THE PROBLEMS OF THE BACK LANDS
The ease with which the American domain had been permitted to extend
to the Mississippi in the peace negotiations with Great Britain did
not mean a freedom from future anxiety concerning the "back lands,"
lying to the west of the thirteen States. The entire domain contained
about 827,000 square miles, inhabited by about three million people,
very unequally distributed. Population was most dense near the coast
and gradually shaded off toward the interior. The front wave of
civilisation may be located by an irregular line passing through central
New Hampshire, skirting Lake Champlain, narrowing down to the Mohawk
valley, and across north-western New Jersey, whence it turned due west
across the mountains in a long arm reaching to Pittsburg. Retreating
to the Shenandoah valley, it descended to central Georgia and thence
to the sea. An "island" of people was to be found in central Kentucky
and another in north-central Tennessee. A great tract of vacant but
desirable land, comprising probably three-fourths of the domain,
stretched from within two hundred miles of the seacoast to the distant
Mississippi River. Barring a few French villagers, it was inhabited
only by savage men and beasts.
The lack of co-operation among the colonies in managing the Indians
had made a lasting impression. During the Revolutionary War, the
Congress gradually assumed the management of the savages to keep them
from serving the British forces. This was especially true of the tribes
dwelling beyond the recognised limits of the thirteen States. The State
Governments readily consented to allow the central body a large control
in this matter, because it meant so much for the common defence. The
British method of Indian agents and commissioners for different
geographical departments was adopted by the Congress, the whole being
placed under control of the Department of War. The National Government
thus came into control of the savages who inhabited the vast
trans-Alleghany region. The thought naturally followed that it should
be given control of the land itself, if it were to manage the savages
successfully.
Following the war, commissioners and agents complained that they could
not get the confidence and trade of the Indians of the North-west,
because of the influence of the British troops remaining in the forts,
in that quarter. According to the stipulations of the treaty of peace,
the forts located on the American side of the boundary line were to
be evacuated. There were some half-dozen of these posts, ranging along
the international line from Michilimackinac at the head of Lake Huron,
to Dutchman's Point, near Lake Champlain. The number of troops in each
was not sufficient to cause any fear of invasion; but their presence
produced an uncertainty in the Indian mind whether the control was
still with the British or had passed to the United States. The fur
trade, which should have passed through the States, was diverted to
Canada along the old lines.
Instead of vacating, the troops went out from some of the forts and
built additional new posts on American soil. "The Great Father across
the Waters," said a chief, when returning an unsigned treaty to Col.
Harmar, "has not given this country over to the Thirteen Fires." Knowing
the former predilection of the Indians for the French, the services
of Lafayette were enlisted, prior to his return to France, in addressing
a council on the frontier of New York to enlighten the natives
concerning their new allegiance. It was felt that all efforts would
be of no avail until the British were removed. To all American protests,
the British Government replied that the posts would not be evacuated
until the Americans had fulfilled their part of the treaty concerning
the debts owed to British merchants.
[Illustration: THE OLD BLOCKHOUSE AT MACKINAC, 1780]
At the beginning of the Revolutionary War, large sums had been due
British exporters and factors by American planters and traders, because
of the commercial system in vogue at that time. The war gave excuse
to unscrupulous debtors to withhold payment. Associations were formed
in many communities to adopt this form of retaliation, although
discountenanced by the better classes. At the close of the war, it was
said that there was not sufficient money in circulation to discharge
these long-due obligations. Jefferson estimated the debts due British
merchants in Virginia alone at thirty times the amount of money in
circulation in the State. Many States had passed stay laws against
executions to recover such debts and had thrown other legal obstructions
in the way of the British creditors. Claim was made not only for the
original amount of the debts, but for back interest as well. The
American merchants rejoined that they could pay neither principal nor
interest until they had been compensated for their slaves carried away
by the British Army and the Tories at the end of the war and contrary
to the terms of the treaty of peace. The labour of these slaves, they
said, would enable them to pay the debts.
Undoubtedly American statesmen wished to sustain inviolate the
provisions of the treaty, not only by preventing the States from
interfering with the collection of valid debts, but also by protecting
the Loyalists or Tories, as the treaty demanded. The English
negotiators, having small experience with a Confederation, supposed
that the clause in the treaty binding Congress to recommend actions
to the several State Legislatures was equivalent to a warrant. It was
agreed that the privilege should be granted to any person to go into
and remain twelve months in any part of the United States to regain
his property by law. The treaty provided further that Congress would
recommend to the States the restoration of all property to former
owners upon payment of the bona fide price which the present possessors
paid for it after confiscation. The treaty also implicitly promised
that there should be no more confiscations or prosecutions. The several
provisions for the alleviation of these Loyalists indicate slightly
the misfortunes into which their action brought them. Their treatment
both officially and by the mob has been described by some foreign
writers as the darkest page in American history. But they had choice
of sides in the issue. Granted that they supposed they were right in
upholding government against rebellion; yet the law of consequences
accepts no excuse for over-conservatism. He who fails to keep step
with the march of events falls behind and suffers the consequences.
The Loyalists were on the losing side and suffered the common fate of
the conquered.
War is abnormal. It undermines ideas of justice prevalent in time of
peace. Thus it came about that the treatment of the Loyalists reacted
unfortunately on the patriots. They had harried the royal sympathisers
out of the land. They had grown accustomed to using force and could
not readily return to law-abiding methods. They would not obey even
the provisions of a national treaty. The Articles of Confederation,
under which they were attempting to live in concord, kept a State from
laying a duty which would interfere with the proposed treaties with
France and Spain. Otherwise there was no compulsion aside from the
moral obligation attached to a treaty. However, John Jay, Secretary
of Foreign Affairs, acting in the capacity of an Attorney-General,
rendered an opinion that no State according to the Articles could
disobey or even interpret the provisions of a national treaty. Congress
adopted resolutions to the same effect. But without coercive power,
resolutions of Congress were idle as the wind. Jay confessed to
Jefferson in France, his fears that "some of the States had gone so
far in their deviations from the treaty that I fear they will not
easily be persuaded to tread back their steps." He also stated his
conviction after investigation that there had not been a single day
since the treaty had been signed in which it had not been broken by
some State. Washington also testified to the helplessness of Congress
by saying, "If you tell the Legislatures that they have violated the
treaty of peace, and invaded the prerogatives of the Confederacy, they
will laugh in your face." In this manner, a series of unfortunate
diplomatic complications turned upon the British possession of the
American forts along the frontier.
Nor was the impotence of the new nation exhibited toward England only
in the western country. Because it drained almost the whole of the
great inland valley, forming with its tributaries a network of
ready-made highways, the Mississippi River assumed an importance to
the trans-Alleghanian settlers which is lost in these days of
artificial means of transportation. As Madison once said, "It is the
Hudson, the Delaware, the Potomac, and all the navigable waters of the
Atlantic States formed into one stream." It is true that the freedom
of navigating the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence was secured to these
western people by the Treaty of 1783, but these ways to the sea were
closed by ice during a portion of the year and were impeded by falls.
The lower Mississippi, on the other hand, had neither of these
obstructions to navigation. Near its mouth was the city of New Orleans,
where ocean vessels lay ready to receive western products. The current
made easy the voyage thither. For twenty years the traditionally
easy-going Spaniard had held the mouth of the river, placing severe
restrictions upon foreign traders, but too indolent to enforce them.
Great Britain and the United States had ignored Spain when they declared
in the treaty of peace that the Mississippi, from its source to the
Gulf, should remain for ever free and open to citizens of both
countries. Perhaps because she was disappointed in not getting a portion
of the middle valley away from the Americans in the course of the peace
negotiations, Spain soon began to show that she was at least mistress
of the lower part of the river. Just where her dominion began was
uncertain. During the war, a Virginia captain raised his colours on
the Mississippi a few miles above Natchez. A Spanish commandant buried
a box near the same spot with the colours of his sovereign as a token
of possession. After 1783, the flatboatmen, who adventured down the
river with loads of tobacco, flour, or planks, seeking a market at New
Orleans or adjacent settlements, found at the Walnut Bluffs, about ten
miles below the mouth of the Yazoo River, a post of Spanish customs
guards. These bade them lower their flag and put themselves under the
protection of the governor of Natchez before proceeding. If the goods
escaped paying a duty at this place, they were examined a second time
when they reached the group of about one hundred houses, crowning the
bluff, which constituted the city of Natchez. On a prominent point,
commanding a view of the river for many miles, stood the governor's
palace and the fort, at which were usually stationed about a score of
Spanish troops.
The hardy frontiersmen, who escaped the perils of navigating the river
as far as Natchez, bore the inspection and frequent seizure of their
goods as a great hardship and unwarrantable action. Scarcely had trade
opened after the war before Congress received a complaint from one
Fowler that his flatboat loaded with produce for the New Orleans market
had been seized for refusal to pay duties at Natchez. A few months
later, Thomas Amis, a North Carolina trader, reported the seizure of
his stock at the same point, consisting of 142 Dutch ovens, 53 pots
and kettles, 34 skillets, 33 cast boxes, 3 pairs dog irons, a pair of
flat irons, a spice mortar, a plough mould, and 50 barrels of flour.
Complaints of some of these seizures officially reached Congress.
Countless tales of other infringements upon American rights on the
lower Mississippi were told among the settlers along the western slope
of the Alleghanies, arousing them to the conviction that they were
being sacrificed by the commercial interests of the Atlantic plain who
wished to preserve a profitable trade with Spain. Gardoqui had arrived
at the seat of government in 1785 as the first representative of the
Spanish King. He was determined, as he said, to make the lower
Mississippi a "bone of contention" in negotiating the long-delayed
treaty with the United States. Not much agitation on his part was
necessary. The western people were wrought up to the determination to
take matters into their own hands, if necessary, to procure an outlet
to Europe for their goods. The rumour that Jay, Secretary of Foreign
Affairs, had approved to Congress the suggestion of Gardoqui, that the
river be closed for ten years as the price of a commercial treaty,
drove them to the point of forcible resistance. The Spanish also
continued to occupy posts on the American side of the Florida boundary
line, but this was a grievance only as they were accused of arousing
the Indians to hostility against American settlers. In truth, these
western pioneers formed a long arm of people thrust out between Indians
under British dominance on the north and Indians under Spanish control
on the south.
Believing themselves outside the pale of eastern protection, the western
people entertained various projects for self-preservation. George
Rogers Clark, whose daring Virginia expedition into the Illinois country
had gained him fame in the Revolutionary days, placed himself at the
head of a volunteer company which called itself the "Wabash regiment,"
and had been recruited in Kentucky for an expedition against the Shawnee
Indians. Clark had degenerated through intemperance into a kind of
border freebooter. Turning his troops from the original purpose, he
seized the goods of the Spanish traders at Post Vincennes as a
retaliation upon the Spanish, and prepared to descend upon New Orleans.
Congress was compelled to take strong measures for disbanding his
followers and making amends to Spain. A short time after, another
Kentuckian was at Vincennes organising men to drive out the Spanish
and make a settlement at Natchez, presumably inside the limits of
Georgia. "Ireland is a free country to what this will be when its
navigation is entirely shut," he wrote to the governor of Georgia in
unfolding his scheme. An emissary was sent through the Illinois French
settlements to describe the Spanish outrages on the lower Mississippi.
Seditious papers were circulating in Kentucky and in the revolutionary
State of Franklin. "In case we are not countenanced," said one of these
documents, "and succoured by the United States, our allegiance will
be thrown off and some other power applied to. Great Britain stands
ready with open arms to receive and support us." One adventurer assured
Gardoqui that fifty thousand men would be in arms in the western country
to get their commercial rights.
Even a more efficient government than a Confederation would have
experienced difficulty in overcoming these decentralising effects of
the Alleghany Mountains, before improved methods of transportation had
annihilated the barrier. The people along the Atlantic Ocean and those
in the Mississippi valley lived really in two parallel north and south
plains, having easier outlets through foreign countries and therefore
more points of contact with them than with each other. Although obscured
by the later north and south sectionalism, this east and west difference
for many years caused a fear in the older portion that the newer or
valley part would secede from it. This fear began with the troubles
over the navigation of the Mississippi, it was renewed by Genet's
intrigues, it reached its climax in Burr's expedition, and it subsided
only when railways and canal transportation had levelled the mountains
and thereby lessened the importance of waterways.
European strategists made ready use of the isolated condition of the
western people, not always with the object of absorbing them, but
rather of using them in the great game of territorial acquisition
played so many times on the American board. For instance, in 1787, the
French Minister to the United States forwarded to his Government a
document presented to him, evidently by a native of France residing
in America, which described the extent of the Mississippi valley and
the dissatisfaction of its inhabitants. The paper asserted that the
people beyond the mountains
"seek for a new support and offer to the power which will welcome them
advantages which will before long effect those which America, as it now
is, could promise.... It requires a protector; the first who will stretch
out his arms to it will have made the greatest acquisition that could be
desired in this new world. Fortunate my country if she does not let this
moment escape, one of those not presented twice."
A year or two later, the British consul at Philadelphia was suggesting
to his Government the use of the western settlements of the United
States in an expedition to be made against Spanish New Orleans. These
frontiersmen would co-operate, he thought, in any measure that might
tend to secure them a free trade which the uninterrupted passage of
the Mississippi would effectually establish. He pronounced them a hardy
race, adventurers by profession, and ready to seize every opportunity
of profit or employment. They were described in a project for using
them presented at another time to the French Government as "hardy,
enterprising, good marksmen, lovers of liberty, and always armed."
The extent to which the western people were prepared to go in the
Confederation days was a matter of much dispute, and was aired fully
in the course of time by controversies in Kentucky politics. But their
hardihood and capacity for achievement have never been questioned.
They were qualified by nature to insist upon their rights even if such
insistence embarrassed the foreign negotiations of the home Government.
Bred in the rural districts of Virginia and the Carolinas, accustomed
to solitude and privations, depending upon their rifles for food and
largely for dress, they felt no ties binding them to home and the old
life when once they had crossed the mountains. They were self-dependent
in nearly every particular except arms and ammunition. Carrying the
organising instinct of their English forefathers, they set up local
government as rapidly as their numbers warranted. To be held as
colonists by the States to the eastward of the mountains was contrary
to that spirit of inherited freedom which had already made those States
out of colonies. Just at the dawn of the Revolution the colonisation
of the far-famed "blue grass" region of Kentucky had begun, when Daniel
Boone led the Transylvania Company from North Carolina to found
Boonesboro. Although the independent government which this company
erected was suppressed by the governors of Virginia and North Carolina,
the movement could not be stayed. A few years later, these Kentuckians,
increased in numbers by the enormous migration thither, were holding
secession conventions which Virginia thought wise not to resist. North
Carolina repressed with some effort the independent State of Franklin,
or "Frankland," the land of the free Franks, as it was first called,
which John Sevier and other hardy spirits set up in what is now eastern
Tennessee.
While these attempts to create independent States in the remote regions
are now praised as evidences of the organising instinct of the American
people, it must not be forgotten that at the time they were formed
within the legitimate bounds of regular States and seriously threatened
to impair their domains. The domain of a State is regarded as one of
the most inviolable attributes of its sovereignty. The third Article
of the Confederation bound the States to assist any of their number
against attacks made upon its sovereignty. Not only were the States
of Virginia and Kentucky threatened with the loss of territory through
insurrection. The "Green Mountain boys," headed by Ethan Allen, had
succeeded in setting up an independent State, with a popular innkeeper
as governor, upon land claimed by New York. Against these infringements
upon the integrity of the States, the Congress could do nothing more
than draw up resolutions expressing "the highest disapprobation" of
those who participated.
The experience of the National Government under the Articles of
Confederation with the settlers on the frontier beyond the recognised
limits of the thirteen States, although alarming at the time, was
invaluable as a lesson. It taught thinking men not only that the Central
Government must be given more power to protect the States themselves,
but that these remote districts could be best governed by the central
authorities. Every argument of this kind was timely since it might
induce the States still holding out to yield their back lands as a
common property. The beginning of ceding the western lands to the
common stock is important as a precedent since it created ultimately
the profit-sharing principle of the public domain. Mention has been
made of the failure in Congress to place western bounds on certain
States. When the Articles were sent to all the States for ratification
before going into effect, individual State Legislatures had opportunity
of making such boundary restriction the price of a national agreement.
Individualism in this instance proved a blessing. It is important to
an appreciation of the times to note that the State whose persistence
won the victory was not one of the largest or most influential. Maryland
was the eighth in rank of territory and probably the sixth in number
of population. Her powerful neighbour and ancient enemy, Virginia,
upon assuming statehood, had reiterated her charter claims to full
one-half the territory of British North America, magnanimously "ceding"
to the States of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and the two Carolinas the
land of which they were already possessed.
As Virginia admitted, the British Government had always assumed that the
Atlantic coast-plain was the seat of its thirteen American colonies, and
had refused to acknowledge openly their claims much beyond the crest of
the Alleghanies. The ownership of the vacant lands between the mountains
and the Mississippi River was vested in the King under the name of "Crown
lands." But no sooner had the struggle for independence begun than the
colonies determined in case of success to claim the entire British
possessions in those parts; that is, to the Mississippi. As early as 1776,
Silas Deane, the commercial agent of the United States in Paris, suggested
to Congress the sale of the vacant lands to French colonists as a means of
paying the expenses of the war. The rich valley, when fully regarded as a
possible spoil of war, became a golden apple of discord. It had been won,
small States argued, "by the blood and treasure of all, and ought,
therefore, to be a common estate."
Led more by the necessity for some kind of a national government to
replace the rule of Britain thrown off in 1776 than by such appeals, the
Legislature of New York in 1781 authorised her delegates in Congress to
quitclaim all lands lying outside her present boundaries to the General
Government for the benefit of present and future States of the Union.
Although the claim of New York, based upon a treaty with the Indians, had
been regarded as shadowy by other States, yet her greatly lauded action
led in the same year to propositions from Virginia and, a few years later,
to advances from Massachusetts and Connecticut resulting eventually in
their giving up all territory north of the Ohio and west of Pennsylvania
and New York. Persuaded by these favourable indications, Maryland signed
the Articles, as heretofore described.
Whether the persistence of Maryland was due to her desire for the
national good, to selfishness in wishing a share of the national spoils
of war, or to animosity toward Virginia dating from their ancient
boundary dispute, the result may well be pronounced the most important
step toward union since the appointment of Washington to the head of
a national army. The public domain was the first inheritance the needy
National Government ever received aside from debts and disputes. Not
that the pecuniary return from the sale of the public lands proved as
large as at first imagined; but that this tangible asset gave some
dignity to the intangible Union. The disposal of the land, as a
profit-sharing enterprise, formed a business undertaking which concerned
all the States. It could be managed only by the combined powers.