Penguin History of the United States of America (42 page)

He was a second-wave frontiersman. He got his start in the West by exploiting his connections. He was paid for his labours as public prosecutor with deeds to public lands – in effect, in paper money, for he could not possibly develop all the thousands of acres involved by himself; he would have to sell most of his holdings and live off the proceeds. He proved an adroit businessman for some years, buying and selling land and slaves; then he decided to set up as a merchant. That was a potentially lucrative line. Manufactured goods came west over the mountains from New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore or Charleston to the Ohio and Tennessee valleys; there they were exchanged for Western farm produce (flour, whisky, tobacco) which in turn was transmitted, in flatboats or keelboats, down the Mississippi to New Orleans, to join Louisiana sugar in shipments from that rising port. The final stretch of this Circular Trade took Western produce to the East Coast cities. Unluckily for Jackson he exchanged his title deeds
not for cash but for the notes of a Philadelphia merchant who failed, leaving Jackson with heavy debts which he could pay only by sacrificing his store. After that, for many years, he contrived to keep afloat financially only by breeding racehorses.

In other respects he was fortunate. When the Cumberland region was admitted to the Union in 1796 as the state of Tennessee, Jackson served as its first Representative in Congress and then as a Senator. Young, well connected and justly respected for his energy and ability, his only weakness seemed to be a propensity for fighting duels in defence of his wife’s honour (‘Great God! Do you mention
her
sacred name?’) which Rachel would much rather he had avoided. He served as a judge for some years, with great success (‘Do what is
right
between these parties,’ he used to tell juries, idealistically, ‘that is what the law always
means
’); on his Nashville plantation, the Hermitage, he grew cotton, as everyone was beginning to do; above all, he turned himself into a soldier by years of service as a militia general. The militia was a good route to influence and popularity: its musters provided much-needed social entertainment, and there were perpetual scuffles with the Indians throughout this period in Tennessee, in which many bold men earned reputations for courage. What is striking about Jackson is that he was not content with these easy triumphs or with the elementary knowledge of military science and discipline that was all most militiamen bothered to acquire. He studied books on the art of war more carefully than, in his youth, he had studied his law books. He came of the same stock as the Duke of Wellington, and his blood was beginning to have its way with him.

His chance arrived in 1812, when the Creek Indians, under the prodding of Tecumseh, went to war, just as war again broke out between the United States and Great Britain. Jackson quickly proved himself to be the ablest of the American generals, and the most successful. He marched against the Creeks. An attack of agonizing dysentery was not allowed to stop him, and he exacted similar resolution from his soldiers, who consequently nicknamed him after the toughest wood they knew – ‘Old Hickory’ – which stuck to him for the rest of his life. He crushed the Indians in battle, despite the best efforts of slothful, incompetent politicians and suppliers to prevent him; and in the subsequent peace treaty, the harshest ever made with the Indians, he not only stripped the Creeks of half their lands, but wrenched great tracts away from tribes who had actually fought on his side. The Indians called him Sharp Knife after that, but the Western settlers, to whom he had opened half Alabama and large stretches of Mississippi and Georgia, applauded him. When later he bid at public auction for some of the lands in the area no one would bid against him, and he got them at the lowest possible rate (the contrast with Daniel Boone’s fate is cruel).

Next, President James Madison made him a major-general in the regular army; as such it fell to him to defend the South-West against British attack. Again he performed brilliantly. The British were preparing to capture New Orleans. Jackson mounted an effective defence; he was greatly helped by
the British commander, one Pakenham, the Duke of Wellington’s brother-in-law, who would have been perfectly at home in Flanders during the First World War. He devised a magnificent plan of attack that had the single disadvantage of being unworkable; then he hurled his devoted troops against Jackson’s well-prepared trenches. All the Americans had to do was to shoot down the assailants as they came. The two armies were roughly equal in size (each had approximately 5,000 men). Total casualties were less symmetrically proportioned. Pakenham (who was himself killed) lost 291 killed, 1,262 wounded and 484 missing. Jackson lost thirteen killed, thirty-nine wounded and nineteen missing. The British crawled off to the safety of their ships, and America rejoiced. What did it matter that the Battle of New Orleans (9 January 1815) was fought after the signing of the Peace of Ghent, which ended the war on 24 December 1814? The latest British assault on the integrity of the United States had ended as ludicrously as the earlier ones: Old Hickory had given Wellington’s veterans bloody noses. From now on Jackson could do no wrong in the eyes of most of his countrymen.

The myth that grew up round him was a most revealing distortion of the reality. He was seen as a child of nature, a wild man of the woods, a spontaneous untutored American democrat, splendidly victorious over an effete European aristocrat. Later on, when popular enthusiasm and cunning organization swept him into the White House, he was seen as the leader of a great democratic uprising against the oligarchs of the East. In fact Jackson was an oligarch himself; he was by temperament an autocrat; and as I have said, had made a serious study of the profession of arms. His restless ambition for fame and fortune were counterbalanced by a kind heart and a certain simplicity of character where women were concerned: he had a Quixotic belief in their chaste perfections. But none of this justifies his legend. True, he had an Irish contempt for correct spelling, but it is absurd to describe this lawyer, businessman, politician, military administrator and planter as illiterate (it is still sometimes done): he probably spent more time at his desk than on horseback. His political views were far too inconsistent to make him a convincing ideological leader as Jefferson and Hamilton had been, and as Lincoln was to be. He was a stout nationalist because he had fought the British and the Indians. He approved of the loose political structure of the West because it suited him: it had eased his rise to affluence and power, and he hoped it would do the same for other poor men in their turn. He distrusted Eastern merchants and politicians because he suspected (with some reason) that they were unwilling to share their wealth and authority with new men from the frontier. His experience as a trader had left him with a deep suspicion of paper money and the banks which printed it: a prejudice that was neither universal nor uncommon on the frontier, and one which would eventually change the economic history of the United States. He had no objection to robbing red men of their lands or black men of their liberty, but regarded himself as a friend of both races.

In spite of his beginnings, he was no backwoodsman. Rather, he was one of the land speculators who dislodged the backwoodsmen and tried to reproduce the political and social structure of old Virginia in the new country. Fatally, he was a large slave-holder. It was men like him, dominating frontier politics, exploiting their public position to seize the best lands for cultivation by slave labour, who dislodged thousands of small white farmers and sent them drifting off north and north-west in search of a better frontier. It seemed that flush times had come for good to the South-West. As an insatiable demand for cotton made itself felt in the world market (Lancashire was launching the Industrial Revolution by making cotton goods by steam, in factories) the Circular Trade was mightily stimulated. The long-fibre cotton of the Carolina Sea Islands was in great demand; and in 1793 Eli Whitney, a New Englander visiting Georgia, invented an improved cotton gin which made it much easier to separate the seed from the fluff of the short-fibre cotton which was all that could be grown in the vast Southern interior. For great planters like Jackson a golden age was at hand. What did it matter if small men found it difficult to stay afloat? In 1814 cotton sold at 15 cents a pound, and only 146,000 bales were produced (a bale weighed 500 lb.). Two years later cotton sold at just under 30 cents a pound, and 259,000 bales were produced: that year, the crop was worth $38 million, or nearly four times what it had been in 1814. Never again until the Civil War was the price of raw cotton to be so high, and in one catastrophic year, 1845, it was to go as low as 5
^1/2
cents; but though such fluctuations could be excessively painful, they scarcely mattered, in the not very long run, compared to the immense increase in the cotton harvest and the ease with which it was marketed. In 1820, 335,000 bales were produced, worth $28 million; in 1830,732,000 bales, worth 836 million; in 1840,1,348,000 bales, worth S60 million; in 1850, 2,136,000 bales, worth S131 million. Such a rising curve of income and production seemed fully to justify the South’s self-confidence, and it mightily stimulated the transformation of the wilderness. In 1811, for instance, the first steamboat on Western waters was launched; and soon myriads of them hurried up and down the Mississippi as best they could (their course often being impeded by sandbanks, floating timber, and exploding boilers), carrying cotton and the imports that it earned.

No wonder that the cotton lords were confident (though before the end of his life Jackson began to wonder if dependence on one crop made any better sense in Tennessee than it had in Virginia). Yet the South-West eventually lost more than it could possibly gain by the westward movement of the plantation system. It was not only that the planters staked the future on a single card. It was not only that they squeezed so many ordinary people out of their native section
⁶
and into anti-slavery, though that was to prove
bad enough, from their point of view, for one of their victims was Thomas Lincoln of Kentucky, who migrated first to Indiana and then to Illinois. His father, Abraham, had been a friend of Daniel Boone. His son, also Abraham (1809–65), was to be the nemesis of almost everything that Jackson stood for, except his nationalism, thus avenging the Long Hunter. The heart of the tragedy was that the cotton plantation tied the South-West to the South-East, so that the poison of race-hatred and class exploitation, with their fatal train of violence, backwardness and corruption, spread westward and condemned an otherwise buoyant and promising region to prolonged defeat.

Those southern yeomen who were not content to be shouldered onto the poorest lands of Trans-Appalachia either crossed the Mississippi, as Boone had done, or headed for the Old North-West, as it came to be called: Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin – the area covered by the North-West Ordinance of 1787. There they met another stream of the displaced, coming west from New England.

Times were hard in that province throughout the years of the French wars, and afterwards. The towns on the seaboard did well enough; indeed, in the early years of the nineteenth century, even before the Peace of Ghent and all the more after it, American shipping rapidly overtook European and British, becoming the dominant mercantile fleet on the Atlantic until the Civil War and the rise of steam and iron. Even in the towns, the call of the frontier might suddenly be heard. ‘One would think that Pawtucket offered as strong inducements, and as great facilities for industry as any place on the continent,’ said the
Fall River Monitor
in 1830, shaking its head in wonder over the decision of some of the township’s citizens to move to Illinois. Nineteen years later the lure of the gold-fields carried many Yankees to California. As the century wore on, many of the immigrants who landed at Boston or New York went straight on to the new country. But this drainage did not hamper urban growth. In Rhode Island, for instance, the urban population quadrupled between 1790 and 1840; in Massachusetts it more than quintupled in the same period. In both states the growth of rural population lagged: in Rhode Island it went up by only 11 per cent.

Life for the farmers of the backwoods in New England, particularly in western Massachusetts, upstate Connecticut and Vermont, was now becoming a desperate struggle to pick stones off the hillsides in an attempt to grow foodstuffs at prices which could compete with the produce of the lands coming into use in the West. Inevitably the attempt failed. Soon the forests and the deer were winning back the homesteads which had been wrested from the wilderness with such pains, while the New Englanders, with that hopefulness which characterized the American farmer until late
in the nineteenth century, sought better lands and life elsewhere. ‘Our New England prosperity and importance are dying away,’ sighed Daniel Webster of Massachusetts (1782–1852), the section’s rising statesman, in 1820. But he was wrong to lament, although sheep runs were replacing ploughed fields. The rise of the woollen industry meant that defeated Yankee farmers could sell their lands for a good price, and with the money build a Greater New England on the south shores of the Great Lakes. This had enormous consequences. No longer bottled up between the sea and the hills, the New England conscience, the New England way – Puritan religion and Yankee ingenuity – could now shape the whole future of America by their implacability, assiduity and intelligence. New England churches, white paint, wooden steeples and all; red-painted New England schoolhouses; seminaries and colleges on the New England model; family farms and businesses run on New England ideas of thrift – these (reinforced by similar traditions emanating from the Quaker state of Pennsylvania) soon marked the North-West even more deeply than the slave plantation was marking the South-West. The self-confidence of the section matched that of the great planters. These free farmers could imagine no better way of life.

It all seems so rapid and fated in retrospect, taking scarcely a generation. Yet it did not seem so at the time. For many, it was difficult to shake off a sense of failure, which first became pronounced, perhaps, when Shays’s Rebellion collapsed. Many of these frontier Yankees – for example, those who had moved into the Green Hills between Massachusetts, New York, and New Hampshire, and there created the first post-Revolutionary state, Vermont – were as ill-educated as Daniel Boone himself, and far less well-adapted to their environment. Their ignorance made them easy prey for charlatans of all kinds, and their Puritan inheritance made it certain that the biggest field for charlatanry would be the religious one. The Bible retained all its old authority and fascination for these poor and anxious people, but they saw no harm in looking for additional revelations. Perhaps they needed religious reassurance all the more because they were uprooting themselves. At any rate, the years of the great exodus from New England were also the years of a new wave of religious enthusiasm. The flames of penitence and conversion, lit by urgent and dramatic preaching, flared over upstate New York
⁷
so often in these years that it became known as the Burned-Over District; not that the religious revival stayed within those bounds. It burned over into western Pennsylvania and into Ohio. It exploded in the South-West, touched off in part by a Presbyterian minister from Pennsylvania, James McGready: it was his example which led in 1801 to the first of the great camp-meetings, at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, where ten to twenty thousand people gathered for days at a time, to be stimulated by a team of preachers into religious delirium – everything from visions of
heaven to barking like a dog. In Tennessee a minister was brave enough to call General Jackson to repent and be saved (the invitation was declined). The wave passed over the seaboard, north and south. In short, the phenomenon which had dismayed the respectable sixty or seventy years earlier was now renewed. To distinguish it from the Great Awakening it is known as the Great Revival.