Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (62 page)

10
The Jeffersonian West

Alexander Hamilton always faced east, toward Europe. By contrast, Thomas Jefferson faced west, toward the trans-Appalachian territory and even the lands beyond the Mississippi. Although Jefferson himself never traveled beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains, he was obsessed with the West. He always had, as he said in 1781, “a peculiar confidence in the men from the Western side of the mountains.”
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Only by moving westward, Jefferson believed, could Americans maintain their republican society of independent yeoman farmers and avoid the miseries of the concentrated urban working classes of Europe. Indeed, an expansive West was capable of redeeming the nation if its Eastern sections should ever become corrupt. “By enlarging the empire of liberty,” said Jefferson, “we multiply its auxiliaries, and provide new sources of renovation, should its principles at any time degenerate in those portions of our country which gave them birth.”
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Jefferson was the most expansion-minded president in American history, a firm believer in what might be called demographic imperialism. As early as 1786 he thought the United States might become “the nest from which all America, North and South, is to be peopled,” creating what he referred to more than once as an “empire of liberty.” “Empire” for him did not mean the coercive domination of alien peoples; instead, it meant a nation of citizens spread over vast tracts of land. Yet the British Empire had given enough ambiguity to the term to lend some irony to Jefferson’s use of it.
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Although the United States was by 1801 hemmed in by Britain and Spain on America’s northern and southern frontiers and by Indians in the West, “it was impossible,” Jefferson told Governor James Monroe of Virginia in 1801, “not to look forward to distant times, when our rapid multiplication will expand itself beyond those limits, and cover the whole northern, if not the southern continent, with a people by similar laws.”
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The vision was not just Jefferson’s. The inhabitants of this empire, wrote Thomas Hutchins, America’s first geographer, in 1784, “far from being in the least danger from the attacks of any other quarter of the globe, will have it in their power to engross the whole commerce of it, and to reign not only lords of America, but to possess, in the utmost security, the dominion of seas throughout the world, which their ancestors enjoyed before them.”
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Foreign observers could only shake their heads in amazement at the numbers and the speed of the Americans migrating to the West. “Old America,” said the recent English immigrant Morris Birkbeck, “seems to be breaking up and moving westward.”
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The settlers created a great triangular wedge of settlement reaching to the Mississippi River. Its northern side ran from New York along the Ohio River, its southern side from east Georgia through Tennessee, and the sides met at the apex, St. Louis. Within this huge triangle of settlement people distributed themselves haphazardly, with huge pockets remaining virtually vacant or sparsely inhabited by Indians.
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National leaders expected American westward migration, but not the way it was happening. The carefully drawn plans of the 1780s for the orderly surveying and settlement of the West were simply overwhelmed by the massive and chaotic movement of people. “We rush like a comet into infinite space,” declared a despairing Fisher Ames. “In our wild career, we may jostle some other world out of its orbit, but we shall, in every event, quench the light of our own.”
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Many settlers ignored land ordinances and titles, squatted on the land, and claimed preemptive rights to it. From 1800 on Congress steadily lowered the price of Western land, reduced the size of purchasable tracts, and relaxed the terms of credit for settlers in ever more desperate efforts to bring the land laws into line with the speed with which the lands were being settled. People moved into the area the Indians had ceded in the Treaty of Greenville and then spread north from the Ohio Valley into the valleys of Indiana and Illinois. Congress created new territories in Indiana (1800), Michigan (1805), and Illinois (1809). In the South people in the Mississippi Territory (created in 1798) moved along the river from Vicksburg toward Spanish-held New Orleans.

A
LTHOUGH BOTH THE RAPIDLY SETTLED
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ORTHWEST
and the Southwest territories were overwhelmingly Jeffersonian Republican in their politics, they tended to create very different kinds of places from one another. That difference essentially flowed from the existence of slavery in one area and not in the other.
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But not immediately. Most of the early migrants that initially spilled over the Appalachian Mountains to the West, whether from the North or the South, traveled with only the labor of their families to help them get on their feet. The first waves of ordinary settlers to the frontier, whether to Kentucky and Tennessee or to Ohio and Indiana, generally began by building a small lean-to house before they turned to the crucially important tasks of clearing the land and planting crops. They felled some trees with axes and killed others by girdling them. They burned so much brush and scrub that smoky hazes often hung over the land for months or even years on end. While the women saw to all the gardening, cooking, sewing, and housekeeping, the men plowed the land and planted the marketable crops, in the Northwest, mainly corn and wheat, with whiskey a major by-product; in the Southwest, corn, tobacco, and eventually cotton were the major crops. For both areas hogs and cattle were the principal livestock.

With crops planted, the pioneers began building more substantial houses—usually cabins built of notched logs designed to shelter households that averaged five to seven persons. The roofs of these primitive homes were clapboard, and the floors were dirt, which meant that vermin and the lack of cleanliness were taken for granted—a sure sign in the eyes of Eastern observers that the occupants weren’t quite civilized.
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Diets were limited, with lots of hominy. Coffee and tea were available in Pittsburgh in 1807 but were very expensive. What the new settlers most wanted was access to rivers and the laying out of roads so they could market some of their produce.
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In the Old Northwest the early settlers resisted the claims of absentee speculators and landlords and were remarkably successful in establishing their small independent farms throughout the region. But the situation in the Old Southwest was different. The early pioneers there were soon overwhelmed by substantial planters who came west with slaves in ever increasing numbers. As early as 1795 slaves had come to constitute more than 20 percent of the population of Middle Tennessee. Since these slaveholding settlers were men of means, they quickly bought out those who had preceded them or purchased new land in the most accessible and desirable areas. By 1802 slaveholders had already established large plantations in the rich valleys of the Cumberland in Middle Tennessee. With the development of cotton as the major staple of the Southwest, slavery flourished. But where the growing season was too short for cotton, as in the northern counties of West Tennessee, the number of slaves remained small. Since slavery and cotton went together, the big slaveholding cotton planters dominated both the economy and government. In both the Southwest and the Northwest, however, the top political positions tended to be captured by those who had initially achieved some military glory, like William Henry Harrison and Andrew Jackson.
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Although slavery and the society and economy it bred were what ultimately separated the Southwest from the Northwest, it was not obvious at the outset that the Northwest would remain free of slaves—despite the
declaration in the Northwest Ordinance that “there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude” in the territory.
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Many of the migrants to the area immediately north of the Ohio River were from the Upper South and were eager to introduce slavery to the Northwest Territory. William Henry Harrison, the son of a prominent slaveholding Virginia family, was the most influential of these advocates for bringing slavery to the Northwest. In 1791 at age nineteen Harrison abandoned a career in medicine and received a commission in the army. He proved invaluable as an aide to General Anthony Wayne at the battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794, and a year later he married the daughter of the speculator John Cleves Symmes. In 1798 he became registrar of the Land Office in Cincinnati, and, using his influence with his friend Robert Goodloe Harper of South Carolina, the Federalist chairman of the House Committee on Ways and Means, he was soon appointed secretary of the Northwest Territory by President John Adams. Within a year Harrison had won election as the territory’s delegate to Congress. In 1800 the Northwest Territory was divided into two parts, the territory of Ohio and the Indiana Territory, of which the twenty-eight-year-old Harrison was appointed governor. He accepted, but only after receiving assurances that if Thomas Jefferson became president, he would be retained in office. No one in the West was more assiduous in cultivating patrons and moving up in the governmental hierarchy than Harrison.
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In 1803 Harrison and his pro-slavery allies in Indiana petitioned Congress to waive the ordinance’s prohibition against slavery for at least ten years. When Congress tabled the petition, Indiana’s pro-slavery settlers circumvented the restriction; and after the territory acquired its legislature in 1804, it passed laws that sustained a de facto form of black slavery. By 1810 there were 630 blacks in Indiana, most of whom were indentured servants serving for long terms or for life.
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But many settlers in the Indiana Territory were opposed to both Harrison and slavery; they argued that slavery made men haughty and proud and that the institution not only sustained a leisured aristocracy but also inhibited the immigration of non-slaveholders. In 1809 the territory of Indiana was divided in two, and Illinois Territory was created. This reduced Harrison’s influence in Indiana and allowed the anti-slave forces
under the leadership of populist Jonathan Jennings to gain strength in the territory. In 1809 the New Jersey–born Jennings, who liked to campaign as the common man, sometimes stopping and helping pioneers repair their cabins or cut wood, defeated Harrison’s candidate, Thomas Randolph, the territorial attorney general, in a close contest for territorial delegate to Congress.

In Washington, where he served three terms, Jennings fought to eliminate property qualifications for voting and to do away with the arbitrary and “monarchical” system of territorial government that had been established by the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, a system, said Jennings, that was “little reconcilable to the principles which governed the institutions of the different States of the Union.” By seeking at every turn to undermine Harrison’s influence in Indiana Territory, Jennings provoked Harrison into labeling him as that “poor animal who represents us.” When Jennings’s allies finally took control of the territorial legislature in 1810, they revoked the laws that maintained de facto slavery in the territory and repudiated the closed system of patronage politics that Harrison and his cronies had used to maintain their power. By exploiting democratic and anti-aristocratic rhetoric, Jennings in 1816 became Indiana’s first state governor.
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Among the most effective arguments the anti-slave forces in Indiana invoked was the example of the incredibly speedy settlement of Ohio. Ohio’s rapid growth convinced many leaders that prohibiting slavery was the best means of enticing the proper kinds of non-aristocratic settlers to migrate westward. Indeed, the area north of the Ohio River was settled largely by swarming numbers of anti-slave Yankees from New England. Many of them came to Ohio via New York and continued to push westward into the northern parts of Indiana and Illinois, bringing their communal spirit and their place names with them; towns named Cambridge, Lexington, Springfield, and Hartford were scattered throughout the states of New York, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan.

Because most of the settlers in the Northwest Territory were small farmers, their society tended to be more democratic and egalitarian than the society of the Southwest, dominated as it was by slaveholding planters. To be sure, landholding in Ohio could be just as oligarchic as that in the South and Southwest: the top 1 percent of Ohio landowners, for example, owned 23 percent of the land.
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But, unlike in the South and Southwest, social and economic authority in the Northwest did not automatically translate into political authority.