Volume IV Part 13 (1/2)
North and South alike, the ways of life were substantially the same; though there were differences, of course, and these differences tended to become accentuated. Thus, in the Mississippi Territory the planters, in the closing years of the century, began to turn their attention to cotton instead of devoting themselves to the crops of their brethren farther north; and cotton soon became their staple product. But as yet the typical settler everywhere was the man of the axe and rifle, the small pioneer farmer who lived by himself, with his wife and his swarming children, on a big tract of wooded land, perhaps three or four hundred acres in extent. Of this three or four hundred acres he rarely cleared more than eight or ten; and these were cleared imperfectly. On this clearing he tilled the soil, and there he lived in his rough log house with but one room, or at most two and a loft. [Footnote: F. A.
Michaux, ”Voyages” (in 1802), pp. 132, 214, etc.]
Game Still Abundant.
The man of the Western waters, was essentially a man who dwelt alone in the midst of the forest on his rude little farm, and who eked out his living by hunting. Game still abounded everywhere, save in the immediate neighborhood of the towns; so that many of the inhabitants lived almost exclusively by hunting and fis.h.i.+ng, and, with their return to the pursuits of savagery, adopted not a little of the savage idleness and thriftlessness. Bear, deer, and turkey were staple foods. Elk had ceased to be common, though they hung on here and there in out of the way localities for many years; and by the close of the century the herds of bison had been driven west of the Mississippi. [Footnote: Henry Ker, ”Travels,” p.22.] Smaller forms of wild life swarmed. Gray squirrels existed in such incredible numbers that they caused very serious damage to the crops, and at one time the Kentucky Legislature pa.s.sed a law imposing upon every male over sixteen years of age the duty of killing a certain number of squirrels and crows every year. [Footnote: Michaux, 215, 236; Collins, I., 24.] The settlers possessed horses and horned cattle, but only a few sheep, which were not fitted to fight for their own existence in the woods, as the stock had to. On the other hand, slab-sided, long-legged hogs were the most plentiful of domestic animals, ranging in great, half-wild droves through the forest.
Fondness of the Westerners for the Lonely Life of the Woods.
All observers were struck by the intense fondness of the frontiersmen for the woods and for a restless, lonely life. [Footnote: Crevecoeur, ”Voyage dans la Haute Pennsylvanie,” etc., p. 265.] They pushed independence to an extreme; they did not wish to work for others or to rent land from others. Each was himself a small landed proprietor, who cleared only the ground that he could himself cultivate. Workmen were scarce and labor dear. It was almost impossible to get men fit to work as mill hands, or to do high-cla.s.s labor in forges even by importing them from Pennsylvania or Maryland. [Footnote: Clay MSS., Letter to George Nicholas, Baltimore, Sept. 3, 1796.] Even in the few towns the inhabitants preferred that their children should follow agriculture rather than become handicraftsmen; and skilled workmen such as carpenters and smiths made a great deal of money, so much so that they could live a week on one day's wage. [Footnote: Michaux, pp. 96, 152.]
The River Trade.
In addition to farming there was a big trade along the river. Land transportation was very difficult indeed, and the frontiersman's whole life was one long struggle with the forest and with poor roads. The waterways were consequently of very great importance, and the flatboatmen on the Mississippi and Ohio became a numerous and noteworthy cla.s.s. The rivers were covered with their craft. There was a driving trade between Pittsburgh and New Orleans, the goods being drawn to Pittsburgh from the seacoast cities by great four-horse wagons, and being exported in s.h.i.+ps from New Orleans to all parts of the earth. Not only did the Westerners build river craft, but they even went into s.h.i.+pbuilding; and on the upper Ohio, at Pittsburgh, and near Marietta, at the beginning of the present century, seagoing s.h.i.+ps were built and launched to go down the Ohio and Mississippi, and thence across the ocean to any foreign port. [Footnote: Thompson Mason Harris, ”Journal of Tour,” etc., 1803, p. 140; Michaux, p. 77.] There was, however, much risk in this trade; for the demand for commodities at Natchez and New Orleans was uncertain, while the waters of the Gulf swarmed with British and French cruisers, always ready to pounce like pirates on the s.h.i.+ps of neutral powers. [Footnote: Clay MSS., W. H. Turner to Thomas Hart, Natchez, May 27, 1797.]
Small Size of the Towns.
Natchez.
Yet the river trade was but the handmaid of frontier agriculture. The Westerners were a farmer folk who lived on the clearings their own hands had made in the great woods, and who owned the land they tilled. Towns were few and small. At the end of the century there were some four hundred thousand people in the West; yet the largest town was Lexington, which contained less than three thousand people. [Footnote: Perrin Du Lac ”Voyage,” etc., 1801, 1803, p. 153; Michaux, 150.] Lexington was a neatly built little burg, with fine houses and good stores. The leading people lived well and possessed much cultivation. Louisville and Nashville were each about half its size. In Nashville, of the one hundred and twenty houses but eight were of brick, and most of them were mere log huts. Cincinnati was a poor little village. Cleveland consisted of but two or three log cabins, at a time when there were already a thousand settlers in its neighborhood on the Connecticut Reserve, scattered out on their farms. [Footnote: ”Historical Collections of Ohio,” p. 120.] Natchez was a very important town, nearly as large as Lexington. It derived its importance from the river traffic on the Mississippi. All the boatmen stopped there, and sometimes as many as one hundred and fifty craft were moored to the bank at the same time.
The men who did this laborious river work were rude, powerful, and lawless, and when they halted for a rest their idea of enjoyment was the coa.r.s.est and most savage dissipation. At Natchez there speedily gathered every species of purveyor to their vicious pleasures, and the part of the town known as ”Natchez under the Hill” became a by-word for crime and debauchery. [Footnote: Henry Ker, ”Travels,” p. 41.]
Growth of Kentucky.
Kentucky had grown so in population, possessing over two hundred thousand inhabitants, that she had begun to resemble an Eastern State.
When, in 1796, Benjamin Logan, the representative of the old woodchoppers and Indian fighters, ran for governor and was beaten, it was evident that Kentucky had pa.s.sed out of the mere pioneer days. It was more than a mere coincidence that in the following year Henry Clay should have taken up his residence in Lexington. It showed that the State was already attracting to live within her borders men like those who were fitted for social and political leaders.h.i.+p in Virginia.
The Kentucky Gentry.
The Danville Political Club.
Though the typical inhabitant of Kentucky was still the small frontier farmer, the cla.s.s of well-to-do gentry had already attained good proportions. Elsewhere throughout the West, in Tennessee, and even here and there in Ohio and the Territories of Indiana and Mississippi, there were to be found occasional houses that were well built and well finished, and surrounded by pleasant grounds, fairly well kept; houses to which the owners had brought their stores of silver and linen and heavy, old-fas.h.i.+oned furniture from their homes in the Eastern States.
Blount, for instance, had a handsome house in Knoxville, well fitted, as beseemed that of a man one of whose brothers still lived at Blount Hall, in the coast region of North Carolina, the ancestral seat of his forefathers for generations. [Footnote: Clay MSS., Blount to Hart, Knoxville, Feb. 9, 1794.] But by far the greatest number of these fine houses, and the largest cla.s.s of gentry to dwell in them, were in Kentucky. Not only were Lexington and Louisville important towns, but Danville, the first capital of Kentucky, also possessed importance, and, indeed, had been the first of the Western towns to develop an active and distinctive social and political life. It was in Danville that, in the years immediately preceding Kentucky's admission as a State, the Political Club met. The members.h.i.+p of this club included many of the leaders Of Kentucky's intellectual life, and the record of its debates shows the keenness with which they watched the course of social and political development not only in Kentucky but in the United States.
They were men of good intelligence and trained minds, and their meetings and debates undoubtedly had a stimulating effect upon Kentucky life, though they were tainted, as were a very large number of the leading men of the same stamp elsewhere throughout the country, with the doctrinaire political notions common among those who followed the French political theorists of the day. [Footnote: ”The Political Club,” by Thomas Speed, Filson Club Publications.]
The Large Landowners.
Open-air Life.
Of the gentry many were lawyers, and the law led naturally to political life; but even among the gentry the typical man was still emphatically the big landowner. The leaders of Kentucky were men who owned large estates, on which they lived in their great roomy houses. Even when they practised law they also supervised their estates; and if they were not lawyers, in addition to tilling the land they were always ready to try their hand at some kind of manufacture. They were willing to turn their attention to any new business in which there was a chance to make money, whether it was to put up a mill, to build a forge, to undertake a contract for the delivery of wheat to some big flour merchant, or to build a flotilla of flatboats, and take the produce of a given neighborhood down to New Orleans for s.h.i.+pment to the West Indies.
[Footnote: Clay MSS., Seitz & Lowan to Garret Darling, Lexington, January 23, 1797; agreement of George Nicholas, October 10, 1796, etc.
This was an agreement on the part of Nicholas to furnish Seitz & Lowan with all the flour manufactured at his mill during the season of 1797 for exportation, the flour to be delivered by him in Kentucky. He was to receive $5.50 a barrel up to the receipt of $1500; after that it was to depend upon the price of wheat. Six bushels of wheat were reckoned to a barrel of flour, and the price of a bushel was put at four s.h.i.+llings; in reality it ranged from three to six.] They were also always engaged in efforts to improve the breed of their horses and cattle, and to introduce new kinds of agriculture, notably the culture of the vine.
[Footnote: _Do._, ”Minutes of meeting of the Directors of the Vineyard Society,” June 27, 1800.] They speedily settled themselves definitely in the new country, and began to make ready for their children to inherit their homes after them; though they retained enough of the restless spirit which had made them cross the Alleghanies to be always on the lookout for any fresh region of exceptional advantages, such as many of them considered the lands along the lower Mississippi. They led a life which appealed to them strongly, for it was pa.s.sed much in the open air, in a beautiful region and lovely climate, with horses and hounds, and the management of their estates and their interest in politics to occupy their time; while their neighbors were men of cultivation, at least by their own standards, so that they had the society for which they most cared. [Footnote: _Do._, James Brown to Thomas Hart, Lexington, April 3, 1804.] In spite of their willingness to embark in commercial ventures and to build mills, rope-walks, and similar manufactures,--for which they had the greatest difficulty in procuring skilled laborers, whether foreign or native, from the Northeastern States [Footnote: _Do._, J.
Brown to Thomas Hart, Philadelphia, February 11, 1797. This letter was brought out to Hart by a workman, David Dodge, whom Brown had at last succeeded in engaging. Dodge had been working in New York at a rope-walk, where he received $500 a year without board. From Hart he bargained to receive $350 with board. It proved impossible to engage other journeymen workers, Brown expressing his belief that any whom he chose would desert a week after they got to Kentucky, and Dodge saying that he would rather take raw hands and train them to the business than take out such hands as offered to go.]--and in spite of their liking for the law, they retained the deep-settled belief that the cultivation of the earth was the best of all possible pursuits for men of every station, high or low. [Footnote _Do._, William Nelson to Col. George Nicholas, Caroline, Va., December 29, 1794.]
Virginia and Kentucky.
In many ways the life of the Kentuckians was most like that of the Virginia gentry, though it had peculiar features of its own. Judged by Puritan standards, it seemed free enough; and it is rather curious to find Virginia fathers anxious to send their sons out to Kentucky so that they could get away from what they termed ”the constant round of dissipation, the scenes of idleness, which boys are perpetually engaged in” in Virginia. One Virginia gentleman of note, in writing to a prominent Kentuckian to whom he wished to send his son, dwelt upon his desire to get him away from a place where boys of his age spent most of the time galloping wherever they wished, mounted on blooded horses.
Kentucky hardly seemed a place to which a parent would send a son if he wished him to avoid the temptations of horse flesh; but this particular Virginian at least tried to provide against this, as he informed his correspondent that he should send his son out to Kentucky mounted on an ”indifferent Nag,” which was to be used only as a means of locomotion for the journey, and was then immediately to be sold. [Footnote: _Do_., William Nelson to Nicholas, November 9, 1792.]
Education.
The gentry strove hard to secure a good education for their children, and in Kentucky, as in Tennessee, made every effort to bring about the building of academies where their boys and girls could be well taught.