American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Feeling along the border eased a bit, only to flare up again late in 1840 when Alexander McLeod, a Canadian deputy sheriff, was picked up in New York State and incarcerated on the charge of having murdered Durfee in the Caroline raid. Downing Street formally demanded McLeod’s release, amid warnings of most serious consequences if the Canadian was not liberated. The State Department might have been conciliatory, but New Yorkers bridled—and they had the body. There was not gold enough in Britain to take McLeod out of Niagara County, a New York legislator proclaimed. London huffed and puffed in reply; McLeod must be surrendered alive, announced The Times, or avenged if dead. Although Webster, on taking office as Secretary of State, tried to calm the British, he could not overcome the stubborn fact that New York as a sovereign state was determined to try McLeod. Once again war cries echoed through the borderlands. The English tried vainly to understand a federal system that would allow a single state to determine a matter of such international concern while the national government was forced to watch helplessly. McLeod was tried before an American jury—and acquitted in twenty minutes—and the war threat dissipated.

  People of good sense were more and more convinced that Anglo-American relations could not be left in the hands of mobs, adventurers, chauvinists, and the unexpected fair-mindedness of a New York jury. The coming to office of Robert Peel as Prime Minister, and the appointment of the more conciliatory Lord Aberdeen as Foreign Secretary in place of Lord Palmerston only a few months after Webster had taken office, set the stage for an attempt to resolve the knottiest issue between the two nations. This was the dispute over the northeastern boundary between Maine and New Brunswick.

  For decades this poorly mapped area had been in dispute. In 1827, after Americans and Canadians competed for land grants along the Aroostook River, London and Washington agreed to submit the boundary differences to the King of the Netherlands for arbitration; but when the King submitted his compromise award, the British accepted and the Senate balked. A bloodless “war” broke out as Canadian lumberjacks invaded the disputed area; amid the usual alarms both Maine and New Brunswick called up their militias, and once again the hawks of Washington called for war rather than national dishonor. A truce was hastily patched together until the matter could be settled by negotiation, a task to test Daniel Webster’s vaunted skill at diplomacy. He was ready for it, having visited England in 1839 and met with its leaders. To parley with Webster, Aberdeen had chosen the agreeable Lord Ashburton, who had married an American belle and heiress, Anne Bingham of Philadelphia, during George Washington’s presidency.

  Webster and Ashburton had little trouble working out a compromise; the problem was gaining acceptance by border chauvinists and by the British government, which insisted on a boundary that would allow the Canadians an overland route between Quebec and St. John. Rarely has an issue turned so much on accurate mapping, and rarely has mapping been so faulty or inadequate. Some old maps, one of which seemed validated by Benjamin Franklin himself, supported British and Canadian claims. In order to gain Maine’s support for his planned compromise with Ashburton, Webster sent the historian Jared Sparks to Maine to persuade the political leaders to accept the deal or risk something worse. Ashburton paid almost $15,000 for Sparks’s expenses. As it turned out later, authentic maps supported the original American claims; unlucky Maine had lost the battle of the maps.

  All the parties gained from the treaty itself, however. After the protracted negotiations with commissioners from Maine and Massachusetts (which still had property rights in Maine after the separation of 1820), the treaty settled a wide range of issues. The St. John, Detroit, and St. Clair rivers and Lake St. Clair were open to navigation by both parties. An extradition article dealt with the old problem of fugitives gone to Canada. On an entirely different but intensifying problem, the two nations agreed to maintain a joint cruising squadron on the coast of Africa to help curb the slave trade, though Washington would not accept a mutual right of visit to ascertain the real identity of a suspected slaver. The heart of the Webster-Ashburton Treaty, however, lay in its settlement of the old boundary question. The United States received about 7,000 of the 12,000 square miles in dispute, and gained most of its claim to about 200 square miles of land around the head of the Connecticut River.

  The treaty was a major achievement at a time of ill feeling between Americans and British. Sixty years after the Revolution countless Americans still hated the British—hated them for their aristocratic condescension, their exactions as creditors, their endless criticism of Americans and American ways. To many Britishers, the United States was still the land of drunks, duelers, spitters, anarchists, lynchers, thieves, gamblers, slave drivers, cattle rustlers, bumptious boasters and yarn spinners. The English and American languages set them apart orally, and verbally too, as each side could read in the press the scurrilous attacks by the other.

  Given such attitudes on both sides of the Atlantic, it seemed remarkable that the two nations avoided a major shooting war. Britain and the United States were economically interdependent, of course, but such a relationship among nations had not always prevented war in the past. The explanation in large part lay with the nation’s foreign-policy and diplomatic leadership. Sixty years after the founding of the United States, it was still widely accepted that diplomats and negotiators must have a considerably free hand in parleys with other envoys, for a democratic foreign policy is not necessarily a pacific foreign policy; the popular mind was extremely touchy, suspicious, excitable, and belligerent. Time and again the leadership in Washington exercised restraint, but ultimately this leadership depended on the people for support. And the people were taking some leadership in foreign policy, not only with their votes, but with their feet, as they moved into Indian territories and into borderlands to the northwest or southwest, gazing across frontiers with envy, fear, greed, hostility, and often with a consuming missionary zeal.

  TRAILS OF TEARS AND HOPE

  Now these people were gazing toward the Far West. By the 1840s the trek west had lengthened considerably from the days of the first trans-Appalachian pioneers, with their Conestoga wagons and frontier stockades. The settlers of the plains bordering the Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico also were more diverse, quicker to organize some kind of government, and more inventive in exploiting land than the Scotch-Irish piedmonters whom Daniel Boone had led through the Cumberland Gap. Boone had never known distances such as his grandchildren faced in the two-thousand-mile trek over the Oregon Trail. Undertaken primarily for private motives, the migration would have enormous public impact, as the settlements provided the rationale for a national war and tinder for a civil one.

  Pioneers and settlers still tended to move along the latitudes. People from the Northeast headed toward the Great Lakes areas and the northern plains. Southerners traveled toward the Gulf seaboard but many turned northwestward in the direction of the lower tiers of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. The migrants were caricatured back East as unscrupulous traders or frontier ruffians; many a Boston or New York salon was titillated by tales of bowie knife fights, eye-gouging brawls, and general drunken mayhem, engaged in by ruffians who styled themselves “ring-tailed roarers, half-horse and half-alligator.” But Tocqueville discovered a more literate pioneer; “Everything about him is primitive and wild, but he is himself the result of the labor and experience of eighteen centuries…acquainted with the past, curious about the future, and ready for argument about the present…a highly civilized being, who consents for a time to inhabit the backwoods, and who penetrates the wilds of the New World with the Bible, an axe, and some newspapers.”

  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 o
rganize 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.