THE CALL OF THE LAND
For over a century after the Revolution the great fact in American
life was the unoccupied land, that vast stretch of expectant acreage
lying fallow in the West. It kept the American buoyant, for it was an
insurance policy against want. When his crops failed or his business
grew dull, there was the West. When panic and disaster overtook him,
there remained the West. When the family grew too large for the old
homestead, the sons went west. And land, unlimited and virtually free,
was the magnet that drew the foreign home seeker to the American
shores.
The first public domain after the formation of the Union extended from
the Alleghanies to the Mississippi. This area was enlarged and pushed
to the Rockies by the Louisiana Purchase (1803) and was again enlarged
and extended to the Pacific by the acquisition of Oregon (1846) and
the Mexican cession (1848). The total area of the United States from
coast to coast then comprised 3,025,000[29] square miles, of which
over two-thirds were at one time or another public domain. Before the
close of the Civil War the Government had disposed of nearly four
hundred million acres but still retained in its possession an area
three times as great as the whole of the territory which had been won
from Great Britain in the Revolution.
The public domain was at first looked upon as a source of revenue, and
a minimum price was fixed by law at $2 an acre, though this rate was
subsequently (1820) lowered to $1.25 an acre. The West always wanted
liberal land laws, but the South before the Civil War, fearing that
the growth of the West would give the North superior strength, opposed
any such generosity. When the North dominated Congress, the Homestead
Law of 1862 provided that any person, twenty-one years of age, who was
a citizen of the United States or who had declared his intention of
becoming one, could obtain title to 160 acres of land by living upon
it five years, making certain improvements, and paying the entry fee
of ten dollars.
The Government laid out its vast estate in townships six miles square,
which it subdivided into sections of 640 acres and quarter sections of
160 acres. The quarter section was regarded as the public land unit
and was the largest amount permitted for individual preëmption and
later for a homestead. Thus was the whole world invited to go west.
Under the new law, 1,160,000 acres were taken up in 1865.[30] The
settler no longer had to suffer the wearisome, heart-breaking tasks
that confronted the pioneer of earlier years, for the railway and
steamboat had for some time taken the place of the Conestoga wagon and
the fitful sailboat.
But the movement by railway and by steamboat was merely a continuation
on a greater scale of what had been going on ever since the
Revolution. The westward movement was begun, as we have seen, not by
foreigners but by American farmers and settlers from seaboard and back
country, thousands of whom, before the dawn of the nineteenth century,
packed their household goods and families into covered wagons and
followed the sunset trail.
The vanguard of this westward march was American, but foreign
immigrants soon began to mingle with the caravans. At first these
newcomers who heard the far call of the West were nearly all from the
British Isles. Indeed so great was the exodus of these farmers that in
1816 the British journals in alarm asked Parliament to check the
"ruinous drain of the most useful part of the population of the United
Kingdom." Public meetings were held in Great Britain to discuss the
average man's prospect in the new country. Agents of land companies
found eager crowds gathered to learn particulars. Whole neighborhoods
departed for America. In order to stop the exodus, the newspapers
dwelt upon the hardship of the voyage and the excesses of the
Americans. But, until Australia, New Zealand, and Canada began to
deflect migration, the stream to the United States from England,
Scotland, and Wales was constant and copious. Between 1820 and 1910
the number coming from Ireland was 4,212,169, from England 2,212,071,
from Scotland 488,749, and from Wales 59,540.
What proportion of this host found their way to the farms is not
known.[31] In the earlier years, the majority of the English and
Scotch sought the land. In western New York, in Ohio, Indiana,
Michigan, and contiguous States there were many Scotch and English
neighborhoods established before the Civil War. Since 1870, however,
the incoming British have provided large numbers of skilled mechanics
and miners, and the Welsh, also, have been drawn largely to the coal
mines.
The French Revolution drove many notables to exile in the United
States, and several attempts were made at colonization. The names
Gallipolis and Gallia County, Ohio, bear witness to their French
origin. Gallipolis was settled in 1790 by adventurers from Havre,
Bordeaux, Nantes, La Rochelle, and other French cities. The colony was
promoted in France by Joel Barlow, an Ananias even among land sharks,
representing the Scioto Land Company, or Companie du Scioto, one of
the numerous speculative concerns that early sought to capitalize
credulity and European ignorance of the West. The Company had, in
fact, no title to the lands, and the wretched colonists found
themselves stranded in a wilderness for whose conquest they were
unsuited. Of the colonists McMaster says: "Some could build coaches,
some could make perukes, some could carve, others could gild with such
exquisite carving that their work had been thought not unworthy of the
King."[32] Congress came to the relief of these unfortunate people in
1795 and granted them twenty-four thousand acres in Ohio. The town
they founded never fully realized their early dreams, but, after a
bitter struggle, it survived the log cabin days and was later honored
by a visit from Louis Philippe and from Lafayette. Very few
descendants of the French colonists share in its present-day
prosperity.
The majority of the French who came to America after 1820 were factory
workers and professional people who remained in the cities. There are
great numbers of French Canadians in the factory towns of New England.
There are, too, French colonies in America whose inhabitants cannot be
rated as foreigners, for their ancestors were veritable pioneers.
Throughout the Mississippi Valley, such French settlements as
Kaskaskia, Prairie du Rocher, Cahokia, and others have left much more
than a geographical designation and have preserved an old world aroma
of quaintness and contentment.
Swiss immigrants, to the number of about 250,000 and over 175,000
Dutch have found homes in America. The majority of the Swiss came from
the German cantons of Switzerland. They have large settlements in
Ohio, Wisconsin, and California, where they are very successful in
dairying and stock raising. The Hollanders have taken root chiefly in
western Michigan, between the Kalamazoo and Grand rivers, on the deep
black bottom lands suitable for celery and market gardening. The town
of Holland there, with its college and churches, is the center of
Dutch influence in the United States. Six of the eleven Dutch
periodicals printed in America are issued from Michigan, and the
majority of newcomers (over 80,000 have arrived since 1900) have made
their way to that State. These sturdy and industrious people from
Holland and Switzerland readily adapt themselves to American life.
No people have answered the call of the land in recent years as
eagerly as have the Scandinavians. These modern vikings have within
one generation peopled a large part of the great American Northwest.
In 1850 there were only eighteen thousand Scandinavians in the United
States. The tide rose rapidly in the sixties and reached its height in
the eighties, until over two million Scandinavian immigrants have made
America their home. They and their descendants form a very substantial
part of the rural population. There are nearly half as many Norwegians
in America as in Norway, which has emptied a larger proportion of its
population into the American lap than any other country save Ireland.
About one-fourth of the world's Swedes and over one-tenth of the
world's Danes dwell in America.
The term Scandinavian is here used in the loose sense to embrace the
peoples of the two peninsulas where dwell the Danes, the Norwegians,
and the Swedes. These three branches of the same family have much in
common, though for many years they objected to being thus rudely
shaken together into one ethnic measure. The Swede is the aristocrat,
the Norwegian the democrat, the Dane the conservative. The Swede,
polite, vivacious, fond of music and literature, is "the Frenchman of
the North," the Norwegian is a serious viking in modern dress: the
Dane remains a landsman, devoted to his fields, and he is more
amenable than his northern kinsmen to the cultural influence of the
South.
The Norwegian, true to viking traditions, led the modern exodus. In
1825 the sloop _Restoration_, the _Mayflower_ of the Norse, landed a
band of fifty-three Norwegian Quakers on Manhattan. These peasants
settled at first in western New York. But within a few years most of
them removed to Fox River, Illinois, whither were drawn most of the
Norwegians who migrated before 1850. After the Civil War, the stream
rapidly rose, until nearly seven hundred thousand persons of Norwegian
birth have settled in America.
The Swedish migration started in 1841, when Gustavus Unonius, a former
student of the University of Upsala, founded the colony of Pine Lake,
near Milwaukee. His followers have been described as a strange
assortment of "noblemen, ex-army officers, merchants, and
adventurers," whose experiences and talents were not of the sort that
make pioneering successful. Frederika Bremer, the noted Swedish
traveler, has left a description of the little cluster of log huts and
the handful of people who "had taken with them the Swedish inclination
for hospitality and a merry life, without sufficiently considering how
long it could last." Their experiences form a romantic prelude to the
great Swedish migration, which reached its height in the eighties.
Today the Swedes form the largest element in the Scandinavian influx,
for well over one million have migrated to the United States.
Nearly three hundred thousand persons of Danish blood have come into
the country since the Civil War. A large number migrated from
Schleswig-Holstein, after the forcible annexation of that province by
Prussia in 1866, preferring the freedom of America to the tyranny of
Berlin.
Whatever distinctions in language and customs may have characterized
these Northern peoples, they had one ambition in common--the desire to
own tillable land. So they made of the Northwest a new Scandinavia,
larger and far more prosperous than that which Gustavus Adolphus had
planned in colonial days for his colony in Delaware. One can travel
today three hundred miles at a stretch across the prairies of the
Dakotas or the fields of Minnesota without leaving land that is owned
by Scandinavians. They abound also in Wisconsin, Northern Illinois,
Eastern Nebraska, and Kansas, and Northern Michigan. Latterly the
lands of Oregon and Washington are luring them by the thousands, while
throughout the remaining West there are scattered many prosperous
farms cultivated by representatives of this hardy race. Latterly this
stream of Scandinavians has thinned to about one-half its former size.
In 1910, 48,000 came; in 1911, 42,000; in 1912, 27,000; in 1913,
33,000. The later immigrant is absorbed by the cities, or sails upon
the Great Lakes or in the coastwise trade, or works in lumber camps or
mines. Wherever you find a Scandinavian, however, he is working close
to nature, even though he is responding to the call of the new
industry.
It is the consensus of opinion among competent observers that these
northern peoples have been the most useful of the recent great
additions to the American race. They were particularly fitted by
nature for the conquest of the great area which they have brought
under subjugation, not merely because of their indomitable industry,
perseverance, honesty, and aptitude for agriculture, but because they
share with the Englishman and the Scotchman the instinct for
self-government. Above all, the Scandinavian has never looked upon
himself as an exile. From the first he has considered himself an
American. In Minnesota and Dakota, the Norse pioneer often preceded
local government. "Whenever a township became populous enough to have
a name as well as a number on the surveyor's map, that question was
likely to be determined by the people on the ground, and such names
as Christiana, Swede Plain, Numedal, Throndhjem, and Vasa leave no
doubt that Scandinavians officiated at the christening." These people
proceeded with the organizing of the local government and, "except for
the peculiar names, no one would suspect that the town-makers were
born elsewhere than in Massachusetts or New York."[33] This, too, in
spite of the fact that they continued the use of their mother tongue,
for not infrequently election notices and even civic ordinances and
orders were issued in Norwegian or Swedish. In 1893 there were 146
Scandinavian newspapers, and their number has since greatly increased.
In politics the Norseman learned his lesson quickly. Governors,
senators, and representatives in Congress give evidence to a racial
clannishness that has more than once proven stronger than party
allegiance. Yet with all their influence in the Northwest, they have
not insisted on unreasonable race recognition, as have the Germans in
Wisconsin and other localities. Minnesota and Dakota have established
classes in "the Scandinavian language" in their state universities,
evidently leaving it to be decided as an academic question which is
_the_ Scandinavian language. Without brilliance, producing few
leaders, the Norseman represents the rugged commonplace of American
life, avoiding the catastrophes of a soaring ambition on the one hand
and the pitfalls of a jaded temperamentalism on the other. Bent on
self-improvement, he scrupulously patronizes farmers' institutes, high
schools, and extension courses, and listens with intelligent patience
to lectures that would put an American audience to sleep. This son of
the North has greatly buttressed every worthy American institution
with the stern traditional virtues of the tiller of the soil. Strength
he gives, if not grace, and that at a time when all social
institutions are being shaken to their foundations.
Among the early homesteaders in the upper Mississippi Valley there
were a substantial number of Bohemians. In Nebraska they comprise nine
per cent of the foreign born population, in Oklahoma seven per cent,
and in Texas over six per cent. They began migrating in the turbulent
forties. They were nearly all of the peasant class, neat, industrious
and intelligent, and they usually settled in colonies where they
retained their native tongue and customs. They were opposed to
slavery and many enlisted in the Union cause.
Among the Polish immigrants who came to America before 1870, many
settled on farms in Illinois, Wisconsin, Texas, and other States. They
proved much more clannish than the Bohemians and more reluctant to
conform to American customs.
Many farms in the Northwest are occupied by Finns, of whom there were
in 1910 over two hundred thousand in the United States. They are a
Tatar race, with a copious sprinkling of Swedish blood. Illiteracy is
rare among them. They are eager patrons of night schools and libraries
and have a flourishing college near Duluth. They are eager for
citizenship and are independent in politics. The glittering
generalities of Marxian socialism seem peculiarly alluring to them;
and not a few have joined the I.W.W. Drink has been their curse, but a
strong temperance movement has recently made rapid headway among them.
They are natural woodmen and wield the axe with the skill of our own
frontiersmen. Their peculiar houses, made of neatly squared logs, are
features of every Finnish settlement. All of the North European races
and a few from Southern and Eastern Europe have contributed to the
American rural population; yet the Census of 1910 disclosed the fact
that of the 6,361,502 white farm operators in the United States, 75
per cent were native American and only 10.5 per cent were foreign
born.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 29: Oberholtzer, _History of the United States since the
Civil War_, vol I, p. 275.]
[Footnote 30: Oberholtzer, _supra cit._, p. 278.]
[Footnote 31: The census of 1910 discloses the fact that of the
6,361,502 farms in the United States 75 per cent were operated by
native white Americans and only 10.5 per cent by foreign born whites.
The foreign born were distributed as follows: Austria, 33,336;
Hungary, 3827; England, 39,728; Ireland, 33,480; Scotland, 10,220;
Wales, 4110; France, 5832; Germany, 221,800; Holland, 13,790; Italy,
10,614; Russia, 25,788; Poland, 7228; Denmark, 28,375; Norway, 59,742;
Sweden, 67,453; Switzerland, 14333; Canada, 61,878.]
[Footnote 32: _History of the People of the United States_, vol. VII,
p. 203.]
[Footnote 33: K.C. Babcock, _The Scandinavian Element in the United
States_, p. 143.]