PART VIII

A NEW AMERICANISM, 1815-1830

CHAPTER XLIV

A THIRD "WEST"

484. The war originated in blunder. It cost two hundred millions of dollars and thirty thousand lives besides the incalculable waste and agony that go with war. It was conducted discreditably. And it was ended without mention of the questions that caused it. Still it did give a new impulse to Nationality and to Americanism.

For a while there had seemed serious danger that our frontiers might be curtailed. All the more buoyantly the spirits of the people rebounded into extravagant self-confidence at the boast,-"Not an inch of territory ceded or lost." The popular imagination forgot shames and failures, and found material for self-glorification even in the campaigns. Once more we had "whipped England."

In the years that followed, this exuberant Americanism was a mighty factor in the eager occupation of our wild territory; in attempts to extend that territory; and in warning Europe to keep hands off this hemisphere.

485. The years just after the war saw the "West" made over and greatly extended. (1) War-wearied Europe poured emigrants upon our shores as never before, and our own people sought eagerly a refuge in the farm lands of the West and "Lower South" from the demoralized industries of the older sections (§ 486). (2) These new homeseekers found homes readily, because the war extinguished Indian title to vast tracts never before open to settlement (§ 488), and because the government now adopted a land

policy more liberal even than that of 1800 (§ 489). And (3) there appeared new facilities for transporting the new home seekers to the land of new homes in an advance in steam navigation and in a new era of road building (§ 490 ff.).

486. Immigration from Europe had been fairly uniform from the Revolution to the War of 1812,- some four or five thousand a year. In 1817 the number of immigrants rose at a bound to 22,000; and the fifteen years, 1816-1830, brought us a half-million,' -mainly from Ireland, England, and Germany. Most of these newcomers found their way at once to new lands in the West.

487. This westward stream was tremendously augmented by the general demoralization of industry in the Atlantic districts. Return of peace in Europe put an end to New England's monopoly of the world's carrying trade. At the same time the new manufactures, which had been built up while the war shut out English goods, were exposed to ruinous foreign competition. In the South, the great planters had been declining in wealth for a generation; and the six years of embargo and war, with no market for tobacco or cotton, had hastened their ruin.2

"Bad times" always turn attention to Western farms; and whole populations in seaboard districts were seized now with "the Ohio fever." "Old America seems to be breaking up and moving westward," wrote Morris Birkbeck in 1817, while journeying on the National Road. "We are seldom out of sight, as we travel this grand track toward the Ohio, of family groups behind or before us. ""

488. The Indian campaigns, in the long run, proved the most important part of the War of 1812. Just before war with England began, Tecumthe, a notable organizer and patriot, united all the

1The next sixteen years brought twice as many; and then the Irish famine (Modern World, § 766) sent us a million from Ireland alone in four years.

2 Jefferson and Monroe were almost in a state of poverty before their death, and Madison's fortune was seriously reduced. Professor Dodd asserts (Expansion and Conflict, 13) that Jefferson's home, Monticello, with 200 acres of land, sold for $2500, in 1829.

8 A European observer, himself seeking a home in the West. A graphic account of the westward movement is given in McMaster, I, 381 ff.

§ 489] NEW HOMESEEKERS AND NEW HOMES 411

tribes of the West into a formidable confederacy to resist White advance. General Harrison attacked and defeated Tecumthe's forces at Tippecanoe, a tributary of the Wabash River (November, 1811), while that chieftain was absent among the Southern Indians. In 1812 the struggle merged in the larger war. The Battle of the Thames (§ 475) takes its chief importance from the death there of Tecumthe; and the Battle of Horseshoe Bend (in the winter of 1814), where Andrew Jackson crushed the Southern

Indians, meant far more for American development than the victory at New Orleans. When conflict was over, treaties with the conquered Indians opened to White settlement much of Georgia, most of Alabama and Mississippi, all of Missouri, and half of Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan.

489. The credit system of land sales (§ 458) had not worked well. Optimistic pioneers bought large amounts of land with all their ready cash, and found themselves unable to make the later payments. In 1820 Congress abolished the plan, but

THIS MAP, WITH PERMISSION, IS SLIGHTLY SIMPLIFIED FROM THAT OF DR. FREDERICK J. TURNER IN HIS "NEW WEST."

§ 490]

NEW ROADS TO THE WEST

413

One hundred dollars Settlers who had pre

began to offer 80-acre lots at $1.25 an acre. would now secure full title to a farm. viously made some payments on the credit plan were given full title to as many acres as they had paid for at this new rate.

490. In 1811 the steamboat Orleans was launched on the Ohio at Pittsburg; and after the war, steam navigation quickly became the chief means of travel in the West. In 1818, Walk-inthe-Water was launched on Lake Erie. Two years later, sixty steamers plied on the Ohio and Mississippi, and others were finding their way up the muddy waters of the Missouri, between herds of grazing buffalo. It now took only five days to go from St. Louis to New Orleans, and two weeks to return.

FULTON'S FERRY BOAT, The Union, built in 1836. From a print of 1859. Compare with The Clermont on page 384. For the full significance of the name in 1836, see §§ 579–584.

A steamboat could be built anywhere on the banks of a river, out of timber sawed on the spot. At first, engine and boilers had to be transported from the East; but soon they began to be manufactured at Pittsburg, whence they could be shipped by water. The woods on the banks supplied fuel.

Some of the vessels were "floating palaces" for that day, "fairy structures of Oriental gorgeousness and splendor," exclaims one exultant Westerner,

"rushing down the Mississippi as on the wings of the wind, or plowing up between the forests and walking against the mighty current as things of life; bearing speculators, merchants, dandies, fine ladies . . . with pianos, novels, cards, dice, and flirting, and love making, and drinking; and, on the deck, three hundred fellows, perhaps, who have seen alligators and fear neither gunpowder nor whisky."

The flatboats and rafts (§ 305) still swarmed out upon the great rivers from every tributary, and made a somber contrast