A School History of the United States Part 30

3. The boundary between the United States and the Spanish possessions was drawn, and Florida was acquired.

4. The Monroe doctrine was announced.

SOME RESULTS OF THE WAR.

_Death of the Federalist party_ ...

End of the European war.

Disappearance of old party issues.

Monroe elected President.

The "era of good feeling."

_Seminole War_ ...

Creek Indians join the English.

Driven out of Alabama by Jackson.

Take refuge with Florida Seminoles.

After the war rise against the settlers in Georgia.

Destroyed by Jackson.

_The boundaries_ ...

1818. Northern boundary of Louisiana settled to the Rocky Mountains.

1819. Treaty with Spain settled the south boundary of Louisiana.

1818. Joint occupation of Oregon.

1824. North boundary of Oregon established at 54 40'.

_The Monroe Doctrine._

The Holy Allies.

The South American republics.

Proposal of the Holy Allies to reduce the South American republics.

The Monroe Doctrine announced (1823).

CHAPTER XXI

THE RISING WEST

%301. Rush into the West.%--The settlement of our boundary disputes, especially with Spain, was most timely, for even then people were hurrying across the mountains by tens of thousands, and building up new states in the Mississippi valley. The great demand for ships and provisions, which from 1793 to 1807 had made business so brisk, had kept people on the seaboard and given them plenty of employment. But after 1812, and particularly after 1815, trade, commerce, and business on the seaboard declined, work became scarce, and men began to emigrate to the West, where they could buy land from the government on the installment plan, and where the states could not tax their farms until five years after the government had given them a t.i.tle deed. Old settlers in central New York declared they had never seen so many teams and sleighs, loaded with women, children, and household goods, traveling westward, bound for Ohio, which was then but another name for the West.

As the year wore away, the belief was expressed that when autumn came it would be found that the worst was over, and that the good times expected to follow peace would keep people on the seaboard. But the good times did not return. The condition of trade and commerce, of agriculture and manufactures, grew worse instead of better, and the western movement of population became greater than ever.

%302. Rapid Growth of Towns.%--Fed by this never-ending stream of newcomers, the West was almost transformed. Towns grew and villages sprang up with a rapidity which even in these days of rapid and easy communication would be thought amazing. Mt. Pleasant, in Jefferson County, Ohio, was in 1810 a little hamlet of seven families living in cabins. In 1815 it contained ninety families, numbering 500 souls. The town of Vevay, Ind., was laid out in 1813, and was not much better than a collection of huts in 1814. But in 1816 the traveler down the Ohio who stopped at Vevay found himself at a flourishing county seat, with seventy-five dwellings, occupied by a happy population who boasted of having among them thirty-one mechanics of various trades; of receiving three mails each week, and supporting a weekly newspaper called the _Indiana Register_. Forty-two thousand settlers are said to have come into Indiana in 1816, and to have raised the population to 112,000.

Letters from New York describe the condition of that state west of Utica as one of astonishing prosperity. Log cabins were disappearing, and frame and brick houses taking their place. The pike from Utica to Buffalo was almost a continuous village, and the country for twenty miles on either side was filling up with an industrious population.

Auburn, where twenty years before land sold for one dollar an acre, was the first town in size and wealth west of Utica, and land within its limits brought $7000 an acre. Fourteen miles west was Waterloo, on the Seneca River, a village which did not exist in 1814, and which in 1816 had fifty houses. Rochester, the site of which in 1815 was a wilderness, had a printing press, a bookstore, and a hundred houses in 1817.[1]

[Footnote 1: McMaster's _History of the People of the United States_, Vol. IV., pp. 381-386.]

%303. Scenes on the Western Highways.%--By 1817 this migration was at its height, and in the spring of that year families set forth from almost every village and town on the seaboard. The few that went from each place might not be missed; but when they were gathered on any one of the great roads to the West, as that across New York, or that across Pennsylvania, they made an endless procession of wagons and foot parties.

A traveler who had occasion to go from Nashville to Savannah in January, 1817, declares that on the way he fell in with crowds of emigrants from Carolina and Georgia, all bound for the cotton lands of Alabama; that he counted the flocks and wagons, and that--carts, gigs, coaches, and wagons, all told--there were 207 conveyances, and more than 3800 people.

At Haverhill, in Ma.s.sachusetts, a train of sixteen wagons, with 120 men, women, and children, from Durham, Me., pa.s.sed in one day. They were bound for Indiana to buy a township, and were accompanied by their minister. Within thirteen days, seventy-three wagons and 450 emigrants had pa.s.sed through the same town of Haverhill. At Easton, Pa., which lay on the favorite westward route for New Englanders, 511 wagons, with 3066 persons, pa.s.sed in a month. They went in trains of from six to fifty wagons each day. The keeper of Gate No. 2, on the Dauphin turnpike, in Pennsylvania, returned 2001 families as having pa.s.sed his gate, bound west, between March and December, 1817, and gave the number of people accompanying the vehicles as 16,000. Along the New York route, which went across the state from Albany to Buffalo, up Lake Erie, and on by way of Chautauqua Lake to the Allegheny, the reports are just as astonishing. Two hundred and sixty wagons were counted going by one tavern in nine days, besides hundreds of people on horseback and on foot.[1]

[Footnote 1: McMaster's _History_. Vol. IV., pp. 387, 388.]

%304. Life on the Frontier.%--The "mover," or, as we should say, the emigrant, would provide himself with a small wagon, very light, but strong enough to carry his family, provisions, bedding, and utensils; would cover it with a blanket or a piece of canvas or with linen which was smeared with tar inside to make it waterproof; and with two stout horses to pull it, would set out for the West, and make his way across Pennsylvania to Pittsburg, then the greatest city of the West, with a population of 7000. Some, as of old, would take boats and float down the Ohio; others would go on to Wheeling, be ferried across the river, and push into Ohio or Indiana or Illinois, there to "take up" a quarter section (160 acres) of government land, or buy or rent a "clearing" from some shiftless settler of an earlier day. Government land intended for sale was laid out in quarter sections of 160 acres, and after being advertised for a certain time was offered for sale at public auction.

What was not sold could then be purchased at the land office of the district at two dollars an acre, one quarter to be paid down, and three fourths before the expiration of four years. The emigrant, having gathered eighty dollars, would go to some land office, "enter" a quarter section, pay the first installment, and make his way in the two-horse wagon containing his family and his worldly goods to the spot where was to be his future home. Every foot of it in all probability would be covered with bushes and trees.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Distribution of the Population of the United States Fourth Census, 1820]

%305. The Log Cabin.%--In that case the settler would cut down a few saplings, make a "half-faced camp," and begin his clearing. The "half-faced camp" was a shed. Three sides were of logs laid one on another horizontally. The roof was of saplings covered with branches or bark. The fourth side was open, and when it rained was closed by hanging up deerskin curtains. In this camp the newcomer and his family would live while he grubbed up the bushes and cut down trees enough to make a log cabin. If he were a thrifty, painstaking man, he would smooth each log on four sides with his ax, and notch it half through at each end so that when they were placed one on another the faces would nearly touch.

Saplings would make the rafters, and on them would be fastened planks laid clapboard fashion, or possibly split shingles.

An opening was of course left for a door, although many a cabin was built without a window, and when the door was shut received no light save that which came down the chimney, which was always on the outside of the house. To form it, an opening eight feet long and six feet high was left at one end of the house, and around this a sort of bay window was built of logs and lined with stones on the inside. Above the top of the opening the chimney contracted and was made of branches smeared both inside and out with clay. Generally the chimney went to the peak of the roof; but it was by no means unusual for it to stop about halfway up the end of the cabin.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Log cabin[1]]

[Footnote 1: The birthplace of Abraham Lincoln, restored (reproduced, together with the first picture on the next page, from Tarbell's _Early Life of Abraham Lincoln_, by permission of the publishers, S.S.

McClure, Limited).]

If the settler was too poor to buy gla.s.s, or if gla.s.s could not be had, the window frame was covered with greased paper, which let in the light but could not be seen through. The door was of plank with leather hinges, or with iron hinges made from an old wagon tire by the nearest blacksmith or by the settler himself. There was no k.n.o.b, no lock, no bolt.

In place of them there was a wooden latch on the inside, which could be lifted by a person on the outside of the door by a leather strip which came through a hole in the door and hung down. When this latch string was out, anybody could pull it, lift the latch, and come in. When it was drawn inside, n.o.body could come in without knocking. The floor was made of "puncheons," or planks split and hewn with an ax from the trunk of a tree, and laid with the round side down. The furniture the settler brought with him, or made on the spot.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Hand mill [1]]

The household utensils were of the simplest kind. Brooms and brushes were made of corn husks. Corn was sh.e.l.led by hand and was then either carried in a bag slung over a horse's back to the nearest mill, perhaps fifteen miles away, or was pounded in a wooden hominy mortar with a wooden pestle, or ground in a hand mill. Chickens and game were roasted by hanging them with leather strings before the open fire. Cooking stoves were unknown, and all cooking was done in a "Dutch oven," on the hearth, or in a clay "out oven" built, as its name implies, out of doors.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Corn-husk broom [1]]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Kitchen utensils [1]]

[Footnote 1: From originals in the National Museum, Washington.]

%306. Clearing and Planting.%--The land about the cabin was cleared by grubbing the bushes and cutting down trees under a foot in diameter and burning them. Big trees were "deadened," or killed, by cutting a "girdle" around them two or three feet above the ground, deep enough to destroy the sap vessels and so prevent the growth of leaves.[1]

[Footnote 1: For a delightful account of life in the West, read W. C.

Howells's _Recollections of Life in Ohio_ (edited by his son, William Dean Howells).]

In the ground thus laid open to the sun were planted corn, potatoes, or wheat, which, when harvested, was threshed with a flail and fanned and cleaned with a sheet. At first the crop would be scarcely sufficient for home use. But, as time pa.s.sed, there would be some to spare, and this would be wagoned to some river town and sold or exchanged for "store goods."