Part 19 (1/2)
Yet, with all his faults, he was brave and patriotic and did splendid service as a fighter in Indian wars. After one of his duels, with a ball in his shoulder and his left arm in a sling, he went to lead an army of two thousand five hundred men in an attack on the Creek Indians, who had risen against the whites in Alabama. Although weak from a long illness, Jackson marched with vigor against the Creeks, and after a campaign of much hards.h.i.+p, badly defeated them at Horseshoe Bend, in eastern Alabama.
He thus broke for all time the power of the Indians south of the Ohio River.
Some three years later (1817) General Jackson, as he was now called, was sent with a body of troops down to southern Georgia, to protect the people there from the Seminole Indians, who lived in Florida. At this time Florida belonged to Spain. Its vast swamps and dense forests made a place of refuge from which outlaws, runaway negroes, and Indians all made a practice of sallying forth in bands across the border into southern Georgia. There they would drive off cattle, burn houses, and murder men, women, and children without mercy.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Jackson's Campaign.]
When Jackson pursued these thieves and murderers, they retreated to their hiding-places beyond the boundaries of Florida. But it was more than Jackson could endure to see his enemy escape him so easily. And, although he was exceeding his orders, he followed them across the border, burned some of their villages, and hanged some of the Indian chiefs. He did not stop until he had all of Florida under his control.
This was a high-handed proceeding, for that territory belonged to Spain.
However, serious trouble was avoided by our buying Florida (1819). This purchase added territory of fifty-nine thousand two hundred and sixty-eight square miles to the United States. It was only six thousand square miles less than the whole area of New England.
By studying your map you can easily see how much the area of the United States was extended by the purchase of Louisiana and of Florida. The adding of these two large territories made America one of the great nations of the world in landed estate.
SOME THINGS TO THINK ABOUT
1. Tell all you can about Jefferson's boyhood. What kind of student was he in college?
2. How did he help his countrymen before taking up his public life?
3. Why did the Westerners wish the Mississippi to be open to their trade?
4. Why was Napoleon willing to sell us the whole of Louisiana? Use your map in making clear to yourself just what the Louisiana Purchase included.
5. Why did Jefferson send Lewis and Clark on their famous expedition? What were the results of this expedition?
6. What kind of boy was Andrew Jackson? What kind of man?
7. What part did he take in the events leading up to the purchase of Florida?
CHAPTER XIII
INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS
After the purchase of Louisiana and the explorations of Lewis and Clark, the number of settlers who went from the eastern part of the country to find new homes in the West kept on increasing as it had been doing since Boone, Robertson, and Sevier had pushed their way across the mountains into Kentucky and Tennessee, twenty-five or thirty years earlier.
These pioneers, if they went westward by land, had to load their goods on pack-horses and follow the Indian trail. Later the trail was widened into a roadway, and wagons could be used. But travel by land was slow and, hard under any conditions.
Going by water, while cheaper, was inconvenient, for the travellers must use the flatboat, which was clumsy and slow and, worst of all, of little use except when going down stream.
The great need both for travel and for trade, then, was a boat which would not be dependent upon wind or current, but could be propelled by steam.
Many men had tried to work out such an invention. Among them was John Rumsey, of Maryland, who built a steamboat in 1774, and John Fitch, of Connecticut, who completed his first model of a steamboat in 1785.
In the next four years Fitch built three steamboats, the last of which made regular trips on the Delaware River, between Philadelphia and Burlington, during the summer of 1786. It was used as a pa.s.senger boat, and it made a speed of eight miles an hour; but Fitch was not able to secure enough aid from men of capital and influence to make his boats permanently successful.
The first man to construct a steamboat which continued to give successful service was Robert Fulton. Robert Fulton was born of poor parents in Little Britain, Pennsylvania, in 1765, the year of the famous Stamp Act.
When the boy was only three years old his father died, and so Robert was brought up by his mother. She taught him at home until he was eight, and then sent him to school. Here he showed an unusual liking for drawing.