Fears of a Spanish conspiracy were very real. At the end of the eighteenth century many Western settlers appeared ready to deal with any government that could benefit them. In 1784 Washington warned that the Westerners were “on a pivot. The touch of a feather would turn them any way.” Even Jefferson in 1787 worried that because of the temptations of foreign powers and “the temper of the people” in the West, a “separation was possible at every moment.”40
FROM THE OUTSET the Federalists knew that they faced difficulties in the newly acquired lands west of the Appalachians. The settlers were moving westward in massive numbers, and their relentless search for land was bound to be resisted by the Indians who possessed it. Like most other American leaders, the Federalists hoped not only that the West would be “a mine of vast wealth to the United States,” as Madison had predicted in Federalist No. 38, but that it would be settled in an orderly and progressive fashion. They also anticipated, as Hamilton put it, “that it should be in great measure settled from abroad rather than at the entire expence of the Atlantic population.”41 The government anticipated drawing boundaries between the settlers and the Indians, care being taken, said Washington, “neither to yield nor to grasp at too much.” But purchasing the Indians’ rights to the land and protecting or assimilating them in a civilized manner depended on an organized and steady pace of white settlement. As Washington foresaw the process, “the gradual extension of our Settlements will as certainly cause the Savage as the Wolf to retire.”42
Nothing worked out as the Federalists and other leaders hoped. The Americans’ desire for land was too great and the authority of the central government too weak to control the westward scramble. The result was decades of continual bloody warfare over possession of the newly acquired Western territories.
Prior to the Revolution the British crown had tried to control the Americans’ movement into the West, especially with the Proclamation of 1763, and it had been no more successful than the Federalists were to be. Land companies sprang up and began staking claims to land in the Ohio Valley. By the time of the Revolution Kentucky had already become an incredible patchwork of conflicting land claims. The break from English authority worsened the disorder in the West. It threw people back upon themselves and their own individual interests. As one Western settler put it, “When without a king, [one] doeth according to the freedom of his own will.” Land claims multiplied and, said one observer, were “so laid one upon another that scarcely any body knows who is safe.”43
The Western settlers were as defiant of the new American authorities in the East as they had been of the British crown. Various separatist movements sought to take control of public lands and set up illegal governments within several of the states—notably in western Virginia, Vermont, the Wyoming valley, and western North Carolina. By the end of the War for Independence the earlier migrations had become a flood. One observer in 1785 thought the movement westward was so great that it seemed “as if the old states would depopulate, and the inhabitants be transported to the new.”44 By 1790 Tennessee had well over thirty-five thousand settlers, while Kentucky had more than double that number, stimulated in part by John Filson’s popular 1784 account of the “Present State of Kentucke.” Both territories were rapidly growing, and land-hungry squatters were already spilling north of the Ohio River in a scattered and unauthorized manner.
The Confederation Congress tried to bring some order out of this chaos. In the early 1780s the various states with claims to the West finally ceded to the Confederation their separate rights to the Western lands. In return, the United States pledged to use the revenues from sales of this national domain for the common benefit of the country and promised to see that the Western settlements would eventually be admitted to the Union as republican states equal in rights to the thirteen original states. The original plan for the trans-Appalachian West was embodied in the Ordinance of 1784 that was drawn up by a committee headed by Jefferson. This plan divided the West into a grid of sixteen states with straight-line boundaries that took no account of the region’s complicated geographical contours.
Although Jefferson’s abstract Enlightenment plan did not survive, it nevertheless set the pattern for the future development of the West. Perhaps more than anything else, it expressed the American leaders’ desire that settlement of the West be neat and orderly. Certainly the Land Ordinance of 1785 by which the Confederation established a comprehensive system for the survey and sale of land in the West likewise revealed a preoccupation with regularity and order.45
The land north of the Ohio River and west of the Appalachians was to be surveyed and marked off in a rectangular pattern—with east-west baselines and north-south ranges—before any of it was sold. This territory was to be divided into townships six miles square, with each township in turn cut up into thirty-six numbered sections of 640 acres each. Land was to be sold at auction, but the minimum price was set at one dollar per acre, and no one could buy less than a section of 640 acres, which meant that a very substantial sum was needed for any purchase. In each township Congress retained four sections for future sale and set aside one other for the support of public education. Although only seven ranges were actually surveyed in southeastern Ohio, this policy of surveying in rectangular units became the basis of America’s land system.
Those who devised this system assumed that development of the West would be centrally controlled, that settlement would be tightly clustered, and that the relatively high price for land would keep out poor, lazy, Indian-hating squatters. Congress hoped that the Western purchasers would be industrious market-oriented farmers who would respect the gradually moving boundary between the white settlers and the Indians. By following these regular procedures of compact settlement, said Washington, wildcat land jobbers and hustlers would be restrained, peace would be maintained with the Indians, and more useful types of citizens would be encouraged to migrate.46 Not only would enterprising and commercially minded settlers be willing to buy the land that would produce the revenue the United States required, but such civilized settlers would also bring to the West much-needed order and enlightenment. Desiring that the Western settlers be properly educated, Congress mandated the setting aside land for public schools.
Many Eastern leaders were leery of encouraging Western settlement anyhow, which is why many Federalists like Hamilton hoped that the West would be settled mostly by immigrants from abroad. Many Easterners had an uneasy sense that the Western settlers were apt to drift away from civilization and union with the United States. As John Jay warned in 1787, “the Western Country will one Day give us trouble—to govern them will not be easy.”47
Even when the Confederation Congress realized in 1787 that sales to individuals by auction were not going well, they continued to cling to the hope that someone would pay money for the Western land. In desperation it turned to Eastern speculators who all through the 1780s had concocted schemes for making profits out of undeveloped tracts of land in the West. In 1787 Congress was convinced by the lobbying efforts of Manasseh Cutler, a New England minister, that the Ohio Company—a joint-stock company made up of former Continental Army officers—might be able to supply the kinds of enterprising settlers, presumably New Englanders, and the money the United States needed. Thus for a million dollars Congress transferred to the private hands of the Ohio Company a large chunk of its Western land—1,500,000 acres west of the previously drawn seven ranges that ran north of the Ohio River. As part of the deal, the Ohio Company was given an option to apply for an additional 4,500,000 acres in the Ohio territory for a newly formed Scioto Company, the brainchild of William Duer, the secretary of the Confederation’s Board of Treasury and later assistant secretary in Hamilton’s Treasury Department.
Congress’s sale of land encouraged other speculators to bid for land north of the Ohio, the biggest being John Cleves Symmes, a prominent New Jersey judge. Symmes acquired from Congress 1,000,000 acres in the southwestern corner of the present state of Ohio where Cincinnati was f
ounded. The last major speculative group involved in the Ohio lands in the eighteenth century was the Connecticut Land Company, which purchased a huge tract of 3,000,000 acres of the lands near presentday Cleveland that the state of Connecticut had reserved for itself when it ceded its claims to the Confederation, the so-called Western Reserve.
Like most of the other speculators, the associates in the Connecticut Land Company were wealthy Eastern gentlemen who had no intentions of emigrating to the West. In an economy lacking sophisticated alternatives for investment, these gentlemen-speculators simply hoped to establish a landed basis to secure their aristocratic aspirations. Indeed, in the 1780s and 1790s many members of the would-be Federalist aristocracy often tried their best to live up to the classical image of being disinterested leaders standing above the marketplace of interests by getting involved in land speculation. During these years many merchants, including Robert Morris, George Clymer, William Bingham, Elbridge Gerry, George Cabot, and others, followed the earlier example of John Hancock and Henry Laurens and retired from business and sought to emulate the English landed gentry, often in order to pursue public careers. Indeed, establishing a seat in the country became something of a mania among wealthy gentlemen in the early Republic, especially among the New England gentry.48
When Morris, who had been one of the wealthiest merchants in America, became a United States senator from Pennsylvania in 1789, he had already shifted much of his capital into speculative land—something that seemed more respectable than trade—and was desperately trying to set himself up as a disinterested aristocrat. In the Senate he was especially anxious to win the approval of the South Carolina nabobs Pierce Butler and Ralph Izard, who seemed to have “a particular antipathy” to him because of his mercantile background. When the Carolina senators haughtily expressed their contempt for vulgar money-making, Morris—to the astonishment of listeners—did “likewise”: he gave himself “Compliments on his manner & Conduct in life, . . . and the little respect he paid to the common Opinions of People.” Like the classical republican aristocrat he aspired to be, he was proud of “his disregard of money.” For Morris, as for other would-be aristocrats, disregarding money eventually proved to be fatal.49
Probably the most successful land speculator in these years was William Cooper, the father of the novelist James Fenimore Cooper. In the mid-1780s William Cooper and a partner bought up shares in a defunct land company that claimed tens of thousands of acres in the Otsego area in upstate New York. The legalities were incredibly complicated, and Cooper hired the best lawyer in New York, Alexander Hamilton, to untangle them. Before other claimants could act, Cooper began selling off the land to settlers and speculators and promoting development of the town he called Cooperstown. Every step of the way he gambled, risked all, and won. By the early 1790s he had become not only the richest man in Otsego County but also an international celebrity whose advice on the sale and settlement of frontier land was sought by aspiring speculators from as far away as Holland and France.
Cooper’s timing was perfect. In the aftermath of the Revolution people were ready to move to better themselves, particularly the Yankees of New England, where a rapidly increasing population made land more and more scarce and expensive. At the same time, the defeat of the British and their Iroquois allies forced the Indians westward or into Canada. This turned upstate New York into one of the fastest growing areas of the country. And so the settlers in the Otsego region increased in number and prospered, and they did so in no small part because of Cooper’s particular methods of development.
The secret of Cooper’s success as a land developer was to build up a critical mass of settlers as quickly as possible and to promote their enterprise. Unlike other speculative landlords, Cooper made available all of his best land at once and sold it at modest prices with long-term credit and as freeholds, not as tenancies, in order to get the settlers to work as hard as they could on land they owned outright. At the same time, he realized that he could not be an absentee landlord. He knew that he needed to live among his settlers, to patronize and encourage them, and to work to develop saleable products and their access to markets. Cooper’s idea of development was to tap into each settler’s own interest in improving himself and make that self-interest redound to the community’s interest and his own. By “the simple measure of letting things take their own course,” he said, “I find my interest and that of the whole community promoted.”50
Cooper was not the only Federalist in the 1790s who sought to secure his social position by acquiring proprietary wealth in land. Some, like Rufus Putnam, James Mitchell Varnum, and the other Ohio Company associates from New England who in 1788 established Marietta at the confluence of the Muskingum and Ohio rivers, sought to escape from Eastern democracy and dreamed of creating civilized landed empires in the West. Others, like Henry Knox, secretary of war, and James Wilson, associate justice of the Supreme Court, remained in the cities of the East and simply speculated in land. Most of these land speculators had the same hopes as the federal government for the gradual, piecemeal, and regulated settlement of the West. Even if the speculators sold some of their land for low prices, they counted on subsequent settlers slowly filling in the territory surrounding the land they retained, which would raise its value and bring them the promised returns on their investments.
Everything was built on illusions. Most of the people moving west ignored the government’s plans for neat and orderly settlement. They shunned the speculators’ lands and refused to buy land at the expensive prices at which it was offered. In 1785 a defiant spokesman for the Ohio squatters declared that “all mankind . . . have an undoubted right to pass into every vacant country, and there to form their constitution, and that . . . Congress is not empowered to forbid them, neither is Congress empowered . . . to make any sale of the uninhabited lands to pay the public debt.”51 In desperation, the speculators lowered their prices, but because of rumors that Congress would soon be selling land in Ohio at twenty-five cents an acre, the settlers continually held out for better terms. By the early 1790s Symmes complained that the settlers in Ohio laughed in his face when he asked them for a dollar an acre for first-rate land. Symmes especially blamed “many land jobbers from Kentucky” who, instead of paying him, only made plans for “selling what they never had any intention of making their own.” When he fell behind in his payments to the government, Symmes eventually had to give back much of the land he had purchased.52
The Scioto Company ended even more disastrously. The company was not interested in settlement but in speculation. It sent the poet Joel Barlow to France to sell land claims to French speculators who presumably would assume all the cost and risks of settlement. Barlow turned for help to an unscrupulous Englishmen who not only sold rights to land in the Ohio Valley that the company did not actually own but sold them to French artisans ill-equipped to be farmers. Five to six hundred French immigrants in 1790 eventually established a miserable settlement they called Gallipolis on the Ohio River almost fifty miles southwest of Marietta. Disease and Indians killed off or drove away most of the French settlers, and by 1806 there were only sixteen families remaining from the original immigrants. The Scioto Company itself had collapsed in 1792.
Both the government and the speculators misunderstood the settlers and the West. The speculators tended to borrow heavily, overextending themselves in the expectation of quicker returns from land sales than was possible. Because of Indian hostilities, there were never enough settlers willing to pay for land they could have for free. Congress tried sending troops to the Ohio Valley to burn the squatters’ settlements, but the settlers simply rebuilt once the soldiers had left. To President Washington it soon became clear that “anything short of a Chinese wall, or a line of troops” would not be enough to stop the swarming settlers.53 Not only did the settlers squat on land they did not own, but they moved irregularly, chaotically, and unevenly, jumping from place to place, leaving huge chunks of unsettled land behind them. They refused to l
ive in organized communities, but instead roamed and rambled like the Indians whose treaty rights they continually violated. Their isolated and scattered settlements tended to make them vulnerable to Indian raids, which in turn incited white retaliation. These cycles of Indian-settler violence drenched the West in blood.
Congress eventually realized that the kinds of respectable, law-abiding, and productive settlers it wanted would not be attracted to the West unless there was peace with the Indians and law and order in the territories. The original plans for colonial governments in the West expressed in the Ordinance of 1784 had left the settlers to govern themselves. But self-government in the West was no more orderly and no more free of self-interest than it was within the several states. Although Washington and other Eastern gentry often called these disorderly settlers “adventurers” and “banditti,” the settlers were actually not much different in character from all those common folk whose ambitions, self-interestedness, and democratic excesses had caused problems in the state legislatures in the 1780s.
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