,
except the minor jurisdiction of justices of the peace. This was well
enough for the great planters who made their regular residence there for
a part of each year; but it was a source of oppression to the up-country
settlers, remote from the court. The difficulty of bringing witnesses,
the delay of the law, and the costs all resulted in the escape of
criminals as well as in the immunity of reckless debtors. The extortions
of officials, and their occasional collusion with horse and cattle
thieves, and the lack of regular administration of the law, led the
South Carolina up-country men to take affairs in their own hands, and in
1764 to establish associations to administer lynch law under the name of
"Regulators." The "Scovillites," or government party, and the
Regulators met in arms on the Saluda in 1769, but hostilities were
averted and remedial measures passed, which alleviated the difficulty
until the Revolution.[117:1] There still remained, however, the
grievance of unjust legislative representation.[117:2] Calhoun stated
the condition in these words:
The upper country had no representation in the government and
no political existence as a constituent portion of the state
until a period near the commencement of the revolution.
Indeed, during the revolution, and until the formation of the
present constitution, in 1790, its political weight was
scarcely felt in the government. Even then although it had
become the most populous section, power was so distributed
under the constitution as to leave it in a minority in every
department of government.
Even in 1794 it was claimed by the up-country leaders that four-fifths
of the people were governed by one-fifth. Nor was the difficulty met
until the constitutional amendment of 1808, the effect of which was to
give the control of the senate to the lower section and of the house of
representatives to the upper section, thus providing a mutual
veto.[117:3] This South Carolina experience furnished the historical
basis for Calhoun's argument for nullification, and for the political
philosophy underlying his theory of the "concurrent majority."[118:1]
This adjustment was effected, however, only after the advance of the
black belt toward the interior had assimilated portions of the Piedmont
to lowland ideals.
When we turn to North Carolina's upper country we find the familiar
story, but with a more tragic ending. The local officials owed their
selection to the governor and the council whom he appointed. Thus power
was all concentrated in the official "ring" of the lowland area. The men
of the interior resented the extortionate fees and the poll tax, which
bore with unequal weight upon the poor settlers of the back country.
This tax had been continued after sufficient funds had been collected to
extinguish the debt for which it was originally levied, but venal
sheriffs had failed to pay it into the treasury. A report of 1770 showed
at least one defaulting sheriff in every county of the province.[118:2]
This tax, which was almost the sole tax of the colony, was to be
collected in specie, for the warehouse system, by which staples might be
accepted, while familiar on the coast, did not apply to the interior.
The specie was exceedingly difficult to obtain; in lack of it, the
farmer saw the sheriff, who owed his appointment to the dominant lowland
planters, sell the lands of the delinquent to his speculative friends.
Lawyers and court fees followed.
In short, the interior felt that it was being exploited,[118:3] and it
had no redress, for the legislature was so apportioned that all power
rested in the old lowland region. Efforts to secure paper money failed
by reason of the governor's opposition under instructions from the
crown, and the currency was contracting at the very time when population
was rapidly increasing in the interior.[119:1] As in New England, in the
days of Shays' Rebellion, violent prejudice existed against the
judiciary and the lawyers, and it must, of course, be understood that
the movement was not free from frontier dislike of taxation and the
restraints of law and order in general. In 1766 and 1768, meetings were
held in the upper counties to organize the opposition, and an
"association"[119:2] was formed, the members of which pledged themselves
to pay no more taxes or fees until they satisfied themselves that these
were agreeable to law.