Part 11

Thomas Jefferson was, at this time (1785), our minister to France, "in every word and deed the representative of a young, vigorous and determined state." Ledyard often sought his counsel and aid. Struck by Ledyard's uncommon devotion to his one idea, Jefferson said to him one day, "Why not go by land to Kamschatka, cross over in some of the Russian vessels to Nootka Sound, fall down into the latitude of the Missouri, and penetrate to and through that to the United States?"

This conversation curiously shows us that, at the time the American Union was first formed, more was known about Kamschatka than about the region lying between the Mississippi and the Pacific Ocean. Through Siberia, at least, there was a travelled route, while from the Mississippi to the Pacific there was none. The conversation is therefore an instructive starting-point in the history of our country.

Although the enterprise itself failed to bear fruit at this time, the coming together of these two men, one of whom became the apostle of the American idea in its broadest sense, was like the striking together of flint and steel. Fire followed it. Ledyard had the best knowledge of the subject. Ledyard pointed out the way. Ledyard had given Jefferson something to ponder, which, in his sagacious mind, soon grew to a question of highest national importance.

Ledyard eagerly agreed to make the trial, provided that the Russian Government would give its consent. This being granted, the explorer set out for Kamschatka; but at Irkutsk, in Siberia, he was stopped and turned back, in consequence of the jealousy of the Russian-American Company, whose headquarters were at Irkutsk, and who feared their interests would be endangered if this daring stranger were permitted to pass into their territory.

From this time Ledyard's personal history ceases to be associated with that of the Great West. But he was the first to perceive, perhaps dimly, what was shortly to become, with a broader growth, the ruling idea of American statesmen.

FOOTNOTE

[1] JOHN LEDYARD was a native of Groton, Conn.; (born 1751, brother of Colonel William, who fell in the defence of Groton, 1781). John went first to Dartmouth College to be fitted as an Indian missionary. In those primitive days the students were called together by the blowing of a conch-shell. Though quick and apt to learn, Ledyard hated study. He preferred climbing the mountains about the college. In four months he ran away. He, however, returned, but finding the rigid discipline no less irksome than before, made his escape in a canoe, in which he floated down the Connecticut River, from Hanover to Hartford, one hundred and forty miles. Ledyard was proud, sensitive, impulsive, and restive under correction or restraint. Finding his purpose to enter the ministry thwarted, in a fit of resentment he shipped for the Mediterranean as a common sailor before the mast. This voyage was Ledyard's preparation for service under Cook. He was in turn theological student, sailor, soldier, explorer, and in his make-up all these characters were combined to produce a thorough-going explorer.

A YANKEE SHIP DISCOVERS THE COLUMBIA RIVER.

With the close of the Revolutionary War, the commercial spirit of our countrymen began to re-assert itself in deeds which should stamp them for all time as worthy sons of worthy sires. Far back, even when the colonies were but a few feeble settlements strung along the Atlantic seaboard, few people had shown greater enterprise in seeking avenues for commerce than they.

This was especially the case with the New-England colonies. War had ruined their commerce, but with the coming of peace the shrewd New-England merchants were on the lookout for new outlets, since nowhere could ships be so cheaply built, while the population largely got their living either on or from the sea. Besides this, they had a brand-new flag of their own, of which they were justly proud, and which they wished to see afloat on the most distant seas.

The discoveries made on the north-west coast by England, though kept secret till after the close of the war, were by no means unknown to our merchants and sailors, in whom the laudable desire to profit by every avenue the ocean might throw open to honest enterprise and skill, was inspired and increased by a condition of national freedom.

It was at this time that certain merchants of Boston formed (1787) a partnership for beginning a trade between the north-west coast and China. They fitted out the ship "Columbia," of two hundred tons, and sloop "Washington," of ninety tons burden, with trading-goods, which the masters were to barter for furs with the Indians, sell the furs at Canton, and with the proceeds buy teas for the home-market. Large profits were expected. As the United States was a new power at sea, and her flag little known, the masters were provided with passports, to certify they were honest traders sailing under an honest flag.

The owners, however, looked somewhat farther than a mere trading voyage would suggest. They had in mind the establishment, under the national authority, of permanent factories, somewhat similar to those of the Hudson's Bay Company. Looking to this end, their masters, John Kendrick and Robert Gray, were instructed to buy lands of the natives, to build storehouses or forts, or make such other improvements on these lands as would insure their permanent tenure to the owners. In so far as occupation by any white people was concerned, the territory lying between Cape Mendocino and the Straits of Fuca was known to be vacant, though, out of England, Spain was thought to have the best claim to it. Kendrick and Gray were therefore directed to begin operations on this unexplored strip of coast, not only as traders, but as explorers of an undiscovered country.

Less could not well be said of these voyages, because of the importance they subsequently assumed in the dispute between England and the United States about their respective boundaries, but we will leave that question now to take its proper turn in the story, and go back to the voyages themselves.

Both vessels[1] reached Nootka in the early autumn of 1788. Having made her cargo, the "Columbia" set sail for Canton, sold her furs for teas, with which she returned to Boston in August, 1790, thus first carrying the flag quite round the world.

This time the Bostonians did not throw the tea overboard as they had once done, when it came seasoned with an odious tax. A quite different reception was given to the "Columbia" as she sailed up the harbor with the stars and stripes fluttering at her mast-head, after an absence of nearly three years. As she passed the Castle, the "Columbia" fired a national salute, which the fortress immediately returned. The loud-booming cannon brought the inhabitants in crowds to the wharves to see what ship was receiving such honorable welcome. As the "Columbia" rounded to, in the inner harbor, the people shouted, the cannon pealed, as if the occasion were one worthy of public commemoration and rejoicing. It was, indeed, felt to be the breaking away from old despotisms which a colonial condition had so long imposed, while the track round the globe was not yet so much travelled, or so well known, as to make the "Columbia's" voyage seem any less a great achievement.

It happened that the "Columbia" had touched at Owyhee, the royal residence of the king of the Sandwich Islands. Captain Gray persuaded the king to let the crown prince go with him to the United States. The prince was royally welcomed in Boston, and safely returned to his native land, so bringing about a friendliness between Americans and the islanders, of much benefit to commerce in the future.

Although the owners had lost money[2] by the venture, they were public-spirited men, and determined on making a second trial. The "Columbia" was therefore again fitted for sea, and in June, 1791, was again breasting the waves of the North Pacific. During this second voyage, Captain Gray saw the mouth of a river, into which, however, he did not sail, because the surf broke with violence quite across it. He, however, carefully noted down the latitude in his log; but when, shortly after, he fell in with Vancouver, that officer doubted what Gray told him about this river. It could not be there, he thought, since he himself had carefully searched without finding it.

After parting company with Vancouver, Gray sailed south, with the intention of knowing more about the river in question. When the entrance was sighted, the "Columbia" was boldly steered for it with all sails set. She safely ran in between the breakers, into a broad basin which no keel but hers had ever ploughed before, and without anchoring held her onward course fourteen miles up the river, surrounded by a swarm of canoes, among which the stately ship moved a leviathan indeed.

When the anchor was let go, Captain Gray found himself quietly floating on the bosom of a large freshwater river, to which, upon quitting it, he gave the name of his ship,—the Columbia.[3]

As a result of these voyages, the direct trade between the North Pacific and China fell almost exclusively into the hands of American traders. British merchants were restrained from engaging in it by the opposition of their East India Company. Russian vessels were not admitted into Chinese ports. We find the British explorer, Mackenzie, speaking with much ill-humor about this state of things, which, nevertheless, only goes to prove the energy and skill of American merchants and ship-masters, who, from the first voyages of the "Columbia," were known to the Indians of the north-west coast as Bostons, because these vessels hailed from that port.

FOOTNOTES

[1] BOTH VESSELS. The "Washington," being a sort of tender to the "Columbia," coasted about Vancouver Island and Straits of Fuca. In pursuance of his instructions, her master bought large tracts of land from native chiefs, from whom he took regular deeds. Copper coins, and medals struck for the purpose, were also given to the natives. Kendrick was the first to collect sandalwood as an article of commerce.

[2] THE OWNERS LOST MONEY. "All concerned in that enterprise have sunk fifty per cent of their capital. This is a heavy disappointment to them, as they had calculated, every owner, to make an independent fortune."—_Letter to General H. Knox._

[3] THE COLUMBIA RIVER. The entrance was sighted by Heceta (Spaniard), 1775, who called the northern promontory St. Roque. This name was soon given, on Spanish maps, to a river St. Roque, flowing out into Heceta's inlet, who says, "These eddies of the water caused me to believe that the place is the mouth of some great river." He did not, however, attempt to enter. Captain Meares (1788), in searching for this River St. Roque, ran into the inlet, but, seeing nothing but breakers ahead, left it under the conviction that there was no such river. On this account he called the northern promontory Cape Disappointment. The southern point was named by Gray, Point Adams.

THE WEST AT THE OPENING OF THE CENTURY.

"_America now attains her majority._"

At the close of the Revolutionary War, almost nothing was known in the American colonies about the country lying to the west of the Mississippi. The sources of the Missouri[1] were unknown even to French traders. Nobody knew that a great sister river carried the snows of the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific, or that the head waters of these two noble streams lay coiled about the feet of the same lofty chain.

Where, then, should we locate the West? Possibly central along the eastern base of the Alleghanies, certainly remote at Pittsburg, and perhaps reaching its vanishing-point somewhere about the Dark and Bloody Ground of Kentucky. Among a host of foes civilization stood at bay here, but would take no backward step.

France opened the way from east to west. France and England fought for the primacy of the continent, and England won. Defeated France gave up the idea of maintaining herself in America, and secretly ceded to Spain what the war had left her west of the Mississippi, as a bankrupt might convey his property out of the reach of his most pressing creditor.

When the Colonies revolted, France saw her way to make them, like the cat in the fable, pull her chestnuts out of the fire. It is no part of a king's trade to set up a republic. France played her own game,[2] played it astutely and to the end. When the Colonies, with her help, achieved their independence, she showed them, much to their wonder, for they were fresh to the tricks of diplomacy, that in politics there is no more friendship than in trade, or rather that politics is a game in which the best player wins.

In view of what it had cost her to give up Louisiana, in the first place, not only in loss of territory, but national prestige, it is perhaps not strange that when, as our ally, France was in turn a victor, she should be found trying to get back Louisiana for herself. To do this she had to play a double game, with the help of Spain, while that power stood ready in the background to take any thing that came in her way.

These two gamesters wished to restore what we should call the old balance of power, thus confining the United States nearly in the limits they had occupied as colonies. To her honor, England would not listen to their seductive pleadings. Not that she loved her revolted subjects more, but that she loved her old rivals less. When John Jay gave their schemes to the light of day, it was seen France had never meant we should be a power among the nations—only a little republic. In the end England's pride prevailed over the sting of wounded self-love. Instead of dictating the terms of peace, as she had meant to do, France had to see herself shut out from Louisiana, for good and all, while Spain, the Mephistophiles of American affairs, recovered Florida from England, so excluding the United States from access to the Gulf of Mexico either by the seaboard or the Mississippi River. What was now left of French Louisiana, as it existed previous to this war, presented the anomaly of a colony of French people living under the Spanish flag.

In effect, John Jay had urged upon England that blood is thicker than water. Franklin said, "Let us now forgive and forget." And so the Anglo-Saxon spirit prevailed.

With independence achieved, the United States gained, as we have seen, all the territory, except Canada, which England had conquered from France. At a single stride her frontier had reached the Mississippi on the west and the Great Lakes on the north.

Before the war, of which this was the grand sequel, a thin stream of English immigrants, chiefly from Virginia and North Carolina, under the lead of Daniel Boone, had crossed the mountains of North Carolina into Kentucky. This movement was central in what is commonly known as the Blue Grass Region, of which Lexington may be considered the pivot.

After the war, a second and larger emigration, chiefly from New England, crossed over the Alleghanies to the head of navigation on the Ohio, whence it moved down that river to the Muskingum, and was central about Marietta. Here, then, we have two separate streams of population, belonging to the same sturdy Anglo-Saxon race, though originating in different sections of the young Republic, each taking along with it to its new home in the West the customs and traditions of its own section, and guided by instinct or destiny upon lines which, ere long, were to divide slave from free States.

By an Act of Congress, known in history as the Ordinance of 1787, all that great block of wilderness country, into which this last emigration was setting, became one political division under the name of the North-west Territory.[3] The Act creating this territory also provided for making three States from it, and most wisely forbade that slavery should ever exist within its borders. Thus it was that the Ohio came to be not only a physical, but a political, dividing-line between the sections, which, now that the law of the land had fixed a limit slavery should not overstep, came to be designated as North and South, not, as formerly, from geographical situation only, but because the line had been thus sharply drawn between free and slave institutions. Each was now on trial before the world; each was now to show what it could do for human progress, under its own institutions, with its own means, and on its own chosen ground.

It would seem as if this splendid acquisition of ours, this North-west Territory, now constituting the great heart and seat of power in the American Union, might well have filled the fullest measure of patriotic desire for territorial expansion. It was to be, however, but the cradle of a newer and more robust growth, as the original States had been for that just beginning at the centre. It was an empire in itself, comprising all those States now enclosed between the Mississippi, the Ohio, Pennsylvania, and the Great Lakes. Yet this whole tract held, in 1792, no more than ten thousand whites, settled in widely scattered spots, among sixty-five thousand wild Indians.

These widely scattered spots were the new settlements at Marietta and Fort Harmar on the Muskingum, Cincinnati and Fort Washington on the Ohio, Clarksville at the Falls of the Ohio, with the old French posts of Vincennes on the Wabash, Kaskaskia on the river of the name, and Fort Chartres and Cahokia on the Mississippi. Over this vast tract a score of military posts held the Indians in check, and formed the kernels of future settlements. Along the line of the Great Lakes, and contrary to treaty stipulations with her, England still held the key-points,—Niagara, Miami, Detroit, Michilimackinac,—thus restricting the movement of our citizens from east to west on that line, and so shutting them out from the lucrative Indian trade of the Far West.

Let us now look at the section south of the Ohio.

Kentucky was made a State in 1792, and Tennessee in 1796. All south of Tennessee and west of Georgia was formed (1798) into the Mississippi Territory. On the east, or American, shore of the Mississippi, settlement was mostly confined to the places mentioned in "The Founding of Louisiana" as villages. None had outgrown this condition. Most were simply plantations. Population had increased (1785) to thirty-eight thousand persons, chiefly by the coming-in of refugees from Nova Scotia and St. Domingo. And blacks were already numerous enough to cause uneasiness among the planters. The cultivation of cotton and sugar was growing to importance; but the Spaniards at New Orleans wanted all the water to their own mill, as the proverb has it, which meant nearly the same thing as closing the river to American trade altogether.

The Falls of the Ohio had already begun to assume importance both as a depot and shipping-point. They were a natural stopping-place for all boats going up or down the river. Hence Louisville had grown up above the falls as the port of a remarkably thrifty cluster of inland settlements which had taken the place of the primitive stations of the first settlers.

On both sides of the Ohio the Indians made a determined stand against the coming in of white settlers. But bravely as they fought, their power was so broken in many bloody conflicts, that they were, at length (1794), glad to sue for peace. Shorn of power, they were now confined within narrower limits. England gave up (1795) the lake fortresses. All roads to the West being now open, they were speedily thronged by an army of settlers.

FOOTNOTES

[1] THE SOURCES OF THE MISSOURI. About the time Mackenzie crossed the mountains (see chapter "Hudson's Bay to the Pacific"), an employee of the North-west Company, named Fidler, is reported to have gone from Fort Buckingham to the head of the Missouri. Traders from St. Louis ascended the river at this period, but how far is uncertain.

[2] FRANCE PLAYED HER OWN GAME. It is notorious that the French minister, Vergennes, intrigued with the British minister, Shelburne, outside the knowledge of the United States Commissioners. See "Life of Lord Shelburne."

[3] NORTH-WEST TERRITORY was ceded to the General Government by the States to provide a means for paying off the debt incurred during the war. In thirty years it had half a million people. Connecticut reserved a strip along Lake Erie to herself.

GROUP II.

BIRTH OF THE AMERICAN IDEA.

AMERICA FOR AMERICANS.

"_America, is therefore the land of the future._"—HEGEL.

I.

AMERICA FOR AMERICANS.

ACQUISITION OF LOUISIANA.

"_I have given England a rival that will humble her pride._"—_Napoleon._

We have now done with that part of French Louisiana lying east of the Mississippi. It is now blossoming all over with incipient civilization in the form of log cabins, trading-posts, cross-roads, hamlets, and schoolhouses.

From 1793 to 1799 our old ally France, now become a republic, was trying first to cajole, then to bully us into taking up her quarrel with England. She even went to the length of demanding tribute-money from us as the price of peace, and, upon a refusal, of ordering our minister out of her territory. Our remonstrances were treated with disdain, our ships captured, and our flag fired upon at sea, without even the formality of a declaration of war. This conduct drove us into making reprisal. After one or two of her frigates had been beaten in fight by ours, France grew more pacific toward us, and again cultivated friendly relations with a power she had seemed to despise, until the reply "Millions for defence, but not a cent for tribute,"[1] warned her that America would never yield a principle to threats.

Let us now turn to Spain. In 1795 this power had made a treaty which secured to us the right of storing[2] American goods at New Orleans, pending shipment abroad, thus making the river so far free for our commerce.

In 1800 Napoleon had come to the head of the French nation. Ambition to restore the ancient sovereignty of France over Louisiana led him to propose to Spain the exchange of Tuscany for it. Spain accepted the offer, and in 1800-1801 treaties of cession were signed, but not made public, because war with England was probable, and Napoleon wished to make his title good on the spot with the bayonets of his soldiers, before England could know of it. Therefore for the present Spain kept possession of Louisiana in trust for France.

Just here some grave international questions arose. Our rapid growth in the West gave Spain uneasiness. It certainly was putting her possessions in peril. In consequence she showed such an unfriendly spirit toward us as to keep the West in a state of chronic irritation.[3] It even disposed the West to listen to plans for separating her from the East, which Spain would gladly have aided in, and so was fast breaking up the feeling of national unity so essential to keep alive in the Republic.

Suddenly, without previous notice, the Spanish intendant at New Orleans revoked the right of deposit. The act shut the only door by which the people of Ohio, Kentucky, and Illinois could get to the sea. It exasperated them to such a point that they begged the General Government to drive the Spaniards out of the Mississippi for good and all.