"During the thirty or forty years of their independence they have done absolutely nothing for the sciences, for the arts, for literature, or even for the statesmanlike studies of politics or In the four quarters of the globe political economy. who reads an American book? Or goes to an American play? Or looks at an American picture or statue?" To put a sharp sting into his taunt he added, forgetting by whose authority slavery was introduced and fostered: "Under which of the old tyrannical governments of Europe is every sixth man a slave whom his fellow creatures may buy and sell?" Some Americans, while resenting the hasty and often superficial judgments of European writers, winced under their satire and took thought about certain particulars in the indictments brought against them. The mass of the people, however, bent on the great experiment, gave little heed to carping critics who saw the flaws and not the achievements of our country — critics who were in fact less interested in America than in preventing the rise and growth of democracy in Europe. References J. S. Bassett, Life of Andrew Jackson. J. W. Burgess, The Middle Period. H. Lodge, Daniel Webster. W. Macdonald, Jacksonian Democracy (American Nation Series). Ostrogorski, Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties, Vol II. C. H. Peck, The Jacksonian Epoch. C. Schurz, Henry Clay. Questions 1. By what devices was democracy limited in the first days of our Republic? 2. On what grounds were the limitations defended? Attacked? 6. Account for the unpopularity of John Adams' administration. 7. What had been the career of Andrew Jackson before 1829? 8. Sketch the history of the protective tariff and explain the theory underlying it. 9. Explain the growth of Southern opposition to the tariff. 10. Relate the leading events connected with nullification in South Carolina. 11. State Jackson's views and tell the outcome of the controversy. 12. Why was Jackson opposed to the bank? How did he finally destroy it? 13. The Whigs complained of Jackson's "executive tyranny." What did they mean? 14. Give some of the leading events in Clay's career. 15. How do you account for the triumph of Harrison in 1840? 16. Why was Europe especially interested in America at this period? Who were some of the European writers on American affairs? of the United States, Sections 86-87; Elson, History of the United States, pp. 492-496. Nullification. - McMaster, History of the People of the United States, Vol. VI, pp. 153-182; Elson, pp. 487–492. The Webster-Hayne Debate. Analyze the arguments. Extensive extracts are given in Macdonald's larger three-volume work, Select Documents of United States History, 1776-1761, pp. 239–260. The Character of Jackson's Administration. Woodrow Wilson, History of the American People, Vol. IV, pp. 1-87; Elson, pp. 498–501. The People in 1830. From contemporary writings in Hart, American History Told by Contemporaries, Vol. III, pp. 509–530. Biographical Studies. — Andrew Jackson, J. Q. Adams, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, J. C. Calhoun, and W. H. Harrison. CHAPTER XII THE MIDDLE BORDER AND THE GREAT WEST "WE shall not send an emigrant beyond the Mississippi in a hundred years," exclaimed Livingston, the principal author of the Louisiana purchase. When he made this astounding declaration, he doubtless had before his mind's eye the great stretches of unoccupied lands between the Appalachians and the Mississippi. He also had before him the history of the English colonies, which told him of the two centuries required to settle the seaboard region. To practical men, his prophecy did not seem far wrong; but before the lapse of half that time there appeared beyond the Mississippi a tier of new states, reaching from the Gulf of Mexico to the southern boundary of Minnesota, and a new commonwealth on the Pacific Ocean where American emigrants had raised the Bear flag of California. THE ADVANCE OF THE MIDDLE BORDER Missouri. When the middle of the nineteenth century had been reached, the Mississippi River, which Daniel Boone, the intrepid hunter, had crossed during Washington's administration "to escape from civilization" in Kentucky, had become the waterway for a vast empire. The center of population of the United States had passed to the Ohio Valley. Missouri, with its wide reaches of rich lands, low-lying, level, and fertile, well adapted to hemp raising, had drawn to its borders thousands of planters from the old Southern states from Virginia and the Carolinas as well as from Kentucky and Tennessee. When the great compromise of 1820-21 admitted her to the union, wearing "every jewel of sovereignty," as a florid orator announced, migratory slave owners were assured that their property. would be safe in Missouri. Along the western shore of the Mississippi and on both banks of the Missouri to the uttermost limits of the state, plantations tilled by bondmen spread out in broad expanses. In the neighborhood of Jefferson City the slaves numbered more than a fourth of the population. Into this stream of migration from the planting South flowed another current of land-tilling farmers; some from Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi, driven out by the onrush of the planters buying and consolidating small farms into vast estates; and still more from the East and the Old World. To the northwest over against Iowa and to the southwest against Arkansas, these yeomen laid out farms to be tilled by their own labor. In those regions the number of slaves seldom rose above five or six per cent of the population. The old French post, St. Louis, enriched by the fur trade of the Far West and the steamboat traffic of the river, grew into a thriving commercial city, including among its seventyfive thousand inhabitants in 1850 nearly forty thousand foreigners, German immigrants from Pennsylvania and Europe being the largest single element. Arkansas. Below Missouri lay the territory of Arkansas, which had long been the paradise of the swarthy hunter and the restless frontiersman fleeing from the advancing borders of farm and town. In search of the life, wild and free, where the rifle supplied the game and a few acres of ground the corn and potatoes, they had filtered into the territory in an unending drift, "squatting" on the land. Without so much as asking the leave of any government, territorial or national, they claimed as their own the soil on which they first planted their feet. Like the Cherokee Indians, whom they had as neighbors, whose very customs and dress they sometimes adopted, the squatters spent their days in the midst of rough plenty, beset by chills, fevers, and the ills of the flesh, but for many years unvexed by political troubles or the restrictions of civilized life. Unfortunately for them, however, the fertile valleys of the Mississippi and Arkansas were well adapted to the cultivation of cotton and tobacco and their sylvan peace was soon broken by an invasion of planters. The newcomers, with their servile workers, spread upward in the valley toward Missouri and along the southern border westward to the Red River. In time the slaves in the tier of counties against Louisiana ranged from thirty to seventy per cent of the population. This marked the doom of the small farmer, swept Arkansas into the main current of planting politics, and led to a powerful lobby at Washington in favor of admission to the union, a boon granted in 1836. Michigan. In accordance with a well-established custom, a free state was admitted to the union to balance a slave state. In 1833, the people of Michigan, a territory ten times the size of Connecticut, announced that the time had come for them to enjoy the privileges of a commonwealth. All along the southern border the land had been occupied largely by pioneers from New England, who built prim farmhouses and adopted the town-meeting plan of self-government after the fashion of the old home. The famous post of Detroit was growing into a flourishing city as the boats plying on the Great Lakes carried travelers, settlers, and freight through the narrows. In all, according to the census, there were more than ninety thousand inhabitants in the territory; so it was not without warrant that they clamored for statehood. Congress, busy as ever with politics, delayed; and the inhabitants of Michigan, unable to restrain their impatience, called a convention, drew up a constitution, and started a lively quarrel with Ohio over the southern boundary. The hand of Congress was now forced. Objections were made to the new constitution on the ground that it gave the ballot to all free white males, including aliens not yet naturalized; but the protests were overborne in a long debate. The boundary was fixed, and Michigan, though shorn of some of the land she claimed, came into the union in 1837. |