Volume I Part 31 (1/2)
This revolution in the views of men like Was.h.i.+ngton, Madison, and Marshall was caused largely by the conduct of the ma.s.ses, which, to such men, seemed to be selfish, violent, capricious, vindictive, and dangerous. The state of the country explains much of this popular att.i.tude and disposition. The development of Marshall's public ideas cannot be entirely understood by considering merely his altered circ.u.mstances and business and social connections. More important is a review of the people, their environment and condition.
The extreme isolation of communities caused by want of roads and the difficulties and dangers of communication; the general ignorance of the ma.s.ses; their childish credulity, and yet their quick and acute suspicion springing, largely, from isolation and lack of knowledge; their savage and narrow individualism, which resisted the establishment of a central authority and was antagonistic to any but the loosest local control; their envy and distrust of the prosperous and successful which their own economic condition strengthened, if, indeed, this circ.u.mstance did not create that sullen and dangerous state of mind--an understanding of all these elements of American life at that time is vital if we are to trace the development of Marshall's thinking and explore the origins of the questions that confronted our early statesmen.
The majority of the people everywhere were poor; most of them owed debts; and they were readily influenced against any man who favored payment, and against any plan of government that might compel it. Also, the redemption of State and Continental debts, which was a hard and ever-present problem, was abhorrent to them. Much of the scrip had pa.s.sed into the hands of wealthy purchasers. Why, exclaimed the popular voice, should this expedient of war be recognized? Discharge of such public obligations meant very definite individual taxes. It was as easy to inflame a people so situated and inclined as it was hard to get accurate information to them or to induce them to accept any reasoning that made for personal inconvenience or for public burdens.
Marshall could not foresee the age of railway and telegraph and universal education. He had no vision of a period when speedy and accurate information would reach the great body of our population and the common hearthstone thus become the place of purest and soundest judgment. So it is impossible to comprehend or even apprehend his intellectual metamorphosis during this period unless we survey the physical, mental, and spiritual state of the country. How the people lived, their habits, the extent of their education, their tendency of thought, and, underlying all and vitally affecting all, the means or rather want of means of communication--a knowledge of these things is essential to an understanding of the times.[764] The absence of roads and the condition of the few that did exist were thoroughly characteristic of the general situation and, indeed, important causes of it. It becomes indispensable, then, to visualize the highways of the period and to picture the elements that produced the thinking and acting of the larger part of the people. Many examples are necessary to bring all this, adequately and in just proportion, before the eye of the present.
When Was.h.i.+ngton, as President, was on his way to meet Congress, his carriage stuck in the mud, and only after it had been pried up with poles and pulled out by ropes could the Father of his Country proceed on his journey;[765] and this, too, over the princ.i.p.al highway of Maryland.
”My nerves have not yet quite recovered the shock of the _wagon_,” wrote Samuel Johnston of a stage trip from Baltimore to New York two years after our present Government was established.[766] Richard Henry Lee objected to the Const.i.tution, because, among other things, ”many citizens will be more than three hundred miles from the seat of this [National] government”;[767] and ”as many a.s.sessors and collectors of federal taxes will be above three hundred miles from the seat of the federal government as will be less.”[768]
The best road throughout its course, in the entire country, was the one between Boston and New York; yet the public conveyance which made regular trips with relays of horses in the most favorable season of the year usually took an entire week for the journey.[769] The stage was ”shackling”; the horses' harness ”made of ropes”; one team hauled the stage only eighteen miles; the stop for the night was made at ten o'clock, the start next morning at half-past two; the pa.s.sengers often had to ”help the coachman lift the coach out of the quagmire.”[770]
Over parts even of this, the finest long highway in the United States, the stage had to struggle against rocks and to escape precipices. ”I knew not which to admire the most in the driver, his intrepidity or dexterity. I cannot conceive how he avoided twenty times das.h.i.+ng the carriage to pieces,”[771] testifies a traveler. In central Ma.s.sachusetts, the roads ”were intolerable” even to a New Englander; and ”the country was spa.r.s.ely inhabited by a rude population.”[772] In Rhode Island not far from Providence the traveler was forced to keep mounting and dismounting from his horse in order to get along at all.[773] Dr. Taylor, in the Ma.s.sachusetts Convention of 1788, arguing for frequent elections, said that it would take less than three weeks for Ma.s.sachusetts members of Congress to go from Boston to Philadelphia.[774]
Farmers only a short distance from New York could not bring their produce to the city in the winter because the roads were impa.s.sable.[775] Up State, in Cooper's Otsego settlement, ”not one in twenty of the settlers had a horse and the way lay through rapid streams, across swamps or over bogs.... If the father of a family went abroad to labour for bread, it cost him three times its value before he could bring it home.”[776] As late as 1790, after forty thousand acres in this region had been taken up ”by the poorest order of men ... there were neither roads nor bridges”; and about Otsego itself there was not even ”any trace of a road.”[777] Where Utica now stands, the opening through the wilderness, which went by the name of a road, was so nearly impa.s.sable that a horseback traveler could make no more than two miles an hour over it. Rocks, stumps, and muddy holes in which the horse sank, made progress not only slow and toilsome, but dangerous.[778]
Twenty days was not an unusual time for ordinary wagons, carrying adventurous settlers to the wilderness west of the Alleghanies, to cross Pennsylvania from Philadelphia to Pittsburg;[779] and it cost a hundred and twenty dollars a ton to haul freight between these points.[780]
Three years after our present Government was established, twenty out of twenty-six lawsuits pending in Philadelphia were settled out of court ”rather than go ninety miles from Phil^a for trial.”[781]
Talleyrand, journeying inland from the Quaker City about 1795, was ”struck with astonishment” at what he beheld: ”At less than a hundred and fifty miles distance from the Capital,” he writes, ”all trace of men's presence disappeared; nature in all her primeval vigor confronted us. Forests old as the world itself; decayed plants and trees covering the very ground where they once grew in luxuriance.” And Talleyrand testifies that the fields, only a few miles' walk out of the ”cities,”
had been ”mere wildernesses of forest” at the time the Const.i.tution was adopted.[782]
”The length and badness of the roads from hence [Mount Vernon] to Philadelphia” made Was.h.i.+ngton grumble with vexation and disgust;[783]
and Jefferson wrote of the President's Southern tour in 1791: ”I shall be happy to hear that no accident has happened to you in the bad roads ... that you are better prepared for those to come by lowering the hang [body] of your carriage and exchanging the coachman for two postilions ... which [are] ... essential to your safety.”[784]
No more comfortable or expeditious, if less dangerous, was travel by boat on the rivers. ”Having lain all night in my Great Coat and Boots in a berth not long enough for me,” chronicles Was.h.i.+ngton of this same Presidential journey, ”we found ourselves in the morning still fast aground.”[785]
So difficult were the New Jersey roads that the stout and well-kept harness with which Was.h.i.+ngton always equipped his horses was badly broken going through New Jersey in 1789.[786] ”The roads [from Richmond to New York] thro' the whole were so bad that we could never go more than three miles an hour, some times not more than two, and in the night, but one,” wrote Jefferson[787] in March, 1790.
A traveler starting from Alexandria, Virginia, to visit Mount Vernon, nine miles distant, was all day on the road, having become lost, in the ”very thick woods.” So confusing was the way through this forest that part of this time he was within three miles of his destination.[788]
Twelve years after our present Government was established James A.
Bayard records of his journey to the Capital: ”Tho' traveling in the mail stage ... we were unable to move at more than the rate of two or three miles an hour.”[789]
Throughout Virginia the roads were execrable and scarcely deserved the name. The few bridges usually were broken.[790] The best road in the State was from Williamsburg, the old Capital, to Richmond, the new, a distance of only sixty-three miles; yet, going at highest speed, it required two days to make the trip.[791] Traveling in Virginia was almost exclusively by horseback; only negroes walked.[792] According to Grigsby, the familiar vision in our minds of the picturesque coach comfortably rolling over attractive highways, with postilions and outriders, which we now picture when we think of traveling in old Virginia, is mostly an historical mirage; for, says Grigsby, ”coaches were rarely seen. There were thousands of respectable men in the Commonwealth who had never seen any other four-wheeled vehicle than a wagon and there were thousands who had never seen a wagon” at the time when the Const.i.tution was ratified.[793]
If horseback journeys were sore trials to the rider, they were desperately hard and sometimes fatal to the poor brute that carried him. In crossing unfordable rivers on the rude ferryboats, the horses'
legs frequently were broken or the animals themselves often killed or drowned.[794] From Fredericksburg to Alexandria the roads were ”frightfully bad.”[795] As late as 1801 the wilderness was so dense just above where the City of Was.h.i.+ngton now stands that Davis called it ”the wilds of the Potomac.” In most parts of Virginia a person unacquainted with the locality often became lost in the forests.[796] South of Jamestown the crude and hazardous highways led through ”eternal woods.”[797]
A short time before the Revolution, General Wilkinson's father bought five hundred acres on the present site of the National Capital, including the spot where the White House now stands; but his wife refused to go there from a little hamlet near Baltimore where her family then lived, because it was so far away from the settlements in the backwoods of Maryland.[798] A valuable horse was stolen from a Virginia planter who lived one hundred and forty miles from Richmond; but, although the thief was known, the expense of going to the Capital with witnesses was double the value of the horse, and so the planter pocketed his loss.[799] It cost more to transport tobacco from Augusta County, Virginia, to market than the tobacco was worth, so difficult and expensive was the carriage.[800]
A sergeant in a Virginia regiment during the Revolutionary War, living in a part of the State which at present is not two hours' ride from the Capital, pet.i.tioned the House of Delegates in 1790 for payment of his arrears because he lived so far away from Richmond that he had found it impossible to apply within the time allowed for the settlement of his accounts in the regular way.[801] In 1785 the price of tobacco on the James River or the Rappahannock, and in Philadelphia varied from twenty to ninety-five per cent, although each of these places was ”the same distance from its ultimate market,”[802] so seriously did want of transportation affect commerce. ”The trade of this Country is in a deplorable Condition ... the loss direct on our produce & indirect on our imports is not less than 50 per ct.,” testifies Madison.[803]
Only in the immediate neighborhood of Philadelphia, Boston,[804] or New York, neither of which ”cities” was as large as a moderate-sized inland town of to-day, were highways good, even from the point of view of the eighteenth century. In all other parts of America the roads in the present-day sense did not exist at all. Very often such trails as had been made were hard to find and harder to keep after they had been found. Near the close of the Revolution, Chastellux became tangled up in the woods on his way to visit Jefferson at Monticello ”and travelled a long time without seeing any habitation.”[805]
Whoever dared to take in North Carolina what, at present, would be a brief and pleasant jaunt, then had to go through scores of miles of ”dreary pines” in which the traveler often lost his way and became bewildered in the maze of the forest.[806] Again, the wanderer would find himself in a desolation of swamp and wood without the hint of a highway to follow out of it; and sleeping on the ground beneath the trees of this wilderness, with only wild animals about him, was, for the ordinary traveler, not an uncommon experience.[807]
Even when the road could be traced, bears would follow it, so much was it still a part of their savage domain.[808] The little traveling possible when the weather was good was sometimes entirely suspended for days after a rain or snowfall, even out of a ”city” like Baltimore.[809]
Six years after the Const.i.tution was adopted, Talleyrand found the buildings of that ambitious town ”disput[ing] the ground with trees whose stumps have not yet been removed.”[810]