American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Others wondered at the time, and have questioned since, how a small nation with a rudimentary economic system could have embarked on such bold and costly efforts, whether successful as in the case of the Erie, or less so as with the Pennsylvania project, but always difficult, expensive, and risky. The ultimate source of the economic changes lay in material needs for better and cheaper food, clothes, and homes, and in requirements for psychic and material security. But we lack the data to measure those needs in the early nineteenth century, and can only assume that they existed among the Americans of that day as they do among all peoples, in various combinations and degrees. How did such needs become translated into economic change and progress in an isolated, mainly rural nation, lacking capital, organized technical training and expertise, and experience in the management of big enterprises?

  Perhaps the most striking aspect of economic change during this period was the extent to which innovating leaders with “sounder calculating minds,” in Jefferson’s phrase, stepped forward to experiment, invent, organize, and manage. The exploits of lone, daring men have come down through history. Certainly the tenacity of a Whitney, the creative daring of a Francis Lowell, the imaginative patronage of a Livingston played a major part in technological change and progress. Certainly, too, the involvement of men of affairs like De Witt Clinton, and of republican aristocrats like Livingston, was crucial in particular moments. But innovating leadership was essentially a collective effort. For one thing, the seemingly solitary innovators were often members of large and influential families, such as the Browns of Providence and the Dwights of Chicopee, that collectively involved themselves in new ventures. Francis Cabot Lowell’s father, John, had married in turn a Higginson, a Cabot, and a Russell, and had sired offspring by all three, so it was not surprising that Francis’ efforts were aided and abetted, and occasionally impeded, by a plethora of in-laws and other members of an extended family that helped form a local and regional community which, in Robert K. Lamb’s words, closely affected “the processes by which certain decision-makers at strategic points in the social structure contribute to economic, political, and social change.”

  But even more, innovating leaders emerged from a variety of groups and situations. Many farmers were as much inventors as husbandmen, eternally tinkering, patching up, imitating others, swapping tales of their experiments and experiences. Homely contrivances and techniques were handed down from father to son. Untrained mechanics improved methods of spinning and weaving, of running steam engines and railroad portages and canal locks. In building the Erie Canal the diggers improvised on the spot. European canal experience had left no manuals for dealing with stretches of swamp near Syracuse that, with their snarled and matted roots, were harder to cut through than rock, where at least hand drills and gunpowder could be used. “Sharp plows were devised for cutting the tangled roots,” according to Broadus and Louise Pearson Mitchell. “Horse-drawn scoops were substituted for shovels. A cable, a wheel, and an endless screw permitted a man, aided by the power of one horse, to pull over the largest trees.” Stumps were twisted and torn out of the ground by an ungainly contraption—a cable pulled by a horse and attached to a great wooden wheel, inside of which was fastened a smaller drum wound about by a cable attached to the stump.

  These collective acts of innovators were spurred by the most influential leadership collectives in America during the 1820s and after—the state governments. With power to intervene in and regulate economic life left largely to the states under the federal Constitution, legislators and governors became the target of promoters seeking legislation, subsidies, and other kinds of help and sponsorship—and often the promoters were as much inside the government as outside. The granting and withholding of monopolistic rights and other privileges, the subscription to the stock of new corporations, the regulation of enterprises through charters issued by the state, the subsidy of private ventures but again with strings attached, the direct establishment and financing of public enterprise by the state—all these brought the collective action of the states directly into the economic life of Americans. This was especially true of transportation: the states played the main role in initiating, planning, and financing most of the canals and many of the roads and turnpikes.

  Innovating leadership thus proceeded from the most variegated sources—from state governments, from European experience and manuals, from the studies and experiments of innovators with wealth and status like Livingston, from fathers and mothers, from the exchanges of ideas in professional societies and local groups, from fellow tinkerers and improvisers on the job, often under the lash of dire necessity. To be sure, much of this innovation was contained within class lines; poor farmers, mill girls in Lowell, and Irish bogtrotters along the canals were victims of existing technology rather than agents for changing it. But among the more educated, mobile, skilled, and affluent classes, innovations in one place soon fertilized developments elsewhere. Elkanah Watson, a gentleman farmer in Albany and member of the New York Society for the Promotion of Agriculture, Arts, and Manufactures, modeled his farming practices on Livingston’s. After purchasing 250 acres near Pittsfield, Massachusetts, Watson bought a pair of merino sheep from the chancellor and put them on exhibition in the Pittsfield town square. Farmers flocked to the scene. “Even women,” wrote Watson, “were excited by curiosity to attend this first novel, and humble exhibition.” Watson became the first president of the Berkshire County Agriculture Society, which held an annual fair. County fairs became an easy means for farmers to learn about, and display, the latest agricultural practices and to put their prize stock on sale.

  The rapid spread of innovations and inventions seemed inexorable in retrospect but most of these changes were charged with conflict. Many Americans had aesthetic and even philosophical objections to the invasion of machines into quiet farmyards and waterways. Many farmers shunned innovation because they liked the old ways of doing things, or simply feared change. The innovators themselves had to overcome obstacles at every turn. The small profits Whitney made from his cotton gin he had to use in fighting infringements on his patent. For years Fulton kept up a running quarrel with rivals who impugned the novelty of his own steamboat innovations.

  But the political conflict transcended the personal. The extent to which government—federal, state, or even local—promoted innovation and development was a matter of fierce partisan and regional debate. If Pennsylvanians competed with New Yorkers in digging their way west, cities within the states fought with one another about the location of turnpikes and canals. Furious debates broke out among engineers and laymen as to the relative advantages of turnpikes, riverways, canals, and (later) railroads. The use of taxpayers’ money as against private investors’ was another bone of contention, though it came to be widely recognized that only the federal or state governments could finance vast projects like the Erie Canal.

  Conflict over such matters produced a higher consciousness of ways and means, methods and goals. Sometimes conflict aroused direct mobilization of the populace, producing grass-roots leaders who further aroused the people to political consciousness. When Clinton was removed from the New York City mayoralty by pressure from Tammany Hall, and Erie Canal prospects seemed doomed, this energetic New Yorker fought back. Working closely with a few associates, he decided to “go to the people” in a final effort to mobilize support for the canal. First he held a meeting of a hundred prominent men in New York City; then he sent material from this meeting throughout the state; then rallies were held in scores of cities and villages along the proposed route; finally, petitions with over 100,000 signatures were sent to the legislature.

  It was a superb political operation, directed squarely at the key economic interests. “Wealthy Federalists—large landholders in the west and great merchants in the cities—as well as western farmers were attracted to Clinton’s banner,” Julius Rubin wrote. “The Irish, whose numbers had recently increased greatly, rallied to Clinton because of past favors and in reaction
to Tammany’s nativist policy.…Large merchants and western farmers, aristocratic landholders and poverty-stricken immigrants—all united behind Clinton and his great canal project.” The Erie, like most great projects, was conceived not in benign consensus but aroused consciousness that enabled men to fight—and win—the political battle.

  The changes in farming, manufacturing, and transportation accelerated in the 1820s and later produced a quickening of commerce in the cities and along the roads and waterways of America. A territorial division of labor developed among the three great regions of the Union, with the South producing plantation staples for the foreign markets, the East increasingly engaged in making goods and capital and selling both to the South and West, and the West growing grain and livestock that supplied the rising needs of the South and East. The old-time triangular maritime commerce before the Revolution had given way by 1830 to a new triangle, creating an “intersectional indebtedness,” in Louis Schmidt’s words, “the West paying for its manufactures from the East with its sales to the South in somewhat the same manner that New England paid for its manufactures from the mother-country during the Colonial period by the sale of its commodities to the West Indies.” The huge, lopsided commerce, moving south down the Mississippi to New Orleans, eastward and northward along the Gulf and Atlantic seaboards to the northern seaports, and westerly toward the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes area, would help produce a political imbalance as well.

  To a large extent these changes in the pattern of economic growth were the product of millions of tiny decisions by farmers, manufacturers, traders, and transporters who had little knowledge about, interest in, or control of the gigantic economic forces that would come to grip the nation before the end of the century. These persons were intent on immediate gain, perhaps even sheer financial survival, from buying and selling goods and services. They were variously the beneficiaries and the victims of “impersonal” forces that dominated the marketplace—of supply and demand, technological change, population growth and change, rises and falls in commodity and retail prices. In such a context even the larger and more aggressive buyers and sellers were essentially barterers and brokers—that is, “transactional leaders”—in an economic environment beyond their power of individual or, for a time at least, collective control.

  But at times certain innovating leaders managed to transcend their environment and even transform it. The most conspicuous cases were doubtless men like Slater and Lowell, Livingston and Clinton, and their close associates. But the farmer who experimented with new seeds or crop rotation or tinkered out in the barn, the canal digger who discovered how to clear away trees and stumps, the southern planter who worked out more efficient methods of large-scale farming, the mechanic who tried out a new pulley arrangement on the banks of the Connecticut—all these in their different ways were altering the world in which they and their children would live. Some of these innovating leaders were acting for immediate self-interest, whatever the broader impact of their feats. Others were acting also for a broader purpose, even for a vision. The Erie Canal, the work of hundreds of New York State leaders supported by thousands of aroused followers, was a brilliant act of economic and technical planning—an act designed to achieve vast socioeconomic changes, an act that achieved them. Men like Francis Cabot Lowell and De Witt Clinton demonstrated that daring economic and political plans could be achieved in the 1820s just as they had been by leaders two generations earlier, in the 1780s.

  If all this was something less than Jefferson’s “moral superiority,” it was something more than a “sounder calculating mind”—purposeful action aimed at explicit goals in response to human needs, somehow fashioned in the disheveled, conflict-ridden arena of American democracy. This remarkable physical and economic creativity almost matched the boldness of vision, genius of invention, and willingness to experiment of the founding fathers. The “economic miracles” of the 1820s and 1830s had their roots to some degree in the “political miracle” of the 1780s—the creation of a reasonably effective federal government operating in a liberated national economy. But the economic miracle had not been matched by constitutional creativity in the years of Monroe and the second Adams; rather the governmental system seemed static. The Framers had responded to the political and ideological imperatives of their time; the question fifty years later was how the leaders would respond to the imperatives rising out of Whitney’s cotton gin, Clinton’s ditch, Lowell’s textile mills, Fulton’s Clermont, and the innovations of thousands of other experimenters, inventors, and builders.

  PART III

  Liberty and Equality

  CHAPTER 9

  The Wind from the West

  AMERICANS WERE MOVING west. Restless, hopeful, yearning for another big chance somewhere out in the distant fields and plains where the rich soil ran six feet deep, so it was said, families sold off possessions from the “old place,” loaded up horses and wagons, spoke farewells to a circle of envious, skeptical neighbors, and left to fulfill dreams of independence and abundance. People often moved in short jumps, from state to next-door state; sometimes they meandered up or down a fertile valley; but the great current flowed inexorably along parallel lines toward the nation’s heartland, with the setting sun as its pole star.

  Up-country yeomen of the Old South struck out for cheap and good land in Tennessee and Kentucky. Planters, their soil exhausted, moved through the Gulf states looking for new acreage to meet the demand for cotton stimulated by the gin, South Carolinians through the Saluda Gap into eastern Tennessee, Georgians into southern Alabama and Mississippi along two main routes linked at Fort Mitchell. They were helping to found a new cotton kingdom to the west of the Old South. Middle-staters used the Wilderness Road and the Cumberland Gap Road to debouch into the Ohio Valley and the farmlands of Indiana and Illinois. New Englanders spread westward in a steady stream into upper and central New York State, northern Pennsylvania, northeastern Ohio, and beyond into Michigan and even Wisconsin, planting churches and schools along the way.

  For years the queen of the roads across the Alleghenies was the Conestoga wagon, with its four to six horses, its broad wheels to cope with muddy roads, and, between a high aft and stern, its ample low bed that kept families and goods from spilling out as the wagon pointed up and down steep hills. Many settlers had to do with less. Journeying along the National Road through Pennsylvania in 1817, Morris Birkbeck noted that with many families a “small waggon (so light that you might almost carry it, yet strong enough to bear a good load of bedding, utensils and provisions, and a swarm of young citizens,—and to sustain marvelous shocks in its passage over these rocky heights), with two small horses, sometimes a cow or two, comprises their all; excepting a little store of hard-earned cash for the land office of the district; where they may obtain a title for as many acres as they possess half-dollars, being one fourth of the purchase money. The waggon has a tilt, or cover, made of a sheet, or perhaps a blanket. The family are seen before, behind, or within the vehicle, according to the road or the weather, or perhaps the spirits of the party.” Birkbeck noted also that some families traveled only with horse and packsaddle, and often “the back of the poor pilgrim bears all his effects, and his wife follows, naked-footed, bending under the hopes of the family.”

  In later years some families traveled in far grander style, as transportation improved on the waterways. Certainly the most extraordinary trip west was via the Allegheny Portage Railroad. Nothing really could compare with awakening in one’s own canal barge on top of an Allegheny mountain. “The whole family was comfortably located in the cabin of their boat, which appeared to glide up the heights of the Alleghenies, unconscious of its being a fish out of water, whilst some of the family were preparing the coming meals and others were lying on their downy pillows,” the Hollidaysburg Aurora wrote enthusiastically of the first trip. Next day “our boat and crew left the sunny summit and smoothly glided down her iron way to Johnstown, astonishing the natives.” Another editor compared the mounta
intop barge to Noah’s Ark on Ararat. Even without hyperbole the portage railroad, with its huge hoists with stationary engines, carefully inclined planes, and elaborately balanced ascending and descending cars carrying barges, soon became world-famous.

  But for most travelers the lasting memory was passage along the Erie Canal: gliding along mile after mile, watching the boy driver ahead manage the horses and keep the towline taut and untangled, talking with lockkeepers and farmers as the great basins were filled and emptied, stopping off in canal shops, showboats, and floating saloons, matching wits with thimblerig experts, gypsy fortune tellers, peddlers of tempting goods,…hearing the double blast of the cow horn as a packet captain signaled that he was “coming through,”…chatting with the tobacco-chewing steersman as he kept his craft off-angle while avoiding rocks and abutments,…and enjoying a good meal prepared by a canalboat chef. And always the slowly passing scenery: the blue smoke in the morning rising from cottages and shanty boats, farmers pulling out stumps or sowing their cleared land with great sweeping movements of their arm, the “gentle slap of water against the boats, the riffle of towropes, the swish of wind in the water grass, the splash and murmur of widening circles when a muskrat slid into the canal, the warning horns of craft coming in from the feeders…the gentle tinkle of cowbells across open fields, the song of fiddle and jew’s-harp, riding the wind, punctuated by the measured plop-plop of oxen hoofs as they plodded westward,” in Madeline Sadler Waggoner’s words. And always the excited talk with other passengers about the adventures and opportunities lying ahead “out west.”

  Not all canal passengers traveled elegantly or comfortably. There was a kind of caste system among boats. The grandee of the Erie was the long and lean canal packet, carrying only passengers and hand luggage and offering good meals, “settles” on top of the cabin from which passengers could enjoy the canal scenery, and separate sleeping spaces for men and women. The emigrant’s boat, or line boat, took on families and their furniture and stoves and chickens, and provided sleeping space on the floor at best. Next down in the hierarchy came the freighter, whose owner might live on board with the horses he carried along the canal; the cabin boat, built by the migrants to carry their families west; the shanty boat, a one-room hovel on a flatboat, which housed thousands of canallers along the Erie and moved occasionally by hitching a ride on another craft; and, lowest in caste of all, the timber raft, a collection of piles of logs lashed together and topped by a shanty for the crew.