[109:3] Cobb, "Story of the Palatines" (Wilkes-Barre, Pa., 1897), p.
300, citing "Penn. Colon. Records," iv, pp. 225, 345.
[109:4] "Works" (Bigelow ed.), ii, pp. 296-299.
[109:5] _Ibid._, iii, p. 297; _cf._ p. 221.
[109:6] "Summary" (1755), ii, p. 326.
[110:1] "European Settlements" (London, 1793), ii, p. 200 (1765); _cf._
Franklin, "Works" (N. Y., 1905-07), ii, p. 221, to the same effect.
[110:2] Proper, "Colonial Immigration Laws," in Columbia Univ.,
"Studies," xii.
[111:1] Libby, "Distribution of the Vote on the Federal Constitution,"
Univ. of Wis. _Bulletin_, pp. 8, 9, and citations. Note especially "New
Hampshire State Papers," x, pp. 228 _et seq._
[111:2] Libby, _loc. cit._, pp. 12-14, 46, 54-57.
[112:1] Farrand, in _Yale Review_, May, 1908, p. 52 and citation.
[112:2] Libby, _loc. cit._
[112:3] See Turner, "Rise of the New West" (Amer. Nation series, N. Y.,
1906), pp. 16-18.
[112:4] Parkman, "Pontiac" (Boston, 1851), ii, p. 352.
[112:5] Shepherd, "Proprietary Government in Pennsylvania," in Columbia
Univ. _Studies_, vi, pp. 546 _et seq._ Compare Watson, "Annals," ii, p.
259; Green, "Provincial America" (Amer. Nation series, N. Y., 1905), p.
234.
[113:1] Lincoln, "Revolutionary Movement in Pennsylvania" (Boston,
1901); McMaster and Stone, "Pennsylvania and the Federal Constitution"
(Lancaster, 1888).
[114:1] "Notes on Virginia." See his table of apportionment in Ford,
"Writings of Thomas Jefferson," iii, p. 222.
[115:1] "Debates of the Virginia State Convention, 1829-1830" (Richmond,
1854), p. 87. These debates constitute a mine of material on the
difficulty of reconciling the political philosophy of the Revolution
with the protection of the property, including slaves, of the lowland
planters.
[115:2] _Loc. cit._, p. 407. The italics are mine.
[116:1] McCrady, "South Carolina, 1719-1776," p. 623.
[117:1] Brevard, "Digest of S. C. Laws," i, pp. xxiv, 253; McCrady,
"South Carolina, 1719-1776," p. 637; Schaper, "Sectionalism in South
Carolina," in Amer. Hist. Assoc. "Report," 1900, i, pp. 334-338.
[117:2] Schaper, _loc. cit._, pp. 338, 339; Calhoun, "Works" (N. Y.,
1851-59), i, p. 402; _Columbia_ (S. C.) _Gazette_, Aug. 1, 1794; Ramsay,
"South Carolina," pp. 64-66, 195, 217; Elliot, "Debates," iv, pp. 288,
289, 296-299, 305, 309, 312.
[117:3] Schaper, _loc. cit._, pp. 440-447 _et seq._
[118:1] Turner, "Rise of the New West," pp. 50-52, 331; Calhoun,
"Works," i, pp. 400-405.
[118:2] "N. C. Colon. Records," vii, pp. xiv-xvii.
[118:3] See Bassett, "Regulators of N. C." in Amer. Hist. Assoc.
"Report," 1894, pp. 141 (bibliog.) _et seq._; "N. C. Colon. Records,"
pp. vii-x (Saunder's introductions are valuable); Caruthers, "David
Caldwell" (Greensborough, N. C., 1842); Waddell, "Colonial Officer"
(Raleigh, 1890); M. De L. Haywood, "Governor William Tryon" (Raleigh, N.
C., 1903); Clewell, "Wachovia," chap. x; W. E. Fitch, "Some Neglected
History of N. C." (N. Y., 1905); L. A. McCorkle and F. Nash, in "N. C.
Booklet" (Raleigh, 1901-07), iii; Wheeler, "North Carolina," ii, pp. 301
_et seq._; Cutter, "Lynch Law," chap. ii. and iii.
[119:1] Bassett, _loc. cit._, p. 152.
[119:2] Wheeler, "North Carolina," ii, pp. 301-306; "N. C. Colon.
Records," vii, pp. 251, 699.
[120:1] "N. C. Colon. Records," viii, p. xix.
[120:2] Turner, in _Amer. Hist. Review_, i, p. 76.
[120:3] "N. C. Colon. Records," vii, pp. xiv-xxiv.
[121:1] Weeks, "Church and State in North Carolina" (Baltimore, 1893);
"N. C. Colon. Records," x, p. 870; Curry, "Establishment and
Disestablishment" (Phila., 1889); C. F. James, "Documentary History of
the Struggle for Religious Liberty in Virginia" (Lynchburg, Va., 1900);
Semple, "The Virginia Baptists" (Richmond, 1810); Amer. Hist. Assoc.
"Papers," ii, p. 21; iii, pp. 205, 213.
[122:1] See Ballagh, "Slavery in Virginia," Johns Hopkins Univ.
"Studies," extra, xxiv; Bassett, "Slavery and Servitude in the Colony of
North Carolina," _Id._, xiv, pp. 169-254; Bassett, "Slavery in the State
of North Carolina," _Id._, xvii; Bassett, "Antislavery Leaders in North
Carolina," _Id._, xvi; Weeks, "Southern Quakers," _Id._, xv, extra;
Schaper, "Sectionalism in South Carolina," Amer. Hist. Assoc. "Report,"
1900; Turner, "Rise of the New West," pp. 54-56, 76-78, 80, 90, 150-152.
[122:2] See F. J. Turner, "State-Making in the West During the
Revolutionary Era," in _American Historical Review_, i, p. 70.
[122:3] Hening, x, p. 35; "Public Acts of N. C.," i, pp. 204, 306;
"Revised Code of Va., 1819," ii, p. 357; Roosevelt, "Winning of the
West," i, p. 261; ii, pp. 92, 220.
[124:1] Alden, "New Governments West of the Alleghanies" (Madison,
1897), gives an account of these colonies. [See the more recent work by
C. W. Alvord, "The Mississippi Valley in British Politics, 1763-1774"
(1917).]
[124:2] Thwaites, "Daniel Boone" (N. Y., 1902); [A. Henderson, "Conquest
of the Old Southwest" (N. Y., 1920), brings out the important share of
up-country men of means in promoting colonization].
[125:1] Turner, in "Alumni Quarterly of the University of Illinois," ii,
133-136.
[125:2] [It has seemed best in this volume not to attempt to deal with
the French frontier or the Spanish-American frontier. Besides the works
of Parkman, a multitude of monographs have appeared in recent years
which set the French frontier in new light; and for the Spanish frontier
in both the Southwest and California much new information has been
secured, and illuminating interpretations made by Professors H. E.
Bolton, I. J. Cox, Chapman, Father Engelhart, and other California and
Texas investigators, although the works of Hubert Howe Bancroft remain a
useful mine of material. There was, of course, a contemporaneous Old
West on both the French and the Spanish frontiers. The formation,
approach and ultimate collision and intermingling of these contrasting
types of frontiers are worthy of a special study.]
IV
THE MIDDLE WEST[126:1]
American sectional nomenclature is still confused. Once "the West"
described the whole region beyond the Alleghanies; but the term has
hopelessly lost its definiteness. The rapidity of the spread of
settlement has broken down old usage, and as yet no substitute has been
generally accepted. The "Middle West" is a term variously used by the
public, but for the purpose of the present paper, it will be applied to
that region of the United States included in the census reports under
the name of the North Central division, comprising the States of Ohio,
Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin (the old "Territory Northwest
of the River Ohio"), and their trans-Mississippi sisters of the
Louisiana Purchase,--Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, Kansas, Nebraska, North
Dakota, and South Dakota. It is an imperial domain. If the greater
countries of Central Europe,--France, Germany, Italy, and
Austro-Hungary,--were laid down upon this area, the Middle West would
still show a margin of spare territory. Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and
Buffalo constitute its gateways to the Eastern States; Kansas City,
Omaha, St. Paul-Minneapolis, and Duluth-Superior dominate its western
areas; Cincinnati and St. Louis stand on its southern borders; and
Chicago reigns at the center. What Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and
Baltimore are to the Atlantic seaboard these cities are to the Middle
West. The Great Lakes and the Mississippi, with the Ohio and the
Missouri as laterals, constitute the vast water system that binds the
Middle West together. It is the economic and political center of the
Republic. At one edge is the Populism of the prairies; at the other, the
capitalism that is typified in Pittsburgh. Great as are the local
differences within the Middle West, it possesses, in its physiography,
in the history of its settlement, and in its economic and social life, a
unity and interdependence which warrant a study of the area as an
entity. Within the limits of this article, treatment of so vast a
region, however, can at best afford no more than an outline sketch, in
which old and well-known facts must, if possible, be so grouped as to
explain the position of the section in American history.
In spite of the difficulties of the task, there is a definite advantage
in so large a view. By fixing our attention too exclusively upon the
artificial boundary lines of the States, we have failed to perceive much
that is significant in the westward development of the United States.
For instance, our colonial system did not begin with the Spanish War;
the United States has had a colonial history and policy from the
beginning of the Republic; but they have been hidden under the
phraseology of "interstate migration" and "territorial organization."
The American people have occupied a spacious wilderness; vast
physiographic provinces, each with its own peculiarities, have lain
across the path of this migration, and each has furnished a special
environment for economic and social transformation. It is possible to
underestimate the importance of State lines, but if we direct our gaze
rather to the physiographic province than to the State area, we shall be
able to see some facts in a new light. Then it becomes clear that these
physiographic provinces of America are in some respects comparable to
the countries of Europe, and that each has its own history of occupation
and development. General Francis A. Walker once remarked that "the
course of settlement has called upon our people to occupy territory as
extensive as Switzerland, as England, as Italy, and latterly, as France
or Germany, every ten years." It is this element of vastness in the
achievements of American democracy that gives a peculiar interest to the
conquest and development of the Middle West. The effects of this
conquest and development upon the present United States have been of
fundamental importance.
Geographically the Middle West is almost conterminous with the Provinces
of the Lake and Prairie Plains; but the larger share of Kansas and
Nebraska, and the western part of the two Dakotas belong to the Great
Plains; the Ozark Mountains occupy a portion of Missouri, and the
southern parts of Ohio and Indiana merge into the Alleghany Plateau. The
relation of the Provinces of the Lake and Prairie Plains to the rest of
the United States is an important element in the significance of the
Middle West. On the north lies the similar region of Canada: the Great
Lakes are in the center of the whole eastern and more thickly settled
half of North America, and they bind the Canadian and Middle Western
people together. On the south, the provinces meet the apex of that of
the Gulf Plains, and the Mississippi unites them. To the west, they
merge gradually into the Great Plains; the Missouri and its tributaries
and the Pacific railroads make for them a bond of union; another rather
effective bond is the interdependence of the cattle of the plains and
the corn of the prairies. To the east, the province meets the Alleghany
and New England Plateaus, and is connected with them by the upper Ohio
and by the line of the Erie Canal. Here the interaction of industrial
life and the historical facts of settlement have produced a close
relationship. The intimate connection between the larger part of the
North Central and the North Atlantic divisions of the United States will
impress any one who examines the industrial and social maps of the
census atlas. By reason of these interprovincial relationships, the
Middle West is the mediator between Canada and the United States, and
between the concentrated wealth and manufactures of the North Atlantic
States and the sparsely settled Western mining, cattle-raising, and
agricultural States. It has a connection with the South that was once
still closer, and is likely before long to reassert itself with new
power. Within the limits of the United States, therefore, we have
problems of interprovincial trade and commerce similar to those that
exist between the nations of the Old World.
Over most of the Province of the Lake and Prairie Plains the Laurentide
glacier spread its drift, rich in limestone and other rock powder, which
farmers in less favored sections must purchase to replenish the soil.
The alluvial deposit from primeval lakes contributed to fatten the soil
of other parts of the prairies. Taken as a whole, the Prairie Plains
surpass in fertility any other region of America or Europe, unless we
except some territory about the Black Sea. It is a land marked out as
the granary of the nation; but it is more than a granary. On the rocky
shores of Lake Superior were concealed copper mines rivaled only by
those of Montana, and iron fields which now[129:1] furnish the ore for
the production of eighty per cent of the pig iron of the United States.
The Great Lakes afford a highway between these iron fields and the coal
areas of the Ohio Valley. The gas and oil deposits of the Ohio Valley,
the coal of Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, and eastern Kansas, the lead and
zinc of the Ozark region and of the upper Mississippi Valley, and the
gold of the black Hills,--all contribute underground wealth to the
Middle West.
The primeval American forest once spread its shade over vast portions
of the same province. Ohio, Indiana, southern Michigan, and central
Wisconsin were almost covered with a growth of noble deciduous trees. In
southern Illinois, along the broad bottom lands of the Mississippi and
the Illinois, and in southern and southwestern Missouri, similar forests
prevailed. To the north, in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, appeared
the somber white pine wilderness, interlaced with hard woods, which
swept in ample zone along the Great Lakes, till the deciduous forests
triumphed again, and, in their turn, faded into the treeless expanse of
the prairies. In the remaining portions were openings in the midst of
the forested area, and then the grassy ocean of prairie that rolled to
west and northwest, until it passed beyond the line of sufficient
rainfall for agriculture without irrigation, into the semi-arid
stretches of the Great Plains.
In the middle of the eighteenth century, the forested region of this
province was occupied by the wigwams of many different tribes of the
Algonquin tongue, sparsely scattered in villages along the water
courses, warring and trading through the vast wilderness. The western
edge of the prairie and the Great Plains were held by the Sioux, chasing
herds of bison across these far-stretching expanses. These horsemen of
the plains and the canoemen of the Great Lakes and the Ohio were factors
with which civilization had to reckon, for they constituted important
portions of perhaps the fiercest native race with which the white man
has ever battled for new lands.
The Frenchman had done but little fighting for this region. He swore
brotherhood with its savages, traded with them, intermarried with them,
and explored the Middle West; but he left the wilderness much as he
found it. Some six or seven thousand French people in all, about Detroit
and Vincennes, and in the Illinois country, and scattered among the
Indian villages of the remote lakes and streams, held possession when
George Washington reached the site of Pittsburgh, bearing Virginia's
summons of eviction to France. In his person fate knocked at the portals
of a "rising empire." France hurried her commanders and garrisons, with
Indian allies, from the posts about the Great Lakes and the upper
Mississippi; but it was in vain. In vain, too, the aftermath of
Pontiac's widespread Indian uprising against the English occupation.
When she came into possession of the lands between the Ohio, the
Mississippi, and the Great Lakes, England organized them as a part of
the Province of Quebec. The daring conquest of George Rogers Clark left
Virginia in military possession of the Illinois country at the
conclusion of the Revolutionary War; but over all the remainder of the
Old Northwest, England was in control. Although she ceded the region by
the treaty which closed the Revolution, she remained for many years the
mistress of the Indians and the fur trade. When Lord Shelburne was
upbraided in parliament for yielding the Northwest to the United States,
the complaint was that he had clothed the Americans "in the warm
covering of our fur trade," and his defense was that the peltry trade of
the ceded tract was not sufficiently profitable to warrant further war.
But the English government became convinced that the Indian trade
demanded the retention of the Northwest, and she did in fact hold her
posts there in spite of the treaty of peace. Dundas, the English
secretary for the colonies, expressed the policy, when he declared, in
1792, that the object was to interpose an Indian barrier between Canada
and the United States; and in pursuance of this policy of preserving the
Northwest as an Indian buffer State, the Canadian authorities supported
the Indians in their resistance to American settlement beyond the Ohio.
The conception of the Northwest as an Indian reserve strikingly exhibits
England's inability to foresee the future of the region, and to measure
the forces of American expansion.
By the cessions of Virginia, New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut,
the Old Congress had come into nominal possession of an extensive public
domain, and a field for the exercise of national authority. The
significance of this fact in the development of national power is not
likely to be overestimated. The first result was the completion of the
Ordinance of 1787, which provided a territorial government for the Old
Northwest, with provisions for the admission of States into the Union.
This federal colonial system guaranteed that the new national
possessions should not be governed as dependent provinces, but should
enter as a group of sister States into the federation.[132:1] While the
importance of the article excluding slavery has often been pointed out,
it is probable that the provisions for a federal colonial organization
have been at least equally potential in our actual development. The full
significance of this feature of the Ordinance is only appreciated when
we consider its continuous influence upon the American territorial and
State policy in the westward expansion to the Pacific, and the political
preconceptions with which Americans approach the problems of government
in the new insular possessions. The Land Ordinance of 1785 is also
worthy of attention in this connection, for under its provisions almost
all of the Middle West has been divided by the government surveyor into
rectangles of sections and townships, by whose lines the settler has
been able easily and certainly to locate his farm, and the forester his
"forty." In the local organization of the Middle West these lines have
played an important part.
It would be impossible within the limits of this paper to detail the
history of the occupation of the Middle West; but the larger aspects of
the flow of population into the region may be sketched. Massachusetts
men had formed the Ohio Company, and had been influential in shaping the
liberal provisions of the Ordinance. Their land purchase, paid for in
soldiers' certificates, embraced an area larger than the State of Rhode
Island. At Marietta in 1788, under the shelter of Fort Harmar, their
bullet-proof barge landed the first New England colony. A New Jersey
colony was planted soon after at Cincinnati in the Symmes Purchase. Thus
American civilization crossed the Ohio. The French settlements at
Detroit and in Indiana and Illinois belonged to other times and had
their own ideals; but with the entrance of the American pioneer into the
forest of the Middle West, a new era began. The Indians, with the moral
support of England, resisted the invasion, and an Indian war followed.
The conquest of Wayne, in 1795, pushed back the Indians to the
Greenville line, extending irregularly across the State of Ohio from the
site of Cleveland to Fort Recovery in the middle point of her present
western boundary, and secured certain areas in Indiana. In the same
period Jay's treaty provided for the withdrawal of the British posts.
After this extension of the area open to the pioneer, new settlements
were rapidly formed. Connecticut disposed of her reserved land about
Lake Erie to companies, and in 1796 General Moses Cleaveland led the way
to the site of the city that bears his name. This was the beginning of
the occupation of the Western Reserve, a district about as large as the
parent State of Connecticut, a New England colony in the Middle West,
which has maintained, even to the present time, the impress of New
England traits. Virginia and Kentucky settlers sought the Virginia
Military Bounty Lands, and the foundation of Chillicothe here, in 1796,
afforded a center for Southern settlement. The region is a modified
extension of the limestone area of Kentucky, and naturally attracted the
emigrants from the Blue Grass State. Ohio's history is deeply marked by
the interaction of the New England, Middle, and Southern colonies within
her borders.
By the opening of the nineteenth century, when Napoleon's cession
brought to the United States the vast spaces of the Louisiana Purchase
beyond the Mississippi, the pioneers had hardly more than entered the
outskirts of the forest along the Ohio and Lake Erie. But by 1810 the
government had extinguished the Indian title to the unsecured portions
of the Western Reserve, and to great tracts of Indiana, along the Ohio
and up the Wabash Valley; thus protecting the Ohio highway from the
Indians, and opening new lands to settlement. The embargo had destroyed
the trade of New England, and had weighted down her citizens with debt
and taxation; caravans of Yankee emigrant wagons, precursors of the
"prairie schooner," had already begun to cross Pennsylvania on their way
to Ohio; and they now greatly increased in number. North Carolina back
countrymen flocked to the Indiana settlements, giving the peculiar
Hoosier flavor to the State, and other Southerners followed,
outnumbering the Northern immigrants, who sought the eastern edge of
Indiana.
Tecumthe, rendered desperate by the advance into his hunting grounds,
took up the hatchet, made wide-reaching alliances among the Indians, and
turned to England for protection. The Indian war merged into the War of
1812, and the settlers strove in vain to add Canadian lands to their
empire. In the diplomatic negotiations that followed the war, England
made another attempt to erect the Old Northwest beyond the Greenville
line into a permanent Indian barrier between Canada and the United
States; but the demand was refused, and by the treaties of 1818, the
Indians were pressed still farther north. In the meantime, Indian
treaties had released additional land in southern Illinois, and pioneers
were widening the bounds of the old French settlements. Avoiding the
rich savannas of the prairie regions, as devoid of wood, remote from
transportation facilities, and suited only to grazing, they entered the
hard woods--and in the early twenties they were advancing in a
wedge-shaped column up the Illinois Valley.