A School History of the United States

by John Bach McMaster

CHAPTER XXI

THE RISING WEST

%301. Rush into the West.%—The settlement of our boundary disputes, especially with Spain, was most timely, for even then people were hurrying across the mountains by tens of thousands, and building up new states in the Mississippi valley. The great demand for ships and provisions, which from 1793 to 1807 had made business so brisk, had kept people on the seaboard and given them plenty of employment. But after 1812, and particularly after 1815, trade, commerce, and business on the seaboard declined, work became scarce, and men began to emigrate to the West, where they could buy land from the government on the installment plan, and where the states could not tax their farms until five years after the government had given them a title deed. Old settlers in central New York declared they had never seen so many teams and sleighs, loaded with women, children, and household goods, traveling westward, bound for Ohio, which was then but another name for the West.

As the year wore away, the belief was expressed that when autumn came it would be found that the worst was over, and that the good times expected to follow peace would keep people on the seaboard. But the good times did not return. The condition of trade and commerce, of agriculture and manufactures, grew worse instead of better, and the western movement of population became greater than ever.

%302. Rapid Growth of Towns.%—Fed by this never-ending stream of newcomers, the West was almost transformed. Towns grew and villages sprang up with a rapidity which even in these days of rapid and easy communication would be thought amazing. Mt. Pleasant, in Jefferson County, Ohio, was in 1810 a little hamlet of seven families living in cabins. In 1815 it contained ninety families, numbering 500 souls. The town of Vevay, Ind., was laid out in 1813, and was not much better than a collection of huts in 1814. But in 1816 the traveler down the Ohio who stopped at Vevay found himself at a flourishing county seat, with seventy-five dwellings, occupied by a happy population who boasted of having among them thirty-one mechanics of various trades; of receiving three mails each week, and supporting a weekly newspaper called the Indiana Register. Forty-two thousand settlers are said to have come into Indiana in 1816, and to have raised the population to 112,000.

Letters from New York describe the condition of that state west of Utica as one of astonishing prosperity. Log cabins were disappearing, and frame and brick houses taking their place. The pike from Utica to Buffalo was almost a continuous village, and the country for twenty miles on either side was filling up with an industrious population. Auburn, where twenty years before land sold for one dollar an acre, was the first town in size and wealth west of Utica, and land within its limits brought $7000 an acre. Fourteen miles west was Waterloo, on the Seneca River, a village which did not exist in 1814, and which in 1816 had fifty houses. Rochester, the site of which in 1815 was a wilderness, had a printing press, a bookstore, and a hundred houses in 1817.[1]

[Footnote 1: McMaster's History of the People of the United States,
Vol. IV., pp. 381-386.]

%303. Scenes on the Western Highways.%—By 1817 this migration was at its height, and in the spring of that year families set forth from almost every village and town on the seaboard. The few that went from each place might not be missed; but when they were gathered on any one of the great roads to the West, as that across New York, or that across Pennsylvania, they made an endless procession of wagons and foot parties.

A traveler who had occasion to go from Nashville to Savannah in January, 1817, declares that on the way he fell in with crowds of emigrants from Carolina and Georgia, all bound for the cotton lands of Alabama; that he counted the flocks and wagons, and that—carts, gigs, coaches, and wagons, all told—there were 207 conveyances, and more than 3800 people. At Haverhill, in Massachusetts, a train of sixteen wagons, with 120 men, women, and children, from Durham, Me., passed in one day. They were bound for Indiana to buy a township, and were accompanied by their minister. Within thirteen days, seventy-three wagons and 450 emigrants had passed through the same town of Haverhill. At Easton, Pa., which lay on the favorite westward route for New Englanders, 511 wagons, with 3066 persons, passed in a month. They went in trains of from six to fifty wagons each day. The keeper of Gate No. 2, on the Dauphin turnpike, in Pennsylvania, returned 2001 families as having passed his gate, bound west, between March and December, 1817, and gave the number of people accompanying the vehicles as 16,000. Along the New York route, which went across the state from Albany to Buffalo, up Lake Erie, and on by way of Chautauqua Lake to the Allegheny, the reports are just as astonishing. Two hundred and sixty wagons were counted going by one tavern in nine days, besides hundreds of people on horseback and on foot.[1]

[Footnote 1: McMaster's History. Vol. IV., pp. 387, 388.]

%304. Life on the Frontier.%—The "mover," or, as we should say, the emigrant, would provide himself with a small wagon, very light, but strong enough to carry his family, provisions, bedding, and utensils; would cover it with a blanket or a piece of canvas or with linen which was smeared with tar inside to make it waterproof; and with two stout horses to pull it, would set out for the West, and make his way across Pennsylvania to Pittsburg, then the greatest city of the West, with a population of 7000. Some, as of old, would take boats and float down the Ohio; others would go on to Wheeling, be ferried across the river, and push into Ohio or Indiana or Illinois, there to "take up" a quarter section (160 acres) of government land, or buy or rent a "clearing" from some shiftless settler of an earlier day. Government land intended for sale was laid out in quarter sections of 160 acres, and after being advertised for a certain time was offered for sale at public auction. What was not sold could then be purchased at the land office of the district at two dollars an acre, one quarter to be paid down, and three fourths before the expiration of four years. The emigrant, having gathered eighty dollars, would go to some land office, "enter" a quarter section, pay the first installment, and make his way in the two-horse wagon containing his family and his worldly goods to the spot where was to be his future home. Every foot of it in all probability would be covered with bushes and trees.

[Illustration: Distribution of the Population of the United States
Fourth Census, 1820]

%305. The Log Cabin.%—In that case the settler would cut down a few saplings, make a "half-faced camp," and begin his clearing. The "half-faced camp" was a shed. Three sides were of logs laid one on another horizontally. The roof was of saplings covered with branches or bark. The fourth side was open, and when it rained was closed by hanging up deerskin curtains. In this camp the newcomer and his family would live while he grubbed up the bushes and cut down trees enough to make a log cabin. If he were a thrifty, painstaking man, he would smooth each log on four sides with his ax, and notch it half through at each end so that when they were placed one on another the faces would nearly touch. Saplings would make the rafters, and on them would be fastened planks laid clapboard fashion, or possibly split shingles.

An opening was of course left for a door, although many a cabin was built without a window, and when the door was shut received no light save that which came down the chimney, which was always on the outside of the house. To form it, an opening eight feet long and six feet high was left at one end of the house, and around this a sort of bay window was built of logs and lined with stones on the inside. Above the top of the opening the chimney contracted and was made of branches smeared both inside and out with clay. Generally the chimney went to the peak of the roof; but it was by no means unusual for it to stop about halfway up the end of the cabin.

[Illustration: Log cabin[1]

[Footnote 1: The birthplace of Abraham Lincoln, restored (reproduced,
together with the first picture on the next page, from Tarbell's Early
Life of Abraham Lincoln, by permission of the publishers, S.S.
McClure, Limited).]

If the settler was too poor to buy glass, or if glass could not be had, the window frame was covered with greased paper, which let in the light but could not be seen through. The door was of plank with leather hinges, or with iron hinges made from an old wagon tire by the nearest blacksmith or by the settler himself. There was no knob, no lock, no bolt.

In place of them there was a wooden latch on the inside, which could be lifted by a person on the outside of the door by a leather strip which came through a hole in the door and hung down. When this latch string was out, anybody could pull it, lift the latch, and come in. When it was drawn inside, nobody could come in without knocking. The floor was made of "puncheons," or planks split and hewn with an ax from the trunk of a tree, and laid with the round side down. The furniture the settler brought with him, or made on the spot.

[Illustration: Hand mill [1]

The household utensils were of the simplest kind. Brooms and brushes were made of corn husks. Corn was shelled by hand and was then either carried in a bag slung over a horse's back to the nearest mill, perhaps fifteen miles away, or was pounded in a wooden hominy mortar with a wooden pestle, or ground in a hand mill. Chickens and game were roasted by hanging them with leather strings before the open fire. Cooking stoves were unknown, and all cooking was done in a "Dutch oven," on the hearth, or in a clay "out oven" built, as its name implies, out of doors.

[Illustration: Corn-husk broom [1]

[Illustration: Kitchen utensils [1]

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

%306. Clearing and Planting.%—The land about the cabin was cleared by grubbing the bushes and cutting down trees under a foot in diameter and burning them. Big trees were "deadened," or killed, by cutting a "girdle" around them two or three feet above the ground, deep enough to destroy the sap vessels and so prevent the growth of leaves.[1]

[Footnote 1: For a delightful account of life in the West, read W. C.
Howells's Recollections of Life in Ohio (edited by his son, William
Dean Howells).]

In the ground thus laid open to the sun were planted corn, potatoes, or wheat, which, when harvested, was threshed with a flail and fanned and cleaned with a sheet. At first the crop would be scarcely sufficient for home use. But, as time passed, there would be some to spare, and this would be wagoned to some river town and sold or exchanged for "store goods."

If the settler chose his farm wisely, others would soon settle near by, and when a cluster of clearings had been made, some enterprising speculator would appear, take up a quarter section, cut it into town lots, and call the place after himself, as Piketown, or Leesburg, or Gentryville. A storekeeper with a case or two of goods would next appear, then a tavern would be erected, and possibly a blacksmith shop and a mill, and Piketown or Leesburg would be established. Hundreds of such ventures failed; but hundreds of others succeeded and are to-day prosperous villages.

[Illustration: Mississippi produce boat[1]

[Footnote 1: From a model in the National Museum at Washington.]

%307. The New States._—While the northern stream of population was thus traveling across New York, northern Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and into Michigan, the middle stream was pushing down the Ohio. By 1820 it had greatly increased the population of southern Indiana and Illinois, and crossing the Mississippi was going up the Missouri River. In the South the destruction of the Indian power by Jackson in 1813, and the opening of the Indian land to settlement, led to a movement of the southern stream of population across Alabama to Mobile. Now, what were some of the results of this movement of population into the Mississippi valley? In the first place, it caused the formation and admission into the Union of six states in five years. They were Indiana, 1816; Mississippi, 1817; Illinois, 1818; Alabama, 1819; Maine, 1820; Missouri, 1821.

%308. Slave and Free States.%—In the second place, it brought about a great struggle over slavery. You remember that when the thirteen colonies belonged to Great Britain slavery existed in all of them; that when they became independent states some began to abolish slavery; and that in time five became free states and eight remained slave states. Slavery was also gradually abolished in New York and New Jersey, so that of the original thirteen only six were now to be counted as slave states. You remember again that when the Continental Congress passed the Ordinance of 1787 for the government of the territory lying between the Ohio River and the Great Lakes, Pennsylvania and the Mississippi River, it ordained that in the Northwest Territory there should be no slavery. In consequence of this, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois were admitted into the Union as free states, as Vermont had been. Kentucky was originally part of Virginia, and when it was admitted, came in as a slave state. Tennessee once belonged to North Carolina, and hence was also slave soil; and when it was given to the United States, the condition was imposed by North Carolina that it should remain so. Tennessee, therefore, entered the Union (in 1796) as a slave state. Much of what is now Alabama and Mississippi was once owned by Georgia, and when she ceded it in 1802, she did so with the express condition that it should remain slave soil; as a result of this, Alabama and Mississippi were slave states. Louisiana was part of the Louisiana Purchase, and was admitted (1812) as a slave state because it contained a great many slaves at the time of the purchase.

Thus in 1820 there were twenty-two states in the Union, of which eleven were slave, and eleven free. Notice now two things: 1. That the dividing line between the slave and the free states was the south and west boundary of Pennsylvania from the Delaware to the Ohio, and the Ohio River; 2. That all the states in the Union except part of Louisiana lay east of the Mississippi River. As to what should be the character of our country west of that river, nothing had as yet been said, because as yet no state lying wholly in that region had asked admittance to the Union.

%309. Shall there be Slave States West of the Mississippi River?%—But when the people rushed westward after the war, great numbers crossed the Mississippi and settled on the Missouri River, and as they were now very numerous they petitioned Congress in 1818 for leave to make the state of Missouri and to be admitted into the Union.

The petitioners did not say whether they would make a slave or a free state; but as the Missourians owned slaves, everybody knew that Missouri would be a slave state. To this the free states were opposed. If the tobacco-growing, cotton-raising, and sugar-making states wanted slaves, that was their affair; but slavery must not be extended into states beyond the Mississippi, because it was wrong. No man, it was said, had any right to buy and sell a human being, even if he was black. The Southern people were equally determined that slavery should cross the Mississippi. We cannot, said they, abolish slavery; because if our slaves were set free, they would not work, and as they are very ignorant, they would take our property and perhaps our lives. Neither can we stop the increase of negro slave population. We must, then, have some place to send our surplus slaves, or the present slave states will become a black America.

%310. The Missouri Compromise.%—Each side was so determined, and it was so clear that neither would yield, that a compromise was suggested. The country east of the Mississippi, it was said, is partly slave, partly free soil. Why not divide the country west of the great river in the same way? At first the North refused. But it so happened that just at this moment Maine, having secured the consent of Massachusetts, applied to Congress for admission into the Union as a free state. The South, which had control of the Senate, thereupon said to the North, which controlled the House of Representatives, If you will not admit Missouri as a slave state, we will not admit Maine as a free state. This forced the compromise, and after a bitter and angry discussion it was agreed

1. That Maine should come in as a free, and Missouri as a slave, state.

2. That the Louisiana Purchase should be cut in two by the parallel of 36° 30', and that all north of the line except Missouri should be free soil[1]. This parallel was thereafter known as the "Missouri Compromise Line."

[Footnote 1: The Compromise was violated in 1836, when the present northwest corner of Missouri was taken from the free territory and added to that state. See maps, pp. 299 and 348]

[Illustration: AREAS OF FREEDOM AND SLAVERY IN 1820]

The admission of Maine and Missouri raised the number of states to twenty-four.[1] No more were admitted for sixteen years. When Missouri applied for admission as a state, Arkansas was (1819) organized as a territory.

[Footnote 1: For the compromise read Woodburn's Historical Significance of the Missouri Compromise (in Report American Historical Association, 1893, pp. 251-297); McMaster's History of the People of the United States, Vol. IV., Chap. 39.]

%311. The Second Election of Monroe.%—This bitter contest over the exclusion of slavery from the country west of the Mississippi shows how completely party lines had disappeared in 1820. In the course of that year, electors of a President were to be chosen in the twenty-four states. That slavery would play an important part in the campaign, and that some candidate would be put in the field by the people opposed to the compromise, might have been expected. But there was no campaign, no contest, no formal nomination. The members of Congress held a caucus, but decided to nominate nobody. Every elector, it was well known, would be a Republican, and as such would vote for the reëlection of Monroe and Tompkins. And this almost did take place. Every one of the 229 electors who voted was a Republican, and all save one in New Hampshire cast votes for Monroe. But this one man gave his vote to John Quincy Adams. He said he did not want Washington to be robbed of the glory of being the only President who had ever received the unanimous vote of the electors.

March 4, 1821, came on Sunday. Monroe was therefore inaugurated on
Monday, March 5.