USA > Mississippi > The westward movement : the colonies and the republic west of the Alleghanies, 1763-1798 with full cartographical illustrations from contemporary sources > Part 35
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402
THE CONDITIONS OF 1790.
could be better brought into communication with the crops of Kentucky. There was urgent need of some sueh closer connec- tion, for St. Louis, now a flourishing village, was drawing away the old settlers of Kaskaskia and Cahokia. This was particu- larly the ease with slave-owners, for there was a widespread belief that the ordinance of 1787 would eventually work the emancipation of their blacks. It was charged that Morgan was encouraging this view in order to obtain accessions to his colony. To place the federal interests in this distant region under more efficient supervision, St. Clair, on leaving for his headquarters in June, 1790, placed them under the immediate control of Winthrop Sargent, the secretary of the Northwest Territory.
In turning from this older alien element and ascending the Ohio, the newer and luckless French colony, for whose coming Putnam had been preparing, did not escape St. Clair's atten- tion. He says he found about four hundred souls here, " not usefully employed and much discontented." There were a hun- dred more at Muskingum, and another hundred at Buffalo Creek, waiting to move on with the opening season. The beginnings of this movement have been recounted in an earlier chapter.
The Scioto Company, of which Joel Barlow, as already explained, was now the principal agent in Europe, had aimed to attraet the longings and cupidity of the French people by presenting what he called the allurements of the American wilderness. The French government suspected the snare, and endeavored to warn the eager victims by caricatures, as we have seen, but to little purpose. By wanton promises, Barlow succeeded in selling a hundred thousand acres of what he pro- fessed was the company's domain to hundreds of deluded eli- cents. Among them were ten persons of some notoriety, if not consideration, who had been founders of the National Assem- bly. There was a reckless folly in these people, who were seek- ing to escape from France, quite equal to that of those who were beginning to make that country the abhorrence of Europe. Brissot, who was also a member of the Assembly, and who had been in America two years before, was chattering in the cafés in the vein in which he was the next year, in a published book, to help on the movement. He warned the loyal aristocrats, who
403
THE SCIOTO COMPANY.
showed a tendency to fly from what was coming, that in thus seek- ing " to preserve their titles, their honors, and their privileges, they would fall into a new society [in America ], where the titles
F.Bonneville pinx?
C. Jose Sculp
J. P. BRISSOT,
[From The Commerce of America with Europe, by Brissot de Warville, etc., London, 1794.]
of pride and chance are despised and even unknown." He pointed out how Barlow's enterprise appealed rather to the poor, "who are deprived of the means of subsistence by the revolution," and who would find open to them " an asylum where they could obtain a property." So this infatuated Frenchman seconded the debased purposes of the Scioto schem- ·
404
THE CONDITIONS OF 1790.
ers, and went on generalizing, after his somewhat amusing prae- tice, from evidence insufficient but useful in his task. Barlow, meanwhile, was busy oiling his machinery. On February 28, 1790, he wrote to St. Clair to bring to his "notice and protec- tion a number of industrious and honest emigrants," who were seeking new homes on the Ohio, "under the direction of Messrs. Barth and Thiebauld." Knox, similarly informed, somewhat later, on May 19, told St. Clair that these Frenchmen were to settle on lands " contracted for by Messrs. Cutler & Co.," and asked the governor to protect them. Barlow further, with a refined cruelty, wrote to Duer, his principal in New York, urg- ing him not to omit any measures which could create good first impressions in these misguided wanderers, for twenty thousand more, as he said, would soon follow the pioneers. He asked him to have houses ready for them on a spot opposite the mouth of the Kanawha, against the arrival of these forerunners. On this representation, Rufus Putnam, lending himself blindly to a nefarious scheme, which subsequently cost him $2,000 for unrecompensed outlays, in the late winter, while in New York, contracted on behalf of the Scioto Company with one Major Jolin Burnham to go with a party and erect cottages on the spot which Barlow had designated, then known by the Indian name of Chieamago, but later called, as Putnam says, Galliopolis, a name soon contracted to Gallipolis. In May, 1790, just at the time when Knox was commending these foreign adventurers to the eare of St. Clair, Burnham arrived at Marietta with fifty ' men and a store of provisions to last till December, when it was expected the work would be done. On June 4, Putnam gave him his instructions. He was to learn from Colonel R. J. Meigs on the spot where he was to place the four ranges of huts which he was to build. They were to be reared of round logs, with elay in the ehinks, and with chimneys of like con- struction. Each range or block was to have at the end a large room for meetings and dancing.
Some days later, this working party reached the site of the future settlement, supposed then, by some at least, to be within the area which Cutler had gained for the Scioto Company. To whomever it belonged, it was wholly unfit for occupancy, with all the germs of disease about it.
While this work was progressing on the Ohio, there was
405
GALLIPOLIS.
among saner observers little confidence in the future of the undertaking. Oliver Wolcott, who was a classmate of Barlow, and doubtless knew him well enough to distrust him, wrote of the movement : " In consequence of the Bill of Rights, agreed to by the National Assembly, an association has been formed for settling a colony in the western country. About one hun- dred Frenchmen have arrived with the national cockades in their hats, fully convinced that it is one of their natural rights to go into the woods of America and cut down trees for a living."
The first comers had indeed just arrived in the Potomac, six hundred souls in all, in five ships, which had left Havre just before New Year's. After a dreary passage of three months, these luckless vessels tied up at Alexandria on the Potomac. It was a motley crowd which they bore, and probably never forerunners of a colonizing scheme were so ill fitted in all but gayety of spirits for the task which was before them. There were carvers and artists with no annual salon to look forward for. There were gilders and friseurs with no expectation of a drawing-room. There were carriage-makers going to a country without a road. There were artisans to make tools without a farmer to wield them.
It was summer before this extraordinary crowd started their caravans over the mountains, or at least such part of them as had not had their eyes opened and refused to go. Those that pro- ceeded were discontented, and showed a refractory spirit. The provisions that were furnished them proved poor, and if they tried to procure other supplies of the farmers on the way, quar- rels were pretty sure to ensue. As they passed the Seven Ranges, there were no signs of the civilization for which Bar- low's lying map had prepared them. Once at the end of their journey, they discovered that their title-deeds covered lands which the grantors did not have to convey, and they perhaps remembered the truth of the Parisian caricatures. They found Burnham and his laborers looking to Putnam for their pay, and the company with which they had dealt was nowhere.
It is difficult to place the entire responsibility of this shame- ful deceit. Barlow, as an agent, may perhaps have exceeded his instructions, though there is no evidence in his correspondence with his principals to show that they did anything to check his
406
THE CONDITIONS OF 1790.
rampant performances. If the Ohio Company is to be exeul- pated, it was certainly Cutler's overdrawn descriptions which were depended upon to delude the poor souls. Barlow's defi- nite instructions from Duer and his associates have never been made known. The truth seems to be that these speculators, some of the first people of the land, as Cutler with some satis- faction called them, had counted upon buying continental seeuri- ties. while depressed under the weakness of the confederation, and using them at face for meeting their obligations for the land. The inauguration of the new government checked the depression and then enhanced the value of such notes, so that they could no longer be bought at the expected discount. This frustrated the schemers' plans. To make some amends to the deluded settlers, Duer and the Ohio Company agreed upon a transfer of some two hundred thousand acres from the company, upon which, in fact, by a miscalculation, the huts had been placed by Meigs and Burnham, but even this restitution in the end was futile, for Duer soon after became bankrupt, and every- thing was awry.
For a time, however, it seemed as if the trustful Frenchmen got something for their money, and, occupying the fragile habi- tations which had been prepared, Gallipolis was fairly begun. But the fettered handicraftsmen, setting to their task, only found that their numbers grew less as the hardier of them became weary and deserted. It was no easy job to fell the enormous sycamores which stood where they needed to plant their fields. When the trees one by one fell, they found no way so easy of getting rid of the massive trunks as to dig trenches and bury them. Then their supplies grew scant, and famine stared them in the face. They were sometimes warned by the whoops of prowling savages, and they were beginning to think that these children of a benignant nature, which the French philosophers had told them about, were not after all the most innocent of neighbors. So they encountered shoeks to their sentiments, and blows as to their physical natures.
As antium came on, they got all the comfort they could from the gracions messages of the governor, who dared to express to them the hope that, amid their trials, they had still found inde- pendence and happiness. He assured them that the rascality of the shameless deceivers would be punished by law, and that
407
PUBLIC LANDS.
the colonists would in the end have justice. He begged them to be patient a little longer, till arrangements for their security could be made, and the comfort of their community assured. St. Clair expressed his own views unreservedly to Knox on November 26, that "an interested speculation of a few men, pursued with too great avidity, will reflect some disgrace on the American character, while it involves numbers in absolute ruin in a foreign land."
All this meant that there was need of much better discern- ment in the use of these Ohio lands than the recipients of the ordinance of 1787 had devised, and that the precluding of chi- canery should go along for honesty with the prevention of servi- tude. Hamilton had seen the evil easily to accompany the large speculative mania which Cutler and his colleagues stood for, and strove, but for the present unsuccessfully, to better the con- ditions in the disposition of these public lands. On July 22, 1790, he made a report for unifying and controlling the sales, in which he proposed a general land office at the seat of govern- ment, with one local office in the northwest and another in the southwest, where sales could be made to actual settlers of not over a hundred acres to each. The Indian titles were first to be quieted. Tracts were then to be set aside to satisfy subscribers to the loans. Townships ten miles square were to be offered for competition. There might in some cases be special contracts. But the main restraint was to be a fixed sum of thirty cents per acre, one quarter cash, with security for the rest. It was an effort to control as much as possible speculative values. In his report on the public credit, Hamilton had declared that cultivated lands in most of the States had fallen in value since the Revolution from twenty-five to fifty per cent., and in the remoter south still more. Western lands, he says, had been heretofore sold at a dollar an acre; but this price was paid in depreciated paper, worth scarce a seventh of its face. But Congress was not yet ready for a movement as Hamilton pro- posed, and the owners of earlier grants were ready at all times to thwart any plans which would make the government their rival in the land market.
The public lands of the west, from the time when the States had been urged to make cession of them, had been looked
408
THE CONDITIONS OF 1790.
upon as a source of income to meet the interest and pro- mote the payment of the national debt. So they played no insignificant part in shaping the financial policy of the new federal government. The movement instituted by Hamilton for resuscitating the credit of the government was complicated by political and sectional interests. The debt of the Union as a whole, resulting mainly from the war, was somewhere about $54,000,000. Of this there were $12,000,000 held in foreign lands, and this it was Hamilton's plan to pay at once. There were $42,000,000 of the government securities held by the peo- ple, and this was to be funded. In addition, there were $25,000,- 000, which constituted the outstanding debt of the individual States, and it was Hamilton's purpose that the federal govern- ment should assume this, with all its varying proportions among the States, and fund it also. On the policy of assuming these state obligations there was strong opposition on the part of those who were already grouping themselves on the side of state rights, and who saw in the measure only a scheme for in- creasing the paternalism of the government. The debates of Congress were showing the mutual distrust of these antagonistic factions. The repelling influences of radical and conservative dispositions in domestic matters found other grounds for dif- ference in the commotions which were now agitating France, and which had come home to the sensibilities of people in the untoward events which had founded Gallipolis. The so-called federal faction rested their plea for breaking the alliance with France on the downfall of the government of that country, which had made the treaty of 1778. Hamilton was the cham- pion of this position, as he was of the funding bill and of the using of the public lands for revenne. Jefferson, with French tastes and sympathies, as his enemies charged, was the natural opponent of Hamilton's " mercenary phalanx." The organs of these respective parties were the Gazette of the United States, as condneted by Fenno, in the interests of neutrality if not of English favor, and the National Gazette, which, under Fre- nean, ontdid its rival in the bitterness which hypocrisy, intrigue, and falschood combined to exemplify in Jefferson at a period of his life over which his admirers may well throw a veil. The blunt John Adams printed in Fenno's paper those Discourses on Darila in which the Jeffersonians found a plea for mon-
409
HAMILTON'S FUNDING BILL.
archy, abetting what Jefferson called Hamilton's monarchism " bottomed in corruption." It was not long before like distinc- tions were again sharply drawn, when the English packet brought over Edmund Burke's Reflections on the French Rev- olution, and when Tom Paine's Rights of Man, in May, 1791, found an echo in the hearts of the American sympathizers with France, who, as Jefferson said, welcomed the pamphlet of Paine as " likely in a single stroke to wipe out all the unconstitutional doctrines which the bell-wether [of the Federalists], Davila, has been preaching for a twelvemonth."
While the question of sustaining or abandoning France caused perhaps warmer controversy in political circles, there was meanwhile no lack of ardor in the way in which Congress had discussed the question of a site for the new federal city. The question was decided by the most conspicuous example of political log-rolling which had yet disgusted the soberer citizens of the new Republic. This compromise prevented, as such plans are usually intended to prevent, a tension of political feel- ing that might turn threats into action. Severance of the Union was already intimated, and Washington pertinently asked "if the Eastern and Northern States are dangerous in the Union, will they be less so in separation ?"
In May, 1790, the Senate rejected a bill to place the capital on the eastern branch of the Potomac. To prevent a site being selected farther north, and to sustain an earlier vote for placing the seat of government in " due regard to the particular situa- tion of the western country," the Senate, on June 28, considered a bill for forming a district ten miles square, on the Potomac, as the place for the federal city. It was at this point, and to reconcile the opposing demands of the two sections of the coun- try, that the political bargain, just mentioned, was made. The future home of the government was determined to the advan- tage of the South, and as a recompense the debts of the States were assumed by the central government, to the gain of the North. So it was that Hamilton's funding bill passed both Houses, and on July 9, 1790, became a law ; and at the same time the residence of Congress was established at Philadelphia till December, 1800, when the new capital was to be occupied.
The bill, both as regards the financial scheme in touching the importance of western lands, and in respect to the location of
1
410
THE CONDITIONS OF 1790.
the capital, was in some sense a victory for the west. There were some, however, like Imlay, who regretted the permanency of the choice of the Potomac and thought the federal city should ultimately be transferred to the Great Valley, and find a home. for instance, near the Falls of St. Anthony.
As against the Potomac, the advantages of a site on the Sus- quehanna were the most promising, because of the claims which were urged of its affording easier communication over the moun- tains with the west. It was shown that the distance from tide- water at Alexandria on the Potomac to the Monongahela and Pittsburg - the usual portal of the west - was three hundred and four miles with thirty-one miles of portage. Imlay says that it is asserted on the best authorities that the land carriage by this ronte may be reduced by further canalization of the rivers to less than twenty miles. This was the natural route from Baltimore and Richmond, and if the Ohio was reached by land only, it took a varying time, from ten to twenty days, to pass the mountains from the principal seaboard towns.
From tide-water on the Susquehanna to Fort Pitt was two hundred and seventy-five miles, and if the route was carried up the Juniata, there was the easiest mountain pass of all, making a portage of twenty-three miles. Another but less favorable passage went by the west branch of the Susquehanna, leading to Toby's Creek and the Alleghany, and thence to the Ohio.
There was still a way by which those passing west, either from Richmond or Philadelphia, entered the valley of the Shenan- doah, and proceeded to Fort Chissel on the Kanawha, near the North Carolina line. Thence the road led through Cumberland Gap. It was the usual path by which those who sought a land carriage entered the leafy regions of Kentucky and so passed on to the rapids of the Ohio, now the liveliest spot in the west, and to Vincennes and Kaskaskia beyond. It was generally con- ceded at this time that Alexandria was nearer by one hundred and fifty miles to Kentucky than Philadelphia was, and twenty to thirty miles nearer than Baltimore was, and this last city was west of the real centre of population of the whole country. Philadelphia was now maintaining a weekly post by the Cum- berland Gap with the Kentucky settlements, and it traversed a road that in one place for a hundred miles was without a house, and the average rate was about twenty miles a day. If this
411
WESTERN ROUTES.
route shared the streams of travel westward with the water passage by the Ohio, the return by land was more usual in avoidance of the struggle against the current of that river.
Those who were bound for the Tennessee country, after strik- ing the valley of the Holston, instead of turning to the right for Cumberland Gap, followed down that river to Fort Campbell, near where the Holston and Clinch unite to form the Tennessee, and then struck northwesterly over the mountains to the Cum- berland valley and so on to Nashville. The distance from Fort Campbell was a little short of two hundred miles. Winter- botham, a contemporary writer, speaks of this route as "a pleasant passage for carriages, as there will be only the Cum- berland Mountain to pass, and that is easy of aseent, and be- yond it the road is generally level and firm, and abounding with fine springs of water." Other descriptions of the time are not so attractive, and they tell of glowing ravines where patrols were sometimes met, and as night came on, there was some- thing startling in the elick of the hoofs of the traders' paek- horses, hurrying to find a night's rest. The occasional log huts are spoken of as filthy, with the roughest household furni- ture, for it was not till 1796 that frame houses began to appear along the way.
At Nashville, the traveler found the inevitable whiskey-tap in its one variety store. The people were just beginning to open trade with New Orleans, sending thither, mainly by water, and running the gauntlet of the river pirates, the produets of the region, - dried beef, hides, tallow, furs, corn, tobacco, and flax. Those who were not traders were apt to follow the hunt- er's trace, which ran from Nashville to Natchez, through the territory of the friendly Chickasaws. The portages which con- neeted the Tennessee with the Florida rivers sometimes brought from the south the Spanish traders of Mobile and Pensacola.
The routes thus far enumerated were generally adapted to indicate the Potomae as the best site for the proposed federal city, to which the water earriage on the Ohio was not so favora- ble. This easier passage to the two hundred thousand square miles, constituting the valley of the Ohio and its tributaries, was found by either the Alleghany or the Monongahela, and was now without a rival. The route westward by the Mohawk, across the valley of the Genesee to Niagara, was slow in devel-
412
THE CONDITIONS OF 1790.
oping, and the retention of the posts on the northern lakes operated against a passage by Oswego and the Great Lakes.
The Ohio boat, now become a familiar object in western experience, was an anomalous construction of various sizes and shapes. It had sometimes a keel, but, on account of the diffi- vulties of the return voyage, it was oftener built as cheaply as possible, with flat bottom and square corners. It was some- times constructed with stories, having a level or hipped roof atop, and was steered by a long sweep at the stern. The usual
OHIO FLATBOAT. [From Collot's Atlas. ]
cost of these cheaper builds was five dollars a ton, and a boat twelve feet beam and forty feet long - a common size - meas- ured about forty tons. Some of them were arranged for stall- ing domestic animals, and others afforded rough conveniences for domestic life, as the temporary homes of journeying immi- grants. The trading-boats sometimes passed on to a distant market, or tied up at the landings as they went for a local traffic. When his merchandise was disposed of, the trader usually sold his boat, and, on his next visit, he would find its plank and boards matched in new tenements or hucksters' booths, within the young town. It was of such material that Fort Harmar and other stoekades had been built in part, the living forest supplying the rest.
The cost of transportation from Philadelphia over the moun- tains, and thence by boat to Louisville, was reckoned at the rate of £1,600 for forty tons ; but for the river passage alone, smaller merchandise was counted at a shilling per hundred- weight, or five shillings per ton for a bulky mass. Toulmin,
413
RIVER NAVIGATION.
buying a boat at Redstone, on the Monongahela, for £6-9-0, in which he carried 13 horses, 21 negroes, 13 whites, and £100 worth of merchandise, took a fair sample of these trading out- fits. It was different with coarse articles, but fine manufactures could often, at this time, be sent from Philadelphia over the mountains, and be exposed for sale in the rough booths of the river settlements, where rent and taxes were of no account, at prices not much beyond those asked in Chestnut or Market streets on the Delaware ; and Philadelphia fashions, it was said, were in vogue in Frankfort in three months after they appeared in the Pennsylvania capital. The days of barter were passing, as money was brought in by immigrants, or was brought up from New Orleans by the traders ; but still, slaves, horses, cat- tle, and pigs were not infrequently exchanged for calicoes, chintzes, and other fabrics.
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