Part 11

Thus we have the most vigorous race in existence, with a few outside elements which were entirely in sympathy with the dominant type, in possession of the richest and most salubrious continent in the world. That this country was healthy and well fitted to breed a highly selected race is shown by the comparison of the fate of the colonists who went to the West Indies with those who went to New England.

These Puritan migrations were in their general nature identical, but the enervating climate of the Caribbean Sea proved fatal to the Nordics who went there, while the vigor of the New Englanders as a body was increased by the elimination of weaklings through a harsh but beneficent climate.

To appreciate how highly selected a race the Americans were at that time, one has only to consider the extraordinary group of men of talent and ability, some fifty-five in number, who represented the colonies at the Convention of 1787 at Philadelphia. Those men framed the Constitution of the United States, which after a hundred and fifty years of stress and strain still remains the model for such documents throughout the world.

Let the reader consider whether our 110,000,000 whites of today could produce the same number of men with corresponding ability and equally high motive, in spite of the fact that our population is more than thirty times as large as in 1787.

So we find in 1790 a practically empty continent, its eastern half buried under a mantle of forest, with a coast line broken by ports and short navigable rivers. Across low mountain ranges we first find a vast central valley traversed for hundreds of miles by wide rivers; then a belt of treeless plains covered with succulent buffalo grass; next a region long called the "Great American Desert"; then a range of mountains dimly known to the Colonials as the "Stony Mountains"; beyond them a great alkaline desert, next the Sierra range, and lastly the genial Pacific Coast. The western half of the continent abounded in mineral wealth, while in the central valley the virgin soil awaited the plow. These conditions had their counterpart in Canada. Wild game abounded, inviting the fur traders to explore the remoter places and enabling the settler to find ready food, while he built his log cabin and planted his crop.

Such was the continent and such the opportunity. In the following pages we shall see what has been done with these opportunities by the British race.

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Before leaving the Colonial Period, it is well to call attention, once more, to the history of the frontier. For a hundred years and more the frontier was beset by savages often instigated by the French in Canada. The Indians killed and tortured the lonely settlers and burned their log cabins. This desultory warfare cost the English many hundreds, if not thousands of lives along the frontiers of New England as well as of Pennsylvania and Virginia.

The Indians found by English settlers on their arrival in America were probably, as to many of their tribes, the most formidable fighting men of any native race encountered by the Whites. Not only were they redoubtable warriors in their own surroundings, but they were beyond question the cruelest of mankind. The Assyrians, of all ancient peoples, were reputed to be the most fiendishly cruel, but bad as they were, they did not compare with the American Indian. The details of the torture of prisoners taken in open warfare are too revolting to describe. These tortures were carried out by the squaws while the bucks sat around and laughed at the agony of their victims. There is nothing like it in history in any part of the world and the result was that the aboriginal Indians were regarded as ravening wolves or worse and deprived of all sympathy, while the Whites stole their lands and killed their game. No one who knew the true nature of the Indian felt any regret that they were driven off their hunting grounds. This attitude was found wherever the Whites came in conflict with them and explains why they were scarcely regarded as human beings.

The effect of the existence of the Indians on the frontier was to slow down the advance westward of the settlements and to compel the backwoodsman to keep in touch with his countrymen in the rear. If there had been no hostile Indians, the settlers would have scattered widely and would have established independent communities, such as were attempted in Kentucky and Tennessee after the Revolution. In this respect the Indians were a benefit to the Whites.

At the close of the period ending in 1790, despite the loss of many valuable elements at the time of the Revolution, the American race was homogeneous and Scotch and English to the core. It was bursting the bonds of the old frontier and ready to pour a human deluge over the mountains and inundate the West.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 9: Studying the percentage of various nationalities in Colonial times, and later, one is guided partly by records of immigration, partly by the names of the inhabitants, as recorded in census and other returns. There was always a tendency, in an Anglo-Saxon region, to corrupt names of other nationalities, occasionally in such a way as to make them appear English. This fact must be allowed for in all calculations in this field.]

VIII

THE OLD NORTHWEST TERRITORY

The second period to be dealt with covers the years from the first census, 1790, to the eve of the Civil War, 1860, and deals with the organization of our government and the extension of settlement westward to the Pacific. Free land and a very high birthrate among native Americans led to a great increase of the population, so that the white inhabitants of the United States, about three millions and a quarter in 1790, became twenty-seven millions and a half, in 1860, though immigration during the seventy-year period was not over four and a quarter million.

From 1790 to 1820, no official record of immigrant arrivals was kept. Thousands certainly arrived during those thirty years, but it seems probable that they were nearly all English and Scotch.

Just as the termination in 1790 of the preceding period was marked by a racial loss, caused by the expulsion of the Loyalists, so this later period was terminated by an internecine Civil War, costing the country three-fourths of a million Nordic lives, counting killed and died of wounds only. The descendants of those men who gave their lives for their country on both sides would have filled up the West, instead of its being largely populated by the immigrants we recklessly invited to our shores.

During the period referred to (1790-1860), there was, as said, no heavy immigration except from two sources, Ireland and Germany, and both of these occurred in the later portion of the period.

The displacement of agriculture by sheep in Scotland at the beginning of the nineteenth century dispossessed thousands of farmers who moved to America, sometimes with the active assistance of their landlords. The population of some districts, as Perthshire, Argyllshire, and Inverness-shire, fell sharply, because the people, no longer able to make a living, moved away. North America was the favorite destination.

Southern England experienced a similar movement. The price of agricultural products, which had been forced up during the Napoleonic wars, fell steadily for a long time. Farmers could not make a living. The counties of Kent, Hampshire, Somerset, and Surrey were the chief centers of emigration. These people also turned their faces toward North America.

Ireland, too, was in perpetual ferment and the emigration from that island was increased as the result of the abortive revolutionary attempts of the United Irishmen in 1798 and 1803. After the leader of the latter, Robert Emmet, was executed, his elder brother, Thomas A. Emmet, came to New York, practised law, and within a decade became the attorney-general of the state. The Emmets, like most others of these Irish refugees, were Protestants in religion.

Later, in 1845, the potato crop failed in Ireland, and soon after the starving peasantry, many of them from the lower types of western Ireland, swarmed over here. The women became domestic servants and the men day laborers, doing the heavy work of ditch digging and railroad building. They were Roman Catholic and that fact excited animosity in many sections of the country. They were not welcome in the West when they drifted there. It was not unusual to see on the frontier railroad stations and in advertisements in New York newspapers, "No Irish need apply." There was some violence and an American party was organized to check their entrance into local politics, for which they showed great aptitude.

Since then, these Irish have been forced upward in the social scale by later arriving immigrants over whom they had the advantage of speaking English. They became the nucleus in America of the present Roman Catholic Church, which has spread rapidly in this country. The Irish did not take to agriculture and have never shown much liking for the larger industries.

The total number of Irish immigrants during the forties and fifties amounted to more than a million and a half, and that first migration has been followed by a continuous stream of southern Irish down to the last few years when the quota restrictions went into effect.

As soon as they secured a certain amount of wealth and rose in the social scale, they established schools and colleges of their own, the teachings and, indeed, the existence of which conflict with those of the public-school system of the United States, and to that extent they have impaired the unity of the nation. Some regiments of Irish fought on the Northern side in the Civil War, but the draft riots of New York were caused by the Irish who did not want to fight for the Union. In addition to the shanty Irish there came over some middle-class families of importance.

The second immigration of importance occurred a few years later when a large number of Germans were forced over here by the failure of the Revolution in Germany in 1848. These Germans were very different from those who migrated to Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century. Many of them were from northern Germany and were Nordics, including individuals of some culture and distinction. They settled in certain cities of the West, notably in Cincinnati, Milwaukee, and Saint Louis. For the most part, however, they took up public land and became hard-working farmers. They did not in the mass improve the population already here intellectually, racially, or physically, and they impaired our national unity, at least for the time being, by the introduction of their own language.

At the end of the period here considered there were in the United States more than one and a quarter millions of German-born, of whom about one-fourth were Roman Catholics. This church, which in 1790 controlled not one in a hundred of the population, could in 1860 count upon one in every nine of the Whites.

Outside of the Irish and Germans, who were preponderantly Nordic, there was not much immigration of importance. The census of 1860 enumerated 4,138,697 foreign-born persons out of a total of nearly 27,000,000 Whites. England, Scotland, and Canada accounted for most of those who were neither Irish nor German. Thus at the end of this period the racial unity of the United States was still virtually unimpaired.

The French in the old Northwest Territory were negligible in number, amounting to but a few thousands. The number of Mexicans in Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico when we took over those countries was but a few thousand more. These Mexicans considered themselves Spanish; but as a matter of fact, the veneer of religion, language, and culture was very thin, and racially most of them were at least seven-eighths Indian. The same condition prevailed in California in 1846; the number of Mexicans being even smaller than in Texas.

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Many of the original Colonial charters granted by the English kings provided for a north and south boundary by latitude, but the western boundary was often defined as the "South Sea," and not unnaturally many of these boundaries overlapped. After the Revolution, the original colonies were induced to cede to the Federal Government their indefinite and conflicting claims to the western lands. This general and important cession of territory had two results: it gave the impoverished Federal Government lands which could be sold for its own benefit, and it led to the establishment of communities which looked to the Federal Government for everything they needed, which in itself was a long step toward unity of government.

In 1787 the western boundaries of New York and Pennsylvania were fixed as they are at present, and out of the country south of the Great Lakes, north of the Ohio River, and east of the Mississippi was erected the Northwest Territory under the special guardianship of the Federal Government.

This "Northwest Territory" had been seized during the Revolution by an extraordinary group of adventurers and frontiersmen under General George Rogers Clark. Thereby the Thirteen Colonies were in physical possession of these districts south of the Great Lakes when the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1783. Without such actual possession of the Old Northwest, it would have remained part of Canada, an outcome which would have limited the growth of the United States westward or, more probably, have led to another war. The reluctance of the British authorities in charge of the outposts in this territory to surrender their forts in accordance with the terms of the treaty, and their alleged backing of the Indians, were among the causes underlying the War of 1812.

As population increased, new States were created in succession out of this territory--Ohio (1803), Indiana (1816), Illinois (1818), Michigan (1837), and Wisconsin (1848).

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Ohio's first straggling settlers had pushed northwesterly across the Ohio River during the Revolution, but the first real, permanent settlement was by the New England Company which established Marietta in 1788. This New England immigration, though soon swamped by that from other States, played an important part in the organization of the territory and in the shaping of its future policies.

Scarcely had the Massachusetts group, led by General Rufus Putnam, taken possession of its vast grant around Marietta, when a new group led by Judge J.C. Symmes of Kentucky occupied a grant of a million acres between the Great and Little Miami Rivers, including the sites of Cincinnati, Dayton, and many of the most important of the early settlements of the territory.

Virginia had reserved a military district of more than four million acres to reward its soldiers of the Revolution, and this quickly began to be settled largely by veterans from Kentucky which was at that time, it will be remembered, still a part of Virginia.

Connecticut on the other hand had stipulated for its own Western Reserve of nearly 3,000,000 acres, extending in an oblong, 120 miles, from the boundary of Pennsylvania along Lake Erie, and the settlement of Cleveland marked its nucleus.

Thus Ohio, within a few years after the Revolution, started with four different growing points. The Virginia element increased the most rapidly, partly because of its proximity to Kentucky, partly because of its easy access by the Ohio River, so that the English and Ulster Scots of the southern part of the State soon dominated the whole.

A similar element was continually coming across the Pennsylvania border from the Monongahela country, and before long the Pennsylvania emigration to Ohio became the greatest from any one State, filling up the central part which comprised the great wheat belt. Even as late as the Mexican War, one-fourth of the members of the Ohio Legislature were natives of Pennsylvania, exceeding the members born in any other State, or in all the New England States combined, or in Ohio itself.

Through Kentucky came not merely Virginians but a steady stream of Ulster Scots from North Carolina, many of whom, however, had previously been Virginians. The southern parts of the State, therefore, took on some of the complexion of the slave-holding States, while the northern part was tinged by the culture of New England and the Central States, many coming in from western New York, which from the present point of view is to be regarded as merely an extension of New England.

Thus for a score of years the population of the States to the south and east of Ohio, which, dammed back by hostile Indians, had been ready to overflow for some time, poured into the new territory. Then the flood slackened until after the close of the War of 1812, when it was renewed with vigor. Men from all parts of the United States who had served with the western and northern forces in the War of 1812 had seen the beauties of the new country and determined to settle there as soon as peace was declared and they could dispose of their holdings at home. So far as New England was concerned this tendency was accentuated by two remarkably cold winters in 1816 and 1817, which surpassed the memories of the oldest inhabitants. General economic and social conditions were favorable for a widespread movement of population. The northwestern part of Ohio had been cleared of Indians and was then thrown open to settlement.

This second great flood of immigration into Ohio was in general of the same character as the first, bringing into the State from all sides an almost purely Nordic population of British ancestry, except for the small element of Pennsylvania Dutch who for a while kept much to themselves, maintained their own customs and their own language, and thus cut themselves off largely from the march of progress. Their Alemannish dialect was rapidly becoming almost as far out of line with the literary language of Germany as it was with the English language of their adopted home.

Later Ohio received a quarter of a million of German and Irish immigrants. But of the 2,339,511 inhabitants whom the State contained in 1860, a million and a half were born in the State itself.

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Indiana, a typical American State, owes nothing worth mentioning to the original French population. In early days it must be considered little more than an extension of Kentucky. Virginia had set aside a large tract for rewarding the men of George Rogers Clark's expedition and these were the original land agents, so to speak, for the territory. But all along the border a frontier population drifted there across the Ohio River. As late as 1850 there were twice as many Southern people in Indiana as there were from the Middle States and New England put together. A good share of these were from Kentucky, which means that they or their parents were previously from Virginia or North Carolina.

That Indiana was in sympathy a Northern State bears testimony to the fact that these migrants had little in common except original racial stock with the older slave-holding population. The Ulster Scots were the largest element, although there were also many Quakers from North and South Carolina, some of whom were of Huguenot descent. It was this element which made of Indiana a principal route of the "Underground Railroad," as the system of smuggling runaway slaves out of the slave States was called. But in the southern part of the State there was much sympathy with the slaveholders.

The settlement of Indiana falls almost entirely in the nineteenth century, the number of people there prior to 1800 being negligible and confined for the most part to lands under the protection of the little post of Vincennes. On the northerly side of the Ohio River, at the Falls, the settlement of the tract of 149,000 acres, which Virginia had conveyed in 1786 to General Clark and his soldiers, was well under way.

The rapid settlement of Indiana was a part of the great westward movement beginning with the panic of 1819, and the hard times that followed. The price of cotton was steadily declining in the South and it was easy for the poorer farmer heavily in debt to sell out or simply pack up and quit, moving on to free and richer land in a new country. Many of the Ulster Scots in the South were hostile to slavery, while others of them, strongly Jacksonian in politics, were opposed to nullification and shared the reputed death-bed regret of the hero of New Orleans that he had not hanged John C. Calhoun. South Carolina therefore sent a large contingent of Ulster Scots to the new territory, in addition to the general immigration which has already been mentioned.

The Southern stream was met in the old Northwest Territory by the stream of New Englanders coming over the line of the Erie Canal after crossing the Hudson at the great break in the highlands near Albany. Many of the settlers of northern Indiana had tarried for a season in Ohio and moved westward as they had a chance to harvest the unearned increment by selling their farms at a profit and migrating to take up cheaper land and start again.

Indiana missed the main flood of foreign immigration in the generation before the Civil War. The Germans were going elsewhere because of clannishness, while the Irish avoided Indiana because of its lack of great cities. By the time the Scandinavian flood began to come in, land values in Indiana were already high and the new settlers went farther west and north.

Indiana, therefore, of the States in the Northwest Territory is the most nearly Nordic in population and the most nearly American, and, at the end of the period under consideration, it represented an overwhelmingly native-born population originating, in not very unequal parts, from the Northern and Southern States, respectively. Though the foreign element was rapidly gaining ground, it had not begun to make itself felt even as late as 1833 when northern Indiana was a wilderness, while southern Indiana was already well peopled from Kentucky, Tennessee and the Carolinas.

The development of internal improvements together with the general migration from Northern States to all points west brought a complete change in the political complexion of the State. In 1836, alone, land sales in Indiana amounted to 3,000,000 acres and in the decade from 1840 to 1850 the population of counties bordering the new Ohio canal increased 400 per cent, while the State began to look to New York as an outlet for its products rather than to New Orleans.

From 1820, the date of the founding of Indianapolis, to 1860, Indiana had twice quadrupled her population and from almost purely American stock. During these forty years, it is calculated that a million people came to the Northwest from the slave States of the South. At the outbreak of the Civil War, Indiana had a population of 1,350,000 of which only about one in eleven was foreign-born. More than half of the aliens were from Germany, and Indiana seems to have attracted particularly the Nordic element, since Prussia contributed the largest quota. Ireland was represented by only 24,000 persons at that time and like the smaller French and English groups, they were scattered through the State and soon became lost in the general mass.

This distinctive character of Indiana, almost purely American, Protestant, and Nordic in 1860, gives the key to much of its history since then. As elsewhere the immediate surrounding States had contributed the bulk of the population. The census returns showed that the ten States constituting the birthplace of the largest number of Hoosiers in that year were, in order of importance: Ohio, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Virginia, New York, North Carolina, Tennessee, Maryland, New Jersey, and Illinois. So far as the New England element was represented, it had come almost wholly through other States.