B005HFI0X2 EBOK (7 page)

I learned for to be very handy;

To use both the shovel and spade;

I learned the whole art of canalling;

I think it an excellent trade.

I learned for to be very handy,

Although I was not very tall,

I could handle the “sprig of Shillelagh”

With the best man on the canal.

Accidents were common and disease even worse. The canal diggers spent much of their time partly immersed in water or in mud. They suffered from mosquito-borne illnesses, including malaria, typhus, and cholera. During the construction of the Erie Canal near Syracuse, a thousand workers suffered from typhoid fever, malaria, ague, and other diseases, and many died.

The combination of alcohol and exclusively male company led to frequent fights among the canal workers and between them and hostile locals. Workers frequently deserted projects like the C&O Canal. The
Maryland Chronicle
on February 22, 1786, warned local residents that “several servants who had been purchased to work on the Potowmack Navigation lately ran away, but being soon after apprehended, were sentenced to have their heads and eyebrows shaved, which operation was immediately executed, and is to be continued every week during the time of their servitude, or until their behavior evinces that they are brought to a sense of their duty.” The problem continued, however, forcing James Rumsey, the manager who oversaw the project, to advertise on June 21, 1786: “Wm. Fee (Shaved,) James Nevin, Francis Cary, Arthur Mullin, (shaved) Thos. Moore, James Munnay, Hugh Taylor, Rob’t Meighan, Taylor took a variety of clothes with him, among them a super fine green cloth coat with bright buttons. £60 reward for all or £10 for each.”
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SLAVERY AND THE TRAGEDY OF GEORGE WASHINGTON

In the American South, the rhetoric of equal rights and democracy was turned into a mockery by black slavery and a hierarchical social order, in which a few rich white slaveowning families lorded it over their slaves and poor whites. Thomas Jefferson tried to reconcile his vision of a nation of humble white farmers and mechanics with his racist belief in black inferiority by proposing colonization, the voluntary emigration of freed slaves to some other country. This doomed scheme was championed by members of the American Colonization Society, including such prominent slaveholders as James Madison and Henry Clay. Clay’s disciple Abraham Lincoln championed colonization as well, abandoning it only reluctantly during the Civil War.

Like Jefferson, Washington recognized the harm that slavery did to his native region. Although Washington sought to appear nonpartisan, he repeatedly sided with Hamilton and the emerging Federalist Party against Jefferson, Madison, and the Republicans (who later became Democratic Republicans and then Democrats in the 1830s). In his political and economic views, he had more in common with the merchants and landowners of the North than with other southerners. Washington complained that his fellow Virginians had “the most malignant (and if one may be allowed the expression, the most unwarrantable) disposition toward the new government.”
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Washington believed in national and regional economic diversification. In 1774, he and other delegates in Williamsburg called on Virginians to reduce their imports from Britain and support “manufactures of all sorts.” In his tour of New England as president in 1789, Washington was fascinated by its mills, ships, roads, and ports. In the same year, Washington wrote to Lafayette: “Equally certain it is, that no diminution of agriculture has taken place, at the time when greater and more substantial improvements in manufacturers were making, than were ever known before in America.”
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Washington supported large-scale economic development for personal as well as patriotic reasons. Following the French and Indian War (1757–1763), he had obtained land in reward for his military service and added other purchases, in the amount of around thirty thousand acres in the Ohio River valley near present-day Pittsburgh. He was outraged when the British government, seeking peace with the Indians, banned settlement of the area with a royal proclamation in 1763. Following his retirement to Mount Vernon after the end of the War of Independence, Washington turned his energies to building his own economic empire. In 1784, he traveled to western Pennsylvania to visit some of the acreage he owned, and when he discovered that settlers had taken up residence and refused to leave, he successfully sued to have what he called this “grazing multitude” evicted.

In order to raise the value of both his western and eastern lands as well as to promote national commerce, Washington organized and became the first president of the Potomac Company, which sought to make the Potomac River navigable beyond Georgetown, where a series of falls, including the Great Falls of the Potomac, blocked ships from traveling farther upstream. Washington dreamed of making the neighborhood of Mount Vernon a center of national and global commerce. In his vision, goods from the Midwest would travel over a link between the Ohio River and the Potomac to meet with trade from Europe. An experiment with a steam engine in the Potomac inspired this reflection by Washington: “I consider Rumsey’s discovery for working boats against the stream, by mechanical powers principally, as not only a very fortunate invention for these States in general, but as one of those circumstances, which have combined to render the present time favorable above all others for fixing, if we are disposed to avail ourselves of them, a large portion of the trade of the western country in the bosom of this State [Virginia] irrevocably.”
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Washington envisioned a shift from a slave-based plantation economy in his home region to one based on economic diversification and free labor. In 1786, he wrote: “I never mean . . . to possess another slave by purchase; it being among my first wishes to see some plan adopted, by which slavery may be abolished by slow, sure and imperceptible degrees.”
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On his own estates he switched from tobacco for export to wheat and other crops. He proposed a national agency to promote scientific agriculture and supported the idea of a national university in the capital.

But all of Washington’s grand schemes for the economic development of his part of Virginia were doomed to fail. Following his death in 1799, the Potomac Company was absorbed into the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal company, which completed a canal only to Cumberland, Maryland, in 1850. By that time the canal had been superseded by the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Long before, the Erie Canal had turned New York City into the dominant entrepôt of North America. Virginia fell further and further behind the commercial, industrial North. Not until the Lincoln administration was a US Department of Agriculture established, and Washington’s gift in his will of fifty shares of Potomac Company stock to the never-founded National University in Washington, DC, was never used.

Washington had hoped to sell some of his western land to finance the purchase of the “dower slaves” at Mount Vernon that his wife, Martha, had inherited from her first husband, but he could not raise the money. In his will, he asked that his own slaves, who had intermarried with Martha’s, be freed at her death, and that the younger should be educated while the elder should be cared for. But according to Abigail Adams, who visited Mount Vernon shortly after his death, his widow Martha “did not feel as tho’ her Life was safe in their hands” and freed Washington’s slaves to remove any incentive on their part to accelerate her demise in order to gain their freedom—a grim reflection on the nature of slavery. She did not free her own slaves in her life or in her will. And in the decades following Washington’s death, the industrial revolution, by creating a lucrative market in Britain for slave-picked cotton, entrenched slavery in the Southern economy to the point that by the mid-nineteenth century many southerners viewed slavery not as an inherited evil but as a positive good.

LORDS OF THE MANOR

Outside of the South, the region with the most unequal patterns of land ownership and labor relations was the Hudson River valley of New York. In the seventeenth century, Dutch settlers called “patroons,” or patrons, had been granted vast estates, which they populated with tenant farmers. When the British captured New Netherland from the Dutch in 1664 and made it part of the colony of New York, the British government kept and extended the system of patroonship for English settlers. Like other states, New York abolished primogeniture soon after the American Revolution, but for seventy years, until the 1840s, “lords of the manor” continued to lord it over their tenants along the Hudson.

A Pole who visited the region in the late 1790s wrote: “The word Patroun is pronounced by everyone with deference and a certain fear. [Stephen Van Rensselaer III] holds here the place held by the Radziwills in Lithuania. The Czartoryski family, that is the Livingstons, is large, wealthy and greatly honored.”
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The Van Rensselaers owned three-quarters of a million acres that stretched for twenty-four miles along the Hudson. In the late eighteenth century, the Livingston family owned 35 percent of the land in Columbia County, New York. Their holdings were divided between the Upper Manor, with about 600 tenant farms, and the Lower Manor, with around 120.
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Stephen Van Rensselaer III, who inherited the rights to the Manor of Rensselaerwyck, was the tenth richest American in US history to date, based on his personal fortune as a percentage of the national economy at the time of his death. Van Rensselaer’s political ambitions were damaged when he proved to be a disastrous failure during the War of 1812. Elected to Congress, in 1825 he cast the deciding vote that put John Quincy Adams in the White House, even though he had received less of the popular vote than Andrew Jackson. A regent of the University of the State of New York, he founded Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, which flourishes today. His marriage to Margarita Schuyler, daughter of the Revolutionary War general Henry Schuyler, made him an in-law of Alexander Hamilton, who married another of Schuyler’s daughters, Elizabeth.

The contracts between patroons and their tenants were modeled on those between European aristocrats and their peasants. The leaseholders were required to provide payment in cash, kind, and personal service. For example, when James Van Deusen leased a 130-acre farm from Robert Livingston in 1785, the terms of his lease required him to bring, on “rent day” (January 1), thirty bushels of “good, clear, and merchantable Winter wheat,” plus two fat hens. Two days a year, Van Deusen was required to provide unpaid labor or else pay a fine as a penalty. Van Deusen also had to pay 6 shillings a year to support the manor’s own Protestant minister.
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The tenants had to pay state taxes on the farms they leased, while the patroons themselves paid taxes only on farm and common land they controlled directly. The Van Rensselaers, Livingstons, and other manorial dynasties in New York also owned black slaves.

The Livingstons’ manor house, Clermont, was described in 1813 by a New York newspaper as “among the largest and most commodious houses in the state. Its front on the river is 104 feet, depth 91, and it consists of a main body of 2 stories; and 4 pavilions. The south or garden-front is a greenhouse, with bathing-rooms and offices adjoining; over these is a large elegant breakfasting room, and 4 bedrooms. The second story is conveniently divided into rooms connected by a gallery. One of the pavilions contains a well chosen library of about 4000 volumes, in various languages.”
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Many of the tenants, however, lived in conditions little better than those of slaves in the South.

THE ANTI-RENT WARS

The manor of Rensselaerwyck had more than three thousand tenants. Before the American Revolution, there were tenant revolts against the patroons in 1755 and 1766.
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Stephen Van Rensselaer III was known as the “good patroon” for his forebearance in collecting rents from struggling farmers among his roughly three thousand tenants. But when he died in 1839, his estate passed to his two sons, Stephen Van Rensselaer IV and William, who insisted that tenants repay all debts immediately.

After their protests failed, tenants organized a mass meeting on the symbolic date of July 4, 1839. When the sheriff’s department served writs of ejectment against tenants, their allies organized vigilante groups whose members disguised themselves as “Injuns,” wearing calico dresses, sheepskin hoods with holes for the eyes and mouth, and feathered headdresses. Led by men with code names like Bluebeard, Redjacket, Yellowjacket, Big Thunder, and Little Thunder, they vandalized property, burned farms and houses, and tarred and feathered sheriffs’ agents. Their chief goal was destroying records of leaseholds.

On August 7, 1845, as he was confronting a mob of two hundred men in “Injun” costume and trying to confiscate cattle in repayment for a debt to the Van Rensselaers, Under-Sheriff Osman Steele was shot to death. Following the murder, hundreds of people were arrested. Around sixty were imprisoned and two were condemned to be hanged (their sentences were commuted later to life in prison).
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Public opinion favored the tenants. The New York Constitution of 1846 abolished manorial leases, forcing the lords of the manor to sell most of their lands to former tenants or others.

FLOWERY FLAG DEVILS

The American Revolution had partly democratized the political order, but the economic structure of the new republic remained far from democratic, from the South, which was dominated by slave-owning planters like Washington, Jefferson, and Madison, to the Hudson River valley with its semifeudal patroons. In the first half of the nineteenth century, before the rise of a new class of rich industrialists, the nation’s slavelords and landlords were joined by another wealthy elite, the merchants.

“I am sending some ships to China in order to encourage others in the adventurous pursuits of commerce,” Robert Morris wrote in November 1783.
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On February 22, 1784, the
Empress of China
, financed by Morris, set off from New York. Its major cargoes were ginseng, prized by Chinese as a medicine and aphrodisiac, and specie, or metal coin.