The Land We Live In Part 8

"Oh G.o.d, it is all over!" exclaimed Lord North, on hearing that Cornwallis had surrendered. And it was all over, although we have Franklin's authority that George III. continued to hope for a revival of his sovereignty over America "on the same terms as are now making with Ireland." These hopes were soon dissipated, and a treaty of peace was finally signed at Paris, September 23, 1783. The British troops sailed away from New York on November 25, and General Washington, after a tender parting with his officers, resigned his commission. A great number of Tory refugees departed from New York with the British, but it is doubtful whether their lot was happier than that of those who remained to accept the new order of things. It is only necessary to glance at the diary of Hutchinson, the royalist governor of Ma.s.sachusetts, to perceive that, even under the most favorable circ.u.mstances, the situation of the exiled Tories was miserable indeed. Many of them settled in Canada, there to hand down to their descendants feelings of antipathy which, in America, have long been discarded. Many of them wisely returned to the United States, and were magnanimously forgiven and received as brethren and citizens. No voice was raised to plead more eloquently in their behalf than that of Patrick Henry. "I feel no objection," he exclaimed, "to the return of those deluded people. They have, to be sure, mistaken their own interests most wofully, and most wofully have they suffered the punishment due to their offences. * * * Afraid of them!--what, sir--shall we who have laid the proud British lion at our feet, now be afraid of his whelps?"

FOURTH PERIOD.

Union.

CHAPTER XX.

Condition of the United States at the Close of the Revolution--New England Injured and New York Benefited Commercially by the Struggle-- Luxury of City Life--Americans an Agricultural People--The Farmer's Home--Difficulty in Traveling--Contrast Between North and South--Southern Aristocracy--Northern Great Families--White Servitude--The Western Frontier--Karly Settlers West of the Mountains--A Hardy Population-- Disappearance of the Colonial French--The Ordinance of 1787--Flood of Emigration Beyond the Ohio.

Peace with Great Britain left the United States free and independent, but burdened with the expenses of the war, and agitated by the problems which independence presented. The soldiers of the Continental Army went back to their firesides and their fields, and trade began to show signs of revival. New England's commercial interests had received a serious blow from the Revolution, while New York city, occupied by the British throughout the war, the headquarters of the royal forces with their lavish expenditures, and its commerce protected and convoyed by the British fleet, was benefited instead of injured by the struggle. The merchants of New York, whether attached or not at heart to the royalist cause, put business before patriotism, while the flag of St. George floated over their city, and urged the British to severer measures against the "rebels" in order that New York's mercantile interests might be promoted and safeguarded.[1] Apart from natural advantages, next in importance to the Erie Ca.n.a.l as a cause of New York's leading commercial position is the fact that the British were in possession of the city during the Revolution.

[1] A number of years ago the Hon. William M. Evarts delivered a speech before the New York Chamber of Commerce in which he congratulated that body on its patriotism "during the Revolution."

Having been allowed to examine the records of the Chamber for the revolutionary period, I wrote an article which appeared over my initials in the New York _Sun_ pointing out that the Chamber, as shown by its own records, had been ultra-loyal, instead of patriotic.--_H. M._

There was considerable luxury in city life then as now. "By Revolutionary times love of dress everywhere prevailed throughout the State of New York," says Mrs. Alice Morse Earle, "a love of dress which caused great extravagance and was noted by all travelers."[2] "If there is a town on the American continent," said the Chevalier de Crevecoeur, "where English luxury displayed its follies it is in New York." Philadelphia was not far behind New York in extravagance, notwithstanding Quaker traditions, while Boston, rich in solid wealth, was more conservative in displaying it, and retained in appearance at least something of Puritan simplicity.

[2] Costumes of Colonial Times.

The urban residents of those days were, however, insignificant in numbers as compared with the total population. The Americans were an agricultural people, and they were a self-dependent people. The articles of clothing needed in the farmer's home were manufactured in the home; the tailor went around from house to house making into suits the cloth which the family had woven; the school teacher "boarded around" as an equivalent for salary that might otherwise have been paid in worthless currency, and the simple requirements of rural existence were supplied in a large degree by trade and barter without the use of what pa.s.sed as money. The farmer's cottage stood upon a level sward of green. The kitchen was the living-room, and there the family spent their time when not out at work or retired to rest. It was the largest apartment in the house, and its great fire-place, with a ruddy back-log and pine knots flaming and sparkling on the iron-dogs, offered a most cheerful welcome on a New England winter's night. The baking oven, heated with fine-split dry wood, cooked the frugal but savory meal, which was served up on a solid old-fashioned table, around which the household gathered, first giving thanks to the Giver of all. When not busied with other duties, the housewife pressed with measured round the treadles of the loom, as she twilled the web she was weaving; and as the shades of evening descended the sonorous hum of the spinning-wheel gave token to the young man on courtship intent that the daughter of the house was at home. From the kitchen a door opened into the best room, a cheerless sort of place only thrown open on special occasions, and not to compare in comfort with the kitchen, its high-backed settle and its genial fire, whose glowing ashes seemed to reflect the warmer glow of loving eyes. Other doors from the kitchen opened into sleeping-rooms, although in the larger houses the family usually slept upstairs. The well was used for cooling purposes as well as water supply, and the old oaken bucket suspended from the well-sweep by means of a slender pole, invited the pa.s.sing stranger to quaff nature's wholesome beverage. Wheeled vehicles were not often seen in the rural districts, horses being commonly used for locomotion. The difficulty of traveling discouraged intercourse between different communities, and a journey from Boston to New York, taking a week by stage-coach, and three or four days by sailing vessel, was a more momentous undertaking than a voyage to Europe now. Few traveled for pleasure. Few took any active interest in public affairs beyond their own neighborhood, or at most their own State, and the bond of the confederation rested loosely on communities now no longer united by the apprehension of common danger.

Between the North and the South the contrast was already ominous of future strife. The Southern planter lived like an aristocrat surrounded by servants and slaves, dispensing hospitality according to his means after the fashion of the British n.o.bility. Cotton had not yet poured the gold of England into the lap of the South, but tobacco held its own as a substantial basis of wealth. In the North, on the other hand, the tiller of the soil was usually its owner, a.s.sisted sometimes by indentured servants or slaves, but never himself above the toil which he exacted from others. The North, too, had its great families, descendants of patroons and others who had received large grants of land and enjoyed exceptional privileges, and were now growing in wealth with the increasing value of their property; but the aristocratic Northern families were gradually losing political power and influence, and sinking toward the level of the people; whereas in the South the aristocratic element was arrogating more and more the control of State affairs, and the representation of Southern States in the councils of the nation. In the North also equality was promoted by the potent influence of the Revolution in breaking up the system of servile white labor. Master and man were summoned for the defence of their country; they fought, they suffered and endured together the same privations for a common cause.

Distinctions of cla.s.s were obliterated by the blood that flowed freely for the freedom of all, and what remained of ancient aristocratic prejudice was yet more thoroughly undermined by the example of the great social upheaval in France. Nevertheless the system of white servitude was not entirely abolished until long after the close of the eighteenth century, immigrants to this country frequently selling themselves as "redemptioners" to pay the cost of their pa.s.sage. The limits of this form of service seldom exceeded seven years. No taint was apparently attached to it, and many a worthy family had a "redemptioner" for its first American ancestor.

Looking to the western frontier just after the Revolution, and in particular the forks of the Ohio, we see a population very different in character from that of the older settlements. The peace-loving Quaker clung to the eastern counties, where life and property were secured from raid and reprisal, and formed his ideas of the Indian character and deserts from the red men, who, either Christianized or demoralized, preferred the grudging charity of civilization to the rude and frugal spoils of the chase, or the blood-stained rapine of war. This specimen of Indian was usually so harmless, in some instances perhaps so deserving, that the well-meaning Quaker learned to receive with discredit the stories of horror from the frontier, and discouraged with his voice and influence every step toward the subjection of the hostile Indian and his European allies. Emigrants were forbidden, under stern penalties, to encroach on the Indian domain, and pet.i.tions from invaded settlements for arms and a.s.sistance, were met with cold indifference or positive refusal.

The men and women who, in face of such discouragement, cast their lot beyond the mountains, must have been a hardy set indeed, and made of stuff not likely to yield in a wrestle with wild nature and wilder humanity.

The early inhabitants of that frontier region were of st.u.r.dy Scotch and Irish stock. The troublous political times in their native countries doubtless had much to do with their emigration hither. The star of the Stuart line had set never to rise again, and its bright and hopeless flicker, in the days of '45, was extinguished in the blood of Scotland's n.o.blest sons. But while order reigned, content was far from prevailing, and many a brave heart sought, on the distant sh.o.r.e of America, to forget the anguish of the past in the building of a prosperous future. With a final sigh for "Lochaber No More," the Highlander turned his gaze from the lochs and glens of his fathers, and crossed the ocean to that new land of promise where every man might be a laird, and a farm might be had for the asking, where no Culloden would remind him of the fate of his kindred, and his children could grow up far from the barbarous laws that crushed out the spirit of the ancient clans. Along the banks of the Monongahela those Scotch and Irish settlers built their rude cabins under the guns of Fort Pitt, guarded--strange irony of fate--from a savage enemy by the very flag which flaunted oppression in their native Britain and Ireland. That they learned to love their adopted land who can question? A Virginian cavalier, accustomed to the graces and _politesse_ of a slave-owning aristocracy, saw fit to sneer at their humble abodes, and their lack of the finer accessories of civilization, forgetting that a cabin is more often than a palace the cradle of the purest patriotism, and that as true American hearts beat in those huts in the wilderness as in the courtly precincts of Richmond.

But the "poor mechanics and laborers" exercised a tremendous influence on the destinies of the young, and as yet disunited republic. They were freemen. Pittsburg, the outpost of civilization, had no slave within sight of its redoubts, and the spirit of freedom which hovered there, found rest and refreshment for its broader flight toward the great northwest. The decision of 1780, which saved Pittsburg to Pennsylvania, preserved it as a stronghold of freedom and of free labor, and now it far surpa.s.ses in industry, wealth and population the then slave-labor capital of the Old Dominion.

It is an interesting fact that the colonial French left no impress on the site where they made such a gallant stand for New France. They have vanished as completely as the Indian. In Detroit, in St. Louis, French ancestry can be traced in families of high position and honorable lineage. Such families are to those cities what the Knickerbockers are to New York. They give a gracious flavor to society; they are a link between the dim and heroic past and the dashing, eager, practical present; they add a dreamy fascination to the social landscape, like the lingering haze of morning illumined by the rays of the sun fast mounting to zenith.

Where Duquesne stood, neither track nor mark remains of the volatile, daring and glory-loving race whose lily flag greeted the bearers of brave Beaujeu's remains from the fatal field of Braddock. No authentic trace has been discovered even of the fortifications which they erected, and Fort Duquesne is known only by its tragic place in American history.

The ordinance of 1787, creating the Northwestern Territory, and throwing it open for settlement, at once induced a large emigration to the lands beyond the Ohio. Descendants of the Puritans mingled in the pioneer throng with rangers from Virginia and backwoodsmen from Pennsylvania. The frontiersman in hunting-shirt and moccasins blazed a path for the New Englander in broadcloth coat, velvet collar, bell-crowned hat and heavy boots. These emigrants all possessed valuable qualities for the building up of new States, and they all displayed in the trials which immediately beset them the courage which had carried the nation successfully through the war for independence. They were entering upon a vast and fertile domain which the aboriginal possessors, notwithstanding treaties, did not propose to abandon, and which was the scene of sanguinary conflict before it was finally surrendered.

CHAPTER XXI.

The Spirit of Disunion--Shays' Rebellion--A National Government Necessary --Adoption of the Const.i.tution--Tariff and Internal Revenue--The Whiskey Insurrection--President Washington Calls Out the Military--Insurgents Surrender--"The Dreadful Night"--Hamilton's Inquisition.

The spirit of disunion was brewing; the people were tax-ridden, the States without credit and the prevailing discontent found expression in riot and rebellion. The insurrection of Daniel Shays and his followers in Ma.s.sachusetts, the disturbances in western North Carolina and other outbreaks in various parts of the country were but symptoms of radical weakness in the body politic, and of the complete failure of the loose-jointed confederation to command the confidence of the people and maintain the credit of the nation. It became evident that union was as vitally important in peace as in war; that national burdens could only be sustained by a national government, and that the welfare of trade and commerce required one system of interstate laws enforced by the united power of all the States. The adoption of the Federal Const.i.tution created a nation; it created a free government worth all that it had cost; it realized the dream of Franklin and the prediction of Adams; it made possible the American Republic of to-day, and the great work was fittingly crowned with the election of George Washington as first President.

The first business of the new government was to establish the public credit. Alexander Hamilton, Washington's Secretary of the Treasury, proposed with this object a tariff on imports, and a tax on whiskey. To the former the people submitted readily enough; the latter provoked an insurrection which for some time threatened to be formidable. The farmers of the western counties of Pennsylvania--Westmoreland, Fayette, Washington and Allegheny--having no market for grain, in the decade following the Revolution, on account of the absence of large settlements in their vicinity, and the lack of facilities to transport to more distant places, were from necessity compelled to reduce the bulk of their grain by converting it into whiskey. A horse could carry two kegs of eight gallons each, worth about fifty cents per gallon on the western, and one dollar on the eastern side of the mountains, and return with a little iron and salt, the former worth fifteen to twenty cents per pound, the latter five dollars per bushel, at Pittsburg. The still was therefore the necessary appendage of every farm, where the farmer was able to procure it; if he was not he carried his grain to the more wealthy to be distilled. To the large majority of these farmers excise laws were peculiarly odious. The State of Pennsylvania made some attempt, during and just after the Revolution, to enforce an excise law; but without effect. A man named Graham, who had kept a public house in Philadelphia, accepted the appointment of Collector for the western counties. He was a.s.sailed, his head shaven and he was threatened with death. Other collectors were equally unsuccessful.

The United States excise law was enacted in March, 1791. While the bill was before Congress, the subject was taken up by the Pennsylvania Legislature, then in session, and resolutions were pa.s.sed in strong terms against the law, and requesting the senators and representatives, by a vote of thirty-six to eleven, to oppose its pa.s.sage; the minority voting on the principle that it was improper to interfere with the action of the Federal Government, and not from approval of the measure. The law imposed a tax of from nine to twenty-five cents per gallon, according to strength, upon spirits distilled from grain. To secure the collection of the duties, suitable regulations were made. Inspection districts were established, one or more in each State, with an inspector for each.

Distillers were to furnish at the nearest inspection office full descriptions of their buildings, which were always subject to examination by a person appointed for that purpose, who was to gauge and brand the casks; duties to be paid before removal. But to save trouble to small distillers, not in any town or village, they were allowed to pay an annual tax of sixty cents per gallon on the capacity of the still.

Such a measure could not fail to be intensely unpopular, especially among the small farmers to whom the whiskey derived from their grain was the princ.i.p.al source of income and support. To the large distillers the tax was not altogether odious, as they comprehended that the new law would add greatly to their trade by cutting off their lesser rivals, and securing the manufacture of spirits to the well-to-do and well-established few. On the same ground distillers to-day are very generally opposed to the removal of the internal revenue tax on spirits.

But popular clamor carried all before it, and it would have been unsafe for any one to openly avow himself in favor of the excise. At a meeting held in Pittsburg, on the seventh of September, 1791, resolutions were adopted denouncing the tax as "operating on a domestic manufacture--a manufacture not equal through the States. It is insulting to the feelings of the people to have their vessels marked, houses painted and ransacked, to be subject to informers gaining by the occasional delinquency of others. It is a bad precedent, tending to introduce the excise laws of Great Britain and of countries where the liberty, property and even the morals of the people are sported with to gratify particular men in their ambitious and interested measures." The duties were likewise denounced as injurious to agricultural interests.

So far as refusal to obey the excise law, and defiance of the Federal officers empowered to enforce it, const.i.tuted rebellion, the western counties of Pennsylvania were in a condition of rebellion for over three years. President Washington was patient; the Congress was conciliatory; the State authorities were more than tolerant. General John Neville, a man of great wealth and well-deserved popularity, accepted the office of Inspector of the Revenue. Had he been discovered guilty of a monstrous crime, his popularity could not have more rapidly waned. Albert Gallatin, Brackenridge and other men, respected not only in Pennsylvania, but wherever known in the country at large, took counsel, and appeared to take sides with the mult.i.tude in their opposition to the national law.

Their motives have been variously interpreted, according to prejudice or favor, but Marshall, in his "Life of Washington," gave the fair and reasonable view of their position when he said that "men of property and intelligence who had contributed to kindle the flame, under the common error of being able to regulate its heat, trembled at the extent of the conflagration. But it had pa.s.sed the limits a.s.signed to it, and was no longer subject to their control."

The crowning outrage was the burning of Inspector Neville's house, in July, 1794. The inspector made his escape to Pittsburg. He and the United States Marshal were compelled to flee from the town, and on the first of August following, seven thousand armed men a.s.sembled at Braddock's Field and marched from thence into Pittsburg. All these men were not hostile to the laws and authority of the United States; many were compelled by threats of violence to go with the majority; not a few were present to restrain the reckless from breaking into open insurrection.

President Washington deemed that the time for action had come. He called upon the States of New Jersey and Pennsylvania for a force of militia sufficient to crush the insurrection, while at the same time he proclaimed amnesty to all who should certify by their signatures their readiness to sustain the government. The insurgents suddenly awakened to the knowledge that they had now the whole power of the United States against them, directed by that arm invulnerable alike to Indian, Frenchman and Briton. Mult.i.tudes came to their senses, and signed the pledge that saved them from punishment. Among these were many who had committed the gravest disorders. The United States forces, however, marched into the western counties, and the disturbed region was prostrate under military law.

Old residents of Pittsburg have not yet forgotten the traditions of "The Dreadful Night"--the thirteenth of November, 1794. Without a moment's warning hundreds of citizens were arrested in Allegheny and the adjoining counties, dragged from their beds, and hurried away, half naked, from their frantic wives and weeping children. The arrests, in numerous instances, were attended with every circ.u.mstance of barbarity short of death. Prisoners were goaded, with shoeless and bleeding feet, on the road to Pittsburg; numbers of them were tied back to back, and thrown into a wet cellar as a place of detention. One man, whose child was dying, came forward voluntarily when the arrests were being made, hoping that humanity would prompt his release on a statement of his condition.

He, too, was tied, and thrown in with the rest. When he obtained his liberty his child was dead. Among the prisoners was George Robinson, chief burgess of Pittsburg, a peaceable law-abiding man, who had never taken any share in the agitation against the excise. Brigadier-General White appears to have been chiefly responsible for the brutal treatment of the captives. When one of them, a veteran of the Revolution, lagged behind, owing to physical infirmity, White ordered him fastened to a horse's tail, and dragged along. The cruel command was not obeyed. On the following day, of about three hundred prisoners, all but ten were discharged, there being no evidence against the others. Of eighteen alleged offenders who were sent to Philadelphia, and marched through the streets, with the label "Insurgent" on their hats, but two were found guilty of crime. One was convicted of arson, another of robbing the United States mail, when the mail was intercepted with a view of capturing letters from the Federal officers in the western counties to the authorities at the capital. In both instances President Washington granted first a reprieve, then a pardon.

Alexander Hamilton held an inquisitorial investigation to ascertain whether a blow had been meditated at the republic, and its form of government, under the guise of opposition to the revenue. He was evidently satisfied that there was no deeper plot than appeared on the surface, and that, apart from their whiskey-stills, the hearts of the West Pennsylvanians beat true to the Union.

Independence Vindicated.

CHAPTER XXII.

Arrogance of France--Americans and Louis XVI--Genet Defies Washington-- The People Support the President--War With the Indians--Defeat of St.

Clair--Indians State Their Case--General Wayne Defeats the Savages--Jay's Treaty--Retirement of Washington--His Character--His Military Genius-- Washington as a Statesman--His Views on Slavery--His Figure in History.

The American nation had yet to win something besides independence, something without which independence would be a burden and a mockery--the respect of other nations; and in dealings between nations fear and respect are closely akin. The English still occupied posts within territory claimed by the United States, the Indians denied the right of the Americans to lands beyond the Ohio, and republican France, having beheaded her king, regarded the United States as a va.s.sal on account of the debt of grat.i.tude which America owed to that king. War with England had given place to jealous and intolerant rivalry, and friendship with France had been succeeded by an arrogant a.s.sumption of patronage and almost of suzerainty menacing to our national independence. Such were the clouds that rose above the ocean horizon, while the western sky was darkened by the shadow of Indian hostility as yet far from contemptible, and directed by able chieftains, like Little Turtle, more than a match in the field and in diplomacy for most of their white antagonists. These were the circ.u.mstances which made it apparent to Americans that the Federal Const.i.tution had come not a day too soon, which welded the nation together like an armor-plate of steel against foes on every hand, and taught the need of union as it never could have been taught amid surroundings of prosperity and peace.

The French Revolution acquitted the American people of all obligations to France. It was not to the French people, but to the French king that Americans owed the a.s.sistance without which the war for independence might have ended in calamity, and with the exception of the Marquis de Lafayette the Frenchmen who were conspicuous as servants of the king in aiding the American cause, were foes, not friends of the Revolution. The French nation, as such, had no more to do with casting the power of France into the scales on the side of America than the people of Russia had to do with their czar's championship of Bulgaria. Had it been in the power of Americans to have saved Louis XVI. from the scaffold, they would have shown cruel ingrat.i.tude not to have interfered in his behalf. It was a most arrogant and baseless a.s.sumption on the part of the French democracy to claim credit for what the Bourbon king had done in sending his army and navy to these sh.o.r.es and supplying funds to equip and maintain our troops. It is true that the men he sent here were Frenchmen, and that the money came from the pockets of the people of France, but his will directed the troops, and diverted to American use the funds of which France was sorely in need. To Louis XVI., to his great minister, Vergennes, to Rochambeau and Lafayette, American independence was due, so far as it was due to any human source outside of America. Rochambeau and Lafayette both narrowly escaped the fate of their king, and Vergennes died before the Revolution which would have made him either a victim or an emigre.[1] So much for the claims of the first French republic that America was ungrateful in not arraying its forces against embattled Europe in defence of the men who slew Louis XVI. for crimes which others committed.

[1] During the reign of terror Rochambeau was arrested at his estate near Vendome, conducted to Paris, thrown into the Conciergerie and condemned to death. When the car came to convey a number of victims to the guillotine, he was about to mount it, but the official in charge seeing it full thrust him back. "Stand back, old marshal,"

cried he, roughly, "your turn will come by and by." A sudden change in political affairs saved his life, and enabled him to return to his home near Vendome. Rochambeau survived the Revolution, and received the grand cross of the Legion of Honor and a marshal's pension from the great Napoleon.--_From Irving's Life of Washington._