What Hath God Wrought (19 page)

Once again, Story delivered the opinion. Now he was not so much concerned with the merits of the lawsuit as with defending the jurisdiction of his court. His opinion was a comprehensive vindication of the logical necessity and constitutionality of a single ultimate interpreter of the law. Instead of treating the federal Constitution as a compact among the states, Story characterized it as the act of a sovereign national people. Even William Johnson, a friend of Jefferson and the associate justice with the most sympathy for Roane’s point of view, concurred in the decision, though he filed a separate and more restrained opinion. In Richmond, the authorities chose to pretend they were complying with Justice Johnson’s opinion rather than Justice Story’s. They remained unconvinced of their subordination to the federal tribunal and would raise the jurisdictional issue again in the future.
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The judgment of history on the judgments of the courts must be qualified. Of course Story has been absolutely vindicated in asserting the right of the United States Supreme Court to hear appeals from state supreme courts. This, the major point at issue, is fundamental to ensuring legal uniformity throughout the country. On the other hand, Roane had a legitimate point too: the state courts came to be accepted as final arbiters of their own laws, except insofar as these conflict with the federal Constitution, laws, and treaties. Story presumed not only to decide the conflict issue, but also to overrule the state court on the meaning of Virginia’s own common law regarding the validity of the Fairfax will, a matter in which no issue of federal law was involved.
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Story had echoed the new Republican nationalism. His opinion represented the judicial counterpart of the legislative nationalism of Clay and Calhoun. Nor was Story embarrassed that his kind of Republicanism seemed so similar to John Marshall’s Federalism. When the chief saw his opinion, Story felt pleased that Marshall “concurred in every word of it.”
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Before long, Monroe’s Era of Good Feelings would splinter, and the different kinds of nationalism that flourished together briefly in his first term would be at loggerheads. American “nationalism” developed a variety of permutations. The judicial nationalism of Marshall and Story endorsed the legislative nationalist program of banking and internal improvements. But Andrew Jackson would encourage another kind of nationalism, based on territorial expansion, that embraced the strict constructionism of Spencer Roane. In the United States no less than in other nineteenth-century countries, nationalism turned out to be a concept that aroused strong feelings but could mean different things to different people. As communications improved in the years ahead, rival interests and rival leaders seized the opportunity to press their rival nationalisms on the public.

The end of the War of 1812 precipitated one of the great migrations of American history. White settlers eagerly took advantage of Andrew Jackson’s expropriation of 14 million acres from the Creeks. Shortly after signing the Treaty of Fort Jackson, the general sent his topographical engineer to report on the condition of the Alabama River valley. Along his route, Major Howell Tatum could observe farms with all their improvements that had been abandoned by the dispossessed natives (many of whom, ironically, had been Jackson’s allies in the war). The officer concluded in his report that the land was “capable of producing, in great abundance, every article necessary to the sustenance of man or beast.” Jackson encouraged white squatters to move onto the lands immediately, without waiting for survey or legal authorization. In December 1815, President Madison ordered them evicted, but his proclamation proved impossible to enforce. When the army moved people off, they came back again as soon as the soldiers had left.
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Jackson’s victory at New Orleans and his subsequent invasion of Florida further encouraged migration to the Southwest by confirming the strategic security of American control. So did the additional cessions he extorted from the other tribes, beginning with the treaties of September 1816 with the Cherokee and Chickasaw, opening up vast areas adjacent to the Creek Cession. Land-hungry thousands rushed into the Old Southwest, where the new states of Mississippi and Alabama were admitted to the Union in 1817 and 1819 respectively. The migrants included rich and poor, speculators and squatters, slaveholders, slaves, and nonslaveholders, single men, very few single women, and families. The great majority came from upland areas of the nearby states of Georgia, Tennessee, and the Carolinas, but some from as far away as Europe; Scots-Irish seem to have been the most prominent ethnic group. Jackson himself purchased land in the area, and acting on his advice, members of his family made profitable investments in Pensacola real estate.
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Seldom in human history has so large a territory been settled so rapidly. Between 1810 and 1820, Alabama’s population increased twelvefold to 128,000; Mississippi’s doubled to 75,000 even though the Choctaw and Chickasaw Indian tribes still owned the northern two-thirds of the state. The population of Louisiana also doubled to 153,000, as an influx of white American southerners arrived to rival the old multicultural society of colonial New Orleans.
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Fittingly, when the ambitious settlers of Mississippi established a capital for their state, they called the new little settlement Jackson.

This great migration into the Southwest focused on certain particularly attractive areas, including the Mississippi River valley in the vicinity of Natchez and the Tennessee River valley in northern Alabama. The most important of these was in the Creek Cession: the region of central Alabama called the “black belt” because of its rich dark soil. Thousands of farm families came to the black belt from the Piedmont via the Federal Road connecting Columbia, South Carolina, with Columbus, Georgia. A North Carolina planter viewed the exodus from his neighborhood with dismay: “The Alabama
fever
rages here with great violence and has
carried off
vast numbers of our Citizens.”
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Mississippi, more remote, drew settlers from Kentucky and Tennessee coming downstream along the Father of Waters. From the frenetic activity of the government land offices in this period comes the American folk expression “doing a land office business.”

The federal government tried to impose a semblance of order on the process of settlement. Only after public lands had been surveyed were they offered for sale. A public auction then provided an opportunity to bid for those willing to pay more than the minimum price of $2 an acre. Large tracts would be bought up by speculators, sometimes working together in syndicates, for resale. The speculators often benefited from inside information acquired through the land agents and surveyors. Any land left after the auction would be sold privately at $2 an acre, with the minimum purchase being 160 acres; buyers had to put 25 percent down and had four years to pay the balance. Credit was easily available in the immediate postwar years. To make sure that even high-risk borrowers could get loans, Alabama Territory abolished limitations on interest in 1818 by repealing the law against usury. Under these terms, the federal government sold over a million acres of public lands in 1815. (By comparison, before the war sales had averaged 350,000 acres.) In the year ending September 30, 1818, the figure reached 2.5 million acres.
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Reacting to the flood of purchases, incoming president Monroe proposed in 1817 that the minimum price of land be raised so the treasury could realize more benefit from the land boom; Congress turned a deaf ear to the proposal. Instead, the minimum purchase was cut from 160 to 80 acres, to make it easier for small farmers to get a piece of the action. Congress was opting to promote settlement rather than raise revenue. But the pressures of demand bid up the average price of public lands in the Creek Cession to more than $5 an acre in 1818; at the same time they were going for an average of $7.50 an acre in the Tennessee Valley, which had been open to settlement longer. The choicest cotton lands, near water transport, could command $50 an acre at auction.
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The situation on the ground was untidy. Squatters who entered on public lands before they had been surveyed and put up for sale faced an uncertain future. From time to time the authorities would relent and allow them to buy the land they occupied for the minimum price; this was called “preemption.” On the other hand, the place where they were living might be bought at auction by some other private party who would prove less understanding. Preexisting land titles, arising out of grants made by the Spanish colonial and British colonial governments, and by the notorious corrupt Yazoo land grant of 1795, further complicated matters. The Yazoo claims took years to sort out; in 1816, the federal government paid the claimants $4 million in scrip they could redeem at the land offices.
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Lawyers found plenty to keep them occupied on the frontier.

Not that everyone settled disputes by legal means. The Old Southwest was a violent society, even by American standards. Institutions of local government could not be set up fast enough to keep pace with needs. In the first few years of settlement, law and order might constitute more an aspiration than a reality. Men fought duels and did not always conduct them according to the conventions of gentlemanly honor; contemporary accounts emphasize brawls, fistfights, shootouts, and knife fights. Natchez and the Natchez Trace road linking it with Nashville had particularly rough reputations for the violence accompanying crime, gambling, drunkenness, and prostitution. The routine cruelty associated with slave discipline and the determination of the whites to maintain their racial supremacy over Indians and free Negroes legitimated other forms of violence, including lynchings. Even the folk humor of the Old Southwest featured tall tales and cruel practical jokes that both portrayed and caricatured the violence of the society. “I’m an alligator, half-man, half-horse; can whip any man on the
Mississippi
, by G-d,” ran a comic boast that led to a real fight.
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What made migration into this hazardous environment so attractive was the high price of cotton. The difficulties in processing short-staple greenseed cotton into textiles had earlier been surmounted through a series of technological innovations culminating in the development of the “saw” cotton gin (“gin” being short for “engine”). The contribution of the Connecticut Yankee Eli Whitney to this long process has been much exaggerated.
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But the Napoleonic Wars had inhibited international commerce and delayed the mass marketing of cotton for nearly a generation. Now, within a year of the end of hostilities in Europe and North America, the price of raw cotton doubled on the New Orleans market, reaching twenty-seven cents a pound. Wherever the soil was suitable and the farmer could count on two hundred frost-free days in the year, short-staple cotton suddenly became an economically attractive crop. The virgin earth of the New Southwest seemed ideal: While backcountry South Carolina yielded three hundred pounds of cotton per acre, the Alabama black belt could yield eight hundred or even a thousand pounds per acre. In response to an apparently insatiable world demand for textiles, U.S. cotton production soared from seventy-three thousand bales in 1800 to ten times that in 1820—the year the United States surpassed India, long the leading cotton producer.
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Cotton, fueling an expansion of transatlantic industrial capitalism, enormously enhanced the importance of the United States in the world economy. In 1801, 9 percent of the world’s cotton came from the USA and 60 percent from Asia. Half a century later, the United States provided 68 percent of a total world production three times as large.
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The American South was to be the most favored place for the production of a raw material of global significance, as the Caribbean sugar islands had been in the eighteenth century or as the oil-rich Middle East would become in the twentieth.

Cotton cultivation required labor-intensive application, but chattel slavery remained legal in the states where the climate was favorable to cotton. The new marketability of short-staple cotton prompted the expansion of slave-plantation agriculture far beyond the areas that would have sustained the traditional export crops, tobacco, rice, and indigo. The spread of cotton cultivation entailed not only the westward migration of free farmers but also the massive forced migration of enslaved workers into the newly acquired lands. Not all cotton planters in the Southwest were self-made pioneers, for some already wealthy men hastened to the area and purchased large holdings, clearing the forest and draining the swamps with slave labor. Whether he owned many slaves or few, a master might bring his bondsmen with him, but sometimes he would go out and select the lands to buy first, returning (or sending agents) later to buy a workforce suited to the property. Most often, the southwestern planter bought slaves who had been transported to that region by a trader. Because the importation of slaves from overseas had been illegal since 1808, the trader’s human merchandise could only come from the seaboard slave states. Contemporaries typically observed the transit of a slave coffle with disgust and shame: “a wretched cavalcade…marching half naked women, and men loaded with chains, without being charged with any crime but that of being black, from one section of the United States to another, hundreds of miles.”
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Such a procession could number anywhere from a dozen to over a hundred souls, who were expected to walk up to twenty-five miles a day and sleep on the ground. The long trek overland from Virginia to Mississippi or Louisiana would consume six to eight weeks and was usually undertaken in winter, when agricultural labor could best be spared. Coastal vessels, more expensive, absorbed some of the traffic when the great slave marketplace in New Orleans was the destination. Only later, after Kentucky and Tennessee acquired surpluses of slaves and began exporting them, did the phrase “sold down the river” come into common use. The slave traders favored people in the prime of life—late teens or early twenties—since they could withstand the rigors of the march and bring a good price as field hands and (in the case of the women) breeders. Small children accompanying their mothers were placed in the supply wagon. The interstate slave trade was big business; the Chesapeake Bay region alone exported 124,000 enslaved workers, mostly across the Appalachians, during the decade following 1810.
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Westward migration meant different things to different people. For a white man eager to raise cotton, it could mean a welcome fresh start in life and even a chance at quick wealth—“to hang a crystal chandelier in his frontier log cabin,” as one historian put it.
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For white female participants, the move might be less attractive, which helps explain why fewer women than men made it. Women tended to regret the breakup of their accustomed networks of kinfolk and friends. Once living in an isolated frontier home, they might not have a chance to visit their previous companions, because women rarely traveled alone.
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Migrating slaves shared these regrets in even more acute form, since they would probably never again even communicate with those they left behind, who could include spouse or child. For African Americans, the move across the mountains constituted a second giant disruption in the generation following the end of forced migration across the ocean. Accordingly, the historian Ira Berlin has called it a “Second Middle Passage.”
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Conditions of slave labor generally worsened in newly settled areas, where there was much backbreaking work to be done clearing the land and little of the paternalism that could soften the brutality of the “peculiar institution” among the planter aristocracy of more stable regions. The most unfortunate were those sent to the sugar plantations of southern Louisiana, where conditions resembled those on the infamous Caribbean islands. Under tight time pressures, sugar planters systematically overworked their slaves during the harvest and grinding season.
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The Great Migration to the Gulf States converted thousands of semi-subsistence farmers from the Piedmont into cotton producers. It was not necessary to trade off all the security of agrarian self-sufficiency for the economic opportunity presented by the new staple. Many a small farmer, possessing few or no slaves, mixed cotton-growing with raising corn and hogs, though they were less profitable. He thus insured against the fluctuations in the price of a single cash crop with products that, come what may, his own family could eat. The agricultural rhythm of cotton production left plenty of time in the year to grow corn. Some settlers took to the piney woods, where there was a living to be earned poaching lumber from the public lands, often with the use of slave lumberjacks. Others raised livestock for sale, as the local Indians did. Squatters generally practiced hunting, grazing, and simple subsistence agriculture, because it made little sense for them to invest much in their farms so long as their legal title was insecure.
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There were those migrants, mostly men, who loved adventure and their own personal freedom in a new country, but these feelings did not stand in the way of seizing whatever market opportunity presented itself. Versatility and adaptability were at a premium, and a man with five months’ schooling, like Gideon Lincecum, who moved from Georgia to Alabama in 1815, could set himself up by turns as a cotton-and-corn farmer, carpenter, surveyor, Indian trader, and (unlicensed) physician.
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The southwestern humorist Johnson Hooper satirized such men-on-the-make in his character Simon Suggs, who professes the maxim “It is good to be shifty in a new country.”
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