CHAPTER V.
THE MEN OF THE WESTERN WATERS, 1798-1802.
Rapid Growth of the West.
The growth of the West was very rapid in the years immediately succeeding the peace with the Indians and the treaties with England and Spain. As the settlers poured into what had been the Indian-haunted wilderness it speedily became necessary to cut it into political divisions. Kentucky had already been admitted as a State in 1792; Tennessee likewise became a State in 1796. The Territory of Mississippi was organized in 1798, to include the country west of Georgia and south of Tennessee, which had been ceded by the Spaniards under Pinckney's treaty. [Footnote: Claiborne's "Mississippi," p. 220, etc.] In 1800 the Connecticut Reserve, in what is now northeastern Ohio, was taken by the United States. The Northwestern Territory was divided into two parts; the eastern was composed mainly of what is now the State of Ohio, while the western portion was called Indiana Territory, and was organized with W. H. Harrison as Governor, his capital being at Vincennes. [Footnote: "Annals of the West," by Thomas H. Perkins, p. 473. A valuable book, showing much scholarship and research. The author has never received proper credit. Very few indeed of the Western historians of his date showed either his painstaking care or his breadth of view.] Harrison had been Wayne's aid-de-camp at the fight of the Fallen Timbers, and had been singled out by Wayne for mention because of his coolness and gallantry. Afterwards he had succeeded Sargent as Secretary of the Northwestern Territory when Sargent had been made Governor of Mississippi, and he had gone as a Territorial delegate to Congress. [Footnote: Jacob Burnett in "Ohio Historical Transactions," Part II., Vol. I., p. 69.]
Ohio Becomes a State.
In 1802 Ohio was admitted as a State. St. Clair, and St. Clair's supporters, struggled to keep the Territory from statehood, and proposed to cut it down in size, nominally because they deemed the extent of territory too great for governmental purposes, but really, doubtless, because they distrusted the people, and did not wish to see them take the government into their own hands. The effort failed, however, and the State was admitted by Congress, beginning its existence in 1803. [Footnote: Atwater, "History of Ohio," p. 169.] Congress made the proviso that the State Constitution should accord with the Constitution of the United States, and should embody the doctrines contained in the Ordinance of 1787. [Footnote: The question of the boundaries of the Northwestern States is well treated in "The Boundaries of Wisconsin," by Reuben G. Thwaites, the Secretary of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin.] The rapid settlement of southeastern Ohio was hindered by the fact that the speculative land companies, the Ohio and Scioto associations, held great tracts of territory which the pioneers passed by in their desire to get to lands which they could acquire in their own right. This was one of the many bad effects which resulted from the Government's policy of disposing of its land in large blocks to the highest bidder, instead of allotting it, as has since been done, in quarter sections to actual settlers. [Footnote: Mr. Eli Thayer, in his various writings, has rightly laid especial stress on this point.]
Harrison, St. Clair, and Sargent.
Lessons Taught by Blount's Experience.
Harrison was thoroughly in sympathy with the Westerners. He had thrown in his lot with theirs; he deemed himself one of them, and was accepted by them as a fit representative. Accordingly he was very popular as Governor of Indiana. St. Clair in Ohio and Sargent in Mississippi were both extremely unpopular. They were appointed by Federalist administrations, and were entirely out of sympathy with the Western people among whom they lived. One was a Scotchman, and one a New Englander. They were both high-minded men, with sound ideas on governmental policy, though Sargent was the abler of the two; but they were out of touch with the Westerners. They distrusted the frontier folk, and were bitterly disliked in return. Each committed the fundamental fault of trying to govern the Territory over which he had been put in accordance with his own ideas, and heedless of the wishes and prejudices of those under him. Doubtless each was conscientious in what he did, and each of course considered the difficulties under which he labored to be due solely to the lawlessness and the many shortcomings of the settlers. But this was an error. The experience of Blount when he occupied the exceedingly difficult position of Territorial Governor of Tennessee showed that it was quite possible for a man of firm belief in the Union to get into touch with the frontiersmen and to be accepted by them as a worthy representative; but the virtues of St. Clair and Sargent were so different from the backwoods virtues, and their habits of thought were so alien, that they could not possibly get on with the people among whom their lot had been cast. Neither of them in the end took up his abode in the Territory of which he had been Governor, both returning to the East. The code of laws which they enacted prior to the Territories possessing a sufficient number of inhabitants to become entitled to Territorial legislatures were deemed by the settlers to be arbitrary and unsuited to their needs. There was much popular feeling against them. On one occasion St. Clair was mobbed in Chillicothe, the then capital of Ohio, with no other effect than to procure a change of capital to Cincinnati. Finally both Sargent and St. Clair were removed by Jefferson, early in his administration.
The Jeffersonians the Champions of the West.
The Jeffersonian Republican party did very much that was evil, and it advocated governmental principles of such utter folly that the party itself was obliged immediately to abandon them when it undertook to carry on the government of the United States, and only clung to them long enough to cause serious and lasting damage to the country; but on the vital question of the West, and its territorial expansion, the Jeffersonian party was, on the whole, emphatically right, and its opponents, the Federalists, emphatically wrong. The Jeffersonians believed in the acquisition of territory in the West, and the Federalists did not. The Jeffersonians believed that the Westerners should be allowed to govern themselves precisely as other citizens of the United States did, and should be given their full share in the management of national affairs. Too many Federalists failed to see that these positions were the only proper ones to take. In consequence, notwithstanding all their manifold shortcomings, the Jeffersonians, and not the Federalists, were those to whom the West owed most.
Right of the Westerners to Self-Government.
Whether the Westerners governed themselves as wisely as they should have mattered little. The essential point was that they had to be given the right of self-government. They could not be kept in pupilage. Like other Americans, they had to be left to strike out for themselves and to sink or swim according to the measure of their own capacities. When this was done it was certain that they would commit many blunders, and that some of these blunders would work harm not only to themselves but to the whole nation. Nevertheless, all this had to be accepted as part of the penalty paid for free government. It was wise to accept it in the first place, and in the second place, whether wise or not, it was inevitable. Many of the Federalists saw this; and to many of them, the Adamses, for instance, and Jay and Pinckney, the West owed more than it did to most of the Republican statesmen; but as a whole, the attitude of the Federalists, especially in the Northeast, toward the West was ungenerous and improper, while the Jeffersonians, with all their unwisdom and demagogy, were nevertheless the Western champions.
Vagaries of Western Constitution-Making.
Mississippi and Ohio had squabbled with their Territorial governors much as the Old Thirteen Colonies had squabbled with the governors appointed by the Crown. One curious western consequence of this was common to both cases. When the old Colonies became States, they in their constitutions usually imposed the same checks upon the executive they themselves elected as they had desired to see imposed upon the executive appointed by an outside power. The new Territories followed the same course. When Ohio became a State it adopted a very foolish constitution. This constitution deprived the executive of almost all power, and provided a feeble, short-term judiciary, throwing the control of affairs into the hands of the legislative body, in accordance with what were then deemed Democratic ideas. The people were entirely unable to realize that, so far as their discontent with the Governor's actions was reasonable, it arose from the fact that he was appointed, not by themselves, but by some body or person not in sympathy with them. They failed to grasp the seemingly self-evident truth that a governor, one man elected by the people, is just as much their representative and is just as certain to carry out their ideas as is a legislature, a body of men elected by the people. They provided a government which accentuated, instead of softening, the defects in their own social system. They were in no danger of suffering from tyranny; they were in no danger of losing the liberty which they so jealously guarded. The perils that threatened them were lawlessness, lack of order, and lack of capacity to concentrate their efforts in time of danger from within or from an external enemy; and against these perils they made no provision whatever.
Western Feeling against the East.
The West in Close Touch with the South.
The inhabitants of Ohio Territory were just as bitter against St. Clair as the inhabitants of Mississippi Territory were against Sargent. The Mississippians did not object to Sargent as a Northern man, but, in common with the men of Ohio, they objected to governors who were Eastern men and out of touch with the West. At the end of the eighteenth century, and during the early years of the nineteenth, the important fact to be remembered in treating of the Westerners was their fundamental unity, in blood, in ways of life, and in habits of thought. [Footnote: Prof. Frederick A. Turner, of the University of Michigan, deserves especial credit for the stress he has laid upon this point.] They were predominantly of Southern, not of Northern blood; though it was the blood of the Southerners of the uplands, not of the low coast regions, so that they were far more closely kin to the Northerners than were the seaboard planters. In Kentucky and Tennessee, in Indiana and Mississippi, the settlers were of the same quality. They possessed the same virtues and the same shortcomings, the same ideals and the same practices. There was already a considerable Eastern emigration to the West, but it went as much to Kentucky as to Ohio, and almost as much to Tennessee and Mississippi as to Indiana. As yet the Northeasterners were chiefly engaged in filling the vacant spaces in New England, New York, and Pennsylvania. The great flood of Eastern emigration to the West, the flood which followed the parallels of latitude, and made the Northwest like the Northeast, did not begin until after the War of 1812. It was no accident that made Harrison, the first governor of Indiana and long the typical representative of the Northwest, by birth a Virginian, and the son of one of the Virginian signers of the Declaration of Independence. The Northwest was at this time in closer touch with Virginia than with New England.
Homogeneity of the West.
Slavery in the West.
There was as yet no hard and fast line drawn between North and South among the men of the Western waters. Their sense of political cohesion was not fully developed, and the same qualities that at times made them loose in their ideas of allegiance to the Union at times also prevented a vivid realization on their part of their own political and social solidarity; but they were always more or less conscious of this solidarity, and, as a rule, they acted together. Most important of all, the slavery question, which afterwards rived in sunder the men west of the Alleghanies as it rived in sunder those east of them, was of small importance in the early years. West of the Alleghanies slaves were still to be found almost everywhere, while almost every where there were also frequent and open expressions of hostility to slavery. The Southerners still rather disliked slavery, while the Northerners did not as yet feel any very violent antagonism to it. In the Indiana Territory there were hundreds of slaves, the property of the old French inhabitants and of the American settlers who had come there prior to 1787; and the majority of the population of this Territory actually wished to reintroduce slavery, and repeatedly petitioned Congress to be allowed the reintroduction. Congress, with equal patriotism, and wisdom, always refused the petition; but it was not until the new century was well under way that the anti-slavery element obtained control in Indiana and Illinois. Even in Ohio there was a considerable party which favored the introduction of slavery, and though the majority was against this, the people had small sympathy with the negroes, and passed very severe laws against the introduction of free blacks into the State, and even against those already in residence therein. [Footnote: "Ohio," by Rufus King. pp. 290, 364, etc.] On the other hand, when Kentucky's first constitutional convention sat, a resolute effort was made to abolish slavery within the State, and this effort was only defeated after a hard struggle and a close vote. To their honor be it said that all of the clergymen—three Baptists, one Methodist, one Dutch Reformed, and one Presbyterian—who were members of the constitutional convention voted in favor of the abolition of slavery. [Footnote: John Mason Brown, "Political Beginnings of Kentucky," 229. Among the men who deserve honor for thus voting against slavery was Harry Innes. One of the Baptist preachers, Gerrard, was elected Governor over Logan, four years later; a proof that Kentucky sentiment was very tolerant of attacks on slavery. All the clergymen, by the way, also voted to disqualify clergymen for service in the legislatures.]
In Tennessee no such effort was made, but the leaders of thought did not hesitate to express their horror of slavery and their desire that it might be abolished. There was no sharp difference between the attitudes of the Northwestern and the Southwestern States towards slavery.
Features of Western Life.
The Farmer the Typical Westerner.
North and South alike, the ways of life were substantially the same; though there were differences, of course, and these differences tended to become accentuated. Thus, in the Mississippi Territory the planters, in the closing years of the century, began to turn their attention to cotton instead of devoting themselves to the crops of their brethren farther north; and cotton soon became their staple product. But as yet the typical settler everywhere was the man of the axe and rifle, the small pioneer farmer who lived by himself, with his wife and his swarming children, on a big tract of wooded land, perhaps three or four hundred acres in extent. Of this three or four hundred acres he rarely cleared more than eight or ten; and these were cleared imperfectly. On this clearing he tilled the soil, and there he lived in his rough log house with but one room, or at most two and a loft. [Footnote: F. A. Michaux, "Voyages" (in 1802), pp. 132, 214, etc.]
Game Still Abundant.
The man of the Western waters, was essentially a man who dwelt alone in the midst of the forest on his rude little farm, and who eked out his living by hunting. Game still abounded everywhere, save in the immediate neighborhood of the towns; so that many of the inhabitants lived almost exclusively by hunting and fishing, and, with their return to the pursuits of savagery, adopted not a little of the savage idleness and thriftlessness. Bear, deer, and turkey were staple foods. Elk had ceased to be common, though they hung on here and there in out of the way localities for many years; and by the close of the century the herds of bison had been driven west of the Mississippi. [Footnote: Henry Ker, "Travels," p.22.] Smaller forms of wild life swarmed. Gray squirrels existed in such incredible numbers that they caused very serious damage to the crops, and at one time the Kentucky Legislature passed a law imposing upon every male over sixteen years of age the duty of killing a certain number of squirrels and crows every year. [Footnote: Michaux, 215, 236; Collins, I., 24.] The settlers possessed horses and horned cattle, but only a few sheep, which were not fitted to fight for their own existence in the woods, as the stock had to. On the other hand, slab-sided, long-legged hogs were the most plentiful of domestic animals, ranging in great, half-wild droves through the forest.
Fondness of the Westerners for the Lonely Life of the Woods.
All observers were struck by the intense fondness of the frontiersmen for the woods and for a restless, lonely life. [Footnote: Crêvecoeur, "Voyage dans la Haute Pennsylvanie," etc., p. 265.] They pushed independence to an extreme; they did not wish to work for others or to rent land from others. Each was himself a small landed proprietor, who cleared only the ground that he could himself cultivate. Workmen were scarce and labor dear. It was almost impossible to get men fit to work as mill hands, or to do high-class labor in forges even by importing them from Pennsylvania or Maryland. [Footnote: Clay MSS., Letter to George Nicholas, Baltimore, Sept. 3, 1796.] Even in the few towns the inhabitants preferred that their children should follow agriculture rather than become handicraftsmen; and skilled workmen such as carpenters and smiths made a great deal of money, so much so that they could live a week on one day's wage. [Footnote: Michaux, pp. 96, 152.]
The River Trade.
In addition to farming there was a big trade along the river. Land transportation was very difficult indeed, and the frontiersman's whole life was one long struggle with the forest and with poor roads. The waterways were consequently of very great importance, and the flatboatmen on the Mississippi and Ohio became a numerous and noteworthy class. The rivers were covered with their craft. There was a driving trade between Pittsburgh and New Orleans, the goods being drawn to Pittsburgh from the seacoast cities by great four-horse wagons, and being exported in ships from New Orleans to all parts of the earth. Not only did the Westerners build river craft, but they even went into shipbuilding; and on the upper Ohio, at Pittsburgh, and near Marietta, at the beginning of the present century, seagoing ships were built and launched to go down the Ohio and Mississippi, and thence across the ocean to any foreign port. [Footnote: Thompson Mason Harris, "Journal of Tour," etc., 1803, p. 140; Michaux, p. 77.] There was, however, much risk in this trade; for the demand for commodities at Natchez and New Orleans was uncertain, while the waters of the Gulf swarmed with British and French cruisers, always ready to pounce like pirates on the ships of neutral powers. [Footnote: Clay MSS., W. H. Turner to Thomas Hart, Natchez, May 27, 1797.]
Small Size of the Towns.
Natchez.
Yet the river trade was but the handmaid of frontier agriculture. The Westerners were a farmer folk who lived on the clearings their own hands had made in the great woods, and who owned the land they tilled. Towns were few and small. At the end of the century there were some four hundred thousand people in the West; yet the largest town was Lexington, which contained less than three thousand people. [Footnote: Perrin Du Lac "Voyage," etc., 1801, 1803, p. 153; Michaux, 150.] Lexington was a neatly built little burg, with fine houses and good stores. The leading people lived well and possessed much cultivation. Louisville and Nashville were each about half its size. In Nashville, of the one hundred and twenty houses but eight were of brick, and most of them were mere log huts. Cincinnati was a poor little village. Cleveland consisted of but two or three log cabins, at a time when there were already a thousand settlers in its neighborhood on the Connecticut Reserve, scattered out on their farms. [Footnote: "Historical Collections of Ohio," p. 120.] Natchez was a very important town, nearly as large as Lexington. It derived its importance from the river traffic on the Mississippi. All the boatmen stopped there, and sometimes as many as one hundred and fifty craft were moored to the bank at the same time. The men who did this laborious river work were rude, powerful, and lawless, and when they halted for a rest their idea of enjoyment was the coarsest and most savage dissipation. At Natchez there speedily gathered every species of purveyor to their vicious pleasures, and the part of the town known as "Natchez under the Hill" became a by-word for crime and debauchery. [Footnote: Henry Ker, "Travels," p. 41.]
Growth of Kentucky.
Kentucky had grown so in population, possessing over two hundred thousand inhabitants, that she had begun to resemble an Eastern State. When, in 1796, Benjamin Logan, the representative of the old woodchoppers and Indian fighters, ran for governor and was beaten, it was evident that Kentucky had passed out of the mere pioneer days. It was more than a mere coincidence that in the following year Henry Clay should have taken up his residence in Lexington. It showed that the State was already attracting to live within her borders men like those who were fitted for social and political leadership in Virginia.
The Kentucky Gentry.
The Danville Political Club.
Though the typical inhabitant of Kentucky was still the small frontier farmer, the class of well-to-do gentry had already attained good proportions. Elsewhere throughout the West, in Tennessee, and even here and there in Ohio and the Territories of Indiana and Mississippi, there were to be found occasional houses that were well built and well finished, and surrounded by pleasant grounds, fairly well kept; houses to which the owners had brought their stores of silver and linen and heavy, old-fashioned furniture from their homes in the Eastern States. Blount, for instance, had a handsome house in Knoxville, well fitted, as beseemed that of a man one of whose brothers still lived at Blount Hall, in the coast region of North Carolina, the ancestral seat of his forefathers for generations. [Footnote: Clay MSS., Blount to Hart, Knoxville, Feb. 9, 1794.] But by far the greatest number of these fine houses, and the largest class of gentry to dwell in them, were in Kentucky. Not only were Lexington and Louisville important towns, but Danville, the first capital of Kentucky, also possessed importance, and, indeed, had been the first of the Western towns to develop an active and distinctive social and political life. It was in Danville that, in the years immediately preceding Kentucky's admission as a State, the Political Club met. The membership of this club included many of the leaders Of Kentucky's intellectual life, and the record of its debates shows the keenness with which they watched the course of social and political development not only in Kentucky but in the United States. They were men of good intelligence and trained minds, and their meetings and debates undoubtedly had a stimulating effect upon Kentucky life, though they were tainted, as were a very large number of the leading men of the same stamp elsewhere throughout the country, with the doctrinaire political notions common among those who followed the French political theorists of the day. [Footnote: "The Political Club," by Thomas Speed, Filson Club Publications.]
The Large Landowners.
Open-air Life.
Of the gentry many were lawyers, and the law led naturally to political life; but even among the gentry the typical man was still emphatically the big landowner. The leaders of Kentucky were men who owned large estates, on which they lived in their great roomy houses. Even when they practised law they also supervised their estates; and if they were not lawyers, in addition to tilling the land they were always ready to try their hand at some kind of manufacture. They were willing to turn their attention to any new business in which there was a chance to make money, whether it was to put up a mill, to build a forge, to undertake a contract for the delivery of wheat to some big flour merchant, or to build a flotilla of flatboats, and take the produce of a given neighborhood down to New Orleans for shipment to the West Indies. [Footnote: Clay MSS., Seitz & Lowan to Garret Darling, Lexington, January 23, 1797; agreement of George Nicholas, October 10, 1796, etc. This was an agreement on the part of Nicholas to furnish Seitz & Lowan with all the flour manufactured at his mill during the season of 1797 for exportation, the flour to be delivered by him in Kentucky. He was to receive $5.50 a barrel up to the receipt of $1500; after that it was to depend upon the price of wheat. Six bushels of wheat were reckoned to a barrel of flour, and the price of a bushel was put at four shillings; in reality it ranged from three to six.] They were also always engaged in efforts to improve the breed of their horses and cattle, and to introduce new kinds of agriculture, notably the culture of the vine. [Footnote: Do., "Minutes of meeting of the Directors of the Vineyard Society," June 27, 1800.] They speedily settled themselves definitely in the new country, and began to make ready for their children to inherit their homes after them; though they retained enough of the restless spirit which had made them cross the Alleghanies to be always on the lookout for any fresh region of exceptional advantages, such as many of them considered the lands along the lower Mississippi. They led a life which appealed to them strongly, for it was passed much in the open air, in a beautiful region and lovely climate, with horses and hounds, and the management of their estates and their interest in politics to occupy their time; while their neighbors were men of cultivation, at least by their own standards, so that they had the society for which they most cared. [Footnote: Do., James Brown to Thomas Hart, Lexington, April 3, 1804.] In spite of their willingness to embark in commercial ventures and to build mills, rope-walks, and similar manufactures,—for which they had the greatest difficulty in procuring skilled laborers, whether foreign or native, from the Northeastern States [Footnote: Do., J. Brown to Thomas Hart, Philadelphia, February 11, 1797. This letter was brought out to Hart by a workman, David Dodge, whom Brown had at last succeeded in engaging. Dodge had been working in New York at a rope-walk, where he received $500 a year without board. From Hart he bargained to receive $350 with board. It proved impossible to engage other journeymen workers, Brown expressing his belief that any whom he chose would desert a week after they got to Kentucky, and Dodge saying that he would rather take raw hands and train them to the business than take out such hands as offered to go.]—and in spite of their liking for the law, they retained the deep-settled belief that the cultivation of the earth was the best of all possible pursuits for men of every station, high or low. [Footnote Do., William Nelson to Col. George Nicholas, Caroline, Va., December 29, 1794.]
Virginia and Kentucky.
In many ways the life of the Kentuckians was most like that of the Virginia gentry, though it had peculiar features of its own. Judged by Puritan standards, it seemed free enough; and it is rather curious to find Virginia fathers anxious to send their sons out to Kentucky so that they could get away from what they termed "the constant round of dissipation, the scenes of idleness, which boys are perpetually engaged in" in Virginia. One Virginia gentleman of note, in writing to a prominent Kentuckian to whom he wished to send his son, dwelt upon his desire to get him away from a place where boys of his age spent most of the time galloping wherever they wished, mounted on blooded horses. Kentucky hardly seemed a place to which a parent would send a son if he wished him to avoid the temptations of horse flesh; but this particular Virginian at least tried to provide against this, as he informed his correspondent that he should send his son out to Kentucky mounted on an "indifferent Nag," which was to be used only as a means of locomotion for the journey, and was then immediately to be sold. [Footnote: Do., William Nelson to Nicholas, November 9, 1792.]
Education.
The gentry strove hard to secure a good education for their children, and in Kentucky, as in Tennessee, made every effort to bring about the building of academies where their boys and girls could be well taught. If this was not possible, they strove to find some teacher capable of taking a class to which he could teach Latin and mathematics; a teacher who should also "prepare his pupils for becoming useful members of society and patriotic citizens." [Footnote: Shelby MSS., letter of Toulmin, January 7, 1794; Blount MSS., January 6, 1792, etc.] Where possible the leading families sent their sons to some Eastern college, Princeton being naturally the favorite institution of learning with people who dwelt in communities where the Presbyterians took the lead in social standing and cultivation. [Footnote: Clay MSS., passim; letter to Thomas Hart, October 19, 1794; October 13, 1797, etc. In the last letter, by the way, written by one John Umstead, occurs the following sentence: "I have lately heard a piece of news, if true, must be a valuable acquisition to the Western World, viz. a boat of a considerable burden making four miles and a half an hour against the strongest current in the Mississippi river, and worked by horses.">[
Currency.
Prices of Goods.
All through the West there was much difficulty in getting money. In Tennessee particularly money was so scarce that the only way to get cash in hand was by selling provisions to the few Federal garrisons. [Footnote: Do., Blount to Hart, Knoxville, March 13, 1799.] Credits were long, and payment made largely in kind; and the price at which an article could be sold under such conditions was twice as large as that which it would command for cash down. In the accounts kept by the landowners with the merchants who sold them goods, and the artizans who worked for them, there usually appear credit accounts in which the amounts due on account of produce of various kinds are deducted from the debt, leaving a balance to be settled by cash and by orders. Owing to the fluctuating currency, and to the wide difference in charges when immediate cash payments were received as compared with charges when the payments were made on credit and in kind, it is difficult to know exactly what the prices represent. In Kentucky currency mutton and beef were fourpence a pound, in the summer of 1796, while four beef tongues cost three shillings, and a quarter of lamb three and a sixpence. In 1798, on the same account, beef was down to threepence a pound. [Footnote: Do., Account of James Morrison and Melchia Myer, October 12, 17098.] Linen cost two and fourpence, or three shillings a yard; flannel, four to six shillings; calico and chintz about the same; baize, three shillings and ninepence. A dozen knives and forks were eighteen shillings, and ten pocket handkerchiefs two pounds. Worsted shoes were eight shillings a pair, and buttons were a shilling a dozen. A pair of gloves were three and ninepence; a pair of kid slippers, thirteen and sixpence; ribbons were one and sixpence. [Footnote: Do., Account of Mrs. Marion Nicholas with Tillford, 1802. On this bill appears also a charge for Hyson tea, for straw bonnets, at eighteen shillings; for black silk gloves, and for one "Aesop's Fables," at a cost of three shillings and ninepence.] The blacksmith charged six shillings and ninepence for a new pair of shoes, and a shilling and sixpence for taking off an old pair; and he did all the iron work for the farm and the house alike, from repairing bridle bits and sharpening coulters to mounting "wafil irons" [Footnote: Do., Account of Morrison and Hickey, 1798.]—for the housewives excelled in preparing delicious waffles and hot cakes.
Holidays of the Gentry.
The gentry were fond of taking holidays, going to some mountain resort, where they met friends from other parts of Kentucky and Tennessee, and from Virginia and elsewhere. They carried their negro servants with them, and at a good tavern the board would be three shillings a day for the master and a little over a shilling for the man. They lived in comfort and they enjoyed themselves; but they did not have much ready money. From the sales of their crops and stock and from their mercantile ventures they got enough to pay the blacksmith and carpenter, who did odd jobs for them, and the Eastern merchants from whom they got gloves, bonnets, hats, and shoes, and the cloth which was made into dresses by the womankind on their plantations. But most of their wants were supplied on their own places. Their abundant tables were furnished mainly with, what their own farms yielded. When they travelled they went in their own carriages. The rich men, whose wants were comparatively many, usually had on their estates white hired men or black slaves whose labor could gratify them; while the ordinary farmer, of the class that formed the great majority of the population, was capable of supplying almost all his needs himself, or with the assistance of his family.
Contrast of Old and new Methods of Settlements.
The immense preponderance of the agricultural, land-holding, and land-tilling element, and the comparative utter insignificance of town development was highly characteristic of the Western settlement of this time, and offers a very marked contrast to what goes on to-day, in the settlement of new countries. At the end of the eighteenth century the population of the Western country was about as great as the population of the State of Washington at the end of the nineteenth, and Washington is distinctly a pastoral and agricultural State, a State of men who chop trees, herd cattle, and till the soil, as well as trade; but in Washington great cities, like Tacoma, Seattle, and Spokane, have sprung up with a rapidity which was utterly unknown in the West a century ago. Nowadays when new States are formed the urban population in them tends to grow as rapidly as in the old. A hundred years ago there was practically no urban population at all in a new country. Colorado even during its first decade of statehood had a third of its population in its capital city. Kentucky during its first decade did not have much more than one per cent of its population in its capital city. Kentucky grew as rapidly as Colorado grew, a hundred years later; but Denver grew thirty or forty times as fast as Lexington had ever grown.
Restlessness of the Frontiersman. Boone's Wanderings.
In the strongly marked frontier character no traits were more pronounced than the dislike of crowding and the tendency to roam to and fro, hither and thither, always with a westward trend. Boone, the typical frontiersman, embodied in his own person the spirit of loneliness and restlessness which marked the first venturers into the wilderness. He had wandered in his youth from Pennsylvania to Carolina, and, in the prime of his strength, from North Carolina to Kentucky. When Kentucky became well settled in the closing years of the century, he crossed into Missouri, that he might once more take up his life where he could see the game come out of the woods at nightfall, and could wander among trees untouched by the axe of the pioneer. An English traveller of note who happened to encounter him about this time has left an interesting account of the meeting. It was on the Ohio, and Boone was in a canoe, alone with his dog and gun, setting forth on a solitary trip into the wilderness to trap beaver. He would not even join himself to the other travellers for a night, preferring to plunge at once into the wild, lonely life he so loved. His strong character and keen mind struck the Englishman, who yet saw that the old hunter belonged to the class of pioneers who could never themselves civilize the land, because they ever fled from the face of the very civilization for which they had made ready the land. In Boone's soul the fierce impatience of all restraint burned like a fire. He told the Englishman that he no longer cared for Kentucky, because its people had grown too easy of life; and that he wished to move to some place where men still lived untrammelled and unshackled, and enjoyed uncontrolled the free blessings of nature. [Footnote: Francis Bailey's "Journal of a Tour in Unsettled Parts of North America in 1796 and 1797," p. 234.] The isolation of his life and the frequency with which he changed his abode brought out the frontiersman's wonderful capacity to shift for himself, but it hindered the development of his power of acting in combination with others of his kind. The first comers to the new country were so restless and so intolerant of the presence of their kind, that as neighbors came in they moved ever westward. They could not act with their fellows.
The Permanent Settlers.
Efforts to Provide Schooling.
Of course in the men who succeeded the first pioneers, and who were the first permanent settlers, the restlessness and the desire for a lonely life were much less developed. These men wandered only until they found a good piece of land, and took up claims on this land, not because the country was lonely, but because it was fertile. They hailed with joy the advent of new settlers and the upbuilding of a little market town in the neighborhood. They joined together eagerly in the effort to obtain schools for their children. As yet there were no public schools supported by government in any part of the West, but all the settlers of any pretension to respectability were anxious to give their children a decent education. Even the poorer people, who were still engaged in the hardest and roughest struggle for a livelihood, showed appreciation of the need of schooling for their children; and wherever the clearings of the settlers were within reasonable distance of one another a log schoolhouse was sure to spring up. The school-teacher boarded around among the different families, and was quite as apt to be paid in produce as in cash. Sometimes he was a teacher by profession; more often he took up teaching simply as an interlude to some of his other occupations. Schoolbooks were more common than any others in the scanty libraries of the pioneers.
The County-System in the West.
The settlers who became firmly established in the land gave definite shape to its political career. The county was throughout the West the unit of division, though in the North it became somewhat mixed with the township system. It is a pity that the township could not have been the unit, as it would have rendered the social and political development in many respects easier, by giving to each little community responsibility for, and power in, matters concerning its own welfare; but the backwoodsmen lived so scattered out, and the thinly-settled regions covered so large an extent of territory, that the county was at first in some ways more suited to their needs. Moreover, it was the unit of organization in Virginia, to which State more than to any other the pioneers owed their social and governmental system. The people were ordinarily brought but little in contact with the Government. They were exceedingly jealous of their individual liberty, and wished to be interfered with as little as possible. Nevertheless, they were fond of litigation. One observer remarks that horses and lawsuits were their great subjects of conversation. [Footnote: Michaux, p. 240.]
The Lawyers and Clergymen Forced to Much Travel.
The vast extent of the territory and the scantiness of the population forced the men of law, like the religious leaders, to travel about rather than stay permanently fixed in any one place. In a few towns there were lawyers and clergymen who had permanent homes; but as a rule both rode circuits. The judges and the lawyers travelled together on the circuits, to hold court. At the Shire-town all might sleep in one room, or at least under one roof; and it was far from an unusual thing to see both the grand and petty juries sitting under trees in the open. [Footnote: Atwater, p. 177.]
Power to Combine among the Frontiersmen.
The fact that the Government did so little for the individual and left so much to be done by him rendered it necessary for the individuals voluntarily to combine. Huskings and house-raisings were times when all joined freely to work for the man whose corn men was to be shucked or whose log cabin was to be built, and turned their labor into a frolic and merrymaking, where the men drank much whiskey and the young people danced vigorously to the sound of the fiddle. Such merry-makings were attended from far and near, offering a most welcome break to the dreariness of life on the lonely clearings in the midst of the forest. Ordinarily the frontiersman at his home only drank milk or water; but at the taverns and social gatherings there was much drunkenness, for the men craved whiskey, drinking the fiery liquor in huge draughts. Often the orgies ended with brutal brawls. To outsiders the craving of the backwoodsman for whiskey was one of his least attractive traits. [Footnote: Perrin Du Lac, p. 131; Michaux, 95, etc.] It must always be remembered, however, that even the most friendly outsider is apt to apply to others his own standards in matters of judgment. The average traveller overstated the drunkenness of the backwoodsman, exactly as he overstated his misery.
Roughness and Poverty of the Life.
Its Attractiveness.
The frontiersman was very poor. He worked hard and lived roughly, and he and his family had little beyond coarse food, coarse clothing, and a rude shelter. In the severe winters they suffered both from cold and hunger. In the summers there was sickness everywhere, fevers of various kinds scourging all the new settlements. The difficulty of communication was so great that it took three months for the emigrants to travel from Connecticut to the Western Reserve near Cleveland, and a journey from a clearing, over the forest roads, to a little town not fifty miles off was an affair of moment to be undertaken but once a year. [Footnote: "Historical Collections of Ohio," p. 120; Perrin Du Lac, p. 143.] Yet to the frontiersmen themselves the life was far from unattractive. It gratified their intense love of independence; the lack of refinement did not grate on their rough, bold natures; and they prized the entire equality of a life where there were no social distinctions, and few social restraints. Game was still a staple, being sought after for the flesh and the hide, and of course all the men and boys were enthralled by the delights of the chase. The life was as free as it was rude, and it possessed great fascinations, not only for the wilder spirits, but even for many men who, when they had the chance, showed that they possessed ability to acquire cultivation.
One old pioneer has left a pleasant account of the beginning of an ordinary day's work in a log cabin [Footnote: Drake's "Pioneer Life in Kentucky." This gives an excellent description of life in a family of pioneers, representing what might be called the average frontiersman of the best type. Drake's father and mother were poor and illiterate, but hardworking, honest, God-fearing folk, with an earnest desire to do their duty by their neighbors and to see their children rise in the world.]:
Life in a Log Cabin.
"I know of no scene in civilized life more primitive than such a cabin hearth as that of my mother. In the morning, a buckeye back-log, a hickory forestick, resting on stone and irons, with a johnny-cake, on a clean ash board, set before the fire to bake; a frying pan, with its long handle resting on a split-bottom turner's chair, sending out its peculiar music, and the tea-kettle swung from a wooden lug pole, with myself setting the table or turning the meat, or watching the johnny-cake, while she sat nursing the baby in the corner and telling the little ones to hold still and let their sister Lizzie dress them. Then came blowing the conch-shell for father in the field, the howling of old Lion, the gathering round the table, the blessing, the dull clatter of pewter spoons and pewter basins, the talk about the crop and stock, the inquiry whether Dan'l (the boy) could be spared from the house, and the general arrangements for the day. Breakfast over, my function was to provide the sauce for dinner; in winter, to open the potato or turnip hole, and wash what I took out; in spring, to go into the field and collect the greens; in summer and fall, to explore the truck patch, our little garden. If I afterwards went to the field my household labors ceased until night; if not, they continued through the day. As often as possible mother would engage in making pumpkin pies, in which I generally bore a part, and one of these more commonly graced the supper than the dinner table. My pride was in the labors of the field. Mother did the spinning. The standing dye-stuff was the inner bark of the white walnut, from which we obtained that peculiar and permanent shade of dull yellow, the butternut [so common and typical in the clothing of the backwoods farmer]. Oak bark, with copper as a mordant, when father had money to purchase it, supplied the ink with which I learned to write. I drove the horses to and from the range, and salted them. I tended the sheep, and hunted up the cattle in the woods." [Footnote: Do., pp. 90, in, etc., condensed.] This was the life of the thrifty pioneers, whose children more than held their own in the world. The shiftless men without ambition and without thrift, lived in laziness and filth; their eating and sleeping arrangements were as unattractive as those of an Indian wigwam.
Peculiar Qualities of the Pioneers.
Native Americans did Best.
The pleasures and the toils of the life were alike peculiar. In the wilder parts the loneliness and the fierce struggle with squalid poverty, and with the tendency to revert to savage conditions, inevitably produced for a generation or two a certain falling off from the standard of civilized communities. It needed peculiar qualities to insure success, and the pioneers were almost exclusively native Americans. The Germans were more thrifty and prosperous, but they could not go first into the wilderness. [Footnote: Michaux, p. 63, etc.] Men fresh from England rarely succeeded. [Footnote: Parkinson's "Tour in America, 1798-1800," pp. 504, 588, etc. Parkinson loathed the Americans. A curious example of how differently the same facts will affect different observers may be gained by contrasting his] The most pitiable group of emigrants that reached the West at this time was formed by the French [Footnote: observations with those of his fellow Englishman, John Davis, whose trip covered precisely the same period; but Parkinson's observations as to the extreme difficulty of an Old Country farmer getting on in the backwoods regions are doubtless mainly true.] who came to found the town of Gallipolis, on the Ohio. These were mostly refugees from the Revolution, who had been taken in by a swindling land company. They were utterly unsuited to life in the wilderness, being gentlemen, small tradesmen, lawyers, and the like. Unable to grapple with the wild life into which they found themselves plunged, they sank into shiftless poverty, not one in fifty showing industry and capacity to succeed. Congress took pity upon them and granted them twenty-four thousand acres in Scioto County, the tract being known as the French grant; but no gift of wild land was able to insure their prosperity. By degrees they were absorbed into the neighboring communities, a few succeeding, most ending their lives in abject failure. [Footnote: Atwater, p. 159; Michaux, p. 122, etc.]
Trouble with Land Titles.
The trouble these poor French settlers had with their lands was far from unique. The early system of land sales in the West was most unwise. In Kentucky and Tennessee the grants were made under the laws of Virginia and North Carolina, and each man purchased or preempted whatever he could, and surveyed it where he liked, with a consequent endless confusion of titles. The National Government possessed the disposal of the land in the Northwest and in Mississippi; and it avoided the pitfall of unlimited private surveying; but it made little effort to prevent swindling by land companies, and none whatever to people the country with actual settlers. Congress granted great tracts of lands to companies and to individuals, selling to the highest bidder, whether or not he intended personally to occupy the country. Public sales were thus conducted by competition, and Congress even declined to grant to the men in actual possession the right of pre-emption at the average rate of sale, refusing the request of settlers in both Mississippi and Indiana that they should be given the first choice to the lands which they had already partially cleared. [Footnote: American State Papers, Public Lands, I., 261; also pp. 71, 74, 99, etc.] It was not until many years later that we adopted the wise policy of selling the National domain in small lots to actual occupants.
Sullen Jealousy of the Pioneers.
Clouded Economic Notions.
The pioneer in his constant struggle with poverty was prone to look with puzzled anger at those who made more money than he did, and whose lives were easier. The backwoods farmer or planter of that day looked upon the merchant with much the same suspicion and hostility now felt by his successor for the banker or the railroad magnate. He did not quite understand how it was that the merchant, who seemed to work less hard than he did, should make more money; and being ignorant and suspicious, he usually followed some hopelessly wrong-headed course when he tried to remedy his wrongs. Sometimes these efforts to obtain relief took the form of resolutions not to purchase from merchants or traders such articles as woollens, linens, cottons, hats, or shoes, unless the same could be paid for in articles grown or manufactured by the farmers themselves. This particular move was taken because of the alarming scarcity of money, and was aimed particularly at the inhabitants of the Atlantic States. It was of course utterly ineffective. [Footnote: Marshall, II., p. 325.] A much less wise and less honest course was that sometimes followed of refusing to pay debts when the latter became inconvenient and pressing. [Footnote: The inhabitants of Natchez, in the last days of the Spanish dominion, became inflamed with hostility to their creditors, the merchants, and insisted upon what were practically stay laws being enacted in their favor. Gayarré and Claiborne.]
Vices of the Militia System.
The frontier virtue of independence and of impatience of outside direction found a particularly vicious expression in the frontier abhorrence of regular troops, and advocacy of a hopelessly feeble militia system. The people were foolishly convinced of the efficacy of their militia system, which they loudly proclaimed to be the only proper mode of national defence. [Footnote: Marshall, II., p. 279.] While in the actual presence of the Indians the stern necessities of border warfare forced the frontiersmen into a certain semblance of discipline. As soon as the immediate pressure was relieved, however, the whole militia system sank into a mere farce. At certain stated occasions there were musters for company or regimental drill. These training days were treated as occasions for frolic and merry-making. There were pony races and wrestling matches, with unlimited fighting, drunkenness, and general uproar. Such musters were often called, in derision, cornstalk drills, because many of the men, either having no guns or neglecting to bring them, drilled with cornstalks instead. The officers were elected by the men and when there was no immediate danger of war they were chosen purely for their social qualities. For a few years after the close of the long Indian struggle there were here and there officers who had seen actual service and who knew the rudiments of drill; but in the days of peace the men who had taken part in Indian fighting cared but little to attend the musters, and left them more and more to be turned into mere scenes of horseplay.
Lack of Military Training.
The frontier people of the second generation in the West thus had no military training whatever, and though they possessed a skeleton militia organization, they derived no benefit from it, because their officers were worthless, and the men had no idea of practising self-restraint or of obeying orders longer than they saw fit. The frontiersmen were personally brave, but their courage was entirely untrained, and being unsupported by discipline, they were sure to be disheartened at a repulse, to be distrustful of themselves and their leaders, and to be unwilling to persevere in the face of danger and discouragement. They were hardy, and physically strong, and they were good marksmen; but here the list of their soldierly qualities was exhausted. They had to be put through a severe course of training by some man like Jackson before they became fit to contend on equal terms with regulars in the open or with Indians in the woods. Their utter lack of discipline was decisive against them at first in any contest with regulars. In warfare with the Indians there were a very few of their number, men of exceptional qualities as woodsmen, who could hold their own; but the average frontiersman, though he did a good deal of hunting and possessed much knowledge of woodcraft, was primarily a tiller of the soil and a feller of trees, and he was necessarily at a disadvantage when pitted against an antagonist whose entire life was passed in woodland chase and woodland warfare. These facts must all be remembered if we wish to get an intelligent explanation of the utter failure of the frontiersmen when, in 1812, they were again pitted against the British and the forest tribes. They must also be taken into account when we seek to explain why it was possible but a little later to develop out of the frontiersmen fighting armies which under competent generals could overmatch the red coat and the Indian alike.
Individualism in Religious Matters.
The Great Revival.
The extreme individualism of the frontier, which found expression for good and for evil, both in its governmental system in time of peace and in its military system in time of war, was also shown in religious matters. In 1799 and 1800 a great revival of religion swept over the West. Up to that time the Presbyterian had been the leading creed beyond the mountains. There were a few Episcopalians here and there, and there were Lutherans, Catholics, and adherents of the Reformed Dutch and German churches; but, aside from the Presbyterians, the Methodists and Baptists were the only sects powerfully represented. The great revival of 1799 was mainly carried on by Methodists and Baptists, and under their guidance the Methodist and Baptist churches at once sprang to the front and became the most important religious forces in the frontier communities. [Footnote: McFerrin's "History of Methodism in Tennessee," 338, etc.; Spencer's "History of Kentucky Baptists," 69, etc.] The Presbyterian church remained the most prominent as regards the wealth and social standing of its adherents, but the typical frontiersman who professed religion at all became either a Methodist or a Baptist, adopting a creed which was intensely democratic and individualistic, which made nothing of social distinctions, which distrusted educated preachers, and worked under a republican form of ecclesiastical government.
Camp Meetings.
The great revival was accompanied by scenes of intense excitement. Under the conditions of a vast wooded wilderness and a scanty population the camp-meeting was evolved as the typical religious festival. To the great camp-meetings the frontiersmen flocked from far and near, on foot, on horseback, and in wagons. Every morning at daylight the multitude was summoned to prayer by sound of trumpet. No preacher or exhorter was suffered to speak unless he had the power of stirring the souls of his hearers. The preaching, the praying, and the singing went on without intermission, and under the tremendous emotional stress whole communities became fervent professors of religion. Many of the scenes at these camp-meetings were very distasteful to men whose religion was not emotional and who shrank from the fury of excitement into which the great masses were thrown, for under the strain many individuals literally became like men possessed, whether of good or of evil spirits, falling into ecstasies of joy or agony, dancing, shouting, jumping, fainting, while there were widespread and curious manifestations of a hysterical character, both among the believers and among the scoffers; but though this might seem distasteful to an observer of education and self-restraint, it thrilled the heart of the rude and simple backwoodsman and reached him as he could not possibly have been reached in any other manner. Often the preachers of the different denominations worked in hearty unison; but often they were sundered by bitter jealousy and distrust. The fiery zeal of the Methodists made them the leaders; and in their war on the forces of evil they at times showed a tendency to include all non-methodists—whether Baptists, Lutherans, Catholics, or infidels—in a common damnation. Of course, as always in such a movement, many even of the earnest leaders at times confounded the essential and the non-essential, and railed as bitterly against dancing as against drunkenness and lewdness, or anathematized the wearing of jewelry as fiercely as the commission of crime. [Footnote: Autobiography of Peter Cartwright, the Backwoods Preacher.] More than one hearty, rugged old preacher, who did stalwart service for decency and morality, hated Calvinism as heartily as Catholicism, and yet yielded to no Puritan in his austere condemnation of amusement and luxury.
Good Accomplished.
Trials of the Frontier Preachers.
Often men backslid, and to a period of intense emotional religion succeeded one of utter unbelief and of reversion to the worst practices which had been given up. Nevertheless, on the whole there was an immense gain for good. The people received a new light, and were given a sense of moral responsibility such as they had not previously possessed. Much of the work was done badly or was afterwards undone, but very much was really accomplished. The whole West owes an immense debt to the hard-working frontier preachers, sometimes Presbyterian, generally Methodist or Baptist, who so gladly gave their lives to their labors and who struggled with such fiery zeal for the moral wellbeing of the communities to which they penetrated. Wherever there was a group of log cabins, thither some Methodist circuit-rider made his way or there some Baptist preacher took up his abode. Their prejudices and narrow dislikes, their raw vanity and sullen distrust of all who were better schooled than they, count for little when weighed against their intense earnestness and heroic self-sacrifice. They proved their truth by their endeavor. They yielded scores of martyrs, nameless and unknown men who perished at the hands of the savages, or by sickness or in flood or storm. They had to face no little danger from the white inhabitants themselves. In some of the communities most of the men might heartily support them, but in others, where the vicious and lawless elements were in control, they were in constant danger of mobs. The Godless and lawless people hated the religious with a bitter hatred, and gathered in great crowds to break up their meetings. On the other hand, those who had experienced religion were no believers in the doctrine of nonresistance. At the core, they were thoroughly healthy men, and they fought as valiantly against the powers of evil in matters physical as in matters moral. Some of the successful frontier preachers were men of weak frame, whose intensity of conviction and fervor of religious belief supplied the lack of bodily powers; but as a rule the preacher who did most was a stalwart man, as strong in body as in faith. One of the continually recurring incidents in the biographies of the famous frontier preachers is that of some particularly hardened sinner who was never converted until, tempted to assault the preacher of the Word, he was soundly thrashed by the latter, and his eyes thereby rudely opened through his sense of physical shortcoming to an appreciation of his moral iniquity.
The Frontiersmen Threaten the Spanish Regions.
Throughout these years, as the frontiersmen pressed into the West, they continued to fret and strain against the Spanish boundaries. There was no temptation to them to take possession of Canada. The lands south of the Lakes were more fertile than those north of the Lakes, and the climate was better. The few American settlers who did care to go into Canada found people speaking their own tongue, and with much the same ways of life; so that they readily assimilated with them, as they could not assimilate with the French and Spanish creoles. Canada lay north, and the tendency of the backwoodsman was to thrust west; among the Southern backwoodsmen, the tendency was south and southwest. The Mississippi formed no natural barrier whatever. Boone, when he moved into Missouri, was but a forerunner among the pioneers; many others followed him. He himself became an official under the Spanish Government, and received a grant of lands. Of the other frontiersmen who went into the Spanish territory, some, like Boone, continued to live as hunters and backwoods farmers. [Footnote: American State Papers, Public Lands, II., pp. 10, 872.] Others settled in St. Louis, or some other of the little creole towns, and joined the parties of French traders who ascended the Missouri and the Mississippi to barter paint, beads, powder, and blankets for the furs of the Indians.
Uneasiness of the Spaniards.
Their Religious Intolerance.
The Spanish authorities were greatly alarmed at the incoming of the American settlers. Gayoso de Lemos had succeeded Carondelet as Governor, and he issued to the commandants of the different posts throughout the colonies a series of orders in reference to the terms on which land grants were to be given to immigrants; he particularly emphasized the fact that liberty of conscience was not to be extended beyond the first generation, and that the children of the immigrant would either have to become Catholics or else be expelled, and that this should be explained to settlers who did not profess the Catholic faith. He ordered, moreover, that no preacher of any religion but the Catholic should be allowed to come into the provinces. [Footnote: Gayarré, III., p. 387.] The Bishop of Louisiana complained bitterly of the American immigration and of the measure of religious toleration accorded the settlers, which, he said, had introduced into the colony a gang of adventurers who acknowledged no religion. He stated that the Americans had scattered themselves over the country almost as far as Texas and corrupted the Indians and Creoles by the example of their own restless and ambitious temper; for they came from among people who were in the habit of saying to their stalwart boys, "You will go to Mexico." Already the frontiersmen had penetrated even into New Mexico from the district round the mouth of the Missouri, in which they had become very numerous; and the Bishop earnestly advised that the places where the Americans were allowed to settle should be rigidly restricted. [Footnote: Do., p. 408.]
A Conflict inevitable.
When the Spaniards held such views it was absolutely inevitable that a conflict should come. Whether the frontiersman did or did not possess deep religious convictions, he was absolutely certain to refuse to be coerced into becoming a Catholic; and his children were sure to fight as soon as they were given the choice of changing their faith or abandoning their country. The minute that the American settlers were sufficiently numerous to stand a chance of success in the conflict it was certain that they would try to throw off the yoke of the fanatical and corrupt Spanish Government. As early as 1801 bands of armed Americans had penetrated here and there into the Spanish provinces in defiance of the commands of the authorities, and were striving to set up little bandit governments of their own. [Footnote: Do., p. 447.]
Advantages of the Frontiersmen.
The frontiersmen possessed every advantage of position, of numbers, and of temper. In any contest that might arise with Spain they were sure to take possession at once of all of what was then called Upper Louisiana. The immediate object of interest to most of them was the commerce of the Mississippi River and the possession of New Orleans; but this was only part of what they wished, and were certain to get, for they demanded all the Spanish territory that lay across the line of their westward march. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the settlers on the Western waters recognized in Spain their natural enemy, because she was the power who held the mouth and the west bank of the Mississippi. They would have transferred their hostility to any other power which fell heir to her possessions, for these possessions they were bound one day to make their own.
Predominance of the Middle West.
A thin range of settlements extended from the shores of Lake Erie on the north to the boundary of Florida on the south; and there were out-posts here and there beyond this range, as at Fort Dearborn, on the site of what is now Chicago; but the only fairly well-settled regions were in Kentucky and Tennessee. These two States were the oldest, and long remained the most populous and influential, communities in the West. They shared qualities both of the Northerners and of the Southerners, and they gave the tone to the thought and the life in the settlements north of them no less than the settlements south of them. This fact of itself tended to make the West homogeneous and to keep it a unit with a peculiar character of its own, neither Northern nor Southern in political and social tendency. It was the middle West which was first settled, and the middle West stamped its peculiar characteristics on all the growing communities beyond the Alleghanies. Inasmuch as west of the mountains the Northern communities were less distinctively Northern and the Southern communities less distinctively Southern than was the case with the Eastern States on the seaboard, it followed naturally that, considered with reference to other sections of the Union, the West formed a unit, possessing marked characteristics of its own. A distinctive type of character was developed west of the Alleghanies, and for the first generation the typical representatives of this Western type were to be found in Kentucky and Tennessee.
The Northwest.
The settlement of the Northwest had been begun under influences which in the end were to separate it radically from the Southwest. It was settled under Governmental supervision, and because of and in accordance with Governmental action; and it was destined ultimately to receive the great mass of its immigrants from the Northeast; but as yet these two influences had not become strong enough to sunder the frontiersmen north of the Ohio by any sharp line from those south of the Ohio. The settlers on the Western waters were substantially the same in character North and South.
The Westerners Formed One People.
In sum, the western frontier folk, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, possessed in common marked and peculiar characteristics, which the people of the rest of the country shared to a much less extent. They were backwoods farmers, each man preferring to live alone on his own freehold, which he himself tilled and from which he himself had cleared the timber. The towns were few and small; the people were poor, and often ignorant, but hardy in body and in temper. They joined hospitality to strangers with suspicion of them. They were essentially warlike in spirit, and yet utterly unmilitary in all their training and habits of thought. They prized beyond measure their individual liberty and their collective freedom, and were so jealous of governmental control that they often, to their own great harm, fatally weakened the very authorities whom they chose to act over them. The peculiar circumstances of their lives forced them often to act in advance of action by the law, and this bred a lawlessness in certain matters which their children inherited for generations; yet they knew and appreciated the need of obedience to the law, and they thoroughly respected the law.
Decadence of Separatist Feeling.
The separatist agitations had largely died out. In 1798 and 1799 Kentucky divided with Virginia the leadership of the attack on the Alien and Sedition laws; but her extreme feelings were not shared by the other Westerners, and she acted not as a representative of the West, but on a footing of equality with Virginia. Tennessee sympathized as little with the nullification movement of these two States at this time as she sympathized with South Carolina in her nullification movement a generation later. With the election of Jefferson the dominant political party in the West became in sympathy with the party in control of the nation, and the West became stoutly loyal to the National Government.
Importance of the West.
The West had thus achieved a greater degree of political solidarity, both as within itself and with the nation as a whole, than ever before. Its wishes were more powerful with the East. The pioneers stood for an extreme Americanism, in social, political, and religious matters alike. The trend of American thought was toward them, not away from them. More than ever before, the Westerners were able to make their demands felt at home, and to make their force felt in the event of a struggle with a foreign power.