Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (22 page)

Congress’s sale of land encouraged other speculators to bid for land north of the Ohio, the biggest being John Cleves Symmes, a prominent New Jersey judge. Symmes acquired from Congress 1,000,000 acres in the southwestern corner of the present state of Ohio where Cincinnati was founded. The last major speculative group involved in the Ohio lands in the eighteenth century was the Connecticut Land Company, which purchased a huge tract of 3,000,000 acres of the lands near presentday Cleveland that the state of Connecticut had reserved for itself when it ceded its claims to the Confederation, the so-called Western Reserve.

Like most of the other speculators, the associates in the Connecticut Land Company were wealthy Eastern gentlemen who had no intentions of emigrating to the West. In an economy lacking sophisticated alternatives for investment, these gentlemen-speculators simply hoped to establish a landed basis to secure their aristocratic aspirations. Indeed, in the 1780s and
1790s many members of the would-be Federalist aristocracy often tried their best to live up to the classical image of being disinterested leaders standing above the marketplace of interests by getting involved in land speculation. During these years many merchants, including Robert Morris, George Clymer, William Bingham, Elbridge Gerry, George Cabot, and others, followed the earlier example of John Hancock and Henry Laurens and retired from business and sought to emulate the English landed gentry, often in order to pursue public careers. Indeed, establishing a seat in the country became something of a mania among wealthy gentlemen in the early Republic, especially among the New England gentry.
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When Morris, who had been one of the wealthiest merchants in America, became a United States senator from Pennsylvania in 1789, he had already shifted much of his capital into speculative land—something that seemed more respectable than trade—and was desperately trying to set himself up as a disinterested aristocrat. In the Senate he was especially anxious to win the approval of the South Carolina nabobs Pierce Butler and Ralph Izard, who seemed to have “a particular antipathy” to him because of his mercantile background. When the Carolina senators haughtily expressed their contempt for vulgar money-making, Morris—to the astonishment of listeners—did “likewise”: he gave himself “Compliments on his manner & Conduct in life, . . . and the little respect he paid to the common Opinions of People.” Like the classical republican aristocrat he aspired to be, he was proud of “his disregard of money.” For Morris, as for other would-be aristocrats, disregarding money eventually proved to be fatal.
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Probably the most successful land speculator in these years was William Cooper, the father of the novelist James Fenimore Cooper. In the mid-1780s William Cooper and a partner bought up shares in a defunct land company that claimed tens of thousands of acres in the Otsego area in upstate New York. The legalities were incredibly complicated, and Cooper hired the best lawyer in New York, Alexander Hamilton, to untangle them. Before other claimants could act, Cooper began selling off the land to settlers and speculators and promoting development of the town he called Cooperstown. Every step of the way he gambled, risked all, and won. By the early 1790s he had become not only the richest man in Otsego County but also an international celebrity whose advice on the sale and settlement of frontier land was sought by aspiring speculators from as far away as Holland and France.

Cooper’s timing was perfect. In the aftermath of the Revolution people were ready to move to better themselves, particularly the Yankees of New England, where a rapidly increasing population made land more and more scarce and expensive. At the same time, the defeat of the British and their Iroquois allies forced the Indians westward or into Canada. This turned upstate New York into one of the fastest growing areas of the country. And so the settlers in the Otsego region increased in number and prospered, and they did so in no small part because of Cooper’s particular methods of development.

The secret of Cooper’s success as a land developer was to build up a critical mass of settlers as quickly as possible and to promote their enterprise. Unlike other speculative landlords, Cooper made available all of his best land at once and sold it at modest prices with long-term credit and as freeholds, not as tenancies, in order to get the settlers to work as hard as they could on land they owned outright. At the same time, he realized that he could not be an absentee landlord. He knew that he needed to live among his settlers, to patronize and encourage them, and to work to develop saleable products and their access to markets. Cooper’s idea of development was to tap into each settler’s own interest in improving himself and make that self-interest redound to the community’s interest and his own. By “the simple measure of letting things take their own course,” he said, “I find my interest and that of the whole community promoted.”
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Cooper was not the only Federalist in the 1790s who sought to secure his social position by acquiring proprietary wealth in land. Some, like Rufus Putnam, James Mitchell Varnum, and the other Ohio Company associates from New England who in 1788 established Marietta at the confluence of the Muskingum and Ohio rivers, sought to escape from Eastern democracy and dreamed of creating civilized landed empires in the West. Others, like Henry Knox, secretary of war, and James Wilson, associate justice of the Supreme Court, remained in the cities of the East and simply speculated in land. Most of these land speculators had the same hopes as the federal government for the gradual, piecemeal, and regulated settlement of the West. Even if the speculators sold some of their land for low prices, they counted on subsequent settlers slowly filling in the territory surrounding the land they retained, which would raise its value and bring them the promised returns on their investments.

Everything was built on illusions. Most of the people moving west ignored the government’s plans for neat and orderly settlement. They shunned the speculators’ lands and refused to buy land at the expensive
prices at which it was offered. In 1785 a defiant spokesman for the Ohio squatters declared that “all mankind . . . have an undoubted right to pass into every vacant country, and there to form their constitution, and that . . . Congress is not empowered to forbid them, neither is Congress empowered . . . to make any sale of the uninhabited lands to pay the public debt.”
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In desperation, the speculators lowered their prices, but because of rumors that Congress would soon be selling land in Ohio at twenty-five cents an acre, the settlers continually held out for better terms. By the early 1790s Symmes complained that the settlers in Ohio laughed in his face when he asked them for a dollar an acre for first-rate land. Symmes especially blamed “many land jobbers from Kentucky” who, instead of paying him, only made plans for “selling what they never had any intention of making their own.” When he fell behind in his payments to the government, Symmes eventually had to give back much of the land he had purchased.
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The Scioto Company ended even more disastrously. The company was not interested in settlement but in speculation. It sent the poet Joel Barlow to France to sell land claims to French speculators who presumably would assume all the cost and risks of settlement. Barlow turned for help to an unscrupulous Englishmen who not only sold rights to land in the Ohio Valley that the company did not actually own but sold them to French artisans ill-equipped to be farmers. Five to six hundred French immigrants in 1790 eventually established a miserable settlement they called Gallipolis on the Ohio River almost fifty miles southwest of Marietta. Disease and Indians killed off or drove away most of the French settlers, and by 1806 there were only sixteen families remaining from the original immigrants. The Scioto Company itself had collapsed in 1792.

Both the government and the speculators misunderstood the settlers and the West. The speculators tended to borrow heavily, overextending themselves in the expectation of quicker returns from land sales than was possible. Because of Indian hostilities, there were never enough settlers willing to pay for land they could have for free. Congress tried sending troops to the Ohio Valley to burn the squatters’ settlements, but the settlers simply rebuilt once the soldiers had left. To President Washington it
soon became clear that “anything short of a Chinese wall, or a line of troops” would not be enough to stop the swarming settlers.
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Not only did the settlers squat on land they did not own, but they moved irregularly, chaotically, and unevenly, jumping from place to place, leaving huge chunks of unsettled land behind them. They refused to live in organized communities, but instead roamed and rambled like the Indians whose treaty rights they continually violated. Their isolated and scattered settlements tended to make them vulnerable to Indian raids, which in turn incited white retaliation. These cycles of Indian-settler violence drenched the West in blood.

Congress eventually realized that the kinds of respectable, law-abiding, and productive settlers it wanted would not be attracted to the West unless there was peace with the Indians and law and order in the territories. The original plans for colonial governments in the West expressed in the Ordinance of 1784 had left the settlers to govern themselves. But self-government in the West was no more orderly and no more free of self-interest than it was within the several states. Although Washington and other Eastern gentry often called these disorderly settlers “adventurers” and “banditti,” the settlers were actually not much different in character from all those common folk whose ambitions, self-interestedness, and democratic excesses had caused problems in the state legislatures in the 1780s.

Just as gentry up and down the continent sought in the Constitution of 1787 a remedy for localist democratic excesses in the states, so too did gentry in the Congress seek some sort of solution for the localist democratic excesses in the West. As Richard Henry Lee, a Virginian much involved with congressional plans for the West, pointed out, something had to be done “for the security of property” in the West because “the greater part of those who go there” were “uninformed and perhaps licentious people.”
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In 1787 the Confederation Congress concluded, first, that the number of states to be carved out of the Northwest would have to be reduced to not more than five but not fewer than three, which inevitably meant that each state would be larger than those Jefferson had proposed in 1784. But, more important, Congress realized that it would have to create what one congressman called “a strong-toned government” to discipline the disorderly populace of the West. At the same time, it would have to provide for a gradual process by which settlements could grow into states. The result was the Northwest Ordinance of 1787.

Apart from winning the War of Independence, this ordinance was the greatest accomplishment of the Confederation Congress. It created an entirely new notion of empire and at a stroke solved the problem of relating colonial dependencies to the central authority that Great Britain had been unable to solve in the 1760s and 1770s.

When the monarchies of early modern Europe claimed new dominions by conquest or colonization, they inevitably considered their new provincial additions as permanently peripheral and inferior to the metropolitan center of the realm. But the Northwest Ordinance, which became the model for the development of much of the Southwest, promised an end to such permanent second-class colonies. It guaranteed to the settlers basic legal and political rights and set forth the unprecedented principle that new states of the American empire settled in the West would enter the Union “on an equal footing with the original States, in all respects whatsoever.” Settlers could leave the older states with the assurances that they were not losing their political liberties and that they would be allowed eventually to form new republics as sovereign and independent as the other older states of the Union. With such a principle there was presumably no limit to the westward expansion of the empire of the United States.
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Of course, this empire had little or no place for the Indian. Although Congress promised that “the utmost good faith shall always be observed towards the Indians, [and that] their lands and property shall never be taken from them without their consent,” the ordinance itself took for granted that the destiny of the Northwest belonged with white American settlers.

These new Western settlements, the congressional leaders believed, would have to be prepared for eventual statehood in stages. In the initial stage of settlement each of the territories was to be governed dictatorially by a federally appointed governor, a secretary, and three judges. Only when the population of the territory reached five thousand would a representative assembly with a very restricted suffrage be permitted. Even then the governor was given an absolute veto over legislation and could prorogue or dissolve the assembly at will. Only when a territory attained a population of sixty thousand could it be admitted to statehood.

Despite its progressive promises, the Northwest Ordinance was actually quite reactionary and anti-populist. Its proposal for garrison governments with authoritarian leadership for the new Western colonies resembled nothing so much as those failed seventeenth-century English efforts at establishing military governments over the obstreperous colonists.
The ordinance was in fact an indication of just how much of a problem democracy had become in the 1780s and how fearful Eastern leaders had become of the unruly Westerners.

T
HE NEARLY ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND
Indians who occupied the trans-Appalachian West had very different ideas from the white Americans about how the land ought to be used.
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Nothing preoccupied the Federalist administration more than having to deal with these native peoples.