Moreover, the Embargo, the Non-Intercourse and Non-Importation Acts, the British blockades, the war itself, had revolutionized the country economically and socially. American manufacturing was firmly established. Land travel and land traffic grew to proportions never before imagined, never before desired. The people of distant sections became acquainted.
The eyes of all Americans, except those of the aged or ageing, were turned from across the Atlantic Ocean toward the boundless, the alluring West—their thoughts diverted from the commotions of Europe and the historic antagonism of foreign nations, to the economic conquest of a limitless and virgin empire and to the development of incalculable and untouched resources, all American and all their own.
The migration to the West, which had been increasing for years, now became almost a folk movement. The Eastern States were drained of their young men and women. Some towns were almost depopulated.[155] And these hosts of settlers carried into wilderness and prairie a spirit and pride that had not been seen or felt in America since the time of the Revolution. But their high hopes were to be quickly turned into despair, their pride into ashes; for a condition was speedily to develop that would engulf them in disaster. It was this situation which was to call forth some of the greatest of Marshall's Constitutional opinions. This forbidding future, however, was foreseen by none of that vast throng of home-seekers crowding every route to the "Western Country," in the year of 1815. Only the rosiest dreams were theirs and the spirited consciousness that they were Americans, able to accomplish all things, even the impossible.
It was then a new world in which John Marshall found himself, when, in his sixtieth year, the war which he so abhorred came to an end. A state of things surrounded him little to his liking and yet soon to force from him the exercise of the noblest judicial statesmanship in American history. From the extreme independence of this new period, the intense and sudden Nationalism of the war, the ideas of local sovereignty rekindled by the New England Federalists at the dying fires that Jefferson and the Republicans had lighted in 1798, and from the play of conflicting interests came a reaction against Nationalism which it was Marshall's high mission to check and to turn into channels of National power, National safety, and National well-being.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] "The navy of Britain is our shield." (Pickering: Open Letter [Feb. 16, 1808] to Governor James Sullivan, 8; infra, 5, 9-10, 25-26, 45-46.)
[2] Diary and Letters of Gouverneur Morris: Morris, ii, 548.
[3] Jefferson to D'Ivernois, Feb. 6, 1795, Works of Thomas Jefferson: Ford, viii, 165.
[4] Jefferson to Short, Jan. 3, 1793, ib. vii, 203; same to Mason, Feb. 4, 1791, ib. vi, 185.
[5] See vol. ii, 354, of this work.