THE EAST
When the West under the guidance and tutelage of Jackson, Calhoun, and
Benton took possession of the national administration in 1829, the older
and more cultured elements and classes of the East trembled for their
country and for the institutions they held dear. The day was dark to
John Quincy Adams and his followers, not only because they had been
deprived of power, but because the rural sections of the East, the towns
and villages which had been active and prosperous from 1783 to 1807,
showed almost as many signs of stagnation and premature decay as did the
Old Dominion, where public men were in a state of alarm and dismay. For
fifteen years the highways of New York and Pennsylvania had borne their
burden of New England emigrants, laden with their meager belongings, as
they journeyed westward to the Mohawk country, western Pennsylvania,
Ohio, and other rising communities of the West. Between 1820 and 1830
the population of New England as a whole increased but slightly, while
in many counties of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Connecticut there
was an actual decline. Ambitious young men or discouraged heads of
families moved northeastward to the freer lands of Maine or to the Far
West, without seeming love for the older haunts or thought for the
fortunes of the Commonwealths which had given them birth. And New York,
whose population increased from 1,400,000 in 1820 to 2,400,000 in 1840,
drew heavily upon her eastern neighbors; Pennsylvania, of more steady
habits, drew less from New England than her immediate neighbors, though
both New York and Pennsylvania gave freely to the West. There was thus a
steady drift of the people from their Eastern homes to the better
opportunities of the Middle States, while from these, in turn, large
numbers joined the more courageous who were never content until they
built their cabins along the river borders or on the prairies of the
Northwest.
The total population of the country in 1830 was nearly 13,000,000, while
that of the East, including New England, the Middle States, and
Maryland, was a little more than 6,000,000. Between 1820 and 1840 the
population of the country increased from 9,654,000 to 17,669,000; that
of the East increased from 4,850,000 to 7,350,000, of which 650,000 had
come from Europe. This represented a growth of only fifty per cent in
twenty years. But the rival South, as a whole, and this includes
Kentucky and Missouri, had increased her population during the same
period from 4,009,000 to 7,748,000, a growth of ninety per cent; while
the West, as a whole, including Tennessee, Kentucky, and Missouri, had
grown from less than 1,000,000 to nearly 4,000,000. These facts were
significant and really distressing to conservative politicians; they
explain the jealous rivalry of the sections, and the alliance of the
South and West foreboded the day when the more cultivated and the
better settled region of the young nation, if it may be called a nation,
would find itself in a hopeless minority.
If we add to this the fact that the lands of the East were the poorest
in the Union and that their total area was less than 175,000 square
miles, while those of the South were counted rich and embraced an area
of 880,000 square miles, we shall understand how statesmen who listened
to the jubilations of the Jackson men felt and envisaged the future--a
future which the South alone might command; but which she would
certainly dominate if she could only succeed in keeping the West true to
her present allegiance.
But economic and social changes were taking place which gave the
darkening cloud a silver lining. On an irregular but narrow belt of land
stretching from southeastern Maine to the Chesapeake Bay manufacturing
establishments had been erected, towns and cities had sprung into
existence as if by magic, and migration from the poor farms and the hard
conditions of New England country life was also turning to the mill
centers, and thus giving promise of a new East, whose life should be
industrial and urban like that of smoky, grimy Lancashire, England. The
older commercial and seafaring interests, which had given the
Federalists their power and made the American flag known on every sea,
were now giving way to the vigorous young captains of industry whose
mills at Lowell, Providence, New Haven, New York, Philadelphia, and
Baltimore gave employment to thousands of people. Much of the money
which had made the New Englanders go down to the sea in ships was now
invested in manufactures. The woolen mills of the East produced in 1820
a little more than $4,000,000 worth of cloth, the cotton mills,
$4,834,000; but in 1830 the yearly manufactures of wool, cotton, and
iron were estimated by the Government as worth $58,500,000. Yet the
total investment in these enterprises was not much in excess of
$100,000,000. In Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, and Pennsylvania
the growth had been miraculous, and the profits were enormous, if we
except one or two years for the woolen interests.
So that while the total annual crop value of Southern plantations
amounted to $40,000,000, and the _per capita_ wealth of the white people
of the so-called black belt was very large, the returns from three
industries located in a much narrower industrial belt of the East were
more than a third greater. The taxable value of the slaves who produced
most of the cotton and tobacco was not less than $1,000,000,000; the
total investments of the East in manufactures of all kinds was certainly
not more than a fourth as great as that in slaves. And what made this
development the more significant was the fact that nearly all that the
black belt produced was sold in Europe, while nearly all that the
industrial belt produced was sold to the people of the United States,
mostly to States which were not engaged in manufacturing at all.
A portentous revolution was taking place. Before 1820 nearly all the
wool of the country had been made into cloth by hand in the homes of the
people, and the ratio of home manufactures to population was about the
same in most of the States. Now the sheep-raisers sold their wool to
the mill men, who sold the country the finished product and whose
factories were concentrated in a small district. The cotton mills had
been a negligible economic factor in 1812; now their owners employed a
capital of $30,000,000 to $35,000,000 and supplied work for 70,000
laborers. From the farms of the interior, where life was in the open,
the poorer and less ambitious elements of the population, who were not
attracted to the West, were drawn to the growing industrial towns, where
they lived, a family in a room, worked twelve to fourteen hours a day,
amidst unsanitary and even immoral surroundings, for wages which ranged
from one dollar to six dollars per week. The cost of living was, to be
sure, correspondingly low; but when the year of toil for men, women, and
children of all ages was told, there was usually an unpaid account at
the company's store, and the chance of bettering one's worldly fortunes
appeared almost hopeless. Emigration to the West was the only escape,
and the difficulties of such an escape, the cost of sustenance for the
long journey, on foot, the greater cost of building a cabin in the
forest and maintaining one's family till a crop could be harvested, and
the necessity of buying the land on which the cabin was to be raised,
made the undertaking heroic. Thus, when the mill life was once begun it
was seldom deserted.
Without educational advantages, save in the most rudimentary way,
without any fair prospect of ever becoming independent or of materially
improving their status, these mill workers kept up the daily round of
labor, earning the millions which were laying the foundations of a new
and greater East, eventually a new United States, and voting, in so far
as they exercised the right of suffrage at all, for the cause of their
masters, against the "slave-drivers" of the South and for protection to
manufactures as a means of defending themselves against their poorer
brethren of Europe. As to their total number, we have no more reliable
estimate than that of McMaster, who says there were not less than two
million operatives in all lines of industry in 1825. Nobody thought of
these people as slaves; and most people thought they must be happy to
escape the dull life of the country, and that fourteen hours' work was a
normal human exercise. A worthless father who lived on the labor of
little children of his own begetting was counted lucky to have children
to work for him; and the girl who entered the primrose path as a
possible way of escape from her hard surroundings was then as now
promptly ruled out of the pale of human sympathy and consigned to the
lake of everlasting fire and brimstone.
Another great interest had grown to immense proportions in the East of
1830--the financial. Beginning with the flush times of Hamilton's
leadership, the financier had grown in power and influence, sometimes
purposely organizing a monopolistic control over the money of the
public, as in the case of the Suffolk Bank of Boston, sometimes
mercilessly robbing depositors, as in the notorious defalcation of the
Derby Bank of Connecticut in 1825, until it had become a serious
national problem not merely to regulate the currency of the country, but
to curb the rapacity of those who, under one pretense or another,
violated the laws of all the States in order to heap up hasty fortunes.
In 1815 there had been 208 banks in the country, mainly in the Middle
States and New England, with a capital of $82,000,000; at the end of the
year 1833 there were 502 banks with a capital of $168,829,000. At the
end of the second war with England, there were $17,000,000 of specie in
the banks; eighteen years later, when the capital had doubled, loans had
greatly increased, and notes in circulation were $61,000,000, there were
still just $17,000,000 of gold and silver in all the banks.
The business of the East naturally tended to the concentration of the
financial resources of the country within her towns, but the location of
414 of the 502 banks of the country in the narrow section under
consideration would seem to indicate something more than a natural
tendency. The six million people of the East enjoyed three times as many
banking facilities, when we consider the amount of money in circulation,
as the seven million Southerners and Westerners. New York alone had a
banking capital of $28,000,000, Massachusetts $21,000,000, and the _per
capita_ circulation of money in the East was nearly $9, while that of
the West was $2. To him that hath shall be given is a familiar axiom
which seemed doubly true of the United States at the time of Jackson's
accession to power.
All signs pointed to a congestion of the financial resources of the
whole country in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. The great National
Bank, with its $35,000,000 capital and loans of $40,000,000, was
located in Philadelphia; New York City had not so strong a banking
system, but the growth of her real estate values was $40,000,000 in the
five years preceding 1831; and the tax valuation of the property of
Suffolk County, Massachusetts, in which Boston was located, was
$86,000,000 as against $208,000,000 for the whole State.
The masters of this region were reaching out for the commerce of the
West through the Erie Canal, which made northern and central Ohio the
hinterland of New York; through the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and the
Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, which were aimed at western Virginia and the
Ohio Valley. The shipping interests of New England and New York did the
same for the South, whose millions of bales of cotton all went north or
to Europe in eastern-made and eastern-owned vessels. And while these
enterprising leaders sought to control the commerce of the country, they
also knitted together their own towns and river valleys by canals and
turnpikes. Boston and New Haven were almost united by canals and
railroads in 1830; the Delaware and the Susquehanna were paralleled far
into the interior in order to bring the produce of the country to the
manufacturing centers. And a railway connected Philadelphia with the
rich Susquehanna Basin, whose commerce had hitherto been controlled by
Baltimore. Pittsburg was actually tied to the East before 1835 by water
and railroad routes. Trade, manufactures, and finance; railways, canals,
and home markets were the great subjects of conversation in the East,
just as cotton, slaves, and land formed the trinity of Southern
thinking.
The men who owned the industrial plants and managed the large banks and
projected the ambitious railway and canal systems, the stockholders and
the officers, the factors and storekeepers, were drawn from the same
sturdy New England and Middle States stock, the small farmers and little
merchants who had composed the democracy which had fought the
Revolution. Retired sea-captains and owners of sailing-vessels joined
the new régime as profits came in and the art of watering stock was
understood. Throughout the East, from Chesapeake Bay to Augusta, Maine,
wherever there were good waterfalls, great brick buildings were rising
story upon story, proclaiming the new prosperity and enticing the hordes
of workers so necessary to the new system. The old-fashioned mansions of
retired traders or prosperous shipbuilders, which had so long adorned
the hills of the coast towns, were giving way to the larger houses of
the captains of industry who built up the inland towns or created the
suburbs of the greater cities.
Like the planters of the South, with their two million slaves, these
able and prosperous makers of a new era in the East had their two
million operatives, and as in the planting districts, the working day
was from sun to sun. Carrying the comparison further, the industrial and
financial region was relatively small, embracing much less of the area
of the country than did that of the black belt.[3]
[Footnote 3: See maps of tobacco and cotton belts on pp. 133, 134.]
From southeastern Maine to Boston, Providence, New Haven, New York City,
and on to Baltimore, with a Western extension to Pittsburg, this
irregular, now widening, now contracting, strip of country extended. It
embraced the strategic positions, the falls of the rivers, the places
whence ships could sail laden with the products of the industries or
return with the raw materials necessary to their operation; it included
the old commercial towns where the surplus capital of the East had been
collected and where now gathered the populations which composed the
districts whose spokesmen exerted the real strength of the North in the
National Congress. It was this articulate East, the growing power of
industry and finance, the promise of greater prosperity to come, which
drew to it, like iron filings to a magnet, the talented and the
ambitious men of the time, just as the black belt was the articulate
part of the South for which men of ability and influence spoke in the
national assemblies which gathered from year to year in Washington.
But the older mercantile and seafaring interests sometimes resisted the
industrial movement and made precarious alliances with the South on the
basis of a national free-trade policy. The great Boston merchants
actually turned to Hayne, of South Carolina, in 1827, to represent them
and their cause in Congress. The Winslows, Goddards, and Lees who thus
appealed to a Southern Senator were representatives of the older order,
of the same declining class in New York and Philadelphia which had in
years past controlled affairs in the East and made alliances with the
aristocratic leaders of the South. In a hopeless minority in their own
States before 1830, they looked to the South for relief, and at least
understood the politics of the planters. Their successors composed the
nucleus of the party of Cushing, Everett, and Winthrop in 1860. It is
difficult for us in our day of great things to understand the industrial
and social revolution of the decade which preceded the inauguration of
the first Western President, and it was difficult for men to make the
transition from the small farmer system of Jefferson's day to the
industrial régime of 1830; many good people were broken in the process,
while whole classes of the population exchanged the life of the open
country for that of the crowded and unsanitary towns, exchanged a rude
and hard independence for a semi-servile subjection.
[Illustration: The Distribution of Industrial Plants in 1833
Miss Maud Hulse drew this map from data in House Documents, 22nd. Cong.,
1st. Sess. No. 303.]
The new Eastern régime readily enlisted the support of the old
professional classes. The clergy and the votaries of the law, always
doing the bidding of the strongest in society, promptly took their
places in the system. When dignitaries of an Eastern town gradually laid
aside their rough farmers' clothes and put on the smooth garbs of
directors of corporations or financial magnates, the legal briefs and
sermons underwent a similar change. Social amenities displaced
Calvinistic theology; dancing, which had been a crime against the
Church, became mere frivolity and finally an innocent pastime. Leading
lawyers ceased to plead in petit courts to inferior magistrates, and
learned to devise forms of contracts, to lobby in legislatures, or
appear with the great Maryland and Virginia practitioners before the
Federal Supreme Court.
The legal profession of the East naturally made common cause with their
clients. The state courts, already accustomed to curb the democracy of
the time and declare public enactments unconstitutional, when the
interests of property required, as readily joined the new standards. The
careers of Justice Parsons of Massachusetts and Chancellor Kent of New
York, to whom all judges and lawyers of the time looked up as sources of
inspiration, illustrate admirably the common tendency. Everywhere in the
East as in the South "independent" judges asserted the power to declare
laws unconstitutional.
The national courts had undergone the same evolution, except that they
had met with violent opposition in the South and West. In many decisions
from 1792 to 1830 the Federal Supreme Court asserted its authority over
Congress, the President, and the States. In almost all of these
instances the federal judges found the heartiest support from the East.
The great institution over which Chief Justice Marshall presided with
such perfect dignity, and which was not paralleled anywhere else in the
world, lent its support to the interests of the East. If the
constitutionality of the tariff were denied by irate planters, Eastern
men pointed to decisions of the Federal Supreme Court; if the powers of
the General Government under which the industrial or financial interests
of the East operated were questioned, it was easy to find a decision of
Chief Justice Marshall to cover the case. Nothing proved more fortunate
for the leaders of the industrial revolution than the almost constant
support of the federal courts and of the legal profession as a whole.
The compact social life of the industrial towns was still further
reinforced by the clergy. In the shift from a stern theology to an
easy-going religious philosophy, William Ellery Channing was a
conspicuous leader. Harvard had already become a Unitarian center, and
in 1836 the Transcendental Club was organized in Boston with Ralph Waldo
Emerson, a preacher in revolt against the old theology, as one of its
leaders; high-toned men, whose minds revolted alike against the old
Puritanism, the grosser talk of rates of exchange and the building of
common roadways, found consolation in speculative philosophy and
romantic literature. The _North American Review_ was already fifteen
years old, and the best minds of the country were happy to have their
thought and inspirations printed in its staid columns. Boston was a
state of mind in 1830, and a good Methodist preacher who visited the
city a little later lamented the lapse from the great virtues and the
great theology of the Mathers.
But outside of Boston and its university suburb, there was little
patience with a new religion or with a theology which did not teach the
world the total depravity of man and the vengeance of an angry Deity
consigning his wayward children to everlasting perdition. Southern
gentlemen like Calhoun or Hayne might accept the mild and humane God of
Channing, but not the farmers of the rural districts or the business men
of the small towns.
If Boston cultivated philosophy and religious reform, New York was the
seat of a literature that was read. Washington Irving, the author of
the _Sketch-Book_ and _Tales of a Traveller_, was just returning from a
long and triumphant literary sojourn in Europe to make his home on the
Hudson. James Fenimore Cooper was publishing his _Leather Stocking
Tales_, which have made the hair on so many boys' heads stand on end.
William Cullen Bryant was making the _New York Evening Post_ the organ
of American culture and setting the pace for the better element of the
press. In Philadelphia, Carey and Lea were alternately publishing the
writings of struggling literary lights and fiery pamphlets on the tariff
and internal improvements. In 1832 John Pendleton Kennedy, of Maryland,
published his _Swallow Barn_, a novel which portrayed the easy-going
life of the Virginia planters; and in Richmond, William Wirt, disgusted
with Western politics, rested on his laurels as the author of the
_British Spy_ and the _Life of Patrick Henry_. To match the _North
American Review_ the Charleston lovers of literature were publishing
their excellent _Southern Review_. Even history was not without her
muses. Reverend Jared Sparks was editing all the crudities of grammar
and errors of spelling out of Washington's fourteen volumes of
correspondence; George Ticknor, a young professor at Harvard, was
beginning the work which was to culminate in his famous _History of
Spanish Literature_; and George Bancroft was writing a _History of the
United States_ which was to win him international fame and ultimately to
secure him a seat in the Cabinet of President Polk.
If literature and history were beginning to thrive in New England and
the Middle States, painting and sculpture also had their devotees.
Allston and Greenough had won laurels in Boston; Inman and Sully were
making portraits in Philadelphia which well-to-do Middle States lawyers
and Southern planters liked well enough to pay for in good banknotes;
even in far-off Kentucky Joel T. Hart was making the busts of great
American politicians on which his title to distinction was to rest. And
Charleston, never outdone in _ante-bellum_ times, encouraged a real
genius in James de Veaux, the painter, so soon to fall a victim to
tuberculosis. That was a promising religious, literary, and artistic
life, which kept time to the looms of the industrial belt or idealized
the nascent feudalism of the South. But we must turn to the fierce
economic and political struggles about to be reopened in
Washington--struggles in which Americans of that day as well as of this
always take supreme interest.
The change in Massachusetts and Connecticut from a defiant particularism
and an uncompromising free-trade policy, during the short years of 1815
to 1830, to a positive nationalism and emphatic protective program
parallels exactly the change at the same time in South Carolina from
nationalism and a protective tariff to a strict states-rights and an
unbending free-trade system. If Calhoun turned sharp corners in those
years, Webster proved equally agile. The whole life of the East was
being reconstructed, and all classes were adapting themselves to the new
organization. The small farmers, allies in 1804 of Thomas Jefferson and
his up-country democracy, became ancillary to the industrial towns
where they found markets for their products; and the new river and canal
and railroad towns were but the recent creations of the new order. With
the exception of a few remote counties and certain old-fashioned
merchants, all New England and the Middle States ranged themselves
around the dominant industrial masters and presented an almost solid
front to the Southern and Western combination which had swept the
country in 1828. There was no doubt that Adams, Webster, and Clay would
renew the fight in time to make an issue in 1832.
And their case was by no means hopeless. In the electoral college of
1832 these Northeastern States would cast 131 of the total 286 votes. If
the industrial forces could hold their communities together as the West
had learned to do, and regain their former hold on Ohio, their candidate
would again be successful. Losing the Presidency, they would still have,
after the apportionment of 1831, a majority of 10 in the Federal House
of Representatives, which would guarantee the protective policy against
serious modification. And the moral support of the Supreme Court was not
without value. Thus if the new President and the Senate be conceded, the
popular branch of Congress and the national judiciary would make steady
bulwarks.
If there were sections of New England, like Maine, or of the Middle
States, like western Pennsylvania, whose people would not support the
industrial program, there were dominant sections of the old South, like
eastern Virginia and all South Carolina, where the leaders either
feared or hated Jackson. Nor did all the West love the South. In the
States which bordered the Ohio River most men demanded internal
improvements at national expense, which all knew the South could not
grant. With the ablest New England and Middle States leaders in the
Senate and House, why might not the arrangement of 1825 be renewed? It
was, then, with every expectation of victory in 1832 that the sanguine
Clay came back to Congress in December, 1831; even John Quincy Adams,
who now became a member of the House, was not without hope that the
ill-selected Cabinet of Jackson would go to pieces and that a
"restoration" would follow in due time. Washington was to be the scene
of still another conflict of the sections that would threaten the very
existence of the Union, not yet accustomed to the idea of a compact
nationality.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The best sources for the growth of the various industries before 1830
are government documents. _The Report on Manufactures, Executive
Documents_, 22d Cong., 1st Sess., 2 vols., is a rare and valuable work;
and _Executive Documents_, 34th Cong., 1st Sess., vol. 4, gives the
statistics of manufactures down to 1850 by States. Darby and Dwight's
_New Gazetteer of the United States_ (1833), and J. L. Bishop's _History
of American Manufactures_ (1868), are useful if sometimes exasperating.
Miss Katharine Coman's _The Industrial History of the United States_
(1910) is the best account for general use. J. B. McMaster's _History of
the United States_, vol. v (1900), and F. J. Turner's _The Rise of the
New West_ already cited (1906), are always serviceable. For a
cross-section of the industrial revolution in New England, read C. F.
Adams's _Three Episodes of Massachusetts History_ (1903). Davis R.
Dewey's _Financial History of the United States_ (1903) is standard; and
A. C. McLaughlin's _The Court, the Constitution and Parties_ (1912),
gives the best account of the beginnings of judicial supremacy, while
W. G. Sumner's _History of American Banking_ (1896) tells the story of
the banks by sections. The _American Commonwealth_ histories are
serviceable for the individual States. For the biographies of leading
statesmen, the _American Statesmen_ and _American Crises_ series are
satisfying. Intellectual life is well treated in W. P. Trent's _History
of American Literature_ (1903), G. W. Sheldon's _American Painters_
(1899), and Lorado Taft's _History of American Sculpture_ (1903).