1810-21]

The building of the West

359

while on his way from Nashville in Tennessee to Savannah in Georgia, found the roads thronged with "movers" on their way to the cotton lands of Alabama.

Once on the frontier, the "mover," the "new-comer," the emigrant, would take up a quarter section (160 acres) of government land on credit, cut down a few saplings, make a "half-faced camp," and begin a clearing. The "half-faced camp" was a shed, three sides of which were made of tree-trunks, the fourth being left open. The roof was of bark laid on saplings. Here the settler would live till he had cut down enough trees to build a log cabin, which, in the course of time, would give way to a comfortable two-storeyed house. The clearing was made by grubbing up the bushes and cutting down the trees under a foot in diameter, and "girdling" the large ones by cutting rings around them deep enough to stop the sap and prevent the growth of leaves. If the settler were indolent, the girdled trees stood till they fell; if he were industrious, he cut them down as soon as he could. In the soil thus opened to the sun and rain he planted his crops.

Fed by this never-ending stream of emigrants, the West was transformed. Towns and villages sprang up with amazing rapidity; trade increased; and every affluent of the Mississippi became a highway of commerce dotted with "broad-horns," arks, flat-boats, rafts, and steamboats. In the East this movement of population was not visible to the eye; but, when the fourth census was taken in 1820, it was distinctly visible in the returns. Between 1810 and 1820 the population of New York City increased by less than 3600 souls. Philadelphia added no more than 12,000 to her numbers; Baltimore only 17,000; and Boston only 11,000. During the decade 1810-20 the population of Charleston increased by 80. In the State of Delaware the increase was 75 in the previous decade it had been 8000. In the New England States, during twenty years, population had increased but 35 per cent.; in the Middle States of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania but 92 per cent. ; while in the Western States of Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee the increase was 321 per cent.

The first result of this great exodus was the formation of five new States in the West, and the admission into the Union, within four years, of Indiana, Illinois, Alabama, Mississippi, and Missouri. Louisiana had been admitted in 1812; and these, with Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee, made nine States in the Mississippi Valley, and raised the number of States in the Union to twenty-four. The West now sent to Congress eighteen Senators and twenty-eight members of the House, and at the next presidential election in 1820 would be entitled to cast forty-six electoral votes. The West, in short, had attained its majority, and henceforth would have much influence in deciding the conduct of national affairs.

A second result of this "building of the West" was the establishment

360

Improvement of communications

[1810-25 there of State constitutions of an extreme democratic type. Property qualifications for the franchise, so prevalent in the East, were not required; and manhood suffrage was introduced. The power of the governor was increased; the power of the legislature was curtailed. Some of the new States abolished life-term offices; some prohibited imprisonment for debt; others provided that the estates of suicides. should be divided among the heirs, as in cases of natural death; others. made truth a good defence in suits for libel; others made population the basis of representation. In all these new States the rights of man as man were recognised; and the old distinctions in the East arising from the ownership of property were generally disregarded.

A third result of the rapid growth of the West was the rise into national importance of the question of internal improvements made at Federal expense. The West was now a great country by itself. Along the banks of its magnificent rivers and the shores of the Great Lakes dwelt more than a million of hardy, enterprising, and progressive people. Down these rivers the Ohio, the Cumberland, the Tennessee, the Missouri, the Mississippi - were floated, on raft and flat-boat to New Orleans, pork and lumber, flour, grain, hemp, furs from the North-west, lead from Missouri, cotton, sugar, tobacco, and provisions of every sort. Before the days of steam, navigation up the rapid and winding Mississippi from New Orleans was all but impossible. The flat-boats, barges, rafts, and "broad-horns" were therefore sold for cash with their contents; and the money was brought back to Pittsburg or Wheeling, there to be expended in the purchase of the manufactures of Europe or the Eastern States. But now a score of steamboats, laden with the manufactures of the Old World obtained at New Orleans, ascended the Mississippi and the Ohio to St Louis, Cincinnati, Louisville, and Pittsburg. Commercially the West was no longer dependent on the eastern seaboard States; and the western trade of New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore was seriously threatened. If this great trade was to be maintained, cheap communication must be had between the seaboard and the West. With this object, appeals were made to Congress for aid; and in 1817 a fund, consisting of the $1,500,000 to be paid by the National Bank as a bonus for its charter, and the dividends to be paid on the $7,000,000 of its stock owned by the United States, was set apart for the building. of good roads and canals and the improvement of river navigation, and was to be distributed annually among the States on the basis of representation in Congress. But Madison, in the last hours of his term of office, vetoed the bill on constitutional grounds; and the attempt to pass it over the presidential veto failed.

The work of opening cheap communication with the West was, however, merely delayed, not prevented. New York at once began the digging of the Erie Canal, and finished it in 1825, thus joining the waters of Lake Erie with those of the Hudson river. Pennsylvania

1783-1819] The slavery question. Missouri

361

appropriated $500,000 for the construction of roads and bridges; and Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina appointed committees to prepare plans. The question of congressional aid to such undertakings became a national one; and from 1817 to 1832 no session of Congress was allowed to pass without the agitation of the question in some form or other.

A fourth result of the "building of the West" was a struggle with slavery. While the colonies were under the British Crown, slavery and the slave-trade existed in each one of them. But in those where no great staple such as rice or tobacco was grown, where, for climatic and economic reasons, slavery was not a profitable form of labour, and where the demand for skilled and unskilled labourers was fully supplied by "redemptioners "and" bondservants," the moral aspects of slave-holding aroused strong feeling; and repeated attempts were made to cut off the slave-trade and stop the source of supply. Every law enacted for the purpose, however, was disallowed by the King in Council; and slavery as an institution was forced on the colonies by the mother-country. The feeling against it, however, suffered no abatement; and, when the Revolution came and the colonies became independent States, the old attacks were vigorously renewed. Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Connecticut enacted gradual abolition laws. Vermont was never a slave-holding State. New Hampshire and Massachusetts became free soil by the interpretation of their constitutions; and when, in 1787, the Continental Congress framed the Ordinance of Government for the territory of the United States north-west of the Ohio river, slavery was excluded, and a magnificent domain was added to the Free-Soil area. In time, New York and New Jersey adopted gradual abolition laws, and by so doing made the southern boundary of Pennsylvania (the Mason and Dixon line) and the Ohio river the dividing line between the Free and the Slave States. The Republic, in fine, was almost equally divided into slave-soil and free-soil; and, as new States entered the Union, they were admitted alternately slave and free. By 1819, twenty-two were in the Union; and of these, eleven were slave-holding and eleven free. As each had two members of the Senate, that body then consisted of fortyfour members; and the two great sections of the country were equally represented. In 1819, however, the legislature of Missouri besought Congress to cut off a piece of the Territory, authorise the people dwelling on it to form a State to be called Missouri, and admit it into the Union. The proposed State lay wholly west of the Mississippi river, and was part of the Louisiana Purchase, the soil of which had as yet been made neither slave nor free. Should the people of Missouri be left to do as they pleased, it was well known that they would form a Slave State. The Free-Soil members of Congress determined, therefore, that slavery should be prohibited in Missouri; members from the slave-holding States were equally determined that it should not be prohibited. The question

362

Boundary dispute with Spain

[1803-19 therefore came to be, whether slavery should be extended to the Louisiana Purchase, or not. During the session of Congress (1819) the struggle went on fiercely, till each side yielded something, and the famous Missouri Compromise was effected (1820). Missouri, it was then agreed, should be admitted as a slave-holding State. But in all the territory west of the Mississippi river bought from France and known as the Louisiana Purchase, and lying north of the parallel 36° 30' (except in the State of Missouri), slavery was prohibited for ever. Maine, meantime, had applied for admission as a Free State. This was granted as part of the compromise. This made up the number of States in the Union to twenty-four, of which twelve were slave-holding and twelve free; and the balance in the Senate was thus preserved.

When Louisiana Territory, thus parted into slave-soil and free, was acquired from France in 1803, no boundaries of any sort were fixed. The United States took up the position that, when La Salle, following up the discovery of the Mississippi by Marquette and Joliet, floated down the great river to its mouth and, standing on the shore of the gulf, named the country Louisiana and claimed it for France, he applied that name to the drainage basin of the Mississippi; that when a year later he landed his band of settlers on the Texan coast and built Fort St Louis of Texas, he extended the authority of France half way to the nearest Spanish settlement, or to the Rio Grande; that later settlements at Biloxi and Mobile carried the authority of France east of the Mississippi as far at least as the Perdido river; and that, therefore, the Louisiana Purchase included much of West Florida, and all the country west of the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains and the Rio Grande. Spain, on the other hand, denied that West Florida and Texas were included in the purchase. During twelve years no progress towards a settlement was made. On the overthrow of Napoleon, the return of Ferdinand VII to the throne of Spain, and the end of the war with Great Britain, negotiations were renewed; and, after four years of diplomatic bickering, a treaty was signed in 1819. The United States abandoned all claim to Texas, agreed to pay the claims of her citizens against Spain to the amount of $4,500,000, and received the two Floridas, East and West. Spain, on her part, accepted as a boundary for her Mexican possessions a line which started from the Gulf of Mexico west of the Mississippi and passed northward and westward across the country to the shores. of the Pacific.

While these negotiations with Spain were dragging on, difficulties of a serious nature had arisen between Great Britain and the United States. When the British Peace Commission at Ghent presented, in 1814, the list of topics for discussion, they surprised the Americans by stating that the liberty, so long enjoyed by American citizens, of fishing within British waters and drying and curing their catch on British soil was to be withdrawn. As defined in the third article of the Treaty of

1783-1815]

Fishery dispute with Great Britain

363

Paris, the people of the United States were to continue to enjoy, unmolested, the right to fish on the Grand Banks and on all the other banks of Newfoundland, in the Gulf of St Lawrence, and at all places in the sea where the inhabitants of both countries used to fish in colonial times. American fishermen might also take fish of every sort on such portions of the coast of Newfoundland as were free to British subjects, and on all other coasts and in all other harbours, bays, and creeks of His Majesty's dominions in America. But the only places where fish could be dried and cured were the unsettled shores of the harbours, bays, and creeks of Nova Scotia, the Magdalen Islands, and Labrador.

From the signing of the treaty to the adoption of the Constitution the fishing industry steadily declined, till the average yearly earnings of each vessel were less than the annual cost. Under the Constitution, Congress came to the relief of the fishermen, and by bounties and annual allowances did much to revive the industry. The opening of the French West Indian ports in 1793 did more; and by 1800 British colonial fishermen were complaining that they were undersold by the Yankees. Unable to get help from the mother-country, the colonists took the matter into their own hands. In 1806 the Americans complained to Congress that their vessels were stopped, fired on, and searched; that they were forced to pay toll as they passed through the Gut of Canso; and, if they anchored in any bay, were made to pay light money and anchorage dues. From this competition the British were relieved by the "long embargo," the restrictive measures which followed, and by the war, which was hailed with delight by the fishermen of the Provinces. The war, they claimed, cancelled the Treaty of 1783. The liberty of fishing in British waters granted by that treaty was therefore a thing of the past; and in a memorial drawn up at St John's, the mother-country was urged never again to suffer foreigners to fish in colonial waters. The Treaty of Ghent was silent on the matter of the fisheries. The colonists, therefore, believed that Americans were excluded; and in the summer of 1815 the captain of a British ship of war seized some American vessels while fishing off the coast of Nova Scotia, and wrote across the enrolments and licences of others the words, "Warned off the coast by His Majesty's ship Jaseur. Not to come within sixty miles." Complaint was made to the British government, which disavowed the act of the captain of the Jaseur; but Lord Bathurst declared that after 1815 no American fishing vessel would be allowed to come within one marine league of the shores of His Majesty's North American possessions, nor be permitted to dry and cure fish in the unsettled ports of those territories. A long discussion on the character of the Treaty of Paris followed. John Quincy Adams, the American Minister, laid down the doctrine that the Treaty of 1783 was of a peculiar character and was not annulled by a state of war. The treaty acknowledged the independence of the United States, and defined its boundaries; and, as these things