CHAPTER XI

THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT, 1817-1860

I. THE EFFECT ON THE PEOPLE OF TERRITORIAL EXPANSION

An Explanation of American Characteristics, 18431

Americans have repeatedly been charged by European observers with emphasizing size and magnitude rather than quality, and because of their activities in accumulating wealth they have been called mean and sordid. These same observers have compared the finer tastes of their own countrymen with those of the Americans to the disadvantage of the latter; and in so doing, they have failed to take into account the differences in national life and environment. The Americans conquered a continent in a century and the conquest left them little time for those activities in which the higher classes of Europeans indulged themselves. The very magnitude of the conquest caused them unconsciously to stress size, and in many cases to express the liveliest contempt for the higher refinements of life. In short they were fully occupied in getting a living.

GENTLEMEN travellers and bookmakers, by way of reproach, call us the trading-nation, a people devoted to gain; they lament our want of chivalry, our neglect of light amusements; they wonder we do not better support our theatres and other places of public resort, and say we are too sombre and gloomy by half for our national health. They compare New York with London and Paris; Boston and Philadelphia, with Liverpool; new cities, with old; a new, young people, seeking their natural level, with the old, settled, and unchanging population of Europe. Partly for the instruction of such persons, and partly for the satisfaction of dwelling upon this honorable characteristic of our country, we will consider these charges in our pages.

But a few years ago, the country we inhabit was a wilderness. Hardly was the land cleared on the coast, and dotted with towns and villages; hardly had New York, and Boston, and Philadelphia, assumed the name and character of cities, before the great west became an object of interest to our own people, and to the immigrant from foreign lands. The story of the resources of this continent reached

1 Hunt's Merchants' Magazine (New York, 1843), VIII, 164-8. Article by J. N. Bellows, of New Hampshire.

the ears of the starved and oppressed European; a gleam of hope lighted up his care-worn features, as he heard of a free life on a fertile soil, by the banks of wide, navigable rivers, skirted by woods that abounded with game, where food, fuel, and peace, could be had for the asking. We had enough to do to welcome our new friends, as every one knows. The wants of a population, increasing in the west by magical numbers, made demands upon the comparatively old portions of the country to supply them. The great canal, connecting the lakes with the Hudson, was one of these wants. The genius of a Clinton devised and planned it, and it is the pattern improvement of this time. The magnitude, completion, and success of it, has given hope and confidence to every subsequent effort of the kind; and it has been of as great benefit in its consequences upon internal improvements, as it has as a high-way for the wealth of the western valleys.

We were, besides, destitute of manufactures, (thanks to the early parental guidance of the mother country,) and were obliged to seek abroad for other means of supplying our new demands. We had no time to give that attention to manufactures which we saw, at a glance, were the great interests of our country. Our population came upon us too rapidly for this; they could not stand naked, and without tools and machinery, while we were putting up the mills to manufacture clothing and supplies for them. They must be imported; the capital of the country was invested in shipping, and the young men flocked to the city and became ship-owners and importers. Our inland towns suffered, and still suffer, the draining off of many of their most promising youth, whom the hope of speedy fortunes and high wages drew to the seaports. Trade became the business of the country from an absolute necessity.

As soon as we had breathing-time, we turned our attention to manufactures; that is, as soon as the young men could be spared, and the capital could be spared or made. Then, in places where water-power was abundant, towns and villages sprung into being, and employed not only the labors of the young men, but the young women, to such an extent, that cooks and chambermaids became scarce; and, at this time, the majority of those who are technically called servants, in the houses of the opulent, are foreigners, the natives being employed, for the most part, on the farms and in the factories.

Our position with regard to other people, has forced us to do everything in a hurry. Our company came so soon, we had hardly time to put ourselves into trim to receive visitors. As a nation, we are much in the same predicament with the lady without "help," who

consequently does her own work and "chores," upon whom a carriage load of fashionable visitors arrives while she is cooking dinner. Hearing the bell, and thinking it is the children just come home from school, she runs to open the door herself. Finding her mistake, she, like a sensible woman, covers her confusion not by apologies and lies, but by making herself as agreeable as she can, and her guests go away and call her a slattern and other hard names; when, if they knew all the circumstances, they would consider her an angel. We trust, from this statement of facts, that it can be seen why we are a trading-nation; why so large a part of our population is engaged in a way that make them averse to spending their leisure time at theatres and in jovial parties.

If we are, then, by the necessity of the case, in consequence of our youth, much engaged in trade, it can easily be seen why we are not, in the popular sense of the word, a chivalrous people. War, love of conquest, the profession of arms, nurture chivalry. The chivalry of the ancients, and the remains of the spirit of knighthood in Europe, at this time, is the refinement which taste throws over a radically bad principle; an attempt to adorn, with a show of justice and equity, what, at the bottom, is but a blood-thirsty preference of self to human rights. It is all of a piece with the drapery of thrones and the imposing magnificence of rank and title, which exist only by cruel want somewhere. For we suppose that it must be a law of nature, that every waste and extravagance deprives some one of comfort; and the present condition of the laboring classes in Europe, is a sufficient verification of our remark. We are not a chivalrous people, then, and do not wear swords and plumes; we discountenance duelling, and live under the protection of laws we have ourselves made. We do not recognise any difference between the law of honor and the law of God, and say that every custom, inconsistent with the latter, is of course so with the former. We take credit for having made this advance in morals, and believe it is the natural fruit of our Christian origin.

Now, the Spaniard is a chivalrous character, and the decayed nobility of Italy are patterns of chivalry, though steeped to the lips. in poverty; "too proud to work, they nobly starve." Thank heaven! there is none of this spirt in our industrious population; and, least of all, is there any one so destitute of common sense as to view the employments of trade as beneath his dignity. We read of such men in fiction, and even then we give them a fictitious pity. That any poor, mortal man, born into this world of trial and struggle, should have the notion that some accident of birth exempts him from exertion, and that an honest livelihood, wrought out by his own energies, is inferior to

dronish dependence and proud poverty, fills us with commiseration and disgust. That trade should be undervalued by the very men who owe their greatness to it; that any Englishman, of all others, should sneer at what has made his country what she is, is surprising indeed. For, to what does England owe her rank among the nations of the globe, if not to the extensive enterprise of her merchants? Take from her her commerce, and how infinitely inferior she would be to France, one-fourth of whose soil is worth more than all the British empire can boast of possessing. The territory of England is the Atlantic and Pacific oceans; her ships are the ploughs of these watery soils, and from them she reaps her great harvests. Her wealth is her power, and it is a wealth heaped up for her by her merchants. Why has Spain lost the position she once held among nations? Her commerce has been interrupted by fatal intestine wars. Property has had no security; and the nation, step by step, has declined. France has not yet recovered from her wasting revolutions, and the derangement of her trade is one of the sorest evils of her commotions. It is the condition of the mercantile class that furnish the best test of the condition of a country, because every nation owes its life to this interest; and it is because we know this by experience and philosophy, that the majority of our people turn their attention to trade as the surest oad to national prosperity.

It is somewhat remarkable, that the English people hold, as a standing jest, the tendency to bargaining and money-getting among the Scotch. Whether they allow other people to laugh at Sawney, is a question. But there is little doubt that the English nation owes much to Scotland. Her men of genius have oftener boasted a Scottish or Irish origin than an English one. Her orators, her poets and legislators, have been born oftener than otherwise among the people she pretends to despise, or the people she is not too proud to oppress. No one may say how much, at this very moment, England owes to the canny Scot, and the warm-hearted son of Erin; the one of whom she derides, and the other subdues. .

...

In due time, no doubt, we shall have the arts in some perfection. Our architecture will improve as we have wealth and leisure to give heed to the elegancies of life; but we trust that we shall always estimate such matters as the Croton aqueduct as of far greater consequence than statues and pictures; that before we have a national gallery, we shall have asylums for the blind and the insane; and study what is due to the wants of the whole people, before we undertake to gratify the taste of foreigners, and the few travellers who, forming a

taste for certain luxuries abroad, would have us stop the gradual progress we are making, to attend to some Quixotic scheme for making America like "dear Italy." One man thinks music the great desideratum, and would sacrifice every thing to that; another is mad upon the subject of public edifices, and decries every ill-proportioned building as a blot and stain upon the national character, forgetting that our wealth is yet limited, and that we have a great deal to do in other affairs, and that it is quite as important the debit side of the account should bear a fair ratio to the credit side, as that a faultless proportion should exist in the parts of the building. How many public edifices have been enlarged to meet the exigency of the moment and from economy, while taste demands that the whole be pulled down and put up anew.

Go to the western immigrant, who consults convenience and expedition in building his log hut, and is glad of any house that will shelter his little family, and say to him, "there friend, your house is out of all proportion; and where are your fences and your flower-garden? Why don't you paint your gateway, and make gravel walks about your domicil, and set out shrubbery, &c., &c.?" The man will laugh in your face, and perhaps answer you thus: "I have a very warm bouse; here is a hole in the roof to let out the smoke, and a hole in the door to let in the pigs; it works very well, as you may see." This matter of the pigs might be dispensed with, to be sure, but you would find out that the man is chiefly bent on living first; he feels that he has great fundamental things to attend to before he can accommodate himself to your tastes.

This is our position as a country. We have the land to clear, canals to dig, rail-tracks to lay, water-works to finish; trade, agriculture, and common school education, are the great interests of our people. You may talk to them, write about them, ridicule them, do what you please to divert them from their common-sense track, and you will talk, and write, and ridicule in vain. We cannot do everything to-day. Give us time; and do not expect from our infancy, what only can be found in the manhood of a nation.

II. ADVICE TO EMIGRANTS

A. Foreign Immigration and the Westward Movement, 18161 During the period when the Mississippi Valley was being rapidly populated many books on emigration were written, in which those about to migrate to America

1 Travels through the United States of America. By John Melish (Philadelphia and London, 1818), 628-33.