American Experiment (82 page)

Many were looking for a new start: New Englanders escaping from falling crop prices and the loss of farmland to sheep pasture; Carolinians and Tennesseeans displaced by plantations and “King Cotton”; Irish and Germans and others who had settled in port cities and now were on the move again. They might start their trip by one of a dozen or so railroads from the East. Or take the Erie Canal, switch to the Welland Canal around Niagara Falls to Lake Erie, and then catch a boat to Toledo, move along the Maumee River to Fort Wayne and Peru in Indiana, and branch off on canals running to Indianapolis and Terre Haute. Or take the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal from Georgetown to Cumberland, Maryland, and pick up the Cumberland Road to Columbus and Indianapolis and points west. Fares were falling; the New Orleans-Louisville steamboat trip cost fifty dollars in 1825, about half that a decade later, while Pittsburgh-Cincinnati dropped from about twelve dollars to about six.

In the great flat, fertile area extending down from the Great Lakes, Americans were no longer pioneers but settlers. Gone were the days when frontier communities had to experience long years of isolation and self-sufficiency. Settlers in the Michigan woods and Illinois prairie were now only a week or less, rather than months, from New York and Philadelphia. And the West was creating its own market centers. Cities like Detroit, Chicago, and Indianapolis were growing with dizzying speed along with the new transportation network. Miners, tanners, lumberjacks, plowmen, and craftsmen of a thousand different styles elbowed aside the old pioneer jack-of-all-trades in his rough homespun.

Farther south, in the “New Counties” organized from the Indian cessions in Alabama and neighboring states, life for the settler was more cramped. Land was quickly given over to growing cotton and rice. The yeoman farmer did not enjoy the variety of opportunities found farther north, but it was still a region of feverish change, “full of the ringing of axes and the acrid smoke of new-grounds,” wrote W.J. Cash. “Whirl was its king.”

A farmer with several acres of cotton and one or two slaves might strike it rich in a few seasons and then set himself up as an old tidewater planter. Imitating the Charleston elite, the planter would build a house of lumber sawn on the place—perhaps not a very grand house, sometimes “just a box, with four rooms, bisected by a hallway, set on four more rooms.…But it was huge, it had great columns in front, and it was eventually painted white, and so, in this land of wide fields and pine woods it seemed
very imposing.” In good years the planter would acquire more land and slaves, broadcloth suits, silk dresses, and even a coach-and-six. North or South, the Yankee peddler made shoes, clocks, pails, patent medicines available to nearly everyone.

“The nervous, rocky West is intruding a new and continental element in the national mind,” Ralph Waldo Emerson observed, “and we shall yet have an American genius.…It is the country of the Future…a country of beginnings, of projects, of designs, of expectations.”

It was also a country of conflict, as the speed of change heightened the clash of economic interests natural to society. Replacing the three distinct waves of emigrants—the transient pioneer who occupied the land, the settler who cultivated it, and the man of capital and connections who fit it into a broader economic network—the entire progression now overlapped and intertwined in a single generation. Federal land policy after 1819 also served to heighten tensions among squatter, landowner, and capitalist, for the government’s refusal to sell land on credit left many farmers without the means of gaining title to the rich new lands, while other settlers who could afford to buy tracts often arrived to find squatters already on their spread.

Politics was a ready escape valve for simmering conflict. Everyone could talk about it, take part in it, denounce it. Almost everyone “expected at some time to be a candidate for something; or that his uncle would be; or his cousin, or his cousin’s wife’s cousin’s friend would be”; so that with frequent elections for numerous offices, people seemed constantly to be electioneering. Conflict also erupted in outright violence. Squatters chased owners off land, and in turn were driven off. In Illinois and Iowa, gangs of horse thieves and other outlaws fought little wars with the citizenry for control of land and even of county governments. The “slick law” of the vigilante ruled some of the New Counties of the South. In the western melting pot, violence was an accepted way to settle differences.

Violence was still the final arbiter in the civil war between red people and white. Gone were the days when President Jefferson could drink a toast to “The Red People of America—Under an enlightened policy, gaining by steady steps the comforts of the civilized, without losing the virtues of the savage state.” Some Americans did continue to idealize, and perhaps patronize, the Indian. A small group of artists and writers, led by the painter George Catlin among others, depicted and sometimes romanticized the noble savage. In their Washington finishing school, Mary Rapine and her classmates thrilled to the adventures of the Pawnee warrior Petalesharo.
For more political reasons, men like Edward Everett and Theodore

Frelinghuysen rose in the Congress to demand that the government honor its commitments to the red nations.

But Henry Clay struck closer to the prevailing national attitude in his view, as interpreted by John Quincy Adams: “There never was a full-blooded Indian who took to civilization. It was not in their nature. He believed they were destined to extinction, and although he would never use or countenance inhumanity towards them, he did not think them, as a race, worth preserving.” Most settlers did not share even this benignly perverse, self-fulfilling attitude. Caught in the cycle of occupation, Indian retaliation, and white counter-retaliation, settlers hated the Indians and the pusillanimous, chicken-livered federals who made treaties with them.

Indians under Black Hawk learned once again the price of resistance. Removal of most of the northwestern tribes had proved easy, since their strength had largely been broken in the War of 1812-15. But Black Hawk, a man of such righteous dignity that he reminded Easterners of James Madison and even Sir Walter Scott, persuaded a number of tribesmen to remain by the fields and graves of their ancestors on the Illinois frontier. Forced over into Wisconsin by white depredations during the fall of 1831, Black Hawk found so little food and game there that he recrossed the Mississippi next spring with about a thousand of his tribe. When both state militia and regulars were called out, he tried twice to surrender, but each time his envoys were cut down by white volunteers. Trapped against the river, his people were driven into the water at bayonet point and shot as they struggled for air. At slaughter’s end, 150 of the original thousand remained alive.

All this time there thrived in the Southeast a wondrous collection of tribes that gave the lie to the stereotype, benign or malign, of the Savage. About 60,000 Indians—Choctaws, Chickasaws, Cherokees, Creeks, and Seminoles—had established their own civilizations on some of the best lands in Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. They had adopted both the best and the worst of white culture. The Cherokees of Georgia owned 22,000 cattle, 2,000 spinning wheels, 700 looms, 31 gristmills, 10 sawmills, 8 cotton gins, 18 schools—and 1,300 slaves. The wealth of the tribes proved their undoing, as land-hungry white Southerners eyed their fields and buildings and agitated for their removal to the West. But these native Americans were not nomads; pioneering in the wilds of Arkansas and Oklahoma did not interest them. Their prime spiritual value was oneness with the land they lived on: “The mountains and hills, that you see, are your backbone, and the gullies and creeks, which are between the hills and mountains, are your heart veins.”

In trying to resist removal, the Indians adopted another white device—formal, representative government. The forms of white rule—assemblies, voting, elected officials—were added to the old tribal structures. The Cherokees adopted a constitution and even applied for statehood. This tribe had some notable leaders, including Sequoyah, who invented a system of writing to fit the ancient tribal language and published a newspaper in Cherokee; and John Ross, who headed two delegations of protest to Washington and made his appeals with the eloquence of a Demosthenes.

All in vain. Federal treaties with the red people were ignored, federal agents assailed with threats and violence. Georgia barred Indian testimony in court, ruled that the tribal government was illegal, and sent the militia onto the Cherokee lands to enforce its decrees, seize the tribal press, and terrorize the Indians into submission. Ross was jailed when he tried to organize a third delegation to Washington. Both President Jackson and the state governor ignored a Supreme Court ruling in favor of the Cherokees. Protection of life, liberty, and property—freedom to organize and petition—the right to a free press and a fair trial—protection against government—the whole American conception of liberty was in shreds.

Savagely punished by the authorities, set upon with whips and clubs by poor whites, defrauded by officials and speculators, the Indians bade farewell to their beloved hills and mountains and struck out for “Indian territory” a thousand miles away through swamps and wilderness. It was a trail of tears. “I saw the helpless Cherokees arrested and dragged from their homes,” an army private wrote, “and driven by bayonet into the stockades. And in the chill of a drizzling rain on an October morning I saw them loaded like cattle or sheep into wagons and started toward the west.” More than a quarter of the tribe died on the way to the banks of the Arkansas and Red rivers.

The epic might have ended there, west of the Mississippi. But the “Five Civilized Nations,” as they came to be called, were not yet defeated. They rebuilt their societies in the wilderness. Creeks and Cherokees retained their old governmental structures, modeled on the southern territorial governments. The Choctaws adopted some of the elements of Jacksonian democracy: every male Choctaw over twenty-one could vote to choose a chief and ten councilors in each district; measures passed by the council could be vetoed by the chiefs, subject to a two-thirds override. At the Choctaw Academy, students pursued not only the three R’s but geography, natural philosophy, history, algebra, and Latin.

The final end of the tragedy, however, had simply been delayed. The remorseless advance of the whites continued, and within a few years the Five Tribes were forced to cede land to settlers in Kansas and Arkansas.
Soon these proud and accomplished people were removed to a “reservation” in Oklahoma.

During these years Texas was arousing national attention. As the Indians were forced west, whites were moving on toward the Southwest and Northwest, driven by high hopes and economic need. By the mid-1820s Stephen F. Austin was achieving in Texas a dream that his father Moses had hoped to realize when he secured a commission from the feeble government of New Spain to settle three hundred American families there. Settling in Bexar, Stephen Austin offered a guarantee of good conduct by the Americans in exchange for grants of land and promises of religious freedom from the Spanish, who wanted the empty land filled up as a buffer against Indians and marauding frontiersmen.

This deal, which threw Texas open to colonization by thousands of settlers seeking her rich bottomlands, worked well until it was threatened by Mexico’s revolution against the mother country. For more than a year Austin, ignorant of the language, the laws, and the leaders of the revolutionary government, haunted the chambers of the constantly changing officialdom in Mexico City. Receiving some concessions, Austin returned to Texas and served as a benign despot on his immense holdings, as well as a trusted adviser to the other
empresarios.
Almost 20,000 Americans flooded into the province. Operating nearly independently of Mexican authority hundreds of miles away, the Texans seemed to some to have virtually realized the Jeffersonian paradise of a small republic.

This near-idyll was shattered when the Mexicans, alarmed by an abortive effort to establish the “Republic of Fredonia,” barred the admission of additional Americans into Texas or the introduction of more slaves. After much agitation by the aroused Texans, a convention resolved that Texas must become an autonomous state within the Mexican federal union. Austin carried the resolves to Mexico City, only to be thrown into jail. By the time he was released months later, in the fall of 1835, war had broken out in Texas much as it had in Lexington and Concord sixty years before. Mexican soldiers had ridden into the hamlet of Gonzales with orders to confiscate a small brass cannon, which the Texans were determined to keep. They not only kept it but used it to fire on the Mexicans. The Texas struggle became one for independence, as Sam Houston, proclaiming that the “work of liberty has begun,” issued a call for volunteers.

Six thousand Mexicans under General Santa Anna marched against the rebels. Reaching San Antonio late in February 1836, they found a company of Texans holed up in the Alamo, under self-styled Colonel Buck Travis,
a pugnacious soldier-politico only twenty-seven years of age. Travis appealed to the “People of Texas and All Americans in the World” for help “in the name of Liberty,” but no help came. With matchless determination and heroism the 187 Texans held off the assaulting force of 3,000 Mexicans for ten days, until they were overwhelmed and massacred. The bodies of Davy Crockett and James Bowie, as well as Travis, lay in the carnage. Santa Anna’s forces now swept on with sword and torch, overrunning American settlements and reaching Galveston Bay. After fleeing toward the United States border, the Texans rallied on the banks of the San Jacinto. With the cry of “Remember the Alamo!” on their lips, they overran a detachment of Mexicans they surprised in their beds, killed six hundred of the enemy, and captured Santa Anna.

With the surrender of Santa Anna, the war seemed over, and the way prepared for joining the United States. But Washington was cool to the Texas petition for annexation. President Jackson feared that merely recognizing Texas would hurt relationships with Mexico and disrupt the Democratic party. John Quincy Adams charged on the floor of the House that the Texas revolution was part of a proslavery conspiracy. Already entangled in the internal politics of the United States, the Texans would have to await further foreign and domestic developments before they could gain admission to the Union.