THE MEN OF THE WESTERN WATERS, 1798-1802.
Rapid Growth of the West.
The growth of the West was very rapid in the years immediately
succeeding the peace with the Indians and the treaties with England and
Spain. As the settlers poured into what had been the Indian-haunted
wilderness it speedily became necessary to cut it into political
divisions. Kentucky had already been admitted as a State in 1792;
Tennessee likewise became a State in 1796. The Territory of Mississippi
was organized in 1798, to include the country west of Georgia and south
of Tennessee, which had been ceded by the Spaniards under Pinckney's
treaty. [Footnote: Claiborne's "Mississippi," p. 220, etc.] In 1800 the
Connecticut Reserve, in what is now northeastern Ohio, was taken by the
United States. The Northwestern Territory was divided into two parts;
the eastern was composed mainly of what is now the State of Ohio, while
the western portion was called Indiana Territory, and was organized with
W. H. Harrison as Governor, his capital being at Vincennes. [Footnote:
"Annals of the West," by Thomas H. Perkins, p. 473. A valuable book,
showing much scholarship and research. The author has never received
proper credit. Very few indeed of the Western historians of his date
showed either his painstaking care or his breadth of view.] Harrison
had been Wayne's aid-de-camp at the fight of the Fallen Timbers, and had
been singled out by Wayne for mention because of his coolness and
gallantry. Afterwards he had succeeded Sargent as Secretary of the
Northwestern Territory when Sargent had been made Governor of
Mississippi, and he had gone as a Territorial delegate to Congress.
[Footnote: Jacob Burnett in "Ohio Historical Transactions," Part II.,
Vol. I., p. 69.]
Ohio Becomes a State.
In 1802 Ohio was admitted as a State. St. Clair, and St. Clair's
supporters, struggled to keep the Territory from statehood, and proposed
to cut it down in size, nominally because they deemed the extent of
territory too great for governmental purposes, but really, doubtless,
because they distrusted the people, and did not wish to see them take
the government into their own hands. The effort failed, however, and the
State was admitted by Congress, beginning its existence in 1803.
[Footnote: Atwater, "History of Ohio," p. 169.] Congress made the
proviso that the State Constitution should accord with the Constitution
of the United States, and should embody the doctrines contained in the
Ordinance of 1787. [Footnote: The question of the boundaries of the
Northwestern States is well treated in "The Boundaries of Wisconsin," by
Reuben G. Thwaites, the Secretary of the State Historical Society of
Wisconsin.] The rapid settlement of southeastern Ohio was hindered by
the fact that the speculative land companies, the Ohio and Scioto
associations, held great tracts of territory which the pioneers passed
by in their desire to get to lands which they could acquire in their own
right. This was one of the many bad effects which resulted from the
Government's policy of disposing of its land in large blocks to the
highest bidder, instead of allotting it, as has since been done, in
quarter sections to actual settlers. [Footnote: Mr. Eli Thayer, in his
various writings, has rightly laid especial stress on this point.]
Harrison, St. Clair, and Sargent.
Lessons Taught by Blount's Experience.
Harrison was thoroughly in sympathy with the Westerners. He had thrown
in his lot with theirs; he deemed himself one of them, and was accepted
by them as a fit representative. Accordingly he was very popular as
Governor of Indiana. St. Clair in Ohio and Sargent in Mississippi were
both extremely unpopular. They were appointed by Federalist
administrations, and were entirely out of sympathy with the Western
people among whom they lived. One was a Scotchman, and one a New
Englander. They were both high-minded men, with sound ideas on
governmental policy, though Sargent was the abler of the two; but they
were out of touch with the Westerners. They distrusted the frontier
folk, and were bitterly disliked in return. Each committed the
fundamental fault of trying to govern the Territory over which he had
been put in accordance with his own ideas, and heedless of the wishes
and prejudices of those under him. Doubtless each was conscientious in
what he did, and each of course considered the difficulties under which
he labored to be due solely to the lawlessness and the many shortcomings
of the settlers. But this was an error. The experience of Blount when he
occupied the exceedingly difficult position of Territorial Governor of
Tennessee showed that it was quite possible for a man of firm belief in
the Union to get into touch with the frontiersmen and to be accepted by
them as a worthy representative; but the virtues of St. Clair and
Sargent were so different from the backwoods virtues, and their habits
of thought were so alien, that they could not possibly get on with the
people among whom their lot had been cast. Neither of them in the end
took up his abode in the Territory of which he had been Governor, both
returning to the East. The code of laws which they enacted prior to the
Territories possessing a sufficient number of inhabitants to become
entitled to Territorial legislatures were deemed by the settlers to be
arbitrary and unsuited to their needs. There was much popular feeling
against them. On one occasion St. Clair was mobbed in Chillicothe, the
then capital of Ohio, with no other effect than to procure a change of
capital to Cincinnati. Finally both Sargent and St. Clair were removed
by Jefferson, early in his administration.
The Jeffersonians the Champions of the West.
The Jeffersonian Republican party did very much that was evil, and it
advocated governmental principles of such utter folly that the party
itself was obliged immediately to abandon them when it undertook to
carry on the government of the United States, and only clung to them
long enough to cause serious and lasting damage to the country; but on
the vital question of the West, and its territorial expansion, the
Jeffersonian party was, on the whole, emphatically right, and its
opponents, the Federalists, emphatically wrong. The Jeffersonians
believed in the acquisition of territory in the West, and the
Federalists did not. The Jeffersonians believed that the Westerners
should be allowed to govern themselves precisely as other citizens of
the United States did, and should be given their full share in the
management of national affairs. Too many Federalists failed to see that
these positions were the only proper ones to take. In consequence,
notwithstanding all their manifold shortcomings, the Jeffersonians, and
not the Federalists, were those to whom the West owed most.
Right of the Westerners to Self-Government.
Whether the Westerners governed themselves as wisely as they should have
mattered little. The essential point was that they had to be given the
right of self-government. They could not be kept in pupilage. Like other
Americans, they had to be left to strike out for themselves and to sink
or swim according to the measure of their own capacities. When this was
done it was certain that they would commit many blunders, and that some
of these blunders would work harm not only to themselves but to the
whole nation. Nevertheless, all this had to be accepted as part of the
penalty paid for free government. It was wise to accept it in the first
place, and in the second place, whether wise or not, it was inevitable.
Many of the Federalists saw this; and to many of them, the Adamses, for
instance, and Jay and Pinckney, the West owed more than it did to most
of the Republican statesmen; but as a whole, the attitude of the
Federalists, especially in the Northeast, toward the West was ungenerous
and improper, while the Jeffersonians, with all their unwisdom and
demagogy, were nevertheless the Western champions.
Vagaries of Western Constitution-Making.
Mississippi and Ohio had squabbled with their Territorial governors much
as the Old Thirteen Colonies had squabbled with the governors appointed
by the Crown. One curious western consequence of this was common to both
cases. When the old Colonies became States, they in their constitutions
usually imposed the same checks upon the executive they themselves
elected as they had desired to see imposed upon the executive appointed
by an outside power. The new Territories followed the same course. When
Ohio became a State it adopted a very foolish constitution. This
constitution deprived the executive of almost all power, and provided a
feeble, short-term judiciary, throwing the control of affairs into the
hands of the legislative body, in accordance with what were then deemed
Democratic ideas. The people were entirely unable to realize that, so
far as their discontent with the Governor's actions was reasonable, it
arose from the fact that he was appointed, not by themselves, but by
some body or person not in sympathy with them. They failed to grasp the
seemingly self-evident truth that a governor, one man elected by the
people, is just as much their representative and is just as certain to
carry out their ideas as is a legislature, a body of men elected by the
people. They provided a government which accentuated, instead of
softening, the defects in their own social system. They were in no
danger of suffering from tyranny; they were in no danger of losing the
liberty which they so jealously guarded. The perils that threatened them
were lawlessness, lack of order, and lack of capacity to concentrate
their efforts in time of danger from within or from an external enemy;
and against these perils they made no provision whatever.
Western Feeling against the East.
The West in Close Touch with the South.
The inhabitants of Ohio Territory were just as bitter against St. Clair
as the inhabitants of Mississippi Territory were against Sargent. The
Mississippians did not object to Sargent as a Northern man, but, in
common with the men of Ohio, they objected to governors who were Eastern
men and out of touch with the West. At the end of the eighteenth
century, and during the early years of the nineteenth, the important
fact to be remembered in treating of the Westerners was their
fundamental unity, in blood, in ways of life, and in habits of thought.
[Footnote: Prof. Frederick A. Turner, of the University of Michigan,
deserves especial credit for the stress he has laid upon this point.]
They were predominantly of Southern, not of Northern blood; though it
was the blood of the Southerners of the uplands, not of the low coast
regions, so that they were far more closely kin to the Northerners than
were the seaboard planters. In Kentucky and Tennessee, in Indiana and
Mississippi, the settlers were of the same quality. They possessed the
same virtues and the same shortcomings, the same ideals and the same
practices. There was already a considerable Eastern emigration to the
West, but it went as much to Kentucky as to Ohio, and almost as much to
Tennessee and Mississippi as to Indiana. As yet the Northeasterners were
chiefly engaged in filling the vacant spaces in New England, New York,
and Pennsylvania. The great flood of Eastern emigration to the West, the
flood which followed the parallels of latitude, and made the Northwest
like the Northeast, did not begin until after the War of 1812. It was
no accident that made Harrison, the first governor of Indiana and long
the typical representative of the Northwest, by birth a Virginian, and
the son of one of the Virginian signers of the Declaration of
Independence. The Northwest was at this time in closer touch with
Virginia than with New England.
Homogeneity of the West.
Slavery in the West.
There was as yet no hard and fast line drawn between North and South
among the men of the Western waters. Their sense of political cohesion
was not fully developed, and the same qualities that at times made them
loose in their ideas of allegiance to the Union at times also prevented
a vivid realization on their part of their own political and social
solidarity; but they were always more or less conscious of this
solidarity, and, as a rule, they acted together. Most important of all,
the slavery question, which afterwards rived in sunder the men west of
the Alleghanies as it rived in sunder those east of them, was of small
importance in the early years. West of the Alleghanies slaves were
still to be found almost everywhere, while almost every where there
were also frequent and open expressions of hostility to slavery. The
Southerners still rather disliked slavery, while the Northerners did
not as yet feel any very violent antagonism to it. In the Indiana
Territory there were hundreds of slaves, the property of the old French
inhabitants and of the American settlers who had come there prior to
1787; and the majority of the population of this Territory actually
wished to reintroduce slavery, and repeatedly petitioned Congress to
be allowed the reintroduction. Congress, with equal patriotism, and
wisdom, always refused the petition; but it was not until the new century
was well under way that the anti-slavery element obtained control in
Indiana and Illinois. Even in Ohio there was a considerable party which
favored the introduction of slavery, and though the majority was against
this, the people had small sympathy with the negroes, and passed very
severe laws against the introduction of free blacks into the State, and
even against those already in residence therein. [Footnote: "Ohio," by
Rufus King. pp. 290, 364, etc.] On the other hand, when Kentucky's first
constitutional convention sat, a resolute effort was made to abolish
slavery within the State, and this effort was only defeated after a hard
struggle and a close vote. To their honor be it said that all of the
clergymen--three Baptists, one Methodist, one Dutch Reformed, and one
Presbyterian--who were members of the constitutional convention voted
in favor of the abolition of slavery. [Footnote: John Mason Brown,
"Political Beginnings of Kentucky," 229. Among the men who deserve honor
for thus voting against slavery was Harry Innes. One of the Baptist
preachers, Gerrard, was elected Governor over Logan, four years later;
a proof that Kentucky sentiment was very tolerant of attacks on slavery.
All the clergymen, by the way, also voted to disqualify clergymen for
service in the legislatures.]
In Tennessee no such effort was made, but the leaders of thought did not
hesitate to express their horror of slavery and their desire that it
might be abolished. There was no sharp difference between the attitudes
of the Northwestern and the Southwestern States towards slavery.
Features of Western Life.
The Farmer the Typical Westerner.
North and South alike, the ways of life were substantially the same;
though there were differences, of course, and these differences tended
to become accentuated. Thus, in the Mississippi Territory the planters,
in the closing years of the century, began to turn their attention to
cotton instead of devoting themselves to the crops of their brethren
farther north; and cotton soon became their staple product. But as yet
the typical settler everywhere was the man of the axe and rifle, the
small pioneer farmer who lived by himself, with his wife and his
swarming children, on a big tract of wooded land, perhaps three or four
hundred acres in extent. Of this three or four hundred acres he rarely
cleared more than eight or ten; and these were cleared imperfectly. On
this clearing he tilled the soil, and there he lived in his rough log
house with but one room, or at most two and a loft. [Footnote: F. A.
Michaux, "Voyages" (in 1802), pp. 132, 214, etc.]
Game Still Abundant.
The man of the Western waters, was essentially a man who dwelt alone in
the midst of the forest on his rude little farm, and who eked out his
living by hunting. Game still abounded everywhere, save in the immediate
neighborhood of the towns; so that many of the inhabitants lived almost
exclusively by hunting and fishing, and, with their return to the
pursuits of savagery, adopted not a little of the savage idleness and
thriftlessness. Bear, deer, and turkey were staple foods. Elk had ceased
to be common, though they hung on here and there in out of the way
localities for many years; and by the close of the century the herds of
bison had been driven west of the Mississippi. [Footnote: Henry Ker,
"Travels," p.22.] Smaller forms of wild life swarmed. Gray squirrels
existed in such incredible numbers that they caused very serious damage
to the crops, and at one time the Kentucky Legislature passed a law
imposing upon every male over sixteen years of age the duty of killing a
certain number of squirrels and crows every year. [Footnote: Michaux,
215, 236; Collins, I., 24.] The settlers possessed horses and horned
cattle, but only a few sheep, which were not fitted to fight for their
own existence in the woods, as the stock had to. On the other hand,
slab-sided, long-legged hogs were the most plentiful of domestic
animals, ranging in great, half-wild droves through the forest.
Fondness of the Westerners for the Lonely Life of the Woods.
All observers were struck by the intense fondness of the frontiersmen
for the woods and for a restless, lonely life. [Footnote: Crêvecoeur,
"Voyage dans la Haute Pennsylvanie," etc., p. 265.] They pushed
independence to an extreme; they did not wish to work for others or to
rent land from others. Each was himself a small landed proprietor, who
cleared only the ground that he could himself cultivate. Workmen were
scarce and labor dear. It was almost impossible to get men fit to work
as mill hands, or to do high-class labor in forges even by importing
them from Pennsylvania or Maryland. [Footnote: Clay MSS., Letter to
George Nicholas, Baltimore, Sept. 3, 1796.] Even in the few towns the
inhabitants preferred that their children should follow agriculture
rather than become handicraftsmen; and skilled workmen such as
carpenters and smiths made a great deal of money, so much so that they
could live a week on one day's wage. [Footnote: Michaux, pp. 96, 152.]
The River Trade.
In addition to farming there was a big trade along the river. Land
transportation was very difficult indeed, and the frontiersman's whole
life was one long struggle with the forest and with poor roads. The
waterways were consequently of very great importance, and the
flatboatmen on the Mississippi and Ohio became a numerous and noteworthy
class. The rivers were covered with their craft. There was a driving
trade between Pittsburgh and New Orleans, the goods being drawn to
Pittsburgh from the seacoast cities by great four-horse wagons, and
being exported in ships from New Orleans to all parts of the earth. Not
only did the Westerners build river craft, but they even went into
shipbuilding; and on the upper Ohio, at Pittsburgh, and near Marietta,
at the beginning of the present century, seagoing ships were built and
launched to go down the Ohio and Mississippi, and thence across the
ocean to any foreign port. [Footnote: Thompson Mason Harris, "Journal of
Tour," etc., 1803, p. 140; Michaux, p. 77.] There was, however, much
risk in this trade; for the demand for commodities at Natchez and New
Orleans was uncertain, while the waters of the Gulf swarmed with British
and French cruisers, always ready to pounce like pirates on the ships of
neutral powers. [Footnote: Clay MSS., W. H. Turner to Thomas Hart,
Natchez, May 27, 1797.]
Small Size of the Towns.
Natchez.
Yet the river trade was but the handmaid of frontier agriculture. The
Westerners were a farmer folk who lived on the clearings their own hands
had made in the great woods, and who owned the land they tilled. Towns
were few and small. At the end of the century there were some four
hundred thousand people in the West; yet the largest town was Lexington,
which contained less than three thousand people. [Footnote: Perrin Du
Lac "Voyage," etc., 1801, 1803, p. 153; Michaux, 150.] Lexington was a
neatly built little burg, with fine houses and good stores. The leading
people lived well and possessed much cultivation. Louisville and
Nashville were each about half its size. In Nashville, of the one
hundred and twenty houses but eight were of brick, and most of them were
mere log huts. Cincinnati was a poor little village. Cleveland consisted
of but two or three log cabins, at a time when there were already a
thousand settlers in its neighborhood on the Connecticut Reserve,
scattered out on their farms. [Footnote: "Historical Collections of
Ohio," p. 120.] Natchez was a very important town, nearly as large as
Lexington. It derived its importance from the river traffic on the
Mississippi. All the boatmen stopped there, and sometimes as many as
one hundred and fifty craft were moored to the bank at the same time.
The men who did this laborious river work were rude, powerful, and
lawless, and when they halted for a rest their idea of enjoyment was
the coarsest and most savage dissipation. At Natchez there speedily
gathered every species of purveyor to their vicious pleasures, and the
part of the town known as "Natchez under the Hill" became a by-word for
crime and debauchery. [Footnote: Henry Ker, "Travels," p. 41.]
Growth of Kentucky.
Kentucky had grown so in population, possessing over two hundred
thousand inhabitants, that she had begun to resemble an Eastern State.
When, in 1796, Benjamin Logan, the representative of the old
woodchoppers and Indian fighters, ran for governor and was beaten, it
was evident that Kentucky had passed out of the mere pioneer days. It
was more than a mere coincidence that in the following year Henry Clay
should have taken up his residence in Lexington. It showed that the
State was already attracting to live within her borders men like those
who were fitted for social and political leadership in Virginia.
The Kentucky Gentry.
The Danville Political Club.
Though the typical inhabitant of Kentucky was still the small frontier
farmer, the class of well-to-do gentry had already attained good
proportions. Elsewhere throughout the West, in Tennessee, and even here
and there in Ohio and the Territories of Indiana and Mississippi, there
were to be found occasional houses that were well built and well
finished, and surrounded by pleasant grounds, fairly well kept; houses
to which the owners had brought their stores of silver and linen and
heavy, old-fashioned furniture from their homes in the Eastern States.
Blount, for instance, had a handsome house in Knoxville, well fitted, as
beseemed that of a man one of whose brothers still lived at Blount Hall,
in the coast region of North Carolina, the ancestral seat of his
forefathers for generations. [Footnote: Clay MSS., Blount to Hart,
Knoxville, Feb. 9, 1794.] But by far the greatest number of these fine
houses, and the largest class of gentry to dwell in them, were in
Kentucky. Not only were Lexington and Louisville important towns, but
Danville, the first capital of Kentucky, also possessed importance, and,
indeed, had been the first of the Western towns to develop an active and
distinctive social and political life. It was in Danville that, in the
years immediately preceding Kentucky's admission as a State, the
Political Club met. The membership of this club included many of the
leaders Of Kentucky's intellectual life, and the record of its debates
shows the keenness with which they watched the course of social and
political development not only in Kentucky but in the United States.
They were men of good intelligence and trained minds, and their meetings
and debates undoubtedly had a stimulating effect upon Kentucky life,
though they were tainted, as were a very large number of the leading men
of the same stamp elsewhere throughout the country, with the doctrinaire
political notions common among those who followed the French political
theorists of the day. [Footnote: "The Political Club," by Thomas Speed,
Filson Club Publications.]
The Large Landowners.
Open-air Life.
Of the gentry many were lawyers, and the law led naturally to political
life; but even among the gentry the typical man was still emphatically
the big landowner. The leaders of Kentucky were men who owned large
estates, on which they lived in their great roomy houses. Even when they
practised law they also supervised their estates; and if they were not
lawyers, in addition to tilling the land they were always ready to try
their hand at some kind of manufacture. They were willing to turn their
attention to any new business in which there was a chance to make money,
whether it was to put up a mill, to build a forge, to undertake a
contract for the delivery of wheat to some big flour merchant, or to
build a flotilla of flatboats, and take the produce of a given
neighborhood down to New Orleans for shipment to the West Indies.
[Footnote: Clay MSS., Seitz & Lowan to Garret Darling, Lexington,
January 23, 1797; agreement of George Nicholas, October 10, 1796, etc.
This was an agreement on the part of Nicholas to furnish Seitz & Lowan
with all the flour manufactured at his mill during the season of 1797
for exportation, the flour to be delivered by him in Kentucky. He was to
receive $5.50 a barrel up to the receipt of $1500; after that it was to
depend upon the price of wheat. Six bushels of wheat were reckoned to a
barrel of flour, and the price of a bushel was put at four shillings; in
reality it ranged from three to six.] They were also always engaged in
efforts to improve the breed of their horses and cattle, and to
introduce new kinds of agriculture, notably the culture of the vine.
[Footnote: _Do._, "Minutes of meeting of the Directors of the Vineyard
Society," June 27, 1800.] They speedily settled themselves definitely in
the new country, and began to make ready for their children to inherit
their homes after them; though they retained enough of the restless
spirit which had made them cross the Alleghanies to be always on the
lookout for any fresh region of exceptional advantages, such as many of
them considered the lands along the lower Mississippi. They led a life
which appealed to them strongly, for it was passed much in the open air,
in a beautiful region and lovely climate, with horses and hounds, and
the management of their estates and their interest in politics to occupy
their time; while their neighbors were men of cultivation, at least by
their own standards, so that they had the society for which they most
cared. [Footnote: _Do._, James Brown to Thomas Hart, Lexington, April 3,
1804.] In spite of their willingness to embark in commercial ventures
and to build mills, rope-walks, and similar manufactures,--for which
they had the greatest difficulty in procuring skilled laborers, whether
foreign or native, from the Northeastern States [Footnote: _Do._, J.
Brown to Thomas Hart, Philadelphia, February 11, 1797. This letter was
brought out to Hart by a workman, David Dodge, whom Brown had at last
succeeded in engaging. Dodge had been working in New York at a
rope-walk, where he received $500 a year without board. From Hart he
bargained to receive $350 with board. It proved impossible to engage
other journeymen workers, Brown expressing his belief that any whom he
chose would desert a week after they got to Kentucky, and Dodge saying
that he would rather take raw hands and train them to the business than
take out such hands as offered to go.]--and in spite of their liking
for the law, they retained the deep-settled belief that the cultivation
of the earth was the best of all possible pursuits for men of every
station, high or low. [Footnote _Do._, William Nelson to Col. George
Nicholas, Caroline, Va., December 29, 1794.]
Virginia and Kentucky.
In many ways the life of the Kentuckians was most like that of the
Virginia gentry, though it had peculiar features of its own. Judged by
Puritan standards, it seemed free enough; and it is rather curious to
find Virginia fathers anxious to send their sons out to Kentucky so that
they could get away from what they termed "the constant round of
dissipation, the scenes of idleness, which boys are perpetually engaged
in" in Virginia. One Virginia gentleman of note, in writing to a
prominent Kentuckian to whom he wished to send his son, dwelt upon his
desire to get him away from a place where boys of his age spent most of
the time galloping wherever they wished, mounted on blooded horses.
Kentucky hardly seemed a place to which a parent would send a son if he
wished him to avoid the temptations of horse flesh; but this particular
Virginian at least tried to provide against this, as he informed his
correspondent that he should send his son out to Kentucky mounted on an
"indifferent Nag," which was to be used only as a means of locomotion
for the journey, and was then immediately to be sold. [Footnote: _Do_.,
William Nelson to Nicholas, November 9, 1792.]
Education.
The gentry strove hard to secure a good education for their children,
and in Kentucky, as in Tennessee, made every effort to bring about the
building of academies where their boys and girls could be well taught.
If this was not possible, they strove to find some teacher capable of
taking a class to which he could teach Latin and mathematics; a teacher
who should also "prepare his pupils for becoming useful members of
society and patriotic citizens." [Footnote: Shelby MSS., letter of
Toulmin, January 7, 1794; Blount MSS., January 6, 1792, etc.] Where
possible the leading families sent their sons to some Eastern college,
Princeton being naturally the favorite institution of learning with
people who dwelt in communities where the Presbyterians took the lead in
social standing and cultivation. [Footnote: Clay MSS., _passim;_ letter
to Thomas Hart, October 19, 1794; October 13, 1797, etc. In the last
letter, by the way, written by one John Umstead, occurs the following
sentence: "I have lately heard a piece of news, if true, must be a
valuable acquisition to the Western World, viz. a boat of a considerable
burden making four miles and a half an hour against the strongest
current in the Mississippi river, and worked by horses."]
Currency.
Prices of Goods.
All through the West there was much difficulty in getting money. In
Tennessee particularly money was so scarce that the only way to get cash
in hand was by selling provisions to the few Federal garrisons.
[Footnote: _Do_., Blount to Hart, Knoxville, March 13, 1799.] Credits
were long, and payment made largely in kind; and the price at which an
article could be sold under such conditions was twice as large as that
which it would command for cash down. In the accounts kept by the
landowners with the merchants who sold them goods, and the artizans who
worked for them, there usually appear credit accounts in which the
amounts due on account of produce of various kinds are deducted from the
debt, leaving a balance to be settled by cash and by orders. Owing to
the fluctuating currency, and to the wide difference in charges when
immediate cash payments were received as compared with charges when the
payments were made on credit and in kind, it is difficult to know
exactly what the prices represent. In Kentucky currency mutton and beef
were fourpence a pound, in the summer of 1796, while four beef tongues
cost three shillings, and a quarter of lamb three and a sixpence. In
1798, on the same account, beef was down to threepence a pound.
[Footnote: _Do._, Account of James Morrison and Melchia Myer, October
12, 17098.] Linen cost two and fourpence, or three shillings a yard;
flannel, four to six shillings; calico and chintz about the same; baize,
three shillings and ninepence. A dozen knives and forks were eighteen
shillings, and ten pocket handkerchiefs two pounds. Worsted shoes were
eight shillings a pair, and buttons were a shilling a dozen. A pair of
gloves were three and ninepence; a pair of kid slippers, thirteen and
sixpence; ribbons were one and sixpence. [Footnote: _Do._, Account of
Mrs. Marion Nicholas with Tillford, 1802. On this bill appears also a
charge for Hyson tea, for straw bonnets, at eighteen shillings; for
black silk gloves, and for one "Aesop's Fables," at a cost of three
shillings and ninepence.] The blacksmith charged six shillings and
ninepence for a new pair of shoes, and a shilling and sixpence for
taking off an old pair; and he did all the iron work for the farm and
the house alike, from repairing bridle bits and sharpening coulters to
mounting "wafil irons" [Footnote: _Do._, Account of Morrison and Hickey,
1798.]--for the housewives excelled in preparing delicious waffles and
hot cakes.
Holidays of the Gentry.
The gentry were fond of taking holidays, going to some mountain resort,
where they met friends from other parts of Kentucky and Tennessee, and
from Virginia and elsewhere. They carried their negro servants with
them, and at a good tavern the board would be three shillings a day for
the master and a little over a shilling for the man. They lived in
comfort and they enjoyed themselves; but they did not have much ready
money. From the sales of their crops and stock and from their mercantile
ventures they got enough to pay the blacksmith and carpenter, who did
odd jobs for them, and the Eastern merchants from whom they got gloves,
bonnets, hats, and shoes, and the cloth which was made into dresses by
the womankind on their plantations. But most of their wants were
supplied on their own places. Their abundant tables were furnished
mainly with, what their own farms yielded. When they travelled they went
in their own carriages. The rich men, whose wants were comparatively
many, usually had on their estates white hired men or black slaves whose
labor could gratify them; while the ordinary farmer, of the class that
formed the great majority of the population, was capable of supplying
almost all his needs himself, or with the assistance of his family.
Contrast of Old and new Methods of Settlements.
The immense preponderance of the agricultural, land-holding, and
land-tilling element, and the comparative utter insignificance of town
development was highly characteristic of the Western settlement of this
time, and offers a very marked contrast to what goes on to-day, in the
settlement of new countries. At the end of the eighteenth century the
population of the Western country was about as great as the population
of the State of Washington at the end of the nineteenth, and Washington
is distinctly a pastoral and agricultural State, a State of men who chop
trees, herd cattle, and till the soil, as well as trade; but in
Washington great cities, like Tacoma, Seattle, and Spokane, have sprung
up with a rapidity which was utterly unknown in the West a century ago.
Nowadays when new States are formed the urban population in them tends
to grow as rapidly as in the old. A hundred years ago there was
practically no urban population at all in a new country. Colorado even
during its first decade of statehood had a third of its population in
its capital city. Kentucky during its first decade did not have much
more than one per cent of its population in its capital city. Kentucky
grew as rapidly as Colorado grew, a hundred years later; but Denver grew
thirty or forty times as fast as Lexington had ever grown.
Restlessness of the Frontiersman. Boone's Wanderings.
In the strongly marked frontier character no traits were more pronounced
than the dislike of crowding and the tendency to roam to and fro, hither
and thither, always with a westward trend. Boone, the typical
frontiersman, embodied in his own person the spirit of loneliness and
restlessness which marked the first venturers into the wilderness. He
had wandered in his youth from Pennsylvania to Carolina, and, in the
prime of his strength, from North Carolina to Kentucky. When Kentucky
became well settled in the closing years of the century, he crossed into
Missouri, that he might once more take up his life where he could see
the game come out of the woods at nightfall, and could wander among
trees untouched by the axe of the pioneer. An English traveller of note
who happened to encounter him about this time has left an interesting
account of the meeting. It was on the Ohio, and Boone was in a canoe,
alone with his dog and gun, setting forth on a solitary trip into the
wilderness to trap beaver. He would not even join himself to the other
travellers for a night, preferring to plunge at once into the wild,
lonely life he so loved. His strong character and keen mind struck the
Englishman, who yet saw that the old hunter belonged to the class of
pioneers who could never themselves civilize the land, because they ever
fled from the face of the very civilization for which they had made
ready the land. In Boone's soul the fierce impatience of all restraint
burned like a fire. He told the Englishman that he no longer cared for
Kentucky, because its people had grown too easy of life; and that he
wished to move to some place where men still lived untrammelled and
unshackled, and enjoyed uncontrolled the free blessings of nature.
[Footnote: Francis Bailey's "Journal of a Tour in Unsettled Parts of
North America in 1796 and 1797," p. 234.] The isolation of his life and
the frequency with which he changed his abode brought out the
frontiersman's wonderful capacity to shift for himself, but it hindered
the development of his power of acting in combination with others of his
kind. The first comers to the new country were so restless and so
intolerant of the presence of their kind, that as neighbors came in they
moved ever westward. They could not act with their fellows.
The Permanent Settlers.
Efforts to Provide Schooling.
Of course in the men who succeeded the first pioneers, and who were the
first permanent settlers, the restlessness and the desire for a lonely
life were much less developed. These men wandered only until they found
a good piece of land, and took up claims on this land, not because the
country was lonely, but because it was fertile. They hailed with joy
the advent of new settlers and the upbuilding of a little market town in
the neighborhood. They joined together eagerly in the effort to obtain
schools for their children. As yet there were no public schools
supported by government in any part of the West, but all the settlers of
any pretension to respectability were anxious to give their children a
decent education. Even the poorer people, who were still engaged in the
hardest and roughest struggle for a livelihood, showed appreciation of
the need of schooling for their children; and wherever the clearings of
the settlers were within reasonable distance of one another a log
schoolhouse was sure to spring up. The school-teacher boarded around
among the different families, and was quite as apt to be paid in produce
as in cash. Sometimes he was a teacher by profession; more often he
took up teaching simply as an interlude to some of his other occupations.
Schoolbooks were more common than any others in the scanty libraries of
the pioneers.
The County-System in the West.
The settlers who became firmly established in the land gave definite
shape to its political career. The county was throughout the West the
unit of division, though in the North it became somewhat mixed with the
township system. It is a pity that the township could not have been the
unit, as it would have rendered the social and political development in
many respects easier, by giving to each little community responsibility
for, and power in, matters concerning its own welfare; but the
backwoodsmen lived so scattered out, and the thinly-settled regions
covered so large an extent of territory, that the county was at first in
some ways more suited to their needs. Moreover, it was the unit of
organization in Virginia, to which State more than to any other the
pioneers owed their social and governmental system. The people were
ordinarily brought but little in contact with the Government. They were
exceedingly jealous of their individual liberty, and wished to be
interfered with as little as possible. Nevertheless, they were fond of
litigation. One observer remarks that horses and lawsuits were their
great subjects of conversation. [Footnote: Michaux, p. 240.]
The Lawyers and Clergymen Forced to Much Travel.
The vast extent of the territory and the scantiness of the population
forced the men of law, like the religious leaders, to travel about rather
than stay permanently fixed in any one place. In a few towns there were
lawyers and clergymen who had permanent homes; but as a rule both rode
circuits. The judges and the lawyers travelled together on the circuits,
to hold court. At the Shire-town all might sleep in one room, or at
least under one roof; and it was far from an unusual thing to see both
the grand and petty juries sitting under trees in the open. [Footnote:
Atwater, p. 177.]
Power to Combine among the Frontiersmen.
The fact that the Government did so little for the individual and left
so much to be done by him rendered it necessary for the individuals
voluntarily to combine. Huskings and house-raisings were times when all
joined freely to work for the man whose corn men was to be shucked or
whose log cabin was to be built, and turned their labor into a frolic
and merrymaking, where the men drank much whiskey and the young people
danced vigorously to the sound of the fiddle. Such merry-makings were
attended from far and near, offering a most welcome break to the
dreariness of life on the lonely clearings in the midst of the forest.
Ordinarily the frontiersman at his home only drank milk or water; but at
the taverns and social gatherings there was much drunkenness, for the
men craved whiskey, drinking the fiery liquor in huge draughts. Often
the orgies ended with brutal brawls. To outsiders the craving of the
backwoodsman for whiskey was one of his least attractive traits.
[Footnote: Perrin Du Lac, p. 131; Michaux, 95, etc.] It must always be
remembered, however, that even the most friendly outsider is apt to
apply to others his own standards in matters of judgment. The average
traveller overstated the drunkenness of the backwoodsman, exactly as he
overstated his misery.
Roughness and Poverty of the Life.
Its Attractiveness.
The frontiersman was very poor. He worked hard and lived roughly, and he
and his family had little beyond coarse food, coarse clothing, and a
rude shelter. In the severe winters they suffered both from cold and
hunger. In the summers there was sickness everywhere, fevers of various
kinds scourging all the new settlements. The difficulty of communication
was so great that it took three months for the emigrants to travel from
Connecticut to the Western Reserve near Cleveland, and a journey from a
clearing, over the forest roads, to a little town not fifty miles off
was an affair of moment to be undertaken but once a year. [Footnote:
"Historical Collections of Ohio," p. 120; Perrin Du Lac, p. 143.] Yet to
the frontiersmen themselves the life was far from unattractive. It
gratified their intense love of independence; the lack of refinement
did not grate on their rough, bold natures; and they prized the entire
equality of a life where there were no social distinctions, and few
social restraints. Game was still a staple, being sought after for the
flesh and the hide, and of course all the men and boys were enthralled
by the delights of the chase. The life was as free as it was rude, and
it possessed great fascinations, not only for the wilder spirits, but
even for many men who, when they had the chance, showed that they
possessed ability to acquire cultivation.
One old pioneer has left a pleasant account of the beginning of an
ordinary day's work in a log cabin [Footnote: Drake's "Pioneer Life in
Kentucky." This gives an excellent description of life in a family of
pioneers, representing what might be called the average frontiersman of
the best type. Drake's father and mother were poor and illiterate, but
hardworking, honest, God-fearing folk, with an earnest desire to do
their duty by their neighbors and to see their children rise in the
world.]:
Life in a Log Cabin.
"I know of no scene in civilized life more primitive than such a cabin
hearth as that of my mother. In the morning, a buckeye back-log, a
hickory forestick, resting on stone and irons, with a johnny-cake, on a
clean ash board, set before the fire to bake; a frying pan, with its
long handle resting on a split-bottom turner's chair, sending out its
peculiar music, and the tea-kettle swung from a wooden lug pole, with
myself setting the table or turning the meat, or watching the
johnny-cake, while she sat nursing the baby in the corner and telling
the little ones to hold still and let their sister Lizzie dress them.
Then came blowing the conch-shell for father in the field, the howling
of old Lion, the gathering round the table, the blessing, the dull
clatter of pewter spoons and pewter basins, the talk about the crop and
stock, the inquiry whether Dan'l (the boy) could be spared from the
house, and the general arrangements for the day. Breakfast over, my
function was to provide the sauce for dinner; in winter, to open the
potato or turnip hole, and wash what I took out; in spring, to go into
the field and collect the greens; in summer and fall, to explore the
truck patch, our little garden. If I afterwards went to the field my
household labors ceased until night; if not, they continued through the
day. As often as possible mother would engage in making pumpkin pies, in
which I generally bore a part, and one of these more commonly graced the
supper than the dinner table. My pride was in the labors of the field.
Mother did the spinning. The standing dye-stuff was the inner bark of
the white walnut, from which we obtained that peculiar and permanent
shade of dull yellow, the butternut [so common and typical in the
clothing of the backwoods farmer]. Oak bark, with copper as a mordant,
when father had money to purchase it, supplied the ink with which I
learned to write. I drove the horses to and from the range, and salted
them. I tended the sheep, and hunted up the cattle in the woods."
[Footnote: _Do_., pp. 90, in, etc., condensed.] This was the life of the
thrifty pioneers, whose children more than held their own in the world.
The shiftless men without ambition and without thrift, lived in laziness
and filth; their eating and sleeping arrangements were as unattractive
as those of an Indian wigwam.
Peculiar Qualities of the Pioneers.
Native Americans did Best.
The pleasures and the toils of the life were alike peculiar. In the
wilder parts the loneliness and the fierce struggle with squalid poverty,
and with the tendency to revert to savage conditions, inevitably produced
for a generation or two a certain falling off from the standard of
civilized communities. It needed peculiar qualities to insure success,
and the pioneers were almost exclusively native Americans. The Germans
were more thrifty and prosperous, but they could not go first into the
wilderness. [Footnote: Michaux, p. 63, etc.] Men fresh from England
rarely succeeded. [Footnote: Parkinson's "Tour in America, 1798-1800,"
pp. 504, 588, etc. Parkinson loathed the Americans. A curious example
of how differently the same facts will affect different observers may
be gained by contrasting his] The most pitiable group of emigrants that
reached the West at this time was formed by the French [Footnote:
observations with those of his fellow Englishman, John Davis, whose trip
covered precisely the same period; but Parkinson's observations as to
the extreme difficulty of an Old Country farmer getting on in the
backwoods regions are doubtless mainly true.] who came to found the
town of Gallipolis, on the Ohio. These were mostly refugees from the
Revolution, who had been taken in by a swindling land company. They were
utterly unsuited to life in the wilderness, being gentlemen, small
tradesmen, lawyers, and the like. Unable to grapple with the wild life
into which they found themselves plunged, they sank into shiftless
poverty, not one in fifty showing industry and capacity to succeed.
Congress took pity upon them and granted them twenty-four thousand acres
in Scioto County, the tract being known as the French grant; but no gift
of wild land was able to insure their prosperity. By degrees they were
absorbed into the neighboring communities, a few succeeding, most ending
their lives in abject failure. [Footnote: Atwater, p. 159; Michaux,
p. 122, etc.]
Trouble with Land Titles.
The trouble these poor French settlers had with their lands was far from
unique. The early system of land sales in the West was most unwise. In
Kentucky and Tennessee the grants were made under the laws of Virginia
and North Carolina, and each man purchased or preempted whatever he
could, and surveyed it where he liked, with a consequent endless
confusion of titles. The National Government possessed the disposal of
the land in the Northwest and in Mississippi; and it avoided the pitfall
of unlimited private surveying; but it made little effort to prevent
swindling by land companies, and none whatever to people the country
with actual settlers. Congress granted great tracts of lands to
companies and to individuals, selling to the highest bidder, whether or
not he intended personally to occupy the country. Public sales were thus
conducted by competition, and Congress even declined to grant to the men
in actual possession the right of pre-emption at the average rate of
sale, refusing the request of settlers in both Mississippi and Indiana
that they should be given the first choice to the lands which they had
already partially cleared. [Footnote: American State Papers, Public
Lands, I., 261; also pp. 71, 74, 99, etc.] It was not until many years
later that we adopted the wise policy of selling the National domain in
small lots to actual occupants.
Sullen Jealousy of the Pioneers.
Clouded Economic Notions.
The pioneer in his constant struggle with poverty was prone to look with
puzzled anger at those who made more money than he did, and whose lives
were easier. The backwoods farmer or planter of that day looked upon the
merchant with much the same suspicion and hostility now felt by his
successor for the banker or the railroad magnate. He did not quite
understand how it was that the merchant, who seemed to work less hard
than he did, should make more money; and being ignorant and suspicious,
he usually followed some hopelessly wrong-headed course when he tried to
remedy his wrongs. Sometimes these efforts to obtain relief took the
form of resolutions not to purchase from merchants or traders such
articles as woollens, linens, cottons, hats, or shoes, unless the same
could be paid for in articles grown or manufactured by the farmers
themselves. This particular move was taken because of the alarming
scarcity of money, and was aimed particularly at the inhabitants of the
Atlantic States. It was of course utterly ineffective. [Footnote:
Marshall, II., p. 325.] A much less wise and less honest course was that
sometimes followed of refusing to pay debts when the latter became
inconvenient and pressing. [Footnote: The inhabitants of Natchez, in the
last days of the Spanish dominion, became inflamed with hostility to
their creditors, the merchants, and insisted upon what were practically
stay laws being enacted in their favor. Gayarré and Claiborne.]
Vices of the Militia System.
The frontier virtue of independence and of impatience of outside
direction found a particularly vicious expression in the frontier
abhorrence of regular troops, and advocacy of a hopelessly feeble
militia system. The people were foolishly convinced of the efficacy of
their militia system, which they loudly proclaimed to be the only proper
mode of national defence. [Footnote: Marshall, II., p. 279.] While in the
actual presence of the Indians the stern necessities of border warfare
forced the frontiersmen into a certain semblance of discipline. As soon
as the immediate pressure was relieved, however, the whole militia
system sank into a mere farce. At certain stated occasions there were
musters for company or regimental drill. These training days were
treated as occasions for frolic and merry-making. There were pony races
and wrestling matches, with unlimited fighting, drunkenness, and general
uproar. Such musters were often called, in derision, cornstalk drills,
because many of the men, either having no guns or neglecting to bring
them, drilled with cornstalks instead. The officers were elected by the
men and when there was no immediate danger of war they were chosen
purely for their social qualities. For a few years after the close of
the long Indian struggle there were here and there officers who had seen
actual service and who knew the rudiments of drill; but in the days of
peace the men who had taken part in Indian fighting cared but little to
attend the musters, and left them more and more to be turned into mere
scenes of horseplay.
Lack of Military Training.
The frontier people of the second generation in the West thus had no
military training whatever, and though they possessed a skeleton militia
organization, they derived no benefit from it, because their officers
were worthless, and the men had no idea of practising self-restraint or
of obeying orders longer than they saw fit. The frontiersmen were
personally brave, but their courage was entirely untrained, and being
unsupported by discipline, they were sure to be disheartened at a
repulse, to be distrustful of themselves and their leaders, and to be
unwilling to persevere in the face of danger and discouragement. They
were hardy, and physically strong, and they were good marksmen; but here
the list of their soldierly qualities was exhausted. They had to be put
through a severe course of training by some man like Jackson before they
became fit to contend on equal terms with regulars in the open or with
Indians in the woods. Their utter lack of discipline was decisive
against them at first in any contest with regulars. In warfare with the
Indians there were a very few of their number, men of exceptional
qualities as woodsmen, who could hold their own; but the average
frontiersman, though he did a good deal of hunting and possessed much
knowledge of woodcraft, was primarily a tiller of the soil and a feller
of trees, and he was necessarily at a disadvantage when pitted against
an antagonist whose entire life was passed in woodland chase and
woodland warfare. These facts must all be remembered if we wish to get
an intelligent explanation of the utter failure of the frontiersmen
when, in 1812, they were again pitted against the British and the forest
tribes. They must also be taken into account when we seek to explain why
it was possible but a little later to develop out of the frontiersmen
fighting armies which under competent generals could overmatch the red
coat and the Indian alike.
Individualism in Religious Matters.
The Great Revival.
The extreme individualism of the frontier, which found expression for
good and for evil, both in its governmental system in time of peace and
in its military system in time of war, was also shown in religious
matters. In 1799 and 1800 a great revival of religion swept over the
West. Up to that time the Presbyterian had been the leading creed beyond
the mountains. There were a few Episcopalians here and there, and there
were Lutherans, Catholics, and adherents of the Reformed Dutch and
German churches; but, aside from the Presbyterians, the Methodists and
Baptists were the only sects powerfully represented. The great revival
of 1799 was mainly carried on by Methodists and Baptists, and under their
guidance the Methodist and Baptist churches at once sprang to the
front and became the most important religious forces in the frontier
communities. [Footnote: McFerrin's "History of Methodism in Tennessee,"
338, etc.; Spencer's "History of Kentucky Baptists," 69, etc.] The
Presbyterian church remained the most prominent as regards the wealth
and social standing of its adherents, but the typical frontiersman who
professed religion at all became either a Methodist or a Baptist,
adopting a creed which was intensely democratic and individualistic,
which made nothing of social distinctions, which distrusted educated
preachers, and worked under a republican form of ecclesiastical
government.
Camp Meetings.
The great revival was accompanied by scenes of intense excitement. Under
the conditions of a vast wooded wilderness and a scanty population the
camp-meeting was evolved as the typical religious festival. To the great
camp-meetings the frontiersmen flocked from far and near, on foot, on
horseback, and in wagons. Every morning at daylight the multitude was
summoned to prayer by sound of trumpet. No preacher or exhorter was
suffered to speak unless he had the power of stirring the souls of his
hearers. The preaching, the praying, and the singing went on without
intermission, and under the tremendous emotional stress whole
communities became fervent professors of religion. Many of the scenes at
these camp-meetings were very distasteful to men whose religion was not
emotional and who shrank from the fury of excitement into which the
great masses were thrown, for under the strain many individuals
literally became like men possessed, whether of good or of evil spirits,
falling into ecstasies of joy or agony, dancing, shouting, jumping,
fainting, while there were widespread and curious manifestations of a
hysterical character, both among the believers and among the scoffers;
but though this might seem distasteful to an observer of education and
self-restraint, it thrilled the heart of the rude and simple
backwoodsman and reached him as he could not possibly have been reached
in any other manner. Often the preachers of the different denominations
worked in hearty unison; but often they were sundered by bitter jealousy
and distrust. The fiery zeal of the Methodists made them the leaders;
and in their war on the forces of evil they at times showed a tendency
to include all non-methodists--whether Baptists, Lutherans, Catholics,
or infidels--in a common damnation. Of course, as always in such a
movement, many even of the earnest leaders at times confounded the
essential and the non-essential, and railed as bitterly against dancing
as against drunkenness and lewdness, or anathematized the wearing of
jewelry as fiercely as the commission of crime. [Footnote: Autobiography
of Peter Cartwright, the Backwoods Preacher.] More than one hearty,
rugged old preacher, who did stalwart service for decency and morality,
hated Calvinism as heartily as Catholicism, and yet yielded to no
Puritan in his austere condemnation of amusement and luxury.
Good Accomplished.
Trials of the Frontier Preachers.
Often men backslid, and to a period of intense emotional religion
succeeded one of utter unbelief and of reversion to the worst practices
which had been given up. Nevertheless, on the whole there was an immense
gain for good. The people received a new light, and were given a sense
of moral responsibility such as they had not previously possessed. Much
of the work was done badly or was afterwards undone, but very much was
really accomplished. The whole West owes an immense debt to the
hard-working frontier preachers, sometimes Presbyterian, generally
Methodist or Baptist, who so gladly gave their lives to their labors and
who struggled with such fiery zeal for the moral wellbeing of the
communities to which they penetrated. Wherever there was a group of log
cabins, thither some Methodist circuit-rider made his way or there some
Baptist preacher took up his abode. Their prejudices and narrow
dislikes, their raw vanity and sullen distrust of all who were better
schooled than they, count for little when weighed against their intense
earnestness and heroic self-sacrifice. They proved their truth by their
endeavor. They yielded scores of martyrs, nameless and unknown men who
perished at the hands of the savages, or by sickness or in flood or
storm. They had to face no little danger from the white inhabitants
themselves. In some of the communities most of the men might heartily
support them, but in others, where the vicious and lawless elements were
in control, they were in constant danger of mobs. The Godless and
lawless people hated the religious with a bitter hatred, and gathered in
great crowds to break up their meetings. On the other hand, those who
had experienced religion were no believers in the doctrine of
nonresistance. At the core, they were thoroughly healthy men, and they
fought as valiantly against the powers of evil in matters physical as in
matters moral. Some of the successful frontier preachers were men of
weak frame, whose intensity of conviction and fervor of religious belief
supplied the lack of bodily powers; but as a rule the preacher who did
most was a stalwart man, as strong in body as in faith. One of the
continually recurring incidents in the biographies of the famous
frontier preachers is that of some particularly hardened sinner who was
never converted until, tempted to assault the preacher of the Word, he
was soundly thrashed by the latter, and his eyes thereby rudely opened
through his sense of physical shortcoming to an appreciation of his
moral iniquity.
The Frontiersmen Threaten the Spanish Regions.
Throughout these years, as the frontiersmen pressed into the West, they
continued to fret and strain against the Spanish boundaries. There was
no temptation to them to take possession of Canada. The lands south of
the Lakes were more fertile than those north of the Lakes, and the
climate was better. The few American settlers who did care to go into
Canada found people speaking their own tongue, and with much the same
ways of life; so that they readily assimilated with them, as they could
not assimilate with the French and Spanish creoles. Canada lay north,
and the tendency of the backwoodsman was to thrust west; among the
Southern backwoodsmen, the tendency was south and southwest. The
Mississippi formed no natural barrier whatever. Boone, when he moved
into Missouri, was but a forerunner among the pioneers; many others
followed him. He himself became an official under the Spanish
Government, and received a grant of lands. Of the other frontiersmen who
went into the Spanish territory, some, like Boone, continued to live as
hunters and backwoods farmers. [Footnote: American State Papers, Public
Lands, II., pp. 10, 872.] Others settled in St. Louis, or some other of
the little creole towns, and joined the parties of French traders who
ascended the Missouri and the Mississippi to barter paint, beads,
powder, and blankets for the furs of the Indians.
Uneasiness of the Spaniards.
Their Religious Intolerance.
The Spanish authorities were greatly alarmed at the incoming of the
American settlers. Gayoso de Lemos had succeeded Carondelet as Governor,
and he issued to the commandants of the different posts throughout the
colonies a series of orders in reference to the terms on which land
grants were to be given to immigrants; he particularly emphasized the
fact that liberty of conscience was not to be extended beyond the first
generation, and that the children of the immigrant would either have to
become Catholics or else be expelled, and that this should be explained
to settlers who did not profess the Catholic faith. He ordered, moreover,
that no preacher of any religion but the Catholic should be allowed to
come into the provinces. [Footnote: Gayarré, III., p. 387.] The Bishop
of Louisiana complained bitterly of the American immigration and of the
measure of religious toleration accorded the settlers, which, he said,
had introduced into the colony a gang of adventurers who acknowledged
no religion. He stated that the Americans had scattered themselves over
the country almost as far as Texas and corrupted the Indians and Creoles
by the example of their own restless and ambitious temper; for they came
from among people who were in the habit of saying to their stalwart boys,
"You will go to Mexico." Already the frontiersmen had penetrated even
into New Mexico from the district round the mouth of the Missouri, in
which they had become very numerous; and the Bishop earnestly advised
that the places where the Americans were allowed to settle should be
rigidly restricted. [Footnote: _Do_., p. 408.]
A Conflict inevitable.
When the Spaniards held such views it was absolutely inevitable that a
conflict should come. Whether the frontiersman did or did not possess
deep religious convictions, he was absolutely certain to refuse to be
coerced into becoming a Catholic; and his children were sure to fight as
soon as they were given the choice of changing their faith or abandoning
their country. The minute that the American settlers were sufficiently
numerous to stand a chance of success in the conflict it was certain
that they would try to throw off the yoke of the fanatical and corrupt
Spanish Government. As early as 1801 bands of armed Americans had
penetrated here and there into the Spanish provinces in defiance of the
commands of the authorities, and were striving to set up little bandit
governments of their own. [Footnote: _Do_., p. 447.]
Advantages of the Frontiersmen.
The frontiersmen possessed every advantage of position, of numbers, and
of temper. In any contest that might arise with Spain they were sure to
take possession at once of all of what was then called Upper Louisiana.
The immediate object of interest to most of them was the commerce of the
Mississippi River and the possession of New Orleans; but this was only
part of what they wished, and were certain to get, for they demanded all
the Spanish territory that lay across the line of their westward march.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century the settlers on the Western
waters recognized in Spain their natural enemy, because she was the
power who held the mouth and the west bank of the Mississippi. They
would have transferred their hostility to any other power which fell
heir to her possessions, for these possessions they were bound one day
to make their own.
Predominance of the Middle West.
A thin range of settlements extended from the shores of Lake Erie on the
north to the boundary of Florida on the south; and there were out-posts
here and there beyond this range, as at Fort Dearborn, on the site of
what is now Chicago; but the only fairly well-settled regions were in
Kentucky and Tennessee. These two States were the oldest, and long
remained the most populous and influential, communities in the West.
They shared qualities both of the Northerners and of the Southerners,
and they gave the tone to the thought and the life in the settlements
north of them no less than the settlements south of them. This fact of
itself tended to make the West homogeneous and to keep it a unit with a
peculiar character of its own, neither Northern nor Southern in
political and social tendency. It was the middle West which was first
settled, and the middle West stamped its peculiar characteristics on all
the growing communities beyond the Alleghanies. Inasmuch as west of the
mountains the Northern communities were less distinctively Northern and
the Southern communities less distinctively Southern than was the case
with the Eastern States on the seaboard, it followed naturally that,
considered with reference to other sections of the Union, the West
formed a unit, possessing marked characteristics of its own. A
distinctive type of character was developed west of the Alleghanies, and
for the first generation the typical representatives of this Western
type were to be found in Kentucky and Tennessee.
The Northwest.
The settlement of the Northwest had been begun under influences which in
the end were to separate it radically from the Southwest. It was settled
under Governmental supervision, and because of and in accordance with
Governmental action; and it was destined ultimately to receive the great
mass of its immigrants from the Northeast; but as yet these two
influences had not become strong enough to sunder the frontiersmen north
of the Ohio by any sharp line from those south of the Ohio. The settlers
on the Western waters were substantially the same in character North and
South.
The Westerners Formed One People.
In sum, the western frontier folk, at the beginning of the nineteenth
century, possessed in common marked and peculiar characteristics, which
the people of the rest of the country shared to a much less extent. They
were backwoods farmers, each man preferring to live alone on his own
freehold, which he himself tilled and from which he himself had cleared
the timber. The towns were few and small; the people were poor, and
often ignorant, but hardy in body and in temper. They joined hospitality
to strangers with suspicion of them. They were essentially warlike in
spirit, and yet utterly unmilitary in all their training and habits of
thought. They prized beyond measure their individual liberty and their
collective freedom, and were so jealous of governmental control that
they often, to their own great harm, fatally weakened the very
authorities whom they chose to act over them. The peculiar circumstances
of their lives forced them often to act in advance of action by the law,
and this bred a lawlessness in certain matters which their children
inherited for generations; yet they knew and appreciated the need of
obedience to the law, and they thoroughly respected the law.
Decadence of Separatist Feeling.
The separatist agitations had largely died out. In 1798 and 1799
Kentucky divided with Virginia the leadership of the attack on the Alien
and Sedition laws; but her extreme feelings were not shared by the other
Westerners, and she acted not as a representative of the West, but on a
footing of equality with Virginia. Tennessee sympathized as little with
the nullification movement of these two States at this time as she
sympathized with South Carolina in her nullification movement a
generation later. With the election of Jefferson the dominant political
party in the West became in sympathy with the party in control of the
nation, and the West became stoutly loyal to the National Government.
Importance of the West.
The West had thus achieved a greater degree of political solidarity,
both as within itself and with the nation as a whole, than ever before.
Its wishes were more powerful with the East. The pioneers stood for an
extreme Americanism, in social, political, and religious matters alike.
The trend of American thought was toward them, not away from them. More
than ever before, the Westerners were able to make their demands felt at
home, and to make their force felt in the event of a struggle with a
foreign power.