A Wilderness So Immense (36 page)

As the American minister in Paris, James Monroe in 1796 once again found himself, as he had in Congress ten years earlier, monitoring secret machinations about the Mississippi River on which the happiness and
peace of his country depended. Angry over the Jay Treaty—which it saw as a betrayal of the Franco-American alliance of 1778—the Directory threatened to begin apprehending American ships trading with Great Britain and, as Monroe recalled in his autobiography, to assume “a still more hostile attitude toward us.” In the halls and salons of Paris, it was said

Privately, Monroe was able to get assurances from a member of the Directory that “their sole object in regard to Canada was to dismember it from England and weaken her.” France, the unnamed director continued, would only take Louisiana “in the event of a war between Spain and England … to keep the British from … seiz[ing] the mouth of the Mississippi,” and “with respect to our interior we had no cause for inquietude.” Nevertheless, as President Washington attempted to steer his administration on a neutral course between the warring powers, America’s relations with France continued to deteriorate. When Monroe left Paris a few months later—his recall engineered by the Federalist secretary of state Timothy Pickering during the bitter fight over Jay’s Treaty—the Directory refused to recognize his successor, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, and the two republics drifted toward armed conflict.
³³

The only surprising aspect of the American reaction to these events was the anger in the Federalist press over the possibility that Spain might cede Louisiana to the hated Republic of France. Northern politicians who had been willing to surrender the Mississippi River in 1786 (and who would oppose the Louisiana Purchase in 1803) suddenly found themselves embracing the views of the westerners they had been eager to push out of the union only a decade earlier.

If France took possession of Louisiana, warned the
New York Herald,
“the United States would be encircled by an artful, insinuating, active nation, and must forever renounce the hope of obtaining by purchase or amicable means, the territory west of the Mississippi, to the ocean.” Interposed between the United States and the west, France was sure to threaten Mexico and the rest of the Spanish American empire as well.
“In the hands of the plodding Spaniards they do no harm and little good to the world at large,” the Federalist writer continued, “but in the hands of an active nation, Mexico would be a dangerous engine of power.” Self-interest demanded that America “prevent any powerful nation from making establishments in our neighborhood.”
³⁴

It should not be surprising that America’s reaction to developments in Europe was accurately reflected in letters from Secretary of State Timothy Pickering to his ambassador at the Court of St. James’s. “We have often heard that the French government contemplated the repossession of Louisiana,” Pickering wrote,

“France means to regain Louisiana,” he added, “and to renew the ancient plan of her monarchs of
circumscribing
and encircling what now constitute the Atlantic states.”
³⁵

At first glance, these sentiments seem an entirely predictable expression of American attitudes at the end of the eighteenth century. The aversion to having French troops on North American soil was commonplace, and the dread of being surrounded by hostile neighbors and cut off from westward expansion is older than the republic, for the restrictive provisions of the Quebec Act of 1774 were listed as evidence of tyranny in the Declaration of Independence.

The surprise in these letters is not in the sentiments expressed but in the identities of the author and recipient. The words were written by Timothy Pickering, one of the participants in the separatist movement of 1786, the chief engineer of Monroe’s recall from France, and a future ringleader both of the 1803–1804 separatist reaction to the Louisiana Purchase and the separatist Hartford Convention of 1814. He wrote them to Rufus King, the congressional floor manager of the 1786 scheme to close the Mississippi, push the south and west out of the union, and establish a northern confederacy. What caused this drastic change in their attitude toward the west? Federalist antipathy toward Jacobin France, bitter partisan politics over the ratification of the Jay Treaty, and the rising specter of Napoleon’s armies are only part of the answer.

•   •   •

In the major settlements of Kentucky and along the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers, the frontier world of isolated log cabins and hunters who frightened Governor Carondelet by wandering for months with “a carbine and a little maize in a sack” was already history. By the mid-1790s, log stockades and “strong cabins” built by the likes of Daniel Boone were being supplanted by frame houses with glass windows and brick chimneys standing in tidy rows along rectilinear streets that anticipated the midwestern farming towns of Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Kentucky led the way, but within eight years of its founding in 1791 even Knoxville, Tennessee, had “about 100 houses all built of wood: the newest are mostly two-story frame structures.” King and Crozier’s mercantile store was offering, “in addition to their former assortment” of imported commodities,

Another Knoxville firm touted their new shipment of goods “from the Philadelphia market; all of which they will sell… on moderate terms for corn, rye, oats, bees wax, flax, old congress money, and Martin’s certificates.”
³⁶

By the mid-1790s, well-established trade routes linked eastern suppliers with the rapidly growing populations of Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Ohio Country. The consumer demands of frontier families bolstered ties of kinship, culture, or politics that stretched across the Appalachian Mountains. In any contest for the allegiance of western settlers—as Talleyrand recognized in his lecture about colonization and trade—American consumers “by far prefer English merchandise” over anything that Spain could provide. “Seven-tenths of the manufactured articles consumed in Kentucky,” a French traveler calculated, “are imported from England.”
³⁷

In the 1790s, the temptation to secede and join with Spanish Louisiana grew weaker with every Conestoga wagon that made the sixteen-day trip from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh, where consumer goods were shipped down the Ohio to merchants and their customers in Lexington and Louisville, Marietta and St. Louis, Natchez and Knoxville.
This movement of British and American manufactured goods across the mountains in the 1790s ended the threat of separatism in the Ohio River Valley just as surely as blue jeans and rock music helped bring down the Berlin Wall in the 1980s.
³⁸

The first retail store opened in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1783. Within a year the town boasted six stores, and by 1792 Lexington alone had twenty retail stores. The surviving invoices and shipping lists kept by merchant John Wesley Hunt provide a glimpse of the consumer goods sent “scrambling over the hills” in seven-ton wagonloads for shipment downriver. In October 1795, for example, Hunt sent five wagons full of merchandise from Philadelphia for delivery to his stores in Kentucky. On October 24, Mathias Vankirk’s wagon left Pittsburgh loaded with two bales of muslin, two cases of dry goods, a chest of tea, and a hogshead of brandy. On the 26th, John Hack departed with four casks of wine, a bale of dry goods, a keg of shot, two crates of Queens ware china, two boxes of wool cards, a keg of alum, kegs of Morocco red and Turkey red dyestuff and six trunks, two cases, a bale, and a tierce
*
of dry goods. William Graham left on the 28th carrying a hogshead of port wine, eight boxes of glass and china, and four trunks and a case of dry goods. That same day Elisha Phipps set out with two tierce of sugar and coffee, three boxes of linen, two barrels of snuff, two barrels of hats, a barrel of brushes, two boxes of wool cards, a keg each of ginger, indigo, brimstone, and shoe polish, and two tierce, four trunks, and a bale of dry goods. Finally, on October 29, Minshal Williams left Pittsburgh with four barrels of sugar, a case of looking glasses, a barrel of shoes, a tierce of dry goods, and three tierce of sugar and coffee.
³⁹

By the end of the decade, John Wesley Hunt’s shipments of dry goods were even larger and his inventories more detailed (with notes indicating which commodities were especially fine or fashionable). The consumer preferences in Kentucky included imported men’s cotton hose, plain or ribbed, in several colors, and silk hose in white, gray, or “fashionable” black. Men’s gloves came in “fashionable silk,” beaver, or white—women’s in white, gray, “Black fashionable,” and kid. Buttons arrived by the gross, plated or pearl, sized for coats or vests. For the gentlemen Hunt also stocked shaving boxes, razors, steel spurs and plated spurs, and the “best finished pen knives.”

For Kentucky households Hunt had frying pans and copper tea kettles, sets of cups and saucers, dozens of teapots, sugar bowls and creamers, glass and common salts, pint and quart bowls, pint and half-pint
tumblers, wineglasses, and pepper mills. He stocked reams of “good quality” writing paper and letter paper, English and American playing cards, four dozen “Webster’s Spelling Books,” seven dozen Bibles, and half a dozen copies of the “late edition of [Jedidiah] Morse’s Geography.” His inventories included bolt after bolt of imported fabrics. “Fine flannel” in red, scarlet, white, or yellow. Fine dimity and common dimity with narrow or broad stripes. Cotton gingham in checks, stripes, and “apron check.” Bed ticking and “fine diaper” fabric, two dozen assorted tablecloths, yards of Irish and German sheeting, “jaconet suitable for cravats,” and “Black Sprig or Spotted gauze (for Vails).” Homespun fabric was for “none but the inferior inhabitants.” The ladies of Louisville wove and exported 2,588 yards of country linen in 1801, but they used their income to buy stylish fabrics imported by merchants like John Wesley Hunt.
⁴⁰

An invoice from the Pittsburgh Glass Works described a consignment of six boxes of window glass, thirty-one dozen porter bottles, eight dozen half-gallon bottles, four dozen quart and pint bottles, and an assortment of jars “filling up the above boxes.” Then there were the books. Invoice and shipping list “No. 19” from Philadelphia publisher and bookseller Mathew Carey to John Wesley Hunt began with two copies of Dr. Samuel Johnson’s
Dictionary.
Eight large pages and two hundred forty titles later it ended with the Reverend Richard Baxter’s
Saints Everlasting Rest
(probably the 1790 American abridgment edited by John Wesley). In between were novels and sermons, the Abbé Raynal’s
Indies,
Buffon in an abridged quarto edition, John Locke’s
Essays,
six copies each of Thomas Paine’s
Age of Reason
and Thomas Jefferson’s
Notes on the State of Virginia
and eighteen of Daniel Defoe’s
Robinson Crusoe.
Hunt also had four copies of Richard Steele’s prescriptive
Ladies’ Library
and three of Susanna Rowson’s sentimental
Fille de Chambre,
but six copies of Mary Wollstonecraft’s
Vindication of the Rights of Woman,
with its dedication to “M. Talleyrand-Périgord, late bishop of Autun” (and author of the inclusive language of Article VI of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen). If the shelves of books that John Wesley Hunt offered his customers in Lexington, Kentucky, are any indication, the manly frontier days of a log cabin, a carbine, and a sack of maize were long past.
⁴¹

The wealth amassed by John Wesley Hunt paid Benjamin Henry Latrobe to design Hopemont (now the Hunt-Morgan House on Gratz Park in Lexington) in the neoclassical style. It also supported his acquisition of the English thoroughbreds Baronet, Paymaster, and Royalist, which were standing stud on his Fayette County farm as early as 1803.
Perhaps the west’s first millionaire ran a more successful commercial network than his rivals because his partners were family. Hunt’s parents, Mary and Abraham, a miller in Trenton, New Jersey, who bred horses on the side, watched prosperity embrace their four older boys and tuberculosis claim their four younger children. John Wesley’s elder brothers Pearson and Wilson worked the wholesale trade and shipping in Philadelphia, while his younger brother Theodore chose a career in the navy. As chronic illness claimed his other siblings, John Wesley Hunt did business with his cousins. Jesse Hunt traded out of Cincinnati, and Jeremiah Hunt was his uncle’s agent in Detroit. Abijah started as John Wesley’s partner in Lexington and in 1798 opened the partners’ store in Natchez, a pivotal location for their export trade to New Orleans.
⁴²

Coin and currency always being in short supply, only 15 percent of John Wesley Hunt’s customers paid for their purchases in cash. Seventeen out of twenty of his Lexington clients settled their accounts in “country produce,” merchandise that Hunt exported by river to New Orleans, as did countless other western merchants. Flatboats carried their flour, tobacco, hemp, beef, pork, whiskey, butter, and other commodities to buyers downriver. The income generated by this Kentucky and Tennessee produce was then transferred on merchants’ accounts with businessmen in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and other eastern cities. There, it bought American and British manufactured goods that men like John Wesley Hunt shipped over the mountains to Kentucky and Tennessee, where the cycle of commerce started anew. The shipments of flour alone exceeded eighty thousand barrels in 1801, a trade valued at $2.6 million. By the beginning of the new century, 70 percent of this export trade was transported in American ships: of 265 vessels that cleared the port of New Orleans in 1802, 158 were American, 104 were Spanish, and 3 were French.
⁴³
Regardless of the Bay State’s earlier disdain for the trans-Appalachian west, Timothy Pickering, Rufus King, and their maritime friends in New England had learned to care about Louisiana and the Mississippi River because what was good for Kentucky was good for the American merchant marine.