SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT OF THE WEST (1820-1830)
Arrived at the nearest point to his destination on the Ohio, the
emigrant either cut out a road to his new home or pushed up some
tributary of that river in a keel-boat. If he was one of the poorer
classes, he became a squatter on the public lands, trusting to find
in the profits of his farming the means of paying for his land. Not
uncommonly, after clearing the land, he sold his improvements to the
actual purchaser, under the customary usage or by pre-emption laws.
[Footnote: Hall, Statistics of the West, 180; Kingdom, America, 56;
Peck, New Guide for Emigrants to the West (1837), 119-132.] With the
money thus secured he would purchase new land in a remoter area, and
thus establish himself as an independent land-owner. Under the
credit system [Footnote: Emerick, Credit and the Public Domain.]
which existed at the opening of the period, the settler purchased
his land in quantities of not less than one hundred and sixty acres
at two dollars per acre, by a cash payment of fifty cents per acre
and the rest in installments running over a period of four years;
but by the new law of 1820 the settler was permitted to buy as small
a tract as eighty acres from the government at a minimum price of a
dollar and a quarter per acre, without credit. The price of labor in
the towns along the Ohio, coupled with the low cost of provisions,
made it possible for even a poor day-laborer from the East to
accumulate the necessary amount to make his land-purchase.
[Footnote: See, for example, Peck, New Guide for Emigrants to the
West (1837), 107-134; Bradbury, Travels, 286.]
Having in this way settled down either as a squatter or as a land-
owner, the pioneer proceeded to hew out a clearing in the midst of
the forest. [Footnote: Kingdom, America, 10, 54, 63; Flint, Letters,
206; McMaster, United States, V., 152-155; Howells, Life in Ohio,
115.] Commonly he had selected his lands with reference to the value
of the soil, as indicated by the character of the hardwoods, but
this meant that the labor of clearing was the more severe in good
soil. Under the sturdy strokes of his axe the light of day was let
into the little circle of cleared ground. [Footnote: Hall,
Statistics of the West, 98, 101, 145.] With the aid of his
neighbors, called together under the social attractions of a
"raising," with its inevitable accompaniment of whiskey and a
"frolic," he erected his log-cabin. "America," wrote Birkbeck, "was
bred in a cabin." [Footnote: Birkbeck, Notes on Journey, 94.]
Having secured a foothold, the settler next proceeded to "girdle" or
"deaden" an additional forest area, preparatory to his farming
operations. This consisted in cutting a ring through the bark around
the lower portion of the trunk, to prevent the sap from rising. In a
short time the withered branches were ready for burning, and in the
midst of the stumps the first crop of corn and vegetables was
planted. Often the settler did not even burn the girdled trees, but
planted his crop under the dead foliage.
In regions nearer to the east, as in western New York, it was
sometimes possible to repay a large portion of the cost of clearing
by the sale of pot and pearl ashes extracted from the logs, which
were brought together into huge piles for burning. [Footnote: Life
of Thurlow Weed (Autobiography), I., ii.] This was accomplished by a
"log-rolling," under the united efforts of the neighbors, as in the
case of the "raising." More commonly in the west the logs were
wasted by burning, except such as were split into rails, which, laid
one above another, made the zig-zag "worm-fences" for the protection
of the fields of the pioneer.
When a clearing was sold to a later comer, fifty or sixty dollars,
in addition to the government price of land, was commonly charged
for forty acres, enclosed and partly cleared. [Footnote: Kingdom,
America, 10, 54.] It was estimated that the cost of a farm of three
hundred and twenty acres at the edge of the prairie in Illinois, at
this time, would be divided as follows: for one hundred and sixty
acres of prairie, two hundred dollars; for fencing it into four
forty-acre fields with rail-fences, one hundred and sixty dollars;
for breaking it up with a plough, two dollars per acre, or three
hundred and twenty dollars; eighty acres of timber land and eighty
acres of pasture prairie, two hundred dollars. Thus, with cabins,
stables, etc., it cost a little over a thousand dollars to secure an
improved farm of three hundred and twenty acres. [Footnote: J.M.
Peck, Guide for Emigrants (1831), 183-188; cf. Birkbeck (London,
1818), Letters, 45, 46, 69-73; S.H. Collins, Emigrant's Guide;
Tanner (publisher), View of the Valley of the Miss. (1834), 232; J.
Woods, Two Years' Residence, 146, 172.] But the mass of the early
settlers were too poor to afford such an outlay, and were either
squatters within a little clearing, or owners of eighty acres, which
they hoped to increase by subsequent purchase. Since they worked
with the labor of their own hands and that of their sons, the cash
outlay was practically limited to the original cost of the lands and
articles of husbandry. The cost of an Indiana farm of eighty acres
of land, with two horses, two or three cows, a few hogs and sheep,
and farming utensils, was estimated at about four hundred dollars.
The peculiar skill required of the axeman who entered the hardwood
forests, together with readiness to undergo the privations of the
life, made the backwoodsman in a sense an expert engaged in a
special calling. [Footnote: J. Hall, Statistics of the West, 101;
cf. Chastellux, Travels in North America (London, 1787), I., 44.]
Frequently he was the descendant of generations of pioneers, who, on
successive frontiers, from the neighborhood of the Atlantic coast
towards the interior, had cut and burned the forest, fought the
Indians, and pushed forward the line of civilization. He bore the
marks of the struggle in his face, made sallow by living in the
shade of the forest, "shut from the common air," [Footnote:
Birkbeck, Notes on Journey, 105-114.] and in a constitution often
racked by malarial fever. Dirt and squalor were too frequently found
in the squatter's cabin, and education and the refinements of life
were denied to him. Often shiftless and indolent, in the intervals
between his tasks of forest-felling he was fonder of hunting than of
a settled agricultural life. With his rifle he eked out his
sustenance, and the peltries furnished him a little ready cash. His
few cattle grazed in the surrounding forest, and his hogs fed on its
mast.
The backwoodsman of this type represented the outer edge of the
advance of civilization. Where settlement was closer, co-operative
activity possible, and little villages, with the mill and retail
stores, existed, conditions of life were ameliorated, and a better
type of pioneer was found. Into such regions circuit-riders and
wandering preachers carried the beginnings of church organization,
and schools were started. But the frontiersmen proper constituted a
moving class, ever ready to sell out their clearings in [Footnote:
Babcock, Forty Years of Pioneer Life ("Journals and Correspondence
of J.M. Peck"), 101.] order to press on to a new frontier, where
game more abounded, soil was reported to be better, and where the
forest furnished a welcome retreat from the uncongenial
encroachments of civilization. If, however, he was thrifty and
forehanded, the backwoodsman remained on his clearing, improving his
farm and sharing in the change from wilderness life.
Behind the type of the backwoodsman came the type of the pioneer
farmer. Equipped with a little capital, he often, as we have seen,
purchased the clearing, and thus avoided some of the initial
hardships of pioneer life. In the course of a few years, as saw-
mills were erected, frame-houses took the place of the log-cabins;
the rough clearing, with its stumps, gave way to well-tilled fields;
orchards were planted; live-stock roamed over the enlarged clearing;
and an agricultural surplus was ready for export. Soon the
adventurous speculator offered corner lots in a new town-site, and
the rude beginnings of a city were seen.
Thus western occupation advanced in a series of waves: [Footnote:
J.M. Peck, New Guide to the West (Cincinnati, 1848), chap. iv.; T.
Flint, Geography and Hist. of the Western States, 350 et seq.; J.
Flint, Letters from America, 206; cf. Turner, Significance of the
Frontier in American History, in Am. Hist. Assoc., Report 1893, p.
214; McMaster, United States, V., 152-160.] the Indian was sought by
the fur-trader; the fur-trader was followed by the frontiersman,
whose live-stock exploited the natural grasses and the acorns of the
forest; next came the wave of primitive agriculture, followed by
more intensive farming and city life. All the stages of social
development went on under the eye of the traveler as he passed from
the frontier towards the east. Such were the forces which were
steadily pushing their way into the American wilderness, as they had
pushed for generations.
While thus the frontier folk spread north of the Ohio and up the
Missouri, a different movement was in progress in the Gulf region of
the west. In the beginning precisely the same type of occupation was
to be seen: the poorer classes of southern emigrants cut out their
clearings along rivers that flowed to the Gulf and to the lower
Mississippi, and, with the opening of this decade, went in
increasing numbers into Texas, where enterprising Americans secured
concessions from the Mexican government. [Footnote: Garrison, Texas,
chaps, xiii., xiv.; Wooten (editor), Comprehensive Hist. of Texas,
I., chaps. viii., ix.; Texas State Hist. Assoc., Quarterly, VII.,
29, 289; Bugbee, "Texas Frontier," in Southern Hist. Assoc.,
Publications, IV., 106.]
Almost all of the most recently occupied area was but thinly
settled. It represented the movement of the backwoodsman, with axe
and rifle, advancing to the conquest of the forest. But closer to
the old settlements a more highly developed agriculture was to be
seen. Hodgson, in 1821, describes plantations in northern Alabama in
lands ceded by the Indians in 1818. Though settled less than two
years, there were within a few miles five schools and four places of
worship. One plantation had one hundred acres in cotton and one
hundred and ten in corn, although a year and a half before it was
wilderness. [Footnote: Hodgson, Letters from North Am., I., 269; see
Riley (editor), "Autobiography of Lincecum," in Miss. Hist. Soc.,
Publications, VIII., 443, for the wanderings of a southern pioneer
in the recently opened Indian lands of Georgia and the southwest in
these years.]
But while this population of log-cabin pioneers was entering the
Gulf plains, caravans of slave-holding planters were advancing from
the seaboard to the occupation of the cotton-lands of the same
region. As the free farmers of the interior had been replaced in the
upland country of the south by the slaveholding planters, so now the
frontiersmen of the southwest were pushed back from the more fertile
lands into the pine hills and barrens. Not only was the pioneer
unable to refuse the higher price which was offered him for his
clearing, but, in the competitive bidding of the public land sales,
[Footnote: Northern Ala. (published by Smith & De Land), 249; Brown,
Hist. of Ala., 129-131; Brown, Lower South, 24-26.] the wealthier
planter secured the desirable soils. Social forces worked to the
same end. When the pioneer invited his slave-holding neighbor to a
"raising," it grated on his sense of the fitness of things to have
the guest appear with gloves, directing the gang of slaves which he
contributed to the function. [Footnote: Smedes, A Southern Planter,
67.] Little by little, therefore, the old pioneer life tended to
retreat to the less desirable lands, leaving the slave-holder in
possession of the rich "buck-shot" soils that spread over central
Alabama and Mississippi and the fat alluvium that lined the eastern
bank of the Mississippi. Even to-day the counties of dense Negro
population reveal the results of this movement of segregation.
By the side of the picture of the advance of the pioneer farmer,
bearing his household goods in his canvas-covered wagon to his new
home across the Ohio, must therefore be placed the picture of the
southern planter crossing through the forests of western Georgia,
Alabama, and Mississippi, or passing over the free state of Illinois
to the Missouri Valley, in his family carriage, with servants, packs
of hunting-dogs, and a train of slaves, their nightly camp-fires
lighting up the wilderness where so recently the Indian hunter had
held possession. [Footnote: Hodgson, Letters from North Am., I.,
138; Niles' Register, XLIV., 222; Smedes, A Southern Planter, 52-54;
Flint, Geography and History of the Western States, II., 350, 379;
Bernhard, Duke of Saxe-Weimar, Travels, II., chaps. xvi., xvii.]
But this new society had a characteristic western flavor. The old
patriarchal type of slavery along the seaboard was modified by the
western conditions in the midst of which the slave-holding interest
was now lodged. Planters, as well as pioneer farmers, were
exploiting the wilderness and building a new society under
characteristic western influences. Rude strength, a certain
coarseness of life, and aggressiveness characterized this society,
as it did the whole of the Mississippi Valley. [Footnote: Baldwin,
Flush Times in Ala.; cf. Gilmer, Sketches of Georgia, etc.] Slavery
furnished a new ingredient for western forces to act upon. The
system took on a more commercial tinge: the plantation had to be
cleared and made profitable as a purely business enterprise.
The slaves were purchased in considerable numbers from the older
states instead of being inherited in the family. Slave-dealers
passed to the southwest, with their coffles of Negroes brought from
the outworn lands of the old south. It was estimated in 1832 that
Virginia annually exported six thousand slaves for sale to other
states. [Footnote: Collins, Domestic Slave Trade, 50.] An English
traveler reported in 1823 that every year from ten to fifteen
thousand slaves were sold from the states of Delaware, Maryland, and
Virginia, and sent to the south. [Footnote: Blane, Excursion through
U.S., 226; Hodgson, Letters from North Am., I., 194.] At the same
time, illicit importation of slaves through New Orleans reached an
amount estimated at from ten to fifteen thousand a year. [Footnote:
Collins, Domestic Slave Trade, 44.] It was not until the next decade
that this incoming tide of slaves reached its height, but by 1830 it
was clearly marked and was already transforming the southwest.
Mississippi doubled the number of her slaves in the decade, and
Alabama nearly trebled hers. In the same period the number of slaves
of Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina increased but slightly.
As the discussion of the south has already made clear, the
explanation of this transformation of the southwest into a region of
slave-holding planters lies in the spread of cotton into the Gulf
plains. In 1811 this region raised but five million pounds of
cotton; ten years later its product was sixty million pounds; and in
1826 its fields were white with a crop of over one hundred and fifty
million pounds. It soon outstripped the seaboard south. Alabama,
which had practically no cotton crop in 1811, and only ten million
pounds in 1821, had in 1834 eighty-five million pounds, [Footnote:
See table of cotton crop, ante, p. 47.] a larger crop than either
South Carolina or Georgia.
Soon after 1830 the differences between the northern and southern
portions of the Mississippi Valley were still further accentuated.
(1) From New York and New England came a tide of settlement, in the
thirties, which followed the Erie Canal and the Great Lakes, and
began to occupy the prairie lands which had been avoided by the
southern axemen. This region then became an extension of the greater
New England already to be seen in New York. (2) The southern
pioneers in the northwest formed a transitional zone between this
northern area and the slave states south of the Ohio. (3) In the
Gulf plains a greater south was in process of formation, but by no
means completely established. As yet it was a mixture of pioneer and
planter, slave and free, profoundly affected by its western traits.
[Footnote: Curry, "A Settlement in East Ala.," in Am. Hist.
Magazine, II., 203.]
The different states of the south were steadily sending in bands of
colonists. In Alabama, for example, the Georgians settled, as a
rule, in the east; the Tennesseeans, moving from the great bend of
the Tennessee River, were attracted to the northern and middle
section; and the Virginians and Carolinians went to the west and
southwest, following the bottom-lands near the rivers. [Footnote:
Brown, Hist. of Ala., 129, 130; Northern Ala. (published bv Smith &
De Land), pt. iv., 243 et seq.]