Frontier in American History — XIII - Middle Western Pioneer Democracy - Part 2

First had come the children of the interior of the South, and with ax and rifle in hand had cut their clearings in the forest, raised their log cabins, fought the Indians and by 1830 had pushed their way to the very edge of the prairies along the Ohio and Missouri Valleys, leaving unoccupied most of the Basin of the Great Lakes.

These slashers of the forest, these self-sufficing pioneers, raising the corn and live stock for their own need, living scattered and apart, had at first small interest in town life or a share in markets.

They were passionately devoted to the ideal of equality, but it was an ideal which assumed that under free conditions in the midst of unlimited resources, the homogeneous society of the pioneers _must_ result in equality.

What they objected to was arbitrary obstacles, artificial limitations upon the freedom of each member of this frontier folk to work out his own career without fear or favor.

What they instinctively opposed was the crystallization of differences, the monopolization of opportunity and the fixing of that monopoly by government or by social customs.

The road must be open.

The game must be played according to the rules.

There must be no artificial stifling of equality of opportunity, no closed doors to the able, no stopping the free game before it was played to the end.

More than that, there was an unformulated, perhaps, but very real feeling, that mere success in the game, by which the abler men were able to achieve preeminence gave to the successful ones no right to look down upon their neighbors, no vested title to assert superiority as a matter of pride and to the diminution of the equal right and dignity of the less successful.

If this democracy of Southern pioneers, this Jacksonian democracy, was, as its socialist critics have called it, in reality a democracy of "expectant capitalists," it was not one which expected or acknowledged on the part of the successful ones the right to harden their triumphs into the rule of a privileged class.

In short, if it is indeed true that the backwoods democracy was based upon equality of opportunity, it is also true that it resented the conception that opportunity under competition should result in the hopeless inequality, or rule of class.

Ever a new clearing must be possible.

And because the wilderness seemed so unending, the menace to the enjoyment of this ideal seemed rather to be feared from government, within or without, than from the operations of internal evolution.

From the first, it became evident that these men had means of supplementing their individual activity by informal combinations.

One of the things that impressed all early travelers in the United States was the capacity for extra-legal, voluntary association.

[343:1] This was natural enough; in all America we can study the process by which in a new land social customs form and crystallize into law.

We can even see how the personal leader becomes the governmental official.

This power of the newly arrived pioneers to join together for a common end without the intervention of governmental institutions was one of their marked characteristics.

The log rolling, the house-raising, the husking bee, the apple paring, and the squatters' associations whereby they protected themselves against the speculators in securing title to their clearings on the public domain, the camp meeting, the mining camp, the vigilantes, the cattle-raisers' associations, the "gentlemen's agreements," are a few of the indications of this attitude.

It is well to emphasize this American trait, because in a modified way it has come to be one of the most characteristic and important features of the United States of to-day.

America does through informal association and understandings on the part of the people many of the things which in the Old World are and can be done only by governmental intervention and compulsion.

These associations were in America not due to immemorial custom of tribe or village community.

They were extemporized by voluntary action.

The actions of these associations had an authority akin to that of law.

They were usually not so much evidences of a disrespect for law and order as the only means by which real law and order were possible in a region where settlement and society had gone in advance of the institutions and instrumentalities of organized society.

Because of these elements of individualistic competition and the power of spontaneous association, pioneers were responsive to leadership.

The backwoodsmen knew that under the free opportunities of his life the abler man would reveal himself, and show them the way.

By free choice and not by compulsion, by spontaneous impulse, and not by the domination of a caste, they rallied around a cause, they supported an issue.

They yielded to the principle of government by agreement, and they hated the doctrine of autocracy even before it gained a name.

They looked forward to the extension of their American principles to the Old World and their keenest apprehensions came from the possibility of the extension of the Old World's system of arbitrary rule, its class wars and rivalries and interventions to the destruction of the free States and democratic institutions which they were building in the forests of America.

If we add to these aspects of early backwoods democracy, its spiritual qualities, we shall more easily understand them.

These men were emotional.

As they wrested their clearing from the woods and from the savages who surrounded them, as they expanded that clearing and saw the beginnings of commonwealths, where only little communities had been, and as they saw these commonwealths touch hands with each other along the great course of the Mississippi River, they became enthusiastically optimistic and confident of the continued expansion of this democracy.

They had faith in themselves and their destiny.

And that optimistic faith was responsible both for their confidence in their own ability to rule and for the passion for expansion.

They looked to the future.

"Others appeal to history: an American appeals to prophecy; and with Malthus in one hand and a map of the back country in the other, he boldly defies us to a comparison with America as she is to be," said a London periodical in 1821. Just because, perhaps, of the usual isolation of their lives, when they came together in associations whether of the camp meeting or of the political gathering, they felt the influence of a common emotion and enthusiasm.

Whether Scotch-Irish Presbyterian, Baptist, or Methodist, these people saturated their religion and their politics with feeling.

Both the stump and the pulpit were centers of energy, electric cells capable of starting widespreading fires.

They _felt_ both their religion and their democracy, and were ready to fight for it.

This democracy was one that involved a real feeling of social comradeship among its widespread members.

Justice Catron, who came from Arkansas to the Supreme Court in the presidency of Jackson, said: "The people of New Orleans and St. Louis are next neighbors--if we desire to know a man in any quarter of the union we inquire of our next neighbor, who but the other day lived by him."

Exaggerated as this is, it nevertheless had a surprising measure of truth for the Middle West as well.

For the Mississippi River was the great highway down which groups of pioneers like Abraham Lincoln, on their rafts and flat boats, brought the little neighborhood surplus.

After the steamboat came to the western waters the voyages up and down by merchants and by farmers shifting their homes, brought people into contact with each other over wide areas.

This enlarged neighborhood democracy was determined not by a reluctant admission that under the law one man is as good as another; it was based upon "good fellowship," sympathy and understanding.

They were of a stock, moreover, which sought new trails and were ready to follow where the trail led, innovators in society as well as finders of new lands.

By 1830 the Southern inundation ebbed and a different tide flowed in from the northeast by way of the Erie Canal and steam navigation on the Great Lakes to occupy the zone unreached by Southern settlement.

This new tide spread along the margins of the Great Lakes, found the oak openings and small prairie islands of Southern Michigan and Wisconsin;

followed the fertile forested ribbons along the river courses far into the prairie lands; and by the end of the forties began to venture into the margin of the open prairie.

In 1830 the Middle West contained a little over a million and a half people; in 1840, over three and a third millions; in 1850, nearly five and a half millions.

Although in 1830 the North Atlantic States numbered between three and four times as many people as the Middle West, yet in those two decades the Middle West made an actual gain of several hundred thousand more than did the old section.

Counties in the newer states rose from a few hundred to ten or fifteen thousand people in the space of less than five years.

Suddenly, with astonishing rapidity and volume, a new people was forming with varied elements, ideals and institutions drawn from all over this nation and from Europe.

They were confronted with the problem of adjusting different stocks, varied customs and habits, to their new home.

In comparison with the Ohio Valley, the peculiarity of the occupation of the northern zone of the Middle West, lay in the fact that the native element was predominantly from the older settlements of the Middle West itself and from New York and New England.

But it was from the central and western counties of New York and from the western and northern parts of New England, the rural regions of declining agricultural prosperity, that the bulk of this element came.

Thus the influence of the Middle West stretched into the Northeast, and attracted a farming population already suffering from western competition.

The advantage of abundant, fertile, and cheap land, the richer agricultural returns, and especially the opportunities for youth to rise in all the trades and professions, gave strength to this competition.

By it New England was profoundly and permanently modified.

This Yankee stock carried with it a habit of community life, in contrast with the individualistic democracy of the Southern element.

The colonizing land companies, the town, the school, the church, the feeling of local unity, furnished the evidences of this instinct for communities.

This instinct was accompanied by the creation of cities, the production of a surplus for market, the reaching out to connections with the trading centers of the East, the evolution of a more complex and at the same time a more integrated industrial society than that of the Southern pioneer.

But they did not carry with them the unmodified New England institutions and traits.

They came at a time and from a people less satisfied with the old order than were their neighbors in the East.

They were the young men with initiative, with discontent; the New York element especially was affected by the radicalism of Locofoco democracy which was in itself a protest against the established order.

The winds of the prairies swept away almost at once a mass of old habits and prepossessions.

Said one of these pioneers in a letter to friends in the East: If you value ease more than money or prosperity, don't come.

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Hands are too few for the work, houses for the inhabitants, and days for the day's work to be done.

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Next if you can't stand seeing your old New England ideas, ways of doing, and living and in fact, all of the good old Yankee fashions knocked out of shape and altered, or thrown by as unsuited to the climate, don't be caught out here.

But if you can bear grief with a smile, can put up with a scale of accommodations ranging from the soft side of a plank before the fire (and perhaps three in a bed at that) down through the middling and inferior grades; if you are never at a loss for ways to do the most unpracticable things without tools; if you can do all this and some more come on.

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It is a universal rule here to help one another, each one keeping an eye single to his own business.

They knew that they were leaving many dear associations of the old home, giving up many of the comforts of life, sacrificing things which those who remained thought too vital to civilization to be left.

But they were not mere materialists ready to surrender all that life is worth for immediate gain.

They were idealists themselves, sacrificing the ease of the immediate future for the welfare of their children, and convinced of the possibility of helping to bring about a better social order and a freer life.

They were social idealists.

But they based their ideals on trust in the common man and the readiness to make adjustments, not on the rule of a benevolent despot or a controlling class.