The Creeks and Cherokees, Choctaws, and Chickasaws of the Gulf region were more advanced towards civilization than the Indians of the northwest. While the latter lived chiefly by hunting and trapping, the southwestern Indians had developed a considerable agriculture and a sedentary life. For that very reason, however, they were the more obnoxious to the pioneers who pressed upon their territory from all sides; and, as we shall see, strenuous efforts were made to remove them beyond the Mississippi.

Throughout the decade the problem of the future of the Indians east of this river was a pressing one, and the secretaries of war, to whose department the management of the tribes belonged, made many plans and recommendations for their civilization, improvement, and assimilation. But the advance of the frontier broke down the efforts to preserve and incorporate these primitive people in the dominant American society. [Footnote: Am. State Paps., Indian, II., 275, 542, et passim; J. Q. Adams, Memoirs, VII., 89, 90, 92; Richardson, Messages and Papers, II., 234, et seq.]

Across the Mississippi, settlement of the whites had, in the course of this decade, pushed up the Missouri well towards the western boundary of the state, and, as the map of the settlement shows, had made advances towards the interior in parts of Arkansas as well. But these were only narrow wedges of civilization thrust into the Indian country, the field of operations of the fur-traders. Successors to the French traders who had followed the rivers and lakes of Canada far towards the interior, the Hudson's Bay Company, and the Northwest Company under British charters had carried their operations from the Great Lakes to the Pacific long before Americans entered the west. As early as 1793, Alexander Mackenzie reached the Pacific from the Great Lakes by way of Canada. [Footnote: Mackenzie, Travels.] The year before, an English ship under Vancouver explored the northwestern coast in the hope of finding a passage by sea to the north and east. He missed the mouth of the Columbia, which in the following month was entered by an American, Captain Gray, who ascended the river twenty miles. The expedition of Lewis and Clark, 1804-1806, made the first crossing of the continent from territory of the United States, and strengthened the claims of that country to the region of the Columbia. [Footnote: Cf. Charming, Jeffersonian System (Am. Nation, XII.), chap vii.]

John Jacob Astor's attempt to plant a trading-post at Astoria [Footnote: Irving, Astoria.] had been defeated by the treachery of his men, who, at the opening of the War of 1812, turned the post over to the British Northwest fur-traders. The two great branches of the Columbia, the one reaching up into Canada, and the other pushing far into the Rocky Mountains, on the American side, constituted lines of advance for the rival forces of England and the United States in the struggle for the Oregon country. The British traders rapidly made themselves masters of the region. [Footnote: Coues (editor), Greater Northwest.] By 1825 the Hudson's Bay Company monopolized the English fur-trade and was established at Fort George (as Astoria was rechristened), Fort Walla-Walla, and Fort Vancouver, near the mouth of the Willamette. Here, for twenty-two years, its agent, Dr. John McLoughlin, one of the many Scotchmen who have built up England's dominion in the new countries of the globe, ruled like a benevolent monarch over the realms of the British traders. [Footnote: Schafer, Pacific Northwest, chap. viii.] From these Oregon posts as centers they passed as far south as the region of Great Salt Lake, in what was then Mexican territory.

While the British traders occupied the northwest coast the Spaniards held California. Although they established the settlement of San Francisco in the year of the declaration of American independence, settlement grew but slowly. The presidios, the missions, with their Indian neophytes, and the cattle ranches feebly occupied this imperial domain. Yankee trading-ships gathered hides and tallow at San Diego, Monterey, and San Francisco; Yankee whalers, seal- hunters, and fur-traders sought the northwest coast and passed on to China to bring back to Boston and Salem the products of the far east. [Footnote: R. H. Dana, Two Years before the Mast.] But Spain's possession was not secure. The genius for expansion which had already brought the Russians to Alaska drew them down the coast even to California, and in 1812 they established Fort Ross at Bodega Bay, a few miles below the mouth of Russian River, north of San Francisco. This settlement, as well as the lesser one in the Farallone Islands, endured for nearly a generation, a menace to Spain's ascendancy in California in the chaotic period when her colonies were in revolt. [Footnote: H. H. Bancroft, Hist. of California, II., 628; Hittel, Hist. of California.]

In the mean time, from St. Louis as a center, American fur-traders, the advance-guard of settlement, were penetrating into the heart of the vast wilderness between the Mississippi and the Pacific coast. [Footnote: Chittenden, Am. Fur Trade of the Far West] This was a more absolute Indian domain than was the region between the Alleghenies and the Mississippi at the end of the seventeenth century—an empire of mountains and prairies, where the men of the Stone Age watched with alarm the first crawling waves of that tide of civilization that was to sweep them away. The savage population of the far west has already been described in an earlier volume of this series.[Footnote: Farrand, Basis of Am. Hist. (Am. Nation, II.), chaps, viii., ix., xii.; see also chap. iv. On the location of the Indians, see map, p. 309; Chittenden, Am. Fur Trade, II., pt. v., chaps, viii., ix., x.; Bureau of Ethnology, Seventh Annual Report.]

With the development of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, the most flourishing period of the St. Louis trade in the far west began. The founder of this company was William H. Ashley, a Virginian. Between the autumn of 1823 and the spring of the next year, one of his agents erected a post at the mouth of the Bighorn, and sent out his trappers through the Green River valley, possibly even to Great Salt Lake. A detachment of this party found the gateway of the Rocky Mountains, through the famous South Pass by way of the Sweetwater branch of the north fork of the Platte. This pass commanded the routes to the great interior basin and to the Pacific Ocean. What Cumberland Gap was in the advance of settlement across the Alleghenies, South Pass was in the movement across the Rocky Mountains; through it passed the later Oregon and California trails to the Pacific coast.

On the lower Missouri and at various places in the interior,[Footnote: See map, p. 114; Chittenden, Am. Fur Trade, I., 44-51 (describes posts, etc.).] stockaded trading-posts were erected by the Rocky Mountain Fur Company and its rival, the American Fur Company. In these posts the old fur-trade life of the past went on, with French half-breed packmen and boatmen, commanded by the bourgeois. But in some of the best trading-grounds, the savages declined to permit the erection of posts, and so, under Ashley's leadership, bands of mounted American trappers, chiefly Kentuckians, Tennesseeans, and Missourians, were sent out to hunt and trade in the rich beaver valleys of the mountains. The Rocky Mountain trappers were the successors to the Allegheny frontiersmen, carrying on in this new region, where nature wrought on a vaster plan, the old trapping life which their ancestors had carried on through Cumberland Gap in the "dark and bloody ground" of Kentucky.

Yearly, in June and July, a rendezvous was held in the mountains, to which the brigades of trappers returned with the products of their hunt, to receive the supplies for the coming year. Here, also, came Indian tribes to trade, and bands of free trappers, lone wanderers in the mountains, to sell their furs and secure supplies. [Footnote: Irving, Bonneville, chap. i.] The rendezvous was usually some verdure-clad valley or park set in the midst of snow-capped mountains, a paradise of game. Such places were Jackson's Hole, at the foot of the lofty Tetons, Pierre's Hole, not far away, and Ogden's Hole, near the present site of Ogden, in Utah. Great Salt Lake was probably first visited by Bridger in 1824, and the next year a party of Hudson Bay trappers were expelled by Americans who took possession of their furs. In 1826, Ashley carried a six-pounder cannon on wheels to Utah Lake for the defense of his post.

A new advance of the American fur-trader was made when Jedediah Smith succeeded Ashley as the leader in Rocky Mountain trade and exploration. In 1826 he left the Salt Lake rendezvous with a party of trappers to learn the secrets of the lands between the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Ocean. Proceeding to the southwest along the Virgin River, Smith descended it to the Colorado, and crossed the desert to San Diego, California. Here, by the intercession of a Yankee captain then in that port, he obtained supplies from the Spaniards, and turned to the northwest, traveling parallel to the coast for some three hundred miles to wintering grounds on the headwaters of the San Joaquin and the Merced. Leaving most of his party behind, he crossed the mountains, by a route south of the Humboldt, and returned to Great Salt Lake.

Almost immediately he set out again for California by the previous route, and in 1827 reached the San Jose mission. Here he was arrested by the Spanish authorities and sent under guard to Monterey, where another Yankee skipper secured his release. Wintering once more in California, this time on the American Fork, he reached the coast in the spring of 1828, and followed the Umpquah River towards the Oregon country. While he was absent, his camp was attacked by the Indians and fifteen of his men killed. Absolutely alone, Smith worked his way through the forest to Fort Vancouver, where he enjoyed the hospitality of Dr. McLoughlin through the winter. In the following spring he ascended the Columbia to the Hudson Bay posts among the Flatheads, and made his way in the summer of 1829 to the rendezvous of his company at the Tetons. In three years this daring trader, braving the horrors of the desert and passing unscathed from Indian attacks which carried off most of his companions, opened to knowledge much of the vast country between Great Salt Lake and the Pacific. [Footnote: H. H. Bancroft, California, III., 152-160, citing the sources.] In 1831, while on the Santa Fe trail, Smith and his companions lost their way. Perishing with thirst, he finally reached the Cimaron, where, as he was digging for water in its sandy bed, he was shot by an Indian.

Thus the active men of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, in the decade between 1820 and 1830, revealed the sources of the Platte, the Green, the Yellowstone, and the Snake rivers, and the characteristics of the Great Salt Lake region; they pioneered the way to South Pass, descended Green River by boat, carried cannon into the interior basin; showed the practicability of a wagon route through the Rockies, reached California from Salt Lake, crossed the Sierras and the deserts of Utah and Nevada, and became intimately acquainted with the activity of the British traders of the northwest coast. [Footnote: Chittenden, Am. Fur Trade, I., 306.]

Already an interest in Oregon and the Rocky Mountain region was arising on the eastern seaboard. In 1832, Captain Bonneville, an officer in the United States army, on leave of absence, passed with a wagon-train into the Rocky Mountains, where for nearly three years he trapped and traded and explored. [Footnote: Irving, Bonneville.] Walker, one of his men, in 1833, reached California by the Humboldt River (a route afterwards followed by the emigrants to California), and made known much new country. A New England enthusiast, Hall Kelley, had for some years been lecturing on the riches of the Oregon country and the need of planting an agricultural colony there. It was natural that Boston should be interested in the Oregon country, which was visited by so many vessels from that port. In 1820, New England missionaries settled in the Hawaiian Islands, closely connected by trade with the coast. In 1832, Nathaniel Wyeth, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, led a party of New-Englanders west, with the plan of establishing a trading and fishing post on the waters of the Columbia. [Footnote: Chittenden, Am. Fur Trade, I., 435; Wyeth's "Journals" are published by the Oregon Hist. Soc.; cf. Irving, Bonneville, chap. vi.]

With Wyeth, on a second expedition in 1834, went the Reverend Jason Lee and four Methodist missionaries. Two years later came Dr. Marcus Whitman and another company of missionaries with their wives; they brought a wagon through South Pass and over the mountains to the Snake River, and began an agricultural colony. Thus the old story of the sequence of fur-trader, missionary, and settler was repeated. The possession of Oregon by the British fur-trader was challenged by the American farmer.

Contemporaneously with the development of the fur-trade in the Rocky Mountains, a trade was opened between St. Louis and the old Spanish settlements at Santa Fe. Although even in the days of Washington adventurous frontiersmen like George Rogers Clark had set their eyes on Santa Fe and the silver-mines of the southwest, it was not until the Mexican revolution (1821), when Spain's control was weakened throughout her whole domain, that systematic trade was possible. In 1822, Becknell, of Missouri, took a wagon-train to Santa Fe, to trade for horses and mules and to trap en route. Year after year thereafter, caravans of Missouri traders found their way across the desert, by the Santa Fe trail, with cottons and other dry-goods furnished from St. Louis, and brought back horses, mules, furs, and silver. The trade averaged about one hundred and thirty thousand dollars a year, and was an important source of supply of specie for the west; and it stimulated the interest of St. Louis in the Mexican provinces. The mode of handling the wagon—trains that passed between Missouri and Santa Fe furnished the model for the caravans that later were to cross the plains in the rush to the gold-fields of California.[Footnote: Gregg, Commerce of the Prairies; Chittenden, Am. Fur Trade, II., chap. xxix.] By 1833 the important western routes were clearly made known.[Footnote: Semple, Am. Hist. and its Geographic Conditions, chap, x.] The Oregon trail, the Santa Fe trail, the Spanish trail, and the Gila route [Footnote: Personal Narrative of James O. Pattie; H. H. Bancroft, Hist. of California, III., 162.] had been followed by frontiersmen into the promised land of the Pacific coast and the southwest. In the course of ten years, not only had the principal secrets of the topography of the Rocky Mountains, the Great Basin, the passes across the Sierra Nevadas been revealed, but also the characteristics of the Spanish-American settlements of California and the Rio Grande region. Already pioneers sought Texas, and American colonization was preparing for another and greater conquest of the wilderness.

The interest of the United States government in the far west in this period was shown in exploration and diplomacy. Calhoun projected an extension of the forts of the United States well up the Missouri into the Indian country, partly as protection to the traders and partly as a defense against English aggressions. Two Yellowstone expeditions [Footnote: Chittenden, Am. Fur Trade, II., 562; Long's Expedition (Early Western Travels, XIV.-XVII.).] were designed to promote these ends. The first of these, 1819-1820, was a joint military and scientific undertaking; but the military expedition, attempting to ascend the Missouri in steamboats, got no farther than Council Bluffs. Mismanagement, extravagance, and scandal attended the undertaking, and the enterprise was made an occasion for a political onslaught on Calhoun's management of the war department.

The scientific expedition, under Major Long, of the United States Engineering Corps, ascended the Missouri in the Western Engineer, the first steamboat which navigated those waters above St. Louis—a stern-wheeler, with serpent-mouthed figure-head, through which the steam escaped, bringing terror to the savages along the banks. The expedition advanced far up the South Platte, discovered Long's Peak, and camped near the site of Denver. Thence the party passed to La Junta, Colorado, whence it broke into two divisions, one of which descended the Arkansas; the other reached the Canadian River (which it mistook for the Red) and descended to its junction with the Arkansas. The effort to push the military power of the government to the mouth of the Yellowstone failed, and the net result, on the military side, was a temporary post near the present site of Omaha.

The most important effect of the expedition was to give currency to Long's description of the country through which he passed as the "Great American Desert," unfit for cultivation and uninhabitable by agricultural settlers. The whole of the region between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains seemed to him adapted as a range for buffalo, "calculated to serve as a barrier to prevent too great an extension of our population westward," and to secure us against the incursions of enemies in that quarter. [Footnote: Long's Expedition (Early Western Travels, XVII.), 147, 148.] A second expedition, in 1825, under General Atkinson and Major O'Fallon, reached the mouth of the Yellowstone, having made treaties with various Indian tribes on the way.

In the mean time, Congress and the president were busy with the question of Oregon. By the convention of 1818, with Great Britain, the northern boundary of the United States was carried from the Lake of the Woods to the Rocky Mountains, along the forty-ninth parallel. Beyond the mountains, the Oregon country was left open, for a period of ten years, to joint occupation of both powers, without prejudice to the claims of either. Having thus postponed the Oregon question, the secretary of state, John Quincy Adams, turned to his Spanish relations. Obliged by Monroe to relinquish our claim to Texas in the treaty of 1819, by which we obtained Florida, he insisted on so drawing our boundary-line in the southwest as to acquire Spain's title to the Pacific north of the forty-second parallel, and to the lands that lay north and east of the irregular line from the intersection of this parallel with the Rocky Mountains to the Sabine. Adams was proud of securing this line to the Pacific Ocean, for it was the first recognition by an outside power of our rights in the Oregon country.[Footnote: Treaties and Conventions (ed. of 1889), 416, 1017; Babcock, Am. Nationality (Am. Nation, XIII.), chap, xvi.; J. Q. Adams, Memoirs, IV., 275.]

Although Russia put forward large and exclusive claims north of the fifty-first parallel, which we challenged, the contest for Oregon lay between England and the United States. At the close of 1820, Floyd, of Virginia, moved in the House of Representatives to inquire into the feasibility of the occupation of the Columbia River; and early the next year [Footnote: Annals of Cong., 16 Cong., 2 Sess., 945; J. Q. Adams, Memoirs, V., 238, 243-260.] a committee report was brought in, discussing the American rights. Floyd's bill provided for the military occupation of the Columbia River, donation of lands to actual settlers, and control of the Indians. No vote was reached, however, and it was not until the close of 1822 that the matter secured the attention of Congress.

Whatever may have been his motives, Floyd stated with vividness the significance of western advance in relation to the Pacific coast. He showed that, while in 1755, nearly a hundred and fifty years after the foundation of Jamestown, the population of Virginia had spread but three hundred miles into the interior of the country, during the last forty-three years population had spread westward more than a thousand miles. He recalled the days when more than a month was required to furnish Kentucky with eastern goods, by way of Pittsburgh, and when it required a voyage of over a month to pass from Louisville to New Orleans and nearly three months for the upward voyage. This had now been shortened by steamboat to seven days down and sixteen days up. From these considerations and the time from St. Louis to the mouth of the Columbia by steamboat and wagon, he argued that Oregon was no more distant from St. Louis in 1822 than St. Louis was twenty years before from Philadelphia. The fur-trade, the whale and seal fisheries, the trade with China, and the opportunity for agricultural occupation afforded by Oregon were all set forth.[Footnote: Annals of Cong., 17 Cong., 2 Sess., 397.]

Against the proposal, his opponents argued inexpediency rather than our treaties with Great Britain. Tracy, of New York, doubted the value of the Oregon country, and, influenced perhaps by Long's report, declared that "nature has fixed limits for our nation; she has kindly introduced as our Western barrier, mountains almost inaccessible, whose base she has skirted with irreclaimable deserts of sand."[Footnote: Ibid., 590.] In a later debate, Smyth, of Virginia, amplified this idea by a proposal to limit the boundaries of the United States, so that it should include but one or two tiers of states beyond the Mississippi. He would remove the Indians beyond this limit, and, if American settlements should cross it, they might be in alliance with, or under the protection of, the United States, but outside of its bounds. [Footnote: Register of Debates, 18 Cong., 2 Sess., I., 37.]

Baylies, of Massachusetts, declared that there were living witnesses "who have seen a population of scarcely six hundred thousand swelled into ten millions; a population which, in their youth, extended scarcely an hundred miles from the ocean, spreading beyond the mountains of the West, and sweeping down those mighty waters which open into regions of such matchless fertility and beauty." "Some now within these walls may, before they die, witness scenes more wonderful than these; and in aftertimes may cherish delightful recollections of this day, when America, almost shrinking from the 'shadows of coming events,' first placed her feet upon untrodden ground, scarcely daring to anticipate the grandeur which awaited her." Tucker, of Virginia, agreed that settlement "marches on, with the increasing rapidity of a fire, and nothing will stop it until it reaches the shores of the Pacific," which he estimated would be by 1872. But he was loath to see it accelerated, believing that the people on the east and the west side of the Rocky Mountains would have a permanent separation of interests. [Footnote: Annals of Cong., 17 Cong., 2 Sess., 422.] Nor were even western men sanguine that the nation could retain the Pacific coast as an integral part of its vast empire. Senator Benton, of Missouri, was the congressional champion of the far west. Born in interior North Carolina, he had followed the frontier to Tennessee, and then, after killing his man in a duel and exchanging pistol-shots in a free fight with Jackson, he removed to the new frontier at St. Louis. Pedantic and ponderous, deeply read in curious historical lore, in many ways he was not characteristic of the far west, but in the coarse vigor with which he bore down opposition by abuse, and in the far horizon line of the policies he advocated, he thoroughly represented its traits.

Familiar as he was with frontier needs and aspirations, he urged the United States to block England's control of the northwest, and to assert title to the Oregon territory, with the idea of ultimately founding a new and independent American nation there. It is true that he admitted that along the ridge of the Rocky Mountains "the western limit of this republic should be drawn, and the statue of the fabled god Terminus should be raised upon its highest peak, never to be thrown down." [Footnote: Register of Debates, I., 712.]

Nevertheless, in his utterances the ideal of expansion was not to be mistaken. He spoke bravely in favor of the protection and extension of the fur-trade, [Footnote: Annals of Cong., 17 Cong., 1 Sess., I., 416; cf. ibid., 18 Cong., I Sess., I., 456.] pointing out that inasmuch as England occupied Oregon, she would, under the law of nations, have the right of possession until the question of sovereignty were decided. He warned his countrymen, in 1823, that Great Britain would monopolize the Pacific Ocean, and by obtaining control of the Rocky Mountain fur-trade would be able to launch the Indians of the north and west against the frontiers of Missouri and Arkansas, Illinois and Michigan, upon the first renewal of hostilities between the United States of America and the king of Great Britain. [Footnote: Ibid., 17 Cong., 2 Sess., 246-251.]

Benton believed that, within a century, a population greater than that of the United States of 1820 would exist on the west side of the Rocky Mountains; and he saw in the occupation of the northwest coast the means of promoting a trade between the valley of the Mississippi, the Pacific Ocean, and Asia. Upon the people of eastern Asia, he thought, the establishment of a civilized power on the opposite coast of America would produce great benefits. "Science, liberal principles in government, and the true religion, might cast their lights across the intervening sea. The valley of the Columbia might become the granary of China and Japan, and an outlet to their imprisoned and exuberant population.... Russia and the legitimates menace Turkey, Persia, China, and Japan; they menace them for their riches and dominions; the same Powers menace the two Americas for the popular forms of their Governments. To my mind the proposition is clear, that Eastern Asia and the two Americas, as they have become neighbors, should become friends." [Footnote: Register of Debates, I., 712.]

With true western passion he denounced the relinquishment of Texas by the treaty of 1819. "The magnificent valley of the Mississippi is ours," he proclaimed, "with all its fountains, springs, and floods and woe to the statesman who shall undertake to surrender one drop of its water, one inch of its soil, to any foreign power." He was ready for a war with Spain, believing that it would give the United States the Floridas and Cuba, "the geographical appurtenance of the valley of the Mississippi"; that it would free the New from the Old World; and that it would create a cordon of republics across the two continents of North and South America. He pointed to the west as the route to the east—the long-sought way to India; and, in imagination, he outlined the states to be laid off "from the center of the valley of the Mississippi to the foot of the shining mountains." "It is time," he wrote, "that Western men had some share in the destinies of this republic." [Footnote: Meigs, Benton, 98, 99, cf. 91.]



CHAPTER IX

THE CRISIS OF 1819 AND ITS RESULTS (1819-1820)

In 1820 the United States had a population of about nine and one- half millions; in 1830, nearly thirteen millions. It was spread out from east to west like a page in the history of society. On the Atlantic seaboard were the centers of American civilization that had grown up in colonial days in close touch with Europe. From this region of commerce and manufacture, the nation, on its march towards the west, changed through successive types of industrial life until in the Rocky Mountains the frontier fur-trader mingled with the Indians. The successive stages of social evolution which at first were exhibited in narrow belts on the Atlantic coast had now spread nearly across the continent. [Footnote: Turner, "Significance of the Frontier," in Am. Hist. Assoc., Report 1893, pp. 200, 206, 208.]

Not only was the country vast in extent, it was rapidly growing. In the decade the nation increased its population by over three million and a quarter inhabitants, an addition which nearly equaled the whole population of any one of the three great sections, the middle states, the south, and the west. As traveler after traveler passed over the routes of his predecessor in this period, reporting the life by the wayside and in the towns, we can almost see American society unfolding with startling rapidity under our gaze; farms become hamlets, hamlets grow into prosperous cities; the Indian and the forests recede; new stretches of wilderness come into view in the farther west, and we see the irresistible tide of settlement flowing towards the solitudes.

Nevertheless, at the opening of our survey the nation was in the gloom of the panic of 1819. This was brought on by the speculative reaction that immediately followed the war, when the long-pent-up crops of cotton found a market at the extraordinary price of nearly thirty cents a pound, and as high as seventy-eight dollars per acre was bid for government land in the offices of the southwest. [Footnote: Annals of Cong., 16 Cong., I Sess., 446.] The policy of the government fostered reckless purchases of public land. In the critical times of the closing years of the war, the treasury agreed to accept the notes of state banks in payment for lands, on condition that these banks should resume specie payment; and then the banks, while taking only nominal steps towards resumption, loaned their paper freely to the settlers and speculators who wished to invest in the public domain.

Under the credit system already mentioned, the pioneer was tempted to exhaust his funds in making his first partial payment, and to rely upon loans from some "wild cat" bank wherewith to complete the purchase of the hundred and sixty acres, the smallest tract offered under the terms of the law; planters, relying equally on the state banks, bought great tracts of land at absurd prices; speculators, tempted by the rapid rise in land values and by the ease of securing loans, purchased large quantities in the hope of selling before it became necessary to complete their payment. On the seaboard, extravagance abounded as a reaction from the economies of war times, imported manufactures found a ready market, and the domestic factories were in distress.

While state banks greatly multiplied and expanded their circulation freely to meet the demands of borrowers, [Footnote: Stunner, Hist, of Banking, I., chaps, iv.-vi.] the United States Bank not only failed to check the movement, but even contributed to it. After a dance of speculation, the bank, in the summer of 1818, was facing ruin, and it took drastic means to save itself. Its measures compelled the state banks to redeem their notes in specie or close their doors. [Footnote: Catterall, Second Bank, chap. iii.; Dewey, Financial Hist, of the U. S., chap, vii.; Babcock, Am. Nationality (Am. Nation. XIII.), chap. xiii.]

By the spring of 1819 the country was in the throes of a panic. State-bank issues were reduced from one hundred million dollars in 1817 to forty-five millions in 1819. Few banks in the south and west were able to redeem their notes in specie before 1822; but they pressed their debtors harshly. Staple productions fell to less than half of their former price; land values declined fifty to seventy per cent.; manufacturers were in distress; laborers were out of work; merchants were ruined. [Footnote: J. Q. Adams, Memoirs, IV., 375; Jefferson, Writings, X., 257; Benton, View, I., 5; Niles' Register, XVI., 114; Hodgson, Travels, II., 128; Sumner, Hist, of Banking, I., chaps, vii., viii.] The conditions are illustrated in the case of Cincinnati. By the foreclosure of mortgages, the national bank came to own a large part of the city-hotels, coffee- houses, warehouses, stables, iron foundries, residences, and vacant lots. "All the flourishing cities of the West," cried Benton, "are mortgaged to this money power. They may be devoured by it at any moment. They are in the jaws of the monster!" Throughout the south and west the bank became familiarly known as The Monster. [Footnote: Catterall, Second Bank, 67.]

Even in the days of its laxity the national bank was obnoxious in many quarters of the country. By the state constitution of 1816 Indiana attempted to prevent the establishment within its limits of any bank not chartered by the state; and Illinois incorporated a similar provision in her constitution of 1818. Between 1817 and 1819 Maryland, Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Ohio all passed acts taxing the United States Bank. [Footnote: Ibid., 64, 65.] Ohio, defying the decision of the supreme court in The case of McCulloch vs. Maryland, which asserted the constitutionality of the bank and denied to the states the right to tax it, forcibly collected the tax and practically outlawed the bank. [Footnote: See chap. xv., below.]

From the beginning of our history the frontier had been a debtor region, always favorable to an expansion of the currency and to laws to relieve the debtor class. It was but the continuation of an old practice when the western legislature in this time of stringency attempted measures of relief for their citizens. Kentucky's "litter" of forty banks chartered in the session of 1818-1819 had been forced to the wall by the measures of the national bank. After the panic, Kentucky repealed the charters of these banks and incorporated the Bank of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, an institution without stockholders and under officers elected by the legislature and paid by the state. Its notes were assigned to the counties in proportion to the taxable property, to be loaned on mortgage securities to those who needed them "for the purpose of paying his, her, or their just debts," or to purchase products for exportation. The only real capital of the bank was a legislative appropriation of seven thousand dollars to buy the material and plates for printing notes. In short, the treasury of the state was used as a kind of land bank of the sort favored in the colonial days for the relief of the debtors.[Footnote: Cf. Greene, Provincial America Am. Nation, VI., chap. xvii.] The legislature then passed a replevin law giving the debtor a delay of two years to satisfy an execution, in case the creditor refused to accept notes of the Bank of the Commonwealth of Kentucky as payment; otherwise the debtor received an extension of but one year. By another law, land could not be sold under execution to pay a debt unless it brought three-fourths of its value as appraised by a board of neighbors, usually themselves debtors and interested in supporting values.

In 1823 the court of appeals of Kentucky declared the replevin and stay laws unconstitutional. In retaliation the legislature, in December, 1824, repealed the law establishing the court of appeals, and a new court was created favorable to the "relief system." This act the old court also declared unconstitutional, and a contest followed between the "old court" and the "new court" parties, which lasted until 1826, when the "old court," "anti-relief" party was victorious. In the mean time, similar relief measures had been passed in Tennessee, Illinois, Missouri, and other western states.[Footnote: Summer, Hist. of Banking, I., chap. x.; ibid., 122, 146, 157, 161; Durrett, Centenary of Louisville; McMaster, United states, V., 160.]

The distress brought about by the panic of 1819, the popular antagonism to the banks in general, and especially to the Bank of the United States, as "engines of aristocracy," oppressive to the common people, and the general discontent with the established order, had, as we have seen, produced a movement comparable to the populist agitation of our own time.

Upon the general government the first effect of this period of distress was a general reduction of the revenue. Imports fell from about $121,000,000 in 1818 to $87,000,000 in 1819. Customs receipts, Which in 1816 were over $36,000,000, were but $13,000,000 in 1821. Receipts for public lands, which amounted to $3,274,000 in 1819, were but $1,635,000 in 1820. In December, 1819, Crawford, the secretary of the treasury, was obliged to announce a deficit which required either a reduction in expenditures or an increase in revenue. Congress provided for two loans, one of $3,000,000 in 1820, and another of $5,000,000 in 1821. A policy of retrenchment was vigorously instituted, leveled chiefly at the department of war. Internal improvement schemes which had been urged in Congress in 1818 were now temporarily put to rest. With the year 1822, however, conditions brightened, and the treasury began a long term of prosperity. [Footnote: Dewey, Financial Hist. of the U. S., 168.]

One of the most important results of the crisis was the complete reorganization of the system of disposal of the public lands. The public domain was more than a source of revenue to the general government; it was one of the most profoundly influential factors in shaping American social conditions. The settler who entered the wilderness with but a small capital, or who became a squatter on the public lands without legal title, was impatient with the policy which made revenue the primary consideration of the government. Benton expressed this view in 1826, [Footnote: Register of Debates, 19 Cong., I Sess., I., 727.] when he said: "I speak to statesmen, and not to compting clerks; to Senators, and not to Quaestors of provinces; to an assembly of legislators, and not to a keeper of the King's forests. I speak to Senators who know this to be a Republic, not a Monarchy; who know that the public lands belong to the People and not to the Federal Government." The effect of the credit system had been, as we have seen, to stimulate speculation and to plunge the settlers deeply in debt to the general government.

By 1820 these payments for the public lands were over twenty-two million dollars in arrears. Relief measures passed by Congress from time to time had extended the period of payment and made other concessions. Now the government had to face the problem of reconstructing its land laws or of continuing the old credit system and relentlessly expelling the delinquent purchasers from their hard-won homes on the public domain. Although the legal title remained in the government, the latter alternative was so obviously dangerous and inexpedient that Congress passed two new acts. The first [Footnote: U. S. Statutes at Large, III., 566.] (April 24, 1820) reduced the price of land from two dollars to one dollar and twenty-five cents per acre, abolished the system of credit, and provided that lands might be purchased in multiples of eighty acres. Thus the settler with one hundred dollars could secure full title to a farm. This was followed by a relief act (March 2, 1821), recommended by Secretary Crawford, [Footnote: Am. State Papers., Finance, III., 551, 718; U. S. Statutes at Large, III., 566.] allowing previous purchasers to relinquish their claims to land for which they had not paid, and apply payments already made to full purchase of a portion of the land to be retained by the buyer, all overdue interest to be remitted. [Footnote: Ibid., III., 612.] It is significant that this system was not unlike the relief system which had been so popular in the west.

This adjustment of the land question by no means closed the agitation. A few years later Benton repeatedly urged Congress to graduate the price of public lands according to their real value, and to donate to actual settlers lands which remained unsold after they had been offered at fifty cents an acre. [Footnote: Speech in the Senate, May 16, 1826, Meigs, Benton, 163-170.] The argument rested chiefly on the large number of men unable to secure a farm even under the cheaper price of 1820; the great quantity of public land which remained unsold after it had been offered; the advantage to the revenues from filling the vacant lands with a productive population; and the injustice to the western states, which found themselves unable to obtain revenue by taxing unsold public lands and which were limited in their power of eminent domain and jurisdiction as compared with the eastern states, which owned their public lands. In this agitation lay the germs of the later homestead system, as well as of the propositions to relinquish the federal public lands to the states within which they lay.

With manufacturers in distress, thousands of operatives out of employment, and the crops of parts of the middle states and the west falling in price to a point where it hardly paid to produce them, an appeal to Congress to raise the duties established by the tariff of 1816 [Footnote: Babcock, Am. Nationality (Am. Nation, XIII.). chap. xiv.] was inevitable. Hence, in the spring of 1820 a new tariff bill was presented by Baldwin, of Pennsylvania, the member from Pittsburgh. He came from a city which felt the full effects of the distress of the manufacturers, especially those of iron and glass, and which was one of the important centers of the great grain- raising area of the middle states and the Ohio Valley.

Baldwin believed that the time had arrived when, "all the great interests of the country being equally prostrate, and one general scene of distress pervading all its parts," there should be a common effort to improve conditions by a new tariff, intended not for the sake of restoring the depleted treasury, but distinctly for protection. Its advocates proposed to meet the failure of the system of revenue, not by encouraging importations, but by internal taxes and excises on the manufactured goods protected by the impost. Additional revenue would be secured by higher duties on sugar, molasses, coffee, and salt. The bill increased ad valorem duties by an amount varying from twenty-five to sixty-six per cent, additional. For woolen and cotton manufactures the rate of additional duty was about one-third; on hemp, an important product in Kentucky, about two-thirds. Duty on forged iron bars was increased from seventy-five cents to one dollar and twenty-five cents per hundred-weight. On many other articles the increase of duty amounted to from twenty to one hundred per cent.

Naturally the home-market argument played an important part in the debates. It was relied upon especially by Henry Clay in his closing speech, [Footnote: Annals of Cong., 16 Cong., I Sess., II., 3034.] in which he argued that the rapidity of growth of the United States as compared with Europe made the ratio of the increase of her capacity of consumption to that of our capacity of production as one to four. Already he thought Europe was showing a want of capacity to consume our surplus; in his opinion, cotton, tobacco, and bread- stuffs had already reached the maximum of foreign demand. From this he argued that home manufactures should be encouraged to consume the surplus, and that some portion of American industry should be diverted from agriculture to manufacturing.

Industrial independence also required this action. England had recently imposed new duties on wool and cotton, and her corn laws contributed to limit her demand for our flour. "I am, too," he said, "a friend of free trade, but it must be a free trade of perfect reciprocity. If the governing considerations were cheapness; if national independence were to weigh nothing; if honor nothing; why not subsidize foreign powers to defend us?" He met the argument of the deficiency of labor and of the danger of developing overcrowded and pauperized manufacturing centers by reasoning that machinery would enable the Americans to atone for their lack of laborers; and that while distance and attachment to the native soil would check undue migration of laborers to the west, at the same time the danger of congestion in the east would be avoided by the attraction of the cheap western lands.

Lowndes, of South Carolina, who with Calhoun had been one of the prominent supporters of the tariff in 1816, now made the principal speech in opposition: he denied the validity of the argument in favor of a home market and contended that the supply of domestic grain would in any case exceed the demand; and that, however small the export, the price of the portion sent abroad would determine that of the whole. It is important to observe that the question of constitutionality was hardly raised. The final vote in the House (April 29, 1820) stood 91 to 78. New England gave 18 votes in favor and 17 opposed; the middle region, including Delaware, gave 56 votes for and 1 vote against; the south, including Maryland and her sister states on the southern seaboard, gave 5 votes in favor and 50 opposed. The northwest gave its 8 votes in favor, and the southwest, including Kentucky, gave 4 votes in favor and 10 opposed. The vote of New England was the most divided of that of any section. From the manufacturing states of Connecticut and Rhode Island but one member, a Connecticut man, voted in opposition to the bill. The only 3 negative votes from Massachusetts proper came from the commercial region of Boston and Salem. That portion of Massachusetts soon to become the state of Maine gave 4 votes in opposition and only 2 in favor, the latter coming from the areas least interested in the carrying-trade. New Hampshire and Vermont gave their whole vote in opposition, except for one affirmative from Vermont. Kentucky's vote was 4 in favor to 3 opposed, Speaker Clay not voting.

In general, the distribution of the vote shows that the maritime interests united with the slave-holding planters, engaged in producing tobacco, cotton, and sugar, in opposition. On the other side, the manufacturing areas joined with the grain and wool raising regions of the middle and western states to support the measure. From the states of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, casting altogether 65 votes, but one man voted against the bill, and he was burned in effigy by his constituents and resigned the same year. Of the 53 votes cast by the south and southwest, outside of the border states of Maryland and Kentucky, there were but 5 affirmative votes. It is seen, therefore, that in the House of Representatives, on the tariff issue, the middle states and the Ohio Valley were combined against the south and southwest, while New England's influence was nullified by her division of interests. By a single vote, on a motion to postpone, the measure failed in the Senate; but the struggle was only deferred.

The most important aspect of the panic of 1819 was its relation to the forces of unrest and democratic change that were developing in the United States. Calhoun and John Quincy Adams, conversing in the spring of 1820 upon politics, had the gloomiest apprehensions. There had been, within two years, Calhoun said, "an immense revolution of fortunes in every part of the Union; enormous numbers of persons utterly ruined; multitudes in deep distress; and a general mass of disaffection to the Government not concentrated in any particular direction, but ready to seize upon any event and looking out anywhere for a leader." They agreed that the Missouri question and the debates on the tariff were merely incidental to this state of things, and that this vague but wide-spread discontent, caused by the disordered circumstances of individuals, had resulted in a general impression that there was something radically wrong in the administration of the government. [Footnote: Adams, Memoirs, V., 128; cf. IV., 498.] Although this impression was the result of deeper influences than those to which it was attributed by these statesmen, yet the crisis of 1819, which bore with peculiar heaviness upon the west and south, undoubtedly aggravated all the discontent of those regions. To the historian the movement is profoundly significant, for ultimately it found its leader in Andrew Jackson. More immediately it led to the demand for legislation to prevent imprisonment for debt, [Footnote: See, for example, Annals of Cong., 16 Cong., 2 Sess., 1224; McMaster, United States, IV., 532-535.] to debates over a national bankruptcy law, [Footnote: Annals of Cong., 16 Cong., 2 Sess., I., 757, 759, 792, 1203 et passim.] to the proposal of constitutional amendments leading to the diminution of the powers of the supreme court, to a reassertion of the sovereignty of the states, [Footnote: See chap. viii., below.] and to new legislation regarding the public lands and the tariff. The next few years bore clear evidence of the deep influence which this period of distress had on the politics and legislation of the country.



CHAPTER X

THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE (1819-1821)

In the dark period of the commercial crisis of 1819, while Congress was considering the admission of Missouri, the slavery issue flamed out, and revealed with startling distinctness the political significance of the institution, fateful and ominous for the nation, transcending in importance the temporary financial and industrial ills.

The advance of settlement in the United States made the slavery contest a struggle for power between sections, marching in parallel columns into the west, each carrying its own system of labor. [Footnote: For previous questions of slavery, see Channing, Jeffersonian System (Am. Nation, XII.), chap. viii.] By 1819 the various states of the north, under favorable conditions of climate and industrial life, had either completely extinguished slavery or were in the process of emancipation [Footnote: See map, p. 6.] and by the Ordinance of 1787 the old Congress had excluded the institution in the territory north of the Ohio River. Thus Mason and Dixon's line and the Ohio made a boundary between the slave-holding and the free streams of population that flowed into the Mississippi Valley. Not that this line was a complete barrier: the Ordinance of 1787 was not construed to free the slaves already in the old French towns of the territory; and many southern masters brought their slaves into Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois by virtue of laws which provided for them under the fiction of indented servants. [Footnote: Harris, Negro Servitude in Ill., 10; Durm, Indiana, chaps. ix., x.] Indeed, several efforts were made in the territory of Indiana at the beginning of the nineteenth century to rescind the prohibition of 1787; but to this petition Congress, under the strange leadership of John Randolph, gave a negative; [Footnote: Ibid., chap, xii.; Hinsdale, Old Northwest, chap, xviii.] and, after a struggle between the southern slavery and antislavery elements by which the state had been settled, Indiana entered the Union in 1816 as a free state, under an agreement not to violate the Ordinance of 1787.

Illinois, on her admission in 1818, also guaranteed the provisions of the Ordinance of 1787, and, not without a contest, included in her constitution an article preventing the introduction of slavery, but so worded that the system of indenture of Negro servants was continued in a modified form. The issue of slavery still continued to influence Illinois elections, and, as the inhabitants saw well- to-do planters pass with their slaves across the state to recruit the property and population of Missouri, a movement (1823-1824) in favor of revising their constitution so as to admit slavery required the most vigorous opposition to hold the state to freedom. The leader of the antislavery forces in Illinois was a Virginian, Governor Coles (once private secretary to President Madison), who had migrated to free his slaves after he became convinced that it was hopeless to make the fight which Jefferson advised him to carry on in favor of gradual emancipation in his native state. [Footnote: Harris, Negro Servitude in III., chap. iv.; Washburne, Coles, chaps, iii., v.] In both Indiana and Illinois, the strength of the opposition to slavery and indented servitude came from the poorer whites, particularly from the Quaker and Baptist elements of the southern stock, and from the northern settlers.

In Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina, ever since the decline of the tobacco culture, a strong opposition to slavery had existed, shown in the votes of those states on the Ordinance of 1787, and in the fact that as late as 1827 the great majority of the abolition societies of the United States were to be found in this region. [Footnote: Dunn, Indiana, 190; Bassettin Johns Hopkins Univ. Studies, XVI., No. vi.; cf. Hart, Slavery and Abolition (Am. Nation, XVI.), chap. xi.] But the problem of dealing with the free Negro weighed upon the south. Even in the north these people were unwelcome. They frequently became a charge upon the community, and they were placed under numerous disabilities. [Footnote: McMaster, United States, IV., 558; Gordy, Political Hist, of U. S., II., 405.]

The idea of deporting freedmen from the United States found support both among the humanitarians, who saw in it a step towards general emancipation, and among the slave-holders who viewed the increase of the free Negroes with apprehension. To promote this solution of the problem, the Colonization Society [Footnote: McPherson, Liberia; McMaster, United States, IV., 556 et seq.] was incorporated in 1816, and it found support, not only from antislavery agitators like Lundy, who edited the "Genius of Universal Emancipation" at Baltimore, but also from slave-holders like Jefferson, Clay, and Randolph. It was the design of this society to found on the coast of Africa a colony of free blacks, brought from the United States. Although, after unsuccessful efforts, Liberia was finally established in the twenties, with the assistance of the general government (but not under its jurisdiction), it never promoted state emancipation. Nevertheless, at first it met with much sympathy in Virginia, where in 1820 the governor proposed to the legislature the use of one-third of the state revenue as a fund to promote the emancipation and deportation of the Negroes. [Footnote: Jefferson, Writings (Ford's ed.), X., 173, 178; Niles' Register, XVII., 363; King, Life and Corresp. of King, VI., 342; Adams, Memoirs, IV., 293.]

The unprofitableness of slavery in the border states, where outworn fields, the decline of tobacco culture, and the competition of western lands bore hard on the planter, [Footnote: See chap. iv. above; Hart, Slavery and Abolition (Am. Nation, XVI.), chap. iv.] now became an argument in favor of, permitting slavery to pass freely into the new country of the west. Any limitation of the area of slavery would diminish the value of the slaves and would leave the old south to support, under increasingly hard conditions, the redundant and unwelcome slave population in its midst. The hard times from 1817 to 1820 rendered slave property a still greater burden to Virginia. Moreover, the increase of the proportion of slaves to whites, if slavery were confined to the region east of the Mississippi, might eventually make possible a servile insurrection, particularly if foreign war should break out. All of these difficulties would be met, in the opinion of the south, by scattering the existing slaves and thus mitigating the evil without increasing the number of those in bondage.

It was seen that the struggle was not simply one of morals and of rival social and industrial institutions, but was a question of political power between the two great and opposing sections, interested, on the one side, in manufacturing and in the raising of food products under a system of free labor; and, on the other, in the production of the great staples, cotton, tobacco, and sugar, by the use of slave labor. Already the southern section had shown its opposition to tariff and internal improvements, which the majority of, the northern states vehemently favored. In other words, the slavery issue was seen to be a struggle for sectional domination.

At the beginning of the nation in 1790, the population of the north and the south was almost exactly balanced. Steadily, however, the free states drew ahead, until in 1820 they possessed a population of 5,152,000 against 4,485,000 for the slave-holding states and territories; and in the House of Representatives, by the operation of the three-fifths ratio, the free states could muster 105 votes to but 81 for the slave states. Thus power had passed definitely to the north in the House of Representatives. The instinct for self- preservation that led the planters to stand out against an apportionment in their legislatures which would throw power into the hands of non-slaveholders now led them to seek for some means to protect the interests of their minority section in the nation as a whole. The Senate offered such an opportunity: by the alternate admission of free and slave states from 1802 to 1818, out of the twenty-two states of the nation eleven were slave-holding and eleven free. If the south retained this balance, the Senate could block the action of the majority which controlled the lower House.

Such was the situation when the application of Missouri for admission as a state in 1819 presented to Congress the whole question of slavery beyond the Mississippi, where freedom and slavery had found a new fighting-ground. East of the Mississippi the Ohio was a natural dividing-line; farther west there appeared no obvious boundary between slavery and freedom. By a natural process of selection, the valleys of the western tributaries of the Mississippi, as far north as the Arkansas and Missouri, in which slaves had been allowed while it was a part of French and Spanish Louisiana (no restraints having been imposed by Congress), received an increasing proportion of the slave-holding planters. It would, in the ordinary course of events, become the area of slave states.

The struggle began in the House of Representatives, when the application of Missouri for statehood was met by an amendment, introduced by Tallmadge of New York, February 13, 1819, [Footnote: Annals of Cong., 15 Cong., 2 Sess., I., 1170.] providing that further introduction of slavery be prohibited and that all children born within the state after admission should be free at the age of twenty-five years. [Footnote: See amended form in House Journal, 15 Cong., 2 Sess., 272.] Tallmadge had already showed his attitude on this question when in 1818 he opposed the admission of Illinois under its constitution, which seemed to him to make insufficient barriers to slavery. Brief as was the first Missouri debate, the whole subject was opened up by arguments to which later discussion added but little. The speaker, Henry Clay, in spite of the fact that early in his political career he had favored gradual emancipation in Kentucky, led the opposition to restriction. His principal reliance was upon the arguments that the evils of slavery would be mitigated by diffusion, and that the proposed restriction was unconstitutional. Tallmadge and Taylor, of New York, combated these arguments so vigorously and with such bold challenge of the whole system of slavery in new territories, that Cobb, of Georgia, declared, "You have kindled a fire which all the waters of the ocean cannot put out, which seas of blood can only extinguish." [Footnote: Annals of Cong., 15 Coneg., 2 Sess., I., 1204.]

The first clause of Tallmadge's motion was carried (February 16, 1819) by a vote of 87 to 76, and the second by 82 to 78. [Footnote: Ibid., 1214.] Taylor was emboldened to offer (February 18) to the bill for the organization of Arkansas territory an amendment by which slavery should be excluded, whereupon McLane, of Delaware, tentatively proposed that a line should be drawn west of the Mississippi, dividing the territories between freedom and slavery. Thus early was the whole question presented to Congress. In the Senate, Tallmadge's amendment was lost (February 27) by a vote of 22 to 16, several northern senators adhering to the south; and Congress adjourned without action. [Footnote: But Arkansas was organized as a territory without restriction.]

The issue was then transferred to the people, and in all quarters of the Union vehement discussions took place upon the question of imposing an anti-slavery restriction upon Missouri. Mass-meetings in the northern states took up the agitation, and various state legislatures, including Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Ohio, and even the slave state of Delaware, passed resolutions with substantial unanimity against the further introduction of slaves into the territories of the United States, and against the admission of new slave states. Pennsylvania, so long the trusted ally of the south, invoked her sister states "to refuse to covenant with crime" by spreading the "cruelties of slavery, from the banks of the Mississippi to the shores of the Pacific." From the south came equally insistent protests against restriction. [Footnote: Niles' Register, XVII., 296, 307, 334, 342-344, 395. 399. 400, 416; Ames, State Docs. on Federal Relations, No. 5, p. 4.]

No argument in the debate in 1819 was more effective than the speech of Rufus King in the Senate, which was widely circulated as a campaign document expressing the northern view. King's antislavery attitude, shown as early as 1785, when he made an earnest fight to secure the exclusion of slavery from the territories, [Footnote: McLaughlin, Confederation and Constitution (Am. Nation, X.), chap. vii.] was clearly stated in his constitutional argument in favor of restriction on Missouri, and his speech may be accepted as typical. [Footnote: Niles' Register, XVII., 215; King, Life and Corresp. of King, VI., 690.] But it was also the speech of an old-time Federalist, apprehensive of the growth of western power under southern leadership. He held that, under the power of making all needful rules and regulations respecting the territory and other property of the United States, Congress had the right to prohibit slavery in the Louisiana purchase, which belonged to the United States in full dominion. Congress was further empowered, but not required, to admit new states into the Union. Since the Constitution contained no express provision respecting slavery in a new state, Congress could make the perpetual prohibition of slavery a condition of admission. In support of this argument, King appealed to the precedent of the Ordinance of 1787, and of the states of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, all admitted on the conditions expressed in that ordinance. In admitting the state of Louisiana in 1812, a different group of conditions had been attached, such as the requirement of the use of the English language in judicial and legislative proceedings.

The next question was the effect of the Louisiana treaty, by which the United States had made this promise: "The inhabitants of the ceded territory shall be incorporated in the Union of the United States, and admitted as soon as possible, according to the principles of the Federal constitution, to the enjoyment of all the rights, advantages and immunities of citizens of the United States; and in the mean time they shall be maintained and protected in the free enjoyment of their liberty, property and the religion which they profess." [Footnote: U. S. Treaties and Conventions, 332.] King contended that, by the admission of Missouri to the Union, its inhabitants would obtain all of the "federal" rights which citizens of the United States derived from its Constitution, though not the rights derived from the constitutions and laws of the various states. In his opinion, the term PROPERTY did not describe slaves, inasmuch as the terms of the treaty should be construed according to diplomatic usage, and not all nations permitted slavery. In any case, property acquired since the territory was occupied by the United States was not included in the treaty, and, therefore, the prohibition of the future introduction of slaves into Missouri would not affect its guarantees.

Could Missouri, after admission, revoke the consent to the exclusion of slavery under its powers as a sovereign state? Such action, King declared, would be contrary to the obligations of good faith, for even sovereigns were bound by their engagements. Moreover, the judicial power of the United States would deliver from bondage any person detained as a slave in a state which had agreed, as a condition of admission, that slavery should be excluded.

Having thus set forth the constitutional principles, King next took up the expediency of the exclusion of slavery from new states. He struck with firm hand the chord of sectional rivalry in his argument against the injustice to the north of creating new slave-holding states, which would have a political representation, under the "federal ratio," not possessed by the north. Under this provision for counting three-fifths of the slaves, five free persons in Virginia (so he argued) had as much power in the choice of representatives to Congress and in the appointment of presidential electors as seven free persons in any of the states in which slavery did not exist. The disproportionate power and influence allowed to the original slave-holding states was a necessary sacrifice to the establishment of the Constitution; but the arrangement was limited to the old thirteen states, and was not applicable to the states made out of territory since acquired. This argument had been familiar to New England ever since the purchase of Louisiana. Finally, he argued that the safety of the Union demanded the exclusion of slavery west of the Mississippi, where the exposed and important frontier needed a barrier of free citizens against the attacks of future assailants.

To the southern mind, King's sectional appeal unblushingly raised the prospect of the rule of a free majority over a slave-holding minority, the downfall of the ascendancy so long held by the south, and the creation of a new Union, in which the western states should be admitted on terms of subordination to the will of the majority, whose power would thus become perpetual. [Footnote: King, Life and Corresp. of King, VI., 205, 267, 279, 288, 329, 339-344, 501; Jefferson, Writings (Ford's ed.), X., 162, 172, 280; Tyler, Tylers, I., 316.]

When the next Congress met, in December, 1819, the admission of Alabama was quickly completed; and the House also passed a bill admitting Maine to the Union, Massachusetts having agreed to this division of the ancient commonwealth, on condition that consent Congress should be obtained prior to March 4, 1820. The Senate, quick to see the opportunity afforded by the situation, combined the bill for the admission of Maine with that for the unrestricted admission of Missouri, a proposition carried (February 16, 1820) by a vote of 23 to 21. Senator Thomas, who represented Illinois, which, as we have seen, was divided in its interests on the question of slavery, and who, as the vote showed, could produce a tie in the Senate, moved a compromise amendment, providing for the admission of Missouri as a slave state and for the prohibition of slavery north of 36 degrees 30' in the rest of the Louisiana purchase; and on the next day his amendment passed the Senate by a vote of 34 to 10.

The debate in the Senate was marked by another speech of Rufus King, just re-elected a senator from New York by an almost unanimous vote. With this prestige, and the knowledge that the states of Pennsylvania and New York stood behind him, he reiterated his arguments with such power that John Quincy Adams, who listened to the debate, wrote in his diary that "the great slave-holders in the House gnawed their lips and clenched their fists as they heard him." [Footnote: Adams, Memoirs, IV., 522; see Cong. Globe, 30 Cong., 2 Sess., App. 63-67.]

The case for the south was best presented by William Pinkney, of Maryland, the leader of the American bar, a man of fashion, but an orator of the first rank. His argument, on lines that the debates had made familiar, was stated with such eloquence, force, and graphic power that it produced the effect of a new presentation. Waiving the question whether Congress might refuse admission to a state, he held that, if it were admitted, it was admitted into a union of equals, and hence could not be subjected to any special restriction. [Footnote: Annals of Cong., 16 Cong., 1 Sess., I., 389 et seq.] Without denying the danger of the extension of slavery, he argued that it was not for Congress to stay the course of this dark torrent. "If you have power," said he, "to restrict the new states on admission, you may squeeze a new-born sovereign state to the size of a pigmy." There would be nothing to hinder Congress "from plundering power after power at the expense of the new states," until they should be left empty shadows of domestic sovereignty, in a union between giants and dwarfs, between power and feebleness. In vivid oratory he conjured up this vision of an unequal union, into which the new state would enter, "shorn of its beams," a mere servant of the majority. From the point of view of the political theory of a confederation, his contention had force, and the hot- tempered west was not likely to submit to an inferior status in the Union. Nevertheless, the debates and votes in the Constitutional Convention of 1787 seem to show that the fathers of the Constitution intended to leave Congress free to impose limitations on the states at admission. [Footnote: Elliot, Debates, V., 492.]

In the mean time, the House of Representatives was continuing the discussion on the old lines. Although the arguments brought out little that had not been stated in the first Missouri debate, they were restated day after day with an amplitude and a bitterness of feeling that aggravated the hostility between the rival forces. Even under this provocation, most southern members expressed their opinions on the morality and expediency of slavery in language that affords a strange contrast to their later utterances: in almost every case they lamented its existence and demanded its dispersion throughout the west as a means of alleviating their misfortune. Although most of the men who spoke on the point were from the regions where cotton was least cultivated, yet even Reid, of Georgia, likened the south to an unfortunate man who "wears a cancer in his bosom." [Footnote: Annals of Cong., 16 Cong., 1 Sess., I., 1025.] Tyler of Virginia, afterwards president of the United States, characterized slavery as a dark cloud, and asked, "Will you permit the lightnings of its wrath to break upon the South when by the interposition of a wise system of legislation you may reduce it to a summer's cloud?" [Footnote: Ibid., II., 1391.] John Randolph, the ultra-southerner, was quoted as saying that all the misfortunes of his life were light in the balance when compared with the single misfortune of having been born a master of slaves.

In addition to the argument of "mitigation by diffusion," the south urged the injustice of excluding its citizens from the territories by making it impossible for the southern planter to migrate thither with his property. On the side of the north, it was argued with equal energy that the spread of slaves into the west would inevitably increase their numbers and strengthen the institution. Since free labor was unable to work in the midst of slave labor, northern men would be effectively excluded from the territories which might be given over to slavery. Economic law, it was urged, would make it almost certain that, in order to supply the vast area which it was proposed to devote to slavery, the African slave-trade would be reopened. As the struggle waxed hot, as the arguments brought out with increasing clearness the fundamental differences between the sections, threats of disunion were freely exchanged. [Footnote: Adams, Memoirs, V., 13, 53; Benton, Abridgment of Debates, XIII., 607.] Even Clay predicted the existence of several new confederacies. [Footnote: Adams, Memoirs, IV., 526.] Nor were the extremists of the north unwilling to accept this alternative. [Footnote: King, Life and Corresp. of King, VI., 274, 286, 287, 387.] But the danger of southern secession was diminished because Monroe was ready to veto any bill which excluded slavery from Missouri. [Footnote: Cong. Globe, 30 Cong., 2 Sess., App. 67.] While still engaged in its own debates, the House received the compromise proposal from the Senate. At first the majority remained firm and refused to accept it. [Footnote: Woodburn, in Am. Hist. Assoc., Report 1893, p. 251-297.] March 1, 1820, the House passed its own bill imposing the restriction on Missouri, by a vote of 91 to 82. By the efforts of the compromisers, however, a committee of conference was arranged, which on the very next day resulted in the surrender of the House. The vote on striking out the restriction on Missouri was 90 to 87. New England gave 7 ayes to 33 nays; the middle states, 8 to 46; the south cast 58 votes for striking out, and none against it; the northwest gave all its 8 votes against striking out the restriction; while the 17 southwestern votes were solidly in favor of admitting Missouri as a slave state.

Thus, while the southern phalanx in opposition remained firm, enough members were won over from the northern ranks to defeat the restrictionists. Some of these deserters [Footnote: See King, Life and Corresp. of King, VI., 291, 329; Benton, View, I., 10; Adams, Memoirs, V., 15, 307. Randolph applied to them the term "doughfaces."] from the northern cause were influenced by the knowledge that the admission of Maine would fail without this concession; others, by the constitutional argument; others, by the fear of disunion; and still others, by the apprehension that the unity of the Democratic party was menaced by the new sectional alignment, which included among its leaders men who had been prominent in the councils of the Federalists. By the final solution, it was agreed (134 to 42) to admit Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state; while all of the rest of the territory, possessed by the United States west of the Mississippi and north of 36 degrees 30' was pledged to freedom. Yet the fate of the measure was uncertain, for some of Monroe's southern friends strongly urged him still to veto the compromise. [Footnote: Cong. Globe, 30 Cong., 2 Sess., App. 64.] The president submitted to the cabinet the question whether Congress had the right to prohibit slavery in a territory, and whether the section of the Missouri bill which interdicted slavery forever in the territory north of 36 degrees 30' was applicable only to the territorial condition, or also to states made from the territory. John Quincy Adams notes in his diary that "it was unanimously agreed that Congress have the power to prohibit slavery in the Territories"; though he adds that neither Crawford, Calhoun, nor Wirt could find any express power to that effect given in the Constitution. [Footnote: Adams, Memoirs, V., 5.] In order to avoid the difficulty arising from the fact that Adams alone believed the word "forever" to apply to states as well as territories, the president modified the question so that all would be able to answer that the act was constitutional, leaving each member to construe the section to suit himself.

Although apparently the Missouri struggle was thus brought to a conclusion, it is necessary to take note of two succeeding episodes in the contest, which immediately revived the whole question, embittered the antagonism, threatened the Union, and were settled by new compromises. In her constitution, Missouri not only incorporated guarantees of a slavery system, but also a provision against the admission of free Negroes to the state. Application for admission to the Union under this constitution in the fall of 1820 brought on a contest perhaps more heated and more dangerous to the Union than the previous struggle. Holding that Missouri's clause against free Negroes infringed the provision of the federal Constitution guaranteeing the rights of citizens of the respective states, northern leaders reopened the whole question by refusing to vote for the admission of Missouri with the obnoxious clause. Again the north revealed its mastery of the House, and the south its control of the Senate, and a deadlock followed. Under the skilful management of Clay, a new compromise was framed, by which Missouri was required, through her legislature, to promise that the objectionable clause should never be construed to authorize the passage of any laws by which any citizen of either of the states of the Union should be excluded from the enjoyment of any of the privileges and immunities to which such citizen was entitled under the Constitution of the United States. This Missouri accepted, but the legislature somewhat contemptuously added that it was without power to bind the state. [Footnote: Niles' Register, XX., 388, cf. 300.]

While this debate was in progress, and the problem of the status of Missouri, which had already established a constitution and claimed to be a state, was under consideration, the question of counting the Missouri vote in the presidential election of 1820 was raised. For this a third compromise was framed by Clay, by which the result of the election was stated as it would be with and without Missouri's vote. Since Monroe had been elected by a vote all but unanimous, the result was in either case the same; this theoretical question, nevertheless, was fraught with dangerous possibilities. Missouri was finally admitted by the proclamation of President Monroe, dated August 10, 1821, more than three years from the first application for statehood.

In a large view of American history, the significance of this great struggle cannot be too highly emphasized. Although the danger passed by and the ocean became placid, yet the storm in many ways changed the coast-line of American politics and broke new channels for the progress of the nation. The future had been revealed to far-sighted statesmen, who realized that this was but the beginning, not the end, of the struggle. "This momentous question," wrote Jefferson, "like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. It is hushed, indeed, for the moment. But this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence. A geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper." [Footnote: Jefferson, Writings (Ford's ed.), X., 157.]

John Quincy Adams relates a contemporaneous conversation with Calhoun, in which the latter took the ground that, if a dissolution of the Union should follow, the south would be compelled to form an alliance, offensive and defensive, with Great Britain, though he admitted that it would be returning pretty much to the colonial state. When Adams, with unconscious prophecy of Sherman's march through Georgia, pressed Calhoun with the question whether the north, cut off from its natural outlet upon the ocean, "would fall back upon its rocks bound hand and foot, to starve, or whether it would not retain its powers of locomotion to move southward by land," Calhoun answered that the southern states would find it necessary to make their communities military. [Footnote: Adams, Memoirs, IV., 530, 531.]

To Adams himself the present question was but a "title page to a great tragic volume." He believed that, if dissolution of the Union should result from the slavery question, it would be followed by universal emancipation of the slaves, and he was ready to contemplate such a dissolution of the Union, upon a point involving slavery and no other, believing that "the Union might then be reorganized on the fundamental principle of emancipation." "This object," wrote he, "is vast in its compass, awful in its prospects, sublime and beautiful in its issue. A life devoted to it would be nobly spent or sacrificed." [Footnote: Adams, Memoirs, IV., 531.] Looking forward to civil war, he declared: "So glorious would be its final issue, that as God shall judge me I do not say that it is not to be desired." [Footnote: Ibid., V., 210.] But as yet he confided these thoughts to his diary. The south was far from contented with the compromise, and her leading statesmen, Calhoun especially, came bitterly to regret both the concession in the matter of admitting federal control over slavery in the territories, and the division of the Louisiana purchase into spheres of influence which left to the slave-holding section that small apex of the triangle practically embraced in Arkansas. While the north received an area capable of being organized into many free states, the south could expect from the remaining territory awarded her only one state.

Among the immediate effects of the contest was its influence upon Monroe, who was the more ready to relinquish the American claim to Texas in the negotiations over Florida, because he feared that the acquisition of this southern province would revive the antagonism of the northern antislavery forces. [Footnote: Monroe, Writings, VI., 127; cf. Adams, Memoirs, V., 25, 54, 68.]

The south learned also the lesson that slavery needed defense against the power of the majority, and that it must shape its political doctrine and its policy to this end. But it would be a mistake to emphasize too strongly the immediate effect in this respect. Slavery was not yet accepted as the foundation of southern social and economic life. The institution was still mentioned with regret by southern leaders, and there were still efforts in the border states to put it in the process of extinction. South Carolina leaders were still friendly to national power, and for several years the ruling party in that state deprecated appeals to state sovereignty. [Footnote: See chap, xviii. below.] In the next few years other questions, of an economic and judicial nature, were even more influential, as a direct issue, than the slavery question. But the economic life of the south was based on slavery, and the section became increasingly conscious that the current of national legislation was shaped by the majority against their interests. Their political alliances in the north had failed them in the time of test, and the Missouri question disclosed the possibility of a new organization of parties threatening that southern domination which had swayed the Union for the past twenty years. [Footnote: Adams, Memoirs, IV., 529; King, Life and Corresp. of King, VI., 501; Jefferson, Writings, X., 175, 193 n.; cf. chap. xi. below; Hart, Slavery and Abolition (Am. Nation, XVI.), chap, xviii.]

The slavery struggle derived its national significance from the west, into which expanding sections carried warring institutions.



CHAPTER XI

PARTY POLITICS (1820-1822)

To the superficial observer, politics might have seemed never more tranquil than when, in 1820, James Monroe received all but one of the electoral votes for his second term as president of the United States. One New Hampshire elector preferred John Quincy Adams, although he was not a candidate, and this deprived Monroe of ranking with Washington in the unanimity of official approval. But in truth the calm was deceptive. The election of 1820 was an armistice rather than a real test of political forces. The forming party factions were not yet ready for the final test of strength, most of the candidates were members of the cabinet, and the reelection of Monroe, safe, conciliatory, and judicious, afforded an opportunity for postponing the issue.

As we have seen, the Missouri contest had in it the possibility of a revolutionary division of the Republican party into two parties on sectional lines. The aged Jefferson, keen of scent for anything that threatened the ascendancy of the triumphant democracy, saw in the dissolution of the old alliance between Virginia and the "fanaticized" Pennsylvania, [Footnote: Jefferson, Writings (Ford's ed.), X., 161, 171, 172, 177, 179, 192, 193 n., 279; King, Life and Corresp. of King, VI., 279, 282, 290: Cong. Globe, 30 Cong., 2 Sess., App. 63-67.] in the heat of the Missouri conflict, the menace of a revived Federalist party, and the loss of Virginia's northern following. So hotly did Virginia resent the Missouri Compromise, that while the question was still pending, in February, 1820, her legislative caucus, which had assembled to nominate presidential electors, indignantly adjourned on learning that Monroe favored the measure. "I trust in God," said H. St. George Tucker, "if the president does sign a bill to that effect, the Southern people will be able to find some man who has not committed himself to our foes; for such are, depend on it, the Northern Politicians." [Footnote: William and Mary College Quarterly, X., 11, 15.] But the sober second thought of Virginia sustained Monroe. On the other side, Rufus King believed that the issue of the Missouri question would settle "forever the dominion of the Union." "Old Mr. Adams," said he, "as he is the first, will on this hypothesis be the last President from a free state." [Footnote: King, Life and Corresp. of King, 267; cf. Adams, Memoirs, IV., 528.]

The truth is that the individual interests of the south were stronger in opposing than those of the north in supporting a limitation of slavery; [Footnote: Adams, Memoirs, IV., 533.] the northern phalanx had hardly formed before it began to dissolve. [Footnote: Benton, Thirty Years' View, I., 10.] Nevertheless, the Missouri question played some part in the elections in most of the states. In Pennsylvania, under the leadership of Duane, the editor of the Aurora, electors favorable to Clinton were nominated on an antislavery ticket, [Footnote: Niles' Register, XIX., 129; National Advocate, October 27, 1820; Franklin Gazette, October 25, November 8, 1820 (election returns); Ames, State Docs. on Federal Relations, No. 5, p. 5.] but, outside of Philadelphia and the adjacent district, this ticket received but slight support. With few exceptions, the northern congressmen who had voted with the south failed of re-election.

The elections in the various states in this year showed more political division than was revealed by the vote for president, and they showed that in state politics the Federalist party was by no means completely extinct. In the congressional elections the flood of Republicanism left only isolated islands of Federalism unsubmerged. In Massachusetts eight of the thirteen members professed this political faith; New York returned some half-dozen men whose affiliations were with the same party; from Pennsylvania came a somewhat larger number; and they numbered nearly half of the delegation of Maryland. The cities of New York and Philadelphia were represented by Federalists, and there were three or four other districts, chiefly in New England, which adhered to the old party. There were also a few congressmen from the south who had been members of this organization. On the whole, however, the Federalists awaited the new development of parties, determined to secure the best terms from those to whom they should transfer their allegiance. In New England, as has already been pointed out, [Footnote: See chap. ii. above.] the toleration movement was completing its work of transferring power to democracy.

More important than local issues or the death throes of federalism, was the democratic tendency revealed in the constitutional conventions of this period. Between 1816 and 1830, ten states either established new constitutions or revised their old ones. In this the influence of the new west was peculiarly important. All of the new states which were formed in that region, after the War of 1812, gave evidence in their constitutions of the democratic spirit of the frontier. With the exception of Mississippi, where the voter was obliged either to be a tax-payer or a member of the militia, all the western states entered the Union with manhood suffrage, and all of them, in contrast with the south, from which their settlers had chiefly been drawn, provided that apportionment of the legislature should be based upon the white population, thus accepting the doctrine of the rule of the majority rather than that of property. As the flood of population moved towards the west and offered these attractive examples of democratic growth, the influence reacted on the older states. In her constitution of 1818, Connecticut gave the franchise to tax-payers or members of the militia, as did Massachusetts and New York in their constitutions of 1821. Maine provided in her constitution of 1820 for manhood suffrage, but by this time there was but slight difference between manhood suffrage and one based upon tax-paying.

Webster in Massachusetts and Chancellor Kent in New York viewed with alarm the prospect that freehold property should cease to be the foundation of government. Kent particularly warned the landed class that "one master capitalist with his one hundred apprentices, and journeymen, and agents, and dependents, will bear down at the polls an equal number of farmers of small estates in his vicinity, who cannot safely unite for their common defense." [Footnote: Carter and Stone, Reports of the Proceedings and Debates of the Convention of 1821, 222.] It was the new counties of New York, particularly those of the western and northeastern frontier, which were the stronghold of the reform movement in that state. The abolition of the council of appointments and the council of revision by the New York convention contributed to the transfer of power to the people. But under the leadership of Van Buren a group of politicians, dubbed "The Albany Regency," controlled the political machinery as effectively as before. [Footnote: McMaster, United States, V., 373- 432; ibid., Rights of Man, 61; MacDonald, Jacksonian Democracy (Am. Nation, XV.), chap. iv.]

The campaign for the presidency of 1824 may be said to have begun as early as 1816. [Footnote: Adams, Memoirs, V., 89.] Adams observed in 1818 that the government was assuming daily the character of cabal, "and preparation, not for the next Presidential election, but for the one after"; [Footnote: Ibid., IV., 193.] and by 1820, when the political sea appeared so placid, and parties had apparently dissolved, bitter factional fights between the friends of the rival candidates constituted the really significant indications of American politics. From the details of the personal struggles (usually less important to the student of party history) one must learn the tendency towards the reappearance of parties in this period, when idealists believed that all factions had been fused into one triumphant organization. In all of the great sections, candidates appeared, anxious to consolidate the support of their own section and to win a following in the nation. It is time that we should survey these men, for the personal traits of the aspirants for the presidency had a larger influence than ever before or since in the history of the country. Moreover, we are able to see in these candidates the significant features of the sections from which they came.