USA > Ohio > The Old Northwest : a chronicle of the Ohio Valley and beyond > Part 9
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"These favorable accounts, " wrote Adlard Wel- by, an Englishman who made a tour of inspection through the West in 1819, "aided by a period of real privation and discontent in Europe, caused emigration to increase ten-fold; and though various reports of unfavorable nature soon circulated, and many who had emigrated actually returned to their native land in disgust, yet still the trading vessels were filled with passengers of all ages and descriptions, full of hope, looking forward to the West as to a land of liberty and delight - a land flowing with milk and honey - a second land of Canaan. "I
After the dangers from the Indians were over- come, the main obstacle to western development was the lack of means of easy and cheap transpor- tation. The settler found it difficult to reach the region which he had selected for his home. East- ern supplies of salt, iron, hardware, and fabrics and " Thwaites, Early Western Travels, vol. XII, p. 148.
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foodstuffs could be obtained only at great expense. The fast-increasing products of the western farms - maize, wheat, meats, livestock - could be mar- keted only at a cost which left a slender margin of profit. The experiences of the late war had al- ready proved the need of highways as auxiliaries of national defense. It required a month to carry goods from Baltimore to central Ohio. None the less, even before the War of 1812, hundreds of transportation companies were running four-horse freight wagons between the eastern and western States; and in 1820 more than three thousand wagons- practically all carrying western products - passed back and forth between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, transporting merchandise valued at eighteen million dollars.
Small wonder that western producer and eastern dealer alike became interested in internal improve- ments; or that under the double stimulus of private and public enterprise Indian trails fast gave way to rough pioneer roadways, and they to carefully planned and durable turnpikes. Long before the War of 1812, Jefferson, Gallatin, Clay, and other statesmen had conceived of a great highway, or series of highways, connecting the seaboard with the interior as the surest and best means of pro-
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moting national unity and strength; and, in the act of Congress of 1802 admitting the State of Ohio, a promising beginning had been made by setting aside five per cent of the money received from the sale of public lands in the State for the build- ing of roads extending eastward to the navigable waters of Atlantic streams. In 1808 Secretary Gallatin had presented to Congress a report calling for an outlay on internal improvements of two million dollars of federal money a year for ten years; and in 1811 the Government had entered upon the greatest undertaking of its kind in the history of the country.
This enterprise was the building of the magnifi- cent highway known to the law as the Cumberland Road, but familiar to uncounted emigrants, travel- ers, and traders - and deeply embedded in the traditions of the Middle States and the West - as the National Road. Starting at Cumberland, Maryland, this great artery of commerce and travel was pushed slowly through the Alleghanies, even in the dark days of the war, and by 1818 it was open for traffic as far west as Wheeling. The method of construction was that which had lately been devised by John McAdam in England, and involved spreading crushed limestone over a care-
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fully prepared road-bed in three layers, traffic being permitted for a time over each layer in suc- cession. This "macadamized" surface was curved to permit drainage, and extra precautions were taken in localities where spring freshets were likely to cause damage.
Controversy raged over proposals to extend the road to the farthest West, to provide its upkeep by a system of tolls, and to build similar highways farther north and south. But for a time constitu- tional and legal difficulties were swept aside and construction continued. Columbus was reached in 1833, Indianapolis about 1840; and the roadway was graded to Vandalia, then the capital of Illinois, and marked out to Jefferson City, Missouri, al- though it was never completed to the last-men- tioned point by federal authority. When one reads that the original cost of construction mounted to $10,000 a mile in central Pennsylvania, and even $13,000 a mile in the neighborhood of Wheeling, one's suspicion is aroused that public contracts were not less dubious a hundred years ago than they have been known to be in our own time.
The National Road has long since lost its im- portance as the great connecting link of East and West. But in its day, especially before 1860, it
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was a teeming thoroughfare. Its course was lined with hospitable farmhouses and was dotted with fast-growing villages and towns. Some of the latter which once were nationally famed were left high and dry by later shifts of the lines of traffic, and have quite disappeared from the map. Through- out the spring and summer months there was a steady westward stream of emigrants; hardly a day failed to bring before the observer's eye the creaking canvas-covered wagon of the homeseeker. Singly and in companies they went, ever toward the promised land. Wagon-trains of merchandise from the eastern markets toiled patiently along the way. Speculators, peddlers, and sightseers added to the procession, and in hundreds of farmhouses the women-folk and children gathered in interested groups by the evening fire to hear the chance visi- tor talk politics or war and retail with equal facility the gossip of the next township and that of Wash- ington or New York. Great stage-coach lines - the National Road Stage Company, the Ohio National Stage Company, and others - advertised the advantages of their services and sought pat- ronage with all the ingenuity of the modern rail- road. Taverns and roadhouses of which no trace remains today offered entertainment at any figure,
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and of almost any character, that the customer de- sired. Eastward flowed a steady stream of wagon- trains of flour, tobacco, and pork, with great droves of cattle and hogs to be fattened for the Philadel- phia or Baltimore markets.
At almost precisely the same time that the first shovelful of earth was turned for the Cumberland Road, people dwelling on the banks of the upper Ohio were startled by the spectacle of a large boat moving majestically down stream entirely devoid of sail, oar, pole, or any other visible means of propulsion or control. This object of wonderment was the New Orleans, the first steamboat to be launched on western waters.
The conquest of the steamboat was speedy and complete. Already in 1819 there were sixty-three such craft on the Ohio, and in 1834- when the total shipping tonnage of the Atlantic seaboard was 76,064, and of the British Empire 82,696 - the tonnage afloat on the Ohio and Mississippi was 126,278. Vessels regularly ascended the navigable tributaries of the greater streams in quest of car- goes, and while craft of other sorts did not dis- appear, the great and growing commerce of the river was revolutionized.
In the upbuilding of steamboat navigation
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the thriving, bustling, boastful spirit of the West found ample play. Steamboat owners vied with one another in adorning their vessels with bow- sprits, figureheads, and all manner of tinseled decorations, and in providing elegant accommoda- tions for passengers; engineers and pilots gloried in speed records and challenged one another to races which ended in some of the most shocking steamboat disasters known to history. The un- conscious bombast of an anonymous Cincinnati writer in Timothy Flint's Western Monthly Review in 1827 gives us the real flavor of the steamboat business on the threshold of the Jacksonian era:
An Atlantic cit, who talks of us under the name of back- woodsmen, would not believe, that such fairy structures of oriental gorgeousness and splendor as the Washington, the Florida, the Walk in the Water, The Lady of the Lake, etc., etc., had ever existed in the imaginative brain of a romancer, much less, that they were actually in exist- ence, rushing down the Mississippi, as on the wings of the wind, or plowing up between the forests, and walk- ing against the mighty current "as things of life," bear- ing speculators, merchants, dandies, fine ladies, every- thing real, and everything affected, in the form of humanity, with pianos, and stocks of novels, and cards, and dice, and flirting, and love-making, and drinking, and champagne, and on the deck, perhaps, three hun- dred fellows, who have seen alligators, and neither fear
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whiskey, nor gun-powder. A steamboat, coming from New Orleans, brings to the remotest villages of our streams, and the very doors of the cabins, a little Paris, a section of Broadway, or a slice of Philadelphia, to ferment in the minds of our young people, the innate propensity for fashions and finery. . . Cincinnati
will soon be the centre of the "celestial empire, " as the Chinese say; and instead of encountering the storms, the seasickness, and dangers of a passage from the Gulf of Mexico to the Atlantic, whenever the Erie Canal shall be completed, the opulent southern planters will take their families, their dogs and parrots, through a world of forests, from New Orleans to New York, giving us a call by the way. When they are more acquainted with us, their voyage will often terminate here.I
The new West was frankly materialistic. Yet its interests were by no means restricted to steam- boats, turnpikes, crops, exports, and money-mak- ing. It concerned itself much with religion. One of the most familiar figures on trail and highway was the circuit-rider, with his Bible and saddle- bags; and no community was so remote, or so hardened, as not to be raised occasionally to a frenzy of religious zeal by the crude but terrifying eloquence of the revivalist. For education, like- wise, there was a growing regard. Nowhere did the devotion of the Western people to the twin
I Vol. I, p. 25 (May, 1827).
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ideas of democracy and enlightenment find nobler expression than in the clause of the Indiana con- stitution of 1816 making it the duty of the Legisla- ture to provide for "a general system of education, ascending in a regular gradation from township schools to a state university, wherein tuition shall be gratis, and equally open to all." This principle found general application throughout the North- west. By 1830 common schools existed wherever population was sufficient to warrant the expense; academies and other secondary schools were springing up in Cincinnati, Louisville, St. Louis, and many lesser places; state universities existed in Ohio and Indiana; and Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians had begun to dot the country with small colleges. Literature developed slowly. But newspapers appeared almost before there were readers; and that the new society was by no means without cultural, and even æsthetic, aspira- tion is indicated by the long-continued rivalry of Cincinnati and Lexington, Kentucky, to be known as "the Athens of the West."
CHAPTER X
SECTIONAL CROSS CURRENTS
THE War of 1812 did much in America to stimu- late national pride and to foster a sense of unity. None the less, the decade following the Peace of Ghent proved the beginning of a long era in which the point of view in politics, business, and social life was distinctly sectional. New Eng- land, the Middle States, the South, the West - all were bent upon getting the utmost advantages from their resources; all were viewing public ques- tions in the light of their peculiar interests. In the days of Clay and Calhoun and Jackson the nation's politics were essentially a struggle for power among the sections.
There was a time when the frontier folk of the trans-Alleghany country from Lakes to Gulf were much alike. New Englanders in the Re- serve, Pennsylvanians in central Ohio, Virginians and Carolinians in Kentucky and southern Indiana,
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Georgians in Alabama and Mississippi, Kentucki- ans and Tennesseeans in Illinois and Missouri - all were pioneer farmers and stock-raisers, ab- sorbed in the conquest of the wilderness and all thinking, working, and living in much the same way. But by 1820 the situation had altered. The West was still a "section," whose interests and characteristics contrasted sharply with those of New England or the Middle States. Yet upon occasion it could act with very great effect, as for instance when it rallied to the support of Jackson and bore him triumphantly to the presidential chair. Great divergences, however, had grown up within this western area; differences which had existed from the beginning had been brought into sharp relief. Under play of climatic and indus- trial forces, the West had itself fallen apart into sections.
Foremost was the cleavage between North and South, on a line marked roughly by the Ohio River. Climate, soil, the cotton gin, and slavery combined to make of the southern West a great cotton-raising area, interested in the same things and swayed by the same impulses as the southern seaboard. Similarly, economic conditions com- bined to make of the northern West a land of small
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farmers, free labor, town-building, and diversified manufactures and trade. A very large chapter of American history hinges on this wedging apart of Southwest and Northwest. To this day the two great divisions have never wholly come to- gether in their ways of thinking.
But neither of these western segments was it- self entirely a unit. The Northwest, in particu- lar, had been settled by people drawn from every older portion of the country, and as the frontier receded and society took on a more matured aspect, differences of habits and ideas were accentuated rather than obscured. Men can get along very well with one another so long as they live apart and do not try to regulate their everyday affairs on common lines.
The great human streams that poured into the Northwest flowed from two main sources - the nearer South and New England. Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois were first peopled by men and women of Southern stock. Some migrated directly from Virginia, the Carolinas, and even Georgia. But most came from Kentucky and Tennessee and rep- resented the second generation of white people in those States, now impelled to move on to a new frontier by the desire for larger and cheaper farms.
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Included in this Southern element were many rep- resentatives of the well-to-do classes, who were drawn to the new territories by the opportunity for speculation in land and for political prefer- ment, and by the opening which the fast-growing communities afforded for lawyers, doctors, and members of other professions. The number of these would have been larger had there been less rigid re- strictions upon slaveholding. It was rather, how- ever, the poorer whites - the more democratic, non-slaveholding Southern element - that formed the bulk of the earlier settlers north of the Ohio.
There was much westward migration from New England before the War of 1812, but only a small share of it reached the Ohio country, and practi- cally none went beyond the Western Reserve. The common goal was western New York. Here again there was some emigration of the well-to-do and influential. But, as in the South, the people who moved were mainly those who were having difficulty in making ends meet and who could see no way of bettering their condition in their old homes. The back country of Maine, New Hamp- shire, Vermont, and western Massachusetts was filled with people of this sort - poor, discontented, restless, without political influence, and needing
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only the incentive of cheap lands in the West to sever the slender ties which bound them to the stony hillsides of New England.
After 1815 New England emigration rose to astonishing proportions, and an increasing number of the homeseekers passed - directly or after a sojourn in the Lower Lake country of New York - into the Northwest. The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 made the westward journey easier and cheaper. The routes of travel led to Lakes On- tario and Erie, thence to the Reserve in northern Ohio, thence by natural stages into other portions of northern Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, and eventu- ally into southern Michigan and Wisconsin. Not until after 1830 did the stalwart homeseekers penetrate north of Detroit; the great stretches of prairie between Lakes Erie and Michigan, and to the south - left quite untouched by Southern pioneers - satisfied every desire of these restless farmers from New England.
For a long time Southerners determined the course of history in the Old Northwest. They occupied the field first, and they had the great advantage of geographical proximity to their old homes. Furthermore, they lived more compactly; the New Englanders were not only spread over
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the broader prairie stretches of the north, but scattered to some extent throughout the entire region between the Lakes and the Ohio.1 But by the middle of the century not only had the score of northern counties been inundated by the "Yankees" but the waves were pushing far into the interior, where they met and mingled with the counter-current. Both Illinois and Indiana became, in a preëminent degree, melting-pots in which was fused by slow and sometimes painful processes an amalgam which Bryce and other keen observers have pronounced the most American thing in America.
I In 1820 the population of Indiana was confined almost entirely to the southern third of the State, although the removal of the capital, in 1825, from Corydon to Indianapolis was carried out in the confidence that eventually that point would become the State's populational as it was its geographical center. When, in 1818, Illinois was ad- mitted to the Union its population was computed at 40,000. The figure was probably excessive; at all events, contemporaries testify that so eager were the people for statehood that many were counted twice, and even emigrants were counted as they passed through the Territory. But the census of 1820 showed a population of 55,000, settled almost wholly in the southern third of the State, with narrow tongues of inhabited land stretching up the river valleys toward the north. Two slave States flanked the southern end of the commonwealth; almost half of its area lay south of a westward pro- longation of Mason and Dixon's line. Save for a few Pennsylvanians, the people were Southern; the State was for all practical purposes a Southern State. As late as 1833 the Legislature numbered fifty-eight members from the South, nineteen from the Middle States, and only four from New England.
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Of the great national issues in the quarter-cen- tury following the War of 1812 there were some upon which people of the Northwest, in spite of their differing points of view, could very well agree. Internal improvement was one of these. Roads and canals were necessary outlets to southern and eastern markets, and any reasonable pro- posal on this subject could be assured of the North- west's solid support. The thirty-four successive appropriations to 1844 for the Cumberland Road, Calhoun's "Bonus Bill" of 1816, the bill of 1822 authorizing a continuous national jurisdiction over the Cumberland Road, the comprehensive "Sur- vey Bill" of 1824, the Maysville Road Bill of 1830 - all were backed by the united strength of the Northwestern senators and representatives.
So with the tariff. The cry of the East for protection to infant industries was echoed by the struggling manufacturers of Cincinnati, Louisville, and other towns; while a protective tariff as a means of building up the home market for food- stuffs and raw materials seemed to the Westerner an altogether reasonable and necessary expedi- ent. Ohio alone in the Northwest had an op- portunity to vote on the protective bill of 1816, and gave its enthusiastic support. Ohio, Indiana,
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and Illinois voted unitedly for the bills of 1820, 1824, 1828, and 1832. The principal western champion of the protective policy was Henry Clay, a Kentuckian; but the Northwest supported the policy more consistently than did Clay's own State and section.
On the National Bank the position of the North- west was no less emphatic. The people were lit- tle troubled by the question of constitutionality; but believing that the bank was an engine of tyr- anny in the hands of an eastern aristocracy, they were fully prepared to support Jackson in his determination to extinguish that "un-American monopoly."
There were other subjects upon which agree- ment was reached either with difficulty or not at all. One of these was the form of local govern- ment which should be adopted. Southerners and New Englanders brought to their new homes widely differing political usages. The former were accustomed to the county as the principal local unit of administration. It was a relatively large division, whose affairs were managed by elective officers, mainly a board of commissioners. The New Englanders, on the other hand, had grown up under the town-meeting system and clung to
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the notion that an indispensable feature of demo- cratic local government is the periodic assembling of the citizens of a community for legislative, fiscal, and electoral purposes. The Illinois con- stitution of 1818 was made by Southerners, and naturally it provided for the county system. But
protest from the "Yankee" elements became so strong that in the new constitution of 1848 provi- sion was made for township organization wherever the people of a county wanted it; and this form of government, at first prevalent only in the northern counties, is now found in most of the central and southern counties as well.
The most deeply and continuously dividing issue in the Northwest, as in the nation at large, was negro slavery. Although written by Southern men, the Ordinance of 1787 stipulated that there should be "neither slavery nor involuntary servi- tude in the said territory, otherwise than in the punishment of crimes whereof the party shall have been duly convicted." If the government of the Northwest had been one of laws, and not of men, this specific provision would have made the territory free soil and would have relieved the inhabitants from all interest in the "peculiar institution." But the laws never execute them-
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selves - least of all in frontier communities. In point of fact, considerable numbers of slaves were held in the territory until the nineteenth century was far advanced. As late as 1830 thirty-two negroes were held in servitude in the single town of Vincennes. Slavery could and did prevail to a limited extent because existing property rights were guaranteed in the Ordinance itself, in the deed of cession by Virginia, in the Jay Treaty of 1794, and in other fundamental acts. The courts of the Northwest held that slave-owners whose property could be brought under any of these guarantees might retain that property; and al- though no court countenanced further importation, itinerant Southerners -" rich planters traveling in their family carriages, with servants, packs of hunting-dogs, and trains of slaves, their nightly camp-fires lighting up the wilderness where so recently the Indian hunter had held possession" - occasionally settled in southern Indiana or Illinois and with the connivance of the authorities kept some of their dependents in slavery, or quasi- slavery, for decades.
Of actual slaveholders there were not enough to influence public sentiment greatly. But the people of Southern extraction, although neither slave-
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holders nor desiring to become such, had no strong moral convictions on the subject. Indeed, they were likely to feel that the anti-slavery restriction imposed an unfortunate impediment in the way of immigration from the South. Hence the per- sistent demand of citizens of Indiana and Illinois for a relaxation of the drastic prohibition of slavery in the Ordinance of 1787. In 1796 Congress was petitioned from Kaskaskia to extend relief; in 1799 the territorial Legislature was urged to bring about a repeal; in 1802 an Indiana territorial convention at Vincennes memorialized Congress in behalf of a suspension of the proviso for a period of ten years. Not only were violations of the law winked at, but both Indiana and Illinois deliberately built up a system of indenture which partook strongly of the characteristics of slavery. After much con- troversy, Indiana, in 1816, framed a state con- stitution which reiterated the language of the Northwest Ordinance, but without invalidating titles to existing slave property; while Illinois was admitted to the Union in 1818 with seven or eight hundred slaves upon her soil, and with a constitution which continued the old system of indenture with slight modification.
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