The Frontier in American History Part 8

The principle is that the owners of slave property must be possessed of all the powers of government, however small their own numbers may be, to secure that property from the rapacity of an overgrown majority of white men. This principle admits of no relaxation, because the weaker the minority becomes, the greater will their need for power be according to their own doctrines.

Leigh of Chesterfield county declared:[115:2]

It is remarkable--I mention it for the curiosity of the fact--that if any evil, physical or moral, arise in any of the states south of us, it never takes a northerly direction, or taints the Southern breeze; whereas, if any plague originate in the North, it is sure to spread to the South and to invade us sooner or later; the influenza--the smallpox--the varioloid--the Hessian fly--the Circuit Court system--Universal Suffrage--all come from the North, _and they always cross above the falls of the great rivers_; below, it seems, the broad expanse of waters interposing, effectually arrests their progress.

Nothing could more clearly bring out the sense of contrast between upland and lowland Virginia, and the continued intimacy of the bond of connection between the North and its Valley and Piedmont colonies, than this unconscious testimony.

In North and South Carolina the upland South, beyond the pine barrens and the fall line, had similar grievances against the coast; but as the zone of separation was more strongly marked, the grievances were more acute. The tide of backwoods settlement flowing down the Piedmont from the north, had cut across the lines of local government and disarranged the regular course of development of the colonies from the seacoast.[116:1] Under the common practice, large counties in North Carolina and parishes in South Carolina had been projected into the unoccupied interior from the older settlements along their eastern edge.

But the Piedmont settlers brought their own social order, and could not be well governed by the older planters living far away toward the seaboard. This may be ill.u.s.trated by conditions in South Carolina. The general court in Charleston had absorbed county and precinct courts, except the minor jurisdiction of justices of the peace. This was well enough for the great planters who made their regular residence there for a part of each year; but it was a source of oppression to the up-country settlers, remote from the court. The difficulty of bringing witnesses, the delay of the law, and the costs all resulted in the escape of criminals as well as in the immunity of reckless debtors. The extortions of officials, and their occasional collusion with horse and cattle thieves, and the lack of regular administration of the law, led the South Carolina up-country men to take affairs in their own hands, and in 1764 to establish a.s.sociations to administer lynch law under the name of "Regulators." The "Scovillites," or government party, and the Regulators met in arms on the Saluda in 1769, but hostilities were averted and remedial measures pa.s.sed, which alleviated the difficulty until the Revolution.[117:1] There still remained, however, the grievance of unjust legislative representation.[117:2] Calhoun stated the condition in these words:

The upper country had no representation in the government and no political existence as a const.i.tuent portion of the state until a period near the commencement of the revolution.

Indeed, during the revolution, and until the formation of the present const.i.tution, in 1790, its political weight was scarcely felt in the government. Even then although it had become the most populous section, power was so distributed under the const.i.tution as to leave it in a minority in every department of government.

Even in 1794 it was claimed by the up-country leaders that four-fifths of the people were governed by one-fifth. Nor was the difficulty met until the const.i.tutional amendment of 1808, the effect of which was to give the control of the senate to the lower section and of the house of representatives to the upper section, thus providing a mutual veto.[117:3] This South Carolina experience furnished the historical basis for Calhoun's argument for nullification, and for the political philosophy underlying his theory of the "concurrent majority."[118:1]

This adjustment was effected, however, only after the advance of the black belt toward the interior had a.s.similated portions of the Piedmont to lowland ideals.

When we turn to North Carolina's upper country we find the familiar story, but with a more tragic ending. The local officials owed their selection to the governor and the council whom he appointed. Thus power was all concentrated in the official "ring" of the lowland area. The men of the interior resented the extortionate fees and the poll tax, which bore with unequal weight upon the poor settlers of the back country.

This tax had been continued after sufficient funds had been collected to extinguish the debt for which it was originally levied, but venal sheriffs had failed to pay it into the treasury. A report of 1770 showed at least one defaulting sheriff in every county of the province.[118:2]

This tax, which was almost the sole tax of the colony, was to be collected in specie, for the warehouse system, by which staples might be accepted, while familiar on the coast, did not apply to the interior.

The specie was exceedingly difficult to obtain; in lack of it, the farmer saw the sheriff, who owed his appointment to the dominant lowland planters, sell the lands of the delinquent to his speculative friends.

Lawyers and court fees followed.

In short, the interior felt that it was being exploited,[118:3] and it had no redress, for the legislature was so apportioned that all power rested in the old lowland region. Efforts to secure paper money failed by reason of the governor's opposition under instructions from the crown, and the currency was contracting at the very time when population was rapidly increasing in the interior.[119:1] As in New England, in the days of Shays' Rebellion, violent prejudice existed against the judiciary and the lawyers, and it must, of course, be understood that the movement was not free from frontier dislike of taxation and the restraints of law and order in general. In 1766 and 1768, meetings were held in the upper counties to organize the opposition, and an "a.s.sociation"[119:2] was formed, the members of which pledged themselves to pay no more taxes or fees until they satisfied themselves that these were agreeable to law.

The Regulators, as they called themselves, a.s.sembled in the autumn of 1768 to the number of nearly four thousand, and tried to secure terms of adjustment. In 1770 the court-house at Hillsboro was broken into by a mob. The a.s.sembly pa.s.sed some measures designed to conciliate the back country; but before they became operative, Governor Tryon's militia, about twelve hundred men, largely from the lowlands, and led by the gentry whose privileges were involved, met the motley army of the Regulators, who numbered about two thousand, in the battle of the Alamance (May, 1771). Many were killed and wounded, the Regulators dispersed, and over six thousand men came into camp and took the oath of submission to the colonial authorities. The battle was not the first battle of the Revolution, as it has been sometimes called, for it had little or no relation to the stamp act; and many of the frontiersmen involved, later refused to fight against England because of the very hatred which had been inspired for the lowland Revolutionary leaders in this battle of the Alamance. The interior of the Carolinas was a region where neighbors, during the Revolution, engaged in internecine conflicts of Tories against Whigs.

But in the sense that the battle of Alamance was a conflict against privilege, and for equality of political rights and power, it was indeed a preliminary battle of the Revolution, although fought against many of the very men who later professed Revolutionary doctrines in North Carolina. The need of recognizing the importance of the interior led to concessions in the convention of 1776 in that state. "Of the forty-four sections of the const.i.tution, thirteen are embodiments of reforms sought by the Regulators."[120:1] But it was in this period that hundreds of North Carolina backwoodsmen crossed the mountains to Tennessee and Kentucky, many of them coming from the heart of the Regulator region.

They used the device of "a.s.sociations" to provide for government in their communities.[120:2]

In the matter of apportionment, North Carolina showed the same lodgment of power in the hands of the coast, even after population preponderated in the Piedmont.[120:3]

It is needless to comment on the uniformity of the evidence which has been adduced, to show that the Old West, the interior region from New England to Georgia, had a common grievance against the coast; that it was deprived throughout most of the region of its due share of representation, and neglected and oppressed in local government in large portions of the section. The familiar struggle of West against East, of democracy against privileged cla.s.ses, was exhibited along the entire line. The phenomenon must be considered as a unit, not in the fragments of state histories. It was a struggle of interior against coast.

VI. Perhaps the most noteworthy Western activity in the Revolutionary era, aside from the aspects already mentioned, was in the part which the mult.i.tude of sects in the Old West played in securing the great contribution which the United States made to civilization by providing for complete religious liberty, a secular state with free churches.

Particularly the Revolutionary const.i.tutions of Pennsylvania and Virginia, under the influence of the back country, insured religious freedom. The effects of the North Carolina upland area to secure a similar result were noteworthy, though for the time ineffective.[121:1]

VII. As population increased in these years, the coast gradually yielded to the up-country's demands. This may be ill.u.s.trated by the transfer of the capitals from the lowlands to the fall line and Valley. In 1779, Virginia changed her seat of government from Williamsburg to Richmond; in 1790, South Carolina, from Charleston to Columbia; in 1791, North Carolina, from Edenton to Raleigh; in 1797, New York, from New York City to Albany; in 1799, Pennsylvania, from Philadelphia to Lancaster.

VIII. The democratic aspect of the new const.i.tutions was also influenced by the frontier as well as by the prevalent Revolutionary philosophy; and the demands for paper money, stay and tender laws, etc., of this period were strongest in the interior. It was this region that supported Shays' Rebellion; it was (with some important exceptions) the same area that resisted the ratification of the federal const.i.tution, fearful of a stronger government and of the loss of paper money.

IX. The interior later showed its opposition to the coast by the persistent contest against slavery, carried on in the up-country of Virginia, and North and South Carolina. Until the decade 1830-40, it was not certain that both Virginia and North Carolina would not find some means of gradual abolition. The same influence accounts for much of the exodus of the Piedmont pioneers into Indiana and Illinois, in the first half of the nineteenth century.[122:1]

X. These were the regions, also, in which were developed the desire of the pioneers who crossed the mountains, and settled on the "Western waters," to establish new States free from control by the lowlands, owning their own lands, able to determine their own currency, and in general to govern themselves in accordance with the ideals of the Old West. They were ready also, if need be, to become independent of the Old Thirteen. Vermont must be considered in this aspect, as well as Kentucky and Tennessee.[122:2]

XI. The land system of the Old West furnished precedents which developed into the land system of the trans-Alleghany West.[122:3] The squatters of Pennsylvania and the Carolinas found it easy to repeat the operation on another frontier. Preemption laws became established features. The Revolution gave opportunity to confiscate the claims of Lord Fairfax, Lord Granville, and McCulloh to their vast estates, as well as the remaining lands of the Pennsylvania proprietors. The 640 acre (or one square mile) unit of North Carolina for preemptions, and frontier land bounties, became the area awarded to frontier stations by Virginia in 1779, and the "section" of the later federal land system. The Virginia preemption right of four hundred acres on the Western waters, or a thousand for those who came prior to 1778, was, in substance, the continuation of a system familiar in the Old West.

The grants to Beverley, of over a hundred thousand acres in the Valley, conditioned on seating a family for every thousand acres, and the similar grants to Borden, Carter, and Lewis, were followed by the great grant to the Ohio Company. This company, including leading Virginia planters and some frontiersmen, asked in 1749 for two hundred thousand acres on the upper Ohio, conditioned on seating a hundred families in seven years, and for an additional grant of three hundred thousand acres after this should be accomplished. It was proposed to settle Germans on these lands.

The Loyal Land Company, by order of the Virginia council (1749), was authorized to take up eight hundred thousand acres west and north of the southern boundary of Virginia, on condition of purchasing "rights" for the amount within four years. The company sold many tracts for 3 per hundred acres to settlers, but finally lost its claim. The Mississippi Company, including in its membership the Lees, Washingtons, and other great Virginia planters, applied for two and one-half million acres in the West in 1769. Similar land companies of New England origin, like the Susquehanna Company and Lyman's Mississippi Company, exhibit the same tendency of the Old West on the northern side. New England's Ohio Company of a.s.sociates, which settled Marietta, had striking resemblances to town proprietors.

These were only the most noteworthy of many companies of this period, and it is evident that they were a natural outgrowth of speculations in the Old West. Washington, securing military bounty land claims of soldiers of the French and Indian War, and selecting lands in West Virginia until he controlled over seventy thousand acres for speculation, is an excellent ill.u.s.tration of the tendency. He also thought of colonizing German Palatines upon his lands. The formation of the Transylvania and Vandalia companies were natural developments on a still vaster scale.[124:1]

XII. The final phase of the Old West, which I wish merely to mention, in conclusion, is its colonization of areas beyond the mountains. The essential unity of the movement is brought out by a study of how New England's Old West settled northern Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, the Adirondacks, central and Western New York, the Wyoming Valley (once organized as a part of Litchfield, Connecticut), the Ohio Company's region about Marietta, and Connecticut's Western Reserve on the sh.o.r.es of Lake Erie; and how the pioneers of the Great Valley and the Piedmont region of the South crossed the Alleghanies and settled on the Western Waters. Daniel Boone, going from his Pennsylvania home to the Yadkin, and from the Yadkin to Tennessee and Kentucky, took part in the whole process, and later in its continuation into Missouri.[124:2] The social conditions and ideals of the Old West powerfully shaped those of the trans-Alleghany West.

The important contrast between the spirit of individual colonization, resentful of control, which the Southern frontiersmen showed, and the spirit of community colonization and control to which the New England pioneers inclined, left deep traces on the later history of the West.[125:1] The Old West diminished the importance of the town as a colonizing unit, even in New England. In the Southern area, efforts to legislate towns into existence, as in Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia, failed. They faded away before wilderness conditions. But in general, the Northern stream of migration was communal, and the Southern individual. The difference which existed between that portion of the Old West which was formed by the northward colonization, chiefly of the New England Plateau (including New York), and that portion formed by the southward colonization of the Virginia Valley and the Southern Piedmont was reflected in the history of the Middle West and the Mississippi Valley.[125:2]

FOOTNOTES:

[67:1] _Proceedings of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin for 1908._ Reprinted with the permission of the Society.

[68:1] For the settled area in 1660, see the map by Lois Mathews in Channing, "United Stales" (N. Y., 1905), i, p. 510; and by Albert Cook Myers in Avery, "United States" (Cleveland, 1905), ii, following p. 398.

In Channing, ii, following p. 603, is Marion F. Lansing's map of settlement in 1760, which is on a rather conservative basis, especially the part showing the interior of the Carolinas.

Contemporaneous maps of the middle of the eighteenth century, useful in studying the progress of settlement, are: Mitch.e.l.l, "Map of the British Colonies" (1755); Evans, "Middle British Colonies" (1758); Jefferson and Frye, "Map of Virginia" (1751 and 1755).

On the geographical conditions, see maps and text in Powell, "Physiographic Regions" (N. Y., 1896), and Willis, "Northern Appalachians," in "Physiography of the United States" (N. Y., 1896), pp.

73-82, 169-176, 196-201.

[70:1] See Osgood, "American Colonies" (N. Y., 1907), iii, chap. iii.

[70:2] See chapter ii, _ante_.

[70:3] Sheldon, "Deerfield" (Deerfield, Ma.s.s., 1895), i, p. 288.

[70:4] Parkman, "Frontenac" (Boston, 1898), p. 390; compare his description of Deerfield in 1704, in "Half Century of Conflict" (Boston, 1898), i, p. 55.

[72:1] Hanna, "Scotch Irish" (N. Y. and London, 1902), ii, pp. 17-24.

[72:2] "Half Century of Conflict," ii, pp. 214-234.

[72:3] "American Husbandry" (London, 1775), i, p. 47.

[73:1] For the extent of New England settlements in 1760, compared with 1700, see the map in Channing, "United States," ii, at end of volume.

[74:1] Schafer, "Land Grants for Education," Univ. of Wis. _Bulletin_ (Madison, 1902), chap. iv.

[75:1] On New England's land system see Osgood, "American Colonies" (N.

Y., 1904), i, chap. xi; and Egleston, "Land System of the New England Colonies," Johns Hopkins Univ. _Studies_ (Baltimore, 1886), iv. Compare the account of Virginia, about 1696, in "Ma.s.s. Hist. Colls." (Boston, 1835), 1st series, v, p. 129, for a favorable view of the New England town system; and note the probable influence of New England's system upon Virginia's legislation about 1700. See chapter ii, _ante_.

[76:1] Amelia C. Ford, "Colonial Precedents of our National Land System," citing Ma.s.sachusetts Bay, House of Rep. "Journal," 1715, pp. 5, 22, 46; Hutchinson, "History of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay" (London, 1768), ii, p. 331; Holland, "Western Ma.s.sachusetts" (Springfield, 1855), pp. 66, 169.

[76:2] "Conn. Colon. Records" (Hartford, 1874), viii, p. 134.

[77:1] Holland, "Western Ma.s.sachusetts," p. 197. See the comments of Hutchinson in his "History of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay," ii, pp. 331, 332.

Compare the steps of Connecticut men in 1753 and 1755 to secure a land grant in Wyoming Valley, Pennsylvania, for the Susquehanna Company, and the Connecticut governor's remark that there was no unappropriated land in the latter colony--"Pa. Colon. Records" (Harrisburg, 1851), v, p.

771; "Pa. Archives," 2d series, xviii, contains the important doc.u.ments, with much valuable information on the land system of the Wyoming Valley region. See also General Lyman's projects for a Mississippi colony in the Yazoo delta area--all indicative of the pressure for land and the speculative spirit.