The United States Taking the Lead in Civilization—Manhood Suffrage and Freedom of Worship—Humane Criminal Laws—Progress the Genius of the Nation—A Patriotic Report—State Builders in the Northwest—Illinois and the Union—Immigration—British Jealousy—An English Farmer's Opinion of America—Commerce and Manufactures—England Tries to Prevent Skilled Artisans from Emigrating—The Beginning of Protection—The British Turn on Their Friends the Algerians—General Jackson Invades Florida—Spain Sells Florida to the United States.
While holding their own against foreign enemies on land and sea the United States were assuming the lead in the march of civilization. Manhood suffrage was gradually taking the place of property suffrage, liberty of worship was recognized in practice as well as theory, and the criminal laws showed a growing spirit of humanity. Capital crimes were few, as compared with Great Britain. "The severity of our criminal laws," wrote William Bradford, the distinguished jurist, and for some time Attorney-General of the United States, "is an exotic plant, and not the growth of Pennsylvania." And Pennsylvania, when left to her own influences and tendencies by the success of the Revolution, was not slow to adopt humane and gratifying reforms, uttering far in advance of some other commonwealths the declaration that "to deter more effectually from the commission of crimes by continued visible punishment of long duration, and to make sanguinary punishments less necessary, houses ought to be provided for punishing by hard labor those who shall be convicted of crimes not capital." In September, 1786, the laws of that State were amended so as to substitute imprisonment at hard labor for capital punishment for robbery, burglary, and one other crime, and it was provided that no attainder should work corruption of blood in any case, and that the estates of persons committing suicide should descend to their natural heirs. It was likewise enacted that "every person convicted of bigamy, or of being accessory after the fact in any felony, or of receiving stolen goods, knowing them to have been stolen, or of any other offence not capital, for which, by the laws now in force, burning in the hand, cutting off the ears, nailing the ear or ears to the pillory, placing in and upon the pillory, whipping, or imprisonment for life, is, or may be inflicted, shall, instead of such parts of the punishment, be fined and sentenced to hard labor for any term not exceeding two years." Also, as if dreading that lax laws might lead to a carnival of crime, the legislators restricted the operation of the new and lenient statute to three years. The act was renewed, however, at the close of that term, and finally, in 1794, the reform of the criminal code was crowned with the declaration that "no crime whatever, excepting murder of the first degree, shall hereafter be punished with death."
Other States either kept pace with or followed the example of Pennsylvania in making their criminal laws more reformatory and less vindictive, and while England affected to despise American civilization, America was leading England in the march of humanity.
The genius of the nation was progress—not the spirit of the huckster, anxious for present gain, but the enlarged view of the patriot, anxious for the future weal of his country and his race. A striking expression of this spirit is shown in the report made in 1812 by Gouverneur Morris, De Witt Clinton and other eminent men on the practicability and prospects of the proposed Erie Canal. After boldly stating that the tolls from this work would amply repay the outlay required for its construction, the report adds: "It is impossible to ascertain and it is difficult to imagine how much toll would be collected; but like our advance in numbers and wealth, calculation out-runs fancy. Things which twenty years ago any man would have been laughed at for believing, we now see. * * * The life of an individual is short. The time is not distant when those who make this report will have passed away. But no time is fixed to the existence of a State; and the first wish of a patriot's heart is that his may be immortal." In the Northwest also, the State-builders of that day were equally farsighted in patriotic provision for the future. When it was proposed to admit Illinois as a State, Nathaniel Pope, delegate in Congress from that territory, urged, that the northern boundary should be extended to take in the port of Chicago, and a considerable coast-line on Lake Michigan, so as to give the State an interest in the lakes and bind it to the North as its southern frontiers bound it to the South and Southwest, thus checking any tendency to sectional disunion. Judge Pope pointed out that associations would thus be formed both with the North and South, and that a State thus situated, having a decided interest in the commerce, and in the preservation of the whole confederacy, could never consent to disunion. These views were happily successful in obtaining the approbation of Congress, and Illinois was saved from the limits which would have made it only a southern border State. In the Southwest, as well as in the North pioneers pushed rapidly into the wilderness, crossing the Mississippi and founding new States in which the long struggle between freedom and slavery was to begin.
When what may be called the blockade of Europe was raised by the final defeat of Napoleon, immigrants began to pour into the United States in large numbers. Many of them, like many immigrants to-day, became stranded in the cities of the coast, without resources and without employment, willing to work, but unable to get work. In February, 1817, James Buchanan, the British consul at New York, issued a warning against immigration to the United States, on the ground, as he alleged, of numerous applications made to his office for aid to return to Great Britain and Ireland, but at the same time the consul stated that he was authorized to place all desirable immigrants, who found themselves destitute in New York, in Upper Canada or Nova Scotia. Mr. Buchanan was evidently not so anxious to assist his fellow-subjects of King George as he was to promote the British policy of building up the Canadian territories as a counterpoise to the United States. While there was undoubtedly some distress among immigrants of the improvident class, those who came here with the determination to work generally found work before long at much better compensation than they could have earned in England, while those who proceeded to the new regions of the West had no difficulty in becoming independent and prosperous freeholders.
"In exchanging the condition of an English farmer for that of an American proprietor," wrote an intelligent immigrant, "I expect to suffer many inconveniences; but I am willing to make a great sacrifice of present ease, were it merely for the sake of obtaining in the decline of life, an exemption from that wearisome solicitude about pecuniary affairs from which even the affluent find no refuge in England; and, for my children, a career of enterprise and wholesome family connections in a society whose institutions are favorable to virtue; and at last the consolation of leaving them efficient members of a flourishing, public-spirited, energetic community; where the insolence of wealth and the servility of pauperism, between which in England there is scarcely an interval remaining, are alike unknown. * * * It has struck me as we have passed along from one poor hut to another, among the rude inhabitants of this infant State, that travelers in general who judge by comparison, are not qualified to form a fair estimate of these lonely settlers. Let a stranger make his tour through England in a course remote from the great roads, and going to no inns, take such, entertainment only as he might find in the cottage of laborers, he would have as much cause to complain of the rudeness of the people, and more of their drunkenness and profligacy than in these backwoods: although in England the poor are a part of society whose institutions are matured by the experience of two thousand years. But in their manners and morals, but especially in their knowledge and proud independence of mind, they exhibit a contrast so striking that he must be a petit maître traveler, or ill-informed of the character and circumstances of his poor countrymen, or deficient in good and manly sentiment, who would not rejoice to transplant into these boundless regions of freedom the millions he has left behind him groveling in ignorance and want."[1] ]
While a great agricultural domain was being occupied in the West, commerce and manufactures were not neglected. American merchantmen visited every sea, no longer in dread of hostile Briton or Barbary pirate, and internal commerce received a mighty impulse from the steamboat. Meanwhile the foundations were laid of those vast manufacturing interests which were yet to overshadow commerce in the East. As early as 1810, the domestic manufactures of all descriptions were worth $127,694,602 annually, and it was estimated by competent authorities that of $36,793,249—the value of the manufactures of wool, cotton and flax, with their mixtures—fully two-thirds were produced in the houses of the farmers and other inhabitants. England had foreseen that America might prove a powerful rival in the manufacturing field, and Parliament enacted laws to prevent the emigration of skilled artisans. It may seem almost incredible that less than one hundred years ago such a prohibition existed, but I read in an account of a voyage from London to Boston in 1817 that "the passengers were summoned to appear at the Gravesend custom house, personally to deliver in their names and a statement of their professions. Had any been known to be artisans or manufacturers, they would have been stopped and forbidden to leave the kingdom. An act of Parliament imposes a heavy fine on those who induce them to attempt it." Samuel Slater, who brought the Arkwright patents in his brain, evaded the prohibition a few years after the Revolution, and his descendants are to-day among the wealthiest and most reputable of New England's citizens.
The war of 1812-15, gave a tremendous impulse to American manufactures through the exclusion of British and other foreign products. At the close of the war, however, when American ports were thrown open to the trade of Great Britain, the manufacturers of that country, with the deliberate purpose of crushing American industries out of existence, threw vast quantities of goods into the American markets, completely swamping native productions, and making it impossible for native manufacturers to compete with the importations. It was this ruinous relapse from comparative prosperity that prompted the agitation for a protective tariff. As further evidence of British purpose to do all the damage possible to American interests, even in time of peace, it may be mentioned that when Lord Exmouth, with a powerful fleet, visited Algiers in 1816, and negotiated a treaty between the Dey—Omar, the successor of Hadgi Ali—and the kings of Sardinia and Naples, the Algerians began to show themselves again hostile to the United States within a few days after the treaty. The public sentiment of Europe, however, made it impossible for England to make longer use of those pirates to injure commercial rivals, and the British Government, in deference to that sentiment, sought a quarrel with the Dey, bombarded Algiers, and compelled the Barbary States to agree to put an end to piracy—an agreement which remained for some time a dead letter.