Trans-Appalachian Frontier: People, Societies, and Institutions, 1775-1850 (A History of the Trans-Appalachian Frontier)

U. S. History

Rohrbough

of his craft.” —Andrew Cayton, Distinguished Professor of History, Miami University

The first American frontier lay just beyond the Appalachian Mountains and along the Gulf coast. Here successive groups of pioneers built new societies and developed new institutions to cope with life in the wilderness. In this thorough revision of his classic account, Malcolm J. Rohrbough tells the dramatic story of these men and women from the first Kentucky settlements to the closing of the frontier. Rather than follow a territory to state approach, Rohrbough divides his narrative into major time periods designed to establish categories of description and analysis. Within this framework, he presents case studies that focus on the county, the town, the community, and the family, as well as politics and urbanization. He addresses as well Spanish, French, and Native American traditions, and the anomalous presence of African slaves and the somewhat shadowy presence of women in the making of this story. Now in its third, completely revised and updated edition, Rohrbough’s magisterial study of the trans-Appalachian frontier is sure to find a new generation of readers interested in the history of America’s first frontier. Malcolm J. Rohrbough is Professor of History at the University of Iowa and editor (with Walter Nugent) of Indiana’s series A History of the Trans-Appalachian Frontier. He is author of the prize-winning book Days of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the American Nation.

A History of the Trans-Appalachian Frontier

INDIANA

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Trans-Appalachian Frontier

“The definitive history of the subject. Nothing approaches it in the scope of its coverage. I can think of no other book more frequently cited . . . on the conquest, settlement, and development of the region between the Appalachians and the Great Plains. [It is] the work of a master historian totally in control

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TransAppalachian Frontier People, Societies, and Institutions, 1775-1850 •

Malcolm J. Rohrbough

University Press Bloomington & Indianapolis http://iupress.indiana.edu 1-800-842-6796

INDIANA

Third Edition

Trans-Appalachian Frontier

A History of the Trans-Appalachian Frontier Walter Nugent and Malcolm Rohrbough, eds.



TransAppalachian Frontier  People, Societies, and Institutions, 1775–1850 Third Edition Malcolm J. Rohrbough

 Indiana University Press

Bloomington and Indianapolis

This book is a publication of Indiana University Press 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, IN 47404-3797 USA http://iupress.indiana.edu Telephone orders 800-842-6796 Fax orders 812-855-7931 Orders by e-mail [email protected] © 2008 by Malcolm J. Rohrbough All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rohrbough, Malcolm J. Trans-Appalachian frontier : people, societies, and institutions, 1775–1850 / Malcolm J. Rohrbough. – 3rd ed. p. cm. – (A history of the trans-Appalachian frontier) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-253-34932-3 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-253-21932-9 (pbk.) 1. Northwest, Old—History–1775-1865. 2. Frontier and pioneer life—Northwest, Old. 3. Southwest, Old—History. 4. Frontier and pioneer life—Southwest, Old. 5. Appalachian Region— History. 6. Frontier and pioneer life—Appalachian Region. I. Title. F484.3.R64 2007 977’.02–dc22 2007011632 1

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 Dedicated to the pioneers of a new generation: Julia Cate Charlie Frances Christina Eva

Devon Maya Dylan

and to the scouts of the twenty-first century: Lucas and Cyrus



 Contents Acknowledgments Abbreviations

xi xiii

A Note on Citations, Quotations, Maps, and Place Names

Introduction

xv

1

Part I. Across the Mountains 17

1.

22 The Struggle for Security

2.

50 The Search for Stability

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82 Security and Stability in the Territory Northwest of the Ohio

Part II. The Widening Frontier, 1795–1815

113

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121 The Reach of Government and the Authority of Law Spread across the Western Country

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154 Diverse Economies Moving toward Commercial Ends

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188 Many Varied Societies Emerge across the Western Country

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Contens

Part III. The First Great Migration, 1815–1830

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223 233

Across the Old Northwest and into Missouri

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274 The Flowering of the Cotton Frontier

Part IV. The Enduring Frontiers 311

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316 Michigan: The Great Lakes Frontier

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351 Florida: A Sectional Frontier

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388 Arkansas: A Frontier More West than South

Part V. The Second Great Migration, 1830–1850 419

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423 The New Counties of Alabama and Mississippi: A Frontier More South than West

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455 The Last Frontier of the Old Northwest: Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin

Part VI. The Trans-Appalachian West and the Nation 489

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492 Villages, Towns, and Cities Spread across the Western Country

Contents

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528 Changing Political Patterns across Three Generations

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556 The Trans-Appalachian West and the Nation

Notes

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Bibliography Index

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ix

Acknowledgments

I shall begin by recognizing a deep obligation to three friends and colleagues. Walter Nugent, University of Notre Dame, read the entire draft of this manuscript. His wisdom and insight have immeasurably improved the final version. Leslie Schwalm, University of Iowa, read the chapters on the expansion of the frontier across the South. Her thoughtful comments have helped me understand the relationship among landscape, staple crop agriculture, and the institution of slavery in the evolution of the frontier in the South over three generations. I am also indebted to Sarah Hanley, whose methodological stance on “thick description” and “contested events” uncovers twists and turns that would be otherwise left uncharted. Her work on Early Modern France is an inspiration for this study. Three graduate students in the Department of History at the University of Iowa have assisted in important ways. Anita Gaul and Kerima Lewis assembled a bibliography of recent primary and secondary literature; Uka Kishida checked the citations. Quinten Taylor, an undergraduate in the Honors Program, helped in the final preparation of the manuscript. The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the Graduate College at the University of Iowa have supported my scholarship over the years in a number of ways. The University of Iowa has always been committed to funding research leaves for the faculty across disciplines, has treated the awards of outside grants to faculty members as a partnership in which to invest, and takes the time to celebrate the grants and prizes awarded to faculty for scholarly projects undertaken and completed. I am grateful for the support tendered by the College and University in league with my grants recently awarded from The Camargo Foundation, Cassis, France, and The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

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Acknowledgments

Robert Sloan at Indiana University Press enthusiastically supported a revised second edition that would incorporate the new scholarship of the last thirty years in the field. Miki Bird managed the preparation of the unwieldy manuscript with efficiency and good humor. Carol Kennedy’s careful editing of the manuscript improved its fluency and saved me from numerous errors of omission and commission. The Huntington Library has provided a fine place for scholarly research and writing and for the fruitful exchange of ideas with colleagues, including Stephen Aron, Hal Barron, William Deverell, Philip Hoffman, Michael Johnson, Karen Lystra, Elaine Tyler May, Lary May, Peter Mancall, Katherine Norberg, Robert Smith, and Samuel Truitt. I am particularly indebted to Robert C. Ritchie, Director of Research; Peter Blodgett, Curator of Western History Manuscripts; Jennifer Watts, Curator of Photographs; Susi Krasnoo, Administrative Assistant; and, Shelley Bennett, Curator of English and European Art for important contributions that have furthered my work at hand and in progress. Peter Rohrbough, Justin Rohrbough, and Elizabeth Rohrbough have interjected into this book their own intellectual expertise from linguistics, statistics, and law, while at the same time, pursuing their own lives and careers. Conversations with them are always rewarding. Faith Rohrbough, Constance Rohrbough, Beatrice Rohrbough Carlson, and Robert Carlson have long been interested in studies of the American West, past and present, and willing to share views on the topic; and Mianne Hanley and William Murphy have offered excellent advice and counsel at critical moments. In the interval that has passed since the first edition of the Trans-Appalachian Frontier was published, a new generation of historical figures has appeared on the scene. I have identified them in the Dedication to this book. They will encounter new frontiers that the two generations behind them can scarcely begin to imagine. MJR The Huntington Library March 2007

Abbreviations

Books and Periodicals

AHQ AI AJLH AR ArHQ FCHQ FHQ IJH IJHP IMH JAH JISHS JMH JSH LH LHQ M-A MH MHM MHR MPHC MVHR OAHQ OHQ RKSHS SAQ THM THQ

Alabama Historical Quarterly Annals of Iowa American Journal of Legal History Alabama Review Arkansas Historical Quarterly Filson Club Historical Quarterly Florida Historical Quarterly Iowa Journal of History Iowa Journal of History and Politics Indiana Magazine of History Journal of American History Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society Journal of Mississippi History Journal of Southern History Louisiana History Louisiana Historical Quarterly Mid-America Michigan History Michigan History Magazine Missouri Historical Review Michigan Pioneer and Historical Collections Mississippi Valley Historical Review Ohio Archaeological and Historical Quarterly Ohio Historical Quarterly Register of the Kentucky State Historical Society South Atlantic Quarterly Tennessee Historical Magazine Tennessee Historical Quarterly

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Abbreviations

TP

WMH

Territorial Papers of the United States, ed. Clarence E. Carter and John Porter Bloom (27 vols. to date, Washington, D.C., 1934– ) Wisconsin Magazine of History

Manuscript Depositories and Microfilm Collections

ADAH AHC CHS ESR HRS IHS IHS-U ISHL ISL LSU McHC MHC MIK OHS PKY SHSI SHSW TSLA UT

Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery Arkansas History Commission, Little Rock Chicago Historical Society, Chicago Early State Records on Microfilm, Library of Congress Historical Records Survey, a division of the Works Progress Administration Indiana Historical Society, Indianapolis Illinois Historical Survey, University of Illinois Library, Urbana Illinois State Historical Library, Springfield Indiana State Library, Indianapolis Department of Archives, Louisiana State University Library, Baton Rouge McClung Historical Collection, Lawson-McGhee Library, Knoxville Michigan Historical Collections, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Margaret I. King Library, University of Kentucky, Lexington Ohio Historical Society, Columbus P. K. Yonge Library of Florida History, University of Florida, Gainesville State Historical Society of Iowa, Iowa City State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison Tennessee State Library and Archives, Nashville University of Tennessee Library, Knoxville

A Note on Citations, Quotations, Maps, and Place Names

Throughout this volume I have not cited secondary literature except where it bears directly on a specific point under discussion. The size of the bibliography of literature on the transAppalachian frontier makes complete citations impossible. Unpublished theses and dissertations are cited by degree, institution, and date. All quotations are reproduced in the original form, except where taken from edited editions, in which case I have included the editor’s corrections and emendations in brackets. The preparation of the necessary maps revealed a number of problems. Counties are important for this study, but county boundaries changed frequently, and I found it especially difficult to locate them in three or four states for the same year. The passage of time and settlement patterns have left their changes elsewhere. Some early towns have disappeared, even from maps. In meeting the challenge of changes in names, and, within names, of variations in spellings, I have opted for the modern usage wherever possible.

Trans-Appalachian Frontier

 Introduction. The TransAppalachian Frontier

This is a book about the first American frontier of the transAppalachian West. More specifically, it is about the varied experiences of people, the emergence of societies, and the development of institutions on the trans-Appalachian frontier from 1775 to 1850. People are at the center of this story. From the middle of the eighteenth century, ambitious and adventurous Anglo-American men and women in growing numbers penetrated into the region west of the Appalachian Mountains. It was a fertile land, well watered, and a hunter’s paradise; above all, it was remote. The obstacles to movement and settlement were great distances, physical barriers in the form of mountains, forests, and rivers, and human obstacles in the form of the hostility of Indian peoples of the Ohio Valley. International rivalries had long also influenced the settlement of European peoples in the transAppalachian region. For almost a century, the English and French had fought for control of the interior of the continent, especially the great river systems of the Ohio and the Mississippi. In 1756 another war broke out between the two imperial rivals. It was the fourth and, as it turned out, the decisive conflict. The English were everywhere triumphant, and at the Treaty of Paris

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in 1763, the French ceded their continental empire to the English. The English thus enormously enlarged the physical dimensions of their empire on the North American continent, but in attempting to govern, they confronted the changed nature of their subjects. Seventeenth-century Englishmen and Englishwomen had changed over the course of five generations on this continent, into Anglo-Americans. They were English in allegiance (thus far) and institutional heritage, but they were also something more. They were making the transition to Americans. The term “Anglo-American,” as used hereafter, identifies both the institutional roots of the past and the impending changes of the future, and implies the growing differences between the two societies and anticipates the move toward political independence that would become a reality in 1776. These decisive transformations seemed unlikely in 1763. Yet, even as they celebrated their victory, the English began to confront imperial problems, principally in defense, finances, and Indian relations. The solution was a proclamation forbidding settlement in the West, but an imaginary line drawn along the crest of the mountains did not prevent hunters, trappers, explorers, and land viewers from crossing into the interior of the continent. For the next decade, Anglo-Americans crossed the mountains with increasing regularity, and, as early as 1774, some staked out claims in the broad expanse known as Kentucky.1 This impulse to go west in pursuit of new lands stretched back more than one hundred and sixty-five years—a full five generations—to the flats of the James River. Here, in the spring of 1607, the first English settlers had raised a palisade. Among the benchmarks of the expansion inland were the occupation of the Connecticut Valley in the 1630s, the movement of settler families into the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia in the 1690s, the extension of settlement down the Great Valley of the Appalachians in the decade of the 1730s, and the spread of settler families across the northern Appalachians into western Pennsylvania after 1763. Not since the first permanent English colonies at Jamestown and Plymouth, however, had the Anglo-American people colonized in such hostile country and at such distance from established institutions of government and law as they did



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in the trans-Appalachian West. Just as the first settlers at Jamestown, Plymouth, and other plantations scattered along the East Coast had been separated from their homeland by the broad and often stormy Atlantic Ocean, those who crossed into the Appalachians and beyond were separated from their original home by a land ocean of trees, mountains, and swift-flowing streams. They went to the West richer in experience, however, than the first English people who had come to the continent. They had one hundred and sixty-five years of colonizing behind them, with all that meant in terms of learning to live on the land and in terms of developing institutions to serve their needs (or adapting them from English models). But they, like the Virginians and Plymouthians, would have to accommodate and adjust. The men and women who crossed the mountains to the “western waters,” for so the land was called, probably gave little thought to such matters. They sought good lands, and to this end they intended to manage their own affairs. In a fertile country, surrounded by danger and hardship, they first sought physical security from hostile forces; once physical security was won, they sought a greater stability. From 1775 to 1850 three generations of people repeated the experience of immigrating to new and distant lands. They were an infinitely varied people, from many places in America and from across the ocean. Some were literate and fair-spoken, others spoke in the vernacular of the day, and still others spoke no English at all. Their economic circumstances covered an equally broad range. They would eventually spread over a vast area, for the trans-Appalachian West stretched from the Holston to the Arkansas, from Detroit and Des Moines to New Orleans and Mobile. In seventy-five years, barely exceeding the biblical lifespan for a single individual, a rush of Anglo-American families occupied the middle third of the continent. This work is also a description, analysis, and comparison of the several societies that emerged on the trans-Appalachian frontier. The movement of people across the mountains—or through the mountains, since many of them already lived in mountain valleys—was more than simply the migration of indi-

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viduals and families from one place to another. It involved partly the transference of an old society, partly the creation of a new one. The word “society” is here used in its broadest sense, to identify the ways in which people related to one another, to suggest common experiences, present circumstances, future hopes, and, throughout, a sense of shared values and priorities. The frontier provided fertile soil for the growth of societies. In the rich lands, connections between and among people grew apace with corn and cotton. The requirements of new land settlement imposed new demands on the individuals and the societies they were in process of shaping. The new settlements, at first much like each other, and like those on the East Coast a century or more earlier, in time developed into different societies in response to different social, political, and economic opportunities and imperatives. Even in the most remote new settlements, groups of people soon came together. At first they joined together for protection from a lonely and forbidding landscape, traveling in companies for the sake of mutual help and security. Once arrived, they located near to one another insofar as their interests in landholding would allow. The basic unit of settlement in early Kentucky was the “station,” where people gathered for safety from the threat of Indians people. North of the Ohio River the compact settlements of the Ohio Company stressed the communal values of New England and the settlers’ responsibilities for one another. In the first years of the settlement of the trans-Appalachian West, the physical expanse of the landscape, the intense labor associated with new settlements, and the dangers posed by Indian peoples demanded that people come together. Of course, a few individuals always sought the solitude of the woods. The first generation of settlers valued their talents, for woodsmen and hunters such as Daniel Boone spied out the lands and led the defense against the Indians. The bulk of the immigrants, however, sought a more stable world. Later, with the larger numbers of people and the reduced Indian threat, people no longer needed to live in forted settlements, but their associations continued. Whether the pioneer families came to the western country from



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INTRODUCTION

the neat villages of New England, the more random countryside of Virginia and the Carolinas, or the closed societies of Europe, they were accustomed to some form of institutional structure that provided a degree of order, law, and protection of property. If some of these societies east of the mountains were narrow and confining (especially in an economic and social sense), they were also secure, ordered, and rational. New societies on the edge of settlement, on the other hand, often conveyed a sense of chaos, confusion, and disorder. In the beginning, observers loosely defined a different society (a frontier society) as those who lived west of the Appalachians. Later, others commented on the different societies north and south of the Ohio River. Slavery was the distinguishing feature of this difference, with its implication of staple crop agriculture and a plantation economy. Elsewhere, deep-seated cultural differences were a salient feature. The Louisiana Purchase contained societies of Spanish and French heritage separate and distinct from the Anglo-American. Beyond these large-scale distinctions, various smaller societies soon appeared on the frontiers. This book is also a study of the creation and re-creation of institutions. The story of Anglo-American settlement of the transAppalachian frontier from 1775 to 1850 begins with confrontations with Indian peoples and then moves to agricultural societies expanding west in search of fertile land, taking up the land, and placing it under cultivation. Simultaneously, the pioneer families established economic, social, and political institutions to protect these gains and preserve their values. Early institutions provided a framework for defense and social organization, defining the way in which people arranged themselves in relation to one another. Institutions fixed the outer limits of human activity. They imposed form and structure on the lives of the frontier people; they established standards of human conduct. Institutions might be formally imposed from above, as in the case of government, courts, and law; or they might evolve with the consensus of the community, in a form suited to the new environment and circumstances, as in the case of religion and education, with lay preachers, circuit riders, and itinerant

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teachers. The first settlers in Kentucky, Tennessee, and, to a lesser extent, the Ohio Valley, had to improvise. As they did so, they repeated a process that had begun with the Mayflower Compact and extended with variations across the breadth to the North American continent over the next century to the shores of the Pacific Ocean. American colonial societies eventually assumed a degree of structure. Even pioneers could not escape—and most did not want to escape—this condition. Settler families in the remote reaches of the Carolina backcountry sought the rudimentary order characterized by a sheriff, justice of the peace, and court of law. If the tax collector was close behind, then he would be served or evaded in various ways. The need remained. The county, the church, and a degree of deference to one or several leading public figures formed the foundation of order in the colonial world. In the same fashion, leaders in political and economic life emerged on the frontier of Anglo-American settlement. They were neither the town fathers of New England nor the county lieutenants of Virginia and the Carolinas, but they gave frontier settlements leaders who could be called upon when needed. The first pioneers across the Appalachians carried this tradition into Kentucky and Tennessee. The county, the militia, and the leading military and economic figures of the area provided a focus of authority on these new frontiers. This story opens in 1775 and continues until 1850. Thus, it is a description and analysis of the first frontier of the new American nation. Continuity with the past remained important, however, for much of what happened drew on English origins. Although they might not have recognized his name, many of the new Americans west of the mountains knew a lot about Sir William Blackstone and his doctrines of property and its conveyance; they were familiar with traditional ways of joining for redress of grievances by memorial and petition; they knew the outlines of the court system and trial by jury; they recognized the influence and administrative authority of the county court. In this sense, they were like the American Revolutionaries who threw off the



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yoke of English oppression in 1775, but who bore the imprint of generations of English influence to a greater degree and in more ways than some would have liked to admit. What happened, however, drew on a more narrowly American experience as well, stretching back over one hundred and sixtyfive years to the first settlements at Jamestown. By 1775 five generations of frontier peoples had created an Anglo-American tradition. And with political independence, a broad strain that was strictly American influenced the development of a national policy for the West. Among the most important results were the Ordinances of 1785 and 1787. These ordinances were the codification of experiences since 1607, adapted to the values and needs of a new and independent American nation. Recognizing the influence of the past, this study looks to and describes the future— that is to say, the three generations after 1775—and so a description of the trans-Appalachian West as the first American frontier seems appropriate. All this is not to say that there were no other significant frontier traditions in the settlement of the New World. There were at least three. The French had established in North America a vast empire that stretched in a crescent from the St. Lawrence by way of the Great Lakes down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. French influence is still dominant today in parts of Canada and remains significant in portions of the original Louisiana Purchase. The Spanish also left their imprint on a large section of the continent. Their heritage is a dominant feature of the American Southwest and survives in several forms in Florida.2 Each of these traditions deserves careful study and analysis. Such study is not undertaken here, however, where the emphasis is on the Anglo-American and American frontier people, societies, and institutions. Only to the extent that the others— French and Spanish—affected the American experience are they considered. Finally, within this vast landscape west of the mountains lived another group of people whose presence on the land would define and shape this three generations of Anglo-American settlement. Indian peoples were the largest numbers of people in the

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trans-Appalachian West in 1775 and for many years thereafter. For Indian peoples, this Anglo-American expansion into the West was just as dramatic as it was for the Europeans. The differences were more important than the similarities, however. As the Anglo-American settler families saw their world enriched by the acquisition of so much fertile land, so Indian peoples saw their worldview diminished in like proportion. Just as the entrepreneurs and settler families in Virginia and North Carolina (and later Virginia and Pennsylvania) looked across the mountains to a new and inviting land, the Indian peoples on the land had occupied those hills, valleys, and watercourses for thousands of years. Although their occupation was defined differently in the sense of hunting and gathering, their presence was no less long lasting and permanent in their eyes. This Indian presence was more than long lasting; it was enormously varied, ranging from the Mingoes, Delawares, and Ottawas along the lakes to the Shawnee and Miamis along the Ohio River, to the Fox and Illinois in the West. Within the South lived five tribal groups in sedentary splendor. The Choctaws, Cherokees, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Seminoles were distinguished by their permanence and their long-standing agricultural lifestyle. It was formidable array of nations, supported by smaller groups, most of them refugees from the raids of the Iroquois. In a sense, the impact of the Iroquois was still felt in the continuing movement of Indian groups north of the Ohio. After years of continuous friction with illegal settlers and speculators west of the mountains, mixed with continuing trading contacts with European peoples, Indian peoples found themselves importuned to take part in a new war involving European nations. It was a war for the independence of the colonies. As had been the case for a century and a half, when Europeans prepared to fight in North America, they immediately set about enlisting Indian allies. It was a siren song to which many Indians responded. It would turn out to be the opening of a long drama in which the power and independence of Indian groups, and especially their occupation of and claims to land, would be irrevocably diminished. Within these three generations that closed in 1850, Indian life that had played out across these landscapes for



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a thousand years was permanently transformed. In this story, the several strands of this transformation are described in detail, for the removal of the Indian presence was a necessary first act to the following flood of Anglo-Americans across the mountains. Throughout these three generations, Indian peoples were significant by their presence and their actions. From the AngloAmerican occupation of Kentucky and the Ohio Valley in the 1770s and 1790s, to Florida and Arkansas in the 1830s, to Mississippi in the 1830s and 1840s, Indian peoples were a strong presence on the trans-Appalachian frontier. This story is incomplete without observing and analyzing their varied roles.3 Within the Anglo-American focus on this series of settlement experiences over three generations, two anomalies stand clearly outlined. The first is the presence within Anglo-American societies of large and growing numbers of enslaved peoples of African origin. This frontier cycle varied, but there were common features: the migration to new lands, the settlement at the new site, the clearing of the lands and preparation for cultivation, the construction of living places for peoples and livestock. All these demanded heavy and continuous physical labor. Enslaved peoples were one response to these demands, as they were to the enlargement of farms into plantations and the planting, cultivation, and harvest of staple crops for commercial agriculture. In a sense, the frontier was an ideal setting for slave labor. Carving a new settlement out of the deep forests or the dense canebrakes needed ongoing labor of the most arduous kind. Slavery turned out to be entirely compatible with the frontier; indeed, for those who had the resources to acquire enslaved people, slavery was a great asset in coming to terms with the demands of the frontier. And so it was on many frontiers of the South, from the first settlements of the Kentucky Country in the 1770s and 1780s to the opening of the new counties in Alabama and Mississippi in the 1830s. That we lack a number of accounts of such enslaved peoples in this frontier setting over three generations does not diminish the necessity for historians to retrieve and articulate their presence. The second dimension of this series of frontiers that needs to be further identified is the women’s perspective. From the beginning of the settlements in the Kentucky Country, women (and

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children, for that matter) were an integral part of the transAppalachian West. While they are not equally represented in newspaper accounts or on the country court or in the militia, their varied labors were indispensable to the opening of these early Anglo-American settlements. Their responsibilities ranged from the field to the barnyard to the house to the firing step in case of attack. And, of course, they had sole responsibility for childbirth and child care. Their sometimes shadowy presence should not detract from their contributions to what was ordinarily a family enterprise. Nor should it obscure their own sense of identity and a continuing search for a place in this world. It is worthwhile noting in this connection that the transAppalachian frontier was preeminently a place of families. They were also young families, reflecting early marriage, high fertility, and, in general, the widespread availability of land. This is a condition that reflects, in part, the world of the land and agriculture that formed its setting. Families became the standard unit of settlement and labor. Each member had a series of labor roles to play, including children from the age of five or six. Families were the basic unit of labor; their presence ensured the development of social and cultural institutions in various forms. Where children were present, in addition to their work roles, plans had to be made for their training and integration into the community. It was a basic feature of this settlement experience that many communities were settled by extended families—four or five or more family units, connected through intermarriage and a mutual commitment to the settlement of new lands. These individual families exhibited the demographic features associated with the extraordinary availability of land. The birth rate was high. Indeed, at the opening of the nineteenth century, the American birth rate was among the highest in the world. From this point, it dropped, but only gradually. There was high infant and child mortality. People in the western country were young, or at least younger than the population at large. Marriage at an early age and the widespread availability of land meant the infinite proliferation of farm units. The western country had its share of hazards to confront the multiplying population. Diseases of various kinds were common, especially malaria, to which must be added smallpox, influenza, measles and mumps, and periodic



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outbreaks of cholera in the river settlements. Men and women were subject to a broad range of injuries associated with the endless physical labor of opening up a new farm. Injuries and illnesses were treated at the home. People tried to compensate for the lack of trained physicians by careful and loving attention. At such times, the support of the family and the community was vital to survival. Frontier families seem to have enjoyed plenty to eat. The diet was basic, but within the products of the farm and the woods, large quantities were the rule.4 With few exceptions, this is a book about an agricultural world. If, as is suggested here, the frontier west of the Appalachians gave rise to many societies, a universal interest in the soil joined almost all of them. The acquisition, cultivation, exploitation, and eternal search for more fertile and cheaper lands provide a common theme from the crest of the Appalachians west to the line of semi-aridity (and even beyond), from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. So this study does not deal with explorers, significant as their contributions may have been. Nor are we concerned here with the origins and early history of the fur trade, a basic economic enterprise in the eighteenth century. Interest in the fur trade dictated the relationship of the Europeans (including the Anglo-Americans) to Indian peoples in the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century it was the land. The fur trade allowed the Indians to remain on the land, but the transition to an abiding interest in landownership placed their access to the land and their rights in jeopardy. Of course, it is important to note that agriculture was not the only kind of economic enterprise that men and women pursued on the trans-Appalachian frontier. People mined early and energetically for lead and later for copper; they also engaged in large-scale lumbering and established small industries as opportunities presented themselves. Urban development gradually appeared across the breadth of the frontier, but urban areas reflected interest in and dependence upon their agricultural hinterlands. This was a population that was overwhelmingly rural. In 1790, the first census reflected that 95 percent of people lived on farms or in small villages. Agriculture, the land, and agrarian values remained basic and continuing themes.5

IN T R O D U C T IO N

Between 1775 and 1850 pioneer peoples physically occupied the trans-Appalachian West. A few hundred settlers in the Kentucky Country had become ten million stretched across the middle third of the continent. These three generations and these extraordinary numbers joined in marking astonishing changes in American life that provide a context for these streams of movement. Almost from the inception of American independence, the West played a role in national and international affairs. A central feature of this role was expansion, a continuation of a basic force in American life from the opening of the seventeenth century to the close of the nineteenth. Beginning in 1775, war and independence led to extended diplomatic negotiations with England, France, and Spain, and several Indian tribes in the 1780s and 1790s, culminating in diplomatic and military successes. For the next decade and a half, the new American nation pursued its economic and physical expansion in the context of a general European war. Among the diplomatic triumphs of this period was the purchase of Louisiana Territory in 1803; its failures included the onset of a war with England in 1812 for which the nation was unprepared. After 1815 the dominant theme was expansion and acquisition by war and diplomacy. Within little more than a generation, settlers filled in the major part of the continental nation, to the Great Bend of the Missouri River. War and diplomacy added Texas, California, the Far Southwest, and the Oregon country. By the opening of the Civil War, the continental nation had taken shape. This book focuses on societies and institutions in order to identify the differences between and among those areas that we generally call frontiers. This analysis uses the word “frontier” to describe a meeting or intersection. These encounters include the Anglo-Americans with the new landscape west of the mountains (from the Kentucky Country to the Mississippi Delta), the Anglo-Americans in their meetings with Indian peoples (innumerable occasions and variations) and with the other European groups (in Indiana, Louisiana, and Florida, to use modern political designations) over this seventy-five years. After these three generations, the lands west of the mountains presented wide variations between those long settled and almost indistinguish-



13

IN T R O D U C T IO N

able from agricultural settlements east of the Appalachians with those still isolated and at an early stage of growth.6 Professor James C. Malin, a remarkable historian, once commented that all history is a progress report.7 Such a comment is applicable to this book. It generalizes about a vast geographic area—larger than many European nations—and millions of people. Such is the scope and power of the advance of population, the distances involved, and the long time period that much has been described in brief, other aspects not at all. Many of the topics identified herein invite full-scale investigations of their own. This work should be thought of as a progress report, outlining some of the conceptual problems and suggesting solutions relative to these seventy-five years of the American occupation of the middle third of the continent.



15

Part I. Across the Mountains

The year 1775 opened on a static America. For one hundred and sixty-five years of permanent Anglo-American settlement, occupation of the continent had proceeded inland, but never rapidly. Indian peoples, political intrigue, imperial considerations, vast distances, and physical obstacles had all slowed the advance. After five generations, settlements had reached the mountain ranges that barred the way to the interior. Along the seaboard a well-developed commercial economy that had produced several wealthy, leisured, and cultured societies (with great differences among them) testified to the maturity of the colonies. An educated class had developed a high degree of political discourse. In that fateful year several of the cities along the eastern seaboard—and there were important urban centers—were in a ferment over the continuing quarrel with Great Britain. What had begun as a dispute about taxation and the payment of war debts had grown into a conflict over principle, calling into question the basic relationship between Great Britain and her colonies three thousand miles to the west. Inland from the great seaports, however (and not so far inland), life went on as it had for generations. The business at hand was scratching a living out of the soil, acquiring land, growing a few surplus crops or some livestock for market, always with a watchful eye on the dangers within the towering forests. Here life had changed little from that experienced by the first English settlers in the New World. Technological innovations—principally in firearms—provided a degree of security, but all around these people swelled the great forest, much as it had encompassed their ancestors before them. The immensity of the landscape everywhere dwarfed cabins and

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clearings, and the more so as one moved west to the great Appalachian range. The year 1775 was also a time of momentous events. In the East armed conflict broke out against King George III. This clash directed the colonies upon a course that would lead to a great struggle for independence. At the same time that gunfire sounded across the Lexington Green, in the remote but inviting lands west of the mountains a group of promoters, speculators, fur traders, land-hungry settlers, and free spirits were beginning the settlement of the trans-Appalachian region. In a short time they would establish another Lexington. There is a sense of parallel new departures here. For the Americans west of the mountains, their intentions were equally dramatic and dangerous, and their determination just as great. Despite dangers from Indian peoples, official disapproval, isolation, and economic hardship, men and women embarked upon a venture in the interior of the continent so remote from the settled and secure portions of the colonies as to represent a new kind of frontier experience. That this new departure in expansion to the West coincided with the outbreak of the American Revolution and a new departure in government raises the question of whether there was a connection between the two. In fact there was not. The first pioneers west of the mountains did think of themselves as engaged in a struggle for political and economic independence from proprietors and other colonial officials, but their interests were eminently practical. They were concerned with protection from the Indians, clear land titles, and good markets for their surplus crops. Whoever could provide these conditions—within reason— met their views of a good government, whether it be George III or George Washington. In truth, they did not long remain aloof, for the War for Independence came to the West as an Indian war. If there was one thing that the early pioneers agreed upon, it was the threat from the Indians, and the often-voiced sentiment that the Indians represented the British was enough to ally many frontier people with the independence movement in the East. Even so, it was a long time before the men and women of the western waters thought in terms of national allegiance. Immedi-

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ately ahead lay a series of confrontations with Indian peoples, with states, and eventually with a new national government. The establishment in 1775 of permanent settlements in that area known as Kentucky marked a dividing line in this long expansion to the West. Although it was carried out by men and women less interested in their contributions to establishing an independent nation than in their own prosperity and physical safety, nonetheless their actions opened the way to the interior of the continent. Even before the end of the Revolutionary War, boats began to drift down the Ohio. Singly and at first few in numbers, they only contrasted with the great river and the silent shores. They were the advance scouts of a surge of numbers, however, that in the next generation would settle the interior of the continent for the new nation, force the Indian peoples from their hunting grounds, press the Spanish into opening the Mississippi River, compel the English into a reluctant evacuation of the Northwest posts, and, in short, lay the basis of the AngloAmerican occupation of the continent to the Mississippi River and even beyond. So rapid and persistent was this movement to the West during the years of the war itself that by the coming of peace, it was no longer possible to confine the settlements to the east of the mountains. To make good her claim, the new, independent American nation embarked on a military struggle against the Indian peoples of the Ohio Valley and their British allies. For the decade from 1784 to 1794, it was an equal contest. The Indians’ inability to unite in the face of the American advance balanced against the weaknesses of the new nation, suffering from severe financial burdens and internal divisions, hard-pressed to carry on a military campaign at a distance of several hundred miles from its sources of strength on the East Coast. The pioneer people who crossed the mountains into Kentucky and Tennessee and their children and grandchildren who acted out the next stages knew a great deal about occupying new land, learned from their parents and created through years of experience in the woods and on the land. They knew how to fell a tree in a certain direction, how to build a log cabin, how to handle



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livestock, how to clear, plant, cultivate, and harvest. They also knew how to supplement their diet in the woods by hunting and fishing and how to trap fur-bearing animals whose skins would be useful in clothing the family. The women knew how to churn, bake, spin, weave, and sew. Above all, they knew how to raise their children to assist on the farm and how to give them the skills they would need for a similar life ahead. These might include the ability to read and write, or it might not. The pioneers also knew how to accept the demands of the land and the physical hardships that it imposed. Gradually, advances in technology came to the frontier people, and, if the requirements were the same, the tasks became somewhat easier. Better axes and stronger wagons for hauling families and produce and improved materials for constructing roads slowly made their influences felt. After 1815 came the steam engine, and with it an economic revolution for nation and frontier alike. Steam moved people across the water and, more important, upstream. It could run saws and millstones that in an earlier but still recent age had depended upon waterpower. These changes would affect the life of the frontier, but only gradually. It was fortunate for the frontier people that they had skills and experience in dealing with the new landscape west of the mountains, for around them lay a world of vast, forested spaces. Natural forces of enormous power—great storms, fires, and floods—mixed with the promise of the land. The deep forests produced a pall of gloom that hung over travelers for days, and permanent settlers for much longer periods. People saw sunlight occasionally filter through the canopy of trees, but they rarely traveled or lived in it. Balanced against this melancholy, however, were beautiful clear streams of running water and a variety and abundance of bird and animal life. Added to the force of nature was the sense of distance and loneliness. The earlier settlers went west in small groups, but few could escape the feeling of having cast off from land and left a harbor to put to sea, without the prospect of a safe anchorage ahead. Behind lay family, friends, and society, those influences that offered the protection of a community against natural and human dangers; ahead lay the unknown.

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In a manner strongly reminiscent of Marc Bloch’s description of the age of feudalism, the early Anglo-American settlers across the mountains were surrounded by powerful forces—human and natural—that they could not control.1 Babies died at birth, and pioneer peoples of all ages and stations succumbed to diseases that few understood and no one could cure. People ventured into the woods and never returned. The constant presence of injury and death, the sense of frailty and vulnerability, gave rise to both a fatalistic view of life and a strong religious fervor as men and women vented their frustrations at the presence of such impersonal and seemingly uncontrollable influences. They also gave rise to superstition and folk remedies in medicine and religion, for where fate seemed to play such a significant role in the lives of people, fate must be analyzed, appeased, evaded. These people lived close to the earth. The rhythm of the seasons conditioned their lives, with an agricultural cycle, hunting interludes, and natural catastrophes. At the same time, hostile Indian peoples who had mastered so much of the forbidding landscape harassed them. As the tillers of land in the Middle Ages stayed near the castle, the pioneers of the trans-Appalachian frontier huddled close to their forted stations, casting an anxious eye on the sky, and then on the great forest, even as they rejoiced in the promise of the land.



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1.

 The Struggle for Security

In June of 1774 a group of land surveyors led by James Harrod laid out a settlement near the headwaters of the Salt River in that broad expanse of land south of the Ohio River known as Kentucky. This act was the culmination of the new, intense interest in that fertile region west of the mountains that made speculators and settler families alike disregard the official restriction of colony and crown and the dangers posed by a strong Indian presence. Like other Anglo-American groups wandering through Kentucky, Harrod’s group spent much time spying out the land and surveying promising tracts. On an especially attractive site near a salt lick, Harrod and his party laid out a town, built cabins, staked out lots, cleared land, planted a crop of corn, and after a sharp clash with the Shawnees, departed, leaving their preemptive marks on the surrounding countryside.1 Some time during the following autumn, a party of Indian hunters came upon the deserted settlement and destroyed it. In doing so, the Indians sought to erase a record of the intrusion on the landscape, which they rightly regarded as their hunting preserve. Already for a century and a half, Anglo-American settlers had been changing the landscape in their inexorable advance from the tidewater to the mountains. Now, after the treaty in

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1763 that removed the French, these advance parties were increasingly west of the mountains. In their persistence and numbers, the Anglo-Americans were relentless in their expansion to the West and in their appetite for new lands that they seized and placed under cultivation. Indian resistance had been continuous, but however often the Indians destroyed the isolated cabins, drove off the livestock, laid waste the cultivated fields, and even killed the settlers, the Anglo-Americans continued to come. When members of Harrod’s party returned in March of 1775, they found others already at the remains of their site. The two groups began at once to rebuild. The result was a crude palisaded fort that endured. This structure may be considered the first permanent Anglo-American settlement in that broad reach of territory stretching from the Tennessee River to the Ohio River, already known as Kentucky. James Harrod was not the first Anglo-American pioneer to visit the “land of the western waters,” as it was known from the watercourses draining toward the interior of the continent. Many others, including the celebrated hunter Daniel Boone, had been in and out of the region, especially since 1763. But Harrod’s expedition and improvements of 1774 represented a new benchmark in the permanence of the Anglo-American presence. Traders promoting commerce in furs had been crisscrossing the mountains for a century, but since about 1750, new groups— hunters and especially land speculators—had become fascinated with the lands of the Virginia Colony that lay west of the mountains. The population in the English colonies, now grown to some two and a half million, intersected with imperial policies that had removed the French from the continent. Yet, even as the Treaty of Paris in 1763 seemed to open the interior of the continent to Anglo-Americans, an imperial proclamation declared it off limits. British policy makers had determined that the empire could not risk a war against the Indian peoples of the West in the interests of the land hunger of speculators or individual settler families. Amidst the outrage of thwarted speculative ambitions at every level, small parties now penetrated west of the mountains every year. These included both hunters from



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the western districts of Virginia and land agents spying out the opportunities associated with the recent French cession. Sometimes the two groups were one and the same, hunters in the employ of speculative groups.2 What they found west of the mountains was a new Garden of Eden. “Heaven was a Kentucky sort of place” was an oftenheard response on reaching this new land, from speculators and settler families alike. Soft- and hardwood forests were interspersed with great stretches of canebrakes, and throughout, occasional open meadows. And within this natural setting was animal and bird life as rich as any seen on the continent by Anglo-Americans. The list included a roll call of the most attractive game on the continent: large herds of buffalo, bands of elk, groups of deer, bear, and flocks of wild turkeys that darkened the skies. The Kentucky country, as it was already known, was a hunter’s paradise. The attractions for investors and cultivators were equally strong.3 The riches of the Kentucky landscape—one of the great game preserves on the North American continent—drew hunters from both sides of the mountains. Word of its attractions had spread widely. In Kentucky, Anglo-American hunters from east of the mountains met Indian hunters from north of the Ohio. By the end of the seventeenth century, Iroquois raiding parties had dispersed the original Indian occupants from Kentucky and driven them to the south and west. In the first half of the eighteenth century, the Shawnee returned, and by mid-century they hunted annually in Kentucky. The two groups—the white hunters from east of the mountains and Indians from north of the Ohio—met in an uneasy truce. They understood one another in the broadest sense, and in a world in which game was plentiful, they managed a wary coexistence, broken by occasional confrontations as one side or the other overstepped the agreed-upon boundaries established by custom. This sense of wary common interest was driven by two ongoing circumstances. The first was the continuing trade in furs that had become universal on the transAppalachian frontier by mid-century. The economic and imperial focus of the trade had, for a century, been the French. Now,

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with the loss of French sovereignty in the Treaty of Paris, English traders filled the void in a business sense, if they sometimes lacked the affinity for cultural assimilation associated with the French. The second heretofore benign influence was the understanding that traders, trappers, and hunters did not have designs on the land. They intended to use the landscape, not to possess it. Thus, they shared the bounty of Kentucky with an unstated understanding that it would continue this way indefinitely into the future.4 For the three groups, the rich animal and bird life, the Indian hunters, and the Anglo-American hunters, these rules were about to change. Driving the transformation was the insatiable land hunger that had propelled Anglo-Americans west for a century and a half. Added to this instinct was the fabled reputation of the Kentucky country, mixed with the economic opportunities unleashed by the expulsion of the French from the interior of the continent. Investors of influence and capital—from the House of Commons to the House of Burgesses—now made plans to engross large tracts of lands west of the mountains. Capitalists needed land-lookers, and for these skills, they turned to the hunters. These were the men who had been in and out of Kentucky—often every year—since mid-century. But this traffic in hunters and land-lookers increased markedly after 1763. The lands of the western waters—including the garden spot of Kentucky—were now part of British North America. The interior of the continent belonged to the king, and although he had issued a proclamation forbidding settlement west of the mountains, this directive could only be understood as temporary, designed to quiet the restlessness of Indian peoples. So in anticipation of inevitable changes in imperial policy, investors of energy and foresight moved to spy out the best lands for future acquisition.5 The settlement of Anglo-American settler families in Kentucky owed much to the ambitions of one of these entrepreneurs. Richard Henderson, a Virginian by birth but North Carolinian by choice, crafted a speculative scheme that would make him the head of a large proprietary colony in the trans-Appalachian West. He promoted the attraction of the lands west of the moun-



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tains to investors and organized a company, the Transylvania Company, which proposed to control large tracts of Kentucky by Indian leases and to sell these lands to immigrants. Henderson intended to retain his rights to the lands in a manner characteristic of proprietary colonies in the seventeenth century. This proprietorship would be the foundation of a new colony—the fourteenth—and the first west of the mountains. Henderson had a measure of grudging acquiescence from several Indian groups, achieved by long bargaining and the distribution of £2,000— then a very large sum—to several chiefs at a gathering convened at Sycamore Shoals in March 1775. British officials and colonial governments called the purchase illegal, and so by the imperial regulations of the day it was. But such officials were distant, and the attractions of the Kentucky country compelling for investor and settler family alike. Buoyed with self-confidence in his project and entranced by the beauty of the landscape, Henderson journeyed to Kentucky in April 1775. There, at a site selected by his employee Daniel Boone, Henderson laid out Boonesborough, the economic and political center of his proposed colony. The new settlement’s first planned structure was a fort, symbolic of the immediate needs for security that pressed from all sides.6 The establishment of the Transylvania Colony and its promise of land attracted a number of immigrant land seekers. Henderson employed Daniel Boone and a company of axmen to cut a track to the settlement. The Wilderness Road, as it came to be called, ran from Long Island on the Holston River through the Cumberland Gap to the center of the new colony at Boonesborough. Even with a trail marked and cut, the journey was hard. William Calk, who went west with the Transylvanians in the spring of 1775, left a short but descriptive account. Here is a part of it: April satd first [1775] this morning there is ice at our camp half inch thick we Start Early & travel this Day along a verey Bad hilley way cross one creek whear the horses almost got Mired Some fell in & all wet their loads we cross Clinch River & travell till late in the Night & camp on cove creek. . . . tuesday 11th this is a very loury morning & like for Rain But we all agree to Start Early we Cross Cumberland River & travel

THE STRUGGLE FOR SECURITY

Down it about 10 miles through Some turrabel Cainbrakes as we went down abrams mair Ran into the River with Her load & Swam over he followd her & got on her & made her Swim Back agin it is a very Raney Eavening we take up camp near Richland Creek they Kill a Beef Mr Drake Bakes Bread with out Washing his hands we Keep Sentry this Night for fear of the indians.7

Calk met some families returning to Virginia, but many of those who went to the western country stayed. The lure was the land. On the eastern side of the mountains were worn-out fields, high prices, and quitrents; ahead, at the end of the long immigrant road, the pioneer “began to discover the pleasing and rapturous appearance of the plains of Kentucky.” So wrote Felix Walker, another 1775 immigrant. Walker wrote of “a sight so delightful to our view and grateful to our feelings, almost inclined us, in imitation of Columbus, in transport to kiss the soil of Kentucky, as he hailed and saluted the sand on his first setting his foot on the shores of America.”8 What Walker thought of as a second encounter with America drew families to the western country in the spring of 1775. Forted stations at Logan’s and Boiling Springs appeared near the settlements at Harrodsburg and Boonesborough in the area later known as the Bluegrass. By the summer of 1775, as the new Continental Army gathered to lay siege to Boston, one hundred and fifty Anglo-American settlers were in Kentucky and had planted two hundred acres of Indian corn. A year later, in the autumn of 1776, Virginia organized the new trans-Appalachian settlements into Kentucky County, an official recognition of their permanent character. The occupation of western North Carolina took place in two stages, one antedating the first permanent settlements in Kentucky. As early as the summer of 1771, pioneer families appeared west of the mountains along the Watauga and Holston rivers. Unlike the journey of families through the Cumberland Gap and into the Kentucky Bluegrass, expansion into the WataugaHolston area was a natural extension of the North Carolina settlements. Here, in the mountain valleys of the Appalachians, pioneers struggled to cultivate the soil, to organize their settlements, and to make an accommodation with the strong Indian tribes that surrounded them.



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The founding of a permanent settlement along the Cumberland River in 1779 was in sharp contrast to this gradual growth. Inspired once again by the entrepreneurial vision of Richard Henderson, who chose to locate his new land grant (given in compensation for his loss of the Transylvania Company lands) on the distant Cumberland, a large immigrant party moved by water down the Kentucky River to the Ohio and thence up the Tennessee. The pioneer families included John Donelson, whose daughter Rachel later became the wife of Andrew Jackson. Surviving both Indian attacks and a small pox epidemic, the settlers established the village of Nashborough (later Nashville), built shelters, and, with the coming of spring, planted a corn crop. This second Tennessee settlement—some two hundred miles west of the Watauga-Holston frontier—survived and grew. North Carolina eventually recognized its western settlements with the formation of Washington County in 1777, to serve the settlements just beyond the mountains and Davidson County in 1783, to accommodate the pioneers around Nashborough in the valley of the Cumberland River.9 The new settlements west of the mountains—in the Bluegrass of Kentucky and on the Watauga and Cumberland in what would become Tennessee—felt the upheavals associated with the American Revolution. Although the events that we associate with the struggle for independence took place largely along the eastern seaboard, the echoes of these dislocations and conflicts developed west of the mountains as increasing confrontations with Indian peoples. Driven by support from British officials north of the Ohio, the naked land hunger of the speculators and settler families, and the growing competition for game within these regions, Indian raiding parties of several tribal groups harassed the frontier of Anglo-American settlements. The year 1777 was especially violent in Kentucky. Hard winters added to the suffering of the first settler families. These continuing raids firmly established Indians as the prototype enemy and the British as their aiders and abettors. These attitudes survived the close of the revolution and continued to define policy and attitudes until well into the decade of the 1790s. Yet it is noteworthy that immigration continued into all three areas throughout the years of the revolutionary war, in spite of growing Indian resis-

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tance and the sense of abandonment by the governments east of the mountains.10 The close of the revolutionary war did not end these confrontations west of the mountains; if anything, it intensified them. The ratification of a formal peace treaty recognizing American independence in 1783 wiped out the last vestiges of the authority of the Proclamation Line of 1763 and, among other changes, signaled the opening of the trans-Appalachian region to the settler families of the new, independent American nation. And so the peace treaty signed in Paris led to a period of increased immigration and intensified Indian warfare west of the mountains. Mountain barriers did not so much block immigration as channel it to conform to the configuration of the land. People moved in great numbers from the Piedmont regions along the Wilderness Road and through the Cumberland Gap, and down the Ohio River by way of Pittsburgh. Richard Henry Lee wrote to James Madison in 1784 of the “powerful emigration” from the interior parts of Virginia to Kentucky. He found two specific causes: “the desire of removing from heavy taxes and the search after land.” For many families, life in the new country west of the mountains (whatever the dangers) seemed more attractive than life in the old. Virginia immigrants went especially to Kentucky. The settlements there were already established and institutions of government, economy, and society more developed than elsewhere in the western country.11 The richness and fertility of Kentucky and other western lands were widely advertised. Virginia land warrants, redeemable in Kentucky lands, and the activities of land speculators helped to speed the movement of people. To the south, settlements in the Tennessee Valley and the Watauga-Holston region grew slowly after 1783. A dispute with North Carolina over sovereignty added to the issues of conflict with Indian peoples and the great distances between the settlements. The year after North Carolina established Davidson County (the Nashville settlements), the Watauga-Holston settlements—North Carolina’s county of Washington—declared their independence and formed the state of Franklin. The dispute between Franklin and North Carolina, which lasted for four years, disrupted orderly government, delayed settlement by calling



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Table 1. Growth of Kentucky and Tennessee, 1775–90 Kentucky 1775 1776 1777 1780 1782 1783 1784 1787 1788 1790

150 — 5,000 in the region south of the Ohio 3,000 men able to bear arms 8,000 inhabitants 12,000 30,000 50,000 — 73,677

Tennessee — 7,700 — — — — — — 25,000 35,691

Source: These figures are from a more complete listing in Evarts B. Greene and Virginia D. Harrington, American Population before the Federal Census of 1790 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), 192–94. The figures for 1790 come from the first federal census. Herman R. Friis, “A Series of Population Maps of the Colonies and the United States, 1625–1790,” Geographical Review 30 (1940): map for 1790, facing p. 464, gives a sense of the distribution of population in Kentucky and Tennessee.

land titles into question, and led to sporadic violence. Despite manifestos and courthouse raids, people continued to arrive, and settlement expanded along the French Broad, Powell, and Clinch (all tributaries of the Tennessee) and, farther to the west, along the Cumberland. In 1788 the Franklinites capitulated, but they gained a measure of independence from North Carolina two years later when Congress organized the “Territory of the United States South of the River Ohio” (hereafter the Southwest Territory).12 The pioneers who moved to the west of the mountains after 1775 (and in increasing numbers after 1783) shared certain basic needs—food, shelter, and physical security. A distinguishing feature of this first trans-Appalachian frontier was its anxiety over Indian peoples. This generation of Indian warriors was formidable. They were brave and skillful foes in warfare, cunning negotiators of equal stature around the council fires, a people whose brilliant wilderness skills had been borrowed wholesale by the Spanish, the French, the English, and, finally, the Americans. In time, security would come to mean an orderly society

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guaranteeing protection of private property; for the first pioneers of the trans-Appalachian West, security meant simply protection from the Indian. The Indian danger was especially severe in 1777 and 1781. Within a few years after 1775, pioneers had come to the western country in such numbers as to make their settlements permanent, yet the nature of Indian warfare, with its surprise attack and rapid withdrawal, disrupted the agrarian society of the early pioneers. These small scattered agricultural settlements that lacked a centralized military force were always vulnerable to such attacks. For the years of the American Revolution—and for a decade thereafter—no settler (man, woman, or child) could look into the forest without wondering what lay concealed there. No one ventured from the cabin unarmed. A generation of children grew up in a world of silence and hasty midnight trips to the nearest station. Women endured the long absences of their husbands, but they never waited easily. Clearing and cultivating the land that the settlers had come so far to possess and endured so much to hold was hard, lonely, and dangerous. To achieve this security, the early settler families relied on two basic institutions. One of these, the frontier station, was new; a second, the organized militia, had roots deep in the colonial past. The station was a group of log houses connected by a high wooden wall to form a primitive palisaded fort. The pioneer Benjamin Allen described Biles’s Station as “20 or 30 steps square, a house at every corner, & a family in each house.” Others were larger and more elaborate. The houses were generally two stories high, the second floor serving as a firing station. Settlers cleared trees and underbrush around the station in order to secure unobstructed observation in every direction and to deprive the attacking Indians of cover. Pioneers with early claims on attractive sites or those who came later with Virginia preemption warrants established many of the first stations; like Harrodsburg, they frequently bore the name of the founder. The early settlers of Kentucky and Tennessee found that the station suited their needs perfectly. Its houses and walls were built of logs from the surrounding forests. It had its own water supply and might contain space for livestock, although an increasing population made the sheltering of animals less practical. Nothing else was necessary. The station was designed to withstand a



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siege and to counter an Indian strategy that depended on surprise that overpowered the defenders. It was successful. Individual lives were lost, but the stations survived.13 Over the first fifteen years of Kentucky’s Anglo-American settlement, stations appeared in numbers and with many variations. Associated with individual families, they were, in a strict sense, proprietary creations, in that the family owned the structure (or most of it) and the land around it. As many as a dozen settler families would live near the station and retreat to it in case of alarm. As settlement spread in Kentucky, stations proliferated in like proportion. Within the twelve counties of the Bluegrass area, more than 150 stations have been identified. Stations were supplemented by forts, larger and stronger structures that could shelter greater numbers and sometimes livestock. Forts (Fort Boonesborough, Lexington Fort) were community enterprises, constructed, maintained, and garrisoned (in the loosest sense of the word) by numbers of people.14 The settlers first lived within the walls of a station, but slowly the pressure of population and the gradual ebb of Indian threat made it not only possible but also necessary for families to move outside the palisade. Once released from the stations by the lifting of a siege, settlers simply camped near the gates. Sometimes they constructed the first shelters in an ever-widening arc around the station, to which people might return in time of emergency. Sarah Graham remembered that her father built his first cabin in a clearing about seventy yards from Fisher’s Station, in the Kentucky Bluegrass.15 With the pressure of new immigrants and the decline in Indian raids in the late 1780s, settlements spread out beyond the Bluegrass region. At the same time, the stations as sites of shelter in central Kentucky made the transition to plantation houses. A more traditional instrument of security was the militia. The role of the citizen-soldier had its origins in colonial America and, before that, in the English countryside. It reflected the longstanding Anglo-American distrust of standing armies, and it was also economical. The first militia units south of the Ohio were unofficial and included all men associated with a station or settlement. Each of the several early governments on the trans-

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Appalachian frontier provided for a militia, beginning with Richard Henderson’s Transylvania Colony proprietorship and the Watauga Association—an unofficial government of the first settlers in eastern Tennessee—and extending through the state of Franklin and county governments under Virginia and North Carolina, to the territories northwest and south of the Ohio River. The requirements were almost always the same. The law or custom required that all men of arms-bearing age (generally eighteen to forty-five) enroll and muster on a regular basis. On the earliest and most exposed frontiers of Kentucky and Tennessee, serviceable equipment and skill in the field counted for more than the fine points of military organization and fancy uniforms. Sarah Graham, who had come to Kentucky in 1780, commented that the early militia units “had no other shirts than buckskin hunting shirts; and wore moccasins and bear-skin hats.”16 Regulations gradually became detailed. A Kentucky Gazette notice in 1787 specified the Kentucky requirements: Every non commission officer and private is by law directed to furnish himself with a good clean musket, containing an ounce ball, three feet eight inches long in the barrel, with a good Bayonet and iron ramrod, well fitted thereto, a cartridge box, properly made, to contain and secure twenty cartridges fitted to his musket; a good musket, and canteen; and to have at every muster one pound of good powder, and four pounds of lead, including twenty blind cartridges; and every serjeant to have a pair of moulds fit to cast balls, in their respective companies.17

As well as military defense, the militia served the social, political, and economic needs of the new settlements. Regimental musters twice yearly and company musters quarterly were a center of political activity. The law specified that members of militia companies should elect their own officers, and many who had failed to meet the property qualifications for suffrage in one of the older colonies (later states) were given their first opportunity to cast a ballot or run for office. In Kentucky, early militia companies became designated units of political representation. As an example, each militia company elected one delegate to the Danville Convention of 1784. Militia activities also had a social

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dimension, for musters were the largest gathering of people on the trans-Appalachian frontiers until the great religious revivals at the turn of the century. They often coincided with court day, and after drills men would gather in small groups to play at politics, swap horses, engage in rough and tumble, debate the leading questions of the day (the price of land, crops, and slaves), or simply exchange news.18 The militia units had institutional connections to the colonies (and soon states) of Virginia and North Carolina. Issues of militia organization and authority became one of the grievances of the new trans-Appalachian settlements against the governments to the east. During the years of most serious confrontations with Indians, Kentucky leaders lacked the administrative authority and the financial resources to order militia units to engage Indian parties outside the Kentucky district. This limitation meant that Indian raiding parties could retire north of the Ohio River without risk of pursuit. This issue was one of several driving the Kentucky settlements toward independence from Virginia.19 In the face of these institutional and financial restrictions, private military organizations in the form of local volunteer units appeared to play a shadowy role in the early years of the transAppalachian settlements. Their establishment arose from the militia’s apparent inability to cope with the wide-ranging nature of Indian warfare. Confronted by sudden raids, the militia often seemed slow and clumsy in response. Private military groups, however, operated spontaneously and without the restraints of the militia or the restrictions imposed by Virginia. In their independence from higher authority and their single-minded determination for vengeance, they were highly motivated and fought well. These groups focused on the threat at hand and were less inclined to drill and muster in approved fashion or on a regular basis. The political and social functions of the militia were less significant for private military organizations, but their leaders established reputations that laid the ground for future political careers. John Sevier of Tennessee was a case in point. The Sevier family had settled on the Holston and later the Watauga by the early 1770s. He was an early leader of the settlements and won elective



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office, standing firm in the face of danger but exercising a degree of restraint in inflammatory situations. Sevier became best known for his wars against the Cherokees. He led some thirty expeditions against the Cherokee, commanding a force of volunteers who rallied to his name, knowing they would be well led. His forceful military leadership through the decade of the revolution and into the 1780s made him the most prominent figure in Tennessee. When Tennessee became a state in 1796, John Sevier would be elected governor six times.20 The need for physical security remained paramount on the early trans-Appalachian frontier, and it affected every aspect of life, especially patterns of settlement and travel. Most of the early travelers within the trans-Appalachian regions north and south of the Ohio moved in groups. The local newspapers carried notices of departures, stressing that those intent on joining should come armed. Prospective travelers assembled the night before to organize themselves; the expedition began promptly at daylight the following morning. Sometimes those returning to the east along the Wilderness Road joined together in a pledge of mutual support reminiscent of the Mayflower Compact. The itinerant Methodist circuit rider Francis Asbury has left an account of his participation in one such trip undertaken in 1790. We set out on our return through the wilderness with a large and helpless company; we had about fifty people, twenty of whom were armed, and five of whom might have stood fire. To preserve order and harmony, we had articles drawn up for, and signed by, our company, and I arranged for people for traveling according to the regulations agreed upon. Some disaffected gentlemen, who would neither sign nor come under discipline, had yet the impudence to murmur when left behind.21

As late as the 1790s, men going up and down the Ohio to Limestone and Pittsburgh continued to advertise in the newspapers for well-armed companions.22 That the station, the militia, and other institutions of frontier life emphasized self-assistance was just as well. Lack of federal military protection against the Indian threat was a continuing grievance of the frontier areas. In the period from 1775 to 1783, the states of Virginia and North Carolina and from 1783 to 1795,

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the new national government made only sporadic efforts to protect the Anglo-American pioneers of the trans-Appalachian region. During the first decade, the new government fought a war for its independence against the strongest military power in the western world; in the second, the uncertain financial condition of the new independent nation worked against well-organized and well-financed military assistance. Officials in the East often stressed that defense must be cheap, whatever its effectiveness.23 When help was forthcoming, the force was initially undermanned, poorly provisioned, and badly led. Not until the twin military disasters of Josiah Harmar (1790) and Arthur St. Clair (1791) in the Northwest Territory did the national government mount a well-organized, well-trained, and well-financed campaign against the Indians. And all this took place north of the Ohio River. To the south, the pioneer settlements of Kentucky and Tennessee received little assistance from the federal governments in their search for physical security.24 As basic as the need for physical security was the need for daily subsistence. The America of 1775 was a land of small farms. The first pioneer families on the trans-Appalachian frontiers were also farmers, and they reacted to the frontier experience of the trans-Appalachian West accordingly. The AngloAmerican struggle for land in the new English colonies had already been under way for a century and a half by the time the pioneers emerged west of the mountains. It had been a long conflict in which the land seekers had fought against the Indians, colonial proprietorships, landlords, and quitrents. This quest for land drove men and women into the backcountry of the Carolinas, across the mountains in Pennsylvania, and into northern New England. The vision of rich, fertile, cheap lands now sent pioneers across the Appalachians, where they intended to pursue their agricultural legacy. By the decade of the 1790s, people had settled the central region known as the Kentucky Bluegrass, land had become expensive, and social and economic distinctions were already evident. This pioneering experience began with the departure for the new land, and what the settler families chose to carry with them was vital. Transportation by wagon—the customary means of travel—placed a premium on weight. Tools and seed were the



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most commonly carried items. Although the settler’s ultimate destiny was linked to the soil, the immediate survival of the family depended on skills with a variety of tools—the axe, knife, hoe, and rifle—and the capacity to keep them in good working order. Joseph Doddridge remembered the several talents that his father brought to the frontier. The elder Doddridge could make shoes, cooper ware, and “farming utensils,” which his son described as the best around. He could also spin thread, repair rifles, and build a cabin, hewed log house, or shingled house with equal facility. Furthermore, as the most literate man in the neighborhood, he served as a kind of public secretary for the community, writing “letters, bonds, deeds of conveyance, etc.” These were all talents not only useful but even necessary on the frontier, although Doddridge perhaps possessed them to an unusual degree.25 Agricultural development ran from a small clearing in the forest or near a station with the first critical crop of corn, to a sufficiency, and ultimately to a surplus for sale. On arriving at the destination, the immigrant family unloaded the wagons and horses and built a shelter for the family and supplies. Later they constructed a log cabin. Both the lean-to and the cabin could be built from materials at hand, and often simultaneously with clearing the land. In the course of the next several years—if the family remained in one spot—this first shelter might be supplemented or changed. If they moved again, the lean-to and log cabin cycle probably recurred, and whether the family was stationary or in motion, the construction of buildings was a continuous process. The pioneer family was always engaged in building or repairing barns, shelters, outbuildings, and additions to the house. Coincident with the construction of shelter came cultivation of the soil. This invariably meant planting the first crop of corn. “They Begin laying off lots in the town and preparing for peopel to go to work to make corn,” wrote William Calk of the first arrivals in Boonesborough in the spring of 1775.26 If the pioneer family lived in or near a station, they would plant in one of the quarter-acre garden plots that surrounded the walls, or perhaps in a common field without fencing. In the woods, a suitable site would have to be cleared. Whatever the location and circum-

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stances, corn was the universal crop on the trans-Appalachian frontier. It needed little cultivation, and it grew rapidly in the fertile, black soil of the Bluegrass and Nashville basins. Without this basic crop—a gift of Indian peoples—so easy to plant and so adaptable to frontier conditions, so nourishing and with so many uses, the cycle of life and labor on the early frontier would have been different. From the time of their arrival, the family’s main effort was directed to the cultivation of their corn crop. Seed was sometimes scarce, family supplies limited, and the pioneer often dependent upon the land and the forest for food through the first winter.27 Accounts of station life and early economic enterprise emphasize again and again that the family was the institution of central importance. The pioneers moved in family groups, both for physical protection and for mutual assistance in many other ways. The accounts collected by Lyman Copeland Draper and John D. Shane, the first chroniclers of pioneer life on the transAppalachian frontier, make constant reference to the family unit. Everyone worked on the first trans-Appalachian frontier— men, women, children of every age. They worked harder in the first years, when the farm was barely self-sufficient. The task of opening up the new land was all consuming. The land had to be cleared, crops planted and cultivated, mixed constantly with construction of shelter and issues of security. In addition to the challenges of the field and the forest were continuous chores for the women of the family. These included clothes and soap to make, cotton to pick and spin, livestock and poultry to manage, corn to grind, and all the daily tasks that had to be done again and again. And above all, the numerous pregnancies, childbirth, and the attendant dangers associated with these responsibilities on remote farms and in isolated settlements. The family was recognized as a basic institutional unit of early settlement. The Legislative Council of the Northwest Territory offered its benediction with these words: “the foundation of public prosperity and happiness must be laid in private families; every well ordered family is a little amiable community.”28 The diverse duties of men, which included militia duty and hunting expeditions in the autumn, often left women in charge of the household for prolonged periods. Whether in managing



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the farm or loading rifles during a siege, women had to exercise initiative and flexibility in their roles. The legendary hunters of Kentucky such as Daniel Boone were gone from what they called home most of the time, but even men disposed to farm found themselves called away on numerous occasions. In the same fashion, children were sometimes called upon to exercise adult responsibilities. The demands of the frontier in these early years were continuous.29 The country west of the mountains was a land of great promise, but plenty and prosperity lay in the future. Many of the early settlers came with little. A decade of war intensified their poverty. Recalling these early years for Draper or Shane, several pioneers noted how little the first generation of settlers had in the way of material goods. William Clinkenbeard immigrated to Kentucky with his father in 1780. It was a ragged procession, he explained: “Pressly Anderson was barefooted and bare legged (rolled up his pantaloons); his W.[ife] was walking and carrying her child.” The Clinkenbeards settled at Strode’s Station, north of Boonesborough, where they sought both safety and land. Strode let Clinkenbeard and others use land rent-free until the close of the war. It was a good way to attract enough able-bodied men around the station to defend it in case of Indian attack. Each family had a garden just outside the palisade, a communal unfenced field, laid off into quarter-acre plots. There the Clinkenbeards and others cultivated their first Kentucky soil. Clinkenbeard remembered the early days in these terms: “The women the first spring we came out, wo’d follow their cows to see what they ate, that they might know what greens to get. My Wife and I had neither spoon, dish, knife, or any thing to do with when we began life. Only I had a butcher knife.” While Clinkenbeard tilled the land, he also tried to accumulate a herd of livestock. Domestic animals—whether cattle, sheep, hogs, or horses—represented an early cash crop, for they were a future surplus that could walk to market in a world where land transportation was virtually nonexistent.30 Like other early farmers in Kentucky, Clinkenbeard also hunted and trapped, selling the meat and skins. He bought a set of trenchers from Enos Terry of Strode’s Station, of whom he

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commented, “He turned dishes & bowls-& being no hunter exchanged them for meat & tallow to us hunters.” Deer and buffalo were among the favorite early targets of the Kentucky hunters, especially the buffalo, which were often shot simply for sport. The surviving accounts testify that every pioneer remembered shooting his first buffalo. Buffalo meat was also widely consumed. “Buffalo was mighty coarse meat; good deal like corn bread. Had it for bread,” noted Benjamin Allen. “Then bear was fat, and we had it for meat.” Pioneers also hunted turkey. John Hedge recalled of the early years in Kentucky: “We had turkeypot-pie till I got so tired I never wanted to eat any more as long as I lived.” The market hunter, who sold his kill to farmers and families in town, was a prominent figure on the early Kentucky frontier. “I supported the family, mostly with my gun,” remembered John Graves.31 After clothes brought on the journey wore out, people made their own, as they had earlier, east of the mountains. Jeptha Kemper commented that “every family had to wear their own make. They had no stores, and if they had, they had no money to take to them.” Sometimes home-woven cloth supplemented the skins of the forest. Sarah Graham remembered that her mother brought four pounds of cotton seed and planted it. From this “she raised 14 lbs: of picked cotton the 1st year, besides letting Aunt Sooky Holtzclaw and Mrs. Copeland also have of some of the seed, from which they also raised cotton. Mother gave 7 yds: of cotton for one sow shoat. With 9 yds: she got some salt on Beargrass and a little money besides.”32 Women’s contributions to the family economy were often the first to find a market. The simplest kinds of economic transactions characterized the economy of the early trans-Appalachian frontiers. People concentrated on the immediate needs of life, which they found in the soil and the woods. To the extent that they made economic contact with the outside world, it was through the fur trade. On all the frontiers from western Pennsylvania to Georgia, the earliest trade with the East was in peltry. The relatively high value of furs justified their transportation for long distances over poor tracks. Doddridge commented of early western Pennsylvania, “Fur and peltry were the people’s money. They had nothing else



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to give in exchange for rifles, salt, and iron, on the other side of the mountains.” The first Kentucky and Tennessee pioneers also traded in furs and ginseng. The numbers of fur-bearing animals soon diminished, as the large numbers of immigrants (especially after 1783) cut down the forests. Furs remained a valued commodity. That Kentucky newspapers in the Bluegrass country advertised for furs as late as 1795 implies a continuing supply and an item of consistent value.33 Such accounts suggest, too, the barter economy that accompanied agricultural self-sufficiency. Hard currency was scarce on the early trans-Appalachian frontier. Immigrants carried a small supply of cash with them for necessities such as nails, tools, or salt, but few of the new settlers had much money. Merchants in the village of Lexington, the commercial center of the Bluegrass, permitted the pioneer family to pay for goods in the products of the farm and the forest. If the merchant wished to do business, he had no choice. Early Kentucky surveying fees were paid in tobacco, dressed deerskins, and second-rate cows and calves. John Hedge remembered that “the currency of the country then was cows and calves, and horses. More current than our bank notes now. Have heard a horse cried off in Paris at so many cows and calves.” As late as 1783, a tract of land was advertised for sale in which the seller would accept in payment “cash, tobacco, hemp, or negroes.” Another seller declared that he would accept “tobacco, negroes, or Officers certificates.” Slaves taken from Virginia to Kentucky were sometimes hired out in exchange for cattle.34 The early immigrants west of the mountains developed several frontier industries and utilized a variety of mechanical skills to meet their basic needs. Production of salt and iron usually received attention first. Salt works early appeared in Kentucky, capitalizing on the many salt licks and the importance of meat in the frontier diet. Salt was one of the few items that the frontier family might purchase at a store. Another was iron. Blacksmiths established furnaces, and such facilities were almost invariably profitable. With the universal dependence on firearms for defense and the hunt, the blacksmith was one of the most valued of frontier tradesmen. Daniel Drake, a Cincinnati doctor

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who grew up on the Kentucky frontier, later wrote, “The mechanic acts practiced at that time were only those which are inseparable from civilization. The blacksmith, house carpenter, turner, tanner, shoemaker, tailor, weaver, and such like, made the whole, and all were very commonplace in skill.” Drake concluded, “The great occupation was clearing off the forest and cultivating the rich and fresh new soil.”35 The gristmill was the most common of the early industries; it processed corn, the basic frontier crop. The mills of the transAppalachian frontier depended for power on the many swift streams that fed the large river system of the Ohio Valley. Perhaps two hundred tributaries of the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers alone had sufficient power for mills. The reliance on waterpower made milling a seasonal operation, for mills could not operate during periods of low water. At flood time, they might be washed away. Even with all the inconveniences and expenses of heavy stones and dam construction, mills early appeared almost everywhere, and pioneers flocked to the mills with their corn.36 Robert McAfee remembered a mill built in the vicinity of Harrodsburg as early as 1778, widely used although the “large hand mill stones . . . ground but slowly, and after filling the hopper it was often left to itself for half a day at a time. The wild turkies often resorted to it to get their breakfast.” In 1783 the McAfees moved away from the station and immediately felt the need of a mill. McAfee’s father, “with the assistance of his brothers . . . and one or two hired hands built a log dam across Salt River and put up a small Tub mill which afterwards done a good business for many years, and settlers from Benson near Frankfort often came to his mill with packhorses loaded with grain.” Mills in Tennessee and western Virginia followed the same pattern. Such was the demand for their services that laws and local custom controlled their use. The law usually provided that each take a turn at the mill. A wait was almost always involved, perhaps even a stay overnight. For this reason, a young boy often carried the corn or grain to the mill and returned with the flour. It was a fine opportunity for social contact, and the wait with contemporaries offered a chance to skylark, visit, play games, and exchange news. For his services, the miller collected a portion of



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the flour, generally one-eighth by law or local custom. As an enterprise that provided a necessary and universal economic service, the mill achieved the status of a public utility.37 The struggle against the Indian peoples, the Revolution under way in the East, and the physical conditions of the new land all made the first years hard ones in the trans-Appalachian West. Immigrants crowded into stations, diet was limited, and sanitary conditions grew worse with the passage of time. Stations were effective against Indian raids, but at the time of a siege, they were crowded, and they were especially unpleasant where livestock was sheltered. As late as 1793, a threatened uprising of Indian groups in the southwestern Tennessee country led Governor William Blount of the Southwest Territory to comment: “The families in general on the frontiers are collected at stations. at one which I lately visited (John Craig’s) there are 280 people, men women and children, living in a miserable manner in small huts.”38 The large numbers in a single station suggest the seriousness of the threat and the lack of alternative shelters. John Floyd noted the aggravations of confined quarters and restricted diet. “People this year seem generally to have lost their health: but perhaps it is owing to the disagreeable way in which we are obliged to live,” he wrote, “crowded in forts where the air seems to have lost all its purity and sweetness.” Floyd’s son was ill, and he was “much afraid we shall lose the child, and if we do I shall impute it to nothing but living in dirt and filth.”39 Despite all the hardships, dangers, and lack of material things, immigrants came across the mountains in increasing numbers. People came during the Indian warfare of 1777; they came before, during, and after the severe winter of 1779–80; they came throughout a decade of Indian hostility that began after the Treaty of 1783. These numbers ensured the survival of the settlements west of the mountains. A sea of farms and land seekers submerged the early stations. And if the frontier experience had a physical hardness about it, the seemingly infinite fertility of the soil repaid the effort. The economic returns of these first years were limited, but most settlers had sufficient food and shelter to support life. Robert McAfee commented that the

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people had enough to live on, “and their stock of Hogs & cattle as well as horses increased rapidly.”40 Accompanying the struggle for subsistence amidst the search for security was the issue of land. In a way it was a dimension of the search for security not less powerful than the issue of physical protection. Over the twenty-five years from James Harrod’s first settlement in 1774 until the turn of the century, the question of land would come to dominate the lives of many in Kentucky. Among the several issues that affected the frontier experience, it was the most enduring, and for many the most frustrating. Unlike later frontiers to the west, the issue of Kentucky lands began in the colonial world of ever-changing schemes and personal alliances, arched across the years of the revolution, and continued unabated and indeed enlarged after American independence. Pioneers and speculators alike (and the distinctions between them were blurred almost from the first Anglo-American settlements) confronted two proprietors. The first were the claims of Indian peoples, their hunting rights firmly established for generations. The arrival of permanent Anglo-American agricultural pioneers gradually ended the prickly but often accommodating relationship between the two groups of hunters, those east of the mountains and those west. The decline of this accommodation was directly related to the deterioration of the hunting environment. The violent resistance of Indian people continued throughout the years of the American Revolution and into the 1780s. But with the opening of the new decade and the end of the war, immigration to Kentucky increased, and sheer numbers provided an increased sense of security and permanence.41 As these numbers swelled across central Kentucky (what would become known as the Bluegrass) the issue of land titles became paramount. Here, frontier people and speculators looked to the second of the proprietors, namely the State (former colony) of Virginia. The original colonial charter of Virginia gave it title to lands beyond the mountains. It was in the colonial chambers and later the state legislature that battles would be fought over the rich lands of Kentucky. Ambitious land entrepreneurs and outrageous speculative schemes flourished in the



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confusion of the 1760s and 70s. Individuals and groups circumvented or ignored British imperial considerations in the struggle to acquire large tracts west of the mountains. Richard Henderson was the most daring and inventive of this group, but he had many imitators. When Henderson’s Transylvania Company failed to take hold in the face of resistance against his harsh terms (high land prices and quitrents), its proprietor simply moved to other schemes in the valley of the Cumberland. Meanwhile, the State of Virginia issued treasury warrants redeemable in Kentucky lands. As the warrants could be purchased for depreciated wartime currency, these warrants offered a golden opportunity for those who sought to acquire large tracts of Kentucky lands. And the system of location—in the legal tradition of Virginia that marked lands by trees, streams, rocks, and other natural landmarks—ensured that these claims would be covered by other claims, and endless legal proceedings would be needed to sort out the various claims and claimants. All these circumstances worked against the early settlers, who took up lands outside the stations that they hoped to hold through the “homestead” principle. The State of Virginia acknowledged the principle, at least in outline, and it passed laws to recognize the claims of early settlers west of the mountains. Three years passed before the details were worked out, however, and when the state commission arrived in Kentucky in October 1779 to hear petitions from claimants, the land system was already in confusion. The commission issued some 1,328 certificates over the next seven months, with vague descriptions of the tracts. By the time surveys began three years later, lawsuits covered every claim. Most of the original settlers lost out, including Daniel Boone, who failed to understand the intricate provisions of his grants and so found himself entangled in endless lawsuits. Instead, Boone soon found employment locating lands for purchasers of treasury warrants. As many of the original settlers lost title, they began to look to the less crowded lands south of the Green River and to the newly opened territory north of the Ohio. Kentucky, which began as a paradise for hunters, became a garden of Eden for lawyers in less than a generation.42

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To Clinkenbeard, Allen, Floyd, and Graham must be added other kinds of Kentucky settlers. They might be usefully divided into two groups of large-scale entrepreneurs whose presence helped to shape (and perhaps dominate) its development, especially with respect to land. The first were people of influence and means who arrived in Kentucky and took up strategic locations subject to preemption rights under a Virginia law of 1779. They intended to build large landed estate. John Floyd of Virginia was one of these. Floyd came to Louisville at the falls of the Ohio in the winter of 1779. He immediately established a station on his land. He hoped to find pioneers to settle and make improvements. “I have no fear of not getting Settlers at my station in abundance, as they are very sickly at the falls,” he wrote. While his family lived in a tent for ten weeks, Floyd built five cabins for his prospective tenants. Although a family of means, the Floyds endured the hardships shared by all pioneer families. The winter of 1779–80 was an exceptionally severe one. A freeze in mid-December closed the Ohio to traffic. Floyd’s outlook on life changed from the confidence of an entrepreneur to the anxiety of a man struggling for survival. He asked relatives or friends making the trip west that winter please to bring “a little Flour,” an item that he called “as dear as gold dust.” Corn rose to $165 a bushel at Louisville, “and people seem desirous to have every other article in proportion to that. Money is of no account here.” Floyd also appealed to his friends in Virginia to send clothes for his wife and son. But throughout the winter he continued to make reference to “all the advantages we expect in the future” and to “my Land where I shall soon have a fine plantation and Fort.” With the coming of spring, Floyd’s prospects rose with the swollen Ohio. He wrote of his changed fortunes: “I am sorry I made such complains to you in the winter about Bread as we now have plenty. I think near three hundred large Boats have arrived at the Falls this spring with families, & corn can be bought now for thirty Dollars—We have six stations on B. Grass with not less than 600 men. You would be surprised to see 10 or 15 Waggons at a time going to & from the falls every day with Families & corn.”43



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A second group of means and influence were those who emigrated from Virginia in the late 1780s and 1790s into a Kentucky that had already achieved a degree of physical security. These families had sufficient wealth to buy large farms (the word “plantations” was coming into common use) ready for occupation, with cleared lands and buildings. This group brought large numbers of slaves with them, in preparation for pursing largescale agriculture and establishing the kind of genteel society they had left behind in Virginia. John Breckenridge and his family were a case in point. After several years of discussion and preparation, the Breckenridge family moved to Kentucky in May 1793. The move was delayed in part by the reluctance of Polly Breckenridge, John’s wife, to leave the lively society of Virginia for what she thought of as the barren society of frontier Kentucky. The Breckenridge family had sent eighteen slaves west a year earlier, hiring them out for cattle until the master and mistress arrived. The extended Breckenridge family immediately became a leader in Kentucky politics and society. In the random domestic disasters that struck rich and poor alike on the frontier (and indeed throughout the nation at the close of the eighteenth century), the two youngest children died of smallpox the winter following the family’s arrival. John Breckenridge, the patriarch of the clan, died in 1806, having already served as senator for the State of Kentucky and attorney general of the United States.44 The scramble for lands in Tennessee was different but no less venal and intense. As John Finger has written of the westward extension of North Carolina, “Land was an all consuming passion in 1783 and 1784.” Carolina speculators were fully as active as those from Virginia. Investors brought quantities of depreciated paper currency to use in swallowing up large tracts. “Bribery of officials at all levels was rampant. Legal loopholes abounded, warrants were forged, and credit was illegally extended on sales.” In this way, some four million acres of Tennessee lands were sold within a year. The state’s cession of its western lands to Congress in 1784 was the work of a powerful group of speculators led by William Blount. The terms of the

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cession included the recognition of prior entries, a condition drawing on the recent Virginia cession under the same terms.45 Within a generation, amidst a war for independence and another against Indian peoples, pioneer families had established substantial permanent settlements on the trans-Appalachian frontier. The original trickle of settlers down the Wilderness Road had, within twenty years, become a flood. Hunters and squatters outside stations had been replaced by affluent families with large land grants and slaves. In many ways, the institutional development of Kentucky and Tennessee reflected this change. By 1795, a substantial degree of security had been achieved, at least within many settlements. Another stage of development now beckoned.



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The Search for Stability

At some point in the pioneering cycle, the early settlers turned their attention from security to stability. When the immediate demands of physical safety, shelter, and subsistence were satisfied, or nearly so, the question arose how best to confirm the economic advantages and high expectations that had sent so many families to the western country. The distinction between security and stability was not always a clear one. The two conditions were not mutually exclusive but often overlapped, or the second followed so closely on the first as to be indistinguishable from it. In the search for stability, families and communities needed to establish firmer arrangements for economic exchange, accompanied by the organization of government, law, and social institutions. Physical and economic growth secured the survival of new settlements, and the development of a more complex society. Government established a framework within which pioneers pursued their interests in an orderly fashion, following accepted rules of behavior. The unofficial rules and customs that governed stations and forts and the compacts put in place for security in immigration had to be succeeded by more formal institutions with a universal applicability. A legal code would regulate personal conduct and encourage people to risk their capital. The

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amorphous and unsettled world of the early frontier had to be fashioned into a society with rules for orderly conduct. Those who deviated from these rules could be admonished and, if necessary, confined and punished. A basic ingredient of the transition was more complex economic relationships. When the harvests of the field and the forest exceeded the needs of the family, the pioneer families began to search for a way to turn this surplus into needed goods and services. Sometimes they found a market near at hand in new immigrants, with whom they exchanged corn and meat for cloth, iron, tools, and perhaps even small amounts of hard money. Robert McAfee remembered that in 1786 his father “raised an abundant crop which he sold to new settlers which poured into Kentucky every year.” Eventually the new settlements produced agricultural surpluses so large that they could no longer be absorbed locally. At this point an accessible market had to be found in the outside world. The Ohio and Mississippi rivers (fed by the Cumberland and the Kentucky, among others) were among the great river systems of the world, and the logical market was downriver to the port of New Orleans. But in the 1780s trade downriver developed slowly, impeded by distance, the uncertain nature of the market, and the bureaucratic confusion and diplomatic intrigue with Spanish officials over American rights of navigation on the Mississippi. The interest of pioneer families in the trans-Appalachian West in the open navigation of the Mississippi River and access to the port of New Orleans grew in like proportion, eventually becoming a crucial political issue, one seen as vital to the growth of the new western settlements.1 The first Anglo-American settler families had depended on the products of the forest: furs and skins for trade, meat through hunting. With the expansion of these early frontier settlements in Kentucky and Tennessee, the focus of economic endeavor shifted to the fields. The first settlers of the trans-Appalachian frontier now searched for a commercial crop with an intensity reminiscent of their Virginia ancestors. The answer was the same: tobacco. Until 1783 hemp was the more significant crop, and tobacco raised only in small quantities. Thereafter, tobacco



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cultivation spread over much of the Bluegrass and Nashville basins. In the manner of the early Virginia experience, tobacco became the circulating medium of the day. Taxes, fines, fees, debts, and other obligations could all be paid in tobacco. As early as 1783, an inspection system certified the quality of the exportable product. Three warehouses—two on the Kentucky River, the third at the falls of the Ohio—became the centers of the inspection system. The pioneers took tobacco to the warehouse, where inspectors graded it and issued a receipt. This receipt circulated as currency. Until 1795, counterfeiting a tobacco warehouse receipt in Kentucky was a crime punishable by death. The rise in tobacco as an export commodity necessitated more complex economic arrangements, with storage, credit, and transportation. The nature and scale of the trade created enlarged opportunities, with new occupations to offer new services.2 The influx of hundreds and subsequently thousands of pioneer families changed the landscape in dramatic ways. The great stands of cane disappeared, replaced by open fields. Forests were harvested to provide lumber for buildings, fencing, and firewood. On his journeys through the Kentucky country in 1796, David Meade noted that not a tree remained on the banks of the Ohio River. The increase in the numbers of hunters led to a marked decline in the game of the forests. This condition reflected in the passing of the local influence of hunters, many of whom made the transition to land locators. And the decline in the game animals led to increasing friction with Indian hunting parties from north of the Ohio. Indian peoples were the first to recognize the dramatic drop in the populations of buffalo, deer, bear, and even turkeys. After the excesses of buffalo slaughter in the 1770s and early 1780s, by 1785 buffalo had disappeared from Kentucky. William Clinkenbeard remembered that he once shot one hundred buffalo in exchange for a single mare.3 Domestic animals replaced the wild game of the forests. Horses, cattle, and hogs were the most prominent and the most numerous. Horses were a valuable commodity on this first transAppalachian frontier, stretching across the social and economic range that soon developed. Families in the woods used horses to

THE SEARCH FOR STABILITY

plow; well-to-do families had a substantial number of horses not only for plantation work but also to pull carriages, ride for sport, and race. Horse racing was soon established as an important interest of the gentry. Cattle ranged widely across the opening meadows of the Bluegrass and the Cumberland. With the gradual decline of danger from Indian raids, herds increased rapidly. The excellent forage, mild climate, and multiple uses (milk, meat, and exchange) combined to make cattle an important dimension of economic life. As the economy grew and needed a medium of exchange, cattle (along with tobacco) helped to fill that need. Land, slaves, and luxury items were advertised in exchange for cattle. This first trans-Appalachian frontier was also an ideal natural setting for hogs. They quickly adapted to grazing in the woods and defending themselves against predators, and their number multiplied through natural increase. Hogs would eat almost anything and thrive, which made this new landscape an ideal setting for them. After a summer and fall of running wild in the woods, hogs would be rounded up for marking and slaughter.4 The replacement of wild animals by domestic animals on the landscape of the trans-Appalachian West was accompanied by important changes in the question of access to the landscape. When animals, Indian hunters, and Anglo-American hunters met, the issue was never access, or at least for the first generation. The Kentucky Bluegrass and the Cumberland Basin were vast game parks, with varieties of animal and bird life to satisfy the most avid hunter and numbers to match. Yet the rapid decline in their numbers, the struggles over land rights, the rise of commercial agriculture, and emergence of the question of land as the main issue of the day all portended changes in the woods. The dramatic rise in the numbers of hunters and their profligate killing inevitably led to growing tension and violence between the native hunters and the Anglo-American hunters.5 With these changes came the emergence of farms and then plantations, the engrossing of large tracts by individuals and speculative groups. With the support of the new laws for the designation and boundaries and the protection of property, access to the woods was increasingly limited. The hunters of this first



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trans-Appalachian frontier, of whom Daniel Boone was the prototype, did not compete well in the struggle for land rights. And with the loss of these rights came the gradual loss of what historians have called “rights in the woods.” As lands were engrossed by individuals, so they were declared off-limits to outsiders, whatever the contributions of these hunters to an earlier survival generation. As Stephen Aron has concluded, “On the transAppalachian frontier, Indians and pioneers shaped the construction and destruction of one another’s rights in the woods.” These losses were another significant benchmark in the transition from security to stability. Hunters on both sides of the Ohio contributed much to the issue of security; they had little role in the next generation’s search for stability.6 Merchants became a growing part of this world. They were already important economic figures on the early trans-Appalachian frontiers, arriving just behind or with the first settlers. The business of the merchant was to supply the pioneer families with needed goods. He was the first contact of the subsistence frontier with the commercial East, and he served as an intermediary figure in bringing commerce to the western country. The career of Lardner Clark of Nashville is one example. As early as 1783, Clark sold goods to the new citizens of Nashville and Davidson County. It was an uncertain and risky undertaking. He offered credit and accepted payment in whatever products the frontier family might bring forward. Some of his clients paid little or nothing. As a result, Clark found himself constantly involved in litigation to recover debts. At the other end of his impoverished western clientele were his creditors in the East, with their dunning form letters. Clark exemplified the opportunities and the risks. In spite of his handsome house (one of the finest in early Nashville) and his many public offices, he was constantly in debt and had to sell off portions of his landholdings. He died in 1801 virtually bankrupt.7 As the size and scope of trade expanded on the transAppalachian frontier, so did the functions of the merchant. He gradually became a middleman in the export of western products. In order to trade, merchants had to take agricultural produce; of necessity, they became shippers. Flatboats carrying

THE SEARCH FOR STABILITY

large quantities of bulk produce received in payment for store goods were among the first to venture down the Mississippi. Merchants began to assume banking functions: offering credit, making loans, discounting notes, serving as brokers in financial transactions. John Sanders, for example, established a bank in Louisville, issuing bills of credit based on goods received. The commodities bound downriver were still frontier staples and tobacco, but the quantities increased, and to save transportation costs merchants gradually took on processing functions, turning hogs into pork, cattle into beef, corn and wheat into flour. Processing represented a new stage in the economy. Elisha Winters of Lexington advertised his business in 1794 as a mixture of trade, shipping, and processing. He and his partners had a large assortment of goods to sell for “Tobacco, Hemp, Wheat, beef, Pork, Hempseed, Flax, Hog’s Lard, Peltry, Bees wax, Hog’s Bristles, or Cash—They will contract (on generous terms) for the ensuing crop of Hemp. They want immediately to employ a number of men that understands Boat building. Also two good Coopers that understands either right work or flour barrels, and great wages will be given to a Miller who can come well recommended.”8 Beyond landscape changes and the decline of warfare with Indian peoples, the trans-Appalachian frontier reflected other dramatic changes in the 1780s—physical expansion, increased population, and rising trade. Stations became towns; farms grew in numbers and size. Editors and pioneers alike began to refer to “plantations.” The settler families and adventurers of the early years found themselves supplanted by new arrivals. Virginians and Carolinians of substance came across the mountains, carrying land warrants or acquiring them on their arrival. Joining them were former Revolutionary War officers and professional men, especially lawyers. In a sense, all these people were the harbingers of a more stable society. The 1780s also witnessed the rise of the tobacco culture. Lands in the Bluegrass Region became valuable, and this broad belt of limestone soil became more and more the economic, social, and political center of a growing population. Later, families of independent wealth, such



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as John Breckenridge, would arrive and settle into positions of wealth and political influence.9 With the appearance of such families and the rising commercial nature of agriculture came the increased presence of slavery. Kentucky was an extension of Virginia, and slaves were brought across the mountains to the new settlements, where they did the work of opening up the large farms that would soon be referred to as plantations. Slaves formed a significant portion of the population even before extensive commercial agriculture. After making the difficult passage along the trail to Kentucky and being subjected to the same dangers of Indian raids, slaves were put to work carving new plantations out of the Kentucky woods. The frontier turned out to be fertile ground for the use of slaves. They did the hard physical labor associated with transition from cane and forests to fields and cultivation. They were in heavy demand; they had an assured value in an economy of uncertain commercial transactions. The census of 1790 identified 12,000 slaves in Kentucky, or nearly one person in six. Joan Wells Cowell’s study shows that in 1792, 23 percent of Kentucky’s 11,803 householders owned slaves, and the average slaveholding size was 4.32. Slaves and slavery were a well-established part of the Kentucky frontier experience, and if the slaveholding units were small, the institution was no less permanent.10 Slaves were also an early dimension of the frontier in the Cumberland, with its center at Nashborough. Initially, few slaves were part of this new settlement. Perhaps this represented the modest economic condition of the early settlers and the risk of the arduous trip. But slaves soon appeared, brought by masters and mistresses from Virginia and North Carolina. Enslaved blacks were the most valuable commodity in the new settlements aside from land. The presence of slaves was indicated by recorded entries of sales, gifts, and mortgages. The ad hoc nature of frontier economic exchange elevated slaves to a valued commercial medium. Land and livestock could be bought with slaves. The use of slaves to raise capital and to pay debts made them even more vulnerable to changes in ownership and locale. And, as befits a society that was intensely interested in the acquisition of property, slaves were property. For example, in 1789,

THE SEARCH FOR STABILITY

the land speculator John Rice delivered a twelve-year-old slave girl, Jenny, to the planter Robert Hays. Next day, Hays sold Jenny for £150 to a merchant, William Taitt, and Taitt assigned the bill of sale to another party. Within three days, Jenny had three different owners. The commercial records indicate that slaves changed owners often and on short notice. In a sense, they had dual roles as a worker and as a unit of commercial value. In 1795, Davidson County (the site of Nashborough) had a population of 3,613, of whom almost 1,000 were slaves. The numbers and proportions would grow rapidly in the new century.11 In the 1790s, government became an increasingly powerful influence in the lives of individuals and families. Government was one of the first institutions on the trans-Appalachian frontier. It appeared in some form with the construction of the first station, with agreements for traveling together, and with arrangements to cultivate a field of corn communally. Early government was often closely related to questions of security and hence to the militia, and the creation of one often led to another. Where the military organization appeared first, the command structure might gradually assume civil functions. As the needs of the frontier settlements became more complex, people turned to government to give order and system to the distribution of land, to keep necessary records, and to afford merchants a degree of protection. Whether it was security or stability they sought, frontier people turned to government to serve where state government did not function or functioned inadequately (in the cases of Virginia and North Carolina), whether because of distance or indifference. Or government was needed to supply services that individuals by themselves could not provide: protection from the Indians, construction of roads and bridges, delivery of the mail, and, eventually, custody of the poor and orphaned.12 Early frontier governments were much alike in objectives and structure. In a petition to North Carolina, dated 1775, the upper Watauga River settlers stated their reasons for coming together: “Finding ourselves on the Frontiers, and being apprehensive that, for the want of a proper legislature, we might become a shelter for such as endeavored to defraud their creditors; consid-



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ering also the necessity of recording Deeds, Wills, and doing other public business; we, by consent of the people, formed a court for the purposes above mentioned . . . [this] was done by the consent of every individual.”13 The members of the Watauga Association chose five commissioners to serve as “a court” that would decide contested issues. The settlers, through the association, also negotiated with the surrounding Indian peoples for a lease to their lands. Pioneers on the Nolichucky and in Carter’s Valley eventually joined the Watauga settlement. Growth in numbers led to a gradual expansion of the role of government, and the “court” eventually employed a clerk and sheriff. Commissioners began to hold sessions at regular intervals. As a basis for judgment, the settlers used the laws of Virginia, the legal code familiar to the largest number.14 Other rudimentary governments on the trans-Appalachian frontier followed the outlines of the Watauga model. Judge Richard Henderson was a dominant figure in the formation of two governments: the Transylvania Company (1775) and the Cumberland Association (1780). In May 1775, as proprietor of the Transylvania Company, he called for representatives of the Kentucky settlements to meet at Boonesborough for purposes of making “such Laws” as were necessary for the safety and good order of the new settlements. Seventeen representatives responded and debated for five days in this first legislative activity on the early trans-Appalachian frontier. The emphasis fell on the needs for protection of the people in the new settlements and of the property that they had and hoped to acquire. The bills passed convey the range of concerns shared by frontier people: morality, bureaucracy, authority: 1. An Act for establishing Courts of Jurisdiction, and regulating the practice therein. 2. An Act for regulating a Militia. 3. An Act for the Punishment of Criminals. 4. An Act to Prevent Profane Swearing and Sabbath Breaking. 5. An Act for Writs of Attachment. 6. An Act for ascertaining Clerks’ and Sheriffs’ Fees. 7. An Act to Preserve the Range.

THE SEARCH FOR STABILITY

8. An Act for Improving the breed of Horses. 9. An Act for Preserving Game.15 The Cumberland Association, Henderson’s government for the new Nashville settlements, emphasized military organization and judicial machinery for the resolution of disputes, especially those concerned with land title. A preamble to the articles of organization listed the many duties of the association and the reasons for its establishment. It specifically mentioned “the manifold suffering and distresses” endured by the settlers, the defection of many who became discouraged, and the subsequent condition under which “all administration of justice seemed to cease from amongst us.” The authors applauded the return of settlers with the close of the war and thought the time appropriate to move to a more organized society. They wrote: It appears highly necessary that for the common weal of the whole, the securing of the peace, the performance of contract between man and man, together with the suppression of vice, again to revive our former manner of proceedings, pursuant to the plan agreed upon at our first settling here, and to proceed accordingly, until such times as it shall please the Legislature to grant us the salutary benefit of the law duly administered amongst us by their authority.

The “several Stations” chose twelve men to meet at Nashborough on January 7, 1783. The Committee, for so it was called, gave much attention to the problem of defense. Security was still a paramount concern.16 None of these rudimentary governments survived; nor did they develop striking new forms or foster the emergence of a new group of leaders. Instead, the forms of government on the trans-Appalachian frontier were much like those found east of the mountains, and the leaders generally came from the first rank of property holders and, in the early years, important local military figures. What these first experiences at government did suggest was a common core of needs, chiefly over matters of security, external and internal. External security meant protection from outside threats such as Indians, by negotiations and, if necessary, by military organization. Internal security meant the



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peaceful resolution of disputes between and among members of the settlement, with legal machinery for the arrest, trial, and punishment of those who flouted or disobeyed established rules of conduct. Conflicts often concerned land, and a committee (or court) was set up to arbitrate them. Most of the pioneers had settled on land that they held solely by right of occupation and without vestige of formal legal title, and they sought guarantees to their lands. They also wanted stability in their relations with one another and with people and institutions in the outside world. Stability meant record keeping, and early frontier governments gave much attention to writing, recording, and validating land claims. As the pioneer acquired property, record keeping expanded to include stock brands, surveys, probate, and marriage records. When Virginia extended county government to Kentucky in 1776, the trans-Appalachian frontier had its first official government. The concept of the county as a basic unit of local government had its roots in England. It was a form familiar to most frontier peoples. In an era of primitive transportation, long distances, and deferential societies, county government was an influential element in individual lives. Its leaders were the most important men in the county, and often the largest landowners. They had much in common with their colleagues at the seat of colonial and later state government and were unlikely to do anything to upset the existing political or economic framework. The machinery of government established in Kentucky County was unexceptional. Virginia authorities named five judges and chose Harrodsburg as the county seat. In September 1777 the judges convened the first county court of quarter sessions, where they set in motion the military and civil provisions of the act creating Kentucky County. The militia, already organized, became a part of the Virginia militia system. The court also named a number of auxiliary officers, including a clerk of the court, a sheriff, a surveyor, and ten justices of the peace, one for each of the stations scattered across the Kentucky frontier.17 County government gradually expanded its authority to include jurisdiction over the construction and maintenance of roads, support for the poor, the licensing of public facilities from

THE SEARCH FOR STABILITY

taverns to gristmills, and the admission of lawyers to the bar. The number of offices and the machinery of government increased with the added duties. Plural office holding was common, and most of the important local figures held several positions of public trust. Sitting in separate judgment or together as a court, the justices had enormous power to define the limits of their authority and to inflict summary punishment. They also levied taxes and allocated tax monies. The county court was self-perpetuating, for its members filled vacancies as they occurred. When the numbers of people grew too large or when people settled at too great a distance from the county seat, new counties would be laid off, and the process repeated itself.18 Hand in hand with government came law and the court system. The pioneer families of the western country looked forward to the material rewards of their efforts, but they could not help feeling uneasy over the random and sometimes violent nature of frontier society. Men and women had dispersed over vast areas without any established authority to make them respect one another’s rights. Early law came in many forms. For the rudimentary governments of the Watauga, Boonesborough, and Cumberland settlements, it was largely informal. The early courts provided machinery to resolve disagreements within the settlement and prevent the resorting to violence. Law, if such existed, was local custom. People presented their grievances against one another to neighbors sitting as elected commissioners; these considered the case in the context of local custom and rendered a verdict. With the arrival of county government from Virginia and North Carolina, the law and court system became both more formal and more wide ranging. There were soon several courts dispensing Virginia or North Carolina law. The most basic and universal of these were the justice of the peace courts, single-judge tribunals of imposing authority delivering summary justice at the local level, with jurisdiction over cases involving small sums and minor infractions of civil law. At the next level were the county courts, a basic judicial unit on the frontier. In a large cabin or even a private home at the county seat, justices of the peace (from three to five) sat in judgment. The convening of the county court (it generally met four



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times a year) was a social as well as judicial occasion. County courts spread over the trans-Appalachian region with settlement, and, by 1790, sometimes in advance of population. Above the county court was the circuit court, and, at the top, the supreme or superior court for the territory or state. Both of these higher courts met at set intervals. Along with the county court appeared the general court of quarter sessions, which dealt with a variety of frontier administrative problems such as roads, taxes, the poor, and public improvements; it also appointed constables and made provision for a jail, where the taxpayers consented to support the construction of such a facility. The orphan’s court and the probate court were offshoots of the general court and handled these special areas. In counties south of the Ohio River, the general court of quarter sessions also established patrols to control the local slave population. A few examples will help to show how several frontier courts of the trans-Appalachian region functioned. The first court of Washington County in the “upper East Tennessee” met at the cabin of Charles Robertson, near Jonesboro, on February 23, 1778. The court opened by choosing a full slate of subordinate officers. Then, exercising judicial, administrative, and legislative powers, it proceeded to engage the problems of the district. Within its judicial authority were matters of crime, principally theft, violence, and disruption. The court was especially sensitive to what it viewed as insults to its authority. Fines for contempt were common. The first one was levied against John Sevier Jr., a son of John Sevier, the clerk of the court. Administrative duties included registering brand marks for livestock, collecting taxes, and recording land titles. The court exercised wide authority over the economy of this developing region, for it examined money in circulation, set prices, approved mill construction, established ferries, and built roads (forty-two by 1792). The court also provided for orphans and for the probate of wills. The early deliberations of the Washington County Court took place at a moment of national crisis, deep in the forests, far from any state authority, and surrounded by enemies. The court reflected the tensions of war and paid little attention to the protec-

THE SEARCH FOR STABILITY

tion of individual rights. It administered a loyalty oath to the citizens of the county. It also ordered that transients be interviewed to determine their character, means of support, and reasons for being abroad. Those who violated the law as interpreted by the Washington County Court suffered immediate and sometimes harsh punishment. Branding and whipping were common sentences, fines universal, and sentences of death imposed (in at least one case after a jury had recommended mercy). For vague actions against the good of the community and a conviction for horse stealing, the court sentenced Elias Pybourn to “be confined to the public Pillory one Hour. That he have both his ears nailed to the Pillory and severed from his Head; That he receive at the Publick Whipping post thirty-nine lashes well laid On; and be branded on the Right cheek with the letter H, and on his left cheek with the letter T. and that the Sheriff of Washington County put this sentence in execution between the hours of Twelve and Two this day.”19 The proceedings of the first court of Davidson County provide another glimpse into the frontier court system. The act of the North Carolina legislature that created “a District County westward of Cumberland Mountain To be known by the name of Davidson County and to include the Settlement on Cumberland River &c” also provided for a court of common pleas and quarter sessions to convene four times yearly. At its first meeting, in October 1783, the gentlemen of the court elected a clerk, a sheriff, an entry taker, a surveyor of the county, and a constable for each station. The court then made plans for the construction of a courthouse (eighteen feet square) at Nashborough. It should be “Built at the expense of the Publick” to be furnished with the necessary benches “Barr Table &c fit for the reception of the Court,” and a prison (fourteen feet square) “of Hewed Logs of a foot square both Walls Loft & floor, Except the same shall be Built on a Rock.” Plans for receiving bids for the buildings, swearing in a grand jury, and organizing the militia soon followed. The initial grand jury case, in the January 1784 term, charged John Chism “for cohabiting wt a woman not his wife.” It was the first of a series of cases involving bastardy, adultery, and fornication. The standard punishment for parties



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duly convicted of adultery, fornication, or giving birth to an illegitimate child was a fine of twenty-five shillings. Routine administrative duties pertaining to the concerns of a frontier community occupied the bulk of the court’s time: probating estates, recording stock markings and strays, licensing lawyers, approving gristmill sites, licensing taverns (called “ordinaries”), establishing a ferry on the Cumberland River (especially important at Nashborough), and setting rates for liquors and places of public entertainment.20 A final example shows the range of court experience in Virginia’s Kentucky counties. The Jefferson County Court convened in 1780. Throughout the next decade it transacted routine and continuing business, including wills, warrants of survey, inventories of estates, records of stock marks, and polls (such as the election for the Virginia Assembly in the spring of 1782). After 1784 it gave much attention to laying out roads. The pages of its minutes recorded the financial transactions of the county, for the court was the universal source of record for its citizens. The record of the county court was the public information journal of the day, the dispenser of charges and apologies alike. Mylassah Mayfield denied before a magistrate of the Jefferson County Court, for example, that he had said Robert Floyd and his family had “Mulatto blood.” The number of the court’s various transactions and the amount of its business grew over time, especially with the heavy immigration after 1781. The financial dealings display the economy of the day: land, slaves, and crops. Currency was varied. One man sold a tract of land for £300 “Current money of Virginia in hand”; James Patton and Benjamin Pope exchanged 660 acres of second-rate land for 165 gallons “of good merchantable whiskey.” There were several indentures. James Steward apprenticed his son, John, to Michael Humble, who “will use his utmost endeavors, to learn, & interest the above named John Steward in the aforementioned art, & mysterys of blacksmith & Gun Smith, & every other mechanical art, . . & that he will, at no time, expose him the said John to the dangers of the Enemy, more than the Common custom, or usage of one of his Circumstances, and that he will find him sufficient meat, drink & clothing.” The court tried several suits between

THE SEARCH FOR STABILITY

parties. It also charged some citizens with breach of the laws. George Pomeroy was convicted for breaking a law with respect to “Divulgers of false news,” fined two thousand pounds of tobacco, and ordered to post bond for his good behavior. The court fined John Nelson five shillings “for profane swearing in open Court.” The court “Ordered that Squire Boone be fined agreeable to Law for not attending as a witness in the Suit . . . when he was duly sumd.” A dominant theme running through all the testimonials, transactions, and recordings associated with the civil, criminal, and administrative duties was a sense of the dignity of the court. Isaac Cox, George May, Richard Chinewith, and William Oldham were “Gentlemen Justices.” They were so described in the records; they clearly expected to be treated as such.21 Despite the sense of open-ended opportunity associated with the frontier period, the county court exercised much direct control over economic affairs. It licensed gristmills and sawmills, fixed the price of whiskey, laid out and maintained roads, and protected property. The Bourbon County (Kentucky) Court also set the prices for taverns: warm dinner, 1/6; cold dinner, 1/; breakfast with tea, coffee, or chocolate, 1/3; breakfast without, 1/1; “lodging in Clean Sheats,” 6d. The court admonished that “Ordinary keepers in this County take pay according to the above rates and no more.” The power of the court extended to the right to tax. Land, polls, slaves (where applicable), and luxuries were the most common targets for levies. Taxes were often reckoned in tobacco and collected in kind. The county court heard suits brought for the collection of debts. The sums involved were sometimes small. Matthew Anderson sued Nicholas Moyers for an unpaid note in the sum of “One Pound Seven Shillings and four pence.” William Alexander brought suit to recover from James McCulloch a debt of fifty bushels of Indian corn.22 As the needs of the frontier people became more intricate and litigation expanded in like proportion, the legal system grew. By the 1780s, the settlers on the frontiers west of the Appalachians (or at least a group of them) had become a litigious group. The expansion of the courts and the growing number and complexity



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of cases coming before them enhanced the status and professional opportunities of a corps of professionals. Lawyers appeared early on the frontier of the trans-Appalachian West, and their numbers increased with conflicts over land claims and the expansion of commercial activity. They came to exercise great influence. The lawyer was the first professional figure on the frontier, and his work carried him to the heart of the frontier’s interest in economic advantage. In the struggle for acquisition of property, amidst the fluid economic condition and numerous opportunities for advancement, lawyers almost everywhere prospered. By the 1780s, issues of land titles had everywhere flooded the court dockets, and lawyers had become everywhere necessary to the resolution of this question. One observer commented of Kentucky in 1786, “There is scarce a tenth man in Kentucky who has land with certain title.” The confused land titles in Kentucky and, to a lesser extent, in Tennessee laid the basis of several legal fortunes. Henry Clay’s was the best example, but far from the only one. Financial reward and influence went hand in hand. Success in law became the basis for investment in lands or a career in politics or both.23 The struggle to engross lands in Kentucky and the Nashville Basin involved a network of officials who profited from these transactions. Surveyors noted the most attractive tracts and their boundaries, which might or might not conform to the original grant. Courthouse officials played a part in recording or not recording with accuracy the completed survey. Lawyers were only the final step in a chain of individuals whose work turned out to favor some claimants as opposed to others. For all of its early settlement patterns of individuals and families, the state and its officials did not favor the early and small settlers. As Wilma Dunaway concluded in her analysis of the land issue: “The State of Kentucky did very poorly in distributing ‘the Promised land’ to people who lived on and cultivated the soil.” Perhaps the Virginia heritage of the influence of lawyers and land companies within the legislature was too strong. For whatever reason, by the turn of the century, the immigrants who continued to pour into Kentucky had no prospects of free land.24

THE SEARCH FOR STABILITY

As the size and duties of the court system expanded, so did the rewards of office holding. The early county governments of Kentucky and Tennessee functioned under the eighteenthcentury doctrine that the best men in a community had an obligation and right to participate in its governance. Office holding also meant profits for a select few. The sheriff and various land officers, such as surveyors and the recorder of land titles, collected fees for their legal work. Surveying also offered opportunities for extralegal gain. The profits of the county clerk were especially attractive. The enumeration of the fees to the clerk and sheriff in the minutes of the Committee of the Cumberland Association for 1783 suggests the complexity of business in an early court and consequent opportunities for income. The clerk and sheriff charged a fee for every separate transaction: issuing a summons, administering an oath, writing a warrant, or recording a stock mark and brand—and the whole might add up to a sizable return.25 Law was not easy to enforce in the new settlements west of the mountains. Some frontier people found the restraints of law inconvenient or even repugnant. To an indeterminate number of those who deliberately flouted the law must be added large numbers who obeyed the law selectively. Most pioneers felt no inclination to refrain from settling on lands guaranteed to Indian peoples by solemn treaty. Officers of the government found it almost impossible to remove such trespassers, and most of them did not try to do so. Settlers also committed random acts of violence against Indians with confidence that a jury of their peers would never convict them. “If the mode of bringing to trial, those who have injured Indians, rests with the people at large, the consequence will be that the aggressors will go unpunished,” Judge David Campbell of the Southwest Territory advised President George Washington in 1791, adding, “It will be well if the present form of Government continues for some years, in the Territory, at least until the people are taught to obey the Law and pay due Respect to Treaties.”26 Selective enforcement of the law carried over into other areas as well: the public domain (state or federal) was considered the



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property of all; the debts owed merchants were evaded or ignored. In small settlements united by common hardship and similar interests, the original settlers banded against outsiders, whether it be Indians, the government, or strangers, and did so whatever the law might say. Even where the machinery of law functioned, a basic instinct took hold: protection of one’s own, suspicion of the outsider, and the strength of local influence. On the frontier, law and justice were personal things, as a letter concerning a recently lost court case, tried at a distance from home, pointed out. “James believes that complete Justice has not been done,” wrote Charles McClung to his brothers, “I believe, nor can you expect to have complete Justice done, there, or at any place, where your connections and friends are absent, and at a distance.” He went on, “Human nature is such now, and as I believe always has, and always will be, those in power, and who are in such circumstances, and situated as to act, can get more than Justice, those otherwise situated will get less.”27 The appearance of higher courts west of the Appalachians was noteworthy, and the introduction of the federal court system under the Judiciary Act of 1789 had a profound impact. In the case of Kentucky, for example, the presence of higher courts dramatically asserted the authority of English common law in all its forms and traditions. Due process, dependence on English precedence, and the force of tradition gave the high courts of the western country a legal structure much like that of the East. Such was the authority of the higher courts that lower courts had to conform, at least to a substantial degree. At the same time that these legal developments provided stability, the appearance of federal authority caused much uneasiness at the prospect of local custom and local influence being eroded by a higher authority. The men who served on the bench exemplified the impact and direction of the federal courts. Harry Innes is a case in point. He came to Kentucky from Virginia in 1783, and two years later he became Kentucky’s second attorney general. In 1789 he became judge of the United States Court for the District of Kentucky, where he labored to shape the country to his judicial standards. In his capacity as a leading public figure, he worked for better defense against the Indians, promoted manufacturing, and im-

THE SEARCH FOR STABILITY

proved agriculture and education. Innes’s most significant contribution, however, was in the courts. He steadfastly conformed to the English practices and the respect for precedent. His views were shaped by a profound regard for the law and precedent and a low opinion of human nature. At the same time, Innes displayed an important understanding of local interests and customs, and by so doing, he eased Kentuckians’ fear about the intrusion of the federal courts system into the legal affairs of the state, particularly in the area of land claims. Thus, he served as a jurist of distinction and an important transitional figure in Kentucky’s judicial evolution.28 As the decade of the 1790s opened, Kentucky was in the final stages of the transition to a stable society. The early security of stations in the woods had given way to open fields and commercial crops; the leadership of hunters and military figures had been superseded by that of men of property and lawyers. The uneasiness over Indian hostility had been replaced by uneasiness over land titles, issues now in the hands of the burgeoning lawyer class. It was at this moment that the move for independence from Virginia achieved success. The important next step was writing a constitution, and to this end, representatives were duly chosen and gathered for the task. Kentucky was still a place in transition. Over twenty years, many different kinds of people had been brought together in the search for advantage. Kentucky began its Anglo-American life as several different visions (sometimes but not always overlapping). For colonial officials, it was a great land speculative scheme. For hunters it was a boundless game preserve. For settler families who responded to the call of Richard Henderson’s Transylvania Company at Boonesborough, it was free land or land on favorable terms. To these groups must be added Indian peoples, who saw themselves engaged in a separate and increasingly losing struggle to preserve what they regarded as their hunting lands south of the Ohio. These separate threads of this evolving frontier were further complicated by a colonial war for independence. In the late 1770s and throughout the 1780s, these various groups were submerged by the sheer number of immigrants who came west. As the greater numbers spread across the



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Bluegrass and into the surrounding new counties, the issue of security from Indian raids was replaced by the question of landownership. Within a few years, land had become the most important issue in Kentucky. Here began the process—to last in places for a half century—in which the dreams of pioneer families would be replaced by the reality of lawyers and courts. This transition and these processes were already under way in 1790, when debates began over the shape of the future state. By the time the constitutional convention convened in 1792, two broad divisions had taken shape and their views laid out in public debate and in print. The Kentucky Constitutional Convention of 1792 represented the culmination of the struggles over the institutional shape of the future state, the first on the trans-Appalachian frontier. At issue here were the traditional institutions gradually carried into and adopted in the western country in the twenty years since the first permanent Anglo-American settlement at Harrodsburg. These dealt specifically with the protection of property and the adoption of the English common law, with its large body of precedent and widespread use of lawyers. Added to this was the issue of the franchise. Who should vote and with what qualifications? What sorts of men should become candidates for elective office? And, finally, reflecting the debates over a national constitution taking place at the same time, what should be the powers of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government in the new State of Kentucky? In the months leading up to the convention, a group of reformers joined to call for a new institutional direction. Their views were local, representing the county level, but they were also clearly influenced by the principles of the recent revolution against British authority. The American rebellion against colonial rule (successful as it turned out) was a popular uprising against a strong central government (synonymous with tyranny) headed by a powerful executive (synonymous with George III), and it was the duty of every right-minded citizen of the new American nation to prevent such concentration of power in government. The reformers called for a government that was “local, democratic, simple and cheap.”29 They favored universal suf-

THE SEARCH FOR STABILITY

frage, including the vote for women, and this enlarged electorate would elect justices of the peace, sheriffs, and all militia officers of the rank of colonel and below. They also supported a onehouse legislature, which would name all other officials (these would be paid in country produce!), and the exclusion of “immoral men” from office. Among their other demands were the abolition of slavery and a tax on uncultivated lands. Both threatened an emerging planter class. The reformers also asked for adoption of a simplified system of law and courts. What they sought, in short, was a law that could be understood and used by everyone. They hoped to construct the outlines of a state in which “the farmer, the mechanic, and even the common labouring man have a voice . . . equal to the lawyer, the colonel or the general.” It was a series of proposals that struck directly at the already powerful lawyer class and the institution of slavery, and raised the specter of taxes levied on large absentee landholdings.30 As on other frontiers on the trans-Appalachian West and indeed other frontiers over the next century, the amorphous nature of Kentucky society in its several forms offered great opportunities for the influence of individuals who would step forward to provide leadership on crucial occasions. To earlier leaders such as Richard Henderson and Daniel Boone was now added another, as unlike his predecessors as one could imagine. George Nicholas was a Virginian, a lawyer by profession, who moved with his family to Kentucky in 1789. In appearance, Nicholas was short and sturdy, with a large bald head. He has no skill with firearms or in the woods, and yet in the tradition of earlier Kentucky figures who had rallied to serve the settlements, he now assumed a leadership role in defending his vision of an orderly society as embodied in the future State of Kentucky.31 As a well-prepared and forceful speaker in a convention that was splintered and inarticulate, Nicholas made his case over the seventeen days of the convention. He argued that a new society such as Kentucky’s required a government more stable and better run than those to the east of the mountains in order to ensure that the new State of Kentucky would grow and mature in the proper ways. These ways must emphasize the protection of



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property in order to ensure that Kentucky would attract immigrants of substance and standing. So Nicholas proposed to control the power of local county interests by a strong executive that would effectively restrain the local influence of the counties. To a powerful executive, Nicholas now added a Senate to balance the popularly elected state House of Representatives. In making his arguments, Nicholas appealed to the common denominator that united all Kentuckians, namely, the need to grow. He argued that his vision of stability in the new state would provide the best conditions for future immigration. His location of power in the executive and popularly elected officials reflected his distrust of county oligarchies. The issue of slavery reflected the same divisions and arguments. To the strong antislavery faction (made up in large part of ministers) in the convention, Nicholas argued that an antislavery position in the constitution would close down immigration of wealthy slave-holding families from the South. It was another dimension of his argument that the protection of property—whether land or slaves—was necessary to ensure the future immigration of the most desirable people. After seventeen days of debate, his views emerged triumphant. The constitution was not submitted for popular ratification. By a vote of 26 to 16, the delegates beat back an attempt to give the legislature the right to interfere with slavery. It was the only roll call vote of the convention.32 Kentucky’s constitution adopted in 1792 provided for separate branches of government at the executive, legislative, and judicial levels. With a bicameral legislature—the lower house elected by free manhood suffrage and the upper hedged by property qualifications—and a governor chosen by electors, the sources of power in the proposed commonwealth of Kentucky were removed from the direct influence of the individual ballot. The resolution to provide for the gradual emancipation of slaves without compensation failed, and, instead, the delegates approved the principle of emancipation only with the full consent of slave owners and only with full compensation. The doctrine of the common law was fully accepted and, indeed, never seriously debated. The end result was a document much like the governments in the eastern states. In the twenty years since James Har-

THE SEARCH FOR STABILITY

rod and his party slashed a few trees and planted some Indian corn, Kentucky had undergone a full-scale transformation into a political unit with institutional values reflecting the new gentry class that had emerged to prominence and influence.33 The provisions of the Constitution of 1792 included a call for another convention seven years later. Nicholas favored such a reconsideration. Various groups would inevitably be dissatisfied with the first document and it was well to give them a chance to be heard; and Nicholas thought that the intervening seven years would see the immigration of many individuals and groups who would support his views. He was right on both counts. Both sides were dissatisfied with the Constitution of 1792. Democratic groups were outraged over the layered effect that shielded elected figures from the direct influence of the ballot, especially in the case of the Senate. Conservatives were concerned over the continuing threat of emancipation, which they regarded as outright danger to property. The overwhelming triumph of conservative forces in the election of delegates and in the document itself confirmed Kentucky’s continuing evolution from the frontier. In 1800, the census showed more than 200,000 residents in the new state. The Constitution of 1799 agreed to the direct elections to the upper house, but the document also confirmed the independence of the judiciary and the status quo of Virginia land grants. The document denied legislators even the right to prohibit the future importation of slaves into Kentucky, and, reversing the guarantee of the Constitution of 1792, the new charter denied the vote to free blacks. The new constitution strengthened the political power of lawyers and the economic power of the Bluegrass region.34 The evolution of a permanent institutional framework in Kentucky as reflected in the constitutions of 1792 and 1799 took a different form in Tennessee. With its widely separated settlements and only fragmentary assistance from North Carolina, Tennessee looked to the federal government. Its interests focused especially on the navigation of the Mississippi and on greater federal military support against the powerful Indian groups to the southwest. These enlarged needs seemed to blend with the



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large changes associated with the new government under the new constitution, and the adoption of the provisions of the Ordinance of 1787 (the Northwest Ordinance) to the southwest. In 1790, immediately upon accepting North Carolina’s land cession (with provisions protecting North Carolina’s land claims in Tennessee), Congress organized “the Territory of the United States South of the River Ohio.” The model was the Northwest Ordinance, leading through a series of steps from territory to state, without the prohibition of slavery. The new governor, William Blount, was one of Tennessee’s leading land speculators. Blount intended to protect his holdings, of course, and those of others like him, but he also sought to promote the security and stability of the territory, for such conditions would improve the value of his lands. He had a difficult challenge. The territorial system was new and untried; the federal government was distracted by the worsening military condition north of the Ohio. Blount needed federal assistance, especially soldiers. The national government lacked resources to support major military campaigns both north and south of the Ohio. Furthermore, Tennessee was not an attractive financial prospect. The national government intended that the expenses of a government west of the mountains would be defrayed by the sale of public lands under the Land Ordinance of 1785, but Tennessee’s lands were already parceled out and in private hands. Administrative costs were high; the prospects to recover any part of these costs were nonexistent. In the face of this federal indifference, Blount rose to the challenge. He traveled all over the territory to listen to its citizens, and along the way, he created a political machine that controlled appointments and patronage throughout the territory. In the critical area of relations with Indian peoples, he utilized effective personal diplomacy with gifts and bribes, mixed with John Sevier’s unofficial military campaigns. Blount and other Tennessee leaders energetically sought statehood as rapidly as possible. Since the territory received little from the federal government, there was no point in prolonging the territorial period. Through a series of parliamentary maneuvers in a divided Congress,

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Blount propelled Tennessee to statehood in 1796. It was the second state on the trans-Appalachian frontier.35 One other dimension of the evolving institutions of this new state captures our attention. In 1799, three years after statehood, Tennessee passed a divorce law. In a world east and west of the mountains where divorce was discussed only in hushed tones and behind closed doors, a law regulating divorce was an oddity. Furthermore, the law was remarkably (by the standards of the day) generous to women. Divorce grounds were expanded from adultery to include bigamy, impotence, and desertion. Other western states, namely Ohio and Kentucky, would enact later more liberal divorce laws. That the Tennessee law was immediately attacked and threatened by repeal indicates the controversial nature of the law. That the protection provided by the law was cast by seeing women as victims and seeking to check the tyranny of a husband was a powerful argument. Other states east of the mountains adopted such protection for women later, and Southern states, much later.36 As the settlements in Kentucky and Tennessee achieved a greater degree of stability, some leaders turned to issues of the nature of society. The western country was a good place to acquire property, but was it a good place to live? Jane Stevenson commented of early Lexington, “We had no notion of raising our children among that sort of people.”37 Of the institutions that gradually softened this harsh existence and diluted the materialism of the frontier, the two most important were the school and the church. Education on the trans-Appalachian frontier between 1775 and 1795 was largely haphazard and unstructured. The early settlers’ primary focus was security: their concerns were conflict with the Indians, the search for land, the struggle to clear, plant, cultivate, harvest, and market. All left their mark. Schoolbook learning was lower on the scale of priorities, but in some form, it was present from the beginning. The early Kentucky stations had informal schools. With the dispersal of settlers across the landscape, instruction took place in the home, if it took place at all. The role of the family was central. Much



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depended on the parents. What sort of place in life did they seek for their children? Those who saw themselves as a “gentry” class—and there were such on the trans-Appalachian frontier from almost the very beginning—placed schooling high in their priorities. Theirs was a tradition of classical education adopted from the landed aristocracy of early Virginia, who first sent their sons to English universities and later, after suitable institutions had been set up in the colonies, to colleges here. The question of school was largely one of class distinction and served as an early indicator of the appearance of varied societies on the transAppalachian frontier. For these families in this early landed gentry, the basic educational institution that emerged was the academy, a private subscription school, taught by an itinerant master, who signed articles of agreement for the season with the parents of the pupils whom he taught. To this center of learning went the young scholars whose parents could afford the tuition, who were interested in their children’s education, and who lived close enough that their sons and daughters might ride or walk to school. A few pupils might board with friends. In 1788 Messrs. Jones and Worley opened a school with a classical curriculum in Lebanon (Kentucky). Their advertisement listed the various fees: “For diet, washing and house room, each scholar pay three pounds in cash or five hundred weight of pork on entrance, and three pounds cash on the beginning of the third quarter. It is desired that as many as can would furnish themselves with beds.” Pupils paid one half of their fees in cash and the other half in produce at the cash price.38 Yet the proportion of school-age children on the trans-Appalachian frontier in this twenty-year period who saw the inside of a schoolhouse or experienced any kind of formal instruction was almost certainly small. And even those who did attend school went for brief periods only. The early schools were centered in towns, giving urban dwellers an advantage over those who lived in the woods. In the rural schools, the educational experience varied widely. Itinerant masters, of diverse origins and competences, taught pupils on an individual basis without regard to formal grades or textbooks. The subject matter was elementary. Boys learned to

THE SEARCH FOR STABILITY

read in order that they might understand newspapers and business transactions, to write in order to draw up contracts and agreements, and to do basic sums for balancing accounts on the farm or in the mercantile house. Formal instruction for girls was oriented toward domestic skills: they assisted in the home in preparation for an early marriage. Cooking, weaving, sewing, working with skins, milking and churning, maintaining the vegetable garden near the home: these were appropriate and sufficient skills for a young woman in these early settlements. Considering the overwhelming emphasis on practicality in frontier life and the frequent interruptions necessitated by work on the farm, Indian alarms, and changes of teachers, it is surprising that children even had the opportunity to acquire the rudiments of a formal education. For those who were uninterested, or whose parents were indifferent, schooling was brief or nonexistent. For a few, however, school brought inspiration. Reading opened the horizons of a small number of young people to the world of literature, ideas, and abstractions. From the perspective of forty years, Daniel Drake wrote, “Now, comparing myself with other boys of my age, I think I had a taste for study rather greater than the bulk of them, and if books had been within my reach, it is probable that I should have made some proficiency by solitary study at night and on rainy days.” Drake was an exception. He founded the first medical school in the Ohio Valley and became the cultural leader of early Cincinnati. His comments for the Kentucky frontier of the 1790s convey the experience of the majority of people: “Our preachers and teachers were, in general, almost as destitute as the people at large, many of whom could neither read nor write, did not send their children to school, and of course, kept no books in the house.”39 In most frontier communities the church was a more important and widespread institution than the school. The enlightened skepticism of the late eighteenth century, well established in Europe and in certain social and intellectual circles on the eastern seaboard, rarely penetrated to the settlements west of the mountains. The appeal of religion to a frontier people was emotional rather than intellectual. This was a world in which



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formal theological training counted for little and the power of the spirit for much. Religion embraced all members of the family, and religious gatherings, which brought together adults and children of varying ages, were social occasions in a rural world where opportunities to gather together were all too limited. All these needs would come together in a series of revivals that would spread across Kentucky and Tennessee at the turn of the century.40 Baptist and Presbyterian preachers moved west of the mountains with pioneer families. Often they farmed during the week and sermonized on Sunday. Baptists were ordinary untrained laymen, fervent in faith and voice. Presbyterians ministered to the strong representation of Scotch-Irish moving to the West. They were more formal and often better educated, but no less intense and vocal. Gideon Blackburn took his ministry to the Nashville area, where he preached in forts and to Cherokees. He was also a pioneer farmer. During the week, while he plowed his land, he would at regular intervals visit a stump on which he had left pen and paper. Here he would record the ideas for his next sermon, as they came to him at the end of the rows. At the end of a day’s work, the Sunday sermon had taken shape. Blackburn knew well the lives of pioneer people. He was one of them.41 The Presbyterians and Baptists soon had help (or competition). Francis Asbury brought the Methodist gospel to the Kentucky-Tennessee area about 1786, and he provided the leadership for a growing number of Methodist circuit riders. The itinerant Methodist circuit riders serving several congregations were different from the part-time resident ministers of other denominations, especially the Baptists. Asbury himself traveled to the most remote parts of the trans-Appalachian frontier between 1786 and 1815. His routine was typical of the circuit riders of the period. He arrived late in the afternoon at the home of one of the faithful supporters, preached to the families that gathered to hear him, slept for a few hours, and left at daybreak the next morning to head for the next house and gathering. Sometimes he lingered to baptize, marry, receive members into the church, conduct a prayer meeting, or simply rest for a day. His journal

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recorded the basic condition of the land and its people. Of his work and the people whom he served, he wrote: I am of opinion it is as hard, or harder, for the people of the west to gain religion as any other. When I consider where they came from, where they are, and how they are called to go further, their being unsettled, with so many objects to take their attention, with good health and good air to enjoy, and when I reflect that not one in a hundred came here to get religion, but rather to get plenty of good land, I think it will be well if some or many do not eventually lose their souls.42

Churches brought a degree of order to the new settlements. Where other institutional direction was still weak, the church might serve as an arbiter and enforcer of social order. Sermons emphasized moral behavior as taught in the Bible and prophesied a sad end for those who strayed from the path as indicated therein. With churches established on a permanent basis, though without full-time resident ministers, authority was vested in the elders, who ran the church and influenced the lives of its members. The elders served as arbiters in disputes to prevent resort to the courts and perhaps even to violence. The sanction of church discipline enforced the decisions made by the board of elders. The Methodist Discipline recited a solemn code under which sinners might be tried, and the circuit riders preached that this law should be carried out to the letter. In matters of personal conduct, church members might be brought to trial for a variety of sins, temporal as well as spiritual. Offenses varied from drunkenness, adultery, fighting, disorderly conduct and habits, and delinquency in attendance to communing with another sect, criticizing the church, celebrating the Fourth of July (a secular holiday), and taking part in Indian (heathen) festivities. Those convicted might be dismissed or placed on probation, depending on the seriousness of the crime. The records of the Great Crossings Church in Scott County (Kentucky) reveal how the deacons worked to get people out to church and keep them on the straight and narrow path to salvation. Those who did not were brought up short. The Sheltons “are Excluded fellowship with



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this Church for Disorderly Conduct” and “Benjamin Appelgate is Excluded from this Church for Fighting & Drinking to Excess,” read the minutes. Members took their dismissal seriously. Severance from the church denied families one of the centers of frontier social life. Churches could be generous with those who confessed their sins, but the fallen had best confess hard and keep at it.43 In the early years of this pioneering experience, life for most of the settlers on the first frontier west of the Appalachians was basic and close to the land; its unifying quality was physical labor. The occasional violent confrontations between pioneer families and Indian peoples have obscured the fact that frontier people spent most of their time in the fields, clearing, planting, harvesting, but always at work. With the added duties of home construction and repair, hunting, and livestock management, little time remained for other activities. Men filled their lives with work and outdoor activities of the most arduous kind. Women lived lonely and isolated lives, their monotonous routines broken only by childbirth, which came with painful regularity. It was a rare frontier family that did not welcome visitors; the settlement of another family nearby was cause for rejoicing. Little wonder, then, that frontier families embraced religion as an emotional outlet and derived great pleasure from such gatherings as an occasion for bringing dispersed people together. Any enterprise that brought people together was welcome. Against this background, social activities among men often ran to excesses of drinking and fighting. It was a physical world, and prowess with arm and rifle was the standard by which they judged one another. Daniel Drake wrote of gatherings “composed of men and boys only, for raising houses, stables, and barns, for rolling logs, for husking corn, for opening new roads, and other purposes; all of which I have repeatedly attended, and well recollect that profanity, vulgarity, and drinking were their most eminent characteristics.”44 At the same time that the accounts of Draper and Shane celebrated the physical hardships and triumphs of these pioneer families, other individuals and families were arriving with large-

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scale (by contrast) resources, including slaves, large land grants, and public offices. Already by 1795, the trans-Appalachian frontiers of Kentucky and Tennessee were characterized by growing economic and social distinctions. The most prominent display of these differences lay in the towns, and the most important of these was Lexington. In Lexington and in other parts of the Kentucky Bluegrass by 1795, the wealthy could purchase an “elegant PHAETON,” take lessons in ballroom dancing or French language, attend any one of several private schools, be tutored in needlework, and choose from a large stock of books in two bookstores. The leisured gentleman might also avail himself of the opportunity to join any one of several social and cultural institutions, including a subscription library, Masonic Lodge No. 25, the Mercer Society for the Encouragement of Agriculture, or the Society of the Cincinnati. The breeding of horses was already a strong interest, and horse racing well organized. Those who saw the value of higher education, probably its social as well as intellectual aspects, had established a college, Transylvania Seminary.45 At the same time, scarcely sixty miles distant from the cultural-economic-political center of the Bluegrass, a frontier population lived in conditions of cultural deprivation and economic subsistence. Over the twenty years from 1775 to 1795, varied new societies had emerged; where they had an institutional framework, it was much like the old. The institutional structure that evolved assisted materially in the preservation of property rights. The new trans-Appalachian settlements had conferred benefits on thousands of families in the form of land. Not surprisingly, some had benefited more than others. These distinctions would continue to grow, and those dissatisfied with their lot in the new world would break off and move to the distant settlements.



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Security and Stability in the Territory Northwest of the Ohio

To the north of the expanding frontiers of Kentucky and Tennessee lay a fertile and well-watered land. Indian peoples had occupied this landscape and lived off its rich natural resources for thousands of years. Amidst the movement and confusion associated with the late eighteenth century, this land had come to be associated with the Shawnees, the Delawares, the Miamis, and other numerous and powerful tribal groups in the valley. The early French fur traders had also exploited the furbearing resources of this rich landscape and advertised its beauty. This immense tract lay next to one of the great water transportation arteries of the continent, the broad, placid Ohio. Even as the Ohio River became a route for immigrants to Kentucky after 1783, the immense forests north of the river and the hostility of the Indian groups there deterred most pioneer families. The first American settlers were probably anonymous squatter families who established temporary camps along the Ohio and its tributaries. Some may have attempted a crop of corn, although it seems unlikely that they stayed in one place long enough. With the close of the American Revolution, a growing tide of immigration swept from Pittsburgh down the Ohio and, not surprisingly, deposited a few hardy, adventur-

SECURITY AND STABILITY IN THE TERRITORY

ous, and less affluent families on the north bank of the river. Some of these stayed. The new American government viewed these squatters with hostility, for in the aftermath of a war for independence, it hoped to establish amiable relations with the Indian peoples so recently allied with the British. These illegal settlers might provoke the Indians north of the Ohio into a military confrontation that the United States was ill prepared to respond to and one that its empty treasury surely could not afford. In the spring of 1785 the government of the Confederation dispatched troops to evict the illegal settlers. The officer in charge met resistance. A squatter leader, John Ross, announced that he did not believe the eviction notices came from Congress and “neither did he care from whom they came, for he was determined to hold his possession.” The reporting officer continued, “And if I should destroy his house he would build six more in the course of a week.” Who were these people who would defy the authority of the American government? Colonel Josiah Harmar, commanding officer at Pittsburgh, described the nature of the settlements: “Most of those engaged in this business are shiftless fellows from Pennsylvania and Virginia, though I have seen and conversed with a few who appear to be intelligent and honest in their purposes.” In the end, the threat of the Indian peoples rather than the American government restricted settlement north of the Ohio in the years immediately after the Revolution.1 At the same time that military detachments attempted to evict squatters from the north bank of the Ohio, the Congress of the Confederation enacted administrative procedures under which the public lands would be made available for purchase. The interest in the lands west of the mountains that appeared after 1750 and quickened after the peace of 1763 had been dampened by British imperial policy and then by the war of the revolution. The war for independence was now won. A new nation had title to the western lands under the Treaty of Paris, although the title was on paper, not on the ground. After long negotiations, the individual states (former colonies) had ceded their western land claims to form a great natural resource (one of the few available to the new nation) to be known as the “public domain.” The



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Confederation Congress now proceeded to debate the issue of how this land would become available, to whom, and under what terms. The Land Ordinance of 1785 was one of the major pieces of legislation that would directly affect the settlement of the trans-Appalachian frontiers over three generations. The Land Ordinance, as it came to be called, laid down broad guidelines for the disposal of the rich lands that would send so many men and women across the mountains. It provided for the survey of the lands by a rectangular system that would offer exact location prior to sale. This precise sighting would remove the endless disputes over location associated with the land claims in Kentucky. The ordinance also gave instructions for the identification and preservation of mines, salt springs, salt licks, and mill seats. Of lasting significance was the reservation of section 16 in every township for the “maintenance of public schools within the said township.” Two years later the framers of the Ordinance of 1787 elaborated on the purpose of this provision: “Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”2 Schools and churches were central to their vision of the society the framers of the ordinance hoped to foster in the West. At the same time that it debated the Land Ordinance, the Congress of the Confederation considered several applications from land companies for large tracts of land in the Ohio Valley. Land was viewed as a source of revenue in a new nation with few such resources. The Ohio Company of Associates was the most important of the land companies influencing the early settlement and institutional development of the Ohio country. This group of New England capitalists and veterans convinced Congress to strengthen the financial condition of the nation by exchanging certificates of indebtedness for western lands. Its initial contract with the national government called for the purchase of 1.5 million acres of the public domain at a price of $500,000, payable in depreciated public securities. After a vigorous advertising campaign stressing the fertility and proximity of its western lands, the company made plans to establish a colony. An advance party set out from Pittsburgh on April 2,

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1788, and headed down the Ohio in a single boat. Four weeks later the Mayflower (for so she was called) landed on the north bank of the Ohio to disembark the first legal American settlers north and west of the Ohio. Like the framers of the Land Ordinance, the directors of the Ohio Company also had a vision of the kind of society they wished to foster. They sought more than simply a financial opportunity; they intended to establish an orderly and secure civil society with a high degree of internal civility and mechanisms for resolving disputes. They thought the formation of such a society would be aided by a high degree of equality among property owners to minimize disputes over property. And along with equality of property would go security, two qualities they thought endangered by the domestic turmoil they saw as widespread in postwar America. To these ends, in May 1788, they gave careful attention in laying out their new community at Marietta.3 The directors laid out the town of Marietta—the name commemorated the assistance of Queen Marie Antoinette to the cause of the American Revolution—with reservations of land for church, school, a town common, and three-acre out-lots for the proprietors. As in the New England towns of the seventeenth century, compactness was important, for both protection from Indians and preservation of a sense of community. The directors eventually gave land to non-stockholders, for an increase in population seemed of paramount importance in the early years of the settlement. They also voted lands to encourage the construction of a gristmill in the same communal spirit with which their New England ancestors had supported the church and the school. With the first distribution of land accomplished, the settlers went to work in vigorous Yankee fashion, constructing log huts and cultivating the soil. The settlement established, the immediate physical wants of the settlers satisfied, and reinforcements arriving in large numbers, the directors of the company made the necessary arrangements for defense from external dangers, for the preservation of order within the colony, and for the more complex needs of a maturing society and growing economy.4



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Like most other settlers on the trans-Appalachian frontier in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the first pioneers north and west of the Ohio feared external dangers, a fear that was surely increased by the presence of the great forest, the strength and reputation of the surrounding Indian tribes, and the knowledge of those tribes’ long-standing alliance with the British. Leaders of the company reacted accordingly. From its beginnings, the Ohio Company settlement at Marietta was an armed camp. The first need was for a militia. Regulations immediately appeared, and rosters were drawn up. “Officers named to command the militia—guard to be mounted every evening— all the males more than 15 years old to appear under arms every Sabbath,” wrote John May, an associate of the Ohio Company. Thus did the New Englanders compromise their observance of the Sabbath in order better to preserve themselves. The company was also mindful of internal order. The directors named themselves a “Board of Police . . . for the regulation of the settlement” and issued a code to govern the conduct of individual settlers. These regulations gave extraordinary powers to police officers, requiring, among other things, that new arrivals in the settlement register their names with the authorities within twenty-four hours of their landing. The code also restricted the movement of settlers outside the limits of the town.5 The document that would provide the structure of government for all American settlement north of the Ohio was the Ordinance of 1787 (or the “Northwest Ordinance”). The drafting of this ordinance led to much debate between those who wished to manage the peoples west of the mountains as England had ruled her colonies and those who wished to grant wide latitude to frontier peoples to conduct their own affairs. The end product was a compromise between the two views. In its final form the ordinance provided for orderly government, a court system, and the creation of a body of law suitable to the needs of the territory, all leading gradually with the passage of time and growth of population to an elected assembly and eventual statehood. The structure of law and courts provided by the ordinance was based on English common law, as modified by colonial practice, and ensured that the institutional structure of the Northwest Territory would be a familiar one.6

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At the center of the new government provided by the ordinance was an appointed governor with large (some would have said dictatorial) powers to fit the perceived large needs of the new territory. In the range of his authority and his independence, the governor of the territory was closer to a colonial governor than most Americans emerging from a revolutionary experience would have liked to admit. He was the chief executive in a government without legislative representation (at least in its initial stage) and the commander of the militia. In consultation with three appointed judges, he formulated, published, and enforced the laws of the new territory. Thus the chief executive united in one officer the powers later apportioned between the executive and legislative branches of government. The governor also had great power in the area of civil affairs. He could lay off counties and townships and appoint all appropriate magistrates and civil officers. The full measure of this authority rested with the governor only until the election of a territorial assembly (to be organized when the district had five thousand free adult males), after which he shared it with the assembly. No such elected body convened in the Northwest Territory until 1799, however, and the work of the governor in formulating the legal, political, economic, military, and even social life of the new district was of paramount importance for a full decade. Those who disliked his actions might complain, and eventually many did so, but the governor had office, authority, and the power of appointment.7 The Northwest Ordinance provided for four other appointed officers to assist the governor. A secretary performed several administrative duties, mostly those of record keeper and correspondent with the congressional and executive branches in the capital. In the governor’s absence from the territory, the secretary exercised all the powers of the chief executive. Three judges were also among the first appointments. In addition to collaborating with the governor in making the laws of the territory, the judges rode circuit and carried the law they had helped formulate to the remote areas of the territory. All five executive officers received freehold estates while in office, a reminder of the colonial period, in which governors coming from England received a landed stake in dominions over which they would rule.



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The first governor under the new ordinance was Arthur St. Clair, a native of Scotland, and at the time of his appointment, a resident in the Ligonier Valley in western Pennsylvania. St. Clair’s record of public service was extensive, including active duty in the French and Indian War and several local and county offices. During the American Revolution he rose to the rank of major general, served on Washington’s staff, and acquired much experience in the midst of adversity. He entered Congress in 1785 and was elected its president in 1787. Governor St. Clair came to the Northwest Territory at the age of fifty-four, mature in experience and achievement, blessed with good health and a strong constitution, confident that he was equal to the tasks before him and to the expectations of the territory’s citizens.8 After a leisurely trip from his western Pennsylvania home, the governor embarked from Pittsburgh for the voyage down the Ohio River. On July 15, 1788, escorted by the officers of the garrison at Fort Washington, St. Clair crossed the Muskingum to the village of Marietta laid out a few months before. “This is the birthday of the western world,” John May recorded in his journal. “At eleven his Excellency Governor St. Clair arriv’d at the garrison. His landing was announced by the discharge of 14 Cannon, and all rejoiced at his coming.” St. Clair walked up the shore to the huzzahs of a large crowd and the volleys of the ranked militia and the garrison’s artillery. On a spot of elevated ground the governor met Winthrop Sargent, the new secretary of the territory, and two of the three territorial judges, Samuel H. Parsons and James M. Varnum. Sargent read aloud the Northwest Ordinance and the commissions of the five officers of the territory. The assembled citizens then presented the governor with a declaration of their pleasure at the institution of government. “When thus far removed from the country, that gave us birth, from our friends and from the influence of the government of any state,” they declared, “we esteem it one of the greatest blessings, that we can have civil government established among us, which is the only foundation for the enjoyment of life, of liberty and of property.” St. Clair responded with a broad-ranging address that revealed much about the principles under which he intended to govern: “A good government, well administered, is

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the first of blessings to a people. Every thing desirable in life is thereby secured to them, and from the operation of wholesome and equal laws the passions of men are restrained within due bounds; their actions receive a proper direction; the virtues are cultivated, and the beautiful fabric of civilized life is reared and brought to perfection.”9 The inhabitants rejoiced at the governor’s presence and his vision of the future. He was the personification of the national government’s concern for the people settled north and west of the Ohio. He would use his great authority in their interests—to solve their many problems, to encourage economic growth for which private strength was insufficient, to pacify the Indians with threats of official reprisal, to bring order and stability to the most remote western settlements. Arthur St. Clair provided whatever assistance government could offer to American settlers in their struggle for survival north of the Ohio. His problems and solutions invite comparison with the experiences south of the Ohio during the previous decade. Kentucky and Tennessee had county governments established by the older states of Virginia and North Carolina. These state governments were not always attentive to the needs of a frontier people. They were, in effect, absentee custodians, and in their narrow concerns, absentee landlords. Much of the attention of the state assemblies of Virginia and North Carolina had been directed to protecting and legitimizing the large land grants of many of the legislators. Distance and the nature of county government, however, combined to ensure the new settlements a substantial degree of independence. Dramatic growth in population after 1783 helped to assure their permanence. The organization of the Southwest Territory in 1790 gave the scattered settlements a connection to the federal government but little physical support from it. The effect of this benign neglect was to spur the inhabitants of the territory to statehood as rapidly as possible. St. Clair’s situation north and west of the Ohio was different. He had the attention (if not always the support) of the general government and the authority of the Ordinance of 1787 behind him. But the general government was in the midst of a transition to a new constitution, and it could not offer much physical assis-



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tance to an enterprise so distant. St. Clair’s government in the Northwest Territory, on the other hand, had the capacity to provide institutions of government on demand and in quantities to satisfy the needs of the most remote frontier settlements, but with power concentrated in the hands of a single individual. The overwhelming authority of the governor (although presumably resident in the territory) outweighed whatever liberal provisions might be found in the Northwest Ordinance. At the same time, his work in providing the support of government for the distant frontiers of the Old Northwest was without precedent and untried. Initially, at least, it was not clear that the Ordinance of 1787 and its first governor would provide more assistance and services of government than Kentucky and Tennessee received from Virginia and North Carolina, respectively. Other differences from the earlier frontier experiences south of the Ohio were equally striking. Except for Nashville—which grew rapidly to a sizable settlement—most of the Kentucky and Tennessee settlements lay close to one another, moving out from stations, then up and down the watercourses. By contrast, St. Clair had to discharge his responsibilities over a vast domain that stretched from the intersection of the Ohio with the Pennsylvania line down the great river, in a sometimes southerly but always westerly direction, to its junction with the Mississippi. To the north, his authority ran to the towering forests that ringed the Great Lakes waterway. Within the Kentucky and Tennessee settlements lived a largely homogeneous population, with roots in the tradition of Anglo-American law and government—where any form of law and government was acknowledged at all—and generally Protestant in religious affiliation. The Northwest Territory, however, included the long-standing presence of Indian peoples across the length and breadth of this federal creation. Among the other human inhabitants were substantial French settlements at Vincennes, Kaskaskia, and Cahokia, with their own institutions and allegiance to Roman Catholicism and French culture. These French communities, vestiges of an earlier fur trade empire, had been in place for more than a century. The French communities had come to terms with English and Span-

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ish sovereigns, and they expected to do the same with the newly arrived Americans.10 Two pressing problems dominated Arthur St. Clair’s first years as governor of the Northwest Territory. To begin with, he had to reach an accommodation with the several Indian tribes of the region. This was a task constantly made more difficult by the growing American immigration to the Northwest and its obvious threat to Indian lands. On his trip down the Ohio in 1788, the governor wrote: “Our settlements are extending themselves so fast on every quarter where they can be extended—Our pretensions to the country they [the Indians] inhabit has been made known to them in so unequivocal a manner, and the consequences are so certain and so dreadful to them, that there is little probability of there ever being any cordiality between us— The idea of being ultimately obliged to abandon their country rankles in their minds.”11 St. Clair opened negotiations with several of the Indian groups of the Northwest, but behind diplomacy lay the ultimate question of military strength. The Indians were not strong militarily in the European sense, but their strategy of surprise raids against frontier settlements was very effective. In negotiations and military activities in the Northwest, several tribes also received counsel and logistical support from the British in Canada. Indian tactics and numbers, British arms and ammunition, were nicely balanced against the newly independent, decentralized American government, superior in numbers but weak in military preparedness, financially uncertain, and hard-pressed to bring its strength to bear in the distant Ohio Valley. St. Clair’s second challenge was to establish civil government. He had to lay off counties, organize county government, and appoint suitable local officials. Finally, in consultation with the appointed judges of the territory, the governor would draft and publish a code of laws for the territory. All had to be accomplished as soon as possible in order to provide a structure within which civil and economic order might thrive. If the great expanse of the Northwest Territory was to be transformed into “the beautiful fabric of civilized life,” St. Clair thought that it



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would do so only within a framework of law. Through this structure, the passions, energies, and ambitions of pioneers would be channeled toward acceptable ends and the security of private property would be confirmed.12 Although he was bound to act in consultation with his judges, Arthur St. Clair was the most important single figure in drafting the new laws. Within six months of his arrival, in consultation with the judges of the territory, he had drawn up the legal code that was an outline of the society he intended to create. The Code of 1788 was henceforth the basic legal structure of the territory. In view of the overriding concern with physical security, it was appropriate that the first law of the territory should establish a militia. Its provisions directed that all male inhabitants from sixteen to fifty years of age should be organized into military units. St. Clair might call the militia to active service at his discretion. Fines were imposed for absence from “parade”; refusal to appear on order of the commander-in-chief brought a fine for the first offense, court martial for the second. The procedure for a court martial was described in detail, as befitted a man with St. Clair’s extensive military experience. Armaments and equipment, to be provided by the individual soldier, were also specified: “A musket and bayonet, or rifle, cartridge box and pouch, or powder horn and bullet pouch, with forty rounds of cartridges, or one pound of powder and four pounds of lead, priming wire and brush and six flints.” Many men had firearms. Indeed, in future years several laws would regulate their use in and around the settlements. St. Clair took his military duties seriously, and he and Sargent ordered out the militia on a continuing basis for such diverse duties as resisting Indian threats, constructing roads, putting down riots, and evicting squatters.13 The governor also established a court system that included courts at several levels to serve his widely dispersed groups of citizens. The range of courts extended from justice of the peace courts within the county to the General Court of the Territory. As a former county officeholder in Bedford County (Pennsylvania), St. Clair knew the structure and far-reaching influence of the county courts. Their decentralized nature, with the presence

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of prominent local officials, would be admirably suited to the extensive distances of the Northwest Territory. Among St. Clair’s powers was the authority to lay off counties, and this he proceeded to do on July 27, 1788, within three weeks of his arrival at Marietta. He called the first new county Washington in honor of his commander-in-chief. It was a princely domain, extending from the Pennsylvania boundary west to the Scioto and from the Ohio River north to Lake Erie. The court system that served it was much like that of Kentucky and Tennessee. The law of August 23, 1788, established the office of justice of the peace for the new Washington County, “appointed and commissioned” by the governor. From three to five justices constituted the “courts of the general quarter sessions of the peace.” The powers of the court, which met quarterly, were broad: to “hear, determine and sentence, according to the course of common law, all crimes and misdemeanors, of whatever nature or kind . . . the punishment whereof doth not extend to life, limb, imprisonment for more than one year, or forfeiture of goods and chattels, or lands and tenements to the government of the territory.” Individual justices might deal with minor crimes at any time and impose fines up to three dollars and costs. The governor also commissioned justices to serve as a county court of common pleas, which met twice yearly, to hear suits “of a civil nature, real, personal and mixed, according to the constitution and laws of the territory.” Individual judges might hear cases of small debts and contracts up to the sum of five dollars. The Code of 1788 also established a probate court to “take the proof of last wills and testaments and to grant letters testamentary and letters of administration” relative to the settlement of estates. A judge of probate, in conjunction with two justices from the court of common pleas in the same county, sat as a court of probate four times annually. Over this network of courts was the General Court of the Territory composed of the territorial judges.14 The county court system had large powers and a complex legal apparatus for a dispersed series of societies in their early



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stages of growth. For example, the courts might issue subpoenas, warrants, and writs of several different kinds. As early as 1792, a special law described in detail the forms used in civil cases, and the appointed officials in distant frontier counties received examples of summonses, replevins, executions, and other legal forms. Within a decade county clerks in the distant parts of the Northwest Territory carefully transcribed Latin phrases familiar in the inns of Westminster. County officials on the American frontier knew little Latin, but they knew much of property. Where one was necessary to serve the other, they found a way. In the first years, facilities for confining criminals or suspects were rare or nonexistent. The cost of constructing jails had to be borne by local taxpayers, and if there was anything frontier citizens worried about more than the Indians, it was the tax rate. It was far cheaper to force suspects (as potential disturbers of the peace) to post bond for their good behavior, at least until the next session of the county court, than to imprison them at public expense pending trial. There was much in the law about “recognizances,” or bonds posted to ensure proper conduct. The judges might call upon citizens in the county to post a recognizance without making any specific charge against them. Procedures for certifying recognizances were, accordingly, described in detail, with special attention to forfeitures. In 1792 laws provided for the construction of public buildings in each county, including a courthouse, jail (“for the reception and confinement of debtors and criminals well secured by timber iron bars grates bolts and locks”), pillory, whipping posts, and stocks. Counties might levy taxes for their construction.15 Within a month of the establishment of county courts, St. Clair appointed officeholders for Washington County. The number of officers was large, testifying to a court system more complete and detailed than that of the rudimentary governments of the early trans-Appalachian region in Kentucky and Tennessee. There were officers of the militia (captains, lieutenants, ensigns, and an adjutant), five justices of the peace, a clerk of court, sheriff of the county, and judge of probate (one of the justices of the peace). Some men had more than one office; three of the jus-

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tices of the quarter sessions court also served as the court of common pleas. One man, Return Jonathan Meigs, held the offices of recorder of deeds, clerk of the orphans court, and prothonotary to the court of common pleas. The appointment of Meigs and others like him is a reminder of the growing number of administrative functions associated with the organization of the county. Under the Code of 1788, justices of the peace had authority to license and collect revenues. Within two years, they also had responsibility for the poor, and with the organization of townships and the appointment of township officers, control over strays and the selection of constables. A 1792 law gave them authority in road construction to select routes for roads and the power to call on the labor of local residents for construction.16 When St. Clair had finished the work of organization and appointment, he wrote to the secretary of Congress with satisfaction: “The Government has been put in motion—a County erected by the name of Washington, Courts instituted, and the Officers necessary for the Administration of Justice appointed, and so far every thing goes well.”17 The section on crimes and punishments was the longest and most detailed part of the Code of 1788. It enumerated the crimes feared on the trans-Appalachian frontier: treason (always at the head of the list), murder, manslaughter (not to be confused with self-defense), arson, burglary, robbery, “Riots and unlawful Assemblies” (defined as three or more people gathered together for an “unlawful act”), perjury, larceny, forgery, assault and battery, and “usurpation” (exercising authority in the territory without proper authorization). Punishments, presumably apportioned to fit the crime, included death (for treason and murder), public flogging, confinement in the stocks, and fines. Conviction for unlawful assembly, for example, carried a fine of sixteen dollars; for burglary, security for good behavior and a public whipping up to thirty-nine stripes. Prison sentences were rare, reflecting both the scarcity of jails and the public’s reluctance to support prisoners for long periods. Governor St. Clair also intended to establish a moral society, a world in which property would be acquired by people of right



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principle and training, or, at the very least, people constrained by such principles. The code condemned crimes of moral turpitude. Among these were acts of disobedience on the part of children and servants. The law provided that “if any children or servants shall contrary to the obedience due to their parents or masters, resist or refuse to obey their lawful commands . . . it shall be lawful for such justice to send him or them so offending, to the gaol or house of correction, there to remain until he or they shall humble themselves to the said parents, or masters satisfaction.” To strike a parent or master brought punishment of up to ten stripes. Drunkenness carried a fine of “five dimes” for the first offense and one dollar thereafter, or one hour in the stocks. “Improper and Profane Language,” defined as “idle, vain and obscene conversation, profane cursing and swearing,” was a punishable offense, as “repugnant to every moral sentiment, subversive of every civil obligation, inconsistent with the ornaments of a polished life, and abhorrent to the principles of the most benevolent religion.” A clause in the law preserved the Sabbath for religious observance, a practice “greatly conducive to civilization as well as morality and piety.” In 1790 St. Clair outlawed gambling, declaring void any contracts to pay money won “at cards, dice-tables, tennis-bowls, or other games.” Tavern keepers could not keep “any billiard, faro, E.O. hazard, or other gaming tables,” by which money or property might be “betted, won or lost.”18 The transgressions named were those associated with a frontier society; the values supported were those of an established society, perhaps even a gentry class. This elaborate structure of courts soon provided lucrative employment for lawyers and officeholders. Lawyers quickly had substantial business, mostly in civil cases concerned with land and petty debts. Business expanded with the increase in population, the growing number of commercial enterprises, and the continuing addition of more laws to the territorial code. James Backus, the first sheriff at Marietta, wrote, “The emoluments of this business are trifling, yet there is more law business here than might be expected from the newness of the place . . . it consists chiefly of suits commenced on old debts against transient persons that resort here.”19 As in Kentucky and Tennessee, mer-

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chants were among the first applicants to the court system. Officeholders profited in proportion to the growth of the courts. A law passed in 1792 enumerated acts for which a fee could be charged, ranging from five cents to the judge of common pleas for swearing in a witness to one dollar for the judge of probate for a final decree. In addition, there were other fees for the judges and clerks of the General Court, the coroner, the constable, the sheriff, grand jurors, commissioners of assessment, and others.20 The scramble for offices increased in proportion to the rewards, along with the power of those who controlled appointments. The creation of this substantial structure of government and law coincided with the growth and dispersal of population. A single county was soon no longer sufficient. St. Clair, accordingly, created others: Hamilton County in 1790, including the settlements around the Great and Little Miami Rivers and the village of Cincinnati, to which St. Clair moved the seat of the government of the territory in 1790; Knox County, laid off by Acting Governor Winthrop Sargent in 1790, encompassing the settlements at Vincennes on the Wabash, and extending from the Great Miami on the east to the junction of the Illinois and Chicago rivers, north to Canada; and St. Clair County, organized in 1790 and embracing the French settlements in the Illinois country. As the structure of government and a court system extended over the Northwest Territory, St. Clair and his judges, sitting as the legislature, expanded the scope of local government. Legislation enacted in 1790 provided for the subdivision of counties into townships and the appointment (by the courts of general quarter sessions of the peace) of constables, overseers of the poor, and clerks of the townships. Among the duties of the overseer of the poor were to watch the vagrants “likely to become chargeable to the township for which he is appointed overseer, and also to take notice of all the poor and distressed families and persons residing in his proper township, and enquire into the means by which they are supported and maintained.” The responsibilities of the clerk included maintenance of a brand book for distinguishing horses, cattle, hogs, and other livestock in the township; he also kept a book of strays, to record the livestock found



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in the township. The township became, in addition, the administrative center of road construction and maintenance. In response to a petition from twelve citizens, supervisors and overseers at the township level would lay out a road. For assistance, they would call on every male inhabitant over sixteen years of age, each to work no more than ten days a year under the direction of the township supervisor “with such utensils and tools as may be ordered him.”21 This government and its elaborate court system labored under great difficulties. Distances within the territory were large, and communications were poor. The scanty population of the frontier areas dispersed from the settlements along the Ohio and moved inland in search of land. There were many small and scattered settlements. It was difficult to disseminate a uniform body of law throughout such a broad area, much less to convene a court in one spot and meet the needs of a widely dispersed populace. The presence of hostile Indian groups in large numbers tended to belie the order that the legal code was designed to give. “Civil Law is an admirable institution any where except on a frontier situated in the center of an Indian Country and in a time of War,” Major Hamtramck wrote to Henry Knox from the Ohio frontier in the spring of 1792. “An Indian Country at war” was a phrase that might have described Kentucky in the 1770s, Tennessee in the early 1780s, and the Northwest Territory for the early 1790s—in short, much of the trans-Appalachian region for the years 1775 to 1795. Delays in the construction of courthouses and jails added to the informality of legal institutions in this period. Without regular courts and a satisfactory means of confining transient prisoners, justice was sporadic, often summary, and sometimes brutal. Courts were scheduled regularly but convened infrequently, and often the principal parties or witnesses failed to appear, making the adjudication of cases long-delayed, inconvenient, and expensive.22 An alien people far removed from the center of authority complicated the task of spreading government and law across the reach of this land. To the west and north of the Ohio lay French settlements dating from the seventeenth century: Vin-

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cennes on the Wabash River; Kaskaskia and Cahokia in the Illinois country; and Detroit at the junction of Lakes Huron and Erie. All were French in origin and long settled when the Americans appeared from across the mountains; all suggested the vast dimensions of the French empire in North America. These villages originated as fur-trading posts. In the early years ownership of land was unimportant. Much of it was farmed in common, and, for those interested in private holdings, land was everywhere, people were few, and central authority distant. The French inhabitants in the remote villages of the Northwest largely ignored the international negotiations that made them English in 1763. The objectives of the British government with respect to the fur trade did not differ appreciably from those of the French. And like the French, the English attempted only to maintain a degree of civil order in the villages; they left the details to the inhabitants themselves. These French communities passed under American authority in 1783. With the complete neglect by the new American government and the ineffectual attempts of the Virginians to make good their claims to the region, the influence of government eroded, and the villages lapsed into anarchy. At the same time, the French settlers began to be concerned about the ownership of their lands. In spite of persistent reassurances that their rights would be safeguarded, les habitants declined to present their land claims before the American courts. They were also reluctant to give any testimony in the land courts, and especially to testify against one another. As a result, the lands claimed by the French settlers remained unpatented and their status uncertain. Differences in language and legal institutions made it difficult for les habitants to understand the Americans and to accept the new government. The judicial system of the Northwest Ordinance was never effective in the Illinois country. Local loyalties remained the strongest force in the French settlements, and the inhabitants struggled to retain their lands and their cultural heritage in the face of the oncoming American tide. The arriving ambitious and aggressive Americans tended to look with contempt on the quiet and self-contained French communities.

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These problems of distance and cultural diversity added to Arthur St. Clair’s burden. He never found satisfactory solutions to them.23 In the summer of 1795 Governor St. Clair and his judges revised the legal code of the Northwest Territory. Congress had declared inadmissible much of the first code of the territory on the grounds that the laws were not taken from the laws of the original states as directed by the Ordinance of 1787. St. Clair and the territory’s judges responded with a new code based on the statutes of Pennsylvania, the only legal code available. The Code of 1795 was a summary of all laws in effect at that time, with some additional regulations touching on questions of dower, divorce, and orphans. It also affirmed the formal adoption of the common law. The acceptance of the common law—confirmed in subsequent legislation in 1802 and 1805—placed the Northwest Territory directly in the Anglo-American legal tradition that ran from English courts through the Anglo-American colonies across the mountains into Kentucky and Tennessee.24 What had emerged in the first seven years was a structure of government and courts well suited to a frontier people, for it could be expanded and new units of government and courts created at will down to township level; a society secure from external and internal threats, with provisions for tax collection, public buildings, the poor, orphans, and record keeping; and careful regulations for the acquisition and protection of property, with suitable forms and even provision for licensing lawyers. St. Clair had provided justices and justice of the peace courts to meet the immediate demands of a decentralized frontier world; the adoption of the common law laid down an institutional foundation for the future. The legal code that Governor St. Clair fashioned in such detail over seven years became the basis for subsequent legal codes in other territories of the Northwest. His was an enduring institutional legacy.25 The early economy of the Northwest Territory developed through a series of settlements along the water courses and then inland from them. The pattern included cautious clearing and



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cultivation, livestock (especially hogs) that ran at large in the woods, and high expectations of a transition to commercial agriculture. “The Ohio settlers were a profit-minded people,” observed R. Douglas Hurt.26 In the first decade of legal settlement, agricultural enterprise and the search for profit were inhibited by a series of powerful influences. The danger from Indian peoples disturbed by the influx of Anglo-American settlement north of the river and urged to resistance by British officers slowed expansion inland from the Ohio River. Trade in volume up the river to Pittsburgh was physically impossible or too costly. The logical route downriver to New Orleans was inhibited by distance and diplomatic uncertainty. The land system for the disposal of the public domain, of which the Northwest Territory would be a part, was still in process of organization. The first surveys moved forward slowly, delayed by inexperience and perceived Indian threats. The terms for the sale of the lands, where they might be purchased, were too high for ordinary settler families. Amidst these uncertainties, small-scale agriculture developed in conjunction with the new settlements. Corn was a basic early crop, supplemented by the harvest of the forests. Of particular significance for the first generation of settler families was the use of the great expanses of the territory for grazing. The foundation of this grazing economy was hog culture. Hogs roamed throughout the woods and in the open meadows during the summer and fall. They were rounded up (where they could be found) and butchered or driven to market in the fall. The hog economy was the first stage in a commercial agricultural economy. Hogs had value in several processed forms, and families prepared them accordingly. Pork and hog products became the most important commodity in the early trade downriver to New Orleans. The nature of the grazing economy placed a premium on marking for identification, hence the importance of registered brands in the books of township and county government. Whatever the form and the products, reliable markets developed slowly. The settlements remained small, surrounded by an Indian presence that intimidated possible expansion to the inte-

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rior. This state of constant hostility reduced the Indian trade, and Indians were never as interested in agricultural products as they were in the manufactured goods that came across the mountains. The New Orleans market was remote and subject to a host of navigational hazards and diplomatic uncertainties.27 Yet the search for commercial agriculture on the part of many settler families and communities was intense. In the first fifteen years after Marietta, these groups settled along the Ohio and pushed up its tributaries. One of the noteworthy features of this early settlement pattern was the appearance of numbers of tenants. Many of the choice tracts had been engrossed by large investors, assisted by the terms of the federal government and by their connections in high places. The Virginia Military Tract, for example, contained several substantial landholdings, where tenant families labored to improve the lands, for their benefit and the advantage of the owner. They worked the land on shares. The customary division was twothirds to the tenant; one-third to the owner. In some places, the division was equal shares. There were real costs in opening a farm, even on the distant frontiers of the Ohio and its tributaries. These included land, tools, livestock, and initial subsistence. As the rents were payable in crops, so corn and livestock were the early currency for economic transactions, whether wages, taxes, or payments at the local store. In the improvements, fencing took priority over buildings. Fencing and other construction involved access to the surrounding woods, where the pioneer family cut materials for housing, barn, fences, and firewood, plus finer pieces for furniture and tools. Sometimes the family had legal access to the woods; more often, it belonged to an absentee land investor or to the federal government as part of the new public domain. In either case, the wood was harvested without guilt. As the fertile soil of the first fields yielded bountiful harvests and the hogs multiplied in the woods, the pioneer family fashioned an early form of trade to distant markets. A few families acting in concert or a community would come together in the fall to build one or more flatboats. These would be launched to float downstream,



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filled with the surplus of the community. By the 1790s, this annual trade downriver was a part of the emerging economic pattern. Reflecting on its expansion, Robert Leslie Jones observed, “Within a very brief period, Ohio ceased to be an agricultural frontier.”28 All of this movement and improvement demanded an enormous amount of physical labor on a continuing basis. The work in opening up a new farm was endless, and it was intensely physical. Aside from wagons and draft animals, the unit of work was the human body. Men worked continuously in clearing, planting, cultivating, and harvesting and in managing stock. Women worked to make household items (clothes, soap), to preserve a portion of the harvest from the fields and the woods, to manage poultry, to tend the family garden, and where necessary at demanding times in the year, to labor alongside their husbands in the fields. Above all, they were responsible for children; they bore them (sometimes alone and unaided), clothed, fed, and protected them. They organized children for useful tasks at an early age. It was endless labor, and childbearing was dangerous. Many pioneer families had stepmothers, after mothers died in childbirth.29 The most important town in the early legal settlement of the Northwest Territory was Marietta, the economic and social center of the Ohio Company of Associates. Land speculators founded Cincinnati in 1788, the same year as Marietta. The Cincinnati entrepreneurs gave away town lots, and Governor St. Clair made it the county seat of Hamilton County, and in 1791, the capital of the territory. The basis of Cincinnati’s early prosperity was its proximity to Fort Washington, the center of the American military presence. Early Cincinnati was a wild and riotous place, as befitted a port town with an army post nearby. When the army departed, the village grew and prospered with the influx of settlement and the growing river trade.30 Early pioneer families always had commercial needs. Goods and tools from the East were required. To meet this need, stores and merchants appeared on the scene almost as soon as farmers. Consider the detailed account of the experiences of one early merchant in the journals of Colonel John May, an associate of

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the Ohio Company. In the summer of 1789 May journeyed on company business from Boston to the Ohio River Valley. On the basis of his trip to Marietta the previous spring, he decided to bring a supply of eastern goods for sale to the growing numbers of settlers along the Ohio. After great effort, and no little expense, May finally succeeded in moving his merchandise from Baltimore to the Monongahela. Five wagons transported five tons of shoes, iron shovels, clover seed, and cheese, wrapped in small packages for retail sale. The new merchant took a quick trip down the Ohio to spy out a suitable place of business, and he quickly discovered that stores and merchandise were already in several river towns. Louisville and other likely river towns in Kentucky had more merchants than they could possibly support. The citizens of May’s own Marietta were “poor and proud,” not an attractive combination for a man with only a few months’ credit. So May chose Wheeling, a village across the river in western Virginia that served the settlers of the Northwest Territory. He rented half a store and set himself up as a merchant. May’s new mercantile establishment immediately became a center of local interest. “There are mighty numbers of old and young women men and Boys collected here today brim full of interrogations but totally Voyd of Money,” he recorded; “They have asked me ten thousand Questions . . . the whole of this day Laborious work brought about Three Dollars and half.” His experience demonstrates the limited life of that little frontier settlement, where people without funds flocked to a new store to handle the merchandise, interrogate the storekeeper, gossip, seek credit, and simply pass the time. Few came to buy, for they had nothing to buy with. May soon decided to accept skins and peltry, and later ginseng, in order to facilitate business. He had no choice. Unless he did so, his prospective customers would come empty-handed. For a summer the Boston investor turned frontier merchant struggled to cater to his sometimes shy and always pitifully poor clientele, carefully watched his merchandise, and evicted those too noisy or rapacious. He worked from sunrise to sunset and into the evening. He wrote in his journal at night, his lamp attracting swarms of Ohio Valley insects. He worried constantly about his investment. Would he sell out the



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stock of goods? How much would it cost to transport peltry and ginseng to Baltimore? Had the price of ginseng fallen during the summer? At the end of the season, May sold the rest of his stock to one of the other merchants in Wheeling, packed his pelts and ginseng, and transported them by horse train to Baltimore. He left no record whether or not he made a profit, but he never tried again.31 For the first half dozen years of its legal settlement, the Northwest Territory lived in a state of military siege. The wars against the Indian peoples delayed the effective operation of the new court system and, indeed, affected every aspect of life in the Northwest Territory. It disrupted communication and interfered with orderly government; it retarded immigration and expansion to the interior; it brought with it physical destruction, suffering, and hardship. But it also stimulated the economy. This extended conflict, like others before and since, encouraged the federal government to expand its authority, and nowhere was its influence more strongly felt than in the economic sphere. Into this military struggle the new American government poured a portion of its limited resources, determined to recapture international respect lost in earlier Indian victories. To this end, the government built roads, recruited and supported an army in the field for much of the period, and engaged in constant negotiations with the Indians. The presence of large numbers of troops fed at government expense meant that quantities of local corn, grain, horses, cattle, and hogs found a cash market, and those pioneers with teams and wagons could rent them to the army for a good price. Hostilities north of the Ohio began in earnest after 1788, when growing American settlements created demands for land cessions from the Native Americans in the Ohio Valley. The Indians resisted both the pressure to negotiate and the military forces sent against them. In the fall of 1790, General Josiah Harmar mounted a campaign against the Miami Confederacy. Harmar commanded an army of some 1,500, a mixture of welldisciplined regulars and a miscellaneous force from the militia units of Pennsylvania and Kentucky. The tensions of the march highlighted, in Andrew Cayton’s words, the “cultural differences

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between the Kentuckians and the regulars.” The Kentuckians were accustomed to informality in military protocol and direct and personal leadership. As he approached the Miami River, Harmar led his army into two ambushes. The survivors retreated in disorder to Fort Washington. The Miami chief Little Turtle had decisively triumphed, and his force “had outfought the Americans at every turn.” Harmar was court-martialed and resigned. The line of settlement north of the Ohio was in a condition of confusion and fear.32 The next year, Governor Arthur St. Clair assumed command of the punitive expedition designed to reestablish American authority north of the Ohio. St. Clair’s mixed force of regulars and militia lacked discipline and purpose, and unlike its predecessor, was not even well served by good organization and attention to detail. Once again, Little Turtle commanded an Indian force of some 1,400 warriors. This time, the Indians’ frontal charge broke the American lines at daybreak on November 4, and the surviving elements of the army force fled in panic. It was the worst military defeat ever suffered by an American army against Indian adversaries. The American casualties were 634 dead, 279 wounded, and the booty, including 1,200 muskets with bayonets, 8 cannons, and officers’ uniforms. As the survivors of the disaster poured into the river settlements, the territory confronted a military and civil crisis.33 It was this military disaster that persuaded the national government to take more vigorous steps, for the deterioration of its position in the Ohio Valley now embarrassed America’s diplomatic posture in a time of extended negotiations with European nations. President George Washington appointed General Anthony Wayne as commander-in-chief and made available both regular troops and supplies. After two years of training—he had noted the results of campaigning with untrained militia—Wayne advanced slowly toward the Indian centers of strength to the north and west. In August 1794, he won a decisive victory at Fallen Timbers near the rapids of the Maumee River. Wayne then called a conference where he dictated terms of land cession. The Treaty of Greenville (August 1795) ensured the rapid expansion of the American settlements north of the Ohio.34



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After a decade of uncertainty about physical security and access to the Mississippi and the market in New Orleans, conditions changed dramatically in 1795. The Treaty of Greenville with the Indian groups defeated at Fallen Timbers opened up the southern half of the future state of Ohio to legal settlement. The treaty with the Spanish Crown the same year signed by Thomas Pinckney at San Lorenzo (near Madrid) opened the Mississippi River to American commerce on a regular basis and established the right of deposit in the port of New Orleans. The Ohio country received a substantial influx of new settler families. The development of commercial agriculture took a marked step forward, led by the growth and economic influence of the towns on the Ohio River. The struggle of the first settlers of the Northwest Territory to establish institutions of an educational and religious nature was much like that in Kentucky and Tennessee. It was carried on by small numbers of people living in physical isolation and interrupted by sporadic Indian wars. Opportunities for religion and education reflected, in part, the growing distinctions in wealth and social position. Those with money and place clearly had advantages, especially if they lived in the river towns. In the countryside religious and educational activities were haphazard and unstructured, falling back again on the individual family and testifying to its importance. An exception was the several French villages on the Wabash and in the Illinois country, where the sense of community was strong and enhanced by generations of isolation and selfsufficiency and a powerful commitment to the church as a center of community life. But everywhere else northwest of the Ohio problems of isolation were intensified for women, who often lacked men’s opportunity for economic success and excitement over the challenge of the wilderness and who did not have occasion to travel and meet others for business purposes. The social needs of children were largely ignored. Schools were virtually unknown, at least up to 1795. The provision in the Ordinance of 1785 setting aside one section of land in each township for the maintenance of schools lay unused. Young enquiring minds

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lived in a closed world, shut off from books and ideas as the canopy of the great forest shut out the sun. Thomas Ewing was one of those who grew up on the isolated rural frontier of the Northwest Territory. In the absence of local schools, his ambitious father sent him away to an academy, and young Ewing returned to read Virgil’s Aeneid (presumably in translation) to the laborers employed on his father’s farm. He made frequent trips to the mill, as did the other boys of his age, but while they wrestled and played games, he passed his time in reading. Books became a passion for him. When a few neighbors pooled funds to purchase books for a private circulating library, Ewing “contributed ten Raccoon skins—being all my hoarded wealth.” At last the long-awaited volumes arrived, and, examining the sixty or seventy books on the cabin floor, he wrote, “It seemed to me like an almost unbounded intellectual treasure— the library of the Vatican and all other libraries of which I had read were trifles,—playthings—compared with it.” Ewing went to college, read law, was admitted to the bar, and became a United States senator from the state of Ohio. A few of his contemporaries acquired some competence in reading and writing; most of them received no formal education and spent their lives on the land.35 In the Ohio Valley, as elsewhere on the early transAppalachian frontier, a life in the woods conferred few social skills. Children knew much about labor on the farm at an early age and little about meeting people, which they did rarely. On one occasion when Thomas Ewing returned from the mill, he was offered and accepted a ride on a flatboat headed down the river. On the flat was a family with an attractive young daughter. But this future senator from Ohio, having spent most of his life in the isolation of his family’s farm, was at a loss how to approach her. He became painfully conscious of his rustic manners and dress. “My hands were chapped and black with toil . . . so that I hardly dared to offer them to help her out of the boat,” he remembered, “and I took due care to hide them in her presence.”36 The need for security and stability determined the direction of institutional development in the Old Northwest. Of greatest ne-



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cessity was the creation of government, a court system, and a code of law. The Ordinance of 1787 responded to this need; the vigorous (if opinionated) leadership of Governor Arthur St. Clair provided chapter and verse. Few other men in American life in the first decade under the new constitution wielded such far-reaching power. St. Clair was a man with a vision of the society that he wished to create, an orderly world where moral men and women prospered. For him, the frontier was an unpleasant and transitory condition, one fraught with dangers from an unstable and sometimes disorderly population. He did everything possible to protect society from such dangers. When Congress questioned the constitutionality of some of the territory’s laws, the governor replied to the effect that unconstitutional laws were better than no laws at all and that to have gone without laws would have produced “a state of anarchy.”37 Under St. Clair’s direction, county government and the county court system spread over the territory’s widely scattered settlements. County bureaucrats, along with the militia and courts, gradually exerted an influence on the life of the individual settlers, even in remote regions. The government and the court system of the counties dealt with the most pressing needs of a frontier community: land, economic development, taxes, property, and civil order. Such institutions were often quite independent of higher authority. Distances from the territorial capital and the courts of appeal and the importance of local issues in a decentralized society meant that their decisions were virtually final. In 1799, on the eve of the election of a legislative assembly, the Northwest Territory had a structure of government and a legal code almost too complex for the small numbers of people it contained. Yet the Ordinance of 1787 and its institutional direction under Arthur St. Clair established a framework within which orderly development might take place in the future. A stroke of the governor’s (later the legislature’s) pen conferred government. A series of commissions with the same signature created a corps of officeholders. This system might be expanded indefinitely to keep pace with a westward moving population, and it spread over the Territory Northwest of the Ohio and, eventually, over much of the nation west of the Appalachians. In this sense, the

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institutions identified in the Northwest Ordinance and created by St. Clair and his judges were admirably designed to meet the needs of expanding people. With peace in 1795, the new wave of population to the Ohio Valley found that government had preceded it. Later in the decade St. Clair would be attacked as arbitrary and dictatorial. He was. For the first settlers and the early experiences in the period from 1788 and 1795, however, his institution building seemed well suited to the requirements of a people still dominated by the need for security and stability. They needed protection from enemies within and without and hoped to see the visible force and authority of government. St. Clair gave them this presence. What emerged worked in fits and starts: successfully for the compact settlements and urban areas along the Ohio; erratically in the sparsely settled areas inland; rarely in the remote and ancient settlements of the French. However sporadic, this form of government, mixed with the success of American arms in the field of battle, assured the survival and orderly development of these first settlements. In the period after 1795, as a consequence of peace at Greenville, the diplomatic triumphs in Madrid, and the stable government provided under the ordinance, large-scale immigration took place to the Territory Northwest of the Ohio. In 1803, Ohio became the first state in the Old Northwest admitted to the Union. It had been fifteen years since a single boatload of New England pioneers in search of a more perfect and stable society established the town of Marietta. The first halfdozen years were filled with military disasters and political and economic isolation. The authority of the national government came to the forefront in the form of a well-organized and wellled military force that produced victory in the field. Diplomatic triumphs at Greenville and in Spain followed. Thereafter, the territory north and west of the Ohio grew dramatically, spurred by immigration and trade. As a final sign of its maturity, political life in the territory grew to mirror that of the political divisions east of the mountains. In this sense, the transition to a more settled condition was complete, and the offer and acceptance of statehood was perfectly appropriate.38 Yet in the celebrations that followed, Ohio and other settlements farther to the



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west owed much to the decisive role played by the national government. However physically remote the Northwest Territory, it laid the basis of orderly settlement through the provisions of the Northwest Ordinance, and the governor of the territory provided a decade of leadership in difficult times. And when confronted by the twin military catastrophes of Harmar and St. Clair, the national government expended its scarce resources to win military and diplomatic victories. In the end, however dramatic the physical obstacles between east and west and however remote the settlements in the interior, those settlements too felt the impress of the authority of the new national government. For most settler families, it was a welcome presence.

Part II. The Widening

Frontier, 1795–1815

From 1795 to 1815 the frontier of the trans-Appalachian West expanded in landscape, in numbers, and in varieties of peoples. Within this largely agricultural world appeared new crops and new units of production, assisted by new technology in processing and transportation. The population of 150,000 west of the mountains in 1795 grew to more than one million by the federal census of 1810. The transformation in terms of numbers was truly astonishing. The nation, as a whole, grew at the rate of about one-third each decade. No European nation had population increases on such a scale. For the western country, the growth was even more remarkable.1 Within the South, these rising numbers reflected dramatic increases in the numbers of enslaved peoples. Over these twenty years, steady streams of African peoples in chains moved from the Tidewater plantations of Virginia and South Carolina to the frontiers of Mississippi and Louisiana. By 1815, large-scale production of a single crop for market through the work of a growing slave population had become a feature of parts of the southern frontier. By the close of these two decades, slavery was an institution indelibly tied to the advance of the frontier The pioneer families moving west advanced across a range of landscapes, but throughout this generation west of the mountains, they moved and settled adjacent to water. They spread in increasing numbers into the Ohio Valley and along the Great Lakes at the intersections of the great rivers; up the valleys of the Whitewater, Wabash, Kaskaskia, Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas, Red, Yazoo, and Alabama; along the banks of the Mississippi in the Deep South; into the great savannahs and

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swamps of the newly acquired Louisiana (organized as Orleans Territory). This portion of the story opens on a world of a vast open and varied landscape; it closes on the increasing presence on the land of numbers of small settlements that represented the harbingers of American presence. The widening of the frontier brought the pioneer family into contact with a vast panorama of rich and varied vegetation. North of the Ohio lay expansive forests, intersected everywhere by watercourses, and as one moved farther west, open areas of prairie. Across the South was a mixture of wooded uplands, fertile lowlands, and overflowed wetlands. And north and south lay rich bottom lands that flooded in the spring. These were the wetlands known for the fevers that accompanied life for the pioneers everywhere. At many sites, they encountered the tracks and cleared fields of maize that testified to the lengthy and often continued occupation of the Indian peoples. The first settler families had to come to terms with the vast physical presence of the land, for they came not to admire it but to live in it and to profit from it. They had to clear the land, construct shelters, raise crops, create a defense against dangers from several quarters, and provide for the immediate needs of themselves and their families. At the same time, as a part of this early process, many of them sought institutions that would ensure security and provide the basis for the economic advantages that they presumed would accompany settlement and reward their hard labor. In this expectation, they drew upon the experiences of the new settlements in Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Northwest Territory. These places west of the mountains had survived and grown with the ancient and tried institutions of the militia and county government. The Northwest Territory was similar to Kentucky and Tennessee in institutional framework, although authority rested with the federal government rather than the states of Virginia and North Carolina. An agricultural society that was familiar to frontier people developed along with the fertile lands that would make an agricultural people prosper. At the same time, the county emerged as the dominant political unit and a center of administrative decision making, law, and services.

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Of the new forces that shaped the trans-Appalachian frontier, the most significant was the growing influence of the federal government. First came the Land Ordinance of 1785. Its provisions outlined the federal government’s control over the organization, preparation, administration, and distribution of the public domain. Where the provisions of the Land Ordinance proved inadequate, too general, or inappropriate, Congress and the executive made laws governing the distribution of land, a matter of great importance to frontier people. But everywhere across the breadth of this expanding frontier, pioneer families had to make an accommodation, sooner or later, with the land system of the national government. Next came the Ordinance of 1787, or Northwest Ordinance because it initially dealt with lands north and west of the Ohio River. The Northwest Ordinance laid down a system of government that provided for the gradual development of a territory into a state. Between 1795 and 1815 the territorial system spread over the expanding frontier west of the Appalachians. Working in conjunction with these two ordinances was the new constitution adopted in 1789. This new form of national government provided for a stronger central authority, but this government asserted its strength only gradually. With a series of military and diplomatic triumphs in the 1790s, it gained respect and confidence. With these three basic documents, the federal government confirmed its paramount influence in the broad landscape west of the mountains. Foreign affairs were another arena in which the influence of the federal government became dominant. From 1795 to 1815 the destiny of the trans-Appalachian frontier became intertwined with a larger world. Control over relations with other nations rested in the hands of the national government. The year 1795 marked a turning point, for military and diplomatic victories combined to alleviate the threat from the Indian nations of the Northwest and to ensure an open Mississippi River for transporting the surplus commodities of the frontier to the world. General Anthony Wayne’s victory at Fallen Timbers in 1794 and the large land cession at the Treaty of Greenville the next year removed the Indian danger to the Ohio settlements (as well as to



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much of the Kentucky and Tennessee regions) and opened a portion of the Northwest Territory for American occupation. The same year John Jay’s Treaty with Great Britain provided for the evacuation of the Northwest posts, and Thomas Pinckney’s diplomatic success in Spain in 1795 opened the Mississippi River to trade and established the right of deposit for American goods at New Orleans. The diplomatic triumphs of Wayne, Jay, and Pinckney were in part a response to the growing American presence and the commercial importance of American settlements in the trans-Appalachian West. The expansion of Anglo-American peoples across the transAppalachian frontier over this twenty-year period carried these families into new landscapes, heretofore the living places of Indian peoples for a thousand years. Much of the federal government’s activity on this frontier was directed toward Indian relations, by which officials at every level took to mean land cessions. When William Henry Harrison became governor of the new Indiana Territory in 1800, he began a decade of systematic pressure against Indian peoples within his princely domain (the present states of Indiana and Illinois). These cycles of treaty making gradually brought him into conflict with Tecumseh, the great Indian statesman of his generation. This confrontation over land began with words and by the end of the decade had moved to violence. Harrison was not the only territorial governor who sought continuous cessions of lands from Indian peoples, but the configuration of Indian strength, density, and land was far greater in the South. There, five tribes, the Creeks, Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, and Seminoles, were long in place across the territories of Mississippi, Alabama, and the state of Georgia. Another powerful Indian presence stood astride the lands of western Tennessee, admitted as a state in 1796. West of the Mississippi River, Indian peoples were interspersed with Euro-Americans from the Missouri River to the Mississippi’s exit into the Gulf of Mexico. Here were large landscapes and relatively few people, giving a temporarily benign cast to relations between the two groups. The first governors of Orleans Territory and Missouri Territory were too preoccupied with fashioning a tranquil connection between

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the French population and the American government and American institutions to give full attention to the Indian presence and its removal.2 In 1803, Thomas Jefferson overcame his constitutional scruples and accepted the purchase of Louisiana, which the accidents of an unhappy war had convinced Napoleon Bonaparte to sell. The result was a decisive moment in the history of American diplomacy and for the future of the American nation. This single act changed the scope of the frontier beyond recognition and confirmed the decisive influence of the federal government in the destinies of people west of the mountains. The Mississippi River—the trade lifeline of the frontier people across the West— now lay safely within the boundaries of an expanding nation, and Americans west of the mountains moved to take advantage of Europe’s distress. At the same time that trade expanded, the question of neutral rights at sea became a matter of national concern, for Americans sought to preserve their neutral status and continue a prosperous commerce with all belligerents. The War of 1812 was a final demonstration of the degree to which the frontier of the trans-Appalachian West had become intertwined with the affairs of the nation. Another foreign influence arrived in the form of shock waves and refugees from the revolution in Saint Domingue. Set against a background of the outbreak of a European War, in 1794 slaves rose in revolt under the inspired leadership of Toussaint l’Ouverture. The revolt succeeded. In 1804, a renamed Haiti declared its independence from France. It confirmed that independence by forcing the capitulation of a large army sent by Napoleon to suppress the revolution. The enslaved peoples were freed; much of the minority (in numbers) white population was killed or emigrated. The Haitian Revolution resonated strongly in American slaves societies along the Atlantic Coast and especially in the new national domain of Louisiana. Refugee families streamed into ports along the south Atlantic Coast. Many brought large numbers of slaves. The immigration of Haitian refugees into Louisiana reached flood tide in 1809. These refugees from the Caribbean islands brought not only slaves but also technical



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knowledge about new commercial crops, principally sugar cane. Portions of the American republic west of the mountains—landscape, people, agriculture, and commerce—would be dramatically modified by this series of events triggered by the uprising of 1794 as its impact spread out around the Atlantic world.3 All across the expanse of the western country lay the enhanced significance of the federal government. What began as a series of treaties in the 1790s had become a decade later diplomatic maneuvers with European belligerents designed to protect America’s trading interests. Nowhere were the trading interests more significant than in the West. The government’s impact on families, communities, and businesses west of the mountains had far exceeded issues of relations with Indian peoples, significant as those were. What had begun as negotiations with Indian peoples had become endless intricate diplomatic maneuvers with England, France, and Spain (the issue of West Florida). As the farm families west of the mountains become increasingly commercial, so they became increasingly traders. Corn and hogs multiplied across a thousand new farms and communities north of the Ohio; new commercial crops brought into production by gangs of slave labor engrossed new landscapes in the South. As the influence of the federal government moved well beyond the issues of the Northwest and Land Ordinances, a curious contradiction emerged. In 1801, the Jeffersonians took power. Soon, the capital moved from New York to Washington, in the new District of Columbia, symbolic of the dominant influence of the Virginians. Yet the party of Thomas Jefferson and his followers had long committed itself to the doctrine of minimal federal authority. It was this principle that most sharply separated it from the Federalist Party of John Adams and Alexander Hamilton. With Jefferson’s triumph in 1800 the idea of minimal government seemed to be established as a basic principle of government. Yet over the next decade, the influence of the federal government intruded into a wide range of areas that no one (least of all the Jeffersonians) could have anticipated at the turn of the century. There was a new division in the western country. Heretofore, East and West were the great divides. Now the influx of large

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numbers of settler families over a wide-ranging landscape had created a new dividing line: the Ohio River. Within these twenty years, new and distinct societies appeared and grew north and south of the river. These separate interests featured the institution of slavery, the different crops associated with the slavelabor system, and the variety of institutions necessary to provide for the presence of enslaved peoples in large numbers and security from them. Issues of race would occupy much attention in the new Louisiana Purchase. Indian peoples were also a basic difference. Indians north of the Ohio were strong in numbers and leadership; they were also struggling to resist amidst constant friction among themselves and conflicting advice from the British in Canada. In the South, the presence of powerful Indian nations over so much of the landscape gave a different configuration to the southern frontier. Occasional pockets of EuroAmerican settlement—in western Mississippi and three hundred miles to the east, another outpost—were interspersed with the landholdings of strong Indian nations, in place and established for hundreds of years. And for the past generation, these Indian peoples were determined to maintain neutrality in the growing conflict between the United States and Great Britain. These different Indian presences and different configurations on the lands produced a different role for the federal government and its representatives. In the North, continuing pressure for land cessions; across the frontier of the South, more circumspect and accommodating relations with Indian peoples, at least temporarily hiding the determination to make inroads in the landholdings of Indian nations. This twenty-year period opens with a series of diplomatic successes that laid the groundwork for accelerating expansion across the western country. There followed astonishing growth in numbers, accompanied by diplomatic triumphs that doubled the size of the nation. There were varieties of new peoples and new crops (commodities for export). Even with this growth, there were relative few numbers of Euro-Americans in this vast landscape. The second generation closed with the maturing of a new technology that would have a great impact in the West:



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steam. It started with the development of the steam-driven cotton gin, which began to remake staple agriculture across the southern frontier. Then came the blending of steam and water: the steamboat. The first steamboat on the western waters, launched at Pittsburgh, arrived in New Orleans in January 1812. It immediately began regular runs between New Orleans and Natchez. Its arrival and regular service, soon overshadowed by the outbreak of war, would presage a revolution whose influence would become apparent after 1815. Steam was poised to change the direction of trade and the rhythm of western commerce.

4.

 The Reach of Government and the Authority of Law Spread across the Western Country

Between the diplomatic landmarks of 1794–95 and the close of the war in 1815, affairs in the western country at every level bore the imprint of government. Its overwhelming influence seemed to contradict the very premise of the West: that is to say, that by moving to the West, settler families could find rich resources free of outside influence. What they found instead were fertile lands acquired by the federal government for citizens of the American republic, lands taken by treaty from Indian peoples after endless negotiations and threats, prepared for sale by surveyors and land officers of the federal government, and sold in accordance with laws passed by the Congress and administered by bureaucrats a thousand miles distant. Settler families could trespass on the public domain, grow crops of corn, cut the timber, and run hogs in the woods, but sooner or later, they would need to move farther west or come to terms with the enveloping influence of national authority. Behind national expansion and the preparation of the land came territorial government. In these two decades, the territorial system, with its legal system and code of laws provided for under the Northwest Ordinance, expanded across the West, North, and South. And underneath territorial government, the

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influence of government at the county level took shape and expanded with the changing conditions within the county. These institutions were remarkably similar across the Old Northwest, allowing for variations in time and place. Within the South, the presence of the institution of slavery was a dominant influence, with the needs to protect slave property and to secure the society against a slave rebellion. The Anglo-American settlements of the South also made a different pattern on the landscape because of the noncontiguous nature of settlements (from Natchez District in the west to the Tombigbee settlements in the east), interspersed with Indian landholdings. The most dramatic and significant story associated with government concerned Thomas Jefferson’s purchase of Louisiana. This act was both unexpected and, in the end, endlessly farreaching in its implications. Even as the territorial system under the Northwest Ordinance assumed a routine constancy, this addition of a massive landmass west of the Mississippi River (doubling the size of the American nation) introduced new questions about the institutions and role of government. Louisiana was dramatically different, in its size, in its mix of peoples, in its governmental and legal heritage. Here, in the most direct kind of way, the impress of advancing Anglo-American legal institutions met a century-long heritage of the civil law. Here, a world divided into black and white met a world of almost infinite racial variations. The mix was not a comfortable one, on either side. The arriving representatives of the American national government trod lightly in the new institutional setting, while, at the same time, they remained firm about their intention of making Louisiana “American” in every sense of the word. And their instructions from Washington propelled them in this direction. Added to race were other issues in Louisiana: language, religion, law, all very complex and very different. The intersection of the views and needs of the federal government, the Creole population of Louisiana (some of it mixed race, with a large free-black community in New Orleans), the newly arrived and arriving Americans challenged the spread of American institutions of government. What kinds of compromises must and could be made among the dominant Anglo-Americans and the long-

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established Creoles who thought American freedom and democracy would preserve the status quo in their lives? And how could this mix be grafted onto the context of continuous spread of government and law across the frontier? Of course, the issues surrounding Louisiana (soon the Territory of Orleans) were only the opening round in questions that would spread west from the river to the mountains, initially in the area of Upper Louisiana (later Missouri Territory), and then farther west. Let us begin with an analysis of the routine spread of government that influenced the largest number of settler families. Between 1795 and 1815 government and law appeared at several levels: the territory, state, county, and township, all providing yet another example of the diversity of government on the frontiers of the western country. On the largest scale, government was the territory. By the turn of the century the territorial system outlined under the Northwest Ordinance was no longer in the experimental stage. Thereafter the expansion of government into the western country began with the extension of the Northwest Ordinance across it. In the first decade of the nineteenth century, Congress subdivided the Northwest Territory into the territories of Indiana (1800), Michigan (1805), and Illinois (1809). To the south, it organized the Mississippi Territory (1798) to meet the needs of the prosperous and growing Natchez District. The purchase of Louisiana in 1803 made necessary some form of government west of the Mississippi River. After an intense debate over the timing and form of this government, followed by sharp divisions over the officials to be appointed, Congress divided Louisiana into two parts, organizing the Territory of Orleans (1804) on lines conforming largely to the Northwest Ordinance. It called the remainder the District of Louisiana and placed it under the jurisdiction of Indiana Territory and Governor William Henry Harrison, who subdivided the district into two administrative units and appointed a military commandant to preside over each. With the admission of Louisiana to the Union in 1812, Congress established Louisiana-Missouri as a separate territory. Aside from a few further subdivisions (Alabama



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from Mississippi, Arkansas from Missouri, Iowa and Wisconsin from Michigan) and a new acquisition (Florida in 1819), Congress had provided territorial organization sufficient to accommodate settlement on the trans-Appalachian frontier until 1850.1 Government now often preceded settlement, and it helped to prepare for and to accelerate the arrival of settlers. Even in the most remote stretches of the frontier, government had the capacity to become a comprehensive set of institutions, interacting at several levels with the arriving settlers. The general uniformity of its structure and forms contrasted with the diverse expanding economies and the incomplete societies they served. Behind the proliferation of territorial governments lay practical considerations of distance, politics, and the expanding needs of the larger numbers of settlers west of the mountains. In this period the emphasis in government passed from physical security to growth and economic development. Government at the state and territorial levels performed a wide range of services for people on the frontier. Foremost among these, in the early period, was managing relations with the Indian peoples. Negotiations with Indian groups were always directed toward smoothing the way for further Anglo-American occupation of Indian lands (often in its initial stages in violation of existing treaties) and finally toward treaty-making exercises that would provide for the cession of more lands. In these twenty years treaty making was a major activity of government, and one in which it was notably successful (albeit against increasing resistance) if not scrupulous about tactics or the impact of such tactics and cessions on Indian peoples. As the War of 1812 approached, relations with the Indians were more frequently of a military nature. Security reemerged as a fundamental concern, from what was perceived as a growing threat from Indian hostility, made the more severe by the large numbers of Indian peoples on the southern frontier and their continuing contact with Spanish and British agents, who provided arms and other logistical support. Here, too, the military strength of the federal government was called upon to protect the rapidly expanding settlements. The national government’s land system was a vital part of this expansion. In an agricultural world of growing Anglo-American

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settler families, the government needed to put the land system into operation. Laid out under the provisions of the Land Ordinance of 1785, this basic document of national policy (often paired with the Northwest Ordinance as two instruments of national expansion) provided initially for the acquisition of lands from Indian peoples, followed by the systematic survey and recording of the acquisitions, and finally the prompt public sale and opening to private entry of new land cessions. And, in a need that resonated with the early frontiers of Kentucky and Tennessee a generation earlier, the Congress and the land system had to energetically pursue and resolve of the issue of private land claims. Accordingly, grants under the French, Spanish, and British officials were to be examined, judged, and resolved within the framework of American legal standards.2 The energy and authority of the territorial governments reached to the new settlements unevenly. As in the earlier period, the organized militia continued to give form to the largely unorganized and widely scattered communities. The laws of the territory demanded that all free, white, adult males join for common defense. The functions of the militia were varied: it supervised elections, conducted censuses, and apportioned and collected taxes. Everywhere, with the territorial governor as commander-in-chief, it served to centralize authority. The militia system reached from the governor by way of a prescribed pattern of command down to the most remote townships. Throughout the trans-Appalachian frontier the militia continued to serve important social and political functions as well. Muster days, the company monthly and the battalion quarterly, coincided with the county court, becoming focal points of social and economic life. With the rising tensions in relations with Indian peoples with the approach of the War of 1812, the militia became more involved as a military organization. The concept of government varied from place to place and time to time, but whether it was as a force to order society, or to provide services, or both, leaders in Washington, ambitious commercial interests in the new territories, and many new settler families on the frontier desired and needed government by the



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opening of the new century. People who ventured out into the western country worried about the unstructured nature of this new world. Threats of disorder came in many forms and from many directions, within the Anglo-American as well as the Indian populations. The potentially turbulent nature of the population and the extreme isolation of some settlements seemed to invite rule by force. Observers described the settlements on the Tombigbee River as sometimes violent; the villages in the Illinois country were uneasy about their distances from the authority of government. Rough transient elements in the frontier population included the fur traders and lead miners of Missouri and St. Louis and the river boatmen everywhere from Shawneetown (Illinois) to Natchez (Mississippi). The focus of this apprehension was violence against persons and property. Of the Natchez District in 1800, one resident wrote, “Murder & Manslaughter are now the common topicks of the day.” In addition there were periodic duels over questions of honor, especially in the longer-settled areas of Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Dueling was not indigenous to the frontier but came across the mountains as a well-established custom in some societies, especially those associated with the seaboard South. That these affairs frequently involved people of wealth and established social connection suggests a kind of class distinction about this kind of violence, namely that brawling and destruction of property belonged to the lower classes, while conflict over honor was the province of the upper elements of society.3 Finally, frontier violence took the form of brutality of master toward slave, and, on a larger level, the need to use the institutions and authority of government to control a growing slave population. The ever-present specter was the possibility of a slave insurrection. For a frontier society was not synonymous with a free society. From the beginning of the first transAppalachian settlements in 1774, law and custom recognized the institution of slavery south of the Ohio River. It had greatly expanded in numbers and area by the turn of the century, especially in those places associated with production of staple agricultural products. The presence of large and growing numbers of slaves produced a variety of institutions to protect the white

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societies. These included a set of rigorous laws to control the black population, slave and free, the organization of the militia and its use for patrols, and the brutal suppression of any activity that could be construed as a slave insurrection. Nowhere was a concern over possible slave insurrections greater than in the wealthy and cultured Natchez District, which had entered into a period of prosperity founded on the cultivation of a staple crop with slave labor. The number of blacks increased rapidly. By 1800 the population of the district was half black; thereafter, blacks grew in numbers more rapidly than whites. The uneasiness in Natchez inaugurated a growing concern over the presence of a slave population on the frontier that troubled settlers for the next two generations. Slave owners remembered stories of the Natchez Indian–Bambara slave revolt in the fall of 1729 that ended in the massacre of two hundred French settlers.4 The most significant government for the largest number of people on the trans-Appalachian frontier was at the county level. With the expansion of the territorial system across the land went the establishment of new counties. The county court of general quarter sessions or the county board of commissioners (renamed and elective in Ohio under the state constitution of 1803) dominated local affairs. The county courts spent much of their time and energy providing such institutions and services for their citizens as jails, courthouses, the care of paupers, and the registration of stock markings. County courts also exercised a degree of control over the local economy, granting licenses and special monopoly privileges and setting rates for a wide variety of economic activities from taverns to ferries and mills. In addition to the commissioners, the county bureaucracy generally included a treasurer, auditor, recorder, coroner, sheriff, and clerk of court. It cost money to support such a bureaucracy (for these positions could not all be supported by fees) and to make such improvements as were needed. To finance its public buildings, the county had the power to levy a tax, and as the needs for services and expenses grew, so did the time spent in apportioning and collecting revenue. This process introduced a new eche-



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lon of civil functionaries: appraisers, collectors, and listers. The tax collector was, in the tradition of the American colonies, an unpopular figure, and few seem to have sought the position. The first county court of Knox County (Indiana) nominated eighteen men over four years to the post of tax collector before collecting any revenue from county levies.5 An examination of the sources of county income and items of expenditure in three different counties from three separate territories in the Old Northwest—Ohio (a state in 1803), Indiana, and Illinois—well illustrates differences and similarities in county government on the frontier. Butler County (Ohio) lay in the southwest corner of the new state, just north of Hamilton County and Cincinnati. In 1804 the income and expenditures of the county looked like this: Credit

Debit

property taxes $770.13 ferry tax 1.00 licensing of taverns 50.00 -do-retailers 60.00 dividend of state tax 186.00 1803 tax not collected 68.13

listers of townships $ 102.75 Jas. Dunn & John Green, assoc judges 36.34 Jas. Dunn, return of lands in 1803 6.25 sheriff and clerk of common pleas 40.00 atty prosecuting pleas of state 80.00 associate judges fee 100.00 grand jury fees 100.00 judge of election fees 30.00 support of paupers 75.00 wolf and panther scalps 50.00 listers, for completing lists of land 25.00 Board of Comm, fees, clerk, stationary 100.00 collectors and county treas commissions 70.00 outstanding orders, unsatisfied 100.00 delinquencies & contingencies 219.92 $1,135.26

$1,135.26

The board of commissioners spent much of its time providing for its income, discussing valuations, and collecting the taxes. The state supplied some assistance from tax funds, in this case $186. The construction, repair, and maintenance of public buildings were a major expense. Although it was not provided for in the annual budget for 1804, every county had to erect a

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courthouse and jail. This obligation might be met through an appeal to the citizens, especially those with a vested interest in the location of the county seat. That the citizens of a village should be prepared to underwrite the construction of public buildings was an underlying assumption of frontier government. If the citizens were unwilling to pay the costs, the commissioners would move the seat of government elsewhere. In this case a number of Butler County citizens pledged “money, whiskey, or grain” toward the erection of the necessary public buildings in the village of Hamilton, the county seat; others contributed “stones, lime, brick, timber, mechanical work, labor, or hauling, or any kind of country produce which can or may be exchanged for cash.”6 The income and expenditures of counties farther to the west provide a view of a different stage of growth. In 1790 Winthrop Sargent organized Knox County, the first county in what later became Indiana Territory. It stretched from the Ohio River to the Canadian border, from the Great Miami River on the east to St. Clair County and the Illinois River on the west. The court of common pleas met in session late the same year, and it gradually assumed administrative direction of the county. The taxes levied in March 1807, while the county was a part of the Indiana Territory, produced these figures: houses, lots, land, buildings 108 slaves @ $1 1395 horses @ .50 2136 neat cattle @ 10¢ 179 single men @ $1 18 stud horses ferries assessed total:

$ 163.50 108.00 697.50 213.60 179.00 43.00 24.00 $1,428.60

The total assessment in Knox and Butler counties was about the same; the sources of income were quite different. In a region where people and animals, however scarce, were more common than economic improvements, the county levied taxes accordingly. Almost half the tax income came from a levy on horses.



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Another sizable item was the tax on slaves, who continued on official records in spite of the provisions of the Northwest Ordinance forbidding slavery or involuntary servitude. Although organized in 1790, the county did not contract for a public building until 1808, and the courthouse was not completed and occupied until July 1813.7 Still farther to the west, the government of Madison County (Illinois Territory) provided few services for a scattered population. The county, organized in 1812, lay across the Mississippi River from St. Louis. The earliest official indication of government was a court of common pleas, meeting for the first time in April 1813. The proceedings of the court were filled with concern over roads and licensing taverns and ferries and setting prices for their services. In 1814 William Ottwell built a jail in Edwardsville. The judges of the court viewed the structure, pronounced it satisfactory, and paid Ottwell $194 for his work. The territory laid a tax on lands, dividing them into three classes (river bottomlands, other located lands, and unlocated lands). The court levied county taxes along much the same lines as those found in Knox County: single men, $1.00; each slave, $1.00; horse, mule, or ass at $.50 each; stud horses at the season’s rate; ferries from $1.00 to $3.00. The tax lists have not survived, but the total collections were $426.84¹⁄₂. The small population—there were 161 men subject to road labor in the county—and the few services provided for the county’s citizens suggest scattered settlements and an earlier stage of economic development. The exact figures are: Credit Thos Kirkpatrick, tavern lic.

Abraham Prickett, merchant lic.

Debit $ 6.50

15.00

Isom Gillham, services, attending election of 1812, two criminal cases, &c., &c Josias Randle, clerk & sundries John G. Lofton, judge of probate 21 days

$75.00; $96.221⁄2 $ 115.533⁄4 $3042.00

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Credit Sam’l G. Mooss [probably Morse], -doSquire Davidson, three fines Court, fine of Jas Green Tax-levy of 1813

Debit

15.00

2.50 1.00 426.841⁄2 $466.841⁄2

Geo Caldwell, judge, listing property for taxation $3032.00 Jacob Whiteside, 5 days Judge of Common Pleas 10.00 Wm Rabb, 4 days, -do$38.00 $303.761⁄2 surplus $163.081⁄2

What were the three fines levied by Squire Davidson, presumably a justice of the peace? Judging by the sum of $2.50, the usual frontier offences were involved: disorderly conduct, contempt of court, failure to turn out for work on the public roads, livestock not properly fenced or marked. They are reminders that the power to fine enhanced the authority of such county officials.8 If government established a framework of regulations for orderly conduct, the authority of law and the courts forced public acceptance of these rules. The extension of law to the transAppalachian frontier from 1795 to 1815 may be examined in two parts: the creation and publication of a code of law by the first territorial officers and the establishment of the territorial court, and the organization and operation of the county court system, the basic unit of justice on the frontier. The activities of Winthrop Sargent, appointed governor of the Mississippi Territory following his service as secretary of the Northwest Territory, provide an example of the work of a territorial governor in framing a code of law. When he arrived, Sargent’s landed domain stretched from the prosperous, sophisticated world of the Natchez District across three hundred miles of uplands, canebrakes, and overflowed lowlands to the primitive settlements on the Tombigbee River. For this broad area Sargent sought to fashion an effective and consistent set of laws. He first adopted the English common law for the Mississippi Territory. Sir William Blackstone and Lord Mansfield became the authorities cited by lawyers before the bar. The territorial judges drew their inspira-



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tion—insofar as their decisions could be called inspired—from the same sources. Local circumstances forced the modification and simplification of some English forms, but the courts accepted the general principles of the applicability of the common law, along with the English principle of equity. Thus, Governor Sargent by fiat implanted the institutions of the Anglo-American legal tradition. The Natchez gentry vigorously supported an effective legal system, for it gave stability and promoted commerce in an increasingly commercial society.9 The law for the territory was specific and detailed. Winthrop Sargent drafted it in consultation with his territorial judges, Peter Bryan Bruin and Daniel Tilden. The third judge, Thomas Rodney, did not arrive until 1803. Neither Bruin nor Tilden had legal training, and they were clearly subordinate to Sargent in the drawing up of the first legal code. Published in the early months of 1799, Sargent’s Code (as it came to be called) had forty-six sections covering a wide range of personal conduct and commercial affairs in the territory. One of its most important provisions dealt with local courts. The code established the general quarter sessions of the peace court, to meet quarterly for three days of sessions. These courts dealt with minor misdemeanors—minimal punishment offenses—committed in the counties. A justice of the peace sitting as judge presided over the court, with great powers to assist him in keeping the peace, including the authority to imprison for an indefinite period. A parallel court, the court of common pleas, heard cases concerned with civil, personal, or real causes. The governor designated “a competent number” of citizens as justices of the court of common pleas, three of whom constituted a court. The code established a probate court to handle wills and testaments, as well as the poor, minors, and lunatics. Cases from the courts of common pleas and the general quarter sessions could be appealed to the territorial supreme court, which met yearly in each county. The supreme court also tried cases of a more serious nature, such as official misconduct and felonies. In addition Sargent’s Code dealt in detail with crimes and punishments. Perjury, treason, and arson were among the most significant crimes, along with murder, mutilation, robbery,

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and burglary. Punishments were severe. The code provided for whipping posts and pillories in each county, as well as a jail. The governor also had great authority over aliens, who were required by law to post bonds as a guarantee of good behavior and to report to the governor on a regular basis. They could be deported on almost any charge. Sargent’s Code underwent several modifications after 1803, but the basic common law foundation remained undisturbed.10 From the beginning of his governorship, Sargent moved to tighten control over the slave population. The town of Natchez, like other urban places in the South, had a substantial slave population engaged in a variety of occupations and under varying restrictions in terms of their freedom to move about and to exercise personal choice in their lives. Sargent saw such variations as lax, and he moved to give legal form to more standard regulations. In 1799, he directed the slave patrols to examine the passes of slaves with great vigilance; next spring, he prohibited slaves from growing or selling cotton (allegedly in response to rumors of theft). Then, he prohibited slaves from owning horses, with a view to reducing or eliminating the traffic in goods and services associated with the Sunday market. Finally, a law of 1805 forbade a slave to sell any item without the express consent of the master. Other laws further reduced the economic activities of slaves, including a law that limited hunting and prohibited slaves from keeping dogs or livestock.11 Under Sargent’s Code and other legal codes on the transAppalachian frontier, the privileges and responsibilities of the common law applied solely to the white population. Yet some black Mississippians in bondage took advantage of the code and its court system to seek their freedom in the courts. Judge Thomas Rodney recorded several such suits and his reactions to them. Abraham Jones, or Samson, sued for his freedom for fifteen years, always without success. Even more striking was the case of Sue, a black woman of Indian ancestry, who sought freedom through the courts under a Virginia statute that freed Indians. She brought suit in Virginia, where the court found in her favor. By the time the judgment was handed down, however, her master had already taken her (and her family) from Virginia to



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South Carolina (1788), thence to Georgia (1800), and finally to Mississippi Territory. Here Sue once more commenced her suit, on behalf of herself and her children. She failed. The judges recognized the complexities of the case, but in the final analysis, they judged property rights more powerful than human rights. Thomas Rodney’s court condemned her and her children to another sixty years of involuntary servitude. That Sue persevered so far and that the court permitted her to do so, and with representation by some of Mississippi Territory’s established white lawyers, suggest that in this period, at least, black men and women had a measure of access to the courts for redress.12 Three hundred miles to the east of the center of government and commerce at Natchez lay the Tombigbee settlements, the eastern anchor of the Mississippi Territory. According to reports, eastern Mississippi consisted of a restless, transient population with a substantial number of fugitives from justice. Governor Winthrop Sargent recognized the existence of these distant settlements with the creation of Washington County in 1800. Distances made it impossible for a court structure centered in Natchez to function effectively in Washington County, so Sargent laid off a separate judicial district. The new judge of the Washington judicial district, Harry Toulmin, an English immigrant, had been, in turn, a Unitarian minister, educator, and public official in Kentucky. Whatever his previous career, in his work as a judge in Mississippi Territory, he emerges from the legal records as a man of character and integrity. Although his judicial circuit was smaller in size, his duties were far more difficult than those of his colleagues in the western part of the territory. During the early years of his magistracy, Toulmin found himself opposed by several factions, and his experience suggests that the laws of the territory could not be enforced without the support of its citizens. Law in the Natchez region functioned effectively because it was a reflection of the values of the dominant commercial element and so had the approval of powerful people.13 Toulmin lived in a very different kind of place, in which the majority in the region he served supported values different from his own. As befitted the nature of his duties and new situation,

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Toulmin interpreted the law in his own way, without regard to popular opinion. He did much to codify the law and function of the courts. His digest of the territorial laws, published in 1807 and incorporating most of the changes made in Sargent’s Code, helped to establish a uniform law throughout the region. He followed this with his Magistrate’s Assistant, a practical guide for justices of the peace in the Mississippi Territory. The annexation of West Florida in 1810 complicated his judicial world; so did Mobile and newly created counties shortly thereafter. But Toulmin remained a leader in the struggle to establish legal institutions in the eastern part of the Mississippi Territory, where he used his authority to foster respect for the law and the courts.14 Toulmin’s legal empire lay at the edge of a new independence movement. At issue here were the simultaneous examples of the Louisiana Purchase and the declining authority of the Spanish Empire in North America. Louisiana was now American, but Spanish Florida remained a prominent alien imperial possession. Aside from rich, fertile lands, Florida seemed to be a place without government and laws, a collecting space for the lawless and dangerous of the Southwest. Escaped slaves, Indian raiders, bandits and thieves of every nationality crossed the line into Florida. The answer was an unofficial initiative against a European imperial power fully occupied by a European war. In 1810, a group of southern annexationists (for this was surely their objective) led a revolt against Spanish authority, captured Baton Rouge, and proclaimed an independent Republic of West Florida. President James Madison issued a proclamation, claiming the territory from the Perdido to the Mississippi, and authorizing its occupation as part of the Orleans Territory. In May 1812, Congress passed a law that incorporated West Florida into the Mississippi Territory. It was the only territorial conquest retained after the war. Louisiana opposed its incorporation into the new state because it would add several thousand AngloAmericans to the population mix. These additions became known as the “Florida parishes,” testimony to their origins.15 The most important of the local courts in the western country was the justice of the peace court. It was certainly the most



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widely known to the frontier family. The office had been an important one in seventeenth-century England and was transported to the colonies. Its significance increased with the dispersal of the population, as people moved farther from the settled areas and access to higher courts. In the colonies justices were often men of wealth and influence, but west of the Appalachians the office gradually became elective (without property requirements), and a fee system transformed the honorary nature of the office. The duties of the justice of the peace west of the mountains pertained primarily to civil cases involving small sums. Only rarely did the justice venture into areas of peace enforcement or criminal cases. The justice court was designed to provide convenient and cheap justice without long trials and recourse to lawyers. The courts were informal; the justices expedited the cases wherever possible. In addition to serving as arbiters in cases for small sums specified by law (up to twenty dollars), justices of the peace checked stray livestock and performed marriages. In their availability, their informal nature, and their significance for frontier people, they resembled the courts of the first trans-Appalachian frontier of the previous generation.16 In spite of the formal titles, the courts were often informal. At the local level, where justice courts were the basic instruments of law, the judge (or justice) was generally a man without formal legal training but, it was hoped, an individual of much common sense and strong integrity. A judge had to be prepared to hold court at any time, under all sorts of physical conditions, and to protect himself from the unexpected. At the first session of the Dearborn County (Indiana) Court a recalcitrant witness, tired of being admonished to speak to the subject, seized a board and swung at the judge’s head. The judge warded off the blow with his arm, which was broken by the act. All present, especially the judge, agreed that the act was in contempt of court. The judge ordered the witness jailed, but there was no jail, so the guilty party was bound hand and foot and “laid along the ground and a section of worm fence was built up over him, the lower rail just touching his neck.” Here he was left for several hours to ponder his intemperate action. Contempt of court also took milder

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forms. An 1808 session of the Miami County (Ohio) Court was held in a room over a tavern. When the noise from the lower floor became too loud, the judge summoned two boisterous men and fined them for contempt. One of the victims addressed the court with some bitterness: “Judge Dunlevy, I knew you when you were so poor you had to lie in bed until your wife washed your breeches.” The fines stood.17 The court of common pleas dealt with civil cases involving citizens of the same county. Three justices sat as a court of common pleas, although in some cases one was sufficient to hold the court. It was generally assumed that they would come from different sections of the county and that at least one of the three would be a lawyer. Quarter session courts, of equal rank and presided over by the same men, had jurisdiction over petty crimes and misdemeanors, such as assault and drunkenness. Sometimes the justices of the court also served as county commissioners and so conducted the administrative as well as judicial business of the county. Where this custom did not prevail, the justices chose the commissioners. Justices also named fence viewers and recommended those who needed licenses, such as tavern keepers. In short, the justices of the counties combined the functions of government and the law, within which the court structure tended to focus authority in the hands of a few. Within the basic framework of the territorial system, the most dramatic exceptions to every rule of government and law lay within Louisiana. Thomas Jefferson’s purchase of Louisiana in 1803 made the Mississippi River an American artery of commerce, made the polyglot city of New Orleans an American port, and transformed the people and the legal structure of Louisiana to American citizens—at least on paper. At the very least, the purchase of Louisiana and its absorption into the expansion to the West reconfigured the frontier for the next half century. Its purchase said much about the expansive nature of American settlement, and more particularly, the vision of Thomas Jefferson for the future of the American nation. In practical terms, the acquisition of a landed area larger in size than the original thirteen states and almost equal in size to the nation in 1803 owed much



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to European political and military events, the imperial designs of Napoleon Bonaparte, and revolutions of enslaved peoples in Europe’s Caribbean empires, together with the good timing, energy, and initiative of American diplomats. The issues on the ground itself were infinitely complex. Within Louisiana, in response to American sovereignty, all institutions had to be reconfigured, compromises found, and negotiations begun over the intersection of American and Louisianan forms.18 When the newly appointed American governor, William C. C. Claiborne, took possession on October 1, 1804, he inherited some fifty thousand alien people of European origin (generally francophone although not exclusively) who were, on the whole, not pleased with the change in imperial proprietors. In addition, the Louisiana territory held some forty thousand Indian peoples. What kind of government and legal system to create for these new citizens of the Republic posed an enormous challenge to the territorial system under the Northwest Ordinance and the political and legal structure that it mandated for the unorganized territories to the west of the mountains. Tennessee, a somewhat fractious and needy territory, adapted to the ordinance with ease, mollified and put at ease by the acceptance of slavery. Louisiana was a series of much more complicated issues. The areas of Louisiana settled by Europeans had been so occupied (some of them) for almost three generations. In this time, Louisianans had much experience with government, or at least with imperial rule. The French and the Spanish had laid claim to the area west of the Mississippi River, and the British had counted the area east of the river as part of their empire. After the transfer from France to the United States, the views of American officials and of the leaders of the province of Louisiana now sharply diverged. Louisianans hoped and indeed expected to run their own affairs, with their own government and legal system. They assumed that the United States, a nation built on republican principles familiar to those who had experienced the French Revolution, would move Louisiana rapidly through territorial status to statehood, and the new state would control its own affairs through its elected representatives. Within the context of rising tensions in foreign affairs and the continued

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expansion of settlements west of the mountains, affairs in Louisiana took a very different direction. To begin with, American officials from President Jefferson to Governor Claiborne assumed that Louisianans would adopt American forms of government and law. The problem was not how to familiarize a population with government—for the people of Louisiana had much experience with government under the French and Spanish; rather it was how to impose the American system of government in such a way that it would rest comfortably on an alien people and, at the same time, presumably point toward the democratic forms described in the Northwest Ordinance. The French and Spanish officials had governed a society, as one American wrote in 1803, “accustomed to arbitrary prompt decisions.”19 The governor of Spanish Louisiana (the direct representative of the king), the intendant (in charge of the treasury), and the cabildo (a town council for New Orleans that advised on public good and served as a court of appeals) guided the affairs of the entire colony. Laws and ordinances in Spanish Louisiana covered a wide range, regulating the construction of bridges and roads (the road network in the Louisiana Territory was better than in most American territories) and levees to control high water; inspecting produce offered for sale and fixing prices; and providing swift trial for those charged and brutal punishment for convicted offenders. Throughout the colony, the Code Noir gave form and permanence to the enslaved condition of peoples of African origin. At the same time, Louisiana had a large and varied population of people of mixed race, many of them “free” persons in the legal sense in which Spanish and French legal forms provided for manumission. It soon became clear that American policy makers had very different ideas. And they were hardened in their views by the reports that came to Washington from their governor. Along with this highly centralized government went a relaxed and easygoing way of life that amazed and even outraged the Americans. Governor Claiborne thought the people of Louisiana wealthy and generally honest but “uninformed, indolent, luxurious—in a word, illy fitted to be useful citizens of the Republic.”20 Clai-



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borne’s comment points to the innumerable differences between the Creoles—people of French origin, although the term had many gradations of meaning in Louisiana itself—and the Americans. The ancient population did not rejoice in the change of government and remained reluctant to accept the presence of the Americans. This reluctance took forms varying from indifference to the ceremonies marking the transfer of ownership to downright hostility at the examination of land titles in the light of Anglo-American legal principles. The separate settlements of Creoles and Americans in the countryside and also in the cities of St. Louis and New Orleans intensified the divisions along ethnic lines. Conflicts appeared over basic cultural, political, and legal institutions. Not the least of these was the question of the legal code.21 So the American nation had a new, imperial colony. It was a diverse people with a substantial degree of prosperity and welldeveloped social institutions among the Creole planters. And whatever the Northwest Ordinance might say, Louisiana was also a colony with its own well-established legal codes based on the civil law of Spain and France. When the United States purchased Louisiana, it found an established legal system, with both civil and ecclesiastical courts. The basis was civil law, a legal system that functioned with speed and rested on the judgment of individual officials. Trial by jury was unknown; appeal was rare; litigation was minimal; and lawyers, accordingly, few in number. The transition to American legal institutions proved difficult in the face of a long-standing system, a large indigenous population, and a reluctance to abandon a European heritage in favor of the encroaching American authority. American officials agreed that the legal system had to be changed gradually. “In the course of my efforts to introduce the American System of Jurisprudence into the ceded Territory, I experienced many difficulties, and excited some dissatisfaction among the People,” wrote Governor Claiborne. In the same letter he identified many of the principal points of difference: “I fear the trial by Jury, the introduction of oral testimony, the Admission of Attorneys &c will illy comport with the former habits of the People, and that the Court, (as I have been) will be accused by the designing few,

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of making injurious innovations on the Spanish Law.” Louisiana gradually became a part of the American territorial system, but the civil law foundations of Spain and France remained. The Legal Code of 1805 affirmed the principles of civil law as the dominant legal system within the Territory of Orleans.22 The first official response was an extended debate in Congress that led to the crafting and passage of a special law to deal with government in the new Louisiana territory. The debate had as its fundamental starting point a generally shared sense that the provisions of the Northwest Ordinance were inadequate to deal with the multiple questions raised by the presence of Louisiana in the American Republic. At issue here was the question of the diverse nature of Louisiana’s population and issues of citizenship. In brief, how could foreigners be converted into Americans? Were special steps necessary in the case of Louisiana that went well beyond the cycle of political steps from dependency to statehood outlined by the Northwest Ordinance? Even the most fervent supporters of the bill argued that Louisianans posed a different challenge to the evolving federal system, and accordingly, they would need special attention to make them loyal Americans within the dominant institutional framework. The intention was to give Louisianans more control over their affairs as they became more American, as they lost their foreign political and social beliefs and adopted American political principles. In its final form, the Governance Act of 1804 gave organized status to both the Territory of Orleans and Upper Louisiana (under the authority of the governor of Indiana Territory). For the Territory of Orleans, Congress provided the customary governor, secretary, thirteen-member Legislative Council, and a number of judges, all requiring Senate approval and serving at the discretion of the president. This system of governance, clearly appropriate for a foreign population of uncertain loyalty, aroused bitter opposition from the people of the new territory. A central point of disagreement was the restriction on the slave trade. The act forbade the importation of foreign slaves into the new Territory of Orleans. It permitted the movement of slaves from the United States into the Territory of Orleans that



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were the property of bona fide settlers. This provision of the law was attacked by almost every political and economic faction within the territory. That the Governance Act also prohibited foreign slave trade in Louisiana seemed further evidence that the federal government (in the person of Congress) had acted against the interests of the territory. There were two separate issues: that the prohibition of the slave trade was against the interests of the people of the territory, and that the law had been enacted without consulting the people (white people) who would be affected by the law. John Quincy Adams, speaking in opposition to the bill, observed: “This is a Colonial system government. It is the first the United States have established—It is a bad precedent.”23 The passage of the Governance Act in March 1804 recognized the reality of the situation in Louisiana itself, for the representatives of the federal government had been in Louisiana and engaged in its governance since December 1803.24 The free residents of Louisiana immediately declared their opposition to the provisions adopted for their governance. Within a month, in May 1804, they replied in a “Remonstrance of the People of Louisiana against the Political System Adopted by Congress for Them.” The core of their argument was that the Governance Act denied the benefits of citizenship to which they had rights under the original article of cession. In short, this was a betrayal of the provisions of the treaty, and equally to the point, a betrayal of what they regarded as the principles at the foundation of the American nation. What they wanted, instead, were elected officials and a representative in Congress. In addition to the absence of political representation, they charged, the act also imposed economic hardships of the strongest kind in the prohibition of the foreign slave trade. Indeed, it appeared that Louisiana had been singled out for special treatment, all of it harsh and discriminatory.25 Governor Claiborne attempted both to carry out his instructions from Washington and, at the same time, to placate the residents of Louisiana. It was a challenge. Influential members of Congress saw Louisiana filled with French people, alien in language, politics, religion, and law. The passage of Louisiana from

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French sovereignty to American upset and set at loose ends the threads of the various elements in Louisiana’s population. These included free whites, slaves, free people of color, and Indians. All now searched to find their place in the new imperial authority with its voice in Washington and its official representatives in New Orleans. The varied groups made an immediate response, in accordance with their heretofore predetermined status. Free whites sought to find representation to reflect their numbers and to reopen the foreign slave trade; they also sought a codification of the status of slaves as a means of preserving their property rights and protecting themselves against a possible slave revolt. Slaves on plantations used their limited authority mostly by flight to the West, while urban slaves sometimes benefited from the growth and prosperity of New Orleans. Free people of color found their rights and privileges in danger of restriction or loss, and they tried to find a voice in an increasingly racialized world.26 Indians were largely ignored except where they made trouble. They were regarded, as were Indian peoples east of the Mississippi, as an unfortunate fact of life, established in more and more permanent settlements on increasingly attractive lands. Still, Governor Claiborne spent much time negotiating with Indian leaders. The Indian position was stronger because of the larger landscapes open to the West (the so-called “Neutral Ground”) with a more limited Euro-American presence. At the same time, the American government, mindful of precedent, was not about to grant Indian peoples a sense of sovereignty and treatment as equals. Relations with Indian groups, especially the powerful Choctaws, were further inflamed by Jefferson’s determination to send various expeditions throughout the region in search of knowledge about this newest part of the American nation. What Jefferson and others saw as voyages of science and discovery, Indian people regarded as trespass and perhaps worse, a prelude to a hostile attempt to occupy lands on the vague border between the two groups.27 In responding to the opposition against the initial law of government for Louisiana, Congress passed a second act, dated March 1805, creating a House of Representatives that would



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work with the appointed Legislative Council and making provision for a nonvoting delegate in Congress. The response of the new territorial legislature to the new conditions associated with American sovereignty was most decisive in the case of slaves and the institution of slavery. Amidst the confusion and jostling of the varied peoples of Louisiana, issues of property were of first importance. Beyond the question of land and land grants, which would be adjudicated over a period of years, slavery was most immediate and most pressing, especially the need to make clear the blurred lines of color and race. The result was the Code Noir (1806), which reduced a world of gradations of color and rights to what Peter Kastor has called “a place of whites and nonwhites.” In short, that race dictated social and political status; that nonwhites, whatever their gradations of color and previous civil condition, had no rights under either heading. The code also further limited (if possible) the few rights of slaves under the law. Under the code, “no slave could possess any thing in his own right, or dispose in any way of the product of his industry, without the consent of his master.” The law made clear that “the condition of a slave being merely a passive one, his subordination to his master and to all who represent him, is not susceptible of any modification or restriction.” In this fashion, the possible ambiguities of the conditions of slavery were laid to rest in the most direct kind of way. What the code of 1806 attempted to do was reduce gradations of color and gradations of legal rights established by custom over time to two conditions: white and black. All rights accrued to the former; none to the latter.28 Amidst the immediate concerns associated with representation in government and governance, the legal condition of slavery and slaves, and the pressing question of the restriction of the foreign slave trade, other questions plagued relations between the new officials of the American government and the inhabitants of this newest part of the American nation. The first of these was language. French had been the language of Louisiana since the French empire established itself in what was later Quebec in 1608. New Orleans was founded in 1718 as the southern anchor of the French Empire that stretched from

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the St. Lawrence, across the Great Lakes, down the Ohio to the Mississippi and thence south. Although Jefferson had been advised to name a French-speaking governor as a gesture to the new Creole Americans, Claiborne did not speak a word of French. The loss of language meant a loss of political influence and control. Newspapers were careless about printing legal notices in both French and English, and French soon lost its official status. The issue of the intersection of security and race arose early in Governor Clairborne’s governorship. In his difficult assignment to organize and, at the same time, reassure the citizens of the new Louisiana Purchase, Claiborne regarded the militia as one of the most important instruments at his disposal, especially for the maintenance of civil order. A rotating company patrolled the streets of New Orleans every night with the instructions “to contribute to the Security of New Orleans; to the safety of the property of the Inhabitants; and to aid the civil authority in the preservation of good order.”29 At the same time that Claiborne depended on the militia, some units consisted of free people of color. They had long served under Spanish authority, with their own uniforms and arms. The idea of armed people of color, whatever their supposed legal status, did not fit with the doctrines of race brought into Louisiana by the newly arrived Americans, now in positions of authority. There was also the rising fear of a slave rebellion fostered by the successful slave revolt in Haiti. The arrival of refugees from Haiti, as many as nine thousand in 1809 and 1810, most of them in the summer of 1809, kept the issue before the officials of the territory in the most direct kind of way.30 That these nine thousand immigrants were almost evenly divided among whites, slaves, and free persons of color gave a further urgency to the question.31 Local government from the Old Northwest to the Mississippi Territory was much alike, especially in the county and township structure and the duties apportioned to various units of government. In Louisiana (Orleans Territory), however, local government was significantly different, for the institutions at the local



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level were the parish government and the police jury. Parish was synonymous with county. The French government had subdivided colonial Louisiana into ecclesiastical districts, a tribute to the influence of the Catholic Church and the parish priest—the church had its own instruments of authority, including courts— in the life of the colony. In 1805, the territory’s Legislative Council originally divided Orleans Territory into twelve counties, but the unit of government proved too large to meet the needs of local populations, and the parish remained the basic unit of administration. In 1807 the council supplemented the county by the division of the territory into nineteen parishes. The parish had the usual county officers: sheriff, coroner, clerk, and justices of the peace, all under the control of the police jury. Another act of the same year, “relative to roads, levees, and the police of cattle,” contained the early roots of the police jury system. The name referred to the committee of twelve citizens who dealt with administrative and judicial problems of the parish. The judge and the police jury served as a grand jury, identifying problems and setting up the administrative machinery to deal with them. The police jury had some judicial functions, but its primary concern lay in its administrative capacity. Law, practice, and custom gradually conferred great powers on judge and jury.32 In Concordia Parish, government and the court system began with the appointment of James Williams as parish judge. With the advice of “the majority of the Magistrates,” Williams directed that the court meet in the residence of William Nicholls “until permanently established according to law.” The court first convened in 1805. In its first term Judge Williams licensed attorneys and appointed Charles Morgan “Cryer for the Court and Constable.” The court also ordered the clerk to take “into his custody the records and papers relative thereto from the Civil Commandant.” Over the next six terms, in two years, the court administered such necessary matters as licenses, roads, ferries, and provisions for orphans. Beginning in 1807 slave patrols made their rounds twice a week. In addition to its administrative duties, the court occupied its time in civil suits. There was a good deal of litigation, and the court established procedures to be followed. Most of the suits concerned property, and in the tra-

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dition of frontier courts to the north and east, justice was slow. The court continued numerous cases in the absence of one or both of the parties to the suits, or their lawyers, or the witnesses. A number of defendants left the parish permanently. Many judgments came by default, and probably with little or no material advantage to the victor, for there was no one to collect from. Most of these cases dealt with sums of less than two hundred dollars. Because of the nature of the economy of the day—with little circulating medium, much credit, and notes of indebtedness that passed from hand to hand—it was difficult to establish who owed what, much less who owed what to whom. But this did not prevent citizens from pursuing legal redress, and for small sums.33 The case of St. Helena Parish illustrates the variety of administrative functions performed by the police jury. The police jury of the parish came into existence in 1813 under the direction of the judge of the parish, Shepherd Brown. As its first official act, the police jury adopted a set of regulations for the conduct of business (“no member shall be permitted to speak in the settings of the Jury without rising from his seat”). The jury then appointed administrative officers, a clerk ($2.00 per day and $.12¹⁄₂ per hundred words transcribed), three appraisers, and a constable for each justice of the peace district. In the subsequent meetings several committees presented reports on the principal problems of the parish: licensing, fees, and prices; strays and wild cattle; the condition of roads and bridges. Under a provision in the license law, the jury regulated the charges of tavern keepers. It assessed billiard tables at the rate of $20 annually. In the important matter of mills, “All millers attending water mills in this Parish shall keep good order in their respective mills by giving every man his proper turn, keeping lawful measures and keep’g his mill in good order.” The jury set compensation for millers at no more than one-eighth the flour ground. A committee of the police jury also fixed the annual tax structure: free white males over twenty-one assessed $1.00; masters to pay $.25 for each slave over ten years of age; horses or mules three years and older, $.12¹⁄₂ each; and stud horses should be taxed “the amount he stands for by the season.” The jury needed fourteen articles to



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describe “the manner of proceedings with strays and wild cattle and also to regulate the structure and height of fences.” The construction and upkeep of roads, bridges, and causeways required even more detail. Finally questions about ferries (licensing, fees, and continuity of service) and fines for delinquents had to be resolved, and administrative machinery to supervise all this business had to be set up. After four days of continuous sessions, the jurors adjourned with the solemn declaration that their actions were now the laws of St. Helena Parish.34 A basic concern of all parishes, all police juries, and the government of the territory itself was control of the slave population. As the plantation system expanded—a growth slowed but not stopped by Thomas Jefferson’s embargo of 1807 on foreign trade—so did the slave presence in the territory. By the time of statehood in 1812, the slave population was more than half in the river parishes. The overriding concern for control of this population was enhanced by the presence of refugees from Haiti and the stories that spread out from that island. As the Americans flooded into Louisiana, the old settlers and the new settlers stayed within the communities, creating separate places of residence and work, both in New Orleans and in the remote rural areas. Whatever the tensions and jealousies that accompanied the arrival of the Americans and their new plantations, in one area at least, the two groups made common cause. The need for control of the slave population forced an alliance between the old Creoles and the newly arrived Americans. Matters of primacy and honor would remain important; but the issue of the institution of slavery was a continuing matter of life and death.35 In February 1811, spurred by the worsening international situation and mindful of the continuous complaints of many Louisianans of their lack of self-government, Congress authorized the citizens of Orleans Territory to draft a constitution and seek admission to the Union. The divisive elements that had roiled the political waters of the territory came together to debate endlessly over the new document. Whatever their views on the past, the delegates agreed on a conservative foundation for the new state, reflecting the influence of planters and commer-

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cial interests. For a place, then a territory, ostensibly so remarkably different from other parts of the Union, even from other southern territories and states, the constitution adopted by the new state in 1812 was remarkably orthodox. If anything, it was more conservative than elsewhere. Since the arrival of American sovereignty, Louisianans had wanted to manage their own affairs. They now had their wish. Their choice in form and details notably restricted expressions of the popular will. If the transfer to the United States had introduced a measure of universal white male suffrage, the expressed use of this right under the new constitution would be limited. Although the governor would be chosen by the legislature, the chief executive of the state had extraordinary powers of appointment without oversight. The apparatus of government over the entire state rested in the hands of the executive. Louisianans, old (pre-1803) and new seemed well satisfied. Property, especially in the form of slaves, had been secured. The rights of free people of color had been severely restricted. The old forms of civic participation such as the militia had vanished, and free people of color would find their ranks thinned and their rights progressively eroded.36 This twenty years of growth in the West was remarkable for national expansion through diplomacy, its new landscapes, its dramatic growth in population, its varied experiences with different kinds of peoples. Indian peoples were still central to this frontier experience. The French villages in the Old Northwest found themselves surrounded by expanding pockets of Anglo-American settlement. The addition of Louisiana provided a new range of peoples, and the adaptation of government and laws for this group occupied the federal government and its appointed officials for a decade. There were other issues, some of them with national implications. The most important of these was the growing issue of slavery. The plantation system had taken hold in what would become the Mississippi Territory (organized 1798). Cotton cultivation had spread east to the distant settlements on the Alabama and Tombigbee. At the same time, sugar plantations appeared in size and numbers on the Mississippi River above New Orleans. Wherever these staple crops appeared, they carried two



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issues of national importance. The first was the control of the Mississippi River system and the port of New Orleans. This was achieved by the purchase of Louisiana in 1803. The second was the expansion of slavery. The new legal codes of Mississippi Territory met this need. The issues in Louisiana (now the Territory of Orleans) were more complex, involving gradations of color and the presence of a large population of free people of color (especially in New Orleans) who had enjoyed certain rights and privileges under the colonial systems of Spain and most recently, France. Crafting the Code Noir of the territory offered a legal response to all these issues. Gradations of color and citizenship were sharply reduced: to two colors, black and white, in which one group had no rights and the other complete rights. This second generation of expansion into the western country experienced two decisive examples of federal power and influence, one permanent, the other temporary. The temporary manifestation was the Embargo of 1807, which essentially ended land and sea trade with all foreign nations. The “Deep South’s first cotton boom ended when the national government enacted a countrywide embargo on exports in December, 1807,” wrote Adam Rothman.37 There can have been few examples of federal power that influenced the lives of more people. As the work of the Jeffersonians, the embargo seemed the ultimate contradiction of the traditional doctrine of Thomas Jefferson, warning against the dangers of the powerful executive branch of government. In a sense, he had proven his fear by his own actions and those of his Virginia successors. No place was more disturbed than the cotton- and sugar-producing parts of Louisiana, where the impact spread out to include shippers, captains and crews, factors and bankers, and purveyors of luxury goods in New York and New Orleans. The other dramatic examples of the reach of government were to have long-term consequences for a wide range of peoples. The first began with the persistent and continuing pressure applied by Governor William Henry Harrison against native peoples in the interests of continuing land cessions. As the decade moved forward, Indian peoples were more at the center of issues in the western country. Harrison mixed diplomacy with military

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threats. His frontier constituents strongly supported his aggressive policies. Harrison himself felt confident that he was carrying out the will of the federal government. As resistance expanded and solidified, under the prodding of Tecumseh and his brother, The Prophet, so did Harrison’s determination to expand in like proportion. When Tecumseh journeyed south to persuade the powerful southern nations to join his alliance, Harrison seized upon his absence to provoke a confrontation. Using his authority as commander of the militia, Harrison called up militia units and marched them against The Prophet’s town, a symbol of Indian resistance to treaties of cession and of their rejection of white cultural values. The battle at Tippecanoe was a drawn military engagement, but the Indians retired from the field, leaving Harrison and his troops to destroy the town and then issue news of a great victory. The proposed pan-Indian alliance never recovered from this use of territorial authority. Harrison’s campaign and public declarations were an appropriate introduction to the War of 1812. In the western country, this war over neutral rights at sea would be thought of as a war against Indian aggression and barbarism.38 The War of 1812, brought on in part by the perceived connection between Indian depredations and British advisors moving south from Canada, intersected with the attractive opportunity to seize Canada while the British were occupied in a life and death struggle against Napoleon Bonaparte in Europe. But things went awry. The Canadian ventures foundered in the early loss of Detroit. Tecumseh rallied the Indian peoples of the North until his death at the Battle of the Thames in 1813. His loss removed from the scene the great unifying force that might have brought Indian peoples west of the mountains together in a single crusade against Anglo-American land hunger. To the south, the war produced a dramatic series of events that forever changed the balance of military power and land occupation in that region. Responding to tribal divisions, the great Creek Confederation assumed a belligerent posture against the scattered but advancing Anglo-American settlements. This posture led to a massacre of women and children at Fort Mims in eastern Mississippi Territory (later Alabama) by elements of the



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Creek tribe and provided a rallying point for state and territorial militia units brought together to avenge these deaths. Andrew Jackson, born in western North Carolina and a child of the Tennessee frontier, commissioned a major general of militia, was a charismatic leader of disparate frontier military units. He used his personal influence and anger to bring various groups together, supply them in defiance of local laws, and motivate them for battle against the large Creek army. And, in a gesture that would resonate in such military actions for the rest of the century, he made effective military use of Indian allies, native people with long-standing grievances against the Creek Nation, who now seized the opportunity to redress ancient wrongs. Jackson brought together elements in the regular army and militia units from across the South in a campaign against Indians that fractured the Indians’ united front against land cessions. Seizing on the Creeks’ responsibility for the massacre at Fort Mims, Jackson motivated his troops to avenge these outrages. Confronting the united Creek force at the Horseshoe Bend of the Tallapoosa River in March 1814, Jackson ordered a frontal assault while his Indian allies infiltrated to attack from the rear. The victory was overwhelming. In a single military engagement, Jackson had destroyed the powerful military presence projected by the “Red Sticks.” There remained only the treaty of land cession at Fort Jackson that took two-thirds of the lands of the Creek Nation. These would become the heart of the new “Cotton Kingdom.” Eighteen months later, at the head of many of the same troops, Jackson decisively defeated a force of British regulars at the Battle of New Orleans. The triumph of his militia offered stunning proof of the legend of the citizen/soldier from the frontier. Thereafter, Americans from the western country added the title of military invincibility to their acknowledged hunger for public lands.39 In many respects, the War of 1812 was a disappointment in the western country. Neither the regular army nor the militias of the territories could conquer Canada. Even Jackson’s great victory at New Orleans, for all its symbolic value, simply confirmed the status quo. But whatever its failure in this area, this twenty

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years had confirmed the growing influence of the national government in the affairs of the West. The national government could mount a successful military campaign against strong Indian military forces and did so at Fallen Timbers. Representatives of the government from victorious generals (Anthony Wayne) to territorial governors (William Henry Harrison) engaged in continuous negotiations with Indian peoples, invariably with a view to further land cessions. While not uniformly successful, their relentless pressure, mixed with declining Indian resources and the loss of British support, opened large tracts to American settler families, and after 1815 it would open more. The national government enlarged the West to the edge of the distant mountains by the purchase of Louisiana, and, at the same time, it made the Mississippi and its commercial traffic an American river. And within Louisiana itself, the federal government and its appointed officials presided over the transition to American rule. Finally, through its negotiations with European nations, the national government vitally affected the lives of individuals, families, and communities in the western country, from the upper Ohio Valley to the lower Mississippi Valley, and across the Old Northwest from the Ohio River north to the Great Lakes. It was a remarkable display of power and authority, and the more so in its impact on distant and isolated communities.



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5.

 Diverse Economies Moving toward Commercial Ends

Between 1795 and 1815 the dominant feature in the economic development of the trans-Appalachian frontier was the OhioMissouri-Mississippi river trade axis. This broad continental water highway, connecting Pittsburgh—by way of Louisville and Cincinnati—and St. Louis with Natchez and New Orleans, was the main channel of trade and the route of immigrants. The pioneers settled along the banks of the great rivers and their many tributaries. Nicole Etcheson writes, “the Ohio River itself, bound the trans-Appalachian West together from 1790 to 1830.”1 Within this trade and settlement pattern, the widespread expansion of the trans-Appalachian frontier was accompanied by diverse strands of economic enterprise. Furs and lead flowed downriver from St. Louis and Upper Louisiana. Commercial agriculture emerged in the Ohio Valley, where farmers grew increasing quantities of corn, wheat, and livestock for market. Cotton and sugar cultivation appeared in new settlements on the southern frontier. Frontier farmers in the North and the South often had substantial herds of livestock, hogs, and cattle for domestic consumption and commercial purposes. All testified to some form of maturing and increasingly complex economy, much of it directed toward commercial goals.

DIVERSE ECONOMIES MOVING TOWARD COMMERCIAL ENDS

Throughout most of the western country agriculture lay at the center of economic life. A recurring seasonal rhythm governed the world of the pioneer family farm: over the winter and early spring, movement and immigration; in the late spring and summer, clearing the fields, breaking the land, plowing, planting, and cultivating; in the fall, harvesting, preserving for the winter, and making trips to market (if such was available); and, in winter, fencing, building, repairing tools, and making clothes. The addition of animals added another series of regular duties: round up, brand, and butcher. Most of these immigrant families came from a similar world: they knew how to clear, break ground, manage livestock, and construct buildings and improvements. These pioneer families knew how to preserve food for winter; they made their clothes in the home. Their earliest surplus was often livestock, and it was from the sale of cattle or hogs to new immigrants or at a nearby market that the pioneers obtained the funds to pay for their lands and to purchase a few necessities in a rare visit to a store. Schools and churches, like store goods, were luxuries. A few settlers gravitated to the rising urban centers of commerce and services, but most of the pioneers only occasionally encountered the social and cultural institutions that developed in the towns.2 Within the vast landscape of the Old Northwest, open lands and prairies lay interspersed with thick forests stretching from the Great Lakes to the Ohio River. Throughout, over a range of hundreds of miles, the lands were uniformly fertile and well watered, with abundant rainfall. Although they were generally forested, Indians had cleared them in select places, planting fields of maize. Pioneers generally went first to the river bottoms, often where Indians had cultivated before them. John Hudson describes much of this landscape: “Stretches of treeless prairie, cleared bottomland, or open woods that had supported people for centuries before Euro-Americans came to know them.” The great fertility of the Virginia Military Tract in Ohio was a magnet drawing the first wave of settlers. Others quickly followed.3 To the south, the pioneer cycle had other dimensions. In some places, especially the new Territory of Mississippi, and after 1803,



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the areas to the south and west organized as the Territory of Orleans (Louisiana), the movement to open up new lands increasingly depended on slave labor. Jonathan Martin observes of the slaveholders going to the west and south: “They followed the well-beaten Southern path to wealth and upward mobility: they acquired more land and more slaves farther west.” In the transition to the western country, “slave hiring had a crucial place.” Slaves owners might take their slave force with them and put them to work clearing and plowing. Or they might take slaves and hire them out for cash; alternatively, they might hire slaves in the western country. Probably the best system was to send a slave force of able-bodied men to the western country a year ahead, to be hired out. During this year, the slaves would be fed, clothed, and sheltered by the renter, with the owner also paid cash. Later, when the master had acquired a tract of land and it was the right season of the year—slaves commanded a premium price at cotton-picking time—he would move his family and the remainder of his slaves, reassemble his slave force, and begin work on his own plantation. Whether owned or rented, this enslaved labor force, varying in numbers from one or two to large gangs, worked at the cutting edge of the frontier, initially in clearing the land, preparing it for cultivation, plowing, and planting the first crop. As these crops soon included cotton or sugarcane, slave labor became intertwined with the frontier experience in ways not heretofore seen on the trans-Appalachian frontier. Drawing on the earlier experiences in Kentucky and Tennessee, the rapid transition to the cultivation of sugarcane and cotton made the slave force a unit of labor in a large-scale production enterprise.4 Across this vast and varied landscape the growing importance of commercial enterprise made itself felt in direct ways. As small farm families north of the Ohio River and owners of large plantations that lined the lower reaches of the Mississippi both sought trade and commercial activity, much of it through the emerging port of New Orleans, this common interest gave growing importance to watercourses as connections with the commercial world. Accordingly, settlement patterns moved up waterways, to the limits of floating a flatboat and perhaps even

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farther. With the opening of the port of New Orleans by the Spanish after the Treaty of 1795, the trickle of commercial traffic down the rivers to New Orleans grew to a flood. In the economic variations that went along with this widespread expansion from 1795 to 1815, virtually every production unit of whatever size intended, sooner rather than later, to find a market for products. In other words, they wished to engage in commercial agricultural enterprise. Most of these new family settlements, especially north of the Ohio, began their frontier lives with a cabin in a small clearing, surrounded by a few plowed tracts, in a vast forested landscape. This was a condition associated with new settlement and isolation, characterized the first year or two by a mixed farming-hunting economy, with corn as a basic frontier crop, livestock pastured in the woods, and a garden. The family consumed the immediate products of the field and forest; there was little or no surplus, and a lack of transportation facilities may have ruled out export of a marketable crop in any case. Subsistence agriculture was the initial experience for the bulk of frontier peoples. But within the framework of subsistence, the economic experiences of the first pioneers varied widely. Some pioneers came as part of a large community; others alone. Some came with livestock, tools, and money; others had nothing but the clothes on their backs and a little corn. There were several variations in the early stages of settlement. Hosea Smith was a solitary pioneer with resources. In the spring of 1810 he moved from Kentucky to Knox County (Indiana) and purchased two hundred acres “with a Considerable Improvement with a crop in the ground.” Smith wrote of his location, “In this Neighborhood there is land aplenty not Entered and the richest I ever beheld and as for stock it is one of the finest places that is to be found.” He was surprised to find so few people and so much excellent land available for two dollars an acre, or land with improvements for three dollars. He wrote in a letter to his father of prospects for new immigrants, “I am satisfied they might better themselves if they had not one Dollar after getting hear.” Smith advised his relatives to bring only the necessities, “tho any light tools is verry servisable as they come high, bed



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and clothing servisable to bring.” A crosscut saw was among the most useful items on the frontier, he continued, and “a new blade might be put in the bottom of a cart or waggon.” He emphasized that those who came to the western country for its cheap fertile lands “must expect to meet with some hardship and expense.” In the course of the summer and the next spring, he noted with increasing frequency the large numbers of new immigrants headed to the West. Their destinations varied, “some to Plattoker [Patoka, a small tributary of the White], some over the Wabash on the Donation, some on busroe settlement and abundance on the new purchase, and a number over the Mississippi and some up the Missory to St. Louis and different parts.” Like scouts in the vanguard of an advancing army, land agents “from New England, Maryland, Pennsylvania, NY, Va, SC, Ga, Ohio, Ky States, as well from many others” preceded the immigrant families.5 At the other end of the scale, Joseph Hayes had neither capital nor friends. His first job was in a salt manufactory near Lawrenceburg (Indiana), on the edge of the Ohio line. The year was 1802; the wage, fifty cents a day. The appearance of western Virginia salt on the frontier of the Old Northwest ended the salt industry in Indiana. Hayes married and flatboated for two years. In 1809 he bought land. With his wife and a new child he settled down to the life of a subsistence farmer. He described planting the first crop in these terms: The first field of corn I planted for myself was about 10 acres I kind of scratched it over with the plow. I then fixed a little crib on the plow so that we placed our first child I furrowed out and my wife dropped the corn. Then when near noon she would take the Child and go to the home and get dinner.—While she would be getting dinner—I took the hoe and would cover the corn. We continued this way—with the child riding on the plow alternately until we finished our ten acres.

The swarms of birds that filled the sky and the forest animals that still inhabited the woods took about one-third of the crop; the Hayes family harvested the remaining two-thirds. With autumn came the pressure of harvest and then a modest social life

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built around corn huskings. When winter arrived, family members made clothes, repaired tools, and planned for spring. Soon the annual cycle of work began again. Amidst the seasonable demands of work were interspersed the cycles of the human condition: birth, injury, sickness, and death.6 Even in a land of such natural abundance, those with little or nothing found life difficult. The early history of Thomas Morrison is a study in hardship and perseverance and demonstrates the mixed economic functions already present in the Ohio Valley frontier by the turn of the century. Orphaned at an early age, Morrison grew up near Rising Sun (Indiana), on the edge of the Greenville Treaty cession line. He attended school for perhaps six months. At the age of fourteen he planted five acres of corn on the public domain but soon left the land to work in a mill. In 1809 he went to Dayton and took work as a builder. He was landless, but small villages such as Dayton made it possible for him to find employment as a carpenter. Morrison wrote his account with an intensity that characterized the struggle he waged for survival. No mention of social activity or leisure punctuates its pages. His objects in life were shelter, food, and clothing, a basic economic sufficiency.7 Policies of the federal government promoted this rapid settlement. Before he became governor, William Henry Harrison had served as a territorial representative in Congress, where he wrote and lobbied for the passage of a new land law with generous credit provisions. Combined with this relentless search for land cessions from Indian peoples, he was a prototype federal official on the trans-Appalachian frontier. No other public figure so clearly recognized the needs of his Anglo-American constituents and moved to meet them. Harrison presided over a decade of settlement and expansion that was increasingly legal, so generous were the terms of his land law and so responsive was his determined treaty-making posture. Still, in contrast with the land and the Indian peoples, there were few Euro-Americans, even counting the ancient French settlements. Those who moved onto the land did so generally without regard to political boundaries. Across the State of Ohio (admitted to the Union in 1803), and



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the territories of Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan, pioneer families generally settled along the watercourses, then gradually moved inland. Watercourses were the lifelines of communication and trade. The transition from subsistence to commercial agriculture was often indistinct. Certainly the early pioneer families sought commercial opportunities as soon as they harvested their first crop. Often these chances were not immediately available. Commercial agriculture depended on trade routes and a market. Jacob Burnet wrote of the Ohio Valley at the turn of the century, “It was of no importance to the farmer, that his fields, with careful cultivation, would yield from 50 to 100 bushels of corn per acre, when a fourth part of the quantity would answer his purpose, there being no market for a surplus.”8 The answer to this search for a commercial connection were herds of cattle and hogs. A frontier product comparable in importance to corn (maize), hogs were unknown in pre-Columbian North America. They were introduced by Hernando De Soto on his celebrated early expedition (1539–43) across the South in search of riches that so drove the early conquistadores. As part of his supplies, De Soto landed a large herd of hogs. Over the course of his trek, many of them escaped. They thrived in the woods, eating almost anything and being strong enough to fend off most predators. Three hundred years later, they had become an ideal commercial animal for the trans-Appalachian frontier. Hogs ran wild in the woods for most of the year; community gangs rounded them up when the weather turned cold. Some families and communities shipped surplus hogs immediately; others fattened their hogs for later shipment. As early as 1792, hogs had been driven east through the Cumberland Gap. Thereafter, they went downriver in various forms, increasingly in barrels. Small settlements on watercourses became the first shipping points for the first large-scale commercial venture of so many communities. The development of these towns depended on their capacity to tap the hinterland and to provide needed goods and services, both for shipment of commodities south down the river and for credit until the shippers returned. Hogs

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were one product with a universal appeal, serving pioneer families north and south.9 The shipments down the Ohio to New Orleans began in spring 1787, when Kentuckians under James Wilkinson sent hams, tobacco, and butter downriver. The growth of New Orleans as a port paralleled the rise of agriculture in the Ohio Valley. The great distance placed a premium on value and weight. The first trips to New Orleans quickly showed that hogs commanded a higher price per pound when sold as processed products rather than live animals. Facilities quickly developed to meet this demand. Farm families processed hogs and shipped them downriver in barrels. One observer counted as many as 27,000 barrels of pork and bacon sent around the falls of Ohio at Louisville as early as 1810–11. The Ohio-Mississippi river systems provided cheap transportation. The first packinghouse of record in Cincinnati appeared in 1818, although small-scale farmers before then had shipped in quantity.10 Cattle feeding operations were directly connected to corn. The first corn-fed cattle came from the Bluegrass of Kentucky and the Scioto Valley of Ohio. From the beginning, the cattle feeders were intended for market. Cheap land—really free land—subsidized the cattle feeders in the West. Cattle were important, but they never produced as much income as hogs. John Hudson describes how early-nineteenth-century Ohio was “a proving ground for agriculture that tested all the farming types.”11 Livestock as a commercial product was a common denominator across much of the western country north of the Ohio River. Those farms in the longer-settled parts of Ohio and eastern Indiana had larger herds and better access to packing facilities. To the west, the newer family enterprises had smaller numbers of leaner hogs, but they were farther downriver and hence closer to the markets of the South and New Orleans. The purchase of Louisiana opened the Ohio-Mississippi trade route to New Orleans, and a dependable market appeared for corn, beef, pork, flour, grain, and other products of the western country. The volume of this trade expanded enormously, in proportion to the growing population and the new fertile lands constantly being placed under cultivation. The rapid growth of



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western commerce brought a measure of wealth to those western areas settled long enough to produce a surplus for export, and it offered to the more remote and recently settled backcountry frontiers the prospect of a future market. A wealthy and more leisured class of people emerged, for commercial agriculture sharpened economic distinctions. Surplus crops also meant a more advanced economic system, with large-scale transportation and storage facilities, a complex of credit, and economic arrangements with the eastern cities and sometimes with Europe. A host of commercial brokers performed these services in New Orleans. In the Ohio Valley the most important commercial center was Cincinnati, which controlled the trade of the Miami River Valley and eventually much of the Ohio. Capitalists, former army officers, real estate dealers, all men united by energy and ambition, began to enter the business of commerce, which, if it were not new, was practiced on a scale not heretofore seen on the trans-Appalachian frontier.12 Access to the great river systems was the single most necessary ingredient to join in the growing trade. The network of water commerce included portions of interior Kentucky and Tennessee, and the vast lands drained by the river systems of the Territory Northwest of the Ohio. Pioneer families had been sending products downriver since the signing of Pinckney’s Treaty (1795) opened the river and gave the American traders the right of deposit in New Orleans. In 1801, William C. C. Claiborne, then governor of Mississippi Territory, estimated that at least six hundred vessels had been counted at Natchez on the way to New Orleans. This number tripled between 1800 and 1807, reflecting the purchase of Louisiana.13 At the same time, new settlements on the richest soils without such access found themselves isolated and stagnant. The New England settlements on the Connecticut Western Reserve, in the northeast corner of the territory, were a case in point. So these settlements, with abundant lands and sense of community, lived in self-contained isolation until well after 1815 and the arrival of steam navigation on Lake Erie.14 These growing commercial operations involved merchants at several levels. Joseph Hough, a merchant of the Miami River

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Valley with headquarters at Cincinnati, participated in the growing trade brought about by the rise of commercial agriculture. He began his commercial operations in 1806, purchasing eastern goods in Philadelphia and laboriously transporting them across the mountains to Pittsburgh. In Pittsburgh, Hough purchased a flatboat and moved the cargo downriver to his warehouse in Cincinnati. He then sent his goods to several stores at interior villages, where the storekeepers offered “fresh eastern goods” to their customers. Frontier farm families bartered growing agricultural surpluses and home manufactures for ammunition, pots, kettles, dishes, pans, nails, and other metalwork. The storekeeper took these commodities (he was without much alternative), and the process reversed itself. In the autumn and early winter quantities of pork, corn, and whiskey went downstream to Hough’s Cincinnati warehouse. Then began the race to reach the New Orleans market before the endless parade of flatboats from the Ohio Valley glutted the wharves in the Crescent City and reduced prices. Merchants of modest means went with their own boats; the larger entrepreneurs employed assistants. Having sold the produce of the Ohio Valley in New Orleans, a merchant went to the East—New York, Philadelphia, or Baltimore—to settle his accounts and obtain credit for a new shipment of goods. The cycle had begun again. Thus the frontier surplus of the Ohio Valley gradually brought a degree of prosperity to the farmer and the village storekeeper (if he could collect his debts), and, provided that nothing disturbed the orderly flow of goods and their profitable sale, might bring a modest fortune to the Cincinnati merchants and the traders in New Orleans and Philadelphia.15 Merchants in longer-settled areas, such as John Coffee of Nashville, also served distant frontiers in several ways. Coffee’s wide range of commercial and manufacturing enterprises stretched from the Mississippi Territory to the Illinois country. In 1798 he began to ship salt from the Illinois saline deposits downriver. Coffee branched out into the slave trade between Nashville and Natchez and, gradually, into the large-scale shipment of corn, pork, saltpeter, cotton, tobacco, and other agricultural produce down the river to New Orleans. Eventually he had



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as many as five boats engaged in the river trade. By 1801 Coffee’s commodity trade was so large that he built a store in Nashville to accommodate his business. He acquired interest in a cotton gin, a boatyard, a tavern, and a racetrack—a cross-section of Nashville businesses. In addition to managing his growing enterprises, Coffee was a surveyor and land locator who continued to style himself a “planter.”16 The introduction of commercial agriculture across the western country after 1795 meant a web of more complex economic relationship among the peoples west of the mountains and between them and their creditors to the east. Currency of many kinds circulated in the West: American dollars, French livres, British pounds, New York currency, and small quantities of United States banknotes. Most of all, money was scarce. In 1800 Governor Arthur St. Clair of the Northwest Territory wrote that the taxes levied in Knox County exceeded the specie in circulation in the county. “Money is extremely scarce in this part of the country,” commented a correspondent of the Scioto Gazette about the Scioto River Valley. It is little wonder that the tax collectors found it almost impossible to make collections. Almost anything in the western country could be paid for in services or produce, such as wheat, corn, or more finished products like lard and flour. Furs always had value; whiskey was acceptable. For the most part, trade depended on a growing system of credit. Distances, small population, and the widely scattered nature of the settlements worked against the establishment of effective banking facilities. Colonel Francis Jackson of Kentucky, who visited Upper Louisiana in 1800, found himself importuned by agriculturists who wished to sell their holdings. When he answered that he had no money and inquired of one man what he would take for his farm, a “dutchman” replied, “horses, cows, every ting.” As late as 1808–10, the forms of exchange in the Western Reserve of Ohio were land, cattle, and notes of indebtedness, under which the signee undertook to pay within a specified period of time. Unpaid notes carried interest. This was by far the most common form of commercial credit.17 Manufacturing enterprises developed with trade. In the tradition of the earliest trans-Appalachian frontier, the first process-

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ing took place in flour mills, gristmills, and sawmills. Mills themselves graduated in complexity and expense from handdriven to horse-driven to water-powered, but at every level they offered an opportunity for profit. Distilleries and tanneries also became significant industries. Salt manufacture was important for the export trade, as were lumber and lead in some places. Other manufacturing enterprises ranged from home-woven worsteds and tanned animal skins to large-scale industry such as pork packing. With these early manufactories appeared a number of skilled and service occupations, among them blacksmithing, barrel making, and the building trades. Early industries in Jefferson County (Ohio) included broadcloth weaving and fulling, whiskey distilling, shipbuilding, and rope, iron, candle, and paper making.18 Thomas Worthington was an early industrial entrepreneur in the Ohio Valley at the opening of the nineteenth century. A transplanted Virginian, Worthington became a landed aristocrat near Chillicothe (Ohio) on the Scioto River. He also promoted home industry. His land purchases included attractive mill sites, and by the turn of the century he had built three mills and leased them out for a rent in kind. In 1810 he began construction of an industrial establishment in Chillicothe that included a rope walk and a cloth mill. The mill wove flax, cotton, and wool; the finished products included linsey, cassimere, and flannel cloth. In order to assure a ready supply of wool, Worthington went into the sheep business on a large scale; he also grew some of the flax. He purchased additional supplies of flax from other Ross County farmers and imported cotton from the South, an early example of trade running up the Mississippi River. In 1817 Worthington’s investments in machinery had reached $7,200, a large sum in the agricultural Scioto River Valley.19 Different cycles of movement and a new landscape defined early economic life on the southern frontier. The land open for occupation was not compact but broken by the presence of large Indian nations. In addition to the Mississippi River, which flowed on its far western boundary (until the purchase of Louisiana in 1803), the South also had its own river systems. The Alabama (and its many tributaries stretching to the north)



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and the Tombigbee drained a large portion of the Southwest, flowing into Mobile Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. Although their access was often interrupted by the presence of large groups of Indian peoples—the Creek Nation, for example, was especially adamant in objecting to the Anglo-American use of water arteries across their traditional hunting lands—the early AngloAmerican settlers in the Tombigbee River region (the far eastern part of the Mississippi Territory) squatted on the land, made a clearing, cultivated corn, and grazed some livestock. The accounts of these first pioneers give the impression of the vastness of the landscape, the tiny clearings of the settler families, the profusion of nature all around, and the continuing presence of Indians as neighbors. These early settlements were scattered, isolated, and they lay surrounded by strong and numerous Indian peoples who had lived and hunted on their lands for a thousand years. They were independent, confident, self-assured. Farther south and west were the remnants of the northern reaches of the Spanish Empire. Florida was an ancient Spanish outpost, dating from the middle of the sixteenth century (St. Augustine was founded in 1565); Louisiana, ceded to Spain in 1762, was a vast expanse stretching from the Mississippi River west to the mountains, but the port of New Orleans held hostage the trade of the trans-Appalachian frontier. The first settler families knew little of political boundaries and international rivalries; they sought the bounty of open lands, whether for the hunt or for early crops of corn.20 The Ramsey family was among these early settlers. Born in North Carolina, resident of Georgia for several years, the elder Ramsey knew life in the woods well. His son remembered, “In the fall of 1807 or thereabouts, Father hearing that a fine country was ahead and that it was to be found in the New Territory, that the United States had just acquired from the Choctaw Indians, in what is now South Eastern Mississippi . . . determined to move to it; so as soon as he could arrange for the trip, packed up and started.” The caravan of three horses, one for the “bedding clothing, camp equipage &c,” a second for his wife, and a third for the two young boys, marched to the “land of promise” through Indian country. The elder Ramsey walked. The destina-

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tion was a tract on the Chickasawhay River, about fifty miles from Fort St. Stephen (later St. Stephens). The family arrived on February 21, 1808, with an estate of “three horses, what baggage they had brought, the negro girl Dinah and twenty-one (21.00) dollars in cash.” What followed, in Ramsey’s own words, was a period of “Hard Times . . . Bread and meat, milk and butter, were the constant bill of fare.” Preparation and planting came in the Anglo-American frontier tradition of nearly two centuries, and the Indian people before that. The Ramseys cut the cane and burned it “so that the clearing would be in good order for planting.” They planted corn and cotton “by making holes at proper distance, depositing the seed covering with the same earth taken out in making the whole.” In order to clothe his family, Ramsey bought a spinning wheel, a pair of cotton cards, and a loom. Sitting around the fire at night, everyone ginned the cotton with a hand gin, “generally operated by the smaller or younger members of the family.” The younger Ramsey commented, “With these facilities; rough and unhandy as they were, Mother not only clothed the family, but made a surplus for market, which Father in the fall of that year carried to Mobile and sold for $2.50 per yeard.” The small cotton crop was a portent of the future, for this staple spread rapidly through the Tombigbee region. The Ramseys stayed only a year, sold the improvements, and moved farther down the river. The family was the epitome of that mixture of farming and hunting, always in motion, that characterized many of these first Euro-American settler families. The son wrote that his father appeared to take up the idea, that improving new places and selling them out, to other new comers (and there were many) was better for him; more money in it; than to remain at one place and make large improvements and thereby accumulate money sufficient to buy, or enter him a permanent home. The country was then new and lands fertile; the range for stock good; bottom or river lands covered with solid cane brakes, easy to clear water and health good. It appears that could he have been contented to have remained there permanently with his energy and economy he might have done well.21



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The Ramsey family was representative of the Anglo-American vanguard that was simultaneously scouting and settling the lands. If their imprint upon the landscape was small, their import for the future was great. They were the vanguard, the advance party of far larger numbers behind them. Their economic profile was hunting mixed with subsistence agriculture, emphasis on a garden and the harvest of the forest. Some of these first arrivals were in the initial stages of creating a large-scale agricultural unit for commercial crops. Others sought and gloried in the independence of their world, and lived largely beyond the institutional reach of government. They knew the range of the sheriff and the tax collector. They intended to move every few years to avoid the imprint of either. Ramsey noted that his father “might have done well,” but many of these first pioneer families did not want to do better. They (at least the men) wanted to live independent lives. They also traded with Indian peoples. As transients on the land, Indian peoples could find shared interests with them in their dependence on and management of the open landscape. But their transient nature would not be the marching orders of the next wave. For those who sought a model on how to create a large-scale commercial enterprise in the South, Natchez played such a role. A new stage in the agricultural development of the frontier was the cultivation and marketing of staple agricultural commodities, especially tobacco, rice, sugarcane, indigo, and cotton. All were associated, at one time or another, with the frontier South. Early staple commodities in the South owed their appearance to high demand, imperial policy, slave labor, and investment capital. The significance of imperial policy of the French and Spanish empires as well as the British played a part. The rise and fall of fortunes in Natchez reflected these changes. The Natchez economy of the 1770s developed as early trading mixed with the beginnings of staples. Furs and trade with the Indians had been joined by lumber and the growing importance of tobacco. The Spanish government subsidized tobacco cultivation as imperial policy, presumably to lessen the crown’s dependence on British sources. By 1790, using slave labor, some 260 farms in the

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Natchez district grew tobacco, based on the Crown’s subsidy. That year, the Crown’s support ended. The Natchez District, an area that extended inland from the river and north to a radius of twenty miles, went into a severe depression. Over the next half a dozen years, the district shifted to other forms of agriculture, notably the grazing industry. Spanish officials purchased substantial quantities of beef, and thus provided the subsidy now lost to tobacco. At the same time, cotton began to assume a major importance as a commercial crop. By the turn of the century, the growing slave labor force was at work clearing new lands for cotton, planting, cultivating, picking, and ginning with the new Whitney gin. Tobacco was Natchez’s past; cotton was its future.22 The important ingredients associated with the development of cotton cultivation on a large scale included the invention of a new machine called the cotton gin, which rapidly separated the seed from the fiber, and, over the next ten years, development of new strains of cotton better suited to the climate and more resistant to diseases. The new Cotton Kingdom spread across the South from western Georgia, across the landscape of Indian nations to Natchez, and thence across the river into Louisiana. This new economic commodity ran across the arc of the frontier at the turn of the century. Here, in the level alluvial lands adjacent to the Mississippi River—a location with richness of soil and access to market—emerged a new agricultural commodity that would reshape the southern frontier. At the far end of this revolutionary change were the British textile manufacturers and their own technical inventions for the massive production of cotton cloth. American diplomatic successes opened the way for the movement of cotton downriver to New Orleans and subsequently to the ports of England, and so the emerging plantations of the frontier South were tied to the squalid mill towns of the English midlands. This connection provided a trade alliance that would come to embrace producers, shippers, factors, bankers, and others on the margins of the cotton trade for the next sixty years. Louisiana plantations (large-scale agricultural production units) were among the charter members of this growing group of agricultural entrepreneurs. But it was the



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Natchez planters who perfected a new strain of cotton, with origins in central Mexico, a superior plant with high yield and resistant to rot. Natchez discoveries now provided the cotton seed that would spread cotton across the frontier of the South in the next generation.23 The Natchez District became an early center of cotton cultivation on the frontier. John Hutchins’s father arrived in what would become the Mississippi Territory in 1774. His accounts describe the world of Natchez and the Mississippi frontier before steam, white pillars, and ballrooms. “For several years we were almost without bread, or milk, or both,” he wrote. “Fortunately the country was well supplied with wild game.” The little settlement of fifteen families lived in fear of Indians, Spanish officials, and thieves. Each member of the Hutchins family worked at several chores, the women in spinning, weaving, and the “household business”; the men in the fields and in the woods. As the family gradually opened up the land, corn replaced meat as the staple of the diet. Then Hutchins began to grow cotton, but without much prospect of a market. Separating the seeds from fiber was an onerous task. At first “if we went to visit a neighbor the ladies would fill their aprons with cotton to amuse themselves on the road picking out the seed.” The cotton gin transformed all this. The younger Hutchins left to start his own plantation, with one milch cow, one ox, a few pigs, and some poultry, a small pot for cooking, and a double cabin. With the help of two slaves and an old English soldier, Hutchins planted fifteen acres of cotton. “We were content,” he wrote. But the cotton crop grew larger and larger. Hutchins saved his cotton for three years before he took it to a gin. Prices were high, and he prospered. By 1807 he had built his own mill and gin.24 Others had the same success. The first cotton gin appeared in the Natchez District in 1795, and thereafter the number of gins and presses increased rapidly, especially after the turn of the century. As early as 1800, Narsworthy Hunter, a leading Natchez citizen, could write that “cotton is at present the staple of the Territory, and is cultivated with singular advantage to the planter.” He continued, “We get a quarter of a dollar per lb. for clean cotton, and an active planter will make from five to eight

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hundred wt. to a hand: and as I conceive we have as many black as white inhabitants, we cannot make much less than three million pounds of merchantable cotton, equal to 750,000 dollars.” By 1802 the larger planters had gins and ginned the crops of the smaller operators (for a fee), very much in the fashion of the gristmills in Kentucky and Tennessee twenty years earlier. Transportation facilities were a necessary part of cotton culture, and Thomas Fenton wrote, “Blest as we are with the benefit of Navigation, every creek of any size is Navigable 3/4 of the year a Distance of fifteen or twenty miles from the Mississippi which affords almost every Planter Navigation to his Door.” Cotton and its cultivation dominated every aspect of life and laid the economic foundation of an increasingly prosperous society.25 The Natchez District became the center of a rush of population and entrepreneurial activity. David Libby has characterized Natchez itself as the “boomtown in the Mississippi Valley.” The lands were rich and open. The growing season (210 frost-free days) and the rainfall were sufficient. The broad avenue of the Mississippi offered direct access to the port of New Orleans, from where the commodity of cotton could be moved to Europe. A kind of “cotton fever” embraced old settlers and newcomers alike. It was a place where the ambitious farmer could turn himself into a plantation owner within a few short years. Many did. Governor William Claiborne of Mississippi Territory could write to Secretary of State James Madison that “the industrious portions of the Citizens [i.e., planters] are amassing great fortunes.” The emergence of cotton as a cash crop with an international demand made Natchez the center of a transformed economic, social, and political world.26 The emergence of this affluent society on the frontier of the Southwest depended on more than lands, crops, and flatboats. It was indelibly linked to slave labor. Slavery was an institution recognized in custom and law in Spanish Louisiana, but the series of events associated with the 1790s that heralded the rise of the first cotton kingdom transformed the status of slaves as fully as it transformed the status of their masters and mistresses. Plantations along the river had heretofore grown a range of crops: tobacco, indigo, and sugar. Cotton rapidly standardized



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the annual work cycle and the routine of the enslaved workers. Slaves with plows prepared the fields after the first of the year. Then slave women sowed the seed. Soon thereafter came cycles of “scraping” (hoeing to remove weeds) and “chopping” (thinning the plants). Picking the crop began when the bolls began to open in September and continued with increasing intensity through the fall. This was the period when the crop was vulnerable to severe storms and, later, early frost. During the peak of harvest time, the slave “gangs” would begin work two hours before sunrise and work steadily until sunset. Picking sometimes ran into January, into ever colder and rainy weather. All slaves, including the elderly, women, and children, worked in the gin house to clean and gin. After ginning, the cotton was packed in bales for shipping. Soon the cycle began again. This new crop and the labor demands associated with it were new labor units. Slave labor was organized around the “gang system” for repetitive labor based on seasonal demands. As Libby points out, Mississippi planters on a distant frontier had introduced a modern labor system. This new labor unit would expand across the South for the next two generations, up to the opening of the American Civil War.27 The cultivation of cotton also spread to other remote areas west of the Appalachians, changing the shape of frontier economic development in the South. When the federal government opened the region at the Great Bend of the Tennessee River (later organized into Madison County), Georgia and Tennessee planters, with cash and slaves, were among the first immigrants. They had come to raise cotton, and commercial agriculture rapidly superseded subsistence agriculture. It was firmly established in Madison County by 1809. Crops from northeastern Mississippi Territory moved by the Tennessee River to the Mississippi and thence south to New Orleans, giving a reliable if distant access to market. By the turn of the century cotton cultivation in portions of Tennessee had also become a large-scale commercial enterprise.28 The purchase of Louisiana in 1803 brought into the American republic a landscape and a people accustomed to market agriculture for more than a decade. Within this area larger than

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most European nations—stretching from the Mississippi to the dim outlines of the Rocky Mountains and from the border with British Canada to the Gulf of Mexico—the substantial European settlements lay around the urban centers of St. Louis and New Orleans. New Orleans was the economic, social, and strategic center of the colony, for its site near the mouth of the Mississippi River gave it command over the trade of the entire Ohio and Mississippi valleys. Although sovereignty had at various times passed to the English (1763) and the Spanish (1783), the town and its people remained French. Indeed, its French people and its French customs and institutions of law and courts would pose a challenge to the American government. Officials concerned with charting the direction of the independent United States amidst a general European war wished to control the direction of the new colony at the same time that they wished to govern under republican principles proclaimed here and in France in 1789. Yet issues of institutional structure were only one concern. Louisiana had a diverse population with free blacks, free persons of color (the product of racial liaisons over almost a century), and rights and duties (including armed service in the militia) that were alien to the American understanding of the institution of slavery.29 By the time of its transfer to the United States, Louisiana was already the site of commercial agriculture on a large scale; this direction would continue and intensify over the first decade of American occupation. The triggering mechanisms of these changes were Spanish imperial policy, revolution in the Caribbean, and a new commercial crop with the technology for its exploitation. In the aftermath of the American Revolution, Spanish imperial policy for the vast landscape known as Louisiana sought to encourage immigration and a profitable and prosperous agricultural base. To this end, the Spanish government subsidized the production of tobacco. Under this new policy, tobacco cultivation soared, agricultural units grew in size and prospered, and a new age of tranquility and prosperity seemed at hand. Unfortunately, as in countless cases across changing national policies, the subsidies given could be ended. When Spain ended the tobacco subsidies, large-scale agriculture



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in Louisiana (like the Natchez District) entered a period of uncertainty and depression. At this moment, cotton entered to fill the void. Louisiana had other agricultural assets. These were developed in response to revolution in the sugar islands of the Caribbean. Here the central events were the revolutionary uprising on the island of Haiti that ushered in the first great successful slave rebellion in the New World. As the rebellion caught fire and grew, so did refugees abandon the island in like proportion. Adam Rothman has written that events in Haiti “initiated a qualitative transformation in Louisiana’s development.”30 Many were wealthy; they brought their families and their enslaved workforce to New Orleans. At the time of the uprising, Haiti was the source of much of the sugar production for western Europe and North America. In the face of the revolt, this production plummeted. Planters elsewhere in the islands, and soon on the mainland, hoped to fill this void. The immigration of refugees had the effect of sending technical experts on sugar production around to other islands and to Louisiana. There, new arrivals and old plantation units hoped to make a rapid transition to sugarcane. One observer wrote in 1795: “our planters are founding all their hopes on sugar cane.”31 The experts in sugarcane now produced new cane strands adapted to the mainland’s shorter growing season of eight to nine months. Production immediately began along both sides of the Mississippi. The earliest accounting showed as many as seventy-five sugar plantations along the Mississippi in lower Louisiana; the census takers identified ninety-one sugar works in Orleans Territory in 1810.32 The remarkable explosion of the cotton and sugar economies almost simultaneously produced a new profile of these frontier regions. Here were large-scale agricultural units already connected to a world market (western Europe), dependent on a trade that was cyclical, sure, and based on credit on two continents. This new economy also was heavily dependent on an enslaved labor force. The initial clearing of forests and swamps, plowing of the new lands, planting of the first crops, and their cultivation, harvest, and processing for market all called upon a large workforce that labored under the most difficult physical

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conditions. The dangers associated with the clearing operations, from falling timber to poisonous snakes, the universal presence of disease associated with this tropical climate, and the unremitting drive of the masters or their overseers, were among the most arduous on the Trans-Appalachian frontier. The result was a new economic dimension of this early frontier: the growing slave trade associated with these new economic enterprises of scale. So, alongside the production and trade of cotton and sugar, and the sale of goods and services associated with their cultivation, harvest, and preparation for market, went a growing and lively market for the human workforce that would make this international trading connection possible. Very quickly, this new economic arc that defined the cotton frontier and its western extension of sugarcane along the river created a great demand for slaves. The supply moved to meet the demand. Thus came the first large-scale involuntary movement of slaves from east to west. New Orleans found another commercial dimension; it turned into one of the most important slave markets in the nation. Some eighteen thousand slaves were brought into Lower Louisiana between 1790 and 1810, and in the words of Adam Rothman, “Their arrival helped to create the most dynamic, heterogeneous, and tumultuous region in North America.”33 The price of slaves rose in like proportion, and the issue of national policy with respect to the slave trade became one of the most important issues for Louisianans, both those with Creole connections from earlier times and the newly arrived Americans, who whatever their cultural differences, made common cause on this economic issue. The slave market was not only expensive, it was also selective. The ambitious planters across the arc of Mississippi and Louisiana wanted a workforce inured to the hardest kind of labor in clearing and preparing the land for a first crop. The emphasis was on young males of optimum age for the hardest physical labor under the most taxing conditions. That such conditions clearly led to a shorter lifespan as a worker affected calculations only to the degree that a new supply must be readily at hand.34 The change in sovereignty and the arrival of the Americans posed threats to the established French planters, augmented by



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refugees from the rebellion in Haiti. Francophone planters saw their political influence in decline and their cultural base (language and religion and law) under siege. But the big economic issue affecting the future of the plantation frontier was the question of the slave trade. Of the population of some 37,000, about two-thirds were white; 30 percent slaves, and the remainder free black. New Orleans and its nearby plantations had about 20 percent of the population but about half of the territory’s slaves, an indication of the significance of large-scale agricultural enterprise.35 In 1804, the Congress of the United States enacted a law banning the importation of slaves into Louisiana from foreign ports. The expanding plantation economy of Louisiana—traditional French planters now augmented by newly arrived Americans, ambitious to share in the profits from rich lands and large slave forces—had stumbled into a growing sectional issue. It was an issue that Louisiana planters—especially the French—deeply resented and never understood. In 1805, a territorial law provided a means to evade the federal restriction, but the issue remained a volatile one. French planters now faced competition from the newly arrived Americans and restrictions on the slave trade that emanated from a federal government a thousand miles away.36 Louisiana offered other views of economic enterprises: small scale and intimate. In a sense, the landscape was a composite of the trans-Appalachian frontier: small settlements and villages, where descendants of the French colonists practiced subsistence agriculture as they had for generations; large-scale plantation agriculture directed to the production of a staple crop for sale on a world market; the rising influence of western commerce transforming a town into an important port; and along the western boundary of the Mississippi River, numerous Indian peoples. Soon after the treaty of cession, Americans began to arrive in Louisiana, attracted by the prospect of rich lands and economic opportunity associated with the imminent arrival of American authority and institutions. The opportunities for landownership at a distance from New Orleans were inhibited by the numerous land grants from officials of the Spanish government to private

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individuals. Yet interspersed among swamps, bayous, and innumerable watercourses were fertile lands available for entry. Some of the new agricultural settlements centered around Opelousas, Natchitoches near the Red River, and the Attakapas country. In 1803 Thomas Nicholls described the Attakapas lands, the site of his new home, as “wide prairies, covered, as far as the eye could reach, with cattle and game of every description.” Daniel Clark wrote the same year of the Attakapas and Opelousas areas, “Both these Posts having extensive & rich Plains have within the few years past attracted a great number of Emigrants from the other parts of the Country on account of the trouble & Expence of clearing and being unnecessary while there was a sufficiency of Timber for all the purposes of the Planter.”37 The opportunities for acquisition of fertile lands lay at some distance, where the landscape had been only lightly touched by the presence of native peoples. The still watercourses, the play of light and shadow, the profusion of wildlife and birds reflected the fertility and the innocence of this natural setting. The Tensas Basin was one such area that lay open to new settlement. The occupation and economic development of the Concordia and Rapides districts took place after the turn of the century. To the west of the great river, settlers moved into the rich bayou lands. Martha Philips Martin, who came to Bayou Teche as a bride in 1811, remembered the stillness of the new country. “After leaving the Mississippi passing through Bayous & Lakes many places looked as never a boat had ever been before,” she wrote. “Alligators were so numerous it was great sport shooting them in every direction.” Soon after the Martins settled, “many families from Kentucky Tennessee & Mississippi came & purchased having plenty [?] made quite a favorable change in our Bayou.” The plantations on Bayou Teche and Bayou La Fourche were like those on the Mississippi, directed principally to growing sugarcane and, later, cotton.38 With all the talk of people, crops, and expansion, most of the land was lightly occupied by Euro-Americans or not occupied at all. From the Tensas region north to the New Madrid outpost lay



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three hundred miles of mangrove swamps, canebrakes, and heavy forests, unchanged, and most of it untrod, by white settlers. Upper Louisiana—as it was called—had little economic activity of a commercial nature. The fur trade and lead mining formed the staples of the economy in what would later become the Territory of Louisiana-Missouri. Both were the work of a small, transient group of specialists, and their labors had brought a degree of prosperity to St. Louis. A few St. Louis families dominated the political, social, and commercial affairs of the region, in the style of other old French settlements in the West at this time. Custom and deference had established a few leading families over generations. Their authority presumably worked to the advantage of the community at every level. In St. Louis, the Chouteaus were the best-known and most influential family. The wealth and estates of these leading Creole families contrasted with the illiteracy, subsistence, and even poverty in the countryside and villages. Upper Louisiana was strangely medieval in its sharp differences between noble and peasant. In this area the world of commerce— especially in agriculture—had not yet appeared, for in the several small French villages les habitants practiced self-sufficient agriculture in the tradition of their ancestors. The change of government in 1803 reinforced the French tendency toward selfsufficiency, for the Americans threatened to call into question all land titles. In the face of the aggressive Americans and their institutions, the ancient French inhabitants—except for the leading St. Louis families, who intended to profit from new opportunities for leadership—banded together in order to preserve their cultural heritage.39 In the decade from the purchase of Louisiana to the opening of the War of 1812, the Louisiana backcountry expanded in everwidening circles, to the north, west, and south of the great port of New Orleans. Population flowed outward, along the twisting watercourses, up the rich river valleys to the interior of the continent, and along the banks of the wide and silent bayous. The agricultural potential of the land matched the prospects of the port that would market its produce. Staple commodities provided the basis of this expansion and prosperity, and the French

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(and, increasingly, the Americans) of Louisiana began the largescale cultivation of cotton. The French planters had experimented with cotton toward the end of the eighteenth century, and soon thereafter cotton culture spread along the Mississippi River as far north as Baton Rouge. Cotton also moved slowly inland, where the rich alluvial soil and ready transportation of this region offset the dangers of flood, disease, and isolation. The Opelousas and Attakapas regions contributed to this economic expansion, in terms of both new settlements and the rise of commercial agriculture, as grazing on the open prairies gradually gave way to intensive cultivation of cotton. “During our stay in Louisiana we raised Cotton Sugar Corn & Rice which all grew to perfection,” wrote Martha Philips Martin of Bayou Teche, “finding a market in New Orleans for all we could make.”40 Rapides Parish and the valley of the Red River also experienced rapid immigration. In 1803 John Sibley of Natchitoches estimated that the Red River already had twenty-four or twentyfive cotton gins and contributed some three thousand bales of cotton to the exports of the region. Other commodities destined for market included a large quantity of tobacco, furs (“Calculated to be equal in Amt to the Cotton”), and 7,300 horses. Sibley estimated that over one hundred sugar plantations already lined the Red River. Many more appeared in the next ten years, when large numbers of immigrants came to Rapides Parish. Agricultural commodities for export—increasingly cotton—went overland to the Red and downriver to New Orleans.41 The frontier of the South in the period 1795 to 1815 produced a new kind of pioneer: the large-scale agriculturist who moved into remote areas with slave labor in search of cheaper and more fertile lands on which to grow a staple crop. John Palfrey, a planter in St. Mary Parish, was one of these. His career demonstrates the new prosperity and dependence experienced by the pioneer in these years. In 1810 Palfrey bought nine hundred acres of land in the Attakapas country, “500 of which is Prairie & fit for immediate cultivation, the remaining 400 is woodland & has excellent timber & cypress which is very useful.” He wrote optimistically about his prospects, “This prairie country is extremely well calculated for new beginnings without much capital



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as a great proportion is ready for the plow without any clearing.” The Attakapas region had older settlements (“the Parish is tolerably well settled & the society good”), with a predominantly grazing economy. Palfrey joined a new group of entrepreneurs who intended to use the prairie lands for cotton culture. He noted the new frontier experience in these terms: “An acquaintance of mine commenced a new establishment in that neighborhood about the 1st April last with about 15 negroes & his present crop promises to give him from 50 to 60 bales cotton besides a sufficient quantity of corn & other provisions.” Palfrey also planted cotton. He purchased nineteen slaves (for which he paid $7,750) and put them to preparing the ground for cotton cultivation. In his first year (1811) Palfrey’s slave labor force planted fifty acres of cotton and another fifty in corn. Although “my commencement was on the 10th of April on an entire new piece of ground without buildings fence or any improvements whatsoever,” he wrote, the crop was good. Palfrey continued, “I have now 30,000#s cotton picked & have every expectation of picking 20,000#s more which in my opinion is doing very well when the lateness of the season in which I began to work is taken into view.”42 The rise of cotton and sugar as export crops made this prosperity a common experience in the period from the purchase of Louisiana to the outbreak of the War of 1812. The success of staple crop agriculture rested on credit as well as cotton. Palfrey was constantly in debt. He maintained his children in private schools in the North, and the notes on his slaves always pressed him. Jefferson’s embargo and the second war against England changed John Palfrey from a frontier cotton planter to a frontier subsistence farmer much like those a generation earlier in Kentucky and Tennessee. Cotton fell to a fraction of its prewar price, and commerce became uncertain. Although Palfrey remained on the plantation, he could not meet his financial obligations. In the fall of 1812 he traded “7 of my table cloths (which were useless to me here) for 2 Cows 8 yearling Calves all gentle. One large spinning wheel & an order on a person to whom I was indebted for 20 Dollars.—so that once more we have plenty of milk & I think I have made an excellent bargain.” Two years

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later the Attakapas planter turned to the manufacture of salt, for which he found a ready market at a good price. Palfrey survived the war, despite the disappearance of money, the loss of some of his slaves on defaulted notes, and the outright sale of at least one other. His was the story of a large-scale agricultural enterprise on the Louisiana frontier, financed by credit and directed solely at the production of cotton for export. It is also a study of the planter’s vulnerability to the policies of the federal government.43 The early Anglo-American frontier of the trans-Appalachian West had a long tradition of government interference in economic affairs. Following the example of the colonies, early county government often regulated the prices of taverns, ferries, and gristmills. It also supervised market operations and weights and measures, and even set the price of bread.44 The national government now became a powerful influence in another way, for its relations with the belligerents in Europe directly affected the economy of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. In the years from 1795 to 1815 economic and political considerations combined to sweep parts of the trans-Appalachian frontier forward to a condition of simultaneous prosperity and dependence. Prosperity came with the demand for American agricultural products—the very commodities that the West produced in abundance—stimulated by a general European war. Accompanying this prosperity was an increasing dependence on European trade and the attempts of the American government to remain neutral and, at the same time, to protect American rights on the high seas. The trade appeared and expanded in response to the success of American diplomats, and so government became a powerful force in the life of the western commercial economy. The Embargo of 1807 emphasized the dependence and vulnerability of the West. With a signature President Jefferson crippled American trade with Europe, and there followed years of falling commodity prices and growing economic distress in the western country.45 The many frontiers that emerged from 1795 to 1815 came to include many varieties of economic experiences. Within the



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South, cotton culture became a vigorous force, even in the remote settlements. The acquisition of Louisiana Territory in 1803 added names such as Attakapas, Atchafalaya, and Bayou Teche to the lexicon of the American frontier. At the head of all these regions lay the port of New Orleans, a cross-section of the western world and the western country. In the style of road building in the Roman Empire, the watercourses of the West all led to New Orleans. Its presence dominated commerce almost everywhere west of the Appalachians. Supported by a vast and growing hinterland already undergoing a transition to staple crop agriculture, an increasing market for cotton and sugar staples, and the demands created by a general European war, New Orleans threw off the mantle of a frontier village and assumed the posture of a world port. The physical appearance of the village remained ramshackle and the climate unhealthy, but a large population poured into the city to take advantage of commercial opportunities. By 1810 probably something on the order of a quarter of the population of the Louisiana Purchase lived in New Orleans and its immediate environs. Along its streets walked a polyglot of the American frontier, old New Orleans, and the commercial world: here frontier boatmen from the Ohio Valley, merchants from Nashville, fur traders from the upper Mississippi and St. Louis, and planters from Natchez and the Louisiana hinterland rubbed shoulders with Creole commission merchants, Haitian refugees from revolution, and ship crews representing the commercial nations of the western world. Corporate organizations appeared to deal with the problems of banking, insurance, water, and navigation. Staples from upriver arrived between November and April, and during these months the city (for so it was becoming) was the center of commercial life in the trans-Appalachian frontier. North of the Ohio there was no dominant port and no dominant agricultural commodity, but a wide variety of economic circumstances, conditions, and ventures. Cincinnati would not become a commercial center of the same regional significance as New Orleans until after the War of 1812. Agriculture remained a universal economic activity, the more so in the distant settle-

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ments. Yet substantial trade had developed with the bustling activities of merchants in small towns, the rise to prominence of several river towns along the Ohio, and the appearance of manufacturing enterprises in several places in the Ohio Valley by 1815. Across the broad range of a thousand miles from east to west and another similar distance from north to south, in so far as permitted by the federal government, whether by embargo or Indian land cessions, the frontier was active in pursuit of a commercial outlet. The beginnings were uneven, but they were real. The future seemed limited only by the machinations of the British in foreign affairs and the Indians at home. The War of 1812 would remove these obstacles by the beginning of 1815.



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Many Varied Societies Emerge across the Western Country

Between 1795 and 1815 several societies emerged on the transAppalachian frontier, as individuals, families, and groups living west of the mountains found a common past, shared values, similar goals—in short, a sense of identity, one with another. Different readily identifiable societies come immediately to mind. A significant and growing group was that associated with a prosperous commercial economy, some leisure, and access to a degree of luxury. Most of these societies were in urban centers; others were in long-settled agricultural communities. Another group included those societies created by the special qualities and loyalties of their members, often by cultural traits, including religious and immigrant communities. The most easily identifiable of these were transplanted New England communities in the Old Northwest, Quaker settlements in Indiana, the several small French villages in the upper Mississippi Valley, and the newly acquired (by treaty in 1803) communities of French origin in lower Louisiana. Beyond these collective groupings was a widespread series of frontier settlements, generally similar in character from the Ohio Valley to the lower Mississippi Valley. Observers and participants (in retrospect) described these as generally rural, isolated, and struggling to develop self-

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sufficiency and then a market for a modest surplus. Yet even this last general group fell into separate and distinct categories: those families and settlements who had recently taken up land with a view to developing farms and a commercial dimension to their labors and another group who squatted on the public domain, raised a cabin and a crop of corn, hunted for meat and skins, and then moved on to repeat the cycle. The focus of both these groups was the family as an economic and social unit. The demographic character of these immigrating individuals and communities represented the settled societies from which they came, juxtaposed against the opportunities for landownership that beckoned them toward the West. Although the households that migrated were modest in size, the prospect of their growth encouraged family movement to new lands, readily available for this generation and the next. The enlarging families on the frontier reflected proportionately more young people, the early marriage of women of childbearing age, and the relatively ease with which large families could be raised on the new lands. The western country was welcoming to growing families, for it provided subsistence on a continuing basis, along with more available lands for children to depart at an early age and repeat the cycle. Morris Birkbeck, who followed immigrants down the Ohio, observed, “In this land of plenty, young people first marry and then look out for the means of a livelihood, without fear or cause for it.” Families joining together for the migration by water and then overland was a common form of organization. So a dozen wagons and as many families would make the journey together. Once arrived, they would generally disperse to individual landholdings. One of the revealing feature of settlement patterns is the paucity of single men on farm sites. The western country was truly a place of family groups.1 Finally, another, separate society spread geographically and expanded in both numbers and impact: namely, the enforced, involuntary gathering of enslaved peoples of African origin. These groups had been present for a century in the tidewater of Virginia and the Carolinas (especially South Carolina); now this internalized series of black societies expanded out to the new frontiers of the trans-Appalachian West. There, as had hap-



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pened in the East, these compulsory communities, work routines, opportunities for leisure, prospects of family life, and common ways of coming together were dictated and controlled by others. In the years after 1795, along the Mississippi River above New Orleans and in the Natchez District, capitalists, entrepreneurs, and large-scale agriculturalists formed these enslaved peoples into large gangs, to clear new lands, plant, cultivate, and harvest a crop for export. With the American purchase of Louisiana in 1803, the assurance of American control of the Mississippi and the port of New Orleans, and the opportunities for economic advantage associated with cotton, sugarcane, and virgin lands, these societies expanded in numbers and range.2 In this second generation on the trans-Appalachian frontier, the number of urban centers increased in number and grew in size and influence, and urbanization (in its many forms, large and small) became an important influence in the life west of the mountains. Peoples with diverse skills came together in a single place to sell and trade their goods and services among one another and with an agricultural hinterland. These early urban societies generally followed the watercourses as the main routes of immigration and trade. Varying in location across the length and breadth of the western country, they had the common denominator of a river location. They developed in towns on the Ohio River (Marietta, Louisville, Cincinnati), the Cumberland River (Nashville), and the Tennessee River (Knoxville), and, of course, on the upper Mississippi (St. Louis) and the lower Mississippi (Natchez and New Orleans). These urban centers varied enormously in size, character, and degree of maturity. Some towns, such as Louisville and Marietta, belonged to the first generation of settlement and had already achieved a degree of permanence and prosperity on the trans-Appalachian frontiers. Others, such as Cincinnati and Natchez, began about 1795 a period of growth built on the commodity trade that would make them significant commercial centers. The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 introduced new and contrasting urban places such as New Orleans and St. Louis. By 1815 several towns on the transAppalachian frontier had achieved a level of economic and so-

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cial development that gave them common attitudes and values. A closer look at two of these will show some of their similarities as well as their differences. In the years immediately after 1795 the Natchez District represented this increased urban presence with its accompanying commercial dimension. Over these twenty years, Natchez moved from prosperity to affluence, and a unified society emerged, based on cotton culture and growing numbers of enslaved peoples of African origin. Of course, not all those who lived and worked in the Natchez District felt this shared sense of identity or common character. The increasingly large number of black slaves in Natchez fashioned their own society, out of necessity rather than choice. Separated by color, law, and custom from the white society, they were absolutely necessary to it and increasingly dominant in numbers. But a number of wealthy and articulate leaders gave voice to a common sense of purpose and shared values in the Natchez District. By the turn of the century, wealth had been translated into material possessions, and Natchez imported varieties of European luxury goods. The narrow interest in property that characterized the district was broadened by leaders with scientific and educational interests. This group pioneered in the search for more scientific agriculture; in 1803, its leaders founded the Mississippi Society for the Acquirement and Dissemination of Useful Knowledge. These men intended to go beyond the boundaries of the district, the Mississippi Territory, and even the nation to correspond with similar European societies. The same year a group of energetic and ambitious citizens established Jefferson College. Natchez had by this time elements of a wealthy and materialistic society, with intellectual and economic interests that spanned the Atlantic, social activities and entertainments that met the needs of all ages, and a view of institutions that was strictly Anglo-American. All these accomplishments were based increasingly on the cultivation of cotton by slave labor.3 One hundred miles down the Mississippi River lay New Orleans. This urban center had the same air of economic prosperity, but the varied societies of New Orleans and Natchez also offered striking contrasts. New Orleans was a port focused on



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trade; Natchez was predominantly agricultural in character, albeit heavily dependent on commercial connections. New Orleans was already displaying the urban interests associated with a commercial center, supplemented by heavy immigration of Americans in response to the change in sovereignty; Natchez continued to emphasize the rural values associated with the plantation. At the same time, in a curious juxtaposition of expected interests, a limited but influential group in Natchez had developed concern for social, educational, and intellectual life; New Orleans, by contrast, was more narrowly focused on the several dimensions of an international commerce. Finally, Natchez was a relatively homogeneous society built around staple crop agriculture; New Orleans was a potpourri of peoples on the trans-Appalachian frontier, brought together in the search for wealth through trade. And New Orleans had a large population of “free people of color,” whose rights individually and as a community were about to come under assault on racial grounds. Whatever its several societies and their origins, there was no mistaking the rise of New Orleans to a position of commercial preeminence. Founded in 1718 as an anchor of the great French empire in the New World, New Orleans survived and grew up as an imperial presence on the greatest river system on the continent. Its slow early growth reflected imperial considerations mixed with disease, increasing slave labor, and a mixed population with gradations of color. The opening of the river and the port to American commerce under the Treaty of 1795 combined with the increasing development of the staples of sugarcane and cotton to generate a new degree of prosperity; the American purchase of Louisiana in 1803 intensified these trends and added a growing influx of Americans in search of economic opportunity. This was an urban society that pursued commercial rather than intellectual and cultural interests. This was the city that the Americans took possession of in 1803, and the large influx of Americans diluted the heretofore French character of the city and, in a sense, produced two urban societies. The two national cultures did not mix easily, and where they were brought together, cultural, economic, and sometimes physical conflict resulted. James Sterrett wrote in

MANY VARIED SOCIETIES EMERGE

1804 of “the great enmity existing between the Creoles & the English & Americans several fights & Challenges—there are some of both sides in jail.” An observant woman identified the contrasts in character between the French and the Americans for Governor William C. C. Claiborne at an evening soiree. In response to the governor’s charge that she preferred the French character to the American, she replied that in many respects, the former was more amiable, than the latter Character; the French love with more Ardour; but the Americans with more constancy; the French make affectionate Husbands; but the Americans are the best Fathers; the French love their Country; but the Americans are attached to their Government; the French act from feeling; But the Americans consult their Judg’ment—to conclude—the French evidence much bravery and Enthusiasm; but the Americans display most firmness & perseverance.

Claiborne responded that “she justly appreciated the American Character,” but the young lady continued in a less happy vein: “You Americans will all take another Bottle.” The governor was so stunned by this observation that he could make no reply, and the lady added, “You I observe, cannot deny it.” Claiborne concluded his account with the comment, “Her goodness however was such, as to admit that there were some exceptions.”4 The French in New Orleans were not all so understanding, and their unhappiness increased as they saw their own institutions and identity as a society threatened. They objected vigorously to the Governance Act of 1804 and replied in a detailed “Remonstrance.” At the same time, the French inhabitants were concerned about the role of the Catholic Church in American Louisiana, and the disputes spread to parishes around the territory. American officials saw the presence of the church and its priests as an institution that delayed the transition to republican principles (as defined by Americans); many Louisianans saw the connection with their church (and the church of their fathers and mothers) as a sacred nonnegotiable connection to the past and present. Finally, in New Orleans, American officials became increasingly concerned with the presence of the society of “free



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men of color,” who had their own objections to the conditions imposed by the new American presence. This community of “free men of color” wanted to establish their loyalty to the American government, and when they did so in petitions like other free men, American officials seemed unsettled. As Peter Kastor observed: “The free residents of Louisiana frightened American policymakers.”5 Thus, even as New Orleans prospered and grew with an influx of Americans, so the societies within the city were being reconfigured. Some would benefit from the new landlord in Washington; others would struggle to retain what they had enjoyed in 1803. Urban societies came in varying degrees of maturity. The village of St. Louis had an economy and society far more limited than either Natchez or New Orleans. Colonel Francis Jackson of Kentucky, who visited St. Louis in 1800, thought the place physically mean and its people unpleasant. He found only two individuals in the town who spoke English, a free black and an American entrepreneur who was building a tavern adjacent to the ferry. St. Louis had its long-established French families who served as the economic and social leaders of the region. With the sale of Louisiana to the United States, aggressive Americans came to the district. One observer described the newcomers as “vile wretches” and “illiterate-semy-savages.” Territorial secretary Frederick Bates saw every element in the rapidly growing population of town and territory: “the wise and foolish; the honest man and the knave; the Slanderer and the Slandered, sometimes meet as in other countries.” St. Louis prospered and grew, but the presence of the lead mines, the continued importance of the fur trade, and the thriving business of supplying army posts hampered the emergence of a distinctive urban society like that of Natchez and New Orleans, based on commerce and services to an agricultural hinterland.6 The Ohio Valley had many towns, most of them on the rivers, where they provided markets for the commodities of the surrounding countryside and transportation facilities downriver. Cincinnati was growing as a commercial center for the longersettled regions on the upper Ohio. As early as 1809, careful regulations controlled the meat-packing industry, emphasizing in-

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spection and approval.7 Farther down river, Shawneetown was a small but important commercial and political center in sparsely settled Illinois Territory, lying adjacent to the rich lands of the American Bottom and the several salt works on nearby Saline Creek. Like other early towns in the Old Northwest, most of them with water connections, Shawneetown was muddy in some seasons and overflowed in others, with the smells that testified to its primitive sanitation and its role as a transshipper of livestock. Within the region, Shawneetown was the first Illinois commercial center. Soon, because of its location on the Ohio River, it became the port of entry for settler families headed to St. Louis or inland. In his account of frontier Illinois, James Davis wrote, “From territorial days to the early 1820s, Shawneetown was Illinois’ financial hub, possibly the busiest place west of Pittsburgh.” Such towns at the edge of settlement in the western country would have general stores, one or more taverns, a cooper and perhaps a wheelwright, a blacksmith and a wagon maker, and perhaps a mill and an early pork-packing operation. To this collection of necessary services might be added a doctor, a lawyer, and perhaps a printer. Town promoters hoped to advertise a church and a school, but both would probably come after the basic commercial outlines.8 Societies with clearly defined characteristics also emerged in rural areas. Some had a degree of wealth associated with a commercial economy. These included growing villages such as Chillicothe and Zanesville in the longer-settled agricultural regions of the upper Ohio, and smaller settlements in the river valleys of the Muskingum, Scioto, and the Great and Little Miamis. Brookville and Madison in Indiana Territory had the same urban outlines and served the population farther west. Across the Ohio River and to the south, the older villages of the first generation had well-established marks on maps. Yet Nashville, the head of the widening settlements in the Nashville Basin, still had only 345 people in 1800. The growth in the next decade, however, was enough to make Nashville capital of the State of Tennessee in 1812. It was the most important prize in the early competition among frontier towns.9 Lexington, in the growing state of Kentucky, had become the commercial, political, and social capital



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of the Bluegrass region, the tract of gently rolling, fertile land, across the center of the state. Already the rural society of the Bluegrass and the urban society of Lexington (many of the wealthy families had substantial residences in both places) were the models for the rest of the state and the upper South. The outward signs of this status were carefully fenced fields with stocks of well-bred horses, racing, hunts, and the customary winter social events. Behind these social displays were gangs of slave labor, who produced large crops of tobacco and wheat.10 The spread of a rural society in this second generation also moved inland in the South. From the center of the cottongrowing region around Natchez, and up and down the Mississippi River from south of New Orleans to Baton Rouge, settlements moved farther into the countryside. The rural areas were more placid than the river towns with their vigorous commercial life, but they were often no less affluent, with wealth measured in different ways. Thomas Nicholls, whose father was civil commandant of Attakapas Parish (Louisiana), described the life there as one of “primitive simplicity.” He especially remembered the pleasant Creole families of the neighborhood, who sent “little delicacies which the season & Country afforded, such as wild Ducks, game of every description, a fine quarter of Mutton, &c.” The population in the Attakapas country was mostly French, and through the quiet years after the turn of the century “the young amused themselves with dancing and love-making; the old with cards and conversation.” This leisured world extended to the east bank of the river, where the East and West Feliciana Parishes (formerly West Florida, seized from the Spanish in 1810) were an economically prosperous and socially unified society by 1814. No less an authority on societies than Thomas Bolling Robertson, congressman and future governor of Louisiana, declared that the planters of St. Helena Parish were “wealthy & well informed and their hospitality & politeness reminded me constantly of our best Virginia Country circles.”11 Observers in the western country noted that affluence and leisure did not dilute the focus on economic advantage. This was true of the energy in the Ohio River towns. It was true in the Southwest, where the institution of slavery mixed with cotton

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culture offered great opportunities for profit. None was more aware of the possibility of financial gain than a settled and prosperous society, whether in Virginia or New Orleans. In such an environment, marriage often served as a profitable form of economic alliance. Soon after arriving in the Mississippi Territory as governor, Winthrop Sargent (formerly Arthur St. Clair’s secretary in the Territory Northwest of the Ohio), married a woman of wealth who brought him two plantations and a large number of slaves. Governor William C. C. Claiborne of Orleans Territory lost his wife and young daughter to yellow fever within months of his arrival in New Orleans. In 1812, the governor married a sixteen-year-old Creole from a prominent New Orleans family. Claiborne’s lack of French did not prevent him from close contact with the influential French families of the territory. Nor did it inhibit other arriving Americans from making similar alliances.12 Such negotiations over the joining of young people for life also took place at a more modest level of society, but they still reflected marriage as an economic and social alliance. Of Lieutenant Newman’s projected marriage in New Orleans in 1804, James Sterrett wrote, “The Old Man . . . had made Some money—gives young Newman 7.000 Ds—the youthful Bride is blind in an eye—but she’s extremely Sharp with the one God has left her—She discovered that Newman is a handsome genteel young man & that he is the first papt the question.” Another marriage, where love was the primary concern, seemed to Sterrett impractical, even foolish: “She is 25 years old & very handsome—but no Money at interest, nor lands, houses, or bank Stock—love all powerful love.” When Thomas Bolling Robertson traveled to the rural Feliciana parishes in 1814, he found the same values there. “The last day of my stay among them we have a pretty large party of ladies at Welches, among them a Miss Barrow pretty enough & rich and a great favorite with R[obinson],” he commented. “Their attachment is said to be reciprocal but hard hearted & avaricious parents heaven help them mar their happiness.”13 In a world in which lands and (increasingly) slaves had become the standards of wealth, the easiest way to find them was at the altar. With the escalation in eco-



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nomic advantage associated with cotton and sugar culture in the South, the economic issues in marriage became more intense. Along with the appearance of staple commodities on the southern frontier came the rise of a particular kind of production unit associated with the cultivation of the great staple crops. For the first Anglo-American settlers in the New World, the word “plantation” was synonymous with farm, and the “planter” was simply a farmer. By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the term “plantation” had come to be associated with an agricultural unit of substantial size, the use of slave labor, the cultivation of staples such as cotton, rice, or sugarcane, and a certain social standing or pretension on the part of the owner. The early settlers carried the concept of a plantation society across the mountains into the trans-Appalachian frontier, where in this as other things they wished to re-create the values and affluence of the colonial Tidewater. The plantation was a vigorous influence in some areas southwest of the Appalachians before 1815. Sugarcane and cotton cultivation offered to the newest frontiers the potential for wealth and economic independence. Imported luxuries, tutors, European goods, music, and crystal chandeliers might appear in an enlarged dogtrot cabin, surrounded by a series of cotton fields that stretched to the edge of a great forest or jungle of canebrakes. Encouraged by the eager merchants of New Orleans and Mobile, the new settlers might purchase luxuries with the first successful cotton crop. For the entrepreneur with land, slave labor, and access to water transportation, cotton offered the opportunity to indulge in the trappings of European luxury in spite of the isolation of the American frontier. The plantation was more than a large-scale economic unit. It was also a self-contained society for its people, black and white. Within the larger institutional framework of the state or territory, county, township, and town, the plantation was the focus of life for many. In a period when distances and primitive communication slowed institutional development, the plantation provided its own institutions to control all aspects of life. The issue of control of the slave population was especially important, for the plantation was the first line of defense in controlling the

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growing slave numbers. If you had a large and growing slave workforce, as a planter, you were responsible for the identification of this labor force and for its control. Economic enterprise, social order, religion, education, and social intercourse were all centered in the plantation. Public education and religion came slowly to the South, their arrival often retarded, even in those areas long settled, by the independence and isolation of the plantation agricultural unit. For many in the South, life revolved around the plantation rather than around the village. In some areas of the southern frontier, the plantation was the village.14 Finally, we need to take note of the formation and appearance of what we might call slave societies. As the plantation became an early feature of some part of the new settlements in the South, in conjunction with the cultivation and marketing of cotton and sugar, enslaved peoples of African origin were brought together in ever larger groups. Whatever their original origins, whether in Africa or this hemisphere, whatever the range of endless work they did, whatever the awkward family situations they confronted in their lives on this frontier, they were united by one common denominator: they had all become part of this frontier experience under duress. They were brought in chains to these distant new settlements; they worked from sunrise to sunset under the most difficult conditions. They found small relief in their lives during their few leisure hours. Families appeared and children were born. To the burden of endless labor must now be added the fear of enforced separation by sale over which they had no control. Here, it might be useful to make distinctions based on recent history and landscape. Consider, to begin with, the new or enlarged cotton production. Cut out of new lands in Louisiana or Mississippi or what would become Alabama, this initial confrontation with the forest, the swamps, and the endless entanglements of brush demanded the hardest kind of physical labor on a continuing basis. The initial plowing provided no relief, as the plow and the draft animals and the slave behind them confronted uneven land, stumps, vines, all set in the context of hot and humid weather of the semitropics. For this kind of labor, plantation owners and their overseers sought young males, with



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maximum physical capacity and endurance. The subsequent planting, cultivating, harvesting, ginning, and preparation for market required the same qualities. The men and women were sold at Natchez as individuals, not as family units. Ira Berlin has written, “Planters wanted a labor force heavily weighted toward men.” Because there were often few women in the initial waves of slaves labor, the new arrivals had difficulty finding spouses. “Cotton, unlike rice, required few skills, and the intense labor needed to carve new plantations out of the upland wilderness decreased the number of slaves who were removed from the field.”15 At the same time, the more open-ended horizon, with its forest, watercourses, open clearings, and swamps offered the opportunity to hunt and fish, an alternative occupation sometimes welcomed by the master as offering another food source not at the expense of the plantation itself. The arrival of this new enslaved labor force to open up the new lands to cotton and sugarcane led to the “reafricanization” of this part of the South, that is to say, the increasing dominance in numbers of enslaved men and women of African origin. Berlin has commented, “Newly arrived Africans rarely settled in the established plantation areas but were quickly marched to the frontier.” Once they arrived, the stress of the work and disease produced a high mortality rate, for which the only response was the acquisition of more slaves. One perverse quality of landscape, health, and social condition worked to the advantage of the slaves. As the living conditions became progressively more difficult, especially in the tropical summer months, the masters and mistresses left their plantations for what they conceived as healthier places. And in this fashion, they gave their slave force increasing time with minimal supervision. This would mean planting more and better gardens, keeping poultry, or hunting in the woods. In the final analysis, these societies were rural, isolated, self-contained. As the concern over a slave revolt rose in direct proportion to the rise in numbers, so did the security details of passes, curfews, and limits on visitations between families on different—even adjacent—plantations. These changing circumstances served to emphasize once again the different societies of African Americans in rural and urban settings.16

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The most important demarcation line in the development of the slave society and its resistance to the plantation system was the great slave revolt of January 1811. Adam Rothman has called this uprising “the largest slave rebellion in the history of the U.S.” The year began in confusion and uncertainty, with many slaves having run away from plantations near New Orleans. When the rumors had been sorted out and the terrified refugees administered to, the reality seemed to confirm the worst fears of the reincarnation of the revolt in Haiti. Some two hundred slaves had left their plantations and were marching on New Orleans, armed and intent on a revolution comparable to that in Haiti. That they were armed with pitchforks, axes, and ancient hunting muskets did not make the nightmare less frightening. This uprising came amidst a time of domestic and foreign uncertainty and confusion. Issues with Spain (West Florida) and Britain (neutral rights at sea) roiled international affairs and dominated the news of a territory very much dependent on foreign trade. And it was equally dependent on a massive enslaved labor force. Under the leadership of Governor Claiborne, the resources and authority of the territory were thrown into the struggle to thwart the advance on New Orleans and to restore racial order and the plantation system. The slave patrols and the militia turned out in force and fought with the determination of those defending their homes and families from Armageddon. They quickly routed the slave force, and the clash of arms became a chase. Seizure and retribution quickly followed. Those captured were tried under the provisions of the Code Noir of 1804 by a local tribunal composed of five planters. The tribunal sentenced twenty slaves to death. To make an example that would deter future rebellions, the heads of the leaders were placed on poles on the levee. Such was the fear of the spread of such deadly disorders in the midst of national and international tension that Claiborne asked the legislature to strengthen the legal and military institutions of the territory to prevent another such occurrence.17 Small communities of related families or men and women brought together by common beliefs were another kind of society on the trans-Appalachian frontier. The family (or families)



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served as the focal point of this society, for the family was a natural concentration of strength in economic enterprise and a source of support for physical protection. In a manner reminiscent of an earlier age, ties of kinship and marriage served as guarantees of mutual safety and support. And so men and women migrated in company with others with whom they had formed such ties. Intermarriage and other kinship interests united the ten families who settled at White Oak Springs in the White River Valley (Indiana), for example. The first White Oak settlers were only the advance party of a larger migration of immigrants from the Albemarle shores of North Carolina to the White River Valley. Other kinds of common values and identities united pioneers. Some groups of Whitewater River Valley settlers were known by their geographic origins, for example, the Carolina settlements, the Kentucky settlements, and others, in a sense identifying their common past.18 One variation of the small community on the transAppalachian frontier was the group that deliberately moved and settled in such a way as to preserve its identity. In the Old Northwest such communities often had New England origins. These groups were characterized by a collective allegiance, established institutional framework, and accepted leadership. The village of Granville (Ohio) was such a community. A Connecticut group organized itself into a stock company prior to its departure for the Ohio Valley. The officers and directors of the company carried with them a charge to re-create the same kind of society that existed in the old home, with special reference to religious, educational, and cultural institutions. A committee viewed and later purchased land in Fairfield County (Ohio), and another committee then supervised immigration to the new promised land. After extended negotiation with the commissioners of Fairfield County, the Granville settlement assumed political control of a township, and so the community integrated itself into the county without loss of identity. With the election of its own justices of the peace, local government was in the hands of friends. At almost the same time that township government came into existence, a late arrival brought with him (in addition to a long saw blade for the mill) several boxes of books, which formed the

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basis of a village public library. The Connecticut settlement had now been reestablished, down to the very books its members approved and read.19 The Connecticut Western Reserve in northeastern Ohio was a large area of settlement that attracted like-minded peoples. The reserve had its origins in the many land schemes of the 1790s, when the state of Connecticut sold its reservation in the West to the Connecticut Land Company. In 1796 a surveying party under Moses Cleaveland laid out at the mouth of the Cuyahoga River a town that would bear his name. The settlement grew slowly (it reached perhaps one thousand in 1800), but after the turn of the century larger numbers of New Englanders came. Jonathan Hale was one of these. The first Hale in the New World, Captain Samuel Hale, was living in the Hartford Valley in 1635; by the beginning of the nineteenth century, Hales had lived in the vicinity of Glastonbury (Connecticut) for five generations. Family roots ran deep, but economic needs were also growing. Jonathan’s father left only a small estate to be divided among seven children. A married man with three young children himself, Jonathan determined to seek a more advantageous life in New Connecticut. He traded his property and land in Connecticut (about one hundred acres) to Thomas Bull, a hardpressed shareholder in the Connecticut Land Company, for five hundred acres of undeveloped lands in Township 3, Range 12, of the Connecticut Western Reserve. Jonathan Hale’s migration west in 1810 was only the first step in the gathering of an extended family in the Connecticut Western Reserve. Jonathan’s brother-in-law, Jason Hammond, purchased an adjacent tract and joined him the same year. At almost the same time, Jonathan’s cousin and brother-in-law Elijah Hale and his family moved to Bath Township (Portage County) just down the road. The war against England slowed immigration, but it began again in 1815, when Jason Hammond’s well-to-do brother Calvin emigrated from Boston to the Western Reserve. Other settlers had similar strong family ties and support in the vicinity of their undeveloped farms. Although they were not necessarily more prosperous than individual settlers in the western country in an economic sense, those on this new frontier of the Connecticut



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Western Reserve had family ties, shared New England values, and a sense of continuity.20 The French villages in Illinois, Missouri, and Louisiana (soon the Territory of Orleans), formed another series of separate societies. Here, people lived in isolated communities, where little had changed from generation to generation. The villages were worlds unto themselves, with their own peculiar modes of dress, the exclusive use of the French language (often in a dialect almost incomprehensible to Europeans), strong identification with the Catholic Church, and communal cultivation of the fields. They were also distinguished by the early appearance of slavery and its continuous presence within the communities. Almost all of these settlements dated from the eighteenth century, when they were established to serve the great fur-trading enterprises of the French and later English nations. The immigration of the Americans in large numbers coincided with the decline of the fur trade and rising interest in agriculture and landownership. Yet the sense of community and shared life style remained. These French settlements continued to be quiet, pleasant, agreeable, calm, and orderly. They presented few examples of wealth or want. The necessities of life were plentiful; most of the inhabitants sought little more. Agriculture was largely self-sufficient. Among themselves, the French enjoyed a vigorous social life. In the small villages like Vincennes, cards, billiards, and dancing helped to pass the long winter days and nights. Visits and social activities of various kinds filled this world of shared values.21 The arrival of the noisy and aggressive Americans directly challenged these well-established communities. The villages at Vincennes, Kaskaskia, and Cahokia, strategically located for the fur trade, lay astride the tide of immigration to the western country. The French had little of the restless economic ambition and physical approach to the landscape that characterized the Americans. Les habitants were in no hurry to accumulate real estate or even to establish ownership. For generations the land had always been there in abundance for those who wanted it. Few did. Those who took land often farmed without reference to the question of ownership. The arriving Americans had come to accumulate great estates founded on the doctrines of Sir William Blackstone that ownership of land may be conveyed forever on a

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slip of paper. It was only with great reluctance—and sometimes not at all—that the French presented their claims for approval in the American courts. Yet differences between the French and the Americans were deeper than questions of landownership. In 1814 Thomas Bolling Robertson made a leisurely trip from Pittsburgh to New Orleans. In the course of this journey, he encountered several of the different societies that already existed in the western country. He addressed the differences between the French and the Americans in these comments: How strikingly different is the appearance of a French and American settlement the one presents small but badly managed fields but gardens abounding in vegetables salads and flowers and vines hanging in festoons over the doors & windows of their houses which, however essentially miserable exhibit a certain air of finery & frivolity-their poultry yards & pigeon boxes are well stocked the sides of their rooms hung around with flaring pictures and the floor covered with sleek cats & pet lap dogs On the other hand the American builds himself a coarse substantial Cabin surrounds it with a high fence to keep off his horses cows & hogs the chief objects of his care, despises all minor accommodations, and cultivates extensive fields, belting the largest trees, and giving additional gloom to the wilderness, instead of making it to blossom as the rose—if he does not fell or extirpate, he inflicts mortal wounds on the gigantic oak poplar & Beech and leaves them standing as monuments of the devastating vigor of his arm—he hunts with large dogs the wild beasts of the forest or drags the mammoth catfish from the flood—the interior of his residence exhibits a stout and stirring wife healthy dirty children, rifles, shot pouches, & powder horns, earthen ware, bacon hanging in the chimney, & Iron pots & pans on the hearth—the one has too much of Civilization, the other too little—the one is pinched up, and fashioned, shewing the effects of Government, & of dense population, the other is wild & rough & rude as the roaming savage—the one has the playfulness of the Kitten with the sycophancy of the vine the other the gruffness of the bear with the sturdiness of the oak.22

Within the emerging societies of the western country, the Americans’ style of life and values would gradually become



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dominant. As they made the laws, so their influence became overwhelming. In addition, there was the issue of language. Legal documents in French became increasingly scarce. The language of the courts and the courthouses and the newspapers was English. It was only a short step from the growing numbers of Anglo-Americans to their increasing control of resources. The French communities soon found themselves hard pressed to protect their ancient land claims, as few of these grants from the distant past had the paper documentation the Americans loved and respected. Gradually the newly arrived Americans left their French counterparts far behind in the competition for economic advantage and treated them with the contempt that aggressive peoples have always reserved for those who choose, for whatever reason, not to run the race for more land and material goods. In the face of this rising tide the French villages struggled to retain their identity and way of life. The largest numbers of people were in another broad division: individuals and families alone on the remote rural frontiers of the western country, without wealth and accordingly with little leisure and no time for introspection. Most of these frontier people lived in isolated cabins. Economic motivations were of primary importance and predominated; the emphasis was on shelter and subsistence. The basic dwelling was the log cabin or lean-to. Servants were rare. Clothing and food were plain. Under such conditions, interest in the world beyond the horizon was minimal. Young people grew up shy and socially backward; the courting process was quick and to the point, and marriage speedily accomplished. The life cycle then began anew. The people on this frontier were without identity except in the broadest sense: rural, poor, and unlettered. David Hoover’s memoir of life in the Indiana Territory at the turn of the century characterizes the dimensions of this limited world. He wrote, “I never had an opportunity of reading a newspaper, nor did I ever see a bank note, until after I was a man grown.”23 For those who belonged to this broad group, the focus of society was the family. It was the only unit with which these people felt identification. Of the activities that revolved around the

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family, the most important were associated with birth, marriage, and death. Upon these solemn or festive occasions, relatives or friends might come from distant points to assist in the celebration of the rites. These people lived close to birth and death. Another constant companion was work, and it is not surprising that these pioneers also used work as a form of social celebration. Joseph Hayes has left a description of a husking bee in Indiana Territory about 1810 that may serve as an example. “Corn-huskings, were kept up every night during corn gathering,” he wrote. “The corn after being pulled from the stock & hauled is thrown into a pile often six feet high and about 200 feet in length. The owner provides himself with 2 or 3 gallons of Whiskey in a stone jugg, kills a pig or 2 or sheep, some dozen chickens or more.” Neighbors came from miles around to make a frolic of hard labor.24 People on the remote rural frontier of the western country were generally not concerned with the great issues of the day, or even with the questions of what was going on in their county or in the territory. They worried about the basic necessities of life—food and shelter; they worried about themselves and their families. Within the framework of the lives of these isolated individuals and families evolved two different strands of future development. One of these threads was composed of incipient commercial farmers and their families. They intended to take up the available lands, clear, plow, plant, cultivate, harvest, and preserve. They intended to make improvements in housing and fencing. They would purchase the lands at the federal land office when the tracts became available for sale. They actively sought a commercial market, first in hogs (and sometimes cattle), and later in commodities such as corn and wheat. They sought a degree of permanence in their settlement patterns. They welcomed like-minded neighbors as a sign of growth and maturity of the kind they valued. They actively sought the intervention of the county court in laying out roads and building bridges and in establishing mills and ferries. They were often interested in the appearance of churches and sometimes of schools. A second group of these pioneer individuals and families had a different trajectory. They were transients. They settled on the



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public domain and made improvements sufficient for their shelter and subsistence. They moved annually or at frequent intervals. Some were perpetually in search of more fertile lands; others rejoiced in the independence associated with the pioneer life. The men’s enthusiasm for this lifestyle was probably greater than that of their wives and children, who might well have preferred more social connections. Yet this was a pioneering pattern of long standing, most recently associated with the hunters of Kentucky. Sometimes these individuals and families were noteworthy for their contacts with Indian peoples, with whom they traded and interacted in a common cause against the challenges of the landscape. Such connections with Indian peoples and some shared qualities of life in the woods would have further separated this group from the more sedentary and agrarian families, who might on occasion live nearby, but whose attitudes and work patterns were quite different. Beyond these varied societies on the trans-Appalachian frontier grounded in shared values and an identity of interests were two common institutions that took various forms: religion and education. Of course, not all frontier people experienced either religion or education, but both—and especially religion—were present to a greater or lesser degree in almost all frontier societies, from the rising urban centers of the Ohio Valley to the remote French villages in the Mississippi Valley, from the tidy farms of the Hale clan in the Western Reserve of Ohio to the isolated cabins of people such as the Ramseys in the remote parts of the Mississippi Territory. In general, the second wave of frontier people had greater and more varied religious and educational opportunities than their fathers and mothers. Like the secular world, religious denominations built on the institutional base established west of the mountains between 1775 and 1795. Of the two, religion was by far the more significant and universal. It was a common element for increasing numbers of pioneer people in a world that tended to divide and isolate people by distance, the repetitive and unending nature of hard labor, and the consuming economic needs of the moment. Into this emotional vacuum came representatives of several religious de-

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nominations, bringing love, community, hope, and a purpose to life. They also brought stern judgment, inflexible standards of conduct, narrow-mindedness, and sometimes intolerance. But whatever the message, religion brought people together. It sometimes transformed the lives of those it affected. It might be a significant social and emotional experience that served to counter the drabness and sameness of frontier life. Religion followed hard on the heels of the first settlers and sometimes, like government, preceded them. In mobilizing their resources to meet the dramatic expansion of people after 1795, the several religious denominations relied on hundreds of devoted men and women, who worked without regard to the cost in the cause of organized religion. Through their unremitting efforts, numbers of both members and leaders increased. Indeed, over this twenty years, religious presence in the western country moved from sparse and exceptional to competitive and almost universal. As organized religion learned how to minister to the distant settlements, so did the settlers find themselves with competing religious institutions. Representatives of institutional religion had been in the Mississippi Valley long before the arrival of the Americans. Among the earliest explorers of the Mississippi Valley were French missionaries. Roman Catholic communities at Green Bay, Detroit, and Vincennes and throughout the Illinois country traced their origins to the eighteenth century. Those across the Mississippi River in the Louisiana Purchase were just as old and established. All served as reminders of the widespread French presence in the Mississippi Valley long before the arrival of the Americans. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Protestant denominations had penetrated the trans-Appalachian frontier as part of the advance of American settlement to the West. New Englanders brought the Congregational Church to Marietta, the surrounding Ohio Company lands, and then the Connecticut Western Reserve. Several communities of Quakers, many of them antislavery, had already begun to settle in the Indiana Territory. The Methodists, drawing on their earlier experience on the frontiers of Kentucky and Tennessee and led by Bishop Francis Asbury, hastened to serve the new settlements. Asbury set up regular circuits in Ohio as early as 1798 to minis-



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ter to Methodists who had crossed the mountains and sought to reestablish contact with the church; from there his circuit riders fanned out into Indiana Territory and other frontiers farther west. Within the first decade of the new century, Methodist circuit riders had reached the Mississippi Territory. Of the evangelical churches that vied for the souls of the pioneers in the western country, the Methodists had the most experience and the best organization. Indeed, their growth in the West was an extension of their impact across rural America at the turn of the century. “The explosive growth of the Methodist Episcopal Church was the most surprising religious development in a republic that turned its back on state-sponsored religion,” wrote Nathan Hatch. Such a message resonated in this isolated agricultural world: the free grace of God, the freedom of women and men to accept or reject this grace, and the power and legitimacy of popular religious expression. They spoke across racial and class lines: to women, to African Americans, to servants, to masters. Their explosive growth ranged across the nation from settled areas of the East to the most distant western settlements; from the northern reaches of New York State to the newest settlements in Mississippi and what would become Alabama. When their national leader, Francis Asbury, died in 1816, he left two thousand ministers and two hundred thousand church members to carry on his work.25 Many of these ministers and members were in the area west of the mountains. The Methodists had an especially strong appeal in the western country. Their instrument to spread the word of the church was the circuit rider. The circuit rider was not an educated man in the formal sense of the word, and his generally humble and rural background made him an ideal figure to follow the track of new settlers. He had no formal theological training, but perfected his preaching skills by experience in the local church. What emerged from this informal training was a dedicated, hardriding, earnest, sometimes stern man of God, armed with a Bible and a copy of the Discipline, who combined several talents in fostering, expanding, and leading his circuit. He had to be a preacher, for it was the oral and not the written word that inspired a frontier congregation; a doctor, to minister to the phys-

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ical needs of a pioneer people; a lawyer and sage, to adjudicate disputes within his Methodist “societies”—the many small congregations that he visited on a regular basis; and a policeman, to control the rowdy elements who tried to disturb his meetings. Allen Wiley’s memoir has left us descriptions of several of these early Methodist preachers. Samuel Parker, a man of great oratorical powers and bizarre appearance, served in the Indiana Territory as early as 1808. He was rather a tall, slim awkward man in appearance, with large blue eyes, with an enormous big Roman nose; and, when he preached, the inside of his upper lip protruded ungracefully. He had a long chin, which he used in the wintertime to hold up the blanket which he used for comfort; in the centre of which he had a hole cut and well bound, to prevent it from tearing, and which was just large enough to let his small head through, when he would hang the fore part of the bound hole on his chin, and bid defiance to wind and rain. If his bed covering, or frequently his pallet covering, was scant at quarterly meetings, his blanket assured him another valuable purpose for additional covering.26

The structure of the Methodist Church provided a sense of belonging for those who desired identification with a larger society. The local unit was the “class,” and above it was the “society”; the church also had circuits, and district and national (called “general”) meetings. The expansion of the circuits and districts in response to the movement of population endowed the church (as the Northwest Ordinance did the new nation) with an infinite capacity to extend its doctrines and institutional structure into the newly settled lands of the trans-Appalachian frontier. The message that the circuit rider brought to the distant reaches of the western country was the doctrine of free grace, and it stressed individual salvation through good behavior and right conduct. Thus, doctrine provided a degree of freedom for those who wished it, and the organization gave a permanent institutional affiliation for those who wanted such a connection.27 The Baptist Church also appealed to frontier peoples. Known in the East for their vigorous opposition to established churches,



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in the decade of the 1790s the Baptists came in numbers to Kentucky and later Tennessee, and their influence spread north of the Ohio and, soon after the turn of the century, into the Mississippi Territory. The Baptists were a plain people, and their capacity to touch the frontier was, accordingly, large. Their churches exercised much independence, as befitted a denomination that struggled so long for freedom from established religion. Baptists formed themselves into churches and, on a higher level, into associations. Many of the associations had written constitutions. Baptist preachers were almost entirely laymen and without formal training. The process of moving into the ministry was informal and at the same time personal. When an individual had a call from God to preach, he made it known to the congregation, to whom he delivered a “trial” sermon. The process of a public appearance on such an important and deeply felt matter must have been an agonizing experience for the untutored, shy, and inarticulate people of the frontier. Jacob Brewer, who moved with his father to Kentucky in 1786, described his decision to become a Baptist preacher in strongly personal terms. Months of prayer preceded his declaration. Finally the moment came. I was trembling like a lief. I recollected the promise God gave me in the woods; as soon therefore as the congregation was dismissed. I steped up on a bench and gave out. “There will be preaching next sunday at Brother Wellborns.” And jumped off the bench and made for the door, as I passed on, several persons asked me, “Who is to preach.” I said, come and see. that week passed off verry slowly, and with much fear & trembling. . . . When I went to fill my appointment, I soon discovered that the Lord heard prayer. The lane was literally filled with horses, and the house with people. I trembled at the sight—but I retired behind a high bank—prostrated myself on my face and prayed to God to help me. Glory to God, he made good his promise to me in the woods. Yes, he did help, for if ever I was favored with the presence of the Holy one, surely he was with me at this time.

Brewer’s sermon was so successful that the congregation licensed him to preach within the bounds of the church. After a day’s work in the fields, he would “gather dry sticks, and read at night by fire light.” “I made slow advances,” he wrote,

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“Laboured incessantly on the farm all week and tried to preach on sundays.” Two years later the church licensed him in writing “to preach the gospel, wheresoever God in his providence mite direct.”28 The Baptists were suspicious of anything that suggested an established church, even a salaried minister. Instead, they felt, in the words of one congregation, “it is the duty of the church to give their minister a reasonable support” in order to relieve him of the need to struggle with the “affairs of this life.” This support was not in the form of a salary but rather a subscription. In 1798, for example, the South Elkhorn (Kentucky) Baptist Church subscribed various commodities for the support of minister John Shackleford, including salt, corn, wheat, pork, flour, “beaf,” sugar, tallow, and whiskey. Some even contributed cash, ranging from six to twenty shillings.29 In this second generation on the trans-Appalachian frontier, the church had a common quality in its ministry. Some of the Baptist churches in the South ministered to black as well as white parishioners. Presumably at this stage in the settlement process, the division of color was less important than the universal condition as sinners in need of guidance.30 Two other major denominations, the Congregationalists and the Presbyterians, also ministered to the needs of the expanding frontier. Missionary societies in the East, especially in New England, were vigorous supporters of Congregational activities west of the mountains. The Connecticut Missionary Society (established 1798), for example, maintained an energetic program in the Western Reserve of Ohio. The predominantly New England settlements in the Ohio Company lands to the south petitioned for missionary support in 1799 in order to spread “religious instruction . . . among the multitudes of our brethren, dispersed in the wilderness, we may share in that munificence, which the more wealthy parts of the community have generously afforded for this purpose.” Such was the recent nature of the settlements, the plea continued, that the settlers, “just beginning to clear their land, conceive themselves unable to spare a sufficiency from their necessary support, to pay for constant preaching.” From the beginning of their New England settlements in



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North America, the Congregationalists had employed an educated ministry. Consistent with their desire for trained ministers, the congregations on the trans-Appalachian frontier sought support from the East. This was perfectly satisfactory for the Ohio Land Company settlement and the Western Reserve, but it was not an approach to religion that appealed to large numbers of uneducated frontier people across the western country. So the Congregationalists, with their emphasis on strict judgment and the sinful human nature, their close official connection with the states of New England, their allegiance to the Federalist party, and their suspicion of and even contempt for the uneducated masses of the frontier, were handicapped in carrying their spiritual message beyond the New England settlements.31 The Presbyterians also offered a structured, intellectual, rigid church. With their emphasis on Calvinist theology and their doctrines of predestination and damnation, they offered little in the way of hope and release. The Presbyterians had contempt for the emotional optimism of the Methodists and regarded evangelical Christianity as pandering to the masses and doing violence to the word of God. The heirs of John Calvin forced the settlements of the western country to accept the gospel on Presbyterian terms or not at all. Presbyterians were present in substantial numbers on the frontiers of the Old Northwest and the South, where there were large numbers of Scotch-Irish, who presumably found these doctrines familiar and acceptable. Beyond this group, the Presbyterians found their field a narrow one. They came to minister to the educated, but frontier people were largely without education. Their ministers were highly literate and professionally trained men who expected to be paid for their services, but frontier people were accustomed to dedicated volunteers who labored for little or nothing. When Presbyterian ministers supported a wide variety of reform movements, including temperance and education, frontier people resented them for what they regarded as criticism of their personal lives. Finally, the ministers talked of John Calvin and his doctrines, while the frontier people wanted a religious experience that emphasized hope and salvation. The match-up was an awkward one.32

MANY VARIED SOCIETIES EMERGE

In the last years of the eighteenth and early years of the nineteenth centuries, the western country experienced an outbreak of religious enthusiasm known as the Second Great Awakening. The first large-scale manifestations of the revival appeared in Kentucky in 1798 and 1799, and from there it spread to Tennessee and north of the Ohio. The culmination of the movement, at least in terms of numbers, came in 1801, when an estimated twenty thousand people gathered at Cane Ridge (Kentucky) for an extended camp meeting. Revivals attracted hundreds of pioneer families from miles around. The organizers established large open-air campgrounds where they built several speakers’ platforms. In the larger meetings it was not unusual to have six or eight preachers holding forth simultaneously, castigating the devil and urging their listeners to repent. A typical schedule included three formal meetings a day, plus uncounted informal prayer meetings. An enthusiastic evening service might last until sunrise. The gatherings created controversy among the various denominations, and theological disputations among frontier preachers commanded the close attention of onlookers. The coming together of so many people, especially women and children, made the camp meeting the greatest social event of its day, and the emotional excesses provided additional excitement. Physical manifestations of the spirit were a feature of every meeting, and some were very violent. As the ministers shouted and the sinners writhed, the onlookers gaped and wondered about the conditions of their souls and whether they would soon suffer torment and anguish. At times the displays of emotion moved beyond the control of the ministers. Gradually the founders of the movement became more and more reluctant to associate themselves with these outbursts, and other denominations followed suit. The enthusiasm for the open-air revival faded about 1810, although a series of natural disasters (earthquakes, fires, and floods) in 1811 and 1812 produced another intense outburst of revivalism. The Baptists continued to hold long revival meetings for several years, but by 1815 the Great Awakening had run its course, replaced by more traditional forms of worship and salvation.33 In the former Spanish and French possessions of the



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Louisiana Purchase, the Catholic Church remained a strong influence in temporal as well as spiritual affairs. It provided a familiar institutional base for these people, an anchor against the changes threatened by the impact of American occupation. At the same time, the connections of the church to the previous Spanish and French governments aroused suspicions in many official quarters about its loyalty. This issue was intensified by the growing anti-Catholicism that formed part of the Protestant resurgence in numbers and influence. What followed after 1803 was a period in which church leaders in Louisiana moved to reassure both parishioners and appointed American officials of the Catholic Church’s loyalty to the American nation and to the future within this nation. So the church modified its religious celebrations to blend in with the holidays of July Fourth and later the celebration of the Battle of New Orleans. And, almost from the change of sovereignty in 1803, the church used “the language of incorporation” as a gesture of reassurance. The transition was notably assisted by Governor William C. C. Claiborne’s remarriage into a prominent Louisiana family and his general posture of cordiality toward the church and its institutions. After the premature death of his young wife, in considering the future of his infant son, Claiborne turned for assistance to the Ursuline Convent in New Orleans. By 1815, the Catholic Church was established as a focal point of life in Louisiana and as an institution loyal to the principles and citizens of the American republic.34 What is noteworthy about the spread of religious institutions in the western country after 1795 is the way this surge of religious presence reflected changes in the nation as a whole. The two dominant religious influences in the West in terms of reach and numbers were the Methodists and the Baptists. The common denominator that united their success was their capacity to reach out to ordinary people, even marginal people, and make them feel an identification with their message. At the same time, these two groups were expanding their presence across the eastern half of the nation. And, as the Congregationalists and Presbyterians played increasingly minor roles in the West, they did so in the rest of the nation. Only in isolated locations did the tra-

MANY VARIED SOCIETIES EMERGE

ditional Protestant churches retain their membership and influence. Increasingly, after 1815, Protestant denominations splintered into smaller units, driven by doctrinal differences. Here, the people west of the mountains played a role parallel to those in the East.35 The appearance of several different societies in this period did not produce a parallel range of educational experiences. These groups, like the earlier generations, concentrated on their struggles with the land and thought of book learning as a dispensable frill. The New England settlements offered more opportunities for education than others, and certainly the only example of public education. Only in settlements where New England traditions were strong did all children—or at least the children of church members—have the chance to attend a public school. Marietta, Granville, and the Western Reserve (all in Ohio) supported public education in their own way. Writing from the Western Reserve in 1808, Abraham Scott, a missionary, noted that “the education of children in this country is considered and made an object of particular attention.” Most of the towns employed teachers for the winter, and some even for the entire year. Scott thought most of the teachers qualified for their responsibilities, and he was “well pleased with their method of teaching, altho’ not in every particular. In teaching children I find that in some schools they make use of novels and romances.” Scott sternly condemned this practice, for everyone knew “from reason, observation and experience the danger of filling the youthful mind with vanities, and neglecting the means of forming a tast for, and improving it with useful knowledge.” He recommended reading the Scriptures instead. Scott’s comments suggest the continuing tie between religion and education in these Congregational settlements.36 A more widespread educational institution on the frontier was the subscription school, with a curriculum fitted to the needs of the scholars of the day and to the capacity of the itinerant masters. “There were but little school in those days to educate the children perhaps two months during the year and that taught by



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subscription at so much per schollar,” remembered Erastus Nevins of Parke County (Indiana). He continued: “To learn the alphabet was a tedious and slow one and spelling seemed to be one of the most important studies and must be recited three times a day.” School facilities in the form of teachers or schoolhouses were scarce, almost “unknown” in the words of Ira Meater. When volunteer labor at last completed the longawaited Parke County school, the building measured sixteen by twenty feet. Meater described school in session in these terms: “If you could weld together three frog ponds with denizens the size of a stove boiler down to a peanut, all doing their level best at noise, you would have a small specimen of our first ‘Hoosier School.’ ” Amidst the dull and tedious routine of lessons recited aloud, the youngsters enjoyed, now and then, the performance of a fiddler who entertained and then treated them with a jug of whiskey, or the first snowball fight of the winter. Meater’s description of a Hoosier school suggests that it did not foster much learning, but the very presence of any kind of school probably represented the exception rather than the rule. And the very act of bringing together young people on a continuing basis (or at least for some months) represented an important social experience for them.37 Almost everywhere, education at all levels, like life on the frontier, was a matter of luck and economic status. Wealth in Natchez for a certain class meant tutors and exposure to the gentle arts of books, imported luxury goods from Europe, music, and the theater; wealth on the Tombigbee meant more land and more slaves, for there was little else to buy in those isolated settlements. In most places, differences in education tended to reflect growing differences in wealth and leisure. Two notions about education prevailed across the western country, from Louisville to New Orleans, from the Tombigbee to the Attakapas country to St. Louis: first, that education was private and for those who could afford it; and, second, that where possible, the federal government ought to support educational institutions, generally through a grant of land. The citizens of the western country constantly appealed for such support. Natchez and the surrounding countryside established and maintained an institu-

MANY VARIED SOCIETIES EMERGE

tion of higher learning for several years, Jefferson College. The federal government contributed a section of land to its founding, but Jefferson College was an institution for the elite of the Natchez District, and like other institutions of higher learning east and west of the mountains, it served only men.38 New Orleans had a variety of private academies, but their influence did not reach into the countryside. Wealthy planters supported a tutor on the plantation or sent their sons north for a classical education. The cost was high. John Palfrey, who moved to the Attakapas country in 1810 for better economic opportunities, was in constant need of money to support his children at northern schools. The situation along the Mississippi River in Rapides or Concordia parishes was much the same. Once more the dominant feature was the academy or the private tutor, both instruments that served only a small number of those settled there. The curriculum of the academy (or the tutor for that matter) was generally classical. Members of the leisured class displayed a fragmentary knowledge of Caesar, Cicero, and Virgil, for classics remained the base of education for gentlemen. The gentler arts, or “accomplishments,” constituted education for women. Thomas Bolling Robertson described the Farrar sisters of the Mississippi Territory in these terms: “Rich as cream beautiful as God made them and sufficiently accomplished to read and write (write as well as I do) and play on the Guitar the sweet old ditty ‘How imperfect is Expression.’ ” Robertson found the accomplishments of these fashionable ladies more than acceptable. He continued, “I wish I could fall in love with one of them and I am not sure that I shall not.”39 Those less economically fortunate derived what information they could about the outside world from their parents. For most of the children on the trans-Appalachian frontier, the home was the dominant force in education. Education was not so much formal training from books as it was preparation for life, and, in this form, it serves to emphasize again the significance of the family on the frontier. If their parents were literate, the children might also achieve some degree of proficiency in reading and sums and would learn how to sign their names. John Hutchins did a man’s work in his father’s cotton fields in Mississippi. At



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dusk he returned to the family cabin, where “I got my class board, which was shaved smooth and with a piece of charred wood for a pencil, the old man would teach me to write and cipher. Our light was a torch of dry canes.”40 For some, instruction consisted simply of moral precepts offered for the conduct of life. The Reverend A. C. Ramsey, who grew up in eastern Mississippi near the Tombigbee settlements, absorbed this kind of education from his parents: “The aim and object of this parental training was to fix in the young minds, such correct principles, as would lead to the adoption and cultivation of all those rules of moral and religious experience and practice, as would secure them against the evil tendencies of depraved nature; and the corruptions of evil society; and thereby be developed in an honorable stand in this to a useful citizenship among men; and worthy and useful members of the church of God.”41 The condition of the world in which these frontier people found themselves and what they hoped to do in it determined their views about education. They hoped to educate their children in a practical way that they felt was appropriate to meet the needs of their station in life. Moral precepts formed the staple of education in the Ramsey family; how to walk across a drawing room and sing a song did the same for the Farrar sisters. These represented the range of the educational experience and social preparation for two such groups. It suggests the ways in which education was a function of economic status, even on the frontier. Individuals sought a minimal capacity to meet the worlds they knew. The same thread united the chattering pupils in the schools of the Indiana Territory, with one difference: the act of attending school was a socializing experience in itself, and one in which not all children participated. In the world that stretched out before all these people, they feared the unknown. Not all the dangers were physical. Some were social. Solitary farmers, trained by long years of labor, were ill equipped to meet with or mix in society. They were comfortable only among their own kind. Little wonder they disliked educated ministers and others who put on “airs.” The social gap that separated the people in the distant rural settlements from the people at ease in an urban society may

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have been greater than their economic differences. In his study of the South, W. J. Cash wrote of a self-made planter, with the big house, a piano, and daughters trained by a Presbyterian parson. Yet, in the end, this self-made Carolina frontier farmer turned aristocrat, with two thousand acres, two hundred slaves, and ten cotton gins, was closer to the world of the log cabin than to Charleston society, which lay at the end of a long road, light years away, as alien and remote as another world. The only thing that the planter had in common with the Charleston aristocrats was money. It was enough to make his daughters eligible for marriage to second and third sons of Charleston’s leading families, but it was not enough to make him one of them. As Cash reminds us, these self-made southern planters stood with one foot on the frontier as late as the outbreak of the Civil War. It often took more than one generation to bring institutions of education to the people on the trans-Appalachian frontier, whatever their economic status.42 Across this vast landscape, greatly enlarged by Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase in 1803, lived varied peoples in like proportion. Accordingly, contrasts and contradictions characterized this second generation on the trans-Appalachian frontier: the sophisticated and worldly vied with the rustic and primitive; the large-scale wealth of Natchez was set against the violent, materialistic lawlessness of the Tombigbee settlements; the ramshackle, dingy, unkempt appearance of New Orleans belied its energy and vigorous growth; the orderly fields and thriving villages along the Ohio did not suggest that only a few miles inland were the isolated clearings of subsistence farmers; a vast body of law and an elaborate court system could not prevent the delayed and uneven justice that so often characterized the frontier, justice that could not always protect the property all asked it to or prevent the violence all deplored but few would take action against. A second characteristic that united the societies that emerged in these twenty years was newness, newness in the sense not of unique but of unfinished. There was rawness about these societies that marked them as being in the process of change. Collectively, this second generation of pioneers knew how to do



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much. From the previous generations and with generous assistance from the Native Americans, they knew a great deal about agriculture, and if they knew little as yet about how to preserve the land, they knew much about the land itself and how to make it respond to their desires for larger crops. From their own experiences and from the first generation of trans-Appalachian frontier people—some of whom had gone to these newer frontiers— they knew about institution building. At bottom, however, this world remained raw and unformed. It was a child of great physical and economic potential whose ambitions reached beyond its physical capacity to control its movements or its words. The world around was still too big, distances too vast, and obstacles too great. The wilderness had not mastered the frontier families, but it kept them from creating finished societies—at least immediately. What emerged was a society that had extensive laws and great economic promise, but was unable as yet to develop or manage such gifts. The full realization of this potential would come with the next generation.

Part III. The First Great

Migration, 1815–1830

Shortly after its confluence with the Miami River, the Ohio—“la belle Rivière” of the early French fur traders—turns sharply to the south and west. For almost three hundred miles it runs to its rendezvous with the Mississippi, whence the waters of the two great rivers flow to a union with the Missouri and then another thousand miles in uninterrupted majesty to New Orleans, and eventually to the Gulf of Mexico. This was the route of the American empire. Upon the waters of these two rivers and their tributaries floated the panorama of the American frontier: the immigrants (some of them with slaves) headed toward the lands that fired the dreams of their future, the agricultural products that represented the tangible achievements of progress in opening the new lands. Over these fifteen years, the people who had come west passed in review along these sovereign waterways. In the words of a historian of the river, “the Ohio River itself, bound the trans-Appalachian West together from 1790 to 1830.”1 Never would this union be more important than in the years immediately after the close of the war with Great Britain. The forces creating movement to the West that had gathered in the last generation now broke loose in a tidal flood. From the Ohio, the Mississippi, the Missouri, and their tributaries, people disembarked and headed inland as far as their ambitions, inclinations, and supplies would take them. Their trade and contact with the outside commercial world would continue to focus for several years on the great waterways. Thus, the impulse of the Great Migration along the great watercourses after 1815 covered several hundred miles in breadth, brought together and intermingled streams of population from north and south of the Ohio, and

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began the further occupation of the trans-Appalachian frontier that would continue over another generation. West of the mountains lay a great landscape, most of it drained by these three rivers and their tributaries. To the north, ice sheets had glaciated the land, smoothing some hills and raising others. As the pioneer families moved inland from the watercourses, they moved from the familiar woodlands to the open prairies and level expanses that would become the settlement sites of the new generation. The vegetation ranged from hardwood forests to panoramas of prairie flowers that covered the land in the spring. To the south lay dense forests of pine and walls of thick tropical cane. Game was present in quantity and variety to delight the most ardent hunter: clouds of birds, including the passenger pigeon, destined to pass from the scene within a single generation; the prairie chicken, grouse, and turkey; and animal life ranging from smaller game such as squirrels and raccoons to deer, bears, and bison. Fresh meat often played a prominent part in the diet of the first pioneer families. Much of the vast region was fertile; some sections came to be counted among the garden spots of the western world. Almost everywhere the land was well watered; in some spots it was almost too wet. Innumerable watercourses penetrated this vast land. Some were enlarged creeks, flooded in the springtime, reduced to a trickle in the dry months. Others were major rivers: the Wabash, Illinois, Sangamon, Whitewater, Tennessee, Arkansas, Missouri, and Yazoo. All pointed the way to the interior.2 To this fertile land in the years immediately after 1815 came one of the great immigrations in the history of the western world. In numbers of people, land occupation, and impact on the nation, it far exceeded anything experienced on the early trans-Appalachian frontier. It conveyed a sense of motion, of movement, a kinetic energy that separated it from the earlier frontier experience. It was the frontier in motion. Westward expansion had entered its modern period; the mobile societies of the nineteenth century were in the process of replacing the static societies of the eighteenth. The moment was caught by one participant. “The whole movement seems to be to the Westward

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and when they get there they go on beyond the Westward,” wrote Gershom Flagg in 1816.3 Numbers underline this dramatic series of immigrations. In 1810, one million Anglo-Americans lived west of the mountains; in 1820, two million; in 1830, almost three million. The year 1815 was the benchmark. Perhaps this was the significant result of the War of 1812, that it arranged national and international affairs in such a way as to unleash the powerful impulses of movement in the nation. A period of postwar readjustment followed, with the attendant economic and social upheaval. One of the most significant of the new configurations in national and international affairs was the reduced diplomatic influence and bargaining power of Indian peoples. Although the threat of the Indian remained still menacing in the popular mind, the circumstances had changed dramatically. The war with England was a military stalemate, but the conflict between the Anglo-American settlers and Indian peoples had ended in decisive Indian defeats. Spurred by the oratory and actions of Tecumseh and others, numerous Indian groups flocked to the British standard, honoring simultaneously their ancient allegiance and what they perceived as their self-interest. In his ongoing conflict with William Henry Harrison over land cessions, Tecumseh had accurately foreseen that the American settlers’ appetite for land was insatiable. Accordingly, he argued, Indian peoples north and south of the Ohio must join in a great confederation to oppose these piecemeal land cessions. Although his oratory drew many followers, he was unable to unite the several diverse Indian groups north and south of the Ohio. Many of these Indian nations, especially powerful tribal groups in the South, saw their interests as different. Tecumseh’s dream suffered a loss of prestige at Tippecanoe in 1811; it ended with his death at the Battle of the Thames in 1813.4 At almost the same time, in the Treaty of Ghent (1814), the British deserted their Indian allies in the interests of neutral rights at sea. Indian peoples across the trans-Appalachian frontier now faced the enlarged number of new Anglo-American immigrants without their British allies. American officials used internal politics to splinter resistance to land cessions within



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individual Indian groups; they used the increasing need of Indian peoples as a way to force land treaties with provisions for subsistence and annuities. These treaty-making practices ranged from deceptive to flagrantly dishonest, but they moved inexorably forward, and with few exceptions, the Senate of the United States ratified the results.5 Indian peoples had lived on these lands for a hundred generations. Now, within twenty-five years, the American pioneer families and their government would thrust aside these long-standing residents. In its dramatic changes, the First Great Migration had many of the qualities of a revolution: for the Native Americans removed by diplomacy and force; for the pioneers who took the land and exploited it; for the land itself. As it had been for generations past, land was the lure. The flood of new settler families benefited from the operation of a national land system established and in place across the western country. Soon after 1815, this administrative mechanism began to place vast quantities of public lands on the market in a continuing stream. With congressional approval, administrators of the public domain had adopted a series of steps to move from Indian cession to rectangular survey to public sale. The credit provisions of the Harrison Land Law of 1800, in which pioneer families or speculators paid only one-quarter down and the rest over four years, encouraged both larger purchases and higher prices. Military bounty lands for veterans in Illinois, Arkansas, and Michigan also attracted prospective settlers to the western country. Added to these inducements were prosperous times, rising prices for staple agricultural products (especially cotton), and a banking system that was almost as democratic as the dominant political philosophy of the day. There were exceptions. Ancient European settlements acquired by conquest or treaty, such as those in the Old Northwest or Louisiana, came with ancient land grants. With special commissioners charged with examining legal documents (where such existed and could be found) and making recommendations to Congress, the system of examining these private land claims was slow and often delayed.6 Who were these people who went west in such astonishing

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numbers? As befits a rush to take up land, most of them were farm families. From the accounts of those who participated and others who observed, large numbers moved together, tied by bonds of family, religion, or simply common interest. Many small settlements in the western country consisted of these families, living in sufficient proximity to assist one another and to meet for social activities. Others were skilled in the trades of the time, blacksmithing, building, and milling, all grouped under the heading that people at the time referred to as “mechanicks.” Still another group were professionals, principally doctors, lawyers, and clergy, who gravitated to the innumerable small towns that sprang up to serve the surrounding agricultural countryside. This generation of frontier peoples was the first to welcome the steamboat. The sight of a steamboat rounding the long reach on the river, the distant wail of the whistle, and the tremor of excitement in the crowd became a more common feature of the western country after 1815. In spite of this dramatic development, the world was not transformed. At least not yet. The steamboat, the steam-driven cotton gin, and the steam-powered factory portended a revolution in the nature of this world that ran counter to the doctrines of Thomas Jefferson. These alien forces would triumph, but not at once. In most respects, this was still the same agricultural world that the first generation of pioneer families found on the frontier from 1795 to 1815. In values and technology, things were not yet remade. Flatboats carried the bulk of the cargo downriver to market, as they had for two hundred years. People moved, cultivated, and traveled at the speed of the horse. This was the world of the land, the draft animal, the doctrines of Jefferson, and the values of an agricultural society. Most of all it continued to be a place of hard physical labor for all members of the family. Nowhere was this truer than on the frontiers west of the Appalachian Mountains. There were vast expanses, different peoples, and varying experiences, but the ways of doing things would be familiar to those of earlier frontier generations. This was an intensely rural world.7 In response to this flood of immigrant families, the Congress of the United States created structures of government to assist



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the growing numbers. State government became a growing presence in the trans-Appalachian West. States entered the union at a steady pace—Indiana (1816), Mississippi (1817), Illinois (1818), Alabama (1819), and, after a quarrel of national proportions, Missouri (1821). States had become the common unit of government in the trans-Appalachian West. Where necessary, Congress laid off new territories, notably in the newly acquired Florida Territory (1819). And after 1815, governors and legislatures laid off much of the newly occupied or about to be occupied western country into counties. In their institutional structure, the pioneers who immigrated to the trans-Appalachian frontier after 1815 also owed much to preceding generations. Between 1775 and 1815, the institutions of the western country had developed with much experimentation and a degree of flexibility that reflected the diverse population that came (not always willingly) under American sovereignty. This early period was one of exploration and experimentation: on the land, in institutions, in societies. Men and women gradually structured the institutions of the new western country, guided in part by the ordinances of 1785 and 1787. This process was largely completed by 1815. After 1815 the institutional structure of the promised land had been defined; the fundamental decisions had been made and needed only be applied in the newly occupied areas of the new generation. The institutional structure of the western country after 1815 was increasingly orderly and cyclical. The exotic and sharply different elements of the former French societies faded (except for remote areas of Louisiana); so did the economic uncertainties brought on by European diplomatic and military conflict and a heretofore continuous military readiness necessitated by the search for security against Indian peoples. Receded also was the uncertainty of the American government about how to handle these problems. An awakening nationalism and confidence in American frontier principles and strengths replaced military weakness, diplomatic delicacy, and niceties of conscience. For those concerned with institutional development, the hesitant experiments of the past, many of them carried on amidst difficulties of isolation and physical weakness, were over. The national

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symbol of this new independence was Andrew Jackson’s dramatic victory over British regulars at New Orleans. Here was absolute proof of the values of America’s frontier people. Whether opening new lands or defeating the best army in the western world, the West of the new American nation was more than up to the challenge.8 In the years after 1815 the standardization of institutional life on the frontier was an influence as wide and deep as the heavy current of immigration that covered the spaces from the Muskingum to the Missouri, from the Arkansas to the Tombigbee. In an institutional sense, it was an important change, comparable to the impact of steam on the movement of people and agricultural commodities. Supported by two generations of experience, the courts, codes of law, government, militia, and churches brought structure to frontier life almost everywhere. In a sense, the search for order and form on the trans-Appalachian frontier had been substantially standardized. The period after 1815 also produced a new kind of diversity in the frontier experience, in the many new frontiers, the older frontiers in transition, and the new people making new societies. Differences in levels of development were broad and sometimes very striking, even in settlements in relative proximity to one another. Consider, for example, the level of economic and social development available in an Ohio River town compared to that of a cabin in a clearing forty miles inland. The differences in condition, interests, and outlook were broad. Some areas of the trans-Appalachian frontier had even passed through the frontier stage into a condition indistinguishable from the agricultural settlements east of the mountains. Thus the frontier west of the mountains came again to encompass several societies, at different stages of development. It is important to remember that the individuals and families who went across the mountains or down the Ohio and Mississippi after 1815 did not disappear from the current of national life. Quite to the contrary, they carried the force of the American nation west—its ideals, virtues and prejudices, strengths and weaknesses—and there they added to the power and authority of the rising colossus of North America. They made this part of



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the trans-Appalachian frontier thoroughly American. These were the pioneers who gave voice and support to John Quincy Adams’s concept of a continental empire, and they effortlessly made the transition to support Andrew Jackson, the expanding nation’s first western president. There remained two large-scale exceptions to this optimistic outlook. The first reflected the growth in numbers and range of African American societies—free and slave. More than the frontier societies of the two earlier generations, this decade and a half would be associated with the mass migration of slaves to the new Southwest. Brought in chains to these new lands, to clear, to plant, to cultivate, to harvest and to prepare the cotton for market, these growing slave populations were a central feature of this frontier experience. Like individuals and families from the Anglo-American population, they suffered massive dislocations. The disruptions of slave communities were the greater, however, for their immigration was compulsory, and often their families were left behind. Initially this condition reflected the immigration of able-bodied men to do the heaviest work of opening the new lands. Sometimes spouses and children reappeared with the immigration of the larger family; sometimes they had been sold and the family permanently splintered. Whatever periods of adjustment accompanied the white population—whether in society, landscape, or whatever—they were multiplied many times over for enslaved peoples, who had no voice in the decision to immigrate, or under what conditions to do so.9 Territories and states north of the Ohio had another set of challenges, namely, how to reconcile the presence of numbers of slaves brought from the states of the South. These extended black and white families dispersed into a great landscape without any kind of central authority that could enforce the language of the Northwest Ordinance. In any case, the dominant influence on the frontier in this world was local custom and local influence. Counties in southern Indiana and southern Illinois had numbers of black servants held in perpetual servitude under various legal devices. The end result was the same. The issue of the presence of black servants and laborers north of the Ohio River lasted for another generation.

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A second large group suffered massive dislocations. These were the many Indian societies in the western country. Heretofore, they had held their place by vigorous opposition to American treaty-making exercises, by support from the British in Canada, and by the relatively small number of Anglo-American immigrants coming across the mountains and down the rivers. Beginning in 1815, these conditions changed. The British had deserted their long-standing allies. Immigrants now arrived in waves. By 1830, there were almost three million Anglo-Americans west of the mountains. And, finally, the national government responded to the demands of its citizens in motion to the West by pressuring Indian peoples for land cession in an unremitting torrent of demands. Amidst these exceptions, two issues emerged in these fifteen years that engaged the full range of the western country. The first was the economic crisis of 1819. The so-called Panic of 1819 changed the optimistic outlook of the West, left a massive debt owed to the national government by purchasers of the public lands in the previous four years. Most of it was owed by residents of the western country, who saw staple commodity prices collapse, with disastrous consequences for settler families (ambitious to enter into a commercial world) north and south of the Ohio. To this must be added the widespread failure of institutions, from local stores to commercial warehouses and counting houses to banks. In the face of this extensive economic catastrophe, tensions rose, relations between debtor and creditor became strained, politicians sought relief for their constituents in the form of stay laws, and hard-working families everywhere sought someone or something to blame for their blighted hopes and expectations. The second series of events was just as unexpected and even more far reaching in its implications. When the Territory of Missouri applied for admission to the Union, amidst a routine hearing in the House of Representatives, a Congressman from New York named James Tallmadge introduced an anti-slavery amendment to the bill. Of the opening of the conflict, Stephen Aron notes, “The controversy was in part so terrifying because . . . it was so



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surprising.” The Tallmadge amendment passed the House of Representatives on a strict sectional vote, with the Ohio River as the dividing line in the West. As a deadlocked Congress adjourned, so the issue would be fought out in local elections across the nation. Missourians had a strong proprietary interest: it was (potentially) their state; it was their issue. Amidst an emotional debate, one recurring strand appeared: that the proposed restriction on slavery was a plot by easterners to restrict the flow of new settler families into the West (as personified by Missouri). When Congress reconvened, several weeks of further debate were necessary to put into place the compromises brokered by Henry Clay of Kentucky and others.10 In one respect, the frontier experiences of the First Great Migration were familiar ones. The family was still the basic unit of the economy and society. White or black, Indian or mixedblood, of every economic condition, the family remained the central unit west of the mountains. And within this unit, women were the basic ingredient. They were the foundation around which the family functioned. Women bridged the inside and outside dimensions of labor. They were responsible for the children. In the first years of opening a new farm, they often made crucial commercial products for sale at towns or county seats. Although towns were appearing—especially along waterways—this was still a rural world. Whatever the size of the new, opening enterprise, the family—whether measured in a half-dozen children or two score slaves—would be the limits of the economy and the society. And, in spite of the controversies over the institution of slavery and the economic hard times of the early 1820s, this was an experience of generally shared optimism. Here, the availability of land was the key, as it had been on the earlier transAppalachian frontiers.

7.

 Across the Old Northwest and into Missouri

“Old America seems to be breaking up, and moving westward,” wrote Morris Birkbeck as he observed the rush of settlement down the Ohio in the spring of 1817. “We are seldom out of sight, as we travel on this grand track towards the Ohio, of family groups behind, and before us, some with a view to a particular spot, close to a brother perhaps, or a friend who has gone before, and reported well of the country.”1 Birkbeck was witness to the first part of a great migration that would settle the remainder of the trans-Appalachian frontier within a generation. Many participants spoke of this compulsion to migrate to the West. The most common image was a fever, a violent and contagious illness that put the unfortunate victim in motion and robbed him of rational response. In 1818, Gershom Flagg described these characteristics in a letter that he wrote in St. Louis to his mother in Vermont: “for although you say the Ohio feever is abated in Vermont—the Missouri & Illinois feever rages greatly in Ohio, Kentucky & Tennessee and carries off thousands. When I got to Ohio, Ohio feever began to turn but I soon caught the Missouri feever which is very catchin and carried me off. I think most probably that I shall return if my life & health is spared a year from next spring but it is very uncertain

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whether I stay in that country. Surely nothing except my friends would tempt me ever to see Vermont again.” His description recounts the cycles of immigration from New England to Ohio, and then from Ohio farther to the west, carried off by the “feever” associated with access to rich lands.2 Flagg confirmed this view. While he would return to Vermont to visit his parents, he would never live there. This mass movement of people affected the several dimensions of the frontier experience in differing ways. The developing societies were determinedly agricultural, and the opening of the fertile lands of the interior river valleys replaced early commercial enterprises such as fur trading, lead mining, and salt manufacturing. Large numbers of pioneer families soon produced surplus agricultural commodities, and more farm products (in various forms) meant more trade. The gradual spread of steamboats on the “western waters” stimulated trade and changed its direction to upriver as well as downriver. Individual communities continued to move together in hopes of retaining their identities. The numbers of Americans and the sweep of their institutions of government and law overwhelmed and submerged the isolated pockets of different cultural character such as the French villages. The pioneers of this next generation dealt with familiar institutions, devised and tested by the previous generations; yet even these exhibited occasional variations.3 The experiences of individuals were also broadly similar, but they were no less compelling for the mass nature of a frontier in motion. Behind the rush of people were thousands of individual decisions to move. The impulse to migrate was basically economic. For the rich lands of the trans-Appalachian West, families left the stony fields of New England, the high rents of New York State, and even the lands settled by a previous frontier generation in the Ohio Valley. James B. Lewis’s father, who returned from the war with a severe hand wound, departed Trumbull County (Ohio) after his third consecutive crop failure. Lewis wrote, “The whole country was a stench in our nostrils and we could taste it in our mouths.” At the suggestion of a Methodist circuit rider, the Lewis family moved to Indiana.4 Many immigrants were young, and some newly married,

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Table 2. Growth of the Old Northwest and Missouri, 1810–30

Ohio Indiana Illinois Missouri

1810

1820

1830

230,760 24,520 12,282 19,783

581,434 147,178 55,211 66,586

937,903 343,031 157,445 140,455

Source: Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1957 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1960), 13.

seeking their first opportunity. Others, already west of the mountains, sought a fresh start. A large number of single men were also in this first wave to the West after 1815. All moved in response to their need for land and the high expectations of its availability farther west, although the single men often had to labor for months or years for wages in order to purchase “Congress lands” (as they were known) and start their own farms. The hopes and expectations of all these groups carried them to the remote and distant settlements, where the federal government and its land system opened great tracts of the public domain to occupation. With such household goods and agricultural tools as their finances permitted, and a few carefully preserved mementos of their past, they floated down the Ohio on varieties of rafts and flatboats, moved overland by wagon, or simply walked, a random and unending procession of pilgrims in search of a promised land. What they found were rich lands and a pioneer life like that experienced by a previous generation. At first, it was without amenities and frills. For most of the immigrants, this was a continuation of a familiar condition. Morris Birkbeck penetrated to the distant frontiers of the western country. He described these early arriving families in front of their cabins, standing awkwardly and self-consciously in their buckskin and linseywoolsey: “The man, his pregnant wife, his eldest son, a tall halfnaked youth, just initiated in the hunter’s art, his three daughters, growing up into great rude girls, and squalling tribe of dirty brats of both sexes, are of one pale yellow, without the



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slightest tint of healthful bloom.” Birkbeck’s judgment was harsh, for these early pioneers experienced repeated bouts of the fever that robbed them of their color, their strength, and sometimes their lives. The physical hardships of the first years on the new land dominated the pioneering experience. T. V. Denny wrote his brother from Indiana in 1818, “Well I can tell you, after a person has been here in the woods awhile he will learn to use economy in the strict sense of the word.” The pioneering period was long remembered by those who experienced it. From the perspective of a life lived on the land, Ira Meater of Parke County (Indiana) commented, “Life meant business in those days.”5 Travelers noted scenes of hardship and sometimes even hunger in the western country. On his journeys across the Old Northwest in 1819, Richard Lee Mason saw many of the first inhabitants of these new settlements. He entered the state of Indiana at New Albany (“a little village inhabited by Tavern keepers and mechanics”) and pushed on to the northwest, cataloguing the poor houses and bad accommodations. Mason had a low opinion of Hoosiers and thought that Indiana’s “Inhabitants generally possess a smaller share of politeness than any met with before.” Yet he was touched by a rural scene outside of Paoli, the county seat of Orange County. It was early November in this sparsely open country, and the nights were already cold, when he recounted this incident: In the midst of one of those long and thick pieces of woods we passed one of the most miserable huts ever seen. A log house built out of slabs without a nail. The pieces laid against a log pen such as pigs are commonly kept in, a dirt floor and no chimney. Indeed the covering would be a bad one in the heat of summer and unfortunately the weather at this time is very severe for the season of the year. This small cabin contained a young and interesting female and her two shivering and almost starving children, all of whom were bare headed and their feet bare. There was a small bed, one blanket and a few potatoes. One cow and one pig (who appeared to share their misfortunes) completed the family except for the husband, who was absent in search of bread. Fortunately for the dear little children we had in our carriage some

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bread, cheese toddy, etc. which we divided with them with much heartfelt satisfaction. In this situation the woman was polite, smiled and appeared happy. She gave us water to drink, which had been refused to us, by persons on the road several times during the day.6

Like many other travelers, Mason showed a degree of class consciousness. He moved across the landscape in a carriage with sufficient to eat and resources for every situation. The instinct to share his bounty with the unfortunate woman and her children had a tone of noblesse oblige about it. Still, western travel literature of the period contains few such acts of generosity. The mass movement of people that characterized this first great migration experience included individuals and families with a wide range of resources, families joined together for mutual protection and advantage, and whole communities of people who emigrated west together. Among the individuals of political and economic standing who came out to the frontier was Edward Coles. Born into a Virginia family of rank and influence, possessed of a superior education and the benefits of foreign travel, he was private secretary to James Madison for several years. Coles went west and north to escape the institution of slavery and to find good lands. He floated down the Ohio in 1819, disembarking at Louisville to continue the trip overland. He was enthusiastic about the lands of Illinois and wrote to Madison that men could not be expected to continue holding an acre of land in Virginia or even on the Miami River in Ohio “when they can exchange it for 15 or 20 acres of equally good land on the Wabash, with the additional advantage of good range for their stock.” On first viewing, Coles found the Illinois countryside monotonous: “So flat and marshy a country, present to the eye of a mountaineer no very pleasing prospect, either of comfort or of health.” The Illinois prairies were often wet, and Coles thought that they were “too level and too wet to afford good water, good health, good roads, or good any thing except most abundant crops of vegetation and of musketeers.” He consoled himself that the settlement of the country would mean its clearing and eventual drainage. Coles purchased a large tract of



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fertile land in Madison County (Illinois). As soon as his slaves arrived—he later freed them—he set them to work in building, clearing, and planting. The experiences of the first several months he recounted in a letter to James Madison: On the 17 of May, the day after the arrival of my Negroes, I commenced ploughing up the Prairie, and splitting rails to fence it; and continued breaking prairie and planting corn until the first week in July. The consequence was that the corn was in some places 5 feet high, while in others it was not yet up. I have planted between 12 and 15 acres in corn for each horse I have worked. This I am sure you will consider good work, when you reflect how late I commenced, and that my horses were exhausted by a long and fatiguing journey; and that the Prairie was so rough & hard that it required my whole team to pull one plough. I am now employed in mowing hay from the prairie, and following it to seed wheat this autumn.7

Here, on the prairie grasslands of Illinois, Coles, his enslaved work force, and other settler families found a new landscape that would impose its own physical challenges to the pioneering experience. To the usual prairie challenges of the lack of timber, the absence of good water, and the challenge of tough prairie sod was added poorly drained lowlands that captured and held water. So these grasslands had sloughs, ponds, sometimes marshes. Such prairie grasslands were deep and rich, but the challenges of drainage and cultivation were daunting. The first wave of immigrants found the wetlands unattractive and avoided them where possible. The presence of such wet and overflowed lands also increased the prospect of disease, the “fever” that plagued so many early settler families. Coles, with a compulsory labor force, was in a better position to deal with wetlands than most immigrants.8 In 1819 some seven or eight families formed a company to settle the “Horseshoe prairie” just below the later site of Noblesville, Hamilton County (Indiana). The leader of the enterprise was John Finch. Loaded in three wagons, the pioneer families moved through seventy miles of open country to their new homes. On at least one occasion the party paused to con-

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struct a bridge over a swift stream. Once arrived, the settlers unloaded, pitched tents, and immediately started to work: “Some went to cutting logs for the cabin, some to hauling and others to making clapboards to cover the house with.” Indians appeared and soon called on the settlers daily, to watch, smoke a pipe, or trade. Sickness began in September with the onset of the “ague” season. Times were hard before harvest: “Our provisions gave out and 60 or 70 miles to the settlement.” Finch wrote about their food, “Conner had a little corn which he sold them at $1.00 per Bu. This they had to pound in a mortar, lift out the finest of it and use for bread and boil the coarser of it and eat it with milk, they called it samp.” Some of the first settlers died in the fall, but other families arrived, and the autumn harvest was sufficient. Over the winter a few enterprising men built a horse mill to grind the corn. More families appeared in the spring of 1820. The cycles of immigration and survival were over, but the hard labor associated with opening new farms had only begun. People married, bore children, died, and continued the natural phases of life; claims changed hands, some settlers moved away, others arrived. The story of the Finches and their company was repeated many times over in the western country.9 Farther to the west, the TenBrook family moved toward Parke County, Indiana. It was the fall of 1822. The TenBrooks had settled outside of Cincinnati in 1815 and decided to move on because of hard times. Andrew TenBrook wrote, “Sickness and doctor’s bills and very low prices for corn and wheat made it impossible to make more than a poor living.” The TenBrook party numbered twenty-seven in all, made up of three families, two teamsters, and three single men. Their stock included thirteen horses, twenty-one cows, two yoke of oxen, and four dogs. They traveled over roads in terrible condition—“turned around old logs and trees in every direction, and the progress was slow.” The wagons and teams frequently mired in the sloughs, amidst a swarm of insects in the hot, sticky, midday air. The travelers went on for days, never seeing other settlers, pitching camp at night, where they ate “mush and rich warm milk.” An axle broke—“there was neither wagon maker nor smith within fifty



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miles that we knew of”—and the immigrants repaired it by native ingenuity. In mid-autumn the party passed through Indianapolis, which Andrew TenBrook described as still largely unbroken land, a single two-story house bravely suggesting future urban development. The most prominent residents were two Kentuckians “that had come to see the country and had a two horse wagon and a barrel of whiskey to sell out to pay their expenses.” The TenBrook party “bought several gallons.” Some nights later, at Greencastle, came the first frost. The next day the TenBrooks crossed into Parke County. Jacob TenBrook, Andrew’s uncle, had selected his farm site on a previous trip. He immediately built a cabin, to shelter the corn as well as his family, for the one hundred bushels he brought along had to last through the winter and to provide seed in the spring. Jacob, his brother John, and a hired hand turned to clearing the land. They worked through autumn of 1822 and into the winter. By spring they had cleared fifteen acres of small timber and split two hundred fence rails. As soon as winter broke, they began burning the logs and underbrush and building rail fences. Plowing and planting began on June 12—“one furrow every four feet and then step drop every three or four feet.” The TenBrooks also planted an acre each of potatoes and turnips. The harvest was good and the corn divided into three classes: best quality for bread, second quality for horses, damaged corn for cows. The nearest mill at Roseville was “so crowded with customers that there could not be a grist ground in less than a week at any time that winter,” and the miller charged “more than one third for grinding.” Jacob TenBrook soon found ways to grind corn at home. The livestock prospered. The first spring brought seven new calves to supplement the herd of cows, and the TenBrook family “depended very much on the milk.” The hogs purchased in the winter ran wild in the spring and summer, reappearing at Christmas just in time for butchering. The first summer the women in the family made forty twelve-pound cheeses, which they sold at Rockville and Armieburg for one dollar each. The TenBrooks, like other farmer immigrants, made quantities of

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sugar from the plentiful groves of sugar trees: “The first season we made three hundred and fifty pounds of sugar and ten gallons of molasses on the same ground that we were clearing for corn.” Andrew TenBrook, who had title to the original farm sixty-six years later, remembered that the experience of settling was hard but rewarding. The fertility of the soil and the natural gifts of the land quickly supplied subsistence. “After the first year, I never saw any scarcity of provisions,” he wrote. “The only complaint was that there was nobody to whom the supplies could be sold.”10 Communities of people united by common values and a common destination also made the trip out to the trans-Appalachian frontier. Several were from New England. Daniel Brush’s father was from Vermont, and he came west with a colony of Vermonters. In the spring of 1820, after a journey of more than two months, the colony settled in Greene County (Illinois), on a tract adjacent to the Illinois River. The elder Brush was enthusiastic over the site: “A prairie of the richest soil, stretched out about 4 miles in length, and one mile wide, extending from the timber growing next the river . . . to the Bluffs . . . , complete with pure springs of cold water in abundance.” After its establishment the colony became known as the “Yankee Settlement.” Brush’s father put up a sixteen-by-twenty-foot cabin and settled down to the business of breaking the prairie. The heavy plow required three spans of horses or three yoke of oxen. His son wrote of the experience: The “breaking up” consisted in turning over the sod which was matted with grass roots, & frequently a “red root” of one to three or four inches in thickness, very strong & hard to tear out, the strips turned over being say 15 to 20 inches, with a heavy plow with coulter for cutting the sod as deep as desired to run the plow, attached to the beam in advance of the share a small way—The work required a team of Horses or Oxen in proportion to the width and depth of the furrow to be cut—if horses were used three or more span—if oxen three or A yoke moved the plow. The strips turned over fitted evenly & snugly into the last displaced sod—so that when a piece of ground was “bro-



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ken,” the surface was as smooth & level as before the sod was turned upside down so that no grass was in sight but the severed roots appeared on top—The Corn was planted by striking an axe, say every 4 feet between the edges of the sods, and dropping kernels for a hill, 3 or 4 grains—and then by a tread of the foot pressing the sod again together. No weeds or grass sprang up on such ground the first year and the corn needed no attention with plow or hoe, and if got in early good crops were yielded—of corn and fodder.11

Flowers bloomed profusely in the spring, and later came wild berries. Into this fertile landscape with its present beauty and its future promise came the sudden tragedy that the frontier often visited on its people. Brush’s father suffered a stroke in early July 1821. Within three days he was dead, leaving a widow and four children, ages ten, eight, five, and two. No sooner had the family recovered from this shock and determined to remain in the West rather than return to Vermont than the autumn fevers prostrated all members. “Fever ’n ager was in every house,” remembered Brush; “Not one in the settlement, I think, escaped.” Others in the “Yankee Settlement” rallied around to assist their own. Care and food assisted the Brush family through illness and helped it to survive a first winter without the father. The Vermonters helped one another at every opportunity, and the colony gradually prospered. After a few years, Brush concluded, “Provisions in abundance, was the rule in that Yankee Settlement, and no one needed to go supperless or hungry to bed.”12 Like previous frontiers in the western country, this one had varieties of peoples and many levels of ambition. Some sought to develop their farms, clear the land, break the sod, plant, cultivate, harvest, and find a market. And during the ensuing winters, they would fence their fields or work on farm outbuildings. Others were transient. Gershom Flagg wrote of this latter group in the Illinois Territory, “The people of This Territory are from all parts of the United States & do the least work I believe of any people in the world. Their principal business is hunting deer, horses hogs and Cattle and raising Corn. They have no pasture but turn every thing out to run at large.” He continued, “These

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kind of People as soon as settlements become thick Clear out and so further into the new Country.” Flagg had entered a large tract of rich bottom land opposite St. Louis. He intended to open a farm through hard work and continuous improvements. He recognized the presence of transient frontier peoples, but he did not admire them. He preferred permanent farm families who would stay to grow up with the country.13 The new settlements confronted a variety of hazards. Among them was the danger of disease, especially in wet and overflowed lands and along water courses. Gershom Flagg noted among the “bad things” about the western country (on the list were bad roads, lack of timber, and “ignorant people”) were “a plenty of Ague near the large streams.” He continued, “The principal objection I have to this country is its unhealthiness the months of Aug. & Sept. are generally very Sickly. I was taken sick with feever & ague the 15 Sept. which lasted me nearly two months. I shall try it one season more and if I do not have my health better than I have the season past I shall sell my property and leave the Country.” Flagg’s correspondence suggested regular autumn bouts of malaria. Seasons were invariably defined as “sickly” or “healthy,” one of the first items of news in any letter.14 Gershom Flagg lacked the resources of Edward Coles, but he was no less ambitious. After observing the new settlements in Ohio, Flagg crossed Indiana and eventually entered a large tract of land in Madison County (Illinois), on the flood plain opposite the village of St. Louis. He immediately sold the largest portion at double the purchase price, keeping only 160 acres. He described his holding as “the handsomest and best country that I have ever seen. In places there is Prairies as far as the eye can reach covered with tall grass higher than a man’s head.” The country was generally level, with few hills. “It is not exceeded in levelness or richness of soil by any in the United States.” In spring and summer, the prairies were covered with flowers, and Flagg soon planted apple and peach trees to supplement the wild plums and cherries. “The Stock of this country consists principally of horses horned Cattle & hogs. . . . Hogs will live & get fat in the Woods and Prairies. I have seen some as fat upon



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Hickory nuts, Acorns, Pecans & Walnuts as ever I did those that were fatted upon Corn.”15 Across the trans-Appalachian frontier, certain regions became identified in the popular imagination with the greatest virtues of good lands—attractive vistas, fertile soil, pure water, native timber. A large agricultural tract west along the Missouri River developed this reputation. In 1805, Nathan and Daniel Morgan Boone, sons of Daniel Boone, opened a salt works near the Salt River. The salt works closed within four years, but the name “Boon’s Lick” endured. In the expansion into Missouri Territory after 1815, streams of settler wagons headed to particular destinations. The area around New Madrid had its new arrivals, and the Ozark Mountains played host to another influx. The largest strands of movement, however, were those associated with the Mississippi River between St. Louis and Cape Girardeau and along the Missouri River toward the Boon’s Lick country. Indeed, Boon’s Lick had become the magic destination of large numbers of settlers (many with slaves) who sought lands in this tract. Between 1810 and 1820, the non-Indian population tripled in this region. The squatters (for so most of them were) pushed the Indians from the lands by sheer force of numbers; they then found themselves caught up in endless legal wrangling that pitted their claims against earlier Spanish land claimants, mixed with the appearance of later settlers and speculators with land warrants that had been given to survivors of the New Madrid earthquake of 1811—many of these warrants had promptly been sold to speculators. Rarely has a Garden of Eden in the western country been accompanied by so much controversy over land titles. Most of the prospective settlers were innocent of these dangers. Those who knew of them may have thought the trials worth the effort. Boon’s Lick had been on the mental maps of ambitious settler families for more than a decade.16 In area, the Boon’s Lick country covered the bottomlands from the mouth of the Osage River, extending some 140 miles west along the Missouri River and a varied distance inland on

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both sides. The territorial legislature organized the area into Howard County in 1816, with the county seat at Franklin. Timothy Flint, missionary and writer from New England, described the circumstances surrounding the fame of Boon’s Lick. From some cause, it happens that in the western and southern states, a tract of country gets a name, as being more desirable than any other. The imaginations of the multitudes that converse upon the subject, get kindled, and the plains of Mamere in old time, or the hills of the land of promise, were not more fertile in milk and honey, than are fashionable points of immigration. During the first, second, and third years of my residence here, the whole current of immigration set towards this country, Boon’s Lick. . . . Boon’s Lick was the common . . . point of union for the people. Ask one of them whither he was moving, and the answer was, “To Boon’s Lick to be sure.”17

The fertile soils of the Boon’s Lick floodplain (although subject to spring inundations) were among the richest opened after the war. As farm families poured into the region, they leaped a one-hundred-mile stretch west of St. Louis to establish these growing settlements. Most of the immigrants came from Kentucky, Virginia, and North Carolina, bringing with them southern culture, southern agriculture (especially the cultivation of tobacco and hemp), and the institution of slavery. Their object was to grow a crop or crops with a ready market. By 1821, the economy of the region had begun to send commodities downriver to St. Louis and even New Orleans. The spread of cotton cultivation had created a market for corn in the South, and the growing numbers of farmers in Boon’s Lick responded, along with a market for hogs and beef cattle. Because of the distance and the hazards, most local farmers had to trade with local merchants, who did a thriving business as middlemen in the trade downriver. The economy in Boon’s Lick, as elsewhere on the trans-Appalachian frontier, was based on credit and goods. As the name Boon’s Lick country faded, it was replaced by another, “Little Dixie,” that captured the character of the thriving settlements.18



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The large influx of population created a demand for a wide range of services. Towns appeared, of which Boonville, Chariton, Columbia, and Rocheport were among the most important. Newspapers published a list of the goods and services available. The towns of Liberty and Gallatin in Clay County, for example, offered the services of industrious builders, who would construct houses for land seekers. However much they may have represented the western-most reaches of Anglo-American settlements, these thriving communities had created a surprising degree of economic variety: builders, agricultural laborers, and boatmen for the burgeoning river trade, along with professional men (doctors and lawyers), teachers, and “mechanicks” skilled in the crafts associated with agricultural production and export.19 That this was an array of occupations that could be found in longersettled towns along the Ohio was a tribute to the rapid transition to commercial agriculture. Boon’s Lick was a good example of the inevitable clash between onrushing Anglo-American families and the resident Native American peoples, which assumed a special urgency in Missouri Territory. At the close of the war, perhaps some eighteen thousand Indians occupied these lands. The flood of incoming settlers had attitudes that ranged from indifference to Indian title to virulent hostility at the idea Indian peoples might have “rights” to lands sought by American settlers. That the inevitable conflicts with squatters were controlled as well as they were was the work of William Clark, appointed governor in 1813. Clark courted Indian peoples during the war, as a diplomatic necessity. Unlike most of his white constituents, however, he did not support a policy of “Jacksonizing” all Indian peoples in the lower Missouri Valley. (This was a term that alluded to Andrew Jackson’s punitive expeditions in the South). Instead, Clark continued to seek a peaceful solution through negotiations. He made peace with the Delawares and Shawnees of the Missouri Valley, but he did so at the cost of his own political reputation. His proclamation of December 1815 that warned “white persons” off Indian lands was universally unpopular among settlers. The backlash came in Missouri’s first gubernatorial election in 1820,

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when Clark was badly defeated by the political newcomer Alexander McNair.20 Parallel to the extraordinary growth of the Boon’s Lick country was the continued expansion of the tracts in and around St. Louis. Stephen Aron has written that these new settlers “threatened the political and economic dominance of old elites, particularly that of the French merchants in St. Louis.” Although the town was still raw and unfinished (like other such early urban creations on the trans-Appalachian frontier), ambitious residents and transients alike agreed that its location would make it a central entrepôt in the expansion of the nation toward the West. The arrival of the first steamboat in St. Louis seemed to confirm the opening of a new era in trade and communication along the axis of the great river, and who was better located to benefit from this new future than a city almost at the junction of the three great rivers in the western country? As Americans expanded in numbers and influence, the town of St. Louis changed character. It became distinctly less French. It was more agricultural and less focused on the fur trade. The leading fur-trading families such as the Chouteaus found themselves under siege from the aggressive and ambitious newcomers.21 The institution of slavery had deep roots in the Missouri Territory (renamed in 1812 when the Territory of Orleans took the name Louisiana). St. Louis had a sizable slave population at the time of the American assumption of sovereignty. These numbers increased rapidly for the whole territory after 1815, with the influx of large numbers of immigrants from Kentucky and Tennessee. The number of slaves in Missouri Territory exceeded ten thousand by 1820. Over the same ten years, the free black population as a proportion of the territory’s population declined. The arrival of the Americans in the aftermath of the purchase of Louisiana led to a tightening of laws (in St. Louis and at the territorial level) that controlled the slave population and to a gradual erosion of the rights of free blacks. These included increasing restrictions on the right to assemble and the right to be out at night. The rising uneasiness about slave conspiracies had



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worked its way upriver from New Orleans and the surrounding parishes.22 Soon after the opening of the First Great Migration, the country bordering the Sangamon River in Illinois received a similar acclaim. Robert Pulliam led a group of five from St. Clair County (Illinois Territory) on the Mississippi north to the Sangamon country as early as 1817. Pulliam drove a herd of cattle at a leisurely pace through the endless rich prairie meadows. The advance party trapped over the winter, and with the coming of spring, they made maple sugar from the groves of trees. They returned south in April 1818, “with fat stock, furs, and several hundred pounds of maple sugar to trade.” John Mack Faragher charts their return next year for permanent settlement. Like others raised in the western country, Pulliam was attracted by the mixture of hardwood forest and prairie openings. The Sugar Creek settlement took root and began to grow. The Sangamon country was a hunter’s paradise, like Kentucky two generations earlier, and the early settler families, such as the Pulliams, shared the hunting landscape with the Kickapoos. Some of the first Anglo-American families brought black servants with them to the Sangamon country.23 The movement to publicize the region began in the summer of 1819, when a correspondent wrote in the Edwardsville Spectator of the attraction of the “Sangamo”(as it was called): “The prairies are too large, but they are the richest and best kinds of prairies, the uplands as well as the bottoms. The timber is very large and lofty, and generally approaches the prairies with the fulness of the interior, without underwood or barrens. The country is well watered with large and small springs . . . the streams continue to hold the usual quantity of water during the dry season.” The Sangamo offered “some enchanting situations for agriculture and habitation.” The writer concluded that the number of settlers in the region did not exceed three hundred families. Immigrants rapidly swelled the number, and in 1821 the state legislature established Sangamon County.24 Earlier experiences had laid down the outlines of economic development, the patterns of trade, and the routes to wealth for

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the pioneers who participated in the Great Migration. This new generation followed, by and large, these guidelines. Even the poorest settlers hoped to accumulate substantial landholdings. William McCutcheon was one of those who moved to the frontier almost without capital, but his ambitions were no less real. He brought a strong constitution and a willingness to work. Settling in Parke County (Indiana), he hired himself out for wages or kind. Gradually he built an economic base. “If we have luck we will soon have a nice start,” he wrote to his father in 1830. “I hav had to work out for all the wheat we got since we come hear and for a cow and calf and other things or I wood been out of money before now wich keep me back in giting my farm open.” Still McCutcheon managed to cut three thousand rails and put nine acres in corn and one-half acre in flax. He also had two cows and two calves. He wrote: “I had got a nice stock of hogs but last winter when the snow was on the ground twelve of my best that I allowed to kill this fall got into my clearing where I was burning logs and brush and got all burnt to death but fore and they got so scorcht that they had done no good since—that instead of having poark to sell I will hardly have what will doo me.”25 Although the popular image of the First Great Migration was of individuals and families occupying tracts of “Congress lands” (as the public domain was known), the varieties of people also included numbers of landless laborers. Sometimes these workers sought to save capital, through day labor or through tenancy, to establish their own farms. Others developed skills associated with occupations that supported agricultural enterprise. Certainly the accounts of immigrants identify these individuals, although they say little about them. William McCutcheon was an example of a man who worked for others and eventually established his own farm. Edward Coles wrote of the variety of labor associated with opening up a farm on the rich flood plain in Madison County, but the actual labor was done by his slave labor force, brought from Virginia to Illinois. In its move from outside Cincinnati to Parke County, Indiana, the TenBrook family had the assistance of two hired teamsters. Once arrived, Jacob and John TenBrook cleared land with the help of a hired hand. Elijah Iles moved his store of goods upriver to the future



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site of Springfield by employing five men who towed the flatboat up the Sangamon River with a long towline. The presence of such laborers developed two separate strains of frontier peoples: those associated with opening new lands with the anticipation of future landownership, and those who were always itinerant laborers on someone else’s land.26 Most of the settlers on the new frontiers of the Old Northwest and Missouri, even in the first years, sought something to sell. “The principal object pursued at this time, is to raise a crop of corn and a great number of hogs, which embraces almost entirely the whole surplus of the country,” noted the editor of the Evansville Gazette in 1824 in a comment that summarized the economy of the western country in this early period.27 The buyers and the means of transportation were more varied. For the first few years incoming immigrants might provide a strong market for corn, meat, and livestock to start their own herds. Eventually, however, production outstripped the capacity of new arrivals to absorb it, and given the widespread availability of land, every new immigrant was likely to be a producer within a few years. The way to a larger market lay, initially at least, by water, to the small towns downstream, thence to the market ports on the Ohio and Mississippi or to New Orleans itself. The steamboat was a dramatic change in the development of western commerce. Steam navigation had first appeared on the western waters with the voyage of the steamboat New Orleans from Pittsburgh to New Orleans in 1811. After the war other vessels and trips quickly established steam transportation on western rivers. The response was euphoric. “Who could or would have dared to conjecture, that in 1819, we would have witnessed the arrival of a steam-boat from Philadelphia and New York,” exclaimed the editor of the Missouri Gazette. “Yet such is the case.” In spite of the outward enthusiasm, the influence of steam navigation on the western waters spread slowly—at least in the first decade. Steamboats plied their trade along the major waters of the trans-Appalachian West, especially the Ohio, Mississippi, Kentucky, and Tennessee, and later along the Tombigbee and Alabama, where their captains and owners found the safest passage, thickest settlements, and largest profits. They did not pen-

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etrate to the most remote settlements; nor did they appear in large numbers. Seventeen steamboats engaged in western commerce in 1817. Three years later the figure had risen to sixtynine, but this was a modest number to serve the more than two million people found west of the mountains by the census takers in 1820. Competition for service was, accordingly, intense and foreshadowed that for railroads half a century later. Not all communities succeeded. As late as 1824, for example, the refusal of steamboats to stop was a source of bitter complaint at Evansville (Indiana). With revived prosperity of the 1820s, steamboats expanded in numbers and geography. Enterprising captains ventured up distant rivers, and the arrival of the steamboat became a benchmark in the economic life of the community: to Terre Haute in Indiana in 1823; Lafayette, 1826; Spencer, 1828; and to Peoria in Illinois in 1830.28 Whatever the delay in the arrival of steamboats, water transportation remained crucial to the trade of the western country. In writing of the prospects for his new land purchase on the Illinois side, opposite St. Louis, Gershom Flagg commented, “The situation of this Territory is good for trade having the advantage of Water carriage on all sides of the Mississippi on the West the Ohio & the Wabash S.E & the Kaskaskia and Illinois in the interior of the Territory.” When a canal was cut to connect the headwaters of the Illinois River to the Chicago River (and its access to Lake Michigan), Flagg continued, “This done we have water communication from almost any part of the territory to the states of Indiana Ohio & Pennsylvania on either side. . . . also with New York by way of Lake Erie & an easy Communication with the Ocean by way of New Orleans.” That Flagg wrote in detail about water transportation and little about roads and bridges (except to complain of their dismal state) spoke to the central role played by rivers and lakes in the lives of the early settlers of the trans-Appalachian frontier.29 Most of the growing commerce of the western country went downriver by flatboat and keelboat. These were suitable conveyances for people with modest quantities of western produce and little capital. Some pioneers flatboated for a living. Archibald Shaw’s father floated produce on a flatboat from



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Switzerland County (Indiana) to New Orleans. Business was so good that he continued the voyages annually until 1820. Early settlers on the Lamotte Prairie in Crawford County (Illinois) built flatboats and sent them by way of the Wabash River to New Orleans. The principal crop was corn, but the flats also carried sides of bacon, honey, and butter. The venture was often a cooperative one, with several families joining together. On the return trip overland the pioneers would bring sugar, coffee, molasses, and endless stories of adventures from the outside world. In the early 1820s, perhaps as many as three thousand flatboats floated down the Ohio each year, a figure suggesting the search for a cash market, the demand for agricultural produce in the South, and the rising importance of New Orleans as an outlet for the products of the western country. The tributaries of the Ohio were also routes to the interior for ambitious traders with strong backs, or the means to employ strong backs, and up the streams went keelboats loaded with goods for the interior. As early as the spring of 1821 a keelboat (bigger than a flatboat and equipped with mast and sail) reached the new town of Indianapolis on the White River, where it took off a load of corn.30 Facilities for transportation by land developed more slowly. Almost all so-called roads in the western country were poor and inadequately maintained by county supervisors. They were heavily used (this was one of the problems) by immigrants moving north away from the rivers. They were also used for communication, but not usually for the movement of bulk commodities, at least not where alternative water transportation was available. Politicians and editors, not to mention merchants and farmers, talked constantly of the need for better roads. With the accelerated movement of population away from the great rivers, the need became more pressing. By 1830 pioneers had penetrated far into the interior of the Old Northwest and settled on lands distant from water transportation. The establishment of state capitals at Indianapolis and Springfield, both inland from the Ohio River, increased the necessity of better overland routes. Roads of a kind gradually connected the settlements on the White, Ohio, and Wabash rivers. Illinois lagged somewhat behind, although there

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were roads running Shawneetown-Kaskaskia-St. Louis and, later, a track from Vandalia to the Sangamon country.31 The commercial world of postwar America was more complex—even in the western country—than that of an earlier generation. It brought forth forms and occupations in proportion to its more complicated needs. Among the new economic enterprises that appeared were a large transportation industry, with boat builders, pilots, and a new waterfront world. Some of the most thriving of the auxiliaries were merchants. Like the multiplicity of frontier experiences, these came in various forms. Some were merchant capitalists, incipient bankers who borrowed and lent on a grand scale; others were middlemen in the rising agricultural trade from frontier to market; still another group was content to keep a store at the crossroads. All came in great numbers. When the English traveler Thomas Hulme passed through the village of Princeton (Indiana) in 1818, he was astounded by the large herds of hogs in the countryside and the large number of merchants in the town. “I was sorry to see very little doing in this town. They cannot all keep stores and taverns!” he wrote in his journal. “One of the storekeepers told me he does not sell more than ten thousand dollars value per annum: he ought, then, to manufacture something, and not spend nine-tenths of his time lolling with a segar in his mouth.” According to reports, however, storekeeping was profitable. The larger numbers of people, the spread of commercial agriculture, and new transportation facilities gave an assurance of trade that John May, Lardner Clark, and other merchants of the previous generation lacked. From the beginning of settlement, many of the new pioneer families bought something, and as their funds expanded with trade opportunities (and sometimes without), so did their appetites for “eastern goods.” Those with funds to invest acted on this opportunity. T. V. Denny wrote in 1818 that the immigrant to the western country could “make a good profit in a small store.” John Reynolds, later governor of Illinois, used his profits from land speculations to buy two dry goods stores.32 Moses U. Payne of Versailles (Missouri) was one of the many village merchants. He traded with small farmers, and his business style reflected not so much his own desires as the condition



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of his clientele. From time to time he received cash payments, but most of his sales were on credit. When (and if) his customers squared their accounts, it was largely in produce. In 1814, for example, Payne accepted in payment sewing thread, skins, bacon, flour, one shoat, beef, potatoes, turnips, meal, and wood. One affluent client left funds to the sum of $552 on deposit at the store, making Payne something of a banker. In general, the scope of his business was safe, small, and secure in spite of occasional nonpayments. His location in a town also provided him with certain comforts and the advantages of an urban society.33 Some ambitious merchants went out to the distant new villages. They paddled or poled up the Illinois or the upper Wabash, or to the Boon’s Lick settlements. Elijah Iles went to the Sangamon country. In 1823, finding a stake in the ground to mark the site of a town named Springfield, he determined to exploit the region’s commercial possibilities. Iles made arrangements for the construction of a storehouse “to be set near the stake, eighteen feet square, with sheds on the sides for shelter.” He then set out for St. Louis, where he bought a large supply of goods. Chartering a boat, he shipped his cargo up the Illinois to the mouth of the Sangamon. “The boat was towed up the river by five men walking on shore and pulling a tow line about three hundred feet long,” he wrote. The crew dumped Iles and his store of goods at the mouth of the Sangamon, in the middle of the woods, fifty miles from the site of Springfield. Iles left his goods stacked by the river: “As no one lived near, I had no fear of thieves.” He walked through the marshy ground to Springfield, where he hired wagons and teams to carry his twenty-five tons of cargo to the village. His was the first store in Springfield and probably one of the first buildings. In the first few years he was without competition and traded about as much with Indian people as with settlers. He later wrote, “My customers were widely and thinly scattered over the territory,” an area subsequently organized into fourteen counties. “Many had to come more than eighty miles to trade,” he went on. “They were poor, and their purchases very light.” The town of Springfield grew up around the store. Business increased rapidly with the growth of population, especially after the first land sales in 1823. Like

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other prosperous merchants, Iles bought land and, through careful management, developed a thriving farm. In his case, as others, merchants appeared together with or even before farm families.34 Ambitious entrepreneurs such as Iles performed a number of services for their growing communities. They served as financial institutions on the frontier—combining the duties of storekeeper, exporter, and banker. Their contributions to the development of urban life were also noteworthy, especially in the areas of legal, governmental, religious, educational, and cultural affairs. Trade thrives on settled, stable conditions, and merchants worked energetically toward these ends. They often stayed on to grow up with the community and the surrounding countryside. In addition to merchants in town and entrepreneurs on the edge of the newly settled lands, there were merchant-traders even farther out on the frontier—beyond agriculture, at least initially. The Ewings of Fort Wayne (Indiana) belonged to this group. Locating at an important portage site between the Maumee and Wabash rivers, the Ewings directed their early trade to the surrounding Indian peoples. As the Indians began to depart in the mid-1820s, the Ewing brothers moved into a variety of other economic ventures: land purchases and speculation, livestock for sale to migrating Indian tribes, and transportation of goods and various services connected with immigration to the region. With the arrival of the agricultural pioneers, the Ewings offered many of the services of bankers: credit and a circulating medium, loans for land purchases. As commission agents they were also much in demand. To the extent that the area around Fort Wayne could be said to have experienced economic development beyond subsistence agriculture in this period, the Ewings were a moving force behind it.35 With the increasing complexity of frontier economic life came a need for banks, and in the years after the war banks expanded out into the frontier almost as rapidly as people. In 1818, a generation removed from the founding of Marietta, Ohio had twenty-eight chartered banks to serve its large population and commercial economy. The legislature of the Indiana Territory chartered two banks in 1814—at Vincennes and Madison—and



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permitted two additional private banks of issue. A territorial law of 1815 even granted rights of note issue to individuals. In the period from 1816 to 1818 the Illinois legislature chartered banks at Shawneetown, Edwardsville, Kaskaskia, and Cairo. The territory of Missouri had an incorporated bank as early as 1813. This listing reflects only the beginning of western banking, which expanded by leaps and bounds up to 1819, and far more slowly and carefully in the 1820s. These banks shared certain basic characteristics. Generally they were in urban centers, and the sites of banks in Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri provide a catalogue of the most important towns in the territories and young states. Banks engaged in several economic activities to facilitate trade, including deposit, note issue, and note discount. The benefit to merchants was evident, and the spread of a banking system accompanied the spread of commercial agriculture. Speculative activities gradually dominated much of early banking in the western country, and in the economic crisis of 1819 western banks failed disastrously. The sense of outrage left by this experience would emerge later in a warm response to the anti-bank views of Andrew Jackson.36 The contested nature of several aspects of life in the western country was more intense in the increasingly troublesome issue of slavery and questions that surrounded freed former slaves’ and escaped slaves’ presence in communities. At its heart was the continuing legal and political struggle over the status of slavery in the territories organized under the Northwest Ordinance. Article VI of the ordinance specified: “There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory” except in case of punishment for a crime. The provisions of the ordinance with respect to slavery were later modified in the case of the Southwest Territory (later the state of Tennessee), but its article remained in force north of the Ohio. In truth, many old and some new settlements were in violation of the prohibition of slavery. Furthermore, the ordinance specified that residents of French origin around Kaskaskia and Vincennes were exceptions because of their ancient laws and customs.37 Indeed, several families in the old French settlement around Vincennes had

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slaves, and some of the families immigrating into Indiana and Illinois from Kentucky were bringing their slaves with them. In the eyes of those determined to promote the growth of the territories, a separate but no less compelling argument was need for new immigrants and a labor force. The new territories north of the Ohio sought growth through numbers, and the growth and development of lands benefited from a labor force of any condition. From the perspective of territorial officials, to prohibit the institution of slavery handicapped the territory in its economic development and in the political arena in its search for an increased population that would propel it to statehood. William Henry Harrison, governor of Indiana Territory, vigorously lobbied for the suspension of this article of the Northwest Ordinance for ten years. He argued that during this time, slaves brought to Indiana and their children could “be considered, and continued in the same state of Servitude, as if they had remained in those parts of the United States where Slavery is permitted and from whence they may have been removed.” While Congress considered Harrison’s request, the territorial legislature in Indiana passed laws to continue the condition of servitude through lifetime indentures and to provide for control of the slave population.38 Opposition to Harrison gradually developed, and antislavery voices grew in volume, in part as a matter of principle and in part as a vehicle for attacking Harrison. Indiana entered the Union in 1816 without slavery, but the presence of large numbers of slaves and the legal condition of freed slaves continued to be a contentious issue for another decade.39 Edward Coles’s account of taking his slave labor force from Virginia to Illinois reflected the presence of slaves in Illinois Territory. Coles, an individual of conscience and rectitude (he later freed his slaves), saw nothing unusual in moving a group of slaves to the new territory. As someone with experience in government, presumably he was aware that Article VI of the Northwest Ordinance had forbidden the institution of slavery in the territories organizing north of the Ohio. In practice, hundreds of slaves were already on the lands north of the Ohio, and in the years after 1815, others were brought there from the South. Settler families came across the river from Kentucky, bringing their



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slaves with them; many Virginians, like Coles, immigrated from farther east. Separated from Indiana Territory in 1809, the citizens and appointed officials in Illinois Territory soon confronted the slavery question. The arguments on behalf of slavery were much the same: a growing, expanding territory needed more people and a willing labor force. In truth, Illinois had a century-long history with legal slavery. By 1818, most of the surviving slave population north of the Ohio River lived in Illinois, concentrated in the southern part of the territory around the American Bottom. The constitution Illinois presented to Congress on applying for admission to the Union reflected a degree of compromise. The rights of original French slave owners were recognized, and an indentured system of servitude kept the institution of slavery alive in modified form. Yet, the provision for indentures specified that the children of these indentured servants would be freed (males at twenty-one, females eighteen), providing a terminal point to the institution. That proslavery groups saw this reality was reflected in their attempts to reestablish slavery in Illinois. This attempt coincided with the governorship of Edward Coles, the transplanted Virginian who arrived in Illinois Territory with slaves. Coles freed his slaves in an elaborate ceremony in 1819; three years later, he was elected governor. Proslavery residents now proposed a referendum on a motion to call a constitutional convention to revise the existing constitution to allow slavery. After a lively campaign across the state, the vote in August 1824 clearly defeated the proposal, with the southern counties generally in favor, those to the north opposed. James Davis remarked of the results, “this critical referendum sparked angry words and veiled threats, but practically no violence.” This popular vote ended the issue of legal slavery in Illinois, but the rights of freed African Americans remained under continuing assault.40 Whether slave or free, the territories and states of the Old Northwest and Missouri had to come to terms with the presence of free blacks among them. During the years of the First Great Migration, the territories of the Old Northwest became states (except Ohio, already a state in 1803). Whether in territories or

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states, the people north of the Ohio River continued to sort out the legal and social conditions of African Americans, slave and free. Everywhere, whatever their conditions, slave or free, blacks were not regarded as citizens. As R. Douglas Hurt remarked about frontier Ohio, “Ohioans abhorred slavery, but they did not oppose servitude or believe in social equality or civil liberty for blacks.” Accordingly, blacks did not vote, serve on juries, or testify against whites. Within the rapidly growing state of Ohio, “the frontier was certainly not a land of opportunity when race determined relations.” Because of its location, Ohio was a major stop in the flight to freedom. Few blacks stayed in Ohio, however, and in 1830, the free black population of the state was only 9,586. They lived in towns along the Ohio River. The rise of the colonization movement in 1816 to move freed blacks back to Africa testified to the strong feelings against their presence and the continuing belief in their inferiority.41 The same conditions and attitudes prevailed in Indiana, except that Indiana had more southerners and proportionately a larger black population. Indiana had a determined political movement to overturn or evade Article VI of the Northwest Ordinance, led by Governor William Henry Harrison. These several attempts failed, and the constitution of 1816 forbade slavery. Yet the new state was not friendly to black people. A law passed in 1831 required free blacks to register with county officials and post a bond for good behavior. In the face of this ongoing racial hostility, African Americans organized their own cohesive societies, fashioning institutions that would give them support and a degree of independence. The most important of these were black churches, whose foundations date from the 1830s. The southern influence in Indiana minimized the presence of antislavery agitation that began in some places north of the Ohio.42 Illinois had the smallest total population, the most extensive landscapes, and proportionately the largest numbers of blacks, and similar racial attitudes. Supporters of slavery in the southern part of the state forced a referendum in 1824, and although the proslavery forces lost, they showed political strength in the southern part of the state. James Davis writes that the result “fatally wounded de facto slavery masquerading as indentured



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servitude, which largely disappeared by 1840.” By this time, Illinois had been a state for more than twenty years. In general, the legislature of the new state disliked the institution of slavery because it would mean the increased presence of blacks. Accordingly, African Americans of any condition were not welcome in Illinois any more than elsewhere in the Old Northwest. As for the role of blacks in frontier society, they were clearly not regarded as citizens, whether slave or free. Racial attitudes placed blacks on the lowest rung. Wherever possible they were ignored. Illinois had a substantial number of runaway slaves because of its geographic location bordering both Kentucky and Missouri, but these runaways came to Illinois without encouragement from the legislature, who wanted to keep out blacks of any status.43 The roles of women in the first great migration were defined in large part by the endless challenges of moving, opening new lands, and everywhere, administering to the needs of their families. Within the varieties of people, there were already issues of class. For those with resources, the voyage to the West could be an adventure. One woman wrote of a trip west to Illinois in 1822 by carriage that “it was still a great event to undertake a journey to Illinois.” Once arrived, many women of education and social standing thought the West a barbarous place. One woman wrote from Marietta (Ohio) that the Ohio country was “a savage land” but, at the same time, it “answered every expectation.” These were the contradictions that characterized the western country in the years of the First Great Migration. The society and culture of the West was primitive; its economic opportunities seemed infinite. In short, here was a “bountiful nature; cultural desert.” In the upsurge of optimism that accompanied the waves of immigration from 1815 to 1819, women continued to share multiple burdens. Although the challenges of the new country might blur gender lines—men and women worked in the fields and fought wildfires together—the outlines remained the same. The male members dominated the households over which they presided. Marriage was a permanent condition within which women had few options. In this agricultural world, with its emphasis on the family, a woman often married early. In Ohio, a girl could marry

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at fourteen, a boy at seventeen, with parental consent. Aside from the customary work in the home and the fields, with responsibility for childbirth and child rearing, women were constantly impressed into service to nurse the injured, ill, and aged. Frontier people were often ill, seasonably in the fever season, prey to epidemics at other times. Women bore the full brunt of this dimension of frontier life, as well as others. In general, in the new constitutions of the new states, grounds for divorce were limited to adultery, bigamy, and impotence. These grounds would be expanded, but only in the future.44 The diversity of frontier life that emerged in this period contrasts sharply with the standardization of several institutions, especially those concerned with government. From the intersection of the Ohio River and the Pennsylvania line to the Boon’s Lick country of Missouri, uniformity of government and law gave a degree of continuity to frontier life. Some structure of government at the county, territorial, or state level was, by this time, widespread. It was a strong and hardy pioneer family who could penetrate sufficiently far into the distant reaches of the western country in the 1820s to escape the reach of the county court, at least for more than a few months. The struggle over what kinds of institutions of government (and all that flows from them) to establish had taken place in an earlier generation. By 1815 it was largely over. Territorial government had successfully passed through the experimental stage and spread across the western country. Territorial governors or state legislatures created new counties on a regular basis. The struggle for office and the battle over the location of the county seat were an inevitable and continuing feature of the frontier political scene. A focal point of the institutional structure of life in the western country continued to be the county court. These courts had been on the frontier of the trans-Appalachian West for more than a generation by 1815. They were universally present. They were also organized with great competence and speed. Even as Elijah Iles made arrangements for his store and goods and other settlers built their cabins, the Sangamon County Commissioners Court met for the first time. The initial terms dealt with matters



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of organization, especially the selection of a constable and clerk. Appointments and recommendations (to the governor for the office of justice of the peace) filled the pages of the court journal. The commissioners located the county seat at “a certain point in the prairie near John Kelly’s field on the waters of Spring Creek at a stake marked 2D . . . called and known by the name of Springfield.” Much administrative business needed attention at the convening of the June term. The commissioners gave the job of building a jail to the lowest bidder—“Robert Hambleton at Eighty-four dollars, and seventy five cents”—to be completed by the first Monday in September. In response to the petition “of Sundry citizens of Sangamon County [who] pray for a public road runing,” the court sent three commissioners, James Tewly, Stephen England, and Robert Pulliam, “to vue Said road and make report to the next term of this court.” The court laid off election districts—or “precinks”—by natural boundaries (e.g., “opposite the mouth of Spring creek runing northern course between the waters of Fancy creek and Higgins Creek to the northern extream of the County including all west of Edwards old trace”) and called for the election of militia officers. It also established townships and levied a tax to defray county expenses: “Horses, neat cattle wheel carriage stock in trade and distillery” to be assessed as taxable by the county assessor. By the end of 1821 the county government was established, staffed, and in operation. It now entered into a routine managing roads, orphans, county buildings, juries, and similar duties. All were necessary services to the citizens of the county, and the needs and solutions were largely the same across the frontiers of the Old Northwest.45 The administrative structure of the county created an early bureaucracy. People in growing counties needed expanded services, and the lengthening list of offices and duties brought to the fore a figure that, if not new, now appeared in larger numbers than ever before—the frontier bureaucrat. His work was not dramatic, but the citizens of his county—great and small—came to him or knew of him, and his signature and the seal of his many offices appeared on thousands of documents. Amos Williams of Vermilion County (Illinois) was one such public figure. He came to Illinois in 1821 by way of Vincennes and Terre

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Haute and settled in Edgar County. There he surveyed and taught school in Paris, the county seat, among other places. He also served as clerk of the county court. In 1826 he helped to organize Vermilion County and was among those who, the following year, laid out the county seat at Danville. In view of his experience in Edgar County and his prominence in early Vermilion County, Williams was a logical choice for the office of clerk of the commissioner’s court. Soon thereafter he became clerk of the circuit court, judge of probate court, postmaster, and county recorder. The official business of the county—with its innumerable transactions including everything from the issuing of birth certificates to the probate of wills—flowed through his hands. The documents that came across his desk needed his signature, and he collected the fees and perquisites due his many offices. In time that he could spare from official duties, Williams built a number of mills in the county. His career represents the rise of the county bureaucracy, and he had his counterpart in the many other counties organized in this period.46 Williams was also an example of the early frontier school teacher. Schools and schooling on the frontier functioned without large-scale institutional direction in these years. Education was still very much an individual or family enterprise. The “articles of agreement” between Williams and eleven subscribing parents read: That the said [Amos] Williams engages to teach a School in the town of Paris, Edgar County, Illinois, for the term of six months, (Saturdays excepted) at the rate of Five Dollars per scholar, one half of said sum to be paid in trade at cash prices; the other half to be paid in money.—School to commence on or before the first Monday of October next, if a sufficient number of Scholars can be had—The subscribers, on their part, engage to furnish a sufficient quantity of Firewood and keep the Schoolhouse in good repair during the above term.47

Schooling for most families and communities was a secondary priority. Ohio entered the union in 1803, yet Gershom Flagg could write of the state in 1816, “there is no regulation for educating the youth by common Schools. The inhabitants are from



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all parts North and East of Kentucky and are the most ignorant people I ever saw.” As a New Englander, Flagg was severe in his judgments, but his account was probably true. And the newer states to the west, Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri, were not more generous in their arrangements.48 The early frontier societies seemed as loosely structured as the vast landscape over which they spread themselves. Judicial circuits were “like the young gentleman’s whiskers, ‘extensively laid out, but thinly settled,’ ” wrote Sandford Cox. Yet both land and societies came under direction from the growing institutional structure. The change was early evident in towns. Cox, who observed the transformation of Indiana’s New Purchase—a large portion of central Indiana acquired from Indian people by treaty in 1818—saw “aristocracy” appear in Crawfordsville in the guise of “a new pair of silver plated spurs” and “a pair of curiously embroidered gloves.” “Society is in a chaotic state,” he wrote, “but the floating elements begin to indicate some definite formation.” Of the institutions that brought “definite formation” to the mass of pioneering humanity that was the First Great Migration, Cox specifically cited law, the court system, and organized religion. His instincts were correct.49 From the first settlements, some early frontier people were litigious. Petty debts and land business formed the favorite subjects for civil suits. Business from merchants alone could have supported the swarm of ambitious men who called themselves lawyers and came flocking to the new frontiers. A correspondent assured Ninian Edwards that suits brought by St. Louis merchants would maintain the lawyers in frontier Illinois. So lawyers came, began practice, settled in, and hoped to marry advantageously.50 One of the most important activities of the frontier lawyer was riding circuit with the judge, for the young lawyer must go where cases were, and the itinerant nature of the job gave many an opportunity to test political ambitions. On court days the fledging lawyers “mingled among the people in the court yard with an air of superiority, as they electioneered for seats in the next legislature.”51 So lawyers crisscrossed the settling landscape, stopping in the enlarging settlements to plead in court.

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In spite of these young lawyers—and perhaps because of them—the judicial system was, in large part, the work of amateurs. Take the circuit court of Indiana as an example. The presiding judge, chosen by the legislature, was a man of legal pretension and training if not a great legal mind; the two associate judges, called “side judges,” were elected by the people in each county and, by voting together, could overrule the presiding judge. This was “equity” and “local law” carried to its logical end, reaffirming that the ordinary people of the frontier knew as much or more about justice and equity under the law as anyone with formal legal training. The clerk of court was a local figure of importance who could presumably write a legible hand; sheriffs were chosen for strength of arm and voice. The most dramatic part of the public proceedings, however, was the young lawyer’s “pleading” for his client. Oliver H. Smith has left an account of the judiciary system in early southeastern Indiana: “All was silent as death, when the young ‘squire,’ afterward Judge Charles H. Test, arose and addressed the court: ‘If the court please—,’ He was here interrupted by Judge Mitchell from the bench, ‘Yes, we do please. Go to the bottom of the case, young man; the people have come in to hear the lawyers plead.’ The young Squire, encouraged by the kind response of the judge, proceeded to address the jury some three hours.”52 The court was more than a judicial proceeding; it was a social-political-economic-cultural event. People came for miles around to enjoy society, witness the drama of the court, pass judgment on the learning of judge and bar, and consummate financial transactions. Court day was a kind of medieval market day with entertainment. The spectacle might be spontaneous and physical, in the case of the inevitable fistfight, or it might be official, in the case of the court proceedings. Sandford Cox also wrote from Indiana’s New Purchase of the early presence of churches in giving form to frontier society. “The Baptists talk of building a small house for worship,” he wrote. “The Rev. Hackaliah Vredenburg, of the Methodist denomination, preached here a few Sabbaths ago, and took incipient steps for the organization of a church, while the Presbyterians think strongly of building a college north-west of town,



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between Nathaniel Dunn’s and the graveyard.”53 By this time, America’s Protestant churches had prepared for the First Great Migration. They spread over the frontier almost before the pioneer wagons were unloaded. If their reach and plans sometimes exceeded their finances and the numbers of willing circuit riders, they nonetheless moved in an organized way to bring organized religion to the distant frontiers. Church officials and secular leaders alike believed that frontier people needed guidance on the path to law and the establishment of social order, especially in that earliest period when institutions were in flux. Through the comment of the day runs the theme that the frontier represented great temptations for young people. The open-ended nature of the world, its opportunities to enjoy gratification in all sorts of glorious (and to some irresponsible) ways, needed to be controlled. Yet the shaping institutions of church and school and the small-town standards for behavior were only emerging. Much attention had to be given to young people to keep them at work in a useful way, to keep them from straying to those pleasures so available on all sides, to instill in them the need to persevere like their parents, who were locked in a struggle with the land. Although temptations for idleness and enjoyment lay all around, the dangers were especially great when the subsistence period was passed. The more intangible drive toward estate building then replaced the immediate needs of shelter, food, and clothing. Some young people, who were reluctant to work fourteen hours a day in the fields, might not fully appreciate this new goal. By confirming traditional values of work and obedience, the church attempted to deal, in part, with this problem. Supporting the church in its emphasis on morality and social order were two satellite institutions, the Bible society and the Sabbath school. Both were associated with established denominations and urban areas. Bible societies appeared in conjunction with churches, ministered to the needs of adults, and had as their object the wide circulation of Bibles and other religious writings. Sabbath schools focused on the young. Volunteer teachers guided the pupils (divided by age group) in the study of

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the Bible and the inculcation of moral behavior. The annual report of the Indianapolis Sabbath School noted, “The memories of many have been stored with large portions of hymns, catechism and scripture, and the knowledge of the school generally in the doctrines and precepts of the gospel greatly increased; and the seeds of religious instruction appears to have taken root in the conscience, spring up, and the field to be whitening for the harvest.” Periodic public examinations or recitations might be held for the gratification of the parents. Both long- and shortrange benefits accrued to the community from such institutions. Wrote one editor: “We have heard it proclaimed that no Sabbath school scholar has ever been condemned at the bar as a criminal; we have heard of the genius that has been elicited, the tempers and habits that have been corrected, and may we not with confidence look forward to the most important mental and moral improvements with the rising generation, from the effects of this institution?”54 The “religious character” of a community was important on the frontier, at least to a certain literate and influential class of people. The equation was direct and unmistakable: religion was morality and orderly behavior. “A few weeks ago our streets exhibited little else than intemperance and profanity,” reflected one observer, “but now, so far has the scene changed that morality seems to predominate in every quarter, through the day, and at night the sounds of prayer, praise, and the shouts of the new born souls cheer the evening shades.”55 The church’s strengths in this respect were twofold. First was the power and strength of the Lord, and the individual’s accountability to him. “We believe that by nature we are fallen and depraved Cretures,” read the covenant of the Shale Creek Baptist Church in Bond County (Illinois). It continued, “We believe the joys of the righteous and the punishment of the wicked are Eternal.” Second, the church itself acted as a check on individual misbehavior. Those who failed to attend meetings, for example, were guilty of “an offense and lay themselves liable to be reproved by the Church.” Careful procedures for the mediation of disputes between and among members were also described in



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detail. Throughout this period the church was a most effective device for promoting personal harmony in an atmosphere of strained relations and frequent resort to the courts.56 With its structured hierarchy of officials and courts, the church exercised many of the functions of a government. In a region where the capacity of government to constrain behavior was sporadic, churches performed an especially important function. Most of the settlers in the period after 1815 felt that government should provide services such as roads, mail, and protection from the Indians. The church inherited the emphasis on personal conduct that had been so much a part of the early governments in Kentucky and Tennessee. The organization and expanding influence of the church can be seen in the expansion of the Presbyterians across the Old Northwest. In the autumn of 1824 the Reverend Isaac Reed, minister to a church in Owen County (Indiana), received a call from the people of Edgar County (Illinois) to minister to the needs of Presbyterians there and to do missionary work under the sponsorship of the Connecticut Missionary Society. These settlers, in his words, “had been about two years there with their families, and no minister had yet found his way to their settlement.” He described his enthusiastic reception in detail. For thirteen days Reed rode over the county, preaching, baptizing, burying, examining, organizing, ministering to the sick and elderly, and holding communion. At Big Raccoon Creek he found the beginnings of a church: “It was formed near three years ago, by a missionary of the General Assembly, but has no minister nor meeting house, nor meeting, except when a missionary comes along.” At the New Hope meetinghouse, Reed preached a funeral sermon, and the congregation promptly subscribed toward its publication. He organized a church at Paris, “the county seat of Edgar county, but [it] is a very small place of about 8 cabins. It lies on the prairie.” He ordained a ruling elder for each of the other churches he visited.57 The establishment of a church was an important milestone in the development of any community or town and was looked forward to with fervent expectation by lay promoters as well as

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ministers. The presence of religious institutions implied a sense of uplift and settled condition that was especially gratifying to frontier areas. Their organization was as important as the founding of a newspaper or the opening of a bank. In 1825 Reed journeyed to the infant town of Indianapolis, where he assisted in the installation of George Bush as minister of the Presbyterian Church. The editor of the Indiana Journal gave the event extensive coverage, for he viewed the ordination as a benchmark for Indianapolis and its citizens: This is understood to be the first Presbyterian Ordinance which has taken place in this state. And, when it is considered that but little more than three and a half years have elapsed since the first foot of land was sold in this or any adjoining county; and that, while other denominations exist in this town and are supplied with regular preaching, the Presbyterian Congregation has for more than a year and a half enjoyed the stated labours of a resident clergyman, and have erected a meeting house, and that a Sabbath School has been in operation here nearly two years, it is somewhat encouraging towards the future religious character of Indianapolis.58

With the strong influence of the church and its obvious importance to the western country, matters of doctrine now became increasingly significant. Differences of opinion between and even within denominations were a continuing part of life on the new frontier after 1815. Some pioneers fought with great determination over abstract theological questions, for to them their salvation depended on such matters. It was no longer necessary simply to minister to the new settlements; the ministry must be doctrinally sound. To be a Methodist no longer sufficed: the new question was, What kind of Methodist? “For several years between 1810 and 1820,” Allen Wiley later wrote, there was a most fierce and unpleasant controversy among Methodist preachers, concerning infant purity on the one hand, and innate depravity on the other. The preachers and people of the present day [1845] can form no estimation of the asperity of feeling and language which prevailed in those days of bitter wa-



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ters, even among good men and able ministers. When I look back, it seems to me little less than a miracle that the church was not rent into a thousand fragments.59

The cold numbers of population, crops, and churches do not sufficiently convey either the force of numbers or the hard work of those who went to the frontier during the Great Migration. Behind every Fourth of July oration on the doctrines of growth and progress were the stories of individuals and families who took the land, placed it under cultivation, and had faith that this new experience (for all its uncertainties and mysteries) would be better than what they left behind. This generation of frontier peoples represented a high point of faith and self-confidence in the new nation and the new country west of the mountains. The second war for independence was behind; the Civil War was not yet a cloud in the sky of limitless horizons. Expectations for the future knew no bounds. The land was good and plentiful. The institutions were as perfect as a republican form of government and its elected representatives could make them. The financial crisis of 1819 had deeply affected the western country, but a guarded optimism soon returned. People were confident that hard work would make them independent freeholders, the ultimate desire of every agriculturist: to have and to hold land, forever, for family and their heirs. Little wonder that the virtues of political liberty and Jefferson’s independent yeoman farmer held the center of the stage. Never had the land been richer; never was there so much of it; never was the future brighter. John Mack Faragher entitles the second part of his history of Sugar Creek “The Country of Plenty to Eat.”60 For most of the participants in the First Great Migration across the Old Northwest and into Missouri, this was an accurate description. But this was not the entire story. Behind these well-deserved celebrations mixed with editorials and sermons of uplift, there was another western country, lying in shadows and umarked by public pronouncements. There were issues of continuing servitude and long indentures, against whites as well as blacks. These were “bound” men and women, bound by unequal legal contracts to years of service. A growing itinerant population of

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landless worked as agricultural laborers in hopes of amassing sufficient resources to take up land for a farm. Local county records also noted instances of violence against women and blacks. Women continued to struggle to gain a degree of control in their own homes, sometimes surrounded by issues of domestic violence and divorce. Across the range of opportunity associated with the rich lands of the Old Northwest, it was good to be white and male. Accordingly, the expansion of the franchise across this region was limited to white males. Hard labor was a characteristic of this world, but among the laborers, women and children were probably more burdened and less rewarded. These qualities of life suggest a darker side to the sunny exhortations of public officials, ministers, town-site promoters, and newspaper editors.61



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The Flowering of the Cotton Frontier

The First Great Migration, which began in 1815, spread across the western country, and the frontier south of the Ohio experienced the same rush of immigration that occurred to the north. Among the reasons for this movement were a postwar readjustment that impelled Americans to pull up roots and begin life anew elsewhere and the enlarged opportunities for new lands and commercial agriculture. Other influences were peculiar to the South. Two hundred years of tobacco culture had depleted the lands of the upper South, especially in Virginia and the Carolinas. Military successes against the Indian peoples of the South in the recent war had opened up vast tracts for American settlement, and the urge to settle these new lands now sent waves of immigrant families from the upper South to the frontier of the new Southwest. They brought with them capital and a wellestablished social and economic system emphasizing staple crops, slave labor, and commercial agriculture. The frontier south of the Ohio—stretching from Louisville to New Orleans, from Alabama Territory to the western parishes of the state of Louisiana—differed from that to the north. Within this vast area emerged a series of societies with great differences among them, and, at the same time, some noteworthy similarities.1

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In this movement of people after 1815, the pioneering families paid close attention to the landscape—as had their ancestors for two centuries. Prospective immigrants from all economic levels described the lands opening to them in great detail; they spoke and wrote about differences in land forms and climate and felt that these variations helped to shape their world. Land and climate impressed upon the southern frontier two significant influences that shaped institutions, societies, and people: cotton and slavery. Cotton was grown on some southern frontiers before 1812—most notably in the Natchez District, in Madison County on the Great Bend of the Tennessee, and in the river parishes in Louisiana. Conditions following the peace greatly expanded its cultivation across the new frontiers of the lower South. The demands of the English mills seemed insatiable. The price of short staple cotton on the New Orleans market doubled within a year and reached thirty cents a pound before 1819. New strains of cotton, more resistant to drought and disease, increased production. Cotton was not the only crop grown in the South after the war, but it quickly spread across much of the newly opened lands. And at the same time, cotton became a standard of economic and social success.2 Slave labor was admirably suited to cotton cultivation. The institution of slavery, firmly established along the seaboard by tobacco culture in the seventeenth and rice in the eighteenth centuries, received new life from cotton and sugar in the nineteenth. The price of slaves rose accordingly, and the First Great Migration to the Southwest after 1815 included white and black, moving side by side, the one coming to take the land, the other to work it in bondage. Both cotton and slavery were a part of the new frontier from the very beginning. They were as universal as the corn crop north of the Ohio. They also produced, almost from the first, a homogeneous and, at the same time, a sharply differentiated society: homogeneous in its interests, its agricultural orientation, and the origin of its immigrants; sharply divided by distinctions of wealth and quality of life, evident almost from the earliest settlements, and by the basic contrast between slavery and freedom.3 Cotton needed more than improved strains and slave labor. It



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also required large quantities of land. The opening of these new cotton lands began with Andrew Jackson’s decisive triumph over the Creek Nation at Horseshoe Bend in 1814. Although Jackson and others may have regarded this campaign as revenge for what they saw as Indian outrages associated with the war in the southern backcountry, the consequences of his triumph were enormous. In a single day, his militia army and its Indian allies (Cherokees and disaffected Creeks) had broken the great political and military power of the Creek Nation. In the aftermath, Creek leaders under duress and the stigma of this great defeat ceded large portions of the Creek lands of the lower South at the Treaty of Fort Jackson. This princely domain would later form the State of Alabama. In the aftermath of this land cession and the end of the war against England (with the coda of the great triumph of the frontier militia at New Orleans), the opening of these lands to legal occupation coincided with the emergence of the postwar demand for cotton and the attendant rapid rise in its price. All that remained was a land system that would process the ceded lands and prepare them for market. The land system, established in outline by the Land Ordinance of 1785, was equal to the challenge. Through some thirty years of trial and error, a system of survey, public sale, and detailed record keeping had evolved that would meet the needs of government, speculator, and settler family alike. It remained to be seen whether the system could expand rapidly enough to serve the wave of immigration into northern and central Alabama after 1815. It could. Under the pressure of numbers, aware of growing trespass on the public domain, and spurred by irate letters from members of Congress and territorial delegates, the administrators of the land system met every challenge. In the years immediately after 1815, the frontier South benefited from a government land system in full operation and ready to place vast tracts of land on the market. This it did, especially in 1817 and 1818. The efficiency of the government in taking land from Indian peoples and surveying and selling the public domain notably assisted the spread of the cotton kingdom after 1815.4 Another necessary dimension to this expansion was trans-

THE FLOWERING OF THE COTTON FRONTIER

portation. Transportation facilities were vital, for cotton bales weighed up to four hundred pounds. In the years of the First Great Migration, the steamboat was the preferred means of transportation in the cotton South and the symbol of its prosperity. Docks appeared along the major southern watercourses, giving the frontier South the appearance of a tropical Venice. Every town with ambition to prosper and grow needed regular steamboat service. The arrival of the first steamboat was cause for rejoicing, with a holiday (at least one) and a dinner for the captain and crew, complete with solemn toasts to the prosperity of the region and the partnership between commerce and agriculture. Consider the enthusiastic response to the arrival of a steamboat on the upper Cumberland River in Tennessee: “A few days since, the [steamboat] ‘Tennessee’ came up—the first that has ever ascended the river this far. It was a matter of great curiosity to the country people—men, women & children flocked to the river bank & waited half a day to see her pass. In going from the river, I was constantly asked by eager visitors, ‘all dressed up in their Sunday clothes’—‘has the steamboat come?’ ” After the steamboat had docked, people swarmed on board, and when the captain let the surplus steam out of the boiler with a great roar, the crowd panicked, dispersing in waves of men, women, and children. For the thrill of witnessing the arrival of the first steamboat, the muddy clothes seemed worthwhile. Citizens had seen a steamboat on their own river and in their own town. This was the future.5 Yet, with all this urgency, steamboats appeared in small numbers, at least in the first years after the war. Steamboats were expensive to build, prone to boiler explosions and fires, and hazardous to run and maintain on waterways filled with snags and obstacles. Thus, the prudent steamboat owner plied his trade on established routes, say between Natchez and New Orleans, and stayed far from the dangers of turbulent and unmarked waterways. The Great Migration to the South after 1815 made a different pattern on this landscape. North of the Ohio, the Indians were in process of removal, at least where they were adjacent to settlement. The stream of immigration resembled rising floodwaters moving up river valleys, lapping at the hills, sometimes flooding



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the lowland prairies, moving with watercourses—always tied to the configuration of the land. On the southern frontier the presence of large and powerful Indian nations across the breadth of the region compartmentalized immigration. The Creek nation had ceded great tracts in 1814, but large portions of the frontier South remained in the hands of the Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Cherokees. Across this expanse of landscape, rarely if ever did the settler families respect Indian treaty rights. Still, given the strong Indian presence of the Creeks and Cherokees in Alabama and the Choctaws in Mississippi, American pioneer families moved into Indian country with care. Few pioneers with capital to invest proposed to venture it under such circumstances, especially when large quantities of vacant and fertile land with good title were available elsewhere.6 The frontier of the South was not a continuing line constantly moving west under the impact of successive waves of new settlers, but before 1815, several widely separated centers of settlement: the Natchez region, expanding to the east since 1795; eastern and central Tennessee around Knoxville and Nashville; Huntsville and Madison County in Alabama; the Mississippi and Red River valleys within Louisiana; and, to a lesser degree, the east Louisiana parishes and the settlements of the lower Tombigbee and Alabama rivers. The areas occupied in the period from 1815 to 1830 were also separated from one another and closely associated with Indian cessions: the Alabama Black Belt, a crescent-shaped tract through the central part of the state, its urban center at Montgomery (acquired from the Indians in Andrew Jackson’s Creek Cession in 1814); the west-central portion of Mississippi, from the river halfway across the state, centered in Jackson (Treaty of Doak’s Stand in 1820); the western third of the state of Tennessee, with its economic center at Memphis, a northward extension of the cotton kingdom (Chickasaw Cession of 1818, also associated with Andrew Jackson).7 The expansion to the south and west after 1815 had its international as well as domestic dimensions. The American government was engaged in continuing diplomatic negotiations on a range of issues that would influence the shape of the new Southwest. There were several. The seizure of the port of Mobile in

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1812 was an important event for the American settlers on the Alabama and Tombigbee rivers. Its retention after the war—the only lasting territorial conquest of the War of 1812—gave central Alabama a direct access to the sea. Activities along the Florida boundary and the eventual purchase of Florida from Spain in 1819 also played a significant part in the settlement and economic growth of the South.8 Aside from the potential of the land, the decline of foreign (especially British) influence among the several Indian groups—remarked upon by all those concerned with the frontier—was an important preliminary step to Indian removal. The end of the Battle of New Orleans put people in motion to the Southwest by the spring of 1815, and a year later immigration had reached flood tide, especially to the Alabama country. A North Carolina planter described the overwhelming urge to emigrate in terms reminiscent of those used at the same time north of the Ohio: The Alabama Feaver rages here with great violence and has carried off vast numbers of our Citizens. I am apprehensive, if it continues to spread as it has done, it will almost depopulate the country. There is no question that this feaver is contagious . . . for as soon as one neighbour visits another who has just returned from the Alabama he immediately discovers the same symptoms which are exhibited by the person who has seen the allureing Alabama. Some of our oldest and most wealthy men are offering their possessions for sale and desirous of removing to this new country.9

New lands were the object of immigrants, young and old, affluent and poor, especially those tracts seized from the Indians in 1814 and 1816. They surpassed anything ever seen before in richness, fertility, and quantity, or so it was said. Robert Woods wrote to John Hale in 1817 about the agricultural potential of the Alabama Territory. It had “the greatest prospect of corn and cotton I ever saw,” he boasted. “Why will you stay in Franklin and work them poor stony ridges when one half of the labor and one third of the ground heare will bring you more and not a stone



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nor hill in the way.” It was a sentiment echoed in numerous letters from the new country to the old.10 The movement of people in the South assumed a form and a direction that would soon make the Southwest more South than West. The immigration to western Tennessee, central Mississippi, and the remote parts of Louisiana and Alabama involved more than the opening of new lands. It involved the transmission— virtually intact—of a culture, a set of values, and an economic and social system. It was, in short, the conveyance of the plantation system from Virginia, the Carolinas, and coastal Georgia to Mississippi, Alabama, and western Tennessee. Affluent planters of the upper South sold their holdings, often lands worn thin by generations of tobacco crops, and moved to the rich, black, canecovered lands in the new Indian cessions. The cycle of movement from the old lands to the new often began with a scouting expedition. The planter or one of his sons would make a rapid trip through the new lands open for settlement. The traveler would examine the lay of the land, its access to water transportation, its proximity to a likely county seat, the progress of the surveying teams, and the likely date the lands would be offered at public sale. After the selection of a site, the next step was the second stage of emigration, with a large labor force of slaves, chosen for their strength and endurance to clear the new lands, under the supervision of one or more members of the family. Along with clearing, plowing, and planting a first crop of corn (for subsistence in the fall), the labor force would also construct houses, barns, and cabins. From the trees felled and sawed on the site, they would build a large, albeit plain, house for the white family, and several cabins for the slave population. At the end of the first season or the beginning of the next year, the entire family would move to the new outpost in the wide expanse of rolling hills, already making the transition to a productive plantation. Rough clearing of new lands sufficed for early corn crops, but cotton did not grow well in fields with stumps and roots. Hence, most planters on the move had a crop of corn in the first year. Then, a more intense clearing of the new fields would prepare them for cotton the second. The organization was almost always gang labor, which provided for greater control

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and direction in this initial stage of clearing. For the slave people, this First Great Migration was a wrenching experience. First, they were uprooted from their homes, from their gardens and poultry, and sometimes separated from their families. At the end of the long and hard journey, often undertaken in winter in order not to miss work time, lay a series of adjustments to harsher conditions. For many slaves, the adjustment involved a change from a variety of tasks throughout the day to a single repetitive duty performed for hours on end. The work of clearing was intense. The labor associated with cotton culture was scarcely less so, for the demands of cultivation were unending and the pressure of harvest time unremitting. At harvest time, especially, overseers and owners would impose quotas, with punishments for slaves who failed to reach the demanded weight in picking. The Taits of Georgia were among the prosperous families who immigrated to eastern Mississippi (the Alabama Territory after 1817). Charles Tait was a political and legal figure of standing and influence who served as judge of the Superior Court for the Western District of Georgia (1803–1809) and as United States senator for Georgia (1809–19). His brother, James Tait, a planter, was the first to move. He wrote Charles in 1817 of the exodus, “Thus you perceive the present inhabitants are moving off [to the Alabama Territory]. I hope to follow in the autumn of next year and that you will bring up the rear the year after.” In early 1818, James Tait moved with several slave men from Georgia into Monroe County, Alabama, the advance guard of a larger black and white immigration to follow.11 After the harvest the first year, Charles Tait sent sixty slaves from his Georgia plantation to the new clearings in the new country. The slaves arrived in January 1819 and immediately began heavy labor in clearing new lands and cultivating the acres already prepared for crops. In 1820, the Taits built a cotton gin and bought more slaves to work the newly cleared fields.12 Although Charles Tait continued to live in Washington, D.C., ties between the brothers remained strong. James wrote to Charles in February 1818: “I am lost to reflect on the vast differences that exist between your situation and my own. I in my



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humble cabin on cane creek, entirely alone, in a wilderness, write these few lines to one who is in the centre of every thing that is the result of a well organized and dense population. You engaged in the noble business of legislating for a great nation, I in the obscure one of preparing a few acres for the cultivation of indian corn.”13 Yet James Tait’s letter pointed up not so much the contrast between the two scenes as the connection. The people who made up the First Great Migration to the Southwest after 1815 were, many of them, joined to the political, economic, and social leaders of the upper South by ties of kinship, and soon by similar interests. In 1819 Charles Tait left his senate seat in Georgia to become a planter and federal judge in Monroe County (Alabama). In so doing, he transferred his wealth and influence to his newly adopted state; he also left behind a host of influential friends, whose good offices might be called upon for the benefit of the new state of Alabama.14 The career of Israel Pickens is another case in point. Pickens was a North Carolinian who served three terms in Congress. He found the attractions of Alabama compelling, and to his fatherin-law, Major William B. Lenoir, he confided “my intention to take a route next summer westward & southwardly. I am perfectly convinced it will be in my interest as at presently circumstanced to move somewhere in the new country.” In his baggage he carried a commission as register of the land office at St. Stephens, tangible evidence of his influence with officials in Washington. Pickens wrote enthusiastically of the lands in Alabama: “My place of farming is on a large canebrake tract in the sunflower bend of the Tombeckbe River, 18 miles below St. Stephens, the largest body of high rich & unbroken bottom land I have heard of in either of these rivers.” He bought heavily at the land sales. Other planter capitalists like him did the same. Newcomers such as the Taits and the Pickenses—people of economic and social substance—engaged in spirited competition for Alabama land. The volume of sales and prices reached unheardof levels in 1818 and 1819.15 The speed with which cotton might thrust the frontier family of the Southwest into the world of commercial agriculture was a striking feature of the postwar cotton frontier. The acceleration

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of the commercial experience was built around large tracts of fertile lands, slave labor, and a ready market for cotton. No sooner had slaves raised shelter for black and white families and put the first corn crop in the ground than they began extensive clearing of the new lands. In the five weeks between midDecember and the end of January, Israel Pickens’s slaves cleared one hundred acres. Pickens so reported to Lenoir, adding, “Nothing remains to compleat the clearing than to set fire to the cut cane which leaves the whole an ash bed.”16 The next spring the crop of the newly arrived frontier planter was not corn but cotton. That autumn, wagons that the year before had carried the planter and his extended white and black family to the frontier carried baled cotton to the nearest watercourse, where it was floated downstream to market. A family that had stood in a forested landscape twelve months earlier now stood at a dock watching its crop load out for the English factory towns. The frontier family was already a part of a commercial economy. The incentive to cultivate cotton was high. In the postwar years short staple cotton fetched record-breaking prices in the South’s Atlantic seaports; it was the most valuable agricultural staple of the day. The planter returned with the luxury goods that the prosperous times entitled him to and eager merchants insisted that he take. Cotton made it possible for a family to hang a crystal chandelier in the log cabin. Most likely it resisted the temptation, opting instead for more land and more slaves. The sales in Madison County were perhaps the most remarkable demonstration of the “Alabama fever” in the first two years of opening this part of the new cotton frontier. 1817 1818

5,610.37 acres 973,361.54 acres

$11,220.74 $7,225,204.00

Dramatic as these numbers are, they are only one example of the surge in sales at record prices across the breadth of the new Indian cessions of the cotton frontier. Amidst the intoxicating air of thirty-cent cotton, the spread of the steamboat, the preparation of the new cessions for sale, a land system that offered credit for four years, and the sense of competition, prospective



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buyers bid numbers that reflected the wildest dreams of future success.17 The cotton frontier of the Southwest was not composed solely of affluent families with substantial numbers of slaves. There were also thousands of small-scale farmers who came to work the land. They grew corn and cotton and raised herds of cattle. Sometimes they had one or two slaves; often they did not. When they did, they probably worked in the fields alongside their enslaved blacks. They could often be found in the hillier portions of the newly opened lands—farther from the rich, expensive lands of the valleys and more distant from the seaboard markets. Pleading for preference in purchasing by preemption, some early Alabama settlers of Montgomery County described themselves as having “settled our selves in the poor Broken & remote parts of the Alabama Territory Montgomery County being generally of the poorer Class we doubted Success in Settling in the richer Soil below.”18 Some members of this group were making the upward transition to what they hoped would be the economic and social status of a plantation world. Others were simply holding their own. These smaller farmers could be found almost everywhere on the cotton frontier—from Natchez on the Mississippi to Montgomery on the Alabama. They were not people who had failed. Accounts emphasize their wide-ranging talents, intelligence, and integrity. An early chronicler wrote of the early development of St. Clair County (Alabama), located in what he called “the best lands in the mountainous region of the state.” “In its early history we had but few stores, and schools and churches were of slow growth,” he recounted. William Cather spoke of the small farmers in glowing terms. People worked the soil with a fierce independence, and their wants were few and practical. Agriculture was commercial: “The products of the country were carried in wagons to Tuscaloosa and Wetumpka, or on flat boats down the Coosa River.” The farmers of St. Clair County did not capture the imagination like the great planter families, but they were an important part of the cotton frontier.19 A third group lived a transient life by hunting, fishing, and trading on a more sparsely settled landscape, where the pioneer

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family simply squatted on the public domain or purchased a claim and a few improvements for little. The overriding characteristic of this life was its transitory and unstructured nature. What dominated the thoughts of the pioneer was not so much the reality of the current situation as the vision of the next one. The best water, the most luxuriant grasses, the richest soil, the fattest and most abundant game lay just across the next ridge or river. What seemed to distinguish these transients from the planters was not ability—for some of the accounts suggest people of great talents—but the high value placed on infinite independence, far removed from connections with institutions of permanence and responsibility for conforming to and maintaining them. These people penetrated into the woods and clearings before the surveyors, often trespassing on Indian land; later, after survey and sale, they retreated up the valleys into the hills. The surviving records show substantial numbers of people in the backcountry of the Carolinas, Georgia, and Tennessee, drifting south and west to the newly opened lands of Alabama and Mississippi. The Lincecum family were members of this group. Gideon Lincecum and his father embodied the pioneer spirit and its transition to a more institution-oriented world, all in one family and in the space of a few years. Gideon Lincecum was born in a log cabin on the Georgia frontier in 1793. His mother was just sixteen. Gideon’s father was a border transient who moved every two or three years to a new situation. “Being naturally of a restless disposition,” Gideon later wrote, “my father loved a border life.” The principal family crops were children and corn. The Lincecums also grew cotton, which brought a high price at any market, and cotton crops financed their migrations. Gideon grew up a free spirit in the woods, except at cotton harvesting time, when, he remembered, “everyone that could pick five pounds a day was forced into the cotton fields.” He was untouched by religion. He entered his first schoolhouse at the age of fourteen, to discover that he had missed some things in life: “I began in the alphabet. There were some very small boys, seven years old, who could read.” Gideon attacked learning with the same vigorous determination with which he tracked a deer in the woods, and, blessed with aptitude, he progressed. At the end



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of five months (when his father moved again), “I could read, the master said, ‘very well,’ could write a pretty fair hand by a copy, had progressed in the arithmetic to the double root of three, and had committed Webster’s spelling book entirely to memory, besides many pieces of poetry which the teacher gave me for night lessons.” It was a substantial frontier education, and all done in one season. Gideon graduated to a man’s world of work. He carried the chain for a surveyor, clerked in a store, and served as county tax collector, while, as his principal occupation, he farmed with his father. In 1815 Gideon Lincecum, age twenty-two, a man grown and recently married, as fully educated as his circumstances allowed, experienced the postwar restlessness that moved so many. He described the state of his preparation for the Great Migration in these terms: “I was as strong as two common men and could do anything from cutting and splitting fence rails to fine cabinet work. And in mercantile action was familiar with all the duties from the lumber house to the counting room. I could mix drugs and practice medicine as far as it was known in the interior of the country in those days.” His crop was good and cotton already thirty-one cents a pound, “but I became restless and did not feel like staying in that country until the crop could be gathered.” His father also felt the urge to be on the move once more. “The Alabama, Black Warrior, Tombeckbee, and Chattahoochee countries had all been acquired by conquest,” Gideon later wrote, “and I was determined to seek a home in the wilderness.” After a year on the Ocmulgee, where Gideon taught school and farmed, the Lincecums—father, son, and extended families—moved again. Gideon commented of the prospect, “I had been reared to a belief and faith in the pleasure of frequent change of country, and I looked upon the long journey, through the wilderness, with much pleasure.” In the spring of 1818 the caravan rolled into Tuscaloosa (Alabama), “at that time a small log cabin village; but people from Tennessee were arriving daily, and in the course of that year it grew to be a considerable town.” A year there and his father discovered a wilder, less settled country on the upper Tombigbee. “His description of the dark, heavy forests, the wide thick canebrakes, and the clear running river,

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full of fish put me into a perfect transport,” recalled the son. Since no road ran through this perfect wilderness, a certain amount of cutting and construction was necessary, especially at the river banks. After twelve days the Lincecums crossed the Tombigbee and settled near the future site of Columbus (Mississippi), where Gideon remarked, in the tradition of such frontier people, “we felt ourselves fully competent for the emergency.” It was in Columbus that Gideon began his gradual transition to a more permanent lifestyle, built around the economic and social advantages offered by the institutions of the day. Initially he built a house for his family. Then he turned to the forest. Gradually he reduced the canebrakes that pressed almost up to the door of the cabin and planted a crop of corn. His only agricultural tool was “a sharp stick.” No sooner was the house up and the corn in the ground than he began to cast about for other opportunities. The most attractive was the government’s road (really a track) from Nashville to Natchez. Where it crossed the Tombigbee, Gideon saw the prospect of a town and trade. He purchased trade goods, “in three days had knocked up a pretty good shanty,” and opened a store. Most of his early customers were Indians, who “had heard of the arrival of a great supply of nice new goods and plenty of liquors, and they flocked in by hundreds.” Gideon had no scruples about selling whiskey to the Indians; he sold them anything they could pay for. This isolated portion of the new state of Mississippi was slow in organizing: “We were there 18 months before we saw an officer of any kind.” Eventually the legislature laid out Monroe County. Gideon was a leader in organizing the new county. He wrote of his role: I first appointed four other county justices and a county clerk, called a meeting, organized a county court and proceeded to appoint and commission the rest of the county officers. Everybody wanted office; and I found it a very difficult duty to get through with. I finally succeeded; and then turned my attention to surveying the town, and regulating all the school lands in the county. I also had to superintend the erection of two—male and female—academies. . . . Holding the courts, appointing the officers, surveying the town lots, appointing and regulating school commissioners at town, and all the other school sections in the



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county, procuring teachers, engaging workmen for the academies and opening the mail six times a week, consumed so much of my time, that my own business was badly neglected.

Gideon formed a partnership with a Choctaw that gave him a large share of the lucrative Indian trade. While his business initially prospered, the Lincecums were in poor health. Fevers of various kinds forced Gideon to move to “the hill country” above Cotton Gin Port, where he recovered. At the same time, his mercantile business suffered. After a short tour with a “company of ball players in the Cherokee Nation,” Gideon went into the practice of medicine and drugs. At last he prospered, for many who came to the country in the Great Migration found it as unhealthy as he had in earlier years. This sickness, which had so plagued the Lincecum family, became the basis of his prosperity.20 Gideon Lincecum’s story was another part of the Great Migration into the new cotton frontier. He was a border transient who loved the free and easy life of the wilderness. The men of the Lincecum family were hunters, traders, merchants, entrepreneurs, artisans, and farmers. They were skillful with tools and in the woods. Yet Gideon was not indifferent to money; he spent much time and effort on all sorts of money-making schemes. He saw the need for institutions and led in organizing Monroe County, with its county court and school system. He even helped to lay out the town. He moved back to Columbus— at considerable risk to his health—in order that his six children might have an opportunity to attend the schools that he organized. In these interests and achievements, Gideon differed from his father. Whether the change represents a new stage of frontier people participating in the economy of the Great Migration and the creation of a new society, or simply differences between individuals, is not clear. What we do know is that in spite of his wanderings, Gideon was anxious to seize the economic advantage of the new cotton frontier and to participate, at least in part, in the greater opportunities that it afforded. The growth of population, its movement over new lands, and the economic influence of new staple crops took place through-

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out the frontier South, but the figures for Alabama are particularly dramatic (Table 3). The lands of Andrew Jackson’s Indian cessions (1814 and 1816), opening up the central two-thirds of Alabama, were especially attractive for the cultivation of cotton, and circumstances came together in the right proportion to promote their settlement and cultivation. The first areas taken up were the river valleys—especially the Alabama, Cahaba, Coosa, and Tallapoosa—where rich soil might be found in combination with water transportation. The high percentage of slaves in the river valley counties as early as 1818 testifies to the establishment of staple-crop agriculture within a few years of their settlement. Immigrants rapidly occupied the Tennessee River counties and placed them under cultivation. Land seekers considered the hillier portions less desirable and overlooked, too, the poorly drained black prairies that would later become known as the Black Belt. Settlements in eastern Mississippi also concentrated around the rivers, east and west. Steamboats reached Columbus on the upper Tombigbee soon after 1821, and the village became a center for the cotton trade. In the western part of the state, search for cotton lands carried people east from Natchez to the piney woods and north to the Indian cession lines.21 In the decade of the 1820s the cotton cultivation of postwar America firmly consolidated its position as a dominant influence in the commercial life of the southern frontier. Part of this development lay in the continued occupation and cultivation—albeit at a slower rate—of those areas in central Alabama opened immediately after the war. This was, in short, a repetition of previous patterns of settlement and cultivation and marketing, now associated with new areas. The most important of these was the Black Belt of Alabama with its extension into Mississippi. The first settlers had ignored the wet flatlands in favor of wooded river valleys. Stretching across the center of the state from Montgomery County in a southerly and westerly direction to the Choctaw Indian reservation on the Mississippi boundary, the Black Belt filled rapidly in the 1820s. It presented a number of new problems, such as how to drain and cultivate the thick black clay, and it raised the issue of internal improvements to move the heavy crops of cotton to market. Cotton cultivation



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reached its height in the Black Belt. The region absorbed capital and slave labor and, in turn, began producing cotton in large quantities. As in other agricultural areas of Alabama and Mississippi, land, slaves, and especially cotton became the dominant topics of the day.22 The cotton frontier included several other parts of the South. Cotton exercised a powerful influence in the settlement and economic development of western Tennessee. Geography and cycles of settlement divided the state of Tennessee into three distinct regions: the mountains and valleys in the east, centered at Knoxville; the fertile limestone lands of the center, with an economic and social focal point at Nashville; the western third of the state, occupied by the Chickasaw Nation and largely without white inhabitants as late as 1815. The pressure of North Carolina land grants, many now owned by Tennessee residents, provoked a surge of petitions from Tennessee for the federal government to press the Chickasaws for a land cession. The federal government and its negotiators enlisted mixed-blood people to serve as cultural brokers to promote a land cession. Several of these were prominent tribal leaders. They had worked against Tecumseh’s call for united resistance against land cessions, including a military alliance. They had supported Andrew Jackson in the Creek War. No matter. Now they met Jackson as an official government negotiator. The result was a treaty known as the Chickasaw Cession of 1818, which opened most of western Tennessee to settlement. In 1820, Tennessee gave the title Western District to its new frontier.23 The state prepared the land for sale, using the general outline of the Land Ordinance, with its provision for survey before sale. Land speculators led the settlers into the district, with special emphasis on the prospective town sites on the bluffs of the Mississippi. The future town of Memphis was laid out on the most attractive site. The population of the Western District grew rapidly. In 1820 it was probably about twenty-five hundred people; by 1830, close to one hundred thousand. Between 1819 and 1823 the legislature laid off fourteen new counties to mark this influx of people. The Western District was long dependent upon water trans-

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portation, with the Tennessee River and its tributaries to the east and the Mississippi River and its tributaries to the west providing avenues for immigration and commerce. The pioneering experience was typical in its struggles and isolation, but relatively short. The first important urban center was Jackson (county seat of Madison County), laid out in 1822. At the sale of the town’s lots, the record showed that “Joseph Lynn was allowed $20.00 for whiskey furnished to encourage bidding.”24 Agriculture was the center of economic activity. Initially corn was the basic crop, but the settlers soon turned to cotton. The economic crisis of 1819 slowed the rush of settlement to the Western District. Easy credit disappeared (including that offered by the federal government on sales of public lands), commodity prices collapsed, newspapers were filled with notices of indebtedness and bankruptcy. Another issue was in play: speculators had acquired many of the most attractive tracts from the original North Carolina claimants. Thus, unlike the sales of the public domain in Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana, which were conducted at federal land offices, sales of lands in the Western District of Tennessee were in the hands of private speculators. These proprietors offered attractive terms in order to attract settler families; they even invited families without means to squat on the lands and improve them, for later purchase in better economic times. So the first settler families simply occupied tracts in the Western District, and they soon elected representatives—of whom the best known was Davy Crockett—who defended their rights against absentee landowners. The towns that appeared in the district were important, because the isolation of the new frontier—its road network was almost nonexistent—reduced contract with the older, more settled parts of the state to the east. John Finger writes of these early urban outposts: “They were the vanguard of civilization on the frontier . . . centers of local government, merchandising, land transactions, education, and culture.” Even within the towns, money was scarce, sanitation was poor or nonexistent, and omnipresent fire dangers mixed with violent opposition to taxes that would support services. So the towns, like other such early urban creations, resorted to volunteers. Among the most important duties of volun-



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teer organizations was control of the slave population. Here, participation by eligible males was mandatory; those who refused to serve on slave patrols could be fined.25 Like other areas of the southern frontier so recently opened to Euro-American settlement, the agriculturists of the Western District planted cotton. A commercial crop was shipped through Memphis as early as 1826, although the absence of a good road network delayed the development of commercial agriculture on a large scale. By the mid-1830s, the District’s cotton was acknowledged to be of the highest quality, and it already commanded a premium price in New Orleans. And with cotton culture came slave labor. The value of the cotton crop mixed with the waves of apprehension over the Nat Turner Rebellion of 1831 produced a harsher tone toward slaves.26 The rapid occupation and growth of the cotton frontier produced a strong demand for the structure and services provided by organized government. Whereas after the passage of the Ordinance of 1787, government (in form, at least) appeared promptly and, in the period immediately after 1815, often preceded settlement in the Old Northwest, the movement of people into the new Southwest threatened temporarily to outdistance any formal structure of government. Two conditions made the question of government in Alabama pressing. The first was the enormous influx of population in the period from 1815 to 1820; the second, the decision to form a separate territory of the lands that lay in eastern Mississippi, necessitating the organization of a territorial government and innumerable new counties at precisely this period of heavy population pressure. In early 1818 the new governor of the Alabama Territory, William Bibb, wrote that in three weeks he would appoint four hundred officeholders in thirteen new counties. In some cases the governor simply sent blank commissions to the county courts in the new counties and asked some responsible official to fill in the names of suitable appointees. Sometimes officials could not organize government at the territorial or county levels rapidly enough to meet the needs of the incoming population. County militias were in a state of disarray as a result of the tu-

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multuous and transient population. Private military organizations appeared in a manner reminiscent of early Kentucky and Tennessee. Mail service was also inadequate, to the extent that at least one town, Cahaba, established a mail service financed by private subscription. A delay in the organization of the judicial district for North Alabama distressed citizens “throughout the six populous Counties,” who wrote of their unhappiness that “the operation of courts of Justice have been suspended in this district for more than seven months,” with the result that “creditors are unable to enforce the payment of their debts.” These were already a commercial people.27 The formative period of the cotton frontier, with its highly competitive land sales, occupation of new lands, and organization of several counties, was accompanied by a widespread and continuous search for office, and at the same time, constant complaints about officeholders and the inadequacy of their performance. The newly settled society needed mail service, roads, county courts, and all immediately, to match the pace and numbers of the arriving settler families. One of the results was that new officeholders found themselves harshly criticized for not instantly meeting these needs: by those trying to circumvent the law and prevented from doing so, by those who felt themselves victimized by mistakes, by those who were themselves disappointed office seekers. One correspondent wrote Alabama’s governor from Tuscaloosa, a newly organized county seat in the Black Belt, “The state of society in this section of Country is such that few persons in public office, can avoid censure, however correct their conduct may be.” The rapidity of the settlement process and the development of large-scale commercial agriculture focused the need for institutions like government and its auxiliary functions. Initially, at least, government at all levels struggled to meet these pressing needs.28 The new frontiers of the cotton South created astonishing opportunities for wealth—at least for a frontier society. Wealth came in many forms: a new house with white columns and a piano, cotton receipts from the local gin and notes from a New Orleans factor, or perhaps simply land, slaves, and bank notes.



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But whatever the form, hand in hand with wealth came the need to protect it. In his opening address to the newly convened Alabama legislature, Governor Bibb affirmed that “the rights of persons and property are carefully protected.”29 The fluid frontier condition quickly gave way to a settled, even static, society interested in preserving the status quo. The foremost allies of those interested in an orderly society and protection of property were the legal system and the county court. On an earlier frontier, groups of men had gathered to give order and direction to a new society. They did so largely through the strength of their own arms and public opinion. Centralized authority was virtually unknown. By the time of the First Great Migration after 1815, state and territorial governments were well established (except for the special case of Alabama), and central authority a strong and ever-present influence. To be sure, it was rarely used. Still, it was there, in the form of the militia, federal courts, and, if necessary, the federal government itself. If social, cultural, and intellectual institutions were still in the process of development—as they were in most places in the frontier South—the same could not be said with respect to law, the court system, and institutions bearing on property.30 County government functioned similarly throughout the cotton frontier, as generally reflected in three different areas with different histories: the cotton frontier of Alabama, carved from a great newly opened landscape after the war; western Tennessee, heir to a long frontier experience dating back to the first transAppalachian frontier; Louisiana, with its diversity of cultures and institutions. Perry County (Alabama), organized in 1819, had been settled after the war. The activities of its county court, however, are indistinguishable from those of the older counties. Officeholders appeared with the organization of the county, and the five-man Orphans Court directed the county’s affairs. Its most important duties dealt with the development of a county road system. The court also concerned itself with two ferries over the Cahaba River, regulation of fees, and licensing of ministers. As in other frontier communities at this time, the first industrial activity was the construction of two mills (saw and grist), quickly followed by a cotton gin. Indeed the cotton gin

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had become as necessary to this economy and society as the gristmill had been on the first trans-Appalachian frontier two generations earlier.31 Unlike Alabama, Tennessee was a well-organized state by the time of the Great Migration to its western lands. Carroll and Weakley were typical new counties in the Western District. In their deliberations, their judgments, and the scope of issues considered, the county courts were much like the courts of an earlier generation of frontier counties. The basic difference was in the volume of business related to economic matters. The county courts concerned themselves largely with administrative (recording) and economic affairs, and specifically probate of estates, taxes, and the recording of deeds of “bargain and sale.” That the court also paid wolf bounties testifies to its location on the edge of settlement. The most time-consuming problem was the roads. The court was constantly occupied with appointing people to view, mark, lay out, and maintain roads. Several officeholders formulated and carried out the laws of the county. In addition to justices of the peace, the roster included county clerk, county treasurer, trustee, coroner, constable (for each militia company), and solicitor general, who presented the government case in court. Trials for assault and battery were rare, and, in the case of a conviction, the fine was generally $.12¹⁄₂ and costs. The less fortunate received attention and even some support. In one case, the county paid the medical fees (“medicine and attendance”) for an “Inphant child” whose father was deceased. The court still bound out orphans under an apprenticeship system.32 The structure of state government carried into the newly settled areas a system of federal and state courts. The first immigrants arrived in the area of Madison County (Tennessee) in 1818 or 1819; the legislature organized the county in 1821. At regular intervals thereafter, the authority of the state came to Madison County in the form of the Eighth Circuit Court. Some of the business was administrative, such as the certifying of sales of land and slaves. The docket always contained a number of appeals from the county courts. A grand jury met to examine the state of local affairs. In one case, it returned a presentment against a man and woman for living in adultery. The moral con-



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dition was not, however, the dominant concern. Property was. Many of the cases before the court concerned debt, petty larceny, and divorce. Most of the divorce cases were uncontested, since one or the other party failed to appear. The sums involved in the higher courts were larger than those at stake in the county courts, often several hundred dollars. Punishment for criminal convictions was still largely physical. Squire Dawson was presumably a man of some importance. Yet, on his conviction for “pettit larceny,” the court sentenced him to “be taken from this place to the common whiping post there to receive twenty lashes well laid on his bar back, and that he be rendered infamous, and that he then be imprisoned one hour, and that he make his peace with the state by the payment of one cent.”33 The police juries in Louisiana conducted a similar range of business—roads, mail service, recording functions—as the county courts of the cotton frontier east of the Mississippi River. Like the county courts, the police juries also established road districts and appointed overseers. Instructions for road maintenance were sometimes very detailed. Drainage ditches that crossed public roads had to be bridged. There were continuing complaints about the conditions of the roads, especially those leading to market. Where the parish lay on a waterway, such as a river or bayou, the police jury put special emphasis on keeping the waterway clear for open access. Where waterways abounded, ferries were important and had to be licensed. There was also a continuing interest in livestock, especially its proper identification. Avoyelles Parish had a communal livestock drive, and each citizen of the parish “should contribute according to the number of horses, cattle, in furnishing one man consecutively for each eighty heads, for the purpose of bringing them out of the swamps.”34 Parishes established slave patrols and supervised their rounds. They levied taxes according to the value of land. Taxes on taverns, grog shops, and billiard tables were universal. The police jury also kept a wary eye on the morals of the parish citizenry. The Avoyelles Parish Jury pronounced that “great injury to the Citizens of the parish and to the general police thereof has

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been found to arrive from the use of Billiard Tables” and placed a tax of three hundred dollars on each table. Avoyelles also controlled undesirable transients by a law that specified that “all persons found working on the banks of Bayous, Rivers, and in by-places shall be subject to be prosecuted . . . provided they do not give a satisfactory account of the manner in which they obtained Subsistence.”35 With its several forms of wealth and its unending quest for stability, the cotton frontier was made to order for lawyers, who often branched out from the practice of law into land speculation, banking, and other forms of economic enterprise. From Alabama Territory, Israel Pickens catalogued the economic affairs of one planter-lawyer on the new cotton frontier: “My [land] office though troublesome is a convenient matter in point of revenue. . . . The whole compensation is about $3000 per annum— the small sallary as president of the [Tombigbee] Bank, & my few Courts yield some thing in addition, so that with a little contrivance, & land trade, I am scuppling along.” Of course, all of these enterprises supplemented Pickens’s principal occupation as a planter. John Williams Walker of Alabama was politician, jurist, and land speculator. Charles Tait was a planter who also served as a judge. Most of the leading lawyers of the day still styled themselves “planters.” Men such as these dominated the statehood convention in Alabama—Walker was its presiding officer—and it is not surprising that the constitutions of these states reflected the political principles and legal ingenuity of some of the South’s foremost lawyers.36 The cotton frontier also gave rise to several early industries. There were numerous sites for dams, which were used for cotton gins, sawmills, gristmills, and flour mills, and wool-carding, cotton-spinning, and weaving factories. Even infant industries, however, required an integration of several elements—labor force, capital, and markets—that strained the capacity of this early frontier economy. The first cotton factories of Madison County (Alabama) manufactured yarn that settlers wove and knitted at home. The exchange was at the barter level. When Horatio Jones, one of the early entrepreneurs in northern Al-



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abama, located on the Flint River, he arranged for a carpenter to construct a factory and dam of wood for $813 on credit. It was an appropriate start for an economic enterprise that would depend much on credit in the years to come. Jones had the support of the local populace, who backed him with loans and supplies, and accepted his notes. To spin his cotton yarn, Jones hired slave girls. He exchanged spun yarn for seed cotton or baled ginned cotton. His commission was 10 percent. Little cash changed hands. Jones sold his yarn in the towns of Huntsville, Madison, and Decatur, and even did some business as far away as Lexington (Kentucky). The delicate economic balance that depended on the goodwill of his neighbors vanished with his untimely death in 1825.37 In this same period, the rapid transition from subsistence to commercial economy called for larger and more complex financial arrangements. Banks soon appeared on the cotton frontier, as early as 1818 in Alabama Territory. Initially founders designed them to provide loans for purchases of public lands, but the international cotton market, of which the region was soon a part, created other needs. The planter in newly settled areas of Alabama or Mississippi had financial transactions with one or more merchants in New Orleans or Mobile. He or his agent sold his cotton in Liverpool or New York, whence came receipts and notes. From the cities of the North and Europe came the goods and luxuries that he purchased, and sometimes he bought foodstuffs from the Ohio Valley. Remittances to and from all these areas had to be arranged. Merchants took on expanded duties as factors. Banks had additional functions to perform, and while the economic panic in 1819 showed the weakness of banks, it did nothing to eliminate their usefulness. Banks became a political issue as well as the institution of a more complex economy. Struggles followed over their chartering and management. In short, frontier communities found themselves embroiled in the banking issue and in need of banks, or at least some of the services that banks could provide. This concentration of economic authority in banks ran parallel to the rise of the cotton frontier after 1815, with its ever-enlarging assets of lands and slaves.38 In trying to assess the nature of the world that emerged on

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Table 3. Growth of the Southwest, 1810–30

Alabama Mississippi Louisiana Tennessee

1810

1820

1830

9,046 31,306 76,556 261,727

127,901 75,448 153,407 422,823

309,527 130,621 215,739 681,904

Source: Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1957 (Washington, 1960), 13.

the new cotton frontier, one must bear in mind the diversity of the experiences, even within the context of the rapid development of a commercial economy. Although cotton as a market crop dominated this frontier experience, for many planters the returns in these first years were modest—a house of logs or wood sawed on the plantation, minimal social activity, maximum time in the fields. Nor was the social and economic force of cotton agriculture uniformly established. Large numbers of small, independent farmers and more traditional frontier families such as Gideon Lincecum’s existed side by side with planters, and in a style of living that was not much different. Thomas Clark and John Guice have identified this balance in their phrase “nabobs and nobodies.”39 For almost everyone, this was a frontier of abundance—with game, fish, trade, with the forest and canebrakes still standing tall in many places—and abundant potential. Women were a crucial part of the migration to the new Southwest. As in the case of families everywhere else on the frontier, a wife was necessary to the productive farm, whether mistress of a plantation or a worker alongside her husband in the field. Accordingly, in the words of Christopher Morris in his study of Warren County (Mississippi), “Women were in great demand.” In its initial stages of settlement, men in Warren County outnumbered women by three to two. The number of early marriages testified “to the importance of marriage and the family to homesteading.” In the first farms in the county, women worked alongside men in the fields. They also manufactured items for



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use in the home, prepared and preserved food, and did other kinds of domestic production. Women were also subject to the continuing dangers of childbirth and the burdens of child rearing. Women married young, and as a result, most of their adult lives they could expect to be responsible for young children. Life expectancy might be brief. The demands of several kinds of work were hard, and the couple were not always compatible for a variety of reasons. The suits over abandonment and divorce in Warren County reflect these strains, as well as the conservative nature of the courts. Physical abuse was not grounds for divorce. At the time of statehood (1817), grounds for divorce in Mississippi were bigamy, impotence, adultery, and desertion. Most women who wished to dissolve a marriage simply fled, often with a man who would protect them, in court and outside court. Issues of property kept women dependent upon men, almost surely lessening their inclination to pursue legal redress. Husbands also fled marriages. A new law in 1822 added “extreme cruelty” to grounds for divorce, but most judges continued to resist what they thought of as interference in domestic matters. In 1824, one Mississippi High Court justice wrote that to air the details of such domestic disputes publicly was most unfortunate. He continued, “let the husband be permitted to exercise the right of moderate chastisement, in cases of great emergency, and use salutary restraints in every case of misbehavior, without being subjected to vexatious prosecutions, resulting in mutual discredit and shame of all parties concerned.” The legal records tell us much about the configuration of southern life in a county next to Natchez, in the heart of the cotton frontier. Men were masters of the households as well as the fields.40 Women often saw the immigration to new lands as a distinctly unfavorable change in their lives. Not surprisingly, they exhibited a pronounced reluctance to have themselves and their families join the great migration to the frontier of the Cotton Kingdom. In her study of family migrations in the South, Joan Cashin observed, “Women, with few exceptions, feared or dreaded the possibility of moving to the Southwest.” Men were anxious to benefit from the challenges and economic opportuni-

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ties associated with the opening of large tracts of rich lands. Women saw such immigration to new and distant lands as severing the connections of the social networks that were so important to them. Furthermore, the new settlements were almost everywhere isolated. Families were alone (even extended families with large numbers of slaves), living in a newly constructed house, surrounded by dense forests gradually giving way to wide fields of cotton. The disconnect was an obvious one. Yet women had little influence in the decision. Cashin has concluded, based on the dispersal over these new landscapes, “The frontier family was not an egalitarian institution . . . migration altered sex roles and heightened severe inequality within the family.” The close relationships with female kinfolk that served to mitigate the unequal relationship within the family were lost, left behind in the move to the new lands: “The worst aspects of the patriarchal family emerged, while women were left without the sustenance of their female kinfolk.” Cashin argues that the First Great Migration to the new cotton frontier of the Southwest “opened a gulf between both sexes where before there had been merely tensions and resentments.” These differences sometimes carried over into attitudes toward and treatment of the slave populations. The physical demands of the new landscapes and the economic opportunities associated with the rapid transition to commercial agriculture, in this case cotton, placed great physical burdens on slave people. They must clear, plow, plant, cultivate, and harvest under the watchful eye of the master or the overseer, always with an eye to the deadlines imposed by the seasons and the demands of the factor. The old-fashioned “paternalism” of the old setting (where it existed) was often lost in the demands of the new staple-commodity agriculture.41 The large and growing slave population did not share in the high expectation of the cotton frontier, but perhaps this silent mass of people also had a sense of change for the better. Did hacking a plantation out of a wilderness provide greater freedom and opportunity than cultivating endless fields of cotton? Did the felling of trees and the raising of shelter—the more unstructured life of the formative period—provide expectations for the



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future that died in the heat of endless annual growing seasons? The records are silent on this subject. The black men and women in bondage on the frontier left few accounts. Yet their presence lies everywhere over the cotton frontier—in the advertisements for runaways that dominate the local papers, in the concern of local government for patrols and their effectiveness, in the occasional rumor of a rebellion. Information is always indirect, but it is there. And in a sense, of course, it was this vast, silent, omnipresent labor force that made the cotton frontier a frontier of high expectations. The expectations were based, at least in part, on the projected work that the slave would do over a lifetime of bondage.42 Joan Cashin has described slaves as “the true captives of migration.” The opening of the Great Migration in 1815 was also the beginning of the mass enforced emigration of perhaps as many as one million slaves from the seaboard to the Southwest in the generation before the opening of the Civil War. All of these came under duress. Many men (the optimal labor force on the new cotton frontier) were forced to leave their families; others had their families sold to other masters to raise funds for the emigration. Slave families that migrated together still lost connections with relatives and friends on adjacent plantations on the seaboard.43 David Libby has grouped slave migrations under three headings. Within the first, slaves might be brought to the frontier of the South by slave traders. Marched in long coffles in chains, they had often been separated from their families along the coast. The demand for enslaved labor in the new Cotton Kingdom overrode any issue of family ties. Slaves were more valuable; young able-bodied males, the labor force to open the new lands or cultivate the first crops of cotton, were the most valuable. So they often made the trip alone, leaving wives and children behind. Or slaves might make the trip to the West in family units as part of entire plantation communities. Conditions at the end of the trip were no less harsh and demanding, but the families were still together. Finally, planters on the cotton frontier might go to the East (or send agents) to purchase slaves. The end result for the slave might be as wrenching, but at least he

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might have an opportunity to plead that his family be included in the transactions. Whatever the option, the demands of the cotton frontier produced certain common denominators. Slaves were in demand, and where they were not present, ambitious entrepreneurs sought them out. Slaves, whether as individuals or family units, often moved from a task-orientated system to a gang system.44 The slave owner had to make many decisions about when to move and how to employ his labor force. The harshest challenge was clearing the new land. Steven Miller writes of the change: “slaves on the cotton frontier came to a work regimen shaped in part by the nature of the staple crop but perhaps even more by the necessity of clearing land. Because only a miniscule amount of land in Alabama and Mississippi had been cleared prior to the arrival of planters, the work of preparing new ground for cultivation vied with that of growing crops during the settlement period.” Establishing a new plantation involved two distinct phases; the first was rough clearing, cutting trees, grubbing and burning underbrush, and constructing cabins, outbuildings, and fences. This could take “a good deal of time.” One male slave could clear twelve acres in four months, enough land area for himself or another full hand to cultivate. In the initial phase, large slaveholders had more slaves than cleared land. The second step in the cycle was field labor: plowing, planting, cultivating. Here, women and children could be brought into the field labor force, for they were effective in field labor, but not in the initial clearing and draining.45 The early planter-settlers of Warren County (Mississippi) followed these cycles. At first, many of them hired out the surplus labor force, waiting for the new land to come into full production. In opening up the new fields, “slaves suffered as cotton production placed a great demand on their labor.” Warren County was the object of a great influx of black and white families in the years of the Great Migration. Christopher Morris writes, “from 1810 until the panic of 1839 people poured into Warren County. Whites seeking a fortune in the cotton trade brought slaves to work the crop.” By 1830, the black population outnumbered the white. And with the increasing numbers of



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slaves, a greater proportion of them would be found in production units of greater than ten slaves. In 1830, 77 percent of the slaves in Warren County were in such holdings.46 A slave labor force always had two separate economic dimensions. From their arrival in Warren County (and elsewhere), slaves’ owners were mindful of the advantage of promoting slave families. When Judge Alexander Covington and his nephew Edmund found their tract of two thousand acres in the south end of the county broken and sterile, they turned to the business of raising slaves rather than cotton. Accordingly, they pursued policies designed to bring more females to the plantation, to promote marriages and families, and to guard the health of their labor force to ensure more live births. Morris concludes in his study that the best southern slave holders promoted both cotton production and natural increase among the slave population.47 In at least one sense, this frontier was much like that experienced by the earlier generation of the Kentucky and Ohio Valley settlers. It was a frontier of activity. People were still engaged in subduing the landscape and in turning it to their own benefit. Or in the case of people such as Gideon Lincecum, they remained in the woods and enjoyed it. The net effect was the same. These groups had no doubt about where they wished to go, what they wished to do, or the world they hoped to create. It was also a frontier of dominant male influence. The gentle arts were as low on the priority list of this frontier as any other. Religion could be more easily experienced than in the earlier generations, for the organized churches had prepared to minister to the needs of the frontier. Generally speaking, people wanted a religion that met social needs (especially for women and children), emphasized the teachings of the Bible as a basis for salvation, and preserved the good order of society. Schooling reflected the dispersion of the new cotton frontier. For the majority of school-aged children there were no facilities. Schooling was available on a subscription basis to those who contracted with a teacher. The school Gideon Lincecum entered at the age of fourteen was run by an itinerant teacher with a family, who “made up a school, which was to be kept in a little

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old log cabin, a mile and a half from our home. Father entered my sister, brother and me as day scholars at the rate of $7.00 each per annum.” The school day ran “from an hour by sun in the morning to an hour by sun in the evening.” The term lasted five months. Scholars recited on a first-come, first-served basis, and between recitations children studied their lessons aloud. The schoolroom was always a torrent of noise. Gideon later taught school, and the character of his class was probably representative of the frontier: “There were forty-five pupils—fifteen grown young men, five of them married, five grown young ladies, and boys and girls of all sizes and ages to make up the forty-five. All entered for the full term.” The curriculum was “reading, writing, and arithmetic.”48 At the other end of the educational (and economic) scale were private academies. These emphasized a classical education and social accomplishments, especially for young ladies. Such educational institutions were especially common in towns, where a concentration of population might ensure a clientele. Miss Campbell’s school for young ladies in Mobile provided a traditional curriculum and a genteel educational philosophy: the Instruction of Young Ladies in Reading, Writing, Grammar, arithmetic, Geography, the first principles of Astronomy, natural and civil history, composition, drawing and music, with embroidery, map work, satin-work, marking, and various other branches of useful ornamental Needle-Work. The principal advantages of this Institution will consist in providing Young Ladies with a liberal and solid education—in drawing the attention of such pursuits as are lasting and useful as well as elegant and ornamental—in substituting the more important acquirements of the mind in lieu of the frivolous pursuits which engage the time and talents of the majority of the rising generation.49

For the dominant white population, the cotton frontier was generally a frontier of abundance, security, and high expectation. Everything was available in quantities to sustain life. Even at its lowest price in 1825 and 1826, cotton sustained hopes for the future. Such expectations sometimes led to reflections on the



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kind of world that emerged. Thus, as early as 1820, Charles Tait could identify the split personality of the new cotton frontier. Of a friend, he wrote, “He wants to plant 200 acres. He will I dare say get rich, but what is this miserable task without consideration; without refined society; without intellectual pleasures.— But some will say give me the Pudding and you may have the empty praise.”50 Tait had been in Alabama for three crucial years, during which it had passed through the territorial period into statehood. Nowhere was the force of the cotton frontier more influential. The vision of cultural advances and an elegant society was large and real, but it had not yet replaced the search for economic gratification. Yet, whatever doubts might occasionally appear, often among women, cotton was wealth; planting was already becoming the prestigious occupation of the South, on the frontier as well as in longer-settled areas. In a world where expanses of rich land planted in staple crops were coming to define wealth, the cotton frontier of the new Southwest had become the magnet for every young man of ambition and resources from the upper South. For some ambitious young men, the challenges of the new country were a way to show their strength and resourcefulness, a proving ground to separate men of talent from those with simply ambition. In such a setting and with such rewards, the conflicting interests of wives and children as well as slave families must be counted as less important. Even on this new frontier, resources were important: slaves to be acquired, lands to purchase at the government land office, initial costs in opening the lands. These funds had a variety of sources: inheritance (land and slaves), personal savings, a beneficial marriage, loans from families and friends, loans from banks (often reluctantly). Of course the cotton frontier had several different dimensions and players: young men with resources, young men without resources, established planters with large holdings, farm families with two wagons and a single slave, itinerant families intent on the hunt and the trade with Indian peoples. All were present on the cotton frontier of the First Great Migration. The cotton frontier was several societies constructed around a single agricultural staple, cotton. A planter society put its stamp

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on institutions and was served by the courts, lawyers, law codes, slave codes, patrols, and banks, but this is not to say that the interests of this group diverged from those of other less affluent agriculturists. The central themes everywhere were land, slaves, and cotton. The leaders of the South at the time celebrated an allegiance to the land since echoed by later southern writers and politicians. And the land meant cotton. The cotton frontier carried the prospect of great wealth and offered a vision of the same kind of bonanza that would later drive dusty men across deserts and into impenetrable mountains. The difference was the permanence of the land and the rising acceptance of land as a social force. The land was always there. If the frontier experience for two generations from 1815 to 1850 was one of expectations and high spirits, none was higher than in the South after 1815. This instinct for land provided the basis for the legend that “cotton was king” and confidently led those who devoutly believed this into their own exercise in nation building. Here was the beginning, often in modest circumstances, but a beginning nonetheless. So amidst the enduring forces of land and cotton we find much diversity: large-scale planters such as the Taits and the Pickenses; small farmers such as Robert Woods; wandering border entrepreneurs such as Lincecum. All gave the South a distinctive flavor. One other dimension of this new frontier deserves comment. The cotton frontier was intensely commercial. As commercial enterprise, its influence spread far beyond the newly opened fields of Mississippi, Alabama, and western Tennessee. The cotton trade involved lawyers, factors, merchants, banks, and bankers as far distant as New Orleans and New York City. These commercial connections stretched across the Atlantic to London and Liverpool. All these varied peoples, black and white, across the breadth of the South and extending into the North and across the Atlantic, felt the flowering of the cotton frontier.



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Part IV. The Enduring Frontiers

The Great Migration that began in 1815 was a frontier experience of high expectation: of landownership, not tenancy; of wealth, not subsistence; of security, not uncertainty. It was the immigration of a confident people, buoyed by success in war, secure from the Indian, moving forward to open, fertile lands. In the midst of the rapid and dramatic growth in the next fifteen years, three widely separated geographic and political areas remained outside the range of movement and economic prosperity. These lands and their political identity were: the Michigan peninsulas, organized as a territory in 1805; Florida, with settlements dating from the middle of the sixteenth century, acquired from Spain in 1819, and created a territory in 1821; and the broad expanse between Louisiana and Missouri organized as Arkansas Territory in 1819. Theirs were experiences removed from the mainstream of development in the western country after 1815. Their isolation, slow immigration, and primitive economic conditions made them lag behind the motion and optimism associated with much of the trans-Appalachian West. These became enduring frontiers. In spite of their varied landscapes, the three territories shared many similar characteristics. One was isolation. The frontier experience of the postwar years came to be associated with a contiguously linked agricultural frontier that moved across the land from east to west in a series of waves. The mass immigration of people after 1815 submerged the several islands of existing settlement. Much open land remained, however, and these great and varied landscapes were still a powerful influence in many places, specifically the new territories of Michigan, Arkansas, and

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Florida. Here, over an extended period, the early frontier experiences of Kentucky and the Northwest Territory were repeated. The frontier condition always implied a degree of physical isolation, but few frontiers were as remote as these three territories. Facilities for communication and transportation were central needs of these areas, for only through tapping the mainstreams of immigration and the dominant routes of trade could these distant territories become part of the expanding western country. But the new steam navigation spread across the frontier unevenly, and steam transportation was least available in areas that required it most. Another shared aspect of the enduring frontiers was their continuing association with Indian peoples. Since the first settlements in Kentucky in 1775, relations with the Indian peoples had been a central concern in the trans-Appalachian West. The War of 1812 seemed to resolve the Indian issue, and the First Great Migration beginning in 1815 reflected this sense of security. The Indian presence remained a powerful influence on the enduring frontiers, however, their power enhanced by the scattered nature of the American settlements with their limited resources. Indian affairs were an important topic of official correspondence and added to the demands made on the federal government. Within this generation, these concerns were continuous but different. For the citizens of Michigan Territory, this was a sensitive issue because of their recent war experiences. The Territory of Florida had a large resident Indian population, while its own numbers were too small and its political influence too limited to demand and enforce the native people’s removal. Arkansas actually became the object of Indian immigration for tribes displaced from east of the Mississippi, much to the delight of a few merchants and the unhappiness of the rest of the territory’s population. The conditions imposed by isolation, transportation and communication requirements, and the presence of Indians meant continuous demands transmitted to the federal government. This circumstance emphasized once again the importance of political boundaries on the frontier. In its early settlement stages, the frontier condition reflected natural boundaries, and these were generally overcome by hard work and the bounties of the

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land. Settler families on these enduring frontiers, however, constantly needed assistance. They sought help through government at various levels, but the government they hoped to use— whether the township, county, or territory—always had precise boundaries. Organized government was in a position to ameliorate the problems of its citizens; this was what governments did, even on the frontier, or perhaps most often on the frontier. In the First Great Migration of the postwar years, the numbers and energy of sheer mass immigration tended to dilute the significance of the national government throughout much of the western country. But on the enduring frontiers of Michigan, Florida, and Arkansas, the United States government remained the paramount influence in solving the many problems associated with the frontier condition. It was a contradiction of the changing and varying frontier scene that the more distant and remote the frontier, the more it came to depend on a central authority. To government at all levels went a constant stream of appeals for assistance, and as the needs became larger, they were passed upward. To the county government went requests for roads, bridges, and maintenance for both; to the territory, petitions for assistance in supporting schools and in constructing public buildings, such as jails and courthouses; to the federal government, appeals for road networks to connect the remote settlements of the territory and to prepare for new immigrants, demands for the removal of the Indians and for improvements in rivers and harbors, and complaints about the mail service. These three isolated territories (later states) shared one other common denominator: their vulnerability to national economic conditions. The movement and energy of the First Great Migration passed them by. Rising immigration a decade later gave them a sense of growth and prosperity, and they caught the wave of speculative enthusiasm that crested in the early 1830s. Just as these enduring frontiers celebrated their place in the sun, the hopes of their pioneer families, early entrepreneurs, and optimistic public officials were overwhelmed by the economic crisis that began in 1837 and continued into the 1840s. The Panic of 1837 and the depression that followed devastated most of the strands of economic development that had appeared in Michi-



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gan, Florida, and Arkansas. As the settling portions of these frontiers became more commercial, so the collapse of the economy became more significant. Wheat prices plummeted in the North (Michigan). Cotton prices fell to historic lows in the South (Florida and Arkansas). With this economic collapse, banks in the developing states and territories failed. The new banks started in new territories and states were important for economic development, but they were especially vulnerable. They were almost entirely without supervision or any kind of regulatory agency, even by the standards of the day. Anxious for profits in the heady world of the mid-1830s, and anxious to assist their territory by providing loans for expansion and land (and in the South, slave) purchases, they had become overextended. A principal outgrowth of this dependent condition found in the enduring frontiers was the enlarged importance of the machinery of government. Officeholders were the intermediaries who passed on the numerous requests for assistance drawn up by the citizens of the territory. This condition had the effect of centralizing authority in the hands of a few. The growth and prosperity of the territory depended much on the energy and vision of the governor, who was also the center of patronage and appointments. The territorial delegate, too, exercised great authority because of his presence in Washington, where he was responsible for presenting the territory’s pleas for assistance. The press was essential to give a sense of identity and to promote the image of the territory in the outside world, but there was seldom support for more than one territorial paper. Only with official patronage in the form of contracts to print laws and the proceedings of the territorial legislature could an editor, often his own printer, survive. So the editor joined that select group who directed the destinies of the territory. In view of the concentration of authority, it is not surprising that the territories became the centers of political disputes in the late 1820s. Political factions appeared, fought, dissolved, reformed, and continued the struggle for preferment at every level and at every opportunity. The search for appointment was as avid and unceasing as in any part of the republic, the more so on the enduring frontiers, where opportunities for economic advantage seemed fewer.

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Institutional forms expanded across the western country after 1815, and the enduring frontiers had their share. The territorial legislatures of Michigan, Florida, and Arkansas filled their journals with solemn deliberations and laws—many laws, in fact laws that the territory scarcely yet required. The legislatures laid off counties, and the governor appointed officials to preside over a landscape virtually uninhabited by Anglo-Americans. In these new counties officeholders might outnumber other citizens. Perhaps these counties assisted a few dispersed citizens; perhaps they were only to make jobs for officeholders. In any case, county-making outstripped settlement. Officeholders, court systems, and a legal structure expanded across hundreds of miles of dense forest, prairie, and swamp. The experience of the enduring frontiers showed that institutions and institutional development spread over these areas regardless of population and even need. In providing for rapid institutional development, the people on the enduring frontiers followed the example of the mainstream of the Great Migration. At the same time, their needs and uses were often at variance. A final quality that needs to be noted is the long arc of time associated with the early settlement and initial development of these three political units. After the slow settlement patterns associated with the first generation of Anglo-Americans in the western country, these cycles of population growth and physical expansion accelerated after 1815. Then, after a pause associated with the 1820s, another decade of movement and optimism appeared. The cycle of the enduring frontiers was quite different. The influences that left them lagging behind this dramatic expansion gave Michigan, Florida, and Arkansas a long-delayed frontier experience. Yet, within this long sweep of time, each of these three territories had a different history, and within the territories (and later states) themselves, the stories varied from place to place.



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Michigan: The Great Lakes Frontier

Michigan had a long European settlement experience. Founded in 1701 to serve the French fur-trade empire, Detroit became a British possession under the Treaty of Paris in 1763 and, after prolonged negotiations, American in 1796. The region’s routine organization as Michigan Territory in 1805 little affected its character as a French fur-trading post. In size, the new territory stretched from Detroit at the intersection of Lakes Erie and Huron west to the Mississippi River, and north to Lake Superior—in short, a landmass covering the present states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and part of Minnesota. It was an area larger than many European nations. In landscape and native population, it was the re-creation of the world of the fur trade: a place of dense forests, interspersed with waterways, and bounded by great rivers and lakes. And in character, its human occupants were a few thousand Europeans appropriate to the fur trade, located at a handful of critical sites at the intersection of waterways, surrounded by thirty thousand Indians. The new Michigan Territory bordered on British Canada, but in truth, whatever diplomats and maps may have said, there was no clear-cut boundary. Indian peoples and European traders moved back across the international boundary line with no

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sense of crossing from one nation to another. The continuing British support of Indian peoples across this vast landscape was a source of continuing anxiety to the small number of Americans resident in the territory. The right of passage across the boundary had been confirmed as recent as Jay’s Treaty (1794). The geographer D. W. Meinig writes, “The whole country tributary to Lake Huron, Michigan, and Superior had been an unchallenged part of Montreal’s hinterland ever since French explorers had penetrated the area a century or more earlier.”1 This continuing French and later British presence was reflected in influence with Indian peoples, and the scattered Americans within the newly organized territory had a sense of living on a few small islands, surrounded by great forests and hostile Indian nations. The continuing tensions associated with international intrigue and the fur trade were a pale introduction to the chaos and destruction of the War of 1812. The declaration of war against England in 1812 was both a complex and a simple exercise. It was complex because of the varying attitudes toward a war within an American nation that now stretched across half the continent from the Atlantic Coast west to the Mississippi River. It was simple in its thirst for Canada. The West was uninvolved in the diplomatic and legal maneuvering over neutral rights at sea; it was intensely interested in the conquest of Canada, as a means of enlarging the nation and as a means of ending British intrigue with Indian nations north of the Ohio. An American nation totally unprepared for war now attempted to seize Canada while the British were engaged in a life-and-death struggle against the armies of Napoleon Bonaparte on the European continent. Poorly equipped and poorly led, the American campaigns failed. The British counterattacked and seized Detroit and Michilimackinac. The American plan was a shambles, and the war in the Northwest became a series of local engagements in which the Americans tried to recover what they had initially lost. Its strategic location on the Great Lakes and its proximity to British Canada made Michigan—especially the area around Detroit—the cockpit of that conflict in the Northwest. Nowhere on the continent did the armies (by frontier standards, at least, they



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were armies) march and countermarch with such regularity. Nowhere was physical devastation as complete as in the crescent of land around the western end of Lake Erie. Nowhere was the war fought with so much personal vindictiveness, intensified by both sides’ decision to use Indian allies. The troops who lived off the countryside physically devastated the land; needy army commanders stripped it by their endless requisitions; the Indians who had been used as auxiliaries in a war that seemed of little advantage to them plundered what remained. The war disrupted the fur trade and left many of the territory’s people in a condition close to starvation. Meinig summarized this condition: “Homes and farmsteads, orchards, crops, and livestock, public buildings and whole towns had been ravaged, pillaged, burned, blown up.” Aside from the physical damage, the war left long memories on both sides of the border. And whatever diplomats might say about the end of hostilities, those in Michigan knew differently. In their view, British officials in Canada must be watched with the greatest care, particularly in their relationship with Indian peoples to the south of the international boundary.2 The people of Michigan survived, but the infant territory (infant in population, not in age or size) faced formidable problems, some natural and others self-inflicted. Of the natural obstacles, the foremost was location. The traveler William Darby commented, “Detroit, politically and commercially, is separated by an expanse of water, and by an uncultivated waste, from the other part of the United States, and remains, together with the little community in its environs, an isolated moral mass, having few sympathies in common, and but a slight tie of interest to unite it to the sovereignty of which it forms a part.”3 This condition became the more obvious after 1815 as population set in motion by the First Great Migration poured down the Ohio and into other parts of the Old Northwest, but not into Michigan. Michigan’s vast landed expanse extending from Lake Erie to the Mississippi River lay far to the north of the natural immigration route down the Ohio River. To the southeast, at the mouth of the Maumee River, the well-known Black Swamp isolated the territory from the state of Ohio. In 1815 no road connected Michigan

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with the growing American settlements to the south. Lines of communication, such as they were, ran by water through the Great Lakes to western New York State. Michigan emerged from the war with a military government. Military needs had been paramount throughout the war. The territory was almost continually in a state of crisis. Decisions in the form of military orders were the logical—some would have said the only—way to meet such needs. For the next fifteen years Michigan provided a case study in the power of one man to shape a frontier, its society, and the development of its institutions. The future of the territory rested in the hands of Lewis Cass, its governor. He was a most fortunate choice. Like Arthur St. Clair of the Northwest Territory in an earlier generation, Cass was a strong nationalist who believed in the authority of government to deal with a wide range of problems; like William Henry Harrison in Indiana Territory, Cass was young and ambitious. Unlike St. Clair and Harrison, however, Cass was strongly committed to representative government. He believed that the territory should move to elections as rapidly as possible. He strongly supported democratic institutions. He wanted the widest possible representation. He was also extraordinarily adept in his personal relations with citizens of the territory and government officials in Washington, D.C. Even his most outspoken opponents (of which he had very few), agreed that he was a master at compromise. It was a useful talent. Cass had to handle many needs in many different areas. He needed to pay careful attention to the demands of his constituents in Michigan, to request endless assistance of various kinds from officials in Washington, to show the proper mixture of strength and correctness in his dealings with officials in Canada, and to conduct continuing negotiations with Indian nations across his vast imperial domain. Lewis Cass was a general when he became governor of the territory in 1813. His was a military rule and, after 1815, in many ways a military reconstruction. His leadership as civil executive was strong and energetic in accordance with his military experience. Indeed, he thought of Michigan’s needs in a military



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framework: supplies for the hungry and indigent; force and negotiation in proper proportion to deal with the Indian presence; a watchful correctness in relations with the nearby English, whom he suspected of dark designs; roads to Ohio and the interior of the territory and ships on the Great Lakes to open communication with the rest of the nation; and the rapid survey and sale of the public lands. Cass set about rebuilding the territory, and military considerations entered forcefully into his decisions. The object of his plans was a large immigration of American farm families to settle and cultivate the lands, to provide a ready source of military strength, and to make Michigan truly American in the sense in which Cass understood the term.4 It was an ambitious program, made the more pressing by the isolation of his territory and its many needs. From the beginning of his governorship, Cass assumed the role of the most important public figure within the territory. At the close of the war, one of his first acts was to issue a series of public proclamations on the physical attractions of Michigan and the virtue of its citizens. Above all, Michigan needed new settler families. The First Great Migration was under way, down the Ohio, down the Mississippi, into the new lands in the South so recently acquired by treaty. Michigan needed to share in this flood of movement. In 1817 Cass persuaded John P. Sheldon to establish a newspaper, and the Detroit Gazette continued the governor’s plan of advertising the virtues of the territory. For the next twenty years, Sheldon and other editors within the territory would endlessly publicize the virtues of the territory for settler families. The governor actively campaigned for the rapid survey of Michigan’s public lands and their immediate sale, for he felt that only such sales would bring the agricultural population that the territory so desperately needed. In this area, he suffered an early setback. In 1813, as a spur to the energetic prosecution of the war, Congress set aside six million acres in the West for military bounty lands. One-third, or two million acres, would be located in Michigan Territory. Unfortunately, the surveyors’ initial reports were unfavorable. They described Michigan lands as a

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mixture of swamps, heavy underbrush, and sterile sandhills. In response to these accounts, the surveyor general recommended that Michigan’s bounty lands be located elsewhere. The Congress agreed and divided Michigan’s lands between Illinois and Missouri, the two other sites. Cass had achieved the most unfortunate results. Michigan had lost the bounty lands; the surveyor general’s negative reports on Michigan lands were now part of the public’s view of this new territory to the far north.5 Discouraged, Cass did not surrender but continued the fight. He campaigned for the resumption of the surveys of Michigan Territory, for only surveyed lands could be offered for public sale at the designed government land offices. Detroit had been designated a land office in 1804, and Cass was anxious to begin public sales. Cass lobbied energetically, and his arguments eventually carried the day. Surveys of Michigan lands resumed. The new reports were much more favorable. In July 1818, the first public lands were offered for sale at the Detroit land office. Sales were modest, but Cass had tied Michigan to the cycle of the survey and sale of the public domain.6 Among Cass’s most important ongoing activities was the continuous search for more effective transportation and communication. Michigan’s small population—the census takers counted 8,896 citizens of European origins in 1820—was widely dispersed. Most of these inhabitants were located in an arc around Detroit south to the Raisin River, but other smaller settlements were at Mackinac in the far north; at Green Bay, on the far side of Lake Michigan; and at Prairie du Chien, at the intersection of the Wisconsin and Mississippi rivers. The postwar revolution in transportation on the transAppalachian frontier was not on land but on water, and its principal agent was steam. On August 27, 1818, the steamship Walkin-the-Water, some forty-four hours out of Buffalo, anchored in Detroit harbor. The age of steam had come to Michigan and with it, presumably, the transformation of the territory.7 The arriving steamship was an impressive representative of the future: a main deck 135 feet long, two masts, a paddlewheel in the middle of the vessel, a wood-burning engine, with a top speed of ten miles an



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hour. The initial fare from Buffalo to Detroit was eighteen dollars cabin class, seven dollars steerage class. But if the revolution was at hand, it was destined to be a gradual, not a precipitous, change. Inland from Detroit harbor the birchbark canoe remained the means of travel; on the lakes it was the durham boat. In 1820, when sixty-nine steamboats served the rivers of the western country, only one served the frontier of the Great Lakes. The season for navigating the Great Lakes was a short one, the risks were high, and the good ship Walk-in-the-Water remained alone. There was no sudden proliferation of steam navigation on the lakes. In late 1821 a heavy storm beached this sole representative of contact with the modern world. A new ship, the Superior, was ready by the next season with Walk-inthe-Water’s salvaged engine, but she also sailed alone.8 Governor Cass vigorously promoted the economic development of the territory, which meant the transition from a furtrading economy to agriculture and, as rapidly as possible, to commercial agriculture. As economic life began anew in 1815, the French anciens habitants were almost the only farmers. The territory needed aggressive economic activity, and Michigan’s public officials had little sympathy for what they regarded as the passive, communal lifestyle of the French. In Cass’s view the French farmers were as indolent as their fur-trading ancestors, and their agriculture lacked a scientific basis. Cass concluded, “Until therefore a radical change shall have taken place in the manners & customs of the people of this Territory, or until a migration into it shall have changed the character of its population and added to its moral strength and physical resources, we shall have a number of indigent helpless people.”9 The Americans at last arrived, but they were slow to bring about the agricultural transformation of the territory. They cleared and cultivated, but they also traded, trapped, hunted, and, in short, made no rapid changes in the economic patterns of Michigan. In early 1818 the Detroit Gazette described the economic condition of the territory in these terms: “Agriculture, that true and invariable source of wealth, exempt from destructibility, has been altogether neglected. We have a town with (comparatively) no country—a very considerable trade, and in-

MICHIGAN: THE GREAT LAKES FRONTIER

stead of exporting country produce, we import almost the whole of our provisions.” “The prosperity of the territory depends on the exertion of agriculturalists,” the Detroit Gazette charged, and a few years later it observed that “there are not TWELVE good practical farmers in the territory.”10 This condition was not for want of interest. Rarely has a pioneering agricultural population received more attention from the press. The Detroit Gazette filled its columns with advice of a theoretical and practical nature, charges of indolence, and the vision of a prosperous future. Commenting on the arrival in 1821 of three hundred barrels of produce from Ohio for sale on commission, the editor noted, “There is not a farmer in the territory that ever had sufficient enterprise to cultivate any article for exportation, although we have thousands of acres of the best hemp land in the world.”11 The territory’s first agricultural exports— two hundred barrels of flour shipped to New York City in 1827— were celebrated as a triumph. The grain was sown, harvested, and milled in Michigan, and the flour packed in barrels of local manufacture, all, wrote the Michigan Sentinel, “evidence of the great change that has taken place in this section of the country within a few years past.”12 A characteristic of the enduring frontiers was the prominence of a few small urban centers. People in insufficient numbers to push settlement into the countryside huddled around the few towns that served as the focus of all aspects of life. Detroit was a case in point. The fur trade had established its commercial role. In 1817 the city had “upwards of thirty commercial houses, some of them doing business on an extensive scale.” But large-scale commercial prosperity required agriculture, and the “boundless wilderness” stretched on all sides to within two miles of the town. Could this land be “converted into a farm and manufacturing country, Detroit might challenge competition for extent of commerce and nature advantages with any of the rising cities of the West.” In the years immediately after the war, agriculture produced no export crops, and manufacturing was no more advanced. In 1821 the Detroit Gazette castigated the economic enterprise of the territory with the declaration that not three families could make clothes, no carding machines or fulling mills



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could be found within a hundred miles of Detroit, and the whole territory did not contain even five looms.13 The territory of Michigan imported much of what it ate and everything it wore and used for business. Prices, reflecting transportation costs, were high. Manufactures in 1819 included “a small quantity of leather” shipped to Montreal, to supplement exports of furs and maple sugar. To these were added, on occasion, shipments of fish and fruit. Commercial activities continued to center on the fur trade. As late as 1821, the Detroit Gazette testified that furs were the only commodity that might be profitably exported to the East. On the eve of the opening of the Erie Canal, this pattern had changed little. An observer put together a “guess” for exports of the 1825 season: furs, $700,000; fish, $20,000; lumber, $7,500; indian sugar, $3,000; pot & pearl ashes, $8,000; for a total of $738,500.14 Cass’s most important ongoing role was in representing the federal government in negotiations with Michigan’s Indian peoples. The context for these encounters was the presence of the British in Canada. Whatever international treaties may have specified, the boundary was open. Indians, individually and in groups, moved back and forth from one national authority to another. And whatever the promises of the British in the Treaty of Ghent, Cass always suspected the British officials in Canada of fomenting unrest and even violence within the vast landscape known as Michigan Territory. In his eyes, evidence was everywhere. When he sat around council fires, he saw opposite him Indian leaders wearing British medals and other reminders of this alien influence. Surrounded by such malevolent influences, Cass thought that “American sovereignty in the region was being undermined by the British.”15 He had two responses. The first was the strict enforcement of the Indian trade in order to prevent any advantage in monetary terms or influence accruing to British traders. That the vast trapping landscape of what was now Michigan Territory had long been the preserve of the Northwest Company, with its headquarters in Montreal, simply confirmed him in the determination. As a counterweight, Cass strongly supported the claims of John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company. That Astor’s was an

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American company was reason enough to favor it at the expense of foreign companies and foreign traders. Cass also compromised his personal principles by permitting the use of alcohol in the Michigan fur trade. The issue here was the need to meet the competition; if the Canadians traded alcohol, then the Americans must be prepared to match the offer. Finally, Cass also joined Astor in his opposition to the government’s “factory” system. By a law enacted in 1796, Congress established government “factories” to engage in the fur trade, arguing that fair prices and honest services for Indian peoples would incline them to support American national interests. Cass believed that the government “factories” unfairly competed with the private trading posts of Astor’s American Fur Company, and he vigorously supported the abolition of government-sponsored trading posts. Congress closed down the government “factories” in 1822, and the American Fur Company quickly came to dominate the fur business.16 Throughout his fourteen years as governor, Cass was engaged in more or less continuous negotiations with Indian groups. Often he served as peacemaker between warring parties, evidence of his high standing among certain Indian peoples. At other times, he pursued land cessions. At the heart of his many and varied activities with Indians was his attitude toward Indian peoples. Based on years of contact, Cass considered himself a realist, under no illusions about the vision of “the noble savage.” He believed that Indians were divided, sometimes victimized, and always dangerous. He thought the idea of “civilization,” that is, that Indians would become white farmers, was unrealistic to the point of fantasy. Cass also believed that as a representative of the national interest, he had an obligation to be consistent and firm in his message to Indian peoples. And, whatever distasteful message he might convey from his superiors in the War Department, he believed that the American government had an obligation to live up to its treaty obligations, that annuities and other support services should be delivered as promised and on time. On the other side of his duty, he was convinced that Indian peoples were too much under the influence of the Canadian officials. From the moment that he took the oath of official,



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Cass was constantly in negotiations with Indians, whether individuals or groups large and small. Issues could be as minor as the theft of a cow; they could be serious questions of brokering a peace between warring factions. Among the results of his labors were two major treaties: the Treaty of Saginaw (1819), which extinguished Indian claims to the east central portion of the territory, and the Chicago Treaty (1821), which did the same for the western portion of the Lower Peninsula south of the Grand River. At the same time, Cass used the Indian presence to keep garrisons of federal troops stationed in the territory, where they provided a welcome economic stimulus. He also employed the troops to construct roads, arguing that this work was necessary to the national defense.17 In the course of this continuing contact with Indian peoples, a new initiative appeared that represented a radical new departure in the policy of the federal government. This was the idea of a Northwest Indian Territory. President James Monroe originally proposed the new direction in 1824. A “western sanctuary” for Indian peoples, it would lie within the boundaries of the Territory of Michigan, although “most of the lands west of Lake Huron and Lake Michigan contained no American settlers, and the idea of creating a formal Indian protectorate in this northwest region was now seriously advocated by various interests, governmental and private.” Secretary of War John C. Calhoun proposed such an Indian state, to include most of Michigan Territory west of Lake Huron. It was a large area “as yet unsought and not likely to be strongly desired by Western settlers.” What moved the idea forward was the idea that this vast unattractive landscape could become the permanent gathering place of the many Algonquian tribes that were already under pressure from the advance of American settlements into the Old Northwest in response to the First Great Migration. These groups to the south were already in almost continuous contact with Americans, connected to the American economy through traders and dependency “upon traders for tools, arms, cloth, and other supplies.” They were under increasing pressure to cede their lands and move. These Algonquian groups had been refugees for almost a generation, driven by hostile groups (Indian and Anglo-

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American) in a continuous cycle of struggle for survival. The solution would be a large buffer state, guaranteed by the Americans and the British in Canada. It would provide a final resting place for these groups. Its creation would greatly simplify the ongoing negotiations over land cessions by providing a landed area to which the retiring Indian peoples might be directed. It would reduce and finally end the constant tension associated with the boundaries created by Indian treaties that could not be enforced on either side. Although Calhoun’s bill passed the Senate, it never received congressional approval. In the end, the destiny of the Indians across much of the Northwest, especially Michigan Territory, was played out in scores of individual meetings and treaty-making exercises. In the words of D. W. Meinig: it “was decided in the usual American way: by uncontrolled encounter, bloodshed, and coercion.”18 The task of providing regular communication with these distant parts of Michigan Territory in order to carry on the business of government was enormous. Cass discovered this himself in 1820, when he took his first tour to the distant reaches of the territory. Secretary of War Calhoun approved the expedition and provided funds to support it. Cass ordered three large birchbark canoes from the Chippewas. The vessels were thirty-five feet long and six feet wide, able to carry a cargo of four tons. The party included Cass and his secretary, a physician, a mineralogist, a topographer, a small military unit, two interpreters, ten voyageurs, and equal numbers of Ottawas, Chippewas, and Shawnees as crews and hunters. In the style of the earlier voyage of discovery by Lewis and Clark, Cass’s expedition was political, diplomatic, and scientific. Cass served the political dimension by representing the power of the territory’s executive to the most distant borders of his domain. The diplomatic part involved Cass’s continued encounter with various Indian groups. And the scientific aspect was significant because so little was known about the distant reaches of Michigan Territory. Cass and his party departed Detroit in late May 1820. They went north and then turned west to follow the western shore of Lake Huron, thence north and west through



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Sault Ste. Marie, by the Portage River to the upper waters of the Mississippi. Then, after a brief side expedition in search of the source of the Mississippi (which the party did not find), they turned south down the Mississippi, then north on the Wisconsin and Fox to Green Bay, where they followed the western shore of Lake Michigan to Fort Dearborn next to the tiny village of Chicago. Cass then took the overland route across southern Michigan to Detroit, arriving in early September. He was gone four months and covered four thousand miles, mostly in a canoe. It was an impressive performance. He had “carried the flag to the far reaches of Michigan Territory” and brought back a wealth of scientific data on the upper reaches of the American Northwest.19 Next year, Cass held a great council of Indian representatives at Fort Dearborn. Some three thousand Chippewas, Potawatomis, and Ottawas listened to Cass’s speech urging them to cede some five million acres in southern Michigan in exchange for annuities and promises. He successfully concluded a treaty at Chicago, but only by favoring the treaty faction of the several groups. After he had left, casks of whiskey were opened, and a drunken brawl left several Indians dead. It was a dark stain on the outward success of his treaty-making exercise.20 The treaty at Chicago opened up the southern portion of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula to Anglo-American occupation, but the response was slow. The prosperous forward movement of the western country had been seriously slowed by the depression following the economic crisis of 1819. Still, Cass turned his energy to the construction of roads into Michigan Territory. With the support of Congress, the army constructed a road from Detroit to the Ohio line, finally linking Michigan to the Union in 1827. Then Cass completed Michigan’s road network with the Territorial Road from Detroit to St. Joseph on Lake Michigan by way of the Kalamazoo Valley and the so-called Chicago Road from Detroit to Chicago, which opened up central Michigan for the land rush of the 1830s.21 As private enterprises struggled forward, the business of government remained a focus of economic activity. Whereas those

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territories that benefited from the First Great Migration became states, Michigan remained a territory, and political power remained concentrated in the hands of a few appointed officials. Federal officeholders, especially the governor, controlled patronage and influence. They represented a territorial elite and dominated political, economic, and social life. In truth, the range was even narrower, for Governor Cass was a figure of supreme importance. Dependence on the federal government and its principal representative was almost complete. Expressions of discontent were, for the most part, muted. Of the national election of 1828, the Michigan Sentinel commented that whoever won, the territory must “cling to the Administration. The Territory is slave to an ‘absentee aristocracy.’ ”22 County government also occupied a significant place in the lives of Michigan’s citizens. In this, as in everything else, the initiative lay with the governor. At the close of the war, Cass quickly laid out lakefront counties: Monroe (1817), Macomb (1818), and St. Clair (1820). In 1820 he organized Oakland, the first truly interior county. Some counties had specialized problems associated with their locations. Mackinac (or Michilimackinac), Brown, and Crawford counties, set off in 1818, lay north and west of Lake Michigan, and the county seats of Mackinac, Green Bay, and Prairie du Chien contained scarcely enough people to fill the offices. The costs of such basic services of government as courts, roads, and mail were high. Because of the many services provided by counties, and because he was always in search of ways to stimulate the peopling of the territory, Cass believed it wise to lay off counties in advance of settlement. He did so energetically, organizing some counties that were almost empty. With great distances, primitive communication, and a few people, government at the township level came to exercise much influence. The township was the basic administrative unit for the construction and maintenance of roads, and each township had a supervisor of roads and highways. Townships also had constables for preserving the peace. Township organization sometimes preceded county government, and some of the early townships were, accordingly, very large. Yet what was different



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about Cass’s policy in appointments was his delicate balance among local factions and his determination that, where possible, officeholders at the county level should be elected.23 Governor Cass recommended much legislation to meet the needs of the territory, and the Legislative Council responded with laws to meet almost every contingency. Cass’s message to the new Legislative Council in 1823 showed the range of issues with which he concerned himself. He asked for more effective local government at the township level, reform of the militia and courts, more attention to road construction, an educational system, and some provision for the poor. The council entered upon its duties with the utmost energy, as evidenced by the extent of its legislation on a wide variety of subjects. Legislation for the session of 1827, for example, filled 354 printed pages. Laws on a multitude of subjects—indeed on almost every subject—were introduced, debated, passed, signed, and placed on the books.24 Towns supplemented these with their own ordinances. This large and growing body of law was then rewritten. As early as 1824, Governor Cass commented that the legal system was being “altered too frequently and with too much facility.” The condition of the law in 1826 called forth this description: “It is literally a cobweb, through which a snail may crawl, or creep around, and there is none to say who.”25 In short, by 1830 Michigan Territory was no colony of isolated simple frontier people, living by the tenets of natural law and under conditions that required little or no formal law or its apparatus. Quite to the contrary, Michigan Territory had a code of law as complete and detailed as those of far more populous and prosperous territories and states. The modest population of Michigan also enjoyed an extensive court system. In 1820 the governor and judges appointed a county court to serve as an appellate court for decisions of the justices of the peace and with original jurisdiction in civil cases up to one thousand dollars and in criminal cases not involving capital punishment. Such wide latitude was eminently suitable to the dispersed nature of Michigan’s population. But justice was not as rapid and impartial as the territory’s citizens wished. The problems of appealing a decision—or carrying an original suit for that matter—from Green Bay to Detroit were almost insur-

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mountable. The principals—lawyers and witnesses—would leave as the ice went off the rivers and with luck might be back in the north country before the first hard freeze the following autumn. Of course, if justice miscarried or was delayed, another trip would be necessary, or a winter spent in Detroit. One tangible response to complaints from people in the north country was the creation by Congress in 1823 of a judge with powers of the General Court for the western counties of Mackinac, Brown, and Crawford. The new judge, James Duane Doty, was a meticulous jurist in an isolated judicial district and later a territorial executive of great skill.26 In 1818 the Detroit Gazette called Michigan a “newly organised and rising society.”27 Probably no one could foresee at the time how gradual that rise would be. In the ten years after the war not even the determined executive leadership of Lewis Cass could accelerate the painfully slow growth of Michigan Territory. Signs of economic maturity began to appear in the late 1820s: the export of flour, which showed a significant advance in agriculture and processing, and the completion of a road network across the territory from Lake Erie to Lake Michigan. The greatest impetus to growth and accelerated immigration was the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825. This shallow ditch across upper New York State brought about an economic transformation of the upper Great Lakes, uniting the fertile but undeveloped lands of Michigan Territory to the great export markets of the East Coast, principally New York City. Michigan now joined the rising western economy. Immigration rose in quantum leaps. Larger numbers of steamboats appeared on the Great Lakes, five new ships for the 1825–26 season alone. Detroit became an important port of entry. Governor Cass laid off new counties across the southern part of the territory in response to people in motion. New towns sprang up in the western part of the territory: Niles, St. Joseph, and Jackson. New agricultural areas to the west, such as the St. Joseph River country, acquired reputations as garden spots. By the end of the decade, assisted by the Erie Canal and the imminent completion of the western roads, Michigan was on the verge of great physical expansion and accompanying economic prosperity.28



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In the generation after the opening of the Erie Canal, an agricultural people occupied the southern part of the peninsula from Lake Erie to Lake Michigan, settled the land, placed it under cultivation, and propelled Michigan into the front rank of expansion and prosperity. This growing agricultural frontier was the result of forces felt throughout the Northwest: the opening of the Erie Canal, which benefited Michigan in a very direct way; liberal land policies; and a general feeling of prosperity that produced large-scale investments in public lands, town sites, and banking ventures. In the 1840s an influx of foreign immigrants came to Michigan. New economic ventures also appeared, as mining and lumbering supplemented agriculture. Settlement gradually expanded north up the peninsula. Accompanying growth and expansion was the rise of several important urban centers, which appeared as a necessary link to agricultural development, providing goods, services, and markets for the settling countryside. Over the course of this new generation, Michigan’s immigrants had two distinct settlement experiences running parallel to the economic conditions of the western country as a whole: the first, lasting from 1825 to about 1840, was a period of motion, prosperity, optimism, easy credit, good markets, and the profound confidence in the future that was associated with the political movement known as Jacksonian democracy. Banks appeared in every village. Railroads were the subject of everyone’s conversation and the ambition of every promoter. A railroad line across the peninsula from Lake Erie to Lake Michigan would have an impact like that of the Erie Canal, or so it was said, over and over. By 1836 promoters had drawn up elaborate plans for no fewer than five railroad projects involving the port town of Monroe alone. The surge of immigration into Michigan in the 1830s might be measured by the sales of public lands. In 1836, the Bronson (soon to be Kalamazoo) land office sold more than $2 million of public lands, and Michigan’s five district land offices had sales of $5,241,000.29 The bright hopes for the future faded in the wake of the panic of 1837 and the depression that followed. Population growth slowed. Cash markets vanished. The northward movement and



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sense of progress that was so much a part of the Michigan frontier of the early and mid-1830s ceased. As elsewhere in the transAppalachian West and the nation as a whole, the depression was severe and long-lasting. Yet the decade of the 1840s gradually emerged as a time of subdued expansion. Grain exports became a major factor in Michigan’s economy, with Detroit and St. Joseph as the principal ports on Lake Erie and Lake Michigan, respectively. The rise of the grain trade owed much to railroad construction, and the state of Michigan entered vigorously into the business of state-owned, state-financed internal improvements. The thirty miles of railroad line completed from Detroit to Ypsilanti in 1836 was extended to Ann Arbor in 1840, Kalamazoo in 1843, and the shores of Lake Michigan at St. Joseph in 1849. The state also planned and built other lines in the 1840s, responding to larger numbers, increased production, and the economic forces associated with them.30 The growth of Michigan’s population shows these cycles of isolation, prosperity, depression, and recovery. The people who participated in Michigan’s first great rush of settlement—characterized by movement and optimism—left many accounts of happy frontier memories. They moved in a world of rising expectations and within a firm institutional framework already in place. Kingsley Scott Bingham was one of this group. In 1833 he immigrated to what would become Livingston County. Like many others, Bingham and his family entered the territory at Detroit. He left his family in Ann Arbor and followed the Huron River north to an attractive site where he purchased two parcels of land. For a farm of two hundred acres, eighty fenced and six acres already in wheat, watered by a branch of the Huron, with excellent lowland and meadow, Bingham paid $650. He also bought 240 acres of government land located on the Territorial Road between Ann Arbor and Pontiac, for which he presumably paid the minimum price. Gathering his family on the way, he returned to Detroit to pick up the goods that he had shipped by steamboat and to purchase supplies. He bought “a good timber wagon,” a yoke of oxen, “some groceries, hardware and farming utensils and started for our farm.” His purchases and those of others like him laid the foundation for

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Table 4. Growth of the Old Northwest, 1820–50

Michigan Illinois Indiana Ohio

1820

1830

8,896 55,211 147,178 581,434

31,639 157,445 343,031 937,903

1840 212,267 476,183 685,866 1,519,467

1850 397,654 851,470 988,416 1,980,329

Source: Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1957 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1960), 13. The population of Michigan in 1820 includes the territory as then constituted.

the development of towns in Michigan. Ann Arbor, Jackson, Marshall, Kalamazoo, Battle Creek, and especially Detroit became outfitting points for immigrants. Bingham hastened back to the land and went to work. “We moved in with a family living near us and in less than 4 weeks from the time we left home, we were at work on our own land,” he continued. With the assistance of a hired man, he put up a log house, built of “seasoned lumber” from Ann Arbor. The first year he planted only half an acre of the traditional frontier crop of corn, but two acres of potatoes and two acres of turnips. The staple crop for market was wheat. Bingham hoped to plant thirty acres in wheat the first year, thus already pursuing the new commercial agriculture of the Michigan frontier. The nearest “permanent market”—as he called it—was Detroit. The grain trade across the Great Lakes had made itself felt in the hinterland, and its presence in southern Michigan did much to explain the energy behind proposed railroad construction.31 Immigrant markets and cash crops aside, the demands of the land were constant: break new ground, improve the old, fence the land, construct outbuildings. In this sense, the farm family of Michigan Territory followed the patterns of the first frontier generation of Kentucky and Tennessee. A Scots immigrant, W. Forbes, wrote of the chores at all seasons of the year. In the winter, for example, he would rise at seven and cut wood and rails and draw them to the house on a sled; or, if the weather was exceptionally bad, he would work in the carpenter shop or weave baskets. In the spring and summer he rose two hours earlier, did



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chores, and then went to the fields at seven, where he remained until sunset. Forbes thought the attractions of his situation and the promise of the future more than compensated for his hard labor. Here is his description of a summer day: Mornings and evenings delicious sitting out of doors in the shady side of the house or trees at breakfast or supper eating melons in (middle) of the day not a cloud, pure blue skye. light & heat. Cattle breaking away to get into the deep shaddow of trees or into the river to cool themselves—drinking water by the gallon which distills from you in large drops in a few minutes—dress shirt and trousers and straw hat, this never lasts 3 or 4 days until it is succeeded by a thunder shower falling in torrents for 1 hour and all is fair and cool and fresh again.

So wrote a pioneer farmer transplanted from Peterhead (Scotland) to Allegan County (Michigan). His reports of the warm summers and the fertility of Michigan lands must have evoked astonishment in the cold and hard agricultural landscape of Scotland. He called the growth of his crops “a rapidity that staggers the belief of those accustomed to the slow growth of colder climate.”32 The sensations Forbes described reflected the optimism of a frontier in motion, expectations buoyed by the new land and the bright future. In the late 1820s and early 1830s numerous families from New England, New York, and Pennsylvania came to the Michigan frontier. Many of them were hard-working, ambitious, orderly, and literate. Among these were the Chandlers, Elizabeth Margaret and her brother Thomas, who immigrated to Michigan Territory in 1830. The Chandlers were Quakers from Philadelphia. They settled in a Friends community near Adrian (Lenawee County), preferring the quality of its society to the faster-growing section in the west around St. Joseph. Thomas bought an eighty-acre tract and hired a carpenter to build a log cabin. Elizabeth wrote to their relatives that the finished dwelling was twenty by twenty-six feet, one and one-half stories high, with two doors and four windows. Thomas was from the city, but he soon rejoiced in his growing physical strength, be-

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coming more and more the acquisitive pioneer. In short, he worked and prospered. Elizabeth wrote of his world: “Brother seems so happy and satisfied that I could scarcely be otherwise if I were disposed to be. He is now independent of the world and master of a fine farm, which requires only industry to insure him a regular competence . . . and there is some comfort, too, in our expecting the roughest part of our undertaking to come first.” Thomas raised corn and wheat, and tended a growing herd of livestock. In 1832 he bought another lot with valuable timber and bottomland. “He does dearly love the business of farming, and seems very happy in his situation,” confided his sister to their relatives. What of his sister? Elizabeth sat by a “favorite window” and wrote. She described the beauty of the countryside and the delights of the seasons as they succeeded one another: sleighing in the winter; sugaring and brilliant fires in the oak openings in the spring; her garden and flowers in the summer; harvesting, threshing, and bright colors in the autumn. She also described the new society of which she was a part. In dress, the plain people of Lenawee County “might be seated down in any of the Philadelphia meetings on first day without their being known from their dress to be strangers.” In manners, too, they were genteel. The society with which she identified included a number of active women who cooked, quilted, sewed, and attended to chores around the house. But they also did much more. They read and wrote; they studied and argued the principal issues of the day. Elizabeth was an avid reader and expressed herself on such diverse questions as the coming of the railroad and the abolition movement. She read every issue of William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator and strongly approved.33 The flood of agricultural settlement that spread across southern Michigan in the early 1830s represented a variety of people with equally diverse economic and social standards. Kingsley Scott Bingham had a hired man to assist in opening his farm. The Chandlers were immigrants of education and culture from Philadelphia. Thomas Chandler was almost a gentleman farmer, glorying in his success. His sister, Elizabeth Chandler, had an



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amazing degree of leisure for this early stage of settlement. She thought her neighbors socially respectable by any standards, even those of Philadelphia. Large numbers of new settlers came to Michigan in the expansive years of the 1830s, settling the southern part of the territory. Many of these were what contemporaries (and historians) called Yankees. These emigrants from New England and New York State settled the lands in the several counties along the Ohio boundary. They were in search of fertile lands; they were also strongly committed to market connections, which meant water transportation. Susan Gray has written of their settlement patterns: “institutions, rather than clans or autonomous planter households, were at the foundation of the Yankee settlements.” The most important of these institutions were the church, school, and township government. The church was a cornerstone of their sense of a moral, orderly society. The school represented the preparation of the next generation. The township was a vehicle for services, especially roads and a court system. In these ten years, Michigan’s southern counties filled with many of these immigrants.34 The great influx of pioneering peoples into Michigan in the decade of the 1830s coincided with the availability of land, the opening of the Erie Canal with the rise of commerce on the Great Lakes, high commodity prices, and a generous banking system. Michigan’s newly arrived settlers—and especially the Yankee immigrants—moved aggressively to take advantage of economic prospects. The Yankees often moved in groups. They took economic control of townships through the purchase of substantial tracts at the local land office, larger parcels than they could farm by themselves. In short, the Yankees speculated in lands. They also took political control of their local township. These controls were important to them. Susan Gray has concluded after a study of three “Yankee” townships near Kalamazoo that Yankees had two cultural markers: the market and morality. The church gave them a moral foundation. Their twin products of lands and wheat gave them access to two markets. Throughout, from the beginning of their settlements, these

MICHIGAN: THE GREAT LAKES FRONTIER

transplanted New Englanders and New Yorkers were not interested in subsistence agriculture. They were early concerned with “market connections.” These market connections were always viewed in the context of the availability of land. With farmmaking costs from five hundred to one thousand dollars, the Yankees were middle-class farmers with resources. And they were everywhere interested in church, school, and township government.35 Indeed, in the early 1830s, Michigan Territory became synonymous with speculation in lands. Those with more resources and greater ambitions established towns. The pioneer families planted wheat as a market commercial crop, intending to use waterways to move their harvest to a commercial market. So they build roads, wherever possible, to water courses and flatboated their grain downriver to market. Unlike many other early frontier economic patterns, these Michigan settlers had only small herds of livestock, directed only to family consumption. These individual families and communities energetically promoted the “capitalist transformation” of this landscape.36 The Yankee settlers in Gray’s story knew of the attractions of the Kalamazoo prairies by 1830. When the district land office at Bronson opened in 1831, they bought heavily, for settlement and for resale to later arrivals. Townships were important because of their relationship to road districts. One of the first acts in the organization of the township was the division into road districts. These first years of settlement produced “intense competition over the development of township resources and institutions.” From their original settlement, they had no interest in isolating themselves in the wilderness. Quite to the contrary, they sought an immediate connection to a regional trade network. In this search, they evolved an early assessment of the value of local resources: soil, water power, access to transportation routes.37 Like the settlers of the 1830s, the Yankees experienced cycles of boom, panic, and depression. First came the boom. The prosperous years “encouraged extensive investment in federal land and concentration on wheat production on the assumption that a market connection with the east would rapidly develop.” In 1836, in a countryside swept by “Michigan land fever,” wheat



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prices on the New York market reached $2.12 a bushel. Next came the Panic of 1837 and the attendant collapse in land values and then commodity prices. By 1840, wheat was below $1 a bushel; it would not again reach the 1836 level until 1854. Years of depression followed, until well into the 1840s. Those who came in a rush to get rich ended in a concern of how to get a living. Gray concludes of their changes of fortune: “The supposedly temporary inconveniences of frontier life had become permanent.”38 With the economic collapse in 1837, fledgling towns disappeared. Merchants found themselves deeply in debt. Courts at the township level became the forum for the collection of innumerable small debts. In the justice of the peace courts in three townships in Kalamazoo County, three-quarters of the cases dealt with sums less than thirty dollars; one-quarter, cases less than ten dollars. The cases that came before the court surely represented only a fraction of the small and intimate economic transactions that characterized these agricultural communities. Within the system of courts, justice courts were local institutions; they were staffed by local justices, and they had local litigants. It was a measure of the severity of the depression that neighbor began suits against neighbor. The so-called swap and dicker, characteristic of the beginning of the frontier economy, survived through the 1840s.39 Some of the immigrants of the 1830s, without substantial resources, settled farther north. Many came to the frontier with nothing but a strong constitution, and when the financial crisis of 1837 ended good times and the full-scale depression descended in 1839—one of the longest and most severe in the American economic experience—they stayed and struggled to survive. They had no choice. Lovira Hart and his family were among those who experienced the changed atmosphere of the 1840s. They endured hard times, isolation, and personal tragedy. In 1836, at the age of twenty-eight, Lovira Hart moved from Livingston County (New York) to what would become Tuscola County (Michigan), where he settled on the Cass River. The next year, he brought out his wife Hannah Emeline, two young

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daughters, and his mother. From the accounts that remain, it seems Hart knew little about some aspects of pioneer life. He never owned firearms, and his daughter later wrote that he fired a gun only once in his lifetime. The family had one trap in which they caught a large timber wolf, but too late to collect the bounty. Hart was a farmer. He wanted the security of land ownership, and he wanted to make himself part of a society of likeminded people. To this end, he lavished much attention on his own little settlement, which came to include his brother and brother-in-law, and he maintained close ties with his relatives in New York State, talking of visits and urging them to move to Michigan. Unfortunately, he immigrated at the height of a boom period that soon faded into depression. When the Hart family arrived at their tract of land in March 1837, the snow was still deep on the ground. Hart transported the family goods and supplies to the site by sleigh. With the coming of spring, he built a cabin, planted crops, and tried to cut a road. He wrote of his hard work, “Weary man has enough to do to bake his own Johnnycakes—especially if he has no help.” In the spring of 1838 the Hart family made “100 pounds of sugar, 10 gallons of molasses, and a barrel of vinegar.” Hart planted the usual crops: oats, potatoes, rutabagas, corn, and a large vegetable garden. His livestock consisted of only one cow and three pigs. The harvests were adequate to support the family and produced a small surplus. That winter Hart went to Flint with the ox team and sold some corn and wheat. He bought two kettles. The next year he planted flax for home use, and he and the bound boy, Ebin, fenced the cultivated fields. Hart needed a barn to protect his grain, but his wife wrote that “I don se much prospect of having a barn verry Soon.” The pattern of economic subsistence persisted. Hart cleared more land and cultivated larger crops, but little surplus remained, prices were low, and the market distant. Hart discovered the fundamental law that the economic prosperity of new frontiers of the Old Northwest depended on the territory, the trans-Appalachian region, and the nation as a whole. The crash of land speculations, town-site schemes, and banks in distant parts affected his frontier farm. In the spring of



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1838 he wrote, “The times are distressing hard in Michigan, the banks are breaking down by the dozens. All branches of trade is monopolized, opression and extortion is the order of the day. Conscience and humanity are strangers here.” He needed nails, salt, and the services of a carpenter, a blacksmith, and a shoemaker, and he wrote, “This makes it hard for those that have everything to buy and nothing to sell, but I hope the times will be better soon.” He continued, “If they are not, I hope our rulers will all turn into pillars (not of salt but gold and silver).” To supplement a meager diet, the Hart family tried to catch fish in the Cass. They were not successful. The annual return of the fields kept them alive, but “the luxuries of life we shall have to dispense with in a great measure.” The struggle continued, but the price for agricultural produce fell as the family’s production increased. By the winter of 1839–40 Lovira Hart had his farm in good operation. He was producing plenty of fodder—“my rutabagas were pretty good for the season three hundred and fifty bushels from an acre which makes us comfortable in the fodder line”—but he could not afford to buy more stock. The family cow had gone dry, “but cattle are so dear and money so scarce that I can not buy any we need another cow verry much the children want milk.” As for prospects of trade: “There is no cash market at Flint for produce of any kind wheat will fetch 5 shillings in goods corn, 4, oats, 2.” The family had enough to eat and clothes and shoes for the winter, but nothing more. That fall Hart and four friends expressed their discontent by traveling the thirty miles to Lapeer to cast votes for the Whig party. The trip there and back took three days. Hart and his community welcomed an institutional framework that might provide them with many services that they so desperately needed. Michigan’s new state government (the state was admitted to the union in 1836) proved as energetic as its territorial predecessor in laying off counties. Among the byproducts of county government was one that struck at every frontier family: taxes. In 1838 Hart noted that no taxes had been levied, but he expected that the settlement in his area would be attached to Saginaw County. “We shall Organize as soon as we can and then taxes will come thick and heavy,” he wrote. In the

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spring Hart walked to Lapeer and talked to Judge Hotchkiss “about the taxes,” which were “seventy-two cents town and county tax and two dollars and fifty cents road tax for every 80 acres.” He objected to the road tax, for his settlement “lay outside the township.” Hart and other settlers petitioned the legislature but to an unrecorded effect. When he returned to Lapeer the following year, he learned that state and road taxes on the section he owned jointly with his father-in-law came to $60.11. He asked that the road commissioners lay out roads, in order that he might work out the road tax. That summer Hart faced another road tax of $24.00 for 1839, but he could report, “We have made some improvement on the roads in this district.” Although the economy worsened, taxes fell due regularly, to be paid for in hard money and hard labor. Hart reflected that he never got a suitable return for his taxes, and the need to deal with government cost him valuable time in traveling to Lapeer, the seat of local government. The one service of government and use for his tax money that Hart valued was road construction, and not simply because it provided a way to work off taxes. Roads were a necessity. With crops and the family’s health, roads formed a staple of Hart’s early correspondence. Roads were the avenue to the all too remote outside world for people and agricultural surplus, and the routes by which new visitors and settlers could reach the Harts. In his second winter in Michigan, Hart spent much time “cutting” roads—from the house to the southeast corner of the section, to the river, to Harrison’s farm (two miles, he reported). Of his experiences, Hart wrote, “It costs a great deal of time to make poor roads in this country.” The road commissioners laid out some better roads, and Hart and others worked off their taxes in laboring on them. In the winter transportation by sled continued to be widely used. In the summer and fall Hart hauled his grain and corn by wagon over terrible roads to a mill in Saginaw, eighteen miles away. Whenever possible, he floated his commodities down the Cass River. The importance of roads was only one symbol of the isolation felt by all members of the family. In the beginning the land seemed beautiful and the opportunities limitless, the animals of



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the forest were not to be feared, and, all together, the new place “begins to seem like holm here.” Emeline Hart’s brave words did not last. Economic depression settled over the land and brought an abrupt halt to immigration. “You rote that I must keep up good courage and hope for the best,” she wrote to her family two years later. “I try to my courage gets pretty lonsome times I have not been out of the Settlement since I first came in it.” Even the taciturn Lovira Hart longed for society. He once wrote, “If we can see no prospect of our having neighbors soon we shall decamp for some central place where we can have the benefit of school and the society of good neighbors.” In spite of such talk, he never moved. But he did urge his father-in-law to sell his land (bought for a speculation in happier times) to someone who would settle on it. Once he traded two half-quarters to people who planned to move onto them. “I did it for the sake of getting some neighbors and I think I shall not lose in the bargain,” he admitted. The 1840s also brought several personal reverses to the Hart family. Their health was a constant worry, ever a topic of discussion in their letters. All members of the family suffered at intervals from the “ague.” Emeline Hart was often ill; “nervous weakness,” she called it. She gave birth to a third daughter in January 1839. The flies were bad in the summertime, and the mosquitoes made life miserable for the children. A daughter, Emmergine, had a serious speech impediment. In the fall of 1840 Ebin went berserk and attacked Lovira Hart. “Lovira could not manage him I run to Mr. Davis the men came half a dozen of them bound him,” wrote Emeline. “Oh it is a trial to us in a trouble that you don’t know anything of I am affraid he never will get over it.” Through the fall, Ebin remained tied to a bed in the house. In the summer of 1841 Emeline Hart died in childbirth, leaving a daughter born prematurely. Lovira Hart now had to provide for his four daughters, one of them an infant, and his aged mother. Some time in the next few years he returned to the East with his oldest daughter, Jannette, and left her with her grandparents. The remaining children of the family turned to and did the work—as best they could.

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To the labors of opening a farm amidst physical and economic isolation, and in continuing periods of depression, Lovira Hart had the added responsibility of raising a family alone. Of his children, he wrote, “I should like to have the oldest ones where they can go to school. They are running wild in the woods, poor little things.” Not until 1845, four years after his wife’s death, did the children attend a formal school, and then only for two months over the winter, with the prospect of another term in the summer. “We have a good teacher and the Children learn well as would be expected,” he wrote. “They lack for books our Schooling comes high.” In spite of the gradual return of economic prosperity, the prospect of neighbors, and the opening of a school, Hart sometimes expressed bitterness over the hardships of life on the frontier. In 1845, after he had been on the land for eight years, Hart wrote, “But why complain I expect neither Sympathy nor assistance I have got into the woods and cannot get out, but must make the best of it now past Errors can not be remedied and myself and family must suffer the consequences.” Hart constantly longed for some sort of society in the form of neighbors, roads to reach them, perhaps even a town. He called his little settlement Cassville, and it had three families in the spring of 1837. A year later, he wrote, “Mr. Perry has got his blacksmith shop arunning so we now have a shoemaker and blacksmith and two carpenters in the settlement.” By 1845 “the town,” now named Tuscola, had thirteen families. Next year, “Our settlement now numbers 23 families. The land on the River is all taken to Bridgeport.” The arrival of immigrants and the growth of the town was a signal that the economic depression had faded. Among the new arrivals was a colony of Germans. Seven German families—complete with pastor, two church bells, and a schoolteacher—moved into Hart’s vicinity in 1845. They were the advance guard of what would be a large foreign immigration over the next decade. Hart liked the Germans. They were “intelligent,” they had money, and many spoke good English. The Germans soon had a gristmill and sawmill in operation five miles down the Cass River from Hart’s farm. At last, he concluded, “this part of the state is fast settling.” By this time



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what Hart called “the lumbar business” had become economically significant, and lumbermen received higher wages for day labor than farm hands. In 1852 Lovira Hart built a new house, a symbol of his economic success. It had, according to one of his daughters, “a kitchen or cook room with a stove in it, a dining room with a fireplace, a parlor with a stove, and three bedrooms below and plenty of room upstairs, a new woodhouse, and a room for Pa to keep his tools and work in when it is bad weather.” It stood on Hart’s Corners as a monument to fifteen years of unremitting labor and human sacrifice. Hart had long promoted schools, and, as part of this interest, he gave his old house to be used as a schoolhouse. Hart wrote to his oldest daughter in New York and urged her to come for a visit: “Remember that life is short and what we have to do must be done quickly.” Perhaps he recalled the long-deferred expectations of his first wife, Hannah Emeline. Years of physical labor and economic hardship left their mark on Lovira Hart. Among the stories told about him when he was an old man was an encounter between him and his daughter as she worked in her flower beds. He told her she might better be doing something worthwhile. She answered him, “But father don’t they look pretty?” “Yes,” he replied; “they look pretty all right, but I think a hill of nice potatoes would look prettier.” It was said of Hart that “he seemed to be a very stern old man in his later years.” It was a comment by those who had not shared in his struggles on Michigan’s enduring frontier.40 Michigan Territory was home to a series of issues over slavery across a generation. These began in 1807 when the territorial supreme court decided several cases involving slaves and their rights. Their conclusions: anyone born in Michigan after American occupation in 1796 was automatically free. Cass owned a household servant, despite a later claim that he was never a slaveholder. Cass’s view: that the “peculiar institution” was constitutional and socially acceptable. In the words of his biographer: “Cass simply did not consider slavery a moral issue, and

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he deplored its potential for sectional divisiveness.” Throughout his life and public career, Cass always considered the black race “inferior” to the white, and he dismissed any idea of political equality or social connection. Issues of slavery and freedom surfaced again in the 1830s over runaway slaves. The cases were centered in Detroit. Escaped slaves came to Detroit. When they found work there, they decided not to cross into Canada. They remained vulnerable to “slave catchers” from the South, and after the enactment of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, they were at real risk. In at least one case, blacks stormed the jail to free an imprisoned black man, awaiting return to the South. As other attempts to recover runaway slaves became news, “the white population of Michigan [was] increasingly on the side of the Negroes.”41 Two new economic frontiers now appeared in Michigan: copper mining and lumbering, still in early forms. Rumors of valuable minerals had swirled around Michigan since the days of the fur trade carried pioneers great distances into remote settings. These stories became reality in the 1840s on the Keweenaw Peninsula, a finger of land projecting into Lake Superior from the Upper Peninsula. No other American mineral rush brought miners to a more desolate and distant land. The peninsula, accessible only by sea, consisted of scrub forests amid rock outcroppings and was subject to violent winter weather. Here, in the 1840s, the prospect of copper drew young men in search of mineral wealth. Mining techniques were still in their infancy. With a supply of blasting powder and with or without a government permit, they dug and blasted for copper. They found some, enough to sustain expectations, but little to suggest the great mining enterprise that would appear in the last half of the century and make Michigan’s mines a determining factor in the world price of copper. Yet as early as 1847 Michigan led the nation in copper production. Individual economic return, however, was fragmentary, and physical conditions were primitive and harsh. The society that emerged was rough and rude. Strictly speaking, there was no society as people on the agricultural



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frontier understood the term. Miners were transients; they were not institution builders. They wanted only enough structure to provide for the resolution of disputes in a very remote and unregulated world. Beyond this, they preferred to think of their stay as temporary. But they forecast the large-scale mining frontier that would engage so much of the mountain West in the last half of the nineteenth century.42 Lumbering had a more widespread influence. The combination of towering pine forests belonging to an absentee landlord and an expanding population in search of building materials created an industry that added a new dimension to Michigan’s frontier experience. The search for good pine began as early as 1820–21 at a Pontiac sawmill in Oakland County. The lumber business steadily expanded through the 1820s and experienced a surge in the following decade with the rising demand of a growing population and the settlement of the more northern counties. Early lumbering provided seasonal winter employment for idle agriculturists. They worked in small units to spy out the best pineries, always trying to keep their discoveries secret until the trees could be cut and hauled away. The first and most obvious targets were the government lands, which stood without public defender. Enterprising groups now picked over large portions of the public domain for choice stands of pine. Lumbering in its early stages did not require much knowledge or equipment: an axe, a saw, a team of horses or oxen, and a strong back. Pioneers felled trees and dragged logs through the snowy woods to a mill—sometimes for sale, sometimes for personal use. A raw material plentiful as the woods itself, and a ready market, led to the widespread construction of sawmills. In Michigan, the sawmill became especially important with the introduction of steam, which roughly coincided with the large-scale expansion of the lumbering industry. The first raft of sawed lumber floated down the Flint River in the winter of 1832–33, to be hauled on sleds to market. Saginaw had a sawmill as early as 1834, and a big sawmill in 1836–37. At about the same time, or perhaps a year earlier, entrepreneurs built a large steam sawmill in Ann Arbor. In response to the market created by the great immigration of the 1830s, lumber had become big business. The

MICHIGAN: THE GREAT LAKES FRONTIER

new immigrants—such as the Germans upriver and downriver from Lovira Hart—built sawmills immediately. The center of the industry was the northern counties, where the great forests lay on land less attractive for agriculture, and a growing number of sawmills met the demands of an agricultural population to the south.43 The degree of interest, competition, and rising stakes were a harbinger of the lumbering frontiers that appeared in the next generation in Michigan and Wisconsin. Michigan had a strong New England influence in its southern counties. This reflected a lateral movement of families and communities from New England and the immigration of a second generation from New York and Ohio. This group generated a strong support of public education within the territory and later the state. In the legislative session of 1827, the council approved legislation establishing common schools in every township with fifty or more families. Schools should be held at least six months a year. In response to objections from townships with scant population, the legislation would not be applicable if two-thirds of citizens of the township voted against compliance. No tax system to support public schools was enacted until 1843. As early as 1817, the territorial legislature founded a public university.44 Leadership and location dominated Michigan’s frontier experiences up to 1850. Lewis Cass was governor for eighteen years. Under his leadership, “Michigan became a truly American commonwealth.” He made strenuous efforts “to bring democracy to all levels of territorial government, calling on the legislative council and local residents to join in the selection of county and township officials formally appointed by the governor.” It was a noteworthy achievement against a wide range of challenging conditions. Cass provided leadership when the territory’s location placed it outside the mainstream of frontier development. Cass’s leadership was much like that provided by territorial governors before the War of 1812; Michigan’s condition was much like these earlier frontiers. The two factors that carried Michigan beyond this early stage were steam navigation and the Erie Canal. Suddenly, within the space of a few years, the Great Lakes became the thoroughfare to the West. Location now



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brought growth and prosperity. So the territory prospered in the 1830s under a mass immigration that gave diversity to the frontier experiences. Beyond the impact of technology and the new frontiers of mining and lumber lay the land. Michigan’s was still predominantly an agrarian world, and as such, it was one with the rest of the frontier. By 1850 its enduring frontier experience was behind (if not always forgotten), and the state of Michigan had joined the growing prosperity of the Old Northwest.45

10.



Florida A Sectional Frontier

When John Quincy Adams and Don Luis de Onís signed the treaty of cession in 1819, Florida resembled a typical Spanish frontier: a few scattered military outposts with missionary churches, surrounded by thousands of square miles of open landscape occupied by Indian peoples. Imprints of European people on the land were few. Geography was a strong influence. The rivers of East Florida emptied into the Atlantic Ocean, those of West Florida into the Gulf of Mexico. The land was also a commanding physical presence, with twelve hundred miles of coastline, new flora and fauna, and an interior of swamps and pine barrens emphasizing the tropical nature of this new American frontier. Aside from forts and churches, only a few government buildings and several place names testified to two hundred fifty years of Spanish occupation. This was also an unsettled frontier, made the more so by the turbulence that accompanied the American purchase of Louisiana, the continuing invasions of West Florida, and the War of 1812 against England, which eventually involved the most powerful Indian nations of the Southwest. Added to these diplomatic issues were “the forays of American slave hunters, the wanton violence against Indians, the unwillingness of Amer-

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ican governments to honor treaties, the open defiance of courts and federal policies by state officials, the blatant attempts to provoke rebellion against Spanish authorities.”1 More than on almost any other trans-Appalachian frontier, Florida’s Euro-American peoples lived in and around cities and towns. In part, this was the legacy of Spain’s colonial system, which emphasized a capital city as the center of economic, political, and social life. When population grew, as in the case of Louisiana, expansion to the hinterland took place. But Florida’s numbers remained small, the landed area large, and physical expansion slow. The territory had no dominant geographic feature comparable to the Mississippi River to encourage settlement patterns, although the St. Johns River in East Florida provided an entry to the interior. The Spanish had designated two capital cities for the two parts of the province—St. Augustine in the east, Pensacola in the west. The two cities served as lasting monuments to the Spanish colonial empire and, incidentally, to the sectional nature of the territory. Nearly four hundred miles of woodlands, prairies, and swamps separated the two administrative, economic, and social centers. A traveler moving rapidly might make the trip overland in twenty days. Few did. So the towns turned to the sea for their contact with the outside world, initially to Cuba and to other Spanish colonies in the Southwest. Later, as the American settlements pushed down from the north, St. Augustine and Pensacola made contact with Georgia and Alabama respectively, not with each other.2 Over a settlement experience of two hundred fifty years, Spanish Florida had become home to a mixture of peoples. By the opening of the nineteenth century, D. W. Meinig writes, “it was a multiracial, multicultural colony with Europeans, Indians, Africans, and various blends of these three living in contact, though not everywhere in close association with one another.” There were Spanish garrisons and officials at St. Augustine, Pensacola, and St. Marks, along with a miscellany of other whites and mestizos, including a number of British planters along the St. Johns. Black slaves worked the plantations, but there was also a substantial population of free blacks in towns, as well as in their own villages inland from St. Augustine. Blacks

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were varied in origin and status. Many black and mixed-race people also lived with the Seminoles. There was considerable intermarriage, certainly by the standards of the American settlements. Spanish Florida, away from the American border, was “a relatively tranquil society, and for some peoples it was obviously an attractive refuge from the more brutal conditions to the north.” For the Americans, however, Florida was “a backcountry out of control.” There were black villages, a black militia, Spanish officials, Indians, and British traders. The American drive for annexation came “from those who wanted to control, crush, even utterly destroy some specific people of Florida who were considered to pose a danger to immediate regional interests.” This pressure came from the frontiers and plantations of Georgia and Tennessee, people for whom “free Blacks and Creeks and Seminoles [were] an anathema.” Unlike the case in Louisiana, “the acquisition of Florida was essentially an expansion by conquest.” Like the case in Louisiana, the United States took in several populations that had no desire to be in the republic.3 The American occupation of Florida, beginning in 1821, was a gradual physical process, befitting a landed area so large, the presence of large groups of native peoples, and the small numbers of arriving Anglo-Americans. The American presence was not new. Indeed, “Anglo-Americans already constituted a majority of Florida’s white inhabitants and had been important, even controlling its trade since the 1670s. Territorial annexation was an anticlimax.” Yet the impact of the Americans represented a powerful new departure in the history of the region. For, “Once Americans gained a legal claim to all of the territory, they set about rapidly, and in characteristic ways, grasping actual control of the land and exploiting its resources. The speed and scale of those actions were unlike anything that had happened before.”4 In its American phase, Florida matured as a study in frontier sectionalism, with widely separated areas, each associated with an urban center, struggling not only against the forces of geography and climate but also against each other.5 Florida was not a new American frontier. Settlement at St. Augustine dated from 1565. To the extent that the Spanish legacy of two and a half centuries influenced the Americans, it



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was through the towns. When the Americans came to Florida, both St. Augustine and Pensacola had well-established city governments. These were the centers of institutional life. Most of Florida’s Euro-American people were Spanish in 1821, but a colony of Minorcan Islanders also lived around St. Augustine, as well as groups of runaway slaves and Indians. The crowd at an official ceremony at St. Augustine in 1821 displayed the diversity of peoples in Florida. They included, among others, the justices (American); the mayor, aldermen, and officers of the “City” (a mixture of English and Spanish surnames); officers of the American army and navy; the French consul for South Carolina; “the late mayor, and officers of the late government” (all Spanish); and fifty Choctaw Indians.6 The organization of America’s newest territorial possession and the transition to American institutions began with military rule. The Caesar was Andrew Jackson. Jackson appeared in Florida on two dramatic occasions: the first as military invader, the second as civil ruler. His commission as governor gave him authority comparable to that exercised by “the Governor and Captain General and Intendant of Cuba.”7 Jackson was hardly the logical choice for the governorship by training or temperament. His achievements were military; he was not noted for his tact in dealing with people. He had no use for the Spanish and did little or nothing to reassure Florida’s Spanish population, which departed in large numbers for Cuba and the Indies. In other respects, however, Andrew Jackson was a most suitable selection. He was the best-known general officer in the armed forces, and his victory over the British at New Orleans was probably the most dramatic ever won by an American commander. The law reducing the American military establishment made his retirement necessary, however, and the governorship was a suitable—and at the same time not too arduous—office to ease his departure. Jackson took formal possession of Florida on July 10, 1821, with a proclamation that continued in force “all laws and municipal regulations, which were in existence at the cessation of the late government.” He retained such Spanish forms as the alcalde and cabildo, to which he added the basic American fron-

FLORIDA: A SECTIONAL FRONTIER

tier institutions of the county—Escambia in West Florida and St. Johns in East—and its auxiliary, the county court, which functioned with an amalgamation of Spanish and American law. The governor also issued ordinances for the operation of county government, including detailed procedures and the fees to be charged by officials.8 Each with a city corporation and a county court, the widely separated parts of Florida went their separate ways, East Florida under the direction of Acting Governor William G. D. Worthington, who carried out the general’s ordinances in St. Augustine. The extension of customs and the mail service completed Florida’s transition to American rule. A government established and as many of his friends rewarded as possible, Jackson resigned in November 1821. Congress established Florida Territory along the guidelines mandated by the Ordinance of 1787 (a governor, secretary, three judges, and a thirteen-member legislative council). By this act Congress made a basic decision: Florida would be one territory. At the same time, the organic act confirmed Florida’s sectional nature by dividing judicial authority between two superior courts, one for East Florida to meet at St. Augustine, the other for West Florida to convene at Pensacola. The new governor of Florida was William Pope Duval, a Virginian who had spent much of his life in Kentucky, where he was a lawyer, an officer in the Rangers (1812), and a congressman (1813–15). In 1821 President James Monroe had appointed him the first judge for East Florida and, soon thereafter, governor of the new territory. Duval spent much of his first term in office in Kentucky attending to his business affairs, for which absence Floridians subjected him to vigorous criticism. His family did not move to Florida until December 1825, three and one-half years after he took the oath of office. Duval was an amiable man who sought the role of statesman and compromiser rather than advocate in a territory splintered into sections. He felt that Florida’s development would be slow, and he was not inclined to hurry. In every way, he was a contrast to Lewis Cass of Michigan.9 The activities of Andrew Jackson in organizing Florida for transition to American rule, the Congress of the United States in establishing a territorial government, and William P. Duval in



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his first years as governor set a trend that would grow stronger with the passage of time. Florida was to become American in the sense in which people understood the term in the 1820s. The rejoicing of the editor of the Florida Gazette at the time of government organization set the tone for the arrival of American law and justice. “Liberty of the Press, and Trial by Jury, have taken up their abode in the fine land of Citron and Orange Groves!” he exclaimed. “The sons of WASHINGTON will vindicate the goodness of the Creator, in showing that man can be great and free, though within the influence of the torrid zone, and fanned by breezes and shaded by bowers of a tropical clime.”10 Americans exhibited much less care and concern for the Spanish in Florida than they had for the French in Louisiana in 1803. In the generation since the purchase of Louisiana, the Americans had fought a war to preserve their sovereignty (or so they thought) and, in the process, acquired much selfconfidence and a strong streak of nationalism. American officials in Florida showed little regard for the rights and privileges of the Spanish population and their institutions—guaranteed to them under the treaty of cession—and virtually none after the first few months. Where Jackson noticed the Spanish people, it was to emphasize the procedures under which they might become American citizens. American law and legal institutions rapidly replaced the Spanish. The machinery of justice also passed into American hands. The lawyers were increasingly American, and, with the exception of some of the city magistrates, so were the judges. Although most of the claimants were Spanish, the mechanism for handling land claims rested with American officials. After the first few months newspapers no longer printed laws in Spanish. As early as December 1821, the Grand Jury for East Florida objected to “the inconvenience to which this Province is subjected, in the establishment and Continuation of the Spanish Laws.” In 1829 the legislative council removed this source of complaint when it repealed all laws and ordinances in the territory passed prior to July 22, 1822, thus ending any Spanish influence.11 The government of territorial Florida went into operation in mid-summer 1822. Some of the peculiar problems associated with

FLORIDA: A SECTIONAL FRONTIER

the territory came into focus in attempts to convene the legislative council. Duval called the first session to meet in Pensacola, seat of the governor’s residence. One member of the council from St. Augustine died in a shipwreck on the way. Two others arrived safely, having endured a hazardous sea voyage of fifty-nine days. Soon after deliberations began, an epidemic of yellow fever broke out and took the life of the president of the council, Dr. John C. Bronaugh. The survivors hastily adjourned, to meet the following year at St. Augustine. This time the Pensacola delegation was en route overland for twenty-eight days. The hazards of travel had become a dominant topic of discussion for this important body. At its second gathering the legislative council agreed to select a central site for a territorial capital. Two commissioners (one each from East and West) chose a ridge of land between the Suwannee and Ochlockonee rivers. The Indians called it Tallahassee, and the name survived. It was a place long occupied by Indian peoples (testimony to the fertility of its soils) and almost halfway between St. Augustine and Pensacola. The identification of the site followed directly on the Treaty of Moultrie Creek (September 1823) in which representatives of Indian peoples ceded twentyfour million acres of land for a twenty-year annuity of $5,000. The first settlers arrived on the site of the future capital in April 1824. Governor Duval made the selection official, and in November 1824 the council met in a log cabin. Although a town grew up around the capitol building, Tallahassee was more frontier outpost than territorial capital, at least for several years. On a visit to Florida in 1827, the New England sage Ralph Waldo Emerson passed through the town and wrote of it, “Tallahassee a grotesque place, selected three years since as a suitable spot for the Capital of the territory, and since that day rapidly settled by public officers, land speculators and desperadoes.”12 Whatever the character of the people, the town and the surrounding countryside settled rapidly. The founding of Tallahassee, halfway between the major towns of St. Augustine and Pensacola, intensified the sectional division of the territory. Middle Florida’s rapid rise to political, economic, and social prominence changed the even balance of population and influence. The section had fertile lands unencumbered by litigation over private



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claims, and Tallahassee was the seat of government. As Middle Florida began to outdistance the other sections in population and prosperity, East Florida and West Florida shifted their suspicious glances from one another to the center of the territory. The arriving American authorities confronted a series of problems, including removing Spanish troops and Spanish subjects who wished to emigrate, sorting out the Spanish land grants in northeast Florida and around Pensacola, preparing the survey and sale of the public lands, and connecting the widely separated parts of the territory.13 The people of Florida sought to solve their problems of isolation from each other and from the rest of the nation and to deal with the usual frontier problems by appeals to Congress. Unfortunately, sectional conflict immediately emerged around preferment from the federal government, which was the source of so many gifts and bounties for the enduring frontiers. In any case, whatever the divisions, petitions, resolutions, and memorials flowed from Florida to Washington in an unending stream. With a congressional appropriation and the assistance of the United States Army, officials eventually constructed a road between St. Augustine and Pensacola. Open in 1826, it was little more than a track where travelers made their way single file on horseback. The interest in roads far exceeded concern about sea transportation and water routes, reflecting a desire to bind the territory together and to foster commercial development through agriculture.14 Another issue that demanded federal intervention was the question of private land claims. Both the Spanish and English governments had made several large grants of land. In 1822 Congress established two boards—everything in Florida was done in pairs—to resolve the claims. The cases dragged on for several years, followed in some instances by appeals to the courts. The contest over land claims had a great impact and almost certainly slowed the occupation of lands and subsequent economic development of East and West Florida. This circumstance gave an advantage to Middle Florida, where the federal government could give good title.15 Health was an ever-present problem in territorial Florida. A tropical climate meant tropical disease. Observers most frequently mentioned a widespread recurring fever (probably

FLORIDA: A SECTIONAL FRONTIER

malaria) and a disease identified only as the “black vomit.” The fever season ran from August through October, when those in a position to do so left the coastal towns for the countryside. Authorities spent much time on the question of public health, and the focus of their concern was the city, where the concentrations of people intensified the impact of disease. One of Andrew Jackson’s first ordinances established a board of health for St. Augustine, adopted rigorous regulations for the quarantining of foreign ships and their crews, and provided for the appointment of a resident physician and a health officer. The city of Pensacola also passed wide-ranging ordinances for health and sanitation, with special reference to the disposal of dead animals and fish, for an outbreak of disease was customarily associated with noxious odors.16 In spite of these provisions, epidemics continued, for example, at St. Augustine in 1821 and Pensacola in 1822. In 1826 St. Augustine passed a special ordinance to provide for searching incoming ships for “malignant, pestilential, or contagious disease” and made the captain of the vessel subject to suit in the local courts for violations. In Pensacola the master of an incoming vessel had to anchor in the quarantine grounds and there “submit to such search, cleansing and purifying as the boarding health official shall direct,” and all this “at the expense of the vessel.” Those who offered public accommodation were required to submit a list of their lodgers each week, and every householder (public and private) had to report any sickness within twelve hours under penalty of a ten-dollar fine for each offense. Deaths also had to be reported within twelve hours, and “a detailed account of the deaths” would be published each week.17 Florida’s economy reflected the sectional nature of her settlement patterns. At the time of government organization in 1821, the St. Augustine Florida Gazette hoped that coffee, orange and citrus trees, olives, indigo, mulberry, sugarcane, and cotton would be cultivated in the new territory.18 Economic development in East and West was slow. Self-styled planters cultivated rice and corn to the south and west of Pensacola, but the soil was thin and sterile, more suitable to livestock grazing. The dominant feature of West Florida was the forest, and lumber became



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its largest crop. The several sawmills that appeared late in the 1820s on the inland waterways testify to the growth of this form of enterprise.19 Pensacola had a fine harbor but a sparsely settled and barren hinterland, without a large river system to draw on. It never became a significant commercial port; it did not even have a pier. The United States Navy early used the harbor at Pensacola (where disease sometimes took a frightful toll) and, in 1830, announced plans to build a full-scale naval yard facility. St. Augustine was the center of an infant citrus industry and had visions of a growing tourist trade. Both developed slowly. Like other Florida towns, St. Augustine had few manufacturers. A St. Augustine editor remarked in 1823 that “the most common articles of domestic use can neither be made nor mended here.” The generalization applied to Florida as a whole.20 Of the prospective crops, cotton would become the most significant and profitable. The surge of American immigrants established a plantation economy in Middle Florida, and the economy and society of this section came to resemble those of other cotton frontiers. This emerging plantation economy was often distinguished by its large scale. Planter families, many of them from North Carolina, brought large enslaved workforces, took up large tracts of land, and soon had reproduced on a large scale the cotton economy, society, and culture of the upper South. The emergence of this group—across the counties of Leon, Jefferson, and Jackson—created a powerful interest group in the young and dispersed frontier territory. Cotton needed water routes to market. In 1827 the first steamboat appeared on the Apalachicola River; in early 1828 a steamboat reached Columbus (Georgia) at the falls of the Chattahoochee. Merchants found business handling the expanding trade of upriver planters. Cotton exports from the port of Apalachicola rose from 317 bales in 1828 to 51,673 bales in 1836. As early as 1830, Apalachicola had surpassed Pensacola as the most important Gulf port in Florida, and Middle Florida, settled within the last half-dozen years, had almost half the territory’s population.21 Among the noteworthy aspects of the development of a plantation economy in Middle Florida was its connection to the land



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grant to the Marquis de Lafayette. A hero of the American Revolution and impoverished by the French Revolution, Lafayette received back pay from Congress (1794) and a land grant in the Louisiana Purchase. When the financial condition of this national hero did not improve, President James Monroe seized upon Lafayette’s visit in 1824 to give the aging French nobleman another cash grant and a township of land (thirty-six square miles). Through friends, Lafayette chose to select the township in the newly acquired Florida Territory. The grant would be located in Leon County, Middle Florida, the focus of a new surge of settlement. Among the new arrivals were a number of large planters from the upper South (Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia). In a familiar pattern, “[t]he large landowners brought their families and slaves and established a plantation economy and culture similar to what they had known in the upper South. Leon became the center of Florida’s cotton kingdom, and large plantations were established near Tallahassee.” A few French settlers arrived, but they quickly found themselves isolated in rural Florida, and they soon fell victim to weather, sickness, and differences in language, religion, and culture. Lafayette decided to sell several sections of his tract.22 In 1834, Hardy Croom bought Section 27 of the Lafayette grant, to which he added in subsequent years. Moving between North Carolina and Florida, Croom bought additional slaves with the profits of the first year. He reported that the soil was rich and the crops were good, but health in Florida was a major problem for all new settlers, whatever their economic status. Croom, like other planters, kept his family in the upper South and spent three months each winter on his Florida plantation. The whole Croom family went to New York City and Saratoga in the summer. Croom had a son and a daughter in boarding schools in New York City. His wife, Frances, wanted to move to New York City, but Croom rejected this suggestion. He favored the society of Charleston, South Carolina (“the society is equal to any in the United States”).23 The rush of planters (many of them absentee) into the region, combined with the prosperous years of the mid-1830s, drove up prices of land and slaves. Croom wrote in 1835, “It is astonishing

FLORIDA: A SECTIONAL FRONTIER

how high negroes are in this country. It is a good country for planting and merchandise but I cannot say that it is a desirable country to live in. indeed, I have pretty well concluded not to settle here. But to make all the money I can and lay out none of it in building.” He bought more land and more slaves. His cotton crop in 1835 was 200 bales, which he sold for 14 cents a pound. By 1836, Croom and his brother jointly owned 1,840 acres, and bought more of the Lafayette Tract, eventually enlarging his holdings to 2,480 acres. In the booming economy of Middle Florida, cash was rarely involved in such transactions. The land was sold by promissory notes. Hardy Croom wrote of his prospects in 1837, “I put the men to cutting new ground in order to enlarge the crop next year. Negroes are very high now and land has risen considerably. So that I made my purchase in good time.” Prominent planters did not spend summer in Florida. Croom wrote of the sterility and “the poverty of the country” in the summer time. He also had a low opinion of the local economy. “There is not one barrel of good Flour in the whole of Middle Florida . . . not a Bacon ham, no fruit, not a bottle of lime juice; we are living now upon black bread and stinking shoulders and wire grass beef, and if you have the wealth of Creosus, why you could look at it. Besides a man rusts here as well as rots.”24 The cotton boom drove the prosperity of the 1830s. The fertile accessible lands in Middle Florida were excellent for cotton cultivation. Capitalists and entrepreneurs and planters from North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia moved into central Florida and exploited this opportunity. Flourishing cotton prices promoted roads and railroads to carry the product to a water access to market. East and West Florida, which grew little cotton, experienced little expansion in the 1830s. Other commodities associated with the boom years were cattle, forest products, sugar, and, up to 1835, citrus. Each product had a social as well as economic dimension. Cattle and other stock were the economic mainstays of squatters, small farmers (known as “crackers”), and Indians. Citrus was an economic foundation of St. Augustine and the St. Johns Valley until the long, hard freeze of February 1835 destroyed all the trees. Forest products, mainly from



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the more sterile, sandy soils of West Florida, were sold to the U.S. Navy.25 Four hundred miles to the south lay Key West and a flourishing salvage industry. The continuous commercial traffic of the Gulf flowed through a strait of water eighty miles wide between Key West and Havana. Here dangerous reefs and sudden storms provided opportunities for a thriving business in crippled ships and abandoned cargoes. At the time the United States took possession of Florida, this business involved fifty to sixty vessels and perhaps as many as five hundred seamen. In response to a demand from Key West, territorial acts of 1823 and 1825 gave preference to American salvagers and laid down rules for salvage operations. The organization of a superior court for southern Florida in 1828 gradually transformed salvaging into an orderly economic enterprise. Key West experienced recurrent seasonal attacks of yellow fever. The United States Navy established a base there in 1823, but such was the cost in lives from fever that it was occupied only in the winter and spring. Key West was the only part of Florida to depend on the sea for its livelihood.26 In its forms of government, court, and law, the Florida Territory conformed to the patterns found elsewhere on the transAppalachian frontier. The incoming American population— which became dominant in numbers and influence in the 1820s—brought the values of the plantation economy and society of the upper South. The purposes of government seemed to be preserving order, keeping records, providing necessary services, and protecting property. “Here, in this age, there is no community of goods,” wrote one observer. “Each person claims a separate and distinct right to property, and expects that the laws and administration of justice will secure to him the enjoyment of it.” Florida’s court system and laws were largely concerned with property and its security: dower, rights of widows, wills, execution and executors, attachments, and divorce. The law prescribed vigorous punishment for crimes against property. For stealing horses or cattle, for example, penalties ranged to a maximum fine of five hundred dollars, two hundred lashes, double

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damages, and permanent disqualification from voting, giving testimony, or holding office. By contrast, crimes against persons were less severely punished. Convictions for assault and battery brought fines of only a few cents. That such violations of the law often involved leading citizens in the community probably had much to do with leniency.27 Interest in an orderly society was high, intensified by the great distances and sparse Anglo-American population. Florida’s leaders seemed especially uneasy about the transient nature of elements of the population. The first AngloAmerican frontier people were all transients. This early stage of settlement, a sorting-out process of trial and error, saw the influx of numbers of people who lived off the land, spied out the main chance, and tested the region for signs of future economic opportunity. Many families moved to Florida and pursued the same cycle. “On the 15th day of October 1830, my father [William Henry Keen] poured me out with the rest of his children down at the root of a pine tree seven miles north of Lake City,” remembered George Gillett Keen. “Next morning father said ‘children, you are now in the territory of Florida.’ During the day he built a camp, covering it with pine tops which was quite an improvement on the preceding day.” Game was everywhere, and Keen’s father killed deer and turkey as needed. The first permanent dwelling was built of “green pine sapling poles with the bark on them; the covering was clap boards five feet long and held in place with weight poles; the flooring was dirt, but it was quite an improvement on the camp.” There were plenty of provisions, basically corn and potatoes, along with meat. “We had beef, pork, venison, turkey and fish all that we needed, and it was summer one eternal day.” Society was less satisfactory: “We are now in the middle of a wild Indian territory with at least fifty Indians to one white man, and we without Law or Gospel, that it what I call living in the dark ages.”28 It is noteworthy that Keen regarded law and religion as the two necessary ingredients for a better society. Among these families, some stayed, while others moved on. Yet distinctions soon became apparent among those who stayed.



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Some participated in the formation of an increasingly structured society, centered around property ownership and estate building, with respect for hard work and the rewards due it. In this fashion, one part of a recently arrived mobile population was now permanent, with vested interests in property rights and growing political power. These people now joined together to cast a suspicious glance at the portion of the population that had not joined them in this forward thrust. Florida Territory’s agreeable climate and bounties of nature made it attractive for those still living off the land and undecided on their directions, but they were increasingly at the mercy of their more directed fellow pioneers. So the report of a grand jury attacked “the great number of vagrants, that are now going at large through the county, and who have no visible means of support the most pernicious consequences may result to society, unless a law is passed authorizing the infliction of a punishment upon them.” Pensacola passed a local ordinance against vagrants as early as 1821, specifying that “all able bodied persons, who have no known or visible means of making a support, in an honest way, shall be deemed and taken to be vagrants” and fined five dollars upon conviction. For a second offense, the convicted vagrant might be set to work “for the benefit of the city” for up to two months.29 Grievances against “vagrants” had a querulous air about them—traditional complaints against traditional antagonists, public nuisances rather than public dangers. The universal concern about Florida’s black population struck a different note: a real and present threat. Many Americans who immigrated into Florida after 1821 brought slaves. The municipalities of St. Augustine and Pensacola immediately established slave patrols with orders “to disperse all assemblages of Negroes, and apprehend any slaves which they may find without the enclosure of their owner or employer, without a written ticket allowing such absence, and place them in jail, to be punished as one of the council may direct, not exceeding fifteen lashes, nor less than five.”30 In 1827 the territory adopted an act that discouraged the immigration of free blacks to the territory by providing for their arrest after thirty days and requiring the posting of a bond of

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two hundred dollars to guarantee a court appearance and a surety of five hundred dollars as a guarantee to leave the territory. This process might be repeated indefinitely. Grand juries constantly investigated the activities of slaves, especially those who lived in towns. In 1827, for example, the Grand Jury of Escambia County charged that “Balls and Assemblies of Negroes,” along with “gambling houses and tippling shops,” threatened to bring about “the ruin of the Slaves, and consequent great injury of their owners.” The executive was equally vigilant, calling on a regular basis for better laws “for the good government and subordination of our slave community.” After all, Acting Governor William M. McCarty noted later that year, “It cannot be unknown to you that a large proportion of the slaves who are brought to the South, are sold by their more Northern owners as a punishment for their crimes.” Floridians must be alert and guard against any “dangerous leniency.”31 Florida’s black population raised issues beyond slave control. Spanish Florida had a large free black population, and in accordance with Spanish law and custom, free blacks served in the militia, where they effectively defended St. Augustine and East Florida during periodic armed incursions from the north. They also had well-developed civil and economic rights, under which they attended school, worked as artisans, married in church, and owned land (some even owned slaves). Beginning in the 1790s, the attractions of land grants from the Spanish Crown led to the immigration of large planters with their slaves, and by 1813, St. Augustine had more black slaves than white residents.32 The terms of the Treaty of 1819 entitled the free blacks in Florida to the same rights and privileges as those given other former Spanish subjects. The guaranteeing of these “rights,” however meager, did not fit with the growing belief of Florida’s Anglo-American planters and officeholders that free blacks were dangerous to a well-ordered society in which slavery was a recognized institution. Slaves were accepted for their services in clearing the land. Florida’s newly arrived planters thought of slaves as “nature’s pioneers, preparing an area where the higher genius of the white man can play a part free from obstruction.” In any



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other role, they were regarded as dangerous. Most dangerous of all were free black men and women, who were increasingly subjected to restrictive laws.33 In Florida restrictions on enslaved peoples were gradually expanded to include free blacks as well. Over the first twenty years of American sovereignty, free black Floridians lost the right to assemble and to carry firearms; they were barred from interracial marriage, and the children of interracial couples were made ineligible to inherit. Free blacks also lost the right to vote, the right to serve on juries, and the right to testify against whites in court. Free black men were universally subjected to special discriminatory head taxes by both local and territorial governments. Finally, free blacks were increasingly saddled with a white guardian, and a territorial law in 1842 (tightening in 1848 and 1856) made the guardian law mandatory. In the 1850s, many free black Floridians emigrated to Mexico.34 With the passage of the first discriminatory laws, free blacks protested. In May 1823 a handwritten petition from “various free men of color” declared that they had been denied the privileges of citizens by the city of St. Augustine, including the right to walk the streets or to “assemble for amusement” after 9 P.M.35 In 1824 the city of St. Augustine levied a special tax on “free Persons of Colour,” three dollars for males ages eighteen to fifty, half that sum for females. This time the free blacks resisted in court. James Clarke, “a free man of colour,” argued that the tax was illegal because it was not collected for any “specific object” and also because “a discriminatory tax was unconstitutional.” The superior court of the territory agreed and threw out the tax. The issue of a free black population was especially pressing in Middle Florida, where the slave population expanded rapidly with the rise of the plantation economy. In 1826 Leon County taxed free black men, ages eighteen to fifty, at the annual rate of five dollars; the poll tax on white males of similar ages was fifty cents.36 The Pensacola Gazette objected to the discriminatory levy and used the occasion to attack the legislative council’s “persecuting and proscriptive course against free persons of colour. They have certain natural and constitutional rights, and those who were in Florida prior to the change of Government, also have rights secured by Treaty.” Resistance through courts

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and the consciences of editors gradually ceased, and the discriminatory tax and registration became a common device for limiting the rights of Florida’s free black population.37 Daniel H. Wiggins was a mechanic whose skills gave him admittance to many plantations. From his wide travels and many encounters, he had a low opinion of slaves generally. He disliked their late-night music and dancing, and he felt that such behavior indicated the lax discipline. He commented that “masters and overseers appear to have but little concern for the interests of their own souls, and less for the slave.” At the same time, Wiggins witnessed the flogging of two slaves who appeared on the plantation at night without a valid pass. In spite of his contempt for slaves, where possible he took steps to provide slaves with religious instruction. He attended a religious service in which blacks “performed a part of the service.” In his view, “the soul of the slave is of as much value as the master, yet how neglected. Too generally they are looked upon as mere beasts of burden—it appears to me that slavery and tirany [tyranny] are almost inseparable and ignorrence is the father to both of them.”38 Whatever the view of Wiggins and others, by the middle of the 1830s, African Americans were a strong presence on Florida’s frontiers, and most of them were slaves. The census of 1830 reflected that the black population was 46 percent; by the census of 1840, the proportion had risen to 50 percent.39 The laws and court system of the Florida Territory were like those of other American frontiers, at once elaborate and transitory. “The lawmaking mania which seems to prevail throughout the United States, is not less remarkable in Florida than elsewhere,” commented the Pensacola Floridian in 1823.40 The many and changing laws, the complexity of the court structure, and the widespread litigation over land claims that dragged on without resolution lent an uncertain air to this aspect of institutional development in the Florida Territory. From the perspective of almost a decade of experience with the American judicial system, the Florida Herald summed up the situation with the comment that the judicial system of the territory, “which should at once



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have been placed upon a permanent footing, has been sported with more than any thing else.” The editor concluded of the legal system, “For these eight years past this territory may be compared to a vessel in a gale of wind with her sails shivered to pieces.” The prosperous years of the early 1830s intensified the impulse to make new laws and revise the old. In 1834 a compilation of the territorial code ran to nearly four hundred pages. By 1840 the statute books contained more than one thousand laws.41 “There is nothing which more strongly marks the progress of civilization in a country, than a well regulated judiciary,” declared the St. Augustine Florida Herald. Well regulated or not, Florida had an elaborate judicial system. The act organizing the judiciary in 1822 established two superior courts in recognition of the traditional division of the territory into East and West. These courts remained functional for the entire territorial period. In 1824 Congress added a third court district for Middle Florida (defined as the area between the Suwannee and Apalachicola rivers) and, four years later, a fourth for southern Florida, to serve the large number of cases flowing out of the salvage business at Key West. Of all the territories, only Florida had superior courts that met in every county. The multiplicity of the courts conformed to the sectional nature of the territory. It was also expensive. By 1836 the cost of maintaining the judiciary in Florida Territory exceeded thirty thousand dollars a year, higher than for any other territory.42 The grand jury was a prominent part of the legal machinery in Florida. It was not an expression of public opinion but a group “selected by one individual,” meeting in secret, not responsible for its actions, and permitting no defense by those it censured. Yet grand juries convened at regular intervals to consider the condition of the county. The matters discussed were the most important problems facing the community: roads, bridges, schools, protection from the Indians, the need for a courthouse and jail. It was a rare grand jury report that did not remind its county citizens and representatives in government of these needs. Other considerations revolved around the special require-

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ments of a particular community. The Duval County Grand Jury (1834) supported railroads and attacked nullification and “incompetent” magistrates. The grand jury of the town of Apalachicola condemned “the practice of profanely swearing in common conversation”; the grand jury of Madison and Jefferson Counties decried “the practice of trading with negroes by the keepers of the various tippling shops established throughout the country”; and Leon County Grand Jury attacked the increasing “number of establishments, familiarly known as doggerys, the tendency of which is, to impede the cultivation of morals, and in many instances, to corrupt our slave population.”43 Florida Territory presents an interesting study in the problem of taxation on the frontier. “The people of the territory must expect to pay taxes too, or how will the country be improved,” asked the East Florida Herald in 1823. “How are roads to be opened, jails and bridges built—ferries erected the poor supported, without the assessment and collection of taxes.”44 Nowhere did people require more in the way of facilities and services. In 1824 the grand jury of Pensacola complained that the city jail was so insecure that “the facility with which [prisoners] may escape is calculated rather to increase than to suppress the violation of the laws.” Three years later Pensacola still had no facilities in which to confine prisoners and released them “in preference to allowing them to starve, no provision having been made for their support.” While requests for federal support to build courthouses and jails flowed in a steady stream to Washington, the several counties took up the question of tax levies. Opposition was intense. A public meeting in Pensacola, called to protest the tax levied by the court of Escambia County, passed a strong resolution: “Taxes . . . are excessive, oppressive and unnecessary, and ought not to be tolerated.” The editor later commented that the county had been organized and taxes levied for three years, but not one cent had been collected, and, not surprisingly, the county treasury was empty.45 But with growth and economic development came gradual acceptance of taxation. The levies were those customarily found on the frontier: polls, black and white; entertainment, such as taverns, billiard tables,



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“showmen of all descriptions”; luxury vehicles such as carriages; license fees for peddlers, doctors, and lawyers. Prosperity expanded the list. By 1845 tax lists in some counties included “wharfs,” money at interest, cattle, and cotton. The changes testify to the maturing agricultural economy of the territory about to become a state.46 The different sections of Florida developed societies of different character. St. Augustine had been the center of social, economic, and political life in the days of the Spanish empire. Much of this influence waned with the departure of a portion of the Spanish community to Cuba and the influx of Americans into Middle Florida. It survived in some forms, however, and especially in the theater. Several performances took place each year.47 Pensacola had musical entertainment, and an ensemble performed a Mozart symphony there in 1822. Both St. Augustine and Pensacola made much of their locations as ports of call. The arrivals of ships offered the opportunity for social activities, especially balls. Key West was a resort in winter, with balls, formal dinner parties, and horseback rides on the beach. But the elite society of the territory gravitated to the new capital at Tallahassee. The newly arrived Americans dominated the government, and the planter class that emerged in the 1820s was basically an extension of the cotton frontier of the upper South. Great balls highlighted the social season. Horse racing was the favored sport of gentlemen (bets in specie only, please). The Magnolia Advertiser’s description of a ball in 1829 to honor the territorial delegate, Joseph M. White, expressed the pride of people in their rapid progress. The whole affair “presented in forcible contrast, the change which the short period of two years has wrought, where the track of civilization has scarcely been seen, and the howling of the wilderness and the roaring of the wild beasts, has given place to the refinements of civilized life—the sounds of music of the enlivening dance.”48 At the same time that Florida Territory embraced the boom years, beginning in 1825 and extending to almost the end of the next decade, class distinctions inevitably appeared. Paul Hoffman has written of this time and place, “The American planters and the infrequent foreign traveler who visited Florida in these

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years had little good to say about their social inferiors.” Poorer families settled in the woods but were considered unambitious and idle. Still, they had a certain status as white. The consensus of the territory’s free white population was that the enslaved people who had appeared in such numbers were useful in clearing the land and taming the forests. This useful quality did not entitle them to any status except that of slavery. Free blacks, on the other hand, were generally regarded as dangerous or potentially dangerous.49 Religion and churches reached into every section of Florida. Blacks made up a substantial proportion of some of the Protestant congregations. In 1839 the Methodist preacher Peter Haskew reported from St. Joseph that his mission congregation contained sixty-five black members and only fourteen white. The blacks faithfully attended his services, he wrote, while the white parishioners went to lectures on phrenology. Haskew prayed hard for his black members, and he concluded that “the coloured class is a tolerable passable class, taking so many together.”50 Organized schooling was rarely found. With the revelation in 1824 that only 80 of 350 children in St. Augustine of school age received any kind of formal instruction, energetic church leaders organized Sunday classes to provide basic schooling. “Sunday instruction,” as it was called, fitted the child to read the Bible and the religious and temperance tracts that circulated in the churches. Minimal as it was, such teaching was significant for children in towns.51 Private academies—almost all of them in towns—provided almost the only opportunities for real education. Public schools languished on the editorial pages of newspapers. In 1832 a public school opened in St. Augustine for the male and female children of taxpayers, but it foundered on the opposition of property holders to the taxes necessary to support the institution. The school closed in five months, terminating the educational opportunities of 120 youngsters. In the countryside, education on an organized basis made little or no headway. In 1830, George Keen observed that his father was one of two men in his settlement who could read and write. The second literate



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man, Daniel Gillett, offered to teach a school if ten young scholars could be found. Only seven appeared; Gillett declined to teach the smaller number, and the school never opened.52 David H. Wiggins, the skilled itinerant mechanic, saw much of middle Florida in the years immediately after 1838. Although he praised Florida’s economic opportunities, Wiggins had a low opinion of Florida society. About the most prosperous section of the territory, he wrote, “There is a want of school and religious institutions—which no doubt would soon be established if Indian hostilities were brought to an end—the inhabitants are mostly emigrants and tolerably well enlightened and would willingly support institutions of learning and religion—may the Lord hasten the day when war shall cease in this otherwise favored land.”53 Sales of public lands were an important measure of growth. Florida’s numbers reflected slow expansion. The first tracts were offered at the Tallahassee land office in May 1825, but at St. Augustine not until 1831, because of the difficulties of sorting out the Spanish land claims. There were similar delays at Pensacola. Congress had established two land commissions to confirm or deny the many Spanish claims, most of them made within the decade before the treaty of cession. The commissioners finished their duties in West Florida in 1825; the commission in East Florida was abolished in 1827, with the remaining claims handed to the register and receiver at St. Augustine for resolution. As it turned out, litigation over the private land claims continued until the 1880s. The continuing agitation of the land claims and their intractable legal nature was further complicated by the large number of individuals and families who poured into Florida after the change in sovereignty. Veterans of Jackson’s campaigns, now reinforced by their families, were among these arrivals. These individuals and groups squatted on what they assumed was the public domain, but many of the most attractive sites were contested private claims. A series of preemption laws allowed preferential purchase at the minimum price of lands not “rightfully claimed” by another party. Of course, in the vast landscape and scant Anglo-American pres-

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ence throughout much of Florida, not to mention the absentee ownership of many of the claims, it was not clear which lands might be “rightfully claimed” and which not. Sales of public lands in Florida were modest in amount and price. Even in the flush years of the early 1830s, Florida’s annual sales never reached 100,000 acres a year. The modest rise in sales in the late 1830s reflected the establishment of local banks.54 Florida’s development from 1835 to 1850 opened on a period of prosperity. By 1835 the basic problems that had plagued territorial Florida seemed on the way to solution: the land system was in operation; the federal government had financed a number of badly needed public works in transportation and communication; federal officials had made plans for the “removal” of the Indian population to the West. In these days of heady prosperity, a few of Florida’s leaders embraced the most powerful economic institutions of the day and employed them for their own ends. Their activity was a remarkable feature of Florida’s enduring frontier. One such institution was the bank. Banks, like almost everything else in Florida, were sectional. Prior to American occupation the British trading firm of Panton, Leslie, and Company had provided whatever banking facilities existed. With its disappearance, Floridians looked for replacements. That the territory was so large, the settlement so sparse, transportation so rudimentary, and economic development so fragmented proved no deterrent. The legislative council acted favorably on the demand for banks, and only Governor Duval’s continued vetoes postponed the appearance of a banking institution until 1828, when the legislative council passed a bill over his veto. This was only the first of many banks. Between 1828 and 1839 the legislative council chartered eighteen banks, of which three became significant. The Union Bank of Florida, chartered in 1833 and centered in Tallahassee, was the largest. This was essentially a planter’s bank, whose charter provided that a board of appraisers appointed by the governor might lend money on land and slaves. Residents of middle Florida owned almost all the stock of the bank. The bank opened for business in January 1835, just in time to participate



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in the prosperous middle years of the decade.55 The Bank of Pensacola was also a locally owned institution chartered to meet the needs of its section, especially the funding of transportation facilities to a remote agricultural hinterland. A Pensacola editor wrote, “Pensacola is the natural mart for about ten or twelve thousand bales of Cotton raised in Alabama, but owing to our entire want of bank facilities, until within the last two or three years, this Cotton has found its way to the Alabama on the west and the Chattahoochee on the east. Now, however, we possess those facilities, in the operations of one of the soundest [banking] institutions in the Southern country.”56 In East Florida, northern capitalists dominated the Southern Life Insurance and Trust Company of St. Augustine. This bank had wide authority; a member of Congress once remarked that it had “every power except that of killing Indians.”57 The bank established branches at commercial centers such as Apalachicola, St. Joseph, and emerging Jacksonville, thus giving it claim to serve all sections. In truth, it served its stockholders, most of whom lived in New York City. Florida’s banks flourished in the flush times of the mid-1830s. Their loans spurred new purchases of land and slaves; their discounts assisted commercial transactions that flowed freely on a crest of high agricultural prices. This prosperity ended abruptly. The war against the Seminoles struck at the economy of East Florida and indirectly at the Southern Life Insurance and Trust Company. The other banks continued in operation, to be closed down in the Panic of 1837 and its subsequent depression. The panic and depression were two events in which all Florida’s sections shared equally. The Florida banking experience provided much evidence to support the indictments of hard money Jacksonians: favoritism, irresponsible management, and reckless loans without proper security. Florida entered the Union in 1845 without a single banking institution.58 Another special feature of Florida’s frontier experience was railroad construction. Why such a poor, sparsely settled territory, which constantly appealed to the federal government for assistance, should actively promote the most advanced transportation technology of the day captures our attention. That

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railroads appeared in Florida along with banks was no accident. Railroads demanded capital in sums unavailable on the frontier unless through outside investment or a bank in the most prosperous of times. Geography also played a part. The land was level, if sometimes wet and marshy. Harsh winters imposed no demands. Furthermore, the nature of Florida’s developing agricultural economy placed a premium on a transportation facility that could ship bulk cargo (synonymous with cotton) a relatively short distance overland to a deep-water port. Florida had a number of such ports on the Gulf by the 1830s, but most of them lay underused because there were no navigable rivers of significance to the hinterland. A railroad—even a short one—would perform economic miracles. So a few ambitious, far-sighted entrepreneurs seized upon railroads as a solution to the territory’s problems of transportation. The flush times of the early and mid-1830s provided an attractive economic setting and ready capital for those disposed to dream such dreams. In 1831 the Florida Legislative Council asked that the engineers surveying a proposed trans-Florida canal also explore the possibility of a railroad. Thereafter an increasing number of applications for railroad charters came before the legislature. Between 1830 and 1860 Florida’s government gave charters to at least twenty companies for railroad construction. This is not surprising. What is astonishing is that by 1840 enterprising companies had constructed and put into operation four railroads in territorial Florida. Not all four were still in existence in 1840, nor did they operate simultaneously, but each had operated, if only for a short period. One was a line from Tallahassee to St. Marks near the Gulf; the short-lived but spectacular development of the town of St. Joseph promoted two railroads, to run from that port to the Apalachicola River (via Lake Wimico) and to Iola; and the fourth was a short line from Arcadia to Pensacola Bay.59 The first and longest lived of these railroad lines served the cotton interests in Middle Florida and was intended to provide rapid transportation to a port on the Gulf of Mexico. After the usual reorganizations and name changes, the Tallahassee Railroad Company emerged in 1834 with a land grant of 500,000 acres and a right-of-way to the Gulf. In its early organization



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and financing, the railroad owed much to its association with the Union Bank of Tallahassee. Construction began in January 1835. The twenty-three-mile stretch from Tallahassee to St. Marks went into operation in 1836, and the company extended the line to Port Leon in 1839. Physically, the railroad reflected an infant state of technology. A large workforce of laborers and slaves laid pine rails on wooden crossties, and strips of iron were nailed on top of the rails. The cars were small, box-shaped affairs in which the passengers—where there were provisions for such—rode on back-to-back benches facing the sides of the car. Other Florida railroads—and railroads everywhere, for that matter—looked much the same. This project had the support of several of the most prominent men in Middle Florida, especially Richard Keith Call, entrepreneur, planter, militia general, and twice territorial governor. The railroad was a notable economic success. No longer did the planters of Middle Florida haul their baled cotton to the Gulf in wagons over primitive roads. The Tallahassee–St. Marks line carried thirty to forty thousand bales of cotton annually to the Gulf, first by mule, and after 1837 by steam locomotive. Slaves owned by the company performed much of the labor in construction and later operation. Port Leon was an early railroad town, built by the railroad company where the tracks ended at deep water on the St. Marks River.60 Daniel H. Wiggins has left an account of his trip by rail from Tallahassee to Port Leon in May 1841. At seven in the morning, he departed on a car drawn by two horses. “This part of the road is very much out of repair—timbers rotten and many of the iron rails loose and their ends sticking up 6 or 8 inches or more.” After traveling twelve or thirteen miles in this way, the horsedrawn car reached a train with several cars and a locomotive, where the horses were unhitched, and Wiggins’s car was attached to the longer train. “From this place to Port Leon the road is repaired,” Wiggins continued. “We had not gone far before one of the baggage cars broke and the whole train was stopped for about half an hour—the broken car was taken off the road and left behind. Now we go on again but when about five miles from port 3 more of the baggage cars run off the road and broke to pieces.” No one was injured, and “the whole train (except the lo-

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comotive and one passenger car which was before those that broke) was left and all the passengers except myself got into this car and went on—I chose to walk rather than run another risk of life.” Wiggins arrived in Port Leon about ten o’clock.61 Wiggins found Port Leon in 1841 a town of great economic promise. In addition to excellent fish from local waters, the town had plenty of goods and provisions. Prices were high. More important, “there has been as high as 40000 bales of cotton shipped from this place in one year—and it is thought there will be that much shipped this year should the end prove as good as the beginning seems to be.” Wiggins hoped to find investors who would provide capital to construct a new cotton press of his design, but he left without the fortune that he had hoped would be his. Cotton prices were low; the prospects of Port Leon uncertain. Perhaps he was fortunate. In 1843, a hurricane shattered Port Leon. The town never recovered.62 Promoters associated with the town of St. Joseph constructed two railroads. Their town had its roots in the St. Joseph– Apalachicola rivalry. In 1835 the United States Supreme Court gave clear title to the town of Apalachicola to a land company. Some residents refused to pay the company’s price and left to start their own town, which they named St. Joseph. The new town flourished on a tide of prosperity and one of the most aggressive promotional campaigns in the town-building experience in the trans-Appalachian West. But the “Saints”—as they came to be called—had built their town on the Bay of St. Joseph, a site that was scenic but not commercially sound, for it lacked a trade connection with the interior. Planners intended that the first St. Joseph railroad of eight miles would run from the town to Lake Wimico, where ships could move by water to the Apalachicola River. Hundreds of carpenters and laborers rushed the project to completion, and in September 1836, in a triumphant gesture, a locomotive pulled twelve cars and three hundred passengers from St. Joseph to the lake in twenty-five minutes. But the lake proved too shallow for large vessels, and, despite the railroad connection, the town did not benefit economically. In the end the new trade route, including the rail line, had to be abandoned. A far more ambitious railroad project replaced it, a line from St.



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Joseph north to Iola on the Apalachicola. Once more the Saints pressed the plan to a conclusion, this time in the face of growing economic depression. The thirty-mile line opened in 1839, the same year that the town hosted the Territorial Constitutional Convention. Both were the high points in St. Joseph’s history. The railroad did not divert the cotton trade from the port of Apalachicola, cotton prices fell, the economy slumped, and depression followed. A yellow fever epidemic in the summer of 1841 closed the town. It never reopened. Scavengers tore down the buildings and ripped up the iron rails from the tracks for use elsewhere.63 Edward Anderson, the master of a schooner that plied the coastal trade, has left a description of St. Joseph in 1844. Of his walk around the town, Twas a melancholy saunter, for the place had been deserted by the inhabitants and had an air of gloom out of keeping with our age of prosperity. Fine dwellings, finished in the best style have been abandoned by their owners and left to rot piecemeal in the weather. Windows & doors are gaping open swinging to & fro with every gust. The grass grows rankly in the streets and wolves and bears now prowl when only a few years ago was all the bustle and excitement of business. The place was in its prime remarkable for good society and gayety.

Among the reasons for the decline, “The railroad was mismanaged & when the revulsion came the inhabitants found themselves invalid in ruin & left the place in disgust. Others followed until all went away but a few families & when we arrived there in the steamer we found those few preparing to go away.” A tailor offered a frock coat for “a comfortable dwelling.” Window sashes and doors disappeared into a wagon, and one of the men, “a wild looking savage came up & asked if we could purchase some bear meat from him, as he had killed one that morning fresh & fat.”64 Florida’s railroads were the work of some of the boldest and most energetic promoters on the trans-Appalachian frontier. In 1840 both the Iola–St. Joseph and the Tallahassee–St. Marks lines were in operation. Horses and mules drew the first trains,

FLORIDA: A SECTIONAL FRONTIER

making them more closely related to urban trolley cars than to the steam trains of the future. The few accounts of trips on Florida’s railroads stressed the hazards and uncertainties: the cars derailed, the tracks disappeared into the marsh, the iron bands curled up and had to be held down by a trainman running ahead.65 Gauges varied, as did charges. Where in competition with water routes, rail charges were low and competitive, but where there was no competition, companies levied whatever the market would bear. In the midst of confusion, humor, and venality, the conclusion was unmistakable: railroads were a revolution and the future. The results were evident by 1840. Railroads would make St. Joseph a great port city, or so thought envious Pensacolians as they planned their own railroad, a line from Pensacola north to Georgia that would transform the sleepy town with the big harbor into a great world port. Commented the Pensacola Gazette, “A new country is to be created by this system of internal improvement, and resources of wealth are to be developed which had otherwise been destined to be dormant forever.”66 This was a vision of the future that would soon embrace large portions of the frontier areas of the transAppalachian West. Balanced against the prosperity associated with banks and railroads were years of chaos and economic depression. The war against the Seminoles was responsible for the chaos. Up to the arrival of the Americans, life for these five thousand Indian people was good. The Indians had space in which to move about, plentiful access to game and fish (both freshwater and saltwater), lands for agriculture, and a policy of benevolent indifference on the part of the Spanish. The Americans who came after 1819 did not propose to permit this land use and lifestyle to continue. Nor did it. The American drive for land cessions made conflict inevitable, for “white determination remained not to tolerate a separate society within their own or even to have Indian neighbors.” Negotiations for removal of the Seminoles went on over a dozen years, while the American population enlarged and expanded. The pressure for removal increased with the flush times of the 1830s.67



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The issue of the Seminoles took on a new urgency and intensity with the election of Andrew Jackson and, soon thereafter, the passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830 as a new official United States policy. Hoffman has commented, “Covetousness, racism, the defense of slavery (the Seminoles allegedly provided refuge for fugitives), claims of self-defense against real or imagined Indian raids on cattle and other property, and a resolve to have a single, national society all played parts in white determination to be rid of the Indians once and for all.” The United States attempted to persuade the Seminoles to remove under the terms of the Treaty of Fort Gibson in 1834. Most agreed, but a small band held out. After confrontations with the agent, the army, and the leaders willing to move, Chief Osceola and his band of resisters began open warfare. The governor called the militia to active duty in early December 1835, a date that marked the official opening of the war. Peoples on the frontiers of Anglo-American settlement had lived in fear of an Indian war since Daniel Boone cut the Wilderness Road. The violence of Kentucky’s “dark and bloody ground” had lost nothing in the retelling over the intervening years. At the same time, the Anglo-American impulse to dispossess the Indians of land had grown overpowering, and the vague contempt for the Indians’ “irresponsible” lifestyle mixed in strange proportions with fear. When it came, the reality of the Indian war in Florida was fully as bad as the folklore said, and was intensified by a total lack of preparedness. “It is inconceivable what Florida is destined to suffer from its defenseless state,” commented the Pensacola Gazette in 1836. The Indians attacked the isolated agricultural settlements and, after death and fire, retired to the fastness of the swamps. In the first winter of the war, such attacks destroyed sixteen plantations south and west of St. Augustine, each employing more than one hundred slaves.68 Friction between the regular army and the territorial militia eroded war planning, and the struggle for military preferment became a prominent feature of the conflict. Sporadically intense, the war dragged on and on. “Indians were a strong force in the city’s life,” the St. Augustine Florida Herald commented in 1840;

FLORIDA: A SECTIONAL FRONTIER

later the same year, “Though we cannot say the Indians are masters of the country, they are masters of all the lives of passing travellers.”69 For the better part of six years the Seminole War had an enormous impact on government, economy, courts and the administration of justice, and the availability of services throughout the territory. As late as the autumn of 1843, the report on the election returns for Dade County noted that “in consequence of the destruction of the County seat, and the Total Abandonment of the County (until within a few months past) the Clerk has not deemed it safe to reside in that County.”70 Daniel Wiggins reflected a growing uneasiness in Middle Florida. In October 1838, he wrote in his diary, “I am now on the extreme frontier—not a settlement between us and the hostile Indian.” Wiggins, like others, hoped for a quick end to the conflict. He and others would be disappointed. In late 1838 and early 1839, rumors of impending Indian attack spread across Middle Florida. His host, Judge Randall, barricaded his house for a siege. The scattered plantations were periodically relieved by the appearance of U.S. Army patrols. Always in motion, the patrols generally found nothing. As scatted Indian attacks increased, “the people are getting much alarmed none feels safe either at home or abroad. We carry our guns with us wherever we go—I think I shall keep close to quarters for a while than I have for some time past.”71 The war lasted until 1842. The regular army and the militia pursued the elusive Indians across central Florida and into the remote hills and swamps. They were incrementally successful over the years, with continuous campaigning mixed with a ruthless destruction of Seminole resources of corn and cattle. The militia came to think of the war as a source of ongoing employment, albeit occasionally a dangerous one. As late as 1840, the Seminoles and their Creek allies retained the capability of raiding at great distances. The countryside was in a state of continuous upheaval and disarray. The war introduced its own variations of sectionalism. A few people and places benefited enormously from the long and determined if not entirely successful campaign waged by the United States Army. Merchants and teamsters with wagons prof-



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ited and cities prospered, especially the town of Jacksonville, which became a supply center. The profits of the towns embittered the displaced farmers and planters, who found their lives completely disrupted. As part of its military operations, the army constructed several roads in Middle and East Florida, all heading south—into Seminole country. After the destruction of millions of dollars in property, hundreds of lives on both sides, and several military reputations, the war drew to a close. The United States Army lured Chief Osceola to a parlay under a flag of truce and captured him; other Indians fell victim to the same ruse, and some surrendered voluntarily. Others continued resistance in what became a war of attrition for both sides. The military high command declared the war over in 1842. When they calculated the cost of the war, the United States and Florida had spent $30–40 million. The casualty lists included 1,621 white deaths. The Indians had lost several hundred killed, including perhaps forty of their black allies. Over the course of the war, the army deported some 4,420 Seminoles. After the armistice, perhaps something on the order of 100 Seminole men capable of bearing arms remained in South Florida.72 The Seminole War found the territory in prosperity and left it in economic stagnation and depression. Not even military roads could make up the difference. In 1842 the western country, and the nation as a whole, was gripped in a prolonged depression that was especially severe for southern agricultural staples. But the slow growth of Florida, compared with Michigan, reflected its struggle against one adversity after another. In 1842, partly in response to the devastation of the war, Congress enacted the Armed Occupation Act, providing a grant of 160 acres of public lands in Florida to any adult male able to bear arms. After five years’ residence and minimal cultivation provisions, the applicant would receive title. The law had a modest impact, with some 1,300 applicants, but the end of the war did encourage a resumption of immigration to Florida and its public lands. By the spring of 1843 the Herald commented of war-ravaged East Florida, “A tide of emigration is flowing in, and the wilds of Florida are giving place to the busy hum of civilization.”73

FLORIDA: A SECTIONAL FRONTIER

Table 5. Growth of Florida, 1820–50

Florida Michigan

1820

1830

1840

1850

ca. 11,000 8,896

34,730 31,639

54,477 212,267

87,445 397,654

Sources: James Grant Forbes, Sketches, Historical and Topographical, of the Floridas; More Particularly of East Florida (1821; rpt. ed., Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1964), 142; Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1957 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1960), 13.

Some of these new settlements initially lay outside the institutions of organized government. The Indian River settlement began in 1842 with the usual frontier activities, centered around building and clearing. In 1844 a group of pioneers met to establish a government and provide for the common defense. Those present chose three of their members to serve as a committee of arbitration to settle disputes within the community. They also organized a militia and elected officers. Within months the governor and legislature laid off St. Lucie County, and the settlers elected the first board of commissioners. The new settlement was agricultural, with a specialty in citrus. The most prosperous planter imported a house from Savannah, bringing it down the coast by schooner. In the end, the colony did not succeed. Citrus trees take several years to yield productively, and the settlers lacked the resources or an alternative means of livelihood for the interim. Indian unrest complicated the situation, and the settlement broke up in 1849. Others remained, however, and the census of 1850 listed twenty-two heads of families in St. Lucie County.74 Sectionalism continued to dominate frontier Florida from 1830 to 1850, for the events that shaped the development of the territory (statehood came in 1845) affected with varying force each of these three regions—four if one includes Key West—and led to strains and tensions among them. The prosperity of the middle 1830s was unequal: Middle Florida expanded and flowered; East Florida prospered until the devastation of the citrus industry by a hard freeze in 1835; West Florida stagnated. The impact of the Seminole War was equally uneven: East Florida



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suffered severe physical destruction, loss of life, and economic and institutional upheaval; Middle Florida also felt the war’s impact, but to a lesser degree; West Florida was largely untouched. Each section continued to regard its own special interests above those of the territory as a whole.75 The experience of Florida was different from that of much of the trans-Appalachian West. The varied sectional nature of the territory produced confusion and conflict that grew rather than dissipated. War and depression resulted in widespread destruction and abandonment of frontier settlements. Deserted villages, derelict houses, and the remains of Anglo-American habitations dotted the territory. Florida demonstrates the degree to which the institutional framework established across the transAppalachian frontier depended upon growth. Legislatures and the executive laid off and organized counties, designed to be in operation by the time the settlers arrived. This system anticipated the early settlers’ needs for roads, ferries, and recording facilities; it provided jobs for officeholders. At the same time, its effectiveness anticipated continuing growth. In most areas of the trans-Appalachian West in the period from 1830 to 1850 the system worked. In Florida it did not work at all. The war ended immigration and cut short economic development. The organization of counties continued, but the counties did not grow. On its establishment in 1836, Dade County had ten families, about enough for a jury. An offshoot of Monroe County, it lay in the remote southeastern part of the territory, a region of scrub palmetto and sandy soil. Its most prominent feature was the Everglades. The population of the county did not increase, and the few had to assume the burdens of government: jury duty on a regular basis and the construction of a courthouse and jail. New counties benefited the entrepreneur and politician. There were numerous openings in the hierarchy of bureaucracy. For the active town promoter, every new county was a new county seat, with attendant opportunities for all town dwellers: professional people, mechanics, and merchants. For ordinary citizens, this was no consolation for “the multiplication of expenses, duties, inconveniences, &c.” they endured.76

FLORIDA: A SECTIONAL FRONTIER

American institutions in Florida replaced the remnants of Spain’s imperial presence, but for all their influence, they had a clumsy quality about them. The court system was constantly in flux and dislocated; the laws were ever changing and confused. Taxes were not levied, and where levied could not be collected. As a result, the most necessary public buildings, such as jails and courthouses, remained unbuilt. Hampered by the confusion of the Seminole War, Floridians were not markedly successful in adapting American institutions to their tropical setting. A new dimension in Florida’s modest growth was the noteworthy work of a few entrepreneurs. This territory (a state in 1845) with small, scattered population, undertook economic development through the establishment of the newest and most powerful economic instruments of the age: banks and railroads. A few individuals served as the driving force. They formed a sharp contrast to the other areas of the frontier Southwest and Northwest in this period, where the major thrust of development was the sheer mass of immigration. On most of the trans-Appalachian frontier individuals were active in planning towns, in establishing mills, plantations, and factories, and, of course, in working the land, but so dramatic and so rapid was the pace of settlement that masses of people tended to submerge their influence. In Florida the contributions of a few—while not always successful in sheer economic terms—were remarkable for their boldness, innovation, and widespread influence. The single exception to this uncertain frontier experience was the rise of a plantation economy and society in Middle Florida. Here, the crop of cotton and the institution of slavery produced a degree of success and maturity, and this section of Florida reflected the values (and families) of the upper South. Florida, with its small population, moved toward statehood on a tide of sectional anxiety that admitted states to the union in pairs. It finally entered the union paired with Iowa, preserving the balance of states and, presumably, the balance in the Senate. Amidst the speeches of celebration, most of the problems of territorial Florida remained. A star in the flag and official representation in Washington could not disguise them.77



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Arkansas: A Frontier More West than South

On his voyage down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers in 1814, Thomas Bolling Robertson of Louisiana “fell in with a canoe navigated by a man and two women.” Robertson engaged the man in conversation. Yes, he was originally from North Carolina, then Tennessee, and most recently from Kentucky. Where were they headed? Arkansas was the reply. Why? The man was firm in his reasons: “That they might live, they had heretofore only breathed, that the lands there were fresh & good and there was spring water that they would set down on Congress Land & purchase when it should be offered for sale.” The canoe cast off and headed up the White River to a world that Robertson called “situated on the extreme verge of civilized inhabitation.”1 Arkansas was another piece of the trans-Appalachian frontier that became American through the Louisiana Purchase. With the eyes of government officials, diplomats, the Congress, and eager entrepreneurs focused on Louisiana and New Orleans, few noticed the scattered settlements to the north around the mouth of the Arkansas River. The most significant of these, Arkansas Post, passed from Spanish to American authority in 1804. At that time, some sixty or seventy families formed the village, most of them of French origin, reflecting the trading and hunt-

ARKANSAS: A FRONTIER MORE WEST THAN SOUTH

ing antecedents of this world. Among the people within the community were sixty blacks, most of them slaves. The region grew slowly. When the federal government took a census in 1810, the enumerators counted a few more than a thousand people of European and African origin.2 Early travelers and government officials found early Arkansas primitive and even dangerous. Among the most outspoken was Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, later a celebrated authority on the American Indian. During a tour of upper White River in 1818, Schoolcraft characterized the society as one of primitive simplicity. “In manners, morals, customs, dress, contempt for labor and hospitality, the state of society is not essentially different from that which exists among savages.”3 In this account and others like it, Arkansas was a reincarnation of the frontier experience associated with places such as Kentucky after 1775 and Michigan after 1815. For the first twenty years of American settlement, Arkansas repeated this early frontier experience, seemingly removed from the innovations of technology and the large immigrations of people that overtook many other frontiers after 1815. While large numbers of Anglo-American people north and south of the Ohio moved aggressively to seize land, to place it under cultivation, and to pursue commercial agriculture, groups in Arkansans hunted, trapped, grazed livestock, and generally pursued a lonely, solitary existence, consistent with their location in the frontier farthest to the west. Amidst this isolation, many people of Arkansas shared a number of common characteristics, among them a tendency to unite in groups, linked by kinship, for self-protection and their own self-interest, and an inclination to violence widespread among several elements of society. Parts of this limited world were like those of medieval lords, with personal estates over which they ruled as armed camps, economic self-sufficiency, and ill-disguised contempt for higher authority and any interference with their lives. Sometimes they had fields under cultivation, but often they simply hunted and trapped, without “even so much as a garden.” In disposition, they varied from kind and good-hearted to vicious. Reflecting the latter, the Flanigan family attempted “by every means in their power to discourage immigration and to injure



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newcomers. . . . The men respected no law, human or divine, but were slaves to their own selfish lusts and brutish habits.” More often, the first Arkansans were primitive but agreeable. Russell W. Benedict described the Wyley clan in these terms: Their habits and manner of living was the same as the Indians. They had no knowledge of Letters or Books, and were wonderfully ignorant and as full of superstitions as their feeble minds were capable of, believing in Witches, Ghosts, Hobgoblins, Evil eyes, and all such traditions, but with all their weaknesses, whims, and follies this family was kind, friendly, inoffensive, harmless and perfectly honest. They did not farm, had no fences around their shanty habitations, and appeared to have lived a roving, rambling life ever since the battle of Bunker Hill when they fled to this wilderness.4

Even as a frontier, Arkansas seemed unknown. The Arkansas Territory had about it the same air of mystery that the Americas held for navigators of the early sixteenth century. In 1820 Cephas Washburn, a missionary headed to Arkansas, inquired about his destination at Walnut Hills (later Vicksburg), Mississippi. People shook their heads in disbelief that any such place existed. Washburn wrote, “At that time Arkansas was a perfect terra incognita. The way to get there was unknown; and what it was, or was like, if you get there, was still more an unrevealed mystery.”5 Even those already in the territory were sometimes not sure where they were. Land movement was almost impossible, and on water the canoe for people and flatboat for cargo were the rule. Joab Hardin’s ferry on the White River in 1818, “consisting of two small canoes lashed together with a few split clapboards laid across,” was one example of local transportation facilities.6 Even as Arkansas experienced modest growth after 1815, as the western country changed from static to kinetic, the area was still “defined largely by its neighbors.” That is to say, it was not Louisiana; it was not even Missouri. This large tract of real estate west of the Mississippi River was “a long segment of Mississippi River waterfront property located at an inconvenient distance

ARKANSAS: A FRONTIER MORE WEST THAN SOUTH

from both New Orleans and St. Louis.” The Arkansas River provided access to the interior, but the territory stretched to the west to an indefinite boundary that soon included Indian peoples. Furthermore, the political lines that formed Arkansas Territory cut across a variety of geographic landforms. The Mississippi River as an eastern boundary was clear enough. But north of the Arkansas River were hills, leading eventually (as one moved upstream) to the Ouachita Mountains and the Ozark Plateau. To the west and south was a coastal plain.7 In the late 1820s and the 1830s, the arrival of ambitious entrepreneurs who sought to reenact in Arkansas the experience of the Great Migration in Mississippi and Alabama diluted this primitive society. The new arrivals—officeholders, merchants, and aspiring planters—succeeded in their objectives, but only very gradually in specific places, and only after a long struggle against natural and human obstacles.8 This was the region and these were the fourteen thousand Anglo-American people to whom Congress gave a territorial government in 1819. The act of organization was based on the Ordinance of 1787 and provided for the usual officers and their prerogatives. One special feature was the adoption of the laws of the Missouri Territory, a step presumably consistent with the area’s experience as a part of Missouri. It was good that Congress mandated some laws, for the first appointed judges failed to assist in the process. Charles Jouett of Virginia briefly appeared at Arkansas Post in 1819, but when he returned to the territory in the spring of 1820, he was attacked by swarms of mosquitoes and retreated. In his letter of resignation, he noted that his wife refused to live in Arkansas. The other judges, Robert Letcher of Kentucky and Andrew Scott of Missouri Territory, served long enough to pass a law paying their salaries. Letcher then departed and never returned. A new set of judges joined Scott, and the judiciary began to function.9 As represented by the principal officeholders, the course of government for the Arkansas Territory seemed uncertain and unfocused. Between 1819 and 1830 lack of continuity, factionalism, and violence characterized both the executive and judicial branches. Three men held the office of governor during



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this period, and each was absent from the territory for a good portion of his tenure. Two of the original three justices appeared only briefly in the territory and served no useful function, so the judiciary lay in disarray. A dissident faction gathered around the secretary, Robert Crittenden, almost from the day of his appearance in the territory in July 1819, and the divisive and violent nature of Arkansas politics grew with each passing year. A duel in 1819 left dead a man who was a brigadier general, the commander of the territorial militia, and a recently elected delegate to the territorial assembly. Nor was the judicial branch of the government exempt from the practice of dueling. In 1824 one superior court judge killed another over a point of honor raised in a card game. Three years later the territorial secretary killed the territorial delegate in an affair of honor. To a greater degree than in other territories, violence in Arkansas involved some of the leading public officeholders.10 Government in Arkansas, as in the other enduring frontiers, was very important at all levels: local, territorial, and national. Officials were, accordingly, the focus of public attention. Unlike Michigan, and to a certain extent Florida, Arkansas was unlucky in the appointments that came its way. The governors were not distinguished by talents in compromise or leadership, or even by success in begging from the federal government. James Miller, the first governor, delayed his departure for Arkansas in 1819 until he could fit up an elaborate barge, with his name and official motto emblazoned in gold letters. His voyage up the Arkansas River ever farther into the unknown had about it something of the air of the Spanish conquistadores three hundred years earlier. Miller was a professional soldier, and the only thing of lasting value that he brought with him was weapons: four hundred stand of arms, forty thousand rounds of “fixed ammunition,” and “fifty horsemen pistols.”11 He spent as little time as possible in the territory. S. Charles Bolton observed of Miller that he “was an honest and capable officeholder, but he simply did not like being in Arkansas.” Miller was extremely critical of the state of society, especially the informal manners of the French, mixed with their interest in gambling and dancing.

ARKANSAS: A FRONTIER MORE WEST THAN SOUTH

He returned frequently to New Hampshire to visit his family. In his absence the secretary, Robert Crittenden, filled the office and promoted his own interests.12 The favorite project of the second territorial governor, George Izard, was the militia. The scattered nature of the population made effective organization impossible, but he devoted much attention to consideration of the appropriate uniform. The commissioned officers of the Izard County Battalion, for example, wore “a round hat, and a plume 15 inches in length; a deep blue cotton hunting frock, fringed with red, with a waist belt four inches in width, to buckle or button before; pantaloons of the same, the seams welted in red; white vest; and shall wear around the neck a black silk handkerchief or black stock.”13 There is no record of what the enlisted men wore—if there were any enlisted men. The third governor, John Pope, was a former senator from Kentucky. As a faithful supporter of Andrew Jackson in the election of 1828, he has hoped for an appointment in Washington. Instead, Jackson nominated him governor of Arkansas Territory in 1829, a position that he accepted reluctantly. Pope was casual and comfortable with the status quo. He made no waves, except when he once stated that his role in Arkansas was like that of an overseer on a plantation. The collective contributions of the governors to the territory lay in the few place names they left scattered on the land. There was little or nothing else.14 The most influential public figure in early Arkansas was the territorial secretary, Robert Crittenden. Only twenty-two when first appointed, Crittenden made his influence felt by continuity, longevity, and the weakness and absenteeism of the governors. He was secretary of the territory for ten years (1819–29), during which he became the most durable figure on the Arkansas political scene. Indeed, he was the first important name in Arkansas politics. As a clever and ambitious political figure—Crittenden always seemed too young to appoint as governor—he came to exercise great influence over the political life of the territory. He gathered a cadre of supporters around him. His ambition and that of his faction rapidly produced an opposition. The intense competition turned violent. The leader of the opposition faction,



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Henry W. Conway, was the territorial delegate in Washington, D.C. In response to a series of charges and countercharges over his expenditures of public funds, Crittenden challenged Conway to a dual. In an exchange of shots on the eastern bank of the Mississippi River, the secretary killed the delegate. The Conway faction, under new leadership (and with the support of the leading paper, the Arkansas Gazette, and its editor, William Woodruff) went on to dominate Arkansas politics for the rest of the territorial period. Crittenden disappeared from public view, his career in ruins.15 As an explanation for the continuing violence among public officials, the new territorial delegate, Ambrose Sevier, wrote to Secretary of State Henry Clay: “Party spirit among us has run high—and not infrequently have these political disputes ended in bloodshed.”16 Much of the factionalism revolved around land. There were issues of special grants, such as the New Madrid Claims, the Cherokee Treaty “donations,” and the Bowie Claims. Each offered the chance for enterprising speculators to engross some of the finest lands in the territory through use of these “floating” claims. There were also continuing conflicts over the site of the new capital at Little Rock (moved from Arkansas Post in 1821). Although the speculators and legislators squabbled over the site and its ownership, finally they joined forces and divided the spoils. In some respects, factionalism and conflict in Arkansas reflected that in older settled parts of the western country, and indeed, in the nation as a whole.17 Government gave territories a degree of control over their own affairs. They also offered many opportunities for ambitious residents and new arrivals to promote their own interests. Or, in the words of one historian, government in Arkansas “created political opportunities that led to intense rivalries and an impressive amount of violence. In addition, politicians demonstrated a marked penchant for using public power for private gain.” The use of public office for private advantage was a longstanding characteristic of the western country. The elevated level of violence was new. More than most places in the western country, Arkansas was newly and sparsely settled, with a full

ARKANSAS: A FRONTIER MORE WEST THAN SOUTH

array of officeholders and the addition of new counties adding more officials every legislative session. There were no established family names from the earlier period, as in the case of Kentucky and Tennessee. There was no dominant single official, such as Lewis Cass in Michigan. In response to the rapid turnover of public officials, Arkansas seemed to offer the prospect of advantage to every new, ambitious arrival, especially one with an appointment letter in his baggage. And in Arkansas, beyond the usual array of federal officials lay jobs in the land business. The patronage of the surveyor of public lands was enormous; that of district land officers less grand but still extensive. When this was combined with the contracts to supply beef, corn, and foodstuffs to the army posts and the Indian encampments, plus transportation to convey the goods a great distance up the Arkansas River, the federal government was the repository of substantial portion of the territory’s economic opportunities in the 1820s.18 The general assembly was neither more civic minded in approaching the problems of the territory nor more effective in solving them than the federal government. For the better part of a decade it engaged in time-consuming debates over the infinite variety of questions that seemed to concern frontiers everywhere, ranging from adultery to wolf bounties. More specifically, the Arkansas Assembly devoted most of its time to three issues: creating new counties, changing the court system, and petitioning the federal government for assistance. In 1829 one honest member introduced a resolution to the effect that since the general assembly had debated for so long and no end was in sight, its members should be paid for only the first thirty days of the session. It would, he concluded, “be unjust to draw from the Treasury of the Territory Arkansas compensation for services rendered since the expiration of the said thirty days.” His colleagues rose up to defeat the resolution decisively: Yeas, one; Nays, twenty-two. Salaries for officials and legislators dominated the budget of the territory. In the year 1825–26, for example, the budget included compensation to the members of the legislature: $4,073.75; salaries of civil officers: $7,603.00; cost of criminal prosecutions, jail fees, and grand jurors: $1,582.15¹⁄₂.



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Salaries and court fees added up to $13,258.90¹⁄₂ out of a total budget for the territory of $14,740.68.19 Like the legislators of Michigan and Florida, Arkansans loved to tinker with their legal code and courts. The legislature organized, abolished, and reorganized the county courts on a regular basis. The index of the laws of the territory shows the staggering amount of debate and legislation on the court system: 31 entries for chancery proceedings, 14 for circuit courts, 21 for county courts, and a total of 128 under the heading “Judicial Proceedings.” The law on the duties of the justice of the peace covered twenty-eight pages; that on the territorial militia, thirty-one pages.20 There were certainly many courts. The scheduled time of the sessions of the superior, circuit, and county courts for 1834 filled a full column of the newspaper. Simply put, the superior court held two terms in Little Rock, in January and July; there were four circuit courts, and one met twice annually in each county; the county courts convened quarterly. In spite of this interest and elaborate structure, justice was often delayed. When the Crawford County Circuit Court met in February 1835, after a lapse of two years, the docket numbered more than two hundred cases.21 The territory of Arkansas grew slowly in the 1820s. As in other parts of the western country, the economic dislocation of the Panic of 1819 was severely felt. The presence of Indian peoples in the western parts of the territory was another inhibiting factor. Nor did Arkansas benefit from a decisive transportation link like the Erie Canal. Instead, transportation remained the raft, the canoe, and the occasional steamboat headed upriver to the government military outposts and Indian agencies. The river systems of Arkansas were widespread, but the flow was uneven. Furthermore, a series of barriers in the form of trees, mud, and other obstacles blocked the upper reaches of the Red River. The roads were worse. The swampy conditions of the eastern part of the territory posed continuing challenges to road builders and travelers alike. Bridges were almost unknown. Ferries were few and primitive. The fourteen thousand people of non-Indian

ARKANSAS: A FRONTIER MORE WEST THAN SOUTH

origin increased to thirty thousand over this ten years. If immigration had been slow, the territorial legislature had been active. In 1830, Arkansas had twenty-seven counties to serve its thirty thousand Anglo-American people.22 Indian peoples were a continuing concern of legislators and the object of much legislation. At the time of territorial organization, when there were about fourteen thousand American settlers, there were also about the same number of Indians. Progress, immigration, settlement, trade and commerce were all conditions associated with the removal of Indians. As Indians seemed increasingly settled in their reserves, they occasioned much comment by the press. In the customary fashion of the time, commentators did not trouble to distinguish among Indian peoples. Nor did they move beyond the traditional frontier stereotypes. The editor of the Arkansas Gazette described Indians in 1817 as “a ferocious band of blood-thirsty marauding savages.” In 1823, the legislature petitioned for more military protection against the “numerous hoards of Savages who have heretofore existed and who Still are Crowding in upon our frontier.” Federal officials worked for years to remove Indians beyond the borders of the territory.23 The determination to remove Indians east of the Mississippi mixed with lack of specific geographic knowledge about Arkansas to create awkward situations. In 1820, for example, Andrew Jackson negotiated a treaty under which the Choctaw Nation gave up about a third of its prime cotton lands in southwest Mississippi for some thirteen million acres of land in Arkansas Territory. Unfortunately, the tracts chosen by Secretary of War John C. Calhoun covered a substantial portion of Arkansas Territory as then identified, including the present home of one-third of the territory’s small population. The outcry was shrill, even for so small a population (perhaps in part because it was a small population). The sense of outrage was palpable, for the new boundaries gave to the Choctaw Nation parts of four or five Arkansas counties. William Woodruff, the editor of the Arkansas Gazette, who led the outcry, accused the federal government of intending that Arkansas Territory be-



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come a “Botany Bay” for Indians. An embarrassed Department of War hastened to conclude another treaty with the Choctaws. When signed in 1825, the new treaty limited the Choctaw presence, but the message remained: Arkansas Territory would become a site of the settlement of Indian peoples under treaties negotiated and signed by the federal government. Thus, the territory would become the object of Indian and AngloAmerican immigration simultaneously.24 The situation was unusually strained. Because of its western location, Arkansas became the homeland of thousands of Indians expelled from the cotton lands east of the Mississippi by the twin forces of the Great Migration and the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Many of the territory’s immigrants, especially after 1829, were Indians on their way west. In conjunction with this immigration of Indian peoples, the economy of the territory depended heavily on the maintenance of Indians. Supplies and rations for Fort Gibson and Fort Smith provided both a market for agricultural produce and a reason for steamboat traffic on the Arkansas. The presence of a large number of Indians removed from areas to the east also gave rise to much uneasiness. The general assembly passed several laws to reduce contact between the Indian peoples and Anglo-Americans, prohibiting the sale of liquor and even of horses to Indians. Anyone with one-quarter or more Indian blood could not give court testimony in criminal cases. In few other territories were the laws separating the two groups so strong or so numerous and the restrictions on Indians so rigorous. Embodying the opinions of its constituencies, the assembly called the Cherokees a “restless, dissatisfied, insolent, and ambitious tribe, engaged in constant intrigues with neighboring tribes, to foment difficulties.” The federal government must move with energy and vigor to control the Indian peoples by surrounding them with white settlements. This would have the effect, concluded the assembly’s memorial of 1827, “of promoting their own civilization and knowledge of agriculture.”25 Arkansans constantly asserted that they represented the onward march of a superior civilization. Looking over the state of

ARKANSAS: A FRONTIER MORE WEST THAN SOUTH

white settlement in town and countryside, some Native Americans were not convinced. Nu-Tah-R-Tuh of the Cherokee delegation saw comments on the superiority of white civilization in the Arkansas Gazette and replied “To the man who makes the paper talk every week at Little Rock”: Brother, you seem very desirous of the civilization of our people. I thank you in my own name, and in their name, for these benevolent wishes. But what is civilization? Is it a practical knowledge of agriculture? Then I am willing to compare the farms and gardens of this nation with those of the mass of white population in the Territory. The advantages will be on our side. Does Civilization consist in good and comfortable buildings? Here, if the comparison be made, we shall have the advantage over the mass of your people. Does it consist in possessing stocks? We are willing to compare. Does it consist in the style of diet and clothing? Here, also for economy and comfort we are willing to compare. Does it consist in morality and religion? Our people have built, wholly at their own expense, the only Meeting-house in the Territory; and though the number of truly religious people is small, and though many immoral practices prevail, yet I believe we might compare with your very best settlements in these respects. Does it consist in schools and education of youth? I believe a larger portion of our youth can read and write than of those in your own settlements. Two permanent Schools, wholly supported by ourselves, will go into operation in a few days. Does it consist in hospitality? We are proud of our hospitable character. —If civilization consists in any of the above, then, Brother, do not tell about hemming us in, by your settlements, to civilize us. But if civilization consists in pitched battles, to murder one another, or in shooting our neighbors and brothers, in streets and places of public resort, then we are in a woeful state of barbarism. Brother, I have done.26

The influence of government spread through the Arkansas Territory by way of the county. At every session the legislature added to the few counties inherited from Missouri. Indeed, one of the characteristics of government in Arkansas was the energy with which the legislature created new counties and the governor named officers for counties that had no roads, no



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towns, and scarcely any people. In 1820 Crawford County had a population of fewer than five hundred people; in 1827 Lafayette, St. Francis, and Lovely counties had only a handful; in 1829 Jackson County had fifty taxpayers. The census of 1835 listed the population of Jackson County at 333; Pike, 449; Hot Spring, 458; Miller, 350; Monroe, 461; and estimated the number of inhabitants in Scott County at fewer than one hundred. Another four counties had fewer than one thousand people within their borders. The reason for the impulse to organize large areas with few people is not clear. County organization gave the illusion of growth, and government helped to attract immigrants. Perhaps the legislature hoped to meet the needs of a few scattered settlers for a court system. Yet the impression persists that the number of counties expanded for the sake of officeholders. In comparison to the small population of Arkansas, the number of officeholders was large. Every county had what the law allowed.27 The budgets of the larger and more centrally located counties, published annually in the Arkansas Gazette, showed the income and expenditure for the year. The major items of income were tax collections (based on land) and license fees for merchants, peddlers, tavern keepers, and others, and, in addition, the occasional fines assessed and collected by the county courts. The principal expenditures were for the support of the bureaucracy: courts and courtrelated costs such as expenses for the grand jury, elections and election returns, and the maintenance of the road viewers. As late as 1826 only one county—Hempstead—supported paupers.28 At the same time that public administration on both territorial and county levels absorbed virtually their entire respective incomes, the counties and territory constantly petitioned the federal government for aid in maintaining roads and schools. At both the executive and legislative levels, Arkansas was a beggar. The territory sent forth petitions for every known form of support, from roads to rivers to courthouses to jails; the assembly even requested funds for printing a digest of the territory’s growing body of laws. Congress, generous in a time of prosperity, provided much assistance, including $666,000 for transportation improvements. The Little Rock–Memphis Road,

ARKANSAS: A FRONTIER MORE WEST THAN SOUTH

opened in 1828, cost the federal government $267,482, and removal of the “Red River raft” (an entangled obstacle of logs, trees, flotsam, and mud) another $216,000. It was a large commitment to so remote a territory.29 Arkansas began its economic life with the fur trade and passed only slowly through this stage. The continued presence of large numbers of Indians perpetuated the trading nature of the economy. Jacob Barkman began to engage in trade at about the time of the War of 1812. With a boat made from a big pine tree, Barkman set out from Arkadelphia for New Orleans with a cargo of bear’s oil, skins, pelts, and tallow. Soon he was making the trip on a regular basis, returning with goods needed by the early settlers: crosscut saws, handsaws, cotton cards, powder, lead, and shot.30 The Great Migration that began in 1815 turned large parts of the frontier South to cotton cultivation, but Arkansas responded slowly to this new commercial crop. The Arkansas Gazette commented in 1819 that Arkansas had plenty of lawyers but needed more farmers. The lands were good—“as rich as human avarice can desire”—yet immigrants were few, and even where agriculture was established, production lagged. Much of the food consumed was imported into the territory at a high cost. Some merchants bought flour on speculation, holding barrels until the river closed and the price climbed accordingly.31 Arkansas exhibited to a high degree the lack of specialization that characterized the early frontier economy. Most people had more than one source of income. Farmers also hunted and trapped, surveyed, and served as minor officials wherever possible. Even those who lived in Little Rock displayed a wide range of occupations.32 In his flowery descriptions of the land, the editor of the Arkansas Gazette was only half right. The pattern of the landscape divided the territory into two very different parts: lowlands and highlands. The lowlands were the western extension of the flood plain known as the delta of the Mississippi. This division, running in a diagonal line across the territory from northeast to southwest, produced two areas roughly equal in size but very different in patterns of settlement and economic development. Cotton cultivation gradually began along the Mississippi and south of the Arkansas River. Reports of cotton crops



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and prices appeared regularly in the newspapers. The term “planter,” with its economic and social implications, entered the Arkansas vocabulary and spread. Arkansas Post, bypassed as the territorial capital, reemerged as a center of the cotton trade. “Our little town is all in a bustle,” was the report in 1826. “Cotton, the great staple of our country, is crowding in from every quarter. Boats arrive every day at our landing, with the rich production of the climate.” Loaded wagons arrived from the interior with the staple and carried home seed for the coming year. The leading Arkansas Post merchant, Frederick Notrebe, had his own gin and general store. He bought cotton at New Orleans prices and offered a “large assortment of DRY GOODS, HARDWARE, and GROCERIES” for cash or produce, probably on credit. By 1830 cotton dominated the agricultural news of the region to the virtual exclusion of other crops, even corn.33 The central fact about life in Arkansas Territory during its first decade remained the slow pace of settlement and economic development. Arkansas’s lands were often suitable for cotton cultivation, the bounty warrants brought many settlers in search of their free tracts, and the Arkansas Gazette advertised the virtues of the territory in a manner equal to anything its most ardent supporters could require. Yet the territory grew very slowly in population. Too many negative forces were at work everywhere. The territory was remote. The extended swamps in eastern Arkansas forced the new settler to confront some of the most inhospitable land in the territory. The Indians were numerous, disinclined to move, and a barrier to stability and expansion—or so it was thought. Navigation of many of the watercourses was hazardous, at a time when the people of the territory moved—when and where they moved at all—by water. Finally, old Spanish claims clouded the title of some of the most attractive lands in the eastern part of the territory. Arkansas was presumably no place for the energetic aggressive agriculturist, especially one with capital. Lands in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana seemed to have much more of everything to offer.34 A principal reason for the slow settlement and economic development of Arkansas was the lack of transportation facilities. The territory had a large river system leading to its interior and,

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most important, the Arkansas River itself, bisecting the territory from east to west and leading directly to the Mississippi and New Orleans. It also had, along the watercourses, much wet and overflowed land that made land transportation and even communication difficult and subjected the hardy traveler who braved these conditions to clouds of insects and wet feet. Between Little Rock and Arkansas Post, for example, the greenheaded horsefly was so bad that people traveled long stretches at a gallop to avoid the pest, sometimes stopping to light fires to smoke the flies off the horses. Occasionally horses died from the ordeal. The Arkansas Gazette carried news of men who left the road, became lost, and wandered for days in the woods. Mail service was irregular. Little Rock, the political and economic center of the territory, was once cut off from the East for more than two months. In 1828 contractors completed the longawaited Little Rock–Memphis Road, but parts of it were under water for three months of each year.35 In the 1820s, Arkansas depended almost exclusively on water transportation. The territorial period opened on the keelboat and the flatboat and eagerly welcomed the steamboat. The arrivals of the steamboat Comet at Arkansas Post in 1821 and of the Eagle at Little Rock in 1822 were among the most dramatic events of the decade. The Arkansas Gazette declared that the Eagle’s docking “opens a new and interesting era in the navigation and commerce of the Arkansas.” To the extent that Arkansas participated in the life of the nation in the 1820s—and it did so only marginally—it did so because of steamboat communication. The impact of steam transportation was felt throughout the territory. The supplies and men for the garrisons at Fort Smith, Fort Gibson, and the Dwight Mission made steamboat traffic profitable, and Little Rock became the principal stop on the voyage upriver. Steamboat service reduced prices of groceries and merchandise, especially after 1825. The price of groceries at Batesville, for example, fell by half within a year of the arrival of the first steamboat. Gradually the vessels found cargoes for the return trip to New Orleans, at first furs and hides, and, by the middle of the decade, cotton. The arriving immigrants came by steamboat; for those intending to bring sub-

ARKANSAS: A FRONTIER MORE WEST THAN SOUTH

stantial quantities of household goods, overland transportation was almost impossible. After 1829 Indians moving to their new lands in the West provided much of the upriver business. By 1833 Little Rock had so many arrivals and departures that the local newspapers began to print a register.36 Cotton gradually emerged as the favorite commercial crop in the eastern (bordering the Mississippi River) and southern counties. There, a form of plantation society emerged modeled on large-scale production units on the east side of the river. The lands were fertile, and the presence of an enlarging slave population (in the southern and eastern counties) provided the means to grow the commercial crop of the South. But Arkansas’s transportation system languished. Planters with access to water could float their baled cotton to market; those at a distance from water connections confronted bad roads, absence of bridges, and indifferent local attention to the road system. Still, Arkansas became more involved in commercial agriculture. To the north and west, corn and cattle were commercial crops with a variety of markets. In general, the territorial legislature left the issue of transportation to the federal government. Counties contributed little.37 The proliferation of county government and the arrival of steamboats did little to change the nature of Arkansas society. Difficult as it is to characterize a society scattered over a large area and on the basis of limited evidence, the development of a plantation economy mixed with a continuing primitive, violent, self-sufficient, and isolated world. The persistent importance of hunting, trapping, and subsistence emphasizes the slow development of the economy. The open land to the west and contact with Indian peoples prolonged the early stage of economic development, as trading continued to be profitable business despite the laws passed by territorial legislatures forbidding contact between American and Indian societies. Perhaps the traditional frontier antipathy toward the Indians that often provoked violence infused the society as a whole. Whatever the reasons, Arkansas had more than its share of bloodshed. Almost everyone went armed. The columns of the Arkansas Gazette carried numerous accounts of the violence and mayhem that



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human beings committed against one another, much of it in the name of personal honor. And this condition was hardly confined to the people in the woods; it extended to the streets of the capital and included the leading public figures of the territory. So to the usual attacks on Indians, horse stealing, counterfeiting, gambling, and random assaults on black people must be added the continuing violence of elected public officials. Indeed, some of the leading presidential appointees participated in it. And to these affairs of honor have to be appended the self-appointed mobs that dispensed unofficial punishment in the name of law and order.38 C. F. M. Noland, a literate Arkansan who was also a good shot, made a tour of the territory in 1830. One of the results was a series of articles for the Little Rock Arkansas Advocate, a new paper in the capital city. “Arkansas is at this time, the only new Western Country to be settled,” wrote Noland in the autumn of 1830. It was a nice, tidy statement. Arkansas was still the West. It was certainly new, although not nearly as “new” as a decade before. Noland’s accounts suggested, among other things, the great variation in topography, the attendant economic development, and the direction of society in the several counties. But everywhere there were great strides in physical amenities. As evidence, he noted that “fifteen years ago and beyond the immediate neighborhood of the Post of Arkansas, there was but one family which enjoyed the luxury of a glass window. . . . Now, most of our farmers occupy comfortable houses, and a glass window no longer excites astonishment.” The Advocate’s witty editor, Albert Pike, joined in celebrating the conquest, or at least the taming, of “a matted and mighty forest” by “the towering wave of emigration.” Pike took sharp exception to the continued criticism of the territory’s location and the condition of its society. “There seems to be an idea among our brethren of the quill, that we in Arkansas are entirely out of the world,” he wrote. “One editor says that Little Rock is a place somewhat west of sunset.” Pike went on to assure his colleagues that the sun did indeed rise and set in Little Rock: “It is true that we are pretty well to the leeward, but we are not quite on the edge of the world.” His was the confidence of a man writing in a period of

ARKANSAS: A FRONTIER MORE WEST THAN SOUTH

Table 6. Growth of the Enduring Frontiers, 1820–50

Arkansas Michigan Florida

1820

1830

1840

1850

14,273 8,896 ca. 11,000

30,388 31,639 34,730

97,574 212,267 54,477

209,897 397,654 87,445

Sources: Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1957 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1960), 13; James Grant Forbes, Sketches, Historical and Topographical of the Floridas; More Particularly of East Florida (1821; rpt. ed., Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1964), 142.

prosperity and expansion.39 The population statistics for the territory (state after 1836) reflect the accelerated growth of the territory after 1830 (see table 6). Whether Noland and Pike celebrated the triumphs of the past or prophesied the future, in 1830, Arkansas began a new phase in its physical expansion and agricultural growth. The reasons for this were better transportation routes, especially roads; the establishment of a number of stage lines, which often ran late, but ran nonetheless; and the arrival of capitalists, with gangs of slaves, who purchased large tracts of land and settled down to the business of raising cotton. Sure signs of prosperity crowded the territory’s newspapers: more advertisements for runaway slaves; more lawyers’ cards; more steamboat arrivals. Little Rock, which welcomed its first steamboat in 1822, docked one hundred steamboats in the month of June 1837. It was a figure that symbolized a decade of physical expansion and, by the standards of the day, progress.40 In the period from 1830 to 1850 distinctive societies appeared in various sections of Arkansas. A planter class slowly emerged in the south and east, with large-scale cotton cultivation and slavery its foundations. Not until the 1830s, however, did the cotton exports downriver justify the characterization of this section of the new state as connected to the cotton frontier, with planters, lawyer class, and wealth based on land and land speculation. This trend received impetus in the early years of the decade with the rise of cotton prices and the opening of the Red River Valley. Supported by the federal government, Captain Henry Shreve sought to break through the heretofore impassa-



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ble Red River raft, an obstacle that projected upstream for more than one hundred miles. The success of his efforts opened the Red River Valley to immigration. “The Red River Country is growing rapidly into notice,” the Arkansas Gazette reported in 1834. “From the vast number of movers many of them with large droves of negroes, who have been almost daily passing through our town for the south for two or three months past, we imagine that country is settling as fast as any other section of the Territory, and perhaps faster.” And a correspondent in Hempstead County commented of the immigrants, “I think that we can safely calculate on an emigration to the Red river country, surpassing, in wealth, enterprize, and industry, the emigration of former years.”41 At the same time, a different society emerged in north and west Arkansas. This was a region of small independent farmers, cultivating corn and grains, grazing large herds of livestock, isolated by geography and economy from the cotton interests to the east. The differences were evident by 1836, when the Little Rock Times, describing the territory for prospective immigrants, treated the two sections separately. The southern and eastern counties “were considered the great cotton region.” Lands to “the north and north-western counties” were “somewhat broken, but interspersed with innumerable vallies and small water courses” where agriculturalists “raised corn, vegetables, and fruits.”42 Batesville was a center of northern economic and political influence. According to the argument of the Batesville News, “substantial comforts” were available for the whole population in northern Arkansas, “as well in the mansions of the rich as in the cottages of the poor.” The independent pioneer in this healthy climate contrasted with the “inhabitant of the tropics,” the “products of his burning clime,” and the “negro who ministers to his wants.”43 The areas north and west of the Arkansas River concentrated on traditional frontier staples—corn and beef. In 1830, C. F. M. Noland found the large herds a part of the livelihood of pioneers everywhere. He wrote, “In a few years a farmer here, will from a small number of cows, acquire a stock, the increase of which will not only gratify him, but create a sigh of regret, that he had not,

ARKANSAS: A FRONTIER MORE WEST THAN SOUTH

at an earlier period of his life, come to the country so congenial to the increase of his means.” The rising Indian immigration provided a ready market at Fort Towson and Fort Smith. The Arkansas Gazette remarked that “the subsistence of such a vast number of Indians will give profitable employment to our farmers, by furnishing an excellent market for all the beef, pork, corn, etc. that they can raise.” On numerous occasions the quantities purchased by the Indian agents reached several hundred thousand pounds.44 Northern Arkansas continued to depend on the keelboat and flatboat to move its commodities to market. In 1841 Batesville served as the departure point for a large “number of flat boats that have been sent down the river this season, loaded with stock, and produce of various kinds. One firm, of this place, alone has sent off twelve, loaded principally with stock; we are informed that in all, about thirty have been sent down this season and a number more are fitting out.” The next season traffic was even heavier, with emphasis on the export of the corn crop to the rest of the state. Trade by water involved risks, for it depended on sufficient water levels. A fall in the river in the winter of 1842–43, the result of no rain for two months, left the town of Batesville “almost destitute of the necessaries of life.”45 For all its cotton, steamboats, and plantation dreams, Arkansas in 1840 was still western and not southern. In this, it differed dramatically from the cotton frontiers across the Mississippi River. Its needs were those shared by the western country: order in society, transportation and communication, and government assistance. Territory and state importuned the federal government to support clearing her rivers, building her roads, and so forth. On the eve of statehood in 1836, the Little Rock Times spoke of an identification with The growing interests of the West. What may we not expect in a few years more, when immense tracts of land in Illinois, Missouri, and Arkansas are taken up and improved? One continual stream of emigration continues pouring within our borders—an emigration of worthy and respectable citizens, adding to an already bold and enterprising population, would ere long raise the character of the West second to no section of the Union. The struggles now



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making by the eastern and northern States to secure the Western commerce already shows its importance; and there is no longer a doubt remaining that the West will, in a few years, be considered by far the most important part of the United States.46

Arkansas became a state in 1836. It was the height of the Second Great Migration, whose speculative energy had spilled across the river into Arkansas. The territory was still sparsely settled. Although it was paired with Michigan for admission to the Union (the formula of a slave and free state together), Arkansas had a population on the order of 60,000, the minimum according to the Northwest Ordinance, and perhaps a third of Michigan’s burgeoning numbers. Of course, Arkansas had no access to great waterways that led to the Erie Canal. Still, statehood was cause for celebration. The dominant political factions found new federal jobs to satisfy the endless thirsts of their supporters. The new state legislature used its authority to establish banks. Banks were a common denominator of the “enduring frontiers” as they were of every territory and state in the western country in the early 1830s. This was a period of economic prosperity, rising sales of public lands, and surging immigration. Of course Arkansas should benefit from such economic advances. The institution of the day that gave energy and physical support to local economic expansion was the bank. In 1836, the legislature established two: a Real Estate Bank and the Bank of Arkansas. The former was designed to serve the needs of Arkansas planters by provided loans for the purchase of land and slaves. In short, its focus was cotton producers. Because the capital of the bank was in the form of land and commodities, both were subject to sharp fluctuations. Lands were overvalued in the inflated optimism of 1836 and 1837, and the bank stock continued to rise until 1841. Yet from the beginning of its existence, the bank had been attacked by members of the legislature on the ground that the bank’s policies benefited only cotton planters in the east and south. Thus, the bank was really a sectional institution, greatly favoring one section and one commodity through the use of the state’s authority at the expense of the numbers of people distant from the river in the south and west. Eventually, as the influence of the economic crisis spread, the

ARKANSAS: A FRONTIER MORE WEST THAN SOUTH

large banking institutions in the East, on whom the Arkansas was dependent, refused to continue the lines of credit. The Arkansas bank now defaulted on the bank bonds, many of which were owned by an English company. The governor ruled that the state was not obligated for the debt. Arkansas was saved, but its financial reputation in Europe was ruined. The second bank, the Bank of Arkansas, made its facilities available everywhere in the state. Indeed, the loans made by the bank were apportioned among the counties in proportion to their representation in the legislature. Thus, the bank was certainly democratic in its operations. Launched on a tide of optimism, the bank was in trouble within a decade, as the depression rolled into Arkansas. Those who had borrowed in good times now confronted the repayment of their loans under totally different economic conditions. By the early months of 1840, the notes of both banks were discounted up to 30 percent in New Orleans. As debtors fell in arrears, so creditors began lawsuits. In one example of local protections, some debtors in Phillips County barricaded themselves in the county court house to prevent the circuit court from hearing cases against debtors. In the face of an angry public, the sheriff resigned and the judge left town, rather than rule on debtors’ cases or execute the rulings. Within six months, the court was in operation again and judgments were handed down and executed against debtors. In 1842, the state legislature took steps to close down the State Bank. Suits against debtors continued as late as 1845. Many debtors went west to Texas. It was an economic option available on the most western frontier. In 1846, the legislature began action on a constitutional amendment that prohibited the future incorporation of banks within the state.47 Statehood did not accelerate Arkansas’s growth in numbers. In 1840, four years after admission to the union, “Arkansas still exhibited a frontier demography. There were fewer than two inhabitants for each square mile of land. In the white population that numbered 77,174 persons, men were more numerous than women by a ratio of three to two. The settlers were also youthful compared with other white Americans.” Slaves represented some 20 percent of the Arkansas population, or 19,935 persons. The



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largest slave representation was in the eastern and southern parts of the state, associated with cotton culture, and adding another dimension to the sectional nature of state. In spite of the growth of the 1830s that provided sufficient numbers for statehood, the state lagged behind both Missouri and Louisiana. Many of the traditional issues remained: Indians, transportation, the hilly and even mountainous terrain, and the unflattering reputation of the new state. One historian of Arkansas has written about the state in 1840, “after several centuries with little human occupation, the land now held about as many people as it had when de Soto and his Spaniards crossed the Mississippi in 1541.”48 Arkansas in the 1840s was still in the process of development, with much of the territory untouched or lightly touched by Anglo-American presence. Frederick Gerstaecker saw this world as he wandered from cabin to cabin, through a trackless and untouched wilderness. Pioneers lived for the hunt, the freedom and exhilaration of the chase. Those who took to agriculture did so solely for survival, while herds of livestock in the woods gave them an economic hedge against the vanishing game. These people were generally content with their lot. The land returned subsistence for little work. Gerstaecker commented, “The western settlers, and particularly those in the south-western states, are not very fond of hard work; in those wild regions they prefer rearing cattle and shooting, to agriculture, and are loth to undertake the hard work of felling trees and clearing land.”49 Others also noted this reluctance to hard labor, at the same time that a commercial agriculture made its appearance. “Corn, wheat, potatoes, and nearly all other grains and vegetables flourish in all parts of the state, where the indolence of men can be aroused to their cultivation,” wrote A. Fowler on the prospects of the Little Rock region in 1841. “Our industrious and enterprizing farmers are yet but few. The hunter race is gradually disappearing before the more useful energies of the planter.”50 A profile of Arkansas agriculture would show that the state had productive agricultural enterprise that reflected the sectional nature of the settlements. Cotton production was growing,

ARKANSAS: A FRONTIER MORE WEST THAN SOUTH

but it was confined to the east and south. Here were the fertile lowlands, the concentration of the slave population, the reliable access to water transportation. Elsewhere, livestock production was a dominant influence. Supplementing livestock by corn in various forms, the small farm families of the west and north found a market for their commodities in the federal facilities in the form of military forts and Indian annuities. Hogs, that universal frontier animal, seem to have been largely kept for home consumption.51 This condition was especially true with respect to access to the public domain. Arkansas had military bounty lands for the enterprising and optimistic speculator. More to the point, it was not burdened by contentious private land claims, with their special laws, administrative mechanism, and subsequent appeals to the courts. But this advantage cut both ways, for it suggested that Arkansas lands were considered less attractive. Finally, and most important, the large tracts of land and the few purchasers offered virtually unlimited opportunity to squat on the public domain. It was the traditional frontier attitude that the “public domain” belonged to the citizens of the republic. In Arkansas, at least, they were right. They could settle down without title, make improvements, run their livestock on the upland hills, and when ready, make application under the Pre-emption Law of 1841. In the interim, they raised large families and supplemented their crops and livestock by hunting. Yet, a careful analysis of the Arkansas frontier experience has shown a growing inequality among its residents in the midst of the usual frontier abundance and opportunity. By the 1840s, “the distribution of taxable wealth was very unequal and that downward mobility may have been as significant as upward mobility.”52 Arkansas was “on the frontier of the slave-holding South,” but an analysis of taxable wealth in 1840 showed “the distribution of wealth in Arkansas in 1840 was markedly unequal. The wealthiest 10% of sample taxpayers throughout the state owned 70% of the taxable wealth.” And beyond, “frontier Arkansas was apparently more unequal than were the colonies on the eve of the American Revolution or the South as a whole on the eve of the Civil War.” In a prototype mitigation of this condition, what



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softened this inequality was the “availability of land without purchase.” What emerged, in short, was a class structure that was “meaningful but fluid.”53 The divisions within Arkansas and its continued frontier condition in many places further stressed the condition of women. The territory had a high birth rate; in 1840, it was the highest in the nation. The results were continuing heavy burdens associated with birth and child rearing. The smaller numbers of women reinforced the isolation of scattered settlement patterns. Their scarcity made them objects of demand as partners and mothers. The developing social and cultural institutions were confined to towns, principally to Little Rock. There, the families of territorial, and later elected state, officials had a certain social pretension. In the expansive countryside, the cycle of opening a farm placed women in their customary central role. Passing travelers commented on the limited world of the small farm families of Arkansas. The wills and testaments showed “an unlettered culture.” Outside of the towns, schools were rare or absent. Arkansas women might be characterized as “more traditional . . . the conditions of the southern frontier stimulated Arkansas women to recreate a role that had worked in the past under similar circumstances.” Thus, their behavior was unlike that in the contemporary Northeast “and made them seem more like women who lived a century earlier.”54 For those areas longer settled that considered themselves part of the greater South, the decade of the 1840s represented a new high point in progress. The spirit of the cotton South centered in Little Rock, one of the oldest settlements and the focus of economic, political, and social life of the territory. But some observers found Little Rock and its surroundings—along with the territory as a whole—still maturing. Fowler wrote of it in 1841, “As to the Society, it is generally far behind that of Tennessee— owing principally to the thinness of the settlements. It is however improving; and in this city, and some other places, is decidedly good.”55 Certainly the earlier frontier society had undergone a transformation and passed on to something else. Yet the maturing of this society only served to highlight the sharp contrast with

ARKANSAS: A FRONTIER MORE WEST THAN SOUTH

the solitude and isolation of the hill country visited by Gerstaecker and the gradual evolution of the staple crop society in Columbia and Union counties. Two major concerns were shared by the various societies that emerged in Arkansas after 1830: moral behavior and slavery. To promote what they referred to as “the morality of the people,” editors attacked gambling and disorder. Antigambling societies appeared in eastern Arkansas and, following the examples in Mississippi in 1834, took vigorous actions against individuals suspected of gambling activities. Many observers viewed the outlawing of gambling as the key to domestic tranquility and argued that its suppression would cleanse society. After a violent outburst against gaming in Little Rock, “everything is quiet and peaceable—no swaggering drunkards infest our streets—no midnight broils, noisy debauches, and coffee houses filled with depraved drunken gamblers, now disturb our rest.” Whether gambling was the key to an immoral society—with the twin evils of drunkenness and dissipation—was never proven conclusively, but citizen groups thought so and attacked these sins with the law, and if necessary without it, and sometimes even in violation of it.56 Some of the activity that took place against gambling was violent, but this was hardly the only example of physical violence in the name of morality. Vigilantism had a strong vogue in Arkansas in the 1830s, and its rise marks, in part, the transition from individual violence to violence as an institutional form. Organized groups took action (sometimes violent) against those suspected of crimes—gamblers, robbers, murderers—and other undesirables. Their activities had the support of the community—or at least the articulate elements of the community. Those working for the growth of the territory and its refurbished image had little patience with “due process” or the legal niceties that enabled suspected criminals to escape what they regarded as just punishment. “To resort to our laws for protection, seems to be worse than useless” was a prevailing opinion among the pacesetters of public opinion. Juries were too lenient; jails were easy to break out of. These criminal elements “ought to be hunted down as wild beasts, and their carcasses left as food for the buzzards.” The solution was “not to trouble our courts or ju-



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ries with them.” The press applauded vigilante activities, including execution without trial.57 The solution involved the same element of lawless violence that presumably the territory was most anxious to rid itself of. Of course, most of those dealt with so summarily were without friends, influence, or property in the community where they were apprehended, and the violence against them was a crime for which no one individual was responsible. It was much easier to hang a vagrant for a suspected murder than charge a member of the legislature with manslaughter for killing another in a duel.58 Recreational activities in Arkansas were likewise physical and occasionally brutal. In spite of the outcry against it, the urge to gamble was powerful. Pioneers wagered on anything and everything. Horse racing was extremely popular, made the more so by the social activities of those it brought to Little Rock from all parts of the state. In the north and west, hunting was not only a business, it was a passion. Other entertainment tended sometimes to cross the line from rough-and-ready to barbaric. The Fourth of July celebration at Batesville in 1842, for example, featured a bear-baiting contest, in which a two-year-old bear “and poor at that, was pitted against all the dogs in town, and we have a good many.” The bear died of wounds, and the celebrants went home contented with the events of the day.59 All Arkansas societies agreed on the need to control the growing black population that became more numerous with the development of commercial agriculture and the rise of cotton culture. The territorial legislature passed the usual restrictive legislation, and municipalities supplemented this with their own local ordinances. By 1850 a legal network circumscribed the lives of slaves in the most minute detail. Free blacks were scarcely better off. In Little Rock, for example, free blacks and mixedblood persons over sixteen years of age (male and female) had to post bonds annually to guarantee good behavior.60 Amidst the customary institutional structures of a slave society, one extraordinary event took place. During elections at the town of Columbia (Chicot County) in 1836, a black man appeared at the polls and, in the words of an eyewitness account, “claimed the right to vote.” The judges refused. An altercation followed in

ARKANSAS: A FRONTIER MORE WEST THAN SOUTH

which the black man, Bunch, allegedly “resorted to violent measures.” One townsman was stabbed; irate citizens hung Bunch.61 By the year 1850 Arkansas had come a long way from the terra incognita described by Thomas Bolling Robertson. Yet despite its cotton, slaves, and 200,000 people, the state bore the imprint of the West rather than the South. Perhaps this was due to the long experience with Indians and the proximity of Texas and Indian Territory, perhaps to the geography that sharply divided societies. Urban development in the state offered a range of sectional allegiances, running from Helena’s world of cotton and docks on the Mississippi to Fort Smith, a staging area for the distant Far West, to Batesville, representing the values of a grazing and agricultural rather than a cotton society. So the distinction was not so much between Arkansas and other frontiers as within Arkansas itself. In this sense, sectionalism defied political boundaries. The political allegiance that united a territory in its dependence upon the federal government for services had faded with statehood. The experience of Arkansas reinforces the significance of people on the enduring frontiers. Large-scale institutions for economic growth, such as banks and railroads, were not important here. Local interests dominated the attention of officials and the press at the expense of national issues. Despite violence, vigilantism, and its timeless submersion in the forces of nature, Arkansas matured in a long-sweeping motion of consistent growth. If people answered the demands for education and religion more slowly than the demands for racetracks and a strong legal code, this was nothing unusual on the transAppalachian frontier. But it was typically Arkansan that these ameliorations in the frontier condition came later in Arkansas than elsewhere.



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Part V. The Second Great

Migration, 1830–1850

The years from 1830 to 1850 saw the climax of an impulse to expansion as old as the American nation. The pioneer men and women who followed Boone’s Wilderness Road in 1775 were the first generation of the trans-Appalachian frontier. Their children drifted down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers in 1815, to the Boon’s Lick country, the Sangamon River Valley, or Madison County at the Great Bend of the Tennessee. Now their grandchildren together, with large numbers of foreign immigrants, took part in a third generation of movement, to distant Arkansas, to Michigan, or perhaps to Wisconsin and Iowa. Like the First Great Migration, this Second Great Migration involved many people over a vast area. It changed the economic and political form of the nation, settled much of the remaining transAppalachian West, filled in the country to the Indian lands, and brought the pioneer almost to the edge of the Great Plains. The Second Great Migration built on the experiences of the first. The institutional framework that dated from before 1815 continued in use, suggesting the continuity rather than the differences of this frontier experience. But there were differences. A common institutional base in the form of the legacies of the ordinances of 1785 and 1787, county government, and the common law could not hide the rise of tensions and mistrust among different areas of the country and within smaller sectional societies, between those areas long settled and now moved into a stable and prosperous society and those at the far end of the scale in an early frontier condition. The frontier of the South was increasingly black, specifically in those areas of Mississippi along the great river. The growing implications of national ex-

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pansion brought the nation once again face to face with slavery, that peculiar institution that had troubled American democracy since the signing of the Declaration of Independence. By 1850 this issue could no longer be evaded. The immigrants to these new frontiers found themselves at once linked to a national economy. The days of self-sufficiency and a long, drawn-out transition to a market economy had passed. The new pioneers moved as rapidly as possible to commercial agriculture and, accordingly, to dependence on a larger marketplace. The period from 1830 to 1850 witnessed widespread fluctuations in the economic condition of the nation that made their influences felt in the western country. It began with prosperity, speculation in real estate, high prices for staple agricultural products, optimism, confidence, and the spread of banking institutions to even the most remote frontiers. The financial crisis of 1837 changed this scene dramatically, and the subsequent depression was long and deep. Cotton prices sank to their lowest figure from the invention of the cotton gin to the opening of the Civil War, and prices for corn, wheat, and livestock plunged in similar fashion. Hard times came to the entire nation, and not least to the frontiers. The decade of the 1840s was one of gradual recovery. Some of the newer frontiers, especially those in western Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin, emerged as the most rapidly growing parts of the western country. By and large, this was still an agricultural world. A dominant feature in this last generation of movement was the emphasis on great staple crops. Cotton remained of continuing importance on the frontiers of the South, whether in Arkansas or in the “New Counties” of Alabama and Mississippi. Cotton culture was the measure of the progress of a society, and the planter continued to represent the highest level of economic and social achievement, even in the newest settlements. Thus the South was determined to retain its right of access, with slave property, to the next frontier, the territories of Kansas and Nebraska. In the last frontiers of the Old Northwest, corn was the first crop, but the settlers soon shifted to wheat for shipment across the Great Lakes or down the Mississippi or grew corn and livestock for commercial purposes. The fat lands of Illinois, Wisconsin, and

THE SECOND GREAT MIGR ATION, 1830–1850

Iowa fed the growing urban centers of the West and East and began to assist in feeding Europe. The economy became diversified. Lumbering offered spectacular economic opportunities on the frontiers in Wisconsin and Michigan and became the economic basis of several Iowa river towns. Mining, too, was a significant feature of settlement, economic development, and institutional structure in some areas of the Northwest. All reflected expanded economic opportunities associated with this generation of movement on the trans-Appalachian frontier. Even before 1850 expansion to the limits of the transAppalachian frontier no longer sufficed for the citizens of a continental nation. Texas attracted heavy immigration in the 1840s. The West Coast of the continent was a new magnet, distant but widely publicized by the stories of explorers, traders, and diplomats and by accounts of the war against Mexico. Its attractions drew people from the trans-Appalachian frontier, even those portions settled in the last generation. Movement to Oregon and California had become a routine—albeit sufficiently exciting to make it an adventure—complete with guidebooks of great detail and towns where the pioneer might procure supplies and advice in equal portions. The climax of this new movement to a distant West came with the discovery of gold in California in 1848. Seamen from Massachusetts, lumberjacks from Wisconsin, farmers from Iowa, all joined in the rush across the continent, overwhelming the Spanish and Indian civilizations of the Far West. Gold drew thousands across the continent in 1849 to a frontier experience markedly different from that west of the Appalachians. The rush to California was one mark of the close of the frontier in the trans-Appalachian West. A continuing part of the experiences of this third generation were inevitable encounters and subsequent conflict with Indian peoples. By 1850, half a million white settlers had moved west of the Mississippi River. The boundaries of Anglo-American settlement had pushed to the edge of the Great Prairie. Indian peoples were further victimized by a great smallpox epidemic of 1837, with an estimated seventeen thousand deaths, a scourge that afflicted almost every Indian tribe. The movement of AngloAmerican population into Iowa generated pressure to force In-



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dian peoples farther to the West. The impending clash over the spread of slavery in Kansas distracted elected officials and citizens alike from a new truth that would guide expansion in the next generation: the grasses of the Great Plains (heretofore “the Great American Desert”) were just as attractive to American settler families as the woodlands and prairies farther to the east. The final homeland for Indian peoples, guaranteed with such solemnity in treaty after treaty, was about to be submerged in another rush of pioneer families to the West. But this last advance would have to await the final adjudication of the conflict over slavery.

12.



The New Counties of Alabama and Mississippi: A Frontier More South than West

From the beginning of Anglo-American settlement west of the Appalachians, the presence of large and powerful Indian tribes had shaped the frontier of the South. The War of 1812 and the First Great Migration changed this condition but only in part. Substantial portions of the states of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi remained in the possession of Indians after 1815. With the rise of the cotton frontier, pressure for complete removal of Indians east of the Mississippi River now began to build throughout the South. By the late 1820s Indian removal had become a central issue in the domestic politics of all three states. Its supporters argued that Georgia’s cession of her lands to the public domain in 1802 committed the federal government to remove the Indians; that the presence of Indians of whatever tribal group represented a threat to the safety of the rapidly enlarging white settlements; that the entire growth and prosperity of states—synonymous with increase in population—hung on the occupation of the Indian lands, so solemnly guaranteed by the federal government to their original inhabitants.1 Whatever the public pronouncements, the real reason was the profitability of cotton. In spite of the lower prices of the 1820s, nothing could diminish the significance of cotton for the South. Cotton cultiva-

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tion was the economic, social, and political force of the age, for new frontier and long-settled sections alike. To the extent that Indian nations stood in the way of this force, they must be persuaded to move, by whatever means necessary. John Quincy Adams partially resisted these rising pressures. He condemned some treaties and renegotiated others. With the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828, this degree of reluctance vanished. Jackson’s inauguration in March 1829 emboldened the state of Georgia to extend state authority over Creek and Cherokee lands within the state’s borders. Jackson argued that Indians had rights of possession to the land (but not ownership), but he also supported removal as in the best interests of the Indian nations themselves. Congress rapidly passed and Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act in 1830. It placed Indians “under the protection of the United States,” and so protected them against illegal intrusions. In exchange, the Indians would agree to emigrate west, to lands chosen by the president of the United States for the relocation of trans-Appalachian tribes. The lands exchanged for those in the East would be “guaranteed forever.” In the trek to their new lands, the Indians would be supported by food, clothing, and shelter for one year as an adjustment to their new homes on the plains.2 The federal government now forced a series of removal treaties on the Indians of the South: in 1830, on the Choctaws; in 1832, on the Chickasaws and the Creeks; in 1835, on the Cherokees. All provided for removal west of the Mississippi.3 Beginning in 1830, then, and at regular intervals for the next half-dozen years, great new tracts of land in the heart of the cotton kingdom became available for settlement and cultivation. The result was the appearance of a new kind of frontier, or series of frontiers. People referred to the new lands variously as the “Indian Nation,” the “Choctaw Cession,” or the “Chickasaw Purchase”; for most, it was the “New Counties.” This was a world in which things were both substantially similar and remarkably different. In many ways the frontier experience here was a continuation of established patterns. The many strands of influence on the frontier were the traditional ones of cotton, slave labor, rich lands, the steamboat, and, toward the end of the period, the railroad.

THE NEW COUNTIES OF ALABAMA AND MISSISSIPPI

In response to public opinion in Alabama and to Georgia’s intrusions on Indian lands by law and by roving bands of land seekers, federal negotiators pressed the Creeks to emigrate west. The Creeks eventually did so, but not willingly. The federal government’s negotiations with the two elements of the Creek Nation (Upper and Lower Creek towns) dated back to the 1820s. At that time, negotiators promised $200,000 to William McIntosh, a Creek chief, and his followers in exchange for a treaty of land cessions. When McIntosh signed the Treaty of Indian Springs (1825), he also signed his death warrant. He was killed within a year for violating the Creek Nation’s law forbidding the sale or cession of any Creek lands to whites. So great was the air of corruption about the treaty that John Quincy Adams forced a renegotiation (Treaty of Washington), although he did so over the objections of the states of Alabama and Georgia. The Creeks had achieved something rare in relations with the American government: the annulment of a ratified treaty. Their luck did not hold, however, and within a year the landed domain of the Lower Creeks was lost and the tribe’s landholdings reduced to five million acres in Alabama. Greatly dissatisfied with the rejection of the Treaty of Indian Springs, the Alabama legislature extended state jurisdiction, mixed with threats and bribes. The Creek National Council vigorously protested the violations of the Treaty of Washington, but in vain. Finally, tribal leaders signed a final treaty of cession in Washington (1834). The chief negotiator for the federal government was Lewis Cass, now the secretary of war. In spite of the federal government’s guarantees to protect Creeks from intruders, squatters and land speculators quickly took over tribal lands. Violence escalated between the settlers and the Indian peoples, including murders. The allotments provided for by the treaty were lost by “sales, leases, and mortgage indebtedness.” There was more violence in 1836, after the Georgia militia attacked the Creeks, who had fled to Cherokee lands in Alabama and Georgia. Cass now ordered federal troops to stop the violence and to move for immediate removal. In the end, some fifteen thousand Creeks were forcibly removed by the end of 1836, without provision for food, clothing, shelter, or transportation.4



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The next target was the Cherokee nation in northeastern Alabama and northwestern Georgia. The Cherokee presence was a continuing affront for two reasons. To begin with, they were led by John Ross, a clever and resourceful leader, well educated and familiar with the usual negotiating tactics of the federal government. Elected chief in 1828, he had “skillful use of English language, both written and spoken, as well as shrewdness and mental toughness and an unwavering commitment to serve the Cherokee nation even though he was more white than Indian.” Ross and his new group of leaders used past treaties and laws to protect the Cherokee Nation’s interests. This group could not be bribed. A second dangerous dimension to the Cherokee Nation was their adjustment to the land and their adaptation of American institutions of government. In 1827, the Cherokee Nation, the most acculturated if not assimilated of the Five Tribes, adopted a constitution. It provided for the “independence, sovereignty and jurisdiction over their territory.” Officials of the state of Georgia were infuriated at the idea of an Indian state within their state, and they moved to extend jurisdiction of the state over Cherokee lands. The Cherokee Nation went to court and won a partial victory. John Marshall ruled in two cases, Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831) and Worcester v. Georgia (1832), that the national government had exclusive jurisdiction in relations with Indian peoples, rendering Georgia’s laws null and void. Marshall also delivered an opinion that the Cherokee Nation had a degree of sovereignty expressed in the phrase “domestic dependent nation.” Jackson ignored Marshall’s opinions. The issue was settled by Jackson’s reelection. Thereafter, a faction under Major Ridge signed the Treaty of New Echota (1835). The roundup and enforced emigration of the Cherokee remnants, the march that came to be known as the “Trail of Tears,” led to some four thousand deaths. After years of negotiations, bribery, corruption, and violence, the Cherokees had gone, and the cotton lands were opened.5 In a tradition going back to the earliest settlements in Kentucky and north of the Ohio, the first Anglo-American settler families thought of themselves as confronting a forbidding land-

THE NEW COUNTIES OF ALABAMA AND MISSISSIPPI

scape far from the comfort of friends and a structured and safe society. “In the older settlements we find stable government, fixed institutions, stereotyped habits and notions, with highways giving facility of communication, with interlacing family and neighborhood relations, with social and religious ties,” wrote J. L. M. Curry, from the perspective of fifty years. He continued, “In the new, unoccupied territory, the settler is confronted by unfelled forests, absence of private ownership of land, county and municipal institutions unorganized, schools and churches just beginning to exist, and by newcomers, entire strangers to one another.”6 The people and the land were indeed new to Anglo-American occupation. The institutions that quickly appeared were not. They were the structures of county and state government, a well-organized court system, and agriculture with cotton as a staple crop. All of these were old and familiar ways of doing things. And people did them rapidly after (and sometimes even before) the settlement of the New Counties. There was also something new on this frontier. What took place was the occupation, cultivation, and development of frontiers within the framework of well-organized and established state governments. The state legislature simply imposed many institutions on the New Counties as part of its routine business: county organization, taxes, and the state’s court structure. No longer was the state government and its tool—the judiciary—the remote creation that it had been for so many on the early transAppalachian frontiers. The circuit court was a prominent part of the institutional structure of the New Counties. The New Counties blended the frontier experience with the growth of a state, the presence of an unsettled and newly occupied region lying adjacent to a settled county where institutions had been established and functioning for a decade. This was the rapid settlement and institutional development of a frontier where the proximity and institutional strength of long-settled areas and the continuing cycle of the agricultural experience minimized the sharp features of frontier life. What emerged was a kind of “instant society” or series of societies, in which longer-settled regions provided immigrant families and models for neighboring frontier regions.



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The Upper Creek lands, lying east of the Coosa River across Alabama and into Georgia, were one of the first targets. No sooner was the treaty signed than the inevitable flow of speculators, surveyors, and bureaucrats from the Indian Office began to engulf this new (for Anglo-American pioneers) country. These new arrivals found many others already on the land: squatters, who lived in defiance of the Indians and federal government alike; Anglo-American men living with Indian groups, some of them for a decade or more, who hoped to profit from the treaty by land, money, or both; traders, who circulated among tribes and sold them whiskey or other goods; their more permanent brethren, who had made their log huts into doggeries, where Indians might come to purchase liquor, trade for tools, sell furs, or simply visit. Most of these groups shared a common characteristic: they exploited the Indians for a livelihood. Among the new arrivals, farmers and those connected with agriculture predominated. Some were men of means from Alabama, Georgia, and the upper South, who weighed the opportunities of the New Counties against those available in the older agricultural settlements. Thomas Law was one of the many land lookers who crossed the cession line from Columbus (Georgia) to Montgomery (Alabama) in the fall of 1834. He intended to move from Darlington District (South Carolina) to the New Counties of Alabama, provided prospects were sufficiently attractive for cotton cultivation. Law kept a journal of his trip, and he also wrote a detailed letter to his brother William. It was a chronicle of the landscape, its early occupants, and his fellow travelers. He passed nights “with some of the Indian traders, as they are scattered all over the nation to purchase up the Indian Reservations, with little shops or stores consisting of a few coarse goods & groceries.” He slept on “some fodder spread down on a dirt floor & a blanket spread over it with our cloaks for covering.” Food was plain, with “plenty of the substantials—meat & bread & a little coffee sweetened with molasses.” Most of his comments concerned the land. It was mixed in quality, he wrote. “Speculators in Indian lands,” as he termed them, were already in possession of some

THE NEW COUNTIES OF ALABAMA AND MISSISSIPPI

choice tracts, excellent lands that “would produce 1,000 to 1,200 weight per acre of cotton & twenty-five or thirty if not more: corn.” These two crops were the yardsticks of land value, and the productiveness he estimated fit the description of choice lands everywhere on the trans-Appalachian frontier since pioneers came over the Wilderness Road in 1775: fertile, level, and well watered. The good lands might be purchased for $2.50 to $4.00 per acre, with credit. Thomas Law thought that he might buy in the Creek Cession. His brother James surely would, he reported, unless he found better lands in “the older parts of the State” to the west. Thomas Law intended to cross the Black Belt to the Choctaw Cession and inspect the lands there. “There is no scarcity of company—we are continually on the road, and I scarcely pass a day without falling in with some traveler,” he concluded. As in any frontier in the process of settlement, society was narrowly concerned with economic advancement. “There are nothing but a parcel of Indians and speculators for society,” Law wrote, “& what is life, with the mines of Perue, without the sweets of special friendship—and in such a place as that, men would be your friends no longer than you would be gain to them, in a pecuniary point of view.”7 As had been the case since the first trans-Appalachian frontier in Kentucky and Tennessee, the land was the attraction, this time stretching in blocks across northern Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. The Creek Cession of Alabama was representative of all the new lands in its variety. Pine uplands, fertile river valleys wet with overflow, and level prairies were all present in abundant quantities. The Creeks had cultivated some of the land, perhaps in the hope of avoiding removal by adopting American ways. Their clearings lay scattered throughout the purchase. The land viewers remarked on them, noting the poor agricultural techniques of the Indians but citing the “Indian old fields” as evidence of fertility of the land. “Upon the whole I think it is a very good poor man’s country,” wrote Joel Spigeuer in 1833. Presumably he intended to convey the sense that the land lacked the uniform fertility of the level Black Belt, which would have led to its immediate engrossment by large planters with slave



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labor. That it was a “poor man’s country” did not mean, however, that the land was suitable only for a noncommercial, isolated, self-sufficient economy. Spigeuer continued, “The greatest objection I have to settling there now is, you are compelled to play squat, that is to set down upon government land. It is not yet known when they will be offered for sale.” He wished to buy land, expected to pay a reasonable price, and wanted the assurance of clear title. In truth, the “poor man’s country” was an opportunity for aggressive, ambitious pioneers, with some capital, to become wealthy.8 Land lookers such as Law and Spigeuer were hard-headed and practical. They wasted no time describing the beauty of the land in its natural state, but focused their attention on the cotton fields of the future. Just as the land varied in quality, so did the patterns of settlement on it. Cotton prices rose steadily in the mid-1830s, and southern agriculturists responded energetically. Immigrants came in a steady stream to Coosa County, by horse, in wagons, on foot, and a few by the newly established stage lines that already linked centers of population. One participant described this restless energy and its impact on Tuskegee, the new county seat of Macon County: “Immigrants were pouring in with a ceaseless tide. Stage coaches filled with travelers, and among them, the ‘Land Sharks’ ready to swallow up the home of the redmen, or the white, as opportunity might offer. . . . Houses were going up as if by magic, fields were being cleared, and crops planted.” The new immigrants crowded into the so-called hotels in the new county seats and market towns. In the country those with shelter provided accommodation for the newcomers and charged for their services. Smooth-curved frontier lines on modern maps disguise the scattered nature of these settlements. Such was the variation in the land that some portions of the cession were still unoccupied at the opening of the Civil War.9 The state of Mississippi, admitted to the union in 1817 and second to none in its search for cotton lands, moved quickly against the Choctaw Nation. The Choctaws occupied the northern third of the state. In 1819, in the face of mounting pressure, the Choctaw Nation refused to move west, though they did agree

THE NEW COUNTIES OF ALABAMA AND MISSISSIPPI

to cede five million acres of their lands in exchange for thirteen million acres in Arkansas. But the Indians did not emigrate, for the treaty gave them rights to live on the other two-thirds of tribal lands. They held fast against further land cessions through the 1820s, but their situation (like that of other Indian groups) changed with Jackson’s election in 1828. In 1830, Jackson’s representatives, Secretary of War John Eaton and General John Coffee, warned Choctaws that the federal government could not protect them from trespassers or state law, whatever the treaties said. The Choctaw Nation had splintered into factions over the issue of removal to the west. The major chiefs agreed to meet at Dancing Rabbit Creek. Intimidated, threatened, bribed with sections of land, and confronted by the impending invasion by whites undeterred by the federal government, they signed. Jackson hoped the treaty would be a model: recognition of Indian land rights and political rights and support for removal. The Choctaws moved west in three groups between 1831 and 1833. The first removal cycle was plagued by hardship and want, the result of the government’s accepting the lowest bids from contractors who intended to skimp on food and services. The War Department recognized a fiasco and took control, and the second and third stages were better managed. By 1833, fifteen thousand Choctaws had been resettled in Indian Territory. Those who stayed behind lived under state law. They were soon swindled out of their lands.10 The Chickasaw Nation soon joined the emigration to the west. Lying to the south of the Choctaws, the Chickasaws’ lands were also targeted for the expansion of the cotton frontier. The Chickasaws were divided between mixed-bloods and full-bloods. The mixed-bloods were a minority, but they dominated tribal leadership. As for other Indian peoples, the election of Jackson and the passage of the Indian Removal Act forced the Chickasaws to confront the prospect of being overrun by land seekers. The extension of the laws of the state of Mississippi was a final reminder that they could not count on the federal government to protect them from state intrusions (legal and physical). In 1832, representatives of the tribe signed a treaty at Pontotoc Creek that provided for their removal to the west. The northern third



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of the state of Mississippi was now open to the expansion of the cotton frontier.11 John Evans’s father moved from Wayne County (Mississippi) to the Choctaw Cession in February 1832. By the autumn of that year, Evans related, “the new purchase, as it was called, filled up rapidly from different portions of the country.” The young boys in the family did a full day’s work, “clearing up the forest and opening lands for agricultural purposes.” There were no postal routes until the establishment of a stage line. It ran once a month. Social intercourse was equally rare. Religion was important as a social institution, and in the absence of church buildings, families held services in farmhouses. Evans remembered, with a touch of asperity, “There is no question that the preacher’s family fared better than any other in the county. In a word they were supplied with everything in the way of living and clothing.” In the first years of settlement, families such as the Evanses worked hard for what they ate and wore.12 Institutions appeared almost simultaneously with settlement. The New County courts began to function. The commissioner’s court managed the traditional frontier administrative and economic concerns of roads, bridges, and ferries; supervised elections, taxes, and licensing; made provisions for the poor; located the county seat; and constructed the necessary public buildings. Local elections were an early proving ground for ambitious politicians. There were several elective offices. The commissioners of Coosa County, organized in 1834, called an election in February “for a sheriff, clerk of circuit court, clerk of county court, an assessor and tax collector, and four commissioners of roads and revenues for the county. On the same day, Asbury Coker was appointed by an Act to take a census of the county.” As early as 1836, the commissioners levied a tax for the support of the poor, and “Wm. Robertson was allowed ten dollars per month for keeping one pauper.”13 The organization of county government and legal machinery flowed from state statutes. A new aspect of institutional development was the almost immediate extension of the circuit court system into the New Counties, taking justice out of the hands of

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local friends and placing it in the hands of remote strangers. Settlers came out to view these all-powerful figures on court day. “On our arrival at the court ground we found all the county officers present; also a very large portion of the white settlers in the county had come out to see and make the acquaintance of their new Judge and solicitor, who were entire strangers to settlers in the county,” wrote Evan Goodwin Richards of early Chambers County. The grand jury met under one tree; the judge presided under another. The deliberations, though often improvised, conveyed a sense of dignity that was designed to reassure the population, and perhaps also to overawe them. Later courthouses would be built—when the struggle over the location of the county seat was sufficiently protracted, several courthouses might be built—along with jails and other physical reminders of the omnipresent legal system and its courts. On this court day in Chambers County there were no cases, but the people went home sensing that they had seen the authority of the law. The affair was reassuring, impressive, and perhaps a little intimidating in terms of the part that law and the courts would play in their lives. The court in the woods under the great oak was heir to an enormous body of law and could affect the lives of settlers in the most remote confines of the newly established counties.14 In an earlier day people complained of the slowness of the arrival of the court system. Now courts appeared almost with the first field of cotton. The new court system did not lack for business. Litigation moved right along with the settlers and increased with the accumulation of property. Property within the New Counties was readily identifiable: land, slaves, and cotton— and litigation over these articles lasted until mid-century and later. In a long American tradition, among the principal beneficiaries were lawyers. They came with the first settlers, spied out the most likely town—preferably the future county seat—hung out a shingle, and commenced practice. Their services were everywhere in demand. The first lawyer came to Talladega in 1833, at the time of the first sitting of the circuit court. There is little evidence that people did not find all the law and court services they wanted. Counties took pride in the skills of their lawyers, the most prominent of their professional men. That lawyers were referred to as men of “wit, grace, and intel-

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lect” suggests the high tone and prosperity of this group. They shared with ministers and doctors the duty of setting the standards of refinement and morality for the community. Distinctions of wealth and influence appeared rapidly in the New Counties, and these professionals exercised widespread influence.15 The law was (at least technically) a universal and impersonal instrument. It touched all peoples on the frontier, however remote and invisible they may have been. In a maturing society, blacks increasingly appeared as objects of litigation and also as witnesses. Slaves were one of the principal forms of property throughout the South by 1830, and their value grew thereafter. So the white population brought them before the courts, the objects of a legal struggle, sometimes in a sale, or an inheritance and estate, or a dowry (land and slaves were a common form of a wife’s conveyance to her husband on the occasion of her marriage). Slaves could be mortgaged or made security for other kinds of loans, and, as such, they were recoverable in a suit at law. Or they might be attached for nonpayment of obligations such as taxes, for they were generally the most valuable part of any estate, and certainly the most negotiable. Blacks also formed a significant proportion of the population; in several counties they outnumbered whites. This circumstance produced related fears—an economic one, over the loss of the slave as property, and a physical one, over the loss of control of the slave. With their universal presence, slaves sometimes appeared in court as witnesses, where they testified under threat of flogging for false testimony, “or such other punishment as the court shall think proper, not extending to life and limb.” Preservation of the value of slave property was always important. Any slave charged with a serious crime would be defended in court by the best legal talent the master could summon. Conviction meant a hasty sale and removal from the region. When the Talladega court charged a slave named Milly with murder, her master quickly sent her off to the West. He was not about to risk a property valued at one thousand dollars in a court, even in pursuit of law and order.16 Another important dimension of legal proceedings in the New Counties involved Indians. The contest was even more unequal than in the case of blacks. The Indian had no interested master



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to intervene in legal proceedings. Not only were Indians in an adversarial position by their very presence in the court—given the nature of white-Indian tensions—but they frequently had land that their legal opponents coveted. The path to the courtroom was well marked. It began with trade at one of the endless groceries or grog shops set up illegally for the express purpose of soliciting the Indian’s business. The commodities stocked and traded were like those in trading posts one hundred years before: liquor, tools, bright cloth, and beads. At first the Indians had something to trade: furs, meat, and the products of the forest that they knew better than anyone how to harvest. Then came the great land cessions. The Indians had money or land now and the storekeeper was solicitous enough of them. After the money ran out, credit was the next step—not that the Indians were helped to understand that, either. When payment was not forthcoming, the storekeepers took Indians to court. The court became a useful instrument to get at the Indians’ property and land. In a world where pioneers conversant with the law coveted the land, the Indians were unable to defend it. All the character and physical traits of tribal leadership and warrior skills counted for little against the Anglo-American pioneer’s powerful instruments of legal warfare. With their little property gone and their land on the block at a sheriff’s sale, the Indians often left the country. Thus the local and state courts were the latest, and perhaps the final, instruments of enforced removal in this generation.17 In spite of the protection provided by law and courts, some elements in society expressed unhappiness with the confused state of criminal law and the lack of vigor in its enforcement. “All communities, for protection of themselves and property, wish to have laws, and honest men who never violate them, are never heard to complain of either their strictness or their enforcement when infringed,” commented the Jacksonville (Alabama) Republican in 1838. “A little more law, a little better enforced, that we have a little better order.”18 Added to this concern was the fear that the law had become so sophisticated that it contained loopholes through which alleged criminals might escape a deserved punishment. The response was an out-

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break of vigorous vigilante activity in the mid-1830s in both Mississippi and Alabama, in long-settled and cultured areas, such as Natchez and Madison County, as well as in the New Counties, such as Chambers and Cherokee. In a timeless tradition, vigilante groups of local citizens came together and dispensed extralegal justice. Their presence coincided with the high tide of immigration in 1835 and 1836, the climax of motion, turbulence, and restlessness.19 At first the targets of “slick law” were thieves and gamblers whose activities seemed beyond the reach of institutional law. Spontaneous vigilante groups gradually took on qualities of permanence and began to dictate morality in the areas where they ruled. Newcomers who declined to join the organization found themselves numbered among its enemies or even victims. Vigilante activities included attacks on those who were different; members used slick law to settle personal feuds. J. D. Anthony of Cherokee County called it “this pioneer monster of corruption.” Some remembered later that members of the “slick company” included rascals who had joined simply to protect their own illegal activities. Eventually a few of those victimized by slick law instituted lawsuits for damages against vigilante companies and helped gradually to force their dissolution.20 Economic development revolved around agriculture. Corn was the basic frontier subsistence crop; cotton was the cash crop. The route to market was overland to water. The journey was sometimes difficult, with six or more mules to move half a dozen bales over “execrable” winter roads. It was little wonder that road construction and repair occupied so much of the county commissioners’ time. Once on water, all routes led south to the great rivers, the Coosa, the Alabama, and, finally, the port of Mobile. This pattern led to the rise of a series of river towns with many merchants and commission agents. In the flush times of the 1830s, villages and hinterland alike prospered as flatboats and canoes with marketable crops crowded the rivers. At least one substantial urban center sprang up: Wetumpka lay at the head of navigation on the Coosa. As geography and the limits of technology funneled cotton and supplies through it, this town became the commercial center of the New Counties. All roads in



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eastern Alabama seemed to lead there, and even counties in western Georgia fell within its economic orbit. In all seasons of the year wagons lined Wetumpka’s muddy streets. By 1840 the town had three thousand people and a thriving business. Had the projected railroad been completed—it was doomed by the financial crisis of 1837—Wetumpka might have become the first city of the state.21 A commercial economy also flourished outside the principal towns. Its center was the small crossroads store. Simmons Grocery in Macon County was one of many. An observer described it in 1833 in these terms: “Its contents, about ten bars of soap, one keg of powder, one jug of whiskey, six strings of glass beads, one piece of blue calico, and one of red, one small keg of pigtail tobacco, a few bars of lead, and a three string fiddle.” The population at the time was a mixture of Indians and Anglo-Americans, and the stores were stocked accordingly, with a good deal of powder, lead, and liquor. As the Indians scattered or became impoverished, the clientele changed to white settlers. The contents of the stores also changed. Ezekiel Banner Powell, in his reminiscence of the New Counties in western Alabama, described the system of country merchandising that catered to the new immigrants: “At almost every crossroad in the county you would find a store, and these country stores were filled almost exclusively with dry goods: all of which had been bought on a credit.”22 The pattern of the several economic functions of these stores may be viewed from the perspective of Warren County, Mississippi. Warren County’s dominant urban center was Vicksburg, on the Mississippi River. Yet such was the dispersed nature of the cotton frontier that smaller settlements appeared, with their own stores. In spite of the growing reach of Vicksburg, these small stores continued to perform a series of important economic functions as late as 1850. These country storekeepers had a localized trade. Consider, for example, the several economic functions performed in W. S. Hankinson’s store at Yokena plantation. He bought and shipped a few bales of cotton to Vicksburg merchants, lent small sums of money, and acquired for his local planter families specialty items such as books, sheet music, cigars, glassware. From the local farmers he bought butter, apples,

THE NEW COUNTIES OF ALABAMA AND MISSISSIPPI

and turkeys for resale in Vicksburg. Throughout, he acted as a conduit between the surrounding rural neighborhood and the urban market. He also collected products for local distribution. Slaves were also (although not commonly) associated with stores. A slave named Montgomery ran the store at Hurricane Plantation. He facilitated trade among several hundred laborers as well as among the planter’s family and neighbors. “His store, with adjacent warehouses and a post office, provided the nucleus of what was in effect a plantation village.”23 A society supported by cotton culture, backed by the statute book, and shaped by the dominant tone of the settled parts of the states quickly emerged and passed through the first settlement stage. Cotton was the only crop for which a market (however low the price) existed. It brought in the funds that could be used to purchase necessities and luxury items from local merchants; it marked progress upward in the economic and social scale to a new coach, custom-cut broadcloth, or the acquisition of more land and slaves. The end product was a world like that settled for a generation. It had much in common with the older parts of the Southwest, in terms of both heritage (many settlers in the New Counties came from there) and ambitions for the future. Not surprisingly, the new society was much like the old in its institutions and values.24 From the beginning of settlement, frontier planter families discoursed much on the morality and civilized nature of the population of their areas. Of the influences here, churches were dominant. They appeared on the scene soon after settlement, a tribute to the dedication of the ministers and the religious enthusiasm of the time. Blacks formed a substantial proportion of many of the early congregations. With the mere presence of churches and ministers no longer a rarity, doctrinal differences (among denominations, and sometimes within denominations) became increasingly important.25 Schooling was of lesser importance, but it did exist. Despite state legislation, the common or public school was rare. Where found, it lasted for perhaps a three-month term. Generally “incompetent men” taught in the early Cherokee County schools, and for some years “the schools . . . on the south side of the Coosa, in Cherokee, were



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schools only in name.” John Evans remembered that his early school in the Choctaw Cession had both white and Indian students. The first teacher was a man named Hennessey, of whom Evans wrote, “He was a splendid scholar and a perfect thrashing machine.”26 For the new immigrants, maturity endowed the pioneer beginnings with great significance. One great holiday served as a reminder of the pioneer past. On the Fourth of July all elements of society convened to give thanks. In day-long celebrations, town and country paid tribute to the ideals and achievements of the past and proclaimed their hopes for the future. It was a day of speeches, parades, a public dinner, solemn toasts. Upon this occasion local leaders spoke to their constituents about their common world. It was a time to celebrate country, state, county, and themselves. The importance of the celebration was not diluted by a variety of competing attractions, for the day was the social occasion of the year. The Fourth of July ceremonies also enhanced the public reputations of the local elites, for the various public roles in the celebration were carefully parceled out. Ambitious politicians paraded to the speaker’s rostrum. Military organizations performed one of their few remaining significant functions. Fourth of July celebrations had one other virtue: description, toasts, even long speeches, found their way into print, and so serve as sources for the historian. In this way, these occasions present an annual account that is one of our most complete records of growth on the frontier.27 The northern third of the state of Mississippi opened for settlement at the same time and under the same circumstances. The Choctaw Cession of 1830 and Chickasaw Cession of 1832 removed Indians from almost half of the state. Between 1833 and 1836 the number of counties in Mississippi doubled, and the legislature eventually added another fourteen from the Indian cessions. The result was “a vast new frontier.” David Libby notes of the surge of population, “counties that did not even exist in 1830 by mid-decade held sizeable slave majorities.” The struggle for institutions of government took place within the context of a long-established state. Here, issues were often sectional, as the

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New Counties constantly struggling for representation and recognition of their interests. For the white participants, the rush to this new frontier “revived the avarice not seen in Mississippi since the first cotton boom a generation earlier.”28 In the center of these great cessions lay a flood plain of incredible fertility. This flood plain was the so-called Delta of the Mississippi, renowned for its richness, annual flooding, and disease. The Delta (more properly the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta) was the most striking of the new lands opened by Indian treaty in the 1830s. In physical area, the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta was two hundred miles long and seventy miles across at its widest point. It ran south from the Tennessee border, bounded on the west by the Mississippi River and on the east by the hills. James Cobb writes that for a place that “would one day come to symbolize the Old South, with only 10% of its land cleared in 1860, the Yazoo Delta was little more than a sparsely inhabited plantation frontier as the antebellum era drew to a close.” Its “pure soil” was “endlessly deep, dark, and sweet.” Parts were thickly forested, and all of it was regularly flooded. In its landscape, the “Delta’s formidable physical disadvantages effectively reserved its tremendous wealth-producing potential for those with the sizeable labor and capital or credit resources necessary to exploit it.”29 Like other places across the South, the attractions of the Delta had their origins in the ravenous demand of the international market for cotton. Within three decades after Mississippi entered the Union, the Delta had emerged as “the most attractive new planting region in the Cotton South.” The initial white settlement, probably between 1825 and 1827, was near the Mississippi River, in the area of Lake Washington, south of present Greenville. The first white settlers lived in “isolated frontier conditions that prevailed in the Mississippi Delta in the 1820s.” Lake Washington was a magnet for the first settlers. Warren County’s population in 1830 was 1,976, of whom 1,184 were slaves. The slave numbers increased six times between 1830 and 1840. In 1840, the ratio of slaves to whites was 10:1; in 1850, 14.5:1.30 The first arrivals spent much time on the question of communication, but roads developed slowly, and where laid out, they



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were primitive and constantly in need in maintenance. In 1838 the board of police of Bolivar County ordered a road cut through what later (1844) would become Sunflower County. It was a track three feet wide and clearly marked, to run from the Mississippi River to a point on the Yazoo River. This and subsequent roads had to be hacked out from the thick covering of cane and vines, and vegetation grew so rapidly in the moist, warm climate that the task was never completed. Almost all so-called roads were impassable in the winter rainy season, especially for wagons. During the wet winter months those settlers inland of the river lapsed into self-contained isolation reminiscent of the earliest days of settlement on the trans-Appalachian frontier. The Delta region prospered within the context of the depression of the early 1840s. Aside from the small market center of Greenwood, towns did not develop. The county of Leflore had no railroad connection in 1860, and conditions of travel and trade were only marginally better than twenty years before. Conditions in this Delta country created a new variation on the frontier society of the South, in which the dominant feature was slave labor. An overwhelmingly agricultural, simple society developed around the cultivation of cotton, access to market for a staple product, and control of the numerically dominant black population. In 1860 the black population in Sunflower County was 78 percent of the total; in what would become Leflore, 63 percent. According to the returns of the census taker for that year, the county had neither church nor school. A more complex society never evolved because it seemed unnecessary. The one that existed could grow cotton for export in abundant quantities. Aside from institutions for cotton cultivation and control of the black population, the rest of the society was formless.31 Bolivar County, organized in 1836, was another Delta county dominated by its number of blacks and the production of cotton by slave labor. These demographic characteristics of the population and the astonishing rise in productivity can be seen in table 7. The population remained rural and overwhelmingly agricultural. As the production of cotton increased, so did the predominance of the slave population. Towns did not develop in Bolivar

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Table 7. Growth of Bolivar County, Mississippi, 1840–60

white population slaves cotton production (bales of 400 lbs.) slaves owned by each slaveholder

1840

1850

1860

384 971 288 21

395 2,180 4,723 32

1,393 9,078 33,452 35

Sources: Anna Alice Kamper, “A Social and Economic History of Ante-Bellum Bolivar County, Mississippi” (M.A., Alabama, 1942), ch. 2; Joseph Kennedy, comp., Population of the United States in 1860, Compiled from the Original Returns of the Eighth Census under the Direction of the Secretary of the Interior (Washington, 1864), 1:265, 267; 2:85.

County. Professional people were largely unknown. In 1850 the county had one merchant, five doctors, and not a single lawyer. Cultural development was nonexistent. Those sufficiently affluent to do so spent much of their time elsewhere, far from the dangerous diseases of this tropical low country.32 The Delta was a physical challenge of a special kind. The ambitious prospective settler needed capital and slave labor. James Cobb writes, “The enormous task of clearing and draining the Delta wilderness, in addition to the cost of acquiring land, was simply beyond the resources of those without substantial slave holdings.” Other places in the frontier South offered opportunities for families of modest means to join the ranks of cotton planters. The Delta, on the other hand, “offered a frontier that was far less economically ‘democratic’ or socially fluid.” There, benefits were reserved for those “who already possessed not just the financial resources (and nerve to investment them on an annual basis) but the sizeable slave labor force necessary to clear, maintain, and operate a plantation under physically demanding and disadvantageous circumstances.”33 In 1855, a national publication described an ideal plantation on the Delta in these terms: 1,600 acres, 1,000 under cultivation, 750 acres in cotton; 75 working field hands (total slave population of 135). The total initial investment: $150,000. Well managed, such a plantation would produce eight bales of cotton per hand, with a net return of $12,000, or 8 percent on the investment.34 With such a high initial investment, from the beginning the



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Delta was a place for the planter elite. In the words of one early resident: “A feudal aristocracy reigned supreme” in antebellum Washington County, where there were “practically no poor white people who worked (except the learned professions),” and those who did were “wholly outside the pale of this charmed circle.” The Delta planter elite traveled to the north in May to seaside and mountain resorts. They returned to the Delta in October for the opening of the hunting and social seasons. The social life was “a whirl of dinners ‘to which all their neighbors for miles around were invited.’ ”35 For slaves, the Delta’s reputation was as a place where “the lot of slaves was an especially hard one.” Frederick Law Olmstead thought slaves worked harder in the southwestern states of Alabama and Mississippi than elsewhere in the South. Everything was subordinated “to large crops of cotton.” With the large initial investment of capital, the land “had to be cleared, drained, and cultivated as quickly and extensively as possible.” Seasonal demands throughout the year were continuous and unrelenting. Planters were always pressed by high expectations and notes of indebtedness, and they passed this pressure on to their slave labor force. Blacks created their own separate communities, “a cushion against the potentially devastating impact of slavery.” It was one of the contradictions of the Delta that the rule of white owners and overseers was absolute, but nowhere else in the South was “white dependence on their black laborers greater than in the Mississippi Delta.”36 More than any other frontier experience on the western country, the Delta was a high-stakes speculation. On the one side lay disease (varied but almost always annual), bad weather, flooding, and volatile cotton prices. As a result, there were great annual variations in income of Delta planters, even among the richest. There was always the sense of gambling on the rich returns of the next year. Many planter families had a continuing sense of financial pressures. On the other side of the scale, the Delta was in almost every respect the planter’s “wildest fantasy fulfilled.” Heretofore sane men were mesmerized by the prospect of profits. One woman from a long-settled part of Alabama described her son as “Mississippianized,” a condition of intoxica-

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tion brought on by the prospect of a Delta fortune.37 By the middle of the nineteenth century, the Delta “had already assumed an enduring identity as a region where the wealthy, pleasure-seeking, and status conscious white elite exploited the labor of a large and thoroughly subjugated black majority. The planter’s grip on both the economy and society of the Delta seemed completely secure in 1850.” Yet their ability to maximize the wealth potential of the land and hence their freedom to indulge their legendary addition to material finery and high living “was wholly dependent on their success in retaining and controlling a large supply of black labor.”38 More than any other flourishing region on the transAppalachian frontier, the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta depended on water transportation. Steamboats moved cotton to market, of course, but in the Delta they also connected planter families to the outside world. Roads were few and poorly maintained. The impression persists that the planter families used roads only to travel to social engagements at nearby plantations. Steamboat service on the Yazoo-Mississippi appeared in the 1830s. The service was seasonal, of course, with the number of boats on the Yazoo and its tributaries increasing as the harvest season got under way in the late fall, until nine or ten steamers reached Yazoo City almost any week during the peak of the cotton season. Finally, some nineteen or twenty boats could be found steaming somewhere on the river system during the four-week period in February and March. As the harvest season dwindled, so did the number of boats, until only two or three remained for the summer doldrums. The rates were generally the same on all boats: $2 to send a bale of cotton from Memphis to New Orleans; from Vicksburg, $1.50; from Natchez, $1. The size of the steamboats was measured by capacity to carry baled cotton. The Creole in 1831 had a capacity of 1,000 bales of cotton. Other boats held as many as 1,500 and 1,800 bales. Water transportation was vital in both directions, for “just as steamers provided the only means of moving large cargoes swiftly to outside markets, they also provided the fastest and least expensive means of bringing manufactured goods to farmers and merchants.” Only rarely did merchants resort to wagon trains. Consider the items enumerated



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for one shipment upriver: St. Louis flour, Connecticut river shad, coffee, gunpowder tea, sugar, sperm candles, sperm oil, nails “of all sizes,” Procter and Gamble’s “best brown soap,” and “very superior old bourbon monongahelia whiskey.” Another steamer carried, among other items: dried beef, cider, vinegar, hams, lime, and cement. And a third had “French corsets,” ladies’ walking shoes, hats, capes, ginghams, and silks.39 High water was another challenge of the Delta frontier. Indeed, it was the constant pattern of flooding over millennia that had laid down the deep, rich soil. For the first generation of entrepreneurs, with their substantial investments in land and slaves, the floodwaters were now a menace. The universal response was the levee. At first each planter built his own, using slave labor. These barriers against floodwaters were “small, crooked, crude levees, in which stumps and logs were covered up with limbs, brush, and other debris—totally without bed preparation or muck ditch—a temporary and hastily constructed levee across the bayous and flats and along ridges.” Given the nature of a flood and the size of the river, individual levees of such primitive construction were inadequate. As pioneer families occupied the lands bordering the rivers, they began to join together in order to plan a collective protection from the threat of high water. The need for levees eventually made their construction an official matter. The board of police of Bolivar County divided the county into levee districts in 1838 and assigned inspectors to each. Between August and December 1838 the board of police supervised the construction of its first levee, sixty feet at base and twenty feet at top, with “no timber in the body or on the sides, and made three feet above the highest water mark.” By 1850 the county had built eighty-five miles of levee, for which a firm tax base had been established. The board gave the work to a contractor, preferring professional labor to the conscripted labor used on roads. Under the impetus of levee construction and high cotton prices, this part of the Delta settled rapidly in the 1850s.40 The New Counties were not settled exclusively by planter families with wealth and scores of slaves. The opportunities for

THE NEW COUNTIES OF ALABAMA AND MISSISSIPPI

settlement in the new Indian cessions attracted many small farmers. Not all graduated to great white houses with pillars, overlooking vast fields tended by slave labor. One of those who remained a small farmer, Lawrence Ferdinand Steel, left a record of his day-to-day activities for twelve years. Steel moved into the Choctaw Cession in 1836. He was then twenty-four years old, with little formal schooling, some experience in storekeeping and on a flatboat, and responsibility for a family of four. He never owned slaves to help in cultivating his 170 acres in northern Carroll County. His account conveys a picture of continuous hard labor, from 5 am until sunset, five and one-half days a week. Saturday afternoon he went to market in the town of Grenada, five miles away. Sunday he devoted to religious affairs. Over the ten years from 1836 to 1846 little changed on the Steel farm. Times were hard. Cotton and corn were the basic crops. Cotton was the cash crop, but it produced little cash. In 1839, for example, Steel harvested enough for five bales (in addition to 350 bushels of corn). The cotton brought in $171.41 and watermelons another $30. His cash outlay for the year was $73.78, plus $57 for two cows and a calf. He performed several kinds of labor during the year: in the fields on his crops; on roads as a part of his tax obligation; in the construction of farm buildings, such as a cotton shed, a springhouse, a stable, and a wagon shelter. Church affairs and exchanges of work and equipment brought Steel into contact with other farmers. According to his account, he took little or no interest in politics except to attend Harrison rallies during the campaign of 1840. The newspapers in the northern counties of Mississippi already expressed concern over the growing abolition movement. Steel did not share their concern, at least to the extent of committing his thoughts to paper. He felt the economic depression, which sent cotton prices to record lows, but his stakes were small. He did not seem threatened by the many sheriff’s sales announced in the columns of newspapers around the state from 1837 to 1841. If cotton prices had been twice as high and his income twice as great, Steel’s lifestyle would have changed little. He might have added some



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livestock to his herd and bought dresses for his mother and sister, but he could scarcely have afforded a slave.41 The region later known as the Delta was not the only area opened to settlement in northern Mississippi in the 1830s. The Chickasaw Cession at Pontotoc—the last of the great cessions in Mississippi—was another. The legislature laid off Pontotoc County from this cession in 1836. The commissioners selected a county seat, also named Pontotoc, and shortly a newspaper, the Pontotoc Chickasaw Union, began publication. Pontotoc had a bank, a branch of the Agricultural Bank of Natchez, almost as soon as it had a hotel. It was “a log building run up for the reception of the strong boxes, and the accommodation of the cashier,” but it performed necessary banking functions in a time of prosperity and optimism. Immigrants surged into the New Counties to create the proverbial “land-office business” in real estate. The Union noted by advertisement and editorial “the progress of the LAND SALES—THE LOCATION OF RESERVATIONS—THE LOCATIONS OF SEATS OF JUSTICE OF THE TEN NEW COUNTIES INTO WHICH THE CHICKASAW CESSION HAS BEEN DIVIDED; and the progress of improvements in them, individually as well as collectively.” As the agriculturists and entrepreneurs poured in, plans for the PontotocAberdeen Railroad (to connect the interior to the Tombigbee River) moved forward.42 A brief history of the early development of Pontotoc County identifies most of the issues that concerned early settlers, as well as the institutional framework established earlier for county organization and carried largely intact into Mississippi’s north in the 1830s. The county benefited much from the assistance of the federal government. In order to accommodate purchases at the new Pontotoc land office and to remove the Indians, the government cut a road from Pontotoc to Memphis. The Turnpike Road—as it was known—had a quality of construction superior to that of the usual county road. In 1839 commissioners appointed to examine the turnpike described it thus: “The road is opened 50 feet wide and good framed bridges built across the creeks and the branches bridged with good puncheon bridges,

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and the road causewayed where it runs through post-oak flats; the causeway 12 feet wide, and each side of the road ditched 18 feet apart.” After the removal of the Indians, the government turned the road over to the proprietors of the adjoining lands, who were given permission to charge a toll in order to defray the cost of maintenance. Although the road deteriorated in quality, it remained an important route of access to a town of growing commercial importance.43 The Probate Court of Pontotoc County also went into operation in 1836. Its duties included recording stock marks and the bonds posted by elected officials. Ministers of the gospel appeared before the court, presented their credentials, and received authorization to “solemnize the Rite of Matrimony within this State according to Law.” The Reverend James B. Stafford of the Presbyterian Church was first, followed by the Reverend Robert Bell of the Cumberland Presbyterians. By 1839 both the Methodists and Baptists had ministers so authorized. The main business of the probate court, however, was wills and estates. The court appointed administrators of estates, a position of great trust and responsibility. The guardians and administrators named were frequently women, almost always in their capacity as the widows of the deceased. Even the earliest pioneers had estates, goods and chattels that they had brought to the new Mississippi counties, in addition to what they had accumulated there. The inventory of an estate in 1838 disclosed large quantities of household necessaries: tables, chairs, dishes, pots, pans, plus books and the products of the farm. These included livestock—two sows and pigs, two cows and calves, one “old cow,” two yearlings, fifty bushels of corn (valued at $37.50), and 450 pounds of bacon ($56.25). But the striking feature of the estate is that the major portion of its value of $1,744 was in four slaves: two women (Duffy, $500; Nancy, $450), and two children ($350 each). Their total value was $1,650. As in the older sections of the South, land and slaves were the most valuable property, and on the frontier slaves were proportionately the greater, for land was relatively inexpensive. It would, of course, go up in value, with clearing, improvements, and cultivation, transportation improvements, and more settlements.



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Slaves were already of premium value. A slave commanded roughly the same price in Pontotoc County as in the city of Natchez.44 County justices of the peace also began their duties in 1836. Their business was handling misdemeanors. The transfer of more serious affairs to the state courts gave an increasingly local air to county court proceedings. The justice of the peace courts considered a number of cases involving blacks and Indians. The Indians almost never appeared, and the court convicted and fined them in absentia. The erosion of the jurisdiction of the local court did nothing to reduce the role of the lawyers. Land and land titles formed a core of business. One commentator on law and lawyers in early Pontotoc County wrote, “The cases of difficulty in perfecting titles under the preemption laws, the irregularity of the public sales, and the conflicts with the Indian locations of land, were innumerable.” Lawyers “attended” at the county courts, Pontotoc of course, but also Tishomingo, Tippah, Marshall, Lafayette, Yalobusha, Chickasaw, and Monroe, as well as the “High Court of Errors and Appeals, Superior Court of Chancery, and U.S. District for Mississippi.” Legal notices filled the columns of newspapers as the profits of legal confusion extended to editors.45 The society that emerged included small farmers such as Steel, a few large agriculturists who would have styled themselves planters, and the mixed occupations carried on in the few towns. The unifying theme of the society was agriculture, and the activities of the people in the small towns supported the agricultural population. The distribution of the population of Attala County is a case in point. Formed in 1833 from the Choctaw Cession, the county’s population in 1840 was 3,029 whites, 1,083 blacks, 194 taxed Indians: total, 4,306. According to the census marshal, the “pursuits of our citizens” broke down into the following categories for the white population: 1,343 in agriculture; 33 in “manufactures and trades”; 9 in “learned professions”; and 2 “in commerce.” Those in nonagricultural categories were presumably linked to agriculture: the “manufactures” had cotton gins; the “learned professions” sorted out land titles, drew up wills, and probated estates; and those in “commerce” con-

THE NEW COUNTIES OF ALABAMA AND MISSISSIPPI

cerned themselves with the shipment of cotton to market. The vast majority of the blacks were also in the agricultural sphere.46 New County agriculture was repetitive in its techniques and crops. There was little agricultural experimentation, crop rotation, or elaborate fertilizers. These were the prerogatives of the educated and the affluent, leisured agriculturists in the older sections. In the New Counties the basic instruments were slave labor and draft animals, and with them the plow and the hoe. The crops remained cotton for cash and corn for the sustenance of pioneers and animals. The rich land of the New Counties gave forth abundantly. In 1839 Noxubee County, organized six years earlier, produced twenty to twenty-five thousand bales of cotton. This crop was worth perhaps one million dollars, even at depressed prices. Wheat was an important secondary crop in Holmes, Carroll, and Choctaw counties. “We are fast marching to the plains of commercial independence, when a county not yet seven years old is able to raise the staff of life in abundance besides making enough cotton bales to wall a fortress,” wrote the editor of the Yazoo City paper.47 The style of life for some of the early settlers was as plain as the agriculture. A man traveling through Holmes County in 1839 spent the night in “the Mansion House of the plantation, a cabin with two rooms and passage between, the one room was occupied by barrels of pork, flour, the plough and its appendages, a few old saddles, some peas spread on the floor, etc. The other served as a parlour, dining room, chamber, etc.”48 This primitive condition was the experience of both the small farmers and the large-scale planters with their gangs of slaves and extensive landholdings. The great architectural displays that became associated with the antebellum aristocracy were the products of the 1850s, a more leisured, more self-assured society, far enough from its frontier antecedents to treasure and revere them without wishing to experience them again. Crime and punishment in Mississippi’s New Counties were much the same as elsewhere. The more structured court system lent an air of judiciary authority, but the punishment was brutal. The circuit court in Holmes County, organized in 1833, found George Treece guilty of horse stealing in 1839 and handed



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down the most humane sentence the law allowed: “To be branded in the right hand with the letter T, receive thirty-nine lashes on the bare back, fined in the sum of five dollars, be incarcerated for three months, and stand in the pillory for one half hour for three successive days.” In the face of such appalling brutality, the frontier editor in Holmes County pleaded for mercy, a quality not associated with frontier justice. His conclusion: better not stand before the court “poor” and “friendless.” He went on to lay such brutal conditions to institutional progress: “In olden times, when there were no physicians, there was no sickness; when there were no lawyers, dissensions and litigation did not exist—when there were no BANKS there were no debts. In our country, when there was no pillory, there was no subject for that disgraceful mode of punishment.” Six years after its organization the county had medicine, law, and justice. The editor thought that the result did not signify progress.49 The struggle to create a more complex society in the New Counties may be viewed through the experiences of Josiah Hinds in Itawamba County. The legislature laid off Itawamba in 1836. Hinds moved there with his family in 1839. “We are among strangers, in a strange land, and in a wilde[r]ness, where but a short time since was heard the yell of the savage, and where the hoot of the owl and the prowl of the wolf is still heard,” he wrote of his situation in 1840. “We are almost in the woods—one cabbin only to shelter us and our little ones, and a rail pen for a smoke house and kitchen, a few neighbours who are kind but ignorant, no churches erected for the worship of God.” Religion was the dominant force in Hinds’s life, and he entered wholeheartedly into revivals, church building, and temperance. He fought the Devil and the Baptists—between whom he saw only shades of difference—with the same vehemence. He was savage in his judgments of others, particularly on religious grounds. His principles of life were hard work and strict discipline. He expected the same of his family. Hinds displayed his sense of purpose most strongly in religious matters. “This day was appointed for class meeting,” he wrote. “No one attended but two black men. I was wonderfully blessed in reading the word of God to those two black men.” Yet Hinds wanted some-

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thing more than religious purity. He wanted a world of more social opportunities for his wife and his children. This he did not find. In 1846, after seven years in Itawamba County, he offered this comment: “My children is growing up like the wild ass’es colt, and I cannot help myself. Education is but little prized by my neighbours, although honest and industrious, yet there is little or no disposition manifested in the acquirement of knowledge, and if the corn and cotton grows to perfection (which it seldom does), it is enough, provided it brings a fare price, and hog meat is at hand to boil with the greens.”50 The frontier experience of the New Counties, taken as a whole, varied little from the Great Migration of the previous generation, at least from the Great Migration in the South. An earlier generation had laid down patterns for establishing a society in all its forms. People going onto the land knew what to cultivate and how to market it. They would find a familiar court system and legal code. The presence of so many settlers from other parts of Alabama and Mississippi strengthened continuity. There were Indians on the land, but they were an inconvenience—and, in the case of land warrants, an opportunity— rather than a danger. The Native Americans left their presence on the records of the county courts and in the observations of travelers, but aside from place names, by the end of the decade little else had survived. This Second Great Migration into the New Counties was a smooth continuation (for the most part) of the dominant features of southern society whose outlines had been laid down in an earlier generation. Cotton, slavery, land, and steamboats were still at the center of this most agricultural of the southern frontiers. But the frontier of the New Counties also differed from the First Great Migration. In spite of the hectic nature of movement in the 1830s, there was a more leisured, almost calculated air about it. People like the Laws of South Carolina approached the land with the cool detachment of military officers planning a campaign. There was little of the rush and intense competition that drove prices of land to unheard-of levels in 1818 and 1819. There was ample land to go around in the New Counties and in the older Black Belt settlements, of varying quality and at varying



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prices. What all this added up to was a world much more southern than western. The basic issues were the price of cotton, the institution of slavery, and a market for the staples. The people in the New Counties shared these values with those everywhere who felt themselves part of a southern civilization. They created a society that changed little in its institutional framework and development up to 1861. The New Counties settled and grew, becoming ever more set in their collective ways. The population was increasingly black; the market crop remained cotton. The frontier condition gradually faded into a world that was always rural and always engaged in commercial agriculture. With the frontier of the New Counties, the sharp sense of a dividing line that separates the frontier period from what follows fades. In this sense, the frontier goes on forever, or passes unremarked into a rural world that is much like the frontier. In many ways, this was an agricultural immigration from one rural society to another rather than a frontier experience.

13.

 The Last Frontier of the Old Northwest: Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin

Massive numbers and great varieties of peoples characterized the last frontier of the Old Northwest. They came from the earlier trans-Appalachian frontiers in the Ohio Valley, from New York and New England, from the Atlantic Coast and Pennsylvania, and, finally, from Europe. A generation of pioneers traveled west by steamer on the Great Lakes, through newly constructed canals, and even by way of an expanding railroad system. Their numbers reflected the growth of the republic and the rising immigration from Europe.1 Consider, for example, the population figures for the new territories of Wisconsin and Iowa, organized in 1836 and 1838 respectively, as given in table 8. For agricultural families this was a familiar landscape. It was so described in the widely available guidebooks and in the letters sent home by the first waves of pioneer families. By the 1830s, there were several access routes to the West: across western New York State by way of the Erie Canal, and thence by water across the Great Lakes, to come ashore and continue inland from ports in western Michigan, at Chicago at the foot of Lake Michigan, or in one of the new port towns on the west of the lake, along the shoreline of the Territory of Wisconsin. Or a family could travel west along the National Road through the

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Table 8. Growth of Wisconsin and Iowa, 1836–50 Wisconsin 1836 1838 1840 1842 1844 1846 1848 1850

11,683 18,139 30,945 44,478 — 155,277 210,546 305,390

Iowa 10,531 22,859 43,112 — 75,152 102,388 116,454 192,214

Sources: Alice E. Smith, The History of Wisconsin: From Exploration to Statehood (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1973), 466; John A. T. Hull, Census of Iowa for 1880 with Other Historical and Statistical Data (Des Moines, 1883), 168.

new heartland; down the Ohio, and then up the Mississippi to the network of water entry routes to the interiors of Illinois and Iowa. Almost everywhere the lands were inviting, shaped and enriched by the last great ice age. Moving farther west exposed the settler families to extremes of temperatures, as the lands in Illinois, Wisconsin, and Iowa lay open to the great winter arctic outbreaks from the Canadian interior. The summers remained warm and sometimes uncomfortably humid. But the growing season was sufficient to accommodate the crops of the prairies, and the rainfall was more than adequate and spread through the growing season. At the convergence of weather systems from north and south, these broad prairies became the scene of violent storms, especially in the spring and summer months. At the same time, pioneer families remained vulnerable to the fevers of the prairies. The abundant rainfall in the largely undisturbed landscape left much standing water that became seasonal breeding grounds for such diseases. Travelers often commented on the clouds of mosquitoes that accompanied them to the West.2 Information about the new lands in the North and West was widely available and included instructions on how to make the trip west, how to purchase land, and even how to farm. Albert M. Lea’s Notes on Wisconsin Territory, with a Map (1836) served

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as a reference work and guide to the new Wisconsin Territory; John Plumbe Jr.’s Sketches of Iowa and Wisconsin Taken during a Residence of Three Years in Those Territories (1839) did the same for Iowa. More maps were in circulation than ever before. The numbers of published travel accounts by visitors—foreign and American—increased in proportion to the ease of travel and high interest in the western country. Letters from friends and relatives to those in the old home added to the pool of information. These written works publicized the new West and, at the same time, alleviated the fear of an unknown and hostile land. Hundreds of thousands from varied places and of varied stations responded to the invitation. Andrew Fitz of Marblehead, Massachusetts, who went west in 1837, traveled by sloop and steamboat to New York, railroad and canal to Pittsburgh, thence down the Ohio and up the Mississippi to the Illinois River and Fulton County (Illinois). Fitz paid $150 for a claim, describing it in these terms: “A house containing one large room one door one window but no glass a small building stable a good well of pure water stoned up 15 acres under fense and had been cultivated three years and seventeen hundred rails split on it.” The next spring he planted corn and potatoes. The crops exceeded all his expectations. Buoyed by confidence in the new country, Fitz purchased another eighty acres (“It is all timber but first rate Land”), three cows (“one which I intend to kill”), a yoke of oxen, one horse, and sixteen hogs. He found several New England friends, and all rejoiced in their good health and prosperity. A well-organized county government had already laid out several roads. Fitz lived near a town (two and a half miles away), a Methodist Society, and a camp meeting in the summer. He had a fortunate location, for the county road “runs by my door and is traveled very much wich is great company for my wife and we have two nabours one at both sides of us.”3 This agricultural frontier also attracted pioneers with marginal resources, seeking financial rewards in exchange for their youth and energy. One such adventurer was Aristarchus Cone, who came from New England by way of Pennsylvania. Cone and



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a companion crossed the Mississippi into Iowa Territory in 1837 and, shouldering their packs, started walking through the tall prairie grass toward the setting sun. They found a beautiful and open land, with “no shelter nothing to eat musquitoes thick you could stir them with a stick.” The two men made a claim and paid fifty cents to have it recorded by the local recorder of claims. They boarded two and a half miles from their land with a man named Johnson, who kept a large supply of whiskey to sell to the Indians. Cone and his friend had to start from the beginning: “Here I was on the Prairie without any thing for a House I built a fire and lay on the ground with a Bufalow Skin for a bed plenty of Shelter for myself and things.” In the fine autumn weather the two men explored the country and built a shelter large enough to satisfy the regulations of the local claims association. Cone spent the winter in Ohio but returned to Iowa and his claim the next spring. When his partner arrived with four yoke of oxen, the two men began to break prairie. Of the experience, Cone later wrote: “We had to wade through grass as high as our heads in the morning we would get as wet as if we had been in the River.” They lived in a tent through the summer. When the weather turned cold, they built “a Rail Pen and filled the cracks with Hay and Hay and dirt on the top for a roof.” The shelter burned down, and, the following day, six inches of snow fell. Cone remembered, with a degree of sarcasm, “We began to realize the pleasures settling in a new country we were on the extream Frontier not a solitary settler West of us to the Pacific Ocean and but few settlers here.” They built a log cabin—“I presume we felt prouder of our Home than many would be with one that cost Thousands”—brought provisions in from Illinois, and saw the winter through. Cone had most of the experiences that the early frontier settler recalled. The staple of the diet was the corn dodger: “I shall call the years 1838 and 1839 the Corn Dodger Period.” He suffered from the ague: “I did not much care whether I lived or died I had lost all ambition.” In March 1839 Cone headed across the prairie on his first visit to the mill, a round trip that would take five days: “It was like starting out on a voiage to sea a man had to take his provisions along for fear he might not make a Port when it came night Harbors are few and

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far between at this time.” Cone persevered. From these lean beginnings he built a prosperous farm in Muscatine County that was still his sixty-five years later.4 The foreign-born represented another group of immigrants to this new agricultural frontier. In the generation after 1830 increasingly large numbers of European farmers in search of lands came to America, and many of these went directly to the frontiers of Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Iowa. The census of 1850 recorded that in Wisconsin one-third of the 305,390 residents had not been born in America. In general foreign immigrants were surprised—indeed astonished—by the opportunity for landownership. The German-born Johann Frederick Diederichs described in detail how he could achieve financial independence on his eighty acres. Within a year, he thought, he would have some surplus to sell. For all his enthusiasm, Diederichs emphasized that foreign immigrants would need money to get started.5 Another German national, Johann Diefenthaeler, agreed on the need for capital as well as on the prospects of the new land. To those who would follow, he offered a list of things to bring: crockery, wood saws, strong steer hides, songbooks, and parts to make threshing flails. The ladies especially wanted door locks, a blue skein of yarn, and silk for a dress. Diefenthaeler concluded, “Bring anything you want, for your baggage will not be inspected.” Scandinavians, Swiss, and Dutch joined the Germans. Large numbers of English and Irish formed a significant if less conspicuous part of the immigration. Oswald Ragatz, a Swiss who settled in Sauk County (Wisconsin) in 1842, offered a benediction on the experience of the immigrant with the land. “Each night found us utterly fatigued,” he wrote. “But we were exultant—it was all ours and we were converting sheer wilderness into a smiling habitable land. There is a deep thrill of such effort—it causes a leaping of the heart incomprehensible to one who has not had the experience.” And, in conclusion, “Thus, Sauk prairie did, indeed, become our promised land.”6 Fitz, Cone, Diederichs, Diefenthaeler, and Ragatz suggest the variety and scope of immigration to the West, as well as the services available in this period, hitherto unknown. From the docks



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of New York City and the villages along the Erie Canal to the prairies of western Illinois and eastern Iowa, catering to the needs of the frontier immigrant had become a large business, involving food, shelter, transportation, and, closer to the final destination, seed, tools, and stock. The immigrant family had several options in transportation. The prospective farmer might walk or ride on horseback with his family, leading a wagon filled with their goods. Or he might take his family and household west by one or more of the several kinds of public transportation available, including coastal ships, canal boats, steamboats, stages, and even railroads. It cost Andrew Fitz nearly three hundred dollars to transport his family and two thousand pounds of baggage from Marblehead to Fulton County, but no one walked a step of the way. Aristarchus Cone, by contrast, took a steamboat up the Illinois River to Peoria, and then walked west into Iowa, carrying his belongings in a small bundle.7 On these distant frontiers, service occupations proliferated, with the business of hauling immigrants to farm sites, building cabins, digging wells, or building fences. Some made a living by providing these services; others supplemented their farm resources by offering services to the new immigrants who could afford to pay for them.8 Breaking new prairie became an important occupation. This was the first pioneer generation for whom the prairie experience was almost universal. There had been prairies before, but it was possible to avoid them. Now they lay all around. The prairie land was flat in some places, gently rolling in others. Wild flowers bloomed in profusion in the spring. The Chicago American called them “these glorious gardens of nature” and saluted “their gaudy and fantastic dress.” The prairies were also treeless and hard to drain, so the new pioneers found themselves working in mud through the growing season. The sod was tough, demanding several teams and a strong plow. So difficult was the task of breaking prairie for the individual farmer that many hired it done and so created a new business of plowing up the prairie at so much an acre. The new settler could also hire fencing. From the scarcity of timber for fencing, sod fences appeared. According to one account, they were more expensive

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than wooden fencing, “but it is better, being permanent, if well made, and of course requiring no repairs.”9 The costs of transportation to the new land and breaking the prairie were only the beginnings of the expenses involved in farming. Sooner or later prospective farmers had to acquire title to the land. Here, too, they found a wide range of options. A “claim” might be bought in a price range from twenty to one thousand dollars, depending on whether the purchaser was buying uncertain rights to a tract of raw unimproved land or a secure title to a farm with large portions cleared, under cultivation, and perhaps fenced. Some sort of suitable house and other farm buildings had to be constructed. The pioneer might do this alone or hire it done, sometimes in exchange for labor or other services. A cash outlay, however, was almost always necessary to acquire livestock. What did it cost to make a farm on this new frontier of the Old Northwest? Obviously the figure varied, depending on the pioneers’ capital and how they wanted to spend it, for many of the costs could still be met by labor instead of cash. George Holland came to Iowa with a team of horses and $2.50 in his pocket. He made a farm by hard work. Aristarchus Cone, if anything, had less. Others, such as Andrew Fitz, expended capital instead of labor. Johann Frederick Diederichs sent a detailed analysis of costs to friends in his homeland to assist those following. He estimated that in Wisconsin in 1848 the pioneer needed five hundred dollars to settle on “wild land,” and two thousand dollars would buy a fine farm. The lands of the West were not free, but in this early period, most of the basic features of pioneering—housing, fencing, breaking prairie— could still be paid for by labor. It was possible to make something out of nothing. Many did it by hard work. But there was no denying that prairie agriculture was a business, and subject to the forces that affected other businesses.10 In spite of the costs (capital and labor) in farm making, the feeling persisted that this agricultural frontier was a good place for people of limited means. Many who went west voiced this sentiment. Wrote Stephen Eames, “The chance here for poor people who are willing to live in a log cabin ware raged clothes and shake a little with the Ague is first rate for if they work they



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can raise corn wheat and sauce of all kinds in abundance, cattle and hogs are kept much easyer than at the east.” Cyrus Aldrich wrote in the same vein: “This is the Country for a poor man, no mistake, corn 20 cts. per Bush. wages $1.¹⁄₄ per day—for a rich man too, money is worth 12 per cent.” Emma Sprague summed up the opportunities in describing her new home in Grant County (Wisconsin): “I do think that a man with small means can do better in this country than at the east if they can get here with a span of horses and waggon and 100 dollars to buy 80 acres of land or 50 dollars to enter 40 and good health and plenty of ambition they are sure to make a good place in a little time.”11 Along with diversity in immigration and options in economic expenditures went increasing standardization in institutional life. The pattern continued to be the guidelines laid down by the Ordinance of 1787, along with the basic instruments of county government, the common law, and the court system. These were already well known to almost everyone except the European immigrants. One important variation emerged. The press for lands across the broad expanses of the new prairies and the sense of competition raised by the large numbers in motion gave rise to a new concept in land rights. Known as the “claim,” it was based not on government title but on the traditional concept that land belonged to those who were there, now given institutional form. When the pioneer had fulfilled certain minimum conditions testifying to his commitment to the land, he registered his claim with a local recorder. A claim conveyed the right (protected by local custom) to purchase a tract of land with improvements at the minimum price at the time of public sale. Morris Sleight described this arrangement as early as 1834. “I can by going one mile from this place where I am now take as much land as I choose, say a mile square, run a Plough Furrow around it, and the place is then mine,” he wrote. “No man will presume to intrude. . . . This is an arrangement among the settlers that they will not bid against each other; anything to the contrary they have declared Club Law, and are determined to put it in force.”12 Most of the time making a claim involved more

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than simply a plowed furrow. An early settler in Mercer County (Illinois) plowed up fifteen acres of prairie and planted a corn crop to make his claim. He also laid down four logs for a cabin foundation. He then returned the following April to plant another crop. He made a second trip east over the summer, and his claim was still valid when he came back in September. In this fashion land might be held for several years—depending on how rapidly the government could place it in market—and great improvements made. The value of the farm rose with the settlement of the area. Thus, by the time the early settler (or the person to whom he sold his claim) bought the tract at the minimum price, the land might already be worth ten dollars an acre. The concept of the claim lasted throughout the period. As late as 1849 P. C. Haynes wrote from Appanoose County (Iowa) that such claims were “almost as good as deeds” and protected by the threat of tar and feathers.13 The rules of the Prophetstown Club on the Rock River in Illinois, organized at a public meeting in August 1837, suggest the institutional form of claims associations—or clubs, as they were sometimes called. The preamble to a formal “constitution” (for so it was entitled) recited the reasons for its existence: “Whereas conflicting claims have arisen between some of the citizens residing on government lands, and whereas many individuals have much larger claims than necessary for common farming purposes, therefore, we, the subscribers to preserve order, peace and harmony deem it expedient to form an association.” In addition to naming officers, the articles laid down a number of specific regulations for holding land claims. No settler could hold more than half a section of land, and this to include not more than eighty acres of timber. Settlers must register their claims, giving specific boundaries, with the recorder, and pay a fee of twentyfive cents. A committee of three investigated and adjudicated disputes between and among claimants, with an appeal to the whole committee of fifteen. Settlers had to make improvements—“by plowing, fencing or building”—within three months of recording their claims. The improvements necessary to retain rights to the claim were a matter of local practice, vary-



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ing from place to place. That the organizing committee directed the publication of the proceedings in three newspapers suggests confidence in the universal acceptance of such an institution.14 Claims associations were, strictly speaking, conspiracies. The association provided for collusion and threats of violence at public sales in order to ensure that the claims of their members might be purchased at the minimum price. But settlers vigorously defended the use of the institution, citing the rights of original claimants, the defenseless condition of their families, and the rapacious character of evil speculators who would outbid them at public auctions and take not only the land but the hard-earned improvements at a price just beyond what the legitimate settler could afford to pay.15 The same fears and responses accompanied public lands sales in Wisconsin Territory. As many as one thousand settlers came to Milwaukee’s first claims association meeting in 1837. Their regulations specified that the settler registering the claim had to improve and cultivate three acres within six months. At the time of the public sale, the association’s representative would do all the bidding on behalf of the members. The permanent Preemption Act of 1841, allowing early settlers to purchase their tracts and improvements at the minimum price without competitive bidding, diluted the need to control bidding at the public sale. Still, many settler groups continued the practice. In 1845, an association at Sun Prairie set a 160-acre limit and issued a warning that anyone purchasing land claimed by a member would be dealt “with such severity as has been common in the settlement of this western country.” In Waukesha County, anyone bidding against members of the association would be physically removed from the public sale and dumped in the river. Not surprisingly, these groups were effective in restraining competitive bidding.16 Between 1830 and 1850 technological changes, institutional stability, and large numbers of arriving immigrant families foreshortened the frontier experience of the Old Northwest. The transition to commercial agriculture was particularly rapid. Staple agricultural products—especially wheat, corn, and livestock—found a ready market. Central to this development was

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the evolution of a transportation system to give access to markets and the rise of a series of important urban centers. Two groups of cities appeared on principal water routes. One group lay along the western edge of Lake Michigan, serving the frontiers of northern Illinois and Wisconsin; the second, on the west bank of the Mississippi River with extensions up the Wisconsin, Rock, and Illinois rivers, met the needs of Iowa Territory. Chicago was the largest and most important of the rising commercial centers that date from the period 1830 to 1850. Located at the foot of Lake Michigan and by turns a fur-trading post and fort, in 1830 it was still a tiny village of traders, Indians, and soldiers. In the following decade, however, factors influencing expansion everywhere—the opening of the Erie Canal, steam navigation on the lakes, and the rapid settlement and development of Michigan, northern Indiana, and northern Illinois—gave this village an enormous impulse to growth. Soon it was the fastest-growing urban center in the western world. Chicago was more than new blocks of wooden shanties, town site speculation, and a busy waterfront; it was a symbol of America’s energetic materialistic growth. Visitors from America and abroad came to see and comment. Amidst the rutted streets, droves of hogs, and grog shops, new immigrants and wagons piled high with goods headed inland. The rise of Chicago reflected the settlement and agricultural production of the hinterland with which it was in partnership. “This country, from Lake Michigan to the Illinois and Mississippi is not now uninhabited, uncultivated region, but the immigrant has broken upon the stillness which reigned there,—molested the forest grove, and turned up the rich soil to the sun,” commented the Chicago American in the summer of 1835. It concluded, “Those fields which yesterday were but broad wastes, are now waving with corn, and enriching the cultivator with plentious harvests.”17 Every autumn wagons rumbled into Chicago from places as far distant as the Rock River Valley and southern Wisconsin. Of his trip to Chicago in 1840, the Wisconsin pioneer Frederick Starin wrote, “It was truly surprising to see the number of teams, and loads of produce that are daily entering the city & oncoming out to find such detestably execrable roads, over



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which we empty as we were . . . could scarcely pass without miring.”18 Chicago, Milwaukee, Dubuque, Burlington, and Keokuk depended on wagon roads to the interior—for settlers headed west, for commodities on their way to market. Under the circumstances, impetus for road construction assumed a new urgency.19 The federal government had systematically removed Indian peoples from these lands for a generation, but the Indians had not gone willingly. The increased pressure of immigration in the 1830s raised the stakes for both groups. The federal government’s commissioners labored to clear the way by treaty, backed by waves of immigrants openly trespassing on Indian lands. The most important physical conflict involved the Sac and Fox confederated tribes and a war chief, Black Hawk. It had its origins a generation earlier, at the turn of the century. In 1804, a splinter group of Sac and Fox came to St. Louis to arrange for the release of a relative held in custody on a charge of murder. Governor William Henry Harrison offered them the opportunity to free their imprisoned relative in exchange for signing a treaty of land cession. They accepted the offer and signed a treaty ceding a vast tract of land, including northwestern Illinois above the Illinois River and the area in Wisconsin south of the Wisconsin River. This group of relatives had no authority to treat for a cession of tribal lands, and the cession was not immediately an issue because the language of the treaty permitted the Indian peoples to continue “living and hunting” on the lands, pending the arrival of white settlers. For the next thirty years, the “X’s” on this parchment hung like a sword over these Indian groups. By 1829, the encroachment of white settlers on Indian hunting lands around the Rock River had severely restricted both the hunting area and the surviving game. So the Sac hunters began moving across the Mississippi River. This carried them into Sioux territory and produced a series of attacks and reprisals. In the context of the advance of white settlement toward the Rock River, the possibility of a wider Indian war loomed. Officials decided to move aggressively to remove the Sac west of the Mississippi and so defuse at least one part of the explosive situation. In

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1829, the War Department ordered the Sacs across the Mississippi River, in accordance with the provision of the 1804 treaty. The federal government’s determination to enforce the provisions of the treaty was driven by the expansion of AngloAmerican families into the region in the early 1830s and by the overwhelming national sentiment that would be embodied in the Indian Removal Act enacted in 1830, specifying the removal of Indian peoples to the west of the Mississippi River. As a gesture of finality, the tribal lands around the village of Saukenuk were put up for sale.20 As the confederated tribes vacillated over the removal orders, two prominent leaders took action. The first was Black Hawk, a noted war leader of the Sacs. Black Hawk believed that the treaties of cession did not apply to him, because he had neither attended the gatherings nor signed the documents. Furthermore, he was convinced that the British, his old allies in the recent war, would come to his aid. In the spring of 1831, he and his band recrossed the Mississippi River, settling near their old fields, where they intended to raise a crop of corn. In response, Governor John Reynolds of Illinois also took action. He called up units of the Illinois militia and dispatched 1,400 men on a march to the Sac encampments. Leaders of the tribe acquiesced, signed another treaty, promised to move across the river and never return, and agreed to sever all contact with the British. Finally, after much talk, other leaders convinced Black Hawk that the British and the Winnebagos would not support resistance. But the winter was a hard one, and in April 1832, Black Hawk and a band of 1,000, including perhaps 500 mounted warriors, again recrossed the Mississippi, intent on reclaiming the lands along the Rock River. In the flurry of negotiations that followed, a peaceful resolution seemed possible when a small force of Black Hawk’s band clashed with an advance patrol of the Illinois state militia. The militia forces were poorly trained and undisciplined, but they were united in their determination to kill Indians. General Henry Atkinson, the commander of the Army’s Western Department, took this isolated clash as the outbreak of a war that would endanger settler families throughout the region. He now

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led 220 soldiers and 2,600 militia (over which he had nominal control) in pursuit of Black Hawk and his band. The Sac war chief moved north, evading a pitched battle against an overwhelming force and constantly in search of food and shelter for his band, which included hundreds of women and children. Finally, Atkinson and his command caught up to Black Hawk on the Bad Axe River, as the Indians sought to cross the Mississippi into what they thought would be the safety of Iowa. What followed was not so much a battle as a massacre, as Indians on canoes and rafts were systematically killed by the militia and regular army firing from steamboats. Another group of Sacs were killed by the Sioux, who waited on the west bank of the river to exact a measure of revenge in the continuing confrontation between the two groups of Indian peoples.21 Rarely has an encounter between Indians and representatives of the advancing Anglo-Americans so nicely summarized the divergent views of land and land occupation. The AngloAmericans, represented by Governor Reynolds and the militia, thought that Black Hawk and his band had invaded the Rock River lands with hostile intent. They had been confronted and defeated by men defending their lands and their families. Black Hawk saw the affair differently. He considered that the treaties (of questionable legality) gave the Sacs the right to live in the Rock River area. Thus, he and his band had returned to exercise that legal right. The Black Hawk War, as it came to be called, had another dimension. It seriously diminished the bargaining power of the Sac and Fox confederated tribes in dealing with American negotiators. The war provided the rationale for a treaty of land cessions, the traditional exercise to end a military engagement. Under the terms of the treaty, the Sac and Fox land cession opened much of eastern Iowa (six million acres) to Anglo-American occupation.22 The Black Hawk War provided a context within which the government concluded a series of treaties to remove other Indian people from the advancing waves of white settlement associated with the Second Great Migration. Seizing on the atmosphere of the confrontation and destruction of Black Hawk’s band, the



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federal government’s commissioners called a gathering of Indian peoples at Chicago. There, under a combination of gifts and threats, the Potawatomis signed a treaty that ceded their lands. Thereafter, the Potawatomis dispersed, some to Canada, others to Wisconsin and Michigan. Eventually, the remaining elements of the tribe moved to Kansas. Building on the Treaty of Chicago, the government signed other treaties of cession with the Wyandots (Ohio) and Miamis (northern Indiana), the last two Indian nations with a large presence in the Old Northwest.23 The varieties of experience in this frontier of the Old Northwest associated with the Second Great Migration emerge in the story of George W. Ogden. Born in New York State in 1810, Ogden came to Wisconsin Territory in the autumn of 1836. On arriving, he and one of his brothers—eventually three joined him—went into the wagon building and repair business in Milwaukee, where, according to his own account, they prospered. Ogden felt the attraction of the land, however, and soon left the city for the prairie in Rock County, where he established a claim and settled down to the pioneer life in a “shanty” of his own construction. In his first few years Ogden witnessed the transformation of the region. When he arrived, a large band of Indians camped across the river from him. He watched their canoes move up and down the river, even into Lake Koshkonong, in search of fish and wildfowl. In the evening the Indians would sometimes come to trade game and fish for tobacco. But gradually the Indians vanished from the scene. In their place came the land lookers, ambitious hard-riding men—driven by a certain sense of competition—who rode over the prairie, stopping by Ogden’s cabin for something to eat and an exchange of information. In general, he welcomed their arrival. The new agricultural enterprise was an endless source of work. Ogden settled on the land in August, and during the fall he cut twelve tons of hay from the prairie. He broke the prairie right up to the time the ground froze. The Ogden brothers traded work with other early arrivals; George split rails in return for breaking prairie, and everyone worked during house raisings

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and prairie fires. The Ogdens bought and borrowed from other settlers such items as a dressed buckskin, a rifle for hunting, or a horse for travel. Seasonal duties commanded their attention, too. In the fall, prairie fires were a constant threat, especially to hay. In the winter, snow and cold winds drove Ogden and his brothers indoors for long spells, where they cobbled, mended, whittled tools and axe handles, did the laundry, and took baths. In the spring came new construction duties: fences, a corn crib, an ox shed, and a horse stable. The main business was planting and harvesting. The principal crops were vegetables, oats, wheat, and corn. Although nearby Janesville had been named the county seat, Ogden made his large purchases in Chicago. On one trip he spent more than $150 for, among other things, “one yoke of oxen, plough, barrel of pork, one of flour, part of barrel of salt, and other fixings.” He built a new house and found a market for his crops at the local gristmill in Beloit. The economic cycle of the next few years was much the same. Ogden hired a Mr. Davis to do much of his harvesting and paid him in shares. Ogden also sold a part of his claim. In September 1841, four years after his arrival on the land, he carried a load of wheat to Chicago. His agricultural enterprise was now well under way; his land and the country itself had been transformed from wilderness to farm, and around him other claims were experiencing a similar evolution. By 1841 there were rumors of a steamboat on the river, and Ogden had already built a skiff and chopped logs for a wharf. Ogden also participated in a wide range of other activities. The news that Janesville was to be the county seat stimulated his interest in government. Soon thereafter he attended the election of county officials. He himself convened a meeting of his neighbors in order to name the prairie—they named it Prairie du Lac—and to draw up a petition for a post office. In autumn 1838 Ogden signed a petition “for a Territorial road from Geneva Lake to Madison, to pass by here.” He and his neighbors agreed “to appoint some person to go to Madison with our road petition, and lobby there a spell.” The legislature approved the petition for a road but declined to act on the request for a ferry as



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beyond its jurisdiction, so the petitioners appealed to the county commissioners. In the summer of 1838 the federal government established a post office at Prairie du Lac. Ogden and several others built a cabin to serve as the post office and named it Grainfield. Road surveyors came through in the winter of 1838, plotting the road to Beloit. At about the same time Ogden paid his first taxes. “Esqr. Brown came along today collecting taxes our tax was $1.75,” he wrote. Ogden and his brothers also helped to build a community of early pioneers. Contact with his neighbors was constant from the beginning of settlement. He and his neighbor Churchill hunted, bartered, and traded work, and when Ogden was injured, having cut his leg with an axe—“two inches deep to the bone, about three inches above the ancle”—Mrs. Churchill made regular visits, for which he expressed much appreciation. In March 1838 Ogden began to attend “a Methodist meeting,” and in late May recorded a visit by a preacher. As the land viewers came and went, succeeded by settler families, Ogden’s world changed. Some of his friends, such as the Churchills, left, but other families moved in. In 1839 Ogden was a member of a committee to make plans for a Fourth of July celebration. On the appointed day, “All hands went independence. We had a first rate independence. an oration delivered by D. F. Kimball. it went off right. I carried Amanda to the ball. We were honored by the presence of Gov. Dodge.” The next year Ogden helped to organize a school district. Financing the project by a tax levy, he and others arranged for the construction of a schoolhouse eighteen feet square. The extended transformation of his world had reached a benchmark by the end of 1841. The first settlement experience was behind. The new society, created by Ogden and others, had many signs of permanence.24 Wapello County (Iowa) in 1850 was different, not only in area but in range of experience. It was farther west and settled later. Because of a delayed resolution of the Indian title, Wapello County could not be legally settled until 1843. The great land rush of that year—anticipating later scenes in the Oklahoma Territory—brought a substantial population to the new county.

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Wapello County posed for a census portrait after seven years of settlement. In 1850 Wapello was agricultural. The census classified 78 percent of the men as farmers, and many others worked in what might be called supporting industries. Of the 2,067 men declaring occupations, only eight identified themselves as ministers, seven as schoolteachers. The average value of the land was $5.74 an acre, a fourfold increase over the minimum government price. This rapid rise in land values flowed from the factors influencing growth: crowded settlements, improvements, roads and ferries, access to schools, and churches. The productive farms raised and sold corn and hogs and grazed large numbers of milk cows. The Des Moines River, cutting through the county, was an easy avenue of access. Within eighteen months of the first legal settlement, voters elected a board of commissioners; the board assessed taxes by July 4, 1844. The district court convened in Ottumwa on September 14, 1844. Farmers were the dominant economic group in the county, but the civic leaders tended to be people involved in trades and professions: merchants, millers, lawyers, and physicians. Urban development was already evident in the villages of Ottumwa and Eddyville, which provided services for the countryside by 1850 and was where these people lived and worked.25 The surge of movement into the Old Northwest offered alternative economic opportunities. Indian peoples had mined lead in the upper Midwest for at least a hundred years. The French knew about the lead deposits on the upper Mississippi, and the Spanish (after 1763) also entered into the lead trade. Then, in the early 1780s, a French Canadian, Julien Dubuque, married a Fox woman, and gained tribal approval to develop the mines in a systematic way. He made two voyages a year to St. Louis with his lead, and the size of his operation may be judged by a report in 1818 that suggested the lead trade was 200,000 pounds annually. The presence of such a profitable natural resource could not long be kept secret. Rumors circulated in St. Louis of the fortunes of mineral wealth found at the “Fever River mines,” as they were known. More and more Americans found reasons to visit the area. The Indian presence prevented a large-scale mining



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rush, at least for some years after 1815. In 1822, the government extended its Missouri lead-leasing system to the Fever River district. Miners could now lease claims, paying 10 percent of the lead smelted to the government. With an official government document in the form of a lease, the miners could call on federal troops for protection. In response to these changes in official policy, a mining rush took place in 1823. It was one of those rare moments of a rapid bonanza of wealth within a short period, characteristic of mining frontiers. A quarter century later, the rush to California would become the most dramatic example. The movement of miners into northeastern Iowa, northwestern Illinois, and southwestern Wisconsin became a flood in 1827. By 1829, some ten thousand miners in the district harvested 13.3 million pounds of lead. The Fever River district had become the largest source of lead in the nation (surpassing the Missouri mines). There a large concentration of people engaged in mining, smelting, and exporting lead ore. These tenants-at-will dug up every mining site within hundreds of square miles. This was a mining enterprise that favored individuals, families, and small companies. The lead was available near the surface, accessible to miners without capital, complex equipment, or technical knowledge. The most basic tools sufficed: picks, shovels, crowbars, hand drills, and blasting powder. Eventually, the miners began burrowing underground, but the small mining units remained the rule. Soon the mines attracted Cornish miners, marking the transition from amateurs to professionals. The Cornishmen arrived in large numbers in the 1830s, and they quickly modernized the mining enterprise. By 1850, they constituted half the mining population. As the mines played out, many started farms, and the Cornish communities survived in a different form.26 Although the lead deposits were found in three separate political units (Illinois, Wisconsin, and Iowa), most of the mines and miners were in Wisconsin. Mining brought variations in the traditional patterns associated with an agricultural frontier, specifically with respect to urban growth, transportation, and government. The rapid influx of a large number of immigrants

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accelerated the rise of towns. In 1828, prospectors struck lead outcroppings; a year later a thousand people celebrated the Fourth of July in the new town of Mineral Point. Built almost overnight, Mineral Point became the most important town associated with the mining boom, and the focal point of the lead industry in what would become in time southwestern Wisconsin. In 1830 it was the county seat for Iowa County (Michigan), and in 1834 became the site of a district land office. Galena (Illinois) grew almost as rapidly. The town lay on hillsides above the Fever River, with steamboat connections to St. Louis. Steamboats were crucial to immigration, supplies, and transportation of the bulk lead product downriver to market. The Galena Advertiser had columns with legal notices, cards of lawyers side by side with those for blacksmiths, and advertisements for dry goods stores, indicating the nature and direction of the town’s business. The attendant commercial transactions meant good business for the region’s lawyers. The Galena Miner’s Journal commented on the rising number of professionals of this class: “The business of the court here has very rapidly increased within the last year. The immense number of business transactions have swollen the civil docket to a large size, and invited the talents of the country to attend the courts here.”27 The town of Dubuque appeared across the river on the Iowa side somewhat later, but under the same circumstances. The first flood of legal immigrants settled on the site of this village in 1833, then still a part of Michigan Territory. On the town’s third birthday, the Dubuque Visitor offered to the outside world an account of the 35 blocks and 280 town lots, “all of which are occupied by homes and gardens. The village contains about one thousand inhabitants, and two hundred and fifty buildings of different descriptions; among which are fifteen dry good stores, and one Methodist meeting house. A large Catholic church is now building, and preparation is being made for a Presbyterian church.”28 Dubuque was the last of the three major lead-district towns. The accidents of time and settlement patterns divided the lead region among three political units, one of them west of the Mississippi River. But the political distinctions were only mar-



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ginally significant. The lead-mining towns were very similar in nature; they appeared as quickly as the mining population moved in, prospered and stagnated with the lead trade, whose wants they catered to, and gradually underwent a transformation to an agricultural economy, along with the countryside around them. Lead made special demands on transportation facilities. The lead region had to trade to survive; its products could not be consumed. Unlike the situation in strictly agricultural frontiers, there could be no long period of self-sufficiency while new immigrants provided a market for surplus crops. There was no lead market nearer than St. Louis, and the bulk of the cargo placed a premium on water transportation. Galena on the Fever (later Galena) River and Dubuque on the Mississippi had excellent locations. Galena fancied itself a “port” in the late 1820s, and the “Marine List” in the local paper testifies to the importance of this commercial contact with urban centers downstream. Galena’s record for 1830 showed vessels arriving at twoor three-day intervals in the spring when traffic first resumed. Incoming cargoes included foodstuffs—pork, flour, dried fruit— iron bars, one box of books, and two thousand fruit trees. Commercial life at Dubuque followed the same pattern.29 Mining attracted a transient, sometimes turbulent population. The special demands of mining and the early settlement fostered confusion. No orderly rectangular survey system showed the boundaries of tracts to pioneers. Miners were intensely interested in small claims. Even a few acres might represent a fortune in lead ore. So the questions of ownership and procedure that after mid-century appeared all over the mountain West and California were anticipated in the lead region of the upper Mississippi Valley: How were claims to be laid out? How was the land to be claimed? How much land could an individual miner claim? When was a claim vacated? How should disputes between and among miners be resolved? A governing body drew up special rules and posted them around the camps. These local customs had the force of law in the mining district. Even after county government appeared in the late 1820s, these customs continued to meet the special needs of a mining community. The miners

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east of the river carried the regulations across the Mississippi to the new “diggings” on the Iowa side in 1830. Those published at the Dubuque Mines on June 17, 1830, offer a fair example: We, a committee, having been chosen to draft certain rules and regulations, by which we, as miners, will be governed; and, having duly considered the subject, do unanimously agree that we will be governed by the regulations on the east side of the Mississippi River, with the following exceptions, to wit: ARTICLE I. That each and every man shall hold two hundred yards square of ground by working said ground one day in six. ARTICLE II. We further agree, that there shall be chosen by the majority of the miners present, a person who shall hold this article, and who shall grant letters of arbitration, on application being made, and that said letter [of] arbitration shall be obligatory on the parties concerned so applying. To the above, we the undersigned subscribe. J. L. Langworthy &c30

Lumbering was a second significant new economic enterprise, its appearance and prosperity demonstrating a perfect blending of supply and demand. The crush of settlers from 1830 to 1850 created an enormous demand for building materials. This need was evident as early as the first lead-mining settlements. Rough pine planking brought thirty-five to forty dollars per thousand board feet in Galena in 1828 and was in short supply. The thriving town of Dubuque suffered from a shortage of lumber that “has hitherto retarded its progress. A large number of buildings, which would otherwise have been erected, have necessarily been delayed on that account; and many emigrants have been obliged to return down the river for want of houses.” As farm families by the thousands moved out onto the Illinois and Iowa prairies, the demand for building materials intensified, for the land provided little in the way of natural timber. George Ogden of rural Rock County (Wisconsin) traded a pair of oxen for eight thousand feet of lumber, flooring, and siding.31 At the same time that this demand arose, in the land north of the Wisconsin River to the Arctic Circle stood an unbroken forest. It now remained to tap this great resource, move it south, and place it in the hands of its potential users. The American



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frontier rarely lacked enterprising pioneers, especially where the exploitation of natural resources was concerned. The Wisconsin pine lands were no exception. Much timberland passed into private hands as part of the speculative flurry of the mid-1830s. At the same time, entrepreneurs organized some ten to fifteen lumber companies on a small scale, probably with no more than fifteen to twenty-five men each. Parties in search of attractive sites began to move upriver from Prairie du Chien (on the Wisconsin River) and La Crosse (at the junction of the Mississippi, Black, and La Crosse rivers). The race for logs, mill sites, and profits had begun. Much of this frenzied economic activity took place on land that still belonged to the federal government and that in many cases had not even been surveyed.32 The federal government assisted in the spread of the lumber industry. In 1826, the government authorized sawmill construction on Indian lands, first around Green Bay. It was an interesting exception to the proclaimed policy of preserving Indian lands inviolate. The new policy suggested, among other things, the appearance of a new and vital resource from the endless expanse of water and forest that characterized the upper Mississippi Valley. Trees were in the process of replacing furs as the new resource. Sawmills multiplied along rivers, even as continuing treaties removed Indian peoples from their traditional hunting grounds. And the demand for lumber was growing apace, with the rising tide of settler families. A treaty signed in 1837 opened up the Chippewa and St. Croix Valleys to legal lumber operations. An immediate rush took place for mill sites. The first mills were in operation in 1840. Heavy logging began on the Wisconsin River in the 1840s, with pine rafts headed downriver to Prairie du Chien, Iowa’s sawmill river towns, and even as far south as St. Louis. The first mills on the Wisconsin rivers were primitive waterpowered affairs, small in size and capacity, with up-and-down saws, waterwheels, and dams made of brush and stone. The work was seasonal, concentrated in the winter months, with supplies brought in by sled from Dubuque or Galena; as the loggers moved to year-round operation, keelboats brought in men and supplies. The lumber frontier expanded enormously in the

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decade of the 1840s. In 1842 a group of Mormons brought large log rafts down the Black River to the Mississippi and down the Mississippi to Nauvoo, thus demonstrating a new technique for moving lumber. Others copied their methods, and the next year more than three million board feet came down the Black. By the year after that, the number of mills had increased to eight. In 1847 thirteen mills were in operation, and the output exceeded 6.25 million board feet. Rafting expanded rapidly to include steam towboats. By 1850 great lumber rafts moved on all the major Wisconsin rivers—down the Mississippi to sawmills in Iowa and markets from St. Louis to New Orleans, down the shore of Lake Michigan to Chicago. The center of the Wisconsin lumber industry gradually focused on the Chippewa River Valley, where lay one-sixth of the pine forest west of the Appalachians. Between 1843 and 1855, the annual lumber harvest of the Chippewa Valley grew from 5.5 million to 75 million board feet.33 The demand for wood created by settlement on the prairie carried the lumbering industry into Iowa. There the resources were neither as extensive nor as rich as in Wisconsin, but the industry appeared to meet the demand. As early as 1831, the first sawmill appeared on the Turkey River, opposite Fort Crawford. The number of mills increased with settlement. In the autumn of 1836 Dubuque had “five saw mills and two grists in our neighborhood, but the demand is greater than can be supplied.” Lumber came from the northeastern corner of the Hawkeye country and increasingly from the Wisconsin pineries. By the middle of the 1840s this new source of timber was so productive that it was no longer profitable to import lumber from the East. The lumber industry was a significant factor in the economic development of Iowa river towns, especially Dubuque and Muscatine.34 Lumbering, like mining, was one of those few and rare exceptions to the agricultural world that emerged on this settlement frontier. And like mining, it offered the opportunity for rapid fortunes amidst flexible or nonexistent rules. Ambitious loggers could pursue the lumbering business at several levels and through various devices. They might log tracts on Indian reservations (with or without permission; the latter was sometimes dangerous); they might buy “stumpage” from land owners, the



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right to log standing timber without owning the land; they might purchase public lands at public sales, through preemption rights (established by law annually after 1830 and permanently in 1841), or from speculators holding military scrip; they might simply trespass on the public domain. Tracts of timber were clear-cut under all of these options and many others. Mark Wyman has observed, “This was a system filled with opportunities for those ready to grab them.” For lumbermen fleeing the crowded and scarce forests of the East, “In the Lake States at mid-century, a small amount of capital, combined with hard work, basic lumbering skills, and luck, could lift a hard-driving lumberman to leadership.”35 Lumbering created its own institutional unit of work, living, and recreation. The lumber camp was the basis of the work, for it served the men who were the necessary backbone of the industry. Generally speaking, camps were seasonal. They opened in the fall, when the workers arrived for the season of lumbering. It was dangerous and demanding work, with a surprising degree of specialty. One crew felled trees, another trimmed branches, a third supervised dragging the trees (generally by oxen) to loading sites, where the logs would be loaded on a sleigh. From this point, the logs were hauled to a riverbank, where they were “banked” and cut into manageable lengths (generally twelve, fourteen, and sixteen feet). In the spring, with the thaw and runoff, the logs began their journey downstream. Driving the logs downriver involved a whole separate workforce and series of skills. Water levels were crucial and unpredictable. Jams of logs on rivers were inevitable and dangerous. In times of low water, the jam of logs might extend for miles upstream. Throughout, injury and death were continual by-products of the logging industry. The trees were too large and too difficult to control. Men and horses suffered accordingly. Men worked for weekly wages, ranging from fifteen dollars for laborers to fifty dollars at the high end. Men were paid in a “due bill” at the end of the season, but the bills were not redeemed until the logs were sold at the end of the summer. Living conditions were basic, that is to say, hard. Food was monotonous; lice were epidemic. As with other such occupations, lumbermen demanded entertain-

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ment in the towns at the end of their run, and lumber towns had to provide it or risk being bypassed.36 To cite only one example, the center of social and cultural life on the Black River was Black River Falls, with its tavern, one-term school, and church. The mix of population in 1849 indicates the nature of its economic activity: 375–400 men, 35 couples, 25 single women.37 Manufacturing also appeared within this great surge of agricultural settlement into the Old Northwest, adding another new dimension to the rapid and varied economic development of the region. The existence of industry on the frontier was not new; it had been present in various forms since the first transAppalachian frontier. But the terms “manufacturing” and “industry” can be misleading. Early industrial workers functioned in such a limited sphere and with such small output that they were more a local convenience than a basic unit of the economy. The first processing industry to serve the frontier was the mill, which became an important economic institution, a significant force in the neighborhood, an early center of social activities, and a substantial living for its owner—which spurred a race for the best mill sites. In the period from 1830 to 1850 the importance of mills—especially sawmills and gristmills—increased in accordance with the greater demands of a large population. This early dependence on mills was typical of early frontiers. The changing nature of the frontier experience—the foreshortening of the process, especially in economic development and the rise of societies—was also evident in the acceleration of manufacturing. Large numbers of people and their demands for goods, growing urban centers, expanding transportation facilities, large-scale agricultural production that led to a surplus of commodities, all combined to spur the rise of industry. As the products of the newest frontier appeared in greater variety, so did the manufacturing processes. Wisconsin is a case in point. It began with a lead industry in the late 1820s, became an important wheat producer by 1840, branched into lumber in the 1840s, and in the 1850s went into the extraction and manufacture of other minerals on a large scale. The area was distinguished not only for its natural abundance, but also for the variety of these



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natural gifts. In 1840 the population of the four-year-old territory was 30,945; its industrial development was centered in the processing industries. The next decade brought dramatic changes. The population of the state—for so it became in 1848— increased to 305,390 in 1850. Some 40 percent of the value of manufactured products concentrated in flour milling and lumber, processing the basic products of the frontier economy. Other significant enterprises included, in decreasing order, construction materials, iron, wagons, boots and shoes, furniture, and agricultural implements.38 With the steamboats, wagons, and immigrant trains pouring into the western country came the drive to preserve older values and the need to ensure an orderly, and what people at the time liked to call a “civilized,” society. Institutionalized religion was a focal point of this effort. Religion no longer carried solace for the lonely and hope for the dispossessed. The religion on the edge of the newest frontier of the Old Northwest was strongly institutionalized and intensely competitive. Denominational identity was important. Those chosen for missionary activity here worked along traditional lines with specific landmarks of progress: the founding of a church, almost always with a Sunday school; the establishment of auxiliaries, such as prayer meetings, ladies’ groups, and regular revivals; and, finally, the construction of a church building. The issues of Sabbath observance and temperance went hand in hand with theology. Already the prohibition of strong drink had become a cornerstone for church membership in several denominations. The minister came to the frontier as a transforming agent, carrying not only theology but also standards for an orderly society. In the first transAppalachian frontier the minister was often one of the people; now he was often apart from them. In spite of the alleged moral darkness and physical hardships of the western country, volunteers were numerous. The speed and volume of missionary activity was remarkable. As early as 1840 missionaries worked hard in the new Wisconsin Territory. Here these messengers from the East encountered the various societies associated with mining, lumbering, and agriculture, and increasingly they found

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urban centers. Each presented its own array of challenges. In general, all societies tended to be transient and unsettled, intensely directed to the pursuit of wealth. Furthermore, they were often free of traditional restraints, especially those all-male societies of mining and lumbering camps.39 The reform campaigns of American Protestant churches became a part of their mission to the West. They campaigned against drinking, dancing, and tobacco as sinful recreational habits. Antislavery would become a significant feature of the reform agenda in the 1850s. These campaigns struck at the habits, cultural traditions, and recreation of the new immigrant groups. The targets were Catholics and Germans, and German Catholics. The two basic acts of immigrant outrage: drinking and Sabbath violation. Irish Catholics, such as those in the Catholic settlements in northeast Iowa, were subject to the same censure. These attacks and their responses represented part of the adjustment of new immigrants, issues well beyond simply questions of hard work and economic condition.40 The part played by the Congregationalists may be taken to represent the increasingly institutional and formal nature of frontier religion. This denomination was especially influential on the Iowa frontier. Its most important leader, Asa Turner, reached the New England settlement near Burlington just as the territory was organized. His call in 1843 for assistance from the East found a response in a group of men from Andover-Newton Theological Seminary who became known as the “Iowa Band.” The best known of the Iowa Congregationalists after Turner was William Salter, renowned both for his longevity (he died at Burlington in 1910) and for his prolific writings. One of those who labored faithfully for Turner and Salter was a young New Englander, Ebenezer Alden. Alden first organized a Congregational church in the town of Solon (Johnson County). It consisted of five members. He left soon for Tipton (Cedar County), a more promising community. In 1844 Alden estimated Tipton’s population at seventy-five individuals, including twenty-five men, “almost all professed infidels & Universalists. A hard place isn’t it.” He pressed forward plans to build a church, “but we moved slowly



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in this Western world. 215 dollars have been subscribed to put up this building—$8.00 in cash I believe the remainder in work— produce—timber etc.” Alden added, “You see how much money is in circulation.” He looked askance at the new society in the West. “The amount of coffee & tobacco used here would be incredible to you. The spitting here at singing school especially would be a caution to those who have to clean up in the morning,” he commented. Towns such as Tipton and Cascade (he had compared notes with the Congregational minister there) “are generally pretty wicked at first. But as the country grows older a new class of people moves in, 2 years may put an entirely new face upon things here. I hope God will change the place before that time.” He cooperated with the Methodists, but reluctantly. Of the denominational competition he wrote, “The best way to preserve peace is to be complaisant, courteous, yielding, & unite sometimes, but still you must be as independent of them & all other sects as you can.” Alden wrote to his father, “It should be remembered that there is no lack of ‘preachers’ here. The great difficulty I have met with has been to arrange my appointments for preaching, as to not conflict with some of them.” The high point of the year 1844 was the appearance of the revered Turner himself to preach to the new congregation. The results were not entirely successful, Alden reported: We had a large congregation yesterday but there was a good deal of confusion on account of the number of small children present & in the evening someone set the prairie on fire close by so that we were disturbed by it. The prairie is on fire now right out a half a mile before my window. Br. Turner did not enjoy the day much & was a good deal disconcerted in preaching so that we did not see so great results as we had hoped for & as he saw up at Br. Salter’s place a week before.41

The Catholic Church was also a vigorous influence in parts of the Old Northwest. From Prairie du Sac (Wisconsin) a priest wrote that Protestant strength overshadowed his church, “for the Protestants are more numerous and prosperous, their churches are simple, and their meager rites cost almost nothing. Their mission bureaus are numerous and strong; consequently

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they flood the country with their missionaries and emissaries. The opposite is the case among the Catholics.”42 In truth, the Protestants were everywhere, but where Catholics chose to organize, they also made their mark. Nowhere was this more evident than in northeastern Iowa. Bishop Mathias Loras established a diocese at Dubuque in 1838, and its influence radiated into the countryside and the small towns. Bishop Loras bought lands, encouraged immigration, consecrated churches, and appealed for missionaries and money from his superiors in the East and in Europe. He became the most important single force for organized Catholic immigration into the northeastern part of Iowa.43 By the time the advance into the last frontier of the Old Northwest began in the 1830s, the concept of the common school, which provided equal opportunity for education of all children at public expense, was widespread. It was a period of great national interest in education and examination of the ways in which the people of the republic should be trained to meet their duties as responsible citizens. Although not without its critics, the doctrine of a universal education had a substantial degree of acceptance in the Old Northwest. The issue was always financial support. The experiences of both Iowa and Wisconsin in this twenty-year period, however, show that despite laws for the support of common schools, these institutions developed slowly and were poorly supported. Urban centers led the way. Milwaukee had a school in 1836, but it was not a public school. Southport (Wisconsin, later incorporated as Kenosha) passed a free-school law and opened a public school in 1849, but only after a long struggle against those who opposed it because of the cost. The presence of a public school was a cause for rejoicing among many parents. The itinerant Methodist circuit rider Elihu Springer reported from Milwaukee in 1847, “We have an excellent school here, where I send five children, free of charge. This I conceive to be an privilege for which I feel truly grateful, and one which I have never before, been permitted to enjoy, and which I hope to improve to advantage.”44 Generally speaking, public schooling beyond the “rate law,” under which parents of pupils paid costs beyond state contributions, was not widespread until the decade of the 1850s. As the final step in the creation of educational institutions came the



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establishment of state universities. The first Wisconsin territorial legislature (1836) made provision for a university; the first Iowa Legislative Assembly (1847) did the same. Both institutions had extended periods of slow growth ahead, but the acts of founding exhibit the high aspirations of the pioneer peoples.45 Amidst the celebrations of land taking and community building, the new societies showed strains and fissures. With all this fertile land so readily available to so many, anxieties surfaced and conflicts bubbled up. Differences in religion and origin exploded in violence, within the context of hard times. The decade of the 1830s showed many of these tensions, arising from the economic crisis at the end of the decade. There were also riots in connection with the rising abolition movement. An antiabolition mob killed Elijah Lovejoy, who published an abolitionist paper, in southern Illinois in 1837. The Mormon prophet Joseph Smith was assassinated in Carthage, Illinois, in 1844. In the aftermath of Smith’s death, the Mormon church, under the leadership of Brigham Young, was once again in motion: this time to the West, across Iowa (admitted to the Union in 1846), then after a sojourn of two years in Omaha, across the plains to the inhospitable Valley of the Great Salt Lake. This was an example of what D. W. Meinig calls “one of the many groups contributing to the diversity, dynamics, and especially in their case, the turbulence of these early streams of migration.”46 Another new dimension of the frontier experience came to the fore in the 1830s. For the first time, pioneer agricultural families began to cross the continent. The first destination was Oregon. The caravans over the so-called Oregon Trail had become part of the western landscape by the 1840s. What had been hundreds of overland pioneers became, in the early 1840s, a thousand. This was “the American thrust to the Pacific so long advocated.” They departed from the river towns of Missouri (Independence and St. Joseph), but many pioneer families crossed Iowa and picked up a company of overlanders in Council Bluffs. The discovery of gold in California in January 1848 turned this steady seasonal overland emigration into a flood tide. In the spring and summer of 1849, tens of thousands of gold seekers set out to

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cross the plains. They took the old Oregon Trail as far as Fort Bridger and then cut south on the branch to California. The surge of prospective forty-niners from the Old Northwest propelled a large transient migration across the state of Iowa.47 Through the flood tide of immigration, the many new societies, and the emergence of a vast agricultural civilization ran the disturbing signs of an America approaching mid-century— and civil war. The vigorous nationalism that arose after 1815 reached a crescendo in the annexation of Texas and the Mexican War, but, at the same time, both divided the nation. Cultural egocentrism emerged in anti-Catholic sentiments, Mormon persecutions, and contempt for the “inefficient” Mexicans. The influx of immigrant peoples attracted suspicious glances, especially in their association with rising urban areas. North of the Ohio, the growing abolition movement, even as it divided and splintered within itself, began to divide the nation. The nation was in the process of change. The lands west of the Appalachians, and, more recently, the newest frontiers of the Old Northwest, reflected these changes. Frontier peoples adopted, or brought with them, the ideology of the East as well as its technology, and they came to be aware of different peoples and societies in their midst. One-third of Wisconsin’s population was foreign-born by 1850, and these immigrants had their own languages and customs. P. C. Haynes, on the other hand, who moved from Tennessee to Davis County (Iowa), hated “Yankees.” So did the Langworthys of Dubuque. A hundred miles to the southwest, Johnson County had a thriving antislavery society.48 The frontier had long exhibited more than its share of intolerance. The rising national tensions of this period did nothing to assuage this instinct, and if anything, only intensified it.



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Part VI. The Trans-Appalachian

West and the Nation

By 1850 the lands west of the Appalachians, which had contained only a handful of settlers in Kentucky in 1775, had a population of more than ten million. The new land settlements stretched west to Des Moines, north to the Wisconsin River, and south to the Gulf of Mexico. The trans-Appalachian frontier had expanded to meet the frontier of the Texas Republic and now prepared—with the help of the railroad—to unite with the new western state on the shores of the Pacific Ocean. The admission of California in 1850 marked the close of one era and the opening of another. The Great West—from the Appalachians to the Missouri River—had made an enormous impact upon the nation, especially in the last generation. Its politicians were among the nation’s leaders; its agricultural production was larger than that of many European nations. The people who lived west of the Appalachians in 1850 would have enjoyed such observations, for they were always intent upon growth and material wealth. The seventy-five years of expansion after 1775 gave them much of both. If the West still lagged in literature and the arts and in providing for schools for its young people, it may be thought of as much like the new American nation after 1775, when the Americans found that cultural achievement was not as easy to achieve as political independence. What the western country had to offer was an abundance of the most fertile agricultural lands in the world, and this it provided in almost endless quantities. Among the many changes over seventy-five years, two continuing themes emerge. From the very beginning, the frontier had towns. Some of these became great cities; others faded from sight. But all had an impact on the people who lived in and

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around them. The eye immediately singles out Cincinnati, Chicago, St. Louis, or New Orleans, but the common urban experience of the frontier was the small town. Here lay the foundation of the services that made the town indispensable in the age of agriculture. It was the center of professional life—such as it was—and professional people came to set the tone for town and countryside alike. Hundreds of such towns appeared. Almost without exception, each was a similar urban experience. Although towns surely played a central role in the development of the trans-Appalachian West, our view of them has been conditioned by the survival of records they themselves made possible. Travelers stayed in towns and described them at length, if not always favorably. People who lived in towns were more likely to leave accounts of their activities, and their records were also more easily preserved than the records of those who struggled quietly in the countryside. Municipal governments also left records of what they did and why. Following these sources, historians have tended to focus on the urban experience at the expense of the rural. In the end, however, even those who lived in the countryside and wrote of their experiences testified to the impact of the town on their political, economic, social, and cultural lives. From the beginning of permanent American settlements west of the mountains, pioneers found political leadership. The need for leaders was universal, but in the western country, especially in the first generation, it was absolutely necessary. Settler families went across the mountains to improve themselves economically, but in order to do this, they had to confront a series of challenges: relations with Indian peoples, contested land titles, and poor transportation and communication. Such was the nature of the land that the pioneers were forced to call on early government to solve many of these challenges for them. Those in control of the apparatus of government obviously had an enormous influence. The struggle for these offices took place at several levels: federal, state, territory, county, and township. In the drive for office, frontier people did not lose sight of the importance of local government to their world. From the time of the establishment of Kentucky County in 1776, politics at the county

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level was a beehive of activity. Like the influence of small towns, local politics was immediate and pervasive. But, at the same time, local politics often reflected political divisions on the larger level. Whatever the circumstances—and they often changed— politics was as much a part of the trans-Appalachian frontier experience as corn and cotton. So, too, was the closing of this first settlement experience. Men and women no sooner began to settle the lands west of the mountains than differences in rate of development appeared. The quality of land, good management, and luck all played a part, but whatever the determining forces, distinctions appeared and grew over time. Some areas matured and passed beyond the frontier stage rapidly; others lagged behind. Whatever the rate, as the frontier was constantly opening in the form of new land settlements, so it was constantly closing, to be succeeded by a world that was rural rather than frontier. By the beginning of the Civil War most of the trans-Appalachian areas considered in this study had passed beyond the frontier stage. The ways in which they did this and the forces involved are an important part of the panorama of experiences in the trans-Appalachian West over seventy-five years.



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Villages, Towns, and Cities Spread across the Western Country

In 1775, at the outbreak of the American Revolution and the opening of this story, European America was a rural world. It was a series of regional societies united around the possession and cultivation of the soil. These societies took various forms, reflecting their antecedents. New England had designed settlements to produce a close-knit and unified community built around a town, whose outlying lands for cultivation and grazing would perpetuate a sense of equality. That this system developed strains over generations did not negate its initial purposes, the more so as these first generations of settler families saw themselves surrounded by a dense and infinitely hostile landscape and native peoples even more alien and dangerous. To the distant south, the first generations of settlements established farms (later dignified with the term “plantation”), along the waterways of the Virginia Colony and, wherever possible, within sight of the ocean. Here, towns appeared as instruments of authority and government. As representative government appeared in the new colonies, places must be established to bring together representatives. But there remained a sense that these places were for business, not for comfort, leisure, or pleasure, which would be found in the countryside. Over the next century and a half, some

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five or six generations, amidst the founding of other English colonies, these same values prevailed. At the close of the revolution, with the triumph of the independence of the colonies, the voices that had produced this miracle of a nation continued to espouse the basic virtues of democracy, equality, representation for all (male and white) groups, and the continuing widespread availability of land to offer the same independent and virtuous world for future generations. This consensual background for the new, independent American nation became the context for the debate that developed in the 1790s. With the adoption of a new form of government in 1789 and with this government taking office and beginning to function, two different visions emerged about the future of the nation. One, represented by Thomas Jefferson, the secretary of state, praised the traditional virtues of the countryside and the small, independent farms that formed the basis of the economic and political independence of the citizens of the American republic. A dissenting image now appeared, represented by the views of Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the treasury. Hamilton argued the nation should develop commerce and manufacturing, and with them, towns and cities. The clash between the two visions of the future of the nation would illuminate the decade of the 1790s. The choice between these two divergent paths seemed settled by the election of 1800. Thomas Jefferson’s triumph and his installation as president seemed to lay the political basis for the spread of an agrarian republic. This direction seemed confirmed, indeed put into final form, with Jefferson’s purchase of Louisiana in 1803. Here was the land to satisfy the families of the republic for the indefinite future. Jefferson’s statement was that the acquisition of Louisiana would provide land for the future generations, infinitely stretching toward the west, toward boundaries that were as vague as the outlines of an agrarian republic were specific. The so-called Virginia dynasty took control of the direction of the nation (which they proposed to direct minimally), and continued through James Monroe and James Madison to govern for almost a quarter century. After the unfortunate interlude of the



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War of 1812, the peace brought forth the First Great Migration, in which hundreds and soon thousands of settler families moved across the mountains to the fertile lands of the interior of the continent. Not even the economic crisis of 1819 could change this world of a vast landed domain presided over by a government that intended to offer land to its citizens under the most generous terms. And where the terms did not suffice, the pioneer families simply squatted on the land, built shelter, and cultivated, in defiance of their government and the solemn treaties that guaranteed many of these lands to the Indian peoples of the interior of the continent. Yet the urban dimension would remain significant on the frontier west of the mountains, as the nineteenth succeeded the eighteenth century, and as the First Great Migration was followed by the Second. Towns sprouted in the path and the wake of the immigrant families. Their services and resources were absolutely necessary to these pioneering generations, as they had been in the colonial period. Still, like the landscape and the people, towns had common denominators and also different qualities. These varied by place and changed over time. Over thousands of square miles of landscape and dozens of watercourses, and through three generations, villages, towns, and cities became a part of the trans-Appalachian West.1 The earliest town builders had a sharp ambition and vision that transcended the dense forest and the few numbers of AngloAmerican settler families. In 1796 Francis Baily toured the new country west of the Appalachians. The Treaty of Greenville had opened to legal settlement a large tract of land north of the Ohio River. After years of continuing confrontation with Indian peoples, the frontier was in motion. Baily felt this impulse as he talked to settlers, examined the country for its agricultural prospects, and hunted the abundant wildlife. One fine autumn day he accompanied a friend and several companions into the woods to establish a new settlement. The young man had chosen a site on the Little Miami, where he and his companions intended to lay out a town. The morning after their arrival, Baily wrote, “Nothing was to be heard but the noise of the axe re-

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sounding through the woods.” Before nightfall the men had raised a cabin from the wilderness. The town was named Waynesville in honor of General Anthony Wayne. Its energetic proprietor had laid off a square in the middle of the proposed village that, Baily recounted, “he told me, with a degree of exulting pride, he intended to a courthouse, or for some public building for the meeting of the legislature; for he has already fallen into that flattering idea which every founder of a new settlement entertains, that his town will at some future time be the seat of government.” Such were the hopes that fashioned innumerable towns along the Ohio and its tributaries. Even Baily had to admit that within “a short time I saw quite a little town rise from the desert; and in several places gardens were actually laid out, and the walks formed.” He was impressed. “When once a town is settled in this way, its rapidity towards greater improvement and perfection is very great,” he wrote, “and I have no doubt but that this town, at the foundation of which I have just been witness, will at some future period make a great figure in the history of its country.”2 Waynesville was only one of many. From the time of the first settlements on the trans-Appalachian frontier, people came together in an urban setting. The first permanent settlement, Harrodsburg, was, in a sense, the first town; other stations were also urban in form and purpose. Just as the Americans had behind them in 1775 more than one hundred and sixty-five years of experience in new land settling, cultivating, and wilderness survival, so they also had extensive experience in town building. Between 1775 and 1850 they built on these urban experiences. Although the urban dimension changed over these three generations, a few basic ingredients endured. Towns generally appeared as service centers for the agricultural (or mining or lumbering) hinterland, as the case might be. They were laid out, lots were sold, and they prospered or withered as they met the needs of their rural constituency. The forces that kept them alive came from outside the town limits. Aside from goods and services for a surrounding agricultural population, there might be other influences. The federal government might designate the town as the site of a land office, Indian agency, or a post office. If the



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town was selected as a county seat, it would have a range of local functions. These official responsibilities meant the appearance of people on a regular basis: to attend the county court, to pay taxes, to bring suit, and the town prospered in like proportion. Or the town might become a center of commerce. Surrounding farms would bring produce and livestock for trade and return with goods from local stores. There were specific reasons for what happened to a frontier town, and these related directly to what went on around it. Town and hinterland were wedded to each other. Pioneers transported this connection across the mountains with towns themselves, much as other institutions and institutional relationships that made the trip through the Cumberland Gap and along the Wilderness Road, down the Ohio, or up the Mississippi. It was one of the paradoxes of the trans-Appalachian frontier experience that while three generations of families sought land and embraced the agrarian life as the avenue to wealth and independence, they needed towns. They recognized that towns performed certain necessary functions, and they used and supported them in spite of their occasional resentment of townspeople, who sometimes seemed superior in their economic, social, and cultural opportunities. Towns were functional. They reflected the immediate needs of the moment. The first priority of the new settlers on the transAppalachian frontier was physical security, so many of the first urban centers were military outposts. This was true of the French fur-trading villages; it was true of the Kentucky stations. In Kentucky and Tennessee, and later north of the Ohio, people came together for mutual protection and perhaps also for mutual reassurance in their struggle against a vast hostile landscape. Other settlement groups had different intentions. In 1788, the Ohio Company of Associates founded a town, Marietta, to serve as a center of company authority, and as a focus for school and church. This town would be the center of a community, orderly and law-abiding, a place with rules and system, in which the good of the settlers was directed toward a common goal. In this sense, Marietta reflected a century and a half of New En-

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gland towns, in which like-minded people came together to form communities with common ideals and a high degree of economic equality. By contrast, the Virginia settlers in the Northwest Territory established their own town of Chillicothe, reflecting their own vision of an orderly settlement. Here, the powerful institution of the county court served as referee among competing families and interest groups. The ancient French settlements in the Northwest Territory had their own towns: Vincennes, Kaskaskia, Cahokia, and Detroit. These were static communities of like-minded men and women, originally rooted in the heritage of the fur trade, now making the transition to agriculture. Lands were sometimes owned in common, and in a world of great open landscapes, land ownership had not been important. The residents of the town over generations were often the mixed-blood children of fur traders and Indian peoples. The arrival of the Americans and their legal system grounded in the doctrines of Sir William Blackstone threatened the world of these anciens habitants. The French towns remained the centers of church and society, but their economic livelihood was increasingly uncertain. In spite of their many contributions to life in the western country, towns did not spring spontaneously into life. In the hands of the arriving Anglo-Americans, they were the creations of ambitious promoters and speculators. These entrepreneurs planted and nurtured their urban centers like a farmer tending a crop of corn or cotton. If the hinterland called the frontier town into existence, then the town promoter served as interested midwife. He knew the factors that made for successful towns, and he did not wait for them to coalesce. Instead he took whatever steps were necessary to bring them about, naturally if possible, artificially if necessary. He knew full well the value of transportation routes. He recognized the importance of a government office or newspaper. Anyone with a semblance to title (or prospects of one) who would give free lots to the first few hardy settlers, cut their construction thirst with a barrel of whiskey, and trust to providence thereafter, could go into the town-building business. Many did. Most of these entrepreneurs went about it in a more organized way than Francis Baily’s friend. Advertising was the



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usual first step. Jacob Myers laid off a town on Slate Creek in Kentucky in 1788, for example, and his advertisement in the Kentucky Gazette emphasized the large streets and the “public ground, sufficient for Courthouse, Meeting house and Schoolhouse.” Everyone settled in the town on July 1, 1789, would be entitled to free in-and-out lots. Additional land might be purchased for cash or millstones, “and the balance in castings and bar iron.” Myers continued: The advantages of a Town with a public road through it to the Eastern states, and Navigable waters from it to the Ohio, must be obvious to every person. Those who wish to become settlers will please to meet me at Strodes station on monday the eighteenth inst. where I will attend with surveyor chain carriers &c. in order to proceed to the laying off said Town. As soon as a crop of corn is raised on said land, I will erect a Grist mill, and further intend, as soon as possible, to erect iron works and slitting mill on the waters of slate creek.3

Proprietors displayed varying degrees of endurance. Some sold their lots and hastily departed; others stayed to grow up with their creations. Special kinds of towns eventually appeared: towns in the lead-mining regions, towns in the northern lumber camps, towns established by communities of like-minded immigrant groups, some native and some foreign. In the first generation of the urban development on the trans-Appalachian frontier, however, most towns came into existence to meet the needs of a slowly expanding agricultural people. They reflected the capability, intelligence, good judgment, and luck of the founder. One of the most determined of the early town builders north of the Ohio was Bezaleel Wells, who laid out the town of Steubenville in 1797. His advertisement in the Pittsburgh Gazette emphasized that the town would be the seat of government for Jefferson County. He pointed out the availability of a sawmill close to the site and noted the abundance of materials for building construction. Wells also established two ferries across the Ohio to assist the growth of his village. Aside from his great manor house (the rival of Thomas Worthington’s as the great estates in the early Northwest Territory), the development

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of the town followed closely the usual form of the period: a tannery (1798, a second tannery in 1802), distillery (1798), gristmill and sawmill (1802), and, at the end of five years, a population of three hundred persons with several stores, a hotel, and a land office. The land office helped to make the town a center of immigration and commercial activity for northeastern Ohio. In order to continue this growth, Wells gave land for a courthouse, jail, and other county buildings at a nominal fee; he also contributed a lot for the city hall. This was a process repeated throughout the Northwest Territory in areas of immigration and growth, but not always with such success.4 After an opening period associated with stations and forts, towns adopted certain standard physical features and occupations. The changes may be said to date from the Treaty of Greenville, and the rapid expansion of settler families into the tracts opened by the treaty. Thereafter, the standardization would range across the western country: from Pittsburgh to Iowa City (Iowa), from Detroit to Blakeley (Alabama). The several parts of a town would include a dry goods store (or more than one) and the saloon (or “grocery”), the miller, the blacksmith, the wainwright, and eventually the schoolteacher and the minister of the gospel. Where the town was lucky enough to be a center of government, there were public buildings and public officials. Routes of transportation were never far distant from the well-ordered town. Roads, canals, and especially rivers and navigable streams of any and every kind became funnels through which people, supplies, and commodities moved. The central role played by transportation routes in urban development can be seen geographically and chronologically from Pittsburgh at the confluence of the Monongahela and Allegheny; to New Orleans at the mouth of the Mississippi; to Chicago at the foot of Lake Michigan; to Dubuque, Davenport, and Burlington on the west bank of the Mississippi River. Urban development on the cotton frontier differed in degree, for the plantation performed many of the services provided by towns north of the Ohio, but in the South the town was still an important center of government functions, economic enterprise, and professional services. The agricultural enterprise associated



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with large staple crops required assistance in the several economic transactions necessary to market cotton, rice, and sugar. So urban places (to use a generous term) in the South developed along watercourses, reflecting the passage of bulk crops downstream. More than in other sections, the southern frontier up to 1815 was marked by two remarkable urban centers: New Orleans and Natchez. In the North, by contrast, there were many towns, all very much alike.5 Over the three generations from 1775 to 1850 town planning (if such it could be called) on the frontier was remarkably similar in form. Planners—in most cases synonymous with founders and entrepreneurs—laid out their towns in a grid or checkerboard pattern. Throughout the frontier of the transAppalachian West the geometric pattern of towns was the same: rectangular blocks, streets in straight lines, and intersections at right angles. The reasons seem clear. Frontier planners did not seek beauty or innovation as much as the familiar. Gridiron plans were simple to understand, easy to survey, and readily enlarged as the town grew. John Reps, in his study of frontier towns, has observed that the patterns confirm that the primary purpose was not to establish communities but to sell lots.6 Within these frontier towns municipal services appeared slowly. Towns soon had government, but with occasional early exceptions (one thinks of the sense of community and authority associated with the foundation of Marietta), local residents did not want a strong government. They did not want to be told what to do; they did not wish to pay taxes to provide for unnecessary (in their eyes) services. They wished to be left alone to pursue economic advantage. So towns might tax to provide police protection, to create health inspections (where appropriate to the climate and locale), to regulate markets, and perhaps to provide a degree of improvements in streets and construction of bridges. Thus, at an early stage, most towns had paid constables (in part supported by fines against lawbreakers), and in the continuing tradition of frontier influence in economic life, among the most important municipal offices was that of supervisor of weights and measures, as towns sought to ensure a degree of integrity in the economic transactions within their limits. Towns

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characteristically did not provide a safe water supply, a fire department, a library, or poor relief. These services were seen as individual, or where absolutely necessary, as voluntary. Citizens would come forward and assist in meeting these needs without providing for them out of tax moneys. That the volunteer fire department was found everywhere gave recognition to a grave danger to town life if not strong protection from it. Schools fell in an intermediate condition. Depending on the residents and their antecedents, the town might organize and support a school. Or education might be left to individual families. These conditions were generally the rule across three generations on the trans-Appalachian frontier.7 Every aspiring town (and ambitious town promoter) needed one vital ingredient: a newspaper. Not all towns would become the site of a land office, a seat of government, or a landing place on a steamboat run. But all towns could have a newspaper, and all needed one. Changes in technology that provided for a moveable press, and a cadre of determined itinerant editors made such a connection possible. D. W. Meinig writes, “the footloose opportunistic newspaper editor-publisher was also common among this frontier throng.”8 The first job of any editor was to promote the town. The departure of an editor and his paper was tangible evidence of the strongest kind that the town was in trouble. Few editors and their papers would remain in a stagnant or declining town. Their services were in demand and immediately portable elsewhere. Among the most desirable prizes in the competition among towns was the designation as county seat. Territorial governors laid off counties, and each county was to have a seat of government. The selection turned out to be an endless struggle. First came the competition to be named county seat, then the continuing campaign to keep the prize, for the selection was not permanent. Shifts in population might reflect a shift in the location of the county seat. Meinig observes of this urban dimension: “the location of a county seat (an American term, first recorded in 1803) was regarded as a major geopolitical decision. This decreed focus, with its cluster of buildings and officers, was considered as certain to attract a host of other facilities and services



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that give that place a marked advantage over other aspiring towns, though in fact such limited political functions alone were not enough to sustain much of a town.” With such high stakes, the selection process was subject to intense pressure from local boosters and land speculators.9 In the period from 1775 to 1815 urbanization was a fragile thing. In truth, the numbers of people and streams of settlement were too thin to support many towns. The population was not sufficient to create a continuing demand for town services. Some growing urban centers, such as Cincinnati, Louisville, and St. Louis, gained size and strength as they solidified their positions as the entrepôts of a growing agricultural hinterland. New Orleans became a great port, or close to it, profiting from its location as the terminus of a trade that began on the upper waters of the Ohio, the Kentucky, the Cumberland, and the Tennessee. An occasional urban phenomenon such as Natchez remained an exception to almost every rule, both in its growth and in the quality of its life and people. Far more characteristic in size and services were villages such as Brookville (Indiana) and Shawneetown (Illinois). John Test, an energetic and ambitious lawyer, brought his wife to the Brookville settlement in 1808. He remembered that “it was with much difficulty that we made our way through a newly cut road, whose scarcely removed stumps formed [a] considerable barrier to our approach to our new residence. On each side of this road was an impenetrable wilderness, so dense, so dark, that the small specks of sunshine that pierced their way looked like stars glimmering in a dark lake.” After a long journey the party at last reached a log cabin settlement. Refreshed by the pause, Test’s wife suggested that they all go into the village for dinner at the hotel, apparently expecting accommodations like those that she had known in the East. Test explained, “She little dreamed we were in the very heart of the village, and that four or five cabins made up the number of its houses.” When informed of the true state of affairs, she burst into tears, for she was “accustomed to all the refinements and delicacies of life.” Her condition was not soothed by the arrival of sympathetic neighbors, “dressed in

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striped cotton of their own manufacturing coarse in the extreme and all barefooted.”10 Shawneetown came into existence to serve the early frontier trade in furs and the manufacture of salt. It grew to minister to and equip thousands of agricultural pioneers. Located on the north bank of the Ohio just downstream from the mouth of the Wabash, it was convenient to the considerable saline industry centered in springs a score of miles to the north. Shawneetown prospered with the price of salt (which remained high until 1815) and began to pick up some of the increasing trade in agricultural commodities that moved down the Ohio and Mississippi to New Orleans. A road laid out to the west connected Shawneetown with Kaskaskia and then St. Louis. In a period before the spread of steam power on the western waters, those who wished to transport goods or even baggage to St. Louis had to land at Shawneetown and proceed overland. As a port of entry, the town provided useful employment for those in the transportation business, renting, selling, servicing vehicles and animals for the trip west. In 1812 Congress established a federal land office at Shawneetown, assuring a clientele for trade and future employment for large numbers of lawyers. A town government emerged and levied taxes, designated a graveyard, put up a jail, and made plans for a stray pen. It became an important influence in the lives of the residents, especially with its authority for promoting improvements. When the legislature organized Gallatin County in 1812, Shawneetown was named the county seat, and three years later it acknowledged its new status with a courthouse.11 Shawneetown alternately prospered and suffered from the presence of the river. It was regularly inundated by the Ohio in the spring and endured severe fevers in the autumn. Even though located on the main route of travel west, the town did not grow much, and, like other frontier villages up and down the Ohio, it was not a thing of beauty. Travelers had nothing kind to say about its physical appearance, its hospitality, or the quality of its accommodations. Indeed the miscellany of people and buildings looked as if they had been left by recently receding



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floodwaters. The gentleman planter-politician from Louisiana, Thomas Bolling Robertson, landed at Shawneetown “on a lovely night, the moon shown bright but it could impart no beauty to the scene. Figure to yourself 40 log huts which you might take for large hen houses or small stables, strung along the banks for half a mile and you will form a correct idea of Shawneetown. It is overflowed every year the inhabitants driven back to the hills about a mile and the buildings such as are worth it made fast to trees & stumps.”12 Yet for all the slighting comments about it, Shawneetown was the most important urban center on the Ohio between Louisville and St. Louis. If anything, its growth picked up after 1815, with the economic impact of the Great Migration. The influx of travelers brought a demand for accommodations. Taverns, inns, and even hotels appeared in response. Skilled tradesmen also set up shops: the presence of saddle and harness makers, hatters, tailors, watchmakers, cabinetmakers, and specialists in eyeglasses attested to the town’s importance. As the inflated prices of salt fell with the end of the war, the land business increased and the town became a banking center. Chartered in 1816 at an early period of banking mania, the Shawneetown Bank became a symbol of the town’s prosperity and permanence. And so it continued, as long as speculation in land and banking currency continued. With the panic of 1819 and the slowing of the Great Migration, the town stagnated and watched immigration and urban growth pass to other towns farther to the interior.13 In this first generation of towns in the trans-Appalachian West, certain common qualities and characteristics appeared. Almost without exception, they clung to waterways. As water was the easiest route of transportation, especially for those moving down the Ohio and thence up its tributaries, ambitious town-site promoters laid out their future trading centers and county seats along navigable streams. Inland, urban inventions had a harder struggle and remained smaller. From the opening of the century, the issue of the location of the county seat assumed an intensity second only to the question of a water location. But the issue of the county seat had a different dynamic: it would be decided by human rather than natural influences.

VILLAGES, TOWNS, AND CITIES ACROSS WESTERN COUNTRY

Seemingly beyond the influence of local entrepreneurial talents, leadership in government and civic affairs, and the vagaries of nature, one urban center dominated the transAppalachian frontier, at least until 1815. Its influence was the more remarkable as its access was disputed for twenty years, until it became a part of the American nation in 1803. New Orleans was the mouth of the funnel through which drained the growing trade of the trans-Appalachian frontier as well as some of the longer-settled areas. In 1804, the new American governor William C. C. Claiborne called it “a great and growing city.” He went on, “The commerce of the Western Country concentrates at this place, and there appears to me a moral certainty, that in ten years, it will rival Philadelphia or New York.” He was right. In spite of swamps and floods the city’s location was strategic and made it the most important urban center on the transAppalachian frontier. For prosperity, New Orleans needed a strong trade from the interior. The opening of the Mississippi to American trade in 1795 and, to an even greater degree, the sale of Louisiana territory to the United States in 1803 assured its future importance. Although it had been continuously occupied since 1718, New Orleans had assumed a variety of shapes and sizes in the intervening three generations. Fires had leveled the city as recently as 1788 and 1794. Viewing the newly rebuilt city in 1804, one observer called it “a cluster of clumsy irregular looking wooden Houses . . . without a solitary decent looking building to relieve the prospect; the levee covered with all the filthy ordure of the City.” Thomas Nicholls, the author of that description, might have excepted the New Cabildo from his general indictment of the city’s architecture, but he was right about the odor. The city was filled with the smells of the river, the vapors of the surrounding swamps, and the remainders of the most recent floodwaters, and it lacked sanitary facilities adequate to clean up the mess.14 Along with the stench of decay came the unmistakable smell of profits. The waterfront was a hive of activity. Already the wharves were piled high with the agricultural products of the interior: hogsheads of tobacco from Kentucky, flour from the Miami River Valley by way of Cincinnati, furs and lead from



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Missouri and the Illinois country, bales of cotton from the Natchez region, sugar and indigo from the adjacent plantations, lumber (long a staple export of Louisiana), all awaiting shipment to the distant corners of the world, not to mention the foodstuffs and provisions that had to be imported to feed the city and nearby plantations. Hogs, corn, and wheat from the Ohio Valley were there in large quantities. Stacked side by side with these were the imported luxury goods from Europe, destined for the plantations upriver, especially those in the Natchez region. At intervals there stood or squatted bands of black slaves, sold or awaiting sale, their final destinations the fields and forests upriver. European war, American peace, and the settlement of the backcountry would multiply these exports and imports, which in turn would nurture numerous fortunes for the large planters, merchants, shipowners, bankers, and Yankee financiers.15 The surge of movement to the trans-Appalachian frontier after the Treaty of Ghent (1814) known as the First Great Migration ushered in a new period of urban development. Among the most thriving crops planted in the western country after 1815 were town sites. Small urban centers sprang up like Indian corn, almost as widespread and rapidly growing. Newspapers were filled with announcements of their births, although few public notices could be found of their deaths. Like the towns on the earlier trans-Appalachian frontier, they were the creation of no spontaneous demand, but, in most cases, the carefully contrived creatures of promoters, and they often grew very rapidly. One frontier editor wrote of a new town that it would “spring up like others of our western cities, out of the woods, and will in all probability like many of them, be visited by the steamboat, before the stumps of the forest have disappeared from its streets.”16 If they were rich with promise, the new towns were also raw. Timothy Flint, a traveler who saw much of the western country after 1815, described an Indiana town in these terms: “The deep and rich bottom, the trees of which had but just been cut down, was so muddy, that my feet sank at every step in the mud. Huge beech and sycamore trunks of trees so impeded these avenues and streets, that were to be, that I doubt if a chaise could have

VILLAGES, TOWNS, AND CITIES ACROSS WESTERN COUNTRY

made its way, by day light and the most careful driving, amidst the logs.”17 A town founded after 1815 fell generally into one of three categories: it might be specifically laid out as a center of government, state, territory, or county; it might be established as a service center for immigrants on the way west; or it might be a small community of like-minded peoples, held together by family ties. The most successful of the government towns in the Old Northwest was Indianapolis. Judge Finch remembered people settling on the site of the future capital in 1820. The next year the commissioners laid out the town on an expanse of trees and underbrush. Andrew TenBrook found a single two-story house there in 1822. The population in 1823, according to one account, consisted of about ninety families. With the usual optimism of the day, one editor declared the village to be “in a rapid state of improvements: and as much can be said in favor of the morality and industry of its inhabitants, as of any other town in the state.” More to the point were the agricultural attractions of surrounding Marion County and the large number of mills: “Four saw mills in operation in the county, three of which are within less than a mile and a half of town—There are also two grist mills within the same distance, and several more grist and saw mills are now building, together with carding machines, etc.” The establishment of an Indianapolis newspaper in late 1823 provided a medium for endless reports of progress and growth. The editor praised “the rapid expansion of inhabited territory, and the great increase of population,” which “will of course produce more business every year.” When the Indiana Journal wrote these words the town had been established for three and a half years. On March 7, 1826, the population of the town was reported as 760; a year later, about 1,000. A description of Indianapolis in 1827 noted: “There are now 25 brick, 60 frame, and about 80 hewn log homes and cabins in town. The public buildings are, a Court House, 60 feet by 45, a Jail, and Meeting Houses belonging to the Presbyterian, Baptist, and Methodist societies.”18 Improvements continued with immigration, especially in the fall season, when most people moved. In 1828 the town was officially seven years old. Stumps still dotted the



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streets, but like much of agricultural Indiana and the New Purchase, Indianapolis was no longer a raw frontier settlement. Isaiah Osborn described it to his brother: “The place begins to look like a town. There are about a thousand acres cut smooth, ten stores, six taverns, a court house which cost $15,000, many fine houses, and six weeks back had in it 1,006 inhabitants, lots worth $100 and the place somewhat sickly but improving.”19 Indianapolis was a creation of the state legislature, a happy accident of geography—a capital must be centrally located—for those who profited. Other towns had a less assured future, although they were no less the product of geographic considerations. They might be natural, an attractive site on a navigable river; or created, the center of a new county and a likely site for the location of the county seat. In the interim the new town could become a base for immigrants, who always needed advice and supplies. Crawfordsville (Indiana), laid out in 1822, served as a focal point for people headed to the Wabash country. Here were the goods and services for an immigrant people. After the first land sale, settlers came in great numbers. “Fresh arrivals of movers were the constant topics of conversation,” an early schoolmaster remembered. “New log cabins widened the limits of the town, and spread over the circumjacent country.” Crawfordsville and its supporters waxed fat and happy on the flood tide of immigration. Within a year the town had a federal land office, a tavern “in a two story log house,” “a little grocery,” two retail stores, two physicians, one lawyer, two cabinet shops, a tannery, and a blacksmith. The town was named the county seat of Montgomery County. The excitement of early growth was long remembered, although time may have dulled the sore muscles and physical exhaustion that accompanied taming the new country. The schoolmaster recalled the new country with delight: “We cleared land, rolled logs, and burned brush, blazed out paths from one neighbor’s cabin to another, and from one settlement to another—made and used handbills and hominy mortars—hunted deer, turkeys, otter, and raccoons—caught fish, dug ginseng, hunted bees, and the like, and lived on the fat of the land.”20 The mass immigration of people after 1815 moved farther inland in a series of reflexive spasms, like expanding waves of an

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incoming tide. Success and growth begat competition. Soon Crawfordsville and the immigrant towns of the North and West like it had their competitors: newer towns, rawer, stumps higher in the streets, log cabins without false fronts, and immense forests on both sides. But they were closer to the expanding settlements. As the new towns grew, urban centers that had earlier experienced explosive growth or others that had long served as entrepôts on a former frontier now stagnated and even lost population. With the opening of the New Purchase and its rapid occupation, the old urban centers such as Brookville, Princeton, Corydon, and even Vincennes seemed to stand still. In the midst of prosperity and movement, the impulse to growth and “progress” had passed farther to the interior. In time these new interior towns suffered a similar fate. In January 1826, the Indiana legislature laid off Tippecanoe County, and commissioners located the county seat at a new village called Lafayette. If the inhabitants of the new county “were like angels’ visits, ‘few and far between,’ ” it did not long remain so. Lafayette now began a period of substantial growth, gradually outstripping its rivals to the south in pace of improvements. Within three years, hard on the heels of Lafayette, came Logansport, founded in 1828 and made the seat of Cass County in 1829. The proprietors of Logansport saw the torch of progress passed to them. In 1828 the little village “situated as it then was, in the heart of the Indian country, almost, we may say, 40 miles from the settlement” saw great physical growth; the next year more than forty buildings were constructed, including four of brick—one of them, designed as a Masonic hall, twenty-five by fifty feet. The Logansport Potawatomie and Miami Times summarized the impulse of progress to which it was now the local heir: the New Purchase, opened in 1818, had 100,000 inhabitants, twenty-two counties, and forty towns with a population of 800–1,200. It concluded, “The backwoods may well be said to be receding.”21 A third kind of urban growth was associated with innumerable small towns that were almost family communities. An example was the village of New Salem, located twenty miles north and west of Springfield (Illinois). New Salem was the village of the Rutledge and Camron families, who came to the Sangamon country in 1825 or 1826. They entered lands on the Sangamon



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River in 1828 and there established the first mill. Settlers came from miles around to get their corn ground into rough flour, and the village grew up around the mill. And, of course, where people appeared in numbers, there also came others who wished to cater to their needs. A store opened in 1829; soon thereafter, a grocery, to meet the thirst of country men who had come to trade. The same year a post office opened, giving the town a kind of official status. It grew slowly, with the addition of new family groups and the traditional trades.22 Little distinguished it from a score of other frontier villages that met the needs of the surrounding countryside; similar small towns provided the urban experience of large numbers of people in the transAppalachian West. To bring order to the little villages that grew up as a result of the Great Migration, town governments were organized and a series of ordinances passed that tended to be similar throughout the trans-Appalachian West, at least in terms of the problems they dealt with. First order of priority was to prevent the discharge of firearms and stop racing of horses within the town limits; there was to be no fighting or rioting; shortly thereafter people were directed to keep pigs off the streets, establish market days, and remove piles of dirt, lumber, manure, and “dead or putrid” animal carcasses. Whether the villages organized sooner or later after their settlement, and whether the surrounding countryside was crowded or deserted, the ordinances were virtually interchangeable. Some were concerned with preservation of order; others were directed toward health and sanitation (a new area of interest on the trans-Appalachian frontier and indeed in the nation as a whole); a third group might be loosely defined as directed to civic improvements. The regulation of the economy in terms of the market, its location, and its functioning and hours, as well as control of weights and measures, was often extensive. Those associated with urban centers on the transAppalachian frontier after 1815, whether as residents or farmers who patronized towns, felt the impact of town government.23 The cotton frontier had its own urban development. Within the common denominator of new people making new settle-

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ments, life on the cotton frontier (even in its formative period) had a different rhythm. The expansion of cotton culture reflected the need for special kinds of services. Among the striking features was the appearance of large-scale agriculture, with large landholdings, commercial economy with an export cash crop, and a large slave labor force. The plantation had different economic needs from northern towns and produced a relatively self-sufficient society. On the plantation social intercourse involved visits, dances, and dinners with the owners of nearby plantations rather than participation in those institutions associated with the rise of towns and concentration of population— churches, schools, public lectures, theatricals, and public libraries. Yet even the largest and most prosperous plantations were associated with urban areas because only in such centers could their economic needs and desires for stability be met. The economic needs of plantations were those of large cotton exporters and closely tied them to major ports rather than country towns, for only a New Orleans or Mobile could ship bulk cotton to Europe or to the northeast in this period, provide long-term credit on the basis of cotton receipts, serve as a center for importing luxury goods—more than just the “fresh goods” advertised in country newspapers—and negotiate for a transoceanic trading economy. Quantities of corn, pork, whiskey, cotton goods, machinery, and other manufactured items might come down the Mississippi River from the Ohio Valley, sometimes directly to the plantation, sometimes through the small market towns (often county seats), and, in the case of Louisiana at least, by way of New Orleans. The Great Migration of postwar America and the attendant rise of cotton culture changed New Orleans from a bustling, growing city into one of the great ports of the world. Similarly the expansion of settlement in its river hinterland transformed Mobile from a sleepy Spanish town to a thriving port. Like its Louisiana counterpart, it owed growth to the new Indian cessions in Alabama. These cities were old and well established. Not so well known was the effort of others to break their monopoly. Among the towns that tried was Blakeley (incorporated 1814), a small but ambitious port on the northeastern corner of



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Mobile Bay. In the period immediately after 1815, with the great migration to Alabama under way, many thought that Blakeley might replace Mobile as the principal Alabama port. Blakeley was a new town constructed to meet a commercial need, or, more properly, to capitalize on the prosperity of the cotton frontier. Its rise coincided with the territory’s, “the tide of emigration into the Alabama, irresistible, as the full and majestic waters of her own great streams.” To these new arrivals the town offered its “advantages”: [O]ur immediate connexion with the seaboard, and the ease with which the abundant production of our rich and fertile soil can be sent to the great marts of trade in any quantities of the world, the great staple articles of commerce which our Territory produces, more especially the article of Cotton . . . ; and our advantage for vast improvement in the extension and facilities of trade, point out the ALABAMA TERRITORY as the abode of future wealth, happiness and grandeur.

The heart of the town was commerce: the importation of goods for upriver consumption; export of cotton to the northeast and Europe. Central to this interest was the ship traffic, the arteries of Blakeley’s lifeblood. The “full and correct report of all arrival and departure of vessels” was a necessary duty of the local paper, and the “Marine List” ran for column after column. Construction of small boats for the coastal and river trade promised not only enlarged trade but also industry. The launching of the steamboat Tensa in the spring of 1819, “intended to ply on the Tombigbee, Alabama and Coosa rivers,” provided the Blakeley editor with a chance to discourse on the disadvantages of barge traffic (“mighty uncertainty”) and the need for small steamboats to get far upriver. The commercial activity of late 1818 and early 1819—coinciding with the most prosperous cotton prices—seemed to justify the town’s expectations. Ships from Boston, New York, and New Orleans (most of them by way of Mobile) were docked at the wharves. Commodities unloaded from these were much like those for any frontier village, except for the large quantities and varieties of spirits (rum, gin, brandy,

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cordials, ale). From Boston came cranberries, kegs of mackerel and salmon, Irish potatoes, and casks of cheese; from New York, “Spanish Segars,” medicines and soaps, buckshot and musket balls, anvils, vises, and nails. And almost everywhere merchants had posted the notice “Cash paid for COTTON.” Blakeley’s busy wharves and large warehouses suffered severely from the drop in prices that began in 1819 and the subsequent depression of agriculture. The town never realized its ambition to overtake Mobile, and this thriving urban center went into decline and eventually vanished from the map altogether.24 Alexandria (Louisiana) was a well-established interior town, located on the Red River, the commercial center for a growing agricultural hinterland. Founded after 1805 and chartered in 1818, Alexandria was the head of navigation on the Red River from July to January every year. Thus, for six months, it was the outfitting and staging town for risky but profitable steamboat trips upriver to ambitious and more remote villages such as Natchitoches. For the other half-year, low water forced all commercial traffic to stop at its wharves. Alexandria’s extensive hinterland had flatlands for cotton cultivation and hill country for grazing.25 There was no doubt, however, where the economic interests of the town lay, at least in the period of the Great Migration. Under the heading “COTTON,” the Louisiana Herald described it in these terms: “There is, probably, no word in the English language that excites more interest in this part of the world, than the word COTTON; for if we except the weather and the enquiry for the news, it forms the primary subject of conversation in all companies; it occupies the thoughts by night and by day, and no doubt many pleasing dreams of wealth employ the midnight hour, arising from anticipating the sale of this staple commodity.” News of cotton prices and steamboats dominated public interest. Several steamboats from New Orleans made regular calls, generally with cargoes of foodstuffs, “flour, bacon, lard, pork, butter, cheese, &c.” Hard times on the cotton frontier came to Alexandria in the 1820s. Ambitious planters had purchased land and slaves on credit. New Orleans moneylenders had lent large sums in the parish, at interest of 10 to 30 percent.



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In the early 1820s, the sheriff sold several properties to satisfy debts, and strong feelings against New Orleans creditors surfaced. The cases of debtors filled the docket of the district court.26 Much of the care and attention of the town centered on its self-improvement in easily definable and practical ways. Citizens of the village elected a board of trustees in 1820, and thereafter the board closely managed town affairs. It placed a tax on freehold estates, suppressed gaming, taxed billiard tables, and regulated the marketing of produce by requiring that all goods be sold in a public market. Eventually the trustees extended this same broad control over draymen—whose fees they set—and appointed an overseer of the town streets (like overseers in rural road districts) and night watchmen. By 1824 elected town officials included a tax collector, three assessors, and five fire wardens. Every effort was made to preserve order. The court hanged two men on the basis of “presumptive evidence; which was doubtless strong and well connected.” The victims asserted their innocence to the end. Leading citizens urged that the town clean out the riffraff and idlers, both men and women, “who are able to work, that have neither trade, profession or property and live idly and frequent grog shops, gambling houses &c &c.” Rapides Parish demanded the attention of its “civil officers . . . in ferreting out the idle and abandoned—it is peculiarly exposed to the machinations of negro stealers, horse thieves and others of the corps des chevaliers d’industri.”27 The expansionist years of the cotton frontier also witnessed the founding and rapid growth of a series of new towns. These sprouted in the newly opened Indian cessions of the postwar period. Several appeared in central Alabama, in that area later known as the Black Belt. Selma (settled in 1816), Montgomery (1817), and Marion (1817) had similar experiences. To begin with, each was a county seat—Montgomery did not become the state capital until 1846—and so assured of serving as the political, administrative, economic, and eventually social center of an agricultural area. Each town began as a town-site speculation, located on a waterway. Each underwent the traditional physical changes as a clearing emerged in the forests: promoters laid off

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and sold lots, the first arrivals built log cabins, businesses and services associated with towns appeared. All three towns were closely associated with the cotton culture. Growth was steady by the early 1820s. More permanent buildings went up, and the black and white population increased. The towns became the center of a society that engaged in large-scale cotton cultivation with slave labor. The pioneers engaged in this process needed an orderly society, and their towns had the institutions to establish and keep order. The period of experimentation in institutions had taken place somewhere else at an earlier stage. By this time settlers knew what they wanted. There was much emphasis on preserving the peace. Stringent local regulations, curfews, and nightly patrols completely controlled the slave population. The excesses of the towns came rather from the gentry: gambling, horse races, confrontations over honor. That men were quick to take personal affront and resort to physical violence did not seem to them to contradict their quest for order. The cultural development was also that associated with economic wealth: private schools, theatricals, and literary clubs. As the rich agricultural hinterland provided support for large numbers of professional people, these towns attracted many doctors and lawyers.28 The emergence of towns within the framework of emerging cotton culture is best examined in the fertile landscape of Mississippi. Natchez pioneered in the development of cotton as a commercial crop. In the years after 1815, the banks of the Mississippi River became a focal point for the spread of cotton as a commercial crop. The story of villages and towns that became a necessary part of the frontier of the South had its origins in the common denominators that united the establishment of towns, North and South: “Southern villages and towns grew out of the countryside that surrounded them. They were as much a part of Southern society as the farm and plantation.” Christopher Morris goes on to observe that the urban South was different from its northern counterpart: “An economy rooted in agriculture, a low population density, and an attachment to slavery that prevented the development of a consumer market and a manufacturing



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sector left the South with fewer and smaller cities and towns than in the free states.” Throughout much of the settling South, “function more than geography distinguished urban from rural in the Southern states, where urban places consisted essentially of small clusters of households. Their inhabitants made a living in the some way other than by farming, usually by offering marketing or manufacturing services to rural farm households.”29 The most successful new town was Vicksburg, marked off in a grid in 1819. Newit Vick, the founding father, laid off lots for the new town from his plantation. Unlike other town sites in the county, “Lots in the new town of Vicksburg sold quickly. The spread of cotton plantations into the interior of the county, and into the interior of the state after the Choctaw Indian land cession of 1820, had created an urgent need for a commercial entrepôt on the Mississippi River.” The site was important. The rising bluff protected the town from seasonal flooding. “More important, that location was the closest accessible point on the river for the inhabitants of newly settled regions to the northeast.” Timing was also crucial. “Until the 1820 Choctaw cession and the development of cotton agriculture in the interior of the state, the farm households around Walnut Hills could support only a village, and Warrenton, with its more central location within the most settled regions of the county, was the larger and more important urban place.” In the space of a decade, on the strength of this large hinterland, Vicksburg “rose from wilderness to commercial center second in the state only to Natchez.” In the mid-1830s, merchants and factors shipped thirty thousand bales of cotton by river boats docked at Vicksburg’s wharves. As Vicksburg grew and prospered, lawyers, merchants, and mechanics left Warrenton. Then county voters moved the county seat. “By the mid-1840s, Vicksburg not only provided access to national and world markets, but had become a market in its own right.”30 The rise of Vicksburg reflected the patterns of southern urbanization in the age of cotton. The town was the center of commerce for a hinterland that stretched deep into the Delta. The farmers and planters in the interior sold cotton and bought goods and supplies through the merchant or factor in the town.

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These middlemen had connections to New Orleans firms. They sometimes offered credit or cash advances in exchange for the promise of cotton at harvest time. At the same time, the wealthiest planters, with their own river frontage, continued to deal directly with the commission houses of New Orleans. As Vicksburg matured, it increasingly assumed the character of an urban center rather than simply that of a larger small town. It was economically dependent on the countryside, but its residents assumed an urban character. As Morris writes, “urban society became more distinct from the rural neighborhoods that surrounded it. Economic ties to the countryside notwithstanding, by the 1850s, Vicksburg residents lived in a place apart from the countryside.” What is remarkable is not that the change happened but that it took so long. The lengthy apprenticeship as a small town reflected the lasting influence of cotton and the rhythm of southern rural life in this first generation of the flowering of the cotton frontier.31 A discussion of the emergence of towns on the new settlement patterns in the South raises another difference. The villages and towns of the cotton frontier (large planters and small farmers) remained closely tied to the countryside around them. More than tied, they remained dependent, for this was a determinedly agricultural world. North of the Ohio River, a different pattern developed within which villages turned into towns and towns transformed themselves into small cities. These small cities, places such as Cincinnati, St. Louis, and later Chicago, even smaller places like Steubenville and Chillicothe, developed a diversified economy, including manufacturing and processing, which made them more than simply trading entrepôts. And this expansion of economic services produced a parallel expansion in the varieties of residents. With the exception of New Orleans, southern towns did not take this next step.32 In sharp contrast to the similarities among the urban centers of the cotton frontier were the varieties of Florida, where the sectional nature of the territory, the diversity of geography, and vast distances gave rise to a wide variety of urban experiences. First there were three urban centers: St. Augustine, with its



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Spanish heritage, trying to adjust to the arrival of the Americans, becoming increasingly dependent on trade to the north; Pensacola, with its great harbor and slow growth, the patient wait for an elusive stimulus, always just beyond the horizon, now to be brought on by railroads, now by the federal government, now perhaps the lumber industry or tourism; and, finally, the new town, Tallahassee, the artificial creation to serve government and, as it turned out, the market and social center of prosperous staple plantation agriculture. To the distant south, Key West was a tropical port whose greatest formative influences were disease and the salvage business. Both boomed in this period, and Key West went its own way to its own kind of success. Added to these were a wonderful variety of other towns. Apalachicola, a vigorous port on the Gulf, was typical of so many villages that rose in response to the demands of cotton cultivation. At the outlet of a large river system, Apalachicola experienced a steady growth and a seasonal cycle of business typical of such port cities. Others were more exotic. St. Marks was one of the first railroad towns in the country. And, of course, there was St. Joseph, the entrepreneurial marvel of the age. The child of a feud over land titles, St. Joseph became the fastest-growing urban center of the Southeast. It created railroads, hosted the Constitutional Convention of 1839, and succumbed to natural and economic storms with the same intensity with which it lived. This was a variety of urban centers unmatched anywhere on the continent at the time. The great surge of energy that ushered in the last generation of large-scale movement on the trans-Appalachian frontier produced much urban development. A national mania for speculation in real estate characterized the mid-1830s, and Michigan was the greatest center of the speculative art in the western country. Newspapers displayed the endless opportunities of the day. As everywhere on the trans-Appalachian frontier, city lots, it seemed, were more common than corn and wheat. Every inlet on either of the two lakes, every promontory on the two roads running east and west, the falls of every river leading inland,

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every prospective county seat, or indeed any vacant field, all were prospective town sites. The proprietor needed a smooth tongue, a suitable location, and the help of a number of urban fixtures—a mill and a hotel, a few stores, plus artisans and mechanics to serve the farmers from the countryside—to begin the village’s career. W. Forbes talked of building mills on his property in Allegan County (Michigan)—not to assist farmers in the surrounding countryside but as a real estate speculation. He wrote: After these mills are a going and a blacksmith and a carpenter shop established this will form the nucleus or a beginning of a village and then my property would rise from the value of 3 Dollars p. acre to that of $100 or more as in many similar instances in this country, such a thing requires only a beginning and some natural advantages, and a proper range of country around it. I know ground bought 4 years ago for 1–1/4 $ now will sell for 100.

Thousands of others shared Forbes’s vision. Agriculture was the road to independence, but it meant a lifetime of backbreaking physical labor. The way to a life of wealth and leisure lay through the manipulation of paper: banks, town building, and railroads. All these devices flowered in the heady days of the mid-1830s; all were found on the frontier; all were associated with urban development.33 Of the urban centers associated with the period 1830 to 1850, one stands as dominant, both in the speed of its growth and in its impact on a large portion of the trans-Appalachian frontier. Chicago was, as late as 1830, a fur-trading post where hogs ran at large in the streets. It was a curious beginning for a city that would become a dominant urban influence within twenty years. The site was a harbor. William Cronon writes of this location: “It nonetheless had two great virtues. One was its harbor: bad as it might be, it was still the best available on the southern shore of Lake Michigan in the 250 miles between St. Joseph, Michigan, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin.” Then, there was a second consideration: “Equally important was the river’s nearness to the



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divide between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi watersheds.” Never in the history of the western country has such a small and seemingly insignificant river as the Chicago carried such influence for the future. For a canal dug across the intervening glacial moraine would connect ships originating in New York (via the Erie Canal) with New Orleans (at the end of the Mississippi).34 With the close of the Black Hawk War, Chicago began to grow, responding to the settlement of western Illinois and southern Wisconsin. Then, federal commissioners concluded a treaty in 1833 with the Potawatomis in which that tribe ceded five million acres in northeastern Illinois and southeastern Wisconsin. This document guaranteed the opening up of a vast tract of the Chicago hinterland. As D. W. Meinig writes, “The city near the southern end of Lake Michigan became the greatest boom town of them all—the wonder child of urban America, for several decades the fastest growing city on earth.”35 The dreams of boosters and speculators expanded beyond imagination and reason, driven by the surge in movement and investment associated with the Second Great Migration. By 1836, Chicago had become the epitome of urban growth and speculation, and real estate changed hands with a single-minded frenzy as fortunes were made and lost within hours. It came to symbolize the ultimate in urban development.36 Chicago combined access to water transportation on the lakes and, by easy portage, to the rivers of the interior with a location that would make it the center of railroad networks. Its location and leadership were such that it made the transition from the steamboat to the railroad with uninterrupted growth. Its success was quickly visible within the limits of the expanding town in the process of transformation into a city. Of greater importance for the expanding agricultural frontier than the question of speculation was the impact of Chicago on the surrounding countryside. It quickly became the commercial center. For the first few years commercial transactions were predominantly in one direction: toward the new western settlements. In 1836, for example, Chicago’s imports were valued at $325,203, its exports at a mere $1,000. It took time for the hinterland so recently settled

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to produce crops for trade. Wheat was first exported in 1839, and grain rapidly became the principal export commodity. By 1841 the wheat surplus was so large that not enough vessels could be found for its shipment. Wheat-laden wagons struggling into the city over poor roads made worse by heavy traffic became a daily sight. Sometimes the lines were eighty wagons long. The growth of this trade in the middle of a depression was truly astonishing and touched hoteliers, farmers, and merchants, who found a ready market for their goods and services. The rise of Chicago’s trade was one of the most dramatic features of the transformation of the new West in this period. In 1845, Chicago’s imports exceeded $2 million; its exports, more than $1.5 million.37 There was only one Chicago, but the word “town” encompassed a wide variety of activity on the frontier. The so-called towns that appeared in the 1830s ranged from the large and respectable to developments that were more urban in name than in reality. In 1837, for example, fourteen “towns” were identified in Peoria County (Illinois). Peoria itself had about three hundred houses and a population of 1,900; all in all, it was a substantial village on the Illinois River. But other urban centers and their improvements included Alliton, “1 house and ferry”; Kickapoo, “1 house”; Hudson, “ferry house”; Kingston, “1 house”; Harkness, “4 or 5 houses”; and others at a similar stage of development.38 Granted that decentralized conditions and difficulties of transportation—three to five miles was obviously a far distance for someone on foot or horseback or by wagon—encouraged the establishment of a great many towns, but these little places were hardly more than sites on the prairie, established presumably with the expectation that the accidents of future patterns of settlement would make them into something permanent. The settlement of the last frontier of the Old Northwest provided a new dimension in the form of a wider range of economic activity. New economic enterprises appeared, and, for each, a new form of urban development. Galena (Illinois), Mineral Point (Wisconsin), and Dubuque (Iowa) all began with lead mining. Galena, like the others, reached a high degree of urbanization because of the nature of the economic enterprise that it served: a



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large concentration of population producing a commodity that offered opportunities for affluence but at the same time demanded good transportation facilities to move a bulk cargo. Galena emphasized its connection with river transportation, and the local newspapers regularly published a “Marine List.” By 1830 the spring traffic was heavy enough for several steamboat arrivals and departures each week. Arriving steamboats brought foodstuffs (dried fruit, flour, green apples, bacon, pork, and sardines) and departed carrying lead to St. Louis.39 These were not the only urban centers associated with lead mining, merely the largest. Smaller towns grew up in the “diggings” to meet more local needs. Later, in the decade of the 1840s, similarly specialized towns appeared around lumbering operations. Located at the falls of streams that provided the waterpower to run the sawmills, they had their own special characteristics to match the specialized nature of the economic enterprise that they served.40 Movement of large numbers of people to the western side of the Mississippi River, especially after the conclusion of the Black Hawk War in 1832 and the subsequent land cession in Iowa, led to the establishment of a number of towns on the Iowa side of the river: Dubuque, which served the lead-mining business; others of lasting importance, such as Davenport and Burlington; and some of a more passing fancy, still the wonders of that age and of great promise for the future, places such as Lyons, Buffalo, and Montrose. The Mississippi River was a unifying force in the establishment of all of them. Keokuk and Montrose depended on the rapids; another set of navigation obstacles served Davenport and Le Claire. The proprietors built their towns on a narrow floodplain, with the bluffs of the river valley hemming them in and thus exposing them to floods. Ferries were an early form of economic activity, for the river served not only as an avenue of trade but also as an obstacle to movement overland. To the west lay the great prairies of Iowa. Dubuque’s avenue to the interior was steep and precipitous; Davenport’s characterized by the gradual ascent. In every case the motive of town founding was profit, but in the source of that profit these towns varied enormously. Dubuque lay adjacent to the lead outcroppings. Davenport appeared on the site of a former Indian trading post. Antoine Le Claire, the interpreter after whom the town was

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named, had clear title to two sections of land given him for services in treaty negotiations. Towns differed greatly in their development, too. Some stagnated and failed, at least in the long run. Others prospered from unexpected sources. For example, Davenport became a resort center for those coming north to escape the heat and disease of the southern summers; Dubuque and Burlington benefited from the establishment of federal land offices; and several towns profited from the arrival of railroads in the 1850s, including Davenport, Burlington, and Dubuque. A town on the river in 1860 without the prospect of a railroad was virtually doomed. The services provided by these towns generally responded to the growth of the countryside and agriculture. Most towns rapidly passed through the early stage of a few houses, with mills, hotels, and ferries, and moved on to a newer stage as suppliers and marketers for those in the interior, selling building materials, machinery, and foodstuffs, and marketing grains and meat downriver, and, with the arrival of railroads, in Chicago.41 Town building in the 1840s changed, partly the result of the slowed growth of the economy generally and partly the result of changing geography, for the settlements that moved toward the center of Iowa edged farther and farther out onto the prairies. Most of the new towns were still located on sizable streams. They were also determinedly agricultural, as the settlement of Iowa was preeminently an agricultural experience. The towns in Wapello County provide a good example. Ottumwa and nearby Eddyville grew in response to the needs for economic and institutional development. Although Ottumwa was located on the Des Moines River, the river was never an important artery to the interior, and not until the arrival of the railroad in 1859 did the town grow rapidly. It provided the services that the expanding agricultural population demanded and also served as the center of the professional classes—doctors, lawyers, merchants, and millers—who would provide the leadership for the county. Ottumwa was only one of many county seats that appeared and prospered with the expansion of settlement into Iowa.42 Inland from the Mississippi and beyond the dominant force of water transportation, a series of prairie towns sprang up in the wake of westward settlement. These were also economic in



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focus. Tipton (Iowa), the county seat of Cedar County, is a good example. Ebenezer Alden, Congregational minister, was a witness to (and indeed a participant in) the urban growth of a part of eastern Iowa. Alden originally settled in Solon (Johnson County) in 1844. Of this town, he wrote: “Solon was ‘staked out’ for a town but it never certainly was named after its proprietors. By a town we mean here a little plat of ground, divided up into lots, laid out by authority of the legislature. The lots in Solon were bid off but never paid for and the town stakes will this winter be pulled up.” Alden also pulled up his stakes. He moved to Tipton, then the center of an agricultural community located on an attractive prairie. The town was three years old and contained “12 to 15 frame houses painted white, 3 lawyers, 1 physician etc.” Tipton was “a right smart place” in the summertime, according to Alden. The progress of urban growth was from east to west, largely along the lines of length of settlement, or so Alden described it. Burlington, he wrote, “is in advance of what it is here. More frame houses & barns. In the n. part of Johnson County I know of but 4 frame houses.” People in Tipton had a sufficiency, if not the luxury associated with Iowa City. Already a sense of difference between town and country had appeared. “As to hardships those who live in Bloomington, Iowa City, are like city folks everywhere, a ‘little stuck up’ above the country people.” In late 1844 Alden described the character of Tipton and its people in these terms: In the towns there is a great deal of extravagance in dress, just as there is in their suppers when they have a party. You can see all kinds of dress in Cedar County even. The Scotch plaid thrown over the shoulders, Eastern ladies dressed well enough not to attract attention in any congregation and hoosier bonnets of all description. There are all kinds of people with a great many different kinds of ways. There is a great deal more familiarity here than in the East. People don’t always take off their hats so much when they go into a house and do not always put a Mr. before a man’s name.

Alden founded a church and stayed in the town, recording his impressions in long letters to his parents. The town grew

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steadily. In three years, Alden estimated that the population of the village increased from 75 to 140 “or upwards.” Among the new improvements: “an apothecaries shop—opened the past year—a new store soon to be opened—7 buildings—6 houses & a school house put in the last year.”43 By the middle of the nineteenth century, towns on the transAppalachian frontier were important and influential. In a sense, they had always been so, whether their initial purpose was military or economic. From the Bluegrass of Kentucky and the first Ohio River towns to the prairies of Illinois and Iowa and the lead-mining camps of the Driftless Region, towns had always been a part of the frontier experience. Those that had initially provided security lived on to provide the countryside around them with an array of goods and services. By 1850 towns were already centers of education and religion; in the next generation they would become the arbiters of taste, manners, and morals. In the last half of the nineteenth century towns across the trans-Appalachian West would have a decisive influence on those who grew up in or adjacent to them. People would identify with them, dislike them, or perhaps even hate their constricting pressures. But all would be shaped by them.44 Towns were one of the lasting legacies of the frontier experience from 1775 to 1850. An overview of the emergence of urban places in the western country offers a useful comparison with the growth of towns and cities in the East. What immediately attracts our attention is the small scale of American urban development. In 1800, fourteen American cities had populations of more than five thousand; Baltimore and Philadelphia, more than twenty-five thousand; and New York, fifty thousand. That same year, the population of London was about one million; that of Paris, more than half a million. In 1810, on the eve of the outbreak of war, New Orleans had more than five thousand people. It was the first western city to reach that benchmark. By 1820, four new western towns appeared on the list. In the aftermath of the First Great Migration, Cincinnati, Columbus, Lexington, and Pittsburgh had five thousand. New Orleans had reached twenty-five thousand. James



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Vance calls the first four “the entrepôts of the New West—Pittsburgh and Cincinnati on the Ohio, and Lexington to the south and Columbus to the north of the river.”45 It was no surprise that the most important western city in trade and numbers was the one that lay at the mouth of the Mississippi River. These numbers were also a commentary on the emergence of cotton as the most important staple agricultural export of the day. Cotton needed an international market; New Orleans had become a port that offered transportation services downriver by flatboats, upriver by steamboat, and dock facilities for the export of cotton to England. Along with these shipping facilities were an array of banking, credit, and merchant services.46 Given the extraordinary growth of numbers in the western country, large-scale urbanization was modest. In 1850, New Orleans, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis had reached fifty thousand. (In 1860, New York City had one million residents.) The fastest growing western city was Chicago, which had more than twenty-five thousand. A striking feature of the urban landscape in 1850 was the emergence of the cities in the Far West: San Francisco with more than twenty-five thousand, Sacramento with more than five thousand. Although annual crowds of immigration surged inland from the waterways, the important towns remained tied to water transportation. By 1850, of the noteworthy cities in the West, only Indianapolis was an inland city. Vance observes, “Despite a relatively regular terrain and consistent land settlement patterns, the towns that reached 5,000 were pretty much along the lines of long-distance trade.”47 The experience of founding towns in the western country began with the first settlements. Indeed, the first AngloAmerican families had to come together for mutual protection. Three generations, seventy-five years, and a third of a continent later, the urban presence continued to be important. Indeed, in light of increased numbers and burgeoning trade, it was more important than ever. Yet, the numbers of cities remained small. The characteristic urban presence was the town. They were universal throughout the western country. That the town was

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different in shape and scope within the frontier of the South did not lessen its influence. It only made its pattern different on the surrounding countryside. Yet, with all the differences, the common denominator that tied successful cities to transportation routes remained.



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15.

 Changing Political Patterns across Three Generations

The political life of the trans-Appalachian frontier began with its first permanent settlements. From the beginning, the challenges of the wilderness demanded that people organize and pool their resources to perform tasks that individuals could not carry out alone. In the course of this organization, some led and others followed. The Anglo-Americans were political creatures. They inherited their interest in politics and political affairs from their English ancestors and carried it across the ocean to the North American continent, where political life underwent changes as time and circumstances dictated. Some form of politics gradually came to permeate the English colonies, from New England to Georgia, as the ministers of the Crown after 1763 knew well. This interest in political affairs did not necessarily indicate widespread participation, for all colonial societies were deferential ones (the frontier perhaps less so but not entirely excepted), and the white males who were part of the political process acknowledged traditional leaders and forms of leadership. By the time that the conflict with England came into focus, the Anglo-Americans had much experience in politics, and at a high level of sophistication, as their private and public arguments in the quarrel with Great Britain before 1775 show and their public

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documents thereafter—the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution of 1787—testify. Between 1775 and 1850 the political life of the transAppalachian frontier embraced three distinct experiences. Although each had its separate characteristics, no single one was mutually exclusive; although the transition from one to another may be measured in chronological terms, the three coexisted in the later years, especially as the settlements of the transAppalachian West grew in size and over time to encompass several stages of development. In the first twenty years, from 1775 to 1795, political life was characterized by an informal spontaneity closely associated with the frontier’s immediate needs for survival and security. The large numbers of people who went west after 1795 (especially after 1784 in Kentucky), the Northwest Ordinance, and a temporary accommodation with the several Indian tribes after 1795 wrought great changes in the informal nature of politics. Groups and institutions began to play a larger part. And, especially with the imposition of political boundaries, a second stage of political life came to coexist with the first: the organization of Kentucky County in 1776 and later, in enlarged form, the promulgation of the Ordinance of 1787 led to the presence, for the first time on the frontier, of a corps of appointed officials. Politics and the struggle for political preferment now took place at several levels: township, county, and territory. Finally, a third stage came into focus: in both the 1790s and later again in the mid-1820s the practical politics directed at specific frontier needs underwent a transformation, and a strong ideological strain emerged. Political principles became a dominant feature of political life on the trans-Appalachian frontier and took the form of what people came to call political parties. The earliest settlers carried a form of politics across the mountains, with their rifles, shot pouches, and axes. For the first several years, specific kinds of challenges gave focus to political life and the search for positions of leadership. A few leaders, chosen in an informal way, met the immediate requirements of the frontier settlements that they served. They provided physical protection from the Indians in the form of stations or forts, ne-



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gotiations, and, if necessary, punitive expeditions to enforce justice or to exact revenge for actual or perceived wrongs. Leaders in stations and on military expeditions directed the economic and military affairs for those settler families who lived or fought within their jurisdiction or authority. They often did so arbitrarily, as befits a people at war. Those who did not like the arrangements could go elsewhere. Throughout these early years, leadership and authority were personal. The result was a few individuals chosen for positions of leadership among frontiersmen like themselves. What was important was not social standing or economic condition; it was the recognized capacity to lead in difficult and dangerous situations. These people—leaders and followers alike—often knew one another personally. Militiamen elected officers and then observed them in battle. In short, the frontier people had ample opportunity to judge the performance of leaders in the position tendered them. This personal form of leadership owed much to the small and dispersed nature of the population, which brought people together in small groups of mutual dependence. It also owed much to their preoccupation with military matters. People moved and settled in military patterns, a direct result of their concern for constant physical security from the Indians. James Harrod was the first such leader on the trans-Appalachian frontier, for he directed the laying out of the settlement that bore his name and led the expedition that laid it out. Judge Richard Henderson was an early political leader whose views on political leadership were more long-range. He intended to establish a government with himself at the head, in a way reminiscent of forms of government in the older colonies. Other frontier leaders were entrepreneurs, such as Benjamin Logan—men who founded stations and gave their names to them. In virtually every case, the practical needs of their constituents were paramount. By whatever name they gave to it, the first settlers pursued an informal voluntary association in search of common ends. Political life was practical, informal, and even spontaneous. A major transition in the nature of politics took place following the close of the Revolution. This transition reflected, in part, larger numbers of people. Kentucky began to grow and grow

CHANGING POLITICAL PATTERNS ACROSS THREE GENER ATIONS

rapidly—from twelve thousand to fifty thousand people in four years. The change also flowed, in part, from the creation of political units that began with Virginia’s organization of Kentucky County in 1776. In addition to the authority of military leadership and economic proprietorship, power was now also rooted in the continuing influence of Virginia. The officials of this Virginia county court were only the first of a huge corps of appointed officials who would fill public office on the trans-Appalachian frontier. Joining them were the surveyors of land claims and, after 1779, the all-powerful land commissioners. This group of leaders achieved prominence and power through its control of the machinery of what Virginia recognized as a legitimate form of government, and, in the final analysis, their impact on the frontier would be much greater than that of the early Indian fighters and pathfinders. John Floyd was one of this new group, although he had been in and around Kentucky longer than most of them. A member of the Virginia gentry class, he used his influence in the Old Dominion to enhance his prospects in Kentucky County. His service as a surveyor was a sign of the transference of Virginia leadership west of the mountains. Men such as Floyd and Isaac Shelby, one of Kentucky’s most prominent military figures, who became the first governor of the commonwealth in 1792, were an increasingly prominent feature of the Kentucky scene after peace with Great Britain.1 Throughout the decade before statehood (1792) politics became increasingly complex, for at the same time that the political arena enlarged, vigorous political struggles continued at the county level. The influence of the county was wide and lasting. The county court passed judgment on a broad range of economic, political, and social matters that directly affected the lives of frontier people, ranging from questions of morality to taxes. Members of the county courts often appointed their own successors. As a self-contained political unit with enormous influence, the county became the focal point of politics. This influence and the importance of political struggles at the county level continued up to the Civil War and even into the twentieth century.2 Most of all, this transition in political life was accompanied by



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a change in the nature of the political process, in the struggle for leadership, and in the issues at stake in new settlements west of the mountains that were no longer quite so new. The survival of the new settlements west of the mountains was no longer in question; it seemed assured by growth. Matters of stability and property began to replace questions of military and economic survival. The issue was the institutional form of the new settlements. In short, people began to debate the kind of world in which they wanted to live, and the focus of the debate revolved around issues of political power and preferment. The debate included questions of land claims (especially those granted by Virginia to favorites), taxes, slavery, law and lawyers—all items that determined the nature of society, the distribution of wealth, and the locus of power. This political debate, if it may be so described, was about the future of the commonwealth. It engaged the interest of Kentucky’s citizens everywhere. As the jurist Harry Innes wrote in 1791, “The people of Kentucky are all turned Politicians from the highest in Office to the Peasant.”3 In the struggle to shape the future of the commonwealth of Kentucky, pioneers used the traditional political techniques, only on a larger scale: public meetings and resolutions, petitions, remonstrances, and letters to the editor. The Kentucky Gazette became an open forum for a broad spectrum of political views. A series of meetings covering the entire district of Kentucky convened, beginning at Danville in 1784 and extending up through the Constitutional Convention of 1792. In its use of large-scale political techniques, the convention may be said to exemplify the transition from the first frontier political experience to the second. The commonwealth of Kentucky entered the Union of States in 1792. Statehood, and the diplomatic triumphs and greater security from the Indians achieved by 1795, changed the nature of the political process and, in a sense, wrote an end to the early political style on the trans-Appalachian frontier. Size, new political units, and the growing complexity of the world had eroded the personal and pragmatic nature of the first frontier political experience. The primacy of military leadership and the search for security were gradually succeeded by struggle for control

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over the levers of economic and political power, at the local, county, and state levels. The prominent part played in Kentucky’s constitution convention by George Nicholas signaled the transition from prominent military figures and early settlement leaders to the new lawyer class. At the same time, the thrust for security had passed on to other, newer frontiers—across the river in portions of the Northwest Territory and in the settlements found on both sides of the Mississippi. The personal nature of politics would be repeated in every subsequent frontier experience for the next half-century. It was a necessary first step in establishing conditions under which the occupation of the country might be carried out. The year 1787 introduced another kind of politics, political leader, and political authority on the trans-Appalachian frontier, or at least it did so on a new scale. This change reflected the paramount influence of a new national ordinance. Under the provisions of the Ordinance of 1787 (the Northwest Ordinance)—which eventually spread over most of the transAppalachian frontier—the territorial governor emerged as an appointed leader with an enormous range of political power, on matters of both governance and appointments. Given the nature of the position as defined in the ordinance, and adding the distances involved, officers in the territories (especially the governor) wielded great, indeed absolute, influence. With his authority to lay off counties and appoint local officials, the governor had enormous patronage to dispense. Not surprisingly, the political life of a territory (and its political intrigues as well) revolved around the governor, and most chief executives developed factions (and later parties), with their office as the base of strength. From this point the territory’s political experience rapidly divided into those who supported the governor and hoped to benefit from his political largesse and those who opposed him and hoped to bring about his downfall. The situation was somewhat parallel to that produced by the appearance of the first county officials from Virginia and North Carolina west of the mountains after 1776, but the influence and authority of the territorial governor dwarfed the significance of any county official, for the



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governor could lay off counties and appoint their officeholders. Just as the passage to statehood removed this arbitrary power of the territorial governors, so, too, in time, the county bureaucracy became elective rather than appointive, but in some places this shift did not occur until well into the nineteenth century.4 The evolution of the office of governor and its powerful influence on early political life in the territories may be observed in three contrasting cases. Here, the styles of politics and governance in the use of the new power and authority under the Northwest Ordinance can be seen in the experiences of the Territory Northwest of the Ohio under two governors, Arthur St. Clair and William Henry Harrison, and in the contrasting story of the initial operation of the ordinance within the Louisiana Purchase, or as it became known formally, the Territory of Orleans. Arthur St. Clair, first governor of the Northwest Territory, brought his own political style to his new appointment. As the first governor appointed under the new ordinance, he came to his office without precedent and with little guidance from his superiors. And to describe his duties as challenging was an understatement. St. Clair was to govern an area larger than most European nations, inhabited by a scattered population of Americans, English, and French, and large numbers of native peoples. He was to represent a new, independent nation, whose strength and authority extended only feebly west of the mountains. So the governor would have to govern to the limits of his power, establish new ways of governing a western territory, and depend on the strength of his personality and authority under the ordinance. St. Clair was a man of much public experience and wellformed views of the varieties of peoples in the western country. In general, he thought the citizens of his territory were poorly equipped by experience or inclination to participate in the political process. To the extent they did so, he thought their participation should be kept to a minimum. In this position, he shared the skepticism of some national leaders about the capacity of the many to govern themselves. In the first years of his governorship, he ruled by decree. His arbitrary direction of the affairs of the territory in a period dominated by a concern for survival at

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first aroused little hostility. For the most part, he gave effective leadership in these years to a decentralized and sparsely settled territory. Until at least 1795 the Northwest Territory and its people were still engaged in a struggle for survival against internal and external threats, especially the Indian threats and the accompanying machinations of the British. Here St. Clair failed his constituents. Acting in his capacity as commander of the military, in 1791 he led a mixture of militia and regulars against a united Indian force. The result was the single most devastating military defeat against an Indian adversary in the history of the nation. In the course of the campaign, St. Clair poorly prepared his force for battle, and when engaged with the Indians, he showed poor judgment and few qualities of leadership. For a frontier people accustomed to measure leadership by results, it was an inept and bloody failure. At the same time, the authority of his office remained intact. Whatever his failings as military leader—and they were infinite—St. Clair was still governor, with all the governor’s rights and privileges. His experience was an interesting contrast to that of the first political figures in Kentucky and Tennessee, whose military reputations counted for everything, and who were successful or quickly replaced. Gradually the Indian threat subsided, subdued by Anthony Wayne’s victory at Fallen Timbers in 1794. The settlements along the Ohio River now grew and prospered, and a concern for stability replaced the overwhelming concern for security. Population increased, resulting both in a division of the territory and in the advance of Ohio to the second stage of government. Effective opposition to Arthur St. Clair appeared from these changing circumstances. St. Clair’s leadership, arbitrary and dictatorial as befitted a territory in a state of siege, was not appropriate for the larger numbers of people in a territory at peace. The organization of the legislature meant political campaigns throughout the territory, and the legislature itself became a forum for opposition to the governor. St. Clair, who as an appointed governor in a territory concerned most of all about security had been flexible, was now almost reactionary. The times had changed; and as Ohio entered the second stage of political experience on the frontier, the nature of politics changed, too.



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Governor St. Clair’s problems were demographic. The first legal settlers in the Northwest were New Englanders, who established a town at Marietta in 1788. In their structured society and economy, the New Englanders were the logical allies of St. Clair. Unfortunately for the governor, as the territory grew in population, the new settler families came from Pennsylvania, Virginia, and North Carolina. Their views of society and government were much more in line with those of a new political faction and ideology associated with Thomas Jefferson. With their settlements centered in the Scioto River Valley and the town of Chillicothe, this rapidly growing group opposed the strong central authority that St. Clair used for practical (in his eyes) and ideological reasons. These new arrivals grew in numbers in the aftermath of Anthony Wayne’s victory at Fallen Timbers and the Treaty of Greenville that opened up much of southwestern Ohio to AngloAmerican settlement. The Ohio country seemed less a series of settlements in a stage of siege and more a group of rapidly expanding communities, relying on their own individual initiative. Slowly but certainly, these differences were translated into divisions between the governor and the assembly (which first met in 1799) and then to local representatives of the emerging national political parties of Republicans and Federalists.5 Governor St. Clair first tried to delay moving the territory to the second stage, where the presence of an elected assembly would force him to share authority (although his influence would still be paramount). Finally, he called an election for 1798. The requirements for candidates and voters were hedged in with the usual property qualifications: fifty-acre freehold for voters, two hundred acres for candidates for the assembly, five hundred acres for the upper house (five members to be chosen by the president from a list of ten submitted by the governor). In the end, partisan politics did not seem to enter much into the election of 1798. Instead, as Douglas Hurt observes, “the frontier people voted for the most respected and best known leaders who stood for election to the assembly.”6 The assembly convened first in 1799. Next year, the Congress of the United States established Indiana Territory, setting the western boundary of Ohio at the

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mouth of the Great Miami River. Now, St. Clair worked to delay statehood. In this object, he was undone by Thomas Jefferson’s election in 1800 and by the continued heavy immigration into the Ohio country. The Scioto Valley Virginians engineering the move of the territorial capital from Cincinnati to Chillicothe, evidence of their political ascendance. As Ohio moved inexorably toward statehood, St. Clair offered one last example of his continuing influence. In the constitution of the new state, the elected delegates reflected their distaste for his executive authority by creating a state government with a powerful legislative body and a weak executive. The constitution opened the franchise to almost any white male of age who paid taxes or worked on the roads. The weakened executive, who had to stand for election every two years, had no veto power. Thus, Arthur St. Clair left a permanent mark on the institutional structure of the new state of Ohio.7 Our story now moves to the new Indiana Territory, where evolved a variation in political life under the provisions of the Northwest Ordinance. The key to the difference was the new governor, William Henry Harrison, who assumed the office of governor at the age of twenty-seven (St. Clair had been fiftytwo). Harrison governed under the same instrument, the Northwest Ordinance, and he had the same power. For reasons of experience, ideology, and knowledge of his constituents, he determined to govern in a different way. Like St. Clair, he used the authority of his office to govern, but he made allowances for widening the scope of his appointments. In order to understand what this meant, we need to have a sense of the world of the Territory Northwest of the Ohio at the turn of the century. Andrew Cayton has analyzed the outlines in these terms: “In the newly created world of Indiana Territory, government offices were glittering prizes sought desperately by young men in a hurry.” The advantages offered by these offices were wide ranging: “they provided a steady stream of income, from either salary of fees. No matter how small this source of income was, it was more predictable than reliance on the money one might make as a



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lawyer.” Then, the office also established the holder within “a network of men who actually ran the territory; it was a way to make important acquaintances, to hone one’s skills, and to learn how power was acquired and exercised.” And lastly, the office immediately propelled the holder to the first rank of social status. He was marked as someone on the way up. As Cayton concludes, “In the world of Indiana territory . . . a title was more than a sinecure; it was a confirmation of one’s importance.”8 Harrison used his power of appointment to reach out to a variety of men whom he needed tied to his administration. They were not necessarily men he liked, nor were they always men he admired. Still, he needed to bring appointees from several families, from several different communities in different geographic locations, and of several principles into his government. And as settlers poured into the newly enlarging Indiana Territory, Harrison needed to make places for at least some of the young, ambitious men seeking new opportunities for themselves and their families. It was a finely tuned exercise. In its successful execution, Harrison had the continuing support of President Thomas Jefferson, who took his governor’s recommendation on virtually every appointment. Harrison was secure in the capital; he need only to face outward and deal with the complexities of his growing domain and new citizens. In 1805, Indiana moved to the second stage as a territory, an election for an assembly and the appointment of a council. The election provided the opportunity for those passed over for whatever reason, or those who were in opposition for whatever reason, to run for office. Their campaign was directed against the governor and his appointments. Political life in the territory now had an elective stage on which to act out its local dramas. The second level of government, as Cayton describes it, became a catalyst for “an alternative construction of political culture,” namely, by an attack on the governor. Those in opposition joined the legislature in a struggle to rid Indiana “of both the governor and his political system of vertical patronage.” So his opponents attacked the governor and his allies as aristocrats. That Harrison and his allies also favored slavery opened them to the charge of oligarchy. Of course, Harrison and his party were closely tied

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to Thomas Jefferson and the Republicans. Thus, the elections and other contests might take the form of a competition over who was most democratic.9 The twin experiences of the Northwest Territory (in 1803 the State of Ohio) and Indiana Territory offer a view of the commonality of politics on the trans-Appalachian frontier from 1790 to 1815. An important feature of this scene was the great influx of ambitious men, some single, others with families. They were seeking opportunities of various kinds, whether in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, or Missouri. The system had to find some way to accommodate these new arrivals. For they were in search of power and preferment, and in their new home, they encountered an entrenched group in the form of locals or earlier arrivals. So there was now a decision to be made by those involved: share the power or face a struggle in which one side or the other would emerge triumphant. And, in addition to the ambitious, there were increases in numbers of settler families, which is another way of saying increases in the numbers of voters. The origins of the new arrivals might be a significant dimension, as in the case of Ohio and the Virginians. But this was only one example. What we have across the spectrum of the western country was the migration of southerners from Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and the Carolinas across the Ohio River. So they came to exercise great influence in the early institutional life and political world of the Northwest Territory. This reflected patterns of immigration that were largely defined by water routes downstream. Gradually, especially after 1815, their numbers and influence were diluted by the arrivals from New York and New England. Political turbulence was further churned by demarcation lines that were arbitrary but no less significant. Congress laid off new territories and appointed the first crucial office holders. Territorial governors and later territorial assemblies laid off counties and appointed office holders. The first elections were held. Issues of residency and land ownership come into question, as a way of defining who could vote and who could not. Within this fluid mix the French villages survived as isolated islands. They were reminders of the great fur-trading empire that flowed through the watercourses of the western country. Now they were



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vestiges of a distant past, with their communal life and their communal landholdings, for they are increasingly surrounded by Anglo-Americans and their carefully defined land boundaries, fixed by an immutable system of survey and an elaborate record-keeping bureaucracy. The issues of the western country were universal: security against the Indians, removal of Indians from lands that should be open to Anglo-American settler families, better roads, more effective mail service. Candidates everywhere from Michigan to Mississippi agreed on these issues. And generally by the end of this first period, most candidates had embraced the principles of Thomas Jefferson and had sworn allegiance to his party and its principles. More to the point, it was the party in power and so the party with power of appointment. Thus, elections were fought over personality, character, and integrity. In a world of strangers, those ambitious for office guarded their own reputations and attacked those of their opponents. The attacks might take the form of letters to the editor, broadsides, or public statements. Responses were sure to be vigorous and sometimes physical. Challenges and duels had their origins in defense against such attacks on character. “Given the highly personal nature of territorial politics, duels were all but inevitable. They were not simply the products of ‘frontier’ culture.” However illegal they might be in the eyes of the law, they provided tangible evidence of the determination of a public figure (or someone ambitious to become a public figure) to defend himself against attacks on his character. Cayton continues, “In Indiana Territory, the distance from the seat of federal power and between the various counties exacerbated distrust. Men who barely knew each other accused each other of reprehensible behavior.” And the stakes were high. Men guarded their reputations with such intensity because they had to. “If the change of hypocrisy or deception stuck, their career was over. In a personal political culture, one’s honor, the security that one’s word was one’s bond, was the most important currency of all.”10 Through the chaos, confusion, and failed expectations of the war came peace and the First Great Migration to the West. On this floodtide of settler families, Indiana (1816) and Illinois

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(1818) became states, joining Mississippi (1817) and Alabama (1819) in casting off the restrictive legacy of the Northwest Ordinance. But statehood did not resolve the main issues of the day; it simply moved them to another forum. The state was probably a more “democratic” venue, albeit within the context of white males only, but politics became factionalized. Without the territorial governor as catalyst for two parties (his own and that in opposition), politics once more became issues of local candidates seeking preferment at the state level. Within this context, the twin issues of the economy (a reaction to the catastrophic economic crisis of 1819) and slavery (the strong southern pull in both states), Indiana and Illinois sought to find workable solutions to both questions. This fluid condition would remain in place until the formation of national political parties once again in the middle of the 1820s. Down the Mississippi River in the Louisiana Purchase, another political mosaic unfolded. In the Territory of Orleans (organized in 1804 from Lower Louisiana), the political drama was complicated by a host of factors that played little or no part in the Old Northwest. Inherent in the disputes between the resident French and the arriving Americans were divisions between old inhabitants and new arrivals and between Catholics and Protestants. Differences between the two cultures were pervasive, extending from fights between Creoles and Americans over which dance tunes should be played at balls to conflict over basic institutional questions, such as civil versus common law. In addition, language differences reduced communication and intensified the estrangement between the two groups. The site of these several conflicts was a growing city (by the standards of the day), and, for the first time, political divisions were based on ethnic identity. New Orleans had several living areas—new suburbs appeared with the arrival of the Americans after 1803—and the city supported several newspapers of various political persuasions. Each editor entered vigorously into a controversy centered around the administration of Governor William C. C. Claiborne, who, as the American governor of essentially French territory, came to symbolize government of a majority by a minority. Although only



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twenty-eight years of age when he became acting governor (Jefferson made him governor in 1804), Claiborne had already served as a clerk in Congress, a judge in Tennessee, a congressman from Tennessee, and governor of the Mississippi Territory. He had his own political style and his own approach to politics and political conflict. Guided by the advice of his superiors in Washington, who wished to do nothing to upset the newest Americans in Louisiana, Claiborne adopted the posture of neutrality amidst the swirling conflicts. In doing so, of course, he neglected the opportunity to use the power and authority of his office to build his own political support and served, instead, as the target for all disaffected groups. In a typically unpartisan (or inept) act, for example, Claiborne awarded the public printing contract to James Bradford and the Orleans Gazette, although Bradford constantly abused him and his administration in print. Claiborne endured Bradford’s attacks for three years before giving his patronage to the more friendly and understanding Louisiana Courier. In addition to the press, weapons in the struggle included petitions, remonstrances, and pamphlets. Whether Claiborne’s neutrality was his own personal style, his interpretation of the wishes of his superiors, or simply the aloofness of a federal official is not entirely clear. The opposition press could not bring down the governor, but it could and did make his life uncomfortable and his posture defensive. At the center of the controversy was the loyalty of Louisiana and her citizens to the United States. The issue was the more pressing as the territory lay on the exposed southern flank of a nation enlarged by the recent purchase of Louisiana and increasingly embroiled in the affairs of western Europe. This was an involvement that might lead to an armed confrontation with the British navy. Also in question were the readiness of the Territory of Orleans for statehood and the acceptance of republican principles implied in admission to the Union. The anciens habitants wanted statehood, for they were a numerical majority (for the moment), and they wished to manage their own affairs with a minimum of interference from the Americans. President Jefferson and Secretary of State Madison felt that the Territory of Orleans was not ready for statehood. Claiborne concurred with

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the views of his superiors. The president named a majority of Americans to the Legislative Council. Some of the older French nominees were reluctant to serve when asked, and the French expressed understandable irritation at their underrepresentation. The American governor now directed the affairs of French Louisiana with only a minority representation for the French. The Americans were democrats, however, and they could not escape their own principles. Three months after government with the council began, Congress—perhaps seeking a compromise on the statehood issue—promoted Orleans Territory to the second grade of territorial government and provided for the election of a lower house. When the election took place in October 1805, the French elected all their candidates. The legislature—at least the lower house—was now at odds with the American governor. The focal point of the conflict was the legislature’s passage of a bill to make civil law the law of the territory. Claiborne vetoed this bill that represented the will of a majority of the territory’s people. Thus, political conflict in Orleans Territory extended well beyond the question of personalities and the search for power and preferment under a generally accepted framework of institutions, to basic questions of institutional and cultural identification.11 The state of Louisiana, admitted to the Union in 1812, had its own style of politics. Consider, for example, the different kind of political story played out at the local level in the Florida parishes. The style of campaigning, the issues, and the physical act of voting all showed Louisiana’s different political culture. Voting practices in Louisiana (like the legal system) were different. A rigid voting procedure stretched over three days in the dead of summer, as mandated by the state constitution. Samuel Hyde writes, “Creole political figures who dominated the constitutional convention in 1812 insisted on mid-summer elections to take advantage of many American residents’ tendency to absent themselves during Louisiana’s sultry, plague-ridden, summer months.” So elections for state legislature, as well as for Congress, were held on the first Monday in July. When the polling began, many affluent and respected gentlemen gathered at the entrance to the polling place to dispense greetings and solicit



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support. Some votes were viva voce, particularly in country parishes, where paper ballots were scarce. This format increased the opportunities for intimidation. In addition to intimidation and vote buying, various other election tricks appeared in political contests. Among the most common ruses used to reduce the numbers voting were omission from tax rolls and fabricated rumors of yellow fever (which led voters to stay home).12 Throughout the political experience from 1775 to 1815, and with echoes of the War of 1812 especially recent and intense, ran the theme of the successful military experience as the mark of personal leadership and the foundation of a call upon the electorate for office. This old frontier tradition dated back to George Washington and continued through the early settlement experience in Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Northwest Territory.13 In the course of these three generations, innumerable political aspirants sought success on the battlefield. Great success and extraordinary political careers came to a few, such as William Henry Harrison, Andrew Jackson, and others lesser known, such as John Tipton of Indiana. Riding to the fore on renewed conflict with the Indians and British, for which he was himself at least partially responsible, William Henry Harrison proved an enormously effective practitioner of the old political rule that a military triumph against the universal public enemy gives the ultimate leverage in political life. Harrison even provided a variation on the theme by claiming a victory at Tippecanoe that far exceeded the actual military results of the battle. Still, the burning of the village by Harrison’s troops broke Tecumseh’s aura of invincibility and forever laid to rest the vision of a great Indian alliance. The West rushed toward the War of 1812 on a flood tide of spirited optimism. This conflict brought much trouble and little satisfaction to the trans-Appalachian frontier, but it did produce one military leader who symbolized the strength and virtues of the frontier in the public mind. Andrew Jackson emerged from Tennessee to win impressive military victories over the British and Indian enemies. The frustrations of the war and the brilliance of Jackson’s

CHANGING POLITICAL PATTERNS ACROSS THREE GENER ATIONS

leadership merged at New Orleans, where the great American victory mitigated the disappointments of the war and sealed Jackson’s reputation as military leader and, in the course of time, civil leader. The Great Migration in the postwar years enlarged the opportunities for aspiring politicians, new offices, and new wealth in the western country. Most of all, it brought numbers. The mass of people who moved to the western country necessitated an increasing number of large-scale political units. Territories passed in regular succession to statehood, and both were political arenas. The West was becoming a place of opportunity in law and in politics as well as in land. The many elective state offices, from governor on down, provided ample scope for the talents of young and ambitious politicians. Larger-scale contests for a larger constituency brought greater rewards. They also brought more competition. Federal patronage in the form of the land business, Indian affairs, and the postal service offered opportunities for reward. When Noah Noble received the appointment as receiver of the land office at Indianapolis over fifty other applicants, one editor summed up a political truth of the day. “Ah, those ‘loaves and fishes’ of Uncle Sam’s,” he wrote, “they’re enticing.”14 Amidst the larger numbers of people, the growing impersonality of politics, and the rising competition for preferment through federal patronage, much of the old personal nature of politics survived. To succeed in political life, one best have militia command, service in the War of 1812 and against the Indians, an avenue to federal patronage, and the right family ties and connections. The widely scattered nature of the population on the trans-Appalachian frontier worked to the continued advantage of those who could bring even modest leverage to bear in search of preferment. John Messinger, for example, exercised influence in the Illinois Territory through his father-in-law, Congressman Matthew Lyon of Kentucky, who provided him with suitable employment and patronage opportunities.15 In spite of the growth of the trans-Appalachian frontier and the new political units being organized across its breadth, some aspects of the political experience were one with what had gone before.



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The personal nature of politics of the first period of frontier experience, the opportunity to benefit from federal patronage that emerged in the second, and the enduring significance of military reputation characteristic of both can be seen in the political career of John Tipton. Born in a log cabin on the East Tennessee frontier in 1786, Tipton began his political career with his appointment as a justice of the peace for Harrison County (Indiana) in 1811 and concluded it in the United States Senate in 1839. Over this generation, he exhibited the full range of the frontier political experience and its changes. When the Tipton family moved from Tennessee to Indiana in 1807, settlements were few. The Greenville Treaty line marked the edge of settlement from the east; the Wabash River was the center of population in the west. In between lay a few scattered villages, most along the Ohio River. The great forests of southern Indiana grew undisturbed. The major economic enterprise of the region was the fur trade. Jeffersonville, site of the new federal land office, and Vincennes, the territorial capital, were the only centers of urban life. The first settlers were small farmers, merchants, and government officials. This was the frontier world that John Tipton entered to seek his fortune. Tipton first operated a ferry on the Ohio River in Harrison County, opposite the mouth of the Salt River. Carrying immigrants and their belongings was a lucrative business, and it was also a good way to meet people. Tipton’s physical strength, directness of manner, and outspokenness were qualities admired by frontier people. In 1811 Governor Harrison of Indiana Territory appointed John Tipton a justice of the peace, his first public office. His participation in Harrison’s punitive expedition against the Tippecanoe campground in the autumn of that year was most significant for his political career. Tipton fought brilliantly and established himself as a brave, confident, and aggressive military commander. He was rewarded with a commission and was later elected captain of a rifle company. For a full decade, talk of confrontation with Tecumseh and his great confederation had brought apprehensive glances from Indiana settlers. Now that threat had ended, and John Tipton had played a significant role. His subsequent military rise was rapid, from

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lieutenant colonel (1813) to colonel (1814) in the War of 1812 and to a commission as brigadier general in 1817. Thereafter he was always “General Tipton.” Tipton was also active on other fronts. In 1814 he purchased a sixty-two-acre farm on the Ohio. In his capacity as deputy sheriff, militia officer, and justice of the peace he often visited the county seat of Corydon, named territorial capital in 1813. In 1816 he moved to Corydon and opened a tavern in his home. All these activities widened his circle of acquaintances. County voters elected him sheriff in 1816, and, in addition to holding other public offices, he was a member of the committee to select the site of the new state capital. He also served two terms in the Indiana House of Representatives. In 1823, after failing in his quest for various federal offices, John Tipton accepted a position as federal agent to the Indians on the upper Wabash. Fort Wayne was remote and primitive, but the office was one of power and influence. Among other duties, Tipton controlled the licensing of Indian traders and the enforcement of trade regulations, and he disbursed annuities and gifts to the several Indian tribes. In response to treaties of cession, he also directed the evacuation of the Indians, an exercise that involved provisioning and transportation. In 1828 Tipton forced the removal of the agency from Fort Wayne to Logansport, where he and his friends controlled the land on which the town had been laid out. His influence as a dispenser of patronage also increased. By 1830 he controlled the appointment of two subagents, one or more interpreters, two millers, a gunsmith, two blacksmiths, three assistants, and ten laborers, plus contracts to purchase food, lumber, and agricultural implements. On the death of James Noble in 1831, John Tipton became a candidate for the United States Senate. The election took place in the Indiana legislature. His opponents were men like him, but all had more education and more political experience. Tipton had the finest military background, however, a reputation for honesty and integrity in an office generally characterized by malfeasance, and powerful support around the state built up over many years through his access to federal patronage. He won on the seventh ballot. Next year the legislature



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elected him to a full six-year term. His decision not to seek reelection in 1838 was based in part on poor health. It also grew out of the changes that had taken place in politics and political style in the trans-Appalachian West. By 1838 the sources of Tipton’s power and the personal nature of his influence had waned in the face of the strength of the new party politics and a new emphasis on ideology.16 The slowed pace of expansion and growth that followed the panic of 1819—a sorting-out process—coincided with a transition in the style and format of political life on the trans-Appalachian frontier. At issue was the change of politics from personal to ideological. This change encompassed two distinct time periods: the 1790s and the mid-1820s. People who found unity in matters of political principle first combined to form political parties in the 1790s. Political parties on the frontier were not indigenous; they came across the mountains like iron, firearms, tools, and other eastern goods. Principles and expectations of officeholding united the so-called parties east and west of the mountains, who had taken the names Federalists and Democratic-Republicans. In a practical sense the Democratic-Republican triumph in the election of 1800 carried most of the frontier into the camp of Thomas Jefferson and his followers. There it remained for almost a generation, with little conflict over principle and much over personal ambition of leaders in search of office. By the middle of the 1820s a new political experience built around political parties was in the process of developing. The election of 1824 saw the last of the old-style politics, and the election of 1828 the first of the new. At the time of the election of 1824 the direction of national political life was not clear, and the contest for president was still fought largely on the basis of personality and sectional identification. The election of 1824 was important because it was the first vigorously contested election in twenty-four years. It offered the national electorate an assortment of candidates from a much wider range of backgrounds than had heretofore been the case. For the first time the trans-Appalachian West had its representatives, not one but two. Andrew Jackson had a strong following. General Jackson’s views on the issues of the day were not entirely clear, but he had

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fought the Indians and the British with great success. He was the most universally acknowledged American military hero since George Washington. His identification with the Tennessee frontier also gave him claims on the West. Henry Clay, of Kentucky, deliberately attempted to portray himself as a spokesman of western interests, and his so-called American System, with its emphasis on internal improvements, had widespread appeal among frontier settlements. William H. Crawford of Georgia had strong support in the South, and John Quincy Adams, the New Englander, commanded wide respect. Adams was a vigorous nationalist who favored using the authority of the federal government to solve many of the problems associated with frontier life. He had successfully acquired Florida—and covered up the diplomatic indiscretions of Andrew Jackson while doing so—and his program of federal internal improvements had obvious attractions for the western country. Despite the qualities of the candidates, however, interest in the election was mild. Newspapers and politicians responded slowly and in measured tones to the noises of political strife drifting across the mountains. Elections at the local level were still very important, and in many places the largest share of interest went to local candidates. Here people in the western country felt themselves directly affected by the outcome.17 At the heart of the new politics were emerging political parties based on new principles. The most important party and principles were associated with Andrew Jackson. That Jackson would become synonymous with ideology seems contradictory, for he himself had a political apprenticeship grounded in the old-style personal politics of the frontier. He emerged as the protégé of John Sevier of Tennessee and made his own reputation by defeating the Creeks at Horseshoe Bend and the British at New Orleans. After 1824, however, other forces worked to give impetus to Jackson and his followers and to build a party ideology around him. The first was a deep sense of grievance at what they felt was the subversion of the political process in the election of 1824. That there had been “bargain and corruption,” the phrase used to describe the alleged arrangement under which Henry Clay threw his support to John Quincy Adams, and Adams in payment made Clay his heir apparent as secretary of state, was



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devoutly believed by many, including Old Hickory himself. So Andrew Jackson cast himself in the role as spokesman for honesty and integrity in government. A second factor in the emergence of ideology was the changing nature of America. The postwar boom and the attendant impulses of the Great Migration created large-scale economic enterprise in the form of banks (of which the Second Bank of the United States was the largest) and an emerging factory system. At the same time, frontier people became accustomed to a considerable degree of economic gratification that was rudely ended by the Panic of 1819. With the onset of the panic and the subsequent depression, the Second Bank of the United States, an eastern corporate colossus, foreclosed on the hopes of many western families. The bank became a natural enemy, eastern and distant. Jackson’s veto of the bill to recharter the bank in 1832 was consistent with his views and with the opinion of much of the West. If the sound of political battle had diminished by the time it crossed the mountains, the revolution of the Jacksonians was no less profound in the West. The issues were not new, but what happened in terms of political style was not only real but far reaching. From the opening of their campaign in 1824, the Jacksonians had organized. Politics was no longer a casual game to be played every two or four years. It was a full-time business, and the stakes were, accordingly, high. Professional politicians—for so, in a sense, they were—kept the issues of the day constantly before the electorate. In this fashion the Jacksonians moved to destroy any semblance of neutrality or nonpartisanship in political life. A favorite weapon in the new politics was the press. The Jacksonians used the press wherever possible, and they set a new standard in rewarding editors for faithful service. With so many appointments in Indian agencies, the land business, and post offices, the new spoils system directly affected the frontier. The electorate in the West generally favored Jackson for his exploits against the Indians and his removal policy. In Alabama and Mississippi sentiment in his favor was overwhelming for these reasons.18 At the same time, Old Hickory’s policies of the bank veto and

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hard money, simplicity and honesty in government, and his constant reference to the virtues of the agrarian life made him popular throughout the western country. The reemergence of political parties brought to the fore once more a concern that dated back to the days of the nation’s founders. Politics was an upsetting element in a society or societies already concerned about questions of order. From the beginning of occupation, some people had voiced uneasiness about the unstructured nature of the frontier. This voice had become louder and more influential as the settlements moved beyond the condition in which survival was the primary concern to the stage dominated by the desire for greater stability. The search for more order on the frontier was constant. Into this uncertain world came politics, with its divisions, bitterness, and occasional violence, and the activities of election day itself. The whole election process loosed elements of rowdyism and boisterousness, not infrequently lubricated with corn whiskey. The Indiana Gazette commented that an election in Corydon in 1820 “exhibited such a degraded state of society, as outrages all the usual principles of civilization, or rules of social order and morality.”19 The emergence of political parties intensified the competition at election time. Achille Murat, a French relative of the fabled Bonaparte, described an election about 1830 in Jefferson County (Florida) in these terms: “The whiskey, however, (not exactly the ‘nectar of the gods’), all this time going its rounds; towards evening all have, more or less, disposed of their sober qualities, and it is rare that the sovereign people abdicate power without a general set-to, where nobody can be heard, . . . and from which all who claim the enviable distinction of possessing a vehicle take very good care to keep aloof.” In 1834 the grand jury of Jefferson and Madison Counties (Florida) publicly deplored “the violence of party spirit,” noting especially that those guilty of violent acts expected to be shielded from punishment by their political friends and allies. One of the Florida solutions was to hold elections less frequently.20 One national political event drew the attention of people everywhere in the West: the election of 1840. Many who wrote at that time remarked on its parades, rallies, and speeches. Lovira



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Hart of Michigan walked to Lapeer to cast his vote for the Whig Party. Lawrence Ferdinand Steel of Mississippi recorded his reactions to the campaign. George Ogden of the Wisconsin Territory responded to the intensified political pulse of the territory by attending political rallies and actively supporting a candidate. Why? Part of the interest was the strain imposed on American society—including the frontier—by the Panic of 1837 and the subsequent depression. The first real opportunity for the Whigs to capture the presidency led to an all-out campaign by Whig editors and vigorous counterattacks by their Democratic colleagues. The “log cabin and hard cider” cry of Harrison’s supporters may have captured the interest and imagination of the western voters. Mass rallies, torchlight parades, and songs probably increased participation by offering another attractive form of socializing. William Henry Harrison had a large following in the West, and if younger voters could not remember the Battle of Tippecanoe, older voters and editors could always be found who would remind them afresh of the debts the republic owed to the general and the reasons for supporting him at the polls. The strong turnout at the election in the autumn of 1840 suggests a response to an intense political campaign that was felt even on the most remote and distant frontiers. Throughout the trans-Appalachian frontier there runs another basic question: did the average frontier family really care about politics? Indeed, the interest and even enthusiasm associated with the election of 1840 seems clearly the exception rather than the rule. Aside from the public demonstrations associated with the campaign that year, significant grievances propelled voters to the polls: the collapse of the economy, rising sectional uneasiness over slavery, outrage against banks and creditors. Under ordinary circumstances, families in the western country opening up new farms had an unending range of work to occupy them at all seasons of the year. Confronting the land was an endless challenge. Local government might play a significant part at a certain stage, in road construction and other public works—especially, in the South, in levee building. But national

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affairs were remote. An editor of the Maumee Express, at the far northwestern corner of the state of Ohio, put the case in these terms: Occupying, as we do, a frontier position in the great American republic—at a great distance from the political metropolis of the country—with limited means of obtaining the earliest information concerning the political movements of the different parties— having no important offices in our immediate vicinity—living in a section of the country where the lines of party distinctions have not been drawn with any degree of certainty, and possessing moderate talents, and a small degree of information upon political subjects, we were not long in foreseeing the entire futility of an attempt to make our paper a leading political journal.21

Party men might change the editor’s mind with suitable financial inducements in the form of printing patronage. But could the party and the editor induce any enthusiasm in the mass of people engaged in making a living? Of the accounts of frontier people that have survived, few mention politics. Fewer still display more than passing notice of national political affairs. The impression persists that a dramatic event such as the election of 1840, the issue of Indian removal, or a grave economic crisis was necessary to make American pioneers into political partisans. A final chapter echoed both the personal politics of the western country and the strength of the new party system. North of the Ohio River, two new territories reflected the increasing partisanship of the 1830s. Wisconsin Territory was separated from Michigan in 1836. The most important early political figure in Wisconsin was Henry Dodge, a man with leadership qualities appropriate to the frontier of the first Anglo-American settlements in Kentucky. Mark Wyman has summarized Dodge’s political appeal in these terms: “Over the years he was repeatedly chosen by the citizenry to lead local governmental and military activities. It is clear that for most of his life, Dodge represented what had become the American pioneer ideal: his attitudes toward the land and its Indian occupants, as well as his enthusi-



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asm for democracy and self-government, were closely entwined with those of frontier America.” Dodge came to the Wisconsin lead region in 1827. Like the leaders of an earlier generation, he developed a reputation for military leadership against the Indians. In 1827, he led the miners against the Winnebagos; later, he served as a colonel in the Black Hawk War. In 1836, a Democratic president appointed Dodge, the most prominent figure in the territory, the first governor of the new Wisconsin Territory. He served one term, being replaced when the Whigs came to power in 1841. Dodge then ran for territorial delegate and was easily elected. When the Democrats returned to power in 1845, he was reappointed governor. He served until statehood (1848), when he was elected one of Wisconsin’s first U.S. senators.22 Iowa was formed as a territory from Wisconsin Territory in 1838. The first governor was Robert Lucas, a Jackson Democrat from Ohio. The legislature, also controlled by the Democrats, met in November 1838. Although a Democrat, the strong, opinionated Lucas feuded with the legislature over new laws, organization of counties, and every aspect of territorial life. Lucas vetoed several laws passed by the legislature. The election of 1840 produced a Whig governor, and the fractious nature of territorial politics continued. Twice, in 1840 and in 1842, the voters declined to call constitutional conventions as a prelude to statehood. When such a body at last assembled, the document reflected Democratic principles: low salaries for state officials plus prohibition of banks and locally issued paper money (reflecting the panic and depression). The first elections in Iowa went to Democrats, but slavery grew as an issue, southern immigration declined, and the Whigs (and later the new Republican Party) came to power. In the sweep of politics across the western country over three generations and a vast landscape, what was most striking were not differences but similarities. Perhaps this reflected the extraordinary power of territorial governors. This authority emanated from the Northwest Ordinance. But the governors themselves, along with other early office holders, were appointed by the president of the United States. Hence, the influence of Wash-

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ington, D.C. (after 1800) continued throughout the West. To the struggles of the territorial governors to translate this appointment power into effective government and wide support among a growing population of immigrant families spread across great open spaces, the results were mixed. What emerges is the theme of constant preoccupation of territorial officials at all levels with the surrounding Indian peoples, and the continuing determination to remove Indians from the landscape and open it to occupation by the arriving immigrant families. Amidst these ongoing themes, certain exceptions emerged. Louisiana had its own dynamic of government and politics. The experiences of the “enduring frontiers” of Michigan, Florida, and Arkansas reflected the variations associated with a prolonged territorial experience. In the end, western politics came to mirror the political struggles east of the mountains. That there were variations only confirmed the basic political landscape of individual leaders replaced, in time, by the consideration of national parties.



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The Trans-Appalachian West and the Nation

The trans-Appalachian West emerges from a shadowy but discrete series of landscapes and peoples. Bounded on the east by the escarpment of the Appalachian range, it stretches west to the edge of the prairies, close to the broad grassland known as the Great American Desert. Bounded on the north by the waterways of the Great Lakes and the Canadian border, it reaches south to the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. Well watered, much of it level (if heavily forested), most of it is among the most fertile lands of the continent. It is drained by some of the great river systems in the world. By the standards of the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries, this was one of the gardens of the world. It was perfectly suited to being occupied by an agricultural people, who intended to change this landscape in dramatic ways for purposes of pursuing commercial agriculture. This great expanse, home to scores of Indian tribal groups for ten thousand years, was seized and occupied by Anglo-American peoples in three generations after 1775. Within the lifetime of a single woman or man, this American cycle of occupation moved from the intersection of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers (the present site of Pittsburgh) west to Des

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Moines, spreading at mid-century from the Chippewa River in Wisconsin to central Florida and Louisiana’s gulf parishes. This was an area larger than any European nation except Russia. At the opening of our story, in 1775, a few thousand EuroAmerican settlers were already settled within this landscape. Most of these were in what would become Tennessee; a few hundred were huddled around palisaded stations in Kentucky County. Three generations later, in 1850, this great expanse had been divided politically into twelve states, with a population in excess of ten million. It was an extraordinary series of stories, involving a wide range of human movement and interaction across this vast landscape. The significance of what happened here over three generations has been described by D.W. Meinig in these terms: “This massive experience in occupying new ground was not only a great American drama; it came to be seen as one of the great episodes in the creation of the modern world.”1 The heroic achievements of these Anglo-American men and women have been celebrated almost since their origins. The triumphs of these farm families and their merchant colleagues in this enterprise were noted in an unending series of public testimonies on celebratory occasions. The important scribes were editors, ministers, and Fourth of July orators, who had celebrated this frontier experience from the stations of Kentucky across seventy-five years and a thousand miles to the Des Moines River Valley. The emphasis has always been on this settlement experience. Few have noted its close. This first settlement story did pass, however, to other regions farther west. “At different periods in our history, the ‘Far West’ has been differently located,” wrote one Indiana editor. “At one time Indiana was the far west; at another . . . the Mississippi but now, it has been determined, that no point short of half a mile this side of sundown deserves the appellation.”2 The time was 1837. The editor’s hyperbole aside, the opening of new land settlements had carefully marked signposts. Where before there had been open space or dense forest were now clearings, log cabins, and the tentative cultivation of the soil. And not too distant, depending on your location, lay a small town with commercial



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connections to a distant world. These were the physical benchmarks of American occupation. And accompanying these changes in the landscape were institutional benchmarks of a different but no less significant nature: county government, the militia, local courts, and the law. Latin phrases echoed off bare courthouse walls, and the frontier people embraced the doctrines of Sir William Blackstone (particularly with respect to forms of private property), if they did not entirely understand them. Into this increasingly dense settlement of the land came signs of a more complex society that gave form to social and cultural institutions. A representative of one of the many religions in the western country arrived to minister to people and organized a church. Soon, in many sites, there was more than one church. Some public-minded citizens raised their voices in support of a school. Here, marks on the landscape were more scattered and less firm. Still, all these markers could be found sooner or later in most places west of the mountains. Relations with Indian peoples dominated the first generation of this story, say from 1775 to 1815. These Indian groups had lived across this landscape for ten thousand years. Over these millennia, Indian peoples had changed, reflecting the many dynamics of the changes within Indian societies. The variables in play in 1775 included the imperial influence of the Iroquois Confederation and its authority west of the mountains, the presence of the Shawnees and Ottawas within the Ohio Valley, and the long sedentary occupation of the much of the South by five great tribal groups (Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles). These were only some of the Indian peoples that the first generation of Anglo-American settlers and their officials would have to deal with in this march to the west, uncertain at first, but gaining momentum, pace, and numbers across the first generation. The stories of the encounters between the invading AngloAmericans and the Indian peoples are among the critical accounts of this movement of peoples and the responses to it. They reflected a century of experience in contact heretofore characterized by commerce in furs, in which representatives of fur companies embraced Indian cultures through living arrangements

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and marriage by choice and by strategy. Between 1775 and 1815, these encounters underwent cyclical changes, reflecting the numbers of arriving Anglo-Americans, the negotiating strength of government representatives, and the conflict of imperial powers. In the years immediately after 1775, for example, the Indian peoples of the interior found themselves wooed and recruited to take sides in the colonists’ revolution for independence. Colonial representatives, who for years had talked of the differences in the two cultural groups and the need to bring “civilization” (read Christianity) to distant Indian groups, now made speeches emphasizing their common interests. Various Indian groups succumbed to the blandishments of one side or another and took up arms in what they regarded as their own self-interest.3 With the triumph of the cause of American independence, the new United States had a western boundary of the Mississippi River and the Great Lakes, far beyond any Anglo-American settlement in 1783. Twenty years earlier, in response to an earlier Treaty of Paris that expelled the French from the continent, British officials had drawn a line down the crest of the Appalachians and had forbidden colonial settlement west of that line. Colonists (individuals and land companies) were outraged. Many of them thought the war had been fought about control of the interior; now the spoils of victory were denied them. The new, independent American government had no intention of following this colonial model. The way to the lands west of the mountains now was open, but those lands were vigorously defended by their Indian occupants. Although the new American government would take few steps to inhibit occupation, it also would do little to assist the ambitious individuals and groups— at least initially. Indian peoples moved from a condition of favored allies (briefly in the war against England) to barbarous savages. Now various native groups opposed the steady encroachment of Anglo-American families west of the mountains. At first, the influx came through the mountains into what was already called Kentucky. North of the Ohio lay only a few French settlements, considered closely tied to the world of Indian peoples for a century. South of the Ohio, a decade of open warfare followed. This period climaxed with dramatic American



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defeats. It was only when Indian resistance inflicted decisive defeats on poorly led militias in 1790 and 1791 and so called into question the strength and authority of the new nation that the government chose to act. It did so by putting an army in the field with sufficient training and resources to win a victory in 1794. The implications of this triumph were enormous—locally, nationally, internationally. Indian representatives signed a treaty of cession that opened a vast tract of land north of the Ohio for American occupation. Now Indian peoples entered into a third stage in their relations with the Americans. This one was associated with the increasing American pressure for land cession personified by the new governor of Indiana Territory, William Henry Harrison, and the opposition of the Shawnee leader Tecumseh, who set about creating a great Indian confederation united against further cessions of land. This confrontation, both institutional and personal, grew over a decade. It climaxed with Tecumseh’s trip to the South in search of allies among the powerful tribal groups of the forests and openings of the southern landscape. Harrison seized on Tecumseh’s absence to attack his political and cultural capital at Tippecanoe. From the perspective of the transAppalachian West, the destruction of the Indian village at Tippecanoe was the opening of the war that would be officially dated from June 1812. Although the declaration of war talked of neutral rights at sea, every American settler and official west of the mountains knew the war was about confronting Indian peoples and their British supporters. Tecumseh’s death at the Battle of Thames in 1813 ended the hopes of a great confederation and an independent Indian neutral ground in the west. The peace treaty of December 1814 ushered in a new stage in relations among Americans and their officials west of the mountains (already more than one million) and the Indian peoples north and south, who had suffered significant defeats in the war and now confronted the advancing Americans without support from Canada. Parallel to these negotiations, raids, and military confrontations, governments at various levels began to assert their authority. The initial representation west of the mountains was county

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government. Virginia established Kentucky County in 1776; North Carolina laid off Washington County in 1777 and Davidson County in 1783. A form of official authority had moved silently west of the mountains, but its potential to affect the lives of those under it was enormous. The common understanding about early settler families was that they went west to pursue free, fertile land and to escape the institutions and structure of organized government. In truth, early settler families almost always welcomed the authority of early government that might be employed in promoting security, especially from Indian incursions. So government appeared, and with it the structure that would become concerned about order in society and protection of private property. People had come west to acquire things, whether land, livestock, or political power. Government was a vehicle that supported all these ends. And so, like their colonial counterparts for a century and a half, the new Anglo-American residents west of the mountains embraced government selectively, supporting and applauding some of its activities while ignoring or evading others. Collective action against perceived Indian threats (whether through private organizations or the militia) was the most universally approved activity; actions associated with the county court in providing rules and structure to the forming societies were supported by some groups and disdained by others; the appearance of taxes and fees was universally criticized, although groups paid their taxes on grounds that their tax moneys supported services they wanted (a court house and jail). Government also supported work on roads and other improvements in transportation. And in many places, the government was also active in regulating the economy, licensing public services (mills and ferries), and setting rates for goods and services of various kinds. The activities of the courts west of the mountains reflected an experience of almost a century and a half, dating from the first stirring of self-government. In their work, they mirrored early county courts in the western reaches of the colonies. Settlers in the West, ranging from squatters to large proprietors, always had special needs associated with their place and time. So the North Carolina and Virginia courts west of the mountains met,



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deliberated, and handed down judgments and made other arrangements surrounded by the confusion and danger of a revolution. And with the close of the Revolution and the establishment of American independence, the Indian confrontations with the growing numbers of Anglo-American settlers in the West grew in intensity and continued for another decade. These first western settlements took place within three basic landmarks. The first was the presence and ongoing relations with Indian peoples. These would continue for another generation. The second was directly related to the first, namely the issue of land. Groups of ambitious entrepreneurs had sought access to lands in the interior (principally in the Ohio Valley) for a generation. The first Ohio Land Company took official form in 1748. The establishment of the legal settlement at Marietta in 1788 represented, among other things, the realization of this long and wide ambition, albeit by a different group. If they were small in number and sparsely settled, these legal settlements constituted the opening wedge in what would surely soon become a flood. Finally, these first settlements and these counties carried with them the institution of slavery. Ambitious families brought their slaves across the mountains, some times separated from their slave families, in order to do the hard physical labor of the first years of agricultural settlement. The first Anglo-American settlements west of the mountains confronted isolation, uncertain land title, and physical danger from surrounding Indian peoples. These were manageable within their own range of authority and resources. One vital dimension of their lives lay outside their capacity to control: the navigation of the Mississippi River. For most of the first settlements, the river systems of the trans-Appalachian West drain to the west, to the Mississippi River. In an age defined by water transportation, invariably downstream, this river system was the lifeline of communication and economic development, and it lay in the hands of the Spanish Empire. Here, the western leaders turned west to intrigue with the Spanish and east for assistance from the American government. In the end, self-interest and the Treaty of San Lorenzo (1795) dictated the solutions. The frac-

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tious American settlements west of the mountains now had nominal navigation rights on the Mississippi and the right of deposit in New Orleans. The next goal was to solidify these issues of regional interest in a permanent fashion. All these pressures would become part of the influences impelling the purchase of Louisiana (1803). At the same time, the new national government had made provision for uniform institutions of government in the western country by adopting the Ordinance of 1787. Originally passed under the government of the Confederation, the Northwest Ordinance, as it came to be called, was a large statement of principles and specific policy, reflecting both the antecedents of colonial rule for a century and a half under the British Empire and new ideology arising out of the rhetoric of the American Revolution. The conclusions of the framers of this basic legislation for the new nation were that the national government could impose what amounted to a colonial system on the new territories. This system would include a governor with almost absolute power (subject only to the distant authority of the president and Congress), but this authority would diminish as the rise in population would bring into play popular forms of elected representation (an assembly). The territorial institutional apparatus would bring stable institutions of law and a court system to the most remote reaches of the western country. And, in the end, when a critical number of sixty thousand “free inhabitants” had been reached, the territory might apply for admission to the Union on the basis of equality with other states in the Union, and with the expectation that it would be accepted on these terms.4 In the movement of Anglo-American pioneer families to the West, whether slowly and fearfully in the first generation or with breathtaking speed in the second and third, the focus was always the land. Accordingly, the occupation and institutional development of the trans-Appalachian frontier depended on the land policy of the federal government. The compromises of the 1780s had created what came to be called the “public domain,” the great expanses of land to the west that had become (subject to the extinction of Native Americans’ title) the property of the nation and its citizens. The policies that would govern the distri-



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bution of this great national resource were laid out under the Ordinance of 1785. By 1800, after several additional modifications, the Land Ordinance, as it came to be called, embodied these principles. After the title of relevant Indian peoples had been extinguished, the lands would be surveyed under a rectangular survey system, and offered for sale by public auction at government land offices established in the western country. All lands not sold at auction would thereafter be available for entry at the fixed minimum price. In this fashion, the federal government assumed control of the distribution of the most important resource in the western country. Over the next century, it would act out the role of administrator (with an elaborate recordkeeping function), mediator (in the case of private land claims), and landlord (in dealing with squatters and trespassers or not dealing with squatters and trespassers, as the case might be). In the final analysis, of course, the government was a most tolerant landlord. And Congress continued to offer more generous terms on a regular basis, culminating in the passage of the Homestead Law in 1862, providing for free land.5 The provisions of the two ordinances went into operation, along with the new federal government under the new constitution. Under the Northwest Ordinance, Congress organized the Territory Northwest of the Ohio (1788), the Territory Southwest of the Ohio (1790), and the Territory of Orleans (1804). Within the experiences of these three territories, leading to the admission of the first states under the ordinance (Tennessee in 1796, Ohio in 1803, Louisiana in 1812), the workings of the territorial system were explored, limits were tested, issues were confronted and solutions found, although not without notable failures on the way. The story of the first decade of the new century in both the Territory Northwest of the Ohio and the Territory of Orleans laid out the parameters of the new institutions of government in the West. Overarching both places (separated by some one thousand miles) was the issue of coming to terms with alien peoples. In the northwest, these foreign people were Indians; within the future state of Louisiana, they were indigenous peoples of French and Spanish origin. Neither group seemed properly “democratic” or

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possessed of the principles of democracy, self-government, and independence that the national leaders already liked to associate with the citizens of the new, independent American nation. The questions raised about alien peoples in Orleans Territory (the future state of Louisiana) were resolved through compromise, careful appointments, or, most of all, demography. The incoming flood of Anglo-Americans diluted and subsequently submerged the political, legal, social, and cultural influence of the French antecedents. In the end, the French rejoiced in the acceptance of the Napoleonic civil code as the legal system of the territory and later state. The Americans imposed English language and adjudication of contentious land claims, and accepted that the new citizens (of alien origin) were loyal to the republic. Both sides accepted intermarriage. Indian peoples were a more severe challenge. They had a long history of combative relations, they were viewed as “savage” and “uncivilized” (meaning nomadic and non-Christian), and they had long-standing rights to lands already in the sights and minds of advancing Anglo-American settler families. Government officials (among them officials of the new territories) solved these problems through a combination of guile, bribery, and force. The issues with respect to Indian peoples were filled with tension and violence. The main influence, of course, was the drive for land cessions. Indian peoples, stressed and divided, resisted with varying degrees of success and accommodation. In the end, whatever they conceded (short of absolute disappearance) did not satisfy the American officials or the newly arrived citizens of the western country they represented. One other common feature embraced both groups of AngloAmerican settlement at opposite ends of the Mississippi River: the urge to pursue commercial agriculture. Even the newest families wanted to grow or produce something to sell. The market for every family, community, and settlement was down the river, or in the case of those within the territories Northwest and South of the Ohio, down the rivers. Whether the goods were corn in its many forms, hogs in several states of preservation, or other products of frontier agriculture, the search for a commercial market was virtually instantaneous. This search was notably as-



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sisted by the broad spectrum of merchants and their establishments that came to dot the landscape of these new frontier agricultural enterprises. Within the South, the crop was different, but the urge the same. There, cotton was already making its presence felt as an export with an international market. That these urges to commerce took place within the regional context of growing uneasiness with relations with Indian peoples and a long and uncertain voyage dowriver to an uncertain market testified to its importance. The same was even truer of cotton exports (supplemented by sugar), which commanded a ready market in such a way as to transform the traditional frontier cycle of measured subsistence into an immediate commercial economy. The evidence on both sides is the rise of the importance of the port of New Orleans, which became, within a decade, the entrepôt of the region west of the mountains. Furthermore, these instincts to commercial ventures on these newly opened lands now intersected with increasingly difficult relations with European trading nations. That these international affairs should come to hold hostage the trans-Appalachian region was testimony to the rising interconnectedness of the western country with the East and with Europe. In this fashion the embargo (1807–1809) of Thomas Jefferson was felt with increasing severity in all communities within reach of the Mississippi River and its tributaries. The declaration of war against England three years later was an exclamation point to the embargo, but at least it provided the prospect of seizing Canada, a step regarded as appropriate and inevitable in the West. The benchmark of 1815 in analyzing the settlement and institutional development of the West emphasizes large-scale commonalities across the western country. Such an analysis disguises the variations already present in many parts of the West. Before 1815 physical growth in the form of tangible improvements was also a key to the maturity of a frontier. The first trans-Appalachian frontier experience began in the deep woods and canebrakes; it demanded continuing physical labor to prepare the land for cultivation or even to let in the sun. The pioneer families struggled to achieve the basic necessities of life. They lived in a world whose dominant features were still vast

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spaces, few people, marginal communication, and subsistence agriculture. This struggle began in 1775 in Kentucky in the vicinity of Harrodsburg, whence it continued over a widening area through the Revolutionary War and the great expansion of the 1780s to statehood and the opening of the Mississippi to American commerce. By 1795 the prosperity of the Bluegrass region, the Nashville Basin, and the Natchez District, all now settled for almost a generation, was already striking. What was as remarkable as their prosperity was the universal presence of slaves as a vital part of their settlement experience and growing affluence. As early as 1793 the Kentucky Gazette—published at Lexington in the heart of the Bluegrass—carried advertisements for “County Seats” with substantial improvements. One included twenty-six acres of land cleared and fenced, eighteen acres in pasture, a garden, two orchards (apple, peach, and cherry trees), a “two story BRICK HOUSE and Kitchen, with a Pump of good water at the door; also a large and convenient framed Barn with stabling for twenty horses.”6 Or physical progress might be measured in a general way by the number of farms, with the many fields under cultivation that travelers could see as they passed along. The Reverend David Barron, who journeyed through northern Kentucky in 1795, noted the superior crops and agricultural production of the region. “The improvements that have been in these counties since their settmt: must surprise a Traveller, and at the same time indicate the future greatness thereof,” he wrote. Or improvement might be represented by numbers of people and their dwellings, such as François Andre Michaux found along the northern banks of the Ohio in 1802. “Till the years 1796 and 1797 the banks of the Ohio were so little populated that they scarcely consisted of thirty families in the space of four hundred miles,” he wrote. As a result of recent heavy immigration from Pennsylvania and Virginia, he continued, “the plantations are now so increased, that they are not farther than two or three miles distant from each other, and when on the river we always had a view of some of them.”7 There is no question that the year 1815 marked a great change in the settlement and development of the western country. The



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years after 1815 brought an accelerated frontier experience, at least in terms of the character of the agricultural frontier and the pace at which people passed through the early settlement stage. To begin with, this extended period brought a number of dramatic changes in technology. The frontier of the transAppalachian West always reflected the world around it, even if this world lay across the mountains. The strength of this reflection varied, of course. It was strong in matters of technology. When steamboats appeared on the rivers and canals in the East, they penetrated to the western waters as soon as the opportunities for profit would admit. Canals, especially the Erie Canal, were also significant in bringing about the rise of large-scale commercial agriculture on the Great Lakes. This development, in turn, led to the rapid settlement and economic growth of the last frontier of the Old Northwest, oriented around the rise of Chicago and other less well-known lake ports. Commercial agriculture now came earlier to the pioneer, and it also came easier. The pace of this economic transformation quickened with the large-scale development of cotton culture on the southern frontier, even in its remote and newest areas. Thomas Law rode through the Black Belt only ten years after the first settlements. On the north side of the Alabama River, he wrote, he had “passed some fine plantations & staid this night at an old dutchman’s.” His host “lived in a very good house & at one of the most beautiful places I ever beheld.” The next day, as he moved north and west into the heart of the Black Belt, Law noted that “the crops in these lands surpass any thing I ever beheld.”8 The acceleration of pace, the larger numbers, the broader landscape all led to a change (or at least a modification) in the needs of the first generation. In this first settlement experience up to 1815, the pioneer family, responding to the harsh and even threatening world in which they found themselves, sought protection from the Indians, good land titles, communications, and a market for their surplus crops. To the extent that these could be supplied, they had what they needed. In this first period, directed to survival and stability, they got government, the militia, the law, and the courts. Added to these was the Ordinance of 1787, reinforcing the influence of the federal government

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through its control of so much institutional machinery. Yet the expansion of people into a variety of isolated places across the length and breadth of the trans-Appalachian West spread population thinly and led to much early subsistence economic activity and a delay in institutional development. It also placed great strains on communication. The bureaucracy at all levels, county (roads and bridges), territorial (county courts), and federal (Indian relations and mail delivery), moved hesitatingly to meet the needs of a diffuse people in a vast wilderness. Minimal achievements gave a sense of accomplishment and a new departure. One Alabama editor rejoiced in 1821 at just such changes. “Our state is now beginning to assume the regularities of society—government is organized—roads cleared out—mails established—the spirit of navigation improving—communication with other states facilitated,” he wrote. “All tend to give us a decided ascendency over our former condition.”9 The 1820s were an especially significant decade for the settlement and institutional development of the western country. The decade began with the crushing impact of the economic crisis of 1819 and subsequent panic. Banks failed, commodity prices of western products plummeted to a fraction of their earlier values, and hundreds of thousands of land purchasers were in debt to the federal government. Commercial trade in western products had largely ceased. It was a time of blighted hopes and anger at banks and other creditors, who insisted on trying to collect debts from families who could not pay. And in the midst of this spreading economic malaise came a routine congressional resolution that turned into a bitter national debate. The resolution was offered by a New York representative as part of the bill to admit Missouri as a state. The resolution’s language—to forbid the institution of slavery in Missouri—and in its direct and uncompromising antislavery tone and substance now provoked attack and counterattack, sectional insult and counter-insult. By the time Missouri was admitted to the union in 1821 after a series of grudging compromises, national nerves were frazzled, and those in the West no less. Western feelings were especially raw because Missouri was a western territory (now state). Issues of



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the spread of slavery as an institution in the West would be debated in Congress, but the practical matters of people and institutions would be fought over (or at least argued over in a more immediate way) on the ground. Lost amidst this growing concern with Thomas Jefferson’s “fire bell in the night” was the accelerated removal of Indian peoples from the western country in this decade. Treaties with Indian groups (some representing a majority of the tribe, others only a faction or a family) removed large groups of Indian peoples from what had become the state of Ohio, the state of Indiana, much of southern and central Illinois, the remainder of Missouri, and the western third of the state of Tennessee. Thus, amidst the recriminations over the collapse of the economy and the reintroduction of politics on a national scale, the business of Indian removal moved forward throughout the decade. The exceptions, of course, were the four powerful tribes of the Southeast, the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, and Creeks. They suffered losses, but they preserved a degree of unity in staving off removal to the West by internal unity and ongoing attempts at assimilation into Anglo-American institutional life. They had only postponed an inevitable day of reckoning. The decade of the 1830s began with the Indian Removal Act and was characterized by continuous efforts to force the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, and Creeks from some of the most attractive cotton lands in the South. These attempts were ultimately successful, although at the local, state, and federal levels they involved intimidation, bribery, and ultimately (in the actual removal process) administrative incompetence mixed with criminal malfeasance. In any case, by the end of the decade, the New Counties of Alabama and Mississippi had been opened to Anglo-American occupation, and they rapidly became a vital part of the cotton frontier. Yet amidst these triumphs, the long reach of the decade ended on a sobering note: the economic crisis of 1837 brought on a depression that would take the bloom off the production of the new cotton lands. In the early 1840s, cotton sank to its lowest price in a generation. Cotton planters, including those on the fresh lands of the New Counties, felt the economic strain.

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The recovery of the economy and the expansion of the national economic network, driven by steamboats, canals, and now railroads (the tracks of the Chicago and Mississippi Railroad Company reached the Mississippi River at Rock Island in 1854), produced heavy immigration into the lands west of the Appalachians. The states longest settled in the Old Northwest, Ohio particularly, had populations and economic growth comparable to the leading states in the East. The new states of Wisconsin and Iowa filled rapidly, blessed with some of the richest agricultural lands in the world (Iowa) and some of the finest timber resources on the continent (Wisconsin). Within the South, the opening of lands for cotton by the large-scale use of slave labor continued apace, borne along by rising prices of that staple. At the same time, large tracts in especially difficult landscapes, for example in the Mississippi Delta, remained unoccupied. These improvements in communication and transportation, these transitions of the interests of people from the local to the state and regional have the effect of overshadowing the human stories associated with this great tide of people in motion. Consider, for example, the meeting of two (or more) groups of peoples from different social and economic worlds. In this fashion, the frontier had telescoped the time of development from a few years to a few months. This condition was perhaps more evident in the New Counties of Alabama and Mississippi, which immediately achieved a community of interests (land, slaves, and cotton) with longer-settled parts of their states and with the South generally. The rise of the cotton frontier introduced a type of settler clearly beyond the frontier period. This was the eastern aristocrat, who left the worn-out lands of the Tidewater and came out to new and fresher lands. The encounters between a Virginia aristocrat and his new hard-working neighbors in one of the new frontier counties in Mississippi provide a compelling example. Thomas Smith Gregory Dabney, descendant of a Huguenot family settled in Virginia since the middle of the seventeenth century, was the essence of elegance and gentility. In 1835 Dabney, age thirty-seven, left his plantation “Elmington” and his native state for a new life in the cotton lands of the



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Southwest. His departure was the occasion for a great testimonial dinner in his honor, reported in detail in the Richmond newspapers. The new seat of the Dabney estate—and home for his family and large slave population—was Hinds County, Mississippi. Over a number of years, as the opportunity presented itself, he bought a total of four thousand acres “from half a dozen small farmers.” In a leaky log cabin, Dabney, the product of four generations of the Virginia aristocracy, settled down to a pioneer life as an aristocrat. Hinds County had been formed in 1821 out of the Indian cession at the Treaty of Doak’s Stand (1820). Although settled for fifteen years, the site of the state’s capital, and already a large-scale producer of cotton, it was not the world from which Dabney emigrated. With his welldeveloped sense of noblesse oblige, Dabney assisted his economically less fortunate neighbors, but succeeded only in arousing their hostility. To an invitation to participate in a house-raising or to help a neighbor whose fields were overgrown with weeds, he would respond with twenty slaves. Mounted on his horse and impeccably gloved, he would direct the work of his labor force. He put up houses in record time and cleared choked fields, but he never called on his neighbors for their aid. As a result, he found himself disliked, and for reasons that he could not understand. He received no more invitations for assistance. His daughter later tried to explain the meeting of two new societies: “The plainer classes in Virginia, like those in England, from whom they were descended, recognized the difference between themselves and the higher classes, and did not aspire to social equality. But in Mississippi the tone was different. They resented anything like superiority in breeding. Thomas Dabney was considered cold and haughty.” Hinds County was a well-settled county in central Mississippi, but it was not yet Tidewater Virginia. Dabney’s purchase of the holdings of small farmers represented a new stage in the economic development of the area. Large-scale agriculture grounded on slave labor had taken over from a less efficient, less profitable system. Large-scale capital investment moved into an area where institutions were formed—at least with respect to government and law. Cotton

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was already the money crop, as it was farther to the north in the New Counties. This was an early state of settlement in a physical sense, but it was a different kind of frontier. There was much going on that was still of a developing nature: building roads, clearing the land, creating drainage, placing large tracts under cultivation for the first time. Dabney tried to apportion the work at “Burleigh” in such a way as to clear one hundred acres of new land each year for cotton cultivation. So to consolidation of land and capital must be added some of the same functions—or a combination of the functions—that we associate with the frontier period. Perhaps the arrival of people like Dabney took some of the influence away from towns, transferring the center of society, economy, and influence over the life of the county to several large-scale, institutionally self-sufficient agricultural units known as plantations. This post-frontier experience—if we may call it that—was especially characteristic of the cotton South and, more specifically, of the new cessions in Mississippi and Alabama. Here large-scale capital investment and commercial agriculture followed hard on the heels of the first pioneers.10 In the early stages of development, the thrust for economic gratification dominated life in the western country. It was the vision that sent new immigrants across the mountains. It emerges from the glowing letters that those who had triumphed over early obstacles sent home to their parents and friends. In 1836 John Humphries of Parke County (Indiana) tried to explain to a Virginia relative what he had done in the past several years and what kind of life he had made for himself and his family. The benchmarks were largely physical and material. They had carved out a farm of 170 acres, with six horses, nine cows, “a good stock of Hogs,” and an orchard of one hundred fruit trees, he wrote. He was constructing a stable and had timbers laid for a barn. In defense of his large family, Humphries wrote that “this is a verry proliffic country.” He recited the improvements of the countryside like a Fourth of July orator: “20 years ago there was not a white man in it now contained from 6 to 8000 inhabitants.” Aside from the urban center of Rockville with its many buildings, “we are about to obtain Charters for putting up a County Seminary and a Steam Mill.” As for the economy, “hog



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is our staple and is supposd that there was near $100,000 worth sold in Parke County this season.” “I tell you my Friends,” he concluded, “it is literally true every Man sets under his own Vine and Fig tree and none to make them afraid. “11 The achievement of economic abundance with a commercial economy, institutional security, and the closing of the frontier did not mean a dramatic change in values or in the quality of life for many people in the western country. The passing of the frontier and the substitution of a rural world was part of the same broad river. Nor did it give any assurance of the quality of the society. Mary Carter Hovey, a minister’s wife in Montgomery County (Indiana), wrote about these circumstances in 1832. What surprised her was the contrast between the affluent conditions of many people—she called them “wealthy” and said they “lived quite genteelly”—and their ignorance and illiteracy. “This is a large and rich settlement where we are,” she continued. “I know of three [women] who live within half a mile of us that do not know [how to read] a word, who are mothers of large families and disposed to let their children grow up in the same way.”12 Sometimes the same indifference could be found with respect to simple physical improvements, sanitation, and cleanliness. Ellen Bigelow wrote of a settlement on the Illinois prairie in which log houses lay surrounded by “a bed of mud, which is trodden in and around the house without the slightest regard for comfort or cleanliness.” These families who lived in their “wretched hovels” had estates “worth $30,000 or $40,000 owning vast herds of cattle and immense farms which produced almost spontaneously every comfort and luxury of life.”13 Bigelow’s observations tell us something important about the settlement patterns, namely that the objectives of individuals, families, and communities cut across a wide range of options. Some families wanted good land, large families, patriarchal households, and full tables; others thought about churches and schools, perhaps even college for their children. There was no one right response in this series of frontier experiences.14 Generally speaking, the frontier of the trans-Appalachian West from 1775 to 1850 was an experience of high expectations.

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The great prize was the land. This was a continuing theme running throughout the three generations of immigrants. Pioneers expected to find rich land and make it their own. It was this expectation that carried them through the hard struggle of the first few years, when the forest wilderness, the canebrakes, or the prairie land had to be subdued acre by acre. In addition to land, another vision also drove people forward. It was the sense that the structure of the New World was not in final form and that something important might come out of it for them. As a more permanent world of institutions took shape around them, they came to realize that the New World was no longer so new. It had aged, counting not in years, but in the occupation and clearing of the land, the establishment of a county court, the acceptance of the common law, the taxes that accompanied these changes, and the gradual appearance and spread of roads, as well as in economic relationships that had changed from spontaneous to permanent. A new society had been shaped. This portion of the frontier had become an agricultural society much like agricultural societies elsewhere. What were people’s reactions to this transition? Some surely rejoiced, the more so if the struggle for survival had been long and hard. Lovira Hart in Tuscola County (Michigan) must have welcomed a sense of progress in the struggle for economic survival, an assurance that the land would provide and that the margin of existence was no longer so thin. For some, the change was less welcome. The expectation of a bright future—landownership and perhaps something more, vague and indefinable but nonetheless more—had been the driving force behind the years of hard work. Now, with a competence achieved, the limits of the hitherto unlimited future revealed themselves with unsettling clarity. What lay ahead were years of labor on the farm to preserve what had been won or to improve on it. People no longer had the illusion of progress, of “getting ahead,” as frontier editors liked to call it. The future was now filled with the monotony of repetitious hard work. A second generation of younger people might react differently to a future on the land. They had not experienced the early years of struggle and the glow of accomplishment that went into making a farm, and saw nothing but work and more work. The differ-



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ence in outlook between the first pioneers and their children led Lovira Hart to plant potatoes, his daughter to cultivate flowers. It was a sense of frustration that sent large numbers to fight a war with Mexico and later to travel to the gold fields of California. It was no accident that these dramatic responses to the opportunity to try something new came at a time when so much of the frontier struggle of the trans-Appalachian West was drawing to a close. Nor was it surprising that the most numerous participants were young people. Furthermore, there was another dimension. Thickened settlement meant rising land prices. In longer-settled areas, tenancy rose. It was more and more difficult for young people on a farm to marry and start their own farming ventures. In 1830, improved agricultural land near Cincinnati cost $100 an acre. By 1850, public land in Illinois was scarce, and tenancy was rising. Individual families and communities needed to confront these changes, for the shifting numbers would help to define their futures.15 Among the varieties of frontier experience were those that spanned the range from rural to urban. The urban frontiers had different bench marks of development. The arrival of the institutions of government, law, and the courts and the emergence of a society were readily recognizable. Peoples in urban centers felt, in a direct way, the structure of institutions. For most, it was a welcome condition, for the economic opportunities associated with urban life thrived on stability and order. The concentration of people that produced economic advantage also created problems. Rowdiness, drunkenness, gambling, and the possibility of violence threatened the orderly rise of urban centers; city ordinances, the sheriff and jail, and, in some places, vigilante movements emerged to control them. It is noteworthy that much of the mob violence on the trans-Appalachian frontier associated with the period of the mid-1830s took place in towns. Perhaps this urban society felt most threatened, had the most to lose, and so was most determined to act; at the same time, it was in urban centers that large numbers of people could be brought together, organized, and activated in pursuit of a common goal. In towns it was order and stability that most clearly marked the transition out of the frontier stage into something beyond, for this was the

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critical condition for the pursuit of commerce and orderly growth. Growth and institutional maturity brought changes. Some did not like these new forms of society, especially the more complicated bureaucratic nature of the new urban world. It was a world of the constable, the tax collector, the alderman, countless regulations and strictures, and often economic planning, with market restrictions and price fixing. Liked or not, they came to all urban centers sooner or later. A theme that constantly emerges from the whole range of the frontier experience in the trans-Appalachian West is that life was surprisingly complex. Travelers noted the inhabitants of lonely cabins in the woods, whose lifestyle and expectations had changed little, if at all, since the outbreak of the American Revolution, and whose institutional needs and interaction with society were minimal. Such descriptions tended to deceive. From the beginning of the first palisaded station in Kentucky, frontier peoples were dependent upon one another and upon the institutions that they created or that others imposed upon them. This was a two-way development: on the one hand were the needs of the pioneers, on the other was the force of the institutions, whether in response to needs or not, whether welcome or not. The county court involved almost everyone; the law was close behind. The need for some kinds of economic transactions, even the most modest barter, was a part of the trans-Appalachian frontier from the very beginning and grew with each passing decade. Commercial men and bureaucrats became important in this world. Merchants took produce and sent it downriver, and so the frontier families had to deal with them. Lovira Hart had to come to terms with the bureaucrats of Tuscola County over taxes and roads. He knew full well the price that he had to pay: three days to Lapeer and back. But he had to pay it all the same. Thus, from the beginnings of settlement to the west of the mountains, life took on an interlocking quality about it that belied the simple picture of the individual against the wilderness. Pioneers depended on their friends, relatives, and neighbors. They also depended on institutions to help them, whether to defend them from Indians, build roads, recover property in a suit



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of law, or, finally, probate a will disposing of their property. They paid a price for this dependence. The presence of an institutional framework on the frontier was not necessarily related to economic conditions or even to physical appearance. After 1815 the institutions of court, law, and county government awaited the settler almost everywhere. D. W. Meinig writes, “even the most thinly settled outer margins of the nation were placed under the jurisdiction of courts and a set of administrative officials. However far the vanguard of the pioneer might outrun effective order, it was rarely even momentarily technically beyond legal authority.”16 These institutions of government and law provided a sense of order and also some necessary services. This did not mean that such benefits accrued to everyone on the frontier; nor did it mean that all those there chose to take advantage of them. A full set of institutions existed along with extreme conditions of poverty. The kinds of facilities and institutions available to people must be measured against the kind of society that people hoped to create. There was little point in lamenting the absence of schools or churches if settlers did not really want them or, alternatively, wanted them but were not prepared to establish and support them. The institutions related to quality of life, cultural matters, and education changed less over seventy-five years than any others, except perhaps for the basic structure of government under the county and the Ordinance of 1787. Even as late as 1850 the concept of a public school supported by the state and local taxation was only in its first stages. On the eve of the Civil War the quality of life in rural agricultural America was much like that on the agricultural frontier. Both focused on economic advantage. Beyond that, the variations had become a matter of degree. At whatever level of development, the strong impression persists that the frontier was one of enormous abundance for almost all those who experienced it. Life was full and rich if not luxurious. Accounts from Kentucky to Wisconsin tell of hardship, some privation, and difficult winters with inadequate shelter, but not of starvation or famine. In spite of early trials, this was a frontier of abundance, and this condition presumably disposed it to adopt institutions and forms that had worked in the past.

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There was no need to change. Along with abundance came optimism. Both were grounded in the seemingly inexhaustible rich lands of the trans-Appalachian West. On the frontiers of the trans-Mississippi West—whether the agricultural frontier of the Great Plains, with its scant rainfall and heartbreak, or the mining frontier of the Rockies and the Far West—failures equaled successes. The story of the people, societies, and institutions across the Mississippi would be very different. But the frontier experience of the trans-Appalachian West is a story of repeated successes. Indeed, one searches in vain for other frontiers that produced so much for so many in so short a time. The great outpouring of county histories in the 1880s and 1890s celebrated this experience. It was an appropriate occasion, for most of those who participated thought, in retrospect, that they had done well. In light of the standards and values of the age, and of later frontier experiences, they had. The balance sheet was not wiped clean at mid-century. The endless, infinite human and institutional experiences of the previous seventy-five years had left two lasting legacies and unresolved issues. The first was the American Indian. One of the continuous strands that unites the history of the landscape west of the mountains over three generations is the contact, friction, friendship, and mystery of relations between the AngloAmericans and Indian peoples. That the relations, especially in the last two generations, were driven by government officials should not lessen the sense that their actions reflected the needs (indeed demands) of the citizens of the republic. The most common image associated with the years after 1815 was the treatymaking exercise. The moral and legal ambivalence of these exercises did not, in the end, restrain their execution. By 1850, the removal of Indian peoples west of the Mississippi River might have resolved the contradictions of relations for the transAppalachian West, but they remained an ongoing presence in the conscience and policy of the nation. Another salient issue stared out at the citizens of the republic, presenting a prospect of violence and division amidst the celebrations of accomplishment. African slavery in the English colonies had been part of colonial America almost since the



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opening of the seventeenth century. In the intervening two hundred fifty years, the numbers of slaves had grown from a few score to three and a quarter million in 1850 (four million in 1860). As a continuing strand of economic and social life in the American South, slave owners moved their slave property west to new settlements, or rather, in most cases, to make new settlements. It was the slave labor force that would hack the open fields out of the forests and the swamps. Slavery had grown as an institution and as a presence with the expansion to the west. Enslaved peoples of African origin were as much a part of the frontier experience as confrontations with Indian peoples and the first county court. That slavery was everywhere legal and part of the system of social control in the South and Missouri should not obscure the fact that slaves’ presence intensified in new lands open for cotton cultivation. Back in the hills, the numbers were reduced, but the system was no less harsh, unforgiving, and permanent. But the contradictions of a large and growing slave system in the most democratic nation in the world were not lost on many, even on slave owners. The issue of the expansion of slavery to the West had become an ongoing contentious national issue. Even as the nation celebrated new continental boundaries in 1850, the continuous friction about the expansion of the institution to the new lands of the West reappeared and grew in intensity. Thus, even as the transAppalachian frontier celebrated its seamless absorption into the nation, the specter of the division of the nation loomed. It was a case in which the worst nightmares of concerned public officials would turn out to be grossly underimagined. The West at mid-century was also remarkable for the transition in national borders and the impending rise of another West, this one far beyond what anyone had imagined in 1775. The war against Mexico broke out in 1846. Whether driven by issues of national honor (clashes along the border) or of expansion of the slave states, the end result was the same. Under the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), the United States annexed by conquest the northern third of the Republic of Mexico. America was now a continental nation. Its new western border was

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the Pacific Ocean. The startling impact of this change was seen almost immediately. The discovery of gold in California in January 1848 set in motion streams of migration that would become known as the California Gold Rush. This newest American West had come to the center of national consciousness within a short time. It would remain there for the rest of the century. Over the preceding three generations, the trans-Appalachian frontier had become a part of the nation. Over the next three generations, the new American West would, in similar fashion, experiment with a variety of institutions as varieties of peoples would attempt to find a place there for themselves and their families.



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Notes

Introduction 1. D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History, vol. 1, Atlantic America, 1492–1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), is an insightful analysis of the interaction of landscape and people over three hundred years. 2. On the French, see Carl J. Eckberg, French Roots in the Illinois Country; The Mississippi Frontier in Colonial Times (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998); on the Spanish, David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). 3. Note Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001); Colin G. Calloway, New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); and Eric Hinderaker and Peter C. Mancall, At the Edge of Empire: The Backcountry in British North America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). 4. Walter Nugent, Structures of American Social History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), 54–62. 5. Nugent, Structures of American Social History, 63. 6. From the innumerable studies of the “frontier,” I note especially Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and Peoples in Between in North American History,” American Historical Review 104 (1999): 814–41; and William Cronon, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin, “Becoming West: Toward a New Meaning for Western History,” in Cronon, Miles, and Gitlin, Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 3–27. 7. James C. Malin, The Grassland of North America: Prolegomena to Its History (Lawrence, KS: self-published, 1947), vi.

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Notes to Pages 21–32

Part 1. Across the Mountains 1. Marc Bloch, Feudal Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 72–75. 1. The Struggle for Security 1. Neal O. Hammon, “The Fincastle Surveyors in the Bluegrass, 1774,” RKSHS 70 (1972): 287–88; Stephen Aron, How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 65–67; Nancy O’Malley, “Frontier Defenses and Pioneer Strategies in the Historic Settlement Era,” in The Buzzel about Kentucky: Settling the Promised Land, ed. Craig Friend (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 59–60. 2. D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History, vol. 1, Atlantic America, 1492–1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 284–88. 3. Aron, How the West Was Lost, ch. 1; O’Malley, “Frontier Defenses and Pioneer Strategies in the Historic Settlement Era,” 60–61. 4. Aron, How the West Was Lost, ch. 1. 5. John Mack Faragher, Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer (New York: Holt, 1992), 73–76. 6. Aron, How the West Was Lost, 59–68; O’Malley, “Frontier Defenses and Pioneer Strategies in the Historic Settlement Era,” 60. 7. William Calk, “The Journal of William Calk, Kentucky Pioneer,” MVHR 7 (1920–21): 367–68. 8. Felix Walker, “The First Settlement of Kentucky,” DeBow’s Review 16 (1854): 152. 9. John R. Finger, Tennessee Frontiers: Three Regions in Transition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 42–46, 80–83. 10. Aron, How the West Was Lost, 40–41, 47–49, and Finger, Tennessee Frontiers, ch. 3 on the years of the revolution. 11. Richard Henry Lee to James Madison, Nov. 20, 1784, in Lee, The Letters of Richard Henry Lee, 2 vols., ed. James C. Ballagh (New York: Macmillan, 1911), 2:300. 12. Finger, Tennessee Frontiers, 112–23, analyzes the rise and fall of the State of Franklin. 13. Lyman C. Draper Collections, 11 CC 68, SHSW. Lyman Copeland Draper (1815–91) filled several volumes with interviews of Kentucky pioneers. He also acquired materials of a similar nature from

Notes to Pages 32–40

the estate of John Shane, a Presbyterian minister. The Draper Collections are an invaluable source. Some of the accounts are repetitive, emphasizing Indian warfare and pioneer hardships. An insightful use of the collections with a fine introduction is Elizabeth Perkins, Border Life: Experience and Memory in the Revolutionary Ohio Valley (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). She describes the accounts as “The lure of ordinary men and women attempting to make sense of their own lives within the stream of history.” (xiii). 14. O’Malley, “Frontier Defenses and Pioneer Strategies in the Historic Settlement Era,” 64–65. 15. Draper Collections, 12 CC 46, SHSW. 16. Draper Collections, 12 CC 45, SHSW. 17. Lexington Kentucky Gazette, Aug. 18, 1787. Under Kentucky law, militia men might substitute a rifle for the specified musket. The governor’s declaration that shirkers would be prosecuted (Lexington Kentucky Gazette, Aug. 25, 1787) suggests that not all those eligible served willingly. 18. George F. Taylor, “Suffrage in Early Kentucky,” RKSHS 61 (1963): 23. 19. Thomas D. Clark, ed., The Voice of the Frontier: John Bradford’s Notes on Kentucky (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993), xxi. 20. Finger, Tennessee Frontiers, 89–91, 160–61. 21. Francis Asbury, The Journals and Letters of Francis Asbury, 3 vols., ed. Elmer T. Clark (Nashville: Abington Press, 1958), 1:640. 22. See, for example, Lexington Kentucky Gazette, Jan. 15, May 7, 1791; April 27, 1793. 23. Note, for example, Henry Knox to Winthrop Sargent, Nov. 9, 1789, in TP, 2: 220–21. 24. Finger, Tennessee Frontiers, 132–40. 25. Joseph Doddridge, Notes on the Settlement and Indian Wars of the Western Parts of Virginia and Pennsylvania, from 1763 to 1783, Inclusive, 2d ed. (Albany, 1876), 166–67. 26. Calk, “Journal,” 369. 27. Harriett Simpson Arnow, “The Pioneer Farmer and His Crops in the Cumberland Region,” THQ 19 (1960): 291–327. 28. Journal of the Legislative Council, 1800–1801, ESR, Ohio, 90. 29. O’Malley, “Frontier Defenses and Pioneer Strategies in the Historic Settlement Era,” 58. 30. Draper Collections, 11 CC 54–66, SHSW. Another account of livestock in the first years of settlement is Benjamin Allen in 11 CC 68, SHSW.



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Notes to Pages 41–52

31. Draper Collections, 11 CC 55, 122, 69, 22, SHSW. 32. Draper Collections, 12 CC 130, 46, SHSW. 33. Doddridge, Notes on Settlement, 148; Lexington Kentucky Gazette, Jan. 3, 1795. 34. Charles Richard Staples, History of Pioneer Lexington, 1779– 1806 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1939), 31–33, 37; Hazel Dicken-Garcia, To Western Woods: The Breckenridge Family Moves to Kentucky in 1793 (Rutherford, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson Press, 1991), 81, 82, 178; William Chenault, “The Early History of Madison Country,” RKSHS 30 (1932): 142; Draper Collections, 11 CC 19, SHSW. 35. Harriette Simpson Arnow, Seedtime on the Cumberland (New York: Macmillan, 1960), 249–50, 252–54; Daniel Drake, Pioneer Life in Kentucky, 1785–1800 (Cincinnati, 1870), 179. 36. Arnow, Seedtime on the Cumberland, 320, 321, 392–93. Arnow notes the widespread use of hand mills. 37. Robert B. McAfee, “Sketches of the First Settlements in Kentucky,” Draper Collections, 4 CC 98, SHSW; McAfee, “The Life and Times of Rbt. B. McAfee and His Family Connections; Written by Himself, Commenced April 23, 1845,” RKSHS 25 (1927): 113. 38. William Blount to Henry Knox, April 11, 9, 1793, in TP, 4: 251, 250. 39. Floyd to Preston, June 1780, Draper Collection, 17 CC 182–83, SHSW. 40. McAfee, “The Life and Times,” 113. 41. Clark, The Voice of the Frontier, xx. 42. Aron, How the West Was Lost, 82–85. 43. John Floyd to Colonel William Preston, Oct. 30, Nov 26, Dec. 19, 1779; Jan 19, May 5, 1780, Draper Collections, 17 CC 120–25, 185–87, SHSW. Indians killed Floyd in 1783. 44. Dicken-Garcia, To Western Woods, 78–89, 173–91. 45. Finger, Tennessee Frontiers, 108, 109, ch. 5, passim. 2. The Search for Stability 1. Robert McAfee, “The Life and Times of Rbt. B. McAfee and His Family Connections; Written by Himself, Commenced April 23, 1845,” RKSHS 25 (1927): 116; John R. Finger, Tennessee Frontiers: Three Regions in Transition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 241– 43, 245–53, discusses the significance of the contract between the frontier settlements and the commercial outlet in New Orleans. 2. Stephen Aron, How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of

Notes to Pages 52–59

Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 119–21. 3. Aron, How the West Was Lost, 56; Stephen Aron, “The Significance of the Kentucky Frontier,” RKSHS 91 (1993): 318–23; Harold B. Gill, ed., “A Virginian’s First Views of Kentucky . . . 1796,” RKSHS 90 (1992): 131–32. 4. Stephen Aron, “Pigs and Hunters: ‘Rights in the Woods’ on the Trans-Appalachian Frontier,” in Contact Points: American Frontiers from the Mohawk Valley to the Mississippi, 1750–1830, ed. Andrew R. L. Cayton (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 175–204. 5. Aron, How the West Was Lost, 50–56. 6. Aron, “Pigs and Hunters,” 175–204; quote from p. 204. 7. W. A. Provine, “Lardner Clark: Nashville’s First Merchant and Foremost Citizen,” THM 3 (1917): 28–50, 115–33. The inventory of Clark’s estate is on pp. 126–27. 8. Lexington Kentucky Gazette, Feb. 15, 1794. 9. Aron, How the West Was Lost, 92–94. 10. Ellen Eslinger, “The Shape of Slavery on the Kentucky Frontier, 1775–1800,” RKSHS 92 (1994): 1–23. Joan Wells Coward, Kentucky in the New Republic: The Process of Constitution Making (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1979), 37. 11. Anita S. Goodstein, “Black History on the Nashville Frontier, 1780–1810,” THQ 38 (1979): 401–20. The account of Jenny is from p. 406. 12. On the range of demands for services from government, see Finger, Tennessee Frontiers, 142–47. 13. Quoted in J. G. M. Ramsey, The Annals of Tennessee to the End of the Eighteenth Century. . . . (Philadelphia, 1853), 134–38. 14. John Haywood, The Civil and Political History of the State of Tennessee from Its Earliest Settlement up to the Year 1796 (Nashville, 1891), 50–61. 15. Quoted in James M. Gaver, “The Boonesborough Experience: Revolution in the Dark and Bloody Ground” (B.A., Princeton, 1964), 83. Proprietors, especially Henderson, exercised much influence at this time, especially the attention to legal forms and the courts. 16. “Records of the Cumberland Association,” American Historical Magazine 7 (1902): 115–16, 123. In addition to the usual emphasis on the militia, the Committee “agreed that six spies be kept out to discover the motions of the enemy, so long as we shall be able to pay them. Each to receive 75 bushels of Indian corn per month.”



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Notes to Pages 60–73

17. Aron, How the West Was Lost, 64; Robert S. Cotterill, History of Pioneer Kentucky (Cincinnati: Johnson and Hardin, 1917), 118–20. 18. Robert M. Ireland, The County Courts in Ante-bellum Kentucky (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1972), analyzes the powerful influence of the county court in Kentucky over a half century. 19. Quoted in John Allison, Dropped Stitches in Tennessee History (Nashville, 1897), 44; see also Howard M. Browning, “The Washington County Court, 1779–1789: A Study in Frontier Administration,” THQ 1 (1942): 328–43. 20. Davidson County, Minute Book A, 1783–1791, 1–25, UT. 21. Jefferson County, Court Orders, Minute Book A, 1780–83; Minute Book No. 1, 1784–85, MIK. The indenture is dated May 7, 1782; Boone’s fine, May 6, 1784. 22. Bourbon County, Order Book, 1786–93, entry for June Court, 1786; Mercer County, Circuit Court, Judgments (Suits), 1780–1801, suits dated 1789 and 1790. 23. Aron, How the West Was Lost, ch. 4, especially 82–86. 24. Wilma Dunaway, The First American Frontier: Transition to Capitalism in the Southern Appalachians, 1700–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), esp. 51–59, 61–70; quote from p. 67. 25. “Records of the Cumberland Association,” 116–17. 26. David Campbell to George Washington, Nov. 9, 1791, TP, 4: 101. 27. Charles McClung to James W. McClung, Feb. 6, 1815, Charles McClung Papers, McHC. 28. Aron, How the West Was Lost, 87, 98. The intrusion of the federal government into state affairs also made itself felt in the absorption of the Kentucky militia at the time of statehood. See “Act Establishing a Uniform Militia throughout the United States,” 1 Stat. 271–74 (May 8, 1792). 29. Joan Wells Coward, Kentucky in the New Republic: The Process of Constitution Making (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1979), 16. 30. Aron, How the West Was Lost, 87–95. See also Patricia Watlington, The Partisan Spirit: Kentucky Politics, 1779–1792 (New York: Atheneum, 1972), 209–22; Coward, Kentucky in the New Republic; quotes from p. 16. 31. My discussion relies on Coward, Kentucky and the New Republic, 12–47. 32. Ibid., 43. 33. Lowell Harrison, Kentucky’s Road to Statehood (Lexington:

Notes to Pages 73–85

University of Kentucky Press, 1992) is a complete account. On the adaptation of the English common law across the trans-Appalachian frontier, see William B. Hamilton, “The Transmission of English Law to the Frontier of America,” SAQ 67 (1968): 243–64. 34. Aron, How the West Was Lost, 89–95. See also Aron’s analysis of “The Bluegrass System” in ibid., ch. six. On the convention of 1799, see Coward, Kentucky in the New Republic, ch. 6. 35. Finger, Tennessee Frontiers, ch. 6. 36. Lawrence B. Goodheart et al, “ ‘An Act for the Relief of Females . . . ’: Divorce and the Changing Legal Status of Women in Tennessee, 1796–1860,” THQ 44 (1985): 318–23. 37. Draper Collections, 13 CC 138, SHSW. This letter probably dates from 1779. 38. Lexington Kentucky Gazette, Jan. 5, 1788. 39. Daniel Drake, Pioneer Life in Kentucky, 1785–1800 (Cincinnati, 1870), 161–62. 40. Aron, How the West Was Lost, 170–79. 41. Herman A. Norton, Religion in Tennessee, 1777–1945 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981), 6–8. 42. Quoted in Samuel C. Williams, Early Travels in the Tennessee Country, 1540–1800 (Johnson City: Wautauga Press, 1928), 305. 43. Leland Winfield Mayer, ed., “The Great Crossings Church Records, 1795–1801,” RKSHS 34 (1936): 10–11. 44. Drake, Pioneer Life in Kentucky, 181–82. 45. Lexington Kentucky Gazette, Dec. 22, 1792; Sept. 28, 1793; May 3, June 28, July 5, Oct. 11, 1794; July 11, 1795. On the significance of Lexington, see Elizabeth Perkins, “The Consumer Frontier: Household Consumption in Early Kentucky,” JAH 78 (1991): 486–510. 3. Security and Stability in the Territory Northwest of the Ohio 1. Ensign John Armstrong to Lt. Col. Josiah Harmar, April 12, 1785, in Western Reserve Historical Society, Historical and Archeological Tracts 6 (1871): 3–4; Harmar to Gen. Henry Knox, June 15, 1785, in ibid., 6. 2. The full text of the Ordinance of 1785 is printed in TP, 2: 12–18; its significance is analyzed in Malcolm J. Rohrbough, The Land Office Business: The Settlement and Administration of American Public Lands, 1789–1837 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 9–10. The text of the Ordinance of 1787 is printed in TP, 2: 39–50. 3. Andrew R. L. Cayton, “ ‘A Quiet Independence’: Western Vision of the Ohio Company,” Ohio History 90 (1981): 5–32.



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Notes to Pages 85–95

4. Archer Butler Hulbert, ed., The Records of the Original Proceedings of the Ohio Company, 2 vols. (Marietta: Marietta Historical Commission, 1917), 1:46. 5. John May, The Western Journals of John May, ed. Dwight L. Smith (Cincinnati: Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio, 1961), 54. A description of the first Ohio Company court, convened at Marietta on September 2, 1788, is “The First Court in Ohio,” Draper Collections, 19 CC 40–41, SHSW. Other settlement groups north of the Ohio— the Symmes Purchase between the Great and Little Miami Rivers; the Virginia Military Tract, between the Miami and Little Scioto; and the Seven Ranges, opposite the Pennsylvania line—had little or no institutional structure prior to the operation of the Northwest Ordinance. 6. Peter S. Onuf, “From Constitution to Higher Law: The Reinterpretation of the Northwest Ordinance,” Ohio History 94 (1985): 5–33 is a large-scale interpretation. 7. Andrew R. L. Cayton, The Frontier Republic: Ideology and Politics in the Ohio Country, 1780–1825 (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1986), 22–26, discusses the origins of the ordinance. 8. Andrew R. L. Cayton, “Land, Power, and Reputation: The Cultural Dimension of Politics in the Ohio Country,” William and Mary Quarterly 47 (1990): 271–73 has a complete biography of St. Clair. R. Douglas Hurt, The Ohio Frontier: Crucible of the Old Northwest, 1720– 1830 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 272–83 is an overview of St. Clair’s governorship. 9. May, Western Journals, 63; Inhabitants on the Muskingum to Governor St. Clair, July 16, 1788, in TP, 2:132; Arthur St. Clair, The St. Clair Papers, ed. William Henry Smith, 2 vols. (Cincinnati, 1882), 2:54. The third judge, John Cleves Symmes, had not yet arrived at Marietta. 10. Winstanley Briggs, “Le Pays des Illinois,” William and Mary Quarterly 47 (1990): 30–56. 11. St. Clair to Sec. at War, July 5, 1788 in TP, 2:119. 12. St. Clair’s line on his arrival in Marietta. See note 9. 13. Theodore Calvin Pease, ed., The Laws of the Northwest Territory, 1788–1800 (Springfield: Trustees of the Illinois State Library, 1925), 1–4. 14. Pease, The Laws of the Northwest Territory, 4–10. The first part of the Ordinance of 1787 was a temporary law of probate. See TP, 2: 119. 15. Pease, The Laws of the Northwest Territory, 93–102, 77–79; the quotation is from p. 77. 16. Richard A. Brisbin, “Before Bureaucracy: State Courts and Administration of Public Services in the North-West, 1787–1830,” Old

Notes to Pages 95–109

Northwest 10 (1984): 151–55 is an important account of the evolution of the early court system in the Northwest Territory. 17. Journal of the Executive Proceedings in the Territory Northwest of the River Ohio, in TP, 3: 278–89; St. Clair to Chas. Thomson, Sept. 2, 1788, in ibid., 2: 152. 18. Pease, The Laws of the Northwest Territory, 13–21, 31. 19. Quoted in Josephine E. Phillips, “James Backus: Citizen of Marietta, 1788–1791,” OAHQ 45 (1936): 163. Note that the law of 1792 permitted parties in litigation to manage their own cases. 20. Pease, The Laws of the Northwest Territory, 102–16. 21. Journal of the Executive Proceedings, 294–95, 301–303; Pease, The Laws of the Northwest Territory, 37–41, 74–77. 22. Major Hamtramck to Knox, March 31, 1792, in TP, 2: 381. 23. Briggs, “Le Pays des Illinois,” 30–56. 24. The Northwest Ordinance gave judges common law jurisdiction and guaranteed “judicial proceedings according to the course of common law.” See also William T. Utter, “Ohio and the English Common Law,” MVHR 16 (1929–30): 321–33. On the controversy with Congress, see Brisbin, “Before Bureaucracy,” 152–53. 25. For a summary of St. Clair’s governorship, see Hurt, The Ohio Frontier, 272–82, and Cayton, “Land, Power and Reputation,” 266–86. 26. Hurt, The Ohio Frontier, 211. 27. Ibid., ch. 8, “Farm Country”; Robert Leslie Jones, “Ohio Agriculture in History,” OHQ 65 (1956): 229–58. 28. This discussion is drawn from Robert Leslie Jones, History of Agriculture in Ohio to 1880 (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1983), ch. 3; quote from p. 32. 29. Ibid., 45–47. 30. Hurt, The Ohio Frontier, 186–89 31. May, Western Journals, 139, 134. See also Hurt’s analysis of early merchants in Cincinnati and Hamilton. The Ohio Frontier, 263–66. 32. Cayton, Frontier Indiana, 150–54; quotes from pp. 150 and 154. 33. Cayton, Frontier Indiana, 157–61. Hurt, The Ohio Frontier, ch. 4 is also an excellent account. 34. Hurt, The Ohio Frontier, ch. 5, is an account of Wayne’s campaign, culminating in the Battle of Fallen Timbers. See also Cayton, Frontier Indiana, 161–66. 35. Thomas Ewing, “The Autobiography of Thomas Ewing,” ed. Clement L. Martzolff, OAHQ 22 (1913): 150–51. 36. Ewing, “Autobiography,” 155.



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Notes to Pages 110–129

37. Journal of the Governors and Judges, 1795, ESR, Ohio, 5. 38. Hurt, The Ohio Frontier, 278–81. Part 2. The Widening Frontier, 1795–1815 1. D. W. Meinig, Continental America, 1800–1867 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 222. 2. Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 40–42 on the strength of southern Indians. He notes that “Most of what is today Mississippi and Alabama remained in indigenous hands on the eve of the War of 1812”(p. 42). 3. Peter J. Kastor, The Nation’s Crucible: The Louisiana Purchase and the Creation of America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 79ff. 4. The Reach of Government and the Authority of Law Spread across the Western Country 1. Peter Onuf, Statehood and Union: A History of the Northwest Ordinance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987) is a fine overview. 2. Malcolm J. Rohrbough, The Land Office Business: The Settlement and Administration of American Public Lands 1789–1837 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 8–12, describes the early operations of the land system. 3. H. Denison to Dr. Hillsman, Oct. 30, 1800, Miscellaneous Collections, TSLA. On settlement conditions in the Mississippi Territory, see Robert V. Haynes, “Law Enforcement in Frontier Mississippi,” JMH 22 (1960): 27–42. 4. D. Clayton James, Antebellum Natchez (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968), is a thorough account of early Natchez. Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 88–89, describes the Bambara rebellion. See also David J. Libby, Slavery and Frontier Mississippi, 1720–1835 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), 7–13. 5. George Purcell, “Collecting Taxes in Indiana Territory, 1797– 1802,” IMH 40 (1944): 363. 6. A History and Biographical Cyclopaedia of Butler County, Ohio

Notes to Pages 130–134

(Cincinnati, 1882), 44. A comparison with the budget for Jefferson County (county seat at Steubenville) from June 12, 1805, to June 4, 1806, shows the same categories for expense. The Jefferson County budget totaled $2,784.20. See Steubenville Western Herald, August 29, 1807. The expenditures for Franklin County (Scioto River Valley, with county seat at Chillicothe) are listed on an annual basis from 1804 to 1811, in the Worthington Western Intelligencer, Sept. 18, 1811. The Franklin County budget included annual items for roads, the courthouse (1805 and thereafter), and the “gaol” (1806 and thereafter). Every historian who writes on the trans-Appalachian frontier has to come to terms with county histories. Almost every county mentioned in this study has a county history—some have more than one—and they form a useful source of information, not so much for their description of analysis as in their occasional printing of documentary materials from the courthouse records. 7. History of Knox and Daviess County, Indiana (Chicago, 1886), 159, 176–77. 8. History of Madison County, Illinois (Edwardsville, 1882), 119– 23. 9. William Baskerville Hamilton, ed., Anglo-American Law on the Frontier: Thomas Rodney and His Territorial Cases (Durham: Duke University Press, 1953), 117–32. Much of what we know about early law in Mississippi Territory is derived from the decisions and correspondence of Thomas Rodney, one of the first territorial judges. Rodney was a soldier in the Revolutionary War and a minor Delaware politician with strong Jeffersonian principles. Jefferson appointed him to the Mississippi Court in 1803. Rodney’s decisions have been edited by Hamilton, whose perceptive introduction enhances our understanding of the text. A general discussion, centered on Rodney, is Clarence E. Carter, “The Transit of Law to the Frontier: A Review Article,” JMH 16 (1954): 183–92. 10. John Remley Wunder, “The Mississippi Territory’s First Experience with American Legal Institutions: Sargent’s Code, Its Adoption and Abolition, 1798–1803” (M.A., Iowa, 1970), 28–34; William N. Ethridge, “An Introduction to Sargent’s Code of the Mississippi Territory (1799–1800),” AJLH 11 (1967): 148–51. 11. Daniel H. Usner Jr., “Frontier Exchange and Cotton Production: The Slave Economy in Mississippi, 1798–1836,” in From Slavery to Emancipation in the Atlantic World, ed. Sylvia R. Frey and Betty Wood (Portland, Ore.: Frank Cass, 1999), 28–29. 12. This account follows Rodney, Anglo-American Law on the Frontier, 145–49.



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Notes to Pages 134–144

13. Thomas D. Clark and John D. W. Guice, Frontiers in Conflict: The Old Southwest, 1795–1830 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989), 57–61, describes Toulmin’s varied activities on behalf of the American government. 14. Robert V. Haynes, “Early Washington County, Alabama,” AR 18 (1965): 190–200. On Toulmin’s different interpretations of the law, see William B. Hamilton, “The Transmission of English Law to the Frontier or America,” SAQ 67 (1968): 243–54. Note Hamilton’s discussions of other kinds of English Law, pp. 246–47. 15. Peter J. Kastor, The Nation’s Crucible: The Louisiana Purchase and the Creation of America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 123–27. 16. James Griffith Harris, “The Justice of the Peace in Missouri, 1800–1845” (M.A., Missouri, 1948), esp. 54–89, is an admirable study of the justice courts generally and in Missouri in particular. Harris notes that the importance of the justice courts declined in the 1830s with rising property values and the increasing influence of lawyers. 17. History of Dearborn, Ohio and Switzerland Counties, Indiana (Chicago, 1885), 114; Miami County, Ohio (n.p., 1880), 279. 18. Kastor, The Nation’s Crucible, 45–52. 19. Benjamin Morgan to Chandler Price, Aug. 7, 1803, in TP, 9: 7. 20. William C. C. Claiborne to Thomas Jefferson, Jan. 16, 1804, in TP, 9: 161. 21. Differences in temperament, style, and institutions run far deeper than can be conveyed in this brief description. On the institutions in Louisiana, see George Dargo, Jefferson’s Louisiana: Politics and the Clash of Legal Traditions (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), 9–11, 23–25. 22. Claiborne to James Madison, Oct. 29, 1804, in TP, 9: 317. On the conflict between civil and common law, see Dargo, Jefferson’s Louisiana, chs. 5 and 6; and Elizabeth Gaspar Brown, “Legal Systems in Conflict: Orleans Territory, 1804–1812,” AJLH 1 (1967): 35–75. 23. Quoted in Kastor, The Nation’s Crucible, 49. 24. Ibid., 46–52; Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 31–32. 25. Kastor, The Nation’s Crucible, 55–61. 26. Ibid., 82–86. 27. Ibid., 62–70, 113–15. 28. Quoted in Ibid., 81.

Notes to Pages 145–154

29. Order to the Commanding Officer of the Militia Guard, Jan. 30, 1806, in TP, 9: 596–97. 30. Sarah Russell, “Ethnicity, Commerce and Community on Lower Louisiana’s Plantation Frontier, 1803–1828,” LH 40 (1999): 395–401. 31. Kastor, The Nation’s Crucible, 115–19; Rothman, Slave Country, 101–103. A full discussion is in Kastor, ch. 6. 32. Robert Dabney Coleman, “Origin and Early Development of County-Parish Government in Louisiana, 1805–1845,” LHQ 18 (1985): 61–65, 93, 118–20, 153–57. Initially, the parish judge, the dominant figure in local government, chose the police jurors. An act of the state of Louisiana, passed in 1813, divided the parishes into wards, and voters chose representatives from each to serve on the police jury. 33. See, for example, the case of Wray v. Donaughoo, April Term, 1806, “Minutes of the County Court of Concordia, 1805–1807,” Concordia Parish Collections, 1794–1896, folder 1, LSU. On the affairs of the parish court in general, also note Robert Dabney Coleman, “A History of Concordia Parish, Louisiana,” LHQ 15 (1932): 225–29, 440–41, 428–32. 34. Walter Prichard, ed., “Minutes of the Police Jury of St. Helena Parish, August 16–19, 1813,” LHQ 23 (1940): 405–27. Other examples of the operation of the police jury are in St. Charles Parish, Police Jury Minutes, 1811–17; and St. Landry Parish, Police Jury Minutes, 1811–19, LSU. Parishes and counties existed side by side until 1845, when counties went out of existence and parishes emerged as the only unit of local government in Louisiana. 35. Russell, “Ethnicity, Commerce, and Community on Lower Louisiana’s Plantation Frontier,” 405. 36. Kastor, The Nation’s Crucible, 142–49, 185–88. 37. Rothman, Slave Country, 54. 38. Andrew Cayton, Frontier Indiana (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 216–24. 39. Rothman, Slave Country, ch. 4. John William Ward, Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955) is a description of the flowering of the legend of Jackson and the military superiority of backwoods militia over the best of European armies. 5. Diverse Economies Moving toward Commercial Ends 1. Nicole Etcheson, The Emerging Midwest: Upland Southerners and the Political Culture of the Old Northwest, 1787–1861 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), xi. She goes on to say that any



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Notes to Pages 155–162

study of the frontier in the Midwest in the early nineteenth century “means putting the Ohio River at the center of the narrative,” xii. 2. Robert Leslie Jones, “Ohio Agriculture in History,” OHQ 65 (1956): 229–38. John C. Hudson, Making the Corn Belt: A Geographical History of Middle-Western Agriculture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994) is a complete study. 3. Hudson, Making the Corn Belt, 43, 60; quote from p. 44. 4. Jonathan D. Martin, Divided Mastery: Slave Hiring in the American South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 34–43; quotes from p. 35. See also Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), ch.1. 5. Hosea Smith to his father, June 14, Oct. 13, 1810; June 5, 1814; Smith to his brother, Nov. 14, 1810 (two letters with the same date); Oct. 22, 1813; Smith to his father-in-law, Nov. 27, 1813, Hosea Smith Letters, 1810–1814, IHS. According to Smith, the War of 1812 scarcely slowed immigration. Smith’s reference to the Donation is to a tract of more than 100,000 acres on both sides of the Wabash that had been set aside under acts of Congress in 1788 and 1791 but was now open for settlement. 6. Joseph Hayes, “Life,” ISL. 7. “A History of Thomas Morrison,” ISL. A similar experience is the story of Thomas Rogers, “Reminiscences of a Pioneer,” ed. Clement Martzloff, OAHQ 19 (1910): 190–227. 8. Jacob Burnet, Notes on the Early Settlement of the NorthWestern Territory (Cincinnati, 1847), 399. R. Douglas Hurt, The Ohio Frontier: Crucible of the Old Northwest, 1720–1830 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 211–17, analyzes the importance of hogs for Ohio’s early settlements. 9. Hudson, Making the Corn Belt, ch. 6, 75–87; Thomas D. Clark and John D. W. Guice, Frontiers in Conflict: The Old Southwest, 1795– 1830 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989), 111–13. 10. Hudson, Making the Corn Belt, 80–81. 11. Ibid., 70, 72, 75. 12. John G. Clark, New Orleans, 1718–1812: An Economic History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1970), 302–11; Frank P. Goodwin, “The Development of the Miami Country,” OAHQ 18 (1909): 484–503. 13. Clark and Guice, Frontiers in Conflict, ch. 5. 14. Brian Harte, “Land in the Old Northwest: A Study of Speculation, Sales and Settlement on the Connecticut Western Reserve,” Ohio History 101 (1992): 121, 139.

Notes to Pages 163–174

15. R. Pierce Beaver, “Joseph Hough, An Early Miami Merchant,” OAHQ 45 (1936): 37–45. The experiences of an early Indiana merchant may be examined in the Samuel Vance Papers, IHS. 16. Gordon T. Chappell, “The Life and Activities of General John Coffee” THQ 1 (1942): 125–46. 17. Arthur St. Clair to William Henry Harrison, Feb. 17, 1800, in TP, 7: 5; Chillicothe Scioto Gazette, Aug. 22, 1800; Memorial of the Harrison County Citizens, Feb. 3, 1809, in TP, 7: 632–35; Sam’l Huntington to Alfred Kelley, May 24, 1816, Charles E. Rice Collection, OHS; Lyman C. Draper Collections, 15 CC 8, SHSW. 18. James E. Davis, Frontier Illinois (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 108–109; on early Jefferson County, see W. W. Hunter, comp., “The Pathfinders of Jefferson County,” OAHSQ 6 (1898): 232– 37. 19. Alfred B. Sears, “Thomas Worthington, Pioneer Businessman of the Old Northwest,” OAHQ 58 (1949): 69–79. The census of 1810 was the first to list data on manufacturing. 20. Clark and Guice, Frontiers in Conflict, 2–5, describes the rivers’ influence in shaping settlement patterns. See also D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: Continental America, 1800–1867 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 436–37. 21. A. C. Ramsey, “A Sketch of the Life and Times of Rev. A. C. Ramsey,” ADAH. 22. David J. Libby, Slavery and Frontier Mississippi, 1720–1835 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), 29–36; Clark and Guice, Frontiers in Conflict, 103–107. 23. Libby, Slavery and Frontier Mississippi, 50; Meinig, Continental America, 286–87. 24. John Hutchins, “Memoirs,” TSLA. 25. Libby, Slavery and Frontier Mississippi, 40–41. See also William B. Hamilton, “The Southwestern Frontier, 1795–1817: An Essay in Social History,” JSH 10 (1944): 389–403, a brief description of the rise of this special society. The quotations are from Narsworthy Hunter to W. C. C. Claiborne, Feb. 4, 1800, in TP, 5:101; Thomas Fenton to Gideon Granger, June 27, 1802, in ibid., 155. 26. Libby, Slavery and Frontier Mississippi, ch. 3, esp. 37–41. Claiborne to Madison, Dec. 20, 1801, is quoted in Libby, p. 39. 27. My description of the cotton cycle follows ibid., 44–45. 28. Daniel S. Dupre, Transforming the Cotton Frontier: Madison County, Alabama, 1800–1840 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), ch 1, is an excellent account.



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Notes to Pages 175–185

29. Sarah Russell, “Ethnicity, Commerce, and Community on Lower Louisiana’s Plantation Frontier, 1803–1828,” LH 40 (1999): 389–405. 30. Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 75. 31. Quoted in ibid., 75. 32. Ibid., 83. 33. Ibid., 83. 34. Ibid., 83. 35. Russell, “Ethnicity, Commerce and Community on Lower Louisiana’s Plantation Frontier,” 391–93. 36. Ibid., 392–99. 37. Thomas C. Nicholls, “Reminiscences,” LSU; Daniel Clark to James Madison, Aug. 20, 1803, in TP, 9:14. On the diversity of Louisiana’s land and people, see George Dargo, Jefferson’s Louisiana: Politics and the Clash of Legal Traditions (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), 3–11. 38. Yvonne Phillips, “Settlement Succession in the Tensas Basin” (Ph.D., Louisiana State University, 1952), ch. 2; Martha Philips Martin, “Memoirs,” McIver Family Collections, TSLA. 39. Stephen Aron, American Confluence: The Missouri Frontier from Borderland to Border State (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 93–105. 40. Martin, “Memoirs,” McIver Collections, TSLA; L. C. Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860, 2 vols. (Washington, 1933), 2:687–88. 41. John Sibley to Claiborne, Oct. 10, 1803, in TP, 9: 75; G. P. Whittington, “Rapides Parish, Louisiana,” LHQ 16 (1933): 255. 42. John Palfrey to Mark Pichard, Oct. 11, 1810; Palfrey to R. D. Shepherd, Nov. 5, 1811; Palfrey to William Simpson, Dec. 17, 1811; March 25, 1812. William T. Palfrey Papers, LSU. 43. John Palfrey to his son Henry, March 30, 1813; Jan. 2, 1814; March 22, 1815; Palfrey to Thomas Harmon, Oct. 9, 1815, William T. Palfrey Papers, LSU. 44. Pierre de la Verge, “Early Economic Life in Louisiana, 1804– 1824 (An Historical Dialogue),” LHQ 26 (1943): 915–36, stresses the powers of the City Council of New Orleans and the legislature to control economic life. On the impact of Anglo-American institutions on the City Council, see Clark, New Orleans, 280–87. 45. George Rogers Taylor, “Prices in the Mississippi Valley Preceding the War of 1812,” Journal of Economic and Business History 3

Notes to Pages 189–195

(1930–31): 157–63, notes the falling prices of agricultural commodities, which began about 1805 and continued until the opening of the War of 1812. 6. Many Varied Societies Emerge across the Western Country 1. James E. Davis, Frontier America: 1800–1840: A Comparative Demographic Analysis of the Frontier Process (Glendale, Calif.: Arthur H. Clark, 1977), ch. 2, esp. 39–55; quote from p. 53. Davis notes minor variations on the southern frontier, ch. 3. 2. Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 325–41. 3. William B. Hamilton, “The Southwestern Frontier, 1795–1817: An Essay in Social History,” JSH 10 (1944): 389–403, Hamilton and William D. McCain, eds., “Wealth in the Natchez Region,” JMH 10 (1948): 290–316. A fascinating manuscript account of early social life in Natchez (1805–1806) is Eliza Chotard Gould, ’”Autobiography,” ADAH. D. Clayton James, Antebellum Natchez (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968) is a complete account. David J. Libby, Slavery and Frontier Mississippi, 1720–1835 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), ch. 3, analyzes the growing connection between Natchez and slavery. 4. James Sterrett to Nathaniel Evans, Oct. 22, 1804, James Sterrett Letters, 1802–1810, Nathaniel Evans and Family Papers, box 17, Meritt M. Shilg Memorial Collections, LSU; William C. C. Claiborne to Albert Gallatin, Aug. 11, 1806, in TP, 9:680. On the consumption of alcohol, see also Sterrett to Evans, Oct. 23, 1804, Sterrett Letters. 5. Peter J. Kastor, The Nation’s Crucible: The Louisiana Purchase and the Creation of America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 61–62; quote from p. 62. 6. Lyman C. Draper Collections, 15 CC 7–9, SHSW; Frederick Bates, The Life and Times of Frederick Bates, ed. Thomas M. Marshall, 2 vols. (St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society, 1926), 1:113–14; Richard C. Wade, The Urban Frontier: The Rise of Western Cities, 1790–1830 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959), 59–64. 7. R. Douglas Hurt, The Ohio Frontier: Crucible of the Old Northwest, 1720–1830 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 216, 218, 353. 8. James E. Davis, Frontier Illinois (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 173–74.



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Notes to Pages 195–205

9. John R. Finger, Tennessee Frontiers: Three Regions in Transition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 226–27. 10. D. W. Meinig, Continental America, 1800–1867 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 277. 11. Thomas C. Nicholls, “Reminiscences,” LSU; Thomas Bolling Robertson letter, June 3, 1814, Thomas Bolling Robertson Letters, Walter Prichard Collection, folder 12, LSU. 12. Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 49–50; Kastor, The Nation’s Crucible, 88, 141. 13. Sterrett to Evans, May 12, 1804; June 10, 1809, Sterrett Letters, LSU; Robertson letters, June 3, 1814, Robertson Letters, Prichard Collection, folder 12, LSU. 14. A brilliant interpretation of the antebellum South, cotton, and the plantation as the key to the emergence of the new southern aristocracy is W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1941), 1–21. 15. Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, 312. 16. Ibid., 345–47; quotes from p. 345. There was a slave insurrection at Point Coupee in 1795. See David J. Libby, Slavery and Frontier Mississippi, 1720–1835 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), 37. 17. Rothman, Slave Country, 74; Kastor, The Nation’s Crucible, 127–31. 18. Margaret Story Jean and Aline Jean Treanor, “The First Families of White Oak Springs, 1810–1817,” IMH 36 (1940): 232; Chelsea L. Lawlis, “Settlement of the Whitewater Valley, 1790–1810,” IMH 43 (1947): 27–29. 19. William T. Utter, Granville: The Story of an Ohio Village (Granville, Ohio: Denison University, 1956), 64–67. 20. John J. Horton, The Jonathan Hale Farm: A Chronicle of the Cuyahoga Valley, Publication 116 (Cleveland: Western Reserve Historical Society 1961), chs. 4–6, 10. This strong sense of identity and the hardships of the early years are described in Hurt, The Ohio Frontier, 197–204. 21. Bridgett Williams-Searle, “Intimate Empires: Domestic Order, Property Relations, and Law in the Western Country, 1760–1830” (Ph.D., Iowa, 2005), ch. 2, is a fine reconstruction and analysis of life in the French villages, especially Vincennes. On the early history of Vincennes, also see Andrew Cayton, Frontier Indiana (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), ch. 3. 22. Thomas Bolling Robertson, “Journal of a Tour down the Ohio

Notes to Pages 206–215

and Mississippi,” Robertson Letters, Prichard Collection, folder 12, LSU. 23. David Hoover, “Memoir,” IMH 2 (1906): 18. Edward Eggleston’s novel, The Hoosier Schoolmaster (1871), which is set in Indiana in the 1840s, suggests that this rural primitivism did not end with the close of the frontier. 24. Joseph Hayes, “Life,” ISL. 25. Nathan O. Hatch, “The Second Great Awakening and the Market Revolution,” in Devising Liberty: Preserving and Creating Freedom in the New American Republic, ed. David Thomas Konig (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 245. 26. Allen Wiley, “Methodism in Southeastern Indiana,” IMH 23 (1927): 164; T. Scott Miyakawa, Protestants and Pioneers: Individualism and Conformity on the American Frontier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), ch. 5. Wiley wrote his memoir in 1845–46. 27. William Warren Sweet, ed., Religion on the American Frontier, 1783–1840, 4 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1936–46), vol. 4, The Methodists, chs. 3 and 4; Elizabeth K. Nottingham, Methodism and the Frontier: Indiana Proving Ground (New York: AMS Press, 1966), chs. 2, 3, and 4. 28. “Autobiography of Jacob Brewer,” in Sweet, Religion on the American Frontier, vol. 1, The Baptists, 202–204; Walter B. Posey, “The Frontier Baptist Ministry,” East Tennessee Historical Society—Publications 14 (1942): 3–10. 29. “Minutes of the Elkhorn Baptists Association,” dated Kentucky, 1798, in Sweet, The Baptists, 37. 30. On the prominent role of black members in one Baptist Church in Tennessee, see the “Minutes of the Mill Creek Baptist Church, 1801– 1802,” TSLA. On the Baptists generally, see Scott Miyakawa, Protestants and Pioneers, ch. 3. 31. Sweet, Religion on the American Frontier, vol. 3, The Congregationalists, 3–12, 44–45; Daniel Story and Rufus Putnam to Strong, May 22, 1799, in ibid., 72. 32. L. C. Rudolph, Hoosier Zion: Presbyterians in Early Indiana (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 28–36; Miyakawa, Protestants and Pioneers, ch. 3. 33. The literature on the Great Awakening is extensive. A good place to begin is Donald G. Mathews, “The Second Great Awakening as an Organizing Process, 1780–1830: An Hypothesis,” American Quarterly 21 (1969): 23–43, which argues that the Great Awakening was an organizing process and social reform movement in a time of national upheaval.



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Notes to Pages 216–226

34. Kastor, The Nation’s Crucible, 107–108, 139, 196, 216–17. 35. Hatch, “The Second Great Awakening and the Market Revolution,” 245–46. 36. “Report of Abraham Scott, Missionary, Jan. 22, 1808,” in Sweet, The Congregationalists, 94–95. Chester Jacob Attig, “The Institutional History of the Northwestern Territory, 1787–1802” (Ph.D., University of Chicago, 1921), ch. 5, describes the miserable conditions of schooling throughout much of the Northwest Territory as late as 1802. 37. Erastus Nevins, “Reminiscences”; Ira Meater, “Early Reminiscences of Parke Co.,” IHS. An account similar in content and tone is A. C. Ramsey, “A Sketch of the Life and Times of Rev. A. C. Ramsey,” ADHA. 38. William B. Hamilton, “Jefferson College and Education in Mississippi, 1798–1817,” JMH 3 (1941): 259–76, is a complete account. 39. John Palfrey to Chew and Rolf, ca. 1812, William T. Palfrey Papers, LSU; G. P. Whittington, “Rapides Parish, Louisiana,” LHQ 17 (1934): 112–13; Robertson to his sister, Aug. 2, 1809, Robertson Letters, Prichard Collection, folder 11, LSU. 40. John Hutchins, “Memoirs,” TSLA. 41. A. C. Ramsey, “Sketch,” 6, ADHA. 42. Cash, The Mind of the South, 28–30. Part 3. The First Great Migration, 1815–1830 1. Kim M. Greenwald, River of Enterprise: The Commercial Origins of Regional Identity in the Ohio Valley, 1790–1850 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), xi. 2. D. W. Meinig, Continental America, 1800–1867 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 436–37. 3. Gershom Flagg to Artemas Flagg, Jan. 8, 1817, The Flagg Correspondence: Selected Letters, 1816–1854, ed. Barbara Lawrence and Nedra Branz (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986), 5. 4. R. David Edmonds, Tecumseh and the Quest for Indian Leadership (Boston: Little Brown, 1984), is a fine account of Tecumseh’s vision and failure. 5. R. Douglas Hurt, The Indian Frontier, 1763–1846 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002), ch. 5, is a complete analysis. 6. Malcolm J. Rohrbough, The Land Office Business: The Settlement and Administration of the Public Lands, 1789–1837 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), ch. 1, describes the evolution of the land system.

Notes to Pages 227–238

7. Walter Nugent, Structures of American Social History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), 63. 8. John William Ward, Andrew Jackson, Symbol for an Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955), describes the outburst of enthusiasm for the final battle of the war. 9. Joan Cashin, A Family Venture: Men and Women on the Southern Frontier (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 49–51. 10. Stephen Aron, American Confluence: The Missouri Frontier from Borderland to Border State (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 178–83; quote from p. 178. 7. Across the Old Northwest and into Missouri 1. Morris Birkbeck, Notes on a Journey in America from the Coasts of Virginia to the Territory of Illinois (Philadelphia, 1817), 34. 2. Gershom Flagg to his mother, Feb. 1, 1818, Flagg Correspondence: Selected Letters, 1816–1854, ed. Barbara Lawrence and Nedra Branz (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1986), 15. 3. The unfolding of the Great Migration is described in Malcolm J. Rohrbough, The Land Office Business: The Settlement and Administration of the American Public Lands, 1789–1837 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 89–93. 4. “The Pioneers of Jefferson County—Reminiscences of James B. Lewis, Esq.,” ISL. 5. Birkbeck, Notes on a Journey in America, 139; T. V. Denny to Christopher Denny, Jan. 24, 1818, T. V. Denny Letters, ISL; Ira Meater, “Early Reminiscences of Parke Co.,” IHS. 6. Richard Lee Mason, “Journey from Philadelphia to Illinois and Missouri, 1819,” ISHL. 7. Edward Coles to James Madison, July 20, 1819, Edward Coles Papers, CHS. A sense of class distinctions in frontier Illinois emerges in William Wilson’s letter from Shawneetown: “It is true we have no slaves here, which is some inconvenience, but here as in every other country where slavery is not tolerated, there is a certain class of people who supplied their places.” Wilson to May Wilson, June 14, 1819, William Wilson Papers, ISHL. 8. Roger A. Winsor, “Environment Imagery of the Wet Prairie of East Central Illinois, 1820–1920,” Journal of Historical Geography 13 (1987): 375–80. The wettest portions of eastern Illinois would not be settled until the 1830s, and the reputation for swampy lands would likewise delay the occupation of northwestern Ohio.



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Notes to Pages 239–248

9. John G. Finch, “Reminiscences,” IHS. 10. Andrew TenBrook, “From Lycoming County, Pennsylvania, to Parke County, Indiana: Recollections of Andrew TenBrook, 1786– 1823,” ed. Donald J. Carmony, IMH 61 (1965): 17–29. On the abundance enjoyed through hard work and rich lands: “We have either beef, pork, or chickens on our table three times a day, both Indian and wheat bread to accompany every meal; all kinds of sauce, sweetening aplenty from our sugar orchards and beehives, and when blessed with a housewife, we have always pickles and preserves.” Edwardsville Spectator, Feb. 15, 1820. 11. Daniel Brush, “Autobiographical Memoir, 1813–1861,” 19–24, ISHL. 12. Ibid. 13. Gershom Flagg to Artemas Flagg, Sept. 12, 1818, Flagg Correspondence, 19. 14. Flagg to John Johnson, Feb. 6, 1819, Flagg Correspondance, 21. The promising town of Chariton, Missouri, in the heart of the Boon’s Lick country, was abandoned in 1829 because of disease, principally malaria. See R. Douglas Hurt, “Seeking Fortune in the Promised Land: Settling the Boon’s Lick Country, 1808–1825,” Gateway Heritage 13 (1992): 12. 15. Gershom Flagg to Dr. and Mrs. Ebenezer Flagg, Feb. 1, 1818, 15; Flagg to Artemus Flagg, Sept. 12, 1818, Flagg Correspondance, 16, 17– 18. 16. Stephen Aron, American Confluence: The Missouri Frontier from Borderland to Border State (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 158–66. 17. Timothy Flint, Recollections of the Last Ten Years in the Valley of the Mississippi (Boston, 1826), 202. 18. R. Douglas Hurt, Agriculture and Slavery in Missouri’s Little Dixie (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992), ch. 1, is a complete account. 19. R. Douglas Hurt, “Seeking Fortune in the Promised Land: Settling the Boon’s Lick Country, 1808–1825,” 4–19. 20. Aron, American Confluence, 157–58, 183–84. 21. Ibid., 169–73; quote from p. 169. 22. Ibid., 173–77. 23. John Mack Faragher, Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 3–17; quote from p. 3. Faragher notes that the “great American forest contained more species of edible and nutritious nuts than any of the world’s woodlands” (11).

Notes to Pages 248–258

24. Edwardsville Spectator, July 10, 1819, reprinted in its entirety in the Brookville Enquirer, Sept. 10, 1819. This is a good example of how information was transmitted on the frontier, where newspapers traditionally copied from one another. 25. William McCutcheon to his father, Aug. 13, 1830, William McCutcheon Letters, ISL. 26. William McCutcheon Letters, ISL; Edward Coles Papers, CHS; TenBrook, “From Lycoming County, Pennsylvania, to Parke County, Indiana,” 17–29; Elijah Iles, Sketches of Early Life and Times in Kentucky Missouri and Illinois (Springfield, 1863), 23–24. 27. Evansville Gazette, Jan. 21, 1824. 28. St. Louis Missouri Gazette, May 19, 1819; Evansville Gazette, Feb. 11, 1824; George Rogers Taylor, The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860 (New York: Harper and Row, 1951), 63–67. See also Erik F. Haites, James Mak, and Gary M. Walton, Western River Transportation: The Era of Early Internal Development, 1810–1860 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), ch. 2. 29. Gershom Flagg to Artemas Flagg, Sept. 12, 1818, Flagg Correspondence, 17. 30. Archibald Shaw, “Autobiography,” ISL; Finch, “Reminiscences,” IHS. 31. James E. Davis, Frontier Illinois (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 173; Andrew Cayton, Frontier Indiana (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 184. 32. Thomas Hulme, “Journal of a Tour in the Western Countries of America . . . ,” in Early Western Travels, 1748–1846, 32 vols., ed. Reuben Gold Thwaites (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark, 1904–1907), 10:46; T. V. Denny to Christopher Denny, Jan. 24, 1818, Denny Letters, ISL. 33. Mary Alice Kennedy, “Business Career of Moses U. Payne, 1828– 1870” (M.A., Missouri, 1944), 1–3. 34. Iles, Sketches of Early Life and Times in Kentucky, Missouri and Illinois, 23–24. The nature of the business in the more prosperous period may be examined in Iles’s General Merchandise Account Book, no. 1: 1824–26, ISHL. 35. Francis X. Brady, “W. G. and G. W. Ewing, Pioneer Mercantile Capitalists” (Ed.D., Ball State, 1965), esp. chs. 3 and 8. Bert Anson, “The Fur Traders of Northern Indiana, 1796–1850” (PhD., Indiana, 1953), 289–90, concludes that the merchant class of northern Indiana came from the ranks of the fur traders. 36. Columbus Gazette, March 20, 1818. A detailed discussion of banking, money, and finance in this period is R. Carlyle Buley, The Old



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Notes to Pages 258–266

Northwest: Pioneer Period, 1815–1840, 2 vols. (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1950), 1: ch. 8. Also note Harry S. Gleick, “Banking in Early Missouri,” MHR 61 (1967): 427–43; 62 (1967): 30–44. 37. The text of the Northwest Ordinance is found in TP, 2: 39–50. 38. Cayton, Frontier Indiana, 188–91; quote from p. 189. 39. Ibid., 187–95; Paul Finkelman, “Evading the Ordinance: The Persistence of Bondage in Indiana and Illinois,” Journal of the Early Republic 9 (1989): 21–51. 40. Davis, Frontier Illinois, 165–68; quote from p. 168. 41. Hurt, The Ohio Frontier, 387, 388. 42. Cayton, Frontier Indiana, 270–71, 299, 300. 43. Davis, Frontier Illinois, 188, 258; quote from p. 268. 44. Hurt, The Ohio Frontier, 253; Davis, Frontier Illinois, 419. 45. Sangamon County, Commissioners Court, Record Book A, 1821– 26, ISHL. A similar story is found in the Jefferson County, Commissioners Court, 1819, ibid. A different aspect of county affairs is the Greene County, Poor Book, 1824–26, also in ibid. An account of criminal proceedings is John Arnold, “Early History of Rush County Courts,” IHS. A published account of the proceedings of the Fountain County (Indiana) circuit court (1826–30), is Harry L. McGurk, “A Pioneer Indiana County Circuit Court,” AJLH 15 (1971): 278–87. 46. A large quantity of materials relative to Amos Williams is in the Williams Woodbury Collections, IHS-U. See, especially, “Danville at an Early Day,” folder 149, and several examples of Williams’s documents in folder 88. Another excellent example of the emergence of a professional bureaucrat in Illinois is Gillum Ferguson, “ ‘He attest well his part’: Hamlet Ferguson and Southern Illinois,” Journal of Illinois History 6 (2003): 271–96. 47. Articles of Agreement dated Aug. 21, 1824, Williams-Woodbury Collection, folder 88, IHS-U. 48. Gershom to Azariah C. Flagg, Nov. 12, 1816, Flagg Correspondence, 3. 49. Sandford C. Cox, Recollections of the Early Settlement of the Wabash Valley (Lafayette, Ind., 1860), 19. 50. Daniel Cook to Ninian Edwards, May 24, 1815, Ninian Edwards Papers, CHS. Although influential, lawyers were not universally admired. The editor of the Indiana Gazette, for example, accused them of placing their interests above those of the public. Corydon Indiana Gazette, July 17, 1819. 51. Wendell Homes Stephenson, “Amos Cane,” IMH 26 (1930): 182. A detailed account of lawyers practicing on the Cumberland River (Tennessee) Circuit is Daniel R. Calhoun, Professional Lives in Amer-

Notes to Pages 267–274

ica: Structure and Aspiration, 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), ch. 3. 52. Quoted in History of Dearborn, Ohio and Switzerland Counties, Indiana (Chicago, 1885), 115–16. 53. Cox, Recollections of the Early Settlement of the Wabash Valley, 16–17. 54. Indianapolis Indiana Journal, May 3, 1825; see also April 10, 1827. The Corydon Indiana Gazette, March 14, 1822, speaks of a Sunday School for “people of Color.” 55. Corydon Indiana Gazette, July 31, 1819. 56. Shale Creek Baptist Church, Bond County, Minutes, 1818–1845, ISHL. A persuasive account of the influence of the circuit rider is Paul B. Boase, “Moral Policemen on the Ohio Frontier,” OHQ 68 (1959): 38– 53. 57. Ira Allen, “Early Presbyterianism in East Central Illinois,” JISHS 9 (1916–17): 136–43. A similar experience in establishing a church is Franklin D. Scott, ed., “Minutes of the Session of the First Presbyterian Church in Morgan County, 1827–1830,” JISHS 18 (1925–26): 142–51. Reed’s astonishment at the spiritual poverty of these people contrasts sharply with the account of a Methodist circuit rider, who ministered to scattered congregations on a regular basis. Note, for example, the career of Elihu Springer, as reflected in his letters and diary, ISHL. 58. Indianapolis Indiana Journal, March 8, 1825. The account states simply that “the Rev. Mr. Reed gave a suitable charge to the people.” I have assumed that this is the same Rev. Reed who traveled through Edgar County. 59. Allen Wiley, “Methodism in Southeastern Indiana,” IMH 23 (1927): 134. Wiley’s accounts were originally published in the Western Christian Advocate in 1846. For the various aspects of religious institution building on the frontier in the period from 1815 to 1830, a basic starting point is Buley, The Old Northwest, 2: ch. 14. See also Leslie Gamblin Hill, “A Moral Crusade: The Influence of Protestantism on Frontier Society in Missouri,” MHR 45 (1950): 16–34. 60. Faragher, Sugar Creek, 37. 61. Bridgett Mary Williams-Searle, “Intimate Empires: Domestic Order, Property Relations, and the Law of the Western Country, 1760– 1830” (Ph.D, Iowa, 2005), ch. 4. 8. The Flowering of the Cotton Frontier 1. Thomas D. Clark and John D. W. Guice, Frontiers in Conflict: The Old Southwest, 1795–1830 (Albuquerque: University of New Mex-



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Notes to Pages 275–281

ico Press, 1989), 161–82, is an overview of the First Great Migration in the Southwest. 2. John Hebron Moore, The Emergence of the Cotton Kingdom in the Old Southwest: Mississippi, 1770–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), ch. 1, analyzes the emergence of the cotton kingdom. See also D. W. Meinig, Continental America, 1800–1867 (New Haven: Yale University Press), 232, 235, 246, 285–88. 3. Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), ch. 5, is an account of the connection between the great migration to the cotton frontier and the parallel migration of a great slave labor force. Southern writers from John Pendleton Kennedy to William Faulkner have emphasized the distinctive texture and shape of the Southern landscape. See especially W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1941), an interpretation of the South that notes the significance of landscape and climate in the evolution of the South. 4. Malcolm J. Rohrbough, The Land Office Business: The Settlement and Administration of the American Public Lands, 1789-1837 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 109–27. 5. Robert V. Remini, “A New York ‘Yankee’ in Tennessee, 1821,” THQ 37 (1978): 286. 6. Meinig, Continental America, 285–89, analyzes the expansion of the new Cotton Kingdom from the perspective of a geographer. Compare, Cash, The Mind of the South, 1–31. 7. Clark and Guice, Frontiers in Conflict, 165, 208. The relationship among the land system, Indian cessions, and transportation on the southern frontier after 1815 is analyzed in Rohrbough, The Land Office Business, chs. 5 and 6. 8. Paul E. Hoffman, Florida’s Frontiers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 279–81. 9. James Graham to Thomas Ruffin, Nov. 9, 1817, in Ruffin, The Papers of Thomas Ruffin, 4 vols., ed. J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton (Raleigh: Edwards and Broughton, 1918–20), 1:198. 10. Robert Woods to John Hale, June 11, 1817, Bensen Family Papers, LSU. Woods eventually settled in Perry County, Alabama, one of the most attractive agricultural sites in the new purchase. Clark and Guice, Frontiers in Conflict, 164, 165, 174 have descriptions of the “Alabama fever.” 11. Steven F. Miller, “Plantation Labor Organization and the Slave Life on the Cotton Frontier: The Alabama-Mississippi Black Belt, 1815–

Notes to Pages 281–291

1840,” in Cultivation and Culture: Labor and Shaping Slave Life in the Americas, ed. Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993), 161, 160. 12. Miller, “Plantation Labor Organization and the Slave Life on the Cotton Frontier,” 158–68; quote from p. 158. 13. James Tait to Charles Tait, Nov. 10, Dec. 15, 1817; Feb. 7, 1818, Charles Tait Family Papers, ADAH. 14. John Perry Cochran, “James Asbury Tait and His Plantations” (M.A., Alabama, 1951), notes that on August 6, 1819, Charles and James Tait purchased 10,247.15 acres of land at the St. Stephens land office (9–15). 15. Israel Pickens to William B. Lenoir, July 29, 1816, Israel Pickens Papers, ADAH; Pickens to Lenoir, Jan. 12, 1819, William B. Lenoir Papers, Special Collections, UT. On the presence of men of means at the public land sales in Alabama Territory, see Rohrbough, The Land Office Business, 118–22. 16. Pickens to Lenoir, Jan. 18, 1819, Pickens Papers, ADAH. 17. Rohrbough, The Land Office Business, 109–27. The figures are from p. 124. Daniel S. Dupre, Transforming the Cotton Frontier: Madison County, Alabama, 1800–1840 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), is an excellent study of the flowering of the cotton frontier in Madison County. 18. Petition to Congress by the Inhabitants of Montgomery County, Dec. 29, 1817, in TP, 18: 225. 19. “A Brief Historical Sketch of St. Clair County,” William H. Cather Collection, ADHA. The economy and lifestyle of these smallscale farmers and grazers are analyzed in Frank L. Owsley, “The Pattern of Migration and Settlement on the Southern Frontier,” JSH 11 (1945): 147–76. 20. This account is based on Gideon Lincecum, “Autobiography of Gideon Lincecum,” Publications of the Mississippi Historical Society 8 (1904): 443–519. The long quotation is from pp. 474–75. 21. Thomas P. Abernethy, The South in the New Nation, 1789–1819 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1961), ch. 16, is a general account. See also Charles D. Lowery, “The Great Migration to the Mississippi Territory, 1789–1819,” JMH 30 (1968): 173–92. 22. Meinig, Continental America, 287, 293. 23. John Finger, Tennessee Frontiers: Three Regions in Transition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), ch. 10, is a complete account of “the Western District.” 24. Samuel Cole Williams, Beginnings of West Tennessee, in the



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Notes to Pages 292–302

Land of the Chickasaws, 1541–1841 (Johnson City: Wautauga Press, 1930), 136–37, 140, 176–79, 202–204. 25. Finger, Tennessee Frontiers, 259, 260. 26. Ibid., 239–74. 27. William Bibb to John Quincy Adams, Feb. 16, 1818, in TP, 18: 256–57; Officer of a Militia Company, April 22, 1818, in ibid., 310–11; Alexander Pope to Josiah Meigs, Sept. 3, 1819, in ibid., 691; David Moore and others to John Quincy Adams, May 28, 1819, in ibid., 636. 28. James O. Crump to Governor Bibb, July 28, 1818, in TP, 18: 386. 29. Journal of the Legislative Council, 1818, ESR, Alabama, 6. 30. Clanton Williams, “Conservatism in Old Montgomery, 1817– 1861,” AR 10 (1957): 99–102; Bernard Creep, “The Muscle Shoals Frontier: Early Society and Culture in Lauderdale County,” AR 9 (1956): 190–211. 31. Weymouth T. Jordan, “Early Ante-Bellum Marion, Alabama: A Black Belt Town,” AHQ 5 (1943): 14–19. 32. Carroll County, County Court, Minute Books, 1826–33, UT; Weakley County, First Minute Book, 1827–35, pp. 1–12, ibid. 33. Madison County, Circuit Court, Minute Book No. I, 1821–28. The elected judge, Joshua Haskell, had to take an oath that he had not violated the state’s anti-dueling law of 1819. 34. Alexandria Louisiana Herald, July 29, 1820; Jan. 21, 1825. 35. Terrebonne Parish, Police Jury Minutes, April 6–Nov. 1, 1822; Lafayette Parish, Police Jury Minutes, June 3–Sept. 9, 1823; Avoyelles Parish, Police Jury Minutes, June 5, 1821–Aug. 31, 1822, LSU. 36. Pickens to Lenoir, July 10, 1819, Pickens Papers; Hugh C. Bailey, John Williams Walker: A Study in the Political, Social and Cultural Life of the Old Southwest (University: University of Alabama Press, 1964), 95–96, 169. 37. In this account, I have relied on James William Bragg, “Frontier Entrepreneurs of Madison County, Alabama: The Bell Factory Enterprise, 1819–1842” (M.A., Alabama, 1958). This is an excellent thesis, characterized by imaginative use of manuscript sources. Another aspect of manufacturing enterprise is discussed in John A. Eisterhold, “Lumber and the Trade in the Lower Mississippi Valley and New Orleans, 1800–1860,” LH 13 (1972): 72–76. 38. See, for example, William H. Brantley, Banking in Alabama, 1816–1860, 2 vols. (Birmingham: Birmingham Publishing, 1961), 1:3–51. 39. Clark and Guice, Frontiers in Conflict, ch. 10, nicely balances the polar opposites. 40. Christopher Morris, Becoming Southern: The Evolution of a Way

Notes to Pages 303–321

of Life, Warren County and Vicksburg, Mississippi, 1770–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 42–62; quotes from pp. 45, 60. 41. Joan Cashin, A Family Venture: Men and Women on the Southern Frontier (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 44, 4, 5; quotes from pp. 4, 5. 42. A useful statistical compilation of the number of blacks in selected counties on the trans-Appalachian frontier is James E. Davis, Frontier America, 1800–1840: A Comparative Demographic Analysis of the Settlement Process (Glendale, Calif.: Arthur H. Clark, 1977), ch. VI. 43. Cashin, A Family Venture, 49–51. See also Rothman, Slave Country, ch. 5. 44. David J. Libby, Slavery and Frontier Mississippi, 1720–1835 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), 61–65. 45. Miller, “Plantation Labor Organization and Slave Life on the Cotton Frontier,” 155–68; quote from p. 158. 46. Morris, Becoming Southern, 67–68. 47. Ibid., 70–72. 48. Lincecum, “Autobiography,” 455–56, 459. 49. Blakeley Sun, Feb. 2, 1819. 50. Charles Tait to John Williams Walker, Jan. 5, 1820, John Williams Walker Papers, ADAH. 9. Michigan 1. D. W. Meinig, Continental America, 1800–1867 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 41–44; quote from p. 41. 2. Meinig, Continental America, 48. On the condition of Michigan Territory at the close of the war, see Judge Augustus B. Woodward to James Monroe, March 5, 1815, in TP, 10:513. 3. William Darby, A Tour from the City of New York to Detroit (New York, 1819), 188. 4. Willard Carl Klunder, Lewis Cass and the Politics of Moderation (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1996) is a complete account. 5. Malcolm J. Rohrbough, The Land Office Business: The Settlement and Administration of American Public Lands, 1789–1837 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 78–82. 6. Ibid., 102–103; Klunder, Lewis Cass and the Politics of Moderation, 25–27. 7. In Detroit Gazette, Aug. 14, 28, 1818, are accounts of the ecstatic welcome of the steamboats.



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Notes to Pages 322–330

8. Floyd R. Dain, Every House a Frontier: Detroit’s Economic Progress, 1815–1825 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1956), 34– 40; Alec R. Gilpin, The Territory of Michigan, 1805–1837 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1958), 137–38. 9. Cass to Calhoun, May 31, 1816, in TP, 10:643. The governor could reverse these views on the appropriate occasion. In 1825, when urging General Lafayette to locate his township of land in Michigan Territory, Cass emphasized the territory’s French heritage and referred happily to “this ancient seat of French enterprise.” Message of the Governor, Jan. 18, 1825, in Journal of the Legislative Council, 1824–35, ESR, Michigan, 13. 10. Detroit Gazette, March 13, Aug. 14, Dec. 4, 1818. 11. Ibid., May 11, 1821. 12. Monroe Michigan Sentinel, June 23, 1827. A description of a prosperous farm at Dexter in 1828 is found in the diary of Munnis Kenny, July 31, 1828, MHC. 13. Detroit Gazette, March 13, 1818; May 11, 1821. Detroit population in 1819 was 1,110, including 70 African-Americans. Gilpin, The Territory of Michigan, 134. 14. Detroit Gazette, July 30, 1819; June 1, 1821; Aug. 30, 1825. 15. Klunder, Lewis Cass and the Politics of Moderation, 28. 16. Ibid., 32–33. Because of his strong support of Astor and his company, Cass was suspected and even accused of accepting bribes. Klunder’s research concludes, “Supporting Astor was simply another manifestation of his [Cass’s] broadening Anglophobia” (33). 17. Ibid., 49, 50, 53, 55. 18. Meinig, Continental America, 82–83. 19. Klunder, Lewis Cass and the Politics of Moderation, 34–39; quote from pp. 38–39. 20. Ibid., 39–40. 21. Lewis Cass to John C. Calhoun, Oct. 21, 1820, in TP, 11:65–69 is an account of the governor’s trip. 22. Monroe Michigan Sentinel, Dec. 6, 1828. The identity, numbers, and order of an earlier version of the territorial “Establishment” may be examined in the funeral procession of Lt. John Brooks. Detroit Gazette, Nov. 7, 1817. 23. Daniel Strange, “Pioneer Days in Eaton County,” MHM 7 (1923): 12; George N. Fuller, Economic and Social Beginnings of Michigan (Lansing: Wynkoop, Hallenbeck, Crawford, 1916), 270. The journal of the board of supervisors of Oakland County for 1827 to 1844 (MHC) discloses nothing beyond the usual run of subjects that con-

Notes to Pages 330–337

cerned county government everywhere in the Northwest in this period. The Legislative Council continued Cass’s policy of laying out counties in advance of settlement. Gilpin, The Territory of Michigan, 111–12. 24. Gilpin, The Territory of Michigan, 105. 25. Journal of the Legislative Council, 1824–35, ESR, Michigan, 13; Monroe Michigan Sentinel, Jan. 27, 1826. 26. On Doty as a frontier politician and entrepreneur, see Alice E. Smith, James Duane Doty: Frontier Promoter (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1954); on Doty as judge, see Elizabeth G. Brown, ed., “Judge James Doty’s Notes of Trial and Opinions: 1823– 1832,” AJLH 9 (1965): 17–40, 156–66, 216–33, 350–62. An example of Doty’s systematic way of conducting judicial business is his “Rules of the Circuit Court of the United States for the Counties of Mackinaw Brown and Crawford, passed by J D Doty,” printed in the Detroit Gazette, Sept. 24, 1824. 27. Detroit Gazette, Oct. 2, 1818. 28. Fuller, Economic and Social Beginnings of Michigan, 56n; Buley, The Old Northwest, 2:80–86. 29. Rohrbough, The Land Office Business, 248. 30. Monroe Michigan Sentinel, Oct. 25, 1834; June 4, 1836. Robert J. Parks, Democracy’s Railroads: Public Enterprise in Jacksonian Michigan (Port Washington: Kennikat Press, 1972), chs. 5–7, analyzes the complicated story of Michigan’s railroad planning and construction, with special attention to public ownership. 31. This account is based largely on Bingham to family, July 1, 1833, Kingsley Scott Bingham Papers, MHC. Reference was also made to Ebenezer Laken Brown, “The Beginning of Schoolcraft,” W. Forbes Collection; William Watts to parents, Nov. 9, 1836, William Watts Letters; Dennis Family Papers, all in MHC; and William Nowlin, “The Bark-Covered House, or Pioneer Life in Michigan,” MPHC 4 (1881): 480–541. On the grain trade, see Thomas D. Odle, “The American Grain Trade of the Great Lakes, 1825–1873” (Ph.D., Michigan, 1951), chs. 1 and 3. 32. W. Forbes to James Forbes, Peterhead, Scotland, April 10, 1835, Forbes Collection; MHC. 33. The Elizabeth Margaret Chandler Papers (MHC), a collection of fifty-five letters, are among the most extensive collections dealing with the lives of literate and perceptive people on the Michigan frontier. They are also filled with accounts of what women did, or could be expected to do. This account is taken from the Chandler Papers, with



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Notes to Pages 338–353

particular reference to the following letters: Sept. 8, Oct. 10, Dec. 23, 1830; May 30, June 28, 1831; Feb. 12, March 27, June 20, Dec. 13, 1832; Jan. 27, March 9, May 28, 1834. 34. Susan Gray, The Yankee West (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996),1–15; quote from p. 12. 35. Ibid., 10, 13. 36. Ibid., 14–15, 39–40, 58; quote from p. 14. On the craze for land speculation, see Rohrbough, The Land Office Business, 241–48. 37. Gray, The Yankee West, 27–32; quote from p 32. 38. Ibid., 51–56; quote from p. 56. 39. Ibid., 79–89; quotes from pp. 79, 80, 83, and 89. 40. This account is based on the Lovira Hart Collection (MHC), a collection of twenty-four letters from Hart to his wife’s relatives in New York State, covering the period from 1837 to 1853. It relies especially on the following letters: April 1, 1837; Feb. 25, April 8, July 1, 1838; Feb. 10, June 7, Dec. 1, 1839; Sept. 5, 1840; July 5, Aug. 4, 1841; Aug. 24, 1845; Nov. 22, 1846; May 9, 1847; May 5, 1850; Feb. 8, 1853. 41. Gilpin, The Territory of Michigan, 29, 150–51; Klunder, Lewis Cass and the Politics of Moderation, 47, 42. Mark A. Neithercut, “The Development of the Portage Lake Mining District” (B.A. [honors], Michigan, 1974), chs. 1 and 2. Three useful accounts are diaries by Cornelius G. Shaw and William W. Spaulding and the anonymous “Recollections and Reminiscences of Early Life on Lake Superior,” all in MHC. 43. Carl Addison Leach, “Sharon Hollow: Story of an Early Mulay Sawmill of Michigan,” MHM 17 (1937): 377–92. 44. Gilpin, The Territory of Michigan, 108. 45. Klunder, Lewis Cass and the Politics of Moderation, 56, 57. 10. Florida 1. D. W. Meinig, Continental America, 1800–1867 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 29. 2. David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), ch. 3. 3. Meinig, Continental America, 29, 30, 31. 4. Paul E. Hoffman, Florida’s Frontiers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 281, 282. 5. Charlton W. Tebeau, A History of Florida (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1971), ch. 1, is an excellent description of Florida’s natural landscape.

Notes to Pages 354–362

6. St. Augustine Florida Gazette, Sept. 1, 1821. The best history of the long frontier experience of Florida is Paul E. Hoffman, Florida’s Frontiers, 283–315. Hoffman also identifies the context of the American period in his earlier chapter, see especially 268–81. 7. The commission is dated March 10, 1821, in TP, 22:10. 8. Jackson’s proclamation is in TP, 22:110; see also St. Augustine Florida Gazette, Sept. 1, 1821, which printed the ordinances in English and Spanish. 9. James Owen Knauss, “William Pope DuVal, Pioneer and State Builder,” FHQ 11 (1933): 95–133, is a history of territorial Florida, for DuVal was active from 1822 to 1849. 10. St. Augustine Florida Gazette, Sept. 15, 1821. 11. Presentment of the Grand Jury of East Florida, Dec. 6, 1821, in TP, 22:295; Pensacola Gazette, Nov. 21, 1829, in Journal of the Legislative Council, 1822–1838, ESR, Florida. 12. Hoffman, Florida’s Frontiers, 285–90; the Emerson quote is in Knauss, “William Pope DuVal,” 127. 13. Hoffman, Florida’s Frontiers, 284–85. 14. Mark F. Boyd, “The First American Road in Florida: PensacolaSt. Augustine Highway, 1824,” FHQ 14 (1935–36): 73–106, 139–92. 15. Sidney Walter Martin, “The Public Domain in Territorial Florida,” JSH 10 (1944): 174–87. 16. St. Augustine Florida Gazette, Sept. 1, 1821; Pensacola Floridian, Sept. 1, 1821; Pensacola Gazette, Oct. 16, 1824. 17. St. Augustine East Florida Herald, Oct. 3, 1826; Pensacola Floridian, July 5, 1823. 18. St. Augustine Florida Gazette, Aug. 4, 1821. 19. Horatio S. Dexter Correspondence, James David Glunt Papers, PKY; Pensacola Gazette, Aug. 27, 1825; John A. Eisterhold, “Lumber and Trade in Pensacola and West Florida, 1800–1860,” FHQ 51 (1973): 267–80. 20. St. Augustine East Florida Herald, May 3, 1823. 21. Harry P. Owens, “Apalachicola before 1861,” (Ph.D., Florida State, 1966), is a detailed study. The figures of cotton exports are from pp. 87, 88n. The population of Middle Florida in 1830 was 15,777; of the territory as a whole, 34,725. See Abstract of Census Population, 1831, in TP, 24:505–506. On the emergence of cotton culture in Middle Florida, Clifton Paisley, The Red Hills of Florida, 1528–1865 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1989), chs. 10–13, is a fine study. 22. William Warren Rogers and Erica R. Clark, The Croom Family



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Notes to Pages 362–369

and Goodwood Plantation: Land, Litigation, and Southern Lives (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999), 33–34. 23. Ibid., 34–41. 24. Ibid., 42–52. 25. Hoffman, Florida’s Frontiers, 302. 26. Dorothy Dodd, “The Wrecking Business on the Florida Reef, 1822–60,” FHQ 22 (1944): 171–99. 27. St. Augustine East Florida Herald, April 12, Jan. 11, 1823; Samuel Pasco, “Jefferson County, Florida, 1827–1910,” FHQ 7 (1928): 139–46. Pasco comments that for assault, juries were “lenient in their penalties, fines of six and a quarter or twelve and a half cents, sometimes a dollar with the costs of prosecution, were often imposed on offenders” (146). 28. James M. Denham and Canter Brown, Jr., eds., Cracker Times and Pioneer Lives: The Florida Reminiscences of George Gillett Keen and Sarah Pamela Williams (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004), 12. 29. St. Augustine East Florida Herald, Dec. 20, 1823; Pensacola Floridian, Sept. 1, 1821. For vagrants in Michigan at the same period, see Detroit Gazette, May 29, Sept. 25, 1818; Nov. 23, 1821. 30. St. Augustine Florida Gazette, Sept. 8, 1821; see also Pensacola Floridian, Sept. 1, 1821. 31. Pensacola Gazette, March 16, May 18, Dec. 28, 1827, in Journal of the Legislative Council, ESR, Florida. 32. Daniel L. Schafer, “ ‘A Class of People Neither Freemen nor Slaves’: From Spanish to American Race Relations in Florida, 1819– 1861,” Journal of Social History 26 (1993): 587–90. 33. Quoted in Hoffman, Florida’s Frontiers, 303. 34. Schaefer, “ ‘A Class of People Neither Freemen nor Slaves’,” 591–92. 35. Petition of May 31, 1823, in Journal of the Legislative Council, ESR, Florida. 36. St. Augustine East Florida Herald, Oct. 30, Nov. 20, 1824; Tallahassee Florida Intelligencer, Sept. 1, 1826. 37. Pensacola Gazette, May 18, 1827; Memorial Referred Jan. 28, 1833, in TP, 24:800–802. See the letter of protest by a free black, Robert Brown, in Schaefer, “ ‘A Class of People Neither Freemen nor Slaves’,” 591–92. 38. David J. Coles, “The Florida Diaries of Daniel H. Wiggins, 1838–41,” FHQ 73 (1995): 489. 39. Hoffman, Florida’s Frontiers, 298. 40. Pensacola Floridian, Aug. 9, 1823.

Notes to Pages 370–375

41. St. Augustine Florida Herald, Sept. 30, 1829; Feb. 27, 1840. On the multitude of legal occasions in territorial life, the complicated nature of the legal mechanisms established, and the widespread use of lawyers, see the John Faulk Correspondence, Glunt Papers, PKY. 42. St. Augustine East Florida Herald, April 12, 1823; Joseph M. White to William Wilson, Feb. 16, 1836, in TP, 25:234. Charles D. Farris, “The Courts of Territorial Florida,” FHQ 19 (1941): 346–67, is a complete study. 43. Pensacola Gazette, May 20, 1837; St. Augustine Florida Herald, Jan. 9, 1834; Tallahassee Floridian and Advocate, June 2, 1831; June 5, 1832; Nov. 21, 1840. 44. St. Augustine East Florida Herald, Sept. 20, 1823. 45. Pensacola Gazette, March 13, 1824; Dec. 1, 1826; June 12, 1824; Feb. 18, 1826. St. Augustine Florida Herald, May 5, June 30, 1830, reflects opposition in the eastern part of the territory. 46. J. Randall Stanley, History of Jackson County (n.p., 1950), 30– 31; David Yancey Tomas, “A History of Banking in Florida,” table 2, PKY. 47. William G. Dodd, “Theatrical Entertainment in Early Florida,” FHQ 25 (1946): 121–74, has pieced together the story in great detail from newspapers and other accounts. 48. Magnolia Advertiser, April 24, 1829. Kenneth Scott, “The City of Wreckers: Two Key West Letters of 1838,” FHQ 25 (1946): 196–97, describes social life in Key West; Lizzie Brown, “Lizzie Brown’s Tallahassee,” ed. Bertram H. Groene, FHQ 48 (1969): 155–75, does the same for Tallahassee. 49. Hoffman, Florida’s Frontiers, 303. 50. Peter Haskew, “A St. Joseph Diary of 1839,” FHQ 17 (1939): 132, 140. 51. St. Augustine East Florida Herald, July 31, 1824. 52. T. Frederick Davis, “Pioneer Florida, A Free Public School in St. Augustine, 1832,” FHQ 22 (1944): 200–207. At about the same time, a Mr. Ashman established in St. Augustine a school for some twenty or thirty black children, most of them the children of slaves (p. 207). James O. Knauss, “Education in Florida, 1821–1829,” FHQ 3 (1925): 22–35, is complete. On Daniel Gillett’s offer, see Cracker Times and Pioneer Lives, 13. 53. David J. Coles, “The Florida Diary of David H. Wiggins, 1838– 1841,” FHQ 73 (1995): 487–88. 54. Rohrbough, The Land Office Business, 170–71, 201; Hoffman, Florida’s Frontiers, 294, 299.



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Notes to Pages 376–385

55. Kathryn T. Abbey, “The Union Bank of Tallahassee,” FHQ 15 (1937): 207–31; Hoffman, Florida Frontiers, 300. 56. Pensacola Gazette, Oct. 8, 1836. 57. Quoted in St. Augustine Florida Herald, Dec. 11, 1840, quoted in Sidney Walter Martin, Florida during the Territorial Days (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1944), 153. 58. Thomas, “Banking in Florida,” is a detailed discussion of Florida’s territorial banks. See also Martin, Florida during the Territorial Days, 144–64. 59. T. Frederick Davis, “Pioneer Florida, The First Railroads,” FHQ 23 (1944): 177–83. Congress passed an omnibus railroad bill for the territory of Florida in 1837, offering an eighty-foot right-of-way through public lands, with the privilege of using the building materials thereon for construction. 5 Stat. 144–46 (Jan. 31, 1837). 60. Herbert J. Doherty, Jr., Richard Keith Call, Southern Unionist (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1961), 87–92; Whitman, “Transportation in Territorial Florida,” 43–44. 61. David J. Coles, “The Florida Diary of David H. Wiggins, 1838– 1841,” FHQ 73 (1995): 495. 62. Ibid., 497. 63. St. Joseph Times, April 27, Oct. 8, 1839; Feb. 19, 1840; James O. Knauss, “St. Joseph: An Episode of the Economic and Political History of Florida,” FHQ 5 (1927): 182–83; 6 (1927): 3–20. 64. Edward C. Anderson, Florida Territory in 1844: The Diary of Master Edward C. Anderson, ed. W. Stanley Hoole (University: University of Alabama Press, 1977), 33. See also his description of Miami, p. 37. 65. Comte de Castelnau, “Essay on Middle Florida, 1837, 1838,” FHQ 26 (1948): 215–16. 66. Pensacola Gazette, Oct. 28, 1837. 67. Hoffman, Florida’s Frontiers, 292. 68. Pensacola Gazette, June 4, 1836; Ruth Danenhower Wilson, “The Bulow Plantation, 1821–1835,” FHQ 23 (1945): 227. 69. St. Augustine Florida Herald, Feb. 27, Dec. 31, 1840. 70. Dade County, Election Report 1843, in WPA Dade County History (HRS), PKY. 71. Coles, “Florida Diaries of Daniel Wiggins, 1838–41,” 485–86. 72. Hoffman, Florida’s Frontiers, 304–305. 73. Hoffman, Florida’s Frontiers, 310; St. Augustine Florida Herald, May 15, 1843. 74. Joseph D. Cushman, Jr., “The Indian River Settlement: 1842–

Notes to Pages 386–393

1849,” FHQ 43 (1964): 21–35. Among other things, the settlers enacted regulations to forbid the importing of diseased orange trees (p. 24). 75. As late as 1837, a group of Floridians petitioned for separate statehood for East Florida. Memorial to Congress by Citizens of East Florida, Feb. 5, 1838, in TP, 25:469–75. 76. Key West Enquirer, Feb. 27, 1836; William A. Whitehead to Delegate White, Feb. 26, 1836, in TP, 25:238–40, enclosing a “petition and remonstrance: against the division of Monroe County” (240–43). 77. Hoffman, Florida’s Frontiers, 308–309. 11. Arkansas 1. Thomas Bolling Robertson, “Journal of a Tour down the Ohio and Mississippi,” Thomas Bolling Robertson Letters, Walter Prichard Collection, folder 12, LSU. 2. S. Charles Bolton, Arkansas, 1800–1860: Remote and Restless (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1998), 4–5. 3. Quoted in ibid., 6. 4. Quoted in Ted R. Worley, “Story of an Early Settlement in Central Arkansas,” ArHQ 10 (1951): 128–29. 5. Quoted in Walter Moffatt, “Transportation in Arkansas, 1819– 1840,” ArHQ 15 (1956): 187. 6. Worley, “Story of the Early Settlement in Central Arkansas,” 123. 7. Bolton, Arkansas, 1800–1860, 12–13. 8. S. Charles Bolton, Territorial Ambition: Land and Society in Arkansas, 1800–1840 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1993), analyzes the development of the Bear State Image, “a stereotype that emphasized the wild nature of the place and the fondness of the inhabitants for hunting . . . [settlers who were ] violent and lawless” (30). He makes a strong case that the stereotype is excessive and ignores the growth of agriculture (37). 9. Bolton, Arkansas, 1800–1860, nicely captures the remoteness of Arkansas with the observation, “The location of Arkansas did seem to put some people off” (26). 10. Lonnie J. White, “Arkansas Territorial Politics, 1824–1827,” ArHQ 20 (1961): 17–38. 11. Journal of the Legislative Council and the House of Representatives, 1819–40, ESR, Arkansas, 13. 12. Bolton, Arkansas, 1800–1860, 28–31. 13. Little Rock Arkansas Gazette, May 21, 1828. The Gazette of Oct. 20, 1830, carried a long caricature of a militia muster.



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Notes to Pages 393–401

14. Bolton, Arkansas, 1800–1860, ch. 2, is an insightful analysis of Arkansas Territorial politics. 15. Ibid., 28–31. 16. Quoted in ibid., 34. 17. Ibid., 37–38. On the fraudulent claims, see ibid., 38–42. 18. Ibid., 23–26; quote from p. 23. Bolton discusses later violent encounters at 33–35. 19. Journal of the Legislative Council, ESR, Arkansas, 202, 51, 112. The same proportions of distribution may be found in the territorial budget for 1827–29, printed in the Little Rock Arkansas Gazette, Nov. 10, 1829. The appointments of the legislature were hardly luxurious. As late as 1827, the assets of the assembly consisted of five plain tables, four pitchers, twelve tine tumblers, six inkstands, four sandboxes, and four benches. Ibid. 20. Laws of the Arkansas Territory, 1835, ESR, Arkansas, 355–82. 21. Little Rock Arkansas Gazette, Jan. 21, 1834; Little Rock Arkansas Advocate, Feb. 27, 1835. The court should have met twice a year. 22. Bolton, Arkansas, 1800–1860, 17–20. 23. Quoted in Bolton, Territorial Ambition, 26. 24. Ibid., 26–28; quote from p. 27. 25. Journal of the Legislative Council, ESR, Arkansas, 117. 26. Little Rock Arkansas Gazette, April 23, 1828, quoted in Ira Gabler, “Lovely’s Purchase and Lovely County,” ArHQ 19 (1960): 36– 37. 27. A list of officers appointed in 1826–27 alone is printed in Little Rock Arkansas Gazette, July 10, 1827; a roster of justices of the peace in 1830 is in ibid., March 23, 1830; the census of 1835 is in ibid., Aug. 25, 1835. 28. County budgets that are especially useful in assessing county priorities for expenditures and the way in which these changed or did not change over time are Phillips and Miller (Little Rock Arkansas Gazette, Dec, 3, 24, 1822); Hempstead, Pulaski, and Clark (Little Rock Arkansas Gazette, March 28, 1826; March 27, 1828; April 11, 1826; Jan. 9, 1827). Annual expenditures published elsewhere often lacked a detailed breakdown of precisely what the expense was for, simply noting a disbursement, the person, and the date. 29. Bolton, Arkansas, 1800–1860, 42–43. 30. “Early Reminiscences by an Early Settler of Clark County,” Myra McAlmont Vaughan Collection, AHC. 31. Arkansas Post Arkansas Gazette, Nov. 20, 1819; Little Rock

Notes to Pages 401–409

Arkansas Gazette, Feb. 3, 1824; Feb. 24, 1821; Aug. 14, 1824; Jan. 1, 1825. The Arkansas Gazette was published at Arkansas Post from 1819 to 1821. John C. Luttig to Jean Antoine, April 16, 1815, printed in ArHQ 1 (1942): 151–55, suggests the primitive state of the economy, with its dependence on trade amidst barter conditions. 32. John Lewis Ferguson, “William E. Woodruff and the Territory of Arkansas, 1819–1836” (Ph.D., Tulane, 1960), 51–55, discusses this dimension of the Arkansas economy. Woodruff was the editor of the Arkansas Gazette. 33. Quoted in Jackson (Missouri) Independent Patriot, March 15, 1826; see also Little Rock Arkansas Gazette, Oct. 8, 1822; Dec. 12, 1825; Sept. 18, 1827. Bolton, Territorial Ambition, 42–43 (note map p. 43), is a clear account of the divisions of landscape and the settlement patterns that emerged from them. 34. The reasons for the slow immigration and economic development are described in Bolton, Territorial Ambition, 28–30. 35. Moffatt, “Transportation in Arkansas, 1819–1840,” 187–91; Little Rock Arkansas Gazette, Jan. 27, 1824; Sept. 9, 1829. 36. Moffatt, “Transportation in Arkansas, 1819–1840,” 194–98; Little Rock Arkansas Gazette, March 19, 1822; Little Rock Arkansas Advocate, Oct. 20, 1830. 37. Bolton, Arkansas, 1800–1860, 49–50. 38. Walter Moffatt, “Out West in Arkansas, 1819–1840,” ArHQ 17 (1958): 33–44. Ted R. Worley, “The Story of Alfred W. Arrington,” ArHQ 14 (1955): 318–23, documents a particularly brutal example of vigilante justice. An account of the tendency to settle personal slights by beatings and whippings is in “Extracts from Reminiscences of John R. Homer Scott,” Vaughan Collection, AHC. 39. Little Rock Arkansas Advocate, Nov. 3, June 9, 1830; March 7, 1834; July 24, 1835. 40. Little Rock Arkansas Gazette, July 4, 1837. 41. Little Rock Arkansas Gazette, Dec. 2, 1834; Moore, “Territorial Arkansas,” 167–70. On the emergence of cotton culture along the Mississippi, see Ted R. Worley, “Helena on the Mississippi,” ArHQ 13 (1945): 1–15. 42. Little Rock Arkansas Times, April 25, 1836. 43. Batesville News, June 24, 1841. 44. Little Rock Arkansas Advocate, Nov. 3, 1830; Aug. 22, 1832; Little Rock Arkansas Gazette, Feb. 23, 1831. 45. Batesville News, Jan. 21, 1841; Dec. 1, 1842; see also Feb. 25, 1841 and Nov. 3, 1842. In the midst of the transition to commercial agricul-



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Notes to Pages 410–423

ture, which continued to depend on water transportation and river improvements, it is surprising to find the newspaper of the Mississippi River town saying, as early as 1837, “In a few years, rail ways will be constructed in every direction, and the produce of an immense extent of back country will find its way to our markets.” Helena Constitutional Journal, April 6, 1837. Arkansas had no railroads until the 1850s. 46. Little Rock Arkansas Times, April 18, 1835. 47. Bolton, Arkansas, 1800–1860, 55–61. 48. Bolton, Territorial Ambition, 28–29, 37; quotes from pp. 28 and 37. 49. Frederick Gerstaecker, Wild Sports in the Far West (Boston, 1864), 164–65. 50. A. Fowler to John S. Russwurm, Feb. 13, 1841, John S. Russwurm Papers, box 1, TSLA. 51. Bolton, Territorial Ambition, 42–55. 52. Ibid., 55. 53. Ibid., 91, 92. 54. Bolton, Territorial Ambition, 81–86. 55. Fowler to Russwurm, Feb. 13, 1841, Russwurm Papers, box 1. 56. Little Rock Arkansas Gazette, Aug. 11, 1835; Little Rock Arkansas Advocate, Sept. 22, 1830; Little Rock Times, Aug. 8, 1835. The constitution of the Hempstead Anti-Gaming Society is printed in ibid., Aug. 15, 1835. 57. Little Rock Arkansas Gazette, April 7, Sept. 29, 1835; Little Rock Times, Oct. 19, 1835. 58. Moffatt, “Out West in Arkansas,” 33–44, documents the violent side of life in early Arkansas. Moffatt’s is the only account I found to address the issue of sex crimes on the southern frontier. 59. Batesville News, July 7, 1842. 60. Little Rock Arkansas Gazette, Feb. 25, 1834; Jan. 12, 1836. On restrictive legislation in other towns, see Helena Constitutional Journal, March 25, 1836; Batesville News, April 8, 1841. 61. Helena Constitutional Journal, Aug. 11, 1836. 12. The New Counties of Alabama and Mississippi 1. R. Douglas Hurt, The Indian Frontier, 1763–1846 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press), chs. 6 and 7, are a complete account. Michael D. Green, The Politics of Indian Removal: Creek Government

Notes to Pages 424–435

and Society in Crisis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982) is an excellent case study of the removal of one tribal group. 2. Hurt, The Indian Frontier, ch. 5. 3. Mary E. Young, Redskins, Ruffleshirts, and Rednecks: Indian Allotments in Alabama and Mississippi, 1830–1860 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961), is an account of the treaties and the struggle over individual tracts of land given to Indians. The fight for spoils eventually corrupted almost everyone involved. 4. Hurt, The Indian Frontier, 144–51; quote from p. 150. 5. Ibid., 154–62; quote from p. 156. Hurt observes that throughout this period of removal, the rule of law failed to protect Indian peoples. He concludes that the astonishing thing is not that the Indians were removed but that the removal was so long delayed. 6. J. L. M. Curry, “Reminiscences of Talladega,” AHQ 8 (1946): 351–52. 7. Thomas C. Law to Capt. William Law, Sept. 20, 1834; Law, “Journal of Travel to the Western Counties—from Sept. 2d 1834,” ADAH. Law’s account suggested, among other things, the extensive development of the Black Belt over the previous ten years. He crossed Greene, Lowndes, Perry, and Dallas counties. He commented that “the houses generally very fine and taste displayed in everything—and health, wealth and contentment,” and he concluded, “The crops in these lands surpass anything I ever beheld” (entry for Sept. 24). 8. Joel Spigeuer to William K. Oliver, June 3, 1833, quoted in George E. Brewer, “History of Coosa County,” AHQ 4 (1942): 36. 9. Brewer, “History of Coosa County,” 80; H. M. King, “Historical Sketches of Macon County,” AHQ 18 (1956): 213–14. 10. Hurt, The Indian Frontier, 140–44. 11. Ibid., 151–54. 12. John H. Evans, “Reminiscences of Olden Times, 1809–1850,” ADAH; William Lewis, “The Centennial History of Winston County,” ADAH. 13. Brewer, “History of Coosa County,” 37, 40–41; Governor John Gayle’s conflict with the federal government had delayed the organization of the county. 14. G. E. Richards, “Reminiscences of the Early Days of Chambers County,” AHQ 4 (1942): 420. 15. Wellington Vandiver, “Pioneer Taladega, Its Minutes and Memories,” AHQ 16 (1954): 16, 105, 112; Curry, “Reminiscences of Talladega,” 350, 361.



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Notes to Pages 435–443

16. Aiken’s Digest, quoted in Vandiver, “Pioneer Taladega, Its Minutes and Memories,” 26, 29. 17. Vandiver, “Pioneer Taladega, Its Minutes and Memories,” 29, 61–63. 18. Jacksonville Republican, May 24, 1838. 19. Huntsville Southern Advocate, Dec. 1, 1835. 20. Richards, “Reminiscences of Early Days in Chambers County,” 434–37; Rev. J. D. Anthony, “Cherokee County, Alabama: Reminiscences of Its Early Settlement,” AHQ 8 (1946): 333–34. James W. Bragg, “Captain Slick, Arbiter of Early Alabama Morals,” AR 11 (1958): 125– 34, is a general account. 21. Brewer, “History of Coosa County,” 56–63; Curry, “Reminiscences of Talladega,” 357. 22. King, “Historical Sketches of Macon County,” 203; Ezekiel Abner Powell, “Fifty-Five Years in West Alabama,” AHQ 4 (1942): 508. 23. Christopher Morris, Becoming Southern: The Evolution of a Way of Life, Warren County and Vicksburg, Mississippi, 1770–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 111–12, map. 24. W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1941), 14–17. The high point of Cash’s planter’s entrance into Charleston society was his daughter’s marriage to a “Charleston gentleman.” 25. Richards, “Reminiscences of the Early Days of Chambers County,” 427. 26. Anthony, “Cherokee County, Alabama: Reminiscences of Its Early Settlement,” 328; Evans, “Reminiscences of Olden Times”; see also Brewer, “History of Coosa County,” 158. 27. John William Ward, Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955), analyzes the volume and significance of this annual outpouring of local sentiment. 28. David J. Libby, Slavery and Frontier Mississippi, 1720–1835 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), 101–103. 29. James C. Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth: the Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), ix, 5. 30. Ibid., 8. 31. Willie D. Halsell, “Migration into, and Settlement of, Leflore County, 1833–1876,” JMH 9 (1947): 219–37. Halsell observes that Leflore County in 1876 was “little more than a frontier” (237). 32. Anna Alice Kemper, “A Social and Economic History of AnteBellum Bolivar County, Mississippi” (M.A., Alabama, 1942), ch. 2. 33. Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth, 28.

Notes to Pages 443–451

34. Ibid., 14. 35. Ibid., 16. 36. Ibid., 16, 17. 37. Ibid., 20, 27. 38. Ibid., 28. 39. Harry P. Owens, Steamboats and the Cotton Economy: Trade in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990), 19, 30–32. 40. Walter Sillers, Jr., “Flood Control in Bolivar County, 1838– 1924,” JMH 9 (1947): 3–6. 41. Edward M. Steel Jr., “A Pioneer Farmer in the Choctaw Purchase,” JMH 16 (1954): 229–41. Steel also composed poetry and read Blackstone in his leisure moments, but the traditional frontier interests, e.g., weather, crop prices, location, and soil, dominated his account. 42. Pontotoc Chickasaw Union, July 1, 1836. Two detailed contemporary descriptions of the New Counties in Northern Mississippi are “North Mississippi—The Chickasaw Counties,” Pontotoc Chickasaw Union, Dec. 7, 1837; “A Ride through the Choctaw Nation,” Columbus Democrat, Aug. 5, 1837. 43. Pontotoc County History, in WPA Historical Project (HRS), Source Materials for Mississippi History, vol. 58, pt. 3, p. 105. This description is taken from “old records found in the basement of the Pontotoc courthouse.” 44. Minutes of the Probate Court, Pontotoc County, 1836–49, in Pontotoc County History, vol. 58, pt. 3, pp. 375–83; Inventory of Estates, in ibid., 384–86. As for the value of land, the January 1836 public sale of Chickasaw lands at the Pontotoc land office resulted in the disposal of 266,442 acres at an average slightly less than $1.70 an acre. The figures for the land sale are from the Pontotoc Chickasaw Union, July 1, 1836. The price of land at subsequent private entry was the minimum of $1.25 per acre. 45. “The Bar,” in Pontotoc County History, vol. 58, pt. 3, pp. 204, 390–91. On legal notices, see, for example, Pontotoc Chickasaw Union, Feb. 8, 1838. 46. Kosciusko Central Register, Aug. 8, 1840. Edward Lee McMillan, “A Social and Economic History of Kosciusko, Mississippi” (M.A., Mississippi, 1951), notes that Kosciusko had no public or free schools before 1870. In 1857, William Dodd, a wealthy citizen of the town, rented books at five cents a day to those who sought reading materials (26).



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Notes to Pages 451–460

47. “Early History of Agriculture,” Pontotoc County History, vol. 58, pt. 3, pp. 2–9; Macon Intelligencer, Dec. 14, 1838; Yazoo City Whig and Political Register, Aug. 9, 1839. 48. Lexington Union, July 20, 1839. 49. Ibid., May 4, 1839. 50. Josiah Hinds, “The Journal of Josiah Hinds, April 24, 1839–July 10, 1863,” ed. Newton Haskin James (M.A., Mississippi, 1939); quotations are from the entries for Oct. 27, 1840; July 24, 1842; and Aug. 24, 1846. 13. The Last Frontier of the Old Northwest 1. The South Bend Northwestern Pioneer and the Maumee Express remind us that western Michigan, northern Indiana, and northwestern Ohio were still frontiers in the 1830s. The Pioneer editor’s “longing for a steamboat to blow its long black nose” (April 25, 1831) places him in the tradition of all the frontiers that eagerly awaited steam transportation. 2. D. W. Meinig, Continental America, 1800–1867 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 238–40. 3. Andrew Fitz to Daniel Weed, Nov. 13, 1837, Daniel Weed Collection, ISHL. Fitz’s wife Nancy, from a New England seaport town, apparently did not know how to ride a horse and remained bound to the house. 4. Aristarchus Cone, “The Memories of Aristarchus Cone,” ed. Mildred Throne, IJH 49 (1951): 51–72. Cone includes a recipe for corn dodgers (or fried corn bread) in his memoirs (67). 5. Alice E. Smith, The History of Wisconsin: From Exploration to Statehood (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973), 488–93; Joh. Fr. Diederichs, “Letters and Diary of Joh. Fr. Diederichs,” WMH 7 (1923–24): 360, 368. On the large numbers of foreign immigrants, see Mark Wyman, The Wisconsin Frontier (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 184–200. 6. Johann Diefenthaeler letter, Jan 16, 1844, SHSW; Oswald Ragatz, “Memoirs of a Sauk Swiss,” WMH 19 (1935–36): 213–19. Ragatz noted that Swiss ministers would not come to serve the growing Swiss community unless the immigrants guaranteed their salaries. In the course of their experiences on the frontier, these immigrants eventually had to come to terms with the traditional American institutions of county government, county court, common school, and even politics. 7. Fitz to Weed, Nov. 13, 1837, Weed Collection; Cone, “Memories,”

Notes to Pages 460–466

56–57. Andrew Fitz noted that his trip west was delayed three hours when the train on which he was riding in Pennsylvania hit a horse, derailing several cars. Another account of a family trip west is in the Peoria Register, Oct. 28, 1837. The first railroad in Illinois was a portion of the Northern Cross line from Meredosia to Springfield, opened in 1839. H. J. Stratton, “The Northern Cross Railroad,” JISHS, 28 (1938): 15–25. 8. Wyman, The Wisconsin Frontier, 179–84. 9. Chicago American, Oct.31, 1835; Peoria Register, July 1, 1837. An extended description of these prairies is found in Allan G. Bogue, From Prairie to Corn Belt: Farming on the Illinois and Iowa Prairies in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 1–7. 10. George and Sarah Holland to Thomas and Elizabeth Cary, Aug. 2, 1843, Thomas Cary Collection, SHSI; Diederichs, “Letters and Diary,” 368. The issue of farm-making costs is analyzed in Bogue, From Prairie to Corn Belt, 169–70, with emphasis on the increased cost for a later generation of pioneer farm families as machinery became more necessary to farming operations. 11. Stephen Eames to Wm. and Oliver Plumb, Aug. 23, 1840, in Stephen Eames, Bascom Letters, IHS-U; Cyrus Aldrich to Nath’l Spaulding, April 22, 1838, Cyrus Aldrich Collection, CHS; Emma Sprague letter, Dec. 4, 1842, SHSW. A similar declaration is in Morris Sleight to his wife, July 9, 1834, Morris Sleight Papers, CHS. 12. Sleight to James Russell, July 7, 1834, Sleight Papers. 13. Peoria Register, July 1, Oct. 28, 1837; P. C. Haynes to his father and mother, May 6, 1849, Peril Columbus Haynes Family Letters, SHSI. 14. Peoria Register, Oct. 7, 1837; Bogue has concluded that land speculation was a basic force behind the organization and operation of these institutions. He also notes the significance of timber lands in claims club activities. Bogue, From Prairie to Corn Belt, 31–39. 15. The constitution of the early claims club of Des Moines County (Iowa), along with a vigorous defense of this institution, is in “Early Land Claims in Des Moines County,” IJHP 10 (1912): 255–60. 16. Wyman, The Wisconsin Frontier, 76–77. 17. Chicago American, June 27, 1835. On the rise of Chicago, see William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: Norton, 1991), 31–45. 18. Frederick J. Starin, “Diary of a Journey to Wisconsin in 1840,” WMH 6 (1922–23): 91. 19. W. Turrentine Jackson, “The Army Engineers as Road Builders in Territorial Iowa,” IJHP 47 (1949): 15–33.



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Notes to Pages 468–482

20. Hurt, The Indian Frontier, 1763–1846 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002), ch. 7, esp. 168–70. 21. Ibid., ch. 7; Wyman, The Wisconsin Frontier, 149–55. 22. Hurt, The Indian Frontier, 182–83. 23. Ibid., 183–86. 24. This account is based on George W. Ogden, Diary, 1837–41, SHSW. 25. Mildred Throne, “A Population Study of an Iowa County in 1850,” IJH 57 (1959): 305–30. 26. Wyman, The Wisconsin Frontier, 135–40. The literature on the lead region of Illinois, Wisconsin, and Iowa is voluminous, especially for Wisconsin. The most complete account is Joseph Schaefer, The Wisconsin Lead Region (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1932). 27. David Dirk Van Tassel, “Democracy, Frontier, and Mineral Point: A Study of the Influence of the Frontier on a Wisconsin Mining Town” (M.S., Wisconsin, 1951); Galena Advertiser, Dec. 14, 1829; Galena Miner’s Journal, May 9, 1829; Galenian, May 16, 1832; D. W. Meinig, Continental America, 83. 28. Dubuque Visitor, May 11, 1836. 29. Galena Advertiser, April 5, 1830; Dubuque Visitor, May 11, 1836. 30. Quoted in John C. Parish, “Langworthys of Early Dubuque and Their Contributions to Local History,” IJHP 8 (1910): 317. 31. Galena Miner’s Journal, Aug. 30, 1828; Dubuque Visitor, June 1, 1836; Ogden Diary, entry for Oct. 10, 1840. 32. Robert F. Fries, Empire in Pine: The Story of Lumbering in Wisconsin, 1830–1900 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1951), ch. 2. Lumbering required skilled labor, and as it expanded in Wisconsin, so did the search for skilled woodsmen in the East. 33. Wyman, The Wisconsin Frontier, 251. 34. Dubuque Visitor, Nov. 9, 1836; Lyda Belthuis, “The Lumber Industry in Eastern Iowa,” IJHP 46 (1948): 121–35. 35. Wyman, The Wisconsin Frontier, 252. 36. Ibid., 256–63. 37. Horace Samuel Merrill, “An Early History of the Black River Falls Region” (M.A., Wisconsin, 1933), ch. 3; Selma Sather Casberg, “The Lumbering Industry of La Crosse, Wisconsin, 1841–1905” (M.A., Wisconsin, 1951), ch. 1. 38. Margaret Walsh, The Manufacturing Frontier: Pioneer Industry in Antebellum Wisconsin, 1830–1860 (Madison: State Historical Society

Notes to Pages 483–487

of Wisconsin, 1972), ch. 1, esp. 1–25, maps 1–4, tables 4 and 5. A useful visual description of the variety of industry in early southwestern Wisconsin is a map in Herman R. Friis, “The David Dale Own Map of Southwestern Wisconsin,” Prologue 1 (1969): 28. 39. Wyman, The Wisconsin Frontier, 202–209. An insight into the financial hardships of frontier ministers may be obtained from the letters and diary of Elihu Springer, ISHL. Springer was a Methodist circuit rider in Illinois. His first year, he traveled four thousand miles, and his income—“quarterage” plus missionary funds—came to $61.16. He wrote of coffee, tea, and sugar as luxuries, at a time when even the most humble cabin would have enjoyed such articles. His is a poignant account of dedication and self-sacrifice that involved all members of his family. 40. Wyman, The Wisconsin Frontier, 209–11. 41. Ebenezer Alden to his father, Feb. 3, March 1844; Alden to his parents, Feb. 22, 1844; Alden to his mother, Nov. 4, 1844, Ebenezer Alden Letters, SHSI. On the high educational standards for Congregational ministers—even in the West—note that George N. Smith was refused a license to preach in Kalamazoo (Michigan) in 1834 because he lacked knowledge of Latin and Greek. J. Fraser Cocks III, “George N. Smith: Reformer on the Frontier,” MH 52 (1968): 39. 42. Adelbert Inama, “Letters of the Reverend Adelbert Inama, O.P,” WMH 12 (1928–29): 59. 43. For a discussion of Bishop Mathias Loras and his contributions to the Iowa frontier, see Loren Nelson Horton, “Roman Catholic Institutions and Their Influence in Early Dubuque,” 1970, unpublished paper in possession of the author. 44. Springer to his father, Nov. 9, 1849, Springer Letters. 45. For the case of Iowa, see Irving H. Hart, “The Governors of Iowa as Educational Leaders, 1839–1949,” IJH 54 (1956): 233–36; Vernon Carstensen, “The University as Head of the Iowa School System,” IJH 53 (1955): 213–24. 46. Meinig, Continental America, 231. 47. Meinig, Continental America, 101. 48. Haynes to his brother, Dec. 3, 1851, Haynes Family Letters; Lucius H. Langworthy, “Sketches of the Early Settlement of the West by Lucius H. Langworthy,” IJHP 8 (1910): 362. The Johnson County (Iowa) Anti-Slavery Society reported more than one hundred members at its meeting in 1844. Iowa City Iowa Standard, Sept. 12, 1844.



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Notes to Pages 494–505

14. Villages, Towns, and Cities Spread across the Western Country 1. For an introduction to towns and town building, see D. W. Meinig, Continental America, 1800–1867 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 248–57. 2. Francis Baily, Journal of a Tour in Unsettled Parts of North America in 1796 and 1797 (London, 1856), 206–209. Waynesville survives as a small village between Dayton and Cincinnati. 3. Lexington Kentucky Gazette, Aug. 9, 1788. In the same issue, David Leitch advertised a proposed town on the upper Blue Licks, suggesting that competition was already a part of town building. 4. Edward Thornton Heald, “Bezaleel Wells, Founder of Canton and Steubenville, Ohio” (M.A., Case-Western Reserve, 1942), ch. 3. On the growth of Steubenville, see Steubenville Western Herald, 1806– 1808, and Edward J. Smith letter, Nov. 8, 1804, OHS. 5. The basic starting point for a consideration of the urban frontier is John W. Reps, Town Planning in Frontier America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969). 6. Meinig, Continental America, 249; Reps, Town Planning in Frontier America, ch. 12. 7. On the services available in selected Ohio and Mississippi River towns, see Richard C. Wade, The Urban Frontier: The Rise of Western Cities, 1790–1830 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959). 8. Meinig, Continental America, 250. 9. Ibid., 250. 10. John Test, “Reminiscences,” IHS. 11. Mary Katherine Kershaw, “Early History of Shawneetown, Illinois, from 1812 to 1832” (M.A., Illinois, 1941), ch. 1. 12. Thomas Bolling Robertson to M. B. Robertson, June 1814, Thomas Bolling Robertson Letters, Walter Prichard Collection, folder 12, LSU. 13. Kershaw, “Early History of Shawneetown, Illinois,” chs. 3 and 4. 14. Governor William C. C. Claiborne to Thomas Jefferson, Jan. 16, 1804, in TP, 9:161; Thomas C. Nicholls, “Reminiscences,” LSU. Reps, Town Planning in Frontier America, 98–105, devotes much attention to New Orleans. Also note the transcriptions of the cabildo records (in English translation) for the period 1769–1803, New Orleans Public Library. Among the issues dealt with by officials were overflowed lands, a large black population, and, in the later years, the presence of many transients, especially Americans.

Notes to Pages 506–515

15. John G. Clark, New Orleans, 1718–1812: An Economic History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1970), chs. 14–16, notes the relationship between New Orleans and its hinterland. 16. St. Augustine East Florida Herald, Jan. 10, 1824, comments on Tallahassee. 17. Timothy Flint, Recollections of the Last Ten Years in the Valley of the Mississippi (Boston, 1826), 59. An amusing contemporary account of town promotion is the “City of Skunksburg,” Detroit Gazette, Nov. 19, 1819. 18. John G. Finch, “Reminiscences,” IHS; Evansville Gazette, April 30, 1823; Indianapolis Indiana Journal, Feb. 1, March 8, 1825; March 7, 1826; Feb. 20, 1827. 19. O. William Sickels to Daniel Gold, July 15, 1828, ISL; Isaiah Osborn to brother John, Jan. 13, 1828, “Old Indianapolis Letter,” IMH 4 (1908): 28. 20. Sandford C. Cox, Recollections of the Early Settlement of the Wabash Valley (Lafayette, Ind., 1860), 19. 21. Logansport Potawattomie and Miami Times, Oct. 10, 1829. A description of Lafayette is in the Indianapolis Indiana Journal, March 5, 1829. 22. Marjorie Ruth Paullin, “New Salem: A Typical Frontier Settlement” (M.A., Illinois, 1942), chs. 1 and 2. 23. As examples, see Columbus Gazette, June 11, July 9, 23, 1818; Edwardsville Spectator, June 26, 1819. See also Lexington Kentucky Gazette, April 4, 1791, for regulations on wooden chimneys and slaughterhouses. 24. Blakeley Sun, Dec. 12, 15, 18, 1818; Feb. 9, 1819. James C. Parker, “Blakeley: A Frontier Seaport,” AR 27 (1974): 39–51, is a complete account of Blakeley’s rise and fall. 25. G. P. Whittington, “Rapides Parish, Louisiana,” LHQ 16 (1933): 427–40. 26. Alexandria Louisiana Herald, Nov. 3, 1821; March 23, 1820; March 3, 1824. 27. Ibid., Oct. 7, March 24, Aug. 12, 1820; April 23, 1823; April 7, 1824; July 1, 1820; July 27, 1825. 28. Clanton W. Williams, “Early Ante-Bellum Montgomery: A Black Belt Constituency,” JSH 7 (1941): 495–525; Clanton W. Williams, “Conservatism in Old Montgomery, 1817–1861,” AR 10 (1957): 96–110; Clanton W. Williams, ed., “Extracts from the Records of the City of Montgomery,” AR 1 (1948): 128–42; Weymouth T. Jordan, “Early AnteBellum Marion, Alabama: A Black Belt Town,” AHQ 5 (1943): 12–31.



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Notes to Pages 516–525

29. Christopher Morris, Becoming Southern: The Evolution of a Way of Life, Warren County and Vicksburg, Mississippi, 1770–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 104. 30. Ibid., 109–110. 31. Ibid., 114, 115. It is of interest that many businessmen in Vicksburg invested in plantations. The great clothing merchant J. J. Chewning owned in 1840, among other properties: 1,526 acres and 31 slaves in Bolivar County, Mississippi; plus 1,570 acres near the Sunflower River in Washington County; and 600 acres in Yazoo County (ibid., 137). 32. Ibid., 114. For a detailed analysis of Vicksburg, see ibid., ch. 7. 33. W. Forbes to James Forbes, April 10, 1835, W. Forbes Collection, MHC. Malcolm J. Rohrbough, The Land Office Business: The Settlement and Administration of American Public Lands, 1789–1837 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 242–44, 248–49, describes the large-scale speculation in towns sites associated with the 1830s. A clever spoof on town founding that emphasizes speculation rather than response to need is “Origin of a Town,” Little Rock Arkansas Advocate, Oct. 30, 1830. 34. William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: Norton), 33. 35. Meinig, Continental America, 358. 36. Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis, 33–41. 37. James Fiske Lee, “Transportation—A Factor in the Development of Northern Illinois previous to 1860,” JISHS 10 (1917–18): 17–28. Trade statistics are on p. 27, n16. 38. Peoria Register, April 8, 1837. 39. Galena Advertiser, April 5, 1830. 40. Selma Sather Casberg, “The Lumbering Industry of La Crosse, Wisconsin, 1841–1905” (M.A., Wisconsin, 1963), is a study of one such town. 41. See, for example, William Roba, The River and the Prairie: A History of the Quad Cities (Quad Cities: Hesperian Press, 1986). 42. Mildred Throne, “A Population Study of an Iowa County in 1950,” IJH 57 (1959): 324–30. Throne comments: “and certainly in Wapello County, and in many other parts of Iowa, another type of pioneer came along with the farmer-the town builder” (320). 43. Ebenezer Alden to his parents, Feb. 3, 22, Dec. 24, 1844; Feb. 12, 1847, Ebenezer Alden Letters, SHSI. 44. On the significance of towns in the lives of people in the last half

Notes to Pages 526–544

of the nineteenth century, see Lewis Atherton, Main Street on the Middle Border (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1954). 45. James E. Vance, Jr., The Merchant’s World: The Geography of Wholesaling (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970), 87. 46. Ibid., 88. 47. Ibid., 87. 15. Changing Political Experiences across Three Generations 1. Patricia Watlington, The Partisan Spirit: Kentucky Politics, 1779–1792 (New York: Atheneum, 1972), 35–37. 2. On the continuing influence of the county court in Kentucky, see Robert M. Ireland, The County Courts in Antebellum Kentucky (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1972). 3. Harry Innes to Thomas Jefferson, Aug. 27, 1791, quoted in Watlington, The Partisan Spirit, 215. 4. Jack Ericson Eblen, The First and Second United States Empires: Governors and Territorial Government, 1784–1912 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1968), ch. 4; Arthur St. Clair, governor of the Northwest Territory, appointed some seven hundred office holders, about half of those in the militia (123). 5. Andrew Cayton, Frontier Indiana (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 229–30; R. Douglas Hurt, The Ohio Frontier (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 275. 6. Hurt, The Ohio Frontier, 276. 7. Ibid. 8. Andrew Cayton, Frontier Indiana, 228. 9. Ibid., 244, 246. 10. Ibid., 237, 236. 11. George Dargo, Jefferson’s Louisiana: Politics and the Clash of Legal Traditions (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), ch. 2, esp. 38–41. 12. Samuel C. Hyde, Pistols and Politics: The Dilemma of Democracy in Louisiana’s Florida Parishes, 1810–1899 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996), 55, 53. 13. This theme of military service as a prerequisite for public office endured long in Kentucky and on the frontier generally. As late as 1794, James Lemon published a letter defending his early return from an Indian campaign. Lexington Kentucky Gazette, Jan. 25, 1794. Or note the case of Thomas Lewis, a candidate for office, in ibid., March 12, 1791.



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Notes to Pages 545–563

14. Richmond (Indiana) Public Ledger, Dec. 3, 1825. 15. For correspondence between Messinger and Matthew Lyon over patronage, see the John Messinger Papers, ISHL. 16. Paul Wallace Gates, Introduction, in The John Tipton Papers, ed. Nellie A. Robertson and Dorothy Riker, 3 vols. (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau, 1942), forms the basis for this account. 17. The Evansville Gazette, for example, showed an interest in elections at several levels. See, for example, March 24, July 1, 1824. Both this paper and the Corydon Indiana Gazette supported Adams. 18. On the Jacksonians’ use of appointments in the land business, see Malcolm J. Rohrbough, The Land Office Business: The Acquisition and Administration of American Public Lands, 1789–1837 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 273–83. 19. Corydon Indiana Gazette, Aug. 10, 1820. Other observations on Indiana’s elections are Sandford C. Cox’s description of an 1828 election gathering in Indiana in Recollections of the Early Settlement of the Wabash Valley (Lafayette, Ind., 1860), 17. “The Pioneers of Jefferson County—Reminiscences of James B. Lewis, Esq,” ISL, emphasizes the more physical aspects of the electoral process. 20. Murat is quoted in James Owen Knauss, “The Growth of Florida’s Election Laws,” FHQ 5, no. 1 (1926): 7–8; on the frequency of elections, see Tallahassee Floridian, Dec. 6, 1834. 21. Maumee Express, April 5, 1837. 22. Wyman, The Wisconsin Frontier, 140–41. Dodge’s political counterpart and sometimes rival in Wisconsin was James Duane Doty. He was delegate to Congress from Wisconsin Territory (1838–41), and as a Whig, he was governor of Wisconsin (1841–45), and congressman (1849–53). 16. The Trans-Appalachian West and the Nation 1. D. W. Meinig, Continental America, 1800–1860 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 257. 2. Logansport Canal Telegraph, June 24, 1837, quote in Virginia Lowell Mauch, “Population Movements in Northern Indiana before 1850” (M.A., Indiana, 1948), 1. 3. Colin G. Calloway, New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 1, explores these curious claims of commonality. 4. Peter S. Onuf, Statehood and Union: A History of the Northwest Ordinance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), is an au-

Notes to Pages 564–574

thoritative analysis. Denis P. Duffey makes the argument that the Northwest Ordinance, “because of the nature of its authority and the significance of its principles, should be included among the foundational documents of our constitutional tradition.” “The Northwest Ordinance as a Constitutional Document,” Columbia Law Review 95, no. 4 (1995): 929–68. 5. Malcolm J. Rohrbough, The Land Office Business: The Settlement and Administration of American Public Lands, 1789–1837 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 3–15, is a discussion of the early provisions of the land system. 6. Lexington Kentucky Gazette, Feb. 16, 1793. 7. “Journal of David Barron,” Lyman C. Draper Collections, 12 CC 179, SHSW; François Andre Michaux, “Travels to the West of the Allegheny Mountains, in the States of Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee,” in Early Western Travels, 1748–1846, 32 vols., ed. Reuben Gold Thwaites (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark, 1904–1907), 3:189. 8. Thomas C. Law, “Journal of Travel to the Western Counties— from September 2d 1834,” ADAH; the entries are from Sept. 23 and 24. 9. Cahaba Press and Alabama State Intelligencer, Jan. 6, 1821. 10. Susan Dabney Smedes, A Southern Planter (New York, 1890), 17–68; quotes from pp. 47 and 67. 11. John Humphries to Samuel Blackwood, Jan. 7, 1836, ISL. Cf. the editorial comment in the Jackson Mississippian (Jan. 10, 1834) that people in that part of the country focused their interest on dollars and cents, and the comment in the Maumee Express (June 24, 1837) that the “accumulation of property is the governing principle” of life in northwest Ohio. 12. Mary Carter Hovey to her mother and sisters, May 12, 1832, Edmund O. Hovey Correspondence, ISL. This description is reminiscent of Edward Eggleston’s Hoosier Schoolmaster (1871), in which the characters lived in ignorance and intellectual poverty on rich bottom land said to be worth $100 an acre. 13. Ellen Bigelow, “Letters Written by a Peoria Woman in 1835,” JISHS 22 (1929–30): 349–50. A similar account in Wisconsin is Frederick J. Starin, “Diary of a Journey to Wisconsin in 1840,” WMH 6 (1922– 23): 87. 14. Andrew Cayton, Frontier Indiana (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 272–73. Cayton notes that on the eve of the Civil War, Indiana ranked at the bottom of the states of the Old Northwest in literacy and access to public education (290).



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Notes to Pages 576–578

15. R. Douglas Hurt, The Ohio Frontier (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 374; James E. Davis, Frontier Illinois (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 406. For a well-developed case study, see John Mack Faragher, Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986). 16. Meinig, Continental America, 250–51.

Bibliography

The trans-Appalachian West continues to be a source of much important historical scholarship. That the subjects continue to revolve around territories and states is recognition of the continuing importance of political boundaries in defining institutions and societies. Among the best of the recent scholarship, I want to note the book-length studies written for the series Walter Nugent and I edit. These volumes are distinguished by their breadth of coverage and depth of analysis. The authors and their subjects are: Stephen Aron (Missouri), Andrew Cayton (Indiana), James Davis (Illinois), R. Douglas Hurt (Ohio), John Finger (Tennessee), Paul Hoffman (Florida), and Mark Wyman (Wisconsin). These studies form the starting point for a consideration of the recent scholarship on the transAppalachian frontier. There are many older works that deserve to be consulted on a continuing basis. Most of the fourteen states considered here have multivolume, multiauthored state histories. The first of these date from the 1920s; others are more recent. Every state has several single-volume histories, written at regular intervals over the last century. Each state also has a historical quarterly, and several have more than one. Several states have also published collections of historical documents, some running to multiple volumes. There are important sources for understanding the distant past of the place under study. Special note should be taken of the several collections of materials prepared by the Historical Records Survey (HRS), a division of the Works Progress Administration. These range from bibliographies of source materials in local archives and depositories to verbatim transcripts of county and local records (sometimes in translation). Projects in the state of Mississippi, for example, included a county history for each of Mississippi’s counties, some running to as many as five volumes. Here and elsewhere, the quality of the work varies, but the Historical Records Survey has made accessible large quantities of historical materials. Special note should also be taken of the Early State Records on Microfilm (ESR). Beginning in 1941, the Library of Congress and the University of North Carolina jointly located and microfilmed early state legislative proceedings. After 1945 the project was expanded to include statutory laws; constitutional, administrative, and executive documents; court records; and local records. Eventually the project included more than 2,500,000 pages of records on 160,000 feet of microfilm. See Lillian A. Hamrick, ed., A Guide to the Mi-

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Bibliography

crofilm Collections of the Early State Records (Washington: Library of Congress, 1950). The Early State Records used in this study are listed below.

Alabama Journal of the Legislative Council, 1818; Journal of the Senate, 1819–32; Journal of the House of Representatives, 1819–28.

Arkansas Journal of the Legislative Council and the House of Representatives, 1819–40; Laws of the Arkansas Territory, 1835.

Florida Journal of the Legislative Council, 1822–38; Journal of the Legislative Council and the Senate, 1839–48; Journal of the House of Representatives, 1839–46.

Illinois Journal of the House of Representatives, 1812; Journal of the Territorial Legislature, 1814–15, 1817–18; Journal of the Legislative Council, 1814–18; Journal of the Senate, 1818–19; Journal of the House of Representatives, 1819.

Indiana Journals of the General Assembly of Indiana Territory, 1805–15; Legislative Council Proceedings, 1808, 1811, 1812–13.

Michigan Governor and Judges, Journal of Proceedings in Their Legislative Capacity, 1805, 1808–10; “Rough Minutes,” 1810–12; Journal of the Legislative Council, 1824–35; Some of the Acts of the Territory of Michigan, 1816.

Mississippi Journal of the Upper House, 1800–17; Statutes of the Mississippi Territory, 1807; Journal of the Legislative Council, 1815–16, 1817; Journal of the Senate, 1817–18; Unbound notes on 1809–10 session; Journal of the House of Representatives, 1811–12, 1813; Statutes of the Mississippi Territory, 1816.

Missouri Journal of the Proceedings of the Legislature of the Territory of Louisiana, 1806–11; Laws of the Territory of Louisiana, 1808; A Digest of the Laws of Missouri Territory, 1818; Journal of the Proceedings of the Legislature of the Territory of Missouri, 1812–17; Journal of the House of Representatives, 1818–19.

Bibliography

Ohio Journal of the Governors and Judges, 1795; Journal of the House, 1795– 1801; Journal of the Legislative Council, 1800–01; Laws of the United States North-West of the Ohio, 1796.

Wisconsin Journal of the Council, 1836–42; Journal of the House of Representatives, 1836–44; Statutes of the Territory of Wisconsin, 1839.

Manuscripts The manuscript collections covering the trans-Appalachian frontier are extensive and found in several depositories. I have listed here those that I found most useful. Some are cited in the footnotes of this study; others are not.

Alabama Alabama Department of Archives and History (ADAH), Montgomery. Matthew Blue Papers; William H. Cather Collection, especially “A Brief Historical Sketch of St. Clair County”; John H. Evans, “Reminiscences of Olden Times, 1809–1850”; Eliza Chotard Gould, “Autobiography”; Thomas C. Law, “Journal of Travel to the Western Counties—from September 2d 1834,” and Letter to Capt. William Law, Sept. 20, 1834; William T. Lewis, “The Centennial History of Winston County”; T. N. Martin, “Historical Sketch of Chickasaw County”; Alexander B. Meek Collection; Israel Pickens Papers; A. C. Ramsey, “A Sketch of the Life and Times of Rev. A. C. Ramsey . . .”; Charles Tait and Family Papers; John Williams Walker Papers. ADAH has a large collection of court records for Alabama counties. Note especially the following: Benton County: Court Records, 1833–53. Bibb County: Minutes, 1818–37; Record of the Superior Court, 1819–; Orphans Court, Minutes, 1818; Administrator’s Account, 1821–31. Chambers County: Miscellaneous Probate Court Records, 1836–76. Madison County: Orphans Court, Minutes, 1810–19; Superior Court of Law and Equity, 1810–12; Superior Court, Appearance Docket, 1811–16; Superior Court of Law and Equity, 1811–19. Montgomery County: Commissioners Court, Transcript Minutes, 1817–45; Orphans Court, Minutes, 1817–23; Probate Court, 1820–52. Perry County: Commissioners Court, Minutes, 1820– 32. Sumter County: Commissioners Court, Minutes, 1833–36. Talladega County: Execution Dockets, 1833–; Fee Books, 1837–43; Circuit Court, Records, Appearance Docket, 1833–39; Subpoena Dockets, 1833–38; Trial Dockets, 1833–38; Commissioners Court, 1833–48; Estray Book, 1833. Tallapoosa County: Commissioners Court, Minutes, 1836–46. Washington County: Superior Court, 1802–11.



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Bibliography

Arkansas Arkansas History Commission (AHC), Little Rock. Arkansas County, Abstract of Records of the Probate Court; Myra McAlmont Vaughan Collection, especially a copy of the Notary Public Records kept by Andre Fagot at Arkansas Post, 1809–12, “Early Reminiscences by an Early Settler of Clark County,” and “Extracts from Reminiscences by John R. Homer Scott”; “Diary of Maria Watkins: Journey of Shelbyville to Little Rock, 1820–27.”

District of Columbia Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Northwest Territory, Miscellaneous Documents; Thomas Rodney Papers; J.N.T., “Settlements on the Mississippi, April 1776”; West Florida Papers, 1799–1827.

Florida P. K. Yonge Library of Florida History (PKY), University of Florida, Gainesville. George Colee Correspondence; T. Frederick Davis Papers; James David Glunt Papers, especially John Faulk Correspondence and Horatio S. Dexter Correspondence; Hillsborough County, Record Book, 1837– 39; David Yancey Thomas, “A History of Banking in Florida.” Several WPA transcripts (HRS) are useful: City of St. Augustine Ordinances Also Minutes, Vol. 1, July 13, 1821–March 7, 1831; Dade County, Election Report 1843; Fernandina; History of Madison County; Jefferson County, 1827– 1910; Madison County, County Commissioners Proceedings and Mortgage Book “A”; Monroe County, Short History of Monroe County; Narrative of a Voyage to the Spanish Main in the Ship ‘Two Friends’; Santa Rosa County.

Illinois Chicago Historical Society (CHS), Chicago Cyrus Aldrich Collection; Benjamin F. Barker Collection; Samuel Burton Collection; Edward Coles Papers; Ninian Edwards Papers; John Estabrooks Collection; O. L. Ingraham Collection; Elias Kent Kane Collection; Griswold C. Morgan Collection; Cecil C. Moss, “Reminiscences”; Morris Sleight Papers. Illinois Historical Survey (IHS-U), University of Illinois Library, Urbana Bloxham Letters; Edward Coles Letters; Stephen Eames, Bascom Letters; Ninian Edwards Papers; Williams-Woodbury Collection. Illinois State Historical Library (ISHL), Springfield. Sarah Aiken Letter; Sidney Breese Papers; Daniel Brush, “Autobiographical Memoir, 1813–1861”; Carlyle Circuit, Day Book 1836, Journals 1836–37, 1840–42; Greene County, Poor Book, 1824–26; William Hempstead Letters; Elijah Iles, Account Books; “Illinois Women”; Jefferson County, Commissioners Court, 1819; P. N. Lewis and John Limkins, “Sketch of the Early Days of Naples”; Laura A. McKee, Diary, 1837–48; Richard Lee Mason, “Journey from Philadelphia to Illinois and Missouri, 1819”; “Memoranda on the Road,” by a Gentleman of Maryland; John Messinger Papers; North Stonington Colony; John Phelps, “Reminiscences”; Harry Riggin Family Papers; John Russell Family Papers; Sang-

Bibliography

amon County, Commissioners Court, Record Book A, 1821–26; Shale Creek Baptist Church, Bond County, Minutes, 1818–45; Elihu Springer, Letters 1834–59, Diary 1840–43; James W. Stephenson Papers; Daniel Weed Collection; William Wilson Papers; James B. Woollard Papers.

Indiana Indiana Historical Society (IHS), Indianapolis. Charles Ailing, “Early Settlers on Upper Big Creek”; John Arnold, “Early History of Rush County Courts”; William H. English Collection; John G. Finch, “Reminiscences”; Nathan D. Gallion Papers; John Kennedy Graham, Diary, 1825–26; John Ingle Papers; Charles K. Laird, Diary, 1820; Nicholas McCarty, Day Book, 1826–27; Ira Meater, “Early Reminiscences of Parke Co.”; Erastus Nevins, “Reminiscences”; Hosea Smith Letters, 1810–14; John Test, “Reminiscences”; Samuel Vance Papers; Samuel Williams Letters. Indiana State Library (ISL), Indianapolis. T. V. Denny Letters; Barton Griffiths Correspondence; Joseph Hayes, “Life”; Edmund O. Hovey Correspondence; John Humphries Letter to Samuel Blackwood, 1836; “The Pioneers of Jefferson County-Reminiscences of James B. Lewis, Esq.”; Little Pigeon Creek Baptist Church, Minute Book, 1816–40; William McCutcheon Letters; “A History of Thomas Morrison”; Peter Pressey Letters; Archibald Shaw, “Autobiography”; O. William Sickels Letter to Daniel Gold, 1828; John Vawter, “Early History of Madison.”

Iowa State Historical Society of Iowa (SHSI), Iowa City. Ebenezer Alden Letters; Thomas Cary Collection; William Duncan Letters, 1837; Samuel Goodnow Letter, 1837; Peril Columbus Haynes Family Letters; David Olmstead Letters.

Kentucky Margaret I. King Library (MIK), University of Kentucky, Lexington. Bourbon County: Wills, vols. A–B, 1786–1805; Order Book, 1786–93. Jefferson County: Court Orders, Minute Book A, 1780–83; Minute Book #1, 1784– 85. Mercer County: Circuit Court, Judgements (Suits), 1780–1801; County Court, Marriage Bonds, 1786–94; Deed Books; Will Books; County Court, Order Books.

Louisiana Department of Archives, Louisiana State University Library (LSU), Baton Rouge. Bensen Family Papers; Richard Butler Collection; John P. Combs Ledger; Concordia Parish Collections, 1794–1896; J. Fair Hardin Collection; David Mills Letter, 1818; Natchitoches Parish Collection; Thomas C. Nicholls, “Reminiscences”; Opelousas District Papers; William T. Palfrey Papers; Thomas Bolling Robertson Letters, Walter Prichard Collection; St. Helena Parish Records; Alonzo Snyder Papers; James Sterrett Letters, 1802–10; Nathaniel Evans and Family Papers, Merritt M. Shilg



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Bibliography

Memorial Collection; Zachariah Taliaferro, “Catahoula Parish.” The following police jury minutes are also useful: Avoyelles Parish, 1821–88; East Feliciana Parish, 1818–22; Lafayette Parish, 1823–57 (typewritten); Point Coupee Parish, 1829–40 (in French); St. Charles Parish, 1811–17 (typewritten in French); St. Helena Parish, 1813 (typewritten); St. Landry Parish, 1811–19 (hand transcribed); Terrebonne Parish, 1822–47. New Orleans Public Library, New Orleans. Ordinances and Resolutions of the City Council of New Orleans, 1805–15; Transcripts of the Cabildo Records, 1769–1803.

Michigan Michigan Historical Collections (MHC), Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. John Allen Family Letters; Berrien County, Niles Township, Commissioner of Highways, 1839; Kingsley Scott Bingham Papers; Chauncy Bird Collection; William Boyd Family Papers; Ebenezer Laken Brown, “The Beginning of Schoolcraft”; John Bryan Letter; Richard A. Bury, Diary, 1853; Carter Collection; Elizabeth Margaret Chandler Papers; Clinton Baptist Church, Records, 1832–42; Clinton Presbyterian Church, Records, 1834–; David Mack Cooper, Scrapbook, 1812; John Cooper Papers; Philip Cumings, Diary; Lorenzo Davis Collection; Dennis Family Papers; Sophia Perrin Fellows, “Reminiscences”; W. Forbes Collection; Charles Foster, Diary, 1836–39; James Fraser Letters; Morell Goodrich, “Reminiscences”; Lovira Hart Collections; Clarissa Hayes Letters; Augustus S. Johnson, “Autobiography”; Munnis Kenny, Diary, 1828; Livingston County, Tuscola Township, Records of Township Meetings, 1838–; Marshall Congregational Church, Minutes, 1832–; Ezra Maynard Letters; Navarre Family Records; Oakland County, Journal of the Board of Supervisors, 1827–44; “Recollections and Reminiscences of Early Life on Lake Superior”; St. Joseph’s Presbytery, Records, 1834–46; William Schlatter, Diary, 1851–52; Shaiwassee Baptist Missionary Board, Records, 1840; Cornelius G. Shaw, Diary, 1847–48; Thaddeus Smith, Record of Serving Summons and Subpoenas, 1834–36; William W. Spaulding, Diary, 1844; William Watts Letters; O. Wilder, Journal; Ypsilanti Township, Highway Commissioners 1827–31, Township Meetings 1828–33. HRS: History of Genessee County; Macomb County, Board of Supervisors, Records, 1827–32; Ottawa County, Board of Supervisors, Records, Vol. A., 1839–; St. Clair County, Supervisors, Record, 1833–34; William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Lucius Lyon Papers, 1822–33; Southwest Territory Papers; Christopher Van Deventer Papers.

Mississippi Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson. WPA Historical Project (HRS), County histories of De Soto, Grenada, Jackson, Lowndes, and Pontotoc.

Missouri State Historical Society of Missouri, University of Missouri Library, Columbia. Cape Girardeau, Court of Common Pleas, 1809; T. Frisel and Co.,

Bibliography

Jackson, Journal, 1818; Abiel Leonard Papers; St. Charles, Miscellaneous Papers, 1801–31; St. Charles District, Grand Jury Papers 1811, Tax Lists 1805; Ste. Genevieve Academy, Records, 1807–12; John Sappington Collection; Thomas A. Smith Papers.

Ohio Ohio Historical Society (OHS), Columbus. Rosvelt Caulkins Letter, 1810; Jesup N. Couch, Diary, 1804–1805; Walter Curtis, “Narrative”; John C. Deems, “Autobiography”; William Fitch Papers; Anna Strong Gillett, “A Memoir”; Charles Hammond Papers; John Harris, “Brief History of Stark County, 1806–”; Edward C. Lamson Collection; Jared Mansfield Papers; “Memorandum Book, 1805–10”; Charles E. Rice Collection; Edward J. Smith Letter, 1804; Tallmadge Stagecoach Records, 1816–36.

Tennessee McClung Historical Collection (McHC), Lawson-McGhee Library, Knoxville. William Blount Papers; Hamilton District Court Papers; William B. Lenoir Papers; Charles McClung Papers. Tennessee Historical Society, Nashville. H. Denison Letter, 1800, Miscellaneous Collections. Tennessee State Library and Archives (TSLA), Nashville. Joseph Bartholomew Correspondence; Isaac Conger, Diary; Fergusson Family Papers; John Hutchins, “Memoirs”; Lawrence Family Papers; Levi Lee, Diary, 1813–31; Martha Philips Martin, “Memoirs,” Mclver Family Collection; Mill Creek Baptist Church, Minutes, 1797–; Miscellaneous Collections; John S. Russwurm Papers; Mary Smith, “Memoir”; Michael Woods Trimble, “Memoirs, 1788–1860.” University of Tennessee Library (UT), Knoxville. William B. Lenoir Papers, Special Collections; transcriptions of the following court records: Blount County: Court Records, Book 1, 1795– 1804. Carroll County: County Court, Minute Books, 1826–33. Davidson County: Minute Book A, 1783–91. Jackson County: Ranger Book, 1817–60. Knox County: Superior Court, Minute Book 1, 1793–1808. Madison County: Circuit Court, Minute Book No. I, 1821–28. Tennessee Superior Court (Mero District): Pleas, 1803–05. Washington County: Superior Court Minutes, Vol. 1, 1791–1804. Weakley County: First Minute Book, 1827–35; Grant Book, 1794–1844. White County: Minutes of County Court, 1806–11.

Wisconsin State Historical Society of Wisconsin (SHSW), Madison. Harvey Brown, “Historical Record of the Brown Family from New York to Buffalo County, Wisconsin”; Johann Diefenthaeler Letter, 1844; Lyman C. Draper Collections; Mrs. M. F. Fishburn, “Reminiscences of Pioneer Life in Eastern Iowa,” 1845; Timothy Flint Letters to Abel Flint, 1815–22; David Giddings Papers; Josiah Harmar Letter to Henry Knox, 1787; Hugh Heward, “Journal of a Voyage, 1790”; Emmor Hickman Letter to William Sharpless, 1845; James C. Howard Papers; Morgan Jones, Diary, 1793; John Kerr, Journal, 1800; Mrs. Robert Murray, “From Boston to Wisconsin in 1838”; George W. Ogden, Diary, 1837–41; Martin Packman Letters; Sarah Pratt,



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Bibliography

Diary, 1844–47; Horace Rublee, “Reminiscences”; Emma Sprague Letter, 1842; “Benjamin Vancleve’s Biographical Memoir from 1773.”

Newspapers This is a list of newspapers most useful for this study. It includes a few newspapers in more settled areas for purposes of contrast. Many of these runs are broken, and I have not listed newspapers with only two or three issues, such as those found in the miscellaneous collections (by state) in the Library of Congress. Where there are major changes in title or in place of publication, I have included separate listings.

Alabama Blakeley Sun, 1818–19; Cahaba Alabama Watchman, 1820; Cahaba Press and Alabama State Intelligencer, 1821; Huntsville Alabama Republican, 1819–21; Huntsville Southern Advocate, 1834–37; Jacksonville Republican, 1837–39; St. Stephens Halcyon and Tombeckbee Public Advertiser, 1819–21; Selma Courier, 1827–29.

Arkansas Arkansas Post Arkansas Gazette, 1819–21; Batesville News, 1840–43; Helena Constitutional Journal, 1836–37; Helena Spy, 1838; Little Rock Arkansas Advocate, 1830–37; Little Rock Arkansas Gazette, 1821–37; Little Rock Times, 1835–36.

Florida Jacksonville Courier, 1835–36; Key West Enquirer, 1834–36; Key West Gazette, 1831–32; Key West Register and Commercial Advertiser, 1829; Magnolia Advertiser, 1828–30; Pensacola Floridian, 1821–22, 1823; Pensacola Gazette, 1824–30, 1833, 1836–45; St. Augustine East Florida Herald, 1823–26; St. Augustine Florida Gazette, 1821; St. Augustine Florida Herald, 1829–30, 1832–45; St. Joseph Times, 1839–40; Tallahassee Florida Advocate, 1828–29; Tallahassee Florida Intelligencer, 1826; Tallahassee Floridian and Advocate, 1829–41.

Illinois Alton Spectator, 1832–34; Chicago American, 1835–37; Chicago Democrat, 1833–36; Edwardsville Spectator, 1819–20; Galena Advertiser, 1829– 30; Galena Miner’s Journal, 1828–29; Galena Galenian, 1832–33; Kaskaskia Illinois Herald, 1814; Kaskaskia Western Intelligencer, 1816–19; Peoria Register and North-western Gazetteer, 1837–39; Springfield Sangamo-Journal, 1831–35; Vandalia Illinois Intelligencer, 1822–23.

Indiana Brookville Enquirer, 1819–25; Corydon Indiana Gazette, 1819–24; Evansville Gazette, 1822–25; Indianapolis Indiana Journal, 1825–30; Lo-

Bibliography

gansport Potawattomie and Miami Times, 1829–31; Richmond Public Ledger, 1824–25; Salem Western Annotator, 1829–31; South Bend Northwestern Pioneer and St. Joseph’s Intelligencer, 1831–32; Vevay Indiana Register, 1824–25; Vincennes Indiana Gazette, 1804–1805; Vincennes Western Sun, 1807–16.

Iowa Bloomington Herald, 1840–42; Burlington Hawkeye and Iowa Patriot, 1841–43; Burlington Herald, 1840–43; Burlington (Wisconsin Territory) Wisconsin Territorial Gazette, 1837–39; Davenport Iowa Sun and Davenport and Rock Island News, 1838; Dubuque Iowa News, 1837–39; Dubuque Visitor, 1836; Fort Madison Patriot, 1838; Iowa City Iowa Capitol Reporter, 1841–45; Iowa City Iowa Standard, 1842–44.

Kentucky Lexington Kentucky Gazette, 1787–98.

Louisiana Alexandria Louisiana Herald, 1820–25; Baton Rouge Gazette, 1821–23; Baton Rouge Republic, 1822–23; New Orleans Louisiana Gazette, 1804–12; New Orleans Moniteur de la Louisiane, 1802–03; St. Francisville Asylum, 1821–25; St. Francisville Louisiana Journal, 1825–26; St. Francisville Louisianian, 1819–20.

Michigan Adrian Michigan Whig, 1838–40; Ann Arbor Michigan Argus, 1835–37; Ann Arbor State Journal, 1835–37; Ann Arbor Western Emigrant, 1830; Brighton Livingston Courier, 1843–46; Copper Harbor Lake Superior and Miners Journal, 1846–49; Detroit Gazette, 1817–26; Grand Rapids Grand River Eagle, 1847–48; Jonesville Expositor, 1840–43; Marshall Western Statesman, 1839–41; Monroe Michigan Sentinel, 1825–30, 1834–36; Monroe Times, 1836–37; Niles Intelligencer, 1838; White Pigeon Michigan Statesman, 1835.

Mississippi Benton Yazoo Banner, 1838–40; Clinton Gazette, 1835–37; Columbus Democrat, 1837; Columbus Southern Argus, 1835; Grenada Grenadian, 1838; Grenada Southern Reporter, 1839; Hernando Free Press, 1839; Holly Springs Marshall County Republican, 1839; Holly Springs Southern Banner, 1839–41; Jackson Mississippian, 1834–37; Kosciusko Central Register, 1839–40; Lexington Standard, 1838; Lexington Union, 1838–40; Liberty Piney Woods Planter, 1838; Macon Intelligencer, 1838; Monticello Gazette, 1833; Monticello Pearl River Advocate and Eastern Advertiser, 1830; Natchez Chronicle, 1808–11; Natchez Mississippi Herald, 1803–1804; Natchez Mississippi Herald and Natchez Gazette, 1804–1807; Natchez Mississippi Messenger, 1807; Natchez Mississippian, 1808–10; Pontotoc Chick-



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Bibliography

asaw Union, 1836–38; Port Gibson Correspondent, 1819–25; Raymond Times, 1837–40; Ripley Transcript, 1838; Yazoo City Whig and Political Register, 1839–40.

Missouri Boonville Western Emigrant, 1839–40; Fayette Missouri Intelligencer, 1829; Fayette Western Monitor, 1829–30; Franklin Missouri Intelligencer, 1819–26; Jackson Independent Patriot, 1820–26; Jackson Missouri Herald, 1819–20; Kansas City Enterprise, 1855–57; St. Charles Missourian, 1820–22; St. Louis Missouri Gazette, 1808–21; St. Louis Missouri Republican, 1822–28.

Ohio Chillicothe Scioto Gazette, 1800–1811; Cincinnati Centinel of the Northwestern Territory, 1793–95; Cleveland Gazette and Commercial Register, 1818–20; Cleveland Herald, 1819–23; Columbus Gazette, 1817–18; Columbus Western Intelligencer, 1814–17; Hamilton Miami Intelligencer, 1814–16; Maumee Express, 1837–39; Steubenville Western Herald, 1806–1808; Worthington Western Intelligencer, 1811–13; Zanesville Express and Republican Standard, 1813–16.

Pennsylvania Pittsburgh Gazette, 1786–97.

Tennessee Knoxville Gazette, 1792–1803; Nashville Tennessee Gazette, 1800–1807.

Wisconsin Green Bay Intelligencer, 1833–36; Milwaukee Advertiser, 1836–37.

Unpublished Theses, Dissertations, and Other Papers I owe an enormous intellectual debt to the authors of unpublished studies about the trans-Appalachian frontier. Each of these titles represents a major piece of work for the author, and most of them continue to reside unread and uncited on library shelves. Many I have cited in notes; some I have not. I hope that this list will, at least partially, discharge my obligations to these scholars and, at the same time, bring to light, however briefly, these useful studies of varying aspects of life in the trans-Appalachian West.

University of Alabama Akens, David Strode. “Clarke County to 1860,” M.A., 1956. Bassett, Ariel Darvel. “A Social and Economic History of Kemper County, Mississippi in the AnteBellum Period,” M.A., 1947. Boozer, Jack Dwight. “Jacksonville, Alabama, 1833–1846,” M.A., 1951.

Bibliography

Bragg, James William. “Frontier Entrepreneurs of Madison County, Alabama: The Bell Factory Enterprise, 1819–1842,” M.A., 1958. Cochran, John Perry. “James Asbury Tait and His Plantations,” M.A., 1951. Cooke, Leonard Calvert. “The Development of the Road System of Alabama,” M.A., 1935. Elliott, James E. “A History of Methodism in Western Alabama, 1819– 1870,” M.A., 1947. Johnson, Dewey Maurice. “History of Coffee County, Alabama, 1840– 1871,” M.A., 1947. Kamper, Anna Alice. “A Social and Economic History of Ante-Bellum Bolivar County, Mississippi,” M.A., 1942. Kelly, Samuel Bledsoe. “The Establishment of Local Government in Alabama,” M.A., 1927. Mason, Mary Glenn. “The Ante-Bellum History of Limestone County, Alabama,” M.A., 1949. Reynolds, Marylee. “A Social and Economic History of Sumter County, Alabama, in the Antebellum Period,” M.A., 1953. Roberts, Frances Cabaniss. “Background and Formative Period in the Great Bend and Madison County,” Ph.D., 1956. Watkins, Esther Belle. “Some Social and Economic Aspects of AnteBellum Neshoba County, Mississippi,” M.A., 1942.

Ball State University Brady, Francis X. “W. G. and G. W. Ewing, Pioneer Mercantile Capitalists,” Ed.D., 1965. Hodges, Malcolm Maurice. “A Social History of Vincennes and Knox County, Indiana, from the Beginning to 1860,” Ed.D., 1968.

Butler University Tobey, Jeanette. “Economic Life in Indiana, 1800–1816,” M.A., 1948.

Case-Western Reserve University Davidson, Kenneth E. “Forgotten Ohioian: Elijah Whittlesey, 1783–1863,” Ph.D., 1953. Heald, Edward Thornton. “Bezaleel Wells, Founder of Canton and Steubenville, Ohio,” M.A., 1942.

University of Chicago Attig, Chester Jacob. “The Institutional History of the Northwestern Territory, 1787–1802,” Ph.D., 1921. Galvin, Sister Eucharista. “The Influences and Conditions Affecting the Settlement of Minnesota, 1837–1860,” Ph.D., 1929. Harr, John Lauren. “The Ante-Bellum Southwest, 1815–1861,” Ph.D., 1941.



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Bibliography

Duke University Hamilton, William Baskerville. “American Beginnings in the Old Southwest: The Mississippi Phase,” Ph.D., 1937.

University of Florida Jones, Robert E. “The Methodist Circuit Rider in Territorial East Florida,” M.A., 1952. Lewis, Frank G. “A History of Education in St. Augustine, Florida, during the Territorial Period, 1821–1845,” M.A., 1950. Osbourn, Sandra Shaw. “Women in the Ohio Valley Frontier Culture,” M.A., 1963. Waite, Mariella Davidson. “Political Institutions in the Trans-Appalachian West, 1770–1800,” Ph.D., 1961.

Florida State University Bittle, George Cassel. “In the Defense of Florida: The Organized Florida Militia from 1821–1920,” Ph.D., 1965. Owens, Harry P. “Apalachicola before 1861,” Ph.D., 1966.

George Peabody College Holt, Albert C. “The Economic and Social Beginnings of Tennessee,” Ph.D., 1923.

Harvard University McNulty, John Wesley. “Chief Justice Sidney Breese and the Illinois Supreme Court—A Study of Law and Politics in the Old West,” Ph.D., 1961.

University of Illinois Addis, Frank Raymond. “The Early History of Stark County, Illinois,” M.A., 1949. Allison, May. “Conditions in the Illinois Country, 1787–1800,” M.A., 1907. Chapman, Marion Lola. “The Establishment of Methodism in Central Illinois (1824–1840),” M.A., 1929. Coard, Helen Clara. “The Illinois and Michigan Canal as an Influence on Westward Migration,” M.A., 1941. Harper, Josephine L. “John Reynolds, ‘The Old Ranger’ of Illinois, 1788– 1865,” Ph.D., 1949. Kershaw, Mary Katherine. “Early History of Shawneetown, Illinois, from 1812 to 1832,” M.A., 1941. Mitchell, Ralph Vernon. “The Character of Lawlessness in Illinois to 1860,” M.A., 1962. Paullin, Marjorie Ruth. “New Salem: A Typical Frontier Settlement,” M.A., 1942. Peckous, Edwin John. “The History of Downers Grove, Illinois, from 1832– 1873,” M.A., 1956.

Bibliography

Pieper, Ezra Henry. “The Settlement of De Kalb, Du Page, Kane, and Kendall Counties to 1850,” M.A., 1926. Ramey, Nell Holland. “History of Early Roads in Illinois,” M.A., 1948. Sandmeyer, Elmer Clarence. “Methodism in Illinois before 1850,” M.A., 1924. Tevebaugh, John Leslie. “Frontier Mail: Illinois, 1800–1830,” M.A., 1952. ———. “Merchant on the Western Frontier: William Morrison of Kaskaskia, 1790–1837,” Ph.D., 1962. Wrone, David Royer. “Prairie Press in Transition: The East Central Illinois Newspaper Scene, 1830–1870,” Ph.D., 1964.

Indiana University Anson, Bert. “The Fur Traders in Northern Indiana, 1796–1850,” Ph.D., 1953. Carmony, Donald F. “Indiana Public Finance, 1800–1826,” Ph.D., 1940. Coplen, Marion Wallace. “History of Kosciusko County, Indiana, to 1875,” M.A., 1944. Deen, Arthur. “Frontier Science in Kentucky and the Old Northwest, 1790– 1860,” Ph.D., 1938. Dragert, Eva Ellen. “Indianapolis: The Culture of an Inland City,” Ph.D., 1952. Gordon, Leon Millard, II. “Transportation Facilities and the Growth of Northern Indiana, 1830–1860,” M.A., 1949. Hewes, Bernard A. “The Rise of the Pork Industry in Indiana,” M.A., 1939. Hisey, Stella J. “Harrison County, 1808–1825,” M.A., 1937. Humphreys, Bertha. “Guide to Early Indiana History,” M.A., 1935. Kuhn, Cecil LeRoy. “The Michigan Road,” M.A., 1927. Lang, Elfrieda W. H. “Immigration to Northern Indiana, 1800–1850,” Ph.D., 1950. Lawlis, Chelsea L. “Settlement and Economic Development of the Whitewater Valley, 1800–1900,” Ph.D., 1956. Mathis, Ray. “History of Brown County,” M.A., 1936. Mauck, Virginia Lowell. “Population Movements in Northern Indiana before 1850,” M.A., 1948. Muncie, Emery O. “A History of Jefferson County,” M.A., 1932. Owen, Mary Steele, “An Analysis of the Frontiersman Based on the Observations of Continental French Travellers,” Ph.D., 1954. Page, Katherine B. “Some Chapters in the Early History of Peoria, Illinois,” M.A., 1936. Prather, Geneal. “The Building of the Michigan Road,” M.A., 1941. Rediger, Lloyd Glenn. “Wilderness Road and the Ohio River, Routes of Emigration, 1783–1820,” M.A., 1944. Steck, Victor. “The Development of Huntington County,” M.A., 1940. Weicker, Jack Edward. “The Growth of Fort Wayne Industry, 1815 to 1860,” M.A., 1950. White, Harlan Scott. “Western Banking: Ideas and Practices before 1840,” M.A., 1942.



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Bibliography

University of Iowa Boeck, George A. “An Early Iowa Community: Aspects of the Economic, Social and Political Development in Burlington, Iowa, 1833–1866,” Ph.D., 1961. Browning, Julia Anne. “The Frontier Settlements of the Early Thirties,” M.A., 1933. Erickson, Erling Arthur. “Banks and Politics before the Civil War: The Case of Iowa, 1836–1861,” Ph.D., 1967. Fleck, Byron Y. “The West as Viewed by Foreign Travellers, 1783–1840,” Ph.D., 1950. Green, Michael David. “Federal-State Conflict over the Administration of Indian Policy: Georgia, Alabama, and the Creeks, 1824–1834,” Ph.D., 1973. Haefner, John Henry. “The West as Seen through Frontier Biography,” Ph.D., 1942. Harris, Faye Erma. “A Frontier Community: The Economic, Social, and Political Development of Keokuk, Iowa from 1820 to 1866,” Ph.D., 1965. Horton, Loren Nelson. “Roman Catholic Institutions and Their Influence in Early Dubuque,” 1970, unpublished paper in possession of the author. Jones, Pamelia Pearl. “Social Life in Territorial Iowa,” M.A., 1908. Kinnett, David George. “Locating in the Garden of the World: The Prairie Factor, 1830–1860,” 1973, unpublished paper in possession of the author. O’Brien, Thomas B. “The Frontier of Settlement in 1850,” M.A., 1935. Pyle, Perry E. “Outlawry in Early Iowa,” M.A., 1940. Sener, William E. F. “The Frontier Life of 1840,” M.A., 1938. Shepherd, Helen Evans. “Social Origins of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 1838– 1861,” M.A., 1947. Swierenga, Robert Peter. “Pioneers and Profits: Land Speculation on the Iowa Frontier,” Ph.D., 1965. Throne, Mildred. “A History of Agriculture in Southern Iowa, 1830–1890,” Ph.D., 1946. Williams-Searle, Bridgett. “Intimate Empires: Domestic Order, Property Relations, and the Law in the Western Country, 1760–1830,” Ph.D., 2005. Wunder, John Remley. “The Mississippi Territory’s First Experience with American Legal Institutions: Sargent’s Code, Its Adoption and Abolition, 1798–1803,” M.A., 1970.

Kent State University Woehrmann, John Paul. “Ft. Wayne, Indiana Territory, 1794–1819: A Study of a Frontier Post,” Ph.D., 1967.

University of Kentucky Allen, Samuel Elwood, Jr. “Observations of Travellers in Kentucky, 1750– 1850,” M.A., 1950. Beasley, Paul W. “The Life and Times of Isaac Shelby, 1750–1826,” Ph.D., 1968.

Bibliography

Clay, William Wilson Hume. “Fleming County, Kentucky, 1773–1860,” M.A., 1963. Eagle, Delbert P. “Aspects of the Kentucky Frontier,” M.A., 1938. Howard, Hugh Asher. “Chapters in the Economic History of Knox County, Kentucky,” M.A., 1937. Royalty, Dale Maurice. “Banking, Politics, and the Commonwealth, Kentucky, 1800–1825,” Ph.D., 1971. Smith, Leland. “A History of the Tobacco Industry in Kentucky from 1783 to 1860,” M.A., 1950. Tachau, Mary K. Bonsteel. “The Federal Courts in Kentucky, 1789–1816,” Ph.D., 1972. Thacker, Joseph Allen, Jr. “The Kentucky Militia from 1792 to 1812,” M.A., 1954.

Louisiana State University Brister, Elaine Holmes. “A History of Pineville, Louisiana,” M.A., 1948. Gillson, Gordon E. “The Development of a Military Frontier: The Story of Fort Adams and Its Hinterland,” M.A., 1954. Hair, Velma Lea. “History of Crowley, Louisiana,” M.A., 1941. Heidelberg, Nell Angela. “The Frontier in Mississippi,” M.A., 1940. Higginbotham, Sanford W. “Frontier Democracy in the Early Courts of Tennessee and Kentucky, 1772–1799,” M.A., 1941. Knipmeyer, William B. “Settlement Succession in Eastern French Louisiana,” Ph.D., 1956. Mason, John Bradley. “Early Immigration to Arkansas,” M.A., 1942. Miller, Marshall Stone, Jr. “The History of Fort Claibome, Louisiana, 1804–1822,” M.A., 1969. Morazan, Ronald R. “A Translation of the Letters, Petitions, and Decrees of the Cabildo of New Orleans for the Year 1800,” M.A., 1969. Odom, Eunice Maxwell. “The Frontier in the Arkansas River Valley,” M.A., 1938. Phillips, Yvonne. “Settlement Succession in the Tensas Basin,” Ph.D., 1952. Suarez, Raleigh A., Jr. “Aspects of the Social History of Iberville Parish, 1850–1860,” M.A., 1948. Walker, David Allan. “A History of Commerce and Navigation on the Lower Mississippi,” M.A., 1965. White, Alice P. “Plantation Experiences of Joseph and Lavinia Erwin, 1807–1836,” M.A., 1933.

University of Michigan Boertman, C. Steward. “The Sequence of Human Occupation in Wayne County, Kentucky; An Historical Study,” Ph.D., 1934. Davis, James Edward. “Demographic Characteristics of the American Frontier, 1800–1840,” Ph.D., 1971. George, Milton C. “The Settlement of the Connecticut Western Reserve of Ohio,” Ph.D., 1950. Kaatz, Martin R. “The Settlement of the Black Swamp of Northwestern Ohio,” Ph.D., 1952.



651

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Bibliography

Neithercut, Mark E. “The Development of the Portage Lake Mining District,” B.A. (honors), 1974; copy in MHC. Odle, Thomas D. “The American Grain Trade of the Great Lakes, 1825– 1873,” Ph.D., 1951. Shirigian, John. “Lucius Lyon: His Place in Michigan History,” Ph.D., 1960.

University of Mississippi Bolton, Reuben Leon. “History of Prentiss County,” M.A., 1935. Boman, Martha. “A Social History of Jackson, Mississippi: 1821–1861, State Capital in the Old South,” M.A., 1952. Cameron, Mary Effie. “The Summer of 1835 in Mississippi History,” M.A., 1931. Fowler, Lula Mae. “History of Panola County, 1836–1860,” M.A., 1960. Hearn, Walter Carey. “Towns in Antebellum Mississippi,” Ph.D., 1969. Holder, Ray, ed. “The Autobiography of William Winans,” M.A., 1936. James, Newton Haskin, ed. “The Journal of Josiah Hinds, April 24, 1839– July 10, 1863,” M.A., 1939. McMillan, Edward Lee. “A Social and Economic History of Kosciusko, Mississippi,” M.A., 1951. Ramsey, Jack Davison. “New County Representation in Mississippi from 1830 to 1840,” M.A., 1931. Sabakka, Clement John. “A History of Lafayette County, Mississippi,” M.A., 1973. Stamphy, Herbert Glenn. “The Academy Movement in Mississippi during the Nineteenth Century,” M.A., 1950. Summers, Mary Floyd. “Tishomingo County, 1836–1860,” M.A., 1957.

University of Missouri Anderson, Hattie Mabel. “A Study of Frontier Democracy: The Social and Economic Bases of the Rise of the Jacksonian Group in Missouri, 1815– 1828,” Ph.D., 1935. Dugger, Harold H. “Reading Interests and the Book Trade in Frontier Missouri,” Ph.D., 1951. English, William F. “The Pioneer Lawyer and Jurist in Missouri,” Ph.D., 1943. Foley, William E. “Territorial Politics in Frontier Missouri, 1804–1820,” Ph.D., 1967. Harris, James Griffith. “The Justice of the Peace in Missouri, 1800–1845,” M.A., 1948. Hill, Leslie G. “The Pioneer Preacher in Missouri,” M.A., 1948. Kennedy, Mary Alice. “Business Career of Moses U. Payne, 1828–1870,” M.A., 1944. Lewis, Donald F. “Economic and Social Life in the French Villages in Missouri,” M.A., 1936. Ronnenbaum, Sister Cheledonia. “Population and Settlement in Missouri, 1804–1820,” M.A., 1936.

Bibliography

Scroggins, Albert Taylor, Jr. “Nathaniel Patton, Jr., and the Missouri Intelligencer and Bison’s Lick Advertiser,” Ph.D., 1961. Swartzlow, Ruby Johnson. “The Early History of Lead Mining in Missouri,” M.A., 1933. Utz, Cornelius. “Life in Missouri, 1800–1840, as Pictured in Travellers’ Accounts, Letters and Journals,” M.A., 1933. Westover, John Glendower. “The Evolution of the Missouri Militia, 1804–1919,” Ph.D., 1948.

University of Nebraska Beck, Paul Louis. “Daniel Drake and the Interior Valley,” Ph.D., 1961.

University of North Carolina Moore, Waddy William. “Territorial Arkansas, 1819–1836,” Ph.D., 1962.

Ohio State University Cramer, Clarence H. “The Career of Duncan McArthur, Ph.D., 1931. Gordon, Francis Marion. “Early History of Hocking County,” M.A., 1940. Hansen, Ann H. “James Kilbourne, Ohio Pioneer,” M.A., 1950. Pitzer, Donald E. “Professional Revivalism in Nineteenth Century Ohio,” Ph.D., 1966. Still, John S. “The Life of Ethan Allen Brown,” Ph.D., 1951.

Princeton University Gaver, James M. “The Boonesborough Experience: Revolution in the ‘Dark and Bloody Ground,’ ” B.A., 1964.

University of Tennessee Brandon, Helen Gould, “A History of Steward County, Tennessee,” M.A., 1944. Carmichael, Claudia J. “A Hisroty of Weakley County, Tennessee, through 1861,” M.A., 1970. Counce, Paul Atkins. “Social and Economic History of Kingsport before 1908,” M.A., 1939. Davidson, Elizabeth Huey. “The Life of William Blount,” M.A., 1928. Fink, Miriam. “Social and Economic History of Jonesboro, Tennessee, prior to the Civil War,” M.A., 1934. Gauding, Henry Hendricks. “Water Transportation in East Tennessee prior to the Civil War,” M.A., 1925. Ledford, Allen James. “Methodism in Tennessee, 1783–1866,” M.A., 1941. Merritt, Frank. “Selected Aspects of Early Carter County History, 1760–1861,” M.A., 1950. Rogers, William Flinn. “Life on the Kentucky-Tennessee Frontier near the End of the 18th Century,” M.A., 1925. Seeher, Raymond Clifford. “A History of Anderson County, Tennessee,” M.A., 1928.



653

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Bibliography

Slay, James Linwood. “A History of Bradley County, Tennessee, to 1801,” M.A., 1967.

University of Texas Walker, William A., Jr. “Tennessee, 1796–1821,” Ph.D., 1959.

Tulane University Ferguson, John Lewis. “William E. Woodruff and the Territory of Arkansas, 1919–1836,” Ph.D., 1960.

Vanderbilt University Applewhite, Joseph Davis. “Early Trade and Navigation on the Cumberland River,” M.A., 1940. Barbee, John D. “Navigation and River Improvement in Middle Tennessee,” M.A., 1934. Browning, Howard Miller. “Washington County Court: The Government of a Tennessee Frontier Community, 1778–1790,” M.A., 1938. Bryant, Gladys Eugenia. “Daniel Smith, Citizen of Tennessee Frontier,” M.A., 1961. Chappell, Gordon T. “The Life and Activities of John Coffee,” Ph.D., 1941. Cooke, John White. “Isaac Shelby, 1750–1796,” M.A., 1959. Des Champs, Margaret. “Pioneer Life in the Cumberland Country,” M.A., 1946. Kinard, Frances M. “Frontier Development of Williamson County, Tennessee,” M.A., 1946. McDonald, Kenneth. “Milling in Middle Tennessee, 1780–1860,” M.A., 1938. Moffat, Charles Hill. “The Life of Charles Tait,” Ph.D., 1946. Wagner, Mary Church. “The Settlement of Zion Community in Maury County, Tennessee, 1806–1860,” M.A., 1945.

University of Wisconsin Casberg, Selma Sather. “The Lumbering Industry of La Crosse, Wisconsin, 1841–1905,” M.A., 1953. Cotton, Juliana Maria. “Social Life and Conditions in the Mississippi Valley, 1825–1840,” M.A., 1953. Fitzrandolph, Lura Mae. “The History of Arkansas to 1836,” M.A., 1935. Fix, Jacquline A. “The Establishment of Wisconsin Territorial Newspapers, 1833–1848,” M.A., 1961. Karn, Edwin D. “Roadmaking in Wisconsin Territory,” M.A., 1959. Kennedy, Charles J. “The Congregationalists and the Presbyterians on the Wisconsin Frontier,” Ph.D., 1940. Liddle, Clifford S. “The Development of the common School District in the Towns of La Grange, Linn, and Sugar Creek, Walworth County, Wisconsin,” Ph.D., 1942. McCluggage, Robert W. “The Fox-Wisconsin Waterway, 1836–1872: Land

Bibliography

Speculation and Regional Rivalries, Politics and Private Enterprise,” Ph.D., 1954. Merrill, Horace Samuel. “An Early History of the Black River Falls Region,” M.A., 1933. Overy, David H., Jr. “Wisconsin Men, The Frontier Cycle, and the South,” M.S., 1960. Paullin, William T. “Money and Credit in Western Trade, 1816–1836,” Ph.D., 1935. Read, Mary Josephine. “A Population Study of the Driftless Hill Land during the Pioneer Period, 1832–1860,” Ph.D., 1941. Sears, James M. “Teachers of the Old Northwest Territory, 1830–1860, as Seen in Their Diaries and Papers,” M.A., 1964. Somerville, James K. “Wisconsin Territorial Politics as Reflected in the Contest to Elect a Delegate to Congress, 1835–1847,” M.A., 1959. Tibbitts, Mary Blanche. “The Development of a Pioneer Wisconsin Farm during the Thirties and Forties,” M.A., 1925. Van Tassel, David Dirk. “Democracy, Frontier, and Mineral Point: A Study of the Influence of the Frontier on a Wisconsin Mining Town,” M.S., 1951.



655

Index

Adams, John Quincy, 118, 142, 230, 351, 424, 425, 549 Adrian, Mich., 336 Agricultural Bank of Natchez, 448 agriculture, importance of to transAppalachian frontier, 12. See also subsistence farming; commercial farming; corn; cotton; rice; sugarcane; tobacco; wheat Alabama: 123; Indians in, 116, 278; the cotton frontier in, 289–284, 288–290, 292–293,296–297, 299; settlement and growth of, 279–282, 288–290; government of, 292–293, 296; New Counties in, 428–430, 437–438, 570, 571–572; urban growth in, 511–513, 514–515. See also cotton; towns, counties, and geographical designations by name Alabama River: settlement along, 113, 278, 284, 289, 437, 568; steam navigation on, 250, 512; cotton transportation on, 376, 437 Alden, Ebenezer, 483–484, 524–525 Aldrich, Cyrus, 462 Alexandria, La., 513–514 Alexander, William, 65 Allegan County, Mich., 336, 519 Allegheny River, 499, 556 Alliton, Ill., 521 American Fur Company, 324–325, 612n16 American Revolution, 7–8, 85, 88, 413, 492; and trans-Appalachian settlement, 10, 45, 82–83, 175 American System (Henry Clay), 549 Anderson, Edward, 380 Anderson, Matthew, 65 Anderson, Pressley, 40 Andover-Newton Theological Seminary, 483 Anglo-American heritage, 3–4, 7–8

Ann Arbor, Mich., 334–335, 348 Anthony, J. D., 437 Apalachicola, Fla., 361, 371, 376, 379, 380, 518 Apalachicola River, 361, 370, 377, 379, 380 Appanoose County, Iowa, 463 Appelgate, Benjamin, 80 Arcadia, Fla., 377 Arkadelphia, Ark., 401 Arkansas 4, 113, 124, 311–315; settlement and growth of, ch. 11 passim, 619n8; as enduring frontier, 388–390, 409–410; violence in, 392, 394, 405–406, 415–417; government of, 392–396, 399–400; Indians in, 397–399; societies in, 405–408;cotton frontier in, 407–408; vigilantism in, 415–417; free blacks in, 416 Arkansas, Bank of, 410–411 Arkansas Post, Ark., 388, 391, 402 Arkansas River, 224, 229, 392, 395, 408; settlement long, 113, 388, 401, 408; bisecting Arkansas, 391, 404; steamboat navigation on, 398 Armed Occupation Act, 384 Armieburg, Ind., 240 Articles of Confederation, 529 Asbury, Francis, 36, 78–79, 209–210 Astor, John Jacob, 324–325, 612n16 Atchafalaya, La., 186 Atkinson, Henry, 468–469 Attakapas Country, La., 181, 186, 196, 218, 219; cotton cultivation in, 183–185 Attakapas Parish, La., 186, 196, 219 Attala County, Miss., 450 Avoyelles Parish, La., 298, 298–299 Backus, James, 96 Bad Axe River, 469 Baily, Francis, 494–495, 597

658



Index Baltimore, Md., 105, 106, 163, 525 banks and banking: in Kentucky, 55; in Old Northwest and Missouri, 256, 257–258, 504; on the cotton frontier, 299, 300, 308, 309; on enduring frontiers, 314, 333, 341–342, 375–376, 377, 410–411; in New Counties, 448; and the Panic of 1819, 550, 569 Baptist Church: in Kentucky and Tennessee, 78–79; 1795–1815, 211–213, 215, 216; in Old Northwest, 269, 607; in New Counties, 449, 452 Barkman, Jacob, 401 Barron, David, 567 Barrow, Miss, 197 Bates, Frederick, 194 Batesville, Ark., 404, 408, 409, 416, 417 Bath Township, Ohio, 203 Baton Rouge, La., 183, 196 Battle Creek, Mich., 335 Bayou La Fourche, 181 Bayou Teche, 181, 183, 186 Bedford County, Pa., 92 Bell, Robert, 449 Beloit, Wisc., 471, 472 Benedict, Russell W., 390 Benson, Ky., 43 Bibb, William, 292, 296 Bible societies, 268 Bigelow, Ellen, 574 Big Raccoon Creek, Ill., 270 Bingham, Kingsley Scott, 334–335, 337 Birkbeck, Morris, 189, 233, 235–236 Black Belt, Ala.: 293, 429, 453; defined, 278; cotton cultivation in, 289–290, 293; urban growth in, 514, 568, 623n7 Blackburn, Gideon, 78 Black Hawk, 466–469 Black Hawk War, 467–470, 520, 522, 554 Black River, 478, 479, 481 Black River Falls, Wisc., 481 Black Warrior River, 286 Black Swamp, Ohio, 318 blacks, free: in Louisiana, 175; in Old Northwest and Mississippi, 247, 260–262; in Florida, 366–369; on enduring frontiers, 416 Blackstone, Sir William, 7, 131, 204, 497, 558 Blakeley, Ala., 499, 511–513 Blount, William, 44, 48, 74–75 Bluegrass Region, Ky.: early settlements in, 27, 28, 32, 37, 42; agriculture

in, 39, 52–53,161; fur trade in, 42; prosperity in 55, 70, 81, 196, 567 Boiling Springs, Ky., 27 Bolivar County, Miss., 442–443, 446, 632n31 Bond County, Ill., 269 Boon’s Lick region, 244–247 Boone, Daniel, 5, 23, 26, 40, 46, 54, 72, 382 Boone, Daniel Morgan, 244 Boone, Nathan, 244 Boone, Squire, 65 Boonesborough, Ky., 26, 27, 32, 38, 40, 58, 61, 69 Boonville, Mo., 246 Boston, Mass., 27, 105, 203, 512–513 Bourbon County, Ky., 65 Bradford, James, 542 Breckenridge, John, and family, 48, 56 Brewer, Jacob, 212–213 Bronaugh, Dr. John C., 357 Brookville, Ind., 195, 502–503, 509 Brown, Esq. (tax collector), 472 Brown, Shepherd, 147 Brown County, Mich., 329, 331 Bruin, Peter Bryan, 132 Brush, Daniel, 241–242 Buffalo, Iowa, 522 Buffalo, N.Y., 321–322 Bull, Thomas, 203 Burlington, Iowa, 466, 483, 499, 522, 523, 524 Bush, George, 271 Butler County, Ohio, 128–129 Cahaba, Ala., 293 Cahaba River, 289, 296 Cahokia, Ill., 90, 100, 204, 497 Cairo, Ill., 258 Calhoun, John C., 326, 327 California, 13, 421, 489; gold rush in, 474, 486–487, 581 Calk, William, 26–27, 38 Call, Richard Keith, 378 Calvin, John, 214 Campbell, Judge David, 67 Campbell, Miss (schoolteacher), 307 Camron family, 509 Canada, 91, 97, 119, 151, 560, 566; French influence in, 8; and Michigan, 317, 318, 319, 324, 327 canals, 324; importance of, 251; and economic development, 331, 333, 338,

Index 349, 465, 520, 568, 571; and AngloAmerican immigration, 455, 457, 460, 499. See also Erie Canal Cane Ridge, Ky., 215 Carroll County, Miss., 447, 451 Carroll County, Tenn., 297 Carthage, Ill., 486 Cascade, Iowa, 484 Cash, W. J., 221, 624n24 Cass, Lewis, 319–322, 324–331, 346–347, 349, 612n9, 612n16 Cass County, Ind., 509 Cass River, 340, 343, 345 Cassville, Mich., 345 Cedar County, Iowa, 483, 524 Chambers County, Ala., 434, 437 Chandler, Elizabeth Margaret, 336–337 Chandler, Thomas, 336–337 Chariton, Mo., 246, 604n14 Charleston, S.C., 221, 362 Chattahoochee River, 286, 361 Cherokee County, Ala., 437, 439 Cherokee tribe, 9, 78, 276, 288, 398, 399; war against, 36; strength of 116, 278, 558, 570; cessions of, 394, 424, 426 Chicago, Ill., 328, 470, 471, 490, 499; as port, 455, 479, 499, 568; as commercial center, 465–466, 523, 568; as urban center, 490, 517, 519–521, 526 Chicago, Treaty of, 326, 328, 470, 520 Chicago and Mississippi Railroad Company, 571 Chicago River, 97, 251 Chicago Road, 328 Chickasaw, Miss., 450 Chickasaw tribe, 9, 116, 290, 558, 570; Cession of 1818, 278, 290, 440, 448, 625n44; Cession of 1832, 424, 431 Chickasawhay River, 169 Chicot County, Ark., 416 Chillicothe, Ohio, 165, 195, 497, 536–537, 593n6 Chippewa River, 478, 479, 479, 557 Chippewa tribe, 327, 328 Choctaw County, Miss., 451 Choctaw tribe, 9, 143, 168, 354, 397–398, 558, 570; strength of, 116, 278; Cession of 1820, 397–398, 516; Cession of 1830, 424, 429, 432, 440, 447, 450; and the Trail of Tears, 430–431 Chouteau family, 182, 247 Churches. See religion; denominations by name

Churchill family, 472 Cincinnati, Ohio, 97, 128, 154, 161, 186, 190, 239, 249, 490, 537; as Northwest Territory capital, 104; as commercial center, 162, 194, 163, 505, 517, 576; as urban center, 190, 490, 502, 525–526 Cincinnati, Society of the, 81 circuit riders, 6, 36, 78, 79, 210, 211 629n39 claims, 462–464, 476–477 claims associations, 463–464, 627n14 Claiborne, William C. C., 173, 193, 197, 216, 505; governance of Louisiana, 138–140, 142–143,145, 201, 541–543 Clark, Daniel, 181 Clark, James, 368 Clark, Lardner, 54, 255 Clark, William, 246–247 Clay, Henry, 66, 232, 394, 549 Clay County, Mo., 246 Cleaveland, Moses, 203 Clinch River, 26, 30 Clinkenbeard, William, 40, 47, 52 cloth manufacture, 165, 299 Code Noir, 139, 144, 150, 201 Code of 1788, 92–93, 95 Coffee, John, 163, 431 Coker, Asbury, 432 Coles, Edward, 237–238, 249, 259–260 Columbia, Ark., 416 Columbia, Mo., 246 Columbus, Ga., 361, 428 Columbus, Ohio, 525–526 Columbus, Miss., 287, 288, 289 commerce: on Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, 51, 103–106, 156–157, 161–163; in Arkansas, 408–409; in Chicago, 520–521. See also economic life and development; merchants; transportation. For commercial cities, see Chicago; Cincinnati; Galena; Lexington; Louisville; Nashville; Natchez; New Orleans; Pittsburgh; St. Louis; Shawneetown commercial farming, 565–566; in Kentucky and Tennessee, 51–52, 102; in Old Northwest and Missouri,160, 207, 245; in Mississippi, 170–173; in Lousiana, 175–179; on cotton frontier, 282–284; on enduring frontiers, 363–364, 405, 407; in New Counties, 451, 572–574. See also cotton; sugarcane



659

660



Index communities: defined, 201–202; in Old Northwest, 201–206, 241–242, 338–339; See also societies; communities by name Concordia Parish, La., 146, 181, 219 Cone, Aristarchus, 457–459, 460, 461 Congregational Church: in Old Northwest, 209, 213–214, 216, 217; in last frontiers of Old Northwest, 483–484, 629n41 Congress: governance of transAppalachian frontier, 74, 83–84, 320–321, 358, 384, 391, 543, 618n59; and the slave trade, 180, 569–570 Connecticut, 203 Connecticut Land Company, 203 Connecticut Missionary Society, 213–214, 270 Connecticut Valley, 3 Connecticut Western Reserve, 162, 203–204 Constitution of the United States, 115, 529 Conway, Henry W., 394 Coosa River, 289, 428, 437, 512 Coosa County, Ala., 430, 432, 523n13 Copeland, Mrs. (Kentucky pioneer), 41 corn, significance of, 38–39 Cornishmen, 474 Corydon, Ind., 509, 547 cotton: early crops of, 171–173; cotton gin, 120, 172, 296–297, 299; in Louisiana, 183; in cotton, frontier, 275, 292; significance of, 282–284, 423–424, 566; in Florida, 361, 363; in Arkansas, 401–402; in New Counties, 439, 442 Cotton Gin Port, Miss., 288 Council Bluffs, Iowa, 486 county courts: in Kentucky, and Tennessee, 61–65, 297, 531; control of economic affairs, 65; in Old Northwest and Missouri, 92, 93–94, 263–264, 266; on enduring frontiers, 330–331, 396; in New Counties, 432–436 county government: function of 57, 263–264; in Kentucky, and Tennessee, 57–61, 561–562; expansion of, 127–128; influence on economy, 127, 185, 598n44; in Old Northwest and Missouri, 264–265; on cotton frontier, 296–297; on enduring frontiers,329, 354–355, 399–400, 612n23; in New Counties, 432–434. See also county courts; grand juries; parish government; police juries

courts: significance of, 61, 68; justices of the peace, 61, 65, 93, 135–137, 450, 594n16; superior or supreme, 62, 132, 346, 368, 370, 379, 396; function of, 62–65; orphans, 62; probate, 62, 449–450, 625n44; federal, 68–69; circuit courts, 62, 267, 297, 396, 427, 432–434; grand juries, 367, 370–371; district, 370, 473 Covington, Alexander, 306 Cox, Isaac, 65 Cox, Sandford, 266, 267 Craig, John, 44 Crawford, William H., 549 Crawford County, Ark., 396, 400 Crawford County, Ill., 254 Crawford County, Mich., 329, 331 Crawfordsville, Ind., 266, 508–509 Creek tribe, 9, 116, 151–152, 168, 276, 290, 353, 549, 558, 570; Cession of 1814, 278; in Seminole War, 383; Cession of 1832, 424, 425, 429 Creoles, 186; in Louisiana, 122, 123, 145, 148, 193, 196, 541, 543; prosperity of, 140, 182 Crittenden, Robert, 392–394 Crockett, Davy, 291 Croom, Hardy, 362–363 Cuba, 352, 354, 372 Cumberland Association, 59, 67, 449, 587n16 Cumberland Gap, 26, 27, 29, 160, 496 Cumberland Mountain, 63 Cumberland River, 26; settlement along, 28, 30, 190; trade along, 51, 502; steam navigation on, 277 currency, varieties of, 42, 52, 164 Curry, J. L. M., 427 Cuyahoga River, 203 Dabney, Thomas Smith Gregory, 571–573 Dade County, Fla., 383, 386 Dallas County, Ala., 623n7 Dancing Rabbit Creek, Treaty of, 431 Danville, Ill., 265 Danville, Ky., 532 Danville, Convention of 1784, 21, 310 Darby, William, 318 Darlington District, S.C., 428 Davenport, Iowa, 499, 522, 523 Davidson, Squire, 131 Davidson County, Tenn., 28, 29, 54, 57, 63

Index Davis, Mr. (neighbor of Lovira Hart), 344 Davis, Mr. (hired by George Ogden), 471 Davis County, Iowa, 487 Dawson, Squire, 298 Dayton, Ind., 159 Dearborn County, Ind., 136 Decatur, Ala., 300 Declaration of Independence, 420, 529 Delaware tribe, 9, 82, 246 Democratic Party, 554 Democratic-Republican Party, 548 Denny, T. V., 236, 255 Des Moines, Iowa, 4, 489, 556–557 Des Moines River, 473, 523, 557 De Soto, Hernando, 160, 412 Detroit, Mich., 4, 100, 209, 316, 321, 327, 328, 335, 497, 499, 612n13; loss of, in War of 1812, 151, 317; isolation of, 318, 323–324; as port, 321–322, 331, 334; escaped slaves in, 347 Diedrichs, Johann Frederick, 459, 461 Diefenthaeler, Johann, 459 distilling, 465, 499 Doak’s Stand, Treaty of, 278, 572 Dodd, William, 625n44 Doddridge, Joseph, 38, 41 Dodge, Henry, 472, 553–554, 634n22 Donelson, John, 28 Doty, James Duane, 331, 634n22 Drake, Daniel, 42–43, 77, 80 Dubuque, Iowa, 466, 485, 487, 499; as mining center 475, 476, 477, 521; as lumbering center 477–479; as urban center 522–523 Dubuque, Julien, 473 Duffy (slave), 449 Dunlevy, Judge 137 Dunn, Nathaniel, 268 Dutch immigrants, 459 Duval, William Pope, 355, 357, 375 Duval County, Fla., 371 Dwight Mission, Ark., 404

313–314, 322–325, 333–334, 359–361, 362–364, 401, 407, 412–414; in New Counties, 437–438; in last frontiers of Old Northwest, 464–466, 473–481; in towns and cities, 521–522, 576–577 Eddyville, Iowa, 473, 523 Edgar County, Ill., 265, 270 editors, significance of 314, 320, 394, 501, 557; and politics, 541, 542, 550, 552 education: early conditions of, 75–77; academies, 76, 307, 373; rural schools, 76–77; of women, 77; in Northwest Territory, 84, 109; 1795–1815, 217–221; subscription schools, 217–218, 306–307; in Old Northwest and Missouri, 265–266; on cotton frontier, 306–307; on enduring frontiers, 345, 373–374, 617n52; public schools,373, 485; in New Counties, 439–440; on last frontiers of Old Northwest, 485–486; universities, 486 Edwards, Ninian, 266 Edwardsville, Ill., 130, 258 elections: in Louisiana, 543–544; local elections, importance of, 549, 634n17; of 1824, 548–550; boisterous nature of, 551–552; of 1840, 551–552 Embargo of 1807, 148, 150; effect on cotton farming, 184, 566 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 357 England, Stephen, 264 English immigrants, 459 Enos, Terry, 40–41 Erastus, Nevins, 218 Erie Canal: and immigration, 331, 333, 338, 349, 455, 460; and economic development, 465, 520, 568 Escambia County, Fla., 355, 367, 371 Evans, John, 432, 440 Evansville, Ind., 251 Ewing, Thomas, 109 Ewing brothers, 257

Eames, Stephen, 461 Eaton, John, 431 economic life and development: in Kentucky and Tennessee, 41–42, 51–52; in Northwest Territory, 101–106; 1795–1815, ch. 5 passim; in Old Northwest and Missouri, 250, 255–258; in enduring frontiers,

Fairfield County, Ohio, 202 Fallen Timbers, battle of, 107, 108, 115, 153, 535, 536, 536 families: on frontier, 11, 206–207; importance of, 232; domestic disputes, 302 Fancy Creek, Ill., 264 Farrar sister of Miss., 219, 220



661

662



Index federal government: weakness of, 36–37, 74; in trans-Appalachian frontier, 68–69, 358, 588n28; and frontier economy, 106, 108, 118, 124, 184–185, 478; and frontier stability, 111–112, 152–153; and Anglo-American expansion, 115, 117, 159, 448–449, 564; control of foreign affairs, 115–116, 150; conflict with Indian tribes,124, 150–152, 225–226; and Louisiana Purchase, 141–142; attempt to seize Canada, 151, 317; removal of Indians from frontier, 231, 290, 326–327, 397–398,424–426, 430–432, 466–470, 623n3, 623n5; in enduring frontiers, 312–313, 329, 395, 400 Federalist Party, 118, 214, 536, 548 Feliciana Parishes, La., 196 Fenton, Thomas, 173 Fever River. See Galena River Finch, John, 238–239 Finch, Judge, 507 Fisher’s Station, Ky., 32 Fitz, Andrew, 457, 459, 460, 461, 626n3 Flagg, Gershom, 225, 233, 234, 242–243, 251, 265–266 Flanigan family, 389–390 Flint, Timothy, 506 Flint River, 300, 348 Florida, 311–315; Spanish heritage in, 8, 168, 351–363; annexation of western Florida, 135; in War of 1812, 279; as enduring frontier, 351–352; settlement and growth of, ch. 10 passim, 615n21, 619n75; slavery in, 366–367; free African Americans in, 367–369; urban growth in, 517–518 flour mills, 165, 299 Floyd, John, 44, 47, 64, 531 Forbes, W. 335–336, 519 foreign immigrants, 345, 455, 459, 487, 626n6. See also nationalities by name Fort Bridger, Wyo., 487 Fort Crawford, Iowa, 479 Fort Dearborn, Ill., 328 Fort Gibson, Ark., 398, 404 Fort Gibson, Treaty of, 382 Fort Jackson, Ala., 152 Fort Jackson, Treaty of, 276 Fort Mims, massacre at, 151–152 Fort Smith, Ark., 398, 404, 409, 417 Fort Towson, Ark., 409 Fort Washington, Pa., 88, 104, 106

Fort Wayne, Ind., 257, 547 Fourth of July celebrations, 79, 272, 416, 440, 472, 475, 557 Fowler, A., 412, 414 Fox River, 9, 328 Fox tribe 9, 466, 473 Frankfort, Ky., 43 Franklin, Mo., 245 Franklin, state of, 29–30 Franklin county, Ohio, 593n6 French and Indian War, 88 French Broad River, 30 French colonial empire, 1, 8, 138, 144, 316 French heritage, 6, 8, 182; in Old Northwest, 82, 90–91, 209; in Louisiana, 142, 144, 175, 192, 193, 541–543, 564, 565; on enduring frontiers, 317, 322, 388, 473. See also French settlements French settlements: in Northwest Territory, 90, 98–100, 108, 111, 149, 159, 258, 497, 559; in La., 175, 180, 188, 182, 196; in Upper La., 182, 188, 194; contrasted with American settlements, 234, 322. See also societies frontier: defined 1, 13; closing of frontier, 69–70, 491, ch. 16 passim; isolation on, 108–109, 311–312; cotton frontier defined, 277–278; enduring frontiers defined, 311; last frontier of Old Northwest defined, 455–456, 626n1. See also frontier experiences frontier experiences, 4, 10–12; 1795–1815, 80–81, 86, 104, 227, 566–567, 603nn6,7; 1815–1830, 237–244, 307–308; on enduring frontiers, 334–337, 340–346; in New Counties, 426–427, 453–454; on last frontier of Old Northwest, 470–472; 1830–1850, 571–579 Fugitive Slave Act, 347 Fulton County, Ill., 457, 460 fur trade: significance of 12; in Michigan, 323–325; in Arkansas, 401 Galena, Ill.: as mining center, 475, 476, 521–522; as commercial center, 476, 522; as lumbering center, 477–478 Galena River, 473–474, 475, 476 Gallatin, Mo., 246 Garrison, William Lloyd, 337 Gayle, John, 523n13 Georgia: 41, 134, 171, 423; Indians in 116, 424–426, 428–429; immigrants to

Index trans-Appalachian frontier from, 168, 174, 280, 281, 282, 285, 362; and Florida, 352, 353, 363, 381; steam navigation in, 361; and Alabama, 438 German immigrants, 345, 349, 459, 483 Gerstaecker, Frederick, 412 Ghent, Treaty of, 225, 324, 506 Gillett, Daniel, 374 ginseng, 42, 105, 106, 508 Glastonbury, 203 Governance Act, 141–142, 193 government, ch. 4 passim, 578; functions of, 57; significance of, 59–60, 560–561; in Kentuckyand Tennessee, 72–75, 297–298; in Alabama, 292–293, 296; in Louisiana, 146–148, 298–299. See also county government; Cumberland Association; federal government; law; municipal government; Ordinance of 1787; parish government; township government; Watauga Association Graham, Sarah, 32, 34, 41, 47 Grainfield, Wisc., 472 grand juries, 297–298, 610n33 Grand River, 326 Grant County, Wisc., 462 Granville, Ohio, 202, 217 Graves, John, 41 Great Awakening, the Second, 215, 601n33 Great Crossing Church, 79 Great Lakes, 8, 12, 90, 145, 155, 317, 556, 559; settlements near, 113; communications on, 319, 320, 520; steam navigation on, 322, 331, 455; and grain trade, 331, 335, 338, 568 Great Migration: First, 223–232, 274, 504, 506, 540–541, 545; Second, 410, 419–422, 520 Great Plains, 419, 422, 579 Great Salt Lake, 486 Green, John, 128 Green Bay, Wisc., 209, 321, 328, 329, 478 Green River, 46 Greene County, Ala., 623n7 Greene County, Ill., 241–242 Greenville, Miss., 441 Greenville, Treaty of, 107, 108, 111, 115–116, 494, 499, 536 Greenwood, Miss., 442 Grenada, Miss., 447 gristmills, 43, 84, 165, 296, 299, 481, 499, 510 Guadelupe Hidalgo, Treaty of, 580

Gulf of Mexico, 8, 12, 116, 168, 175, 351, 378, 489, 556; Fla. ports on, 361, 364, 377, 518 Haitian Revolution, 117–118, 145; refugees from, 178 Hale, Calvin, 203, 208 Hale, Elijah, 203, 208 Hale, Jonathan, 203, 208, 279 Hale, Captain Samuel, 203, 208 Hambleton, Robert, 264 Hamilton, Alexander, 118, 493 Hamilton, Ohio, 129 Hamilton County, Ohio, 97, 128 Hamilton County, Ind., 238–239 Hammond, Jason, 203 Hamtramck, Major, 98 Hankinson, W. S., 438–439 Hardin, Joab, 390 Harkness, Ill., 521 Harmar, Josiah, 37, 83, 106–107, 112 Harrison, William Henry, 150–151, 159, 225, 259, 544, 552; as Indiana Territory governor, 116, 261, 537–539, 546, 560; as Illinois Territory governor, 466 Harrison County, Ind., 546 Harrison Land Law, 159, 226 Harrod, James, 22–23, 45, 530 Harrodsburg, Ky., 27, 43, 60, 495, 567 Hart, Lovira and family, 340–346, 551–552, 575–576, 577 Hartford Valley, Conn., 203 Haskell, Joshua, 610n33 Haskew, Peter, 373 Hatch, Nathan, 210 Havana, Cuba, 364 Hayes, Joseph, 158–159, 207 Haynes, P. C., 463, 487 Hays, Robert, 57 Hedge, John, 42 Helena, Ark., 417 Hempstead County, Ark., 400, 408 Henderson, Richard, 58, 71, 530, 587n15 Hennessey, Mr. (schoolteacher), 440 Higgins Creek, Ill., 264 Hinds, Josiah, 452–453 Hinds County, Miss., 572 Holland, George, 461 Holmes County, Miss., 451–452 Holston River, 4, 26, 27 Holtzclaw, Sooky, 41 “homestead” principle, 46



663

664



Index Hoover, David, 206 Horseshoe Bend, battle of, 276 Hotchkiss, Judge, 343 Hot Spring County, Ark., 400 Hough, Joseph, 162–163 Hovey, Mary Carter, 574 Howard County, Mo., 245 Hudson, Ill., 521 Hulme, Thomas, 255 Humble, Michael, 64 Humphries, John, 573–574 Hunter, Narsworthy, 172–173 Huntsville, Ala., 278, 300 Huron River, 334 Hurricane Plantation, 439 Hutchins, John, 172, 219 Iles, Elijah, 249–250, 256–257, 263 Illinois, 237–238; French settlements in, 100, 204–206; settlement and growth of, 237–238, 248, 604n23; as last frontier of Old Northwest ch. 13 passim (especially465–466, 469–470); violence in 486; urban growth in 503–504, 509–510. See also lumbering, mining; towns, counties, and geographical designations by name Illinois River, 97, 224, 256; settlements along, 113, 129, 241, 465, 466; steam navigation along, 251, 460 Illinois tribe, 9 illness, 243, 344, 358–359, 604n14 immigration and settlement: 1795–1815, 155–160, 180–183, 196, 539, 562–567, 596n5; 1815–1830, 223–232, 233–237, 274, 277–280, 539, 567–571, 603n8; on enduring frontiers, 331–334, 338–340, 384–385, 571; 1830–1850, 419–422, 430, 455–460,486–487, 508–509, 571 Independence, Mo., 486 Indian heritage, 8–10, 82, 116, 119 Indian Removal Act, 382, 424, 468, 570 Indian River, 385 Indiana, 116, 123; settlement and growth of, 128, 129, 160, 195, 202, 238–239, 249–250, 266; slavery in, 259; free blacks in, 261; urban growth in, 502–503, 506–509; politics in, 537–541 Indianapolis, Ind., 240, 254, 271, 507–508, 526, 545 Indian tribes: conflict with AngloAmericans, 18–19, 22–23, 30–31, 106–108, 150–152, 225–226; British

support of 28, 91, 324; in Northwest Territory, 91, 98, 107; in Louisiana, 143; in enduring frontiers, 312, 324, 397; in New Counties, 423; removal of, 231, 424–426, 430–432, 435–436, 570, 623n3, 623n5; in last frontier of Old Northwest 466–470; relations with Anglo-Americans, 558–560, 564–565. See also Indian tribes by name. industry: in Kentucky, 42–43; 1795–1815, 164–165; in cotton frontiers, 299–300; in last frontiers of Old Northwest, 481–482. See also economic life and development; industries and entrepreneurs by name Innes, Harry, 68–69, 532 institutions: significance of, 6; in Northwest Territory, 109–111; and the First Great Migration, 228–229; failure of, 231; on enduring frontiers, 375; and the closing of the frontier, 558, 569, 577–578 Iola, Fla., 377, 380 Iola-St. Joseph railroad, 380 Iowa: as last frontier of Old Northwest, ch. 13 passim (especially 457–459, 472–473); urban growth in, 522–525; politics in, 554. See also lumbering; mining; towns, counties, and geographical designations by name Iowa City, Iowa, 499, 524 Iowa County, Mich., 475 Irish immigrants, 459 Iroquois tribe, 9, 24, 558 Itawamba County, Miss., 452–453 Izard, George, 393 Izard County, Ark., 393 Jackson, Andrew, 258, 278, 290, 544–545, 548; victory over Creek Confederation, 152, 276; victory at Battle of New Orleans, 152, 229, 544–545; as president, 230, 424, 431; as Florida territory governor, 354–355, 356, 359, 382; politics of, 549–550 Jackson, Francis, 194 Jackson, Mich., 331, 335 Jackson, Miss., 278 Jackson, Tenn., 291 Jackson County, Ark., 400 Jackson County, Fla., 361 Jacksonville, Ala., 436 Jacksonville, Fla., 376, 384

Index James River, 3 Jamestown, Va., 3, 4, 8 Janesville, Wisc., 471 Jay, John, 116 Jefferson, Thomas, 139, 143, 145; and Louisiana Purchase, 117, 122, 137, 148, 566; doctrines of, 118, 150, 219, 227, 272, 493, 536, 569; and the Embargo of 1807, 184–185, 566; and trans-Appalachian politics, 536–537, 538, 539, 540, 542 Jefferson College, Miss., 191, 219 Jefferson County, Fla., 361, 371, 551 Jefferson County, Ky., 64–65 Jefferson County, Ohio, 165, 498, 593n6 Jeffersonville, Ind., 546 Johnson, Mr. (Iowa settler), 458 Johnson County, Iowa, 483, 487, 524 Jones, Abraham, 133 Jones, Horatio, 299–300 Jones, Mr. (schoolteacher), 76 Jonesboro, Tenn., 62 Jouett, Charles, 391 Judiciary Act of 1789, 68 Kalamazoo, Mich., 333, 334, 335, 338, 629n41 Kaskaskia, Ill., 90, 100, 204, 255, 258, 497, 503 Kaskaskia River, 113, 251 Kelly, John, 264 Keen, George Gillett, 365, 373 Keen, William Henry, 365 Kenosha, Wisc., 485 Kentucky: settlement and growth of, 3, 5, 7, 13, 19, 22, chs. 1 and 2 passim; attraction for early settlers, 24–27, 29; Kentucky Constitutional Convention, 70–72, 532–533;Constitution of 1792, 73; Constitution of 1799, 73; compared to later frontiers, 89–90, 108, 114, 125, 156, 173, 184, 293, 335, 395; immigrants to later frontiers from, 157, 181, 233, 247, 259, 539; politics in, 529–533, 544 Kentucky County, Ky., 27, 60, 490, 529, 531, 557, 561 Kentucky River, 28, 51, 52, 250, 502 Keokuk, Iowa, 466, 522 Keweenaw Peninsula, 347 Key West, 364, 372, 518 Kickapoo, Ill., 521 Kickapoo tribe, 248

Kimball, D. F., 472 Kingston, Ill., 521 Knox, Henry, 98 Knox County, Ind., 129, 164 Knox County, Ky., 157 Knoxville, Tenn., 190, 278, 290 Kosciusko, Miss., 625n46 La Crosse, Wisc., 478 La Crosse River, 478 Lafayette, Marquis de, 362, 612n9 Lafayette, Ind., 251, 509 Lafayette, Miss., 450 Lafayette County, Ark., 400 Lake Erie, 93, 100, 162, 251, 318, 331, 333, 334 Lake Huron, 100, 316, 317, 326 Lake Koshkonong, 470 Lake Michigan, 251, 321, 326, 328, 329, 331, 333; and grain trade, 334; and Chicago, 455, 465, 479, 499, 520 Lake Washington, 441 Lamotte Prairie, 254 Land Ordinance. See Ordinance of 1785 land rights 45–46, 53–54, 563; role of government in 59–60, 125, 374; in Kentucky and Tennessee, 66; in Northwest Territory 100; in Florida, 358, 374–375; in Last Frontier of Old Northwest, 462–464, 476–477 Langworthy family, 487 Lapeer, Mich., 342–343, 552, 577 law: in Kentucky and Tennessee, 67–68; divorce law, 75, 302; in Northwest Territory, 92–96, 101;common law, 101, 591n24; civil (Louisiana Territory), 122, 140; on enduring frontiers, 330, 364–365, 368, 396, 616n27; in New Counties, 435–436. See also courts; government; lawyers; Sargent’s Code; vigilantism Law, Thomas, 428–429, 568, 623n7 Law family, 453 Lawrenceburg, Ind., 158 lawyers: in Kentucky and Tennessee, 66; in Old Northwest, 96, 266–267, 606n50; in Mississippi Territory, 131–135; on cotton frontier, 299; in New Counties, 434–435, 450 Le Claire, Iowa, 522 Le Claire, Antoine, 522–523 Lebanon, Ky., 76 Lee, Richard Henry, 29



665

666



Index Leflore County, Miss., 442 Leich, David, 630n3 Lenawee County, Mich., 336 Lenoir, William B., 282, 283 Leon County, Fla., 361, 362, 368, 371 Letcher, Robert, 391 Lewis, James B., 234 Lexington, Ky., 18, 32, 42, 55, 75, 81, 300, 567; as commercial center, 195–196, 525–526 Lexington, Mass., 18 Liberty, Mo., 246 Ligonier Valley, Pa., 88 Limestone, Pa., 36 Lincecum, Gideon and family, 285–288, 306–307 Little Rock, Ark., 394, 396, 405, 406, 412, 414, 416; isolation of, 404 Little Rock-Memphis Road, 400, 404 Little Turtle (Miami Confederation chief), 107 livestock: hogs, 102, 160–161, 565; processing of, 161; cattle, 161, 408–409 Liverpool, England, 300, 309 Livingston County, Mich., 334 Livingston County, N.Y., 340 Logan, Benjamin, 530 Logan’s Fort, Ky., 27 Logansport, Ind., 509, 547 London, England, 525 Long Island (of the Holston River), 26 Loras, Mathias, 485 Louisiana, 123; law and government in, 137, 139–143, 146–148; French and Spanish heritage in, 138–139, 175–178, 193, 204–206, 542; Indians in, 143; slavery in, 144, 148, 156; constitution of, 148–149; slave trade in, 179–180; settlement of, 180–183; cotton frontier in, 298–299; urban growth in, 505, 513–514, 630n14; politics in, 541–544. See also French settlements; Louisiana Purchase; Orleans Territory; towns, parishes, and geographical designations by name Louisiana Purchase, 13, 117, 122, 161–162, 190, 493. See also Louisiana Louisville, Ky., 47, 105; as commercial center, 154; as urban center, 190, 502, 504 Lovejoy, Elijah, 486 Lovely County, Ark., 400 Lowndes County, Ala., 623n7

lumbering, 12, 52; in Michigan, 348–349, 628n32; in Florida, 359–361; in last frontiers of Old Northwest, 477–481, 522 Lucas, Robert, 554 Lynn, Joseph, 291 Lyon, Matthew, 545 Lyons, Iowa, 522 Mackinac, Mich., 321, 329 Mackinac County, Mich., 329 Macomb County, Mich., 329 Macon County, Ala., 430, 438 Madison, Ala., 300 Madison, Ind., 195, 257 Madison, James, 29, 135, 173, 237, 238, 493, 542 Madison County, Ala., 278, 283, 299, 437 Madison County, Fla., 371, 551 Madison County, Tenn., 291, 297–298, 419, 610n33 Madison County, Ill., 130, 238, 243, 249 Madison County, Miss., 174, 275, 437 Mansfield, Lord, 132 manufacturing. See industry Marblehead, Mass., 457, 460 Marietta, Ohio, 104, 217, 262; early settlement of, 85–86, 88–89, 496, 590n9; as urban center, 190 Marion, Ala., 514 Marion County, Ind., 507 Marshall, John, 426 Marshall, Ala., 450 Marshall, Mich., 335, 450 Martin, Jonathan, 156 Martin, Martha Phillips, 181, 183 Maryland, 158, 362 Mason, Richard Lee, 236–237 Massachusetts, 421, 457 Maumee Express, 553 Maumee River, 107, 257, 318 May, George, 65 May, John, 104–106, 255 Mayfield, Mylassah, 64 Mayflower, 85 McAfee, Robert, 43, 44, 51 McCarty, William M., 367 McClung, Charles, 68 McCulloch, James, 65 McCutcheon, William, 249 McNair, Alexander, 247 Meade, David, 52 Meater, Ira, 218, 236

Index Meigs, Return Jonathan, 95 Mercer County, Ill., 463 Mercer Society for the Encouragement of Agriculture, 81 Mexican War, 487 Memphis, Tenn., 278, 290 Mercer County, Ill., 463 merchants: in Kentucky and Tennessee, 54–55; in Northwest Territory, 104–106; in Old Northwest and Missouri, 162–164, 255–257; on cotton frontier, 287; in New Counties, 438–439 Messinger, John, 545 Methodist Church: in Kentucky and Tennessee, 78–80; and The Methodist Discipline, 79–80, 210; in Old Northwest, 209–211; denominational disputes of, 271–272; in last frontiers of Old Northwest, 457, 472, 475, 484, 485, 629n39. See also circuit riders Mexican War, 580 Miami County, Ohio, 137 Miami River, Great, 97, 107, 129, 152, 195, 223, 237, 505, 537 Miami River, Little, 97, 195, 494 Miami tribe, 9, 106, 470 Michaux, François Andre, 567 Michigan, 123; as enduring frontier 316–317; settlement and growth of 311–315, ch. 9 passim; slavery in, 346–347; urban growth in, 518–519. See also lumbering; mining; towns, counties, and geographical designations by name Michilimackinac, Mich., 317 militia: history and influence, 32, 34, 585n17; private military groups, 35; in Northwest Territory, 86, 82; in Old Northwest, 125; in La., 145; role in Indian removal, 468–469 Miller, James, 392 Miller County, Ark., 400 mills. See gristmills, flour mills, saw mills, cloth manufacturing Milly (slave), 435 Milwaukee, Wisc., 464, 466, 470, 485 Mineral Point, Wisc., 475, 521 Mingoe tribe, 9 mining, 12; copper, in Mich., 347–348; lead, in last frontiers of Old Northwest, 473–475, 521–522 Mississippi, 123, 124, 131, 278; slavery in, 156; cotton frontier in, 171–174,

301–302, 305–306; settlement and growth of, 289; New Counties in, 430–431, 432, 438–439, 440–446, 448–451, 570, 271–572; urban growth in, 515–517; See also cotton; towns, counties, and geographical designations by name Mississippi Delta, 13, 441–446, 571 Mississippi River, 1; opening of American trade along, 51, 73, 108, 115–116, 117, 137, 150, 152, 505, 511, 562–563; trade along, 55, 154, 156, 161, 165, 250, 503; movement of peoples along, 82, 181, 223, 244, 320, 419, 456; as trade route, 150, 154, 165, 173, 174; and urban growth, 190, 191, 476, 499, 520, 522, 526; settlement along, 113, 149, 178, 219, 244–247, 284, 321, 478; steam navigation on, 250; and lumbering, 479 Mississippi Society for the Acquirement and Dissemination of Useful Knowledge, 191 Missouri 113, 116, 124, 228, 232, 250; and Arkansas, 124, 390, 391, 399, 412, 474; violence in, 126; settlement and growth in, 244–248; slavery in, 247–248; free blacks in, 260–261 Missouri River, 13, 113, 116, 223, 224, 244, 246; trade along, 154; movement of peoples along, 223 Mitchell, Judge, 267 Mobile, Ala., 4, 135, 169, 198, 300, 307; as port, 279, 437; as urban center, 511–513 Mobile Bay, 512 Monongahela River, 105, 499, 556 Monroe, James, 326, 355, 362, 493 Monroe, Mich., 333 Monroe, Miss., 450 Monroe County, Ala., 281–282 Monroe County, Ark., 400 Monroe County, Fla., 386 Monroe County, Mich., 329 Monroe County, Miss., 287, 288 Montgomery (slave), 439 Montgomery, Ala., 278, 428, 514 Montgomery County, Ala., 289 Montgomery County, Ind., 508, 574 Montreal, Canada, 317, 324 Montrose, Iowa, 522 Morgan, Charles, 146 Mormon Church, 479, 486 Morrison, Thomas, 159



667

668



Index Moultrie Creek, Treaty of, 357 Moyers, Nicholas, 65 municipal government, 500–501 Murat, Achille, 551 Muscatine, Iowa, 479 Muscatine County, Iowa, 459 Muskingum River, 88, 195 Napoleon Bonaparte, 117, 138, 151, 317, 565 Nashville, Tenn., 54, 78, 90, 186, 190, 195, 278, 287; early settlement of, 28, 29, 54, 59; as commercial center, 163–164, 290 Nashville Basin, 39, 52, 66, 195, 567 Natchez, Miss., 120, 500; violence in, 126; as commercial center, 154, 170–171, 173; as urban center, 190, 500, 502, 515; urban growth of, 194. See also Natchez District Natchez County, Miss., 437 Natchez District 122, 123, 278; violence in, 126; fear of slave insurrection in, 127; cotton cultivation in, 171–172; urban growth of, 191–192; prosperity in, 567. See also Natchez, Miss. Natchitoches, La., 181, 183, 513 National Road, 455 Nauvoo, Ill., 479 Nebraska, 420 Nelson, John, 65 New Albany, Ind., 236 New Counties, ch. 12 passim, 570, 571–572; defined, 424; closing of the frontier in, 470–471 New England: settlement of New Englanders in Old Northwest, 5, 6, 84–86, 158, 162, 188, 202–204, 234, 241, 536; missionary societies of, 213–214; immigrants to trans-Appalachian frontier from, in general, 336–339, 349, 455, 457–458, 483, 539, 626n3 New Madrid, Mo., 181, 244, 394 Newman, Lieutenant, 197 New Orleans, La., 4, 140, 145, 196, 120, 479, 490; as port, 51, 102–103, 116, 137, 150, 156–157, 161, 174, 168, 503, 505–506, 525–526, 563, 566; Battle of 152, 229, 545; as commercial center, 154, 156, 162, 163, 175; and slave trade, 179–180; urban growth of, 191–194, 630n14; as urban center, 190, 499, 500, 502, 505–506, 511, 512, 513, 517. See also French heritage

New Purchase, Ind., 266, 267, 509 New Salem, Ill., 509 newspapers. See editors New York, 210, 251, 512–513, 525; and Mich., 319, 331; immigrants to trans-Appalachian frontier from, 336, 338, 339, 340, 349, 455, 470, 539 New York, N.Y., 118, 150, 250, 525, 526; trade with trans-Appalachian west, 163, 300, 309, 323, 331, 362, 512, 513 Nicholas, George, 71–73, 533 Nicholls, Thomas, 181, 196, 505 Nicholls, William, 146 Niles, Mich., 331 Noble, James, 547 Noble, Noah, 545 Noblesville, Ind., 238–239 Noland, C. F. M., 406, 408–409 Nolichucky River, 58 North Carolina, 6, 9, 274; western settlements of, 27–30, 48, 57, 74, 561; immigrants to trans-Appalachian frontier from, 152, 168, 202, 245, 279, 361, 362, 536, 539. See also Franklin, state of Northwest Company, 324 Northwest Indian Territory, 326–327 Northwest Ordinance. See Ordinance of 1787 Northwest Territory, 37, 39, ch. 3 passim, 564; division of, 123; urban growth in, 502–504; politics in, 534–537 Notrebe, Frederick, 402 Noxubee County, Miss., 451 Nu-Tah-R-Tuh (Indian in Ark), 399 Oakland County, Mich., 329, 348 Ochlockonee River, 357 Ocmulgee River, 286 officeholding and officeholders, 127–128; in Kentucky, and Tennessee, 67; in Old Northwest and Missouri., 94–95, 97, 264–265, 537–538; on cotton frontier, 293; on enduring frontiers, 315, 329, 394–395 Ogden, George W., 470–472, 477, 552 Ohio: 75, New England influence in, 5, 188, 202, 204, 209; settlement and growth of, 7, ch. 3 passim, 113, 202–204; free blacks in, 261; immigrant to later frontiers from, 234,

Index 237; urban growth in, 190, 498–499; politics in, 536–537 Ohio Company of Associates, 84–86, 104, 496 Ohio Land Company, 214 Ohio River, 1, 51, ch. 3 passim, 145, 496, 502; settlement near, 5, 6, 7, 47, 52, 83, 98, 103, 105, 495, 546, 567; Indians along, 9–10, 19, 35, 52, 69, 83, 225; movement of peoples along, 19, 28, 29, 36, 82, 223, 229, 235, 318, 320, 419, 456; trade along, 51, 52, 154, 161, 250, 254, 503; as division of North and South, 119, 232; shipping on 161, 503; and urban growth, 108, 190, 194–196, 499, 503–504, 511, 526, 535; steam navigation on, 250 Oklahoma Territory, 472 Old Northwest, ch 3, 7 passim; New England settlement in, 5, 6, 84–86, 158, 162, 188, 202–204, 234, 241, 536; politics in, 534–541 Omaha, Neb., 486 Onís, Don Louis de, 351 Opelousas, La., 181 Opelousas region, La., 183 Orange County, Ind., 236 Ordinance of 1785 (Land Ordinance), 8, 74, 108; function of, 84, 115, 125, 276; provisions of, 564 Ordinance of 1787 (Northwest Ordinance) 8, 74, 563, 564, 591n24, 636n4; role in settling Northwest Territory, 86–88, 89, 101, 110–111, 112, 563; role in settling later frontiers, 121, 122–123, 125, 138–141, 355, 391, 410, 462; and slavery, 258–259; and politics, 529, 533, 534, 537, 554 Oregon, 13, 486 Oregon Trail, 486–487 Orleans Territory, 114, 116, 123, 141, 146, 564; violence in, 126; politics in, 541–544. See also Louisiana; New Orleans, La. Osage River, 244 Osborn, Isaiah, 508 Osceola, Chief, 382, 384 Ottawa tribe, 9, 327, 328, 558 Ottumwa, Iowa, 473, 523 Ottwell, William, 130 Ouachita Mountains, 391 l’Ouverture, Toussaint, 117 Owen County, Ill., 270

Ozark Mountains, 244 Ozark Plateau, 391 Pacific coast, 7, 458, 486, 489, 581 Palfrey, John, 183–185, 219 Panic of 1819, 231, 504, 550, 569 Panic of 1837, 313, 333–334, 340, 376, 410–411, 552, 570 Panton, Leslie, and Company, 375 Paoli, Ind., 236 Paris, France, 525 Paris, Ill., 265, 270 Paris, Treaty of (1763), 1–3, 316 Paris, Treaty of (1783), 83 parish government, 146–148, 298–299, 595n32 Parke County, Ind., 218, 236, 239–240, 249, 573–574 Parker, Samuel, 211 Parsons, Samuel H., 88 Patoka River, 158 Patton, James, 64 Payne, Moses U., 255–256 Pennsylvania: frontier in, 3, 37, 41; immigrants in trans-Appalachian frontier from, 83, 158, 336, 455, 536, 567; and Northwest Territory, 101, 106 Pensacola, Fla.: as center of West Fla., 352, 354, 355, 357, 372, 376; ordinances of, 359, 366; slow growth of, 361, 371, 374, 518; railroads in, 381 Pensacola, Bank of, 376 Pensacola Bay, 377 Peoria, Ill., 251, 460 Peoria County, Ill., 521 Perdido River, 135 Perry County, Ala., 296, 608n10, 623n7 Philadelphia, Pa., 163, 525; immigrants to trans-Appalachian frontier from, 337, 338 Phillips County, Ark., 411 Pickens, Israel, 282, 283, 299 Pike, Albert, 406–407 Pike County, Ark., 400 Pinckney, Thomas, 108, 116 Pinckney’s Treaty, 108, 116, 162, 556 Pittsburgh, Pa., 120, 499; on route to West, 29, 82, 84, 88, 163, 205, 457; and steam navigation, 120, 250; trade with trans-Appalachian frontier, 154; as commercial center, 499, 525–526



669

670



Index plantations: and slavery, 10, 56, 143, 148, 156, 180, 200, 303–306, 368; in Kentucky, 32, 48, 53, 55, 56, 567; on cotton frontier, 149, 171, 173, 280, 301, 303–306, 568, 573; in Louisiana, 149, 178, 180, 181, 183–184, 219; society of, 198–199, 307–309, 439–440, 624n24; slave revolt on, 201; in Florida, 361–363, 383, 387; in Arkansas, 405; in New Counties, 439, 443–444, 451; and urban growth, 499, 506, 511 Plumbe, John Jr., 457 Plymouth, Mass., 3, 4 police juries, 146–148 politics, 490, ch. 15 passim, 322n13; political leaders, 7; violence in, 394. See also elections; political leaders by name Pomeroy, George, 65 Pontiac, Mich., 334, 348, 625n44 Pontotoc, Miss., 448 Pontotoc County, Miss., 448–450 Pontotoc Creek, Treaty of, 431 Pope, Benjamin, 64 Pope, John, 393 Port Leon, Fla., 378–379 Portage County, Ohio, 203 Portage River, 328 ports. See cities by name Potawatomi tribe, 328, 470 Powell, Ezekial Banner, 438 Prairie Du Chien, Wisc., 321, 329, 478 Prairie du Lac, Wisc., 471–472 Prairie du Sac, Wisc., 484 Pre-emption Act of 1841, 413, 464 Presbyterian Church: in Kentucky and Tennessee, 78–79; in Old Northwest, 214, 270–271; in South, 214 Princeton, Ind., 255, 509 Prophetstown Claims Club, 463 Pullman, Robert, 248, 264 Pybourn, Elias, 63 Quakers, 188, 209 Ragatz, Oswald, 459 railroads: in Michigan 333–334; in Florida, 376–381, 618n59; importance of, 571; in Pennsylvania, 627n7 Raisin River, 321 Ramsey, A. C., 168–169, 220 Randall, Judge, 383 Rapides district, 181

Rapides Parish, La., 183, 219, 514 Real Estate Bank, 410 Red River, 113, 181, 183, 278, 396, 408, 513 Red River Valley, 278, 407–408 Reed, Isaac, 270–271, 607n57–58 religion: importance of, 21, 269; in Kentucky and Tennessee, 77–80; 1795–1815, 208–217; 1815–1830, 267–272, 607n57; on cotton frontier, 306; on enduring frontiers, 338, 373; in New Counties, 439; on last frontiers of Old Northwest, 482–485; and politics in Louisiana, 541. See also Sabbath schools; bible societies; churches, denominations, and ministers by name Republican Party, 554 Reynolds, John, 255, 468 rice, 170, 183, 198, 275, 275, 500 Rice, John, 57 Richards, Evan Goodwin, 434 Richland Creek, Ky., 27 Richmond, Va., 572 Rising Sun, Ind., 159 roads, 20, 27; in Kentucky and Tennessee, 62, 95, 98; in Louisiana, 139; in Old Northwest, 239, 254; on cotton frontier, 284, 298; in Michigan, 320, 328, 329, 331, 343; in Florida., 358, 363, 384; in Arkansas, 396; in New Counties, 441–442, 445; in last frontiers of Old Northwest, 457 Robertson, Charles, 62 Robertson Thomas Bolling, 196, 197, 205, 219, 388, 504 Rocheport, Mo., 246 Rock County, Wisc., 470, 477 Rock Island, Ill., 571 Rock River, 463, 466–469 Rockville, Ind., 240 Rodney, Thomas, 132, 133–134, 593n9 Roman Catholic Church, 90; in Louisiana, 146, 193, 215–216; in Old Northwest, 204, 209; in last frontier of Old Northwest, 484–485 Ross, John, 83 Ross County, Ohio, 165 Rutledge family, 509 Sabbath schools, 268–269 Sacramento, Calif., 526 Sac tribe, 466–470 Saginaw, Mich., 343, 348

Index Saginaw County, Mich., 342 Saginaw, Treaty of, 326 St. Augustine, Fla., 373, 374, 617n52; Spanish heritage in, 168, 352, 372; as center of East Florida, 352, 353–354, 355, 357, 372, 376, 517–518; ordinances of, 355, 359; slow development of, 361; free blacks in, 367–368; education in, 373–374 St. Clair, Arthur, 37, 164; as Northwest Territory governor, ch. 3 passim (especially 88–101), 534–537; Indian defeat of, 107, 535; political style, 534–537 St. Clair County, Ala., 284 St. Clair County, Ill., 97 St. Clair County, Mich., 329 St. Croix River Valley, 478 St. Francis County, Ark., 400 St. Helena Parish, La., 147–148, 196 St. Johns County, Fla., 355 St. Johns River, 352 St. Joseph, Fla., 373, 376, 377, 486, 518; decline of, 379–380 St. Joseph, Mich., 331, 334 St. Joseph, Bay of, 379 St. Joseph River, 331 St. Lawrence River, 8, 145 St. Louis, Mo.: 140, 473, 475, 476, 478, 479, 490; violence in, 126; as commercial center, 154, 182, 247; as urban center, 190, 502, 503–504, 526; society of, 193 St. Lucie County, Fla., 385, 619n74 St. Marks, Fla., 377–378, 518 St. Marks River, 378 St. Mary Parish, La., 183–184 St. Stephens, Ala., 282 Saline Creek, Ill., 195 salt production, 42, 158, 165, 185, 195, 234, 244, 503 Salt River, 43, 546 Salter, William, 483, 484 salvage industry, 364, 518 Sanders, John, 55 San Francisco, Calif., 526 Sangamon County, Ill., 248, 256, 263–264 Sangamon River 224; settlement of Sangamo county, 248, 509–510 Saratoga, N.Y., 362 Sargent, Winthrop: as Northwest Territory secretary, 88, 92, 97; as

Mississippi Territory governor, 129, 131–135, 197 Sargent’s Code (1803), 132–133 San Lorenzo, Treaty of, 562 Sauk County, Wisc., 459 Sauk Prairie, Wisc., 459 Saukenuk, Ill., 468 Sault Ste. Marie, Mich., 328 sawmills, 165, 296, 299, 348–349, 361, 478–479, 481, 499, 522 Scandinavian immigrants, 459 schools. See education Schoolcraft, Henry Rowe, 389 Scioto River, 93, 195 Scioto River Valley, 161, 164, 165, 536, 537 Scotch-Irish immigrants, 214 Scott, Abraham, 217 Scott, Andrew, 391 Scott County, Ark., 400 Scott County, Ky., 79 Second Bank of the United States, 550 sectionalism: in Florida, 352, 359–361, 372, 385–386; in Arkansas, 407–408 Selma, Ala., 514 Seminole tribe, 9, 116, 353, 376, 382–384, 558; Seminole War, 382–384 settlement. See immigration and settlement Seven Ranges, Ohio, 590n5 Sevier, Ambrose, 394 Sevier, John, 35, 62, 549 Shackleford, John, 213 Shale Creek Baptist Church, 269 Shane, John D., 39 Shaw, Archibald, 251–254 Shawnee tribe, 9, 82, 246, 558, 560 Shawneetown, Ill.: 126, 258; as commercial center, 195, 502–504 Shawneetown Bank, 504 Shelby, Isaac, 531 Sheldon, John P., 320 Shenandoah Valley, Va., 3 Shreve, Henry, 407–408 Sibley, John 183 Simmons Grocery, 438 Sioux tribe, 466, 469 Slate Creek, Ky., 498 slavery: role in Anglo-American expansion, 10, 156; slave trade, 42, 178–179; in Kentucky and Tennessee, 56–57, 72; revolt in Saint Domingue, 117; fear of slave insurrection, 126–127, 200; in Natchez District, 127, 133; slave



671

672



Index slavery (continued) control policies, 133, 199–200; and the law, 133–134; in Louisiana, 144, 148; and cotton cultivation, 149–150, 173–174; movement of slaves to the West, 189–190, 230; on plantations, 10, 56, 143, 148,156, 180, 200, 303–306, 368; revolt of 1811, 201; in Missouri, 247–248; in Old Northwest., 258–260; on cotton frontier, 113, 122, 275, 280–281, 303–306; in Florida, 366–367; in New Counties, 435, 444; legacy of, 579; revolt at Point Cupee, Miss., 600n16 Sleight, Morris, 462 Smith, George N., 629n41 Smith, Hosea, 157–158 Smith, Joseph, 486 Smith, Oliver H., 267 societies: varieties of, 4–6; family, significance of 39; in Kentucky and Tennessee, 75–80; 1795–1815, ch. 6 passim; in Old Northwest, 85, 95–96, 109–112, 574; northern and southern, compared, 119; French, 204–206; on cotton frontier, 308–309; on enduring frontiers, 337, 365–366, 372–373, 407–408, 414–417; mining, 347–348; in New Counties, 439–440, 442, 450–453, 624n24, 625n46; lumbering, 480–481 society: defined 5; on frontier: 5–6 Society of the Cincinnati, 81 Solon, Iowa, 483, 524 South: chs. 8, 10, and 12 passim; Deep, 113, 150; upper, 196, 274, 282, 308, 361, 362, 364 South Carolina, 6, 274; immigrants to trans-Appalachian frontier from, 539 South Elkhorn Baptist Church, 213 Southern Life Insurance and Trust Company, 376 Southwest Territory, 30, 44, 67, 89 Spanish colonial empire, 139, 351–353 Spanish heritage, 8, 51; in Louisiana, 138; in Florida, 8, 168, 351–353, 356, 372 Spencer, Ind., 251 Spigeuer, Joel, 429 Sprague, Emma, 462 Springer, Elihu, 485, 607n57, 629n39 Springfield, Ill., 254, 256–257, 509 Stafford, James B., 449 stage lines, 407, 430, 432 Starin, Frederick, 465

state government: growth of, 228; in Tennessee, 297–298; and governance of New Counties, 427. See also county government; territorial government stations, 5, 31–32, 44, 529. See also stations by name steam navigation: significance of, 119–120, 227, 234, 568, 571; first appearance on trans-Appalachian frontier, 250–254; in South, 277; on enduring frontiers, 321–322, 349–350, 361, 404–405; in New Counties, 445–446. See also Great Lakes; rivers by name Steel, Lawrence Ferdinand, 447–448, 552, 625n41 Sterret, James, 192–193, 197 Steubenville, Ohio, 498, 593n6 Steward, James, 64 Steward, John, 64 Strode’s Station, 40 subsistence farming, 38; in Old Northwest, 102–103, 155, 157–159, 206, 237–241, 601n23, 604n10; in Mississippi, 169; on cotton frontier, 284; on enduring frontiers, 401–402; in New Counties, 446–448, 625n41; on last frontier of Old Northwest, 460–462, 470–471 Sue (slave), 133–134 sugarcane, 178 Sugar Creek, Ill., 248, 272 Sunflower River, 632n31 Sunflower County, Miss., 442 Sun Prairie, Wisc., 464 Suwannee River, 357, 370 Swiss immigrants, 459, 626n6 Switzerland County, Ind., 254 Symmes, John Cleves, 590n9 Symmes Purchase, 590n5 Tait, Charles, 281–282, 299, 308 Tait, James, 281–282 Taitt, William, 57 Talladega, Ala., 434, 435 Tallahassee, Fla.: 374, 375, 377–378, 518; as Florida capital, 357–358 Tallahassee Railroad Company, 377–378 Tallahassee-St. Marks railroad, 377, 378, 380 Tallapoosa River, 289 Tallmadge, James, 231 tanning (animal skins), 165, 499

Index taxes and taxation: in Old Northwest, 127–131, 592n6; on enduring frontiers, 342–343, 371–372; of free blacks, 368–369 technology, 20, 501, 568. See also steam navigation; cotton, cotton gin Tecumseh, 116, 151, 225, 544, 546, 560 TenBrook, Andrew, 239–241, 507 TenBrook, Jacob, 240, 249 TenBrook, John, 240, 249 Tennessee, 116; early settlement of, 7, chs. 1 and 2 passim, 116, 290–292; compared to later frontiers, 108, 114, 125, 138, 156, 173, 184, 293, 335, 395, 414; urban growth in, 195; cotton frontier in, 278, 280, 290–292, 297–298; immigrants to later frontiers from, 174, 181, 233, 285, 286, 487, 539, 546; politics in, 535, 544, 549. See also North Carolina; Watauga Association; state government; towns, counties, and geographical designations by name Tennessee River, 224, 502; settlement along, 23, 28, 30, 174, 275, 289, 419; movement of peoples along, 28, 174; trade along, 174, 502; urban growth near, 190; steam navigation along, 250 Tensas Basin, La., 181 Terre Haute, Ind., 251 territorial government: in Northwest Territory, 86–87, 89, 98–99, 109–111; expansion of, 121, 125, 563; in Louisiana, 137–145; in Alabama, 292–293; in enduring frontiers, 314–315, 319, 354–355, 391–394, 395–396, 620n19; territorial governor: powers of, 87; and frontier politics, 533–544, 633n4. See also territorial government; governors by name Territorial Road, 334, 471 territorial secretary, 87. See also territorial government; secretaries by name Territory Northwest of the Ohio. See Northwest Territory Territory Southwest of the Ohio, 74, 564 Terry, Enos, 40 Test, Charles H., 267 Test, John, 502–503 Tewly, James, 264 Texas, 13, 487, 489, 580

Thames, Battle of the, 151, 225, 560 Tidewater, Va., 198, 571–572 Tilden, Daniel, 132 Tippah, Miss., 450 Tippecanoe, battle of, 151, 225, 544, 546, 560 Tippecanoe County, Ind., 509 Tipton, Iowa, 483–484, 524–525 Tipton, Henry, 544, 546–548 Tishomingo, Miss., 450 tobacco: 17; significance of, 51–52, 170–171 Tombigbee River, 229, 278, 286–287; settlements along, 122, 126, 134–135, 149, 168, 218, 220, 221, 278, 279, 286; steam navigation along, 250, 289, 512 Toulmin, Harry 134–135; The Magistrate’s Assistant, 135 towns and cities: function of, 496–497; composition of, 499; city planners, 500; defined, 521; importance of, 525; violence in, 576. See also township governments; urban growth; towns and cities by name township governments, 97–98, 329–330, 510, 514 trade. See commerce transients, 207–208; in Illinois, 242; in South, 284–288; in Florida, 365 transportation: importance of river system to, 162–164; in Old Northwest, 250–255; in South, 276–277; in enduring frontiers, 321–322, 328, 343, 396, 402–405, 409, 621–622n45; in New Counties, 441–442, 445–446; in last frontier of Old Northwest, 460, 476, 627n7; and urban growth, 499. Transylvania Colony, 26, 34 Transylvania Company, 26, 28, 34, 46, 69, 58 Transylvania Seminary, 81 treasury warrants, 46 Treaty of 1819, 367 Treece, George, 451 Trumbull County, Ohio, 234 Turkey River, 479 Turner, Asa, 483 Turnpike Road, 448 Tuscaloosa, Ala., 286, 293 Tuscola, Mich., 345 Tuscola County, Mich., 340, 575, 577 Union Bank of Florida, 375 Union Bank of Tallahassee, 378



673

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Index Union County, Ark., 415 Upper Louisiana, 141 Upper Peninsula, Mich., 347 urban growth 190–195, 576–577; on enduring frontiers, 465–466, 474–476, 489, ch. 14 passim, 630n3. See also towns and cities by name Ursuline Convent, 216 vagrants, 97, 366, 416 Vandalia, Ill., 255 Varnum, James M., 88 Vermilion County, Ill., 264 Vermont, 233, 234, 242 Versailles, Mo., 255–256 Vick, Newit, 516 Vicksburg, Miss., 390, 438–439, 445; as urban center, 516–517, 632n31 vigilantism, 436–437, 576 Vincennes, Ind., 90, 97, 98, 204, 497, 509, 546 Virginia, 3, 6, 34, 35, 45, 105, 113, 133, 189, 274, 280, 492; western settlements of, 23, 24, 27, 43, 56, 60–61 45, 531, 561; immigrants to trans-Appalachian frontier from, 9, 29, 31, 47–48, 55, 68, 71, 83, 165, 237, 245, 260, 362, 497, 536, 537, 539, 567. See also Kentucky; Kentucky County; cities by name Virginia Military Tract, 103, 590n5 Wabash River, 224, 251, 547; French settlements along, 97, 100, 108; settlements along,113, 158, 237, 503, 508, 546, 596n5; trade along, 254, 256, 257 wagon roads, 465–466 Walker, Felix, 27 Walker, John Williams, 299 Walnut Hills, Miss. See Vicksburg Wapello County, Iowa, 472–473, 523, 632n31 War of 1812, 117, 225, 544–545; and Indian relations, 124, 151, 312; effect on cotton farming, 184–185; in Michigan, 317–318 Warren County, Miss., 301, 302, 305–306, 438, 441 Warrenton, Miss., 516 Washburn, Cephas, 390 Washington, George, 67, 107, 544, 549, 588 Washington, D.C., 118

Washington County, La., 632n31 Washington County, Miss., 134, 444 Washington County, Ohio, 93 Washington County, Tenn., 28, 62–63, 561 Watauga Association, 32, 57–58 Watauga River, 28 Waukesha County, Wisc., 464 Wayne, General Anthony, 107, 115, 116, 153, 495, 535, 536 Wayne County, Miss., 432 Waynesville, Ohio, 495 Weakley County, Tenn., 297 Wells, Bezaleel, 498 West. See frontier and geographic places by name. Western District, Tenn., 290–292 Western Reserve. See Connecticut Western Reserve Wetumpka, Ala., 284, 437–438 wheat, 154; in Kentucky and Tennessee, 196; in Old Northwest, 207, 238; in enduring frontiers, 314, 335, 339, 340; in New Counties, 451; in last frontier of Old Northwest, 464, 471, 481; trade of, 521 Wheeling, Va., 105 Whig Party, 342, 552, 554, 634n22 White, Joseph M., 372 White Oak Springs, Ind., 202 White River, Ark., 254, 388–390 White River Valley, Ind., 202 Whitewater River, 113, 224 Wiggins, Daniel H., 369, 374, 378–379, 383 Wilderness Road, 26, 29, 496 Wiley, Allen, 211, 271 Williams, Amos, 264–265 Williams, James, 146 Wilson, William, 603n7:7 Wimico, Lake, 379 Winters, Elisha, 55 Winnebago tribe, 468, 554 Wisconsin: as last frontier of Old Northwest, 464, 470–472, 477–478, 481–482; politics in, 553–554. See also lumbering; mining; towns, counties, and geographical designations by name Wisconsin River, 465, 466, 477, 478, 489 women: role in Anglo-American expansion, 10–11, 104, 232, 262–263, 301–302, 414; and divorce, 75, 302;

Index education of, 77; effect of immigration on, 302–303 Woodruff, William, 394 Woods, Robert, 279, 608n10 Worley, Mr. (schoolteacher), 76 Worthington, Thomas, 165, 498 Worthington, William G. D., 355 Wyandot tribe, 470 Wyley family, 399

Yalobush, Miss., 450 Yazoo City, Miss., 445 Yazoo County, Miss., 632n31 Yazoo River, 113, 224, 445 Yokena Plantation, 438 Young, Bringham, 486 Ypsilanti, Mich., 334 Zanesville, Ohio, 195



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MALCOLM J. ROHRBOUGH

Is Professor of History at the University of Iowa and coeditor (with Walter Nugent) of Indiana University Press’s series A History of the Trans-Appalachian Frontier.