THE WEST AT THE OPENING OF THE CENTURY.

"America now attains her majority."

At the close of the Revolutionary War, almost nothing was known in the American colonies about the country lying to the west of the Mississippi. The sources of the Missouri[1] were unknown even to French traders. Nobody knew that a great sister river carried the snows of the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific, or that the head waters of these two noble streams lay coiled about the feet of the same lofty chain.

Where, then, should we locate the West? Possibly central along the eastern base of the Alleghanies, certainly remote at Pittsburg, and perhaps reaching its vanishing-point somewhere about the Dark and Bloody Ground of Kentucky. Among a host of foes civilization stood at bay here, but would take no backward step.

France opened the way from east to west. France and England fought for the primacy of the continent, and England won. Defeated France gave up the idea of maintaining herself in America, and secretly ceded to Spain what the war had left her west of the Mississippi, as a bankrupt might convey his property out of the reach of his most pressing creditor.

When the Colonies revolted, France saw her way to make them, like the cat in the fable, pull her chestnuts out of the fire. It is no part of a king's trade to set up a republic. France played her own game,[2] played it astutely and to the end. When the Colonies, with her help, achieved their independence, she showed them, much to their wonder, for they were fresh to the tricks of diplomacy, that in politics there is no more friendship than in trade, or rather that politics is a game in which the best player wins.

In view of what it had cost her to give up Louisiana, in the first place, not only in loss of territory, but national prestige, it is perhaps not strange that when, as our ally, France was in turn a victor, she should be found trying to get back Louisiana for herself. To do this she had to play a double game, with the help of Spain, while that power stood ready in the background to take any thing that came in her way.

These two gamesters wished to restore what we should call the old balance of power, thus confining the United States nearly in the limits they had occupied as colonies. To her honor, England would not listen to their seductive pleadings. Not that she loved her revolted subjects more, but that she loved her old rivals less. When John Jay gave their schemes to the light of day, it was seen France had never meant we should be a power among the nations—only a little republic. In the end England's pride prevailed over the sting of wounded self-love. Instead of dictating the terms of peace, as she had meant to do, France had to see herself shut out from Louisiana, for good and all, while Spain, the Mephistophiles of American affairs, recovered Florida from England, so excluding the United States from access to the Gulf of Mexico either by the seaboard or the Mississippi River. What was now left of French Louisiana, as it existed previous to this war, presented the anomaly of a colony of French people living under the Spanish flag.

In effect, John Jay had urged upon England that blood is thicker than water. Franklin said, "Let us now forgive and forget." And so the Anglo-Saxon spirit prevailed.

With independence achieved, the United States gained, as we have seen, all the territory, except Canada, which England had conquered from France. At a single stride her frontier had reached the Mississippi on the west and the Great Lakes on the north.

Before the war, of which this was the grand sequel, a thin stream of English immigrants, chiefly from Virginia and North Carolina, under the lead of Daniel Boone, had crossed the mountains of North Carolina into Kentucky. This movement was central in what is commonly known as the Blue Grass Region, of which Lexington may be considered the pivot.

After the war, a second and larger emigration, chiefly from New England, crossed over the Alleghanies to the head of navigation on the Ohio, whence it moved down that river to the Muskingum, and was central about Marietta. Here, then, we have two separate streams of population, belonging to the same sturdy Anglo-Saxon race, though originating in different sections of the young Republic, each taking along with it to its new home in the West the customs and traditions of its own section, and guided by instinct or destiny upon lines which, ere long, were to divide slave from free States.

By an Act of Congress, known in history as the Ordinance of 1787, all that great block of wilderness country, into which this last emigration was setting, became one political division under the name of the North-west Territory.[3] The Act creating this territory also provided for making three States from it, and most wisely forbade that slavery should ever exist within its borders. Thus it was that the Ohio came to be not only a physical, but a political, dividing-line between the sections, which, now that the law of the land had fixed a limit slavery should not overstep, came to be designated as North and South, not, as formerly, from geographical situation only, but because the line had been thus sharply drawn between free and slave institutions. Each was now on trial before the world; each was now to show what it could do for human progress, under its own institutions, with its own means, and on its own chosen ground.

It would seem as if this splendid acquisition of ours, this North-west Territory, now constituting the great heart and seat of power in the American Union, might well have filled the fullest measure of patriotic desire for territorial expansion. It was to be, however, but the cradle of a newer and more robust growth, as the original States had been for that just beginning at the centre. It was an empire in itself, comprising all those States now enclosed between the Mississippi, the Ohio, Pennsylvania, and the Great Lakes. Yet this whole tract held, in 1792, no more than ten thousand whites, settled in widely scattered spots, among sixty-five thousand wild Indians.

These widely scattered spots were the new settlements at Marietta and Fort Harmar on the Muskingum, Cincinnati and Fort Washington on the Ohio, Clarksville at the Falls of the Ohio, with the old French posts of Vincennes on the Wabash, Kaskaskia on the river of the name, and Fort Chartres and Cahokia on the Mississippi. Over this vast tract a score of military posts held the Indians in check, and formed the kernels of future settlements. Along the line of the Great Lakes, and contrary to treaty stipulations with her, England still held the key-points,—Niagara, Miami, Detroit, Michilimackinac,—thus restricting the movement of our citizens from east to west on that line, and so shutting them out from the lucrative Indian trade of the Far West.

Let us now look at the section south of the Ohio.

Kentucky was made a State in 1792, and Tennessee in 1796. All south of Tennessee and west of Georgia was formed (1798) into the Mississippi Territory. On the east, or American, shore of the Mississippi, settlement was mostly confined to the places mentioned in "The Founding of Louisiana" as villages. None had outgrown this condition. Most were simply plantations. Population had increased (1785) to thirty-eight thousand persons, chiefly by the coming-in of refugees from Nova Scotia and St. Domingo. And blacks were already numerous enough to cause uneasiness among the planters. The cultivation of cotton and sugar was growing to importance; but the Spaniards at New Orleans wanted all the water to their own mill, as the proverb has it, which meant nearly the same thing as closing the river to American trade altogether.

The Falls of the Ohio had already begun to assume importance both as a depot and shipping-point. They were a natural stopping-place for all boats going up or down the river. Hence Louisville had grown up above the falls as the port of a remarkably thrifty cluster of inland settlements which had taken the place of the primitive stations of the first settlers.

On both sides of the Ohio the Indians made a determined stand against the coming in of white settlers. But bravely as they fought, their power was so broken in many bloody conflicts, that they were, at length (1794), glad to sue for peace. Shorn of power, they were now confined within narrower limits. England gave up (1795) the lake fortresses. All roads to the West being now open, they were speedily thronged by an army of settlers.