Part 4 (1/2)
Almost all of the most recently occupied area was but thinly settled. It represented the movement of the backwoodsman, with axe and rifle, advancing to the conquest of the forest. But closer to the old settlements a more highly developed agriculture was to be seen. Hodgson, in 1821, describes plantations in northern Alabama in lands ceded by the Indians in 1818. Though settled less than two years, there were within a few miles five schools and four places of wors.h.i.+p. One plantation had one hundred acres in cotton and one hundred and ten in corn, although a year and a half before it was wilderness. [Footnote: Hodgson, Letters from North Am., I., 269; see Riley (editor), ”Autobiography of Lincec.u.m,” in Miss. Hist. Soc., Publications, VIII., 443, for the wanderings of a southern pioneer in the recently opened Indian lands of Georgia and the southwest in these years.]
But while this population of log-cabin pioneers was entering the Gulf plains, caravans of slave-holding planters were advancing from the seaboard to the occupation of the cotton-lands of the same region. As the free farmers of the interior had been replaced in the upland country of the south by the slaveholding planters, so now the frontiersmen of the southwest were pushed back from the more fertile lands into the pine hills and barrens. Not only was the pioneer unable to refuse the higher price which was offered him for his clearing, but, in the compet.i.tive bidding of the public land sales, [Footnote: Northern Ala. (published by Smith & De Land), 249; Brown, Hist. of Ala., 129-131; Brown, Lower South, 24-26.] the wealthier planter secured the desirable soils. Social forces worked to the same end. When the pioneer invited his slave-holding neighbor to a ”raising,” it grated on his sense of the fitness of things to have the guest appear with gloves, directing the gang of slaves which he contributed to the function. [Footnote: Smedes, A Southern Planter, 67.] Little by little, therefore, the old pioneer life tended to retreat to the less desirable lands, leaving the slave-holder in possession of the rich ”buck-shot” soils that spread over central Alabama and Mississippi and the fat alluvium that lined the eastern bank of the Mississippi. Even to-day the counties of dense Negro population reveal the results of this movement of segregation.
By the side of the picture of the advance of the pioneer farmer, bearing his household goods in his canvas-covered wagon to his new home across the Ohio, must therefore be placed the picture of the southern planter crossing through the forests of western Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, or pa.s.sing over the free state of Illinois to the Missouri Valley, in his family carriage, with servants, packs of hunting-dogs, and a train of slaves, their nightly camp-fires lighting up the wilderness where so recently the Indian hunter had held possession. [Footnote: Hodgson, Letters from North Am., I., 138; Niles' Register, XLIV., 222; Smedes, A Southern Planter, 52-54; Flint, Geography and History of the Western States, II., 350, 379; Bernhard, Duke of Saxe-Weimar, Travels, II., chaps. xvi., xvii.]
But this new society had a characteristic western flavor. The old patriarchal type of slavery along the seaboard was modified by the western conditions in the midst of which the slave-holding interest was now lodged. Planters, as well as pioneer farmers, were exploiting the wilderness and building a new society under characteristic western influences. Rude strength, a certain coa.r.s.eness of life, and aggressiveness characterized this society, as it did the whole of the Mississippi Valley. [Footnote: Baldwin, Flush Times in Ala.; cf. Gilmer, Sketches of Georgia, etc.] Slavery furnished a new ingredient for western forces to act upon. The system took on a more commercial tinge: the plantation had to be cleared and made profitable as a purely business enterprise.
The slaves were purchased in considerable numbers from the older states instead of being inherited in the family. Slave-dealers pa.s.sed to the southwest, with their coffles of Negroes brought from the outworn lands of the old south. It was estimated in 1832 that Virginia annually exported six thousand slaves for sale to other states. [Footnote: Collins, Domestic Slave Trade, 50.] An English traveler reported in 1823 that every year from ten to fifteen thousand slaves were sold from the states of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia, and sent to the south. [Footnote: Blane, Excursion through U.S., 226; Hodgson, Letters from North Am., I., 194.] At the same time, illicit importation of slaves through New Orleans reached an amount estimated at from ten to fifteen thousand a year. [Footnote: Collins, Domestic Slave Trade, 44.] It was not until the next decade that this incoming tide of slaves reached its height, but by 1830 it was clearly marked and was already transforming the southwest.
Mississippi doubled the number of her slaves in the decade, and Alabama nearly trebled hers. In the same period the number of slaves of Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina increased but slightly.
As the discussion of the south has already made clear, the explanation of this transformation of the southwest into a region of slave-holding planters lies in the spread of cotton into the Gulf plains. In 1811 this region raised but five million pounds of cotton; ten years later its product was sixty million pounds; and in 1826 its fields were white with a crop of over one hundred and fifty million pounds. It soon outstripped the seaboard south. Alabama, which had practically no cotton crop in 1811, and only ten million pounds in 1821, had in 1834 eighty-five million pounds, [Footnote: See table of cotton crop, ante, p. 47.] a larger crop than either South Carolina or Georgia.
Soon after 1830 the differences between the northern and southern portions of the Mississippi Valley were still further accentuated.
(1) From New York and New England came a tide of settlement, in the thirties, which followed the Erie Ca.n.a.l and the Great Lakes, and began to occupy the prairie lands which had been avoided by the southern axemen. This region then became an extension of the greater New England already to be seen in New York. (2) The southern pioneers in the northwest formed a transitional zone between this northern area and the slave states south of the Ohio. (3) In the Gulf plains a greater south was in process of formation, but by no means completely established. As yet it was a mixture of pioneer and planter, slave and free, profoundly affected by its western traits.
[Footnote: Curry, ”A Settlement in East Ala.,” in Am. Hist.
Magazine, II., 203.]
The different states of the south were steadily sending in bands of colonists. In Alabama, for example, the Georgians settled, as a rule, in the east; the Tennesseeans, moving from the great bend of the Tennessee River, were attracted to the northern and middle section; and the Virginians and Carolinians went to the west and southwest, following the bottom-lands near the rivers. [Footnote: Brown, Hist. of Ala., 129, 130; Northern Ala. (published bv Smith & De Land), pt. iv., 243 et seq.]
CHAPTER VII
WESTERN COMMERCE AND IDEALS (1820-1830)
By 1820 the west had developed the beginnings of many of the cities which have since ruled over the region. Buffalo and Detroit were hardly more than villages until the close of this period. They waited for the rise of steam navigation on the Great Lakes and for the opening of the prairies. Cleveland, also, was but a hamlet during most of the decade; but by 1830 the construction of the ca.n.a.l connecting the Cuyahoga with the Scioto increased its prosperity, and its harbor began to profit by its natural advantages. [Footnote: Whittlesey, Early Hist. of Cleveland, 456; Kennedy, Hist. of Cleveland, chap. viii.] Chicago and Milwaukee were mere fur-trading stations in the Indian country. Pittsburgh, at the head of the Ohio, was losing its old pre-eminence as the gateway to the west, but was finding recompense in the development of its manufactures. By 1830 its population was about twelve thousand. [Footnote: Thurston, Pittsburg and Allegheny in the Centennial Year, 61.] Foundries, rolling-mills, nail-factories, steam-engine shops, and distilleries were busily at work, and the city, dingy with the smoke of soft coal, was already dubbed the ”young Manchester” or the ”Birmingham”
of America. By 1830 Wheeling had intercepted much of the overland trade and travel to the Ohio, profiting by the old National Road and the wagon trade from Baltimore. [Footnote: Martin, Gazetteer of Va., 407.]
Cincinnati was rapidly rising to the position of the ”Queen City of the West.” Situated where the river reached with a great bend towards the interior of the northwest, in the rich farming country between the two Miamis, and opposite the Licking River, it was the commercial center of a vast and fertile region of Ohio and Kentucky; [Footnote: Melish, Information to Emigrants, 108.] and by 1830, with a population of nearly twenty-five thousand souls, it was the largest city of the west, with the exception of New Orleans. The center of steamboat-building, it also received extensive imports of goods from the east and exported the surplus crops of Ohio and adjacent parts of Kentucky. Its princ.i.p.al industry, however, was pork-packing, from which it won the name of ”Porkopolis” [Footnote: Drake and Mansfield, Cincinnati in 1826, p. 70; Winter in the West, I., 115.] Louisville, at the falls of the Ohio, was an important place of trans-s.h.i.+pment, and the export center for large quant.i.ties of tobacco. There were considerable manufactures of rope and bagging, products of the Kentucky hemp-fields; and new cotton and woolen factories were struggling for existence. [Footnote: Durrett, Centenary of Louisville (Filson Club, Publications, No. 8), 50-101; Louisville Directory, 1832, p. 131.] St. Louis occupied a unique position, as the entrepot of the important fur-trade of the upper Mississippi and the vast water system of the Missouri, as well as the outfitting-point for the Missouri settlements. It was the capital of the far west, and the commercial center for Illinois. Its population at the close of the decade was about six thousand.
Only a few villages lay along the Mississippi below St. Louis until the traveler reached New Orleans, the emporium of the whole Mississippi Valley. As yet the direct effect of the Erie Ca.n.a.l was chiefly limited to the state of New York. The great bulk of western exports pa.s.sed down the tributaries of the Mississippi to this city, which was, therefore, the center of foreign exports for the valley, as well as the port from which the coastwise trade in the products of the whole interior departed. In 1830 its population was nearly fifty thousand.
The rise of an agricultural surplus was transforming the west and preparing a new influence in the nation. It was this surplus and the demand for markets that developed the cities just mentioned. As they grew, the price of land in their neighborhood increased; roads radiated into the surrounding country; and farmers, whose crops had been almost worthless from the lack of transportation facilities, now found it possible to market their surplus at a small profit.
While the west was thus learning the advantages of a home market, the extension of cotton and sugar cultivation in the south and southwest gave it a new and valuable market. More and more, the planters came to rely upon the northwest for their food supplies and for the mules and horses for their fields. Cotton became the engrossing interest of the plantation belt, and, while the full effects of this differentiation of industry did not appear in the decade of this volume, the beginnings were already visible.
[Footnote: Callender, ”Early Transportation and Banking Enterprises of the States,” in Quarterly Journal of Econ., XVII., 3-54.] In 1835, Pitkin [Footnote: Pitkin, Statistical View (1835), 534.]
reckoned the value of the domestic and foreign exports of the interior as far in excess of the whole exports of the United States in 1790. Within forty years the development of the interior had brought about the economic independence of the United States.
During most of the decade the merchandise to supply the interior was brought laboriously across the mountains by the Pennsylvania turnpikes and the old National Road; or, in the case of especially heavy freight, was carried along the Atlantic coast into the gulf and up the Mississippi and Ohio by steamboats. The cost of transportation in the wagon trade from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh and Baltimore to Wheeling placed a heavy tax upon the consumer.
[Footnote: Niles' Register, XX., 180.] In 1817 the freight charge from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh was sometimes as high as seven to ten dollars a hundredweight; a few years later it became from four to six dollars; and in 1823 it had fallen to three dollars. It took a month to wagon merchandise from Baltimore to central Ohio.
Transportation companies, running four-horse freight wagons, conducted a regular business on these turn-pikes between the eastern and western states. In 1820 over three thousand wagons ran between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, transporting merchandise valued at about eighteen million dollars annually. [Footnote: Birkbeck, Journey from Va., 128; Ogden, Letters from the West, 8; Cobbett, Year's Residence, 337; Evans, Pedestrious Tour, 145; Philadelphia in 1824, 45; Searight, Old Pike, 107, 112; Mills, Treatise on Inland Navigation (1820), 89, 90, 93, 95-97; Journal of Polit. Econ., VIII., 36.]
The construction of the National Road reduced freight rates to nearly one-half what they were at the close of the War of 1812; and the introduction of steam navigation from New Orleans up the Mississippi cut water-rates by that route to one-third of the former charge. [Footnote: Annals of Cong., 18 Cong., I Sess., I., 991; cf.
Fearon, Sketches, 260; Niles' Register, XXV., 95; Cincinnati Christian Journal, July 27, 1830.] Nevertheless, there was a crying need for internal improvements, and particularly for ca.n.a.ls, to provide an outlet for the increasing products of the west. ”Even in the country where I reside, not eighty miles from tidewater,” said Tucker, [Footnote: Annals of Cong., 15 Cong., I Sess., I., 1126.] of Virginia, in 1818, ”it takes the farmer one bushel of wheat to pay the expense of carrying two to a seaport town.”
The bulk of the crop, as compared with its value, practically prevented transportation by land farther than a hundred miles.
[Footnote: McMaster, United States, III., 464.] It is this that helps to explain the attention which the interior first gave to making whiskey and raising live-stock; the former carried the crop in a small bulk with high value, while the live-stock could walk to a market. Until after the War of 1812, the cattle of the Ohio Valley were driven to the seaboard, chiefly to Philadelphia or Baltimore.
Travelers were astonished to see on the highway droves of four or five thousand hogs, going to an eastern market. It was estimated that over a hundred thousand hogs were driven east annually from Kentucky alone. Kentucky hog-drivers also pa.s.sed into Tennessee, Virginia, and the Carolinas with their droves. [Footnote: Life of Ephraim Cutler, 89; Birkbeck, Journey, 24.; Blane, Excursion through U. S. (London, 1824), 90; Atlantic Monthly, XXVI., 170.] The swine lived on the nuts and acorns of the forest; thus they were peculiarly suited to pioneer conditions. At first the cattle were taken to the plantations of the Potomac to fatten for Baltimore and Philadelphia, much in the same way that, in recent times, the cattle of the Great Plains are brought to the feeding-grounds in the corn belt of Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa. [Footnote: Michaux, Travels, 191: Palmer, Journal of Travels, 36] Towards the close of the decade, however, the feeding-grounds s.h.i.+fted into Ohio, and the pork-packing industry, as we have seen, found its center at Cincinnati, [Footnote: Hall, Statistics of the West (1836), 145- 147.] the most important source of supply for the hams and bacon and salt pork which pa.s.sed down the Mississippi to furnish a large share of the plantation food. From Kentucky and the rest of the Ohio Valley droves of mules and horses pa.s.sed through the Tennessee Valley to the south to supply the plantations. Statistics at c.u.mberland Gap for 1828 gave the value of live-stock pa.s.sing the turnpike gate there at $1,167,000. [Footnote: Emigrants' and Travellers' Guide to the West (1834), 194.] Senator Hayne, of South Carolina, declared that in 1824 the south was supplied from the west, through Saluda Gap, with live-stock, horses, cattle, and hogs to the amount of over a million dollars a year. [Footnote: Speech in Senate in 1832, Register of Debates in Cong., VIII., pt. i., 80; cf.