THE MIDDLE REGION (1820-1830)
The middle states formed a zone of transition between the east and
the west, the north and the south [Footnote: For earlier discussions
of the middle colonies and states, see Tyler, ENGLAND IN AMERICA,
chap, xvii.; Andrews, COLONIAL SELF-GOVERNMENT, chaps, v., vii.,
xviii., xix.; Greene, PROVINCIAL AMERICA, chaps. xvi.-xviii. (AM.
NATION, IV., V., VI.)]. Geographically, they lay on the line of the
natural routes between the Atlantic on the one side, and the Ohio
and the Great Lakes on the other. [Footnote: Gallatin, WRITINGS,
III., 49; Clinton, in LAWS OF THE STATE OF N.Y. IN RELATION TO ERIE
AND CHAMPLAIN CANALS, I., 140.] The waters of the Susquehanna,
rising near the lake region of central New York, flowed to
Chesapeake Bay, which opened into the Atlantic far down Virginia's
coast-line. The Great Valley ran through eastern Pennsylvania,
across Maryland, and, in the form of the Shenandoah Valley, made a
natural highway to the interior of North Carolina. New York City and
Philadelphia saw in an intimate connection with the rising west the
pledge of their prosperity; and Baltimore, which was both a
metropolis of the south and of the middle region, extended her trade
north to central New York, west to the Ohio, and south into
Virginia, and, like her rivals, sent her fleets to garner the
commercial harvest of the sea. In the composition of its population,
also, the middle region was a land of transitions between sections,
and a prototype of the modern United States, composite in its
nationality. In New York an influential Dutch element still
remained; the New England settlers had colonized the western half of
the state and about equaled the native population. In Pennsylvania,
Germans and Scotch-Irishmen had settled in such numbers in the
course of the eighteenth century that, by the time of the
Revolution, her population was almost evenly divided between these
stocks and the English. [Footnote: See Lincoln, Revolutionary
Movement in Pa., in University of Pa., Publications, I., 24, 35.]
There was also a larger proportion of recent immigrants than in any
other state, for by 1830 Pennsylvania had one unnaturalized alien to
every fifty inhabitants.
Following the Great Valley in the middle of the same century, the
Scotch-Irish and German settlers had poured into the up-country of
the south, so that these interior counties of Virginia and the
Carolinas were like a peninsula thrust down from Pennsylvania into
the south, with economic, racial, social, and religious connections
which made an intimate bond between the two sections. A multitude of
religious sects flourished in tolerant Pennsylvania, and even the
system of local government was a combination of the New England town
and the southern county.
This region, therefore, was essentially a mediating, transitional
zone, including in its midst an outlying New England and a west, and
lacking the essential traits of a separate section. It was
fundamentally national in its physiography, its composition, and its
ideals--a fighting-ground for political issues which found their
leaders in the other sections.
Compared with New England, the middle region was a rapidly growing
section. The population of New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and
Delaware combined was about two and three-quarter millions in 1820,
and three and two-third millions in 1830. By that date New York
alone balanced all New England in the number of its people. But it
was its western half that permitted this growth of the middle
section. During the decade 1820-1830, New York west of Oneida Lake
increased in population by a percentage more than twice as great,
and by an amount almost as great, as that of the populous eastern
half of the state. By the end of the decade, about one-third of
Pennsylvania's population was found west of her central counties. At
that time New York and Pennsylvania became the most populous states
in the Union. Virginia and Massachusetts, which in 1790 held the
lead, had now fallen to third and eighth place respectively. New
Jersey, meanwhile, lagged far behind, and Delaware's rate of
increase was only five and one-half per cent. In 1829 a member of
the Virginia constitutional convention asked: "Do gentlemen really
believe, that it is owing to any diversity in the principles of the
State Governments of the two states, that New York has advanced to
be the first state in the Union, and that Virginia, from being the
first, is now the third, in wealth and population? Virginia ceded
away her Kentucky, to form a new state; and New York has retained
her Genessee--there lies the whole secret." [Footnote: Va.
Constitutional Convention, Debates (1829-1830), 405.]
In the closing years of the eighteenth century and the first decade
of the nineteenth the New York lands beyond the sources of the
Mohawk had been taken up by a colonization characteristically
western. New England farmers swarmed into the region, hard on the
heels of the retreating Indians. Scarcely more than a decade before
1820 western New York presented typically frontier conditions. The
settlers felled and burned the forest, built little towns, and
erected mills, and now, with a surplus of agricultural products,
they were suffering from the lack of a market and were demanding
transportation facilities. Some of their lumber and flour found its
way by the lakes and the St. Lawrence to Montreal, a portion went by
rafts down the Allegheny to the waters of the Ohio, and some
descended the upper tributaries of the Susquehanna and found an
outlet in Baltimore or Philadelphia; but these routes were
unreliable and expensive, and by one of them trade was diverted from
the United States to Canada. There was a growing demand for canals
that should give economic unity to New York and turn the tide of her
interior commerce along the Mohawk and Lake Champlain into the
waters of the Hudson and so to the harbor of New York City. The Erie
and the Champlain canals were the outcome of this demand.
It is the glory of De Witt Clinton that he saw the economic
revolution which the Erie Canal would work, and that he was able to
present clearly and effectively the reasons which made the
undertaking practicable and the financial plan which made it
possible. He persuaded the legislature by the vision of a greater
Hudson River, not only reaching to the western confines of the
state, but even, by its connection with Lake Erie, stretching
through two thousand miles of navigable lakes and rivers to the very
heart of the interior of the United States. To him the Erie Canal
was a political as well as an economic undertaking. "As a bond of
union between the Atlantic and western states," he declared, "it may
prevent the dismemberment of the American empire. As an organ of
communication between the Hudson, the Mississippi, the St. Lawrence,
the great lakes of the north and west, and their tributary rivers,
it will create the greatest inland trade ever witnessed. The most
fertile and extensive regions of America will avail themselves of
its facilities for a market. All their surplus productions, whether
of the soil, the forest, the mines, or the water, their fabrics of
art and their supplies of foreign commodities, will concentrate in
the city of New-York, for transportation abroad or consumption at
home. Agriculture, manufactures, commerce, trade, navigation, and
the arts, will receive a correspondent encouragement. That city
will, in the course of time become the granary of the world, the
emporium of commerce, the seat of manufactures, the focus of great
moneyed operations, and the concentrating point of vast, disposable,
and accumulating capitals, which will stimulate, enliven, extend,
and reward the exertions of human labor and ingenuity, in all their
processes and exhibitions. And before the revolution of a century,
the whole island of Manhattan, covered with habitations and
replenished with a dense population, will constitute one vast city."
[Footnote: View of the Grand Canal (N. Y., 1825), 20.]
Sanguine as were Clinton's expectations, the event more than
justified his confidence. By 1825 the great canal system, reaching
by way of Lake Champlain to the St. Lawrence, and by way of the
Mohawk and the lakes of central New York to Lake Erie, was opened
for traffic throughout its whole length. The decrease in
transportation charges brought prosperity and a tide of population
into western New York; villages sprang up along the whole line of
the canal; the water-power was utilized for manufactures; land
values in the western part of the state doubled and in many cases
quadrupled; farm produce more than doubled in value. Buffalo and
Rochester became cities. [Footnote: J. Winden, Influence of the Erie
Canal (MS. Thesis, University of Wisconsin); U. S. Census of 1900,
Population, I., 430, 432; Callender, in Quarterly Journal of
Economics, XVII., 22; Hulbert, Historic Highways, XIV., chap. v.]
The raw products of the disappearing forests of western New York--
lumber, staves, pot and pearl ashes, etc., and the growing surplus
of agricultural products, began to flow in increasing volume down
this greater Hudson River to New York City. The farther west was
also turning its streams of commerce into this channel. The tolls of
the canal system were over half a million dollars immediately upon
its completion; for 1830 they were over a million dollars.
[Footnote: McMaster, United States, V., 135; Canal Commissioners of
N. Y., Report (January 17, 1833), App. A.] By 1833 the annual value
of the products sent by way of the Erie and Champlain canals was
estimated at thirteen million dollars. [Footnote: Pitkin,
Statistical View (ed. of 1835), 577.] At the close of this decade
the Ohio system of canals, inspired by the success of the Erie
Canal, had rendered a large area of that state tributary to New
York. The Great Lake navigation grew steadily, the Western Reserve
increased its population, and the harbor of Cleveland became a
center of trade.
The effect of all this upon New York City was revolutionary. Its
population increased from 123,000 in 1820 to 202,000 in 1830. Its
real and personal estate rose in value from about seventy million
dollars in 1820 to about one hundred and twenty-five million dollars
in 1830. [Footnote: U. S. Census of 1900, Population, I., 432;
MacGregor, Commercial Statistics of America, 145.] The most
significant result of the canal was the development of the commerce
of New York City, which rose from a market town for the Hudson River
to be the metropolis of the north. The value of the imports of New
York state in 1821 was twenty-four million dollars; in 1825, the
year of the completion of the canal, it was fifty million dollars.
This was an exceptional year, however, and in 1830 the value of the
imports was thirty-six million dollars. In 1821 New York had thirty-
eight per cent. of the total value of imports into the United
States; in 1825, over fifty per cent.; and this proportion she
maintained during our period. In the exports of domestic origin, New
York was surpassed in 1819 by Louisiana, and in 1820 by South
Carolina, but thereafter the state took and held the lead.
[Footnote: Compiled from Pitkin, Statistical View.] In 1823 the
amount of flour sent from the western portion of New York by the
Erie Canal equaled the whole amount which reached New Orleans from
the Mississippi Valley in that year. [Footnote: Based on statistics
in Report on Internal Commerce, 1887, p. 196; Canal Commissioners of
N. Y., Annual Report (February 20, 1824), 33.] The state of New York
had by a stroke achieved economic unity, and its metropolis at once
became the leading city of the country.
Philadelphia lost power as New York City gained it. Though the
counties tributary to Philadelphia constituted the old center of
population and political power, the significant fact of growth in
Pennsylvania was the increasing importance of Pittsburgh at the
gateway to the Ohio Valley. In the Great Valley beyond the Blue
Ridge lived the descendants of those early Germans and Scotch-
Irishmen who early occupied the broad and level fields of this
fertile zone, the granary of Pennsylvania. Beyond this rock-walled
valley lay the mountains in the west and north of the state, their
little valleys occupied by farmers, but already giving promise of
the rich yield of iron and coal on which the future greatness of the
state was to rest. The anthracite mines of the northeastern corner
of the state, which have given to their later possessors such
influence over the industries of the country, were just coming into
use. The iron ores of the middle mountain counties found their way
to the forges at Pittsburgh. Already the bituminous coals of the
western counties were serving to generate steam-power for the mills
upon the upper waters of the Ohio, but, as yet, the iron
manufacturers of the state depended on the abundant forests for the
production of coke for smelting.
The problem of transportation pressed hard upon Pennsylvania from
the beginning. While Philadelphia was obliged to contest with
Baltimore the possession of the eastern half of the state, she saw
the productions of the western counties descending the Ohio and
Mississippi to New Orleans. Even the trade in manufactured goods
which she had formerly sent to the western rivers was now menaced
from two quarters: the development of steam navigation on the
Mississippi enabled New Orleans to compete for this trade; and the
construction of the Erie Canal, with the projected system of
tributary canals in Ohio, made it plain to Pennsylvania that New
York was about to wrest from her the markets of the west. It had
taken thirty days and cost five dollars a hundred pounds to
transport goods from Philadelphia to Columbus, Ohio; the same
articles could be brought in twenty days from New York, by the Erie
Canal, at a cost of two dollars and a half a hundred. [Footnote:
McMaster, United States, V., 136.] To Pennsylvania the control of
the western market, always an important interest, had led in 1800 to
the construction of a system of turnpikes to connect Philadelphia
with Pittsburgh over the mountains, which developed a great wagon
trade. But the days of this wagon trade were now numbered, for the
National Road, joining the Ohio and the Potomac and passing south of
Pittsburgh, diverted a large share of this overland trade to
Baltimore. The superior safety, rapidity, and cheapness of canal
communication showed Pennsylvania that she must adjust her
transportation to the new conditions.
The way was prepared by the experience of corporations attempting to
reach the coal-fields of northeastern Pennsylvania. In 1820
practically the whole output from the anthracite fields came from
the Lehigh Valley and amounted to three hundred and sixty-five tons-
-an equivalent of one for each day of the year. By the end of the
decade the output of the anthracite fields was about one hundred and
seventy-five thousand tons, and the retail price was reduced to six
dollars and a half a ton. Navigation had been secured by the coal
companies between the mines and Philadelphia by the Schuylkill; the
Union Canal connected the Schuylkill and Susquehanna, and New York
City was supplied by the Delaware Canal. [Footnote: McCulloch,
Commercial Dictionary (ed. of 1852), I., 366; U.S. Census of 1880,
IV.; Worthington, Finances of Pa.]
This activity in Pennsylvania in the improvement of navigation so
far had been the work of corporations; but now, with the growth of
population in the west and the completion of the Erie Canal, a
popular demand arose for state construction of inland waterways. In
1825 the legislature passed an act under which an extensive system
of canals was begun, to connect Philadelphia with Pittsburgh, the
Allegheny River with Lake Erie, and Philadelphia with the central
counties of New York at the head of the Susquehanna. [Footnote: See
chap. xvii., below.] Obstacles speedily developed in the jealousies
of the various sections of the state. The farmers of the Great
Valley, whose interests lay in the development of a communication
with Baltimore, were not enthusiastic; the southern counties of the
state, along the line of the turnpikes, found their interests
threatened; and the citizens of the northwestern counties were
unwilling to postpone their demands for an outlet while the trunk-
line was building. These jealousies furnish issues for the politics
of the state during the rest of the decade. [Footnote: McCarthy,
'Antimasonic Party,' in Am. Hist. Assoc., Report 1902, I., 427.]
Nevertheless, Pennsylvania was growing rich through the development
of her agriculture and her manufactures. The iron industry of the
state was the largest in the Union. Although the industry was only
in its infancy, Pittsburgh was already producing or receiving a
large part of the pig-iron that was produced in Pennsylvania. The
figures of the census of 1820 give to the middle states over forty
per cent, of the product of pig-iron and castings and wrought iron
in the United States, the value of the latter article for
Pennsylvania being one million one hundred and fifty-six thousand
dollars as against four hundred and seventy-two thousand dollars for
New York. [Footnote: Secretary of Treasury, 'Report,' 1854-1855, p.
90.] The influence of this industry upon Pennsylvania politics
became apparent in the discussions over the protective tariff during
the decade.
Together, New York and Pennsylvania constituted a region dominated
by interest in the production of grain and the manufacture of iron.
Vast as was the commerce that entered the port of New York, the
capital and shipping for the port were furnished in part by New
England, and the real interest of the section was bound up with the
developing resources of the interior of the nation.
It must not be forgotten that, in these years of entrance upon its
industrial career, the middle region was also the scene of
intellectual movements of importance. These were the days when the
Knickerbocker school in New York brought independence and reputation
to American literature, when Irving, although abroad, worked the
rich mine of Hudson River traditions, and Cooper utilized his early
experience in the frontier around Lake Otsego to write his
"Leatherstocking Tales." Movements for social amelioration abounded.
The lighting of New York City and Philadelphia by gas diminished
crime. Reform movements with regard to imprisonment for debt and the
improvement of the condition of prisons, temperance movements,
improvements in the administration of the public schools, and the
increase in the number of high-schools were all indicative of the
fact that this new democracy was not unresponsive to ideals. Among
the New England element of western New York, as has already been
pointed out, there arose some of the most interesting religious and
political movements of the period, such as Mormonism, Spiritualism,
and Antimasonry. The Presbyterians and Baptists found a sympathetic
constituency in the new regions. It is easy to see that the traits
of these western counties of the middle states were such that
idealistic political movements, as antislavery, would find in them
effective support.
Obviously, the political traits of this section would have a
significance proportionate to the power of its population and
resources. On the whole, the middle region was the most democratic
section of the seaboard, but it was managed by the politicians under
a system of political bargaining for the spoils of office. The old
ascendancy which the great families exercised over New York politics
[Footnote: Becker, "Nominations in Colonial New York" (Am. Hist.
Rev., VI., 261).] was on the wane. The rise of the western half of
the state diminished the influence of the successors to the
patroons; but, nevertheless, family power continued to make itself
felt, and a group of new men arose, around whom factions formed and
dissolved in a kaleidoscope of political change.
During the colonial period, executive patronage and land grants had
been used to promote the interests of the men in power, and the
reaction against executive corruption resulted in a provision in New
York's constitution of 1777 whereby the executive was limited by the
Council of Appointment. The state was divided into four districts,
and one senator from each was selected by the House of
Representatives to serve in this council. [Footnote: Fish, Civil
Service, 87.] By 1821 the council appointed 8287 military officers
and 6663 civil officers. Nearly all the state officers, all the
mayors, militia officers, and justices of the peace fell under its
control.[Footnote: Hammond, Political Parties in N.Y., II., 65.]
This concentration of the appointive power in the hands of the
dominant faction brought the system of rotation in office, and the
doctrine that to the victors belong the spoils of war, to a climax.
It led to the building up of political machines by the use of
offices, from the lowest to the highest, as the currency for
political trading. The governor was checked, but the leaders of the
party in power held despotic control over the offices of the state.
This bargaining was facilitated by the extension of the system of
nominating conventions. From the local units of town and county
upwards, the custom of sending delegates to conventions had early
developed in the state. It had become a settled practice for the
representatives of one local unit to agree with those of another
regarding the order in which their favorite sons should receive
office. Town bargained with town, county with county, district with
district. In place of the system of control by the established
classes, New York's democracy was learning to elaborate the
machinery of nomination by the people; but in the process there was
developed a race of managing politicians, and the campaigns tended
to become struggles between personal elements for power rather than
contests on political issues.
The finished product of New York politics is shown in Van Buren, the
devotee of "regularity" in party and the adroit manager of its
machinery. Shrewdness, tact, and self-reliant judgment, urbane good-
humor, mingled with a suspicious and half-cynical expression, were
written on his face. "Little Van" was an affable, firm, and crafty
politician. Although he was not a creative statesman, neither was he
a mere schemer. He had definite ideas, if not convictions, of the
proper lines of policy, and was able to state them with incisive and
forcible argument when occasion demanded. To him, perhaps, more than
to any other of the politicians, fell the task of organizing the
campaign of Crawford, and afterwards of making the political
combinations that brought in the reign of Andrew Jackson. He was the
leader of that element of New York politics known as the Bucktails,
from the emblem worn by the Tammany Society. Clinton, his opponent,
exercised an influence somewhat akin to the Livingstons, the
Schuylers, the Van Rensselaers, and the other great family leaders
in the baronial days of New York politics. Brusque, arrogant, and
ambitious, he combined the petty enmities of a domineering
politician with flashes of statesman-like insight, and he crushed
his way to success by an exterminating warfare against his enemies.
Around him gathered a personal following embracing one wing of the
Republicans, aided by a large fraction of the old Federal party. For
the most part, his strength lay along the line of the Erie Canal and
in the regions where the New England element was strong.
About these New York rivals were grouped many lesser lights, for the
political organization tended to create a multitude of able
political leaders, many of them capable of holding high position,
but few of them swayed by compelling ideas or policies.
In Pennsylvania, where the spoils system and the nominating
convention developed contemporaneously with the movement in New
York, there were even fewer men of the highest political rank.
Gallatin's effective career belongs to an earlier period, and he had
no successor, as a national figure, among the Pennsylvania party
chieftains.