What Hath God Wrought (8 page)

The synthesis of agriculture and commerce such as Aaron and Fanny Fuller practiced had profound cultural as well as economic consequences in the early nineteenth-century United States. The way they and others succeeded in realizing their vision of the good life strengthened their purposefulness and reinforced the dignity of their labor and thrift. The availability of such opportunities on a relatively wide scale fostered individual autonomy, even within the family, weakening patriarchal traditions and encouraging sons and daughters to strike out on their own. Like the early-modern European advocates of free enterprise, Americans of the Fullers’ generation thought of their economic careers as making a moral and political statement on behalf of freedom. Despite the continued exclusion of women from the “public sphere” of politics, wives laid (a modest) claim to the gratitude of the commonwealth, for were they not “republican mothers,” responsible for rearing future citizens?
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It is no accident that the word “liberalism” came to have both an economic and a political meaning—although our generation often finds this a confusing ambiguity. In early nineteenth-century America, economic development in regions such as southern New England, western New York and Pennsylvania, or Ohio was associated with the appearance of social reform movements.
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The woman of the house often led the way in establishing commercial contact with the wider world beyond the local community, through her desire to introduce amenities into the rustic simplicity of her home. From the peddlers who called with increasing frequency over the years, she could purchase a clock for the mantel, a second book to go with the Bible, and even porcelain cups. The traveling artisan could make furniture better than her husband’s best efforts. She might have earned the money to pay for these things herself, with “put out” work. So, despite occasional reproaches from neighbors that she was introducing unbecoming “luxuries,” she initiated the democratization of refinement. Sometimes her husband resisted. The famous itinerant preacher Peter Cartwright remembered how, in the 1820s, he had to urge a Methodist layman to spend some of his savings on furnishing his primitive cabin, so as to “give your wife and daughters a chance” at a decent life.
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More often the husband cooperated in improving the family’s standard of living. After all, if he could be addressed as a “gentleman,” should not his home reflect gentility? A successful yeoman family looked forward to dividing the downstairs into two rooms (one of them bravely named “the parlor”) and adding a full upstairs, perhaps with additional fireplaces and chimneys. In warm climates, a prosperous family would build a separate structure for cooking, to keep from overheating the main house. A few even had their portraits painted by itinerant artists.
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Many of the items in the peddler’s pack or on the storekeeper’s shelves came from overseas: “dry goods” (that is, textiles of wool, linen, and silk), “wet goods” (wine, gin, brandy, and rum), household hardware, cutlery, firearms, tools, and the aptly named China-ware. Besides manufactured products such as these, the United States also imported unfinished iron, citrus fruits, coffee, tea, and cocoa. Even prior to independence, American consumers had played an important role in the economy of the British Empire, which has been called “an empire of goods.” The colonists employed for political advantage the leverage this provided them. Before having recourse to arms, they famously collaborated to boycott British imports as a way of protesting against parliamentary taxation.
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More recently, when the Jefferson administration had embargoed all overseas trade, the impact on the American economy had been very serious. Americans paid for their imports with exports that included wheat, tobacco, rice, lumber, “naval stores” (turpentine, tar, and tall pines for ships’ masts), animal hides and pelts—and, by 1815, cotton. Indeed, all the countries bordering on the Atlantic had long been integrated by a complex network of trade routes that, despite the efforts of metropolitan governments, often broke the bonds of the mercantile systems of the rival empires. The coming of peace to the Atlantic world in 1815 found the British and French Empires greatly diminished, the Spanish and Portuguese Empires in the final stages of disintegration. International commerce consequently expanded in response to increased freedom of the seas, and so did the opportunities for American agricultural producers to find markets abroad.

Ocean travel was easier than overland travel, and ocean commerce far greater in scope. People had been crossing the Atlantic regularly for more than three hundred years; no one crossed the North American continent above Mexico until Sir Alexander Mackenzie’s Canadian expedition in 1793–94; the only Americans to have done so in 1815 were the veterans of Lewis and Clark’s expedition of 1805–6. A typical ocean crossing from New York to Liverpool took three or four weeks, but the westward voyage, against prevailing winds and currents, took anywhere from five to eight or even more. (The news that might have prevented the War of 1812 and that which would have prevented the Battle of New Orleans were both carried in westward crossings.) These times had not improved since the middle of the eighteenth century.
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New England Yankees made themselves one of the world’s great seafaring peoples; they had already traveled around Cape Horn and across the Pacific to open the China trade. They had a remarkable amount in common with the Dutch—another seagoing, predominantly Calvinist people who combined agriculture with commerce, practiced religious toleration, and had no compunction about subjugating native populations. Seaport Americans earned livings not only as merchant sailors but also as fishermen, whalers, and shipwrights. North Atlantic cod flourished in vast numbers off the coasts of Newfoundland, Labrador, Nova Scotia, and New England. The fish could be preserved by drying, for even longer by salting. Yankee men who had not secured land to farm or had spare time on their hands in winter could go out on the fishing boats. In colonial times cod became one of America’s important exports, to Europe and to the West Indies. But after the Revolution London clamped down on American rights to fish off the Canadian shore and to sell in the British West Indies. Both would be the subject of diplomatic negotiations after 1815. In the meantime, Yankee fishermen contrived to expand their domestic market.
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Until 1815, Americans looked principally eastward, toward the Atlantic and Europe. The Battle of New Orleans encouraged them to face westward toward the continent—but not exclusively: They still needed frequently to glance back over their shoulders, toward the ocean that continued to bring them goods, additional people, and new ideas. Atlantic crossing times and costs would both fall steadily over the next thirty-five years and for the rest of the century, integrating commodity markets, even on the North American frontier, in an early example of what our own era calls “globalization.”
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Native Americans showed as much willingness as white people to participate in the market economy. Their aptitude for commerce gave rise to one of the fastest-growing “industries” of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: the fur trade. Tribes all over North America participated, trapping beaver, hunting buffalo, and catching sea otters to sell into what was truly a global market. When the Old Northwest around the Great Lakes ceased to be a “middle ground,” the New Northwest on the Pacific Coast took its place, with Americans, British, and Russians all competing to obtain beaver and sea otter furs. Furs from Oregon sold in China, Hawaii, South America, and Europe. No longer do historians believe that white traders laughingly obtained these pelts for a few trifling beads. On the contrary, Native people drove shrewd bargains and received items of use and value to them—even though, in the Pacific Northwest, they sometimes destroyed their profits in spectacular potlatches to win prestige. Among other benefits, the fur trade promoted peace on the frontier. Nevertheless, it proved but a mixed blessing to the Indians, for it not only depleted their ecological resources but spread unfamiliar diseases, including dependency on alcohol, a favorite item of their purchase.
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Enthusiasm for the fur trade prompted the most powerful tribes of the Great Plains to conclude a peace agreement with each other in 1840 so they could concentrate on lucrative buffalo hunting instead of warfare. By that time they hunted buffalo not primarily for their own consumption but in order to sell the hides and robes to white traders. Serious over-hunting resulted. Meanwhile, the Indians’ new herds of domesticated horses competed with the buffalo for grasslands and sheltered winter habitats. So did the animals with the wagon trains of white settlers crossing the Plains to Utah, Oregon, and California. The great bison herds had begun to diminish even before “Buffalo Bill” Cody and his fellow white hunters slaughtered meat for the workers on the transcontinental railroad. Despite the mythology of “noble savages” in harmony with nature, in fact Native Americans collaborated with whites in altering their environment and depleting its resources.
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Whites involved in the fur trade followed the examples, sometimes the actual leadership, of French Canadians who had been involved in the enterprise since long before Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase. Besides buying pelts, whites also trapped beaver on their own. Starting in 1825, the firm of William H. Ashley paid salaries to keep white trapper-traders in the wilderness the year round, departing from the depot-based practice of its British rival, the Hudson’s Bay Company. Other “mountain men” worked as free agents or on shares for their creditors. These white men often married Native women, who contributed valuable knowledge as contacts, guides, and interpreters. All would hold an annual
rendezvous
with each other and traders from many Indian tribes to pool their catches. The trade in beaver furs declined after about 1840, as beaver became harder to find and the fashion for men’s fur hats passed.
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After the proclamation of Mexican independence in 1821, the old Spanish mercantile restrictions on trade with foreigners came to an end. Now,
nuevomexicanos
could exchange Mexican silver, livestock, and beaver pelts for U.S. cotton textiles and manufactured goods. Traders opened up communication between the western United States and the north of Mexico. Entrepreneurial Mexicans journeyed as far north as Council Bluffs, Iowa, in search of commercial opportunities. The Santa Fe Trail they and their American counterparts followed between New Mexico and St. Louis was surveyed and marked by the U.S. federal government as far as the international border, though no actual roadway was ever laid. In 1833, Bent’s Fort in what is now southeastern Colorado began to facilitate commerce among Americans, Mexicans, and the Indian tribes of the southern Plains; it became “the capital of the southern fur trade.”
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During its height in the 1820s and ’30s, the beaver fur trade added greatly to whites’ knowledge of North American geography. The mountain men’s commercially motivated expeditions revealed valuable information about the Rocky Mountains and practicable ways to cross them. The most extensive of the explorations of the American fur trade were those of Jedediah Smith. The fourth of twelve children born to a New Hampshire farming family, he went to work for Ashley’s fur company in 1821 at the age of twenty-two and retraced much of Lewis and Clark’s route up the Missouri in 1822–23. During his short life Smith proved himself a natural leader, an intrepid explorer, and a successful businessman. Taking his Bible and a few companions, this sober, religious young man laid out the route of the future Oregon Trail over South Pass in 1824 and explored the region of the Great Salt Lake. He traveled over the Mojave Desert to Mexican San Diego and returned as the first American (quite possibly the first person) to have crossed the Sierra Nevada and the Great Basin. The next year, he trekked overland a second time to California and thence up the coast by land to Oregon. Along the thousands of miles that he traveled without maps, he fought some Indians, traded with others, survived hunger, thirst, snowstorms, and floods, and got mauled by a grizzly. He successfully challenged the Hudson’s Bay Company in the fur business, and with two partners was able to buy out his employer Ashley in 1826. A rich man when he returned to St. Louis in 1830, Smith had seen more of the Rocky Mountain West than anyone else in his time—and more than most since. He decided to make a final expedition, to New Mexico, partly in order to complete a map of the Rockies he was drawing based on his own experiences. Along the Santa Fe Trail in May 1831, he rode by himself away from his well-equipped wagon train, to look for a water hole. He located the water hole, but so did a Comanche hunting party. When his nervous horse wheeled, they interpreted it as a hostile movement and opened fire. His body was never found.
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IV

In 1815, Isabella, a slave girl of about seventeen living in Ulster County, New York, married Thomas, an older man who belonged, as she did, to the Dumont family. Over the next eleven years Isabella bore Thomas five children, in between stints of strenuous labor in the fields. New York had recognized the legality of marriages between slaves in 1809, meaning that now the couple and their children could not be sold apart from each other. Isabella herself had been sold away from her own parents at the age of nine for a hundred dollars, when their master died and his estate went up for auction. Isabella’s first owner had been a Dutch American, and the child’s first language was Dutch. Her next owner, an English-speaker, beat her for not comprehending his commands; her back bore the scars for the rest of her life. By 1810, she had been sold twice more (each owner realizing a profit on the transaction), ending up with the Dumonts.

The state of New York had adopted a program of gradual emancipation, decreeing that slaves born after the Fourth of July 1799 should become free at age twenty-eight (for males) or twenty-five (for females). This would allow the owner who bore the cost of rearing the children reimbursement with several of their prime working years. Isabella, having been born before the cutoff date, would remain in slavery for the rest of her life. But in 1817, the New York legislature sped up the emancipation process and decreed that on July 4, 1827, all remaining slaves, whenever born, should become free. Masters would receive no financial compensation from the state but did have one more decade to exploit their chattels’ unpaid labor. Shortly before the final emancipation took effect, Isabella’s five-year-old son was sold away from her, south to Alabama. This constituted a violation of New York law; the newly free Isabella took the remarkable step of suing for and obtaining the boy’s return, an act that set a pattern for her lifetime of resolute opposition to injustice.
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