The Old Northwest: A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond · Chapter 8Contents (8)
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So with the tariff. The cry of the East for protection to infant industries was echoed by the struggling manufacturers of Cincinnati, Louisville, and other towns; while a protective tariff as a means of building up the home market for foodstuffs and raw materials seemed to the Westerner an altogether reasonable and necessary expedient. Ohio alone in the Northwest had an opportunity to vote on the protective bill of 1816, and gave its enthusiastic support. Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois voted unitedly for the bills of 1820, 1824, 1828, and 1832. The principal western champion of the protective policy was Henry Clay, a Kentuckian; but the Northwest supported the policy more consistently than did Clay's own State and section.
On the National Bank the position of the Northwest was no less emphatic. The people were little troubled by the question of constitutionality; but believing that the bank was an engine of tyranny in the hands of an eastern aristocracy, they were fully prepared to support Jackson in his determination to extinguish that "un-American monopoly."
There were other subjects upon which agreement was reached either with difficulty or not at all. One of these was the form of local government which should be adopted. Southerners and New Englanders brought to their new homes widely differing political usages. The former were accustomed to the county as the principal local unit of administration. It was a relatively large division, whose affairs were managed by elective officers, mainly a board of commissioners. The New Englanders, on the other hand, had grown up under the town-meeting system and clung to the notion that an indispensable feature of democratic local government is the periodic assembling of the citizens of a community for legislative, fiscal, and electoral purposes. The Illinois constitution of 1818 was made by Southerners, and naturally it provided for the county system. But protest from the "Yankee" elements became so strong that in the new constitution of 1848 provision was made for township organization wherever the people of a county wanted it; and this form of government, at first prevalent only in the northern counties, is now found in most of the central and southern counties as well.
The most deeply and continuously dividing issue in the Northwest, as in the nation at large, was negro slavery. Although written by Southern men, the Ordinance of 1787 stipulated that there should be "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory, otherwise than in the punishment of crimes whereof the party shall have been duly convicted." If the government of the Northwest had been one of laws, and not of men, this specific provision would have made the territory free soil and would have relieved the inhabitants from all interest in the "peculiar institution." But the laws never execute themselves—least of all in frontier communities. In point of fact, considerable numbers of slaves were held in the territory until the nineteenth century was far advanced. As late as 1830 thirty-two negroes were held in servitude in the single town of Vincennes. Slavery could and did prevail to a limited extent because existing property rights were guaranteed in the Ordinance itself, in the deed of cession by Virginia, in the Jay Treaty of 1794, and in other fundamental acts. The courts of the Northwest held that slave-owners whose property could be brought under any of these guarantees might retain that property; and although no court countenanced further importation, itinerant Southerners—"rich planters traveling in their family carriages, with servants, packs of hunting-dogs, and trains of slaves, their nightly camp-fires lighting up the wilderness where so recently the Indian hunter had held possession"—occasionally settled in southern Indiana or Illinois and with the connivance of the authorities kept some of their dependents in slavery, or quasi-slavery, for decades.
Of actual slaveholders there were not enough to influence public sentiment greatly. But the people of Southern extraction, although neither slaveholders nor desiring to become such, had no strong moral convictions on the subject. Indeed, they were likely to feel that the anti-slavery restriction imposed an unfortunate impediment in the way of immigration from the South. Hence the persistent demand of citizens of Indiana and Illinois for a relaxation of the drastic prohibition of slavery in the Ordinance of 1787. In 1796 Congress was petitioned from Kaskaskia to extend relief; in 1799 the territorial Legislature was urged to bring about a repeal; in 1802 an Indiana territorial convention at Vincennes memorialized Congress in behalf of a suspension of the proviso for a period of ten years. Not only were violations of the law winked at, but both Indiana and Illinois deliberately built up a system of indenture which partook strongly of the characteristics of slavery. After much controversy, Indiana, in 1816, framed a state constitution which reiterated the language of the Northwest Ordinance, but without invalidating titles to existing slave property; while Illinois was admitted to the Union in 1818 with seven or eight hundred slaves upon her soil, and with a constitution which continued the old system of indenture with slight modification.
In a heated contest in Illinois in 1824 over the question of calling a state convention to draft a constitution legalizing slavery the people of Northern antecedents made their votes tell and defeated the project. But, like other parts of the Northwest, this State never became a unit on the slavery issue. Certainly it never became abolitionist. By an almost unanimous vote the Legislature, in 1837, adopted joint resolutions which condemned abolitionism as "more productive of evil than of moral and political good"; and in Congress in the preceding year the delegation of the State had given solid support to the "gag resolutions," which were intended to deny a hearing to all petitions on the slavery question.
Throughout the great era of slavery controversy the Northwest was prolific of schemes of compromise, for the constant clash of Northern and Southern elements developed an aptitude for settlement by agreement on moderate lines. The people of the section as a whole long clung to popular, or "squatter," sovereignty as the supremely desirable solution of the slavery question—a device formulated and defended by two of the Northwest's own statesmen, Cass and Douglas, and relinquished only slowly and reluctantly under the leadership, not of a New England abolitionist, but of a statesman of Southern birth who had come to the conclusion that the nation could not permanently exist half slave and half free.
Cass, Douglas, Lincoln—all were adopted sons of the Northwest, and the career of every one illustrates not only the prodigality with which the back country showered its opportunities upon men of industry and talent, but the play and interplay of sectional and social forces in the building of the newer nation. Cass and Douglas were New Englanders. One was born at Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1782; the other at Brandon, Vermont, in 1813. Lincoln sprang from Virginian and Kentuckian stocks. His father's family moved from Virginia to Kentucky at the close of the Revolution; in 1784 his grandfather was killed by lurking Indians, and his father, then a boy of six, was saved from captivity only by a lucky shot of an older brother. Lincoln himself was born in 1809. Curiously enough, Cass and Douglas, the New Englanders, played their rôles on the national stage as Jackson Democrats, while Lincoln, the Kentuckian of Virginian ancestry, became a Whig and later a Republican.
Cass and Douglas were well-born. Cass's father was a thrifty soldier-farmer who made for his family a comfortable home at Zanesville, Ohio; Douglas's father was a successful physician. Lincoln was born in obscurity and wretchedness. His father, Thomas Lincoln, was a ne'er-do-well Kentucky carpenter, grossly illiterate, unable or unwilling to rise above the lowest level of existence in the pioneer settlements. His mother, Nancy Hanks, whatever her antecedents may have been, was a woman of character, and apparently of some education. But she died when her son was only nine years of age.
Cass and Douglas had educational opportunities which in their day were exceptional. Both attended famous academies and received instruction in the classics, mathematics, and philosophy. Both grew up in an environment of enlightenment and integrity. Lincoln, on the other hand, got a few weeks of instruction under two amateur teachers in Kentucky and a few months more in Indiana—in all, hardly as much as one year; and as a boy he knew only rough, coarse surroundings. When, in 1816, the restless head of the family moved from Kentucky to southern Indiana, his worldly belongings consisted of a parcel of carpenters' tools and cooking utensils, a little bedding, and about four hundred gallons of whiskey. No one who has not seen the sordidness, misery, and apparent hopelessness of the life of the "poor whites" even today, in the Kentucky and southern Indiana hills, can fully comprehend the chasm which separated the boy Lincoln from every sort of progress and distinction.
All three men prepared for public life by embracing the profession that has always, in this country, proved the surest avenue to preferment—the law. But, whereas Cass arrived at maturity just in time to have an active part in the War of 1812, and in this way to make himself the most logical selection for the governorship of the newly organized Michigan Territory, Douglas saw no military service, and Lincoln only a few weeks of service during the Black Hawk War, and both were obliged to seek fame and fortune along the thorny road of politics. Following admission to the bar at Jacksonville, Illinois, in 1834, Douglas was elected public prosecutor of the first judicial circuit in 1835; elected to the state Legislature in 1836; appointed by President Van Buren registrar of the land office at Springfield in 1837; made a judge of the supreme court of the State in 1841; and elected to the national House of Representatives in 1843. Resourceful, skilled in debate, intensely patriotic, and favored with many winning personal qualities, he drew to himself men of both Northern and Southern proclivities and became an influential exponent of broad and enduring nationalism.
Meanwhile, after a first defeat, Lincoln was elected to the Illinois Legislature in 1834, and again in 1836. When he gathered all of his worldly belongings in a pair of saddle-bags and fared forth to the new capital, Springfield, to settle himself to the practice of law, he had more than a local reputation for oratorical power; and events were to prove that he had not only facility in debate and familiarity with public questions, but incomparable devotion to lofty principles. In the subsequent unfolding of the careers of Lincoln and Douglas—especially in the turn of events that brought to each a nomination for the presidency by a great party in 1860—there was no small amount of good luck and sheer accident. But it is equally true that by prodigious effort Kentuckian and Vermonter alike hewed out their own ways to greatness.
It was the glory of the Northwest to offer a competence to the needy, the baffled, the discouraged, the tormented of the eastern States and of Europe. The bulk of its fast-growing population consisted, it is true, of ordinary folk who could have lived on in fair comfort in the older sections, yet who were ambitious to own more land, to make more money, and to secure larger advantages for their children. But nowhere else was the road for talent so wide open, entirely irrespective of inheritance, possessions, education, environment. Nowhere outside of the trans-Alleghany country would the rise of a Lincoln have been possible.
The Upper Mississippi Valley
While the Ohio country—the lower half of the States of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois—was throwing off its frontier character, the remoter Northwest was still a wilderness frequented only by fur-traders and daring explorers. And that far Northwest by the sources of the Mississippi had been penetrated by few white men since the seventeenth century. The earliest white visitors to the upper Mississippi are not clearly known. They may have been Pierre Radisson and his brother-in-law, Ménard des Grosseilliers, who are alleged to have covered the long portage from Lake Superior to the Mississippi in or about 1665; but the matter rests entirely on how one interprets Radisson's vague account of their western perambulations. At all events, in 1680—seven years after the descent of the river from the Wisconsin to the Arkansas by Marquette and Joliet—Louis Hennepin, under instructions from La Salle, explored the stream from the mouth of the Illinois to the Falls of St. Anthony, where the city of Minneapolis now stands, five hundred miles from the true source.
There the matter of exploration rested until the days of Thomas Jefferson, when the purchase of Louisiana lent fresh interest to northwestern geography. In 1805 General James Wilkinson, in military command in the West, dispatched Lieutenant Zebulon M. Pike with a party of twenty men from St. Louis to explore the headwaters of the great river, make peace with the Indians, and select sites for fortified posts. From his winter quarters near the Falls, Pike pushed northward over the snow and ice until, early in 1806, he reached Leech Lake, in Cass County, Minnesota, which he wrongly took to be the source of the Father of Waters. It is little wonder that, at a time when the river and lake surfaces were frozen over and the whole country heavily blanketed with snow, he should have found it difficult to disentangle the maze of streams and lakes which fill the low-lying region around the headwaters of the Mississippi, the Red River, and the Lake of the Woods. In 1820 General Cass, Governor of Michigan, which then had the Mississippi for its western boundary, led an expedition into the same region as far as Cass Lake, where the Indians told him that the true source lay some fifty miles to the northwest. It remained for the traveler and ethnologist Henry Schoolcraft, twelve years later, to discover Lake Itasca, in modern Clearwater County, which occupies a depression near the center of the rock-rimmed basin in which the river takes its rise.
It was not these infrequent explorers, however, who opened paths for pioneers into the remote Northwest, but traders in search of furs and pelts—those commercial pathfinders of western civilization. There is scarcely a town or city in the State of Wisconsin that does not owe its origin, directly or indirectly, to these men. Cheap and tawdry enough were the commodities bartered for these wonderful beaver and otter pelts—ribbons and gewgaws, looking-glasses and combs, blankets and shawls of gaudy color. But scissors and knives, gunpowder and shot, tobacco and whiskey, went also in the traders' packs, though traffic in fire-water was forbidden. These goods, upon arrival at Mackinac, were sent out by canoes and bateaux to the different posts, where they were dealt out to the savages directly or were dispatched to the winter camps along the far-reaching waterways. "Returning home in the spring, the bucks would set their squaws and children at making maple-sugar or planting corn, watermelons, potatoes, and squash, while they themselves either dawdled their time away or hunted for summer furs. In the autumn, the wild rice was garnered along the sloughs and the river mouths, and the straggling field crops were gathered in—some of the product being hidden in skillfully covered pits, as a reserve, and some dried for transportation in the winter's campaign. The villagers were now ready to depart for their hunting-grounds, often hundreds of miles away. It was then that the trader came and credits were wrangled over and extended, each side endeavoring to get the better of the other." ¹
¹ Thwaites, Story of Wisconsin, p. 156.
This traffic was largely managed by the British in Canada until 1816, when an act of Congress forbade foreign traders to operate on United States soil. But a heavier blow was inflicted in the establishment of John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company, which was given a substantial monopoly of Indian commerce. From its headquarters on Mackinac Island this great corporation rapidly squeezed the clandestine British agents out of the American trade, introduced improved methods, and built up a system which covered the entire fur-bearing Northwest.
Of this remoter Northwest, the region between Lakes Erie and Michigan was the most accessible from the East; yet it was avoided by the first pioneers, who labored under a strange misapprehension about its climate and resources. In spite of the fact that it abounded in rich bottom-lands and fertile prairies and was destined to become one of the most bountiful orchards of the world, it was reported by early prospectors to be swampy and unfit for cultivation. Though Governor Cass did his best to overcome this prejudice, for years settlers preferred to gather mainly about Detroit, leaving the rich interior to fur-traders. When enlightenment eventually came, population poured in with a rush. Detroit—which was a village in 1820—became ten years later a thriving city of thirty thousand and the western terminus of a steamboat line from Buffalo, which year after year multiplied its traffic. By the year 1837 the great territory lying east of Lake Michigan was ready for statehood.
Almost simultaneously the region to the west of Lake Michigan began to emerge from the fur-trading stage. The place of the picturesque trader, however, was not taken at once by the prosaic farmer. The next figure in the pageant was the miner. The presence of lead in the stretch of country between the Wisconsin and Illinois rivers was known to the Indians before the coming of the white man, but they began to appreciate its value only after the introduction of firearms by the French. The ore lay at no great depth in the Galena limestone, and the aborigines collected it either by stripping it from the surface or by sinking shallow shafts from which it was hoisted in deerskin bags. Shortly after the War of 1812 American prospectors pushed into the region, and the Government began granting leases on easy terms to operators. In 1823 one of these men arrived with soldiers, supplies, skilled miners, and one hundred and fifty slaves; and thereafter the "diggings" fast became a mecca for miners, smelters, speculators, merchants, gamblers, and get-rich-quick folk of every sort, who swarmed thither by thousands from every part of the United States, especially the South, and even from Europe. "Mushroom towns sprang up all over the district; deep-worn native paths became ore roads between the burrows and the river-landings; sink-holes abandoned by the Sauk and Foxes, when no longer to be operated with their crude tools, were reopened and found to be exceptionally rich, while new diggings and smelting-furnaces, fitted out with modern appliances, fairly dotted the map of the country." ¹
¹ Thwaites, Story of Wisconsin, p. 163.
Galena was the entrepôt of the region. A trail cut thither from Peoria soon became a well-worn coach road; roads were early opened to Chicago and Milwaukee. In 1822 Galena was visited by a Mississippi River steamboat, and a few years later regular steamboat traffic was established. And it was by these roadways and waterways that homeseekers soon began to arrive.
The invasion of the white man, accompanied though it was by treaties, was bitterly resented by the Indian tribes who occupied the Northwest above the Illinois River. These Sioux, Sauk and Foxes, and Winnebagoes, with remnants of other tribes, carried on an intermittent warfare for years, despite the efforts of the Federal Government to define tribal boundaries; and between red men and white men coveting the same lands causes of irritation were never wanting. In 1827 trouble which had been steadily brewing came to the boiling-point. Predatory expeditions in the north were reported; the Winnebagoes were excited by rumors that another war between the United States and Great Britain was imminent; an incident or even an accident was certain to provoke hostilities. The incident occurred. When Red Bird, a petty Winnebago chieftain dwelling in a "town" on the Black River, was incorrectly informed that two Winnebago braves who had been imprisoned at Prairie du Chien had been executed, he promptly instituted vengeance. A farmer's family in the neighborhood of Prairie du Chien was massacred, and two keel-boats returning down stream from Fort Snelling were attacked, with some loss of life. The settlers hastily repaired the old fort and also dispatched messengers to give the alarm. Galena sent a hundred militiamen; a battalion came down from Fort Snelling; Governor Cass arrived on the spot by way of Green Bay; General Atkinson brought up a full regiment from Jefferson Barracks, near St. Louis; and finally Major Whistler proceeded up the Fox with a portion of the troops stationed at Fort Howard, on Green Bay.
When all was in readiness, the Winnebagoes were notified that, unless Red Bird and his principal accomplice, Wekau, were promptly surrendered, the tribe would be exterminated. The threat had its intended effect, and the two culprits duly presented themselves at Whistler's camp on the Fox-Wisconsin portage, in full savage regalia, and singing their war dirges. Red Bird, who was an Indian of magnificent physique and lofty bearing, had but one request to make—that he be not committed to irons—and this request was granted. At Prairie du Chien, whither the two were sent for trial, he had opportunities to escape, but he refused to violate his word by taking advantage of them. Following their trial, the redskins were condemned to be hanged. Unused to captivity, however, Red Bird languished and soon died, while his accomplice was pardoned by President Adams. In 1828 Fort Winnebago was erected on the site of Red Bird's surrender.
The Winnebagoes now agreed to renounce forever their claims to the lead mines. Furthermore, in the same year, the site of the principal Sauk village and burying-ground, on Rock River, three miles south of the present city of Rock Island, was sold by the Government, and the Sauk and Foxes resident in the vicinity were given notice to leave. Under the Sauk chieftain Keokuk most of the dispossessed warriors withdrew peacefully beyond the Mississippi, and two years later the tribal representatives formally yielded all claims to lands east of that stream. Some members of the tribe, however, established themselves on the high bluff which has since been known as Black Hawk's Watch Tower and defied the Government to remove them.
The leading spirit in this protest was Black Hawk, who though neither born a chief nor elected to that dignity, had long been influential in the village and among his people at large. During the War of 1812 he became an implacable enemy of the Americans, and, after fighting with the British at the battles of Frenchtown and the Thames, he returned to Illinois and carried on a border warfare which ended only with the signing of a special treaty of peace in 1816. For years thereafter he was accustomed to lead his "British band" periodically across northern Illinois and southern Michigan to the British Indian agency to receive presents of arms, ammunition, provisions, and trinkets; and he was a principal intermediary in the British intrigues which gave Cass, as superintendent of Indian affairs in the Northwest, many uneasy days. He was ever a restless spirit and a promoter of trouble, although one must admit that he had some justice on his side and that he was probably honest and sincere. Tall, spare, with pinched features, exceptionally high cheekbones, and a prominent Roman nose, he was a figure to command attention—the more so by reason of the fact that he had practically no eyebrows and no hair except a scalp-lock, in which on state occasions he fastened a flaming bunch of dyed eagle feathers.
Returning from their hunt in the spring of 1830, Black Hawk and his warriors found the site of their town preëmpted by white settlers and their ancestral burying-ground ploughed over. In deep rage, they set off for Malden, where they were liberally entertained and encouraged to rebel. Coming again to the site of their village a year later, they were peremptorily ordered away. This time they resolved to stand their ground, and Black Hawk ordered the squatters themselves to withdraw and gave them until the middle of the next day to do so. Black Hawk subsequently maintained that he did not mean to threaten bloodshed. But the settlers so construed his command and deluged Governor Reynolds with petitions for help. With all possible speed, sixteen hundred volunteers and ten companies of United States regulars were dispatched to the scene, and on the 25th of June, they made an impressive demonstration within view of the village. In the face of such odds discretion seemed the better part of valor, and during the succeeding night Black Hawk and his followers quietly paddled across the Mississippi. Four days later they signed an agreement never to return to the eastern banks without express permission from the United States Government.
On the Indian side this compact was not meant to be kept. Against the urgent advice of Keokuk and other leaders, Black Hawk immediately began preparations for a campaign of vengeance. British intrigue lent stimulus, and a crafty "prophet," who was chief of a village some thirty-five miles up the Rock, made it appear that aid would be given by the Potawatomi, Winnebagoes, and perhaps other powerful peoples. In the first week of April, 1832, the disgruntled leader and about five hundred braves, with their wives and children, crossed the Mississippi at Yellow Banks and ascended the Rock River to the prophet's town, with a view to raising a crop of corn during the summer and taking the war-path in the fall.
The invasion created much alarm throughout the frontier country. The settlers drew together about the larger villages, which were put as rapidly as possible in a state of defense. Again the Governor called for volunteers, and again the response more than met the expectation. Four regiments were organized, and to them were joined four hundred regulars. One of the first persons to come forward with an offer of his services was a tall, ungainly, but powerful young man from Sangamon County, who had but two years before settled in the State, and who was at once honored with the captaincy of his company. This man was Abraham Lincoln. Other men whose names loom large in American history were with the little army also. The commander of the regulars was Colonel Zachary Taylor. Among his lieutenants were Jefferson Davis and Albert Sidney Johnston, and Robert Anderson, the defender of Fort Sumter in 1860, was a colonel of Illinois volunteers. It is said that the oath of allegiance was administered to young Lincoln by Lieutenant Jefferson Davis!
Over marshy trails and across streams swollen by the spring thaws the army advanced to Dixon's Ferry, ninety miles up the Rock, whence a detachment of three hundred men was sent out, under Major Stillman, to reconnoitre. Unluckily, this force seized three messengers of peace dispatched by Black Hawk and, in the clash which followed, was cut to pieces and driven into headlong flight by a mere handful of red warriors. The effect of this unexpected affray was both to stiffen the Indians to further resistance and to precipitate a fresh panic throughout the frontier. All sorts of atrocities ensued, and Black Hawk's name became a household bugaboo the country over.
Finally a new levy was made ready and sent north. Pushing across the overflowed wilderness stretches, past the sites of modern Beloit and Madison, this army, four thousand strong, came upon the fleeing enemy on the banks of the Wisconsin River, and at Wisconsin Heights, near the present town of Prairie du Sac, it inflicted a severe defeat upon the Indians. Again Black Hawk desired to make peace, but again he was frustrated, this time by the lack of an interpreter. The redskins' flight was continued in the direction of the Mississippi, which they reached in midsummer. They were prevented from crossing by lack of canoes, and finally the half-starved band found itself caught between the fire of a force of regulars on the land side and a government supply steamer, the Warrior, on the water side, and between these two the Indian band was practically annihilated.
Thus ended the war—a contest originating in no general uprising or far-reaching plan, such as marked the rebellions instigated by Pontiac and Tecumseh, but which none the less taxed the strength of the border populations and opened a new chapter in the history of the remoter northwestern territories. Black Hawk himself took refuge with the Winnebagoes in the Dells of the Wisconsin, only to be treacherously delivered over to General Street at Prairie du Chien. Under the terms of a treaty of peace signed at Fort Armstrong (Rock Island) in September, the fallen leader and some of his accomplices were held as hostages, and during the ensuing winter they were kept at Jefferson Barracks (St. Louis) under the surveillance of Jefferson Davis. In the spring of 1833 they were taken to Washington, where they had an interview with President Jackson. "We did not expect to conquer the whites," Black Hawk told the President; "they had too many houses, too many men. I took up the hatchet, for my part, to revenge injuries which my people could no longer endure. Had I borne them longer without striking, my people would have said, 'Black Hawk is a woman—he is too old to be a chief—he is no Sauk.'" After a brief imprisonment at Fortress Monroe, where Jefferson Davis was himself confined at the close of the Civil War, the captives were set free, and were taken to Philadelphia, New York, up the Hudson, and finally back to the Rock River country.