III
THE OLD WEST[67:1]
It is not the oldest West with which this chapter deals. The oldest West was the Atlantic coast. Roughly speaking, it took a century of Indian fighting and forest felling for the colonial settlements to expand into the interior to a distance of about a hundred miles from the coast. Indeed, some stretches were hardly touched in that period. This conquest of the nearest wilderness in the course of the seventeenth century and in the early years of the eighteenth, gave control of the maritime section of the nation and made way for the new movement of westward expansion which I propose to discuss.
In his "Winning of the West," Roosevelt dealt chiefly with the region beyond the Alleghanies, and with the period of the later eighteenth century, although he prefaced his account with an excellent chapter describing the backwoodsmen of the Alleghanies and their social conditions from 1769 to 1774. It is important to notice, however, that he is concerned with a backwoods society already formed; that he ignores the New England frontier and its part in the winning of the West, and does not recognize that there was a West to be won between New England and the Great Lakes. In short, he is interested in the winning of the West beyond the Alleghanies by the southern half of the frontier folk.
There is, then, a western area intermediate between the coastal colonial settlements of the seventeenth century and the trans-Alleghany settlements of the latter portion of the eighteenth century. This section I propose to isolate and discuss under the name of the Old West, and in the period from about 1676 to 1763. It includes the back country of New England, the Mohawk Valley, the Great Valley of Pennsylvania, the Shenandoah Valley, and the Piedmont--that is, the interior or upland portion of the South, lying between the Alleghanies and the head of navigation of the Atlantic rivers marked by the "fall line."[68:1]
In this region, and in these years, are to be found the beginnings of much that is characteristic in Western society, for the Atlantic coast was in such close touch with Europe that its frontier experience was soon counteracted, and it developed along other lines. It is unfortunate that the colonial back country appealed so long to historians solely in connection with the colonial wars, for the development of its society, its institutions and mental attitude all need study. Its history has been dealt with in separate fragments, by states, or towns, or in discussions of special phases, such as German and Scotch-Irish immigration. The Old West as a whole can be appreciated only by obliterating the state boundaries which conceal its unity, by correlating the special and fragmentary studies, and by filling the gaps in the material for understanding the formation of its society. The present paper is rather a reconnaissance than a conquest of the field, a program for study of the Old West rather than an exposition of it.
The end of the period proposed may be placed about 1763, and the beginning between 1676 and 1700. The termination of the period is marked by the Peace of Paris in 1763, and the royal proclamation of that year forbidding settlement beyond the Alleghanies. By this time the settlement of the Old West was fairly accomplished, and new advances were soon made into the "Western Waters" beyond the mountains and into the interior of Vermont and New Hampshire. The isolation of the transmontane settlements, and the special conditions and doctrines of the Revolutionary era during which they were formed, make a natural distinction between the period of which I am to speak and the later extension of the West.
The beginning of the period is necessarily an indeterminate date, owing to the different times of colonizing the coastal areas which served as bases of operations in the westward advance. The most active movements into the Old West occurred after 1730. But in 1676 New England, having closed the exhausting struggle with the Indians, known as King Philip's War, could regard her established settlements as secure, and go on to complete her possession of the interior. This she did in the midst of conflicts with the exterior Indian tribes which invaded her frontiers from New York and Canada during the French and Indian wars from 1690 to 1760, and under frontier conditions different from the conditions of the earlier Puritan colonization. In 1676, Virginia was passing through Indian fighting--keenest along the fall line, where the frontier lay--and also experiencing a social revolt which resulted in the defeat of the democratic forces that sought to stay the progress of aristocratic control in the colony.[70:1] The date marks the end of the period when the Virginia tidewater could itself be regarded as a frontier region, and consequently the beginning of a more special interest in the interior.
Let us first examine the northern part of the movement into the back country. The expansion of New England into the vacant spaces of its own section, in the period we have chosen for discussion, resulted in the formation of an interior society which contrasted in many ways with that of the coast, and which has a special significance in Western history, in that it was this interior New England people who settled the Greater New England in central and western New York, the Wyoming Valley, the Connecticut Reserve of Ohio, and much of the prairie areas of the Old Northwest. It is important to realize that the Old West included interior New England.
The situation in New England at the close of the seventeenth century is indicated by the Massachusetts act of 1694 enumerating eleven towns, then on the frontier and exposed to raids, none of which might be voluntarily deserted without leave of the governor and council, on penalty of loss of their freeholds by the landowners, or fine of other inhabitants.[70:2]
Thus these frontier settlers were made substantially garrisons, or "mark colonies." Crowded into the palisades of the town, and obliged in spite of their poverty to bear the brunt of Indian attack, their hardships are illustrated in the manly but pathetic letters of Deerfield's minister, Mr. Williams,[70:3] in 1704. Parkman succinctly describes the general conditions in these words:[70:4]
The exposed frontier of New England was between two and three hundred miles long, and consisted of farms and hamlets loosely scattered through an almost impervious forest. . . . Even in so-called villages the houses were far apart, because, except on the seashore, the people lived by farming. Such as were able to do so fenced their dwellings with palisades, or built them of solid timber, with loopholes, a projecting upper story like a block house, and sometimes a flanker at one or more of the corners. In the more considerable settlements the largest of these fortified houses was occupied in time of danger by armed men and served as a place of refuge for the neighbors.
Into these places, in days of alarm, were crowded the outlying settlers, just as was the case in later times in the Kentucky "stations."
In spite of such frontier conditions, the outlying towns continued to multiply. Between 1720 and the middle of the century, settlement crept up the Housatonic and its lateral valley into the Berkshires. About 1720 Litchfield was established; in 1725, Sheffield; in 1730, Great Barrington; and in 1735 a road was cut and towns soon established between Westfield and these Housatonic settlements, thus uniting them with the older extensions along the Connecticut and its tributaries.
In this period, scattered and sometimes unwelcome Scotch-Irish settlements were established, such as that at Londonderry, New Hampshire, and in the Berkshires, as well as in the region won in King Philip's War from the Nipmucks, whither there came also Huguenots.[72:1]
In King George's War, the Connecticut River settlers found their frontier protection in such rude stockades as those at the sites of Keene, of Charlestown, New Hampshire (Number Four), Fort Shirley at the head of Deerfield River (Heath), and Fort Pelham (Rowe); while Fort Massachusetts (Adams) guarded the Hoosac gateway to the Hoosatonic Valley. These frontier garrisons and the self-defense of the backwoodsmen of New England are well portrayed in the pages of Parkman.[72:2] At the close of the war, settlement again expanded into the Berkshires, where Lennox, West Hoosac (Williamstown), and Pittsfield were established in the middle of the century. Checked by the fighting in the last French and Indian War, the frontier went forward after the Peace of Paris (1763) at an exceptional rate, especially into Vermont and interior New Hampshire. An anonymous writer gives a contemporary view of the situation on the eve of the Revolution:[72:3]
The richest parts remaining to be granted are on the northern branches of the Connecticut river, towards Crown Point where are great districts of fertile soil still unsettled. The North part of New Hampshire, the province of Maine, and the territory of Sagadahock have but few settlements in them compared with the tracts yet unsettled. . . .
I should further observe that these tracts have since the peace [i. e., 1763], been settling pretty fast: farms on the river Connecticut are every day extending beyond the old fort Dummer, for near thirty miles; and will in a few years reach to Kohasser which is nearly two hundred miles; not that such an extent will be one-tenth settled, but the new-comers do not fix near their neighbors, and go on regularly, but take spots that please them best, though twenty or thirty miles beyond any others. This to people of a sociable disposition in Europe would appear very strange, but the Americans do not regard the near neighborhood of other farmers; twenty or thirty miles by water they esteem no distance in matters of this sort; besides in a country that promises well the intermediate space is not long in filling up. Between Connecticut river and Lake Champlain upon Otter Creek, and all along Lake Sacrament [George] and the rivers that fall into it, and the whole length of Wood Creek, are numerous settlements made since the peace.[73:1]
For nearly a hundred years, therefore, New England communities had been pushed out to new frontiers in the intervals between the almost continuous wars with the French and Indians. Probably the most distinctive feature in this frontier was the importance of the community type of settlement; in other words, of the towns, with their Puritan ideals in education, morals, and religion. This has always been a matter of pride to the statesmen and annalists of New England, as is illustrated by these words of Holland in his "Western Massachusetts," commenting on the settlement of the Connecticut Valley in villages, whereby in his judgment morality, education, and urbanity were preserved:
The influence of this policy can only be fully appreciated when standing by the side of the solitary settler's hut in the West, where even an Eastern man has degenerated to a boor in manners, where his children have grown up uneducated, and where the Sabbath has become an unknown day, and religion and its obligations have ceased to exercise control upon the heart and life.
Whatever may be the real value of the community type of settlement, its establishment in New England was intimately connected both with the Congregational religious organization and with the land system of the colonies of that section, under which the colonial governments made grants--not in tracts to individuals, but in townships to groups of proprietors who in turn assigned lands to the inhabitants without cost. The typical form of establishing a town was as follows: On application of an approved body of men, desiring to establish a new settlement, the colonial General Court would appoint a committee to view the desired land and report on its fitness; an order for the grant would then issue, in varying areas, not far from the equivalent of six miles square. In the eighteenth century especially, it was common to reserve certain lots of the town for the support of schools and the ministry. This was the origin of that very important feature of Western society, federal land grants for schools and colleges.[74:1] The General Courts also made regulations regarding the common lands, the terms for admitting inhabitants, etc., and thus kept a firm hand upon the social structure of the new settlements as they formed on the frontier.
This practice, seen in its purity in the seventeenth century especially, was markedly different from the practices of other colonies in the settlement of their back lands. For during most of the period New England did not use her wild lands, or public domain, as a source of revenue by sale to individuals or to companies, with the reservation of quit-rents; nor attract individual settlers by "head rights," or fifty-acre grants, after the Virginia type; nor did the colonies of the New England group often make extensive grants to individuals, on the ground of special services, or because of influence with the government, or on the theory that the grantee would introduce settlers on his grant. They donated their lands to groups of men who became town proprietors for the purpose of establishing communities. These proprietors were supposed to hold the lands in trust, to be assigned to inhabitants under restraints to ensure the persistence of Puritan ideals.
During most of the seventeenth century the proprietors awarded lands to the new-comers in accordance with this theory. But as density of settlement increased, and lands grew scarce in the older towns, the proprietors began to assert their legal right to the unoccupied lands and to refuse to share them with inhabitants who were not of the body of proprietors. The distinction resulted in class conflicts in the towns, especially in the eighteenth century,[75:1] over the ownership and disposal of the common lands.
The new settlements, by a process of natural selection, would afford opportunity to the least contented, whether because of grievances, or ambitions, to establish themselves. This tended to produce a Western flavor in the towns on the frontier. But it was not until the original ideals of the land system began to change, that the opportunity to make new settlements for such reasons became common. As the economic and political ideal replaced the religious and social ideal, in the conditions under which new towns could be established, this became more possible.
Such a change was in progress in the latter part of the seventeenth century and during the eighteenth. In 1713, 1715, and 1727, Massachusetts determined upon a policy of locating towns in advance of settlement, to protect her boundary claims. In 1736 she laid out five towns near the New Hampshire border, and a year earlier opened four contiguous towns to connect her Housatonic and Connecticut Valley settlements.[76:1] Grants in non-adjacent regions were sometimes made to old towns, the proprietors of which sold them to those who wished to move.
The history of the town of Litchfield illustrates the increasing importance of the economic factor. At a time when Connecticut feared that Andros might dispose of the public lands to the disadvantage of the colony, the legislature granted a large part of Western Connecticut to the towns of Hartford and Windsor, pro forma, as a means of withdrawing the lands from his hands. But these towns refused to give up the lands after the danger had passed, and proceeded to sell part of them.[76:2] Riots occurred when the colonial authorities attempted to assert possession, and the matter was at length compromised in 1719 by allowing Litchfield to be settled in accordance with the town grants, while the colony reserved the larger part of northwestern Connecticut. In 1737 the colony disposed of its last unlocated lands by sale in lots. In 1762 Massachusetts sold a group of entire townships in the Berkshires to the highest bidders.[77:1]
But the most striking illustration of the tendency, is afforded by the "New Hampshire grants" of Governor Wentworth, who, chiefly in the years about 1760, made grants of a hundred and thirty towns west of the Connecticut, in what is now the State of Vermont, but which was then in dispute between New Hampshire and New York. These grants, while in form much like other town grants, were disposed of for cash, chiefly to speculators who hastened to sell their rights to the throngs of land-seekers who, after the peace, began to pour into the Green Mountain region.
It is needless to point out how this would affect the movement of Western settlement in respect to individualistic speculation in public lands; how it would open a career to the land jobbers, as well as to the natural leaders in the competitive movement for acquiring the best lands, for laying out town sites and building up new communities under "boom" conditions. The migratory tendency of New Englanders was increased by this gradual change in its land policy; the attachment to a locality was diminished. The later years showed increasing emphasis by New England upon individual success, greater respect for the self-made man who, in the midst of opportunities under competitive conditions, achieved superiority. The old dominance of town settlement, village moral police, and traditional class control gave way slowly. Settlement in communities and rooted Puritan habits and ideals had enduring influences in the regions settled by New Englanders; but it was in this Old West, in the years just before the Revolution, that individualism began to play an important rôle, along with the traditional habit of expanding in organized communities.
The opening of the Vermont towns revealed more fully than before, the capability of New Englanders to become democratic pioneers, under characteristic frontier conditions. Their economic life was simple and self-sufficing. They readily adopted lynch law (the use of the "birch seal" is familiar to readers of Vermont history) to protect their land titles in the troubled times when these "Green Mountain Boys" resisted New York's assertion of authority. They later became an independent Revolutionary state with frontier directness, and in very many respects their history in the Revolutionary epoch is similar to that of settlers in Kentucky and Tennessee, both in assertion of the right to independent self government and in a frontier separatism.[78:1] Vermont may be regarded as the culmination of the frontier movement which I have been describing in New England.
By this time two distinct New Englands existed--the one coastal, and dominated by commercial interests and the established congregational churches; the other a primitive agricultural area, democratic in principle, and with various sects increasingly indifferent to the fear of "innovation" which the dominant classes of the old communities felt. Already speculative land companies had begun New England settlements in the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania, as well as on the lower Mississippi; and New England missions among the Indians, such as that at Stockbridge, were beginning the noteworthy religious and educational expansion of the section to the west.
That this movement of expansion had been chiefly from south to north, along the river valleys, should not conceal from us the fact that it was in essential characteristics a Western movement, especially in the social traits that were developing. Even the men who lived in the long line of settlements on the Maine coast, under frontier conditions, and remote from the older centers of New England, developed traits and a democratic spirit that relate them closely to the Westerners, in spite of the fact that Maine is "down east" by preëminence.[79:1]
The frontier of the Middle region in this period of the formation of the Old West, was divided into two parts, which happen to coincide with the colonies of New York and Pennsylvania. In the latter colony the trend of settlement was into the Great Valley, and so on to the Southern uplands; while the advance of settlement in New York was like that of New England, chiefly northward, following the line of Hudson River.
The Hudson and the Mohawk constituted the area of the Old West in this part of the eighteenth century. With them were associated the Wallkill, tributary to the Hudson, and Cherry Valley near the Mohawk, along the sources of the Susquehanna. The Berkshires walled the Hudson in to the east; the Adirondacks and the Catskills to the west. Where the Mohawk Valley penetrated between the mountainous areas, the Iroquois Indians were too formidable for advance on such a slender line. Nothing but dense settlement along the narrow strip of the Hudson, if even that, could have furnished the necessary momentum for overcoming the Indian barrier; and this pressure was lacking, for the population was comparatively sparse in contrast with the task to be performed. What most needs discussion in the case of New York, therefore, is not the history of expansion as in other sections, but the absence of expansive power.
The fur-trade had led the way up the Hudson, and made beginnings of settlements at strategic points near the confluence of the Mohawk. But the fur-trader was not followed by a tide of pioneers. One of the most important factors in restraining density of population in New York, in retarding the settlement of its frontier, and in determining the conditions there, was the land system of that colony.
From the time of the patroon grants along the lower Hudson, great estates had been the common form of land tenure. Rensselaerswyck reached at one time over seven hundred thousand acres. These great patroon estates were confirmed by the English governors, who in their turn followed a similar policy. By 1732 two and one-half million acres were engrossed in manorial grants.[80:1] In 1764, Governor Colden wrote[80:2] that three of the extravagant grants contain,
as the proprietors claim, above a million acres each, several others above 200,000. * * * Although these grants contain a great part of the province, they are made in trifling acknowledgements. The far greater part of them still remain uncultivated, without any benefit to the community, and are likewise a discouragement to the settling and improving the lands in the neighborhood of them, for from the uncertainty of their boundaries, the patentees of these great tracts are daily enlarging their pretensions, and by tedious and most expensive law suits, distress and ruin poor families who have taken out grants near them.
He adds that "the proprietors of the great tracts are not only freed from the quit-rents, which the other landholders in the province pay, but by their influence in the assembly are freed from every other public tax on their lands."
In 1769 it was estimated that at least five-sixths of the inhabitants of Westchester County lived within the bounds of the great manors there.[81:1] In Albany County the Livingston manor spread over seven modern townships, and the great Van Rensselaer manor stretched twenty-four by twenty-eight miles along the Hudson; while still farther, on the Mohawk, were the vast possessions of Sir William Johnson.[81:2]
It was not simply that the grants were extensive, but that the policy of the proprietors favored the leasing rather than the sale of the lands--frequently also of the stock, and taking payment in shares. It followed that settlers preferred to go to frontiers where a more liberal land policy prevailed. At one time it seemed possible that the tide of German settlement, which finally sought Pennsylvania and the up-country of the South, might flow into New York. In 1710, Governor Hunter purchased a tract in Livingston's manor and located nearly fifteen hundred Palatines on it to produce naval stores.[82:1] But the attempt soon failed; the Germans applied to the Indians on Schoharie Creek, a branch of the Mohawk, for a grant of land and migrated there, only to find that the governor had already granted the land. Again were the villages broken up, some remaining and some moving farther up the Mohawk, where they and accessions to their number established the frontier settlements about Palatine Bridge, in the region where, in the Revolution, Herkimer led these German frontiersmen to stem the British attack in the battle of Oriskany. They constituted the most effective military defense of Mohawk Valley. Still another portion took their way across to the waters of the Susquehanna, and at Tulpehockon Creek began an important center of German settlement in the Great Valley of Pennsylvania.[82:2]
The most important aspect of the history of the movement into the frontier of New York at this period, therefore, was the evidence which it afforded that in the competition for settlement between colonies possessing a vast area of vacant land, those which imposed feudal tenures and undemocratic restraints, and which exploited settlers, were certain to lose.
The manorial practice gave a bad name to New York as a region for settlement, which not even the actual opportunities in certain parts of the colony could counteract. The diplomacy of New York governors during this period of the Old West, in securing a protectorate over the Six Nations and a consequent claim to their territory, and in holding them aloof from France, constituted the most effective contribution of that colony to the movement of American expansion. When lands of these tribes were obtained after Sullivan's expedition in the Revolution (in which New England soldiers played a prominent part), it was by the New England inundation into this interior that they were colonized. And it was under conditions like those prevailing in the later years of the expansion of settlements in New England itself, that this settlement of interior and western New York was effected.
The result was, that New York became divided into two distinct peoples: the dwellers along Hudson Valley, and the Yankee pioneers of the interior. But the settlement of central and western New York, like the settlement of Vermont, is a story that belongs to the era in which the trans-Alleghany West was occupied.
We can best consider the settlement of the share of the Old West which is located in Pennsylvania as a part of the migration which occupied the Southern Uplands, and before entering upon this it will be advantageous to survey that part of the movement toward the interior which proceeded westward from the coast. First let us observe the conditions at the eastern edge of these uplands, along the fall line in Virginia, in the latter part of the seventeenth century, in order that the process and the significance of the movement may be better understood.
About the time of Bacon's Rebellion, in Virginia, strenuous efforts were made to protect the frontier line which ran along the falls of the river, against the attacks of Indians. This "fall line," as the geographers call it, marking the head of navigation, and thus the boundary of the maritime or lowland South, runs from the site of Washington, through Richmond, and on to Raleigh, North Carolina, and Columbia, South Carolina. Virginia having earliest advanced thus far to the interior, found it necessary in the closing years of the seventeenth century to draw a military frontier along this line. As early as 1675 a statute was enacted,[84:1] providing that paid troops of five hundred men should be drawn from the midland and most secure parts of the country and placed on the "heads of the rivers" and other places fronting upon the Indians. What was meant by the "heads of the rivers," is shown by the fact that several of these forts were located either at the falls of the rivers or just above tidewater, as follows: one on the lower Potomac in Stafford County; one near the falls of the Rappahannock; one on the Mattapony; one on the Pamunky; one at the falls of the James (near the site of Richmond); one near the falls of the Appomattox, and others on the Blackwater, the Nansemond, and the Accomac peninsula, all in the eastern part of Virginia.
Again, in 1679, similar provision was made,[84:2] and an especially interesting act was passed, making quasi manorial grants to Major Lawrence Smith and Captain William Byrd, "to seate certain lands at the head [falls] of Rappahannock and James river" respectively. This scheme failed for lack of approval by the authorities in England.[84:3] But Byrd at the falls of the James near the present site of Richmond, Robert Beverley on the Rappahannock, and other frontier commanders on the York and Potomac, continued to undertake colonial defense. The system of mounted rangers was established in 1691, by which a lieutenant, eleven soldiers, and two Indians at the "heads" or falls of each great river were to scout for enemy,[85:1] and the Indian boundary line was strictly defined.
By the opening years of the eighteenth century (1701), the assembly of Virginia had reached the conclusion that settlement would be the best means of protecting the frontiers, and that the best way of "settling in co-habitations upon the said land frontiers within this government will be by encouragements to induce societies of men to undertake the same."[85:2] It was declared to be inexpedient to have less than twenty fighting men in each "society," and provision was made for a land grant to be given to these societies (or towns) not less than 10,000 nor more than 30,000 acres upon any of the frontiers, to be held in common by the society. The power of ordering and managing these lands, and the settling and planting of them, was to remain in the society. Virginia was to pay the cost of survey, also quit-rents for the first twenty years for the two-hundred-acre tract as the site of the "co-habitation." Within this two hundred acres each member was to have a half-acre lot for living upon, and a right to two hundred acres next adjacent, until the thirty thousand acres were taken up. The members of the society were exempt from taxes for twenty years, and from the requirements of military duty except such as they imposed upon themselves. The resemblance to the New England town is obvious.
"Provided alwayes," ran the quaint statute, "and it is the true intent and meaning of this act that for every five hundred acres of land to be granted in pursuance of this act there shall be and shall be continually kept upon the said land one christian man between sixteen and sixty years of age perfect of limb, able and fitt for service who shall alsoe be continually provided with a well fixed musquett or fuzee, a good pistoll, sharp simeter, tomahawk and five pounds of good clean pistoll powder and twenty pounds of sizable leaden bulletts or swan or goose shott to be kept within the fort directed by this act besides the powder and shott for his necessary or useful shooting at game. Provided also that the said warlike christian man shall have his dwelling and continual abode within the space of two hundred acres of land to be laid out in a geometricall square or as near that figure as conveniency will admit," etc. Within two years the society was required to cause a half acre in the middle of the "co-habitation" to be palisaded "with good sound pallisadoes at least thirteen foot long and six inches diameter in the middle of the length thereof, and set double and at least three foot within the ground."
Such in 1701 was the idea of the Virginia tidewater assembly of a frontiersman, and of the frontier towns by which the Old Dominion should spread her population into the upland South. But the "warlike Christian man" who actually came to furnish the firing line for Virginia, was destined to be the Scotch-Irishman and the German with long rifle in place of "fuzee" and "simeter," and altogether too restless to have his continual abode within the space of two hundred acres. Nevertheless there are points of resemblance between this idea of societies settled about a fortified town and the later "stations" of Kentucky.[87:1]
By the beginning of the eighteenth century the engrossing of the lands of lowland Virginia had progressed so far, the practice of holding large tracts of wasteland for reserves in the great plantations had become so common, that the authorities of Virginia reported to the home government that the best lands were all taken up,[87:2] and settlers were passing into North Carolina seeking cheap lands near navigable rivers. Attention was directed also to the Piedmont portions of Virginia, for by this time the Indians were conquered in this region. It was now possible to acquire land by purchase[87:3] at five shillings sterling for fifty acres, as well as by head-rights for importation or settlement, and land speculation soon turned to the new area.
Already the Piedmont had been somewhat explored.[87:4] Even by the middle of the seventeenth century, fur-traders had followed the trail southwest from the James more than four hundred miles to the Catawbas and later to the Cherokees. Col. William Byrd had, as we have seen, not only been absorbing good lands in the lowlands, and defending his post at the falls of the James, like a Count of the Border, but he also engaged in this fur-trade and sent his pack trains along this trail through the Piedmont of the Carolinas,[87:5] and took note of the rich savannas of that region. Charleston traders engaged in rivalry for this trade.
It was not long before cattle raisers from the older settlements, learning from the traders of the fertile plains and peavine pastures of this land, followed the fur-traders and erected scattered "cow-pens" or ranches beyond the line of plantations in the Piedmont. Even at the close of the seventeenth century, herds of wild horses and cattle ranged at the outskirts of the Virginia settlements, and were hunted by the planters, driven into pens, and branded somewhat after the manner of the later ranching on the Great Plains.[88:1] Now the cow-drovers and the cow-pens[88:2] began to enter the uplands. The Indians had by this time been reduced to submission in most of the Virginia Piedmont--as Governor Spotswood[88:3] reported in 1712, living "quietly on our frontiers, trafficking with the Inhabitants."
After the defeat of the Tuscaroras and Yemassees about this time in the Carolinas, similar opportunities for expansion existed there. The cattle drovers sometimes took their herds from range to range; sometimes they were gathered permanently near the pens, finding the range sufficient throughout the year. They were driven to Charleston, or later sometimes even to Philadelphia and Baltimore markets. By the middle of the century, disease worked havoc with them in South Carolina[89:1] and destroyed seven-eighths of those in North Carolina; Virginia made regulations governing the driving of cattle through her frontier counties to avoid the disease, just as in our own time the northern cattlemen attempted to protect their herds against the Texas fever.
Thus cattle raisers from the coast followed the fur-traders toward the uplands, and already pioneer farmers were straggling into the same region, soon to be outnumbered by the tide of settlement that flowed into the region from Pennsylvania.
The descriptions of the uplands by contemporaneous writers are in glowing terms. Makemie, in his "Plain and Friendly Persuasion" (1705), declared "The best, richest, and most healthy part of your Country is yet to be inhabited, above the falls of every River, to the Mountains." Jones, in his "Present State of Virginia" (1724), comments on the convenience of tidewater transportation, etc., but declares that section "not nearly so healthy as the uplands and Barrens which serve for Ranges for Stock," although he speaks less enthusiastically of the savannas and marshes which lay in the midst of the forest areas. In fact, the Piedmont was by no means the unbroken forest that might have been imagined, for in addition to natural meadows, the Indians had burned over large tracts.[89:2] It was a rare combination of woodland and pasture, with clear running streams and mild climate.[89:3]
The occupation of the Virginia Piedmont received a special impetus from the interest which Governor Spotswood took in the frontier. In 1710 he proposed a plan for intercepting the French in their occupation of the interior, by inducing Virginia settlement to proceed along one side of James River only, until this column of advancing pioneers should strike the attenuated line of French posts in the center. In the same year he sent a body of horsemen to the top of the Blue Ridge, where they could overlook the Valley of Virginia.[90:1] By 1714 he became active as a colonizer himself. Thirty miles above the falls of the Rappahannock, on the Rapidan at Germanna,[90:2] he settled a little village of German redemptioners (who in return for having the passage paid agreed to serve without wages for a term of years), to engage in his iron works, also to act as rangers on the frontier. From here, in 1716, with two companies of rangers and four Indians, Governor Spotswood and a band of Virginia gentlemen made a summer picnic excursion of two weeks across the Blue Ridge into the Shenandoah Valley. Sic juvat transcendere montes was the motto of these Knights of the Golden Horse Shoe, as the governor dubbed them. But they were not the "warlike christian men" destined to occupy the frontier.
Spotswood's interest in the advance along the Rappahannock, probably accounts for the fact that in 1720 Spotsylvania and Brunswick were organized as frontier counties of Virginia.[91:1] Five hundred dollars were contributed by the colony to the church, and a thousand dollars for arms and ammunition for the settlers in these counties. The fears of the French and Indians beyond the high mountains, were alleged as reasons for this advance. To attract settlers to these new counties, they were (1723) exempt from purchasing the lands under the system of head rights, and from payment of quit-rents for seven years after 1721. The free grants so obtained were not to exceed a thousand acres. This was soon extended to six thousand acres, but with provision requiring the settlement of a certain number of families upon the grant within a certain time. In 1729 Spotswood was ordered by the Council to produce "rights" and pay the quit-rents for the 59,786 acres which he claimed in this county.
Other similar actions by the Council show that large holdings were developing there, also that the difficulty of establishing a frontier democracy in contact with the area of expanding plantations, was very real.[91:2] By the time of the occupation of the Shenandoah Valley, therefore, the custom was established in this part of Virginia,[91:3] of making grants of a thousand acres for each family settled. Speculative planters, influential with the Governor and Council secured grants of many thousand acres, conditioned upon seating a certain number of families, and satisfying the requirements of planting. Thus what had originally been intended as direct grants to the actual settler, frequently became grants to great planters like Beverley, who promoted the coming of Scotch-Irish and German settlers, or took advantage of the natural drift into the Valley, to sell lands in their grants, as a rule, reserving quit-rents. The liberal grants per family enabled these speculative planters, while satisfying the terms of settlement, to hold large portions of the grant for themselves. Under the lax requirements, and probably still more lax enforcement, of the provisions for actual cultivation or cattle-raising,[92:1] it was not difficult to hold such wild land. These conditions rendered possible the extension of a measure of aristocratic planter life in the course of time to the Piedmont and Valley lands of Virginia. It must be added, however, that some of the newcomers, both Germans and Scotch-Irish, like the Van Meters, Stover, and Lewis, also showed an ability to act as promoters in locating settlers and securing grants to themselves.
In the northern part of the Shenandoah Valley, lay part of the estate of Lord Fairfax, some six million acres in extent, which came to the family by dower from the old Culpeper and Arlington grant of Northern Neck. In 1748, the youthful Washington was surveying this estate along the upper waters of the Potomac, finding a bed under the stars and learning the life of the frontier.
Lord Fairfax established his own Greenway manor,[92:2] and divided his domain into other manors, giving ninety-nine-year leases to settlers already on the ground at twenty shillings annually per hundred acres; while of the new-comers he exacted two shillings annual quit-rent for this amount of land in fee simple. Litigation kept land titles uncertain here, for many years. Similarly, Beverley's manor, about Staunton, represented a grant of 118,000 acres to Beverley and his associates on condition of placing the proper number of families on the tract.[93:1] Thus speculative planters on this frontier shared in the movement of occupation and made an aristocratic element in the up-country; but the increasing proportion of Scotch-Irish immigrants, as well as German settlers, together with the contrast in natural conditions, made the interior a different Virginia from that of the tidewater.
As settlement ascended the Rappahannock, and emigrants began to enter the Valley from the north, so, contemporaneously, settlement ascended the James above the falls, succeeding to the posts of the fur-traders.[93:2] Goochland County was set off in 1728, and the growth of population led, as early as 1729, to proposals for establishing a city (Richmond) at the falls. Along the upper James, as on the Rappahannock, speculative planters bought headrights and located settlers and tenants to hold their grants.[93:3] Into this region came natives of Virginia, emigrants from the British isles, and scattered representatives of other lands, some of them coming up the James, others up the York, and still others arriving with the southward-moving current along both sides of the Blue Ridge.
Before 1730 few settlers lived above the mouth of the Rivanna. In 1732 Peter Jefferson patented a thousand acres at the eastern opening of its mountain gap, and here, under frontier conditions, Thomas Jefferson was born in 1743 near his later estate of Monticello. About him were pioneer farmers, as well as foresighted engrossers of the land. In the main his country was that of a democratic frontier people--Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, Quakers, Baptists, and other sects,[94:1] out of sympathy with the established church and the landed gentry of the lowlands. This society in which he was born, was to find in Jefferson a powerful exponent of its ideals.[94:2] Patrick Henry was born in 1736 above the falls, not far from Richmond, and he also was a mouthpiece of interior Virginia in the Revolutionary era. In short, a society was already forming in the Virginia Piedmont which was composed of many sects, of independent yeomen as well as their great planter leaders--a society naturally expansive, seeing its opportunity to deal in unoccupied lands along the frontier which continually moved toward the West, and in this era of the eighteenth century dominated by the democratic ideals of pioneers rather than by the aristocratic tendencies of slaveholding planters. As there were two New Englands, so there were by this time two Virginias, and the uplands belonged with the Old West.
The advance across the fall line from the coast was, in North Carolina, much slower than in Virginia. After the Tuscarora War (1712-13) an extensive region west from Pamlico Sound was opened (1724). The region to the north, about the Roanoke, had before this begun to receive frontier settlers, largely from Virginia. Their traits are interestingly portrayed in Byrd's "Dividing Line." By 1728 the farthest inhabitants along the Virginia boundary were frontiersmen about Great Creek, a branch of the Roanoke.[94:3] The North Carolina commissioners desired to stop running the line after going a hundred and seventy miles, on the plea that they were already fifty miles beyond the outermost inhabitant, and there would be no need for an age or two to carry the line farther; but the Virginia surveyors pointed out that already speculators were taking up the land. A line from Weldon to Fayetteville would roughly mark the western boundary of North Carolina's sparse population of forty thousand souls.[95:1]
The slower advance is explained, partly because of the later settlement of the Carolinas, partly because the Indians continued to be troublesome on the flanks of the advancing population, as seen in the Tuscarora and Yemassee wars, and partly because the pine barrens running parallel with the fall line made a zone of infertile land not attractive to settlers. The North Carolina low country, indeed, had from the end of the seventeenth century been a kind of southern frontier for overflow from Virginia; and in many ways was assimilated to the type of the up-country in its turbulent democracy, its variety of sects and peoples, and its primitive conditions. But under the lax management of the public lands, the use of "blank patents" and other evasions made possible the development of large landholding, side by side with headrights to settlers. Here, as in Virginia, a great proprietary grant extended across the colony--Lord Granville's proprietary was a zone embracing the northern half of North Carolina. Within the area, sales and quit-rents were administered by the agents of the owner, with the result that uncertainty and disorder of an agrarian nature extended down to the Revolution. There were likewise great speculative holdings, conditioned on seating a certain proportion of settlers, into which the frontiersmen were drifting.[95:2] But this system also made it possible for agents of later migrating congregations to establish colonies like that of the Moravians at Wachovia.[95:3] Thus, by the time settlers came into the uplands from the north, a land system existed similar to that of Virginia. A common holding was a square mile (640 acres), but in practice this did not prevent the accumulation of great estates.[96:1] Whereas Virginia's Piedmont area was to a large extent entered by extensions from the coast, that of North Carolina remained almost untouched by 1730.[96:2]
The same is true of South Carolina. By 1730, settlement had progressed hardly eighty miles from the coast, even in the settled area of the lowlands. The tendency to engross the lowlands for large plantations was clear, here as elsewhere.[96:3] The surveyor-general reports in 1732 that not as many as a thousand acres within a hundred miles of Charleston, or within twenty miles of a river or navigable creek, were unpossessed. In 1729 the crown ordered eleven townships of twenty thousand acres each to be laid out in rectangles, divided into fifty acres for each actual settler under a quit-rent of four shillings a year for every hundred acres, or proportionally, to be paid after the first ten years.[96:4] By 1732 these townships, designed to attract foreign Protestants, were laid out on the great rivers of the colony. As they were located in the middle region, east of the fall line, among pine barrens, or in malarial lands in the southern corner of the colony, they all proved abortive as towns, except Orangeburg[96:5] on the North Edisto, where German redemptioners made a settlement. The Scotch-Irish Presbyterians who came to Williamsburg, on Black River, suffered hardships; as did the Swiss who, under the visionary leadership of Purry, settled in the deadly climate of Purrysburg, on the lower Savannah. To Welsh colonists from Pennsylvania there was made a grant--known as the "Welsh tract," embracing over 173,000 acres on the Great Pedee (Marion County)[97:1] under headrights of fifty acres, also a bounty in provisions, tools, and livestock.
These attempts, east of the fall line, are interesting as showing the colonial policy of marking out towns (which were to be politically-organized parishes, with representation in the legislature), and attracting foreigners thereto, prior to the coming of settlers from the North.
The settlement of Georgia, in 1732, completed the southern line of colonization toward the Piedmont. Among the objects of the colony, as specified in the charters, were the relief of the poor and the protection of the frontiers. To guard against the tendency to engross the lands in great estates, already so clearly revealed in the older colonies, the Georgia trustees provided that the grants of fifty acres should not be alienated or divided, but should pass to the male heirs and revert to the trustees in case heirs were lacking. No grant greater than five hundred acres was permitted, and even this was made conditionally upon the holder settling ten colonists. However, under local conditions and the competition and example of neighboring colonies, this attempt to restrict land tenure in the interest of democracy broke down by 1750, and Georgia's land system became not unlike that of the other Southern colonies.[97:2]
In 1734, Salzburgers had been located above Savannah, and within seven years some twelve hundred German Protestants were dwelling on the Georgia frontier; while a settlement of Scotch Highlanders at Darien, near the mouth of the Altamaha, protected the southern frontier. At Augusta, an Indian trading fort (1735), whence the dealers in peltry visited the Cherokee, completed the familiar picture of frontier advance.[98:1]
We have now hastily surveyed the movement of the frontier of settlement westward from the lowlands, in the later years of the seventeenth and early part of the eighteenth century. There is much that is common in the whole line of advance. The original settlers engross the desirable lands of the older area. Indented servants and new-comers pass to the frontier seeking a place to locate their headrights, or plant new towns. Adventurous and speculative wealthy planters acquire large holdings in the new areas, and bring over settlers to satisfy the requirements of seating and cultivating their extensive grants, thus building up a yeomanry of small landholders side by side with the holders of large estates. The most far-sighted of the new-comers follow the example of the planters, and petition for increasing extensive grants. Meanwhile, pioneers like Abraham Wood, himself once an indented servant, and gentlemen like Col. William Byrd--prosecuting the Indian trade from their posts at the "heads" of the rivers, and combining frontier protection, exploring, and surveying--make known the more distant fertile soils of the Piedmont. Already in the first part of the eighteenth century, the frontier population tended to be a rude democracy, with a large representation of Scotch-Irish, Germans, Welsh, and Huguenot French settlers, holding religious faiths unlike that of the followers of the established church in the lowlands. The movement of slaves into the region was unimportant, but not unknown.
The Virginia Valley was practically unsettled in 1730, as was much of Virginia's Piedmont area and all the Piedmont area of the Carolinas. The significance of the movement of settlers from the North into this vacant Valley and Piedmont, behind the area occupied by expansion from the coast is, that it was geographically separated from the westward movement from the coast, and that it was sufficient in volume to recruit the democratic forces and postpone for a long time the process of social assimilation to the type of the lowlands.
As has been pointed out, especially in the Carolinas a belt of pine barrens, roughly eighty miles in breadth, ran parallel with the fall line and thus discouraged western advance across this belt, even before the head of navigation was reached. In Virginia, the Blue Ridge made an almost equally effective barrier, walling off the Shenandoah Valley from the westward advance. At the same time this valley was but a continuation of the Great Valley, that ran along the eastern edge of the Alleghanies in southeastern Pennsylvania, and included in its mountain trough the Cumberland and Hagerstown valleys. In short, a broad limestone band of fertile soil was stretched within mountain walls, southerly from Pennsylvania to southwestern Virginia; and here the watergaps opened the way to descend to the Carolina Piedmont. This whole area, a kind of peninsula thrust down from Pennsylvania, was rendered comparatively inaccessible to the westward movement from the lowlands, and was equally accessible to the population which was entering Pennsylvania.[99:1]
Thus it happened that from about 1730 to 1760 a generation of settlers poured along this mountain trough into the southern uplands, or Piedmont, creating a new continuous social and economic area, which cut across the artificial colonial boundary lines, disarranged the regular extension of local government from the coast westward, and built up a new Pennsylvania in contrast with the old Quaker colonies, and a new South in contrast with the tidewater South. This New South composed the southern half of the Old West.
From its beginning, Pennsylvania was advertised as a home for dissenting sects seeking freedom in the wilderness. But it was not until the exodus of German redemptioners,[100:1] from about 1717, that the Palatinate and neighboring areas sent the great tide of Germans which by the time of the Revolution made them nearly a third of the total population of Pennsylvania. It has been carefully estimated that in 1775 over 200,000 Germans lived in the thirteen colonies, chiefly along the frontier zone of the Old West. Of these, a hundred thousand had their home in Pennsylvania, mainly in the Great Valley, in the region which is still so notably the abode of the "Pennsylvania Dutch."[100:2]
Space does not permit us to describe this movement of colonization.[100:3] The entrance to the fertile limestone soils of the Great Valley of Pennsylvania was easy, in view of the low elevation of the South Mountain ridge, and the watergaps thereto. The continuation along the similar valley to the south, in Maryland and Virginia, was a natural one, especially as the increasing tide of emigrants raised the price of lands.[100:4] In 1719 the proprietor's price for Pennsylvania lands was ten pounds per hundred acres, and two shillings quit-rents. In 1732 this became fifteen and one-half pounds, with a quit-rent of a half penny per acre.[101:1] During the period 1718 to 1732, when the Germans were coming in great numbers, the management of the lands fell into confusion, and many seated themselves as squatters, without title.[101:2] This was a fortunate possibility for the poor redemptioners, who had sold their service for a term of years in order to secure their transportation to America.
By 1726 it was estimated that there were 100,000 squatters;[101:3] and of the 670,000 acres occupied between 1732 and 1740, it is estimated that 400,000 acres were settled without grants.[101:4] Nevertheless these must ultimately be paid for, with interest, and the concession of the right of preëmption to squatters made this easier. But it was not until 1755 that the governor offered land free from purchase, and this was to be taken only west of the Alleghanies.[101:5]
Although the credit system relieved the difficulty in Pennsylvania, the lands of that colony were in competition with the Maryland lands, offered between 1717 and 1738 at forty shillings sterling per hundred acres, which in 1738 was raised to five pounds sterling.[101:6] At the same time, in the Virginia Valley, as will be recalled, free grants were being made of a thousand acres per family. Although large tracts of the Shenandoah Valley had been granted to speculators like Beverley, Borden, and the Carters, as well as to Lord Fairfax, the owners sold six or seven pounds cheaper per hundred acres than did the Pennsylvania land office.[102:1] Between 1726 and 1734, therefore, the Germans began to enter this valley,[102:2] and before long they extended their settlements into the Piedmont of the Carolinas,[102:3] being recruited in South Carolina by emigrants coming by way of Charleston--especially after Governor Glenn's purchase from the Cherokee in 1755, of the extreme western portion of the colony. Between 1750 and the Revolution, these settlers in the Carolinas greatly increased in numbers.
Thus a zone of almost continuous German settlements had been established, running from the head of the Mohawk in New York to the Savannah in Georgia. They had found the best soils, and they knew how to till them intensively and thriftily, as attested by their large, well-filled barns, good stock, and big canvas-covered Conestoga wagons. They preferred to dwell in groups, often of the same religious denomination--Lutherans, Reformed, Moravians, Mennonites, and many lesser sects. The diaries of Moravian missionaries from Pennsylvania, who visited them, show how the parent congregations kept in touch with their colonies[102:4] and how intimate, in general, was the bond of connection between this whole German frontier zone and that of Pennsylvania.
Side by side with this German occupation of Valley and Piedmont, went the migration of the Scotch-Irish.[103:1] These lowland Scots had been planted in Ulster early in the seventeenth century. Followers of John Knox, they had the contentious individualism and revolutionary temper that seem natural to Scotch Presbyterianism. They were brought up on the Old Testament, and in the doctrine of government by covenant or compact. In Ireland their fighting qualities had been revealed in the siege of Londonderry, where their stubborn resistance balked the hopes of James II. However, religious and political disabilities were imposed upon these Ulstermen, which made them discontented, and hard times contributed to detach them from their homes. Their movement to America was contemporaneous with the heavy German migration. By the Revolution, it is believed that a third of the population of Pennsylvania was Scotch-Irish; and it has been estimated, probably too liberally, that a half million came to the United States between 1730 and 1770.[103:2] Especially after the Rebellion of 1745, large numbers of Highlanders came to increase the Scotch blood in the nation.[103:3] Some of the Scotch-Irish went to New England.[103:4] Given the cold shoulder by congregational Puritans, they passed to unsettled lands about Worcester, to the frontier in the Berkshires, and in southern New Hampshire at Londonderry--whence came John Stark, a frontier leader in the French and Indian War, and the hero of Bennington in the Revolution, as well as the ancestors of Horace Greeley and S. P. Chase. In New York, a Scotch-Irish settlement was planted on the frontier at Cherry Valley.[104:1] Scotch Highlanders came to the Mohawk,[104:2] where they followed Sir William Johnson and became Tory raiders in the Revolution.
But it was in Pennsylvania that the center of Scotch-Irish power lay. "These bold and indigent strangers, saying as their excuse when challenged for titles that we had solicited for colonists and they had come accordingly,"[104:3] and asserting that "it was against the laws of God and nature that so much land should be idle while so many christians wanted it to work on and to raise their bread," squatted on the vacant lands, especially in the region disputed between Pennsylvania and Maryland, and remained in spite of efforts to drive them off. Finding the Great Valley in the hands of the Germans, they planted their own outposts along the line of the Indian trading path from Lancaster to Bedford; they occupied Cumberland Valley, and before 1760 pressed up the Juniata somewhat beyond the narrows, spreading out along its tributaries, and by 1768 had to be warned off from the Redstone country to avoid Indian trouble. By the time of the Revolution, their settlements made Pittsburgh a center from which was to come a new era in Pennsylvania history. It was the Scotch-Irish and German fur-traders[104:4] whose pack trains pioneered into the Ohio Valley in the days before the French and Indian wars. The messengers between civilization and savagery were such men,[105:1] as the Irish Croghan, and the Germans Conrad Weiser and Christian Post.
Like the Germans, the Scotch-Irish passed into the Shenandoah Valley,[105:2] and on to the uplands of the South. In 1738 a delegation of the Philadelphia Presbyterian synod was sent to the Virginia governor and received assurances of security of religious freedom; the same policy was followed by the Carolinas. By 1760 a zone of Scotch-Irish Presbyterian churches extended from the frontiers of New England to the frontiers of South Carolina. This zone combined in part with the German zone, but in general Scotch-Irishmen tended to follow the valleys farther toward the mountains, to be the outer edge of this frontier. Along with this combined frontier stream were English, Welsh and Irish Quakers, and French Huguenots.[105:3]
Among this moving mass, as it passed along the Valley into the Piedmont, in the middle of the eighteenth century, were Daniel Boone, John Sevier, James Robertson, and the ancestors of John C. Calhoun, Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson, James K. Polk, Sam Houston, and Davy Crockett, while the father of Andrew Jackson came to the Carolina Piedmont at the same time from the coast. Recalling that Thomas Jefferson's home was on the frontier, at the edge of the Blue Ridge, we perceive that these names represent the militant expansive movement in American life. They foretell the settlement across the Alleghanies in Kentucky and Tennessee; the Louisiana Purchase, and Lewis and Clark's transcontinental exploration; the conquest of the Gulf Plains in the War of 1812-15; the annexation of Texas; the acquisition of California and the Spanish Southwest. They represent, too, frontier democracy in its two aspects personified in Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln. It was a democracy responsive to leadership, susceptible to waves of emotion, of a "high religeous voltage"--quick and direct in action.
The volume of this Northern movement into the Southern uplands is illustrated by the statement of Governor Tryon, of North Carolina, that in the summer and winter of 1765 more than a thousand immigrant wagons passed through Salisbury, in that colony.[106:1] Coming by families, or groups of families or congregations, they often drove their herds with them. Whereas in 1746 scarce a hundred fighting men were found in Orange and the western counties of North Carolina, there were in 1753 fully three thousand, in addition to over a thousand Scotch in the Cumberland; and they covered the province more or less thickly, from Hillsboro and Fayetteville to the mountains.[106:2] Bassett remarks that the Presbyterians received their first ministers from the synod of New York and Pennsylvania, and later on sent their ministerial students to Princeton College. "Indeed it is likely that the inhabitants of this region knew more about Philadelphia at that time than about Newbern or Edenton."[106:3]
We are now in a position to note briefly, in conclusion, some of the results of the occupation of this new frontier during the first half of the eighteenth century--some of the consequences of this formation of the Old West.
I. A fighting frontier had been created all along the line from New England to Georgia, which bore the brunt of French and Indian attacks and gave indispensable service during the Revolution. The significance of this fact could only be developed by an extended survey of the scattered border warfare of this era. We should have to see Rogers leading his New England Rangers, and Washington defending interior Virginia with his frontiersmen in their hunting shirts, in the French and Indian War. When all of the campaigns about the region of Canada, Lake Champlain, and the Hudson, central New York (Oriskany, Cherry Valley, Sullivan's expedition against the Iroquois), Wyoming Valley, western Pennsylvania, the Virginia Valley, and the back country of the South are considered as a whole from this point of view, the meaning of the Old West will become more apparent.
II. A new society had been established, differing in essentials from the colonial society of the coast. It was a democratic self-sufficing, primitive agricultural society, in which individualism was more pronounced than the community life of the lowlands. The indented servant and the slave were not a normal part of its labor system. It was engaged in grain and cattle raising, not in producing staples, and it found a partial means of supplying its scarcity of specie by the peltries which it shipped to the coast. But the hunter folk were already pushing farther on; the cow-pens and the range were giving place to the small farm, as in our own day they have done in the cattle country. It was a region of hard work and poverty, not of wealth and leisure. Schools and churches were secured under serious difficulty,[107:1] if at all; but in spite of the natural tendencies of a frontier life, a large portion of the interior showed a distinctly religious atmosphere.
III. The Old West began the movement of internal trade which developed home markets and diminished that colonial dependence on Europe in industrial matters shown by the maritime and staple-raising sections. Not only did Boston and other New England towns increase as trading centers when the back country settled up, but an even more significant interchange occurred along the Valley and Piedmont. The German farmers of the Great Valley brought their woven linen, knitted stockings, firkins of butter, dried apples, grain, etc., to Philadelphia and especially to Baltimore, which was laid out in 1730. To this city also came trade from the Shenandoah Valley, and even from the Piedmont came peltry trains and droves of cattle and hogs to the same market.[108:1] The increase of settlement on the upper James resulted in the establishment of the city of Richmond at the falls of the river in 1737. Already the tobacco-planting aristocracy of the lowlands were finding rivals in the grain-raising area of interior Virginia and Maryland. Charleston prospered as the up-country of the Carolinas grew. Writing in the middle of the eighteenth century, Governor Glenn, of South Carolina, explained the apparent diminution of the colony's shipping thus:[108:2]
Our trade with New York and Philadelphia was of this sort, draining us of all the little money and bills that we could gather from other places, for their bread, flour, beer, hams, bacon, and other things of their produce, all which, except beer, our new townships begin to supply us with which are settled with very industrious and consequently thriving Germans.
It was not long before this interior trade produced those rivalries for commercial ascendancy, between the coastwise cities, which still continue. The problem of internal improvements became a pressing one, and the statutes show increasing provision for roads, ferries, bridges, river improvements, etc.[109:1] The basis was being laid for a national economy, and at the same time a new source for foreign export was created.
IV. The Old West raised the issues of nativism and a lower standard of comfort. In New England, Scotch-Irish Presbyterians had been frowned upon and pushed away by the Puritan townsmen.[109:2] In Pennsylvania, the coming of the Germans and the Scotch-Irish in such numbers caused grave anxiety. Indeed, a bill was passed to limit the importation of the Palatines, but it was vetoed.[109:3] Such astute observers as Franklin feared in 1753 that Pennsylvania would be unable to preserve its language and that even its government would become precarious.[109:4] "I remember," he declares, "when they modestly declined intermeddling in our elections, but now they come in droves and carry all before them, except in one or two counties;" and he lamented that the English could not remove their prejudices by addressing them in German.[109:5] Dr. Douglas[109:6] apprehended that Pennsylvania would "degenerate into a foreign colony" and endanger the quiet of the adjacent provinces. Edmund Burke, regretting that the Germans adhered to their own schools, literature, and language, and that they possessed great tracts without admixture of English, feared that they would not blend and become one people with the British colonists, and that the colony was threatened with the danger of being wholly foreign. He also noted that "these foreigners by their industry, frugality, and a hard way of living, in which they greatly exceed our people, have in a manner thrust them out in several places."[110:1] This is a phenomenon with which a succession of later frontiers has familiarized us. In point of fact the "Pennsylvania Dutch" remained through our history a very stubborn area to assimilate, with corresponding effect upon Pennsylvania politics.
It should be noted also that this coming of non-English stock to the frontier raised in all the colonies affected, questions of naturalization and land tenure by aliens.[110:2]
V. The creation of this frontier society--of which so large a portion differed from that of the coast in language and religion as well as in economic life, social structure, and ideals--produced an antagonism between interior and coast, which worked itself out in interesting fashion. In general this took these forms: contests between the property-holding class of the coast and the debtor class of the interior, where specie was lacking, and where paper money and a readjustment of the basis of taxation were demanded; contests over defective or unjust local government in the administration of taxes, fees, lands, and the courts; contests over apportionment in the legislature, whereby the coast was able to dominate, even when its white population was in the minority; contests to secure the complete separation of church and state; and, later, contests over slavery, internal improvements, and party politics in general. These contests are also intimately connected with the political philosophy of the Revolution and with the development of American democracy. In nearly every colony prior to the Revolution, struggles had been in progress between the party of privilege, chiefly the Eastern men of property allied with the English authorities, and the democratic classes, strongest in the West and the cities.
This theme deserves more space than can here be allotted to it; but a rapid survey of conditions in this respect, along the whole frontier, will at least serve to bring out the point.
In New England as a whole, the contest is less in evidence. That part of the friction elsewhere seen as the result of defective local government in the back country, was met by the efficiency of the town system; but between the interior and the coast there were struggles over apportionment and religious freedom. The former is illustrated by the convention that met in Dracut, Massachusetts, in 1776, to petition the States of Massachusetts and New Hampshire to relieve the financial distress and unfair legislative representation. Sixteen of the border towns of New Hampshire sent delegates to this convention. Two years later, these New Hampshire towns attempted to join Vermont.[111:1] As a Revolutionary State, Vermont itself was an illustration of the same tendency of the interior to break away from the coast. Massachusetts in this period witnessed a campaign between the paper money party which was entrenched in the more recently and thinly-settled areas of the interior and west, and the property-holding classes of the coast.[111:2] The opposition to the constitutions of 1778 and 1780 is tinctured with the same antagonism between the ideas of the newer part of the interior and of the coast.[112:1] Shays' Rebellion and the anti-federal opposition of 1787-88 found its stronghold in the same interior areas.[112:2]
The religious struggles continued until the democratic interior, where dissenting sects were strong, and where there was antagonism to the privileges of the congregational church, finally secured complete disestablishment in New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. But this belongs to a later period.[112:3]
Pennsylvania affords a clear illustration of these sectional antagonisms. The memorial of the frontier "Paxton Boys," in 1764, demanded a right to share in political privileges with the older part of the colony, and protested against the apportionment by which the counties of Chester, Bucks, and Philadelphia, together with the city of Philadelphia, elected twenty-six delegates, while the five frontier counties had but ten.[112:4] The frontier complained against the failure of the dominant Quaker party of the coast to protect the interior against the Indians.[112:5] The three old wealthy counties under Quaker rule feared the growth of the West, therefore made few new counties, and carefully restricted the representation in each to preserve the majority in the old section. At the same time, by a property qualification they met the danger of the democratic city population. Among the points of grievance in this colony, in addition to apportionment and representation, was the difficulty of access to the county seat, owing to the size of the back counties. Dr. Lincoln has well set forth the struggle of the back country, culminating in its triumph in the constitutional convention of 1776, which was chiefly the work of the Presbyterian counties.[113:1] Indeed, there were two revolutions in Pennsylvania, which went on side by side: one a revolt against the coastal property-holding classes, the old dominant Quaker party, and the other a revolt against Great Britain, which was in this colony made possible only by the triumph of the interior.
In Virginia, as early as 1710, Governor Spotswood had complained that the old counties remained small while the new ones were sometimes ninety miles long, the inhabitants being obliged to travel thirty or forty miles to their own court-house. Some of the counties had 1,700 tithables, while others only a dozen miles square had 500. Justices of the peace disliked to ride forty or fifty miles to their monthly courts. Likewise there was disparity in the size of parishes--for example, that of Varina, on the upper James, had nine hundred tithables, many of whom lived fifty miles from their church. But the vestry refused to allow the remote parishioners to separate, because it would increase the parish levy of those that remained. He feared lest this would afford "opportunity to Sectarys to establish their opinions among 'em, and thereby shake that happy establishment of the Church of England which this colony enjoys with less mixture of Dissenters than any other of her Maj'tie's plantations, and when once Schism has crept into the Church, it will soon create faction in the Civil Government."
That Spotswood's fears were well founded, we have already seen. As the sectaries of the back country increased, dissatisfaction with the established church grew. After the Revolution came, Jefferson, with the back country behind him, was able finally to destroy the establishment, and to break down the system of entails and primogeniture behind which the tobacco-planting aristocracy of the coast was entrenched. The desire of Jefferson to see slavery gradually abolished and popular education provided, is a further illustration of the attitude of the interior. In short, Jeffersonian democracy, with its idea of separation of church and state, its wish to popularize education, and its dislike for special privilege, was deeply affected by the Western society of the Old Dominion.
The Virginian reform movement, however, was unable to redress the grievance of unequal apportionment. In 1780 Jefferson pointed out that the practice of allowing each county an equal representation in the legislature gave control to the numerous small counties of the tidewater, while the large populous counties of the up-country suffered. "Thus," he wrote, "the 19,000 men below the falls give law to more than 30,000 living in other parts of the state, and appoint all their chief officers, executive and judiciary."[114:1] This led to a long struggle between coast and interior, terminated only when the slave population passed across the fall line, and more nearly assimilated coast and up-country. In the mountain areas which did not undergo this change, the independent state of West Virginia remains as a monument of the contest. In the convention of 1829-30, the whole philosophy of representation was discussed, and the coast defended its control as necessary to protect property from the assaults of a numerical majority. They feared that the interior would tax their slaves in order to secure funds for internal improvements.
As Doddridge put the case:[115:1]
The principle is that the owners of slave property must be possessed of all the powers of government, however small their own numbers may be, to secure that property from the rapacity of an overgrown majority of white men. This principle admits of no relaxation, because the weaker the minority becomes, the greater will their need for power be according to their own doctrines.
Leigh of Chesterfield county declared:[115:2]
It is remarkable--I mention it for the curiosity of the fact--that if any evil, physical or moral, arise in any of the states south of us, it never takes a northerly direction, or taints the Southern breeze; whereas, if any plague originate in the North, it is sure to spread to the South and to invade us sooner or later; the influenza--the smallpox--the varioloid--the Hessian fly--the Circuit Court system--Universal Suffrage--all come from the North, and they always cross above the falls of the great rivers; below, it seems, the broad expanse of waters interposing, effectually arrests their progress.
Nothing could more clearly bring out the sense of contrast between upland and lowland Virginia, and the continued intimacy of the bond of connection between the North and its Valley and Piedmont colonies, than this unconscious testimony.
In North and South Carolina the upland South, beyond the pine barrens and the fall line, had similar grievances against the coast; but as the zone of separation was more strongly marked, the grievances were more acute. The tide of backwoods settlement flowing down the Piedmont from the north, had cut across the lines of local government and disarranged the regular course of development of the colonies from the seacoast.[116:1] Under the common practice, large counties in North Carolina and parishes in South Carolina had been projected into the unoccupied interior from the older settlements along their eastern edge.
But the Piedmont settlers brought their own social order, and could not be well governed by the older planters living far away toward the seaboard. This may be illustrated by conditions in South Carolina. The general court in Charleston had absorbed county and precinct courts, except the minor jurisdiction of justices of the peace. This was well enough for the great planters who made their regular residence there for a part of each year; but it was a source of oppression to the up-country settlers, remote from the court. The difficulty of bringing witnesses, the delay of the law, and the costs all resulted in the escape of criminals as well as in the immunity of reckless debtors. The extortions of officials, and their occasional collusion with horse and cattle thieves, and the lack of regular administration of the law, led the South Carolina up-country men to take affairs in their own hands, and in 1764 to establish associations to administer lynch law under the name of "Regulators." The "Scovillites," or government party, and the Regulators met in arms on the Saluda in 1769, but hostilities were averted and remedial measures passed, which alleviated the difficulty until the Revolution.[117:1] There still remained, however, the grievance of unjust legislative representation.[117:2] Calhoun stated the condition in these words:
The upper country had no representation in the government and no political existence as a constituent portion of the state until a period near the commencement of the revolution. Indeed, during the revolution, and until the formation of the present constitution, in 1790, its political weight was scarcely felt in the government. Even then although it had become the most populous section, power was so distributed under the constitution as to leave it in a minority in every department of government.
Even in 1794 it was claimed by the up-country leaders that four-fifths of the people were governed by one-fifth. Nor was the difficulty met until the constitutional amendment of 1808, the effect of which was to give the control of the senate to the lower section and of the house of representatives to the upper section, thus providing a mutual veto.[117:3] This South Carolina experience furnished the historical basis for Calhoun's argument for nullification, and for the political philosophy underlying his theory of the "concurrent majority."[118:1] This adjustment was effected, however, only after the advance of the black belt toward the interior had assimilated portions of the Piedmont to lowland ideals.
When we turn to North Carolina's upper country we find the familiar story, but with a more tragic ending. The local officials owed their selection to the governor and the council whom he appointed. Thus power was all concentrated in the official "ring" of the lowland area. The men of the interior resented the extortionate fees and the poll tax, which bore with unequal weight upon the poor settlers of the back country. This tax had been continued after sufficient funds had been collected to extinguish the debt for which it was originally levied, but venal sheriffs had failed to pay it into the treasury. A report of 1770 showed at least one defaulting sheriff in every county of the province.[118:2] This tax, which was almost the sole tax of the colony, was to be collected in specie, for the warehouse system, by which staples might be accepted, while familiar on the coast, did not apply to the interior. The specie was exceedingly difficult to obtain; in lack of it, the farmer saw the sheriff, who owed his appointment to the dominant lowland planters, sell the lands of the delinquent to his speculative friends. Lawyers and court fees followed.
In short, the interior felt that it was being exploited,[118:3] and it had no redress, for the legislature was so apportioned that all power rested in the old lowland region. Efforts to secure paper money failed by reason of the governor's opposition under instructions from the crown, and the currency was contracting at the very time when population was rapidly increasing in the interior.[119:1] As in New England, in the days of Shays' Rebellion, violent prejudice existed against the judiciary and the lawyers, and it must, of course, be understood that the movement was not free from frontier dislike of taxation and the restraints of law and order in general. In 1766 and 1768, meetings were held in the upper counties to organize the opposition, and an "association"[119:2] was formed, the members of which pledged themselves to pay no more taxes or fees until they satisfied themselves that these were agreeable to law.
The Regulators, as they called themselves, assembled in the autumn of 1768 to the number of nearly four thousand, and tried to secure terms of adjustment. In 1770 the court-house at Hillsboro was broken into by a mob. The assembly passed some measures designed to conciliate the back country; but before they became operative, Governor Tryon's militia, about twelve hundred men, largely from the lowlands, and led by the gentry whose privileges were involved, met the motley army of the Regulators, who numbered about two thousand, in the battle of the Alamance (May, 1771). Many were killed and wounded, the Regulators dispersed, and over six thousand men came into camp and took the oath of submission to the colonial authorities. The battle was not the first battle of the Revolution, as it has been sometimes called, for it had little or no relation to the stamp act; and many of the frontiersmen involved, later refused to fight against England because of the very hatred which had been inspired for the lowland Revolutionary leaders in this battle of the Alamance. The interior of the Carolinas was a region where neighbors, during the Revolution, engaged in internecine conflicts of Tories against Whigs.
But in the sense that the battle of Alamance was a conflict against privilege, and for equality of political rights and power, it was indeed a preliminary battle of the Revolution, although fought against many of the very men who later professed Revolutionary doctrines in North Carolina. The need of recognizing the importance of the interior led to concessions in the convention of 1776 in that state. "Of the forty-four sections of the constitution, thirteen are embodiments of reforms sought by the Regulators."[120:1] But it was in this period that hundreds of North Carolina backwoodsmen crossed the mountains to Tennessee and Kentucky, many of them coming from the heart of the Regulator region. They used the device of "associations" to provide for government in their communities.[120:2]
In the matter of apportionment, North Carolina showed the same lodgment of power in the hands of the coast, even after population preponderated in the Piedmont.[120:3]
It is needless to comment on the uniformity of the evidence which has been adduced, to show that the Old West, the interior region from New England to Georgia, had a common grievance against the coast; that it was deprived throughout most of the region of its due share of representation, and neglected and oppressed in local government in large portions of the section. The familiar struggle of West against East, of democracy against privileged classes, was exhibited along the entire line. The phenomenon must be considered as a unit, not in the fragments of state histories. It was a struggle of interior against coast.
VI. Perhaps the most noteworthy Western activity in the Revolutionary era, aside from the aspects already mentioned, was in the part which the multitude of sects in the Old West played in securing the great contribution which the United States made to civilization by providing for complete religious liberty, a secular state with free churches. Particularly the Revolutionary constitutions of Pennsylvania and Virginia, under the influence of the back country, insured religious freedom. The effects of the North Carolina upland area to secure a similar result were noteworthy, though for the time ineffective.[121:1]
VII. As population increased in these years, the coast gradually yielded to the up-country's demands. This may be illustrated by the transfer of the capitals from the lowlands to the fall line and Valley. In 1779, Virginia changed her seat of government from Williamsburg to Richmond; in 1790, South Carolina, from Charleston to Columbia; in 1791, North Carolina, from Edenton to Raleigh; in 1797, New York, from New York City to Albany; in 1799, Pennsylvania, from Philadelphia to Lancaster.
VIII. The democratic aspect of the new constitutions was also influenced by the frontier as well as by the prevalent Revolutionary philosophy; and the demands for paper money, stay and tender laws, etc., of this period were strongest in the interior. It was this region that supported Shays' Rebellion; it was (with some important exceptions) the same area that resisted the ratification of the federal constitution, fearful of a stronger government and of the loss of paper money.
IX. The interior later showed its opposition to the coast by the persistent contest against slavery, carried on in the up-country of Virginia, and North and South Carolina. Until the decade 1830-40, it was not certain that both Virginia and North Carolina would not find some means of gradual abolition. The same influence accounts for much of the exodus of the Piedmont pioneers into Indiana and Illinois, in the first half of the nineteenth century.[122:1]
X. These were the regions, also, in which were developed the desire of the pioneers who crossed the mountains, and settled on the "Western waters," to establish new States free from control by the lowlands, owning their own lands, able to determine their own currency, and in general to govern themselves in accordance with the ideals of the Old West. They were ready also, if need be, to become independent of the Old Thirteen. Vermont must be considered in this aspect, as well as Kentucky and Tennessee.[122:2]
XI. The land system of the Old West furnished precedents which developed into the land system of the trans-Alleghany West.[122:3] The squatters of Pennsylvania and the Carolinas found it easy to repeat the operation on another frontier. Preëmption laws became established features. The Revolution gave opportunity to confiscate the claims of Lord Fairfax, Lord Granville, and McCulloh to their vast estates, as well as the remaining lands of the Pennsylvania proprietors. The 640 acre (or one square mile) unit of North Carolina for preëmptions, and frontier land bounties, became the area awarded to frontier stations by Virginia in 1779, and the "section" of the later federal land system. The Virginia preëmption right of four hundred acres on the Western waters, or a thousand for those who came prior to 1778, was, in substance, the continuation of a system familiar in the Old West.
The grants to Beverley, of over a hundred thousand acres in the Valley, conditioned on seating a family for every thousand acres, and the similar grants to Borden, Carter, and Lewis, were followed by the great grant to the Ohio Company. This company, including leading Virginia planters and some frontiersmen, asked in 1749 for two hundred thousand acres on the upper Ohio, conditioned on seating a hundred families in seven years, and for an additional grant of three hundred thousand acres after this should be accomplished. It was proposed to settle Germans on these lands.
The Loyal Land Company, by order of the Virginia council (1749), was authorized to take up eight hundred thousand acres west and north of the southern boundary of Virginia, on condition of purchasing "rights" for the amount within four years. The company sold many tracts for £3 per hundred acres to settlers, but finally lost its claim. The Mississippi Company, including in its membership the Lees, Washingtons, and other great Virginia planters, applied for two and one-half million acres in the West in 1769. Similar land companies of New England origin, like the Susquehanna Company and Lyman's Mississippi Company, exhibit the same tendency of the Old West on the northern side. New England's Ohio Company of Associates, which settled Marietta, had striking resemblances to town proprietors.
These were only the most noteworthy of many companies of this period, and it is evident that they were a natural outgrowth of speculations in the Old West. Washington, securing military bounty land claims of soldiers of the French and Indian War, and selecting lands in West Virginia until he controlled over seventy thousand acres for speculation, is an excellent illustration of the tendency. He also thought of colonizing German Palatines upon his lands. The formation of the Transylvania and Vandalia companies were natural developments on a still vaster scale.[124:1]
XII. The final phase of the Old West, which I wish merely to mention, in conclusion, is its colonization of areas beyond the mountains. The essential unity of the movement is brought out by a study of how New England's Old West settled northern Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, the Adirondacks, central and Western New York, the Wyoming Valley (once organized as a part of Litchfield, Connecticut), the Ohio Company's region about Marietta, and Connecticut's Western Reserve on the shores of Lake Erie; and how the pioneers of the Great Valley and the Piedmont region of the South crossed the Alleghanies and settled on the Western Waters. Daniel Boone, going from his Pennsylvania home to the Yadkin, and from the Yadkin to Tennessee and Kentucky, took part in the whole process, and later in its continuation into Missouri.[124:2] The social conditions and ideals of the Old West powerfully shaped those of the trans-Alleghany West.
The important contrast between the spirit of individual colonization, resentful of control, which the Southern frontiersmen showed, and the spirit of community colonization and control to which the New England pioneers inclined, left deep traces on the later history of the West.[125:1] The Old West diminished the importance of the town as a colonizing unit, even in New England. In the Southern area, efforts to legislate towns into existence, as in Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia, failed. They faded away before wilderness conditions. But in general, the Northern stream of migration was communal, and the Southern individual. The difference which existed between that portion of the Old West which was formed by the northward colonization, chiefly of the New England Plateau (including New York), and that portion formed by the southward colonization of the Virginia Valley and the Southern Piedmont was reflected in the history of the Middle West and the Mississippi Valley.[125:2]
FOOTNOTES:
[67:1] Proceedings of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin for 1908. Reprinted with the permission of the Society.
[68:1] For the settled area in 1660, see the map by Lois Mathews in Channing, "United Stales" (N. Y., 1905), i, p. 510; and by Albert Cook Myers in Avery, "United States" (Cleveland, 1905), ii, following p. 398. In Channing, ii, following p. 603, is Marion F. Lansing's map of settlement in 1760, which is on a rather conservative basis, especially the part showing the interior of the Carolinas.
Contemporaneous maps of the middle of the eighteenth century, useful in studying the progress of settlement, are: Mitchell, "Map of the British Colonies" (1755); Evans, "Middle British Colonies" (1758); Jefferson and Frye, "Map of Virginia" (1751 and 1755).
On the geographical conditions, see maps and text in Powell, "Physiographic Regions" (N. Y., 1896), and Willis, "Northern Appalachians," in "Physiography of the United States" (N. Y., 1896), pp. 73-82, 169-176, 196-201.
[70:1] See Osgood, "American Colonies" (N. Y., 1907), iii, chap. iii.
[70:2] See chapter ii, ante.
[70:3] Sheldon, "Deerfield" (Deerfield, Mass., 1895), i, p. 288.
[70:4] Parkman, "Frontenac" (Boston, 1898), p. 390; compare his description of Deerfield in 1704, in "Half Century of Conflict" (Boston, 1898), i, p. 55.
[72:1] Hanna, "Scotch Irish" (N. Y. and London, 1902), ii, pp. 17-24.
[72:2] "Half Century of Conflict," ii, pp. 214-234.
[72:3] "American Husbandry" (London, 1775), i, p. 47.
[73:1] For the extent of New England settlements in 1760, compared with 1700, see the map in Channing, "United States," ii, at end of volume.
[74:1] Schafer, "Land Grants for Education," Univ. of Wis. Bulletin (Madison, 1902), chap. iv.
[75:1] On New England's land system see Osgood, "American Colonies" (N. Y., 1904), i, chap. xi; and Egleston, "Land System of the New England Colonies," Johns Hopkins Univ. Studies (Baltimore, 1886), iv. Compare the account of Virginia, about 1696, in "Mass. Hist. Colls." (Boston, 1835), 1st series, v, p. 129, for a favorable view of the New England town system; and note the probable influence of New England's system upon Virginia's legislation about 1700. See chapter ii, ante.
[76:1] Amelia C. Ford, "Colonial Precedents of our National Land System," citing Massachusetts Bay, House of Rep. "Journal," 1715, pp. 5, 22, 46; Hutchinson, "History of Massachusetts Bay" (London, 1768), ii, p. 331; Holland, "Western Massachusetts" (Springfield, 1855), pp. 66, 169.
[76:2] "Conn. Colon. Records" (Hartford, 1874), viii, p. 134.
[77:1] Holland, "Western Massachusetts," p. 197. See the comments of Hutchinson in his "History of Massachusetts Bay," ii, pp. 331, 332. Compare the steps of Connecticut men in 1753 and 1755 to secure a land grant in Wyoming Valley, Pennsylvania, for the Susquehanna Company, and the Connecticut governor's remark that there was no unappropriated land in the latter colony--"Pa. Colon. Records" (Harrisburg, 1851), v, p. 771; "Pa. Archives," 2d series, xviii, contains the important documents, with much valuable information on the land system of the Wyoming Valley region. See also General Lyman's projects for a Mississippi colony in the Yazoo delta area--all indicative of the pressure for land and the speculative spirit.
[78:1] Compare Vermont's dealings with the British, and the negotiations of Kentucky and Tennessee leaders with Spaniards and British. See Amer. Hist. Review, i, p. 252, note 2, for references on Vermont's Revolutionary philosophy and influence.
[79:1] See H. C. Emery, "Artemas Jean Haynes" (New Haven, 1908), pp. 8-10.
[80:1] Ballagh, in Amer. Hist. Assoc. "Report," 1897, p. 110.
[80:2] "N. Y. Colon. Docs," vii, pp. 654, 795.
[81:1] Becker, in Amer. Hist. Review, vi, p. 261.
[81:2] Becker, loc. cit. For maps of grants in New York, see O'Callaghan, "Doc. Hist. of N. Y." (Albany, 1850), i, pp. 421, 774; especially Southier, "Chorographical Map of New York"; Winsor, "America," v, p. 236. In general on these grants, consult also "Doc. Hist. of N. Y.," i, pp. 249-257; "N. Y. Colon. Docs.," iv, pp. 397, 791, 874; v, pp. 459, 651, 805; vi, pp. 486, 549, 743, 876, 950; Kip, "Olden Time" (N. Y., 1872), p. 12; Scharf, "History of Westchester County" (Phila., 1886), i, p. 91; Libby, "Distribution of Vote on Ratification of Constitution" (Madison, 1894), pp. 21-25.
For the region of the Wallkill, including New Paltz, etc., see Eager, "Outline History of Orange County, New York" (Newburgh, 1846-47); and Ruttenber and Clark, "History of Orange County" (Phila., 1881), pp. 11-20. On Cherry Valley and upper Susquehanna settlements, in general, in New York, see Halsey, "Old New York Frontier," pp. 5, 119, and the maps by De Witt and Southier in O'Callaghan, "Doc. Hist. of N. Y.," i, pp. 421, 774.
Note the French Huguenots and Scotch-Irish in Orange County, and the Scotch-Irish settlers of Cherry Valley and their relation to Londonderry, N. H., as well as the missionary visits from Stockbridge, Mass., to the upper Susquehanna.
[82:1] Lord, "Industrial Experiments" (Baltimore, 1898), p. 45; Diffenderfer, "German Exodus" (Lancaster, Pa., 1897).
[82:2] See post.
[84:1] Hening, "Va. Statutes at Large" (N. Y., 1823), ii, p. 326.
[84:2] Ibid., p. 433.
[84:3] Bassett, "Writings of William Byrd" (N. Y., 1901), p. xxi.
[85:1] Hening, iii, p. 82. Similar acts were passed almost annually in successive years of the seventeenth century; cf. loc. cit., pp. 98, 115, 119, 126, 164; the system was discontinued in 1722--see Beverley, "Virginia and its Government" (London, 1722), p. 234.
It is interesting to compare the recommendation of Governor Dodge for Wisconsin Territory in 1836--see Wis. Terr. House of Reps. "Journal," 1836, pp. 11 et seq.
[85:2] Hening, iii, pp. 204-209.
[87:1] Compare the law of 1779 in "Va. Revised Code" (1819), ii, p. 357; Ranck's "Boonesborough" (Louisville, 1901).
[87:2] Bassett, "Writings of Byrd," p. xii; "Calendar of British State Papers, Am. and W. I.," 1677-80 (London, 1896), p. 168.
[87:3] Bassett, loc. cit., p. x, and Hening, iii, p. 304 (1705).
[87:4] [See Alvord and Bidgood, "First Explorations of the Trans-Allegheny Region."]
[87:5] Bassett, "Writings of Byrd," pp. xvii, xviii, quotes Byrd's description of the trail; Logan, "Upper South Carolina" (Columbia, 1859), i, p. 167; Adair describes the trade somewhat later; cf. Bartram, "Travels" (London, 1792), passim, and Monette, "Mississippi Valley" (N. Y., 1846), ii, p. 13.
[88:1] Bruce, "Economic Hist. of Va." (N. Y., 1896), i, pp. 473, 475, 477.
[88:2] See descriptions of cow-pens in Logan, "History of Upper S. C.," i, p. 151; Bartram, "Travels," p. 308. On cattle raising generally in the Piedmont, see: Gregg, "Old Cheraws" (N. Y., 1867), pp. 68, 108-110; Salley, "Orangeburg" (Orangeburg, 1898), pp. 219-221; Lawson, "New Voyage to Carolina" (Raleigh, 1860), p. 135; Ramsay, "South Carolina" (Charleston, 1809), i, p. 207; J. F. D. Smyth, "Tour" (London, 1784), i, p. 143, ii, pp. 78, 97; Foote, "Sketches of N. C." (N. Y., 1846), p. 77; "N. C. Colon. Records" (Raleigh, 1887), v, pp. xli, 1193, 1223; "American Husbandry" (London, 1775), i, pp. 336, 350, 384; Hening, v. pp. 176, 245.
[88:3] Spotswood, "Letters" (Richmond, 1882), i, p. 167; compare Va. Magazine, iii, pp. 120, 189.
[89:1] "N. C. Colon. Records," v, p. xli.
[89:2] Lawson, "Carolina" (Raleigh, 1860), gives a description early in the eighteenth century; his map is reproduced in Avery, "United States" (Cleveland, 1907), iii, p. 224.
[89:3] The advantages and disadvantages of the Piedmont region of the Carolinas in the middle of the eighteenth century are illustrated in Spangenburg's diary, in "N. C. Colon. Records," v, pp. 6, 7, 13, 14. Compare "American Husbandry," i, pp. 220, 332, 357, 388.
[90:1] Spotswood, "Letters," i, p. 40.
[90:2] On Germanna see Spotswood, "Letters" (index); Fontaine's journal in A. Maury, "Huguenot Family" (1853), p. 268; Jones, "Present State of Virginia" (N. Y., 1865), p. 59; Bassett, "Writings of Byrd," p. 356; Va. Magazine, xiii, pp. 362, 365; vi, p. 385; xii, pp. 342, 350; xiv, p. 136.
Spotswood's interest in the Indian trade on the southern frontier of Virginia is illustrated in his fort Christanna, on which the above references afford information.
The contemporaneous account of Spotswood's expedition into Shenandoah Valley is Fontaine's journey, cited above.
[91:1] See the excellent paper by C. E. Kemper, in Va. Magazine, xii, on "Early Westward Movement in Virginia."
[91:2] Compare Phillips, "Origin and Growth of the Southern Black Belts," in Amer. Hist. Review, xi, p. 799.
[91:3] Va. Magazine, xiii, p. 113.
[92:1] "Revised Code of Virginia" (Richmond, 1819), ii, p. 339.
[92:2] Mag. Amer. Hist., xiii, pp. 217, 230; Winsor, "Narr. and Crit. Hist. of America," v, p. 268; Kercheval, "The Valley" (Winchester, Va., 1833), pp. 67, 209; Va. Magazine, xiii, p. 115.
[93:1] "William and Mary College Quarterly" (Williamsburg, 1895), iii, p. 226. See Jefferson and Frye, "Map of Virginia, 1751," for location of this and Borden's manor.
[93:2] Brown, "The Cabells" (Boston, 1895), p. 53.
[93:3] Loc. cit., pp. 57, 66.
[94:1] Meade, "Old Churches" (Phila., 1861), 2 vols.; Foote, "Sketches" (Phila., 1855); Brown, "The Cabells," p. 68.
[94:2] Atlantic Monthly, vol. xci, pp. 83 et seq.; Ford, "Writing of Thomas Jefferson" (N. Y., 1892), i, pp. xix et seq.
[94:3] Byrd, "Dividing Line" (Richmond, 1866), pp. 85, 271.
[95:1] "N. C. Colon. Records," iii, p. xiii. Compare Hawks, "Hist. of North Carolina" (Fayetteville, 1859), map of precincts, 1663-1729.
[95:2] Raper, "North Carolina" (N. Y., 1904), chap. v; W. R. Smith, "South Carolina" (N. Y., 1903), pp. 48, 57.
[95:3] Clewell, "Wachovia" (N. Y., 1902).
[96:1] Ballagh, in Amer. Hist. Assoc. "Report," 1897, pp. 120, 121, citing Bassett, in "Law Quarterly Review," April, 1895, pp. 159-161.
[96:2] See map in Hawks, "North Carolina."
[96:3] McCrady, "South Carolina," 1719-1776 (N. Y., 1899), pp. 149, 151; Smith, "South Carolina," p. 40; Ballagh, in Amer. Hist. Assoc. "Report," 1897, pp. 117-119; Brevard, "Digest of S. C. Laws" (Charleston, 1857), i, p. xi.
[96:4] McCrady, "South Carolina," pp. 121 et seq.; Phillips, "Transportation in the Eastern Cotton Belt" (N. Y., 1908), p. 51.
[96:5] This was not originally provided for among the eleven towns. For its history see Salley, "Orangeburg"--frontier conditions about 1769 are described on pp. 219 et seq.; see map opposite p. 9.
[97:1] Gregg, "Old Cheraws," p. 44.
[97:2] Ballagh, loc. cit., pp. 119, 120.
[98:1] Compare the description of Georgia frontier traders, cattle raisers, and land speculators, about 1773, in Bartram, "Travels," pp. 18, 36, 308.
[99:1] See Willis, "Northern Appalachians," in "Physiography of the U. S." in National Geog. Soc. "Monographs" (N. Y., 1895), no. 6.
[100:1] Diffenderfer, "German Immigration into Pennsylvania," in Pa. German Soc. "Proc.," v, p. 10; "Redemptioners" (Lancaster, Pa., 1900).
[100:2] A. B. Faust, "German Element in the United States."
[100:3] See the bibliographies in Kuhns, "German and Swiss Settlements of Pennsylvania" (N. Y., 1901); Wayland, "German Element of the Shenandoah Valley" (N. Y., 1908); Channing, "United States," ii, p. 421; Griffin, "List of Works Relating to the Germans in the U. S." (Library of Congress, Wash., 1904).
[100:4] See in illustration, the letter in Myers, "Irish Quakers" (Swarthmore, Pa., 1902), p. 70.
[101:1] Shepherd, "Proprietary Government in Pennsylvania" (N. Y., 1896), p. 34.
[101:2] Gordon, "Pennsylvania" (Phila., 1829), p. 225.
[101:3] Shepherd, loc. cit., pp. 49-51.
[101:4] Ballagh, Amer. Hist. Assoc. "Report," 1897, pp. 112, 113. Compare Smith, "St. Clair Papers" (Cincinnati, 1882), ii, p. 101.
[101:5] Shepherd, loc. cit., p. 50.
[101:6] Mereness, "Maryland" (N. Y., 1901), p. 77.
[102:1] "Calendar Va. State Papers" (Richmond, 1875), i, p. 217; on these grants see Kemper, "Early Westward Movement in Virginia" in Va. Mag., xii and xiii; Wayland, "German Element of the Shenandoah Valley," William and Mary College Quarterly, iii. The speculators, both planters and new-comers, soon made application for lands beyond the Alleghanies.
[102:2] In 1794 the Virginia House of Delegates resolved to publish the most important laws of the state in German.
[102:3] See Bernheim, "German Settlements in the Carolinas" (Phila., 1872); Clewell, "Wachovia"; Allen, "German Palatines in N. C." (Raleigh, 1905).
[102:4] See Wayland, loc. cit., bibliography, for references; and especially Va. Mag., xi, pp. 113, 225, 370; xii, pp. 55, 134, 271; "German American Annals," N. S. iii, pp. 342, 369; iv, p. 16; Clewell, "Wachovia; N. C. Colon. Records," v, pp. 1-14.
[103:1] On the Scotch-Irish, see the bibliography in Green, "Scotch-Irish in America," Amer. Antiquarian Soc. "Proceedings," April, 1895; Hanna, "Scotch-Irish" (N. Y., 1902), is a comprehensive presentation of the subject; see also Myers, "Irish Quakers."
[103:2] Fiske, "Old Virginia" (Boston, 1897), ii, p. 394. Compare Linehan, "The Irish Scots and the Scotch-Irish" (Concord, N. H., 1902).
[103:3] See MacLean, "Scotch Highlanders in America" (Cleveland, 1900).
[103:4] Hanna, "Scotch-Irish," ii, pp. 17-24.
[104:1] Halsey, "Old New York Frontier" (N. Y., 1901).
[104:2] MacLean, pp. 196-230.
[104:3] The words of Logan, Penn's agent, in 1724, in Hanna, ii, pp. 60, 63.
[104:4] Winsor, "Mississippi Basin" (Boston, 1895), pp. 238-243.
[105:1] See Thwaites, "Early Western Travels" (Cleveland, 1904-06), i; Walton, "Conrad Weiser" (Phila., 1900); Heckewelder, "Narrative" (Phila., 1820).
[105:2] Christian, "Scotch-Irish Settlers in the Valley of Virginia" (Richmond, 1860).
[105:3] Roosevelt gives an interesting picture of this society in his "Winning of the West" (N. Y., 1889-96), i, chap. v; see also his citations, especially Doddridge, "Settlements and Indian Wars" (Wellsburgh, W. Va., 1824).
[106:1] Bassett, in Amer. Hist. Assoc. "Report," 1894, p. 145.
[106:2] "N. C. Colon. Records," v, pp. xxxix, xl; cf. p. xxi.
[106:3] Loc. cit., pp. 146, 147.
[107:1] See the interesting account of Rev. Moses Waddell's school in South Carolina, on the upper Savannah, where the students, including John C. Calhoun, McDuffe, Legaré, and Petigru, were educated in the wilderness. They lived in log huts in the woods, furnished their own supplies, or boarded near by, were called to the log school-house by horn for morning prayers, and then scattered in groups to the woods for study. Hunt, "Calhoun" (Phila., 1907), p. 13.
[108:1] Scharf, "Maryland" (Baltimore, 1879), ii, p. 61, and chaps. i and xviii; Kercheval, "The Valley."
[108:2] Weston, "Documents," p. 82.
[109:1] See, for example, Phillips, "Transportation in the Eastern Cotton Belt," pp. 21-53.
[109:2] Hanna, "Scotch-Irish," ii, pp. 19, 22-24.
[109:3] Cobb, "Story of the Palatines" (Wilkes-Barre, Pa., 1897), p. 300, citing "Penn. Colon. Records," iv, pp. 225, 345.
[109:4] "Works" (Bigelow ed.), ii, pp. 296-299.
[109:5] Ibid., iii, p. 297; cf. p. 221.
[109:6] "Summary" (1755), ii, p. 326.
[110:1] "European Settlements" (London, 1793), ii, p. 200 (1765); cf. Franklin, "Works" (N. Y., 1905-07), ii, p. 221, to the same effect.
[110:2] Proper, "Colonial Immigration Laws," in Columbia Univ., "Studies," xii.
[111:1] Libby, "Distribution of the Vote on the Federal Constitution," Univ. of Wis. Bulletin, pp. 8, 9, and citations. Note especially "New Hampshire State Papers," x, pp. 228 et seq.
[111:2] Libby, loc. cit., pp. 12-14, 46, 54-57.
[112:1] Farrand, in Yale Review, May, 1908, p. 52 and citation.
[112:2] Libby, loc. cit.
[112:3] See Turner, "Rise of the New West" (Amer. Nation series, N. Y., 1906), pp. 16-18.
[112:4] Parkman, "Pontiac" (Boston, 1851), ii, p. 352.
[112:5] Shepherd, "Proprietary Government in Pennsylvania," in Columbia Univ. Studies, vi, pp. 546 et seq. Compare Watson, "Annals," ii, p. 259; Green, "Provincial America" (Amer. Nation series, N. Y., 1905), p. 234.
[113:1] Lincoln, "Revolutionary Movement in Pennsylvania" (Boston, 1901); McMaster and Stone, "Pennsylvania and the Federal Constitution" (Lancaster, 1888).
[114:1] "Notes on Virginia." See his table of apportionment in Ford, "Writings of Thomas Jefferson," iii, p. 222.
[115:1] "Debates of the Virginia State Convention, 1829-1830" (Richmond, 1854), p. 87. These debates constitute a mine of material on the difficulty of reconciling the political philosophy of the Revolution with the protection of the property, including slaves, of the lowland planters.
[115:2] Loc. cit., p. 407. The italics are mine.
[116:1] McCrady, "South Carolina, 1719-1776," p. 623.
[117:1] Brevard, "Digest of S. C. Laws," i, pp. xxiv, 253; McCrady, "South Carolina, 1719-1776," p. 637; Schaper, "Sectionalism in South Carolina," in Amer. Hist. Assoc. "Report," 1900, i, pp. 334-338.
[117:2] Schaper, loc. cit., pp. 338, 339; Calhoun, "Works" (N. Y., 1851-59), i, p. 402; Columbia (S. C.) Gazette, Aug. 1, 1794; Ramsay, "South Carolina," pp. 64-66, 195, 217; Elliot, "Debates," iv, pp. 288, 289, 296-299, 305, 309, 312.
[117:3] Schaper, loc. cit., pp. 440-447 et seq.
[118:1] Turner, "Rise of the New West," pp. 50-52, 331; Calhoun, "Works," i, pp. 400-405.
[118:2] "N. C. Colon. Records," vii, pp. xiv-xvii.
[118:3] See Bassett, "Regulators of N. C." in Amer. Hist. Assoc. "Report," 1894, pp. 141 (bibliog.) et seq.; "N. C. Colon. Records," pp. vii-x (Saunder's introductions are valuable); Caruthers, "David Caldwell" (Greensborough, N. C., 1842); Waddell, "Colonial Officer" (Raleigh, 1890); M. De L. Haywood, "Governor William Tryon" (Raleigh, N. C., 1903); Clewell, "Wachovia," chap. x; W. E. Fitch, "Some Neglected History of N. C." (N. Y., 1905); L. A. McCorkle and F. Nash, in "N. C. Booklet" (Raleigh, 1901-07), iii; Wheeler, "North Carolina," ii, pp. 301 et seq.; Cutter, "Lynch Law," chap. ii. and iii.
[119:1] Bassett, loc. cit., p. 152.
[119:2] Wheeler, "North Carolina," ii, pp. 301-306; "N. C. Colon. Records," vii, pp. 251, 699.
[120:1] "N. C. Colon. Records," viii, p. xix.
[120:2] Turner, in Amer. Hist. Review, i, p. 76.
[120:3] "N. C. Colon. Records," vii, pp. xiv-xxiv.
[121:1] Weeks, "Church and State in North Carolina" (Baltimore, 1893); "N. C. Colon. Records," x, p. 870; Curry, "Establishment and Disestablishment" (Phila., 1889); C. F. James, "Documentary History of the Struggle for Religious Liberty in Virginia" (Lynchburg, Va., 1900); Semple, "The Virginia Baptists" (Richmond, 1810); Amer. Hist. Assoc. "Papers," ii, p. 21; iii, pp. 205, 213.
[122:1] See Ballagh, "Slavery in Virginia," Johns Hopkins Univ. "Studies," extra, xxiv; Bassett, "Slavery and Servitude in the Colony of North Carolina," Id., xiv, pp. 169-254; Bassett, "Slavery in the State of North Carolina," Id., xvii; Bassett, "Antislavery Leaders in North Carolina," Id., xvi; Weeks, "Southern Quakers," Id., xv, extra; Schaper, "Sectionalism in South Carolina," Amer. Hist. Assoc. "Report," 1900; Turner, "Rise of the New West," pp. 54-56, 76-78, 80, 90, 150-152.
[122:2] See F. J. Turner, "State-Making in the West During the Revolutionary Era," in American Historical Review, i, p. 70.
[122:3] Hening, x, p. 35; "Public Acts of N. C.," i, pp. 204, 306; "Revised Code of Va., 1819," ii, p. 357; Roosevelt, "Winning of the West," i, p. 261; ii, pp. 92, 220.
[124:1] Alden, "New Governments West of the Alleghanies" (Madison, 1897), gives an account of these colonies. [See the more recent work by C. W. Alvord, "The Mississippi Valley in British Politics, 1763-1774" (1917).]
[124:2] Thwaites, "Daniel Boone" (N. Y., 1902); [A. Henderson, "Conquest of the Old Southwest" (N. Y., 1920), brings out the important share of up-country men of means in promoting colonization].
[125:1] Turner, in "Alumni Quarterly of the University of Illinois," ii, 133-136.
[125:2] [It has seemed best in this volume not to attempt to deal with the French frontier or the Spanish-American frontier. Besides the works of Parkman, a multitude of monographs have appeared in recent years which set the French frontier in new light; and for the Spanish frontier in both the Southwest and California much new information has been secured, and illuminating interpretations made by Professors H. E. Bolton, I. J. Cox, Chapman, Father Engelhart, and other California and Texas investigators, although the works of Hubert Howe Bancroft remain a useful mine of material. There was, of course, a contemporaneous Old West on both the French and the Spanish frontiers. The formation, approach and ultimate collision and intermingling of these contrasting types of frontiers are worthy of a special study.]
IV
THE MIDDLE WEST[126:1]
American sectional nomenclature is still confused. Once "the West" described the whole region beyond the Alleghanies; but the term has hopelessly lost its definiteness. The rapidity of the spread of settlement has broken down old usage, and as yet no substitute has been generally accepted. The "Middle West" is a term variously used by the public, but for the purpose of the present paper, it will be applied to that region of the United States included in the census reports under the name of the North Central division, comprising the States of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin (the old "Territory Northwest of the River Ohio"), and their trans-Mississippi sisters of the Louisiana Purchase,--Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota. It is an imperial domain. If the greater countries of Central Europe,--France, Germany, Italy, and Austro-Hungary,--were laid down upon this area, the Middle West would still show a margin of spare territory. Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Buffalo constitute its gateways to the Eastern States; Kansas City, Omaha, St. Paul-Minneapolis, and Duluth-Superior dominate its western areas; Cincinnati and St. Louis stand on its southern borders; and Chicago reigns at the center. What Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore are to the Atlantic seaboard these cities are to the Middle West. The Great Lakes and the Mississippi, with the Ohio and the Missouri as laterals, constitute the vast water system that binds the Middle West together. It is the economic and political center of the Republic. At one edge is the Populism of the prairies; at the other, the capitalism that is typified in Pittsburgh. Great as are the local differences within the Middle West, it possesses, in its physiography, in the history of its settlement, and in its economic and social life, a unity and interdependence which warrant a study of the area as an entity. Within the limits of this article, treatment of so vast a region, however, can at best afford no more than an outline sketch, in which old and well-known facts must, if possible, be so grouped as to explain the position of the section in American history.
In spite of the difficulties of the task, there is a definite advantage in so large a view. By fixing our attention too exclusively upon the artificial boundary lines of the States, we have failed to perceive much that is significant in the westward development of the United States. For instance, our colonial system did not begin with the Spanish War; the United States has had a colonial history and policy from the beginning of the Republic; but they have been hidden under the phraseology of "interstate migration" and "territorial organization."
The American people have occupied a spacious wilderness; vast physiographic provinces, each with its own peculiarities, have lain across the path of this migration, and each has furnished a special environment for economic and social transformation. It is possible to underestimate the importance of State lines, but if we direct our gaze rather to the physiographic province than to the State area, we shall be able to see some facts in a new light. Then it becomes clear that these physiographic provinces of America are in some respects comparable to the countries of Europe, and that each has its own history of occupation and development. General Francis A. Walker once remarked that "the course of settlement has called upon our people to occupy territory as extensive as Switzerland, as England, as Italy, and latterly, as France or Germany, every ten years." It is this element of vastness in the achievements of American democracy that gives a peculiar interest to the conquest and development of the Middle West. The effects of this conquest and development upon the present United States have been of fundamental importance.
Geographically the Middle West is almost conterminous with the Provinces of the Lake and Prairie Plains; but the larger share of Kansas and Nebraska, and the western part of the two Dakotas belong to the Great Plains; the Ozark Mountains occupy a portion of Missouri, and the southern parts of Ohio and Indiana merge into the Alleghany Plateau. The relation of the Provinces of the Lake and Prairie Plains to the rest of the United States is an important element in the significance of the Middle West. On the north lies the similar region of Canada: the Great Lakes are in the center of the whole eastern and more thickly settled half of North America, and they bind the Canadian and Middle Western people together. On the south, the provinces meet the apex of that of the Gulf Plains, and the Mississippi unites them. To the west, they merge gradually into the Great Plains; the Missouri and its tributaries and the Pacific railroads make for them a bond of union; another rather effective bond is the interdependence of the cattle of the plains and the corn of the prairies. To the east, the province meets the Alleghany and New England Plateaus, and is connected with them by the upper Ohio and by the line of the Erie Canal. Here the interaction of industrial life and the historical facts of settlement have produced a close relationship. The intimate connection between the larger part of the North Central and the North Atlantic divisions of the United States will impress any one who examines the industrial and social maps of the census atlas. By reason of these interprovincial relationships, the Middle West is the mediator between Canada and the United States, and between the concentrated wealth and manufactures of the North Atlantic States and the sparsely settled Western mining, cattle-raising, and agricultural States. It has a connection with the South that was once still closer, and is likely before long to reassert itself with new power. Within the limits of the United States, therefore, we have problems of interprovincial trade and commerce similar to those that exist between the nations of the Old World.
Over most of the Province of the Lake and Prairie Plains the Laurentide glacier spread its drift, rich in limestone and other rock powder, which farmers in less favored sections must purchase to replenish the soil. The alluvial deposit from primeval lakes contributed to fatten the soil of other parts of the prairies. Taken as a whole, the Prairie Plains surpass in fertility any other region of America or Europe, unless we except some territory about the Black Sea. It is a land marked out as the granary of the nation; but it is more than a granary. On the rocky shores of Lake Superior were concealed copper mines rivaled only by those of Montana, and iron fields which now[129:1] furnish the ore for the production of eighty per cent of the pig iron of the United States. The Great Lakes afford a highway between these iron fields and the coal areas of the Ohio Valley. The gas and oil deposits of the Ohio Valley, the coal of Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, and eastern Kansas, the lead and zinc of the Ozark region and of the upper Mississippi Valley, and the gold of the black Hills,--all contribute underground wealth to the Middle West.
The primeval American forest once spread its shade over vast portions of the same province. Ohio, Indiana, southern Michigan, and central Wisconsin were almost covered with a growth of noble deciduous trees. In southern Illinois, along the broad bottom lands of the Mississippi and the Illinois, and in southern and southwestern Missouri, similar forests prevailed. To the north, in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, appeared the somber white pine wilderness, interlaced with hard woods, which swept in ample zone along the Great Lakes, till the deciduous forests triumphed again, and, in their turn, faded into the treeless expanse of the prairies. In the remaining portions were openings in the midst of the forested area, and then the grassy ocean of prairie that rolled to west and northwest, until it passed beyond the line of sufficient rainfall for agriculture without irrigation, into the semi-arid stretches of the Great Plains.
In the middle of the eighteenth century, the forested region of this province was occupied by the wigwams of many different tribes of the Algonquin tongue, sparsely scattered in villages along the water courses, warring and trading through the vast wilderness. The western edge of the prairie and the Great Plains were held by the Sioux, chasing herds of bison across these far-stretching expanses. These horsemen of the plains and the canoemen of the Great Lakes and the Ohio were factors with which civilization had to reckon, for they constituted important portions of perhaps the fiercest native race with which the white man has ever battled for new lands.
The Frenchman had done but little fighting for this region. He swore brotherhood with its savages, traded with them, intermarried with them, and explored the Middle West; but he left the wilderness much as he found it. Some six or seven thousand French people in all, about Detroit and Vincennes, and in the Illinois country, and scattered among the Indian villages of the remote lakes and streams, held possession when George Washington reached the site of Pittsburgh, bearing Virginia's summons of eviction to France. In his person fate knocked at the portals of a "rising empire." France hurried her commanders and garrisons, with Indian allies, from the posts about the Great Lakes and the upper Mississippi; but it was in vain. In vain, too, the aftermath of Pontiac's widespread Indian uprising against the English occupation. When she came into possession of the lands between the Ohio, the Mississippi, and the Great Lakes, England organized them as a part of the Province of Quebec. The daring conquest of George Rogers Clark left Virginia in military possession of the Illinois country at the conclusion of the Revolutionary War; but over all the remainder of the Old Northwest, England was in control. Although she ceded the region by the treaty which closed the Revolution, she remained for many years the mistress of the Indians and the fur trade. When Lord Shelburne was upbraided in parliament for yielding the Northwest to the United States, the complaint was that he had clothed the Americans "in the warm covering of our fur trade," and his defense was that the peltry trade of the ceded tract was not sufficiently profitable to warrant further war. But the English government became convinced that the Indian trade demanded the retention of the Northwest, and she did in fact hold her posts there in spite of the treaty of peace. Dundas, the English secretary for the colonies, expressed the policy, when he declared, in 1792, that the object was to interpose an Indian barrier between Canada and the United States; and in pursuance of this policy of preserving the Northwest as an Indian buffer State, the Canadian authorities supported the Indians in their resistance to American settlement beyond the Ohio. The conception of the Northwest as an Indian reserve strikingly exhibits England's inability to foresee the future of the region, and to measure the forces of American expansion.
By the cessions of Virginia, New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, the Old Congress had come into nominal possession of an extensive public domain, and a field for the exercise of national authority. The significance of this fact in the development of national power is not likely to be overestimated. The first result was the completion of the Ordinance of 1787, which provided a territorial government for the Old Northwest, with provisions for the admission of States into the Union. This federal colonial system guaranteed that the new national possessions should not be governed as dependent provinces, but should enter as a group of sister States into the federation.[132:1] While the importance of the article excluding slavery has often been pointed out, it is probable that the provisions for a federal colonial organization have been at least equally potential in our actual development. The full significance of this feature of the Ordinance is only appreciated when we consider its continuous influence upon the American territorial and State policy in the westward expansion to the Pacific, and the political preconceptions with which Americans approach the problems of government in the new insular possessions. The Land Ordinance of 1785 is also worthy of attention in this connection, for under its provisions almost all of the Middle West has been divided by the government surveyor into rectangles of sections and townships, by whose lines the settler has been able easily and certainly to locate his farm, and the forester his "forty." In the local organization of the Middle West these lines have played an important part.
It would be impossible within the limits of this paper to detail the history of the occupation of the Middle West; but the larger aspects of the flow of population into the region may be sketched. Massachusetts men had formed the Ohio Company, and had been influential in shaping the liberal provisions of the Ordinance. Their land purchase, paid for in soldiers' certificates, embraced an area larger than the State of Rhode Island. At Marietta in 1788, under the shelter of Fort Harmar, their bullet-proof barge landed the first New England colony. A New Jersey colony was planted soon after at Cincinnati in the Symmes Purchase. Thus American civilization crossed the Ohio. The French settlements at Detroit and in Indiana and Illinois belonged to other times and had their own ideals; but with the entrance of the American pioneer into the forest of the Middle West, a new era began. The Indians, with the moral support of England, resisted the invasion, and an Indian war followed. The conquest of Wayne, in 1795, pushed back the Indians to the Greenville line, extending irregularly across the State of Ohio from the site of Cleveland to Fort Recovery in the middle point of her present western boundary, and secured certain areas in Indiana. In the same period Jay's treaty provided for the withdrawal of the British posts. After this extension of the area open to the pioneer, new settlements were rapidly formed. Connecticut disposed of her reserved land about Lake Erie to companies, and in 1796 General Moses Cleaveland led the way to the site of the city that bears his name. This was the beginning of the occupation of the Western Reserve, a district about as large as the parent State of Connecticut, a New England colony in the Middle West, which has maintained, even to the present time, the impress of New England traits. Virginia and Kentucky settlers sought the Virginia Military Bounty Lands, and the foundation of Chillicothe here, in 1796, afforded a center for Southern settlement. The region is a modified extension of the limestone area of Kentucky, and naturally attracted the emigrants from the Blue Grass State. Ohio's history is deeply marked by the interaction of the New England, Middle, and Southern colonies within her borders.
By the opening of the nineteenth century, when Napoleon's cession brought to the United States the vast spaces of the Louisiana Purchase beyond the Mississippi, the pioneers had hardly more than entered the outskirts of the forest along the Ohio and Lake Erie. But by 1810 the government had extinguished the Indian title to the unsecured portions of the Western Reserve, and to great tracts of Indiana, along the Ohio and up the Wabash Valley; thus protecting the Ohio highway from the Indians, and opening new lands to settlement. The embargo had destroyed the trade of New England, and had weighted down her citizens with debt and taxation; caravans of Yankee emigrant wagons, precursors of the "prairie schooner," had already begun to cross Pennsylvania on their way to Ohio; and they now greatly increased in number. North Carolina back countrymen flocked to the Indiana settlements, giving the peculiar Hoosier flavor to the State, and other Southerners followed, outnumbering the Northern immigrants, who sought the eastern edge of Indiana.
Tecumthe, rendered desperate by the advance into his hunting grounds, took up the hatchet, made wide-reaching alliances among the Indians, and turned to England for protection. The Indian war merged into the War of 1812, and the settlers strove in vain to add Canadian lands to their empire. In the diplomatic negotiations that followed the war, England made another attempt to erect the Old Northwest beyond the Greenville line into a permanent Indian barrier between Canada and the United States; but the demand was refused, and by the treaties of 1818, the Indians were pressed still farther north. In the meantime, Indian treaties had released additional land in southern Illinois, and pioneers were widening the bounds of the old French settlements. Avoiding the rich savannas of the prairie regions, as devoid of wood, remote from transportation facilities, and suited only to grazing, they entered the hard woods--and in the early twenties they were advancing in a wedge-shaped column up the Illinois Valley.
The Southern element constituted the main portion of this phalanx of ax-bearers. Abraham Lincoln's father joined the throng of Kentuckians that entered the Indiana woods in 1816, and the boy, when he had learned to hew out a forest home, betook himself, in 1830, to Sangamon county, Illinois. He represents the pioneer of the period; but his ax sank deeper than other men's, and the plaster cast of his great sinewy hand, at Washington, embodies the training of these frontier railsplitters, in the days when Fort Dearborn, on the site of Chicago, was but a military outpost in a desolate country. While the hard woods of Illinois were being entered, the pioneer movement passed also into the Missouri Valley. The French lead miners had already opened the southeastern section, and Southern mountaineers had pushed up the Missouri; but now the planters from the Ohio Valley and the upper Tennessee followed, seeking the alluvial soils for slave labor. Moving across the southern border of free Illinois, they had awakened regrets in that State at the loss of so large a body of settlers.
Looking at the Middle West, as a whole, in the decade from 1810 to 1820, we perceive that settlement extended from the shores of Lake Erie in an arc, following the banks of the Ohio till it joined the Mississippi, and thence along that river and up the Missouri well into the center of the State. The next decade was marked by the increased use of the steamboat; pioneers pressed farther up the streams, etching out the hard wood forests well up to the prairie lands, and forming additional tracts of settlement in the region tributary to Detroit and in the southeastern part of Michigan. In the area of the Galena lead mines of northwestern Illinois, southwestern Wisconsin, and northeastern Iowa, Southerners had already begun operations; and if we except Ohio and Michigan, the dominant element in all this overflow of settlement into the Middle West was Southern, particularly from Kentucky, Virginia, and North Carolina. The settlements were still dependent on the rivers for transportation, and the areas between the rivers were but lightly occupied. The Mississippi constituted the principal outlet for the products of the Middle West; Pittsburgh furnished most of the supplies for the region, but New Orleans received its crops. The Old National road was built piecemeal, and too late, as a whole, to make a great artery of trade throughout the Middle West, in this early period; but it marked the northern borders of the Southern stream of population, running, as this did, through Columbus, Indianapolis, and Vandalia.
The twenty years from 1830 to 1850 saw great changes in the composition of the population of the Middle West. The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 was an epoch-making event. It furnished a new outlet and inlet for northwestern traffic; Buffalo began to grow, and New York City changed from a local market to a great commercial center. But even more important was the place which the canal occupied as the highway for a new migration.
In the march of the New England people from the coast, three movements are of especial importance: the advance from the seaboard up the Connecticut and Housatonic Valleys through Massachusetts and into Vermont; the advance thence to central and western New York; and the advance to the interior of the Old Northwest. The second of these stages occupied the generation from about 1790 to 1820; after that the second generation was ready to seek new lands; and these the Erie Canal and lake navigation opened to them, and to the Vermonters and other adventurous spirits of New England. It was this combined New York-New England stream that in the thirties poured in large volume into the zone north of the settlements which have been described. The newcomers filled in the southern counties of Michigan and Wisconsin, the northern countries of Illinois, and parts of the northern and central areas of Indiana. Pennsylvania and Ohio sent a similar type of people to the area adjacent to those States. In Iowa a stream combined of the Southern element and of these settlers sought the wooded tributaries of the Mississippi in the southeastern part of the State. In default of legal authority, in this early period, they formed squatter governments and land associations, comparable to the action of the Massachusetts men who in the first quarter of the seventeenth century "squatted" in the Connecticut Valley.
A great forward movement had occurred, which took possession of oak openings and prairies, gave birth to the cities of Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul, and Minneapolis, as well as to a multitude of lesser cities, and replaced the dominance of the Southern element by that of a modified Puritan stock. The railroad system of the early fifties bound the Mississippi to the North Atlantic seaboard; New Orleans gave way to New York as the outlet for the Middle West, and the day of river settlement was succeeded by the era of inter-river settlement and railway transportation. The change in the political and social ideals was at least equal to the change in economic connections, and together these forces made an intimate organic union between New England, New York, and the newly settled West. In estimating the New England influence in the Middle West, it must not be forgotten that the New York settlers were mainly New Englanders of a later generation.
Combined with the streams from the East came the German migration into the Middle West. Over half a million, mainly from the Palatinate, Würtemberg, and the adjacent regions, sought America between 1830 and 1850, and nearly a million more Germans came in the next decade. The larger portion of these went into the Middle West; they became pioneers in the newer parts of Ohio, especially along the central ridge, and in Cincinnati; they took up the hardwood lands of the Wisconsin counties along Lake Michigan; and they came in important numbers to Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan, and to the river towns of Iowa. The migration in the thirties and forties contained an exceptionally large proportion of educated and forceful leaders, men who had struggled in vain for the ideal of a liberal German nation, and who contributed important intellectual forces to the communities in which they settled. The Germans, as a whole, furnished a conservative and thrifty agricultural element to the Middle West. In some of their social ideals they came into collision with the Puritan element from New England, and the outcome of the steady contest has been a compromise. Of all the States, Wisconsin has been most deeply influenced by the Germans.
By the later fifties, therefore, the control of the Middle West had passed to its Northern zone of population, and this zone included representatives of the Middle States, New England, and Germany as its principal elements. The Southern people, north of the Ohio, differed in important respects from the Southerners across the river. They had sprung largely from the humbler classes of the South, although there were important exceptions. The early pioneer life, however, was ill-suited to the great plantations, and slavery was excluded under the Ordinance. Thus this Southern zone of the Middle West, particularly in Indiana and Illinois, constituted a mediating section between the South and the North. The Mississippi still acted as a bond of union, and up to the close of the War of 1812 the Valley, north and south, had been fundamentally of the same social organization. In order to understand what follows, we must bear in mind the outlines of the occupation of the Gulf Plains. While settlement had been crossing the Ohio to the Northwest, the spread of cotton culture and negro slavery into the Southwest had been equally significant. What the New England States and New York were in the occupation of the Middle West, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia were in the occupation of the Gulf States. But, as in the case of the Northwest, a modification of the original stock occurred in the new environment. A greater energy and initiative appeared in the new Southern lands; the pioneer's devotion to exploiting the territory in which he was placed transferred slavery from the patriarchal to the commercial basis. The same expansive tendency seen in the Northwest revealed itself, with a belligerent seasoning, in the Gulf States. They had a program of action. Abraham Lincoln migrated from Kentucky to Indiana and to Illinois. Jefferson Davis moved from Kentucky to Louisiana, and thence to Mississippi, in the same period. Starting from the same locality, each represented the divergent flow of streams of settlement into contrasted environments. The result of these antagonistic streams of migration to the West was a struggle between the Lake and Prairie plainsmen, on the one side, and the Gulf plainsmen, on the other, for the possession of the Mississippi Valley. It was the crucial part of the struggle between the Northern and Southern sections of the nation. What gave slavery and State sovereignty their power as issues was the fact that they involved the question of dominance over common territory in an expanding nation. The place of the Middle West in the origin and settlement of the great slavery struggle is of the highest significance.
In the early history of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, a modified form of slavery existed under a system of indenture of the colored servant; and the effort of Southern settlers in Indiana and in Illinois to reintroduce slavery are indicative of the importance of the pro-slavery element in the Northwest. But the most significant early manifestation of the rival currents of migration with respect to slavery is seen in the contest which culminated in the Missouri Compromise. The historical obstacle of the Ordinance, as well as natural conditions, gave an advantage to the anti-slavery settlers northwest of the Ohio; but when the Mississippi was crossed, and the rival streams of settlement mingled in the area of the Louisiana Purchase, the struggle followed. It was an Illinois man, with constituents in both currents of settlement, who introduced the Missouri Compromise, which made a modus vivendi for the Middle West, until the Compromise of 1850 gave to Senator Douglas of Illinois, in 1854, the opportunity to reopen the issue by his Kansas-Nebraska bill. In his doctrine of "squatter-sovereignty," or the right of the territories to determine the question of slavery within their bounds, Douglas utilized a favorite Western political idea, one which Cass of Michigan had promulgated before. Douglas set the love of the Middle West for local self-government against its preponderant antipathy to the spread of slavery. At the same time he brought to the support of the doctrine the Democratic party, which ever since the days of Andrew Jackson had voiced the love of the frontier for individualism and for popular power. In his "Young America" doctrines Douglas had also made himself the spokesman of Western expansive tendencies. He thus found important sources of popular support when he invoked the localism of his section. Western appeals to Congress for aid in internal improvements, protective tariffs, and land grants had been indications of nationalism. The doctrine of squatter-sovereignty itself catered to the love of national union by presenting the appearance of a non-sectional compromise, which should allow the new areas of the Middle West to determine their own institutions. But the Free Soil party, strongest in the regions occupied by the New York-New England colonists, and having for its program national prohibition of the spread of slavery into the territories, had already found in the Middle West an important center of power. The strength of the movement far surpassed the actual voting power of the Free Soil party, for it compelled both Whigs and Democrats to propose fusion on the basis of concession to Free Soil doctrines. The New England settlers and the western New York settlers,--the children of New England,--were keenly alive to the importance of the issue. Indeed, Seward, in an address at Madison, Wisconsin, in 1860, declared that the Northwest, in reality, extended to the base of the Alleghanies, and that the new States had "matured just in the critical moment to rally the free States of the Atlantic coast, to call them back to their ancient principles."
These Free Soil forces and the nationalistic tendencies of the Middle West proved too strong for the opposing doctrines when the real struggle came. Calhoun and Taney shaped the issue so logically that the Middle West saw that the contest was not only a war for the preservation of the Union, but also a war for the possession of the unoccupied West, a struggle between the Middle West and the States of the Gulf Plains. The economic life of the Middle West had been bound by the railroad to the North Atlantic, and its interests, as well as its love of national unity, made it in every way hostile to secession. When Dr. Cutler had urged the desires of the Ohio Company upon Congress, in 1787, he had promised to plant in the Ohio Valley a colony that would stand for the Union. Vinton of Ohio, in arguing for the admission of Iowa, urged the position of the Middle West as the great unifying section of the country: "Disunion," he said, "is ruin to them. They have no alternative but to resist it whenever or wherever attempted. . . . Massachusetts and South Carolina might, for aught I know, find a dividing line that would be mutually satisfactory to them; but, Sir, they can find no such line to which the western country can assent." But it was Abraham Lincoln who stated the issue with the greatest precision, and who voiced most clearly the nationalism of the Middle West, when he declared, "A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free."
So it was that when the civil war in Kansas grew into the Civil War in the Union, after Lincoln's election to the presidency, the Middle West, dominated by its combined Puritan and German population, ceased to compromise, and turned the scale in favor of the North. The Middle West furnished more than one-third of the Union troops. The names of Grant and Sherman are sufficient testimony to her leadership in the field. The names of Lincoln and Chase show that the presidential, the financial, and the war powers were in the hands of the Middle West. If we were to accept Seward's own classification, the conduct of foreign affairs as well belonged to the same section; it was, at least, in the hands of representatives of the dominant forces of the section. The Middle West, led by Grant and Sherman, hewed its way down the Mississippi and across the Gulf States, and Lincoln could exult in 1863, "The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea. Thanks to the great Northwest for it, nor yet wholly to them."
In thus outlining the relations of the Middle West to the slavery struggle, we have passed over important extensions of settlement in the decade before the war. In these years, not only did the density of settlement increase in the older portions of the region, but new waves of colonization passed into the remoter prairies. Iowa's pioneers, after Indian cessions had been secured, spread well toward her western limits. Minnesota, also, was recruited by a column of pioneers. The treaty of Traverse de Sioux, in 1851, opened over twenty million acres of arable land in that State, and Minnesota increased her population 2730.7 per cent in the decade from 1850 to 1860.
Up to this decade the pine belt of the Middle West, in northern Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota had been the field of operations of Indian traders. At first under English companies, and afterward under Astor's American Fur Company, the traders with their French and half-breed boatmen skirted the Great Lakes and followed the rivers into the forests, where they stationed their posts and spread goods and whiskey among the Indians. Their posts were centers of disintegration among the savages. The new wants and the demoralization which resulted from the Indian trade facilitated the purchases of their lands by the federal government. The trader was followed by the seeker for the best pine land "forties"; and by the time of the Civil War the exploitation of the pine belt had fairly begun. The Irish and Canadian choppers, followed by the Scandinavians, joined the forest men, and log drives succeeded the trading canoe. Men from the pine woods of Maine and Vermont directed the industry, and became magnates in the mill towns that grew up in the forests,--millionaires, and afterwards political leaders. In the prairie country of the Middle West, the Indian trade that centered at St. Louis had been important ever since 1820, with an influence upon the Indians of the plains similar to the influence of the northern fur trade upon the Indians of the forest. By 1840 the removal policy had effected the transfer of most of the eastern tribes to lands across the Mississippi. Tribal names that formerly belonged to Ohio and the rest of the Old Northwest were found on the map of the Kansas Valley. The Platte country belonged to the Pawnee and their neighbors, and to the north along the Upper Missouri were the Sioux, or Dakota, Crow, Cheyenne, and other horse Indians, following the vast herds of buffalo that grazed on the Great Plains. The discovery of California gold and the opening of the Oregon country, in the middle of the century, made it necessary to secure a road through the Indian lands for the procession of pioneers that crossed the prairies to the Pacific. The organization of Kansas and Nebraska, in 1854, was the first step in the withdrawal of these territories from the Indians. A period of almost constant Indian hostility followed, for the savage lords of the boundless prairies instinctively felt the significance of the entrance of the farmer into their empire. In Minnesota the Sioux took advantage of the Civil War to rise; but the outcome was the destruction of their reservations in that State, and the opening of great tracts to the pioneers. When the Pacific railways were begun, Red Cloud, the astute Sioux chief, who, in some ways, stands as the successor of Pontiac and of Tecumthe, rallied the principal tribes of the Great Plains to resist the march of civilization. Their hostility resulted in the peace measure of 1867 and 1868, which assigned to the Sioux and their allies reservations embracing the major portion of Dakota territory, west of the Missouri River. The systematic slaughter of millions of buffalo, in the years between 1866 and 1873, for the sake of their hides, put an end to the vast herds of the Great Plains, and destroyed the economic foundation of the Indians. Henceforth they were dependent on the whites for their food supply, and the Great Plains were open to the cattle ranchers.
In a preface written in 1872 for a new edition of "The Oregon Trail," which had appeared in 1847, Francis Parkman said, "The wild cavalcade that defiled with me down the gorges of the Black Hills, with its paint and war plumes, fluttering trophies and savage embroidery, bows, arrows, lances, and shields, will never be seen again." The prairies were ready for the final rush of occupation. The homestead law of 1862, passed in the midst of the war, did not reveal its full importance as an element in the settlement of the Middle West until after peace. It began to operate most actively, contemporaneously with the development of the several railways to the Pacific, in the two decades from 1870 to 1890, and in connection with the marketing of the railroad land grants. The outcome was an epoch-making extension of population.
Before 1870 the vast and fertile valley of the Red River, once the level bed of an ancient lake, occupying the region where North Dakota and Minnesota meet, was almost virgin soil. But in 1875 the great Dalrymple farm showed its advantages for wheat raising, and a tide of farm seekers turned to the region. The "Jim River" Valley of South Dakota attracted still other settlers. The Northern Pacific and the Great Northern Railway thrust out laterals into these Minnesota and Dakota wheat areas from which to draw the nourishment for their daring passage to the Pacific. The Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul, the Chicago and Northwestern Railway, Burlington, and other roads, gridironed the region; and the unoccupied lands of the Middle West were taken up by a migration that in its system and scale is unprecedented. The railroads sent their agents and their literature everywhere, "booming" the "Golden West"; the opportunity for economic and political fortunes in such rapidly growing communities attracted multitudes of Americans whom the cheap land alone would not have tempted. In 1870 the Dakotas had 14,000 settlers; in 1890 they had over 510,000. Nebraska's population was 28,000 in 1860; 123,000 in 1870; 452,000 in 1880; and 1,059,000 in 1890. Kansas had 107,000 in 1860; 364,000 in 1870; 996,000 in 1880; and 1,427,000 in 1890. Wisconsin and New York gave the largest fractions of the native element to Minnesota; Illinois and Ohio together sent perhaps one-third of the native element of Kansas and Nebraska, but the Missouri and Southern settlers were strongly represented in Kansas; Wisconsin, New York, Minnesota, and Iowa gave North Dakota the most of her native settlers; and Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, and New York did the same for South Dakota.
Railroads and steamships organized foreign immigration on scale and system never before equaled; a high-water mark of American immigration came in the early eighties. Germans and Scandinavians were rushed by emigrant trains out to the prairies, to fill the remaining spaces in the older States of the Middle West. The census of 1890 showed in Minnesota 373,000 persons of Scandinavian parentage, and out of the total million and one-half persons of Scandinavian parentage in the United States, the Middle West received all but about three hundred thousand. The persons of German parentage in the Middle West numbered over four millions out of a total of less than seven millions in the whole country. The province had, in 1890, a smaller proportion of persons of foreign parentage than had the North Atlantic division, but the proportions varied greatly in the different States. Indiana had the lowest percentage, 20.38; and, rising in the scale, Missouri had 24.94; Kansas 26.75; Ohio 33.93; Nebraska 42.45; Iowa 43.57; Illinois 49.01; Michigan 54.58; Wisconsin 73.65; Minnesota 75.37; and North Dakota 78.87.
What these statistics of settlement mean when translated into the pioneer life of the prairie, cannot be told here. There were sharp contrasts with the pioneer life of the Old Northwest; for the forest shade, there was substituted the boundless prairie; the sod house for the log hut; the continental railway for the old National Turnpike and the Erie Canal. Life moved faster, in larger masses, and with greater momentum in this pioneer movement. The horizon line was more remote. Things were done in the gross. The transcontinental railroad, the bonanza farm, the steam plow, harvester, and thresher, the "league-long furrow," and the vast cattle ranches, all suggested spacious combination and systematization of industry. The largest hopes were excited by these conquests of the prairie. The occupation of western Kansas may illustrate the movement which went on also in the west of Nebraska and the Dakotas. The pioneer farmer tried to push into the region with the old methods of settlement. Deceived by rainy seasons and the railroad advertisements, and recklessly optimistic, hosts of settlers poured out into the plains beyond the region of sufficient rainfall for successful agriculture without irrigation. Dry seasons starved them back; but a repetition of good rainfalls again aroused the determination to occupy the western plains. Boom towns flourished like prairie weeds; Eastern capital struggled for a chance to share in the venture, and the Kansas farmers eagerly mortgaged their possessions to secure the capital so freely offered for their attack on the arid lands. By 1887 the tide of the pioneer farmers had flowed across the semi-arid plains to the western boundary of the State. But it was a hopeless effort to conquer a new province by the forces that had won the prairies. The wave of settlement dashed itself in vain against the conditions of the Great Plains. The native American farmer had received his first defeat; farm products at the same period had depreciated, and he turned to the national government for reinforcements.
The Populistic movement of the western half of the Middle West is a complex of many forces. In some respects it is the latest manifestation of the same forces that brought on the crisis of 1837 in the earlier region of pioneer exploitation. That era of over-confidence, reckless internal improvements, and land purchases by borrowed capital, brought a reaction when it became apparent that the future had been over-discounted. But, in that time, there were the farther free lands to which the ruined pioneer could turn. The demand for an expansion of the currency has marked each area of Western advance. The greenback movement of Ohio and the eastern part of the Middle West grew into the fiat money, free silver, and land bank propositions of the Populists across the Mississippi. Efforts for cheaper transportation also appear in each stage of Western advance. When the pioneer left the rivers and had to haul his crops by wagon to a market, the transportation factor determined both his profits and the extension of settlement. Demands for national aid to roads and canals had marked the pioneer advance of the first third of the century. The "Granger" attacks upon the railway rates, and in favor of governmental regulation, marked a second advance of Western settlement. The Farmers' Alliance and the Populist demand for government ownership of the railroad is a phase of the same effort of the pioneer farmer, on his latest frontier. The proposals have taken increasing proportions in each region of Western Advance. Taken as a whole, Populism is a manifestation of the old pioneer ideals of the native American, with the added element of increasing readiness to utilize the national government to effect its ends. This is not unnatural in a section whose lands were originally purchased by the government and given away to its settlers by the same authority, whose railroads were built largely by federal land grants, and whose settlements were protected by the United States army and governed by the national authority until they were carved into rectangular States and admitted into the Union. Its native settlers were drawn from many States, many of them former soldiers of the Civil War, who mingled in new lands with foreign immigrants accustomed to the vigorous authority of European national governments.
But these old ideals of the American pioneer, phrased in the new language of national power, did not meet with the assent of the East. Even in the Middle West a change of deepest import had been in progress during these years of prairie settlement. The agricultural preponderance of the country has passed to the prairies, and manufacturing has developed in the areas once devoted to pioneer farming. In the decade prior to the Civil War, the area of greatest wheat production passed from Ohio and the States to the east, into Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin; after 1880, the center of wheat growing moved across the Mississippi; and in 1890 the new settlements produced half the crop of the United States. The corn area shows a similar migration. In 1840 the Southern States produced half the crop, and the Middle West one-fifth; by 1860 the situation was reversed and in 1890 nearly one-half the corn of the Union came from beyond the Mississippi. Thus the settlers of the Old Northwest and their crops have moved together across the Mississippi, and in the regions whence they migrated varied agriculture and manufacture have sprung up.
As these movements in population and products have passed across the Middle West, and as the economic life of the eastern border has been intensified, a huge industrial organism has been created in the province,--an organism of tremendous power, activity, and unity. Fundamentally the Middle West is an agricultural area unequaled for its combination of space, variety, productiveness, and freedom from interruption by deserts or mountains. The huge water system of the Great Lakes has become the highway of a mighty commerce. The Sault Ste. Marie Canal, although open but two-thirds of the year, is the channel of a traffic of greater tonnage than that which passes through the Suez Canal, and nearly all this commerce moves almost the whole length of the Great Lakes system; the chief ports being Duluth, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Buffalo. The transportation facilities of the Great Lakes were revolutionized after 1886, to supply the needs of commerce between the East and the newly developed lands of the Middle West; the tonnage doubled; wooden ships gave way to steel; sailing vessels yielded to steam; and huge docks, derricks, and elevators, triumphs of mechanical skill, were constructed. A competent investigator has lately declared that "there is probably in the world to-day no place at tide water where ship plates can be laid down for a less price than they can be manufactured or purchased at the lake ports."
This rapid rise of the merchant marine of our inland seas has led to the demand for deep water canals to connect them with the ocean road to Europe. When the fleets of the Great Lakes plow the Atlantic, and when Duluth and Chicago become seaports, the water transportation of the Middle West will have completed its evolution. The significance of the development of the railway systems is not inferior to that of the great water way. Chicago has become the greatest railroad center of the world, nor is there another area of like size which equals this in its railroad facilities; all the forces of the nation intersect here. Improved terminals, steel rails, better rolling stock, and consolidation of railway systems have accompanied the advance of the people of the Middle West.
This unparalleled development of transportation facilities measures the magnitude of the material development of the province. Its wheat and corn surplus supplies the deficit of the rest of the United States and much of that of Europe. Such is the agricultural condition of the province of which Monroe wrote to Jefferson, in 1786, in these words: "A great part of the territory is miserably poor, especially that near Lakes Michigan and Erie, and that upon the Mississippi and the Illinois consists of extensive plains which have not had, from appearances, and will not have, a single bush on them for ages. The districts, therefore, within which these fall will never contain a sufficient number of inhabitants to entitle them to membership in the confederacy."
Minneapolis and Duluth receive the spring wheat of the northern prairies, and after manufacturing great portions of it into flour, transmit it to Buffalo, the eastern cities, and to Europe. Chicago is still the great city of the corn belt, but its power as a milling and wheat center has been passing to the cities that receive tribute from the northern prairies. It lies in the region of winter wheat, corn, oats, and live stock. Kansas City, St. Louis, and Cincinnati are the sister cities of this zone, which reaches into the grazing country of the Great Plains. The meeting point of corn and cattle has led to the development of the packing industries,--large business systems that send the beef and pork of the region to supply the East and parts of Europe. The "feeding system" adopted in Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa, whereby the stock is fattened from the surplus corn of the region, constitutes a species of varied farming that has saved these States from the disasters of the failure of a single industry, and has been one solution of the economic life of the transition belt between the prairies and the Great Plains. Under a more complex agriculture, better adapted to the various sections of the State, and with better crops, Kansas has become more prosperous and less a center of political discontent.
While this development of the agricultural interests of the Middle West has been in progress, the exploitation of the pine woods of the north has furnished another contribution to the commerce of the province. The center of activity has migrated from Michigan to Minnesota, and the lumber traffic furnishes one of the principal contributions to the vessels that ply the Great Lakes and supply the tributary mills. As the white pine vanishes before the organized forces of exploitation, the remaining hard woods serve to establish factories in the former mill towns. The more fertile denuded lands of the north are now receiving settlers who repeat the old pioneer life among the stumps.
But the most striking development in the industrial history of the Middle West in recent years has been due to the opening up of the iron mines of Lake Superior. Even in 1873 the Lake Superior ores furnished a quarter of the total production of American blast furnaces. The opening of the Gogebic mines in 1884, and the development of the Vermillion and Mesabi mines adjacent to the head of the lake, in the early nineties, completed the transfer of iron ore production to the Lake Superior region. Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin together now produce the ore for eighty per cent of the pig iron of the United States. Four-fifths of this great product moves to the ports on Lake Erie and the rest to the manufactories at Chicago and Milwaukee. The vast steel and iron industry that centers at Pittsburgh and Cleveland, with important outposts like Chicago and Milwaukee, is the outcome of the meeting of the coal of the eastern and southern borders of the province and of Pennsylvania, with the iron ores of the north. The industry has been systematized and consolidated by a few captains of industry. Steam shovels dig the ore from many of the Mesabi mines; gravity roads carry it to the docks and to the ships, and huge hoisting and carrying devices, built especially for the traffic, unload it for the railroad and the furnace. Iron and coal mines, transportation fleets, railroad systems, and iron manufactories are concentrated in a few corporations, principally the United States Steel Corporation. The world has never seen such a consolidation of capital and so complete a systematization of economic processes.
Such is the economic appearance of the Middle West a century after the pioneers left the frontier village of Pittsburgh and crossed the Ohio into the forests. De Tocqueville exclaimed, with reason, in 1833: "This gradual and continuous progress of the European race toward the Rocky Mountains has the solemnity of a providential event. It is like a deluge of men, rising unabatedly, and driven daily onward by the hand of God."
The ideals of the Middle West began in the log huts set in the midst of the forest a century ago. While his horizon was still bounded by the clearing that his ax had made, the pioneer dreamed of continental conquests. The vastness of the wilderness kindled his imagination. His vision saw beyond the dank swamp at the edge of the great lake to the lofty buildings and the jostling multitudes of a mighty city; beyond the rank, grass-clad prairie to the seas of golden grain; beyond the harsh life of the log hut and the sod house to the home of his children, where should dwell comfort and the higher things of life, though they might not be for him. The men and women who made the Middle West were idealists, and they had the power of will to make their dreams come true. Here, also, were the pioneer's traits,--individual activity, inventiveness, and competition for the prizes of the rich province that awaited exploitation under freedom and equality of opportunity. He honored the man whose eye was the quickest and whose grasp was the strongest in this contest: it was "every one for himself."
The early society of the Middle West was not a complex, highly differentiated and organized society. Almost every family was a self-sufficing unit, and liberty and equality flourished in the frontier periods of the Middle West as perhaps never before in history. American democracy came from the forest, and its destiny drove it to material conquests; but the materialism of the pioneer was not the dull contented materialism of an old and fixed society. Both native settler and European immigrant saw in this free and competitive movement of the frontier the chance to break the bondage of social rank, and to rise to a higher plane of existence. The pioneer was passionately desirous to secure for himself and for his family a favorable place in the midst of these large and free but vanishing opportunities. It took a century for this society to fit itself into the conditions of the whole province. Little by little, nature pressed into her mold the plastic pioneer life. The Middle West, yesterday a pioneer province, is to-day the field of industrial resources and systematization so vast that Europe, alarmed for her industries in competition with this new power, is discussing the policy of forming protective alliances among the nations of the continent. Into this region flowed the great forces of modern capitalism. Indeed, the region itself furnished favorable conditions for the creation of these forces, and trained many of the famous American industrial leaders. The Prairies, the Great Plains, and the Great Lakes furnished new standards of industrial measurement. From this society, seated amidst a wealth of material advantages, and breeding individualism, energetic competition, inventiveness, and spaciousness of design, came the triumph of the strongest. The captains of industry arose and seized on nature's gifts. Struggling with one another, increasing the scope of their ambitions as the largeness of the resources and the extent of the fields of activity revealed themselves, they were forced to accept the natural conditions of a province vast in area but simple in structure. Competition grew into consolidation. On the Pittsburgh border of the Middle West the completion of the process is most clearly seen. On the prairies of Kansas stands the Populist, a survival of the pioneer, striving to adjust present conditions to his old ideals.
The ideals of equality, freedom of opportunity, faith in the common man are deep rooted in all the Middle West. The frontier stage, through which each portion passed, left abiding traces on the older, as well as on the newer, areas of the province. Nor were these ideals limited to the native American settlers: Germans and Scandinavians who poured into the Middle West sought the country with like hopes and like faith. These facts must be remembered in estimating the effects of the economic transformation of the province upon its democracy. The peculiar democracy of the frontier has passed away with the conditions that produced it; but the democratic aspirations remain. They are held with passionate determination.
The task of the Middle West is that of adapting democracy to the vast economic organization of the present. This region which has so often needed the reminder that bigness is not greatness, may yet show that its training has produced the power to reconcile popular government and culture with the huge industrial society of the modern world. The democracies of the past have been small communities, under simple and primitive economic conditions. At bottom the problem is how to reconcile real greatness with bigness.
It is important that the Middle West should accomplish this; the future of the Republic is with her. Politically she is dominant, as is illustrated by the fact that six out of seven of the Presidents elected since 1860 have come from her borders. Twenty-six million people live in the Middle West as against twenty-one million in New England and the Middle States together, and the Middle West has indefinite capacity for growth. The educational forces are more democratic than in the East, and the Middle West has twice as many students (if we count together the common school, secondary, and collegiate attendance), as have New England and the Middle States combined. Nor is this educational system, as a whole, inferior to that of the Eastern States. State universities crown the public school system in every one of these States of the Middle West, and rank with the universities of the seaboard, while private munificence has furnished others on an unexampled scale. The public and private art collections of Pittsburgh, Chicago, St. Paul, and other cities rival those of the seaboard. "World's fairs," with their important popular educational influences, have been held at Chicago, Omaha, and Buffalo; and the next of these national gatherings is to be at St. Louis. There is throughout the Middle West a vigor and a mental activity among the common people that bode well for its future. If the task of reducing the Province of the Lake and Prairie Plains to the uses of civilization should for a time overweigh art and literature, and even high political and social ideals, it would not be surprising. But if the ideals of the pioneers shall survive the inundation of material success, we may expect to see in the Middle West the rise of a highly intelligent society where culture shall be reconciled with democracy in the large.
FOOTNOTES:
[126:1] With acknowledgments to the International Monthly, December, 1901.
[129:1] 1901.
[132:1] See F. J. Turner, "Western State-Making in the Revolutionary Era," in Am. Historical Review, i, pp. 70 et seq.
V
THE OHIO VALLEY IN AMERICAN HISTORY[157:1]
In a notable essay Professor Josiah Royce has asserted the salutary influence of a highly organized provincial life in order to counteract certain evils arising from the tremendous development of nationalism in our own day. Among these evils he enumerates: first, the frequent changes of dwelling place, whereby the community is in danger of losing the well-knit organization of a common life; second, the tendency to reduce variety in national civilization, to assimilate all to a common type and thus to discourage individuality, and produce a "remorseless mechanism--vast, irrational;" third, the evils arising from the fact that waves of emotion, the passion of the mob, tend in our day to sweep across the nation.
Against these surges of national feeling Professor Royce would erect dikes in the form of provincialism, the resistance of separate sections each with its own traditions, beliefs and aspirations. "Our national unities have grown so vast, our forces of social consolidation so paramount, the resulting problems, conflicts, evils, have become so intensified," he says, that we must seek in the province renewed strength, usefulness and beauty of American life.
Whatever may be thought of this philosopher's appeal for a revival of sectionalism, on a higher level, in order to check the tendencies to a deadening uniformity of national consolidation (and to me this appeal, under the limitations which he gives it, seems warranted by the conditions)--it is certainly true that in the history of the United States sectionalism holds a place too little recognized by the historians.
By sectionalism I do not mean the struggle between North and South which culminated in the Civil War. That extreme and tragic form of sectionalism indeed has almost engrossed the attention of historians, and it is, no doubt, the most striking and painful example of the phenomenon in our history. But there are older, and perhaps in the long run more enduring examples of the play of sectional forces than the slavery struggle, and there are various sections besides North and South.
Indeed, the United States is, in size and natural resources, an empire, a collection of potential nations, rather than a single nation. It is comparable in area to Europe. If the coast of California be placed along the coast of Spain, Charleston, South Carolina, would fall near Constantinople; the northern shores of Lake Superior would touch the Baltic, and New Orleans would lie in southern Italy. Within this vast empire there are geographic provinces, separate in physical conditions, into which American colonization has flowed, and in each of which a special society has developed, with an economic, political and social life of its own. Each of these provinces, or sections, has developed its own leaders, who in the public life of the nation have voiced the needs of their section, contended with the representatives of other sections, and arranged compromises between sections in national legislation and policy, almost as ambassadors from separate countries in a European congress might make treaties.
Between these sections commercial relations have sprung up, and economic combinations and contests may be traced by the student who looks beneath the surface of our national life to the actual grouping of States in congressional votes on tariff, internal improvement, currency and banking, and all the varied legislation in the field of commerce. American industrial life is the outcome of the combinations and contests of groups of States in sections. And the intellectual, the spiritual life of the nation is the result of the interplay of the sectional ideals, fundamental assumptions and emotions.
In short, the real federal aspect of the nation, if we penetrate beneath constitutional forms to the deeper currents of social, economic and political life, will be found to lie in the relation of sections and nation, rather than in the relation of States and nation. Recently ex-secretary Root emphasized the danger that the States, by neglecting to fulfil their duties, might fall into decay, while the national government engrossed their former power. But even if the States disappeared altogether as effective factors in our national life, the sections might, in my opinion, gain from that very disappearance a strength and activity that would prove effective limitations upon the nationalizing process.
Without pursuing the interesting speculation, I may note as evidence of the development of sectionalism, the various gatherings of business men, religious denominations and educational organizations in groups of States. Among the signs of growth of a healthy provincialism is the formation of sectional historical societies. While the American Historical Association has been growing vigorously and becoming a genuine gathering of historical students from all parts of the nation, there have also arisen societies in various sections to deal with the particular history of the groups of States. In part this is due to the great distances which render attendance difficult upon the meetings of the national body to-day, but we would be short-sighted, indeed, who failed to perceive in the formation of the Pacific Coast Historical Association, the Mississippi Valley Historical Association, and the Ohio Valley Historical Association, for example, genuine and spontaneous manifestations of a sectional consciousness.
These associations spring in large part from the recognition in each of a common past, a common body of experiences, traditions, institutions and ideals. It is not necessary now to raise the question whether all of these associations are based on a real community of historical interest, whether there are overlapping areas, whether new combinations may not be made? They are at least substantial attempts to find a common sectional unity, and out of their interest in the past of the section, increasing tendencies to common sectional ideas and policies are certain to follow. I do not mean to prophesy any disruptive tendency in American life by the rejuvenation of sectional self-consciousness; but I do mean to assert that American life will be enriched and safe-guarded by the development of the greater variety of interest, purposes and ideals which seem to be arising. A measure of local concentration seems necessary to produce healthy, intellectual and moral life. The spread of social forces over too vast an area makes for monotony and stagnation.
Let us, then, raise the question of how far the Ohio Valley has had a part of its own in the making of the nation. I have not the temerity to attempt a history of the Valley in the brief compass of this address. Nor am I confident of my ability even to pick out the more important features of its history in our common national life. But I venture to put the problem, to state some familiar facts from the special point of view, with the hope of arousing interest in the theme among the many students who are advancing the science of history in this section.
To the physiographer the section is made up of the province of the Alleghany Plateaus and the southern portion of the Prairie Plains. In it are found rich mineral deposits which are changing the life of the section and of the nation. Although you reckon in your membership only the states that touch the Ohio River, parts of those states are, from the point of view of their social origins, more closely connected with the Northwest on the Lake Plains, than with the Ohio Valley; and, on the other hand, the Tennessee Valley, though it sweeps far toward the Lower South, and only joins the Ohio at the end of its course, has been through much of the history of the region an essential part of this society. Together these rivers made up the "Western World" of the pioneers of the Revolutionary era; the "Western Waters" of the backwoodsmen.
But, after all, the unity of the section and its place in history were determined by the "beautiful river," as the French explorers called it--the Ohio, which pours its flood for over a thousand miles, a great highway to the West; a historic artery of commerce, a wedge of advance between powerful Indian confederacies, and rival European nations, to the Mississippi Valley; a home for six mighty States, now in the heart of the nation, rich in material wealth, richer in the history of American democracy, a society that holds a place midway between the industrial sections of the seaboard and the plains and prairies of the agricultural West; between the society that formed later along the levels about the Great Lakes, and the society that arose in the Lower South on the plains of the Gulf of Mexico. The Alleghanies bound it on the east, the Mississippi on the west. At the forks of the great river lies Pittsburgh, the historic gateway to the West, the present symbol and embodiment of the age of steel, the type of modern industrialism. Near its western border is St. Louis, looking toward the Prairies, the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains, the land into which the tide of modern colonization turns.
Between these old cities, for whose sites European nations contended, stand the cities whose growth preëminently represents the Ohio valley; Cincinnati, the historic queen of the river; Louisville, the warder of the falls; the cities of the "Old National Road," Columbus, Indianapolis; the cities of the Blue Grass lands, which made Kentucky the goal of the pioneers; and the cities of that young commonwealth, whom the Ohio river by force of its attraction tore away from an uncongenial control by the Old Dominion, and joined to the social section where it belonged.
The Ohio Valley is, therefore, not only a commercial highway, it is a middle kingdom between the East and the West, between the northern area, which was occupied by a greater New England and emigrants from northern Europe, and the southern area of the "Cotton Kingdom." As Pennsylvania and New York constituted the Middle Region in our earlier history, between New England and the seaboard South, so the Ohio Valley became the Middle Region of a later time. In its position as a highway and a Middle Region are found the keys to its place in American history.
From the beginning the Ohio Valley seems to have been a highway for migration, and the home of a culture of its own. The sciences of American archeology and ethnology are too new to enable us to speak with confidence upon the origins and earlier distribution of the aborigines, but it is at least clear that the Ohio river played an important part in the movements of the earlier men in America, and that the mounds of the valley indicate a special type of development intermediate between that of the northern hunter folk, and the pueblo building races of the south. This dim and yet fascinating introduction to the history of the Ohio will afford ample opportunity for later students of the relations between geography and population to make contributions to our history.
The French explorers saw the river, but failed to grasp its significance as a strategic line in the conquest of the West. Entangled in the water labyrinth of the vast interior, and kindled with aspirations to reach the "Sea of the West," their fur traders and explorers pushed their way through the forests of the North and across the plains of the South, from river to lake, from lake to river, until they met the mountains of the West. But while they were reaching the upper course of the Missouri and the Spanish outposts of Santa Fé, they missed the opportunity to hold the Ohio Valley, and before France could settle the Valley, the long and attenuated line of French posts in the west, reaching from Canada to Louisiana, was struck by the advancing column of the American backwoodsmen in the center by the way of the Ohio. Parkman, in whose golden pages is written the epic of the American wilderness, found his hero in the wandering Frenchman. Perhaps because he was a New Englander he missed a great opportunity and neglected to portray the formation and advance of the backwood society which was finally to erase the traces of French control in the interior of North America.
It is not without significance in a consideration of the national aspects of the history of the Ohio Valley, that the messenger of English civilization, who summoned the French to evacuate the Valley and its approaches, and whose men near the forks of the Ohio fired the opening gun of the world-historic conflict that wrought the doom of New France in America, was George Washington, the first American to win a national position in the United States. The father of his country was the prophet of the Ohio Valley.
Into this dominion, in the next scene of this drama, came the backwoodsmen, the men who began the formation of the society of the Valley. I wish to consider the effects of the formation of this society upon the nation. And first let us consider the stock itself.
The Ohio Valley was settled, for the most part (though with important exceptions, especially in Ohio), by men of the Upland South, and this determined a large part of its influence in the nation through a long period. As the Ohio Valley, as a whole, was an extension of the Upland South, so the Upland South was, broadly speaking, an extension from the old Middle Region, chiefly from Pennsylvania. The society of pioneers, English, Scotch-Irish, Germans, and other nationalities which formed in the beginning of the eighteenth century in the Great Valley of Pennsylvania and its lateral extensions was the nursery of the American backwoodsmen. Between about 1730 and the Revolution, successive tides of pioneers ascended the Shenandoah, occupied the Piedmont, or up-country of Virginia and the Carolinas, and received recruits from similar peoples who came by eastward advances from the coast toward this Old West.
Thus by the middle of the eighteenth century a new section had been created in America, a kind of peninsula thrust down from Pennsylvania between the falls of the rivers of the South Atlantic colonies on the one side and the Alleghany mountains on the other. Its population showed a mixture of nationalities and religions. Less English than the colonial coast, it was built on a basis of religious feeling different from that of Puritan New England, and still different from the conservative Anglicans of the southern seaboard. The Scotch-Irish Presbyterians with the glow of the covenanters; German sectaries with serious-minded devotion to one or another of a multiplicity of sects, but withal deeply responsive to the call of the religious spirit, and the English Quakers all furnish a foundation of emotional responsiveness to religion and a readiness to find a new heaven and a new earth in politics as well as in religion. In spite of the influence of the backwoods in hampering religious organization, this upland society was a fertile field for tillage by such democratic and emotional sects as the Baptists, Methodists and the later Campbellites, as well as by Presbyterians. Mr. Bryce has well characterized the South as a region of "high religious voltage," but this characterization is especially applicable to the Upland South, and its colonies in the Ohio Valley. It is not necessary to assert that this religious spirit resulted in the kind of conduct associated with the religious life of the Puritans. What I wish to point out is the responsiveness of the Upland South to emotional religious and political appeal.
Besides its variety of stocks and its religious sects responsive to emotion, the Upland South was intensely democratic and individualistic. It believed that government was based on a limited contract for the benefit of the individual, and it acted independently of governmental organs and restraints with such ease that in many regions this was the habitual mode of social procedure: voluntary coöperation was more natural to the Southern Uplanders than action through the machinery of government, especially when government checked rather than aided their industrial and social tendencies and desires. It was a naturally radical society. It was moreover a rural section not of the planter or merchant type, but characterized by the small farmer, building his log cabin in the wilderness, raising a small crop and a few animals for family use. It was this stock which began to pass into the Ohio Valley when Daniel Boone, and the pioneers associated with his name, followed the "Wilderness Trace" from the Upland South to the Blue Grass lands in the midst of the Kentucky hills, on the Ohio river. In the opening years of the Revolution these pioneers were recruited by westward extensions from Pennsylvania and West Virginia. With this colonization of the Ohio Valley begins a chapter in American history.
This settlement contributed a new element to our national development and raised new national problems. It took a long time for the seaboard South to assimilate the upland section. We cannot think of the South as a unit through much of its ante-bellum history without doing violence to the facts. The struggle between the men of the up-country and the men of the tide-water, made a large part of the domestic history of the "Old South." Nevertheless, the Upland South, as slavery and cotton cultivation extended westward from the coast, gradually merged in the East. On the other hand, its children, who placed the wall of the Alleghanies between them and the East, gave thereby a new life to the conditions and ideals which were lost in their former home. Nor was this all. Beyond the mountains new conditions, new problems, aroused new ambitions and new social ideals. Its entrance into the "Western World" was a tonic to this stock. Its crossing put new fire into its veins--fires of militant expansion, creative social energy, triumphant democracy. A new section was added to the American nation, a new element was infused into the combination which we call the United States, a new flavor was given to the American spirit.
We may next rapidly note some of the results. First, let us consider the national effects of the settlement of this new social type in the Ohio Valley upon the expansion and diplomacy of the nation. Almost from the first the Ohio valley had constituted the problem of westward expansion. It was the entering wedge to the possession of the Mississippi Valley, and, although reluctantly, the Eastern colonies and then the Eastern States were compelled to join in the struggle first to possess the Ohio, then to retain it, and finally to enforce its demand for the possession of the whole Mississippi Valley and the basin of the Great Lakes as a means of outlet for its crops and of defense for its settlements. The part played by the pioneers of the Ohio Valley as a flying column of the nation, sent across the mountains and making a line of advance between hostile Indians and English on the north, and hostile Indians and Spaniards on the south, is itself too extensive a theme to be more than mentioned.
Here in historic Kentucky, in the State which was the home of George Rogers Clark it is not necessary to dwell upon his clear insight and courage in carrying American arms into the Northwest. From the first, Washington also grasped the significance of the Ohio Valley as a "rising empire," whose population and trade were essential to the nation, but which found its natural outlet down the Mississippi, where Spain blocked the river, and which was in danger of withdrawing from the weak confederacy. The intrigues of England to attract the Valley to herself and those of Spain to add the settlements to the Spanish Empire, the use of the Indians by these rivals, and the efforts of France to use the pioneers of Kentucky to win New Orleans and the whole Valley between the Alleghanies and the Rocky Mountains for a revived French Empire in America, are among the fascinating chapters of American, as well as of Ohio Valley, history. This position of the Valley explains much of the Indian wars, the foreign relations, and, indirectly, the domestic politics of the period from the Revolution to the purchase of Louisiana. Indeed, the purchase was in large measure due to the pressure of the settlers of the Ohio Valley to secure this necessary outlet. It was the Ohio Valley which forced the nation away from a narrow colonial attitude into its career as a nation among other nations with an adequate physical basis for future growth.
In this development of a foreign policy in connection with the Ohio Valley, we find the germ of the Monroe doctrine, and the beginnings of the definite independence of the United States from the state system of the Old World, the beginning, in fact, of its career as a world power. This expansive impulse went on into the War of 1812, a war which was in no inconsiderable degree, the result of the aggressive leadership of a group of men from Kentucky and Tennessee, and especially of the daring and lofty demands of Henry Clay, who even thus early voiced the spirit of the Ohio Valley. That in this war William Henry Harrison and the Kentucky troops achieved the real conquest of the northwest province and Andrew Jackson with his Tennesseeans achieved the real conquest of the Gulf Plains, is in itself abundant evidence of the part played in the expansion of the nation by the section which formed on the Ohio and its tributaries. Nor was this the end of the process, for the annexation of Texas and the Pacific Coast was in a very real sense only an aftermath of the same movement of expansion.
While the Ohio Valley was leading the way to the building of a greater nation, it was also the field wherein was formed an important contribution of the United States to political institutions. By this I mean what George Bancroft has well called "federal colonial system," that is, our system of territories and new States. It is a mistake to attribute this system to the Ordinance of 1787 and to the leadership of New England. It was in large measure the work of the communities of the Ohio Valley who wrought out the essentials of the system for themselves, and by their attitude imposed it, of necessity, upon the nation. The great Ordinance only perfected the system.[168:1]
Under the belief that all men going into vacant lands have the right to shape their own political institutions, the riflemen of western Virginia, western Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Tennessee, during the Revolution, protested against the rule of governments east of the mountains, and asserted with manly independence their right to self-government. But it is significant that in making this assertion, they at the same time petitioned congress to admit them to the sisterhood of States. Even when leaders like Wilkinson were attempting to induce Kentucky to act as an independent nation, the national spirit of the people as a whole led them to delay until at last they found themselves a State of the new Union. This recognition of the paramount authority of congress and this demand for self-government under that authority, constitute the foundations of the federal territorial system, as expressed in congressional resolutions, worked out tentatively in Jefferson's Ordinance of 1784, and finally shaped in the Ordinance of 1787.
Thus the Ohio Valley was not only the area to which this system was applied, but it was itself instrumental in shaping the system by its own demands and by the danger that too rigorous an assertion of either State or national power over these remote communities might result in their loss to the nation. The importance of the result can hardly be overestimated. It insured the peaceful and free development of the great West and gave it political organization not as the outcome of wars of hostile States, nor by arbitrary government by distant powers, but by territorial government combined with large local autonomy. These governments in turn were admitted as equal States of the Union. By this peaceful process of colonization a whole continent has been filled with free and orderly commonwealths so quietly, so naturally, that we can only appreciate the profound significance of the process by contrasting it with the spread of European nations through conquest and oppression.
Next let me invite your attention to the part played by the Ohio Valley in the economic legislation which shaped our history in the years of the making of the nation between the War of 1812 and the rise of the slavery struggle. It needs but slight reflection to discover that in the area in question, the men and measures of the Ohio Valley held the balance of power and set the course of our national progress. The problems before the country at that time were problems of internal development: the mode of dealing with the public domain; the building of roads and digging of canals for the internal improvement of a nation which was separated into East and West by the Alleghany Mountains; the formation of a tariff system for the protection of home industries and to supply a market for the surplus of the West which no longer found an outlet in warring Europe; the framing of a banking and currency system which should meet the needs of the new interstate commerce produced by the rise of the western surplus.
In the Ohio Valley, by the initiative of Ohio Valley men, and often against the protest of Eastern sections, the public land policy was developed by laws which subordinated the revenue idea to the idea of the upbuilding of a democracy of small landholders. The squatters of the Ohio Valley forced the passage of preëmption laws and these laws in their turn led to the homestead agitation. There has been no single element more influential in shaping American democracy and its ideals than this land policy. And whether the system be regarded as harmful or helpful, there can be, I think, no doubt that it was the outcome of conditions imposed by the settlers of the Ohio Valley.
When one names the tariff, internal improvements and the bank, he is bound to add the title "The American System," and to think of Henry Clay of Kentucky, the captivating young statesman, who fashioned a national policy, raised issues and disciplined a party to support them and who finally imposed the system upon the nation. But, however clearly we recognize the genius and originality of Henry Clay as a political leader; however we recognize that he has a national standing as a constructive statesman, we must perceive, if we probe the matter deeply enough, that his policy and his power grew out of the economic and social conditions of the people whose needs he voiced--the people of the Ohio Valley. It was the fact that in this period they had begun to create an agricultural surplus, which made the necessity for this legislation.
The nation has recently celebrated the one hundredth anniversary of Fulton's invention of the steamboat, and the Hudson river has been ablaze in his honor; but in truth it is on the Ohio and the Mississippi that the fires of celebration should really burn in honor of Fulton, for the historic significance to the United States of the invention of the steamboat does not lie in its use on Eastern rivers; not even in its use on the ocean; for our own internal commerce carried in our own ships has had a vaster influence upon our national life than has our foreign commerce. And this internal commerce was at first, and for many years, the commerce of the Ohio Valley carried by way of the Mississippi. When Fulton's steamboat was applied in 1811 to the Western Waters, it became possible to develop agriculture and to get the Western crops rapidly and cheaply to a market. The result was a tremendous growth in the entire Ohio Valley, but this invention did not solve the problem of cheap supplies of Eastern manufactures, nor satisfy the desire of the West to build up its own factories in order to consume its own products. The Ohio Valley had seen the advantage of home markets, as her towns grew up with their commerce and manufacturers close to the rural regions. Lands had increased in value in proportion to their nearness to these cities, and crops were in higher demand near them. Thus Henry Clay found a whole section standing behind him when he demanded a protective tariff to create home markets on a national scale, and when he urged the breaking of the Alleghany barrier by a national system of roads and canals. If we analyse the congressional votes by which the tariff and internal improvement acts were passed, we shall find that there was an almost unbroken South against them, a Middle Region largely for them, a New England divided, and the Ohio Valley almost a unit, holding the balance of power and casting it in favor of the American system.
The next topic to which I ask your attention is the influence of the Ohio Valley in the promotion of democracy. On this I shall, by reason of lack of time, be obliged merely to point out that the powerful group of Ohio Valley States, which sprang out of the democracy of the backwoods, and which entered the Union one after the other with manhood suffrage, greatly recruited the effective forces of democracy in the Union. Not only did they add new recruits, but by their competitive pressure for population they forced the older States to break down their historic restraints upon the right of voting, unless they were to lose their people to the freer life of the West.
But in the era of Jacksonian democracy, Henry Clay and his followers engaged the great Tennesseean in a fierce political struggle out of which was born the rival Whig and Democratic parties. This struggle was in fact reflective of the conditions which had arisen in the Ohio Valley. As the section had grown in population and wealth, as the trails changed into roads, the cabins into well-built houses, the clearings into broad farms, the hamlets into towns; as barter became commerce and all the modern processes of industrial development began to operate in this rising region, the Ohio Valley broke apart into the rival interests of the industrial forces (the town-makers and the business builders), on the one side and the old rural democracy of the uplands on the other. This division was symbolical of national processes. In the contest between these forces, Andrew Jackson was the champion of the cause of the upland democracy. He denounced the money power, banks and the whole credit system and sounded a fierce tocsin of danger against the increasing influence of wealth in politics. Henry Clay, on the other hand, represented the new industrial forces along the Ohio. It is certainly significant that in the rivalry between the great Whig of the Ohio Valley and the great Democrat of its Tennessee tributary lay the issues of American politics almost until the slavery struggle. The responsiveness of the Ohio Valley to leadership and its enthusiasm in action are illustrated by the Harrison campaign of 1840; in that "log cabin campaign" when the Whigs "stole the thunder" of pioneer Jacksonian democracy for another backwoods hero, the Ohio Valley carried its spirit as well as its political favorite throughout the nation.
Meanwhile, on each side of the Ohio Valley, other sections were forming. New England and the children of New England in western New York and an increasing flood of German immigrants were pouring into the Great Lake basin and the prairies, north of the upland peoples who had chopped out homes in the forests along the Ohio. This section was tied to the East by the Great Lake navigation and the Erie canal, it became in fact an extension of New England and New York. Here the Free Soil party found its strength and New York newspapers expressed the political ideas. Although this section tried to attach the Ohio River interests to itself by canals and later by railroads, it was in reality for a long time separate in its ideals and its interests and never succeeded in dominating the Ohio Valley.
On the south along the Gulf Plains there developed the "Cotton Kingdom," a Greater South with a radical program of slavery expansion mapped out by bold and aggressive leaders. Already this Southern section had attempted to establish increasing commercial relations with the Ohio Valley. The staple-producing region was a principal consumer of its live stock and food products. South Carolina leaders like Calhoun tried to bind the Ohio to the chariot of the South by the Cincinnati and Charleston Railroad, designed to make an outlet for the Ohio Valley products to the southeast. Georgia in her turn was a rival of South Carolina in plans to drain this commerce itself. In all of these plans to connect the Ohio Valley commercially with the South, the political object was quite as prominent as the commercial.
In short, various areas were bidding for the support of the zone of population along the Ohio River. The Ohio Valley recognized its old relationship to the South, but its people were by no means champions of slavery. In the southern portion of the States north of the Ohio where indented servitude for many years opened a way to a system of semi-slavery, there were divided counsels. Kentucky also spoke with no certain voice. As a result, it is in these regions that we find the stronghold of the compromising movement in the slavery struggle. Kentucky furnished Abraham Lincoln to Illinois, and Jefferson Davis to Mississippi, and was in reality the very center of the region of adjustment between these rival interests. Senator Thomas, of southern Illinois, moved the Missouri Compromise, and Henry Clay was the most effective champion of that compromise, as he was the architect of the Compromise of 1850. The Crittenden compromise proposals on the eve of the Civil War came also from Kentucky and represent the persistence of the spirit of Henry Clay.
In a word, as I pointed out in the beginning, the Ohio Valley was a Middle Region with a strong national allegiance, striving to hold apart with either hand the sectional combatants in this struggle. In the cautious development of his policy of emancipation, we may see the profound influence of the Ohio Valley upon Abraham Lincoln--Kentucky's greatest son. No one can understand his presidency without proper appreciation of the deep influence of the Ohio Valley, its ideals and its prejudices upon America's original contribution to the great men of the world.
Enough has been said to make it clear, I trust, that the Ohio Valley has not only a local history worthy of study, a rich heritage to its people, but also that it has been an independent and powerful force in shaping the development of a nation. Of the late history of this Valley, the rise of its vast industrial power, its far-reaching commercial influence, it is not necessary that I should speak. You know its statesmen and their influence upon our own time; you know the relation of Ohio to the office of President of the United States! Nor is it necessary that I should attempt to prophesy concerning the future which the Ohio Valley will hold in the nation.
In that new age of inland water transportation, which is certain to supplement the age of the railroad, there can be no more important region than the Ohio Valley. Let us hope that its old love of democracy may endure, and that in this section, where the first trans-Alleghany pioneers struck blows at the forests, there may be brought to blossom and to fruit the ripe civilization of a people who know that whatever the glories of prosperity may be, there are greater glories of the spirit of man; who know that in the ultimate record of history, the place of the Ohio Valley will depend upon the contribution which her people and her leaders make to the cause of an enlightened, a cultivated, a God-fearing and a free, as well as a comfortable, democracy.
FOOTNOTES:
[157:1] An address before the Ohio Valley Historical Association, October 16, 1909.
[168:1] See F. J. Turner, "New States West of the Alleghanies," American Historical Review, i, pp. 70 ff.