Frederick Jackson Turner

“ Charging the administration, and especially John Quincy Adams, with subserviency to Great Britain, he demanded that the United States should become the center of a system against the despotism of the Old World and should act on its own responsibility. "We look too much abroad," said he. "Let us break these commercial and political fetters; let us no longer watch the nod of any European politician; let us become real and true Americans, and place ourselves at the head of the American system." ”

“ In the dark period of the commercial crisis of 1819, while Congress was considering the admission of Missouri, the slavery issue flamed out, and revealed with startling distinctness the political significance of the institution, fateful and ominous for the nation, transcending in importance the temporary financial and industrial ills.
The advance of settlement in the United States made the slavery contest a struggle for power between sections, marching in parallel columns into the west, each carrying its own system of labor. ”

“ West of the Mississippi lay a huge new world—an ocean of grassy prairie that rolled far to the west, till it reached the zone where insufficient rainfall transformed it into the arid plains, which stretched away to the foot-hills of the Rocky Mountains. Over this vast waste, equal in area to France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Austria-Hungary, Italy, Denmark, and Belgium combined, a land where now wheat and corn fields and grazing herds produce much of the food supply for the larger part of America and for great areas of Europe, roamed the bison and the Indian hunter. ”

“ A steamboat, coming from New Orleans, brings to the remotest villages of our streams, and the very doors of the cabins, a little Paris, a section of Broadway, or a slice of Philadelphia, to ferment in the minds of our young people, the innate propensity for fashions and finery. Within a day's journey of us, three distinct canals are in respectable progress towards completion. ”

“ Even greater than New England's interest in the carrying-trade was the interest of the south in the exchange of her great staples in the markets of Europe.
Never in history, perhaps, was an economic force more influential upon the life of a people. As the production of cotton increased, the price fell, and the seaboard south, feeling the competition of the virgin soils of the southwest, saw in the protective tariff for the development of northern manufactures the real source of her distress. The price of cotton was in these years a barometer of southern prosperity and of southern discontent. ”

“ It is an evidence of the rapidity with which the west stamped itself upon its colonists, that although Clay was born, and bred to the law, in Virginia, he soon became the mouth-piece of these western forces. In his personality, also, he reflected many of the traits of this region. Kentucky, ardent in its spirit, not ashamed of a strain of sporting blood, fond of the horse-race, partial to its whiskey, ready to "bluff" in politics as in poker, but sensitive to honor, was the true home of Henry Clay. ”

“ In the decade of 1820-1830, fur-traders threaded the dark and forbidding defiles of the mountains, unfolded the secrets of the Great Basin, and found their way across the Rockies to California and Oregon; the government undertook diplomatic negotiations to safeguard American rights on the Pacific, and extended a line of forts well into the Indian country; while far-seeing statesmen on the floor of Congress challenged the nation to fulfill its destiny by planting its settlements boldly beyond the Rocky Mountains on the shores of the Pacific. ”

“ Fields abandoned; the hospitable mansions of our fathers deserted; agriculture drooping; our slaves, like their masters, working harder, and faring worse; the planter striving with unavailing efforts to avert the ruin which is before him." He drew a sad picture of the once thriving planter, reduced to despair, gathering up the small remnants of his broken fortune, and, with his wife and little ones, tearing himself from the scenes of his childhood and the bones of his ancestors to seek in the wilderness the reward for his industry of which the policy of Congress had deprived him. ”

“ But the political ideals and actions of the west are explained by social quite as much as by economic forces. It was certain that this society, where equality and individualism flourished, where assertive democracy was supreme, where impatience with the old order of things was a ruling passion, would demand control of the government, would resent the rule of the trained statesmen and official classes, and would fight nominations by congressional caucus and the continuance of presidential dynasties. ”

“ No statesman ever handled the problems of his public career with a keener understanding of the conditions of success.
The middle region was too much divided by the game of politics played by her multitude of minor leaders to unite upon a favorite son in this campaign; but De Witt Clinton, finding elements of strength in the prestige which his successful advocacy of the Erie Canal had brought to him throughout the region where internal improvements were popular, and relying upon his old connections with the Federalists, watched events with eager eye, waiting for an opportunity which never came. ”

“ Calhoun and John Quincy Adams, conversing in the spring of 1820 upon politics, had the gloomiest apprehensions. There had been, within two years, Calhoun said, "an immense revolution of fortunes in every part of the Union; enormous numbers of persons utterly ruined; multitudes in deep distress; and a general mass of disaffection to the Government not concentrated in any particular direction, but ready to seize upon any event and looking out anywhere for a leader." ”

“ New England was achieving unity and national feeling as a manufacturing region, and Webster was developing those powers which were to make him the orator of consolidation. While the leaders of the middle states played the game of personal politics, their people and those of the growing west were rallying around the man who personified their passion for democracy and nationalism—the fiery Jackson, who confused sectional opposition to the government with personal hostility to himself. ”

“ The Great Valley ran through eastern Pennsylvania, across Maryland, and, in the form of the Shenandoah Valley, made a natural highway to the interior of North Carolina. New York City and Philadelphia saw in an intimate connection with the rising west the pledge of their prosperity; and Baltimore, which was both a metropolis of the south and of the middle region, extended her trade north to central New York, west to the Ohio, and south into Virginia, and, like her rivals, sent her fleets to garner the commercial harvest of the sea. ”

“ When the south became fully conscious that slavery set the section apart from the rest of the nation, when it saw in nationalizing legislation, such as protection to manufactures and the construction of a system of internal improvements, the efforts of other sections to deprive the cotton states of their profits for the benefit of an industrial development in which they did not share, deep discontent prevailed. With but slight intermission from the days of Washington to those of Monroe, the tobacco planters under the Virginia dynasty had ruled the nation. ”

“ Henry Clay made an earnest effort to commit Congress to the exercise of the power of construction of interstate highways and canals which could not be undertaken by individual states or by combinations of states, and which, if built at all, must be by the nation. He recounted the attention given by Congress to the construction of public buildings and light-houses, coast surveys, erection of sea- walls in the Atlantic states—"everything on the margin of the ocean, but nothing for domestic trade; nothing for the great interior of the country." ”

“ That city will, in the course of time become the granary of the world, the emporium of commerce, the seat of manufactures, the focus of great moneyed operations, and the concentrating point of vast, disposable, and accumulating capitals, which will stimulate, enliven, extend, and reward the exertions of human labor and ingenuity, in all their processes and exhibitions. And before the revolution of a century, the whole island of Manhattan, covered with habitations and replenished with a dense population, will constitute one vast city. ”

“ His principal reliance was upon the arguments that the evils of slavery would be mitigated by diffusion, and that the proposed restriction was unconstitutional. Tallmadge and Taylor, of New York, combated these arguments so vigorously and with such bold challenge of the whole system of slavery in new territories, that Cobb, of Georgia, declared, "You have kindled a fire which all the waters of the ocean cannot put out, which seas of blood can only extinguish." ”

“ In the industrial field transportation was revolutionized by the introduction of the steamboat and by the development of canals and turnpikes. The factory system, nourished by the restrictions of the embargo and the war, rapidly developed until American manufactures became an interest which, in political importance, outweighed the old industries of shipping and foreign commerce. The expansion of cotton-planting transformed the energies of the south, extended her activity into the newer regions of the Gulf, and gave a new life to the decaying institution of slavery. ”

“ The men of the time were not unaware of these tendencies. Writing in 1823, Henry Clay declared that it was a just principle to inquire what great interests belong to each section of our country, and to promote those interests, as far as practicable, consistently with the Constitution, having always an eye to the welfare of the whole. "Assuming this principle," said he, "does any one doubt that if New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and the Western States constituted an independent nation, it would immediately protect the important interests in question? ”

“ With the existing colonies or dependencies of any European power we have not interfered and shall not interfere. But with the Governments who have declared their independence and maintained it, and whose independence we have, on great consideration and on just principles, acknowledged, we could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them, or controlling in any other manner their destiny, by any European power in any other light than as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States. ”

“ The transformation of the west from a rude and boisterous frontier to a group of states, soon rivaling their parent communities in population and wealth, was not unlike the process through which Massachusetts and Pennsylvania and Virginia passed as colonies, except that the inland people accepted ideals and standards originally English, but worked out and put into shape by their colonist fathers. ”

“ When New York undertook the Erie Canal in 1817 as a state enterprise, and pushed it to such a triumphant conclusion that before a decade after its completion its tolls repaid the cost of construction, a revolution was effected in transportation. The cheapness of water carriage not only compelled the freighters on the turnpike roads to lower their charges, but also soon made it probable that canals would supersede land transportation for heavy freights, and even for passengers. ”

“ He must win over his enemies in New England and attach that section to his fortunes; he must find friends in the middle states, conciliate the south, and procure a following in the west, where Clay, the Hotspur of debate, with all the power of the speakership behind him, and Jackson, "Old Hickory," the hero of New Orleans, contested the field. And all the time he must satisfy his conscience, and reach his goal by the craft and strength of his intellect rather than by the arts of popular management. ”

“ If iron foundries were developing among the towns of the New England coast, where ships brought in the raw material from Sweden and from England, the Pennsylvania forges found an opposite interest in their desire for an increased duty on pig-iron to protect the domestic product.
The history of the tariff has always been the history of the struggle to combine local and opposing interests into a single bill. Such conditions furnished opportunity for the clever politicians who guided Jackson's canvass to introduce discordant ideas and jealousy between the middle states, the west, and New England. ”

“ From the days when South-Carolinians led in legislation for tariff and internal improvements, when Virginians promoted the Colonization Society, and Georgians advocated the policy of mitigating the evils of slavery by scattering the slaves, we have reached the period when a united south protests against "the American system," and the lower south asserts that slavery must not be touched—not even discussed. ”

“ By the side of the picture of the advance of the pioneer farmer, bearing his household goods in his canvas-covered wagon to his new home across the Ohio, must therefore be placed the picture of the southern planter crossing through the forests of western Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, or passing over the free state of Illinois to the Missouri Valley, in his family carriage, with servants, packs of hunting-dogs, and a train of slaves, their nightly camp-fires lighting up the wilderness where so recently the Indian hunter had held possession. ”

“ In 1820 the United States had a population of about nine and one- half millions; in 1830, nearly thirteen millions. It was spread out from east to west like a page in the history of society. On the Atlantic seaboard were the centers of American civilization that had grown up in colonial days in close touch with Europe. From this region of commerce and manufacture, the nation, on its march towards the west, changed through successive types of industrial life until in the Rocky Mountains the frontier fur-trader mingled with the Indians. ”

“ Following the Great Valley in the middle of the same century, the Scotch-Irish and German settlers had poured into the up-country of the south, so that these interior counties of Virginia and the Carolinas were like a peninsula thrust down from Pennsylvania into the south, with economic, racial, social, and religious connections which made an intimate bond between the two sections. A multitude of religious sects flourished in tolerant Pennsylvania, and even the system of local government was a combination of the New England town and the southern county. ”