THE FIRST ADMINISTRATION
OF
THOMAS JEFFERSON
1801-1805
HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES.
BY
HENRY ADAMS.
VOLS. I. AND II.--THE FIRST ADMINISTRATION OF JEFFERSON. 1801-1805.
VOLS. III. AND IV.--THE SECOND ADMINISTRATION OF JEFFERSON. 1805-1809.
VOLS. V. AND VI.--THE FIRST ADMINISTRATION OF MADISON. 1809-1813.
VOLS. VII., VIII., AND IX.--THE SECOND ADMINISTRATION OF MADISON.
1813-1817. WITH AN INDEX TO THE ENTIRE WORK.
HISTORY
OF THE
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
DURING THE FIRST ADMINISTRATION OF
THOMAS JEFFERSON
BY HENRY ADAMS
VOL. I.
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1891
_Copyright, 1889_,
BY CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS.
University Press:
JOHN WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE.
CONTENTS OF VOL. I.
CHAPTER PAGE
I. PHYSICAL AND ECONOMICAL CONDITIONS 1
II. POPULAR CHARACTERISTICS 41
III. INTELLECT OF NEW ENGLAND 75
IV. INTELLECT OF THE MIDDLE STATES 108
V. INTELLECT OF THE SOUTHERN STATES 131
VI. AMERICAN IDEALS 156
VII. THE INAUGURATION 185
VIII. ORGANIZATION 218
IX. THE ANNUAL MESSAGE 247
X. LEGISLATION 264
XI. THE JUDICIARY DEBATE 284
XII. PERSONALITIES 307
XIII. THE SPANISH COURT 334
XIV. THE RETROCESSION 352
XV. TOUSSAINT LOUVERTURE 377
XVI. CLOSURE OF THE MISSISSIPPI 399
XVII. MONROE’S MISSION 423
HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES.
CHAPTER I.
ACCORDING to the census of 1800, the United States of America
contained 5,308,483 persons. In the same year the British Islands
contained upwards of fifteen millions; the French Republic, more than
twenty-seven millions. Nearly one fifth of the American people were
negro slaves; the true political population consisted of four and a
half million free whites, or less than one million able-bodied males,
on whose shoulders fell the burden of a continent. Even after two
centuries of struggle the land was still untamed; forest covered every
portion, except here and there a strip of cultivated soil; the minerals
lay undisturbed in their rocky beds, and more than two thirds of the
people clung to the seaboard within fifty miles of tide-water, where
alone the wants of civilized life could be supplied. The centre of
population rested within eighteen miles of Baltimore, north and east of
Washington. Except in political arrangement, the interior was little
more civilized than in 1750, and was not much easier to penetrate than
when La Salle and Hennepin found their way to the Mississippi more than
a century before.
A great exception broke this rule. Two wagon-roads crossed the
Alleghany Mountains in Pennsylvania,--one leading from Philadelphia
to Pittsburg; one from the Potomac to the Monongahela; while a third
passed through Virginia southwestward to the Holston River and
Knoxville in Tennessee, with a branch through the Cumberland Gap
into Kentucky. By these roads and by trails less passable from North
and South Carolina, or by water-ways from the lakes, between four
and five hundred thousand persons had invaded the country beyond the
Alleghanies. At Pittsburg and on the Monongahela existed a society,
already old, numbering seventy or eighty thousand persons, while on the
Ohio River the settlements had grown to an importance which threatened
to force a difficult problem on the union of the older States. One
hundred and eighty thousand whites, with forty thousand negro slaves,
made Kentucky the largest community west of the mountains; and about
ninety thousand whites and fourteen thousand slaves were scattered over
Tennessee. In the territory north of the Ohio less progress had been
made. A New England colony existed at Marietta; some fifteen thousand
people were gathered at Cincinnati; half-way between the two, a small
town had grown up at Chillicothe, and other villages or straggling
cabins were to be found elsewhere; but the whole Ohio territory
contained only forty-five thousand inhabitants. The entire population,
both free and slave, west of the mountains, reached not yet half a
million; but already they were partly disposed to think themselves, and
the old thirteen States were not altogether unwilling to consider them,
the germ of an independent empire, which was to find its outlet, not
through the Alleghanies to the seaboard, but by the Mississippi River
to the Gulf.
Nowhere did eastern settlements touch the western. At least one hundred
miles of mountainous country held the two regions everywhere apart.
The shore of Lake Erie, where alone contact seemed easy, was still
unsettled. The Indians had been pushed back to the Cuyahoga River,
and a few cabins were built on the site of Cleveland; but in 1800, as
in 1700, this intermediate region was only a portage where emigrants
and merchandise were transferred from Lake Erie to the Muskingum and
Ohio valleys. Even western New York remained a wilderness: Buffalo was
not laid out; Indian titles were not extinguished; Rochester did not
exist; and the county of Onondaga numbered a population of less than
eight thousand. In 1799 Utica contained fifty houses, mostly small
and temporary. Albany was still a Dutch city, with some five thousand
inhabitants; and the tide of immigration flowed slowly through it into
the valley of the Mohawk, while another stream from Pennsylvania,
following the Susquehanna, spread toward the Genesee country.
The people of the old thirteen States, along the Atlantic seaboard,
thus sent westward a wedge-shaped mass of nearly half a million
persons, penetrating by the Tennessee, Cumberland, and Ohio rivers
toward the western limit of the Union. The Indians offered sharp
resistance to this invasion, exacting life for life, and yielding only
as their warriors perished. By the close of the century the wedge of
white settlements, with its apex at Nashville and its flanks covered
by the Ohio and Tennessee rivers, nearly split the Indian country in
halves. The northern half--consisting of the later States of Wisconsin,
Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, and one third of Ohio--contained
Wyandottes and Shawanese, Miamis, Kickapoos, and other tribes, able
to send some five thousand warriors to hunt or fight. In the southern
half, powerful confederacies of Creeks, Cherokees, Chickasaws, and
Choctaws lived and hunted where the States of Mississippi, Alabama, and
the western parts of Georgia, Tennessee, and Kentucky were to extend;
and so weak was the State of Georgia, which claimed the southwestern
territory for its own, that a well-concerted movement of Indians
might without much difficulty have swept back its white population of
one hundred thousand toward the ocean or across the Savannah River.
The Indian power had been broken in halves, but each half was still
terrible to the colonists on the edges of their vast domain, and was
used as a political weapon by the Governments whose territory bounded
the Union on the north and south. The governors-general of Canada
intrigued with the northwestern Indians, that they might hold in check
any aggression from Washington; while the Spanish governors of West
Florida and Louisiana maintained equally close relations with the
Indian confederacies of the Georgia territory.
With the exception that half a million people had crossed the
Alleghanies and were struggling with difficulties all their own, in an
isolation like that of Jutes or Angles in the fifth century, America,
so far as concerned physical problems, had changed little in fifty
years. The old landmarks remained nearly where they stood before. The
same bad roads and difficult rivers, connecting the same small towns,
stretched into the same forests in 1800 as when the armies of Braddock
and Amherst pierced the western and northern wilderness, except that
these roads extended a few miles farther from the sea-coast. Nature was
rather man’s master than his servant, and the five million Americans
struggling with the untamed continent seemed hardly more competent
to their task than the beavers and buffalo which had for countless
generations made bridges and roads of their own.
Even by water, along the seaboard, communication was as slow and almost
as irregular as in colonial times. The wars in Europe caused a sudden
and great increase in American shipping employed in foreign commerce,
without yet leading to general improvement in navigation. The ordinary
sea-going vessel carried a freight of about two hundred and fifty
tons; the largest merchant ships hardly reached four hundred tons;
the largest frigate in the United States navy, the “line-of-battle
ship in disguise,” had a capacity of fifteen hundred and seventy-six
tons. Elaborately rigged as ships or brigs, the small merchant craft
required large crews and were slow sailers; but the voyage to Europe
was comparatively more comfortable and more regular than the voyage
from New York to Albany, or through Long Island Sound to Providence.
No regular packet plied between New York and Albany. Passengers
waited till a sloop was advertised to sail; they provided their own
bedding and supplies; and within the nineteenth century Captain Elias
Bunker won much fame by building the sloop “Experiment,” of one
hundred and ten tons, to start regularly on a fixed day for Albany,
for the convenience of passengers only, supplying beds, wine, and
provisions for the voyage of one hundred and fifty miles. A week on the
North River or on the Sound was an experience not at all unknown to
travellers.
While little improvement had been made in water-travel, every increase
of distance added to the difficulties of the westward journey. The
settler who after buying wagon and horses hauled his family and goods
across the mountains, might buy or build a broad flat-bottomed ark,
to float with him and his fortunes down the Ohio, in constant peril
of upsetting or of being sunk; but only light boats with strong
oars could mount the stream, or boats forced against the current by
laboriously poling in shallow water. If he carried his tobacco and
wheat down the Mississippi to the Spanish port of New Orleans, and
sold it, he might return to his home in Kentucky or Ohio by a long and
dangerous journey on horseback through the Indian country from Natchez
to Nashville, or he might take ship to Philadelphia, if a ship were
about to sail, and again cross the Alleghanies. Compared with river
travel, the sea was commonly an easy and safe highway. Nearly all the
rivers which penetrated the interior were unsure, liable to be made
dangerous by freshets, and both dangerous and impassable by drought;
yet such as they were, these streams made the main paths of traffic.
Through the mountainous gorges of the Susquehanna the produce of
western New York first found an outlet; the Cuyahoga and Muskingum were
the first highway from the Lakes to the Ohio; the Ohio itself, with its
great tributaries the Cumberland and the Tennessee, marked the lines
of western migration; and every stream which could at high water float
a boat was thought likely to become a path for commerce. As General
Washington, not twenty years earlier, hoped that the brawling waters of
the Cheat and Youghiogheny might become the channel of trade between
Chesapeake Bay and Pittsburg, so the Americans of 1800 were prepared to
risk life and property on any streamlet that fell foaming down either
flank of the Alleghanies. The experience of mankind proved trade to be
dependent on water communications, and as yet Americans did not dream
that the experience of mankind was useless to them.
If America was to be developed along the lines of water communication
alone, by such means as were known to Europe, Nature had decided that
the experiment of a single republican government must meet extreme
difficulties. The valley of the Ohio had no more to do with that of the
Hudson, the Susquehanna, the Potomac, the Roanoke, and the Santee, than
the valley of the Danube with that of the Rhone, the Po, or the Elbe.
Close communication by land could alone hold the great geographical
divisions together either in interest or in fear. The union of New
England with New York and Pennsylvania was not an easy task even as a
problem of geography, and with an ocean highway; but the union of New
England with the Carolinas, and of the sea-coast with the interior,
promised to be a hopeless undertaking. Physical contact alone could
make one country of these isolated empires, but to the patriotic
American of 1800, struggling for the continued existence of an embryo
nation, with machinery so inadequate, the idea of ever bringing the
Mississippi River, either by land or water, into close contact with Now
England, must have seemed wild. By water, an Erie Canal was already
foreseen; by land, centuries of labor could alone conquer those
obstacles which Nature permitted to be overcome.
In the minds of practical men, the experience of Europe left few
doubts on this point. After two thousand years of public labor and
private savings, even despotic monarchs, who employed the resources of
their subjects as they pleased, could in 1800 pass from one part of
their European dominions to another little more quickly than they might
have done in the age of the Antonines. A few short canals had been
made, a few bridges had been built, an excellent post-road extended
from Madrid to St. Petersburg; but the heavy diligence that rumbled
from Calais to Paris required three days for its journey of one hundred
and fifty miles, and if travellers ventured on a trip to Marseilles
they met with rough roads and hardships like those of the Middle Ages.
Italy was in 1800 almost as remote from the north of Europe as when
carriage-roads were first built. Neither in time nor in thought was
Florence or Rome much nearer to London in Wordsworth’s youth than in
the youth of Milton or Gray. Indeed, such changes as had occurred were
partly for the worse, owing to the violence of revolutionary wars
during the last ten years of the eighteenth century. Horace Walpole at
his life’s close saw about him a world which in many respects was less
civilized than when as a boy he made the grand tour of Europe.
While so little had been done on the great highways of European
travel, these highways were themselves luxuries which furnished no
sure measure of progress. The post-horses toiled as painfully as ever
through the sand from Hamburg to Berlin, while the coach between York
and London rolled along an excellent road at the rate of ten miles an
hour; yet neither in England nor on the Continent was the post-road a
great channel of commerce. No matter how good the road, it could not
compete with water, nor could heavy freights in great quantities be
hauled long distances without extravagant cost. Water communication
was as necessary for European commerce in 1800 as it had been for the
Phœnicians and Egyptians; the Rhine, the Rhone, the Danube, the Elbe,
were still the true commercial highways, and except for government
post-roads, Europe was as dependent on these rivers in the eighteenth
century as in the thirteenth. No certainty could be offered of more
rapid progress in the coming century than in the past; the chief hope
seemed to lie in the construction of canals.
While Europe had thus consumed centuries in improving paths of trade,
until merchandise could be brought by canal a few score miles from the
Rhone to the Loire and Seine, to the Garonne and the Rhine, and while
all her wealth and energy had not yet united the Danube with other
river systems, America was required to construct, without delay, at
least three great roads and canals, each several hundred miles long,
across mountain ranges, through a country not yet inhabited, to points
where no great markets existed,--and this under constant peril of
losing her political union, which could not even by such connections
be with certainty secured. After this should be accomplished, the
Alleghanies must still remain between the eastern and western States,
and at any known rate of travel Nashville could not be reached in
less than a fortnight or three weeks from Philadelphia. Meanwhile
the simpler problem of bringing New England nearer to Virginia and
Georgia had not advanced even with the aid of a direct ocean highway.
In becoming politically independent of England, the old thirteen
provinces developed little more commercial intercourse with each other
in proportion to their wealth and population than they had maintained
in colonial days. The material ties that united them grew in strength
no more rapidly than the ties which bound them to Europe. Each group of
States lived a life apart.
Even the lightly equipped traveller found a short journey no slight
effort. Between Boston and New York was a tolerable highway, along
which, thrice a week, light stage-coaches carried passengers and
the mail, in three days. From New York a stage-coach started every
week-day for Philadelphia, consuming the greater part of two days in
the journey; and the road between Paulus Hook, the modern Jersey City,
and Hackensack, was declared by the newspapers in 1802 to be as bad
as any other part of the route between Maine and Georgia. South of
Philadelphia the road was tolerable as far as Baltimore, but between
Baltimore and the new city of Washington it meandered through forests;
the driver chose the track which seemed least dangerous, and rejoiced
if in wet seasons he reached Washington without miring or upsetting his
wagon. In the Northern States, four miles an hour was the average speed
for any coach between Bangor and Baltimore. Beyond the Potomac the
roads became steadily worse, until south of Petersburg even the mails
were carried on horseback. Except for a stage-coach which plied between
Charleston and Savannah, no public conveyance of any kind was mentioned
in the three southernmost States.
The stage-coach was itself a rude conveyance, of a kind still familiar
to experienced travellers. Twelve persons, crowded into one wagon,
were jolted over rough roads, their bags and parcels, thrust inside,
cramping their legs, while they were protected from the heat and
dust of mid-summer and the intense cold and driving snow of winter
only by leather flaps buttoned to the roof and sides. In fine, dry
weather this mode of travel was not unpleasant, when compared with
the heavy vehicles of Europe and the hard English turnpikes; but when
spring rains drew the frost from the ground the roads became nearly
impassable, and in winter, when the rivers froze, a serious peril was
added, for the Susquehanna or the North River at Paulus Hook must
be crossed in an open boat,--an affair of hours at best, sometimes
leading to fatal accidents. Smaller annoyances of many kinds were
habitual. The public, as a rule, grumbled less than might have been
expected, but occasionally newspapers contained bitter complaints. An
angry Philadelphian, probably a foreigner, wrote in 1796 that, “with
a few exceptions, brutality, negligence, and filching are as naturally
expected by people accustomed to travelling in America, as a mouth,
a nose, and two eyes are looked for in a man’s face.” This sweeping
charge, probably unjust, and certainly supported by little public
evidence, was chiefly founded on the experience of an alleged journey
from New York:--
“At Bordentown we went into a second boat where we met with very
sorry accommodation. This was about four o’clock in the afternoon. We
had about twenty miles down the Delaware to reach Philadelphia. The
captain, who had a most provoking tongue, was a boy about eighteen
years of age. He and a few companions despatched a dozen or eighteen
bottles of porter. We ran three different times against other vessels
that were coming up the stream. The women and children lay all night
on the bare boards of the cabin floor.... We reached Arch Street
wharf about eight o’clock on the Wednesday morning, having been about
sixteen hours on a voyage of twenty miles.”
In the Southern States the difficulties and perils of travel were so
great as to form a barrier almost insuperable. Even Virginia was no
exception to this rule. At each interval of a few miles the horseman
found himself stopped by a river, liable to sudden freshets, and rarely
bridged. Jefferson in his frequent journeys between Monticello and
Washington was happy to reach the end of the hundred miles without
some vexatious delay. “Of eight rivers between here and Washington,” he
wrote to his Attorney-General in 1801, “five have neither bridges nor
boats.”
Expense caused an equally serious obstacle to travel. The usual charge
in the Northern States was six cents a mile by stage. In the year
1796, according to Francis Baily, President of the Royal Astronomical
Society, three or four stages ran daily from Baltimore to Philadelphia,
the fare six dollars, with charges amounting to two dollars and a
quarter a day at the inns on the road. Baily was three days in making
the journey. From Philadelphia to New York he paid the same fare and
charges, arriving in one day and a half. The entire journey of two
hundred miles cost him twenty-one dollars. He remarked that travelling
on the main lines of road in the settled country was about as expensive
as in England, and when the roads were good, about as rapid. Congress
allowed its members six dollars for every twenty miles travelled. The
actual cost, including hotel expenses, could hardly have fallen below
ten cents a mile.
Heavy traffic never used stage routes if it could find cheaper.
Commerce between one State and another, or even between the seaboard
and the interior of the same State, was scarcely possible on any large
scale unless navigable water connected them. Except the great highway
to Pittsburg, no road served as a channel of commerce between different
regions of the country. In this respect New England east of the
Connecticut was as independent of New York as both were independent
of Virginia, and as Virginia in her turn was independent of Georgia
and South Carolina. The chief value of inter-State communication by
land rested in the postal system; but the post furnished another
illustration of the difficulties which barred progress. In the year
1800 one general mail-route extended from Portland in Maine to
Louisville in Georgia, the time required for the trip being twenty
days. Between New York and Petersburg in Virginia was a daily service;
between New York and Boston, and also between Petersburg and Augusta,
the mail was carried thrice a week. Branching from the main line at
New York, a mail went to Canandaigua in ten days; from Philadelphia
another branch line went to Lexington in sixteen days, to Nashville in
twenty-two days. Thus more than twenty thousand miles of post-road,
with nine hundred post-offices, proved the vastness of the country and
the smallness of the result; for the gross receipts for postage in the
year ending Oct. 1, 1801, were only $320,000.
Throughout the land the eighteenth century ruled supreme. Only within
a few years had the New Englander begun to abandon his struggle with
a barren soil, among granite hills, to learn the comforts of easier
existence in the valleys of the Mohawk and Ohio; yet the New England
man was thought the shrewdest and most enterprising of Americans.
If the Puritans and the Dutch needed a century or more to reach the
Mohawk, when would they reach the Mississippi? The distance from New
York to the Mississippi was about one thousand miles; from Washington
to the extreme southwestern military post, below Natchez, was about
twelve hundred. Scarcely a portion of western Europe was three hundred
miles distant from some sea, but a width of three hundred miles was
hardly more than an outskirt of the United States. No civilized country
had yet been required to deal with physical difficulties so serious,
nor did experience warrant conviction that such difficulties could be
overcome.
* * * * *
If the physical task which lay before the American people had advanced
but a short way toward completion, little more change could be seen
in the economical conditions of American life. The man who in the
year 1800 ventured to hope for a new era in the coming century, could
lay his hand on no statistics that silenced doubt. The machinery of
production showed no radical difference from that familiar to ages
long past. The Saxon farmer of the eighth century enjoyed most of
the comforts known to Saxon farmers of the eighteenth. The eorls
and ceorls of Offa and Ecgbert could not read or write, and did not
receive a weekly newspaper with such information as newspapers in that
age could supply; yet neither their houses, their clothing, their
food and drink, their agricultural tools and methods, their stock,
nor their habits were so greatly altered or improved by time that
they would have found much difficulty in accommodating their lives to
that of their descendants in the eighteenth century. In this respect
America was backward. Fifty or a hundred miles inland more than half
the houses were log-cabins, which might or might not enjoy the luxury
of a glass window. Throughout the South and West houses showed little
attempt at luxury; but even in New England the ordinary farmhouse was
hardly so well built, so spacious, or so warm as that of a well-to-do
contemporary of Charlemagne. The cloth which the farmer’s family wore
was still homespun. The hats were manufactured by the village hatter;
the clothes were cut and made at home; the shirts, socks, and nearly
every other article of dress were also home-made. Hence came a marked
air of rusticity which distinguished country from town,--awkward shapes
of hat, coat, and trousers, which gave to the Yankee caricature those
typical traits that soon disappeared almost as completely as coats of
mail and steel headpieces. The plough was rude and clumsy; the sickle
as old as Tubal Cain, and even the cradle not in general use; the
flail was unchanged since the Aryan exodus; in Virginia, grain was
still commonly trodden out by horses. Enterprising gentlemen-farmers
introduced threshing-machines and invented scientific ploughs; but
these were novelties. Stock was as a rule not only unimproved, but ill
cared for. The swine ran loose; the cattle were left to feed on what
pasture they could find, and even in New England were not housed until
the severest frosts, on the excuse that exposure hardened them. Near
half a century afterward a competent judge asserted that the general
treatment of cows in New England was fair matter of presentment by
a grand jury. Except among the best farmers, drainage, manures, and
rotation of crops were uncommon. The ordinary cultivator planted his
corn as his father had planted it, sowing as much rye to the acre,
using the same number of oxen to plough, and getting in his crops on
the same day. He was even known to remove his barn on account of the
manure accumulated round it, although the New England soil was never so
rich as to warrant neglect to enrich it. The money for which he sold
his wheat and chickens was of the Old World; he reckoned in shillings
or pistareens, and rarely handled an American coin more valuable than a
large copper cent.
At a time when the wealth and science of London and Paris could
not supply an article so necessary as a common sulphur-match, the
backwardness of remote country districts could hardly be exaggerated.
Yet remote districts were not the only sufferers. Of the whole United
States New England claimed to be the most civilized province, yet
New England was a region in which life had yet gained few charms of
sense and few advantages over its rivals. Wilson, the ornithologist, a
Pennsylvania Scotchman, a confirmed grumbler, but a shrewd judge, and
the most thorough of American travellers, said in 1808: “My journey
through almost the whole of New England has rather lowered the Yankees
in my esteem. Except a few neat academies, I found their schoolhouses
equally ruinous and deserted with ours; fields covered with stones;
stone fences; scrubby oaks and pine-trees; wretched orchards; scarcely
one grain-field in twenty miles; the taverns along the road dirty,
and filled with loungers brawling about lawsuits and politics; the
people snappish and extortioners, lazy, and two hundred years behind
the Pennsylvanians in agricultural improvements.” The description
was exaggerated, for Wilson forgot to speak of the districts where
fields were not covered with stones, and where wheat could be grown to
advantage. Twenty years earlier, Albert Gallatin, who knew Pennsylvania
well, having reached Hartford on his way to Boston, wrote: “I have
seen nothing in America equal to the establishments on the Connecticut
River.” Yet Wilson’s account described the first general effect of
districts in the New England States, where agriculture was backward
and the country poor. The houses were thin wooden buildings, not
well suited to the climate; the churches were unwarmed; the clothing
was poor; sanitary laws were few, and a bathroom or a soil-pipe was
unknown. Consumption, typhoid, scarlet fever, diphtheria, and rheumatic
fevers were common; habits of drinking were still a scourge in every
family, and dyspepsia destroyed more victims than were consumed by
drink. Population increased slowly, as though the conditions of life
were more than usually hard. A century earlier, Massachusetts was
supposed to contain sixty thousand inhabitants. Governor Hutchinson
complained that while the other colonies quadrupled their numbers,
Massachusetts failed to double its population in fifty years. In 1790
the State contained 378,000 people, not including the province of
Maine; in 1800 the number rose to 423,000, which showed that a period
of more rapid growth had begun, for the emigration into other States
was also large.
A better measure of the difficulties with which New England struggled
was given by the progress of Boston, which was supposed to have
contained about eighteen thousand inhabitants as early as 1730, and
twenty thousand in 1770. For several years after the Revolution it
numbered less than twenty thousand, but in 1800 the census showed
twenty-five thousand inhabitants. In appearance, Boston resembled an
English market-town, of a kind even then old-fashioned. The footways or
sidewalks were paved, like the crooked and narrow streets, with round
cobblestones, and were divided from the carriage way only by posts and
a gutter. The streets were almost unlighted at night, a few oil-lamps
rendering the darkness more visible and the rough pavement rougher.
Police hardly existed. The system of taxation was defective. The town
was managed by selectmen, the elected instruments of town-meetings
whose jealousy of granting power was even greater than their objection
to spending money, and whose hostility to city government was not to be
overcome.
Although on all sides increase of ease and comfort was evident, and
roads, canals, and new buildings, public and private, were already in
course of construction on a scale before unknown, yet in spite of more
than a century and a half of incessant industry, intelligent labor,
and pinching economy Boston and New England were still poor. A few
merchants enjoyed incomes derived from foreign trade, which allowed
them to imitate in a quiet way the style of the English mercantile
class; but the clergy and the lawyers, who stood at the head of
society, lived with much economy. Many a country clergyman, eminent for
piety and even for hospitality, brought up a family and laid aside some
savings on a salary of five hundred dollars a year. President Dwight,
who knew well the class to which he belonged, eulogizing the life of
Abijah Weld, pastor of Attleborough, declared that on a salary of two
hundred and twenty dollars a year Mr. Weld brought up eleven children,
besides keeping a hospitable house and maintaining charity to the poor.
On the Exchange a few merchants had done most of the business of Boston
since the peace of 1783, but a mail thrice a week to New York, and an
occasional arrival from Europe or the departure of a ship to China,
left ample leisure for correspondence and even for gossip. The habits
of the commercial class had not been greatly affected by recent
prosperity. Within ten or fifteen years before 1800 three Banks had
been created to supply the commercial needs of Boston. One of these
was a branch Bank of the United States, which employed there whatever
part of its capital it could profitably use; the two others were local
Banks, with capital of $1,600,000, toward which the State subscribed
$400,000. Altogether the banking capital of Boston might amount to two
millions and a half. A number of small Banks, representing in all about
two and a half millions more, were scattered through the smaller New
England towns. The extraordinary prosperity caused by the French wars
opened to Boston a new career. Wealth and population were doubling; the
exports and imports of New England were surprisingly large, and the
shipping was greater than that of New York and Pennsylvania combined;
but Boston had already learned, and was to learn again, how fleeting
were the riches that depended on foreign commerce, and conservative
habits were not easily changed by a few years of accidental gain.
Of manufactures New England had many, but none on a large scale. The
people could feed or clothe themselves only by household industry;
their whale-oil, salt fish, lumber, and rum were mostly sent abroad;
but they freighted coasters with turners’ articles, home-made linens
and cloths, cheese, butter, shoes, nails, and what were called Yankee
Notions of all sorts, which were sent to Norfolk and the Southern
ports, and often peddled from the deck, as goods of every sort were
peddled on the flat-boats of the Ohio. Two or three small mills
spun cotton with doubtful success; but England supplied ordinary
manufactures more cheaply and better than Massachusetts could hope
to do. A tri-weekly mail and a few coasting sloops provided for the
business of New England with domestic ports. One packet sloop plied
regularly to New York.
The State of New York was little in advance of Massachusetts and Maine.
In 1800 for the first time New York gained the lead in population by
the difference between 589,000 and 573,000. The valuation of New York
for the direct tax in 1799 was $100,000,000; that of Massachusetts was
$84,000,000. New York was still a frontier State, and although the city
was European in its age and habits, travellers needed to go few miles
from the Hudson in order to find a wilderness like that of Ohio and
Tennessee. In most material respects the State was behind New England;
outside the city was to be seen less wealth and less appearance of
comfort. The first impression commonly received of any new country was
from its inns, and on the whole few better tests of material condition
then existed. President Dwight, though maintaining that the best
old-fashioned inns of New England were in their way perfect, being in
fact excellent private houses, could not wholly approve what he called
the modern inns, even in Connecticut; but when he passed into New
York he asserted that everything suffered an instant change for the
worse. He explained that in Massachusetts the authorities were strict
in refusing licenses to any but respectable and responsible persons,
whereas in New York licenses were granted to any one who would pay for
them,--which caused a multiplication of dram-shops, bad accommodations,
and a gathering of loafers and tipplers about every tavern porch,
whose rude appearance, clownish manners, drunkenness, swearing, and
obscenity confirmed the chief of Federalist clergymen in his belief
that democracy had an evil influence on morals.
Far more movement was to be seen, and accumulation was more rapid than
in colonial days; but little had yet been done for improvement, either
by Government or by individuals, beyond some provision for extending
roads and clearing watercourses behind the advancing settlers. If
Washington Irving was right, Rip Van Winkle, who woke from his long
slumber about the year 1800, saw little that was new to him, except the
head of President Washington where that of King George had once hung,
and strange faces instead of familiar ones. Except in numbers, the city
was relatively no farther advanced than the country. Between 1790 and
1800 its population rose from 33,000 to 60,000; and if Boston resembled
an old-fashioned English market-town, New York was like a foreign
seaport, badly paved, undrained, and as foul as a town surrounded by
the tides could be. Although the Manhattan Company was laying wooden
pipes for a water supply, no sanitary regulations were enforced, and
every few years--as in 1798 and 1803--yellow fever swept away crowds of
victims, and drove the rest of the population, panic stricken, into the
highlands. No day-police existed; constables were still officers of the
courts; the night-police consisted of two captains, two deputies, and
seventy-two men. The estimate for the city’s expenses in 1800 amounted
to $130,000. One marked advantage New York enjoyed over Boston, in
the possession of a city government able to introduce reforms. Thus,
although still mediæval in regard to drainage and cleanliness, the town
had taken advantage of recurring fires to rebuild some of the streets
with brick sidewalks and curbstones. Travellers dwelt much on this
improvement, which only New York and Philadelphia had yet adopted,
and Europeans agreed that both had the air of true cities: that while
Boston was the Bristol of America, New York was the Liverpool, and
Philadelphia the London.
In respect to trade and capital, New York possessed growing advantages,
supplying half New Jersey and Connecticut, a part of Massachusetts,
and all the rapidly increasing settlements on the branches of the
Hudson; but no great amount of wealth, no considerable industry or new
creation of power was yet to be seen. Two Banks, besides the branch
Bank of the United States, supplied the business wants of the city, and
employed about the same amount of capital in loans and discounts as
was required for Boston. Besides these city institutions but two other
Banks existed in the State,--at Hudson and at Albany.
The proportion of capital in private hands seemed to be no larger.
The value of exports from New York in 1800 was but $14,000,000; the
net revenue on imports for 1799 was $2,373,000, against $1,607,000
collected in Massachusetts. Such a foreign trade required little
capital, yet these values represented a great proportion of all the
exchanges. Domestic manufactures could not compete with foreign, and
employed little bank credit. Speculation was slow, mostly confined to
lands which required patience to exchange or sell. The most important
undertakings were turnpikes, bridges such as Boston built across the
Charles, or new blocks of houses; and a canal, such as Boston designed
to the Merrimac, overstrained the resources of capital. The entire
banking means of the United States in 1800 would not have answered the
stock-jobbing purposes of one great operator of Wall Street in 1875.
The nominal capital of all the Banks, including the Bank of the United
States, fell short of $29,000,000. The limit of credit was quickly
reached, for only the richest could borrow more than fifteen or twenty
thousand dollars at a time, and the United States Government itself
was gravely embarrassed whenever obliged to raise money. In 1798 the
Secretary of the Treasury could obtain five million dollars only by
paying eight per cent interest for a term of years; and in 1814 the
Government was forced to stop payments for the want of twenty millions.
The precise value of American trade was uncertain, but in 1800 the
gross exports and imports of the United States may have balanced at
about seventy-five million dollars. The actual consumption of foreign
merchandise amounted perhaps to the value of forty or fifty million
dollars, paid in wheat, cotton, and other staples, and by the profits
on the shipping employed in carrying West India produce to Europe. The
amount of American capital involved in a trade of fifty millions, with
credits of three, six, and nine months, must have been small, and the
rates of profit large.
As a rule American capital was absorbed in shipping or agriculture,
whence it could not be suddenly withdrawn. No stock-exchange existed,
and no broker exclusively engaged in stock-jobbing, for there were few
stocks. The national debt, of about eighty millions, was held abroad,
or as a permanent investment at home. States and municipalities had
not learned to borrow. Except for a few banks and insurance offices,
turnpikes, bridges, canals, and land-companies, neither bonds nor
stocks were known. The city of New York was so small as to make
extravagance difficult; the Battery was a fashionable walk, Broadway a
country drive, and Wall Street an uptown residence. Great accumulations
of wealth had hardly begun. The Patroon was still the richest man in
the State. John Jacob Astor was a fur-merchant living where the Astor
House afterward stood, and had not yet begun those purchases of real
estate which secured his fortune. Cornelius Vanderbilt was a boy six
years old, playing about his father’s ferry-boat at Staten Island. New
York city itself was what it had been for a hundred years past,--a
local market.
As a national capital New York made no claim to consideration. If
Bostonians for a moment forgot their town-meetings, or if Virginians
overcame their dislike for cities and pavements, they visited and
admired, not New York, but Philadelphia. “Philadelphia,” wrote the
Duc de Liancourt, “is not only the finest city in the United States,
but may be deemed one of the most beautiful cities in the world.” In
truth, it surpassed any of its size on either side of the Atlantic
for most of the comforts and some of the elegancies of life. While
Boston contained twenty-five thousand inhabitants and New York sixty
thousand, the census of 1800 showed that Philadelphia was about the
size of Liverpool,--a city of seventy thousand people. The repeated
ravages of yellow fever roused there a regard for sanitary precautions
and cleanliness; the city, well paved and partly drained, was
supplied with water in wooden pipes, and was the best-lighted town in
America; its market was a model, and its jail was intended also for
a model,--although the first experiment proved unsuccessful, because
the prisoners went mad or idiotic in solitary confinement. In and
about the city flourished industries considerable for the time. The
iron-works were already important; paper and gunpowder, pleasure
carriages and many other manufactures, were produced on a larger scale
than elsewhere in the Union. Philadelphia held the seat of government
until July, 1800, and continued to hold the Bank of the United States,
with its capital of ten millions, besides private banking capital to
the amount of five millions more. Public spirit was more active in
Pennsylvania than in New York. More roads and canals were building; a
new turnpike ran from Philadelphia to Lancaster, and the great highway
to Pittsburg was a more important artery of national life than was
controlled by any other State. The exports of Pennsylvania amounted
to $12,000,000, and the custom-house produced $1,350,000. The State
contained six hundred thousand inhabitants,--a population somewhat
larger than that of New York.
Of all parts of the Union, Pennsylvania seemed to have made most use of
her national advantages; but her progress was not more rapid than the
natural increase of population and wealth demanded, while to deal with
the needs of America, man’s resources and his power over Nature must
be increased in a ratio far more rapid than that which governed his
numbers. Nevertheless, Pennsylvania was the most encouraging spectacle
in the field of vision. Baltimore, which had suddenly sprung to a
population and commerce greater than those of Boston, also offered
strong hope of future improvement; but farther South the people showed
fewer signs of change.
The city of Washington, rising in a solitude on the banks of the
Potomac, was a symbol of American nationality in the Southern States.
The contrast between the immensity of the task and the paucity of
means seemed to challenge suspicion that the nation itself was a
magnificent scheme like the federal city, which could show only a few
log-cabins and negro quarters where the plan provided for the traffic
of London and the elegance of Versailles. When in the summer of 1800
the government was transferred to what was regarded by most persons
as a fever-stricken morass, the half-finished White House stood in
a naked field overlooking the Potomac, with two awkward Department
buildings near it, a single row of brick houses and a few isolated
dwellings within sight, and nothing more; until across a swamp, a mile
and a half away, the shapeless, unfinished Capitol was seen, two wings
without a body, ambitious enough in design to make more grotesque the
nature of its surroundings. The conception proved that the United
States understood the vastness of their task, and were willing to stake
something on their faith in it. Never did hermit or saint condemn
himself to solitude more consciously than Congress and the Executive
in removing the government from Philadelphia to Washington: the
discontented men clustered together in eight or ten boarding-houses as
near as possible to the Capitol, and there lived, like a convent of
monks, with no other amusement or occupation than that of going from
their lodgings to the Chambers and back again. Even private wealth
could do little to improve their situation, for there was nothing
which wealth could buy; there were in Washington no shops or markets,
skilled labor, commerce, or people. Public efforts and lavish use of
public money could alone make the place tolerable; but Congress doled
out funds for this national and personal object with so sparing a hand,
that their Capitol threatened to crumble in pieces and crush Senate and
House under the ruins, long before the building was complete.
A government capable of sketching a magnificent plan, and willing to
give only a half-hearted pledge for its fulfilment; a people eager to
advertise a vast undertaking beyond their present powers, which when
completed would become an object of jealousy and fear,--this was the
impression made upon the traveller who visited Washington in 1800,
and mused among the unraised columns of the Capitol upon the destiny
of the United States. As he travelled farther south his doubts were
strengthened, for across the Potomac he could detect no sign of a
new spirit. Manufactures had no existence. Alexandria owned a bank
with half a million of capital, but no other was to be found between
Washington and Charleston, except the branch Bank of the United States
at Norfolk, nor any industry to which loans and discounts could safely
be made. Virginia, the most populous and powerful of all the States,
had a white population of 514,000, nearly equal to that of Pennsylvania
and New York, besides about 350,000 slaves. Her energies had pierced
the mountains and settled the western territory before the slow-moving
Northern people had torn themselves from the safer and more comfortable
life by the seaboard; but the Virginia ideal was patriarchal, and an
American continent on the Virginia type might reproduce the virtues
of Cato, and perhaps the eloquence of Cicero, but was little likely
to produce anything more practical in the way of modern progress. The
Shenandoah Valley rivalled Pennsylvania and Connecticut in richness
and skill of husbandry; but even agriculture, the favorite industry in
Virginia, had suffered from the competition of Kentucky and Tennessee,
and from the emigration which had drawn away fully one hundred thousand
people. The land was no longer very productive. Even Jefferson, the
most active-minded and sanguine of all Virginians,--the inventor of the
first scientific plough, the importer of the first threshing-machine
known in Virginia, the experimenter with a new drilling-machine,
the owner of one hundred and fifty slaves and ten thousand acres
of land, whose negroes were trained to carpentry, cabinet-making,
house-building, weaving, tailoring, shoe-making,--claimed to get
from his land no more than six or eight bushels of wheat to an acre,
and had been forced to abandon the more profitable cultivation of
tobacco. Except in a few favored districts like the Shenandoah
Valley, land in Virginia did not average eight bushels of wheat to an
acre. The cultivation of tobacco had been almost the sole object of
land-owners, and even where the lands were not exhausted, a bad system
of agriculture and the force of habit prevented improvement.
The great planters lavished money in vain on experiments to improve
their crops and their stock. They devoted themselves to the task with
energy and knowledge; but they needed a diversity of interests and
local markets, and except at Baltimore these were far from making their
appearance. Neither the products, the markets, the relative amount
of capital, nor the machinery of production had perceptibly changed.
“The Virginians are not generally rich,” said the Duc de Liancourt,
“especially in net revenue. Thus one often finds a well-served table,
covered with silver, in a room where for ten years half the window
panes have been missing, and where they will be missed for ten years
more. There are few houses in a passable state of repair, and of all
parts of the establishment those best cared for are the stables.”
Wealth reckoned in slaves or land was plenty; but the best Virginians,
from President Washington downward, were most outspoken in their
warnings against the Virginia system both of slavery and agriculture.
The contrast between Virginia and Pennsylvania was the subject of
incessant comment.
“In Pennsylvania,” said Robert Sutcliffe, an English Friend who
published travels made in 1804-1806, “we meet great numbers of wagons
drawn by four or more fine fat horses, the carriages firm and well
made, and covered with stout good linen, bleached almost white; and it
is not uncommon to see ten or fifteen together travelling cheerfully
along the road, the driver riding on one of his horses. Many of these
come more than three hundred miles to Philadelphia from the Ohio,
Pittsburg, and other places, and I have been told by a respectable
Friend, a native of Philadelphia, that more than one thousand covered
carriages frequently come to Philadelphia market.... The appearance of
things in the Slave States is quite the reverse of this. We sometimes
meet a ragged black boy or girl driving a team consisting of a lean
cow and a mule; sometimes a lean bull or an ox and a mule; and I have
seen a mule, a bull, and a cow each miserable in its appearance,
composing one team, with a half-naked black slave or two riding or
driving as occasion suited. The carriage or wagon, if it may be called
such, appeared in as wretched a condition as the team and its driver.
Sometimes a couple of horses, mules, or cows would be dragging a
hogshead of tobacco, with a pivot or axle driven into each end of the
hogshead, and something like a shaft attached, by which it was drawn
or rolled along the road. I have seen two oxen and two slaves pretty
fully employed in getting along a single hogshead; and some of these
come from a great distance inland.”
In the middle of these primitive sights, Sutcliffe was startled by
a contrast such as Virginia could always show. Between Richmond and
Fredericksburg,--
“In the afternoon, as our road lay through the woods, I was surprised
to meet a family party travelling along in as elegant a coach as
is usually met with in the neighborhood of London, and attended by
several gayly dressed footmen.”
The country south of Virginia seemed unpromising even to Virginians.
In the year 1796 President Washington gave to Sir John Sinclair his
opinion upon the relative value of American lands. He then thought the
valley of Virginia the garden of America; but he would say nothing to
induce others to settle in more southern regions.
“The uplands of North and South Carolina and Georgia are not
dissimilar in soil,” he wrote, “but as they approach the lower
latitudes are less congenial to wheat, and are supposed to be
proportionably more unhealthy. Towards the seaboard of all the
Southern States, and farther south more so, the lands are low, sandy,
and unhealthy; for which reason I shall say little concerning them,
for as I should not choose to be an inhabitant of them myself, I ought
not to say anything that would induce others to be so.... I understand
that from thirty to forty dollars per acre may be denominated the
medium price in the vicinity of the Susquehanna in the State of
Pennsylvania, from twenty to thirty on the Potomac in what is called
the Valley, ... and less, as I have noticed before, as you proceed
southerly.”
Whatever was the cause, the State of North Carolina seemed to offer few
temptations to immigrants or capital. Even in white population ranking
fifth among the sixteen States, her 478,000 inhabitants were unknown
to the world. The beautiful upper country attracted travellers neither
for pleasure nor for gain, while the country along the sea-coast was
avoided except by hardy wanderers. The grumbling Wilson, who knew
every nook and corner of the United States, and who found New England
so dreary, painted this part of North Carolina in colors compared
with which his sketch of New England was gay. “The taverns are the
most desolate and beggarly imaginable; bare, bleak, and dirty walls,
one or two old broken chairs and a bench form all the furniture. The
white females seldom make their appearance. At supper you sit down to
a meal the very sight of which is sufficient to deaden the most eager
appetite, and you are surrounded by half-a-dozen dirty, half-naked
blacks, male and female, whom any man of common scent might smell a
quarter of a mile off. The house itself is raised upon props four or
five feet, and the space below is left open for the hogs, with whose
charming vocal performance the wearied traveller is serenaded the whole
night long.” The landscape pleased him no better,--“immense solitary
pine savannahs through which the road winds among stagnant ponds; dark,
sluggish creeks of the color of brandy, over which are thrown high
wooden bridges without railings,” crazy and rotten.
North Carolina was relatively among the poorest States. The exports and
imports were of trifling value, less than one tenth of those returned
for Massachusetts, which were more than twice as great as those of
North Carolina and Virginia together. That under these conditions
America should receive any strong impulse from such a quarter seemed
unlikely; yet perhaps for the moment more was to be expected from the
Carolinas than from Virginia. Backward as these States in some respects
were, they possessed one new element of wealth which promised more for
them than anything Virginia could hope. The steam-engines of Watt had
been applied in England to spinning, weaving, and printing cotton;
an immense demand had risen for that staple, and the cotton-gin had
been simultaneously invented. A sudden impetus was given to industry;
land which had been worthless and estates which had become bankrupt
acquired new value, and in 1800 every planter was growing cotton,
buying negroes, and breaking fresh soil. North Carolina felt the strong
flood of prosperity, but South Carolina, and particularly the town
of Charleston, had most to hope. The exports of South Carolina were
nearly equal in value to those of Massachusetts or Pennsylvania; the
imports were equally large. Charleston might reasonably expect to rival
Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. In 1800 these cities
still stood, as far as concerned their foreign trade, within some range
of comparison; and between Boston, Baltimore, and Charleston, many
plausible reasons could be given for thinking that the last might have
the most brilliant future. The three towns stood abreast. If Charleston
had but about eighteen thousand inhabitants, this was the number
reported by Boston only ten years before, and was five thousand more
than Baltimore then boasted. Neither Boston nor Baltimore saw about
them a vaster region to supply, or so profitable a staple to export. A
cotton crop of two hundred thousand pounds sent abroad in 1791 grew to
twenty millions in 1801, and was to double again by 1803. An export of
fifty thousand bales was enormous, yet was only the beginning. What use
might not Charleston, the only considerable town in the entire South,
make of this golden flood?
The town promised hopefully to prove equal to its task. Nowhere in the
Union was intelligence, wealth, and education greater in proportion
to numbers than in the little society of cotton and rice planters
who ruled South Carolina; and they were in 1800 not behind--they
hoped soon to outstrip--their rivals. If Boston was building a canal
to the Merrimac, and Philadelphia one along the Schuylkill to the
Susquehanna, Charleston had nearly completed another which brought the
Santee River to its harbor, and was planning a road to Tennessee which
should draw the whole interior within reach. Nashville was nearer to
Charleston than to any other seaport of the Union, and Charleston lay
nearest to the rich trade of the West Indies. Not even New York seemed
more clearly marked for prosperity than this solitary Southern city,
which already possessed banking capital in abundance, intelligence,
enterprise, the traditions of high culture and aristocratic ambition,
all supported by slave-labor, which could be indefinitely increased by
the African slave-trade.
If any portion of the United States might hope for a sudden and
magnificent bloom, South Carolina seemed entitled to expect it. Rarely
had such a situation, combined with such resources, failed to produce
some wonderful result. Yet as Washington warned Sinclair, these
advantages were counterbalanced by serious evils. The climate in summer
was too relaxing. The sun was too hot. The sea-coast was unhealthy, and
at certain seasons even deadly to the whites. Finally, if history was
a guide, no permanent success could be prophesied for a society like
that of the low country in South Carolina, where some thirty thousand
whites were surrounded by a dense mass of nearly one hundred thousand
negro slaves. Even Georgia, then only partially settled, contained
sixty thousand slaves and but one hundred thousand whites. The cotton
States might still argue that if slavery, malaria, or summer heat
barred civilization, all the civilization that was ever known must have
been blighted in its infancy; but although the future of South Carolina
might be brilliant, like that of other oligarchies in which only a few
thousand freemen took part, such a development seemed to diverge far
from the path likely to be followed by Northern society, and bade fair
to increase and complicate the social and economical difficulties with
which Americans had to deal.
A probable valuation of the whole United States in 1800 was eighteen
hundred million dollars, equal to $328 for each human being, including
slaves; or $418 to each free white. This property was distributed with
an approach to equality, except in a few of the Southern States. In New
York and Philadelphia a private fortune of one hundred thousand dollars
was considered handsome, and three hundred thousand was great wealth.
Inequalities were frequent; but they were chiefly those of a landed
aristocracy. Equality was so far the rule that every white family of
five persons might be supposed to own land, stock, or utensils, a
house and furniture, worth about two thousand dollars; and as the only
considerable industry was agriculture, their scale of life was easy to
calculate,--taxes amounting to little or nothing, and wages averaging
about a dollar a day.
Not only were these slender resources, but they were also of a kind
not easily converted to the ready uses required for rapid development.
Among the numerous difficulties with which the Union was to struggle,
and which were to form the interest of American history, the
disproportion between the physical obstacles and the material means for
overcoming them was one of the most striking.