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distant. The attempts at state making in Transylvania and Westsylvania illustrate but too clearly the lack of sympathy between the frontiersmen and their eastern neighbors, while the backwoodsmen's associations of Watauga Boonesboro, and Nashboro exemplify the "spaial compact in its simplest forms and are in marked contrast to the undemocratic features of the state constitutions being set up almost simultaneously.

Conquest of the West.-The frontier advance across the Alleghanies was the opening scene of the Revolutionary drama which records the winning for the infant Republic of the lands between the mountains and the Mississippi. The British witnessed with uneasiness the few settlements beginning to dot the western slope, and from his headquarters at Detroit, Lieutenant-Governor Hamilton, known as the "Hair-Buyer," sent his Indian allies in raid after raid upon the hapless frontiersmen. George Rogers Clark, scarcely twenty-six years of age, but a born leader, with a commission from Patrick Henry of Virginia, raised a force in the spring of 1778 of some two hundred and fifty men, descended the Ohio, and captured the old French posts, now held by the British, at Kaskaskia and Cahokia on the Mississippi, and Vincennes on the Wabash. Although Hamilton drove him out of Vincennes in December, Clark returned two months later after a 175-mile march across the "drowned lands," surprised and captured Hamilton and his garrison, and insured the American possession of the northwest at the close of the war. To Clark and his little band belongs the chief credit for this expansion of territory, a region now inhabited by twenty millions.

The winning of the Old Northwest helps to make clear the fact that the Revolution was to no small extent a frontier phenomenon. It was the men of the Piedmont region rather than those of the coast cities who were Whigs. After the first months there was scarcely a shot fired in New England. An appreciable part of the destinies of the Revolution lay in the hands of the frontiersmen: in Vermont under Ethan Allen, in New York under Gates and Herkimer, or in the Carolinas under Marion and Sumter, many of whom were not English, but Scotch-Irish, Germans, and Welsh. As the situation came under the influence

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of the upland country the westward migration of the state capitals began and continued in the years following the Revolution: in Virginia from Williamsburg to Richmond, in South Carolina from Charleston to Columbia; in North Carolina from Edenton to Raleigh; in Georgia from Savannah to Louisville, thence to Milledgeville and after the Civil War to Atlanta; in New Jersey from Burlington to Trenton; in New York from New York City to Albany; in Pennsylvania from Philadelphia to Lancaster and later to Harrisburg; and in New Hampshire from Portsmouth to Exeter. One of the demands of Shays' Rebellion was that the capital of Massachusetts be moved westward. The frontier, says Professor Turner, was the "vanguard of the Revolution and the advance guard of colonization."

Effect of the War on Agriculture.-At the opening of the Revolution the population of the United States is estimated to have been in the neighborhood of 2,750,000. Of men between eighteen and sixty there were about 700,000, but at no time during the war was more than one-eighth of this number under arms in the colonial armies, and during most of the period probably not more than one-sixteenth. Concerning the war there was widespread apathy, and the agricultural and industrial life of the people went on much as usual. New England after the first year, with the exception of the occupation of Newport and a few minor raids upon the coast, was free from the British. Agriculture was hardly affected. In New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania the depredations of both armies was to a great extent compensated for by the liberal prices paid in gold by the French and British for supplies of all kinds from the farmers, who seemed only too willing to double their prices for the French and to sell their produce to Howe, while Washington's men shivered and starved at Valley Forge. That the colonies must have been plentifully supplied with "sunshine patriots" we may gather from the words of John Adams, who said: "The spirit of venality is the most dreadful and alarming enemy America has to oppose. . . . It will ruin America, if she is ever ruined. If God Almighty does not interfere by His grace to control this universal idolatry to the mammon of unrighteousness, we shall be given up to the chastise

ment of His judgements. I am ashamed of the age I live in." 1 "Such a dearth of public spirit," said Washington in 1775, “and want of virtue, such stock-jobbing, and fertility in all the low arts to obtain advantage of one kind or another I never saw before, and I pray God I may never be a witness to again. . . . Such a dirty mercenary spirit pervades the whole that I should not be at all surprised at any disaster that may happen."

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Blockade runners were always ready to carry the tobacco of the Virginia plantations to a waiting market in Europe. Comparatively speaking, the last twenty years of the century was the golden age for tobacco for it was still the leading southern product, in 1791 surpassing flour as an export. The production of leaf tobacco rose from 101,800,000 pounds in 1774 to 130,000,000 in 1790, at which time over one-half of the southern population was either engaged in or dependent on its production. In the Carolinas the cultivation and export of rice went on apparently with little interruption. In 1778 the first water mill adapted to cleaning and preparing rice for the market and the model upon which subsequent improvements were based, was erected on the Santee River. The cessation of the British bounties on indigo occasioned by the war marked the beginning of the end of an important industry, a decline rapidly accelerated by the invention of the cotton gin. The cotton plant throve on the same soil and was so much easier to raise and market that by 1796 it had almost entirely supplanted indigo.

The interference in trade caused by non-importation agreements and the first years of the war stimulated throughout the colonies the production of wool. The same was true of cotton in the south. The legislatures of Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina urged the growing of cotton upon their farmers with such effect, apparently, that Hamilton, writing in 1775, said, "Several of the Southern colonies are so favorable to it that, with due cultivation, in a couple of years they would afford enough to clothe the whole continent." American agriculture with its

1 Adams, John, Familiar Letters, p. 232.

2 Washington, Writings (Ford's ed.), iii, pp. 246, 247.

3 Works of Alexander Hamilton, ed. by H. C. Lodge (1885), vol. i, p. 153.

primitive, wasteful methods was stimulated as a whole rather than injured by the war. Knowledge of European improvements was spread by the foreigners whom the war brought into the country. The first society for the promotion of agriculture was founded in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1785, followed by similar societies in Philadelphia, 1785; New York, 1791; and Massachusetts, 1792.

Effect of the Revolution on Industrial Life.-American manufactures were more directly affected by the war than American agriculture. The Revolution enfranchised American industry by doing away with all of the annoying restrictions which the English Parliament under the influence of mercantilism had imposed when it sought to confine the colonies to the production of raw materials. During the boycotts preceding the outbreak of hostilities, the colonists had refused to purchase English goods and great efforts were made to stimulate the manufacture of such necessities as woolens and linens which had formerly been im. ported in large amounts. The spinning-wheel came into renewed use. Large numbers of people pledged themselves not to eat lamb or mutton or to buy from butchers who sold it, that the wool might be saved for clothing. Women of all classes turned to the production of cloth as a domestic business. The southern planters employed their poorer white neighbors at spinning or weaving or themselves built loom houses and trained their slaves to this work. Homespun was worn by the wealthiest. The necessity of wool cards led Connecticut to loan £300 to Nathaniel Niles, of Norwich, for four years to make wire for card teeth. Massachusetts granted in 1777 a bounty of £100 for the first 1,000 pounds of "good merchantable card wire" made in any water mill in her own territory from iron made in the American states. This activity in spinning and weaving during the early years of the war declined after the cargoes captured by the privateers began to be thrown on the market and importation was resumed.

The manufacture of munitions and necessaries of war was, of course, stimulated. The life in the colonies which made everyone a hunter had developed skilled locksmiths, and small gun factories sprang up at Sutton, Massachusetts; Waterbury, Connecticut;

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