The frontier did much to shape American life. Conditions
along the entire Atlantic seaboard stimulated migration to the newer
regions. From New England, where the soil was incapable of producing
high yields of grain, came a steady stream of men and women who left
their coastal farmsand villages to take advantage of the rich interior
land of the continent. In the backcountry settlements of the Carolinas
and Virginia, people handicapped by the lack of roads and canals giving
access to coastal markets, and suffering from the political dominance
of the Tidewater planters, also moved westward. By 1800 the Mississippi
and Ohio River valleys were becoming a great frontier region. "Hi-o,
away we go, floating down the river on the O-hi-o," became the song
of thousands of migrants.
The westward flow of population in the early 19th century
led to the division of old territories and the drawing of new boundaries.
As new states were admitted, the political map stabilized east of the
Mississippi River. From 1816 to 1821, six states were created -- Indiana,
Illinois and Maine (which were free states), and Mississippi, Alabama
and Missouri (slave states). The first frontier had been tied closely
to Europe, the second to the coastal settlements, but the Mississippi
Valley was independent and its people looked west rather than east.
Frontier settlers were a varied group. One English traveler
described them as "a daring, hardy race of men, who live in miserable
cabins.... They are unpolished but hospitable, kind to strangers, honest
and trustworthy. They raise a little Indian corn, pumpkins, hogs and
sometimes have a cow or two.... But the rifle is their principal means
of support." Dexterous with the axe, snare and fishing line, these men
blazed the trails, built the first log cabins and confronted Native
American tribes, whose land they occupied.
As more and more settlers penetrated the wilderness,
many became farmers as well as hunters. A comfortable log house with
glass windows, a chimney and partitioned rooms replaced the cabin; the
well replaced the spring. Industrious settlers would rapidly clear their
land of timber, burning the wood for potash and letting the stumps decay.
They grew their own grain, vegetables and fruit; ranged the woods for
deer, wild turkeys and honey; fished the nearby streams; looked after
cattle and hogs. Land speculators bought large tracts of the cheap land
and, if land values rose, sold their holdings and moved still farther
west, making way for others.
Doctors, lawyers, storekeepers, editors, preachers,
mechanics and politicians soon followed the farmers. The farmers were
the sturdy base, however. Where they settled, they intended to stay
and hoped their children would remain after them. They built large barns
and brick or frame houses. They brought improved livestock, plowed the
land skillfully and sowed productive seed. Some erected flour mills,
sawmills and distilleries. They laid out good highways, built churches
and schools. Incredible transformations were accomplished in a few years.
In 1830, for example, Chicago, Illinois, was merely an unpromising trading
village with a fort; but long before some of its original settlers had
died, it had become one of the largest and richest cities in the nation.
Farms were easy to acquire. Government land after 1820
could be bought for $1.25 for about half a hectare, and after the 1862
Homestead Act, could be claimed by merely occupying and improving it.
In addition, tools for working the land were easily available. It was
a time when, in a phrase written by John Soule and popularized by journalist
Horace Greeley, young men could "go west and grow with the country."
Except for a migration into Mexican-owned Texas, the
westward march of the agricultural frontier did not pass Missouri until
after 1840. In 1819, in return for assuming the claims of American citizens
to the amount of $5 million, the United States obtained from Spain both
Florida and Spain's rights to the Oregon country in the Far West. In
the meantime, the Far West had become a field of great activity in the
fur trade, which was to have significance far beyond the value of the
skins. As in the first days of French exploration in the Mississippi
Valley, the trader was a pathfinder for the settlers beyond the Mississippi.
The French and Scots-Irish trappers, exploring the great rivers and
their tributaries and discovering all the passes of the Rocky and Sierra
Mountains, made possible the overland migration of the 1840s and the
later occupation of the interior of the nation.
Overall, the growth of the nation was enormous: population
grew from 7.25 million to more than 23 million from 1812 to 1852, and
the land available for settlement increased by almost the size of Europe
-- from 4.4 million to 7.8 million square kilometers. Still unresolved,
however, were the basic conflicts rooted in sectional differences which,
by the decade of the 1860s, would explode into civil war. Inevitably,
too, this westward expansion brought settlers into conflict with the
original inhabitants of the land: the Indians.
In the first part of the 19th century, the most prominent
figure associated with these conflicts was Andrew Jackson, the first
"Westerner" to occupy the White House. In the midst of the War of 1812,
Jackson, then in charge of the Tennessee militia, was sent into southern
Alabama, where he ruthlessly put down an uprising of Creek Indians.
The Creeks soon ceded two-thirds of their land to the United States.
Jackson later routed bands of Seminole Indians from their sanctuaries
in Spanish-owned Florida.
In the 1820s, President Monroe's secretary of war, John
C. Calhoun, pursued a policy of removing the remaining tribes from the
old Southwest and resettling them beyond the Mississippi. Jackson continued
this policy as president.
In 1830 Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, providing
funds to transport the eastern tribes beyond the Mississippi. In 1834
a special Indian territory was set up in what is now Oklahoma. In all,
the tribes signed 94 treaties during Jackson's two terms, ceding millions
of hectares to the federal government and removing dozens of tribes
from their ancestral homelands.
Perhaps the most egregious chapter in this unfortunate
history concerned the Cherokees, whose lands in western North Carolina
and Georgia had been guaranteed by treaty since 1791. Among the most
progressive of the eastern tribes, the Cherokees' fate was sealed when
gold was discovered on their land in 1829. Even a favorable ruling from
the Supreme Court proved little help. With the acquiescence of the Jackson
administration, the Cherokees were forced to make the long and cruel
trek to Oklahoma in 1835. Many died of disease and privation in what
became known as the "Trail of Tears."