PART III.
THE ORGANIZATION OF POLITICAL
PARTIES, 1789–1825.
CHAPTER XII.
the country at the close of the eighteenth century.
GENERAL CONDITIONS.
257. Population and Area.—The country over which Washington began to preside in 1789 was very different from the great nation it has grown to be. Counting about seven hundred and fifty thousand slaves, the population did not quite reach four millions. Eleven years later, by the second census, that of 1800, this population had increased to 5,308,480; but the area of 827,844 square miles was not yet settled at the ratio of six and a half persons to a square mile. It was only along the Atlantic coast from Virginia to Massachusetts that the original wilderness had been fairly conquered by settlements that furnished a population of from twenty-five to ninety inhabitants to the square mile.
258. Boundary Disputes.—The boundaries of this immense and practically unoccupied area were in dispute to the north, northwest, and south. The British still kept garrisons at Detroit, Niagara, and other forts. In the region bordering on the Gulf of Mexico, Spanish claims conflicted with those of the Americans, and Spain denied the inhabitants of the new settlements beyond the Alleghanies any practical use of the lower Mississippi. A treaty with Spain in 1795 helped to mend these matters.
Blockhouse at Mackinaw,
1780.
259. The West.—The Westerners, who were thus deprived of the full use of their great waterway and whom Spanish agents endeavored to detach from the Union, were few in numbers. Kentucky and Tennessee were practically the only organized settlements; but a popular movement toward Ohio and the Northwest was beginning, and by the end of the century the Mississippi Territory had been formed in the region which Georgia claimed north of the Gulf. Most of the settlers in these outlying communities had moved westward from the frontier portions of the adjoining older states. Thus many of the immigrants to Tennessee came from North Carolina. Often they were of Scotch-Irish stock, deeply religious, hardy and frugal. They drove out the Indians, killed the wild beasts, cleared lands for their farms, and raised their large families in a rude independence. On the foundations they laid, great commonwealths have been erected which should not in their present wealth and power forget the bold adventurers who crossed the mountains in wagon trains or floated down the Ohio in large flat-bottomed boats.[[103]]