§ 316]

EARLY SETTLEMENT

269

Various hamlets soon clustered about this first settlement, —each, as a rule, centered about a mill, and within two years the colony contained a thousand people. Thousands more floated past Marietta during its first season, most of them bound for Kentucky, but many to establish themselves at points in the Northwest.

For many years, migration continued to be by wagon to Pittsburg or Wheeling, and thence by water on hundred-foot rafts carrying cattle and small houses, or on somewhat more manageable flatboats seventy feet long perhaps. Such vehicles were steered from rocks and sand bars by long "sweeps (cut on p. 255). They floated lazily with the current by day, and tied up at the bank at night. Occasionally, long narrow keel boats were used; and these were especially convenient, because, by the brawny arms of seven or eight men, they could be poled up tributary streams, to choice points for settlement.

For a time, settlement was hampered by frequent Indian forays. The wars that followed, however, were managed by the Federal government, with regiments of "regulars." In 1790 and 1791, expeditions against the Indians were repulsed disastrously the second costing more than half the American force. But in 1794 General Wayne inflicted a crushing defeat upon the natives; and, the same year, a new treaty with England secured to the United States actual possession of the Northwest posts ($ 290). This deprived the Indians of all hope of English support,' and they ceased to molest settlement seriously until just before the War of 1812.

1 American writers used to assume that the early Indian forays were directly fomented by the English officials in the Northwest posts. No doubt the presence of English troops there did have some effect upon Indian hopes. But after a careful examination of recently opened sources of information, Professor Andrew McLaughlin writes: "I am glad to be able to state . . . that England and her ministers can be absolutely acquitted of the charge that they desired to foment war in the West. . . There was never a time when the orders of the home government did not explicitly direct that war was to be deprecated, and that the Indians were to be encouraged to keep the peace." - Report of American Historical Association for 1894, 435 ff.

...

The second stage of territorial government, with a representative legislature, did not begin until 1799. The next year Congress divided the district into two "Territories." In 1802 the eastern Territory was admitted to the Union as the State of Ohio. The western district became the Territory of Indiana.

317. Summary: the Meaning of the West. The early Western settlements, we have seen, reproduced the simplicity of the first settlements on the Atlantic coast a century and a half before; and the progress of the new communities was influenced greatly by the experience of the older ones. But the Western societies did not merely copy Eastern development. They did not begin just where the Atlantic seaboard settlements did. They started on a different plane and with greater momentum. The Atlantic frontier had to work upon European germs. Moving westward, each new frontier was more and more American, at the start; and soon the older communities were reacted upon wholesomely by the simplicity and democracy of the West. These considerations give the key to the meaning of the West in American history. Says Frederic G. Turner:

"American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, this continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character. . The frontier is the line of most rapid and (American Historical Association Report

effective Americanization." for 1893.)1

1 Dr. Turner is the first true interpreter of the frontier in our history. But every student should read also Woodrow Wilson's "Course of American History" in his volume Mere Literature, and Samuel Crothers' "Land of the Large and Charitable Air" in The Pardoner's Wallet.

PART V

MAKING THE CONSTITUTION

CHAPTER XXVIII

THE "LEAGUE OF FRIENDSHIP"

318. THE motion in Congress for Independence, on June 7, 1776 (§ 263), contained also a resolution that a "plan of confederation" be prepared and submitted to the States. A committee was appointed at once to draw up a plan. Not till November, 1777, however, did Congress adopt the "Articles of Confederation"; and ratification by the States was not secured until 1781 (§ 311), when the war was virtually over. From '76 to '81, Congress exercised the powers of a central government. The States had not expressly authorized it to do so, but they acquiesced, informally, because of the supreme necessity.

319. During those years were the States one nation or thirteen ? No one at the time thought the Declaration of Independence binding upon any State because of the action at Philadelphia, but only because of the instructions or ratification by the State itself. Congress had not even advised the States on Independence. It waited for the States to instruct their delegates. Then the vote was taken by States, and the delegates of no State voted for the Declaration until authorized by their own State Assembly. The action at Philadelphia on July 4, 1776, amounted to a joint announcement, in order, in Franklin's phrase, that they might all "hang together," so as not to "hang separately." Twenty years afterward, in a decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, Justice Chase said:

"I regard this [the Declaration of July 4, 1776] a declaration not that the united colonies in a collective capacity were independent States, but that each of them was a sovereign and independent State" (3 Dallas, 224).

The final paragraph of the Declaration refers to "the authority of the good people of these colonies"; and, in later times, that one phrase has been tortured into proof that the Declaration was the act of one people, a single nation. Such reasoning ignores three longer phrases in the same paragraph which teach more emphatically the opposite doctrine,—of thirteen peoples. The signed copy, too, was headed "The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen United States."

It would be unwise, however, to draw conclusions from the wording of this document alone, even were that wording in agreement throughout. The men of '76 had not yet learned to use the terms, independence, sovereign, state, nation, with the nice precision that belongs to later days. Moreover, they were thinking just then of the relations of the States to England, not to one another. But other language· of even the most accurate thinkers and most earnest "unionists -proves beyond

doubt that men did not think of the thirteen States as one nation in 1776.

sons

66

Hamilton wrote, in 1784: "By the Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776, acceded to by our Convention of the ninth, the late colony of New York became an independent State" (Works, Lodge ed., III, 470). The Pennsylvania Convention in July, 1776, approved the "cogent reagiven by the honorable Continental Congress for declaring this, as well as the other United States of America free and independent," and asserted that "we will . . . maintain the freedom and independency of this and the other United States." So, too, Connecticut (October, 1776), when adopting her old charter for a constitution, declared, "This Republic [viz., Connecticut] is . a free, sovereign, and independent State."

320. More than half a century later there dawned a long struggle - finally to be settled by the sword-between Union and Disunion. Meantime the early principle of Union had been growing stronger and more pervasive, until it had become the truth most essential to the political life of our people. The

§ 321]

ONE NATION OR THIRTEEN?

273 progressive side, in the long struggle that followed, took its stand upon this truth; and, with a common instinct of our people, they tried to date that truth back further than it really belonged, so as to claim for it the sanction of age. The splendid names of Story and Lincoln became connected with the mistaken doctrine that the Union was older than the States. To the North, this blunder finally became identified with patriotism; and for two generations after the Civil War it was taught in textbooks.

The present generation has not known the terrible danger of disunion, and it can look more calmly at the theories. Recent scholars reject the patriotic fiction of the antiquity of the Union in its extreme form. We can all see now that the real basis for Lincoln's stand was not any theory about the past, but the need and will of a living people.

321. Still we must not assert dogmatically that the States were older than the Union When we look at the actions of the time as well as at its words, we see that States and Union grew up together. True, the States took form fastest and first: but, from the beginning, there was a general expectation that they would soon be united. Except for some such expectation, they would hardly have been born at all and except for the creation of a union, they certainly could not have lived. The Union did not create the States; but it did preserve them.

and leave the delicate question so.

Just after July 4, 1776, there was nothing but common sense to keep any State from acting as an independent nation. Some of them did act so, even in foreign relations. Virginia negotiated with Spain about the protection of their common trading interests in the West; and she even thought it necessary for her legislature to confirm the treaty made by Congress with

1 Reformers of the English-speaking race have ever tried to persuade themselves that they were only trying to get back to the "good old days of King Edward." Progress tries to cloak itself in some legal fiction to the effect that it is merely restoration. The student of English history will be familiar with many illustrations.