COLONIZATION OF THE WEST (1820-1830)
The rise of the new west was the most significant fact in American
history in the years immediately following the War of 1812. Ever
since the beginnings of colonization on the Atlantic coast a
frontier of settlement had advanced, cutting into the forest,
pushing back the Indian, and steadily widening the area of
civilization in its rear. [Footnote: Three articles by F.J. Turner,
viz.: "Significance of the Frontier in American History," in Am.
Hist. Assoc., Report 1893, 199-227; "Problem of the West," in
"Atlantic Monthly, LXXVIII, 289; "Contributions of the West to
American Democracy, ibid, XCI., 83.] There had been a west even in
early colonial days; but then it lay close to the coast. By the
middle of the eighteenth century the west was to be found beyond
tide-water, advancing towards the Allegheny Mountains. When this
barrier was crossed and the lands on the other side of the mountains
were won, in the days of the Revolution, a new and greater west,
more influential on the nation's destiny, was created. [Footnote:
Howard, Preliminaries of Revolution, chap. xiii.; Van Tyne, Am.
Revolution, chap. xv.; McLaughlin, Confederation and Constitution,
chap. viii. (Am. Nation, VIII., IX., X.).]
The men of the "Western Waters" or the "Western World," as they
loved to call themselves, developed under conditions of separation
from the older settlements and from Europe. The lands, practically
free, in this vast area not only attracted the settler, but
furnished opportunity for all men to hew out their own careers. The
wilderness ever opened a gate of escape to the poor, the
discontented, and the oppressed. If social conditions tended to
crystallize in the east, beyond the Alleghenies there was freedom.
Grappling with new problems, under these conditions, the society
that spread into this region developed inventiveness and
resourcefulness; the restraints of custom were broken, and new
activities, new lines of growth, new institutions were produced. Mr.
Bryce has well declared that "the West is the most American part of
America.... What Europe is to Asia, what England is to the rest of
Europe, what America is to England, that the Western States and
Territories are to the Atlantic States." [Footnote: Bryce, American
Commonwealth (ed. of 1895), II., 830.] The American spirit--the
traits that have come to be recognized as the most characteristic--
was developed in the new commonwealths that sprang into life beyond
the seaboard. In these new western lands Americans achieved a
boldness of conception of the country's destiny and democracy. The
ideal of the west was its emphasis upon the worth and possibilities
of the common man, its belief in the right of every man to rise to
the full measure of his own nature, under conditions of social
mobility. Western democracy was no theorist's dream. It came, stark
and strong and full of life, from the American forest. [Footnote: P.
J. Turner, "Contributions of the West to American Democracy," in
Atlantic Monthly, XCL, 83, and "The Middle West," in International
Monthly, IV., 794.]
The time had now come when this section was to make itself felt as a
dominant force in American life. Already it had shown its influence
upon the older sections. By its competition, by its attractions for
settlers, it reacted on the east and gave added impulse to the
democratic movement in New England and New York. The struggle of
Baltimore, New York City, and Philadelphia for the rising commerce
of the interior was a potent factor in the development of the middle
region. In the south the spread of the cotton-plant and the new form
which slavery took were phases of the westward movement of the
plantation. The discontent of the old south is partly explained by
the migration of her citizens to the west and by the competition of
her colonists in the lands beyond the Alleghenies. The future of the
south lay in its affiliation to the Cotton Kingdom of the lower
states which were rising on the plains of the Gulf of Mexico.
Rightly to understand the power which the new west was to exert upon
the economic and political life of the nation in the years between
1820 and 1830, it is necessary to consider somewhat fully the
statistics of growth in western population and industry.
The western states ranked with the middle region and the south in
respect to population. Between 1812 and 1821 six new western
commonwealths were added to the Union: Louisiana (1812), Indiana
(1816), Mississippi (1817), Illinois (1818), Alabama (1819), and
Missouri (1821). In the decade from 1820 to 1830, these states, with
their older sisters, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio, increased their
population from 2,217,000 to nearly 3,700,000, a gain of about a
million and a half in the decade. The percentages of increase in
these new communities tell a striking story. Even the older states
of the group grew steadily. Kentucky, with 22 per cent., Louisiana,
with 41, and Tennessee and Ohio, each with 61, were increasing much
faster than New England and the south, outside of Maine and Georgia.
But for the newer communities the percentages of gain are still more
significant: Mississippi, 81 per cent.; Alabama, 142; Indiana, 133;
and Illinois, 185. The population of Ohio, which hardly more than a
generation before was "fresh, untouched, unbounded, magnificent
wilderness," [Footnote: Webster, Writings (National ed.), V., 252.]
was now nearly a million, surpassing the combined population of
Massachusetts and Connecticut.
A new section had arisen and was growing at such a rate that a
description of it in any single year would be falsified before it
could be published. Nor is the whole strength of the western element
revealed by these figures. In order to estimate the weight of the
western population in 1830, we must add six hundred thousand souls
in the western half of New York, three hundred thousand in the
interior counties of Pennsylvania, and over two hundred thousand in
the trans-Allegheny counties of Virginia, making an aggregate of
four million six hundred thousand. Fully to reckon the forces of
backwoods democracy, moreover, we should include a large fraction of
the interior population of Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, North
Carolina, and Georgia, and northern New York. All of these regions
were to be influenced by the ideals of democratic rule which were
springing up in the Mississippi Valley.
In voting-power the western states alone--to say nothing of the
interior districts of the older states--were even more important
than the figures for population indicate. The west itself had, under
the apportionment of 1822, forty-seven out of the two hundred and
thirteen members of the House of Representatives, while in the
Senate its representation was eighteen out of forty-eight--more than
that of any other section. Clearly, here was a region to be reckoned
with; its economic interests, its ideals, and its political leaders
were certain to have a powerful, if not a controlling, voice in the
councils of the nation.
At the close of the War of 1812 the west had much homogeneity. Parts
of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio had been settled so many years that
they no longer presented typical western conditions; but in most of
its area the west then was occupied by pioneer farmers and stock-
raisers, eking out their larder and getting peltries by hunting, and
raising only a small surplus for market. By 1830, however,
industrial differentiation between the northern and southern
portions of the Mississippi Valley was clearly marked. The northwest
was changing to a land of farmers and town-builders, anxious for a
market for their grain and cattle; while the southwest was becoming
increasingly a cotton-raising section, swayed by the same impulses
in respect to staple exports as those which governed the southern
seaboard. Economically, the northern portion of the valley tended to
connect itself with the middle states, while the southern portion
came into increasingly intimate connection with the south.
Nevertheless, it would be a radical mistake not to deal with the
west as a separate region, for, with all these differences within
itself, it possessed a fundamental unity in its social structure and
its democratic ideals, and at times, in no uncertain way, it showed
a consciousness of its separate existence.
In occupying the Mississippi Valley the American people colonized a
region far surpassing in area the territory of the old thirteen
states. The movement was, indeed, but the continuation of the
advance of the frontier which had begun in the earliest days of
American colonization. The existence of a great body of land,
offered at so low a price as to be practically free, inevitably drew
population towards the west. When wild lands sold for two dollars an
acre, and, indeed, could be occupied by squatters almost without
molestation, it was certain that settlers would seek them instead of
paying twenty to fifty dollars an acre for farms that lay not much
farther to the east--particularly when the western lands were more
fertile. The introduction of the steamboat on the western waters in
1811, moreover, soon revolutionized transportation conditions in the
West. [Footnote: Flint, Letters, 260; Monette, in Miss. Hist. Soc.,
Publications, VII., 503; Hall, Statistics of the West, 236, 247;
Lloyd, Steamboat Disasters (1853), 32, 40-45; Preble, Steam
Navigation, 64; McMaster, United States, IV., 402; Chittenden, Early
Steamboat Navigation on the Missouri, chap. ix.] At the beginning of
the period of which we are treating, steamers were ascending the
Mississippi and the Missouri, as well as the Ohio and its
tributaries. Between the close of the War of 1812 and 1830,
moreover, the Indian title was extinguished to vast regions in the
west. Half of Michigan was opened to settlement; the northwestern
quarter of Ohio was freed; in Indiana and Illinois (more than half
of which had been Indian country prior to 1816) all but a
comparatively small region of undesired prairie lands south of Lake
Michigan was ceded; almost the whole state of Missouri was freed
from its Indian title; and, in the Gulf region, at the close of the
decade, the Indians held but two isolated islands of territory, one
in western Georgia and eastern Alabama, and the other in northern
and central Mississippi. These ceded regions were the fruit of the
victories of William Henry Harrison in the northwest, and of Andrew
Jackson in the Gulf region. They were, in effect, conquered
provinces, just opened to colonization.
The maps of the United States census, giving the distribution of
population in 1810, 1820, and 1830, [Footnote: See maps of
population; compare U. S. Census of 1900, Statistical Atlas, plates
4, 5, 6.] exhibit clearly the effects of the defeat of the Indians,
and show the areas that were occupied in these years. In 1810
settlement beyond the mountains was almost limited to a zone along
the Ohio River and its tributaries, the Cumberland and the
Tennessee. In the southwest, the vicinity of Mobile showed sparse
settlement, chiefly survivals of the Spanish and English occupation;
and, along the fluvial lands of the eastern bank of the lower
Mississippi, in the Natchez region, as well as in the old province
of Louisiana, there was a considerable area occupied by planters.
By 1820 the effects of the War of 1812 and the rising tide of
westward migration became manifest. Pioneers spread along the river-
courses of the northwest well up to the Indian boundary. The zone of
settlement along the Ohio ascended the Missouri, in the rush to the
Boone's Lick country, towards the center of the present state. From
the settlements of middle Tennessee a pioneer farming area reached
southward to connect with the settlements of Mobile, and the latter
became conterminous with those of the lower Mississippi.
By 1830 large portions of these Indian lands, which were ceded
between 1817 and 1829, received the same type of colonization. The
unoccupied lands in Indiana and Illinois were prairie country, then
deemed unsuited for settlement because of the lack of wood and
drinking-water. It was the hardwoods that had been taken up in the
northwest, and, for the most part, the tracts a little back from the
unhealthful bottom-lands, but in close proximity to the rivers,
which were the only means of transportation before the building of
good roads. A new island of settlement appeared in the northwestern
portion of Illinois and the adjacent regions of Wisconsin and Iowa,
due to the opening of the lead-mines. Along the Missouri Valley and
in the Gulf region the areas possessed in 1820 increased in density
of population. Georgia spread her settlers into the Indian lands,
which she had so recently secured by threatening a rupture with the
United States. [Footnote: MacDonald, Jacksonian Democracy (Am.
Nation, XV.), chap. x. ]
Translated into terms of human activity, these shaded areas,
encroaching on the blank spaces of the map, meant much for the
history of the United States. Even in the northwest, which we shall
first describe, they represent, in the main, the migration of
southern people. New England, after the distress following the War
of 1812 and the hard winter of 1816-1817, had sent many settlers
into western New York and Ohio; the Western Reserve had increased in
population by the immigration, of Connecticut people; Pennsylvania
and New Jersey had sent colonists to southern and central Ohio, with
Cincinnati as the commercial center. In Ohio the settlers of middle-
state origin were decidedly more numerous than those from the south,
and New England's share was distinctly smaller than that of the
south. In the Ohio legislature in 1822 there were thirty-eight
members of middle-state birth, thirty-three of southern (including
Kentucky), and twenty-five of New England. But Kentucky and
Tennessee (now sufficiently settled to need larger and cheaper farms
for the rising generation), together with the up-country of the
south, contributed the mass of the pioneer colonists to most of the
Mississippi Valley prior to 1830. [Footnote: See, for Ohio, Niles'
Register, XXI., 368 (leg. session of 1822), and Nat. Republican,
January 2, 1824; for Illinois in 1833, Western Monthly Magazine, I.,
199; for Missouri convention of 1820, Niles' Register, XVIII., 400;
for Alabama in 1820, ibid., XX., 64. Local histories, travels,
newspapers, and the census of 1850 support the text.] Of course, a
large fraction of these came from the Scotch-Irish and German stock
that in the first half of the eighteenth century passed from
Pennsylvania along the Great Valley to the up-country of the south.
Indiana, so late as 1850, showed but ten thousand natives of New
England, and twice as many persons of southern as of middle states
origin. In the history of Indiana, North Carolina contributed a
large fraction of the population, giving to it its "Hoosier" as well
as much of its Quaker stock. Illinois in this period had but a
sprinkling of New-Englanders, engaged in business in the little
towns. The southern stock, including settlers from Kentucky and
Tennessee, was the preponderant class. The Illinois legislature for
1833 contained fifty-eight from the south (including Kentucky and
Tennessee), nineteen from the middle states, and only four from New
England. Missouri's population was chiefly Kentuckians and
Tennesseeans.
The leaders of this southern element came, in considerable measure,
from well-to-do classes, who migrated to improve their conditions in
the freer opportunities of a new country. Land speculation, the
opportunity of political preferment, and the advantages which these
growing communities brought to practitioners of the law combined to
attract men of this class. Many of them, as we shall see, brought
their slaves with them, under the systems of indenture which made
this possible. Missouri, especially, was sought by planters with
their slaves. But it was the poorer whites, the more democratic,
non-slaveholding element of the south, which furnished the great
bulk of the settlers north of the Ohio. Prior to the close of the
decade the same farmer type was in possession of large parts of the
Gulf region, whither, through the whole of our period, the slave-
holding planters came in increasing numbers.
Two of the families which left Kentucky for the newer country in
these years will illustrate the movement. The Lincoln family
[Footnote: Tarbell, Lincoln, I., chaps, i.-iv.; Herndon, Lincoln,
I., chaps, i.-iv.; Nicolay and Hay, Lincoln, I., chaps, i.-iii.] had
reached that state by migration from the north with the stream of
backwoodsmen which bore along with it the Calhouns and the Boones.
Abraham Lincoln was born in a hilly, barren portion of Kentucky in
1809. In 1816, when Lincoln was a boy of seven, his father, a poor
carpenter, took his family across the Ohio on a raft, with a capital
consisting of his kit of tools and several hundred gallons of
whiskey. In Indiana he hewed a path into the forest to a new home in
the southern part of the state, where for a year the family lived in
a "half-faced camp," or open shed of poles, clearing their land. In
the hardships of the pioneer life Lincoln's mother died, as did many
another frontier woman. In 1830 Lincoln was a tall, strapping youth,
six feet four inches in height, able to sink his axe deeper than
other men into the opposing forest. At that time his father moved to
the Sangamon country of Illinois with the rush of land-seekers into
that new and popular region. Near the home of Lincoln in Kentucky
was born, in 1808, Jefferson Davis [Footnote: Mrs. Davis, Jefferson
Davis, I., 5.], whose father, shortly before the War of 1812, went
with the stream of southward movers to Louisiana and then to
Mississippi. Davis's brothers fought under Jackson in the War of
1812, and the family became typical planters of the Gulf region.
Meanwhile, the roads that led to the Ohio Valley were followed by an
increasing tide of settlers from the east. "Old America seems to be
breaking up, and moving westward," wrote Morris Birkbeck in 1817, as
he passed on the National Road through Pennsylvania. "We are seldom
out of sight, as we travel on this grand track, towards the Ohio, of
family groups, behind and before us. ... A small waggon (so light
that you might almost carry it, yet strong enough to bear a good
load of bedding, utensils and provisions, and a swarm of young
citizens,--and to sustain marvellous shocks in its passage over
these rocky heights) with two small horses; sometimes a cow or two,
comprises their all; excepting a little store of hard-earned cash
for the land office of the district; where they may obtain a title
for as many acres as they possess half-dollars, being one fourth of
the purchase-money. The waggon has a tilt, or cover, made of a
sheet, or perhaps a blanket. The family are seen before, behind, or
within the vehicle, according to the road or the weather, or perhaps
the spirits of the party. ... A cart and single horse frequently
affords the means of transfer, sometimes a horse and packsaddle.
Often the back of the poor pilgrim bears all his effects, and his
wife follows, naked-footed, bending under the hopes of the family."
[Footnote: Birkbeck, Notes on a Journey from Va. to Ill., 25, 26.]
The southerners who came by land along the many bad roads through
Tennessee and Kentucky usually traveled with heavy, long-bodied
wagons, drawn by four or six horses. [Footnote: Hist. of Grundy
County, Ill., 149.] These family groups, crowding roads and fords,
marching towards the sunset, with the canvas-covered wagon, ancestor
of the prairie-schooner of the later times, were typical of the
overland migration. The poorer classes traveled on foot, sometimes
carrying their entire effects in a cart drawn by themselves.
[Footnote: Niles' Register, XXI., 320.] Those of more means took
horses, cattle, and sheep, and sometimes sent their household goods
by wagon or by steamboat up the Mississippi. [Footnote: Howells,
Life in Ohio, 1813-1840, 86; Jones, Ill. and the West, 31; Hist, of
Grundy County, Ill., 149.] The routes of travel to the western
country were numerous. [Footnote: See map, page 226.] Prior to the
opening of the Erie Canal the New England element either passed
along the Mohawk and the Genesee turnpike to Lake Erie, or crossed
the Hudson and followed the line of the Catskill turnpike to the
headwaters of the Allegheny, or, by way of Boston, took ship to New
York, Philadelphia, or Baltimore, in order to follow a more
southerly route. In Pennsylvania the principal route was the old
road which, in a general way, followed the line that Forbes had cut
in the French and Indian War from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh by way
of Lancaster and Bedford. By this time the road had been made a
turnpike through a large portion of its course. From Baltimore the
traveler followed a turnpike to Cumberland, on the Potomac, where
began the old National Road across the mountains to Wheeling, on the
Ohio, with branches leading to Pittsburgh. This became one of the
great arteries of western migration and commerce, connecting, as it
did at its eastern end, with the Shenandoah Valley, and thus
affording access to the Ohio for large areas of Virginia. Other
routes lay through the passes of the Alleghenies, easily reached
from the divide between the waters of North Carolina and of West
Virginia. Saluda Gap, in northwestern South Carolina, led the way to
the great valley of eastern Tennessee. In Tennessee and Kentucky
many routes passed to the Ohio in the region of Cincinnati or
Louisville.
When the settler arrived at the waters of the Ohio, he either took a
steamboat or placed his possessions on a flatboat, or ark, and
floated down the river to his destination. From the upper waters of
the Allegheny many emigrants took advantage of the lumber-rafts,
which were constructed from the pine forests of southwestern New
York, to float to the Ohio with themselves and their belongings.
With the advent of the steamboat these older modes of navigation
were, to a considerable extent, superseded. But navigation on the
Great Lakes had not sufficiently advanced to afford opportunity for
any considerable movement of settlement, by this route, beyond Lake
Erie.
In the course of the decade the cost of reaching the west varied
greatly with the decrease in the transportation rates brought about
by the competition of the Erie Canal, the improvement of the
turnpikes, and the development of steamboat navigation. The expense
of the long overland journey from New England, prior to the opening
of the Erie Canal, made it extremely difficult for those without any
capital to reach the west. The stage rates on the Pennsylvania
turnpike and the old National Road, prior to the opening of the Erie
Canal, were about five or six dollars a hundred-weight from
Philadelphia or Baltimore to the Ohio River; the individual was
regarded as so much freight. [Footnote: Evans, Pedestrians Tour,
145.] To most of the movers, who drove their own teams and camped by
the wayside, however, the actual expense was simply that of
providing food for themselves and their horses on the road. The cost
of moving by land a few years later is illustrated by the case of a
Maryland family, consisting of fifteen persons, of whom five were
slaves. They traveled about twenty miles a day, with a four-horse
wagon, three hundred miles, to Wheeling, at an expense of seventy-
five dollars. [Footnote: Niles' Register, XLVIII., 242.] The expense
of traveling by stage and steamboat from Philadelphia to St. Louis
at the close of the decade was about fifty-five dollars for one
person; or by steamboat from New Orleans to St. Louis, thirty
dollars, including food and lodging. For deck-passage, without food
or lodging, the charge was only eight dollars. [Footnote: Ill.
Monthly Magazine, II., 53.] In 1823 the cost of passage from
Cincinnati to New Orleans by steamboat was twenty-five dollars; from
New Orleans to Cincinnati, fifty dollars. [Footnote: Niles'
Register, XXV., 95.] In the early thirties one could go from New
Orleans to Pittsburgh, as cabin passenger, for from thirty-five to
forty-five dollars. [Footnote: Emigrants' and Travelers' Guide
through the Valley of the Mississippi, 341.]