Part 7 (2/2)
Along with this combined frontier stream were English, Welsh and Irish Quakers, and French Huguenots.[105:3]
Among this moving ma.s.s, as it pa.s.sed 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 leaders.h.i.+p, 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 ill.u.s.trated by the statement of Governor Tryon, of North Carolina, that in the summer and winter of 1765 more than a thousand immigrant wagons pa.s.sed 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 c.u.mberland; and they covered the province more or less thickly, from Hillsboro and Fayetteville to the mountains.[106:2] Ba.s.sett 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 Was.h.i.+ngton defending interior Virginia with his frontiersmen in their hunting s.h.i.+rts, 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 p.r.o.nounced 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 s.h.i.+pped to the coast. But the hunter folk were already pus.h.i.+ng 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 b.u.t.ter, 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 s.h.i.+pping 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 towns.h.i.+ps 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 pa.s.sed 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 a.s.similate, 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 fas.h.i.+on. In general this took these forms: contests between the property-holding cla.s.s of the coast and the debtor cla.s.s 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 cla.s.ses, strongest in the West and the cities.
This theme deserves more s.p.a.ce 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 ill.u.s.trated by the convention that met in Dracut, Ma.s.sachusetts, in 1776, to pet.i.tion the States of Ma.s.sachusetts and New Hamps.h.i.+re to relieve the financial distress and unfair legislative representation. Sixteen of the border towns of New Hamps.h.i.+re sent delegates to this convention. Two years later, these New Hamps.h.i.+re towns attempted to join Vermont.[111:1] As a Revolutionary State, Vermont itself was an ill.u.s.tration of the same tendency of the interior to break away from the coast. Ma.s.sachusetts 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 cla.s.ses of the coast.[111:2] The opposition to the const.i.tutions 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 Hamps.h.i.+re, Connecticut, and Ma.s.sachusetts. But this belongs to a later period.[112:3]
Pennsylvania affords a clear ill.u.s.tration 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 const.i.tutional 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 cla.s.ses, 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 t.i.thables, 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 t.i.thables, many of whom lived fifty miles from their church. But the vestry refused to allow the remote paris.h.i.+oners 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 ill.u.s.tration of the att.i.tude 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 pa.s.sed across the fall line, and more nearly a.s.similated 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 a.s.saults 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]
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