The Winning of the West Volume IV Part 14

Life in a Log Cabin.

"I know of no scene in civilized life more primitive than such a cabin hearth as that of my mother. In the morning, a buckeye back-log, a hickory forestick, resting on stone and irons, with a johnny-cake, on a clean ash board, set before the fire to bake; a frying pan, with its long handle resting on a split-bottom turner's chair, sending out its peculiar music, and the tea-kettle swung from a wooden lug pole, with myself setting the table or turning the meat, or watching the johnny-cake, while she sat nursing the baby in the corner and telling the little ones to hold still and let their sister Lizzie dress them.

Then came blowing the conch-sh.e.l.l for father in the field, the howling of old Lion, the gathering round the table, the blessing, the dull clatter of pewter spoons and pewter basins, the talk about the crop and stock, the inquiry whether Dan'l (the boy) could be spared from the house, and the general arrangements for the day. Breakfast over, my function was to provide the sauce for dinner; in winter, to open the potato or turnip hole, and wash what I took out; in spring, to go into the field and collect the greens; in summer and fall, to explore the truck patch, our little garden. If I afterwards went to the field my household labors ceased until night; if not, they continued through the day. As often as possible mother would engage in making pumpkin pies, in which I generally bore a part, and one of these more commonly graced the supper than the dinner table. My pride was in the labors of the field.

Mother did the spinning. The standing dye-stuff was the inner bark of the white walnut, from which we obtained that peculiar and permanent shade of dull yellow, the b.u.t.ternut [so common and typical in the clothing of the backwoods farmer]. Oak bark, with copper as a mordant, when father had money to purchase it, supplied the ink with which I learned to write. I drove the horses to and from the range, and salted them. I tended the sheep, and hunted up the cattle in the woods."

[Footnote: _Do_., pp. 90, in, etc., condensed.] This was the life of the thrifty pioneers, whose children more than held their own in the world.

The shiftless men without ambition and without thrift, lived in laziness and filth; their eating and sleeping arrangements were as unattractive as those of an Indian wigwam.

Peculiar Qualities of the Pioneers.

Native Americans did Best.

The pleasures and the toils of the life were alike peculiar. In the wilder parts the loneliness and the fierce struggle with squalid poverty, and with the tendency to revert to savage conditions, inevitably produced for a generation or two a certain falling off from the standard of civilized communities. It needed peculiar qualities to insure success, and the pioneers were almost exclusively native Americans. The Germans were more thrifty and prosperous, but they could not go first into the wilderness. [Footnote: Michaux, p. 63, etc.] Men fresh from England rarely succeeded. [Footnote: Parkinson's "Tour in America, 1798-1800,"

pp. 504, 588, etc. Parkinson loathed the Americans. A curious example of how differently the same facts will affect different observers may be gained by contrasting his] The most pitiable group of emigrants that reached the West at this time was formed by the French [Footnote: observations with those of his fellow Englishman, John Davis, whose trip covered precisely the same period; but Parkinson's observations as to the extreme difficulty of an Old Country farmer getting on in the backwoods regions are doubtless mainly true.] who came to found the town of Gallipolis, on the Ohio. These were mostly refugees from the Revolution, who had been taken in by a swindling land company. They were utterly unsuited to life in the wilderness, being gentlemen, small tradesmen, lawyers, and the like. Unable to grapple with the wild life into which they found themselves plunged, they sank into shiftless poverty, not one in fifty showing industry and capacity to succeed.

Congress took pity upon them and granted them twenty-four thousand acres in Scioto County, the tract being known as the French grant; but no gift of wild land was able to insure their prosperity. By degrees they were absorbed into the neighboring communities, a few succeeding, most ending their lives in abject failure. [Footnote: At.w.a.ter, p. 159; Michaux, p. 122, etc.]

Trouble with Land t.i.tles.

The trouble these poor French settlers had with their lands was far from unique. The early system of land sales in the West was most unwise. In Kentucky and Tennessee the grants were made under the laws of Virginia and North Carolina, and each man purchased or preempted whatever he could, and surveyed it where he liked, with a consequent endless confusion of t.i.tles. The National Government possessed the disposal of the land in the Northwest and in Mississippi; and it avoided the pitfall of unlimited private surveying; but it made little effort to prevent swindling by land companies, and none whatever to people the country with actual settlers. Congress granted great tracts of lands to companies and to individuals, selling to the highest bidder, whether or not he intended personally to occupy the country. Public sales were thus conducted by compet.i.tion, and Congress even declined to grant to the men in actual possession the right of pre-emption at the average rate of sale, refusing the request of settlers in both Mississippi and Indiana that they should be given the first choice to the lands which they had already partially cleared. [Footnote: American State Papers, Public Lands, I., 261; also pp. 71, 74, 99, etc.] It was not until many years later that we adopted the wise policy of selling the National domain in small lots to actual occupants.

Sullen Jealousy of the Pioneers.

Clouded Economic Notions.

The pioneer in his constant struggle with poverty was p.r.o.ne to look with puzzled anger at those who made more money than he did, and whose lives were easier. The backwoods farmer or planter of that day looked upon the merchant with much the same suspicion and hostility now felt by his successor for the banker or the railroad magnate. He did not quite understand how it was that the merchant, who seemed to work less hard than he did, should make more money; and being ignorant and suspicious, he usually followed some hopelessly wrong-headed course when he tried to remedy his wrongs. Sometimes these efforts to obtain relief took the form of resolutions not to purchase from merchants or traders such articles as woollens, linens, cottons, hats, or shoes, unless the same could be paid for in articles grown or manufactured by the farmers themselves. This particular move was taken because of the alarming scarcity of money, and was aimed particularly at the inhabitants of the Atlantic States. It was of course utterly ineffective. [Footnote: Marshall, II., p. 325.] A much less wise and less honest course was that sometimes followed of refusing to pay debts when the latter became inconvenient and pressing. [Footnote: The inhabitants of Natchez, in the last days of the Spanish dominion, became inflamed with hostility to their creditors, the merchants, and insisted upon what were practically stay laws being enacted in their favor. Gayarre and Claiborne.]

Vices of the Militia System.

The frontier virtue of independence and of impatience of outside direction found a particularly vicious expression in the frontier abhorrence of regular troops, and advocacy of a hopelessly feeble militia system. The people were foolishly convinced of the efficacy of their militia system, which they loudly proclaimed to be the only proper mode of national defence. [Footnote: Marshall, II., p. 279.] While in the actual presence of the Indians the stern necessities of border warfare forced the frontiersmen into a certain semblance of discipline. As soon as the immediate pressure was relieved, however, the whole militia system sank into a mere farce. At certain stated occasions there were musters for company or regimental drill. These training days were treated as occasions for frolic and merry-making. There were pony races and wrestling matches, with unlimited fighting, drunkenness, and general uproar. Such musters were often called, in derision, cornstalk drills, because many of the men, either having no guns or neglecting to bring them, drilled with cornstalks instead. The officers were elected by the men and when there was no immediate danger of war they were chosen purely for their social qualities. For a few years after the close of the long Indian struggle there were here and there officers who had seen actual service and who knew the rudiments of drill; but in the days of peace the men who had taken part in Indian fighting cared but little to attend the musters, and left them more and more to be turned into mere scenes of horseplay.

Lack of Military Training.

The frontier people of the second generation in the West thus had no military training whatever, and though they possessed a skeleton militia organization, they derived no benefit from it, because their officers were worthless, and the men had no idea of practising self-restraint or of obeying orders longer than they saw fit. The frontiersmen were personally brave, but their courage was entirely untrained, and being unsupported by discipline, they were sure to be disheartened at a repulse, to be distrustful of themselves and their leaders, and to be unwilling to persevere in the face of danger and discouragement. They were hardy, and physically strong, and they were good marksmen; but here the list of their soldierly qualities was exhausted. They had to be put through a severe course of training by some man like Jackson before they became fit to contend on equal terms with regulars in the open or with Indians in the woods. Their utter lack of discipline was decisive against them at first in any contest with regulars. In warfare with the Indians there were a very few of their number, men of exceptional qualities as woodsmen, who could hold their own; but the average frontiersman, though he did a good deal of hunting and possessed much knowledge of woodcraft, was primarily a tiller of the soil and a feller of trees, and he was necessarily at a disadvantage when pitted against an antagonist whose entire life was pa.s.sed in woodland chase and woodland warfare. These facts must all be remembered if we wish to get an intelligent explanation of the utter failure of the frontiersmen when, in 1812, they were again pitted against the British and the forest tribes. They must also be taken into account when we seek to explain why it was possible but a little later to develop out of the frontiersmen fighting armies which under competent generals could overmatch the red coat and the Indian alike.

Individualism in Religious Matters.

The Great Revival.

The extreme individualism of the frontier, which found expression for good and for evil, both in its governmental system in time of peace and in its military system in time of war, was also shown in religious matters. In 1799 and 1800 a great revival of religion swept over the West. Up to that time the Presbyterian had been the leading creed beyond the mountains. There were a few Episcopalians here and there, and there were Lutherans, Catholics, and adherents of the Reformed Dutch and German churches; but, aside from the Presbyterians, the Methodists and Baptists were the only sects powerfully represented. The great revival of 1799 was mainly carried on by Methodists and Baptists, and under their guidance the Methodist and Baptist churches at once sprang to the front and became the most important religious forces in the frontier communities. [Footnote: McFerrin's "History of Methodism in Tennessee,"

338, etc.; Spencer's "History of Kentucky Baptists," 69, etc.] The Presbyterian church remained the most prominent as regards the wealth and social standing of its adherents, but the typical frontiersman who professed religion at all became either a Methodist or a Baptist, adopting a creed which was intensely democratic and individualistic, which made nothing of social distinctions, which distrusted educated preachers, and worked under a republican form of ecclesiastical government.

Camp Meetings.

The great revival was accompanied by scenes of intense excitement. Under the conditions of a vast wooded wilderness and a scanty population the camp-meeting was evolved as the typical religious festival. To the great camp-meetings the frontiersmen flocked from far and near, on foot, on horseback, and in wagons. Every morning at daylight the mult.i.tude was summoned to prayer by sound of trumpet. No preacher or exhorter was suffered to speak unless he had the power of stirring the souls of his hearers. The preaching, the praying, and the singing went on without intermission, and under the tremendous emotional stress whole communities became fervent professors of religion. Many of the scenes at these camp-meetings were very distasteful to men whose religion was not emotional and who shrank from the fury of excitement into which the great ma.s.ses were thrown, for under the strain many individuals literally became like men possessed, whether of good or of evil spirits, falling into ecstasies of joy or agony, dancing, shouting, jumping, fainting, while there were widespread and curious manifestations of a hysterical character, both among the believers and among the scoffers; but though this might seem distasteful to an observer of education and self-restraint, it thrilled the heart of the rude and simple backwoodsman and reached him as he could not possibly have been reached in any other manner. Often the preachers of the different denominations worked in hearty unison; but often they were sundered by bitter jealousy and distrust. The fiery zeal of the Methodists made them the leaders; and in their war on the forces of evil they at times showed a tendency to include all non-methodists--whether Baptists, Lutherans, Catholics, or infidels--in a common d.a.m.nation. Of course, as always in such a movement, many even of the earnest leaders at times confounded the essential and the non-essential, and railed as bitterly against dancing as against drunkenness and lewdness, or anathematized the wearing of jewelry as fiercely as the commission of crime. [Footnote: Autobiography of Peter Cartwright, the Backwoods Preacher.] More than one hearty, rugged old preacher, who did stalwart service for decency and morality, hated Calvinism as heartily as Catholicism, and yet yielded to no Puritan in his austere condemnation of amus.e.m.e.nt and luxury.

Good Accomplished.

Trials of the Frontier Preachers.

Often men backslid, and to a period of intense emotional religion succeeded one of utter unbelief and of reversion to the worst practices which had been given up. Nevertheless, on the whole there was an immense gain for good. The people received a new light, and were given a sense of moral responsibility such as they had not previously possessed. Much of the work was done badly or was afterwards undone, but very much was really accomplished. The whole West owes an immense debt to the hard-working frontier preachers, sometimes Presbyterian, generally Methodist or Baptist, who so gladly gave their lives to their labors and who struggled with such fiery zeal for the moral wellbeing of the communities to which they penetrated. Wherever there was a group of log cabins, thither some Methodist circuit-rider made his way or there some Baptist preacher took up his abode. Their prejudices and narrow dislikes, their raw vanity and sullen distrust of all who were better schooled than they, count for little when weighed against their intense earnestness and heroic self-sacrifice. They proved their truth by their endeavor. They yielded scores of martyrs, nameless and unknown men who perished at the hands of the savages, or by sickness or in flood or storm. They had to face no little danger from the white inhabitants themselves. In some of the communities most of the men might heartily support them, but in others, where the vicious and lawless elements were in control, they were in constant danger of mobs. The G.o.dless and lawless people hated the religious with a bitter hatred, and gathered in great crowds to break up their meetings. On the other hand, those who had experienced religion were no believers in the doctrine of nonresistance. At the core, they were thoroughly healthy men, and they fought as valiantly against the powers of evil in matters physical as in matters moral. Some of the successful frontier preachers were men of weak frame, whose intensity of conviction and fervor of religious belief supplied the lack of bodily powers; but as a rule the preacher who did most was a stalwart man, as strong in body as in faith. One of the continually recurring incidents in the biographies of the famous frontier preachers is that of some particularly hardened sinner who was never converted until, tempted to a.s.sault the preacher of the Word, he was soundly thrashed by the latter, and his eyes thereby rudely opened through his sense of physical shortcoming to an appreciation of his moral iniquity.

The Frontiersmen Threaten the Spanish Regions.

Throughout these years, as the frontiersmen pressed into the West, they continued to fret and strain against the Spanish boundaries. There was no temptation to them to take possession of Canada. The lands south of the Lakes were more fertile than those north of the Lakes, and the climate was better. The few American settlers who did care to go into Canada found people speaking their own tongue, and with much the same ways of life; so that they readily a.s.similated with them, as they could not a.s.similate with the French and Spanish creoles. Canada lay north, and the tendency of the backwoodsman was to thrust west; among the Southern backwoodsmen, the tendency was south and southwest. The Mississippi formed no natural barrier whatever. Boone, when he moved into Missouri, was but a forerunner among the pioneers; many others followed him. He himself became an official under the Spanish Government, and received a grant of lands. Of the other frontiersmen who went into the Spanish territory, some, like Boone, continued to live as hunters and backwoods farmers. [Footnote: American State Papers, Public Lands, II., pp. 10, 872.] Others settled in St. Louis, or some other of the little creole towns, and joined the parties of French traders who ascended the Missouri and the Mississippi to barter paint, beads, powder, and blankets for the furs of the Indians.

Uneasiness of the Spaniards.

Their Religious Intolerance.

The Spanish authorities were greatly alarmed at the incoming of the American settlers. Gayoso de Lemos had succeeded Carondelet as Governor, and he issued to the commandants of the different posts throughout the colonies a series of orders in reference to the terms on which land grants were to be given to immigrants; he particularly emphasized the fact that liberty of conscience was not to be extended beyond the first generation, and that the children of the immigrant would either have to become Catholics or else be expelled, and that this should be explained to settlers who did not profess the Catholic faith. He ordered, moreover, that no preacher of any religion but the Catholic should be allowed to come into the provinces. [Footnote: Gayarre, III., p. 387.] The Bishop of Louisiana complained bitterly of the American immigration and of the measure of religious toleration accorded the settlers, which, he said, had introduced into the colony a gang of adventurers who acknowledged no religion. He stated that the Americans had scattered themselves over the country almost as far as Texas and corrupted the Indians and Creoles by the example of their own restless and ambitious temper; for they came from among people who were in the habit of saying to their stalwart boys, "You will go to Mexico." Already the frontiersmen had penetrated even into New Mexico from the district round the mouth of the Missouri, in which they had become very numerous; and the Bishop earnestly advised that the places where the Americans were allowed to settle should be rigidly restricted. [Footnote: _Do_., p. 408.]

A Conflict inevitable.

When the Spaniards held such views it was absolutely inevitable that a conflict should come. Whether the frontiersman did or did not possess deep religious convictions, he was absolutely certain to refuse to be coerced into becoming a Catholic; and his children were sure to fight as soon as they were given the choice of changing their faith or abandoning their country. The minute that the American settlers were sufficiently numerous to stand a chance of success in the conflict it was certain that they would try to throw off the yoke of the fanatical and corrupt Spanish Government. As early as 1801 bands of armed Americans had penetrated here and there into the Spanish provinces in defiance of the commands of the authorities, and were striving to set up little bandit governments of their own. [Footnote: _Do_., p. 447.]

Advantages of the Frontiersmen.

The frontiersmen possessed every advantage of position, of numbers, and of temper. In any contest that might arise with Spain they were sure to take possession at once of all of what was then called Upper Louisiana.

The immediate object of interest to most of them was the commerce of the Mississippi River and the possession of New Orleans; but this was only part of what they wished, and were certain to get, for they demanded all the Spanish territory that lay across the line of their westward march.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century the settlers on the Western waters recognized in Spain their natural enemy, because she was the power who held the mouth and the west bank of the Mississippi. They would have transferred their hostility to any other power which fell heir to her possessions, for these possessions they were bound one day to make their own.

Predominance of the Middle West.

A thin range of settlements extended from the sh.o.r.es of Lake Erie on the north to the boundary of Florida on the south; and there were out-posts here and there beyond this range, as at Fort Dearborn, on the site of what is now Chicago; but the only fairly well-settled regions were in Kentucky and Tennessee. These two States were the oldest, and long remained the most populous and influential, communities in the West.

They shared qualities both of the Northerners and of the Southerners, and they gave the tone to the thought and the life in the settlements north of them no less than the settlements south of them. This fact of itself tended to make the West h.o.m.ogeneous and to keep it a unit with a peculiar character of its own, neither Northern nor Southern in political and social tendency. It was the middle West which was first settled, and the middle West stamped its peculiar characteristics on all the growing communities beyond the Alleghanies. Inasmuch as west of the mountains the Northern communities were less distinctively Northern and the Southern communities less distinctively Southern than was the case with the Eastern States on the seaboard, it followed naturally that, considered with reference to other sections of the Union, the West formed a unit, possessing marked characteristics of its own. A distinctive type of character was developed west of the Alleghanies, and for the first generation the typical representatives of this Western type were to be found in Kentucky and Tennessee.

The Northwest.

The settlement of the Northwest had been begun under influences which in the end were to separate it radically from the Southwest. It was settled under Governmental supervision, and because of and in accordance with Governmental action; and it was destined ultimately to receive the great ma.s.s of its immigrants from the Northeast; but as yet these two influences had not become strong enough to sunder the frontiersmen north of the Ohio by any sharp line from those south of the Ohio. The settlers on the Western waters were substantially the same in character North and South.

The Westerners Formed One People.

In sum, the western frontier folk, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, possessed in common marked and peculiar characteristics, which the people of the rest of the country shared to a much less extent. They were backwoods farmers, each man preferring to live alone on his own freehold, which he himself tilled and from which he himself had cleared the timber. The towns were few and small; the people were poor, and often ignorant, but hardy in body and in temper. They joined hospitality to strangers with suspicion of them. They were essentially warlike in spirit, and yet utterly unmilitary in all their training and habits of thought. They prized beyond measure their individual liberty and their collective freedom, and were so jealous of governmental control that they often, to their own great harm, fatally weakened the very authorities whom they chose to act over them. The peculiar circ.u.mstances of their lives forced them often to act in advance of action by the law, and this bred a lawlessness in certain matters which their children inherited for generations; yet they knew and appreciated the need of obedience to the law, and they thoroughly respected the law.

Decadence of Separatist Feeling.

The separatist agitations had largely died out. In 1798 and 1799 Kentucky divided with Virginia the leadership of the attack on the Alien and Sedition laws; but her extreme feelings were not shared by the other Westerners, and she acted not as a representative of the West, but on a footing of equality with Virginia. Tennessee sympathized as little with the nullification movement of these two States at this time as she sympathized with South Carolina in her nullification movement a generation later. With the election of Jefferson the dominant political party in the West became in sympathy with the party in control of the nation, and the West became stoutly loyal to the National Government.

Importance of the West.

The West had thus achieved a greater degree of political solidarity, both as within itself and with the nation as a whole, than ever before.

Its wishes were more powerful with the East. The pioneers stood for an extreme Americanism, in social, political, and religious matters alike.

The trend of American thought was toward them, not away from them. More than ever before, the Westerners were able to make their demands felt at home, and to make their force felt in the event of a struggle with a foreign power.

CHAPTER VI.

THE PURCHASE OF LOUISIANA; AND BURR'S CONSPIRACY, 1803-1807.

A great and growing race may acquire vast stretches of scantily peopled territory in any one of several ways. Often the statesman, no less than the soldier, plays an all-important part in winning the new land; nevertheless, it is usually true that the diplomatists who by treaty ratify the acquisition usurp a prominence in history to which they are in no way ent.i.tled by the real worth of their labors.

Ways in which Territorial Expansion may Take Place.