THE WEST
Tens of thousands of eager people witnessed the inauguration of Andrew
Jackson on March 4, 1829; they crowded the streets, stood upon the
house-tops, and peered out from every open window; they jostled the
attendants at the White House and overturned the bowls and jars which
contained the ices and wines intended for the entertainment of the new
President and his friends. "The people have come to power," said a
chastened admirer of Henry Clay as she watched sadly the wreckage of the
dainties which dainty hands had prepared, and as she looked with dismay
upon the wearers of rough and dirty boots striding over costly carpets
where hitherto only gentlemen and ladies had trod. It was a happy
occasion to the unthinking but honest democrats[2] who gloried in the
success of their "hero," but a sad warning to the more refined who had
been accustomed to see things done in due form and stateliness.
[Footnote 2: This term is used to indicate those who believed in
democracy, not those who called themselves Democrats. The distinction
will be observed throughout the book.]
But neither the uninformed masses who looked on with delight that bright
day nor the cultured people whose hearts sank within them as they saw
the old order pass away recked aught of what was to come during the next
four years. Possibly the old man, whom everybody called "the General,"
and who many feared could not live out his term, or the solemn-visaged
Vice-President, who had been filling half the cabinet positions with his
own partisans, saw dimly what was to follow these joyous opening days of
a new régime, for he knew how unstable was the base upon which the new
structure rested.
The people who composed this new régime, the men who voted for Andrew
Jackson and who shouted at and derided sturdy John Quincy Adams as he
retired from the Presidency that 4th of March, were the rank and file of
the United States. But the nucleus of the party of Jackson was the West.
In the region which extends from Georgia to the Sabine, save in New
Orleans alone, no name equaled that of the man who had driven the
Indians like chaff before the wind at the battle of Horseshoe Bend, and
who a year later had defeated the regiments of Great Britain near New
Orleans. "The General" was known and admired all over the great valley
of the Mississippi as the friend of the people, while John Quincy Adams
had resisted the demands of the frontier and had actually sent a
regiment of the United States Army into Georgia to defeat the purposes
of a popular governor, who was driving the hated Indians from coveted
cotton lands. Jackson met, therefore, with little or no opposition in
this region, and the Southwestern politicians who had fought for Adams
and Clay in the campaign of 1828 had signed their political
death-warrants.
In the older West, Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri, and Ohio, Henry Clay
had been the natural leader; and until about 1820, when he had
championed the cause of the National Bank as against local interests and
local banks, he had been the most popular man west of the Alleghanies.
From the beginning of the Adams Administration he had lost steadily till
in 1828 he tasted for the first time the gall of political defeat. In
these older Western communities it was still a reproach to a public man
to ally himself with New England and the United States Bank, though he
might favor the protective tariff, and he must support internal
improvements. In addition to supporting John Quincy Adams after 1825,
Clay led a "fast and extravagant" life in Washington, which only added
to his unpopularity in the West. In 1831 it was with much difficulty,
and after a close contest with Richard M. Johnson, that he was returned
to the United States Senate. General Jackson had completely won the
leadership of the Clay territory and the affections of the plain
farmers.
In the Northwest there were other large areas of fertile lands in the
possession of the hated Indians, and there, as in the Southwest, the
most popular leader was he who believed and taught that the quickest way
to build up the country was to take immediate possession of these lands.
In Michigan, Indiana, and Illinois the small farmers and the pioneers
were almost as enthusiastic followers of Jackson as were their economic
kinsmen of the Gulf region.
With these backwoods States thus devoted to the man to whom Chief
Justice Marshall had sorrowfully administered the oath of office, it was
easy for the leaders of the new régime to make strong appeal to the
mountain counties of the Middle States and South, whose political idol
had been Thomas Jefferson and whose people were only a generation
removed from the pioneer stage of development. With the exception of
some of the New England _émigrés_ of western New York, the peasant
proprietors of all the up-country counties of the Middle States gave
Jackson their allegiance; while south of Maryland, except in a few
counties of western Virginia, almost every man in the hill country was a
stanch defender of the first Western President. Thus in the West and in
the interior of the States which bordered upon the Alleghany Mountains,
Jackson had a great compact following which for years to come was to
give him the advantage over all his opponents.
The radical and enthusiastic wing of the new party was the Southwest,
closely followed by the Northwest; the older West and the up-country of
the Middle States and South composed the "solid" element; while the
low-country men, the planters of Virginia and the Carolinas, regarded
askance the democratic leader whom they had reluctantly helped to the
Presidency. Of real organization and party discipline there was little,
and the beliefs and principles of the various groups of the party were
sometimes antagonistic. On one thing only were most of these men united:
on the necessity of keeping New England out of the control of the
Government. Surely any one who knew the actual conditions of 1829, the
ambitions and the smouldering animosities of the Jackson lieutenants,
must have faced the future with more than ordinary doubt and anxiety.
But the people who shouted at the inauguration and who had voted "the
ticket" the preceding November did not know the feelings of their
leaders. They thought that this country was a democracy and that a
majority of the electorate was entitled to rule. Their ideals were those
of the Declaration of Independence, which were not very popular in New
England, and which were just then being repudiated in the planter
sections of the South. They lived the lives of simple farmers and daily
practiced the doctrine of social equality, and hence they could not
understand why others should not do the same, or why there should be
anything difficult or complex in the work of the incoming President.
In all the Western States almost every office was filled by popular
election. Legislatures met annually and unpopular men or measures could
be promptly recalled, to employ a modern term. Even the judges of the
courts were subject to frequent election and were quite attentive to
popular opinion; while United States Senators must canvass for votes in
ardent campaigns which strongly resembled the primary contests of the
South and West to-day. But this democracy of the larger section of the
country which supported Jackson was counterbalanced by the prestige and
experience of its allies of the South, where, by reason of the
three-fifths rule of representation for the slaves, which gave the
master of slaves a privileged position, and of long political habit, a
few planters exercised power out of all proportion to their numbers.
Still the history of the country after 1812 indicated that the Western
voters and not the Eastern leaders would control the Government while
Jackson was President. These voters were nationalists and their position
made them look to the Federal Government for better roads and improved
markets; they were expansionists who not only coveted the lands of the
Indians, but wanted also to seize the territory of their neighbors. They
were already taking possession of Texas, and Thomas H. Benton and Lewis
Cass, of Michigan, their most popular leaders after Jackson, were
already the exponents of an early imperialism which would never rest
until the shores of the Pacific became the western frontier of the
United States. In every State that bordered on the Mississippi this
sentiment was ardent, and many good men were ready to make war upon
Mexico for Texas or upon England for Oregon, whose boundaries no one
knew and whose title had been held jointly by the United States and
Great Britain since 1818.
Moreover, the Western men occupied a peculiar position in the country
because of the fact that a large number of them had bought their lands
from the Federal Government on easy terms, at two dollars or even a
dollar and a quarter an acre, and were still in debt for them to the
Government or the banks or other creditors. This indebtedness still
further stimulated their restlessness of character. The land laws of the
United States were apparently liberal, but unless the settler could
obtain land near a navigable stream, it was a most difficult matter to
buy even a quarter section and make the improvements necessary to
successful farming. And since all the river area had long since been
occupied, the Westerners of 1830 had bought their land in the remote
districts and begun the hard struggle of "paying out." The distance to
markets made this an almost hopeless task, and the holders of the
frontier farms came to think their lot a peculiarly hard one. They
resisted always; and in hard years, after driving a herd of cattle or a
drove of hogs to the distant market and receiving therefor barely the
cost of production, they were angry and resentful.
[Illustration: Distribution of Indians and Location of Indian Lands and
Unorganized Territory of the United States or the States]
The frontier remedy for these ills was an "easier" currency or high
prices for commodities, or stay laws against creditors who pressed for
their money. And since a great number of the Western farmers had simply
taken up their lands, before they were thrown open to sale, and made
improvements on them without procuring titles, they feared the
enforcement of the federal law against them and clamored for a
preëmption system which would secure them their land, when the day of
sales did come, at the minimum price, $1.25 per acre. A still better
plan was already strongly urged, the free gift of small tracts of land
to all who would go West and build homes. Not only would this be good
for the home-seeker, but it would result in the rapid upbuilding of the
great wastes of the country. Animated by such purposes as these, Benton
and his colleagues in Congress were constantly gaining strength as their
constituents increased in number.
Thus the restless but devoted followers of Jackson were developing a
program: the removal of the Indians in order that more cotton and corn
might be grown; the seizure of the territory contiguous to the western
frontier, even at the cost of war with Mexico and England; the giving of
free homesteads to all who would go West and join in the upbuilding of
the Mississippi Commonwealths; and the improvement of roadways at
national expense in order that Western products might find better
markets. These were the things which the Westerners ardently desired and
which it was hoped the new President would be able to obtain for them.
Incidentally, he was expected to set up the rule of the people in the
national capital, and to substitute a more simple life and etiquette for
the formal and fashionable manners which had come into vogue with Monroe
and his Cabinet.
The strength of the Western people was great, and to the East it
appeared ominous. They numbered in 1830 nearly 4,000,000 souls as
compared with 12,500,000 for the country as a whole, and their increase
in the preceding decade had run from 22 per cent in Kentucky to 185 per
cent in Illinois. In the National House of Representatives the West cast
47 votes in a total of 213; in the Senate their strength was 18 in a
total of 48. But this does not fairly represent their influence. In
western New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia there were more than a
million people who counted themselves Westerners, while in the Carolinas
and Georgia a majority, or more than another half-million, must be
reckoned as adherents of the cause of the "Trans-alleghany." Thus about
6,000,000 of the total 12,500,000 were Western in character and ideals,
to say nothing of the large frontier element in New England.
In economic strength, however, these Jackson States and communities were
much weaker. They were isolated. Their surplus crops had no value save
as they were produced within reach of navigable rivers. Of these the
5,500,000 people living in the region drained by the Mississippi and the
other streams which fall into the Gulf of Mexico, exported about
$17,800,000 worth of commodities in 1830, a _per capita_ value of less
than $4. And most of this surplus output came from the cotton counties
of the lower South, where only a small proportion of the population of
the West dwelt. Still, the herds of cattle and droves of swine that were
driven southward to the cotton communities or over the mountains to
Eastern cities, and the large quantities of grain which, after 1825,
found its way to market through the Erie Canal, added greatly to and
perhaps doubled the income of the West from exports down the
Mississippi. When all is told, however, these isolated people were in
the main very poor, as the narratives of travelers and the journals of
preachers attest on every page.
Yet every year added thousands to the numbers of Eastern men who
migrated West to enjoy some of the liberty of a region where lands were
cheap and the social life unconventional; every decade added new voices
and able leaders to the Western group in Congress, who clamored
unceasingly for the enactment of laws aimed at the rapid development of
that section. New England, where the rise of industrial towns
necessitated an increasing number of laborers, took fright, or had never
ceased to be alarmed, at the westward movement of population; and
Eastern members of Congress, under one pretext or another, opposed every
demand which came up from the West, every petition of the "squatters" on
the public domain. In the Middle States the building of numerous
canals, turnpikes, and railways called for both skilled and unskilled
laborers. But if everybody ran off to the West when wages were
unsatisfactory, these improvements could not be made and the old
communities would languish and decay.
Virginia and the South were less disturbed at the growth of the West,
because of their system of slavery, and because the votes of the new
States could be relied on to support Virginian and Southern policies in
Congress--a legacy of the old Jeffersonian alliance of the South with
the early West; and also because of the similar economic and social life
of the two sections. But even the Old Dominion in the sore economic
distress of the late twenties, due in the main to the desertion of her
tobacco-fields and workshops by thousands of her most energetic sons,
who went to the rich cotton country, wavered in her loyalty to the
younger States of the West. John Randolph ridiculed in merciless fashion
the "sharp-witted" Westerners, whom he would avoid in the highway as
"one would a pickpocket"; and in both the Carolinas there was a fear and
a dread of the growing West, whose ideals were too Jeffersonian and
whose power waxed greater with the passing years. Yet Calhoun, Hayne,
and other able Southerners remained true to the new region and supported
Benton in his debates with Foote and Webster in 1830, perhaps because
the whole Jackson program of 1829 was based upon the alliance of these
forces in the national life.
If the political plans of the Western men of 1830 were ambitious and
far-reaching, the lives of the shrewd pioneers were simple, hard, and
narrow. The men wore coats when the weather was cold, and found shoes
more of a nuisance than a comfort during half the year; and the women
rejoiced if they received a "store" bonnet once in two years. Wants were
few and the annual _per capita_ expense beyond what was produced at home
was seldom as great as $10. Peter Cartwright counted himself rich when
he learned that the Methodist annual conference to which he belonged had
added $12 to his regular stipend of $100 a year.
Most men, including the clergy, owned or rented farms and followed the
plow in season, while wives and children did outdoor work from morning
till night. Houses were built by the aid of neighbors in a single day,
and extra rooms were improvised by the judicious hanging of quilts and
curtains. A door in front and another in the rear allowed plenty of
fresh air, though the large crevices between the logs usually rendered
this superfluous. Floors were made of logs split in halves and laid
"with backs downward." Beds and chairs were home-made and especially
intended for the use of the older members of the family, boys and girls
accommodating themselves with stools or blocks of wood sawed for the
purpose. Meals were prepared in a few moments at the broad fireside,
where a huge crane aided the mother in swinging her kettles on or off
the blazing fire. In every pretentious home there was a loom for the
weaving of cotton and woolen cloth for family or neighborhood
consumption; and late at night the steady thump of the beam proclaimed
the industry of the busy housewife as she put in the last threads of her
"fifth" or "sixth yard." Few were so wealthy that they could afford the
broadcloth which came up the rivers from New Orleans or over the Erie
Canal from New York; and when some migrating Virginia squire or Kentucky
colonel, master of a thousand acres of land, did so disport himself on
Sundays or at the races, he appeared in his glossy suit, made by the
hand of his devoted spouse, wrinkled and fretted in a hundred places,
not unlike Lincoln when he first spoke at Cooper Institute, New York.
Life was simple on the Western farm or distant frontier, but pleasure,
too, had its place, English sports of Angevin times serving the place of
baseball or golf of to-day. In the older West, Kentucky, Tennessee, and
Missouri, the race-course was the common playground where horses and men
ran their rounds and won their prizes. To drink deeply of the strong
"corn" or "rye" was as common as is the drinking of wine in France; and
races, corn-huskings, or weddings were seldom closed without
drunkenness, and oftentimes fisticuffs or the more fatal duel with knife
or pistol. Jackson had "killed his man," and Benton had been knocked
through a trapdoor into the basement of a Nashville bar-room; Clay and
Poindexter, the Mississippi Governor and Senator, had had more than one
encounter in which life was set against life.
If men held human life cheap, they held woman's honor more than dear,
and to give currency to a tale of slander was tantamount to half a dozen
challenges. Women were in the minority in the West, and although they
did not vote, they were still of utmost importance in homes where
clothing was handmade and the needs of numerous children increased
daily. Henry Clay was one of thirteen or fourteen brothers and sisters,
while Thomas Marshall, the father of the Chief Justice, carried ten or
twelve children with him to his Western home about the year 1781. But
the sorrows of the pioneer women and the waste of human material were
extraordinary. In those days of hardship and ignorance of the most
rudimentary rules of sanitation, few knew how to save their children
from death due to the simplest diseases, and the student to-day reads
the sad story in the many tiny tombstones of the old family cemeteries,
knowing well that the great majority rest in unmarked graves. Many were
born and many died without a fair chance at normal existence.
Western men were seldom members of organized churches, though the fear
of the Deity, natural to those who witnessed the great "freshets" and
the storms and cyclones which swept over the plains, carrying entire
villages with them or cutting wide swaths through the primeval forests,
was a powerful influence upon everyday conduct. Presbyterians, Baptists,
and Methodists, with their strict and hard Calvinism, penetrated first
the wilderness beyond the mountains and built their rude log churches,
in which stern preachers, like Samuel Doak, of Tennessee, or Jonathan
Going, of Ohio, warned men against the wrath to come and the fiery
furnace below, whose surging flames were ever ready to swallow up and
consume stiff-necked, yet never-dying sinners. The simple and
superstitious minds of the neglected West flocked to these little
churches or to great camps where revivalists, like James McCreary, of
Kentucky, or the later Bishop Soule, of Ohio, preached for weeks in
succession and seemed to work miracles hardly less wonderful than those
of New Testament times. Hundreds were "stricken" on a single day and
were later gathered into the church clothed and in their right minds.
Before 1830 the greater denominations of the East and South realized the
importance of the West as a semi-destitute land to which missionaries
should be sent, though by this time the churches of the older border and
of most of the great valley were self-supporting and the population
could no longer complain that the Gospel had never been preached to
them.
While the civilizing hand of the churches was being spread over the
West, schools and colleges were built and opened to students. The
liberal land grants of the Federal Government were made to serve the
cause of common schools, while institutions of higher learning
flourished at Lexington, Natchez, Granville (Ohio), and Hanover
(Indiana),--schools where many of the statesmen of the Civil War period
were trained and where preachers prepared themselves for their strenuous
labors in a poor country. The civilizing forces of religion and
education were rapidly leavening the lump of hard Western life and
preparing it for the great days and the awful struggle that were so soon
to come. Books found their way into the Athens of the West, as Lexington
was called, and gradually, under the fostering care of Henry Clay, the
Mechanics' Library came to play an important part. St. Louis, too,
boasted of its Mercantile Library; and there were numerous other
collections of religious writings, history, and the English poets,
mostly in private hands like those of John M. Peck, of Illinois.
Newspapers, such as the _Republican_ of St. Louis, the Maysville
_Eagle_, or the Louisville _Advertiser_, carried their weekly or
semi-weekly burden of neighborhood gossip and political news to near-by
villages and distant settlements.
The roads were also improving and steadily expanding the area of
productive farming, though all, or nearly all, led to the river ports or
the old fort towns like La Porte, Indiana, or Detroit and Cleveland on
the Lakes. The Erie and the Ohio Canals were already turning exports and
communication northeastward, while the Lake steamers were adding their
share to the development of the Western frontier; but the great river
steamers, the City of New Orleans and the Crescent, which the preachers
compared to ancient Babylon, as centers of vice and lewd fashion, were
the marvels of the West, and they carried the burden of grain, tobacco,
and cotton which crowded the wharves of New Orleans. Cincinnati was the
pork-packing and manufacturing center of the West, sending its salted
meats and farm implements to the plantations of the lower South in
ever-increasing volume. St. Louis was the home of the most important
commercial monopoly of the time, the American Fur Company, which had an
undue influence in national politics, and of which John Jacob Astor was
the millionaire head, to whom all Americans looked up as one of the
great figures of his generation. From the old half-French, half-American
town caravans of explorers, trappers, and traders set out each spring
for the Far Northwest, whence they returned annually with their loads of
furs and their tales of the wonderful Oregon country. But New Orleans,
with its population of 50,000, its European life and rather easy morals,
its slave marts and miles of cotton wharves, was the wonder of the world
to Western eyes like those of young Abraham Lincoln, who visited the
city about this time. There, rich men lived in splendid mansions, served
by scores of negro slaves; there, great newspapers were published and
shrewd speculators from all parts of the world bought cotton and
imported luxuries for the newly rich of the Southwest.
It was this great West, pulsating with life and vigor, filled with hope
for the future, restless and eager, at once democratic and
imperialistic, which put the resolute and dictatorial Andrew Jackson in
the President's chair in 1829. And never was constituency more truly
represented than was that of the West in the wiry old man whom they
called "Old Hickory." Accustomed to the hardships of the poor in his
youth and to the responsibility of the well-to-do merchant and cotton
planter in middle life, he had experienced most that was common to his
fellows and had gained a prestige which in their admiring eyes surpassed
that of all other men since Thomas Jefferson. Brave and generous,
plain-spoken and sometimes boisterous, he embodied most of the
qualities that compelled admiration throughout the Mississippi Valley.
No matter what Webster or Calhoun or even Clay said of "Old Hickory," it
was not believed in the back-country until the President himself had
confirmed the story. Jackson was the second American President who so
understood "his people" that he could interpret them and by intuition
scent the course the popular mind would take--particularly in the West.
To be sure, there were small groups of Westerners who opposed him and
whom he did not represent: some of the counties of Ohio, a part of the
Blue-Grass region of Kentucky, and a narrow strip of Mississippi which
lay in the southwestern part of the State, and finally the French and
mercantile elements of New Orleans; but these were never strong enough
to deprive him of any object at which he aimed. It was well-nigh "King
Andrew I," as some Eastern papers were accustomed to term him in a weak
attempt at ridicule.
Thus appeared the new régime in 1829, in so far as its Western majority
and base of support were concerned. How the conservative East, with its
serious doubts about democracy, and the older Southern leaders, uneasy
lest slavery should be undermined, would find themselves in the new
system is a problem which our next chapters must seek to disclose.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
F. J. Turner's _The Rise of the New West_ (1906) is the best brief
account of social and economic conditions in the United States just
prior to 1830. J. B. McMaster's _History of the United States_, vol.
_IV_, chap. _XXXIII_, and vol. _V_, chap. _XLV_; T. H. Clay's _Henry
Clay_, in _American Crises_ biographies, Theodore Roosevelt's _Life of
Thomas H. Benton_, in _American Statesmen_ series, and Bassett's _Life
of Andrew Jackson_, already cited, give the principal facts about their
subjects. T. Flint's _History and Geography of the Mississippi Valley_
(1832); J. Hall's _Letters from the West_ (1828) and _Statistics of the
West_ (1836); early numbers of the _American Almanacs_; Peter
Cartwright's _The Backwoods Preacher_ (1860); Alfred Brunson's _A
Western Pioneer_ (1858); and the various denominational histories supply
the needful social background for an understanding of the West. Margaret
Bayard Smith's _The First Forty Years of Washington Society_ (edited by
Gaillard Hunt, 1906) and K. W. Colgrove's _Attitude of Congress toward
the Pioneers of the West_, in _Iowa Journal of History and Politics_
(1910), give good reports of Eastern opinion of the West. And _American
State Papers_, on _Public Lands_ and _Indian Affairs_, are excellent for
treatment of land and Indian problems.