WESTERN COMMERCE AND IDEALS (1820-1830)
By 1820 the west had developed the beginnings of many of the cities
which have since ruled over the region. Buffalo and Detroit were
hardly more than villages until the close of this period. They
waited for the rise of steam navigation on the Great Lakes and for
the opening of the prairies. Cleveland, also, was but a hamlet
during most of the decade; but by 1830 the construction of the canal
connecting the Cuyahoga with the Scioto increased its prosperity,
and its harbor began to profit by its natural advantages. [Footnote:
Whittlesey, Early Hist. of Cleveland, 456; Kennedy, Hist. of
Cleveland, chap. viii.] Chicago and Milwaukee were mere fur-trading
stations in the Indian country. Pittsburgh, at the head of the Ohio,
was losing its old pre-eminence as the gateway to the west, but was
finding recompense in the development of its manufactures. By 1830
its population was about twelve thousand. [Footnote: Thurston,
Pittsburg and Allegheny in the Centennial Year, 61.] Foundries,
rolling-mills, nail-factories, steam-engine shops, and distilleries
were busily at work, and the city, dingy with the smoke of soft
coal, was already dubbed the "young Manchester" or the "Birmingham"
of America. By 1830 Wheeling had intercepted much of the overland
trade and travel to the Ohio, profiting by the old National Road and
the wagon trade from Baltimore. [Footnote: Martin, Gazetteer of Va.,
407.]
Cincinnati was rapidly rising to the position of the "Queen City of
the West." Situated where the river reached with a great bend
towards the interior of the northwest, in the rich farming country
between the two Miamis, and opposite the Licking River, it was the
commercial center of a vast and fertile region of Ohio and Kentucky;
[Footnote: Melish, Information to Emigrants, 108.] and by 1830, with
a population of nearly twenty-five thousand souls, it was the
largest city of the west, with the exception of New Orleans. The
center of steamboat-building, it also received extensive imports of
goods from the east and exported the surplus crops of Ohio and
adjacent parts of Kentucky. Its principal industry, however, was
pork-packing, from which it won the name of "Porkopolis" [Footnote:
Drake and Mansfield, Cincinnati in 1826, p. 70; Winter in the West,
I., 115.] Louisville, at the falls of the Ohio, was an important
place of trans-shipment, and the export center for large quantities
of tobacco. There were considerable manufactures of rope and
bagging, products of the Kentucky hemp-fields; and new cotton and
woolen factories were struggling for existence. [Footnote: Durrett,
Centenary of Louisville (Filson Club, Publications, No. 8), 50-101;
Louisville Directory, 1832, p. 131.] St. Louis occupied a unique
position, as the entrepot of the important fur-trade of the upper
Mississippi and the vast water system of the Missouri, as well as
the outfitting-point for the Missouri settlements. It was the
capital of the far west, and the commercial center for Illinois. Its
population at the close of the decade was about six thousand.
Only a few villages lay along the Mississippi below St. Louis until
the traveler reached New Orleans, the emporium of the whole
Mississippi Valley. As yet the direct effect of the Erie Canal was
chiefly limited to the state of New York. The great bulk of western
exports passed down the tributaries of the Mississippi to this city,
which was, therefore, the center of foreign exports for the valley,
as well as the port from which the coastwise trade in the products
of the whole interior departed. In 1830 its population was nearly
fifty thousand.
The rise of an agricultural surplus was transforming the west and
preparing a new influence in the nation. It was this surplus and the
demand for markets that developed the cities just mentioned. As they
grew, the price of land in their neighborhood increased; roads
radiated into the surrounding country; and farmers, whose crops had
been almost worthless from the lack of transportation facilities,
now found it possible to market their surplus at a small profit.
While the west was thus learning the advantages of a home market,
the extension of cotton and sugar cultivation in the south and
southwest gave it a new and valuable market. More and more, the
planters came to rely upon the northwest for their food supplies and
for the mules and horses for their fields. Cotton became the
engrossing interest of the plantation belt, and, while the full
effects of this differentiation of industry did not appear in the
decade of this volume, the beginnings were already visible.
[Footnote: Callender, "Early Transportation and Banking Enterprises
of the States," in Quarterly Journal of Econ., XVII., 3-54.] In
1835, Pitkin [Footnote: Pitkin, Statistical View (1835), 534.]
reckoned the value of the domestic and foreign exports of the
interior as far in excess of the whole exports of the United States
in 1790. Within forty years the development of the interior had
brought about the economic independence of the United States.
During most of the decade the merchandise to supply the interior was
brought laboriously across the mountains by the Pennsylvania
turnpikes and the old National Road; or, in the case of especially
heavy freight, was carried along the Atlantic coast into the gulf
and up the Mississippi and Ohio by steamboats. The cost of
transportation in the wagon trade from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh
and Baltimore to Wheeling placed a heavy tax upon the consumer.
[Footnote: Niles' Register, XX., 180.] In 1817 the freight charge
from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh was sometimes as high as seven to
ten dollars a hundredweight; a few years later it became from four
to six dollars; and in 1823 it had fallen to three dollars. It took
a month to wagon merchandise from Baltimore to central Ohio.
Transportation companies, running four-horse freight wagons,
conducted a regular business on these turn-pikes between the eastern
and western states. In 1820 over three thousand wagons ran between
Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, transporting merchandise valued at
about eighteen million dollars annually. [Footnote: Birkbeck,
Journey from Va., 128; Ogden, Letters from the West, 8; Cobbett,
Year's Residence, 337; Evans, Pedestrious Tour, 145; Philadelphia in
1824, 45; Searight, Old Pike, 107, 112; Mills, Treatise on Inland
Navigation (1820), 89, 90, 93, 95-97; Journal of Polit. Econ.,
VIII., 36.]
The construction of the National Road reduced freight rates to
nearly one-half what they were at the close of the War of 1812; and
the introduction of steam navigation from New Orleans up the
Mississippi cut water-rates by that route to one-third of the former
charge. [Footnote: Annals of Cong., 18 Cong., I Sess., I., 991; cf.
Fearon, Sketches, 260; Niles' Register, XXV., 95; Cincinnati
Christian Journal, July 27, 1830.] Nevertheless, there was a crying
need for internal improvements, and particularly for canals, to
provide an outlet for the increasing products of the west. "Even in
the country where I reside, not eighty miles from tidewater," said
Tucker, [Footnote: Annals of Cong., 15 Cong., I Sess., I., 1126.] of
Virginia, in 1818, "it takes the farmer one bushel of wheat to pay
the expense of carrying two to a seaport town."
The bulk of the crop, as compared with its value, practically
prevented transportation by land farther than a hundred miles.
[Footnote: McMaster, United States, III., 464.] It is this that
helps to explain the attention which the interior first gave to
making whiskey and raising live-stock; the former carried the crop
in a small bulk with high value, while the live-stock could walk to
a market. Until after the War of 1812, the cattle of the Ohio Valley
were driven to the seaboard, chiefly to Philadelphia or Baltimore.
Travelers were astonished to see on the highway droves of four or
five thousand hogs, going to an eastern market. It was estimated
that over a hundred thousand hogs were driven east annually from
Kentucky alone. Kentucky hog-drivers also passed into Tennessee,
Virginia, and the Carolinas with their droves. [Footnote: Life of
Ephraim Cutler, 89; Birkbeck, Journey, 24.; Blane, Excursion through
U. S. (London, 1824), 90; Atlantic Monthly, XXVI., 170.] The swine
lived on the nuts and acorns of the forest; thus they were
peculiarly suited to pioneer conditions. At first the cattle were
taken to the plantations of the Potomac to fatten for Baltimore and
Philadelphia, much in the same way that, in recent times, the cattle
of the Great Plains are brought to the feeding-grounds in the corn
belt of Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa. [Footnote: Michaux, Travels,
191: Palmer, Journal of Travels, 36] Towards the close of the
decade, however, the feeding-grounds shifted into Ohio, and the
pork-packing industry, as we have seen, found its center at
Cincinnati, [Footnote: Hall, Statistics of the West (1836), 145-
147.] the most important source of supply for the hams and bacon and
salt pork which passed down the Mississippi to furnish a large share
of the plantation food. From Kentucky and the rest of the Ohio
Valley droves of mules and horses passed through the Tennessee
Valley to the south to supply the plantations. Statistics at
Cumberland Gap for 1828 gave the value of live-stock passing the
turnpike gate there at $1,167,000. [Footnote: Emigrants' and
Travellers' Guide to the West (1834), 194.] Senator Hayne, of South
Carolina, declared that in 1824 the south was supplied from the
west, through Saluda Gap, with live-stock, horses, cattle, and hogs
to the amount of over a million dollars a year. [Footnote: Speech in
Senate in 1832, Register of Debates in Cong., VIII., pt. i., 80; cf.
Annals of Cong., 18 Cong., i Sess., I., 1411.]
But the outlet from the west over the roads to the east and south
was but a subordinate element in the internal commerce. Down the
Mississippi floated a multitude of heavily freighted craft: lumber
rafts from the Allegheny, the old-time arks, with cattle, flour, and
bacon, hay-boats, keel-boats, and skiffs, all mingled with the
steamboats which plied the western waters. [Footnote: Flint,
Recollections of the Last Ten Years, 101-110; E. S. Thomas,
Reminiscences, I., 290-293; Hall, Statistics of the West (1836),
236; Howells, Life in Ohio, 85; Schultz, Travels, 129; Hulbert,
Historic Highways, IX., chaps, iii., iv., v.] Flatboatmen, raftsmen,
and deck-hands constituted a turbulent and reckless population,
living on the country through which they passed, fighting and
drinking in true "half-horse, half-alligator" style. Prior to the
steamboat, all of the commerce from New Orleans to the upper country
was carried on in about twenty barges, averaging a hundred tons
each, and making one trip a year. Although the steamboat did not
drive out the other craft, it revolutionized the commerce of the
river. Whereas it had taken the keel-boats thirty to forty days to
descend from Louisville to New Orleans, and about ninety days to
ascend the fifteen hundred miles of navigation by poling and warping
up-stream, the steamboat had shortened the time, by 1822, to seven
days down and sixteen days up. [Footnote: Annals of Cong., 17 Gong.,
2 Sess., 407; McMaster, United States, V., 166; National Gazette,
September 26, 1823 (list of steamboats, rates of passage, estimate
of products); Blane, Excursion through the U. S., 119; Niles'
Register, XXV., 95.] As the steamboats ascended the various
tributaries of the Mississippi to gather the products of the growing
west, the pioneers came more and more to realize the importance of
the invention. They resented the idea of the monopoly which Pulton
and Livingston wished to enforce prior to the decision of Chief-
Justice Marshall, in the case of Gibbons vs. Ogden--a decision of
vital interest to the whole interior. [Footnote: Thomas, Travels
through the Western Country, 62; Alexandria Herald, June 23, 1817.]
They saw in the steamboat a symbol of their own development. A
writer in the Western Monthly Review, [Footnote: Timothy Flint's
Western Monthly Review (May, 1827), I., 25; William Bullock, Sketch
of a Journey, 132.] unconsciously expressed the very spirit of the
self-contented, hustling, materialistic west in these words: "An
Atlantic cit, who talks of us under the name of backwoodsmen, would
not believe, that such fairy structures of oriental gorgeousness and
splendor, as the Washington, the Florida, the Walk in the Water, the
Lady of the Lake, etc. etc., had ever existed in the imaginative
brain of a romancer, much less, that they were actually in
existence, rushing down the Mississippi, as on the wings of the
wind, or plowing up between the forests, and walking against the
mighty current 'as things of life,' bearing speculators, merchants,
dandies, fine ladies, every thing real, and every thing affected, in
the form of humanity, with pianos, and stocks of novels, and cards,
and dice, and flirting, and love-making, and drinking, and
champagne, and on the deck, perhaps, three hundred fellows, who have
seen alligators, and neither fear whiskey, nor gun-powder. A
steamboat, coming from New Orleans, brings to the remotest villages
of our streams, and the very doors of the cabins, a little Paris, a
section of Broadway, or a slice of Philadelphia, to ferment in the
minds of our young people, the innate propensity for fashions and
finery. Within a day's journey of us, three distinct canals are in
respectable progress towards completion. . . . Cincinnati will soon
be the center of the 'celestial empire,' as the Chinese say; and
instead of encountering the storms, the sea sickness, and dangers of
a passage from the gulf of Mexico to the Atlantic, whenever the Erie
canal shall be completed, the opulent southern planters will take
their families, their dogs and parrots, through a world of forests,
from New Orleans to New York, giving us a call by the way. When they
are more acquainted with us, their voyage will often terminate
here."
By 1830 the produce which reached New Orleans from the Mississippi
Valley amounted to about twenty-six million dollars. [Footnote:
Quarterly Journal of Economics, XVII., 20; Pitkin, Statistical View
(ed. of 1835), 534-536.] In 1822 three million dollars' worth of
goods was estimated to have passed the Falls of the Ohio on the way
to market, representing much of the surplus of the Ohio Valley. Of
this, pork amounted to $1,000,000 in value; flour to $900,000;
tobacco to $600,000; and whiskey to $500,000. [Footnote: National
Republican, March 7, 1823; cf. National Gazette, September 26, 1823;
Blane, Excursion through the U. S., 119.] The inventory of products
reveals the Mississippi Valley as a vast colonial society, producing
the raw materials of a simple and primitive agriculture. The
beginnings of manufacture in the cities, however, promised to bring
about a movement for industrial independence in the west. In spite
of evidences of growing wealth, there was such a decline in
agricultural prices that, for the farmer who did not live on the
highways of commerce, it was almost unprofitable to raise wheat for
the market.
An Ohio pioneer of this time relates that at the beginning of the
decade fifty cents a bushel was a great price for wheat at the
river; and as two horses and a man were required for four days to
make the journey of thirty-five miles to the Ohio, in good weather,
with thirty-five or forty bushels of wheat, and a great deal longer
if the roads were bad, it was not to be expected that the farmer
could realize more than twenty-five cents in cash for it. But there
was no sale for it in cash. The nominal price for it in trade was
usually thirty cents. [Footnote: Howells, Life in Ohio, 138; see
M'Culloch, Commercial Dictionary, I., 683,684; Hazard, U.S.
Commercial and Statistical Register, I., 251; O'Reilly, Sketches of
Rochester, 362.] When wheat brought twenty-five cents a bushel in
Illinois in 1825, it sold at over eighty cents in Petersburg,
Virginia, and flour was six dollars a barrel at Charleston, South
Carolina. [Footnote: Niles' Register, XXIX, 165.]
These are the economic conditions that assist in understanding the
political attitude of western leaders like Henry Clay and Andrew
Jackson. The cry of the east for protection to infant industries was
swelled by the little cities of the west, and the demand for a home
market found its strongest support beyond the Alleghenies. Internal
improvements and lower rates of transportation were essential to the
prosperity of the westerners. Largely a debtor class, in need of
capital, credit, and an expansion of the currency, they resented
attempts to restrain the reckless state banking which their optimism
fostered.
But the political ideals and actions of the west are explained by
social quite as much as by economic forces. It was certain that this
society, where equality and individualism flourished, where
assertive democracy was supreme, where impatience with the old order
of things was a ruling passion, would demand control of the
government, would resent the rule of the trained statesmen and
official classes, and would fight nominations by congressional
caucus and the continuance of presidential dynasties. Besides its
susceptibility to change, the west had generated, from its Indian
fighting, forest-felling, and expansion, a belligerency and a
largeness of outlook with regard to the nation's territorial
destiny. As the pioneer, widening the ring-wall of his clearing in
the midst of the stumps and marshes of the wilderness, had a vision
of the lofty buildings and crowded streets of a future city, so the
west as a whole developed ideals of the future of the common man,
and of the grandeur and expansion of the nation.
The west was too new a section to have developed educational
facilities to any large extent. The pioneers' poverty, as well as
the traditions of the southern interior from which they so largely
came, discouraged extensive expenditures for public schools.
[Footnote: McMaster, United States, V., 370-372.] In Kentucky and
Tennessee the more prosperous planters had private tutors, often New
England collegians, for their children. For example, Amos Kendall,
later postmaster-general, was tutor in Henry Clay's family. So-
called colleges were numerous, some of them fairly good. In 1830 a
writer made a survey of higher education in the whole western
country and reported twenty-eight institutions, with seven hundred
and sixty-six graduates and fourteen hundred and thirty
undergraduates. Less than forty thousand volumes were recorded in
the college and "social" libraries of the entire Mississippi Valley.
[Footnote: Am. Quarterly Register (November, 1830), III., 127-131.]
Very few students went from the west to eastern colleges; but the
foundations of public education had been laid in the land grants for
common schools and universities. For the present this fund was
generally misappropriated and wasted, or worse. Nevertheless, the
ideal of a democratic education was held up in the first
constitution of Indiana, making it the duty of the legislature to
provide for "a general system of education, ascending in a regular
graduation from township schools to a State university, wherein
tuition shall be gratis, and equally open to all." [Footnote: Poore,
Charters and Constitutions, pt. i., 508 (art. ix., sec. 2 of
Constitution of Ind., 1816).]
Literature did not flourish in the west, although the newspaper
press [Footnote: W. H. Perrin, Pioneer Press of Ky. (Filson Club
Publications).] followed closely after the retreating savage; many
short-lived periodicals were founded, [Footnote: Venable, Beginnings
of Literary Culture in the Ohio Valley, chap, iii.; W. B. Cairns,
Development of American Literature from 1815 to 1833, in University
of Wis., Bulletin (Phil, and Lit. Series), I., 60-63.] and writers
like Timothy Flint and James Hall were not devoid of literary
ability. Lexington, in Kentucky, and Cincinnati made rival claims to
be the "Athens of the West." In religion, the west was partial to
those denominations which prevailed in the democratic portions of
the older sections. Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians took the
lead. [Footnote: Am. Quarterly Register, III., 135 (November, 1830);
Schermerhorn and Mills, View of U. S. West of the Alleghany
Mountains (Hartford, 1814); Home Missionary, 1829, pp. 78, 79; 1830,
p. 172; McMaster, United States, IV., 550-555.]
The religious life of the west frequently expressed itself in the
form of emotional gatherings, in the camp-meetings and the revivals,
where the rude, unlettered, but deeply religious backwoods preachers
moved their large audiences with warnings of the wrath of God.
Muscular Christianity was personified in the circuit-rider, who,
with his saddle-bags and Bible, threaded the dreary trails through
the forest from settlement to settlement. From the responsiveness of
the west to religious excitement, it was easy to perceive that here
was a region capable of being swayed in large masses by enthusiasm.
These traits of the camp-meeting were manifested later in political
campaigns.
Thus this society beyond the mountains, recruited from all the older
states and bound together by the Mississippi, constituted a region
swayed for the most part by common impulses. By the march of the
westerners away from their native states to the public domain of the
nation, and by their organization as territories of the United
States, they lost that state particularism which distinguished many
of the old commonwealths of the coast. The section was nationalistic
and democratic to the core. The west admired the self-made man and
was ready to follow its hero with the enthusiasm of a section more
responsive to personality than to the programmes of trained
statesmen. It was a self-confident section, believing in its right
to share in government, and troubled by no doubts of its capacity to
rule.