CHAPTER EIGHT
AMERICAN EPIC
THE YEAR 1815 HAD MARKED THE END OF A PERIOD OF
AMERICAN development. Up to this time the life of the continent had
been moulded largely by forces from Europe, but with the conclusion
of the war of 1812 against England America turned in upon herself
and with her back to the Atlantic looked towards the West. The
years following the Peace of Ghent are full of the din of the
Westward advance. In politics the vehement struggles of Federalist
and Republican were replaced by what a contemporary journalist
called “the era of good feelings.” But underneath the calm surface
of the first decade lay the bitter rivalry of sectional interests
which were soon to assume permanent and organised party forms. As
in all post-war periods, the major political issue was that of
finance. The ideas of Alexander Hamilton on Protection and banking
were reluctantly accepted by the Republican administration under
the stress of war conditions. The tariff of 1816 had created a
régime of Protection under which New England turned from her
shipping interests to manufacture and laid the foundations of her
nineteenth-century prosperity. The old suspicions of Jefferson
about a Federal banking system were overcome, and in 1816 a charter
replacing the one which had expired was issued for the foundation
of a new Federal Bank.
The ties with Europe were slowly and inexorably
broken. Outstanding disputes between England and America were
settled by a series of commissions. The boundaries of Canada were
fixed, and both countries agreed to a mutual pact of disarmament
upon that storm centre, the Great Lakes. In 1819, after straggling
warfare in Spanish Florida, led by the hero of New Orleans, Andrew
Jackson, the Spanish Government finally yielded the territory to
the United States for five million dollars. Spain had withdrawn
from the Northern continent for ever.
But the turmoils of European politics were to
threaten America once again for the last time for many years to
come. The sovereigns of the Old World were bound together to
maintain the principle of monarchy and to co-operate in intervening
in any country which showed signs of rebellion against existing
institutions. The policy of this Holy Alliance had aroused the
antagonism of Britain, who had refused to intervene in the internal
affairs of Italy in 1821. The new crisis came in Spain. Bourbon
France, burning to achieve respectability in the new Europe, sent
an army across the Pyrenees to restore the Spanish monarchy. Russia
would have liked to go farther. The Czar of Russia had world-wide
interests, including large claims to the western coastline of North
America, which he now reaffirmed by Imperial decree. Rumours also
spread to Washington that the reactionary Powers of Europe, having
supported the restoration of the Bourbons in Spain, might promote
similar activities in the New World to restore Bourbon sovereignty
there. In Southern America lay the Spanish colonies, which had in
their turn thrown off the yoke of their mother country.
The British Government under Canning offered to
co-operate with the United States in stopping the extension of this
threatening principle of intervention to the New World. Britain
announced that she recognised the sovereignty of the Latin
republics in South America. Meanwhile President Monroe acted
independently and issued his message to Congress proclaiming the
principles later known as the Monroe Doctrine. This famous
Doctrine, as has been related, was at once a warning against
interference on the part of any European Powers in the New World
and a statement of the intention of America to play no part in
European politics. With this valedictory message America
concentrated upon her own affairs. A new generation of politicians
was rising. The old veterans of the days of the Constitution had
most of them vanished from the scene, though Jefferson and Madison
lingered on in graceful retirement in their Virginian homes.
Westward lay the march of American Empire. Within
thirty years of the establishment of the Union nine new states had
been formed in the Mississippi valley, and two in the borders of
New England. As early as 1769 men like Daniel Boone had pushed
their way into the Kentucky country, skirmishing with the Indians.
But the main movement over the mountains began during the War of
Independence. The migration of the eighteenth century took two
directions: the advance westward towards the Ohio, with its
settlement of Kentucky and Tennessee, and the occupation of the
north-west forest regions, the fur-traders’ domain, beyond Lake
Erie. The colonisation of New England and the eastern coastline of
America had been mainly the work of powerful companies, aided by
the English Crown or by feudal proprietors with chartered rights.
But here in the new lands of the West any man with an axe and a
rifle could carve for himself a rude frontier home. By 1790 there
were thirty-five thousand settlers in the Tennessee country, and
double that number in Kentucky. By 1800 there were a million
Americans west of the mountain ranges of the Alleghenies. From
these new lands a strong, self-reliant Western breed took its place
in American life. Modern American democracy was born and cradled in
the valley of the Mississippi. The foresight of the first
independent Congress of the United States had proclaimed for all
time the principle that when new territories gained a certain
population they should be admitted to statehood upon an equality
with the existing partners of the Union. It is a proof of the
quality and power of the Westerners that eleven of the eighteen
Presidents of the United States between 1828 and 1901 were either
born or passed the greater part of their lives in the valley of the
Mississippi. Well might Daniel Webster upon an anniversary of the
landing of the Pilgrim Fathers declaim the celebrated passage: “New
England farms, houses, villages, and churches spread over and adorn
the immense extent from the Ohio to Lake Erie and stretch along
from the Alleghanies [sic] onwards beyond the Miamis and
towards the falls of St Anthony. Two thousand miles westward from
the Rock where their fathers landed may now be seen the sons of
pilgrims cultivating smiling fields, rearing towns and villages,
and cherishing, we trust, the patrimonial blessings of wise
institutions, of liberty and religion. . . . Ere long the sons of
the pilgrims will be upon the shores of the Pacific.”
America was swelling rapidly in numbers as well as
in area. Between 1790 and 1820 the population increased from four
to nine and a half millions. Thereafter it almost doubled every
twenty years. Nothing like such a rate of growth had before been
noted in the world, though it was closely paralleled in
contemporary England. The settlement of great bodies of men in the
West was eased by the removal of the Indian tribes from the regions
east of the Mississippi. They had been defeated when they fought as
allies of Britain in the war of 1812. Now it became Federal policy
to eject them. The lands thus thrown open were made available in
smaller units and at lower prices than in earlier years to the
incoming colonists—for we might as well use this honourable word
about them, unpopular though it may now be. Colonisation, in the
true sense, was the task that engaged the Western pioneers. Farmers
from stony New England were tilling the fertile empty territories
to the south of the Great Lakes, while in the South the Black Belt
of Alabama and Mississippi proved fruitful soil for the recent art
of large-scale cotton cultivation.
But this ceaseless expansion to the West also
changed the national centre of gravity, and intense stresses arose
of interest as well as of feeling. The Eastern states, North and
South alike, presently found their political power challenged by
these settler communities, and the lure of pioneering created the
fear of a labour shortage in the Eastern factories. In fact the gap
was filled by new immigrants from Europe. As the frontier line
rolled westward the new communities rising rapidly to statehood
forced their own problems and desires upon the exhilarated but also
embarrassed Federal Government. The East feared the approaching
political dominance of the democratic West. The West resented the
financial and economic bias of the Eastern moneyed classes. The
forces of divergence grew strong, and only the elasticity of the
Federal system around the core of state rights prevented the usual
conflict between a mother country and its sturdy children.
The political history of these years between 1815
and 1830 is confused through the lack of adequate national party
organisations to express the bitter sectional conflicts and hatreds
in the North, South, and West. By 1830 the situation cleared and
the great parties of the future stood opposed. With the growth of
Federal legislation and the creation of a national economic
framework of tariffs, banks, and land policies the Union felt the
stress of state jealousies and rival interests. The expansion to
the West tilted the political balance in favour of the new Western
states, and strenuously the older forces in the North and South
resisted the rising power of democracy within the Federal State.
They had to confront not only the desires of the West, but also
those of the small planters in the South and of the working men in
the industrial North. Many of these people now for the first time
began to receive the vote as universal manhood suffrage was more
widely adopted. The electorate was expanding and eager to make its
voice heard. At the same time the convention system was introduced
into American politics. Candidates for the Presidency and for
lesser public office in the states gradually ceased to be nominated
by restricted party caucuses. Instead they were selected at
meetings of delegates representing a variety of local and
specialised opinion. This obliged the would-be President and other
public office-holders to be more responsive to the divergences of
popular will. Politicians of conservative mind like Henry Clay and
John C. Calhoun feared the menacing signs of particularism and the
consequent threat to the Union. These men formulated what they
called the “American System.” But their policy was merely a
re-expression of the ideas of Hamilton. They sought to harmonise
economic interests within a Federal framework. As Calhoun had said
in 1817, “We are greatly and rapidly—I was about to say
fearfully—growing. This is our pride and our danger, our weakness
and our strength. . . . Let us then bind the Republic together with
a perfect system of roads and canals. Protection would make the
parts adhere more closely. . . . It would form a new and most
powerful cement.”
Public works were set on foot; steamboats appeared
upon the Mississippi, and the concentration of trade in the Gulf of
Mexico roused alarm in the Atlantic states, who saw themselves
being deprived of profitable markets. But they hastened themselves
to compete with this increasing activity. In 1817 the state of New
York began the construction of the Erie Canal, which was to make
New York City the most prosperous of the Eastern seaports. The
great Cumberland high-road across the Ohio to Illinois was built
with Federal money, and a network of roads was to bind the eager
West to the Eastern states. But the history of the American
nineteenth century is dominated by the continually threatened
cleavage of East and West, and, upon the Atlantic seaboard, of the
Northern and Southern states. In the early years of the century the
keynote of politics was the rival bidding of Northern and Southern
politicians for the votes and support of the Western states.
The issue of slavery was soon to trouble the
relations of the North and South. In 1819 a Bill was tabled in
Congress to admit Missouri as a state to the Union. This territory
lay inside the bounds of the Louisiana Purchase, where the future
of slavery had not so far been decided by Federal law. As the
people of Missouri proposed to allow slavery in their draft
constitution the Northerners looked upon this Bill as an aggressive
move to increase the voting power of the South. A wild campaign of
mutual recrimination followed. But with the increasing problem of
the West facing them both, North and South could not afford to
quarrel, and the angry sectional strife stirred up by this Bill
ended in a compromise which was to hold until the middle of the
century. Missouri was admitted as a slave-holding state, and
slavery was prohibited north of latitude 36° 30ʹ within the
existing territories of the Union which did not yet enjoy
statehood. As part of the compromise Maine, which had just severed
itself from Massachusetts, was admitted as a free state, making the
division between slave and free equal, being twelve each.
Far-seeing men realised the impending tragedy of this division.
John Quincy Adams noted in his diary, “I considered it at once as
the knell of the Union. I take it for granted that the present
question is a mere preamble—a title-page to a great, tragic
volume.”
It was this cultured New Englander, son of the
second President of the United States, who succeeded Monroe in
1825. The so-called era of good feelings was coming to a close, and
the four years of his Presidency were to reveal the growth of
lively party politics. All the political and economic interests of
the Eastern states were forced on to the defensive by the rapid
expansion of the West.
The West grouped itself around the figure of the
frontier General Andrew Jackson, who claimed to represent the true
Jeffersonian principles of democracy against the corrupt moneyed
interests of the East. Adams received the support of those classes
who feared majority rule and viewed with alarm the growing power of
the farmers and settlers of the frontier. The issue between the two
factions was joined in 1828, when Jackson stood as rival candidate
against Adams’s re-election. In the welter of this election two new
parties were born, the Democrats and the National Republicans,
later called the Whigs. It was the fiercest campaign since
Jefferson had driven the elder Adams from office in 1800. As the
results came in it was seen that Adams had won practically nothing
outside New England, and that in the person of Andrew Jackson the
West had reached controlling power. Here at last was an American
President who had no spiritual contacts whatever with the Old World
or its projection on the Atlantic shore, who represented at the
White House the spirit of the American frontier. To many it seemed
that democracy had triumphed indeed.
There were wild scenes at Washington at the
inauguration of the new President, dubbed by his opponent Adams as
“the brawler from Tennessee.” But to the men of the West Jackson
was their General, marching against the political monopoly of the
moneyed classes. The complications of high politics caused
difficulties for the backwoodsman. His simple mind, suspicious of
his opponents, made him open to influence by more partisan and
self-seeking politicians. In part he was guided by Martin Van
Buren, his Secretary of State. But he relied even more heavily for
advice on political cronies of his own choosing, who were known as
the “Kitchen Cabinet,” because they were not office-holders.
Jackson was led to believe that his first duty was to cleanse the
stables of the previous régime. His dismissal of a large number of
civil servants brought the spoils system, long prevalent in many
states, firmly into the Federal machine.
Two great recurring problems in American politics,
closely related, demanded the attention of President Andrew
Jackson—the supremacy of the Union and the organisation of a
national economy. Protection favoured the interests of the North at
the expense of the South, and in 1832 the state of South Carolina
determined to challenge the right of the Federal Government to
impose a tariff system, and, echoing the Virginia and Kentucky
resolutions of 1798, expounded in its most extreme form the
doctrine of state rights. In the party struggles which followed the
votes of the Western states held the balance. Their burning
question was the regulation of the sale of public land by the
Federal Government. As the historian S. E. Morison puts it, “It was
all a game of balance between North, South, and West, each section
offering to compromise a secondary interest in order to get votes
for a primary interest. The South would permit the West to plunder
the public domain, in return for a reduction of the tariff. The
North offered the tempting bait of distribution [of the proceeds
from land sales for public works in the West] in order to maintain
protection. On the outcome of this sectional balance depended the
alignment of parties in the future; even of the Civil War itself.
Was it to be North and West against South, or South and West
against North?”1
The debates on these themes in the American Senate
contained the finest examples of American oratory. In this battle
of giants the most imposing of them all was Daniel Webster, of
Massachusetts, the best speaker of his day. He it was who stated
the case for the Union and refuted the case of South Carolina in
one of the most famous of American speeches. His words enshrined
the new feeling of nation-wide patriotism that was gathering
strength, at least in the North. They show that New England in
particular was moving away from the sectional views which had
prevailed in 1812. A broader sense of loyalty to the Union was
developing. “It is to that Union,” Webster declared in the Senate,
“we owe our safety at home, and our consideration and dignity
abroad. It is to that Union that we are chiefly indebted for
whatever makes us most proud of our country. That Union we reached
only by the discipline of our virtues in the severe school of
adversity. It had its origin in the necessities of disordered
finance, prostrate commerce, and ruined credit. Under its benign
influences these great interests immediately awoke, as from the
dead, and sprang forth with newness of life. Every year of its
duration has teemed with fresh proofs of its utility and its
blessings; and although our territory has stretched out wider and
wider, and our population spread farther and farther, they have not
outrun its protection, or its benefits. It has been to us all a
copious foundation of national, social and personal
happiness.”
“I have not allowed myself, Sir,” he went on, “to
look beyond the Union, to see what might lie hidden in the dark
recess behind. I have not coolly weighed the chances of preserving
liberty when the bonds that unite us together shall be broken
asunder. I have not accustomed myself to hang over the precipice of
disunion to see whether, with my short sight, I can fathom the
depth of the abyss below; nor could I regard him as a safe
counsellor in the affairs of this Government, whose thoughts should
be mainly bent on considering, not how the Union may be best
preserved, but how tolerable might be the condition of the people
when it should be broken up and destroyed. While the Union lasts we
have high, exciting, gratifying prospects spread out before us, for
us and our children. Beyond that I seek not to penetrate the veil.
God grant that in my day at least that curtain may not rise! God
grant that on my vision never may be opened what lies behind! When
my eyes shall be turned to behold for the last time the sun in
heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonoured
fragments of a once glorious Union; on states dissevered,
discordant, belligerent; on a land rent with civil feuds, or
drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood! Let their last feeble and
lingering glance rather behold the gorgeous ensign of the Republic,
now known and honoured throughout the earth, still full high
advanced, its arms and trophies streaming in their original lustre,
not a stripe erased or polluted, not a single star obscured,
bearing for its motto no such miserable interrogatory as ‘What is
all this worth?’ nor those other words of delusion and folly,
‘Liberty first and Union afterwards,’ but everywhere, spread all
over in characters of living light, blazing on all its ample folds,
as they float over the sea and over the land, and in every wind
under the whole heavens, that other sentiment, dear to every true
American heart—Liberty and Union, now and for ever, one and
inseparable!”
On the Indiana frontier a young man was moved by
this speech. His name was Abraham Lincoln.
President Jackson himself was impressed, and in his
warlike approach to politics was prepared to coerce South Carolina
by force. But a tactful compromise was reached. The tariff was
lowered but rendered permanent, and the Force Act, authorising the
President to use the Army if necessary to collect the customs
duties, was declared null and void by South Carolina. Here then for
a space the matter was left. But the South Carolina theory of
“nullification” showed the danger of the Republic, and with the
prophetic instinct of the simple frontiersman Jackson pointed to
the future: “The next pretext will be the negro or slavery
question.”
But the next serious issue was the Federal Bank,
whose charter was due to come up for renewal in 1836. The National
Republicans, or Whigs, now led by Clay, preferred to force it
before the 1832 Presidential election. Jackson had long been
expected to attack the moneyed power in politics. The position of
the Bank illustrated the economic stresses which racked the
American Republic. “It was an economic conflict,” wrote Charles
Beard, “that happened to take a sectional form: the people of the
agricultural West had to pay tribute to Eastern capitalists on the
money they had borrowed to buy land, make improvements, and engage
in speculation.” The contest was joined in the election. The
triumphant return of Jackson to power was in fact a vote against
the Bank of the United States. It was in vain that Daniel Webster
was briefed as counsel for the Bank. Jackson informed the Bank
president, “I do not dislike your bank more than all banks, but
ever since I read the history of the South Sea Bubble I have been
afraid of banks.” He refused to consent to the passing of a Bill to
renew the charter, and without waiting for the Bank to die a
natural death in 1836 he decided at once to deprive it of
Government deposits, which were sent to local banks throughout the
states. When the charter expired it was not renewed, and for nearly
thirty years there was no centralised banking system in the United
States. The union of Western and Southern politicians had had their
revenge upon the North. The Radicalism of the frontier had won a
great political contest. Jackson’s occupation of the Presidency had
finally broken the “era of good feelings” which had followed the
war with Britain, and by his economic policy he had split the old
Republican Party of Jefferson. The Radicalism of the West was
looked upon with widespread suspicion throughout the Eastern
states, and Jackson’s official appointments had not been very
happy.
The election in 1836 of Jackson’s lieutenant, Van
Buren, meant the continuation of Jacksonian policy, while the old
General himself returned in triumph to his retirement in Tennessee.
The first incursions of the West into high politics had revealed
the slumbering forces of democracy on the frontier and shown the
inexperience of their leaders in such affairs.
The westward tide rolled on, bearing with it new
problems of adjustment. The generation of the 1840’s saw their
culmination. During these years there took place the annexation of
Texas, a war with Mexico, the conquest of California, and the
settlement of the Oregon boundary with Great Britain. Adventurous
Americans in search of land and riches had been since 1820 crossing
the Mexican boundary into the Texas country, which belonged to the
Republic of Mexico, freed from Spain in 1821. While this community
was growing, American sailors on the Pacific coast, captains
interested in the China trade, established themselves in the ports
of the Mexican Province of California. Pioneers pushed their way
overland in search of skins and furs, and by 1826 reached the
mission stations of the Province. The Mexicans, alarmed at the
appearance of these settlers, vainly sought to stem the flood; for
Mexican Governments were highly unstable, and in distant Provinces
their writ hardly ran. But there appeared on the scene a new
military dictator, Santa Anna, determined to strengthen Mexican
authority, and at once a revolt broke out. In November 1835 the
Americans in Texas erected an autonomous state and raised the Lone
Star flag. The Mexicans, under Santa Anna, marched northwards. At
the Mission House of the Alamo in March 1836 a small body of
Texans, fighting to the last man, was exterminated in one of the
epic fights of American history by a superior Mexican force. The
whole Province was aroused. Under the leadership of General Sam
Houston from Tennessee a force was raised, and in savage fighting
the Mexican army of Santa Anna was in its turn destroyed and its
commander captured at San Jacinto River. The Texans had stormed the
positions with the cry “Remember the Alamo!” The independence of
Texas was recognised by Santa Anna. His act was repudiated later by
the Mexican Government, but their war effort was exhausted, and the
Texans organised themselves into a republic, electing Sam Houston
as President.
For the next ten years the question of the
admission of Texas as a state of the Union was a burning issue in
American politics. As each new state demanded entry into the Union
so the feeling for and against slavery ran higher. The great
Abolitionist journalist, William Lloyd Garrison, called for a
secession of the Northern states if the slave state of Texas was
admitted to the Union. The Southerners, realising that Texan votes
would give them a majority in the Senate if this vast territory was
admitted as a number of separate states, clamoured for annexation.
The capitalists of the East were committed, through the formation
of land companies, to exploit Texas, and besides the issue of
dubious stocks by these bodies vast quantities of paper notes and
bonds of the new Texan Republic were floated in the United States.
The speculation in these helped to split the political opposition
of the Northern states to the annexation. Even more important was
the conversion of many Northerners to belief in the “Manifest
Destiny” of the United States. This meant that their destiny was to
spread across the whole of the North American continent. The
Democratic Party in the election of 1844 called for the occupation
of Oregon as well as the annexation of Texas, thus holding out to
the North the promise of Oregon as a counterweight to Southern
Texas. The victory of the Democratic candidate, James K. Polk, was
interpreted as a mandate for admitting Texas, and this was done by
joint resolution of Congress in February 1845.
It remained to persuade Mexico to recognise this
state of affairs, and also to fix the boundaries of Texas.
President Polk was determined to push them as far south as
possible, and war was inevitable. It broke out in May 1846.
Meanwhile a similar train of events was unfolding on the other side
of the continent. All this time American penetration of the West
had continued, often with grim experiences of starvation and winter
snows. Nothing could stop the migration towards the Pacific. The
lure of the rich China trade and the dream of controlling the
Western Ocean brought the acquisition of California to the fore,
and gave her even more importance in American eyes than Texas. In
June 1846 the American settlers in California, instigated from
Washington, raised the Bear Flag as their standard of revolt and
declared their independence on the Texan model. Soon afterwards
American forces arrived and the Stars and Stripes replaced the
Bear.
The American advance was rapidly gathering
momentum. The Mexican army of the North was twice beaten by General
Zachary Taylor, a future President. A force under General Winfield
Scott was landed at Vera Cruz and marched on Mexico City. The
capital fell to the Americans after a month of street fighting in
September 1847. On this expedition a number of young officers
distinguished themselves. They included Captain Robert E. Lee,
Captain George B. McClellan, Lieutenant Ulysses S. Grant, and
Colonel Jefferson Davis.
Mexico sued for peace, and by the treaty which
followed she was obliged not only to recognise the annexation of
Texas, but also to cede California, Arizona, and New Mexico.
Lieutenant Grant confided his impressions to his memoirs: “I do not
think there was ever a more wicked war than that waged by the
United States on Mexico. I thought so at the time, when I was a
youngster, only I had not moral courage enough to resign.” But the
expansive force of the American peoples was explosive. “Manifest
Destiny” was on the march, and it was unfortunate that Mexico stood
in the path. The legend of Imperialism and the belief in the right
of the United States to exploit both continents, North and South,
which sprang from the Mexican War henceforward cast their shadow on
co-operation between the South American republics and the United
States.
The immediate gains were enormous. While the
commissioners were actually debating the treaty with Mexico an
American labourer in California discovered the first nugget of gold
in that region. The whole economy of a sleepy Mexican province,
with its age-old Spanish culture, was suddenly overwhelmed by a mad
rush for gold. In 1850 the population of California was about
eighty-two thousand souls. In two years the figure had risen to two
hundred and seven thousand. A lawless mining society arose upon the
Pacific coast. From the cities of the East and from the adjoining
states men of all professions and classes of society flocked to
California, many being murdered, killed in quarrels, by cold and
famine, or drowned in the sea voyage round Cape Horn. The gold of
California lured numbers to their death, and a few to riches beyond
belief.
Oh! California,
That’s the land for me;
I’m off to Sacramento
With my washbowl on my knee.
That’s the land for me;
I’m off to Sacramento
With my washbowl on my knee.
The anarchy of the gold rush brought an urgent
demand for settled government in California, and the old
perplexing, rasping quarrel over the admission of a new state was
heard again at Washington. For the moment nothing was done, and the
Californians called their own state convention and drew up a
temporary constitution.
During all this time, farther to the north, another
territory had been coming into being. The “Oregon Trail” had
brought many men from the more crowded states of the North-East to
find their homes and establish their farms along the undefined
Canadian frontier to the Pacific. With the prospect of war in the
South for the acquisition of Texas and California, the American
Government was not anxious to embark upon a quarrel with Great
Britain upon its Northern frontier. There was strong opposition by
the Southerners to the acquisition of Oregon, where the Northern
pioneers were opposed to slavery. Oregon would be another “free
soil state.” Negotiations were opened with Britain, and in spite of
electioneering slogans of “Fifty-four-forty or fight” the boundary
was settled in June 1846 by peaceful diplomacy along the
forty-ninth parallel. This solution owed much to the accommodating
nature of the Foreign Secretary in Peel’s Government, Lord
Aberdeen. The controversy now died down, and in 1859 the territory
of Oregon reached statehood.
Among the many settlements which lay dotted over
the whole of the American continent the strangest perhaps was the
Mormon colony at Salt Lake City. In the spring of 1847 members of
this revivalist and polygamist sect started from the state of
Illinois under their prophet leader, Brigham Young, to find homes
free from molestation in the West. By the summer they reached the
country round Salt Lake, and two hours after their arrival they had
begun establishing their homes and ploughing up the soil. Within
three years a flourishing community of eleven thousand souls,
combining religious fervour, philoprogenitiveness, and shrewd
economic sense, had been established by careful planning in the
Salt Lake country, and in 1850 the territory received recognition
by the Federal Government under the name of Utah. The colony was
established in a key position on the trail which led both to Oregon
and California. The sale of food and goods to the travellers and
adventurers who moved in both directions along this route brought
riches to the Mormon settler, and Salt Lake City, soon tainted, it
is true, by the introduction of more lawless and unbelieving
elements, became one of the richest cities in America.
With the establishment of this peculiar colony the
settlement of the continent was comprehensive. The task before the
Federal Government was now to organise the Far Western territory
won in the Mexican War and in the compromise with Britain. From
this there rose in its final and dread form the issue of bond and
free.