§ 495] AND THE LOWER SOUTH 419 family shelter was a "three-faced camp" (a shed of poles open on one side except for hanging skins or canvas); and for some years more the home was a one-room log cabin without floor or window. As in most houses of the kind, the floor, when it came, was made of logs split in halves and laid with backs down. When Abraham Lincoln was a raw-boned youth of six feet four, with blue shinbones showing between the tops of his socks and the bottom of his trousers, the family removed again, to Illinois. Abraham, now twenty-one, after clearing a piece of land for his father, set up for himself. He had had very few weeks of schooling; but he had been fond of practicing himself in speaking and writing clearly and force THE BIRTHPLACE OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN at Hodgenville, recently enshrined within a magnificent granite memorial building erected by contributions of rich and poor in North and South. fully, and he knew well five or six good books - the only books of any sort that had chanced in his way. After this date, he walked six miles and back one evening to borrow an English grammar, and was overjoyed at finding it. He was scrupulously honest and fair in all dealings, and intellectually honest with himself, — and champion wrestler among the neighborhood bullies. He made a flatboat voyage to New Orleans; clerked in a country store, where he was the best story-teller among the loose-mouthed loafers who gathered there; studied law, and went into politics, - finally to meet his childhood neighbor, Jefferson Davis, in new relations. 495. Shortly before 1830, a yet more important road was opened to the West. Thinkers had long seen the possibility of water communication between the Atlantic and the Lakes, by way of the Hudson and a canal along the Mohawk valley. Gallatin's plan of 1808 (§ 456) included such a canal at national expense; and in 1816 and 1817 the Congressional plans for internal improvements, with this as one object, failed only because of Madison's and Monroe's unexpected vetoes. But national aid had proved a delusion; and now De Witt Clinton, governor of New York, persuaded the State to take up the work. In 1825, after eight years of splendid effort, the Erie canal was completed, -300 miles in length from Albany to Lake Erie. DeWitt Clinton had been jeered as a dreamer of dreams; and, in truth, the engineering difficulties for that day, and the cost for the State, meant more effort than does the Panama Canal to the United States to-day. The ditch was forty feet wide. It had eighty-one locks, to overcome a grade of seven hundred feet. Before the end, the cost of seven millions appalled the most enthusiastic champions of the scheme; but cost and upkeep were more than met from the first by the tolls (half a million dollars the first year, and twice that annually before 1830), while the added prosperity to the State outran even Clinton's hope. Little Buffalo became the main station for the vast fur trade that previously had gone to Europe by way of the St. Lawrence. Farm produce in the western counties doubled in value; land trebled; freight from New York to Buffalo fell from $120 to $20 a ton, and in a few years, to $6. In one year the 20 vessels on Lake Erie became 218. The forests of the western part of the State were converted into lumber, staves, and pearl-ash, and their place was taken by farms and thriving villages. New York City, the port for all the Lake district, doubled its population between 1820 and 1830, taking Philadelphia's place as the leading American city and securing more than half the total import trade of the United States. 496. Pennsylvania now found that her recent expense for good roads by land counted for little against New York's water communication with the West, and in 1826 she began her own system of canals from the Susquehanna to Pittsburg. This doubled the value of farm produce in the eastern Ohio valley. § 499] THE ERIE CANAL 421 From the great highways, too, cheap but helpful "State roads" and private turnpikes began to radiate in other parts of the West. Ohio and Illinois lacked stone for road building, but they invented a "plank road" -long a favorite in those States. The trees along the "right of way" furnished heavy hewn planks, which were laid side by side on a prepared level surface of earth. 497. The success of the Erie and Pennsylvania canals overstimulated canal building. In particular, the new States entered upon an orgy of building far beyond their means. Between 1825 and 1840 nearly five thousand miles of costly canals were constructed in America, — of which four fifths were either needless or were replaced soon by the railroad. 498. The rapid growth of the "New West" through the period 1815-1830 had never had a parallel in human history. Between the admission of Ohio and that of Louisiana there had been an interval of ten years (1802-1811). Now in six years six States came in Indiana, in 1816; Mississippi, 1817; Illinois, 1818; Alabama, 1819; Maine, 1820; and Missouri, 1821. During the next decade the Western States grew at the rate of from a hundred to a hundred and fifty per cent, while Massachusetts and Virginia remained almost stationary. Ohio in 1830 had a million people, more than Massachusetts and Connecticut together. The center of population in 1830 was 125 miles west of Baltimore (§ 433); and the Mississippi valley contained more than three and a half millions of our total population of thirteen millions, while a million more, in the back districts of the older States, really belonged to this Western movement. Since 1800, the West had grown from a tenth to a third of the nation. New England's total population was only two million, and she had gained only half a million in the last decade (even including the growing "frontier" State of Maine), while the Mississippi valley States had gained a million and a half. Indiana in the decade from 1810 to 1820 grew from 24,000 to 147,000! 499. Throughout the period, Virginia held first place as mother State for the new commonwealths both north and south of the Ohio.1 1 Dr. Turner (The New West) has some interesting figures to show the preponderance of Southern immigration. Of the Illinois legislature in 1833, he Her first emigration to the Lower South, like that into Kentucky in Revolutionary days, went mainly from her yeoman class, without slaves, or with only one or two to a family. But soon a stream of aristocratic planters followed these "small farmers " and pushed them back from the fat lands of the cotton belt to the foothills. There the small farmers continued to make the bulk of the population, much as in western Pennsylvania or North Carolina, raising, mainly, not cotton or tobacco, like the "planters," but wheat, corn, and live stock. 500. New England was populating her own frontier counties in Maine, and also, in good measure, the western districts of New York and the Lake region of Ohio. Her sons did not begin to come in large numbers into the great central valley until the close of this period. So far as they did come, they were from her western democratic farming communities. They kept much of the old Puritan seriousness and moral earnestness, mingled with a radicalism like that of original Puritans of the Roger Williams type. They were reformers and "come-outers" in religion and politics and society. Temperance movements, Mormonism, Abolitionism, Bible societies, Spiritualism, Anti-masonry, schools and colleges, when such things came in the West, all found their chief support from this element of the population. FOR FURTHER READING. - Turner's Rise of the New West, and Dodd's Expansion and Conflict, 20-37. tells us, 58 members were from the South, 19 from the Middle States, and only 4 from New England. As late as 1850, two thirds the population of Indiana was Southern in origin. Indeed, the "Hoosier" element was, originally, wholly from North Carolina. CHAPTER XLV FOREIGN RELATIONS, 1815-1830 501. FROM Waterloo to the Crimean War (1815-1854), Europe had no general war. This made it easier for the United States to withdraw from European entanglements; and, with one great exception (§ 504), our foreign questions were concerned mainly with unsettled boundaries. The Treaty of 1783 had drawn our northern boundary from the Lake of the Woods "due west" to the Mississippi. But Pike's exploration (§ 469) had made clear that the Mississippi rose almost "due south" of that lake. Moreover, the line between the Louisiana Province and the British Possessions had never been determined. The Treaty of Ghent referred the matter to inquiry by a mixed commission; and the "Convention1 of 1818" between England and the United States fixed the boundary at the 49th parallel from the Lake of the Woods to the "Stony Mountains." 502. A still more important "Convention" the preceding year (also provided for in the Treaty) had made a vast gain for humanity. The two nations agreed that neither should keep armed vessels (except revenue cutters) on the Great Lakes. This humane and sensible arrangement is the nearest approach to disarmament yet reached by international agreement. For the century since, in striking contrast to the constant threat of all European frontiers with their frowning fortresses crowded with hostile-minded soldiery, Canada and the United States have smiled in constant friendliness across the peaceful waters that unite our lands. 1 A name for an international agreement effected by an exchange of "notes rather than by a formal "treaty." |