Part 12 (1/2)
The causes and consequences of this colonization of the Southwest form a vital chapter in the economic history of the country. In the year before the war, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia produced 75,000,000 pounds of cotton; the only other cotton-raising States, Tennessee and Louisiana, produced 5,000,000 pounds. Ten years later, the Seaboard States raised 117,000,000 pounds; the Southwest, 60,000,000. In another decade the States of the Southwest had outstripped the Old South. This comparison throws a flood of light upon Southern history. The invention of the cotton gin had made possible the cultivation of the short-staple cotton plant, which was the only variety that could be raised profitably in the uplands. Occurring just at the moment when the use of the power loom in factories was giving an unprecedented stimulus to the manufacture of cotton, the cotton gin worked a revolution in Southern life and industry. From the tidewater, with its large plantations worked by African slaves, the cultivation of cotton pa.s.sed into the region above the fall-line of the rivers, where the small farmer practiced a diversified agriculture. Socially and politically the two regions had always been distinct. The gentlemen planters of the tidewater, with much the same outlook as the English gentry of the same period, regarded the democratic yeomen of the Piedmont with distrust not unmixed with contempt. By excluding them from their proportionate representation in the state legislatures, the aristocratic planters maintained an ascendency which was at once political and social. But as cotton-growing became more profitable and advanced into the interior, the farmer of the uplands found himself pushed to the wall. Either he must adopt the plantation system and purchase slaves, or sell his land and move on. For want of capital large numbers chose the latter alternative and swelled the numbers of those who had already set their faces westward.
The communities which within six years after the Treaty of Ghent were admitted into the Union as the States of Mississippi and Alabama, did not at first differ materially from Indiana and Illinois, which became Commonwealths at the same time. Much the same obstacles confronted the pioneer in the pine forests of Mississippi as in the hard woods of the Northwest. Either as squatter or _bona fide_ purchaser he had with the aid of his neighbors hewed out a clearing, or single-handed girdled the trees, and laid the sills of his log cabin. A ”raising” or ”frolic” was one of the few opportunities for social intercourse in the hard life of the frontiersman. Between the stumps of his clearing he planted his first crop of Indian corn; and what the soil did not yield for his sustenance, he supplied with his trusty rifle. Time wrought vast transformations in these new communities. The thriftless, who scratched the surface of the ground and then sold out to a newcomer of sterner fiber, pa.s.sed on to a new frontier. Log cabins gave way to frame houses.
Clearings became well-tilled farms. Better methods of cultivation extracted a surplus of produce which could be sent to market. Along the rivers of the Northwest, cities sprang up like mushrooms.
From this point the history of the Southwest diverged from that of the Northwest. The virgin lands of the Gulf attracted also the planter with his capital invested in African slaves. Once again the small farmer felt the combined pressure of social and economic forces. He saw his wealthier neighbor acquire the more fertile lands; he found himself thrust into a socially inferior cla.s.s; and again he yielded to fate.
While a democratic society of self-reliant yeomen was developing in the northern half of the Mississippi Valley, a society based upon a plantation economy and aristocratic in its outward characteristics was forming in the Gulf States. Yet in its aggressiveness and commercial enterprise, the new South resembled the Northwest rather than the old South.
[Map: The West as an Economic Section in 1820]
While the South was producing staples for an ever-growing market, it became itself the market for the surplus products of the Northwest. An active internal trade sprang up between the sections in spite of the natural barriers to commercial intercourse. Live stock could be driven to market. It was a common occurrence to see droves of thousands of ”razor-back” hogs on their way from Kentucky to the Seaboard States, feeding on nuts and roots by the way. Rivers were the chief highways for such produce as could not provide for its own locomotion. The Western waters floated all sorts of craft, from the lumber raft to the flatboat, laden with pork, cheese, b.u.t.ter, flour, corn, and whiskey. The greater part of these boats were makes.h.i.+fts, and made no return voyage. It was not until 1809 that a barge was warped upstream from New Orleans to Nashville. The entire traffic on the Mississippi and the Ohio was carried on until 1817 in less than a score of keel boats, which made the voyage downstream from Louisville to New Orleans in about forty days, and upstream in ninety. When, then, a steamboat succeeded in making a return voyage in twenty-five days, it was hailed as an epoch-making performance. In the next year twenty steamboats were competing for the river traffic; and three years later (1820) seventy-two were in actual service. Yet the steamboat did not drive the flatboat from the Western rivers. So late as 1840 one fifth of the freight handled on the lower Mississippi was carried in flatboats or barges.
The rapid rise of this internal commerce between the farmer of the Northwest and the cotton planter of the South increased the ability of both to purchase manufactures in the Eastern markets. Both sections had wants which they could not supply by their simple household industries.
They had to import not only their farming implements, but most of those articles, useful or ornamental, which were thought indispensable to a higher civilization. ”Spots in Tennessee, in Ohio, and Kentucky,”
comments an English traveler, ”that within the lifetime of even young men, witnessed only the arrow and the scalping knife, now present the traveler with articles of elegance and modes of luxury which might rival the displays of London and Paris.” Most of this stock was transported over the mountains from Philadelphia or Baltimore. In 1820, three thousand wagons carried to Pittsburg, the distributing center of the West, nearly eighteen million dollars' worth of merchandise.
The commercial interests of the East were quick to see the possibilities of this new market. An eager rivalry sprang up between the merchants of New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Everywhere ways and means of cheaper transportation were discussed. In this subject the Western farmer was vitally interested, for freight charges added nearly one third to the cost of merchandise transported over the mountains. The cotton planter of the Seaboard States, also, feeling the compet.i.tion of the Southwest, where riverways were abundant and easily navigable, saw the need of better roads to tidewater, in order to lessen the cost of marketing his produce.
The popular demand for better roads was not recent. All the States had encouraged, directly or indirectly, the building of turnpikes and bridges. Between 1793 and 1812, Pennsylvania had chartered fifty-five turnpike companies, and other States had been scarcely less ready to grant articles of incorporation to stock companies. Private enterprise had, indeed, done much to improve communication along the seaboard.
Turnpikes and bridges had shortened the journey by stage from Boston to Was.h.i.+ngton to four and a quarter days by the year 1815. The city of New York was in 1816 within twenty-four hours of Albany by the Hudson River steamboats.
Numerous ca.n.a.l companies had also been chartered; but of all the ca.n.a.ls projected, only three had been completed when the War of 1812 began: the Dismal Swamp Ca.n.a.l in Virginia, the Santee Ca.n.a.l in South Carolina, and the Middles.e.x Ca.n.a.l in Ma.s.sachusetts. It remained for New York to usher in a new era in internal communication by authorizing in 1817 the construction of the Erie Ca.n.a.l. In the ardent imagination of its chief promoter, De Witt Clinton, this ca.n.a.l was destined to be ”a bond of union between the Atlantic and Western States” and ”an organ of communication between the Hudson, the Mississippi, the St. Lawrence, the Great Lakes of the North and West, and their tributary rivers,” creating ”the greatest inland trade ever witnessed” and transforming New York into a vast emporium of commerce and ”the granary of the world.”
This bold bid for Western trade alarmed the merchants of Philadelphia, particularly as the completion of the national road threatened to divert much of their traffic to Baltimore. In 1825, the legislature of Pennsylvania grappled with the problem by projecting a series of ca.n.a.ls which were to connect its great seaport with Pittsburg on the west and with Lake Erie and the upper Susquehanna on the north.
The magnitude of the transportation problem was such, however, that neither individual States nor private corporations seemed able to meet the demands of an expanding internal trade. As early as 1807, Albert Gallatin had advocated the construction of a great system of internal waterways to connect East and West, at an estimated cost of $20,000,000.
But the only contribution of the National Government to internal improvements during the Jeffersonian era was an appropriation in 1806 of two per cent of the net proceeds of the sales of public lands in Ohio for the construction of a national road, with the consent of the States through which it should pa.s.s. By 1818 the road was open to traffic from c.u.mberland, Maryland, to Wheeling, Virginia.
In 1816, with the experiences of the war before him, no well-informed statesman could shut his eyes to the national aspects of the problem.
Even President Madison invited the attention of Congress to the need of establis.h.i.+ng ”a comprehensive system of roads and ca.n.a.ls.” Soon after Congress met, it took under consideration a bill drafted by Calhoun which proposed an appropriation of $1,500,000 for internal improvements.
Because this appropriation was to be met by the moneys paid by the National Bank to the Government, the bill was commonly referred to as the ”Bonus Bill.” ”Let it not be forgotten,” said Calhoun in advocacy of his bill, ”that it [the size of the Union] exposes us to the greatest of all calamities,--next to the loss of liberty,--and even to that in its consequences--disunion. We are great, and rapidly--I was about to say fearfully--growing. This is our pride and our danger; our weakness and our strength.... We are under the most imperious obligation to counteract every tendency to disunion.... Whatever impedes the intercourse of the extremes with this, the center of the Republic, weakens the Union.”
The one section which was impervious to these national considerations at this moment was New England; but it was President Madison, and not New England, who defeated the Bonus Bill. On the day before he left office, Madison sent to Congress a notable veto message. Reverting to his earlier faith, he p.r.o.nounced the measure unconst.i.tutional. Neither the express words of the Const.i.tution nor any fair inference could, in his judgment, warrant the exercise of such powers by Congress. To pa.s.s the bill over his veto was impossible. Monroe, too, in his first message to Congress intimated that he also held strict views of the powers of Congress. The policy of internal improvements by Federal aid was thus wrecked on the const.i.tutional scruples of the last of the Virginia dynasty.
Having less regard for consistency, the House of Representatives recorded its conviction, by close votes, that Congress could appropriate money to construct roads and ca.n.a.ls, but had not the power to construct them. As yet the only direct aid of the National Government to internal improvements consisted of various appropriations, amounting to about $1,500,000 for the c.u.mberland Road.
Circ.u.mstances were also pressing the claims of the Far West upon the Government. Beyond the scattered settlements of Illinois and Indiana extended vast forests, known only to the Indians and the fur traders.
With the experiences of the war fresh in mind, the new Secretary of War, Calhoun, urged upon the Government the necessity of taking resolute measures to hold this territory. Laws excluding foreigners from the Indian trade were pa.s.sed; forts were established at strategic points like Chicago, Prairie du Chien, and Green Bay; and in 1820, Governor Ca.s.s, of the Michigan Territory, was sent on an expedition through the Wisconsin forests into Minnesota, to a.s.sert American claims wherever British influence was still felt.
Still farther west lay an almost unknown region of imperial dimensions.
Save where venturesome pioneers had pushed up the Arkansas and the Missouri, and where the Spaniards maintained their feeble hold in the Southwest, no white men inhabited the great prairies which swept westward to the foothills of the Rockies. Only nomadic Indian tribes and occasional traders followed the buffalo trails across this wide expanse.
Between the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific was the region which Lewis and Clark had penetrated. Along the valley of the northern branch of the Columbia River, the Hudson's Bay Company had planted their trading posts. Farther to the south lay Spanish California and the ill-defined region to the eastward over which _presidios_ maintained a shadowy jurisdiction.
On October 20, 1818, Benjamin Rush and Albert Gallatin, ministers to England and France respectively, concluded a convention with Great Britain which left the fate of the Oregon country in suspense for a period of ten years. To the British claims of prior discovery by Cook and Mackenzie and of prior occupation by the Hudson's Bay Company, the American commissioners opposed the claims based on the voyage of Captain Gray in 1792 and on the founding of Astoria by John Jacob Astor in 1811.
It was finally agreed that the northern boundary of the United States should run from the Lake of the Woods to the Stony Mountains, along the forty-ninth parallel, and that the disputed country beyond the mountains should be occupied jointly for a period of ten years. An agreement was also reached regarding the Newfoundland and Labrador fisheries.