The United States Taking the Lead in Civilization--Manhood Suffrage and
Freedom of Worship--Humane Criminal Laws--Progress the Genius of the
Nation--A Patriotic Report--State Builders in the Northwest--Illinois and
the Union--Immigration--British Jealousy--An English Farmer's Opinion of
America--Commerce and Manufactures--England Tries to Prevent Skilled
Artisans from Emigrating--The Beginning of Protection--The British Turn
on Their Friends the Algerians--General Jackson Invades Florida--Spain
Sells Florida to the United States.
While holding their own against foreign enemies on land and sea the
United States were assuming the lead in the march of civilization.
Manhood suffrage was gradually taking the place of property suffrage,
liberty of worship was recognized in practice as well as theory, and the
criminal laws showed a growing spirit of humanity. Capital crimes were
few, as compared with Great Britain. "The severity of our criminal laws,"
wrote William Bradford, the distinguished jurist, and for some time
Attorney-General of the United States, "is an exotic plant, and not the
growth of Pennsylvania." And Pennsylvania, when left to her own
influences and tendencies by the success of the Revolution, was not slow
to adopt humane and gratifying reforms, uttering far in advance of some
other commonwealths the declaration that "to deter more effectually from
the commission of crimes by continued visible punishment of long
duration, and to make sanguinary punishments less necessary, houses ought
to be provided for punishing by hard labor those who shall be convicted
of crimes not capital." In September, 1786, the laws of that State were
amended so as to substitute imprisonment at hard labor for capital
punishment for robbery, burglary, and one other crime, and it was
provided that no attainder should work corruption of blood in any case,
and that the estates of persons committing suicide should descend to
their natural heirs. It was likewise enacted that "every person convicted
of bigamy, or of being accessory after the fact in any felony, or of
receiving stolen goods, knowing them to have been stolen, or of any other
offence not capital, for which, by the laws now in force, burning in the
hand, cutting off the ears, nailing the ear or ears to the pillory,
placing in and upon the pillory, whipping, or imprisonment for life, is,
or may be inflicted, shall, instead of such parts of the punishment, be
fined and sentenced to hard labor for any term not exceeding two years."
Also, as if dreading that lax laws might lead to a carnival of crime, the
legislators restricted the operation of the new and lenient statute to
three years. The act was renewed, however, at the close of that term, and
finally, in 1794, the reform of the criminal code was crowned with the
declaration that "no crime whatever, excepting murder of the first
degree, shall hereafter be punished with death."
Other States either kept pace with or followed the example of
Pennsylvania in making their criminal laws more reformatory and less
vindictive, and while England affected to despise American civilization,
America was leading England in the march of humanity.
The genius of the nation was progress--not the spirit of the huckster,
anxious for present gain, but the enlarged view of the patriot, anxious
for the future weal of his country and his race. A striking expression of
this spirit is shown in the report made in 1812 by Gouverneur Morris, De
Witt Clinton and other eminent men on the practicability and prospects of
the proposed Erie Canal. After boldly stating that the tolls from this
work would amply repay the outlay required for its construction, the
report adds: "It is impossible to ascertain and it is difficult to
imagine how much toll would be collected; but like our advance in numbers
and wealth, calculation out-runs fancy. Things which twenty years ago any
man would have been laughed at for believing, we now see. * * * The life
of an individual is short. The time is not distant when those who make
this report will have passed away. But no time is fixed to the existence
of a State; and the first wish of a patriot's heart is that his may be
immortal." In the Northwest also, the State-builders of that day were
equally farsighted in patriotic provision for the future. When it was
proposed to admit Illinois as a State, Nathaniel Pope, delegate in
Congress from that territory, urged, that the northern boundary should be
extended to take in the port of Chicago, and a considerable coast-line on
Lake Michigan, so as to give the State an interest in the lakes and bind
it to the North as its southern frontiers bound it to the South and
Southwest, thus checking any tendency to sectional disunion. Judge Pope
pointed out that associations would thus be formed both with the North
and South, and that a State thus situated, having a decided interest in
the commerce, and in the preservation of the whole confederacy, could
never consent to disunion. These views were happily successful in
obtaining the approbation of Congress, and Illinois was saved from the
limits which would have made it only a southern border State. In the
Southwest, as well as in the North pioneers pushed rapidly into the
wilderness, crossing the Mississippi and founding new States in which the
long struggle between freedom and slavery was to begin.
* * *
When what may be called the blockade of Europe was raised by the final
defeat of Napoleon, immigrants began to pour into the United States in
large numbers. Many of them, like many immigrants to-day, became stranded
in the cities of the coast, without resources and without employment,
willing to work, but unable to get work. In February, 1817, James
Buchanan, the British consul at New York, issued a warning against
immigration to the United States, on the ground, as he alleged, of
numerous applications made to his office for aid to return to Great
Britain and Ireland, but at the same time the consul stated that he was
authorized to place all desirable immigrants, who found themselves
destitute in New York, in Upper Canada or Nova Scotia. Mr. Buchanan was
evidently not so anxious to assist his fellow-subjects of King George as
he was to promote the British policy of building up the Canadian
territories as a counterpoise to the United States. While there was
undoubtedly some distress among immigrants of the improvident class,
those who came here with the determination to work generally found work
before long at much better compensation than they could have earned in
England, while those who proceeded to the new regions of the West had no
difficulty in becoming independent and prosperous freeholders.
"In exchanging the condition of an English farmer for that of an American
proprietor," wrote an intelligent immigrant, "I expect to suffer many
inconveniences; but I am willing to make a great sacrifice of present
ease, were it merely for the sake of obtaining in the decline of life, an
exemption from that wearisome solicitude about pecuniary affairs from
which even the affluent find no refuge in England; and, for my children,
a career of enterprise and wholesome family connections in a society
whose institutions are favorable to virtue; and at last the consolation
of leaving them efficient members of a flourishing, public-spirited,
energetic community; where the insolence of wealth and the servility of
pauperism, between which in England there is scarcely an interval
remaining, are alike unknown. * * * It has struck me as we have passed
along from one poor hut to another, among the rude inhabitants of this
infant State, that travelers in general who judge by comparison, are not
qualified to form a fair estimate of these lonely settlers. Let a
stranger make his tour through England in a course remote from the great
roads, and going to no inns, take such, entertainment only as he might
find in the cottage of laborers, he would have as much cause to complain
of the rudeness of the people, and more of their drunkenness and
profligacy than in these backwoods: although in England the poor are a
part of society whose institutions are matured by the experience of two
thousand years. But in their manners and morals, but especially in their
knowledge and proud independence of mind, they exhibit a contrast so
striking that he must be a _petit maître_ traveler, or ill-informed of
the character and circumstances of his poor countrymen, or deficient in
good and manly sentiment, who would not rejoice to transplant into these
boundless regions of freedom the millions he has left behind him
groveling in ignorance and want."[1]
[1] Notes on a journey in America from the coast of Virginia to the
territory of Illinois, by M. Birkbeck.
While a great agricultural domain was being occupied in the West,
commerce and manufactures were not neglected. American merchantmen
visited every sea, no longer in dread of hostile Briton or Barbary
pirate, and internal commerce received a mighty impulse from the
steamboat. Meanwhile the foundations were laid of those vast
manufacturing interests which were yet to overshadow commerce in the
East. As early as 1810, the domestic manufactures of all descriptions
were worth $127,694,602 annually, and it was estimated by competent
authorities that of $36,793,249--the value of the manufactures of wool,
cotton and flax, with their mixtures--fully two-thirds were produced in
the houses of the farmers and other inhabitants. England had foreseen
that America might prove a powerful rival in the manufacturing field, and
Parliament enacted laws to prevent the emigration of skilled artisans. It
may seem almost incredible that less than one hundred years ago such a
prohibition existed, but I read in an account of a voyage from London to
Boston in 1817 that "the passengers were summoned to appear at the
Gravesend custom house, personally to deliver in their names and a
statement of their professions. Had any been known to be artisans or
manufacturers, they would have been stopped and forbidden to leave the
kingdom. An act of Parliament imposes a heavy fine on those who induce
them to attempt it." Samuel Slater, who brought the Arkwright patents in
his brain, evaded the prohibition a few years after the Revolution, and
his descendants are to-day among the wealthiest and most reputable of New
England's citizens.
The war of 1812-15, gave a tremendous impulse to American manufactures
through the exclusion of British and other foreign products. At the close
of the war, however, when American ports were thrown open to the trade of
Great Britain, the manufacturers of that country, with the deliberate
purpose of crushing American industries out of existence, threw vast
quantities of goods into the American markets, completely swamping native
productions, and making it impossible for native manufacturers to compete
with the importations. It was this ruinous relapse from comparative
prosperity that prompted the agitation for a protective tariff. As
further evidence of British purpose to do all the damage possible to
American interests, even in time of peace, it may be mentioned that when
Lord Exmouth, with a powerful fleet, visited Algiers in 1816, and
negotiated a treaty between the Dey--Omar, the successor of Hadgi
Ali--and the kings of Sardinia and Naples, the Algerians began to show
themselves again hostile to the United States within a few days after the
treaty. The public sentiment of Europe, however, made it impossible for
England to make longer use of those pirates to injure commercial rivals,
and the British Government, in deference to that sentiment, sought a
quarrel with the Dey, bombarded Algiers, and compelled the Barbary States
to agree to put an end to piracy--an agreement which remained for some
time a dead letter.
* * *
The Louisiana Purchase was crowned in 1818 by the purchase of Florida
from Spain. Spanish authority in North America had long been little more
than a thin disguise, behind which the British plotted and operated
against the welfare of the United States. General Jackson had found it
necessary in 1814 to capture Pensacola, which the English were using as a
base of hostilities. Again in 1818 General Jackson invaded Florida to
punish Indians who, incited by British subjects under Spanish protection,
were plundering and murdering in American settlements. Jackson took by
force the Spanish post of St. Marks, entered Pensacola, and attacked the
fort at Barrancas, compelling it to surrender. Two British subjects who
had stirred up the Indians to attack the Americans were executed.
Secretary of State John Quincy Adams sustained Jackson, notwithstanding
the protests of Spain, and the latter power concluded to yield to the
inevitable, and sold Florida to the United States on the extinction of
the various American claims for spoliation, for the satisfaction of which
the United States agreed to pay $5,000,000 to the claimants. Thus all
foreign authority was extinguished in the Southeast and the American flag
waved from the Florida Keys to the boundaries of New Spain.