The Fabric of America (33 page)

No such problems existed on the northern frontier. By 1845 some twelve thousand mostly white American settlers had moved into the territory on both sides of the Columbia River in what was called Oregon Country. On the basis of the Monroe Doctrine “that no future European colony or dominion shall, with our consent, be planted or established on any part of the North American continent,” Polk claimed the area from Britain, as far north as 54 degrees 40 north, the southern border of the old Russian empire and of present Alaska.

Always the New Englander, Adams backed expansion to the northwest because it tilted the United States away from slaves, and toward the great tea and silk markets of China and Japan that were making New England shippers and traders rich. At the age of seventy-nine, he vigorously endorsed the slogan “Fifty-four Forty or Fight,” but the Oregon Treaty with Britain was a compromise between the American goal and the British claim for a frontier on the Columbia River. It ensured that the last thousand miles of the longest undefended frontier in the world would run along the forty-nineteenth parallel, excluding British Columbia but bringing Washington, Idaho, and parts of Montana and Wyoming as well as Oregon within the United States.

Yet even this did not provide Adams with consolation for the values that motivated the new, enlarged United States. “Was all this a Utopian daydream?” he exclaimed in despair. “Is the one talent, entrusted to man, to be hidden under a bushel? Is the candle, destined to light the world, to be extinguished by the blasting breath of slavery?” In one of his last public pronouncements, he abrasively denounced the Constitution as “a menstruous rag” stained by the taint of slavery. Soon afterward, he was felled by a stroke that left him incapable of speech.

Two years later, in 1848, a second stroke killed him as he sat at his desk in
the Congress. In the range of his dreams and the agony he felt at his failure, his life constituted a genuine American tragedy, a fact usually obscured by celebration of his brief moments of glory as author of the Monroe Doctrine and in his bitter defiance of slavery in Congress. “Americans,” said his acerbic grandson Henry, “have always taken their tragedy lightly.”

We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others, the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men's labor.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN, Address at Baltimore, Maryland, 1864

Looking back from the 1890s on the way that Congress had sliced and diced the immense continent,
Woodrow Wilson
was astonished by its insouciance. “States have, indeed, often been whimsically enough formed,” he wrote in the
Atlantic Monthly
. “We have left the matter of boundaries to surveyors rather than to statesmen, and have by no means managed to construct economic units in the making of States. We have joined mining communities with agricultural, the mountain with the plain, the ranch with the farm, and have left the making of uniform rules to the sagacity and practical habit of neighbors ill at ease with one another.”

The process ensured that far from being an isolated activity, settlement of the prairie states was not only enclosed within a framework of law and government, but directed from Washington in a manner that only partially reflected the will of the people. In Congress, the Committee on Territories was the agency responsible, delineating the shapes of new Territories out of land allocated to Indians or from gigantic counties spawned by older states
by giving them borders that occasionally followed rivers and mountains, but more often simply followed parallels and meridians.

Minnesota, for example, came into existence like a Russian doll, emerging in 1849 from inside the larger Iowa Territory, which until 1838 had been concealed within a greater Wisconsin, originally part of the bigger northern “unorganized territory” that had once been contained within the huge Territory of Missouri, which was hidden inside the enormous District of Louisiana that in 1805 had been carved from the original gigantic Louisiana Purchase.

The impetus for the committee's work came from the spread of population beyond the old state boundaries, but it was a two-way process. The settlers' need to have their claims recognized as legitimately owned property made the wildest and most freedom-loving among them as anxious to bring in government as any politician in Washington. In less than five years, for instance, the process transformed the frontier community of Blodgett's Settlement on the Rock River into Beloit City in Rock County, Wisconsin, with a Board of Commissioners, a school district, a federal postmaster, a delegate to the territorial legislature, and a courthouse.

In 1836 Caleb Blodgett, a forceful Vermonter, accompanied by his sons and some friends, established a squatter's claim to some seven thousand acres of grass-covered bluffs on the border between Illinois and the future Wisconsin by building a log cabin and plowing a hundred acres. The claim overlooked the Rock River, and the following spring Dr. Horace White from Colebrook, New Hampshire, arrived and bought almost one third of it, about two thousand acres, on behalf of the New England Emigrating Society for $2,500. It was not just the location—on the edge of the prairies with woodland and the river at hand—but the chance of planting immediately on the plowed ground that persuaded him to buy, though at that point all he owned was Blodgett's claim to the land. “Purchasers of claims took their chances of being able to hold what they had bargained for,” White's son remembered. “What was paid for in such a case was the chance that the government land office would eventually recognize the claim as valid under the pre-emption laws, and give a patent for it.” Until then, they relied on the unofficial rules of claimants' associations that based ownership not just on payment but on use and occupancy.

This was the classic squatter's progression, adding layer after layer of ownership from occupancy, possession, and improvement, through purchase
and registration, until with the issue of a patent for the land it became official property. The final layers were added the following summer, when U.S. surveyors extended the federal Public Land Survey over Blodgett's Settlement, locating it inside Section 35, Township 1 North, Range 12 East, 4th Principal Meridian.

The system allowed every acre of public land to be given its own individual identification and put up for sale. So efficient had the survey become that in the mid-1830s, and again in the early 1840s, the income generated by the General Land Office, the agency that sold the squared-off land, amounted to roughly half of all federal revenue. Eventually the grid of squares laid out by an army of surveyors would transform the continent into more than one billion acres of property. By 1893, the year that Frederick Jackson Turner delivered his speech on the significance of the mythical frontier, the checkerboard of lines running north-south and east-west had provided the foundation for about three million farms, more than two thousand counties, and exactly thirty states and four Territories.

Once the U.S. Survey had noted the claims to preemption of the fourteen settler families squashed into three log cabins, a delegate from the Blodgett settlement was promptly sent to the General Land Office in Milwaukee to pay the federal government the purchase price for the land. According to a series of Pre-Emption Acts passed since 1831, their receipt constituted a right of ownership until a formal patent could be issued.

To cope with the hardships of the frontier life required courage and resilience. Horace White recalled that in the roughly constructed cabin he would wake on winter mornings “under an extra counter-pane of snow which had sifted through the crevices,” and until the first crops were harvested, the community had to live on what they could hunt and fish, and on barrels of flour carted in on almost impassably muddy tracks. Even so, lack of food forced them in their second year to slaughter an ox used for plowing and send an emergency team to buy a barrel of pork from a settlement downriver. The married women suffered especially. Worn down by giving birth and breast-feeding, with no respite from the need to farm and pickle, preserve and cook, several died in their thirties during the early years.

Looking back over half a century, White could also remember the beauty of the untouched prairie. “Blackberries, strawberries, wild plums, wild grapes, hickory nuts, hazel nuts and black walnuts were to be had for the trouble of
gathering them, and as for wild flowers I cannot begin to tell you how the prairies, the woods and the river banks glowed with them,” he told a commencement class at Beloit College in the 1880s. And the food shortages began to disappear once the farms were established. “We produced our own vegetables, and poultry, our own pork, and milk and butter. The cows grazed freely on the open prairie round about, and were lured homeward by an enticement of bran at the close of each day. We had a wood lot which supplied our fuel and I cut down the trees.”

But what is most noticeable about the story of Blodgett's Settlement, and a thousand frontier communities like it, is the inextricable connection with government. The federal government had provided the state line between Illinois and Wisconsin that put them just inside Wisconsin Territory and also served as the baseline for the Public Land Survey, where their preemption claim was first registered. They looked to the federally appointed governor, Henry Dodge, who nominated the chief justice, judges, and sheriffs, to maintain order, including protection of land records. And they registered with the Territorial census of 1836 to be able to vote for their own legislature, which had the power to legislate for frontier needs. Until then the laws of Michigan, the territory's parent state, remained in force.

On the basis of the census, the Territorial government divided the eastern half of the Territory into four immense counties. This placed the pioneer families of Blodgett's Settlement in Rock County and made them eligible to vote for a board of commissioners with responsibility for law enforcement and administration of the county.

Thus even before the patent was issued confirming the settlers' ownership of their land, and before the water-driven sawmill started turning out boards so that proper houses could be built to replace the log cabins, the settlement had three layers of government—county, Territorial, and federal. Within another three years, it had a federally appointed postmaster, and in 1841 a county courthouse was being constructed where prairie flowers and wild plums had grown a few summers before, in a town that now preferred to call itself Beloit rather than Blodgett's Settlement.

As Woodrow Wilson pointed out, there was nothing organic in the creation of a state like Wisconsin. In 1837 the Committee on Territories sliced away Wisconsin's Upper Peninsula, which divided Lake Superior from Lake Michigan, and gave it to Michigan, when it became a state, as compensation for the 468 square miles around Toledo that it had lost to Ohio through a mapping error. The committee also chopped off the territory west of the Mississippi—the future Iowa and Minnesota—because the river had been accepted as a boundary ever since Jefferson had made it the western edge of the imagined states of Michigania and Assenisipia in 1784.

The First Congregational Church in Beloit, Wisconsin, 1877

Within the amputated remnant, the inhabitants of Beloit in a southern prairie county had more in common with other New England communities stretching eastward through Illinois and Indiana back to their starting point beyond the Appalachians than with immigrant miners in the north and west or lumber concerns in the forest counties of the center. Like other prairie communities, it soon developed a narrow sense of self based on the shared challenge of farming and building, and through communal institutions such as the churches and Beloit College. An outside influence, however, was to fuse a wider sense of identity and pride in being part of Wisconsin and, more intensely than that, being part of the United States.

Just six years after Horace White decided to settle beside the Rock River, his friend Benjamin Brown started to advocate the “free soil” policies of the Liberty Party. The goal was to keep cheap slave labor out of the Territories,
but Free Soil also meant keeping out free African-Americans as well. In 1854 even Abraham Lincoln took this for granted. “The whole nation is interested that the best use shall be made of these territories,” he acknowledged. “We want them for the homes of free white people.” It was a populist demand, aimed both at the aristocratic planters from the south and at moneyed speculators of the east who might bring in cheap black labor. As the escaped slave Frederick Douglass noted bitterly, “The cry of Free Man was raised, not for the extension of liberty to the black man, but for the protection of the liberty of the white.”

Nevertheless, the slogan could be interpreted more broadly, to be against slavery wherever it existed. The way that Brown presented Free Soil policies led him to be dubbed, as his son recalled, “a nigger lover and abolitionist.” What had touched the new community of Beloit was the first little tug of a current that would pull it into the mainstream of national events.