What Hath God Wrought (21 page)

Settlers in the Ohio Valley generally raised corn and hogs, as many of them had done in their previous homes. They found the region too cold for cotton, and by raising their accustomed crops they were able to use seed corn they brought with them and skills they had already mastered. Wooded areas were settled sooner than open country; timber provided building material and fuel, as the settlers well understood.
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Taking advantage of the river system, they could market their produce in far-off New Orleans, especially after the coming of the steamboats made the return trip upstream practical. The first western steamboat had been launched from Pittsburgh in 1811, appropriately named the
New Orleans
. Converting corn to pork made it more efficient to transport. Cincinnati on the Ohio became a meatpacking center nicknamed “Porkopolis,” turning hogs into ham and lard for shipment hundreds or thousands of miles by water. In 1837, two immigrant brothers-in-law, William Procter and James Gamble, formed a partnership to use some of Cincinnati’s mountain of lard in making soap for market, initiating the replacement of an article of household manufacture with a mass consumer product.
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Yankees coming either from upstate New York or New England itself settled across the northern band of the midwestern states. Some came as early as the 1790s to the Western Reserve in Ohio, which Connecticut had long claimed as part of its colonial land grant. But on the whole, the area along the Great Lakes was occupied more slowly than the Ohio Valley; access remained difficult before the Erie Canal opened a water highway across western New York to the Hudson River in 1825. A communal people, the Yankees often moved in families rather than as individuals; sometimes communities of several hundred would migrate together, replicating the name of the town from which they had come. In this way New England place names (deriving ultimately from seventeenth-century East Anglia) came to be repeated across the continent: There are Springfields in Massachusetts, Vermont, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Minnesota, Colorado, and Oregon. Wheat was the favorite crop of these settlers; it withstood the severe climate, and they were used to growing it. In the early days wheat and flour floated downstream to New Orleans; only after the Erie Canal opened could the market orientation of the Upper Midwest shift direction. Until the canal barges came, wheat-growers, like corn-growers, depended on the riverboats for access to world markets.
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Participants in the Great Migration were not purely “economic men”; they remained loyal, often fiercely loyal, to their cultural heritages and resolved to re-create them on the frontier. As a result, geographically distinct culture zones appeared in the West. Yankees and Butternuts spoke with different accents, ate different foods, and practiced agriculture differently. Yankees supplemented their staple crop with dairying and transplanted fruit orchards; the legendary “Johnny Appleseed” was a Yankee visionary named John Chapman. (Apples could be drunk as well as eaten, and hard cider marketed to communities with unsafe water.) Migrants from the Upland South, on the other hand, raised animals for their meat, hides, and tallow. Styles of architecture contrasted, even under primitive conditions. Upland Southerners built log cabins, said to have been invented by the Finnish colonists in Delaware while it was still New Sweden. Yankee pioneers built homes of sod, stone, or clapboard; they were more eager to form villages than to live on isolated farmsteads. When the migrants built churches, their theologies differed: Yankees were characteristically Congregationalists or Presbyterians and espoused the relatively liberal “New School” Calvinism; southern settlers included Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians of the “Old School.” Institutions of local government differed too: “Extended New England” preferred townships, “Extended Virginia,” counties. In this cultural rivalry, the southern portions of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois counted for many purposes as part of Extended Virginia. Not surprisingly, cultural differences gave rise to political conflicts within those states even after the introduction of slavery had been ruled out. Yankees believed in public education; Butternuts, in individualism and low taxes. Yankees thought the Butternuts lazy; the latter resented Yankee condescension.
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A contemporary observer recorded their mutual dislike: Southerners believed the “Yankee was a close, miserly, dishonest, selfish getter of money, void of generosity, hospitality, or any of the kindlier feelings of human nature”; northerners saw the Butternut as “a long, lank, lean, and ignorant animal, but little in advance of the savage state; one who was content to squat in a log-cabin, with a large family of ill-fed and ill-clothed, idle, ignorant children.”
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But the cultural history of the Northwest encompassed more than the rivalry between Yankees and Butternuts. Between their zones of occupancy developed a diverse intermediate zone settled by peoples from the Middle Atlantic states: Pennsylvania Presbyterians, Methodists, and Quakers, Dutch as well as Yankees from New York, and “Pennsylvania Dutch,” who were really German-Americans. (Their name for themselves, Deutsch, had been misunderstood as meaning Dutch.) Cincinnati has been called “a Middle States enclave in an Upland South environment.”
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Amidst them all were the remaining Native Americans, the French settlements that antedated U.S. sovereignty, and free Negroes hoping to encounter less hostility in the West. Later decades would find immigrants from Europe, especially Germany, Scandinavia, and Ireland. Accustomed to cultural pluralism, the settlers from the Middle Atlantic states partially blunted the conflict between Yankees and Butternuts. This conflict did, however, persist at least through the Civil War.
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Adding together the Northwest and Southwest, the early nineteenth century witnessed a population movement of stunning magnitude. The census of 1800 identified a third of a million people living beyond the Appalachians; in 1820, the number was over 2 million. Never again did so large a portion of the nation live in new settlements. Later generations of Americans would revere the westward migrants as “pioneers,” a word that originally meant the advance guard of an army, who carried tools to enable them to repair roads and bridges or throw up fortifications as needed.
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It was an apt metaphor insofar as it suggested both occupation of another’s territory and construction for later generations. But the settlers of the Great Migration gave little thought to preserving the natural environment for future use. They concerned themselves primarily with short-term advantage. They employed profligate methods of agriculture and land-clearing, heedlessly burning off timber and valuable ground cover, leaving precious topsoil to wash or blow away. Wildlife they destroyed, often deliberately (if they judged it incompatible with agriculture), sometimes through indifference, but also just for the morbid thrill of killing. Decades of wasteful slaughter plus destruction of habitat led to the extinction of the passenger pigeons, which the first settlers found by countless millions in the Ohio Valley.
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Northwest or Southwest, the frontier did not always deliver a tangible improvement in the lives of those who moved there. Poorer migrants voluntarily accepted travel conditions not much different from those imposed on the slaves sent west. “A cart and single horse frequently affords the means of transfer, sometimes a horse and pack-saddle,” observed Morris Birkbeck along the National Road heading for Ohio in 1817. “Often the back of the poor pilgrim bears all his effects, and his wife follows, naked-footed, bending under the hopes of the family.”
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To be sure, such migrants had been inured to privation in their previous homes. But the trials of the trip itself were only the beginning. Settlers found a land of hardship and disease. Malaria was endemic in the wet valleys of the Midwest. Amidst a thick woods in Indiana in 1819, a traveler came across “a log house built out of slabs without a nail,” with a dirt floor and no chimney. “This small cabin contained a young and interesting female and her two shivering and almost starving children.” Though it was November, all were barefoot. The family had a cow and a pig. The husband “was absent in search of bread,” the visitors learned. “In this situation the woman was polite, smiled and appeared happy. She gave us water to drink.”
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Pioneers like this woman were living on hope, and little more. Her condition differed little from that of the Lincoln family, who started the winter of 1816–17, upon their arrival in Indiana, in a rude shelter enclosed on three sides and open on the fourth until Thomas could build a regular log cabin. In October 1818, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, wife of Thomas and mother of nine-year-old Abraham, died of brucellosis. A frontier household needed two parents. Thomas soon found a widow who also needed to remarry and brought her to the cabin to bring up his children with her own. Sarah Bush Johnson Lincoln did an excellent job of it.
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Absentee speculators who slowed development by withholding their lands from settlement until they had appreciated made themselves understandably unpopular with actual settlers. But settlers North and South, large holders and small, whatever their crop, were speculators too, in the sense that they hoped their lands would increase in value and often held more than they could actually farm. Because the settlers in the Northwest did not invest in slaves, they had even more at stake in their lands than their southern counterparts did; they were “land-lords” but not “labor-lords.” Land titles were always more secure in the Old Northwest because the lands there had been properly surveyed from the outset, whereas in the Old Southwest the hope of making quick profits through cotton and slavery led to rapid and often unregulated settlement, with potential confusion over titles. In the hasty southwestern process, wealthy planters ended up with not only more land but also better land, because they could send advance agents out quickly to identify choice parcels. More towns sprouted up in the Northwest, and one of the reasons for this was the greater incentive northern speculators had to sponsor the growth of urban areas and commercial development so their landholdings would appreciate in value. In the Southwest, on the other hand, population remained more dispersed because slaveowners were free to relocate their labor force as they saw fit. Compared with freedom, slavery proved less favorable not only to urbanization but also to the development of infrastructure like transportation and public education, all of which made real estate more valuable. But southwestern speculators did not mind; cotton lands with access to natural waterways and an enslaved labor force could be yielding quick profits while northerners waited years for their more complicated plans to bear fruit. River transportation—easier downstream than upstream—worked satisfactorily for cotton-growers because the product they sold was so much bulkier than the items they bought.
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Speculators sometimes win and sometimes lose. Although the Great Migration was a success story from the point of view of American national aggrandizement, it did not constitute a success story for all its individual participants. Some prospered in their new homes. Those who did not might end up as tenants or hired laborers. But often they simply moved on. Sixty to 80 percent of frontier residents moved within a decade of their arrival, the historian Allan Kulikoff has found, though “the wealthier the farmer, the less often his family moved.”
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Many would fail repeatedly, drifting ever farther westward in the hope that their luck would turn. Hope was what it was all about. Tomorrow was more important than yesterday.

IV

The speculative bubble burst in 1819. By then, Europe had recovered enough from the Napoleonic conflicts that postwar shortages had been made up, and a good harvest in 1818 diminished reliance on American foodstuffs. Most importantly, the rapidly expanded supply of raw cotton temporarily outran the ability of the new mills to absorb it, and its price in Liverpool began to drop in late 1818. The value of cotton in the American seaports fell from a high of 32.5 cents a pound in October 1818 to 24 cents by the end of the year and kept going down to 14 cents.
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London banks decided there was no longer a need to extend more credit. The Second Bank of the United States, still only two years old, responded by shifting suddenly away from its own expansionist policy. The reversal reflected an effort by Bank president William Jones to protect his institution, but his clumsiness exacerbated the credit contraction. State banks, in debt to the BUS, had no choice but to call in their own loans. Banks in those days issued paper money, backed by gold and silver. Now specie was draining out of the hinterland into the commercial centers, and from there out of the country altogether. When banks began to suspend specie payment (that is, to stop redeeming their currency in gold and silver), confidence in the banking system evaporated. Investors panicked and tried to liquidate. With everyone trying to sell at the same time, the value of investments plummeted.
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Each businessman in the commercial chain was trying to save himself. At the end of the chain, the little people, the farmers and workers, the consumers, had less recourse when
their
debts were called in. They lost their mortgaged homes and farms. As their demand for goods and services shriveled, those who sold to them went bankrupt and laid off their employees. Historians refer to it as “the Panic of 1819,” from the behavior of the investors. Contemporaries called it “hard times,” reflecting the perspective of the little people.
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Hard times lasted three to four years, longer in some places.

The Great Migration itself ground to a halt, since people could not afford to buy land, prices of agricultural commodities hit rock bottom, and places like Cincinnati no longer offered jobs. The government discovered it had sold $44 million worth of land since 1790 but had collected only half the money. Overextended westerners were now trying to return unimproved lands to the Treasury in return for debt cancellation. Congress acquiesced in 1820, deciding at the same time to end the sale of public lands on credit. To keep the door open to small purchasers, the basic price of land was lowered from $2 an acre to $1.25.
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