Rise of the New West, 1819-1829 Part 12

By the middle of this administration the popularity of internal improvement appropriations seemed irresistible, although southern states raised their voices against it and complained bitterly that they were neglected. The example of the Erie Ca.n.a.l, which was open by 1825, seemed to furnish proof of the success that awaited state ca.n.a.l construction. States were learning that English capital was ready for investment in such undertakings and that Congress could donate lands and subscribe for stock.

By acts of 1825 and 1826, Pennsylvania initiated its extensive state system of roads and ca.n.a.ls to reach the Ohio, the central part of New York, and the Great Lakes. [Footnote: Hulbert, Historic Highways, XIII., chap, iv.; Worthington, Finances of Pennsylvania, 22.] The trunk line of this system united Philadelphia with Pittsburgh by a horse railway to Columbia on the Susquehanna, thence by a ca.n.a.l along that river and its tributary, the Juniata, to Hollidaysburg, where stationary engines carried the freight over a series of inclined planes across the thirty-six miles of mountains, to reach the western section of the ca.n.a.l at Johnstown on the Conemaugh, and so by the Allegheny to Pittsburgh. Sectional jealousies delayed the work, and piled up a debt incurred partly for branch ca.n.a.ls in various parts of the state; but by 1830 over four hundred miles of ca.n.a.l had been built in Pennsylvania and five hundred more projected. Not until 1835 was the trunk line between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh fully in operation, however, and in the decade after 1822 the total expenditure for internal improvements in the state amounted to nearly twenty-six million dollars, of which over ten millions was contributed by individual subscription. But the steam railroad proved too strong a compet.i.tor, the state was plunged too deeply in debt, and it was not many years before the public works were sold, and the era of the corporation opened.

Meanwhile the Chesapeake and Ohio Ca.n.a.l project [Footnote: Hulbert, Historic Highways, XIII., chap, iii.; Ward, Chesapeake and Ohio Ca.n.a.l (Johns Hopkins Univ. Studies, XVII.)] had gained great impetus under the efforts of those who wished to turn the tide of western commerce to the Potomac River. The innate difficulties of the task, even more than the opposition of Baltimore, rendered abortive the efforts of the Potomac Company to make the river navigable above tide-water. But in 1823 public interest in Virginia and Maryland was aroused by the plan of a great ca.n.a.l to run alongside of the Potomac to its upper streams, and thence to connect with the Monongahela or Youghiogheny in order to reach the Ohio. At a convention which met in Washington in the fall of 1823, Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia were largely represented by delegates enthusiastic over this new highway to the west. Even Baltimore acquiesced in the undertaking after a provision giving the right to tap the ca.n.a.l by a branch to that city, so that her western trade should not be diverted to the Potomac cities.

By 1826 the company was duly chartered by Virginia and Maryland; Pennsylvania's consent was also obtained; and the financiering of the enterprise seemed feasible by joint subscription to the stock by Maryland, Virginia, the District of Columbia, and the federal government. Under the general survey act of 1824, the route was surveyed, including an extension to Lake Erie by way of a ca.n.a.l from the Ohio. But when, in 1826, the board of engineers published its estimate of the cost of the ca.n.a.l, it was seen that the larger plans were doomed, for the total cost was placed at over twenty-two million dollars. This was practically prohibitive, for the whole capital stock of the Chesapeake and Ohio Company was only six millions. Congress made a million-dollar subscription to the stock of the company, but only the eastern section of the ca.n.a.l could be begun; the completion of navigation between the coal-fields on the upper Ohio and c.u.mberland on the Potomac must be postponed.

Baltimore's interest in the grand design of ca.n.a.l communication between that city and Pittsburgh quickly disappeared. Nearer to the Ohio Valley than any other seaport, she had built turnpikes to connect with the national road, and thus shared with Philadelphia the western trade. But now New York and Pennsylvania were undertaking ca.n.a.l systems which were certain in the long run to destroy the advantages of Baltimore. In desperation, her far-sighted and courageous merchants inaugurated the plan of a railroad across the mountains to the Ohio, grasping the idea that as the ca.n.a.l had shown its superiority over the turnpike, so this new device would win the day over the ca.n.a.l. In 1827 and 1828 charters for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad were granted by Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania.

At Washington, on July 4, 1828, President Adams stripped off his coat, amid the cheers of the crowd, and thrust the spade into the ground in signal of the beginning of the Chesapeake and Ohio Ca.n.a.l; but on the same day a rival celebration was in progress at Baltimore, where the venerable signer of the Declaration of Independence, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, placed the foundation- stone to commemorate the commencement of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, first of the iron bonds between the east and the west.

When Adams thus won the plaudits of the people for his evidence of ability to break the conventions of polite society and use a laborer's tool, it was perhaps the only time that he and democracy came into sympathetic touch. But he was aiding in a losing cause, for, though Carroll was a man of the past, destiny was working on the side of the movement which he represented. In the field of transportation, the initiative of individuals and of corporations during the next two generations proved superior to that of state or nation.

In the mean time, Ohio, eager to take advantage of the compet.i.tion of these rival routes from New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, and wishing to develop the central region of the state, undertook in 1825 a state system of ca.n.a.ls connecting the Ohio with Lake Erie. [Footnote: Morris, Internal Improvement in Ohio (Am.

Hist. a.s.soc., Papers, III.), 107; see also McClelland and Huntington, Ohio Ca.n.a.ls.] The Ohio Ca.n.a.l began at Portsmouth and followed the valleys of the Scioto and the Cuyahoga to Cleveland, while another ca.n.a.l extended from Cincinnati along the Miami to Dayton. By branches connecting with the Pennsylvania system, this net-work of water-ways was intended to give alternative outlets for the rapidly growing surplus of the state. Wheat which sold for from twenty-five to thirty-seven cents per bushel in central Ohio in 1825 brought double the amount in 1832 when the ca.n.a.l began to be effective; and it sold for a higher price a hundred miles west of Pittsburgh than it did sixty miles to the east of that city, where water transportation was lacking. [Footnote: Quar. Jour. of Econ., XVII., 15; Dial, in Ohio Archaeological and Hist. Soc., Publications, XIII., 479.] An example of the rivalry of the followers of Adams and of Jackson in conciliating western interests is furnished in the case of Ohio, just prior to the campaign of 1828, when each party in Congress persisted in supporting its own bill donating lands for the ca.n.a.ls of that state. Owing to the fear of each that the other party would gain the credit of the measure, both bills were pa.s.sed, and Ohio received double the amount originally asked. [Footnote: Benton, Abridgment, X., 197 n.] It was small wonder that Indiana, Illinois, and other western states memorialized Congress for aid in their own plans for ca.n.a.ls.

The activity of the states, no longer waiting for the federal government to construct a national system; the rapidly growing demand for the relinquishment of the national road to the states within which it lay; and the activity of corporations, all pointed to a new era in internal improvements. The states were ready to receive appropriations, but they preferred to build their own roads and dig their own ca.n.a.ls. The state and the corporation were replacing the national government as the controlling power in internal improvements, and Adams's conception of a national system of turnpikes and ca.n.a.ls had failed.

Nor was President Adams successful in carrying out a system of complete maritime reciprocity. After the War of 1812, Great Britain and the United States agreed upon the abolition of discriminating duties on ships or products engaged in the trade between the two countries; [Footnote: Cf. Babc.o.c.k, Am. Nationality (Am. Nation, XIII.), chap. xvi.] but England reserved her right to exempt her American possessions from this reciprocity. By excluding the ships of the United States from the trade with the English West Indies, England denied a profitable avocation to American ship-owners; while, at the same time, the liberal arrangements of the United States permitted her vessels freely to enter the ports of this country with their cargoes of English manufactures, and to carry thence to the West Indies lumber, flour, and provisions to exchange for the mola.s.ses and sugar of the islands.

This ability to make a triangular voyage, with profits on each transaction, gave such advantage to British ships that they were able to carry on the trade between the United States and England at a rate below that which American vessels could afford. Driven to seek some remedy, the Yankee merchants and skippers turned to the Orient. The trade with China and the East Indies developed rapidly, and our tonnage registered for foreign trade increased from 583,000 tons in 1820 to 758,000 in 1828. [Footnote: Marvin, American Merchant Marine, chap. ix.] Ninety per cent. of our foreign commerce was carried in our own vessels, and, from this point of view, American shipping enjoyed one of the most prosperous periods in its history. [Footnote: Pitkin, Statistical View (ed. of 1835), 363; Soley, "Maritime Industries," in Shaler (ed. of 1894), United States, I., 538.] Smuggling was extensively carried on in the West Indies, and a war of retaliatory legislation in regard to shipping characterized the whole decade.

In 1825 Parliament pa.s.sed a somewhat obscure act which opened the ports on a more liberal system of reciprocity. To nations without colonies she offered the same shipping rights in her colonies which such nations gave to England and her possessions. The act provided that it must be accepted within a year by nations who desired to avail themselves of its provisions. President Adams preferred to deal with the question by diplomacy, and Congress neglected to pa.s.s the legislation necessary to accept the offer. When Gallatin, who had been sent to England to treat of this matter, opened his negotiations in 1826, he was informed that it was too late. The stipulated time having elapsed, American vessels were definitely excluded from the West Indies in 1826 by orders in council.

[Footnote: Adams, Gallatin, 615-620; cf. MacDonald, Jacksonian Democracy (Am. Nation, XV.), 201.] In the campaign of 1828 Adams was blamed for the failure to seize this opportunity, but the generally prosperous condition of our shipping not only moderated the discontent, but even led to a law (May 24, 1828) intended to place American vessels in complete control of our foreign commerce by providing for the abolition, by proclamation of the president, of all discriminating duties against such nations as should free ships of the United States from corresponding discriminations. In the long run, this reciprocity act proved a mistake; the end of Adams's administration marked the beginning of a decline in the prosperity of the merchant marine. [Footnote: Soley, in Shaler, United States, I., 540.]

American commerce during this period by no means kept pace with the growing wealth and population of the country. [Footnote 2: Sterns, Foreign Trade of the United States, 1820-1840, in Jour. Pol. Econ., VIII., 34, 452.] As we have seen, the staple states produced the lion's share of the domestic exports, and the internal exchange favored by the protective tariffs restrained the foreign importations. Aside from the depression in 1821, following the panic of 1819, and the extraordinary rise in 1825, the exports in general exhibited no marked increase or decline between 1820 and 1829.

Imports showed a value of nearly seventy-four and one-half million dollars in 1820, ninety millions in 1825, and sixty-seven millions in 1829. [Footnote 3: Soley, in Shaler, United States, I., 538; cf.

Pitkin, Statistical View (ed. of 1835), 177; W. C. Ford, in Depew, One Hundred Years of Am. Commerce, I., 23.] During the whole of Adams's administration, New York preserved its easy lead in domestic exports, although, as the west leaped up to power, New Orleans rose rapidly to a close second in exports of domestic origin. The southern cities retained merely the same proportion of the exports of domestic origin which they had in 1820, in spite of the great increase of cotton production. New York and New Orleans gained a large fraction of this trade, and Ma.s.sachusetts changed its proportion of domestic exports only slightly during the whole decade. Over three-fourths of the cotton went to the British Isles, while almost all the pork and beef, and two-thirds of the flour, went to the West Indies, South America, and Great Britain's American colonies. [Footnote: Pitkin, Statistical View, 121-137.]

The statistics of commerce repeat the same story of increasing national self-dependence which was told by the development of manufactures, internal trade, and transportation, and even by the diplomatic policy of the United States. The nation was building an empire of its own, with sections which took the place of kingdoms.

The west was already becoming the granary of the whole country. But in the development of this "American system," the navigating portions of New England and the staple states of the south and southwest found themselves at a disadvantage. Their interest lay in a free exchange across the ocean.

Although many minor treaties of commerce and navigation were negotiated by Clay during this administration, all his other diplomatic efforts met with failure, among them attempts to purchase Texas and to procure a treaty with England for the rendition of fugitive slaves who had escaped to Canada--strange evidences of the political concessions of the northern president.

CHAPTER XVIII

REACTION TOWARDS STATE SOVEREIGNTY (1816-1829)

From the close of the War of 1812, an increasing reaction was in progress in various states against the ardent nationalism which characterized the country at that time. The a.s.sertion of the doctrine of state sovereignty by the Hartford Convention in 1814 [Footnote: Babc.o.c.k, Am. Nationality (Am. Nation, XIII.), chap. xv.]

so aroused the other sections of the country that particularism was for the time discredited. Leaders of Virginia politics even approved a rumor that Madison would march troops against New England; Judge Roane, later a champion of Virginia's sovereignty, denounced the "anarchical principles" of the section. [Footnote: Randolph-Macon College, John P. Branch Hist. Papers, II., 18.] In that period, when Calhoun and the other leading statesmen of South Carolina supported the protective tariff and the bonus bill, when Madison, the author of the Virginia resolutions of 1798, signed the bill for the recharter of the national bank, when Chief-Justice Marshall, a son of Virginia, was welding firm the bonds of nationalism in his great series of decisions limiting the powers of the states and developing the doctrine of loose construction of the Const.i.tution, [Footnote: Babc.o.c.k, Am. Nationality (Am. Nation, XIII.), chap. xviii.] and when New England itself was explaining away the particularistic purposes of the Hartford Convention, it might well seem that the days of state sovereignty had come to an end.

Even then, however, the pendulum was starting to swing in the opposite direction. The crisis of 1819 and the decisions of the supreme court a.s.serting the const.i.tutionality of the national bank under the broad national conception of the Const.i.tution, produced protests and even resistance from various states whose interests were most affected. Ohio in 1819 forcibly collected a tax on the branch bank of the United States, in defiance of Marshall's decision rendered earlier in the year in the case of McCulloch vs. Maryland; and in 1821 her legislature reaffirmed the doctrines of the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions, and pa.s.sed an act withdrawing the protection of the laws of the state from the national bank, [Footnote 2: Ames, State Docs. on Federal Relations, No. 3, p. 5.]

and even persisted in her resistance after the decision (Osborn vs.

Bank of U. S., 1824) against the state. But the proceeds of the tax were ultimately restored. Nor was Ohio alone in her opposition to this decision. Kentucky was almost equally excited, and Senator R.

M. Johnson made a vain attempt in 1821 to procure an amendment to the Const.i.tution providing that in controversies in which a state was a party the Senate of the United States should have appellate jurisdiction. [Footnote: Annals of Cong., 17 Cong., I Sess., I., 23, 68, 96; Ames, State Docs., No. 3, p. 17; Ames, Amendments to the Const., in Am. Hist. a.s.soc., Report 1896, II., 161; Niles' Register, XVII., 289, 311, 447.] Judge Roane, chief-justice of Virginia, in a series of papers in the Richmond Enquirer, challenging the nationalistic reasoning of the court, a.s.serted that the Const.i.tution resulted from a compact between the states, [Footnote 2: Randolph- Macon College, John P. Branch Hist. Papers, II., 106-121.] and in this attack he was heartily supported by Jefferson. [Footnote 3: Jefferson, Writings (Ford's ed.), X., 140, 189, 229.] Justice Marshall, in Cohens vs. Virginia [Footnote 4: 6 Wheaton, 264.]

(1821), decided that the supreme court had appellate jurisdiction in a case decided by the state court where the Const.i.tution and the laws of the United States were involved, even though a state was a party.

Virginia's attorneys maintained, on the contrary, that the final construction of the Const.i.tution might be given by the courts of every state in the Union; and Judge Roane, whose own decision had been overturned, again appealed to his fellow-citizens in a strong series of articles. Again Jefferson denounced the consolidating tendencies of the judiciary, "which, working like gravity without any intermission, is to press us at last into one consolidated ma.s.s." Virginia entered her solemn protest against the decision, and her House of Delegates reaffirmed the argument of Virginia's counsel, and a.s.serted that neither the government of the state nor of the United States could press the other from its sphere. In effect, Virginia's position would have given the state a veto on the will of the federal government, by the protection which her courts could have extended to the individual subject to her jurisdiction under the interpretation placed by the state upon the Const.i.tution.

[Footnote: Randolph-Macon College, John P. Branch Hist. Papers, II., 28; Jefferson, Writings (Ford's ed.), IX., 184; cf. ibid., X.

pa.s.sim; Madison, Writings, III., 217-224; Ames, State Docs. on Federal Relations, No. 3. p. 15; Niles' Register, XX., 118; 6 Wheaton 385.] The leading expositor of Virginia reaction in this period was John Taylor of Caroline, the mover of the resolutions of 1798. His "Construction Construed", published in 1820, was introduced by a preface in which the editor said: "The period is indeed by no means an agreeable one. It borrows new gloom from the apathy which seems to run over so many of our sister states. The very sound of State Rights is scarcely ever heard among them; and by many of their eminent politicians is only heard to be mocked at."

Taylor himself was led to write the book by the agitation over the Missouri question and the case of McCulloch vs. Maryland. One of its purposes was to insist that sovereignty was not divided between the separate spheres of the state and federal government, but rested rather in the people of the several states. Two years later, in his "Tyranny Unmasked", Taylor developed the idea that the division of the power of the people between the federal and state governments would be nugatory if either Congress or the supreme court could exclusively determine the boundaries of power between the states and the general government. His remedy for usurpation was the "state veto," which was to be "no mere didactic lecture," but involved the right of resisting unconst.i.tutional laws. He met the difficulty that the people of one state would construe the Const.i.tution for the people of all the states, by the answer that it was the lesser evil.

[Footnote: Taylor, Tyranny Unmasked, 258, 262.] Again in 1823, in his "New Views of the Const.i.tution", he expounded the same ideas, and dwelt upon the position of the states as the defenders of separate geographical interests against oppression by the majority of the nation. He saw a grave danger in the relinquishment to Congress of the power to deal with local and dissimilar geographical interests by loose-construction legislation upon such subjects as banks, roads, ca.n.a.ls, and manufactures. It would tend to produce geographical combinations; sections by combining would exploit and oppress the minority; "Congress would become an a.s.sembly of geographical envoys from the North, the South, and the West."

Against these evils, the Const.i.tution, according to his view, had provided by confining geographical interests within state lines instead of "collecting them into one intriguing arena." The states, reposing on their sovereignty, would interpose a check to oppressive action and to the combination of sectional interests against the minority. [Footnote 1: Taylor, New Views (ed. of 1823), 261 et seq.]

Not a theory of government, however, but a political exigency called out a working principle of state rights. When the industrial policy of the government fell under the complete control of the north, and the social system of the south seemed to be menaced, state sovereignty controlled the southern policy. The increase in popularity of Clay's American system of internal improvements and a protective tariff aroused the apprehensions of the whole planting section; the struggle over the admission of Missouri taught the south the power of an unfriendly national majority; and, in 1822, a threatened insurrection of the Negroes at Charleston brought home to the whole section, and particularly to South Carolina, the dangers arising from an agitation of the question of slavery. [Footnote 2: Cf. Hart, Slavery and Abolition (Am. Nation, XVI.), chap. viii.] In the irritated condition and depression of this section, the triumph of loose construction principles and the possible election of a northern president seemed to presage not only the sacrifice of their economic interests, but even the freeing of their slaves. [Footnote 3: See the resolutions of Virginia, December 23, 1816, in Ames, State Docs. on Federal Relations, No. 5, p. 3.] The colonization society, which in its origin had been supported by southern men, became an object of denunciation by the lower south after the Missouri controversy and the insurrection of 1822. The opposition was intensified by the disposition of the society, towards the close of the period, to advocate emanc.i.p.ation, as well as the removal of the existing free Negroes. [Footnote: Cf. Hart, Slavery and Abolition (Am. Nation, XVI.), chap. xiv.]

In Virginia the doctrine of state rights was supported by the friends of Crawford, and, in general, by the older portion of the state. In her western counties, however, where a movement was in progress for a const.i.tutional convention to redistribute political power so that the populous interior should not be subordinated to the slave-holding minority of the coast, there was a strong sentiment in favor of the const.i.tutionality and expediency both of federal internal improvements and the tariff. Nevertheless, Virginia's voice was determined by the ascendancy of the old-time plantation interests. In 1825, Jefferson suggested that the legislature of Virginia should pa.s.s a set of resolutions, declaring the internal-improvement laws null and void. He advised, however, that, at the same time, the issue should be avoided by an act of the Virginia legislature validating these congressional laws [Footnote 2: Jefferson, Writings (Ford's ed.), X., 348-352; Ames, State Docs.

on Federal Relations, No. 4, p. 8.] until action could be taken on a carefully guarded proposal to amend the Const.i.tution so as to grant the right. This was the last effort of Jefferson to stay the tide of internal improvements which was sweeping opposition before it, and even he withdrew his project before it was acted on. His death (July 4, 1826) removed from Virginia the most influential advocate of state sovereignty and the greatest of the Virginia dynasty since Washington. On the same day John Adams died. The men who made the declaration of independence were pa.s.sing away, but the spirit of that epoch was reviving in the south.

South Carolina was the theatre of a conflict between the old-time forces of nationalism, of which Calhoun had been the most prominent exponent, and the newer tendencies which would safeguard the interests of the commonwealth by appealing to the doctrine of state sovereignty. [Footnote: Houston, Nullification in S. C., chap. iv. ]

At first, the conservative party was in the ascendancy. In 1820 the House of Representatives of South Carolina pa.s.sed a resolution which deprecated the system of protection as premature and pernicious, but admitted that Congress possessed the power of enacting all laws relating to commerce, and lamented the practice "of arraying upon the questions of national policy the states as distinct and independent sovereignties in opposition to, or (what is much the same thing), with a view to exercise a control over the general government"; [Footnote 2: Ames, State Docs. on Federal Relations, No. 4, p. 3.] and, as late as 1824, the same body pa.s.sed resolutions declaring that the man "who disseminates doctrines whose tendency is to give an unconst.i.tutional preponderance to State, or United States' rights, must be regarded as inimical to the forms of government under which we have hitherto so happily lived"; and that "the People have conferred no power upon their state legislature to impugn the Acts of the Federal Government or the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States." [Footnote: Ames, State Docs. on Federal Relations, No. 4, p. 6.] The state Senate was already controlled by the opponents of national power, led by Judge Smith; and the next year the Lower House also fell under their dominance.

The att.i.tude of McDuffie ill.u.s.trates the transitional conditions in South Carolina. In 1821 he published a pamphlet supporting a liberal construction of the powers of Congress, and refuting the "ultra doctrines respecting consolidation and state sovereignty." [Footnote 2: Defense of a Liberal Construction, etc., by "One of the People."

Reprinted in Philadelphia, 1831. To this pamphlet, Governor Hamilton had prefixed "an encomiastic advertis.e.m.e.nt."] In 1824, also, he supported the const.i.tutionality and expediency of the general survey act, and repudiated the idea that the state governments were "in any respect more worthy of confidence than the General Government."

[Footnote 3: Annals of Cong., 18 Cong., I Sess., 1372.] But he opposed the tariff of 1824, and in 1825 he voted against specific measures for internal improvement. Soon after this he joined the ranks of the advocates of state sovereignty, and, together with Hamilton and Hayne, so far outstripped the leaders of that faction that Judge Smith and his friends found themselves in a conservative minority against the ultra doctrines of their former opponents.

Doubtless the reversal of South Carolina's att.i.tude was accelerated by the slavery agitation which followed the emanc.i.p.ation proposition of Ohio, already mentioned, and by the contest over the Negro seamen act, [Footnote: Pa.s.sed December 21, 1822. See Ames, State Docs. on Federal Relations, No. 5, p. 12; cf. Hart, Slavery and Abolition (Am. Nation, XVI.), chap. xix.] a measure by which South Carolina, in consequence of the plot at Charleston, required that free Negroes on vessels entering a port of South Carolina should be imprisoned during the sojourn of the ship. The act brought out protests, both from other states and from Great Britain, whose subjects were imprisoned; and it was declared unconst.i.tutional by Adams's attorney-general and by the federal courts nevertheless, it remained unrepealed and continued to be enforced. [Footnote 2: McMaster, United States, V., 200-204, 417.] The Senate of South Carolina met the situation, at the close of 1824, by resolutions affirming that the duty of preventing insurrections was "paramount to all laws, all treaties, all const.i.tutions," and protesting against any claims of right of the United States to interfere with her domestic regulations in respect to the colored population. [Footnote 3: Ames, State Docs. on Federal Relations, No. 5, p. 14.]

Georgia, a few years later (December, 1827), in opposition to the Colonization Society, [Footnote 4: Ibid., 17, 19.] vehemently a.s.serted her rights, and found the remedy no longer in remonstrance, but in "a firm and determined union of the people and the states of the south" against submission to interference. Already Georgia had placed herself in the att.i.tude of resistance to the general government over the question of the Indians within the state. From the beginning of the nation, the Indians on the borders of the settled area of Georgia were a menace and an obstacle to her development. Indeed, they const.i.tuted a danger to the United States as well: their pretensions to independence and complete sovereignty over their territory were at various times utilized by adventurers from France, England, and Spain as a means of promoting the designs of these powers. [Footnote: Am. Hist. Rev., X., 249.] Jackson drove a wedge between the Indian confederacies of this region by his victories in the War of 1812 and the cessions which followed.

[Footnote: Babc.o.c.k, Am. Nationality (Am. Nation, XIII.), chaps, ii., xvii.] Although, in 1821, a large belt of territory between the Ocmulgee and Flint rivers was ceded by the Creeks to Georgia, the state saw with impatience some of the best lands still occupied by these Indians in the territory lying between the Flint and the Chattahoochee.

The spectacle of a stream of Georgia settlers crossing this rich Indian area of their own state to settle in the lands newly acquired in Alabama and Mississippi provoked Georgia's wrath, and numerous urgent calls were made upon the government to carry out the agreement made in 1802, [Footnote: Phillips, "Georgia and State Rights," in Am. Hist. a.s.soc., Report 1901, II., 34.] by completing the acquisition of these Indian lands. Responding to this demand, a treaty was made at Indian Springs in February, 1825, by which the Creeks ceded all of their lands in Georgia; but when Adams came to the presidency he was confronted with a serious situation arising from this treaty. Shortly after it had been ratified, Mclntosh, a princ.i.p.al chief of the Lower Creeks, who had signed the treaty, contrary to the rule of the tribe and in spite of the decision to sell no more land, was put to death; and the whole treaty was repudiated by the great body of the Creeks, as having been procured by fraud and made by a small minority of their nation. The difficulty arose from the fact that the various villages of these Indians were divided into opposing parties: the Upper Creeks, living chiefly along the forks of the Alabama, on the Tallapoosa and the Coosa in Alabama, const.i.tuting the more numerous branch, were determined to yield no more territory, while the princ.i.p.al chiefs of the Lower Creeks, who dwelt in western Georgia, along the Flint and Chattahoochee branches of the Appalachicola, were not unfavorable to removal.

When Governor Troup, of Georgia, determined to survey the ceded lands, he was notified that the president expected Georgia to abandon the survey until it could be done consistently with the provisions of the treaty. Although the treaty had given the Creeks until September, 1826, to vacate, Governor Troup informed General Gaines, who had been sent to preserve peace, that, as there existed "two independent parties to the question, each is permitted to decide for itself," and he announced that the line would be run and the survey effected. The defiant correspondence which now ensued between the governor and the war department doubtless reflected the personal hot-headedness of Troup himself, but Georgia supported her governor and made his defiances effective. He plainly threatened civil war in case the United States used force to prevent the survey. [Footnote: Ames, State Docs on Federal Relations, No. 3, pp.

25-31; Phillips, "Georgia and State Rights," in Am. Hist. a.s.soc., Report 1901, II., 58-60; 40 (map).]

On investigation, President Adams reached the conclusion that the treaty was wrongfully secured, and gave orders for a new negotiation. This resulted in the treaty of Washington, in January, 1826, supplemented by that of March, 1826, by which the Creek Indians ceded all of their lands within the state except a narrow strip along the western border. This treaty abrogated the treaty of Indian Springs and it provided that the Indians should remain in possession of their lands until January 1, 1827. Throughout the whole of these proceedings Georgia was bitterly incensed. Claiming that the treaty of Indian Springs became operative after its ratification, and that the lands acquired by it were thereby incorporated with Georgia and were under her sovereignty, the state denied the right of the general government to reopen the question.

"Georgia," said Troup, "is sovereign on her own soil," and he entered actively upon the survey of the tract without waiting for the date stipulated in the new treaty. When the surveyors entered the area not ceded by the later treaty, the Indians threatened to use force against them, and at the beginning of 1827 another heated controversy arose. The president warned the governor of Georgia that he should employ, if necessary, "all the means under his control to maintain the faith of the nation by carrying the treaty into effect." Having done this, he submitted the whole matter in a special message to Congress. [Footnote: February 5, 1827.

Richardson, Messages and Papers, II., 370.]

"From the first decisive act of hostility," wrote Troup to the secretary of war, "you will be considered and treated as a public enemy"; and he announced his intention to resist any military attack on the part of the United States, "the unblushing allies of the savages." [Footnote: Harden, Troup, 485.] He thereupon made preparations for liberating any surveyors who might be arrested by the United States, and for calling out the militia. In the House of Representatives, a committee recommended the purchase of the Indian t.i.tle to all lands in Georgia, and, until such cession were procured, the maintenance of the treaty of Washington by all necessary and const.i.tutional means; but the report of the Senate committee, submitted by Benton, supported the idea that the ratification of the treaty of Indian Springs vested the t.i.tle to the lands in Georgia, and reached the conclusion that no preparations should be made to coerce the state by military force. In November, 1827, the Creeks consented to a treaty extinguishing the last of their claims, and the issue was avoided.

In the mean time, the Cherokees in the north-western portion of the state gave rise to a new problem by adopting a national const.i.tution (July 26, 1827) and a.s.serting that they const.i.tuted one of the sovereign and independent nations of the earth, with complete jurisdiction over their own territory to the exclusion of the authority of any other state. [Footnote: Text in Exec. Docs., 23 Cong., 2 Sess., III., No. 91 (Serial No. 273); Ames, State Docs. on Federal Relations, No. 3, p. 36; see also House Reports, 19 Cong., 2 Sess. No. 98.] This bold challenge was met by Georgia in the same spirit which guided her policy in regard to the Creek lands. The legislature, by an act of December 20, 1828, subjected all white persons in the Cherokee territory to the laws of Georgia, and provided that in 1830 the Indians also should be subject to the laws of the state. Thus Georgia completed her a.s.sertion of sovereignty over her soil both against the United States and the Indians. But this phase of the controversy was not settled during the presidency of Adams.

CHAPTER XIX

THE TARIFF OF ABOMINATIONS AND THE SOUTH CAROLINA EXPOSITION (1827- 1828)

While the slavery agitation was inflaming the minds of South Carolina and her sister states of the cotton region, and while Georgia, half a frontier state, was flinging defiance at the general government when it checked her efforts to complete the possession of her territory, the reopening of the tariff question brought the matter of state resistance to a climax.

The tariff of 1824 was unsatisfactory to the woolen interests. In the course of the decade there had been an astonishing increase of woolen factories in New England, [Footnote: See chap. ii., above.]

and the strength of the protective movement grew correspondingly in that section. By a law which took effect at the end of 1824, England reduced the duty on wool to a penny a pound, and thus had the advantage of a cheap raw material as well as low wages, so that the American mills found themselves placed at an increasing disadvantage. Under the system of ad valorem duties, the English exporters got their goods through the United States custom-house by such under valuation as gravely diminished even the protection afforded by the tariff of 1824; and the unloading of large quant.i.ties of woolen goods by auction sales brought a cry of distress from New England. This led to an agitation to subst.i.tute specific duties in place of ad valorem, and to apply to woolens the minimum principle already applied to cottons. At the same time sheep-raisers were demanding increased protection.