Part 6 (1/2)

Right at the end of his life, Benjamin Franklin wrote a pamphlet giving advice to Europeans planning to come to America. He said it was a good place for those who wanted to become rich. But, he said, it was above all a haven for the industrious poor, for 'nowhere else are the laboring poor so well fed, well lodged, well clothed and well paid as in the United States of America.' It was a country, he concluded, where 'a general happy mediocrity prevails.” It is important for those who wish to understand American history to remember this point about 'happy mediocrity.' The historian is bound to bring out the high points and crises of the national story, to record the doings of the great, the battles, elections, epic debates, and laws pa.s.sed. But the everyday lives of simple citizens must not be ignored simply because they were uneventful. This is particularly true of America, a country specifically created by and for ordinary men and women, where the system of government was deliberately designed to interfere in their lives as little as possible. The fact that, unless we investigate closely, we hear so little about the ma.s.s of the population is itself a historical point of great importance, because it testifies by its eloquent silence to the success of the republican experiment.

Early in the 19th century, America was achieving birth-rates never before equaled in history, in terms of children reaching adulthood. The 1800 census revealed a population of 5,308,843, itself a 35 percent increase over ten years. By 1810 it had leaped to 7,239,881, up another 36.4 percent. By 1820 it was 9,638,453, close to doubling in twenty years, and of this nearly 80 percent was natural increase. As one Congressman put it: 'I invite you to go to the west, and visit one of our log cabins, and number its inmates. There you will find a strong, stout youth of eighteen, with his Better Half, just commencing the first struggles of independent life. Thirty years from that time, visit them again; and instead of two, you will find in that same family twenty-two. That is what I call the American Multiplication Table.'

But with the end of the world war in 1815 high American birth-rates were compounded by a great flood of immigrants. It is a historical conjunction of supreme importance that the coming of the independent American republic, and the opening up of the treasure-house of land provided by the Louisiana Purchase and the destruction of Indian power by Andrew Jackson, coincided with the beginnings of the world's demographic revolution, which hit Europe first. Between 1750 and 1900 Europe's population rose faster than anywhere else in the world (except North America), from 150 million to over 400 million.' This, in turn, produced a huge net outflow of immigration: to South America, Russia, Australasia, Canada, South Africa, and above all the United States. The rush to America began after the Battle of Waterloo in June 1815 and continued right through the autumn and winter, the immigrant s.h.i.+ps braving gales and ice. It accelerated in 1816, which in Europe was 'the year without a summer,' with torrential rain and even sleet and snow continuing into July and August and wrecking harvests, sending poor and even starving people to the coast to huddle in the transports. Ezekiah Niles (1777-1839), who ran Niles's Weekly Register from 1811 onwards, in many ways America's best journal of record at the time, calculated that 50,000 immigrants reached America in the year, though this figure was later revised downwards. His more careful calculation for 1817, based on s.h.i.+pping lists (the federal government, though it took censuses, did not yet publish statistics), produced a figure of 30,000 up to the end of the main season in September. Of this half went to New York and Philadelphia, though some went straight over the Appalachians into the Ohio Valley.

No authority on either side of the Atlantic was bothered with who was going where or how, though the British limited s.h.i.+p-carrying capacity to one pa.s.senger to every 2 tons of registry in their own s.h.i.+ps. The sheer freedom of movement was staggering. An Englishman, without pa.s.sport, health certificate or doc.u.mentation of any kind-without luggage for that matter-could hand over 10 at a Liverpool s.h.i.+pping counter and go aboard. The s.h.i.+p provided him with water, nothing else, and of course it might go down with all hands. But if it reached New York he could go ash.o.r.e without anyone asking him his business, and then vanish into the entrails of the new society. It was not even necessary to have 10, as the British provided free travel to Canada, whence the emigrants could b.u.m rides on coastal boats to Ma.s.sachusetts or New York. There was no control and no resentment. One of them, James Flint from Scotland, recorded in 1818: 'I have never heard of another feeling than good wishes to them.' In the five years up to 1820, some 100,000 people arrived in America without having to show a single bit of paper.

The first check of this inflow-the end of innocence if you like-came with the catastrophic bank crash of 1819, the first financial crisis in America's history. Such a disaster was inevitable, granted the rate at which the country was expanding. In the years 1816-21 alone, six new states were created; in size and potential power it was like adding six new European countries. The United States was already creating for itself a reputation for ma.s.sive borrowing against its limitless future. That meant a need for large numbers of banks, and they duly sprang up, good, bad, and indifferent (mostly the last two). The Jeffersonians hated banks, as we have seen, and in 1811when the First Bank of the United States' charter expired, they controlled Congress and refused to renew it. That was foolish, because the states stepped into the vacuum thus created and happily chartered banks, whose numbers thus rose from 88 in 1811 to 208 two years later. Each state bank was allowed by the state legislature to issue bills up to three times its capital. But in practice there was no check on these issues. Hence, in good times at least, to get a charter to found a state bank was literally a license to print money. As critics like Jefferson and John Taylor claimed, a new kind of money power was coming into existence in America, which ran directly counter to the Founding Fathers' concept of an idyllic rural society based on landed property. During the War of 1812 America was awash with suspect $2 and $5 bills printed by these mushroom banks. Such gold as there was flowed straight into Boston, whose state banks were the most secure. By 1813 Boston notes were at a 9-10 percent premium in Philadelphia. The New England banks refused to take paper notes from the South and West at all. In 1814, with the burning of Was.h.i.+ngton and the virtual collapse of federal government, every bank outside New England was forced to suspend payment.

The remedy of Congress proved worse than the disease. It created (April 10, 1826) the Second Bank of the United States, bought 20 percent of its stock, and stipulated that the federal government appoint five of its twenty-five directors, but made little provision for supervising its operations. Moreover, its first president, William Jones (1760-1831), a former congressman and Madison's Navy Secretary, knew little about banking; his speciality was having dubious friends. He fitted beautifully into Taylor's demonology. Indeed, he managed to create a fragile boom which was a miniature foretaste of the Wall Street boom of the 1920s leading to the crash of 1929. Jones' boom was in land. From 1815 the price of American cotton rose rapidly and that in turn fed the land boom. At that time public land was sold primarily to raise revenue rather than to encourage settlers, who needed no encouragement anyway. Each was charged $2 an acre in minimum blocks of 160 acres. But they only had to put 20 percent down, borrowing the rest from the banks on the security of the property. The $2 was a minimum; in the South potential cotton land was sold at $100 an acre in the boom years. The SBUS, fueling the boom by easy credit, allowed purchasers to pay even the second installment on credit, again raised on the security of the land, like a second mortgage. Jones, whose only concern seems to have been to pay high dividends, based on the total lent by his bank, ran this federal central bank like a bucket-shop. He actually allowed the SBUS to deal in 'racers,' short for Race Horse Bills. These were bills of exchange paid for by other bills of exchange, which thus raced around rapidly from one debtor to another, acc.u.mulating interest charges and yielding less and less of their face value. It was a typical bit of 19th-century ruin-finance, beloved of novelists like Thackeray and d.i.c.kens, who used such devices to get their gullible heroes into trouble. This kind of paper explains why needy people actually got so little of the sums they undertook to repay. But then they probably could not repay anyway, which explains why the pyramid was bound to collapse.

Jones' easy-credit policy was further undermined by the activities of the SBUS's branch offices, some of which were run by crooks. In Baltimore the branch was run by two land speculators, James A. Buchanan and James W. McCulloch, who financed their speculations by taking out unsecured loans from their own bank ($429,049 and $244,212 respectively, with the First Teller borrowing a further $50,000). In effect, this was to put their hand in the till. Here was a typical example of the general credit expansion Jones encouraged, raising the debt on public land from $3 million in 1815 to over five times that amount ($16.8 million) three years later. Some of this went into house purchases-it was the first urban boom in US history too. As many of the Latin American goldmines had been shut by their own war of independence against Spain, which was now raging, the relation of paper to gold was astronomical. Moreover, all the other banks followed Jones' example. Sensible men warned of what would happen. John Jacob Astor, who had now used his fur empire to build up a ma.s.sive holding in Manhattan real estate, accused the SBUS of provoking runaway inflation. In a letter to Albert Gallatin (March 14, 1818) he said the SBUS had made money so cheap 'that everything else has become Dear, & the result is that our Merchants, instead of s.h.i.+pping Produce, s.h.i.+p Specie, so that I tell you in confidence that it is not without difficulty that Specie payments are maintained. The different States are going on making more Banks & and I shall not be surprised if by & by there be a general Blow Up among them.'

Astor was right about the state banks: Hezekiah Niles recorded that in 1815-19 all you needed to start a bank issuing paper money were plates, presses, and paper. It was enough to drive genuine counterfeiters out of business, though they still managed (according to Niles) to produce a lot of forged notes too. He said that counterfeit notes from at least 100 banks were freely circulated in 1819. Many of the new banks were in converted forges, inns, or even churches, thus adding blasphemy to gimcrack finance. By 1819 there were at least 392 chartered banks, plus many more unchartered ones, and the debt on public lands had jumped another $6 million to stand at $22 million. Suddenly, the cotton bubble burst, as Liverpool cotton importers, alarmed by the high prices, started s.h.i.+pping in Indian raw cotton in huge quant.i.ties. In December January 1819 the price of New Orleans cotton halved, and this in turn hit land prices, which fell from 50 to 75 percent. The banks then found themselves with collateral in land worth only a fraction of their loans, which were now irrecoverable. So the banks started to go bust. Jones compounded his earlier errors of inflation by abruptly switching to savage deflation, ordering the branches of the SBUS to accept only its own notes, to insist on immediate repayments of capital as well as interest, and by calling in loans.' This immediately doubled and trebled the number of state-chartered banks going bust, and the SBUS, their main creditor, secured their a.s.sets-the land-deeds of hundreds of thousands of farmers.

Many congressmen, seeing the future of their electors thus put into the power of a wicked central bank they had never wanted anyway, turned with fury on Jones. A Congressional committee soon discovered the Baltimore business. Jones and his entire board were forced to resign and an experienced money-man, Langdon Cheves (1776-1857), took over in March 1819 to find the SBUS what he called 'a s.h.i.+p without a rudder or sails or mast ... on a stormy sea and far from land.' Cheves decided that the worst of all outcomes was for the SBUS to go bust too, so he intensified the deflationary policy and contrived, with some difficulty, to keep the SBUS's doors open, thus earning his t.i.tle 'the Hercules of the United States Bank.' But everyone else had to pay for it. As one contemporary expert, William Goude, put it, 'The Bank was saved but the people were ruined.'

The result of the bank Blow Up was a crisis in manufacturing industry. The Philadelphia cotton mills employed 2,325 in 1816; by autumn 1819 all but 149 had been sacked. In New England the crisis was mitigated by sound banking but it was still acute and unemployment shot up. John Quincy Adams, always quick to strike a note of gloom, recorded in his diary on April 24, 1819: 'In the midst of peace and partial prosperity we are approaching a crisis which will shake the Union to its center. The news of trouble reached Europe too late to affect the 1819 sailings, so tens of thousands of immigrants continued to arrive, to find no work and rising hostility. One observer, Emanuel Howitt, wrote that 'the Yankees now [1819] regard the immigrant with the most sovereign contempt ... a wretch, driven out of his own wretched country, and seeking a subsistence in this glorious land. It would 'never be glad confident morning again.' In March 1819 Congress, in a panic attempt to stop s.h.i.+ps arriving at New York and other ports, slapped a two-persons-for-5-tons rule on incoming s.h.i.+ps, effective from September-the beginning of control. The State Department, in a prescript published in Niles's Weekly Register, announced its policy-lines: 'The American Republic invites n.o.body to come. We will keep out n.o.body. Arrivals will suffer no disadvantages as aliens. But they can expect no advantages either. Native-born and foreign-born face equal opportunities. What happens to them depends entirely on their individual ability and exertions, and on good for tune.'

There is something magnificent about this declaration, penned by John Quincy Adams himself. It epitomizes the spirit of laissez-faire libertarianism which pervaded every aspect of American life at this time-though, as we shall see, there were state interventionists at large too. Libertarianism was, of course, based upon an underlying, total self-confidence in the future of the country. There was something magnificent too about the speed and completeness with which America recovered from this crisis, which within a year or two seemed a mere mishap, a tiny blip on a rising curve of success. Ma.s.s immigration soon resumed, thanks this time to Ireland. Hitherto, America had taken in plenty of Ulster Protestants, but few from the Catholic south. But in 1821, when the Irish potato crop failed, one in an ominous series of failures culminating in the catastrophe of the mid-1840s, the British government tried to organize a sea-lift to Canada. There was panic in Mayo, Clare, Kerry, and Cork, where rumor had it the s.h.i.+ps would transport them to convict bondage in Australia. But, once the truth was known, the idea of going to America, at virtually no cost, caught on in the poorest parts of Ireland. When the first letters reached home in 1822, explaining how easy it was to slip from Canada into America, and how the United States, albeit Protestant, gave equal rights to Catholics, the transatlantic rush was on. In 1825 50,000 Southern Irish applied for a mere 2,000 a.s.sisted places on a government scheme. It was a foretaste of the exodus which was to transport one-third of the Irish nation to America.” This, in turn, was part of the process whereby the continuing English (and Welsh and Scottish) immigation to the United States was now balanced by new arrivals from outside Britain. The number of Continental Europeans rose from 6,000 to 10,000 a year in the early 1820s to 15,000 in 1826 and 30,000 in 1828. In 1832 it pa.s.sed the 50,000-a-year mark and thereafter fell below it only twice. An Anglicized United States was gradually becoming Europeanized.,'

Why did the immigrants come? One reason was increasingly cheap seapa.s.sages. Another was food shortages, sometimes widening into famines. The bad weather of 1816, and the appalling winters of 1825-6, 1826-7, and 1829-30, the last one of the coldest ever recorded, produced real hunger. The demographic-catastrophe theories of Thomas Malthus filtered downwards to the ma.s.ses, in horrifyingly distorted form, and men wanted to get their families out of Europe before the day of wrath came. Then there was the tax burden. At the end of the Bonapartist Wars, all Europe groaned under oppressive taxation. A parliamentary revolt in 1816 abolished income tax in Britain, and in the 1820s duties were gradually reduced too. But in Europe it was the same old story of the state piling the fiscal burdens on the backs of poor peasants and tradespeople. This was compounded, on the Continent, by tens of thousands of internal customs barriers, imposing duties on virtually everything which crossed them.

By comparison, America was a paradise. Its army was one-fiftieth the size of Prussia's. The expense of government per capita was 10 percent of that in Britain, itself a country with a small state by Continental standards. There were no t.i.thes because there was no state church. Nor were there poor rates-there were virtually no poor. An American farm with eight horses paid only $12 a year in tax. Europeans could scarcely believe their ears when told of such figures. Not only were American wage-rates high, but you kept your earnings to spend on your family. Then there were other blessings. No conscription. No political police. No censors.h.i.+p. No legalized cla.s.s distinctions. Most employers ate at the same table as their hands. No one (except slaves) called anyone 'Master.' Letters home from immigrants who had already established themselves were read aloud before entire villages and acted as recruitment-propaganda for the transatlantic s.h.i.+ps. So, interestingly enough, did the President's annual messages to Congress, which were reprinted in many Continental newspapers until the censors suppressed them. As the Dublin Morning Post put it: 'We read this doc.u.ment as if it related purely to our concerns.'

But the most powerful inducement was cheap land. Immigrants from Europe were getting cheap land from all the old hunting grounds of the world's primitive peoples-in Australia and Argentina especially-but it was in the United States where the magic was most potent because there the government went to enormous trouble to devise a system whereby the poor could acquire it. In the entire history of the United States, the land-purchase system was the single most benevolent act of government. The basis of the system was the Act of 1796 pricing land at $2 an acre. It allowed a year's credit for half the total paid. An Act of 1800 created federal land offices as Cincinnati, Chillicothe, Marietta, and Steubenville, Ohio, that is, right on the frontier. The minimum purchase was lowered from 640 acres, or a square mile, to 320 acres, and the buyer paid only 25 percent down, the rest over four years. So a man could get a big farm-indeed, by Continental standards, an enormous one-for only about $160 cash. Four years later, Congress halved the minimum again. This put a viable family farm well within the reach of millions of prudent, saving European peasants and skilled workmen. During the first eleven years of the 19th century, nearly 3 ,400,000 acres were sold to individual farmers in what was then the Northwest, plus another 250,000 in Ohio. These land transfers increased after 1815, with half a million acres of Illinois, for instance, pa.s.sing into the hands of small- and medium-scale farmers every year. It was the same in the South. In Alabama, government land sales rose to 600,000 acres in 1816 and to 2,280,000 in 1819. In western Georgia the state gave 200-acre plots free to lottery-ticket holders with lucky numbers. In the years after 1815, more people acquired freehold land at bargain prices in the United States than at any other time in the history of the world.

Individual success-stories abounded. Daniel Brush and a small group of Vermonters settled in Greene County, Illinois, in spring 1820. 'A prairie of the richest soil,' Brush wrote, 'stretched out about four miles in length and one mile wide ... complete with pure springs of cold water in abundance.' Once a cabin, 16 by 24 feet, had been built, they began the hard task of breaking up the prairie. This done, Brush wrote, 'No weeds or gra.s.s sprung up upon such ground the first year and the corn needed no attention with plough or hoe. If got in early, good crops were yielded, of corn and fodder.' He added: 'Provisions in abundance was the rule ... no one needed to go supperless to bed. The Ten Brook family moved to what became Parke County, Indiana, in autumn 1822. There were twenty-seven of them altogether-three interrelated families, three single men, two teamsters, thirteen horses, twenty-one cows, two yoke-oxen, and four dogs. Their first priority was to build a strong cabin. The soil was rich but virgin. Working throughout the winter, they had cleared 15 acres by the spring and fas.h.i.+oned 200 fence-rails. They had l00 bushels of corn for winter-feed and spring planting. They put two more acres under potatoes and turnips. The spring brought seven calves, and that first summer they made forty 12-pound cheeses, sold at market for a dollar each. The harvest was good. They not only ground their own corn but made 350 pounds of sugar and 10 gallons of mola.s.ses from the same soil they cleared for corn. Their leader, Andrew Ten Brook, recounted: 'After the first year, I never saw any scarcity of provisions. The only complaint was that there was n.o.body to whom the supplies could be sold.'

The sheer fertility of the soil made all the backbreaking work of opening it up worth while. In the Lake Plains-parts of Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan-a vast glacier known as the Wisconsin Drift had in prehistoric times smoothed off the rocks and laid down a deep layer of rich soil containing all the elements needed for intensive agriculture. The settlers, steeped in the Old Testament, called it Canaan, G.o.d's Country, because it yielded a third more than the rest, known as 'Egypt.' Some of the settlements in the years after 1815 became celebrated for quick prosperity. One was Boon's Lick, a belt 60 miles wide on each side of the Missouri River which became Howard County in 1816. It boasted superb land, pure water, as much timber as required, and idyllic scenery. By 1819 the local paper, the Missouri Intelligence, produced at the little town of Franklin, offered a spring toast: 'Boon's Lick-two years since, a wilderness. Now-rich in cotton and cattle!' It was widely reputed to be the best land in all the West.

Moreover, the tendency was for the land price to come down-in the 1820s it was often as low as $1.25 an acre. The modern mind is astonished that, even so, it was regarded as too high and there was a clamor for cheaper or even free land. Many settlers were termed 'squatters.' This simply signified they had got there first, paid over money immediately after the survey but before the land was 'sectionalized' for the market. They risked their t.i.tle being challenged by non-resident purchasers-speculators. By the end of 1828 two-thirds of the population of Illinois were squatters. Their champion was Thomas Hart Benton (1782-1858), Senator 1821-51. He sensibly argued against a minimum price for Western lands, proposing grading by quality, and he insisted that settlers pay compensation for improvements, pa.s.sing a law to this effect. In frontier areas, speculators were naturally hated and took a risk if they showed their faces. A Methodist preacher recorded at Elkhorn Creek, Wisconsin: 'If a speculator should bid on a settler's farm, he was knocked down and dragged out of the [land] office, and if the striker was prosecuted and fined, the settlers paid the fine by common consent among themselves. [But] no jury would find a verdict against a settler in such a case because it was considered self-defense. [So] no speculator dare bid on a settler's land, and as no settler would bid on his neighbor, each man had his land at Congress price, $1.25 an acre.”

All the same, speculation and land dealing were the foundation of many historic fortunes at this time. And powerful politicians (and their friends) benefited too. When a popular figure like General Jackson bid for a potentially valuable town lot, no one bid against him. He acquired his estate and became a reasonably wealthy man through land sales, though by the end of the war he had ceased to be interested in money. His aide, General Coffee, formed the Cypress Land Company, bought land at Muscle Shoals, and laid out the town of Florence, Alabama, where speculators and squatters bid up the government minimum to $78 an acre.” Others in the Jackson camp made fortunes this way. The New York politician Martin Van Buren (1782-1862), who became Jackson's Secretary of State, also grew rich through land deals: he got large parcels of land in Otsego County for a fraction of their true value-one 600-acre parcel he bought for $60.90-and he knocked down land cheap at Sheriff's Auctions when settlers were sold up for non-payment of taxes.” Of course some land speculation was parasitical and downright antisocial. But large-scale speculators were indispensable in many cases. They organized pressure on Congress to put through roads and they invested capital to build towns like Manchester, Portsmouth, Dayton, Columbus, and Williamsburg. A lot of speculation was on credit, and speculators went bust if they could not sell land quickly at the right price. That was how big groups like the one organized by Sir William Pulteney, the English politician, acquired huge tracts. His agent spent over $1m building infrastructures-stores, mills, taverns, even a theater. A group of bankers from Amsterdam formed the Holland Land Company, which acquired 4 million acres in northwest New York and western Pennsylvania, put in roads and other services, and eventually (1817) made a profit by selling off land in 350-acre plots at $5 an acre (on ten years' credit). But most settlers preferred cheaper land to the use of an infrastructure which they could create for themselves. Moses Cleveland, agent of the Connecticut Land Company, managed to sell good land at a dollar an acre, with five years' credit, and to found the village named after him which became in time a mighty city. It was from Cleveland that William Henry Harrison (1773-1841) played a major role in creating the new state of Ohio, then moved on to Indiana, and finally became America's ninth President.

There is an important historical and economic point to be noted here. Men always abuse freedom, and 19th-century land speculators could be wicked and predatory. But Congress, true to its origins, was prepared to take that risk. It laid down the ground rules by statute and then, in effect, allowed an absolutely free market in land to develop. It calculated that this was the best and quickest way to get the country settled. And it was proved right-freedom worked. In South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, the British authorities interfered in the land market in countless ways and from the highest of motives, and as a result these countries-some of which had even bigger natural advantages than the United States-developed far more slowly. One British expert, H. G. Ward, who had witnessed both systems, made a devastating comparison before a House of Commons committee in 1839. In Canada, the government, fearing speculators, had devised a complex system of controls which actually played straight into their hands. By contrast, the American free system attracted mult.i.tudes who quickly settled and set up local governments which soon acted as a restraining force on antisocial operators. The system worked because it was simple and corresponded to market forces. 'There is one uniform price at $1.25 an acre [minimum]. No credit is given [by the federal government]. There is a perfect liberty of choice and appropriation at this price. Immense surveys are carried on, to an extent strangers have no conception of. Over 140 million acres have been mapped and planned at a cost of $2,164,000. There is a General Land Office in Was.h.i.+ngton with 40 subordinate district offices, each having a Registrar and Receiver ... Maps, plans and information of every kind are accessible to the humblest persons ... A man if he please may invest a million dollars in land. If he miscalculates it is his own fault. The public, under every circ.u.mstance, is the gainer.'

He was right and the proof that the American free system worked is the historic fact-the rapid and successful settlement of the Mississippi Valley. This is one of the decisive events in history. By means of it, America became truly dynamic, emerging from the eastern seaboard bounded by the Appalachians and descending into the great network of river valleys beyond. The Mississippi occupation, involving an area of 1,250,000 square miles, the size of western Europe, marked the point at which the United States ceased to be a small, struggling ex-colony and turned itself into a major nation.'

The speed with which representative governments were set up was an important part of this dynamism. In addition to Kentucky and Tennessee, the first trans-Appalachian states, Ohio became a state in 1803, Louisiana in 1812, Indiana in 1816, Mississippi in 1817, Illinois in 1818, Alabama in 1819, Missouri in 1821, Arkansas in 1836, Michigan in 1837. Insuring rapid progress from territory to state was the best way Was.h.i.+ngton could help the settlement, though under the Const.i.tution it could also build national roads. The first national road, a broad, hardened thoroughfare across the Appalachians, was open in 1818 as far as Wheeling, whence settlers could travel along the Ohio River. By the early 1830s the road had reached Columbus, Ohio. Further south, roads were built by state and federal government in collaboration or by thrusting military men like General Jackson, who in 1820, as commander of the Western Army, strung a road between Florence, Alabama, and New Orleans, the best route into the Lower Mississippi area. There were also the Great Valley Road, the Fall Line Road, and the Upper Federal Road. They were rough by the standards of the new McAdam-Telford roads in Britain but far superior to anything in Latin America, Australasia, or trans-Ural Russia, other vast territories being settled at this time. In addition there were the rivers, most of them facing in the direction of settlement. Even before the steamers came, there were hundreds, then thousands, of flatboats and keelboats to float settlers and their goods downriver. By 1830 there were already 3,000 flatboats floating down the Ohio each year. In 1825 the completion of the Erie Ca.n.a.l, which linked the Atlantic via the Hudson River to the Great Lakes, made easy access possible to the Great Plains. It also confirmed New York's primacy as a port, especially for immigrants, as they could then proceed, via the Ca.n.a.l, straight to new towns in the Midwest. From that point on steamboats were ubiquitous in the Mississippi Valley, not only bringing settlers in but taking produce out to feed and clothe the people of America's explosive cities-only 7 percent of the population in 1810, over a third by mid-century.