A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (52 page)

Westward Again

Beneath the simmering political cauldron of pro-and antislavery strife, pioneers continued to surge west. Explorers and trappers were soon joined in the 1830s by a relatively new group, religious missionaries. Second Great Awakening enthusiasm propelled Methodists, led by the Reverend Jason Lee, to Oregon in 1832 to establish a mission to the Chinook Indians.
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Elijah White, then Marcus Whitman and his pregnant wife, Narcissa, followed later, bringing along some thousand migrants (and measles) to the region. White and Lee soon squabbled over methods; eventually the Methodist board concluded that it could not Christianize the Indians and dried up the funding for the Methodist missions. The Whitmans were even more unfortunate. After measles spread among the Cayuse Indians, they blamed the missionaries and murdered the Whitmans at their Walla Walla mission. Such brutality failed to stem the missionary zeal toward the new western territories, however, and a number of Jesuit priests, most notably Father Pierre De Smet, established six successful missions in the northern Rocky Mountains of Montana, Idaho, and Washington.

Pioneer farmer immigrants followed the missionaries into Oregon, where the population rose from fifty to more than six thousand whites between 1839 and 1846. They traveled the Oregon Trail from Independence, Missouri, along the southern bank of the Platte River, across Wyoming and southern Idaho, and finally to Fort Vancouver via the Columbia River. Oregon Trail pioneers encountered hardships including rainstorms, snow and ice, treacherous rivers, steep mountain passes, and wild animals. Another group of immigrants, the Mormons, trekked their way to Utah along the northern bank of the Platte River under the leadership of Brigham Young. They arrived at the Great Salt Lake just as the Mexican War broke out; tens of thousands of their brethren joined them during the following decades. The Mormon Trail, as it was called, attracted many California-bound settlers and, very soon, gold miners.

Discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill near Sacramento in 1848 brought hordes of miners, prospectors, and speculators, virtually all of them men, and many attracted to the seamier side of the social order. Any number of famous Americans spent time in the California gold camps, including Mark Twain and Henry Dana, both of whom wrote notable essays on their experiences. But for every Twain or Dana who made it to California, and left, and for every prospector who actually discovered gold, there were perhaps a hundred who went away broke, many of whom had abandoned their families and farms to seek the precious metal. Even after the gold played out, there was no stopping the population increase as some discovered the natural beauty and freedom offered by the West and stayed. San Francisco swelled from a thousand souls in 1856 to fifty thousand by decade’s end, whereas in parts of Arizona and Colorado gold booms (and discoveries of other metals) could produce an overnight metropolis and just as quickly, a ghost town.

The Pacific Coast was largely sealed off from the rest of the country by the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains. Travel to California was best done by boat from ports along the Atlantic to Panama, then overland, then on another boat up the coast. Crossing overland directly from Missouri was a dangerous and expensive proposition.

St. Joseph, Missouri, the jumping-off point for overland travel, provided plenty of reputable stables and outfitters, but it was also home to dens of thieves and speculators who preyed on unsuspecting pioneers. Thousands of travelers poured into St. Joseph, then on across the overland trail to Oregon on a two-thousand-mile trek that could take six months. Up to 5,000 per year followed the trail in the mid-1840s, of which some 2,700 continued on to California. By 1850, after the discovery of gold, more than 55,000 pioneers crossed the desert in a year. Perhaps another thousand traders frequented the Santa Fe Trail. Many Forty-niners preferred the water route. San Francisco, the supply depot for Sacramento, overnight became a thriving city. In seven years—from 1849 to 1856—the city’s population filled with merchants, artisans, shopkeepers, bankers, lawyers, saloon owners, and traders. Access to the Pacific Ocean facilitated trade from around the world, giving the town an international and multiethnic character. Saloons and gambling dens dotted the cityscape, enabling gangs and brigands to disrupt peaceful commerce.

With the addition and slow settlement of California, the Pacific Northwest, and the relatively unexplored American Southwest, Americans east of the Mississippi again turned their attention inward. After all, the objective of stretching the United States from sea to shining sea had been met. Only the most radical and unrealistic expansionists desired annexation of Mexico, so further movement southward was blocked. In the 1850s there would be talk of acquiring Cuba, but the concept of manifest destiny had crested. Moreover, the elephant in the room could no longer be ignored. In the years that followed, from 1848 until 1860, slavery dominated almost every aspect of American politics in one form or another.

The Falling Veil

A
chilling wire service report from Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, reached major U.S. cities on October 18, 1859:

 

Harper’s Ferry: 6 a.m.—Preparations are making to storm the Armory…. Three rioters are lying dead in the street, and three more lying dead in the river…. Another rioter named Lewis Leary, has just died, and confessed to the particulars of the plot which he says was concocted by Brown…. The rioters have just sent out a flag of truce. If they are not protected by the soldiers…every one captured will be hung.
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The “rioters” consisted of seventeen whites and five blacks (some former slaves) who intended to capture the federal armory in the city, use the arms contained therein to seize the town, and then wait for the “army” of radical abolitionists and rebel slaves that John Brown, the leader, believed would materialize. Brown, a Kansas abolitionist guerrilla fighter who had worked in the Underground Railroad, thought that the slave South would collapse if he conquered Virginia.

Virginia militiamen hastily grabbed guns and ammunition and began assembling. Farther away, other towns, including Charlestown, Martinsburg, and Shepherdstown, awakened to warnings from their church bells, with citizens mobilizing quickly to quell a rumored slave rebellion. The telegraph alerted Washington, Baltimore, and New York, whose morning newspapers reported partial information. Many accounts referred to a “Negro Insurrection” or slave revolt. Hoping to avoid a full-scale rampage by the militias, as well as intending to suppress Brown’s insurrection quickly, the president, James Buchanan, ordered U.S. Marines under the command of Colonel Robert E. Lee and his lieutenant, J.E.B. Stuart, to Harper’s Ferry. They arrived on October seventeenth, by which time Brown, who had hoped he could avoid violence for at least a few days to allow his forces to grow, was forced to act without any reinforcements. Lee’s troops surrounded Brown’s motley band, then broke into the engine house at the train station near the armory where the conspirators had holed up. In the ensuing gun battle, the soldiers killed ten, including two of Brown’s sons, and soldiers bayoneted Brown several times. He lived to stand trial, but his conviction was a foregone conclusion, and on December 2, 1859, John Brown was hanged in Charlestown, Virginia.

Brown’s raid triggered a wave of paranoia in the South, which lived in utter terror of slave rebellions, even though few had ever occurred and none succeeded. It also provoked Northern abolitionist sympathizers to try to differentiate the man from the cause. “A squad of fanatics whose zeal is wonderfully disproportioned to their senses,” was how the Chicago
Press and Tribune
referred to Brown.
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“His are the errors of a fanatic, not the crimes of a felon,” argued editor Horace Greeley in his New York
Tribune
. “There are fit and unfit modes of combating a great evil.”
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Few doubted Brown was delusional at some level, especially since his plan involved arming slaves with several thousand pikes. Historian C. Vann Woodward warned historians looking at Brown “not to blink, as many of his biographers have done,” on the question of Brown’s looniness. Woodward pointed to Brown’s history of insanity and his family tree, which was all but planted in the insane asylum arboretum: three aunts, two uncles, his only sister, her daughter, and six first cousins were all intermittently insane, periodically admitted to lunatic asylums or permanently confined.
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However, the fact that he suffered from delusions did not mean that Brown did not have a plan with logic and order to it, nor did it mean that he did not understand the objective for which he fought.
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Such distinctions proved insufficient for those seeking a genuine martyr, however. Ralph Waldo Emerson celebrated Brown’s execution, calling him a “new saint, a thousand times more justified when it is to save [slaves from] the auction-block.”
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Others, such as abolitionist Wendell Phillips, blamed Virginia, which he called “a pirate ship,” and he labeled the Commonwealth “a chronic insurrection.”
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“Who makes the Abolitionist?” asked Emerson. “The Slaveholder.” Yet Emerson’s and Phillips’s logic absolved both the abolitionist lawbreakers and Jayhawkers (Kansas border ruffians), and their rationale gave license to cutthroats like William Quantrill and the James Gang just a few years later. Worse, it mocked the Constitution, elevating Emerson, Phillips, Brown, and whoever else disagreed with any part of it, above the law.

One statesman, in particular—one might say, alone—realized that the abolition of slavery had to come, and could
only
come, through the law. Anything less destroyed the very document that ensured the freedom that the slave craved and that the citizen enjoyed. Abraham Lincoln owed his political career and his presidential success to the concept that the Constitution had to remain above emotion, free from the often heartbreaking injustices of the moment, if it was to be the source of redress. By 1861, when few of his neighbors in the North would have fully understood that principle, and when virtually all of his countrymen in the South would have rejected it on a variety of grounds, both sides nevertheless soon arrived at the point where they had to test the validity of Lincoln’s assertion that the nation could not remain a “house divided.”

An Arsenic Empire?

Having added Texas, California, and the Southwest to the national map, and finalized the boundaries with England over Oregon, the nation in 1850 looked much the way it does in 2004. Within twenty years, Alaska and the Gadsden Purchase would complete all continental territorial expansion, with other additions to the Union (Hawaii, Guam, Puerto Rico) coming from the Caribbean or the Pacific. “Polk’s war” interrupted—only temporarily—the rapid growth of American industry and business after the Panic of 1837 had receded.

The United States stood behind only Russia, China, and Australia as the largest nation in the world, whereas its economic power dwarfed those states. By European concepts of space and distance, America’s size was truly astonishing: it was as far from San Francisco to Boston as it was from Madrid to Moscow; Texas alone was bigger than France, and the Arizona Territory was larger than all of Great Britain. The population, too, was growing; science, invention, and the arts were thriving; and a competitive balance had again reappeared in politics.

Throughout her entire history, however, the United States had repeatedly put off dealing with the issue of slavery—first through constitutional compromise, then through appeals to bipartisan good will, then through a political party system that sought to squelch discussion through spoils, then finally through compromises, all combined with threats and warnings about disunion. By the 1850s, however, the structure built by the Founders revealed dangerous cracks in the framework. Emerson warned that acquisition of the Mexican cession territories, with its potential for sectional conflict, would be akin to taking arsenic. How much longer could the nation ignore slavery? And how much longer would the perpetual-motion machine of growing government power, spawned by Van Buren, spin before abolitionist voices were thrust to the fore? The answer to both questions was, not long.

The Dark, Nether Side

Opponents of capitalism—especially those who disparaged northern factories and big cities—began their attacks in earnest for the first time in American history. Certainly there was much to lament about the cities. Crime was rampant: New York City had as high a homicide rate in 1860 per one hundred thousand people as it did in the year 2000 (based on the FBI’s uniform crime reports). After falling in the 1830s, homicides in New York nearly tripled, to fifteen per one hundred thousand by 1860.

By far the worst sections of New York’s dark, nether side, as reformers of the day called it, included Hell’s Kitchen, which by the late 1850s had started to replace the Bowery as the most dangerous and notorious section of the city.
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Hell’s Kitchen received its name from policemen, one of whom complained that the place was worse than hell itself, to which the other replied, “Hell’s a mild climate. This is Hell’s Kitchen, no less.” According to one writer, the Bowery, Hell’s Kitchen, and other rough sections of town, such as Rag Picker’s Row, Mulligan Alley, Satan’s Circus, and Cockroach Row consisted of

 

…streets…ill paved, broken by carts and omnibuses into ruts and perilous gullies, obstructed by boxes and sign boards, impassable by reason of thronging vehicles, and filled with filth and garbage, which was left where it had been thrown to rot and send out its pestiferous fumes, breeding fever and cholera. [The writer] found hacks, carts, and omnibuses choking the thoroughfares, their Jehu drivers dashing through the crowd furiously, reckless of life; women and children were knocked down and trampled on…hackmen overcharged and were insolent to their passengers; baggage-smashers haunted the docks…rowdyism seemed to rule the city; it was at risk of your life that you walked the streets late at night; the club, the knife, the slung-shot, the revolver were in constant activity….
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Like other cities, New York had seen rapid population increases, leaping from 123,000 in 1820 to 515,000 in 1850, mostly because of immigrants, people Charles Loring Brace called “the Dangerous Classes.”
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Immigrants provided political clout, leapfrogging New York past Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore in size, but they also presented a growing problem, especially when it came to housing. The tenement population, which had reached half a million, included 18,000 who lived in cellars in addition to 15,000 beggars and 30,000 unsupervised children (apparently orphans). When the state legislature investigated the tenements, it concluded that cattle lived better than some New Yorkers.

Prostitution and begging were omnipresent, even in the presence of policemen, who “lounged about, gaped, gossiped, drank, and smoked, inactively useless upon street corners.”
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Some women used babies as props, renting them and then entering saloons, inducing them to cry by pinching them in order to solicit alms.
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Gangs were also seen everywhere in the slums, sporting names such as the Dead Rabbits, the Gorillas, the East Side Dramatic and Pleasure Club, and the Limburger Roarers. Politicians like Boss Tweed employed the gangs on election day—paid in cash and alcohol—to disrupt the polling places of the opponent, intimidating and, if necessary, beating up anyone with an intention of voting there. No wonder the English writer Rudyard Kipling, who visited New York, thought its streets were “first cousins to a Zanzibar foreshore or kin to the approaches of a Zulu kraal,” a “shiftless outcome of squalid barbarism and reckless extravagance.”
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Cast into this fetid urban setting were masses of immigrants. The United States moved past the 50,000-per-year immigrant level in 1832, but by 1840 nearly fifteen times that many people would arrive from Ireland alone. Overall immigration soared from 20,000 in 1820 to 2.2 million in 1850, with Wisconsin, New York, California, and the Minnesota Territory receiving the most newcomers. In those states and Minnesota, immigrants made up 20 percent or more of the total population. But Ohio, Louisiana, Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, Michigan, and Pennsylvania were not far behind, since immigrants made up between 10 to 20 percent of their populations.
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Steam-powered sailing vessels made the transatlantic crossing faster and easier, and the United States had generally open borders. Still, immigrants had to
want
to come to America. After all, both Canada and Mexico were approximately the same distance from Europe, yet they attracted only a handful of immigrants by comparison.

Lured by jobs, land, and low taxes, a small standing army (with no conscription), a relatively tiny government, complete absence of mandatory state church tithes, no state press censorship, and no czarist or emperor’s secret police, Europeans thronged to American shores. As early as 1818, John Doyle, an Irish immigrant to Philadelphia who had found work as a printer and a map seller, wrote home, “I am doing astonishingly well, thanks be to God, and was able on the 16th of this month to make a deposit of 100 dollars in the Bank of the United States…. [Here] a man is allowed to thrive and flourish without having a penny taken out of his pocket by government; no visits from tax gatherers, constables, or soldiers.”
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