A School History of the United States

by John Bach McMaster

CHAPTER XIV

OUR COUNTRY IN 1790

%185. The States.%—What sort of a country, and what sort of people, was Washington thus chosen to rule over? When, he was elected, the Union was composed of eleven states, for neither Rhode Island nor North Carolina had accepted the Constitution.[1] Vermont had never been a member of the Union, because the Continental Congress would not recognize her as a state.

[Footnote 1: The states ratified the Constitution on the dates given below: 1. Delaware Dec. 7, 1787 2. Pennsylvania Dec. 12, 1787 3. New Jersey Dec. 18, 1787 4. Georgia Jan. 2, 1788 5. Connecticut Jan. 9, 1788 6. Massachusetts Feb. 7, 1788 7. Maryland April 28, 1788 8. South Carolina May 23, 1788 9. New Hampshire June 21, 1788 10. Virginia June 26, 1788 11. New York July 26, 1788 12. North Carolina Nov. 21, 1789 13. Rhode Island May 29, 1790]

[Illustration: The %UNITED STATES% March 4, 1789]

%186. Only a Part inhabited.%—Three fourths of our country was then uninhabited by white men, and almost all the people lived near the seaboard. Had a line been drawn along what was then the frontier, it would (as the map on p. 177 shows) have run along the shore of Maine, across New Hampshire and Vermont to Lake Champlain, then south to the Mohawk valley, then down the Hudson River, and southwestward across Pennsylvania to Pittsburg, then south along the Blue Ridge Mountains to the Altamaha River in Georgia, and by it to the sea. How many people lived here was never known till 1790. The Constitution of the United States requires that the people shall be counted once in each ten years, in order that it may be determined how many representatives each state shall have in the House of Representatives; and for this purpose Congress ordered the first census to be taken in 1790. It then appeared that, excluding Indians, there were living in the eleven United States 3,380,000 human beings, or less than half the number of people who now live in the single state of New York.

%187. How the People were scattered.%—More were in the Southern than in the Eastern States. Virginia, then the most populous, contained one fifth. Pennsylvania had a ninth, while in the five states of Maryland, Virginia, the two Carolinas, and Georgia were almost one half of the English-speaking people of the United States. These were the planting states, and, populous as they were, they had but two cities—Baltimore and Charleston. Savannah, Wilmington, Alexandria, Norfolk, and Richmond were small towns. Not one had 8000 people in it. Indeed, the inhabitants of the six largest cities of the country (Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston, and Salem) taken together were but 131,000.

[Illustration: DISTRIBUTION OF THE POPULATION OF THE UNITED STATES FIRST
CENSUS, 1790/]

[Illustration: Boston in 1790[1]

[Footnote 1: From the Massachusetts Magazine, November, 1790.]

%188. The Cities.%—And how different these cities were from those of our day! What a strange world Washington would find himself in if he could come back and walk along the streets of the great city which now stands on the banks of the Potomac and bears his name! He never in his life saw a flagstone sidewalk, nor an asphalted street, nor a pane of glass six feet square. He never heard a factory whistle; he never saw a building ten stories high, nor an elevator, nor a gas jet, nor an electric light; he never saw a hot-air furnace, nor entered a room warmed by steam.

In the windows of shop after shop would be scores of articles familiar enough to us, but so unknown to him that he could not even name them. He never saw a sewing machine, nor a revolver, nor a rubber coat, nor a rubber shoe, nor a steel pen, nor a piece of blotting paper, nor an envelope, nor a postage stamp, nor a typewriter. He never struck a match, nor sent a telegram, nor spoke through a telephone, nor touched an electric bell. He never saw a railroad, though he had seen a rude form of steamboat. He never saw a horse car, nor an omnibus, nor a trolley car, nor a ferryboat. Fancy him boarding a street car to take a ride. He would probably pay his fare with a "nickel." But the "nickel" is a coin he never saw. Fancy him trying to understand the advertisements that would meet his eye as he took his seat! Fancy him staring from the window at a fence bright with theatrical posters, or at a man rushing by on a bicycle!

[Illustration: Philadelphia in 1800 (Arch Street)]

%189. Newspapers and Magazines.%—A boy enters the car with half a dozen daily newspapers all printed in the same city. In Washington's day there were but four daily papers in the United States! On the news counter of a hotel, one sees twenty illustrated papers, and fifty monthly magazines. In his day there was no illustrated paper, no scientific periodical, no trade journal, and no such illustrated magazines as Harper's, Scribner's, the Century, St. Nicholas. All the printing done in the country was done on presses worked by hand. To-day the Hoe octuple press can print 96,000 eight-page newspapers an hour. To print this number on the hand press shown in the picture would have taken so long that when the last newspaper was printed the first would have been three months old!

[Illustration: A Franklin press]

[Illustration: A fire bucket [1]

[Footnote 1: Original in the Pennsylvania Historical Society.]

%190. The Fire Service.%—the ambulance, the steam fire engine, the hose cart, the hook and ladder company, the police patrol, the police officer on the street corner, the letter carrier gathering the mail, the district messenger boy, the express company, the delivery wagon of the stores, have all come in since Washington died. In his day the law required every householder in the city to be a fireman. His name might not appear on the rolls of any of the fire companies, he might not help to drag through the streets the lumbering tank which served as a fire engine, but he must have in his hall, or beneath the stairs, or hanging up behind his shop door, at least one leathern bucket inscribed with his name, and a huge bag of canvas or of duck. Then, if he were aroused at the dead of night by the cry of fire and the clanging of every church bell in the town, he seized this bucket and his bag, and, while his wife put a lighted candle in the window to illuminate the street, set off for the fire. The smoke or the flame was his guide, for the custom of indicating the place by a number of strokes on a bell had not yet come in. When at last he arrived at the scene he found there no idle spectators. Every one was busy. Some hurried into the building and filled their sacks with such movable goods as came nearest to hand. Some joined the line that stretched away to the water, and helped to pass the full buckets to those who stood by the fire. Others took posts in a second line, down which the empty buckets were hastened to the pump. The house would often be half consumed when the shouting made known that the engine had come. It was merely a pump mounted over a tank. Into the tank the water from the buckets was poured, and it was pumped thence by the efforts of a dozen men.

[Illustration: Fire engine of 1800[1]

[Footnote 1: From an old cut]

%191. The Post Office.%—Washington sees a great wagon or a white trolley car marked United States Mail, and on inquiry is told that the money now spent by the government each year for the support of the post offices would have more than paid the national debt when he was President. He hears with amazement that there are now 75,000 post offices, and recalls that in 1790 there were but seventy-five. He picks up from the sidewalk a piece of paper with a little pink something on the corner. He is told that the portrait on it is his own, that it is a postage stamp, that it costs two cents, and will carry a letter to San Francisco, a city he never heard of, and, if the person to whom it is addressed cannot be found, will bring the letter back to the sender, a distance of over 5000 miles. In his day a letter was a single sheet of paper, no matter how large or small, and the postage on it was determined not by weight, but by distance, and might be anything from six to twenty-five cents.

At that time postage must always be prepaid, and as the post office must support itself, letters were not sent from the country towns till enough postage had been deposited at the post office to pay the expense of sending them. Newspapers and books could not be sent by mail.

%192. The Franchise.%—Taking the country through, the condition of the people was by no means so happy as ours. They had government of the people, but it was not by the people nor for the people. Everywhere the right to vote and to hold office was greatly restricted. The voter must have an estate worth a certain sum, or a specified number of acres, or an annual income of so many dollars. But the right to vote did not carry with it the right to hold office. More property was required for office holding than for voting, and there were besides certain religious restrictions. In New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, the governor, the members of the legislature, and the chief officers of state must be Protestants. In Massachusetts and Maryland they must be Christians. All these restrictions were long since swept away.

%193. Cruel Punishments.%—The humane spirit of our times was largely wanting. The debtor was cast into prison. The pauper might be sold to the highest bidder. The criminal was dragged out into open day and flogged or branded. From ten to nineteen crimes were punishable with death. No such thing as a lunatic asylum, or a deaf and dumb asylum, or a penitentiary existed. The prisons were dreadful places. Men came out of them worse than they went in.

%194. The Condition of the Laborer; of the well to do.%—Men worked harder and for less money then than now. A regular working day was from sunrise to sunset, with an hour for breakfast and an hour for dinner. Sometimes the laborer was fed and lodged by the employer, in which case he was paid four dollars a month in winter and six in summer. Two shillings (30 cents) a day for unskilled labor was thought high wages.

[Illustration: %Washington's flute and Miss Custis's harpsichord at
Mount Vernon%]

Even the houses of the well to do were much less comfortable places than are such abodes in our day. There were no furnaces, no gas, no bathrooms, no plumbing. Wood was the universal fuel. Coal from Virginia and Rhode Island was little used. All cooking was done in "Dutch ovens," or in "out ovens," or in the enormous fireplaces to be found in every household. Wood fuel made sooty chimneys, and sooty chimneys took fire. In every city, therefore, were men known as "sweeps," whose business it was to clean chimneys.

[Illustration: %Earthenware stove—Moravian%]

[Illustration: %Dutch oven%[1]

[Footnote 1: The bread, or meat, to be baked was put into the pot, and hot coals were heaped all around the sides and on the lid, which had a rim to keep the coals on it.]

[Illustration: a foot stove]

Washington was a farmer, yet he never in his life beheld a tomato, nor a cauliflower, nor an eggplant, nor a horserake, nor a drill, nor a reaper and binder, nor a threshing machine, nor a barbed wire fence.

[Illustration: Kitchen in Washington's headquarters in Morristown,
N.J.[1]

[Footnote 1: This shows a fine specimen of the old-fashioned fireplace.
Notice the andirons, the bellows, the lamp, the spinning wheel, the old
Dutch clock, and the kettles hanging on the crane over the logs.]

[Illustration: A plow used in 1776]

His land was plowed with a wooden plow partly shod with iron. His seed was sown by hand; his hay was cut with scythes; his grain was reaped with sickles, and threshed on the barn floor with flails in the hands of his slaves.

%195. Negro Slavery.%—No living person under thirty years of age has ever seen a negro slave in our country. When Washington was President there were 700,000 slaves. When the Revolution opened, slavery was permitted by law in every colony. But the feeling against it in the North had always been strong, and when the war ended, the people began the work of abolition. In Massachusetts and New Hampshire the constitutions of the states declared that "all men are born free and equal," and that "all men are born equally free," and this was understood to abolish slavery. In Pennsylvania, slavery was abolished in 1780. In Rhode Island and Connecticut gradual abolition laws were passed which provided that all children born of slave parents after a certain day should be free at a certain age, and that their children should never be slaves. The Ordinance of 1787 had prohibited slavery in the Northwest Territory. But in 1790 New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and all the states south of these were slave states. (See map on the next page.)

Though slaves were men and women and children, they had no civil rights whatever. They could be bought and sold, leased, seized for a debt, bequeathed by will, given away. If they made anything, or found anything, or earned anything, it belonged not to them, but to their owners. They were property just as oxen or horses were in the North. It was unlawful to teach them to read or write. They were not allowed to give evidence against a white man, nor to travel in bands of more than seven unless a white man was with them, nor to quit the plantation without leave.

If a planter provided coarse food, coarse clothes, and a rude shelter for his slaves, if he did not work them more than fifteen hours out of twenty-four in summer, nor more than fourteen in winter, and if he gave them every Sunday to themselves, he did quite as much for their comfort as the law required he should.

[Illustration: MAP SHOWING THE AREA OF %SLAVE AND FREE SOIL IN 1790%]

If the slave committed any offense, if he stole anything, or refused to work, or ran away, it was lawful to load him with irons, to confine him for any length of time in a cell, and to beat him and whip him till the blood ran in streams from the wounds, and he grew too weak to stand. Old advertisements are still extant in which runaway blacks are described by the scars left upon their bodies by the lash. When such lashings were not prescribed by the court, they were commonly given under the eye of the overseer, or inflicted by the owner himself.

%196. Six Days from Boston to New York.%—Our country was small when Washington was President. The people lived on the seaboard. The towns and cities were not actually very far apart; but the means of travel were so poor, the time consumed in going even fifty miles was so great, that the country was practically immense in extent. Now we step into a beautifully fitted car, heated by steam, lighted by electricity, richly carpeted, and provided with most comfortable seats and beds, and are whirled across the continent from Philadelphia to San Francisco in less time than it took Washington to go from New York to Boston.

[Illustration: Old mill at West Falmouth, Mass.[1]

[Footnote 1: In many parts of the country where there was no water power, as Cape Cod, Long Island, Nantucket, etc., flour was ground at windmills. The windmill shown in the picture was built in 1787, and is still in use.]

If you had lived in 1791 and started, say, from Boston, to go to Philadelphia to see the President and the great city where independence had been declared, you would very likely have begun by making your will, and bidding good-by to your friends. You would then have gone down to the office of the proprietor of the stagecoach, and secured a seat to New York. As the coach left but twice a week, you would have waited till the day came and would then have presented yourself, at three o'clock in the morning, at the tavern whence the coach started.

The stagecoach was little better than a huge covered box mounted on springs. It had neither glass windows, nor door, nor steps, nor closed sides. The roof was upheld by ten posts which rose from the body of the vehicle, and the body was commonly breast high. From the top were hung curtains of leather, to be rolled up when the day was fine, and let down and buttoned when it was rainy and cold. Within were four seats. Without was the baggage. Fourteen pounds of luggage were allowed to be carried free by each passenger. But if your portmanteau or your brass-nail-studded hair trunk weighed more, you would have paid for it at the rate per mile that you paid for yourself. Under no circumstances, however, would you be permitted to take on the journey more than 150 pounds. When the baggage had all been weighed and strapped on the coach, when the horses had been attached, and the waybill, containing the names of the passengers, made out, the passengers would clamber to their seats through the front of the stage and sit down with their faces toward the driver's seat.

One pair of horses usually dragged the coach eighteen miles, when a fresh pair would be attached, and if all went well, you would be put down about ten at night at some wayside inn or tavern after a journey of forty miles. Cramped and weary, you would eat a frugal supper and hurry off to bed with a notice from the landlord to be ready to start at three the next morning. Then, no matter if it rained or snowed, you would be forced to make ready by the dim light of a horn lantern, unknown now, for another ride of eighteen hours.

If no mishaps occurred, if the coach was not upset by the ruts, if storm or flood did not delay you at Springfield, where the road met the Connecticut, or at Stratford, where it met the Housatonic, each of which had to be crossed on clumsy flatboats, the stage would roll into New York at the end of the sixth day.

%197. Two Days from New York to Philadelphia.%—And here a serious delay was almost certain to occur, for even in the best of weather it was no easy matter to cross the Hudson to New Jersey. When the wind was high and the water rough, or the river full of ice, the boldest did not dare to risk a crossing. Once over the river, you would again go on by coach, and at the end of two more days would reach Philadelphia. In our time one can travel in eight hours the entire distance between Boston and Philadelphia, a distance which Washington could not have traversed in less than eight days.

[Illustration: Stagecoach and inn[1]

[Footnote 1: From a print of 1798.]

%198. The Roads and the Inns.%—The newspapers and the travelers of those days complained bitterly of the roads and the inns. On the best roads the ruts were deep, the descents precipitous, and the passengers were often forced to get out and help the driver pull the wheels out of the mud. Breakdowns and upsets were of everyday occurrence. Yet bad as the roads were, the travel was so considerable that very often the inns and taverns even in the large cities could not lodge all who applied unless they slept five or six in a room.

%199. A Steamboat on the Delaware.%—Rude as this means of travel seems to us, the men of 1790 were quite satisfied with it, and absolutely refused to make use of a better one. Had you been in Philadelphia during the summer of 1790 and taken up a copy of The Pennsylvania Packet, you could not have failed to notice this advertisement of the first successful steamboat in the world:

%The Steam-Boat

Is now ready to take Passengers, and is intended to set off from Arch Street Ferry in Philadelphia every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, for Burlington, Bristol, Bordentown and Trenton, to return on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays—Price for Passengers, 2/6 to Burlington and Bristol, 3/9 to Bordentown, 5/. to Trenton. June 14. tu.th ftf.%

This boat was the invention of John Fitch, and from June to September ran up and down the Delaware; but so few people went on it that he could not pay expenses, and the boat was withdrawn.

%200. To the Great West.%—From Philadelphia went out one of the great highways to what was then the far West, but to what we now know as the valley of the Ohio. The traveler who to-day makes the journey from Philadelphia to Pittsburg is whisked on a railroad car through an endless succession of cities and villages and rich farms, and by great factories and mills and iron works, which in the days of Washington had no existence. He makes the journey easily between sunrise and sunset. In 1790 he could not have made it in twelve days.

%201. Towns beyond the Alleghany Mountains.%—Though the country between the Alleghany Mountains and the Mississippi had been closed to settlement from 1763 to 1776 by the King's proclamation, it was by no means without population in 1790. At Detroit and Kaskaskia and Vincennes were old French settlements, made long before France was driven out of Louisiana. But there were others of later date. The hardy frontiersman of 1763 cared no more for the King's proclamation than he did for the bark of the wolf at his cabin door. The ink with which the document was written had not dried before emigrants from Maryland and Virginia and Pennsylvania were hurrying into the valley of the Monongahela.

In 1769 William Bean crossed the mountains from North Carolina, and, building a cabin on the banks of Watauga Creek, began the settlement of Tennessee. James Robertson and a host of others followed in 1770, and soon the valleys of the Clinch and the Holston were dotted with cabins. In 1769 Daniel Boone, one of the grandest figures in frontier history, began his exploits in what is now Kentucky, and before 1777 Boonesboro, Harrodsburg, and Lexington were founded.

[Illustration: %Model of Fitch's steamboat%[l]

[Footnote 1: Now in the National Museum, Washington.]

%202. State of Franklin.%—Before the Revolution closed, emigrants under James Robertson and John Donelson planted Nashville and half a dozen other settlements on the Cumberland, in middle Tennessee. After the Revolution ended, so many settlers were in eastern Tennessee that they tried to make a new state. North Carolina, following the example of her Northern sisters, ceded to Congress her claim to what is now Tennessee in 1784. But the people on the Watauga no sooner heard, of it than under the lead of John Sevier they organized the state of Franklin, whereupon North Carolina repealed the act of cession and absorbed the new state by making the Franklin officials her officials for the district of Tennessee. In 1789 she again ceded the district, and in May of that year Tennessee became part of the public domain.

%203. Squatters in Ohio.%—The cession to Congress of the land north of the Ohio led to an emigration from Virginia and Kentucky to what is now the state of Ohio. As this territory was to be sold to pay the national debt, Congress was forced to order the squatters away, and when they refused to go, sent troops to burn their cabins, destroy their crops, and drive them across the Ohio. The lawful settlement of the territory began after the Ohio and Scioto companies bought their lands in 1787, and John C. Symmes purchased his in 1788.

%204. Pittsburg in 1790.%—At Pittsburg, then the greatest town in the United States west of the Alleghany Mountains, were some 200 houses, mostly of logs, and 2000 people, a newspaper, and a few rude manufactories. The life of the town was its river trade. Pittsburg was the place where emigrants "fitted out" for the West. A settler intending to go down the Ohio valley with his family and his goods would lay in a stock of powder and ball, buy flour and ham enough to last him for a month, and secure two rude structures which passed under the name of boats.

[Illustration: %The first millstones and salt kettle in Ohio%]

%205. A Trip down the Ohio in 1790.%—In the long keel boat he would put his wife, his children, and such travelers as had been waiting at Pittsburg for a chance to go down the river. In the flatboat would be his cattle or his stores. Two dangers beset the voyager on the Ohio. His boat might become entangled in the branches of the trees that overhung the river, or be fired into by the Indians who lurked in the woods. The cabin of the keel boat, therefore, was low, that it might glide under the trees, and the roof and sides were made as nearly bullet-proof as possible. The whole craft was steered by a huge oar mounted on a pivot at the stern.[1]

[Footnote 1: See the boats in the pictures on next page.]

[Illustration: Map of Ohio]

%206. Towns along the Ohio.%—As the emigrant in such an ark floated down the river, he would come first to Wheeling, a town of fifty log cabins, and then to Marietta, a town planted in Ohio in 1788 by settlers sent by the Ohio Company. Below Marietta were Belpre and Gallipolis, a settlement made by Frenchmen brought there by the Scioto Company. Yet farther down, on the Kentucky side, were Limestone (now Maysville) and Newport, opposite which some settlers were founding the city of Cincinnati. Once past Cincinnati, all was unbroken wilderness till one reached Louisville in Kentucky, beyond which few emigrants had yet ventured to go.

[Illustration: %Cincinnati in 1802 (Fort Washington)%]

%207. Cotton Planting.%—The South, in 1790, was on the eve of a great industrial revolution. The products of the states south of Virginia had been tar, pitch, resin, lumber, rice, and indigo. But in the years following the peace the indigo plants had been destroyed year after year by an insect. As the plant was not a native of our country, but was brought from the West Indies, it became necessary either to import more seed plants, or to raise some other staple. Many chose the latter course, and about 1787 began to grow cotton.

[Illustration: %Farmers' Castle (Belpre) in 1791%]

%208. Whitney and the Cotton Gin.%—The experiment succeeded, but a serious difficulty arose. The cotton plant has pods which when ripe split open and show a white woolly substance attached to seeds. Before the cotton could be used, these seeds must be picked out, and as the labor of cleaning was very great, only a small quantity could be sent to market. It happened, however, that a young man from Massachusetts, named Eli Whitney, was then living in Georgia, and he, seeing the need of a machine to clean cotton, invented the cotton gin.[1] Till then, a negro slave could not clean two pounds of cotton in a day. With the gin the same slave in the same time could remove the seeds from a hundred pounds. This solved the difficulty, and gave to the United States another staple even greater in value than tobacco. In 1792 one hundred and ninety-two thousand pounds of cotton were exported to Europe; in 1795, after the gin was invented, six million pounds were sent out of the country. In 1894 no less than 4275 million pounds were raised and either consumed or exported. Of all the marvelous inventions of our countrymen, this produced the very greatest consequences. It made cotton planting profitable; it brought immense wealth to the people of the South every year; it covered New England with cotton mills; and by making slave labor profitable it did more than anything else to fasten slavery on the United States for seventy years, and finally to bring on the Civil War, the most terrible struggle of modern times.

[Footnote 1: The word "gin" is a contraction of "engine.">[

[Illustration: %The cotton gin% A. Whitney's original gin. B. A later form.]