Books: The Old Northwest, A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond
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Frederic Austin Ogg >> The Old Northwest, A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond
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According to official returns, the Westerners were totally
unprepared for the contest. There were but five garrisoned posts
between the Ohio and the Canadian frontier. Fort Harrison had
fifty men, Fort Wayne eighty-five, Fort Dearborn fifty-three,
Fort Mackinac eighty-eight, and Detroit one hundred and twenty--a
total force of fewer than four hundred. The entire standing army
of the United States numbered but sixty-seven hundred men, and it
was obvious that the trans-Alleghany population would be obliged
to carry almost alone the burden of their own defense. The task
would not be easy; for General Brock, commanding in upper Canada,
had at least two thousand regulars and, as soon as hostilities
began, was joined by Tecumseh and many hundred redskins.
While the question of the war was still under debate in Congress,
President Madison made a requisition on Ohio for twelve hundred
militia, and in early summer the Governors of Indiana and
Illinois called hundreds of volunteers into service. Leaving
their families as far as possible under the protection of
stockades or of the towns, the patriots flocked to the
mustering-grounds; many, like Cincinnatus of old, deserted the
plough in midfield. Guns and ammunition in sufficient quantity
were lacking; even tents and blankets were often wanting. But
enthusiasm ran high, and only capable leadership was needed to
make of these frontier forces, once they were properly equipped,
a formidable foe.
The story of the leaders and battles of the war in the West has
been told in an earlier volume of this series.* It will be
necessary here merely to call to mind the stages through which
this contest passed, as a preliminary to a glimpse of the
conditions under which Westerners fought and of the new position
into which their section of the country was brought when peace
was restored. So far as the regions north of the Ohio were
concerned, the war developed two phases. The first began with
General William Hull's expedition from Ohio against Fort Malden
for the relief of Detroit, and it ended with the humiliating
surrender of that important post, together with the forced
abandonment of Forts Dearborn and Mackinac, so that the Wabash
and Maumee became, for all practical purposes, the country's
northern boundary. This was a story of complete and bitter
defeat. The second phase began likewise with a disaster--the
needless loss of a thousand men on the Raisin River, near
Detroit. Yet it succeeded in bringing William Henry Harrison into
chief command, and it ended in Commodore Perry's signal victory
on Lake Erie and Harrison's equally important defeat of the
disheartened British land forces on the banks of the Thames
River, north of the Lake. At this Battle of the Thames perished
Tecumseh, who in point of fact was the real force behind the
British campaigns in the West. Tradition describes him on the eve
of the battle telling his comrades that his last day had come,
solemnly stripping off his British uniform before going into
battle, and arraying himself in the fighting costume of his own
people.
* See "The Fight for a Free Sea," by Ralph D. Paine (in "The
Chronicles of America").
For two-thirds of the time, the war went badly for the
Westerners, and only at the end did it turn out to be a brilliant
success. The reasons for the dreary succession of disasters are
not difficult to discover. Foremost among them is the character
of the troops and officers. The material from which the regiments
were recruited was intrinsically good, but utterly raw and
untrained. The men could shoot well; they had great powers of
endurance; and they were brave. But there the list of their
military virtues ends.
The scheme of military organization relied upon throughout the
West was that of the volunteer militia. In periods of ordinary
Indian warfare the system served its purpose fairly well. Under
stern necessity, the self-willed, independence-loving
backwoodsmen could be brought to act together for a few weeks or
months; but they had little systematic training, and their
impatience of restraint prevented the building up of any real
discipline. There were periodic musters for company or regimental
drill. But, as a rule, drill duty was not taken seriously.
Numbers of men failed to report; and those who came were likely
to give most of their time to horse-races, wrestling-matches,
shooting contests--not to mention drinking and brawling--which
turned the occasion into mere merrymaking or disorder. The men
brought few guns, and when drills were actually held these
soldiers in the making contented themselves with parading with
cornstalks over their shoulders. "Cornstalk drill" thus became a
frontier epithet of derision. It goes without saying that these
troops were poorly officered. The captains and colonels were
chosen by the men, frequently with more regard for their
political affiliations or their general standing in the community
than for their capacity as military commanders; nor were the
higher officers, appointed by the chief executive of territory,
state, or nation, more likely to be chosen with a view to their
military fitness.
So it came about, as Roosevelt has said, that the frontier people
of the second generation "had no military training whatever, and
though they possessed a skeleton militia organization, they
derived no benefit from it, because their officers were
worthless, and the men had no idea of practising self-restraint
or obeying orders longer than they saw fit."* When the War of
1812 began, these backwoods troops were pitted against British
regulars who were powerfully supported by Indian allies. The
officers of these untrained American troops were, like Hull,
pompous, broken-down, political incapables; while to the men
themselves may fairly be applied Amos Kendall's disgusted
characterization of a Kentucky muster: "The soldiers are under no
more restraint than a herd of swine. Reasoning, remonstrating,
threatening, and ridiculing their officers, they show their sense
of equality and their total want of subordination." Not until the
very last of the war, when under Harrison's direction capable and
experienced officers drilled them into real soldiers, did these
backwoods stalwarts become an effective fighting force.
* "Winning of the West," vol. IV, p. 246.
There were also shortcomings of another sort. None was more
exasperating or costly than the lack of means of transportation.
Even in Ohio, the oldest and most settled portion of the
Northwest, roads were few and poor; elsewhere there were
practically none of any kind. But the regions in which the war
was carried on were far too sparsely populated to be able to
furnish the supplies, even the foodstuffs, needed by the troops;
and materials of every sort had to be transported from the East,
by river, lake, and wilderness trail. Up and down the great
unbroken stretches between the Ohio and the Lakes moved the
floundering supply trains in the vain effort to keep up with the
armies, or to reach camps or forts in time to avert starvation or
disaster. Pack-horses waded knee-deep in mud; wagons were dragged
through mire up to their hubs; even empty vehicles sometimes
became so embedded that they had to be abandoned, the drivers
being glad to get off with their horses alive. Many times a
quartermaster, taking advantage of a frost, would send off a
convoy of provisions, only to hear of its being swamped by a thaw
before reaching its destination. One of the tragedies of the war
was the suffering of the troops while waiting for supplies of
clothing, tents, medicines, and food which were stuck in swamps
or frozen up in rivers or lakes.
Beset with pleurisy, pneumonia, and rheumatism in winter, with
fevers in summer, and subject to attack by the Indians at all
times, these frontier soldiers led an existence of exceptional
hardship. Only the knowledge that they were fighting for their
freedom and their homes held them to their task. An interesting
sidelight on the conditions under which their work was done is
contained in the following extract from a letter written by a
volunteer in 1814:
"On the second day of our march a courier arrived from General
Harrison, ordering the artillery to advance with all possible
speed. This was rendered totally impossible by the snow which
took place, it being a complete swamp nearly all day. On the
evening of the same day news arrived that General Harrison had
retreated to Portage River, eighteen miles in the rear of the
encampment at the rapids. As many men as could be spared
determined to proceed immediately to re-enforce him.... At
two o'clock the next morning our tents were struck, and in half
an hour we were on the road. I will candidly confess that on that
day I regretted being a soldier. On that day we marched thirty
miles under an incessant rain; and I am afraid you will doubt my
veracity when I tell you that in eight miles of the best of the
road, it took us over the knees, and often to the middle. The
Black Swamp would have been considered impassable by all but men
determined to surmount every difficulty to accomplish the object
of their march. In this swamp you lose sight of terra firma
altogether--the water was about six inches deep on the ice, which
was very rotten, often breaking through to the depth of four or
five feet. The same night we encamped on very wet ground, but the
driest that could be found, the rain still continuing. It was
with difficulty we could raise fires; we had no tents; our
clothes were wet, no axes, nothing to cook with, and very little
to eat. A brigade of pack-horses being near us, we procured from
them some flour, killed a hog (there were plenty of THEM along
the road); our bread was baked in the ashes, and our pork we
broiled on the coals--a sweeter meal I never partook of. When we
went to sleep it was on two logs laid close to each other, to
keep our bodies from the damp ground. Good God! What a pliant
being is man in adversity.*
* Dawson. "William H. Harrison," p. 369.
The principal theater of war was the Great Lakes and the lands
adjacent to them. Prior to the campaign which culminated in
Jackson's victory at New Orleans after peace had been signed, the
Mississippi Valley had been untrodden by British soldiery. The
contest, none the less, came close home to the backwoods
populations. Scores of able-bodied men from every important
community saw months or years of toilsome service; many failed to
return to their homes, or else returned crippled, weakened, or
stricken with fatal diseases; crops were neglected, or had only
such care as could be given them by old men and boys; trade
languished; Indian depredations wrought further ruin to life and
property and kept the people continually in alarm. Until 1814,
reports of successive defeats, in both the East and West, had a
depressing influence and led to solemn speculation as to whether
the back country stood in danger of falling again under British
dominion.
It was, therefore, with a very great sense of relief that the
West heard in 1815 that peace had been concluded. At a stroke
both the British menace and the danger from the Indians were
removed; for although the redskins were still numerous and
discontented, their spirit of resistance was broken. Never again
was there a general uprising against the whites; never again did
the Northwest witness even a local Indian war of any degree of
seriousness save Black Hawk's Rebellion in 1832. Tecumseh
manifestly realized before he made his last stand at the Thames
that the cause of his people was forever lost.
For several years the unsettled conditions on the frontiers had
restrained any general migration thither from the seaboard
States. But within a few months after the proclamation of peace
the tide again set westward, and with an unprecedented force.
Men who had suffered in their property or other interests from
the war turned to Indiana and Illinois as a promising field in
which to rebuild their fortunes. The rapid extinction of Indian
titles opened up vast tracts of desirable land, and the
conditions of purchase were made so easy that any man of ordinary
industry and integrity could meet them. Speculators and promoters
industriously advertised the advantages of localities in which
they were interested, boomed new towns, and even loaned money to
ambitious emigrants.
The upshot was that the population of Indiana grew from
twenty-five thousand in 1810 to seventy thousand in 1816, when
the State was admitted to the Union. Illinois filled with equal
rapidity, and attained statehood only two years later. Then the
tide swept irresistibly westward across the Mississippi into the
great regions which had been acquired from France in 1803. As
late as 1819, the Territory of Missouri, comprising all of the
Louisiana Purchase north of the present State of Louisiana, had a
population of only twenty-two thousand, including many French and
Spanish settlers and traders. But in 1818 it had a population of
more than sixty thousand, and was asking Congress for legislation
under which the most densely inhabited portion should be set off
as the State of Missouri. Thus the Old Northwest was not merely
losing its frontier character and taking its place in the nation
on a footing with the seaboard sections; it was also serving as
the open gateway to a newer, vaster, and in some respects richer
American back country.
In the main, southern Indiana and Illinois--as well as the
trans-Mississippi territory--drew from Kentucky, Tennessee,
Virginia, and the remoter South. North of the latitude of
Indianapolis and St. Louis the lines of migration led chiefly
from New England, New York, and Pennsylvania. But many of the
settlers came, immediately or after only a brief interval, from
Europe. The decade following the close of the war was a time of
unprecedented emigration from England, Scotland, Ireland, and
Germany to the United States; and while many of the newcomers
found homes in the eastern States, where they in a measure offset
the depopulation caused by the westward exodus, a very large
proportion pressed on across the mountains in quest of the cheap
lands in the undeveloped interior. During these years the western
country was repeatedly visited by European travelers with a view
to ascertaining its resources, markets, and other attractions for
settlers; and emigration thither was powerfully stimulated by the
writings of these observers, as well as by the activities of
sundry founders of agricultural colonies.
"These favorable accounts," wrote Adlard Welby, an Englishman who
made a tour of inspection through the West in 1819, "aided by a
period of real privation and discontent in Europe, caused
emigration to increase tenfold; and though various reports of
unfavorable nature soon circulated, and many who had emigrated
actually returned to their native land in disgust, yet still the
trading vessels were filled with passengers of all ages and
descriptions, full of hope, looking forward to the West as to a
land of liberty and delight--a land flowing with milk and honey--
a second land of Canaan.*
* Thwaites, "Early Western Travels," vol. XII, p. 148.
After the dangers from the Indians were overcome, the main
obstacle to western development was the lack of means of easy and
cheap transportation. The settler found it difficult to reach the
Legion which he had selected for his home. Eastern supplies of
salt, iron, hardware, and fabrics and foodstuffs could be
obtained only at great expense. The fast-increasing products of
the western farms--maize, wheat, meats, livestock--could be
marketed only at a cost which left a slender margin of profit.
The experiences of the late war had already proved the need of
highways as auxiliaries of national defense. It required a month
to carry goods from Baltimore to central Ohio. None the less,
even before the War of 1812, hundreds of transportation companies
were running four-horse freight wagons between the eastern and
western States; and in 1820 more than three thousand wagons--
practically all carrying western products--passed back and forth
between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, transporting merchandise
valued at eighteen million dollars.
Small wonder that western producer and eastern dealer alike
became interested in internal improvements; or that under the
double stimulus of private and public enterprise Indian trails
fast gave way to rough pioneer roadways, and they to carefully
planned and durable turnpikes. Long before the War of 1812,
Jefferson, Gallatin, Clay, and other statesmen had conceived of a
great highway, or series of highways, connecting the seaboard
with the interior as the surest and best means of promoting
national unity and strength; and, in the act of Congress of 1802
admitting the State of Ohio, a promising beginning had been made
by setting aside five per cent of the money received from the
sale of public lands in the State for the building of roads
extending eastward to the navigable waters of Atlantic streams.
In 1808 Secretary Gallatin had presented to Congress a report
calling for an outlay on internal improvements of two million
dollars of federal money a year for ten years; and in 1811 the
Government had entered upon the greatest undertaking of its kind
in the history of the country.
This enterprise was the building of the magnificent highway known
to the law as the Cumberland Road, but familiar to uncounted
emigrants, travelers, and traders--and deeply embedded in the
traditions of the Middle States and the West--as the National
Road. Starting at Cumberland, Maryland, this great artery of
commerce and travel was pushed slowly through the Alleghanies,
even in the dark days of the war, and by 1818 it was open for
traffic as far west as Wheeling. The method of construction was
that which had lately been devised by John McAdam in England, and
involved spreading crushed limestone over a carefully prepared
road-bed in three layers, traffic being permitted for a time over
each layer in succession. This "macadamized" surface was curved
to permit drainage, and extra precautions were taken in
localities where spring freshets were likely to cause damage.
Controversy raged over proposals to extend the road to the
farthest West, to provide its upkeep by a system of tolls, and to
build similar highways farther north and south. But for a time
constitutional and legal difficulties were swept aside and
construction continued. Columbus was reached in 1833,
Indianapolis about 1840; and the roadway was graded to Vandalia,
then the capital of Illinois, and marked out to Jefferson City,
Missouri, although it was never completed to the last-mentioned
point by federal authority. When one reads that the original cost
of construction mounted to $10,000 a mile in central
Pennsylvania, and even $13,000 a mile in the neighborhood of
Wheeling, one's suspicion is aroused that public contracts were
not less dubious a hundred years ago than they have been known to
be in our own time.
The National Road has long since lost its importance as the great
connecting link of East and West. But in its day, especially
before 1860, it was a teeming thoroughfare. Its course was lined
with hospitable farmhouses and was dotted with fast-growing
villages and towns. Some of the latter which once were
nationally famed were left high and dry by later shifts of the
lines of traffic, and have quite disappeared from the map.
Throughout the spring and summer months there was a steady
westward stream of emigrants; hardly a day failed to bring before
the observer's eye the creaking canvas-covered wagon of the
homeseeker. Singly and in companies they went, ever toward the
promised land. Wagon-trains of merchandise from the eastern
markets toiled patiently along the way. Speculators, peddlers,
and sightseers added to the procession, and in hundreds of
farmhouses the womenfolk and children gathered in interested
groups by the evening fire to hear the chance visitor talk
politics or war and retail with equal facility the gossip of the
next township and that of Washington or New York. Great
stage-coach lines--the National Road Stage Company, the Ohio
National Stage Company, and others--advertised the advantages of
their services and sought patronage with all the ingenuity of the
modern railroad. Taverns and roadhouses of which no trace remains
today offered entertainment at any figure, and of almost any
character, that the customer desired. Eastward flowed a steady
stream of wagon-trains of flour, tobacco, and pork, with great
droves of cattle and hogs to be fattened for the Philadelphia or
Baltimore markets.
At almost precisely the same time that the first shovelful of
earth was turned for the Cumberland Road, people dwelling on the
banks of the upper Ohio were startled by the spectacle of a large
boat moving majestically down stream entirely devoid of sail,
oar, pole, or any other visible means of propulsion or control.
This object of wonderment was the New Orleans, the first
steamboat to be launched on western waters.
The conquest of the steamboat was speedy and complete. Already in
1819 there were sixty-three such craft on the Ohio, and in 1834--
when the total shipping tonnage, of the Atlantic seaboard was
76,064, and of the British Empire 82,696--the tonnage afloat on
the Ohio and Mississippi was 126,278. Vessels regularly ascended
the navigable tributaries of the greater streams in quest of
cargoes, and while craft of other sorts did not disappear, the
great and growing commerce of the river was revolutionized.
In the upbuilding of steamboat navigation the thriving, bustling,
boastful spirit of the West found ample play. Steamboat owners
vied with one another in adorning their vessels with bowsprits,
figureheads, and all manner of tinseled decorations, and in
providing elegant accommodations for passengers; engineers and
pilots gloried in speed records and challenged one another to
races which ended in some of the most shocking steamboat
disasters known to history. The unconscious bombast of an
anonymous Cincinnati writer in Timothy Flint's "Western Monthly
Review" in 1827 gives us the real flavor of the steamboat
business on the threshold of the Jacksonian era:
"An Atlantic cit, who talks of us under the name of backwoodsmen,
would not believe, that such fairy structures of oriental
gorgeousness and splendor as the Washington, the Florida, the
Walk in the Water, The Lady of the Lake, etc., etc., had ever
existed in the imaginative brain of a romancer, much less, that
they were actually in existence, 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, everything real,
and everything affected, in the form of humanity, with pianos,
and stocks of novels, and cards, and dice, and flirting, and
love-making, and drinking, and champagne, and on the deck,
perhaps, three hundred fellows, who have seen alligators, and
neither fear whiskey, nor gun-powder. A steamboat, coming from
New Orleans, brings to the remotest villages of our streams, and
the very doors of the cabins, a little Paris, a section of
Broadway, or a slice of Philadelphia, to ferment in the minds of
our young people, the innate propensity for fashions and
finery....
Cincinnati will soon be the centre of the "celestial empire," as
the Chinese say; and instead of encountering the storms, the
seasickness, and dangers of a passage from the Gulf of Mexico
to the Atlantic, whenever the Erie Canal shall be completed, the
opulent southern planters will take their families, their dogs
and parrots, through a world of forests, from New Orleans to
New York, giving us a call by the way. When they are more
acquainted with us, their voyage will often terminate here."*
* Vol. I., p. 25 (May, 1827).
The new West was frankly materialistic. Yet its interests were by
no means restricted to steamboats, turnpikes, crops, exports, and
moneymaking. It concerned itself much with religion. One of the
most familiar figures on trail and highway was the circuit-rider,
with his Bible and saddlebags; and no community was so remote, or
so hardened, as not to be raised occasionally to a frenzy of
religious zeal by the crude but terrifying eloquence of the
revivalist. For education, likewise, there was a growing regard.
Nowhere did the devotion of the Western people to the twin ideas
of democracy and enlightenment find nobler expression than in the
clause of the Indiana constitution of 1816 making it the duty of
the Legislature to provide for "a general system of education,
ascending in a regular gradation from township schools to a state
university, wherein tuition shall be gratis, and equally open to
all." This principle found general application throughout the
Northwest. By 1830 common schools existed wherever population was
sufficient to warrant the expense; academies and other secondary
schools were springing up in Cincinnati, Louisville, St. Louis,
and many lesser places; state universities existed in Ohio and
Indiana; and Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians had begun to
dot the country with small colleges. Literature developed slowly.
But newspapers appeared almost before there were readers; and
that the new society was by no means without cultural, and even
aesthetic, aspiration is indicated by the long-continued rivalry
of Cincinnati and Lexington, Kentucky, to be known as "the Athens
of the West."
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