Part 5 (1/2)

IV. Transportation and Settlement, 1809 to 1818.

At the close of the War of 1812, an unparalleled emigration to the frontiers of the United States began. Contemporary accounts speak of its great volume. ”Through New York and down the Alleghany River is now the track of many emigrants from the east to the west. Two hundred and sixty waggons have pa.s.sed a certain house on this route in nine days, besides many persons on horseback and on foot. The editor of the Gennessee Farmer observes, that he himself met on the road to Hamilton a cavalcade of upwards of twenty waggons, containing one company of one hundred and sixteen persons, on their way to _Indiana_, and all from one town in the district of Maine. So great is the emigration to _Illinois_ and _Missouri_ also, that it is apprehended that many must suffer for want of provisions the ensuing winter.”(279) ”Nothing more strongly proves the superiority of the western territory than the vast emigration to it from the eastern and southern states; during the eighteen months previous to April, 1816, fifteen thousand waggons pa.s.sed over the bridge at Cayuga, containing emigrants to the western country.”(280) ”Old America seems to be breaking up, and moving westward.... The number of emigrants who pa.s.sed this way [St. Clairsville, Ohio], was greater last year than in any preceding; and the present spring they are still more numerous than the last. Fourteen waggons yesterday, and thirteen today, have gone through this town.

Myriads take their course down the Ohio. The waggons swarm with children.

I heard today of three together, which contain forty-two of these young citizens.”(281) From Hamilton, New York: ”It is estimated, that there are now in this village and its vicinity, three hundred families, besides single travellers, amounting in all to fifteen hundred souls, waiting for a rise of water to embark for 'the promised land.' ”(282) ”The numerous companies of emigrants that flock to this country, might appear, to those who have not witnessed them, almost incredible. But there is scarce a day, except when the river is impeded with ice, but what there is a greater or less number of boats to be seen floating down its gentle current, to some place of destination. No less than five hundred families stopped at Cincinnati at one time, and many of them having come a great distance, and being of the poorer cla.s.s of people, before they could provide for themselves, were in a suffering condition; but to the honor of the citizens of Cincinnati, they raised a donation and relieved their distress.”(283) Of the remote districts, Missouri and Michigan were receiving crowds of immigrants.(284)

The changes in government and in the land question in Illinois were typical of changes in other frontier regions, but although worthy of note as helping to make a more attractive place for settlement, they are by no means sufficient to account for the great migration to the westward. Why that migration took place and how it was accomplished are interesting and important questions.

Emigration from New England resulted largely from financial and industrial disorganization caused by the close of the war, and a year of such continued cold weather as to produce a famine. This movement was interesting, dramatic, and large in volume, but its influence upon Illinois was slight, because the tide was stayed to the eastward of that state.(285) Migration from the South was also large, and it was from this source that most of the immigrants to Illinois came. In 1816 there was a severe drought in eastern North Carolina, and many planters cut their immature corn for their cattle, while great numbers sold their property and joined the emigrants.(286) Kentucky, still a favorite place for settlement, was in the midst of a land boom which reached such proportions as to cause a large volume of emigration to Illinois, Missouri, and the southwest. The buyer of Kentucky land was often a neighbor who wished to enlarge his farm and work on a larger scale, or some well-to-do immigrant who preferred the location to a more remote region. Land sold on credit and at fict.i.tious prices, the seller in turn buying land for which he frequently could make only the first payment. Retribution did not come, however, until after 1820, and for some years it seemed as if Kentucky was to become a source of population, for it was to Illinois and Missouri, and to a lesser degree to Alabama, what New England was to Ohio.(287) Probably chief among the reasons for migration from the South was the increase of slavery, with the resulting changes in industrial and social conditions.

Early in the century the growing importance of the cotton crop began to hasten a stratification of opinion which was determined by physiographic areas. The western parts of Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina, the northern part of Georgia, and the eastern parts of Kentucky and Tennessee, respectively, being hilly and less fertile than the coastal plain, became the center of the southern anti-slavery sentiment. On the plain settled the wealthy planters, and later the poorer Germans and Quakers settled in the uplands. Only when cotton-raising became very profitable was slavery to intrude upon the latter location.(288)

During the war the production of cotton in the United States had been almost constant in amount and less than in preceding years, but 1815 saw an increase of over forty-two per cent and 1816 an increase of twenty-four per cent,(289) while in the latter year South Carolina, after an interval of thirteen years, resumed its slavery legislation by pa.s.sing the first of a series of acts which show that the slavery problem was becoming increasingly difficult. Similar legislation took place in Tennessee, and to a lesser degree in Kentucky.(290) Increased production of cotton was accompanied by an increase in price, middling upland cotton selling at New York at 15 cents per pound in 1814, at 21 cents in 1815, at 29- cents in 1816, at 26- cents in 1817, and at 34 cents in 1818, while South Carolina sea-island cotton sold at Charleston in 1816 at 55 cents a pound.(291) An increase in cotton production meant an increase of the plantation system with its slaves, this meant an increased demand for large farms, and also a strengthening of the antagonism between pro-slavery and anti-slavery parties. Even in 1812, a man who wished to sell, lease, or rent his manufacturing establishment in the northwestern part of Virginia, Frederick county, lamented in his advertis.e.m.e.nt that ”some good men of strict moral or religious principles should object against forming settled abodes in Virginia” or other slave states.(292) Census reports show that the proportion of negroes to whites increased in the western counties of North Carolina during the decade 1810 to 1820 over the proportion in 1800 to 1810. Conditions above described naturally led to the emigration of at least four cla.s.ses of people: those who were anti-slavery, those who did not wish to change from small farming to the plantation system, the poor whites who found themselves increasingly disgraced and who at the same time found that their land was in demand, the slave-holder who wished a large tract of virgin soil. It is very important to note that these forces were merely beginning to operate in the time from 1814 to 1818, and that they did not reach their maximum of influence until after 1830, yet as the population of Illinois increased less than twenty-eight thousand from 1810 to 1818, it is altogether probable that a considerable proportion were influenced by the causes suggested. It is also true that some pioneers moved merely from habit, without any well-defined cause.

Although it is true that the first steamboat that pa.s.sed down the Ohio and Mississippi made its trip in the winter of 1811-12, and by 1816 an enterprising captain had made a successful experiment of running a steamboat with coal for fuel, also that the speed of steamboats in eastern waters was a matter for enthusiastic comment, yet it is also true that immigrants to Illinois did not usually arrive by steamer.(293) The development of steamboat navigation in western waters was slow, the first steamboat reaching St. Louis on August 2, 1817.(294) Peter Cartwright wrote of his trip from the West to the General Conference in Baltimore, in 1816: ”We had no steamboats, railroad cars, or comfortable stages in those days. We had to travel from the extreme West on horseback. It generally took us near a month to go; a month was spent at General Conference, and nearly a month in returning to our fields of labor.”(295)

Some instances of the manner and cost of emigration may be given. A man with his wife and brother having arrived at Philadelphia from England, _en route_ to Birkbeck's settlement(296) in Illinois, the party was directed to Pittsburg, which they reached after a wearisome journey of over three hundred miles across the mountains. At Pittsburg they bought a little boat for six or seven dollars, and came down the Ohio to Shawneetown, whence they proceeded on foot.(297) In the summer of 1818, a party of eighty-eight came over the same route in much the same manner, using flat-boats on the river.(298) In 1817, John Mason Peck, with his wife and three children, went from Litchfield, Connecticut, to Shawneetown, Illinois, in a one-horse wagon. The journey was begun on July 25 and Shawneetown was reached on the sixth of November. ”Nearly one month was occupied in pa.s.sing from Philadelphia through the State of Pennsylvania over the Alleghany Mountains, till on the 10th of September he pa.s.sed into Ohio. Three weeks he journeyed in that State, and on the 23d of October recrossed the Ohio River into the State of Kentucky ..., and on the 6th of November again crossed the Ohio River, into the then Territory of Illinois, at Shawneetown.”(299) Here the family was delayed by floods which rendered the roads impa.s.sable. Leaving the horse and wagon at Shawneetown to be brought on by a friend, they proceeded to St. Louis in a keel-boat, paying twenty-five dollars fare, and arrived at their destination on the first of December.(300)

Shawneetown was a sort of center from which emigrants radiated to their destinations. It owed much to its location, being on the main route from the southern states to St. Louis and what was then called the Missouri, and being also the port for the salt works on Saline Creek. It was the seat of a land-office. The town thus had a business which was out of all proportion to the number of its permanent inhabitants. In 1817 it consisted of but about thirty log houses, a log bank, and a land-office.

When a certain traveler came to the place from the South, in 1818, he found the number of wagons, horses, and pa.s.sengers waiting to cross the Ohio, on the ferry, so great that he had to wait ”a great part of the morning” for his turn.(301)

During the latter part of the territorial period freight charges from Philadelphia to Pittsburg, by land, were from seven to ten dollars per hundredweight;(302) from Pittsburg to Shawneetown, one dollar; from Louisville to Shawneetown, thirty-seven cents; and from New Orleans to Shawneetown, four dollars and a half.(303) The use of arks was common.

These were flat-bottomed boats of a tonnage of from twenty-five to thirty tons, covered, square at the ends, of a uniform size of fifty feet in length and fourteen in breadth, usually sold for seventy-five dollars, and would carry three or four families. A common practice was to re-sell them at a somewhat reduced price to someone going further down the river. Two dollars was the charge for piloting an ark over the falls of the Ohio.(304)

There is much truth in the remarks made by a German traveler in 1818-19.

He said: ”The State of Illinois is from one thousand to twelve hundred miles distant from the sea ports. The journey thither is often as costly and tedious, for a man with a family, as the sea pa.s.sage. Any father of a family, unless he is well-to-do, can certainly count on being impoverished upon his arrival in Illinois. At Williamsport, on the Susquehanna, I found a Swiss, who, with his wife and ten children, had spent one thousand French crown-dollars for their journey. In the village of Williamsport, an old German schoolmaster, who seems to have been formerly a merchant in Na.s.sau, told me that the pa.s.sage of himself and family had cost thirteen hundred dollars. For an adult the fare is seventy-five dollars-one dollar is equal to one thaler, ten groschen, Prussian-for children under twelve years, half so much, for children of two years, one-fourth so much, and only babes in arms go free.”(305)

It can now be understood why people emigrated to the West, and also why many went overland. A family too poor to go by water could go in a buggy or wagon, and if poorer still they might walk, as many actually did. The immigration to Illinois, which was but a small fraction of the great westward movement, was still largely southern in origin, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, and even New York still staying, in large measure, the tide from New England. In New England it was the ”Ohio fever” and not the Illinois fever which carried away the people, and the designation is geographically correct. The men prominent in Illinois politics at the close of the territorial period, and at the beginning of the state period, were natives of southern states, a fact hardly conceivable if New England had been largely represented in Illinois. Then, too, the natural routes from the South led to, or near to, Illinois, the great road from the South crossing the Ohio River at Shawneetown, and the Kentucky and c.u.mberland rivers being natural water routes. Another fact to be noticed is that much of the emigration was of relatives and friends to join those who had gone before, and as Virginia, Maryland, Kentucky, Tennessee, the Carolinas, and even Georgia, had furnished a large number of early settlers to Illinois, this was a powerful inducement to continued emigration from the same sources.

Similarly Ohio and Michigan had early received settlers from the East.

Immigration to Illinois was not large in comparison to that to neighboring states or territories. Indians still held the greater part of Illinois, and the inconveniences incident to frontier life were more p.r.o.nounced as the distance from the East increased. Pro-slavery men, and anti-slavery men as well, were still in doubt as to the ultimate fate of slavery in Illinois. This had a deterrent effect upon immigration.

IV. Life of the Settlers.

According to the marshal's return the manufactures in Illinois, in 1810, were as follows:

Spinning-wheels, $630 Looms, 460; cloth produced, 90,039 yards, $54,028 Tanneries, 9; leather dressed, $7,750 Distilleries, 10,200 gallons, $7,500 Flour, 6,440 barrels, $32,200 Maple sugar, 15,600 lbs., $1,980(306)-$104,088

This list incidentally indicates the average price of several manufactured articles. For the first six months of 1814, the internal revenue a.s.sessed in Illinois was:

Licenses for stills and boilers, $490.14 Carriages, $62.00 Licenses to retailers, $835.00 Stamps, $5.60-$1392.74

Of this amount ($1392.74), $1047.37 had been paid by October 10, 1814.(307) For the period from April 18, 1815, to February 22, 1816, the following were the internal duties: