their own government to pursue an innocent and lawful course, how different would have been the state of the treasury and the public credit! . . . The immense population which has swarmed into the west, remote from immediate danger, and which is constantly augmenting, will not be averse from the occasional disturbances of the Atlantic states.*

As the results of one hundred years show, Jefferson had broad and forecasting views as to the ownership of the Louisiana, and it would be difficult to name another act of statesmanship which has so rounded up the republic with grace and strength and promise:

We should take care not to think it for the interest of that great continent to press too soon upon the Spaniards. Those countries cannot be in better hands. My fear is that they are too feeble to hold them until our population can be sufficiently advanced to gain it from them piece by piece. The navigation of the Mississippi we must have soon. This is all we are yet ready to receive.†

This was in 1786.

1805-7-says that the prairies, "incapable of cultivation," will serve as restriction of our population to some certain limits, and thereby a continuance of the Union." In a letter to enterprise as the hopeful germ of a body Astor, Jefferson speaks of the Astorian. enterprise as the hopeful germ of a body of "independent Americans unconnected with us, but by the ties of blood and interest, enjoying, like us, the right of of the Upper Louisiana, Major Stodself-government." Our first governor dard, enters this most singular statement in his 'Sketches,' so discouraging to immigration into that exuberant wheat field of the world: "The country above the Falls of St. Anthony will never attract the attention of the agriculturalists. It is mostly of a cold and sterile nature." In a communication addressed to President Monroe, General Jackson advances this theory: "Concentrate our population, confine our frontier to proper limits, until our country, to those limits, is filled with a dense population. It is the denseness of our population that gives strength and security to Our

The unintelligent neglect of the west by the east-apathy and sometimes opposition-may be best seen by grouping, somewhat miscellaneously, a few scattered facts. In 1791 Vermont prevailed over the opposition of Virginia, North and South Carolina and Georgia, and entered the Union. Madison, in a paper furnished by himself to Sparks, says: "The grounds of this opposition are, first, an habitual jealousy of a predominance of eastern interests." ‡

The citations following go more directly to show a willingness to limit the national growth westward. Lieutenant Pike, basing his remarks on observations made in his two exploring tours*History of the Hartford Convention.' Theodore Dwight, secretary of the convention. pp. 369, 392, 371, 372, 373.

+'American State Papers.' Boston Ed. V. 94. 'Writings of Washington,' Vol. XII, 548.

By

frontier."

In 'Flint's Travels in the Valley of the Mississippi, 1815-1825,' the author thus sets forth, in paraphrase, the views on the new settlers, and settlements, of a man famed for his scholarship, offices and published writings, among them four volumes, octavo, of travels in New England and New York. *

I have read, and not without feelings of pain, the bitter representations of the learned Dr. Dwight in speaking of them. He represents these vast re*Travels in New England and New York, by Timothy Dwight, D.D., LL.D. 4 Vols. Vol. II, Letter 14.

gions as a kind of reservoir for the scum of the Atlantic states. He characterizes, in the mass, the emigrants from New England, as discontented cobblers, too proud, too much in debt, too unprincipled, too much puffed up with self-conceit, too strongly impressed that their fanciful talents could not find

scope in their own country to stay there.

These views of the president of Yale college-not drawn from observationare quite in contrast with those of Daniel Webster, in his speech in the senate, in 1838, on "The Right of Preëmption," after he had visited regions beyond the Mississippi and looked upon our border men in their homes:

They have the general character of frontiersmen; they are hardy, adventurous and enterprising. They have come from far, to establish themselves and families in new abodes in the west. They appeared

to me to be industrious and laborious; and I saw nothing in their character or conduct that should justly draw upon them expressions of contumely and reproach. +

Such impressions of the west as those

Very like. It is not the Rocky mountains alone which have been easily moved about here and there, and by Americans, scholarly in the alcove and quite at home in the Alps and on the Jordan. Dr. Bushnell had a good word in that sermon of his in 1847, under the title, "Barbarism the First Danger:"

spinning into the wilderness, and setting the remotest hamlets in connection and close proximity with the east, the more certain it is that light, good manners and Christian civilization will become universally diffused.

The sooner we have railroads and telegraphs,

His presumption is that knowledge would travel both ways, and needed information come east. A chapter of blunders in American geography would be a choice entertainment, and all the contributors to it would not be foreigners and western Americans.

even yet, and among otherwise learned men, who confine their travels to their family carriage and to their native New England hills. Bradbury, an English traveler, who ventured so far from home as to spend the years, 1809-11, in the interior of North America, and while. making the discovery of the surprising breadth of country between the Mississippi river and the Rocky mountains,

makes these unintentional reflections on American geographers and travelers: The territory west of the Mississippi, and extending from that river to the Rocky mountains . . . is not accurately known on account of the real situation of the Rocky mountains not yet being truly ascertained. But it appears from the accounts of hunters and travelers, that, on some of our best maps and globes they are laid down too far to the eastward.

+ Webster's Works, Vol. IV, p. 399.

commerce, before the Mercantile Library association in Boston, said it would be a less evil for the American Union, to have the Pacific extend itself over Oregon territory to the base of the Rocky mountains, than to convert that territory into new states for the Union.

In his admirable letters, which shed so much light on the Oregon question, and aided so much to its final and fortunate settlement, Albert Gallatin, secretary of the treasury from 1801 to 1814, favored the policy of an undivided. Oregon, extending north to 54 degrees, 40 minutes, erected into an independent government. These letters were written in 1846.

In his seat in the lower house of congress in 1844, Winthrop guards against

the preponderating growth of the west over the east, by making access to Oregon across the continent naturally impossible, and speaks of "the perpetual snows which nature has opposed to the passage of this disputed territory;" and again: "The west has no interest, the country has no interest in extending our territorial possessions." And again, in Congress, in 1846: "Are our western brethren straitened for elbow-room, or likely to be for a thousand years ?" The "perpetual snows" have proved to be a figure of speech rather than a fact in nature; and from the speed with which "our western brethren" are fill

ing up that impassable and inhospitable region, it seems likely to be necessary to shorten the "one thousand years into a hundred and less.

In the line of thought which we are now opening it is a suggestive fact that "no bill relating to Oregon was passed by either house before 1843, nor was any decisive measure on the subject adopted by the American govern

ment."*

It was in March of the same year that Dr. Whitman ended his wonderful ride at Washington, and first fully showed to the east the value and accessibility of Oregon, and in the summer took back eight hundred and seventy-five emigrants in two hundred wagons, with thirteen hundred head of cattle, and thus saved Oregon. Covering these and other great facts, Gallatin well says in his fifth letter:

Enterprising individuals have, without any aid or encouragement by government, opened a wagon road eighteen hundred miles in length, through an

*Greenhow: 'His. Oregon and California, p. 379.

arid or mountainous region, and made settlements on or near the shores of the Pacific, without any guaranty for the possession of the land improved by their labors. Now that the tide of emi

gration has turned in their favor, they are suddenly invited to assume a hostile position, to endure the calamities, and to run the chances and consequences of war.

Early and primitive Oregon is a marked illustration of this neglect of the frontier. The government had its claims in Oregon, and the founders of the coming twentieth state in the Union were there. These were left without civil government or laws, except as those of an alien power, those of the Hudson Bay company, were imposed on them. So hemmed in were they by the critical issues of the Oregon controversy, and the nervous anxieties of the times, that they could not openly convene in council to take first steps from an inorganic to an organic civil state. A ruse was well planned to supply the deficiency of congress. They were stock owners, and the wild animals preyed on their herds, and they called the "wolf meeting," to concert measures for defense, and thence went up from wild animals to men, and established the first civil government of Oregon.* It was nothing new for the best blood and heroic spirits of the Republic, then at the extreme front planting out coming commonwealths, to be left quite unaided to struggle with wild animals and hostile Indians. The same thing was common to the border from earlier days, and, sad to say, is yet.

*The History of Oregon,' By W. H. Gray, 1870, Chap. xxxiii. 'Oregon-The Struggle for Possession,' By W. Barrows, 1884, Chap. xxvi.

The voice of many a John the Baptist is now crying in the wilderness of America, and doing brave and patriotic work for a Christian civilization, to whom very scant stipends come, and often tardily; and dubious wardrobes from the very comfortable east. Judge Innes of Kentucky, in a letter to the war department, under date of July, 1790,

says:

The people say they have long groaned under their misfortunes-they see no prospect of reliefthey constitute the strength and wealth of the western country, and yet all measures heretofore attempted, have been committed for execution to the hands of strangers (eastern men) who have no interest in common with the west.

Nor did matters much or rapidly improve for the advance belt of the American nation, as the years ran by.

The few roads that crossed the mountains (the Alleghanies, 1811) were so wretchedly bad that the

wagons toiled over them with great difficulty; and a large portion of the merchandise was carried on the backs of horses. Even that was considere la triumphant result of enterprise, and a rapid advance in improvement. For a few years only had then advanced since Mr. Brown, a delegate from Kentucky in congress, had been smiled at as visionary, by the members of that August body, for asking the establishment of a mail to Pittsburgh, to be carried on horseback once in two weeks. He was told that

such a mail was not needed, that probably it would never be required, and that the obstacles of the road were insuperable.*

Benton had pointed out the same unwise and cramping policy of the east toward the new country in the discussion of the resolution of Mr. Foot, offered in the senate in 1829. Mr. Foot was senator from Connecticut, and may be assumed to have carried the ordinary interests that eastern men then had in

* 'Notes on the Western States.' By James Hall, 1832, p. 225.

visionary fortunes in wild lands, alreaay purchased, both sides of the Alleghanies. His project was to stop all survey and sales of government lands till those already on the public market, at the national land offices, were sold. The opponents of the resolution urged that that state of things had already been attained which Webster, during the discussion, said would come under another system of sale, when individuals would get large quantities of land into their hands, and then "become themselves. the competitors with the government in the sale of land." The east held inferior lands, which they could not sell without forcing the land market to a scarcity of supply. The resolution had this tendency and apparent design, and, if enforced, would greatly damage the opening of the new west. Hence Mr.

Benton said: "If the sales are limited to the lands now in market, emigration will cease to flow, for those lands (now in market) are not of a character to attract people at a distance." They were the refuse of many years sales, as "shop-worn" goods. It was as if sharp speculators in wheat had loaded themselves heavily with inferior and unsalable grain, and would move to stop receipts of good grades till, under stress of buyers, they could unload. These speculative capitalists sought thus to use the government for private gains and to help them out of poor investments, by dwarfing and stopping the growth of the nation on the borders. Benton urged that the resolution would have the effect of "limiting the settlements in the new states and territories,"

and by keeping back first-class lands "it would deliver up large portions of new states and territories to the dominion of wild beasts." In the same connection Benton said that the scheme of the resolution "was intended to prevent emigration to the west. It was a renewed effort to strangle the young Hercules. The same attempt had been systematically made for forty years. The attempt came from the same quarter now as formerly." In commenting on the discussion as developing eastern jealousy of the west and a selfish willingness to sacrifice it to the ill-proportioned growth of the oldest states, he adds: "The debate spread and took an acrimonious and sectional turn, imputing to the quarter of the Union from which it came an old and early policy to check the growth of the west at the outset."

The defense of the east, in this regard, by Webster, must not be forgotten, as, indeed, there is no danger. Out of this resolution of Foote to stop the sales of the public lands came those two remarkable speeches of the great statesman, in which he defended New England against varied criticisms and attacks, as summed up by Benton, but formally and oratorically presented by Hayne. It is doubtful whether the English language, so well adapted for a forensic oration, was ever more nobly used. That masterly constitutional defense of the American Union left nothing more for argument, and all remaining protection to the sword. When the logical defense revived, in later days, all * Benton's Thirty Years' View,' Vol. I, 130-2.

turned to that speech for argument, and little was found that Webster had left unsaid. He towered above all others as a fortress of strength, and those who looked for a peaceable preservation of the Union turned to him, saying: "Thy neck is like the tower of David, builded for an armory, whereon there hang a thousand bucklers, all shields of mighty men." The prayer of his great American heart was answered, yet not much in advance of the visions he feared: "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 dishonored 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!"

His defense, however, of the east, which should lie rather in the line of facts than of oratory, does not seem to have been as conclusive as his constitutional argument for the Union. His defense of the east is made up mostly of well-rounded and energetic affirmations and denials. His strongest point is put first: "It appears that we have, at this moment, surveyed and in the market, ready for sale, two hundred and ten millions of acres, or thereabouts." He also says, and to the honor of New England: "In 1820 the people of the west esought congress for a reduction in the price of lands. In favor of that reduction, New England, with a delegation of forty members in the other house, gave thirty-three votes, and one only against it. . . . In 1821 the law passed for the relief of the pur