1826. FLAT-BOATING ON THE MISSISSIPPI. 167 told twenty-eight thousand tons of freight. As many as thirty, building and repairing, loading and unloading, might almost any day be counted within the bounds of Cincinnati. Despite this increase of steamboat traffic, the movement of freight down the rivers by flat-boat and raft was greater than ever. New Madrid was like a seaport. In the spring it was no uncommon occurrence for one hundred boats to arrive day after day from every part of the great valley loaded with the products of the East and the West. There would be gathered in one indescribable mass planks and lumber from the forests of Pennsylvania and New York; Yankee notions from New England; pork and flour, whiskey and hemp, tobacco, cotton bagging, and bale rope from Kentucky and Tennessee; corn and apples and potatoes from Ohio; cattle and horses from Illinois; lead and poultry from Missouri; cider and dried fruit and spirits of all sorts from the Ohio Valley; and barges carrying nothing but turkeys. As they lay side by side at the river bank, with the crews wandering from boat to boat making inquiries, forming acquaintances, seeking old friends, and filling the air with shouts of recognition and congratulation and boisterous gayety, they formed a moving picture of life peculiar to the Father of Waters. At dusk all hands would go on shore to "raise the wind," as they expressed it; but by midnight quiet would settle down, and at the first streaks of dawn, as bugle after bugle rang out, the boats would again be astir, and before the sun was fairly up would be on their way down the river. Now they no longer went singly, but, lashed together in little fleets of eight or ten, they floated on toward New Orleans, while the boatmen whiled away the time as best they could with music, dancing, singing, and playing cards.* At the Crescent City the lumber and produce met a ready sale, after which the flat-boatmen worked their passage up the Mississippi as deck hands on the steamboats. West of the Mississippi the chief city was St. Louis, the centre of the fur trade of the Northwest and of a promising * For these details I am indebted to a description of the scene at New Madrid by Timothy Flint. commerce with Mexico. The pioneers in the Mexican trade seem to have been two parties, the one led by two men named McKnight and Beard, who went across the plains to Santa Fé in 1812, and the other by Choteau, who made the journey in 1817. But the hostility of the Indians along the route, the jealousy with which the Spanish Government beheld any intercourse of foreign nations with her American provinces, and the risk attending the introduction of American goods, rendered the expeditions so uncertain and unsafe that no move was undertaken till 1821, when Mexico had become an independent power, and gladly received the goods and wares of the United States. Thenceforth little bands of adventurers, with small trains of pack-horses, mules, and wagons, annually wound across the great American desert to Santa Fé, taking with them cotton and woollen goods of the cheaper and coarser sorts, light articles of cutlery, silk shawls, and looking-glasses, to be exchanged for horses, mules, beaver furs, Spanish milled dollars, and gold and silver bullion. On one occasion the party numbered eighty-one men, with one hundred and fiftysix horses and mules, twenty-three four-wheeled vehicles, and a piece of field artillery, for the route led through the hunting grounds of the Pawnees, the Arapahoes, Comanches, Apaches, Snakes, and Osages. The hostility of these Indians, who never failed to attack and rob every party that crossed their territory, induced the traders to petition Congress to establish a post on the Arkansas where the trail crossed the river, and secure for them, by treaties with the Indians, an unmolested passage to the interior provinces of Mexico. Benton warmly espoused their cause, and brought in a bill to authorize the marking out of a road from the western frontier of Missouri to the confines of New Mexico. No opposition was made by either Congress or the President, and in June, 1825, a party duly empowered to treat with the Indians and mark out the road left St. Louis. South of Kentucky lay the cotton belt. Ten years before, at the close of the war with Great Britain, no section of our country could boast of so promising an industrial future. The return of peace had opened to British enterprise many markets 1811-23. THE COTTON TRADE. 169 long closed, our own among them, and had created a demand for cotton which it was almost impossible to supply. The price, as a consequence, rose till, in 1816, upland cotton sold at Liverpool for twenty pence halfpenny a pound, and at twenty-two pence two years later. A wild speculation in negroes, land, and cotton followed. Planters made haste to expand their fields. Men who had never been planters bought land and slaves on credit, and rushed into cotton-growing. One hundred dollars an acre was willingly paid for land and one thousand dollars a head for negro laborers. A golden harvest seemed at hand, but, unhappily, it was not gathered. Extravagant prices led the factors of Great Britain to seek in the East Indies for cheaper cotton, and large quantities were exported. During the six years 1811 to 1816 not eighty-five thousand bales of East Indian cotton came to Great Britain. But in 1817 one hundred and seventeen thousand and in 1818 two hundred and forty-seven thousand bales were imported. Not one half was consumed, for the staple was ill-suited to the machinery then in use. To the surplus thus created was added a yet greater surplus from the United States, and before 1818 ended the price fell twenty per cent. at Liverpool. Early in January, 1819, news of this shrinkage reached our country, and in one day cotton dropped from thirty-three cents to twenty-six and a half, and went steadily down till June, when it reached sixteen and a half cents, a decline of fifty per cent. in five months. Experts estimated the loss thereby inflicted on the merchants at over four million dollars, and the diminution in the income of the planters at seven millions more. Failure of the East India crops in 1819 raised prices in Great Britain for a short time; but the production in the South went on increasing year by year with such rapidity that the one hundred and seventy-three million pounds of cotton exported to Great Britain in 1823 yielded six hundred thousand dollars less than the eighty-seven million pounds exported in 1819. Then came the day of reckoning. Speculators, cotton merchants, planters, men who were in any way connected with the growing, selling, or shipping of cotton, went down in bankruptcy. For weeks at a time not a pound was sold at any price. Planters who in 1818 bought one thousand acres on credit now gladly offered to part with two thousand to pay the debt incurred. Land purchased on credit in 1818 at three hundred dollars an acre could not be sold in 1825 for twenty. Negroes worth one thousand dollars in the flush time seven years before were now unsalable at three hundred. The effect on the South of the rise of cotton-growing was already apparent. In every State, from Louisiana to North Carolina, cotton was the great staple. Here, then, was a long belt of States wholly agricultural with identically the same sort of agriculture, carried on by identically the same kind of labor-that of negro slaves. The diversified industry already characteristic of the North was wanting in the South. The questions of an economic kind which now deeply concerned the North were therefore treated with indifference or viewed as hostile issues by the South. The South had no manufactures; therefore a tariff for the protection of manufactures was unconstitutional. The South had no interstate trade of any consequence; no market to seek in the West; no goods, wares, or merchandise to transport from the seaboard to the Mississippi; therefore the construction of internal improvements, of turnpikes, canals, good roads, or the opening of watercourses by the Federal Government was an exercise of power not granted by the Constitution. The South imported heavily from Great Britain; therefore all tariffs must be as low as possible, and to keep them low the expenses of Government must be reduced to a minimum. Thus on the three questions of the hour-the tariff, internal improvements, and the protection of American industries there was a great gulf fixed between the cottongrowing States on the one hand and the manufacturing and trading States on the other. The rapid settlement of the West and South, and the purchase of large tracts of land by settlers and by speculators, brought up yet another economic question for serious discussion. Neither in the East nor in the West was the manner of selling and using the public lands satisfactory to the people. In the opening year of the century Congress, abandoning the 1812-1816. THE PUBLIC LANDS. 171 old system especially favorable to the rich man, adopted another especially favorable to the poor man, and having fixed the minimum price at two dollars, and reduced the minimum number of acres to be sold to one hundred and sixty, gave the purchaser four years in which to make his payments.* For a while the credit system worked well. The quantity of land sold was considerable; but the times were good, and, till the prostration of business and the ruin of commerce by the Long Embargo in 1808, the forfeitures for non-payment were few in number and far between. With the enforcement of that dreadful restrictive measure, and of the equally fruitless and ruinous non-intercourse and non-importation laws, the effect of the loss of commerce, trade, and foreign markets on the ability of the settler to pay for his land was quickly manifest, and in 1809 and 1810 Congress found it expedient to extend the time of payment. In 1811 no indulgence was granted, and tens of thousands of acres reverted to the Government. With the opening of the war times grew worse instead of better, and year after year, in 1812, 1813, 1814, and 1815, Congress was forced to be lenient with a great army of debtors. But the hard times and business distress which made it impossible for the settlers in the West to pay for their land was the cause of a movement of population from the seaboard, where trade and commerce were prostrate, where land was costly and rents were high, to the West, where farms were to be had for a few dollars an acre, were free from taxation for five years from the day of sale, and could be purchased on four years' credit. A wild speculation in Government or, as the phrase went, Congress lands followed. To speculate was easy, for in the dark days of the war, when the credit of the Government was almost gone, when loans could hardly be negotiated, and when bonds and Treasury notes were depreciated twenty-five per cent., the Treasury Department made a bargain with the State banks in the West. If they, on the one hand, would receive and reissue Treasury notes, the Treasury, on the other hand, would accept their bills in pay * History of the People of the United States, vol. iii, pp. 124, 125. |