Colin Woodard (26 page)

The United States had already taken a great leap into the interior of the continent. During Washington's administration, the federal government had taken possession of the former Indian territories comprising what is now Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan. The creation of this so-called “Northwest Territory” had been accepted by New Englanders largely because they correctly recognized it would be largely settled by Yankees. Ownership of the first part to be colonized—the northern portions of the future state of Ohio—was split between the State of Connecticut (its so-called Western Reserve) and the Yankee-controlled Marietta Company. While some feared an exodus that would depopulate New England itself, most took pride in the opportunity to extend the Yankee nation, increasing its relative power over its competitors.

But President Jefferson's purchase of the 828,000-square-mile Louisiana Territory from France
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in 1803 was another matter altogether. The United States had suddenly acquired 50,000 Louisiana Creoles; a tropical enclave of New France where French and Spanish blended with blacks, Indians, and one another in the port of New Orleans; and French-speaking Acadians who practiced an idiosyncratic form of Catholicism in the swamps of the Mississippi's delta. Future congressman and Harvard College president Josiah Quincy warned that the transaction had “introduced a population alien to [U.S. constitutional principles] in every element of character, previous education, and political tendency” and unleashed “the opportunity and power of multiplying slave states, for which their climate was adapted.” This would lead, Quincy warned, to the “ultimate predominancy of slave power in the Union.” These fears over an expansion of the Deep South deepened with Jefferson's annexation of the Spanish territories of west Florida (now the Florida Panhandle and the Gulf coasts of Alabama and Mississippi) in 1810, leaving the slaveocracy free to expand all the way to the frontiers of Spanish Texas. In fact, Jefferson encouraged Deep Southerners to do so to ensure that lower Louisiana would be admitted as “an American, rather than a French state.” Yankees like Boston merchant Stephen Higginson saw this all as confirmation of a Southern conspiracy “to govern and depress New England” and “secure the influence and safety of the south.”
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Yankee influence over national affairs was increasingly compromised. As other states attracted immigrants or imported slaves, Massachusetts' share of the Union's tangible resources had sunk from second to fourth place between 1790 and 1813; by 1820 its population had fallen from second to fifth, behind even the new state of Ohio. The region wouldn't field a serious presidential candidate for a quarter century after Adams's defeat. With Yankeedom in decline, New Englanders began to look on the election of 1800 as a “moral revolution proceeding from the vices and passions of men” and even a symbol of “God's displeasure.” “God does not send a wicked ruler to a good people,” one minister said in reference to Jefferson. “It demonstrates the wickedness of the nation.” A hopeful alliance of “free republics,” Congressman Samuel Thatcher warned, had been replaced by “a consolidated empire” and “the deep abyss of a frightful despotism.” Saving the young republic, some prominent figures began muttering, might compel New England to leave the Union and create a free Northern Confederacy.
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The issue of Yankee secessionism moved to the mainstream after Congress passed an oppressive series of embargo acts in 1807 and 1808, which prohibited trade with foreign possessions. Yankees, who controlled most trade with Britain, the Maritimes, and the West Indies, saw it as a reprise of King George's Boston Port Bill and “the utmost streak of despotism.” They compared Jefferson and his allies in Tidewater and the Deep South with Napoleon, whose empire the embargo benefited. They saw the people of Appalachia and the Midlands as democratic rabble poised to bring the French Revolution's terror to American shores. Shortly thereafter, British agents in New England reported talk of “an armed truce along the [Canadian] borders and even a Union with Great Britain.” One recounted from Boston, “In a few months more of suffering and privation of all the benefits of commerce, the people of the New England States will be ready to withdraw from the confederacy [and] establish a separate government.” Indeed, Massachusetts Senate president Harrison Gray Otis soon called for a regionwide convention to be held to find “some mode of relief that may not be inconsistent with the union of these [New England] states.” (Recognizing the Yankee dominance of large swaths of New York, Otis considered inviting that state as well.) The
Boston Gazette
concurred: “It is better to suffer the amputation of a limb, than to loose the whole body. We must prepare for the operation.” Other newspapers carried reports that New England's political leaders were preparing “to form a northern confederacy, separate from the United States, in alliance with Great Britain, and eventually connected with Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and the Canadas.”
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President James Madison's declaration of war against Great Britain in the spring of 1812 finally pushed Yankeedom over the edge. Having effectively allied the federation with Napoleon, the Southerners had, in New England's view, completed their betrayal of the revolution and revealed their devotion to tyrannical empires. Massachusetts governor Caleb Strong immediately proclaimed a day of public fasting to atone for a war “against the nation from which we are descended, and which for many generations has been the bulwark of our religion.” Strong and his counterparts in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Vermont all declined the president's requests to requisition state militia units, dismissing them as orders from the “little man in the Palace.” Boston bankers refused to issue loans to the federal government. “We ought never to volunteer our services in a cause which we believe to be morally wrong,” George Cabot declared. Lavish festivities were held in Boston to celebrate Russian and British victories over Napoleon's armies in Europe, and mobs tried to liberate captured British sailors when American privateers arrived in New England ports. The people of Newburyport, Massachusetts, began flying a modified American flag with only five stars and five stripes, one for each New England state.
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New Englanders also refused to fight their Canadian counterparts, particularly those in the Yankee-dominated Maritime provinces. When the federal government invaded Canada with the intention of forcing it into the Union, Yankees roundly condemned the action as an immoral war of imperial conquest. “We will give you millions for defense,” said Congressman Morris Miller of (Yankee) Oneida County, New York. “But not a cent for the conquest of Canada—not a ninety-ninth part of a cent for the extermination of its inhabitants.” New Englanders not only chose not to attack their Maritime neighbors, they declined to defend or attempt to liberate eastern Maine after British forces invaded in 1814. (New Brunswick and Nova Scotia militia, for their part, had refused to participate in the British action.) Governor Strong even sent an envoy to meet with his counterpart in Nova Scotia to determine if Great Britain would give New Englanders military assistance if they attempted to secede from the United States. The answer from London, which arrived too late to affect events, was yes; the governor of Nova Scotia was authorized to sign a separate armistice with the Yankees and offer them “arms, accoutrements, ammunition, clothing, and naval cooperation.”
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Yankee frustration culminated with a convention of New England leaders held in Hartford in December 1814. In the run-up to the meeting, John Lowell, scion of one of the region's most powerful families, called for delegates to draft a new federal constitution and offer membership only to the original thirteen states. The Revolutionary Era alliance would be restored on Yankee terms, and the uncouth Borderlander-settled territories beyond the mountains would be allowed to join Great Britain. Lowell's plan was extremely popular, and was backed by nearly all New England's newspapers. “We must no longer suffer our liberties to be made the sport of theorists . . . neither allow the region of the West, which was a wilderness when New England wrought the Independence of America, to wrest from us those blessings which we permitted them to share,” the influential
Columbian Centinel
declared. “When we have once entered on the high road of honor and independence, let no difficulties stay our course, nor dangers drive us back.” Even opposition papers admitted that a majority of Massachusetts' citizens supported secession. Proposals poured in to delegates calling for the seizure of federal customs houses and an end to conscription and the war.
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Standing on the brink, the conventioneers themselves pulled back. After a series of secret meetings, they emerged with a list of proposed constitutional amendments to initiate negotiations with the federal government. The South would no longer be able to count three-fifths of its enslaved population when determining its representation in Congress—a measure that would have gutted Tidewater and Deep Southern political power, guaranteeing Yankee preeminence in the United States. The president would be limited to a single term and could not be succeeded by an individual from his own state, ending Virginia's near-lock on the office. Wars, trade embargos, and the admission of new states would heretofore require a two-thirds majority in Congress, effectively giving Yankeedom veto power.

Massachusetts subsequently dispatched three commissioners to Washington to negotiate these terms.
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But shortly after their arrival at the languid capital—where the White House and Capitol building had been burned by British troops—astonishing news broke that changed everything.

The British had signed a peace treaty and U.S. forces had defeated an invading British army in New Orleans. With the nation victorious, the Yankees' demands appeared preposterous and the Hartford conventioneers treasonous. The Yankees quietly dropped their demands while the rest of the country celebrated the gallant new war hero who'd saved the day at New Orleans. He was an Appalachian country lawyer from the old State of Franklin; fiery, bellicose, and profoundly un-Yankee, he was about to lead his long-neglected nation into the very heart of American power. His name was Andrew Jackson.

PART THREE

WARS FOR THE WEST
1816 to 1877

CHAPTER 15

A
fter the revolution, four of the American nations hurdled the Appa lachians and began spreading west across the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. There was very little mixing in their settlement streams, as politics, religion, ethnic prejudice, geography, and agricultural practices kept colonists almost entirely apart in four distinct tiers. Their respective cultural imprints can be seen to this day on maps created by linguists to trace American dialects, by anthropologists codifying material culture, and by political scientists tracking voting behaviors from the early nineteenth century straight through to the early twenty-first. With the exception of the New French enclave in southern Louisiana, the middle third of the continent was divided up among these four rival cultures.

New Englanders rushed due west to dominate upstate New York; the northern parts of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, and Iowa; and the future states of Michigan and Wisconsin. Midlanders poured over the mountains to spread through much of the American Heartland, characteristically mixing German, English, Scots-Irish, and other ethnicities in an ethnonational checkerboard. Appalachian people rafted down the Ohio River, dominating its southern shore, and conquered the uplands of Tennessee, northwestern Arkansas, southern Missouri, eastern Oklahoma, and, eventually, the Hill Country of Texas. Deep Southern slave lords set up new plantations in the lowlands of the future states of Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi; on the floodplains of the Big Muddy from northern Louisiana to the future city of Memphis; and, later, on the coastal plains of eastern Texas. Cut off from the west by their rivals, Tidewater and New Netherland remained trapped against the sea as the others raced across the continent, vying to define its future.

 

New England pushed west because of the shortcomings of its land. By the end of the eighteenth century, farmers were finding that the thin, rocky soils of much of Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine were played out. In one of the continent's most densely populated regions, the best farmland was already spoken for, and farmers' younger children had to settle for ever-worsening prospects on the glacially scoured frontiers of eastern Maine. Even before the revolution, thousands had moved over the New York border and into northern Pennsylvania; afterward they flooded western New York in incredible numbers and drowned Dutch Albany and the upper Hudson Valley in a Yankee sea.

Their early efforts were supported by their political leaders, whose states laid claim to great swaths of New York, Pennsylvania, and what would become Ohio. Connecticut asserted its jurisdiction over the northern third of Pennsylvania, and its people even fought a now-forgotten war with Scots-Irish guerrillas for control of the area in the 1760s and 1770s. Connecticut settlers won the opening matches with the help of Scots-Irish mercenaries and a favorable ruling from King George I, and founded Wilkes-Barre and Westmoreland; after the revolution, the Continental Congress gave the region back to Pennsylvania, which tried to evict the Yankees by force. Connecticut and Vermont sent soldiers to help the settlers repel the attack, resulting in a final “Yankee-Pennamite War” in 1782. In the end Pennsylvania kept jurisdiction, but the settlers retained their land titles.

Similarly, Massachusetts laid claim to all of present-day New York west of Seneca Lake—six million acres in all—an area larger than Massachusetts itself. Based on contradictory royal grants, the claim was strong enough to compel New York to agree to a major compromise in 1786: the region would be part of the state of New York, but Massachusetts would own the property and could sell it at a profit. The result: settlement of much of the region was directed by Boston-based land speculators, and virtually all of its settlers came from New England. Traveling in the region in the early nineteenth century, Yale president (and Congregational minister) Timothy Dwight remarked on how much its towns looked like those in his native Connecticut and prophesied the Empire State would soon become “a colony from New England.” The towns of Yankee-settled areas such as Oneida and Onondaga counties in the west or Essex, Clinton, and Franklin in the north still look and vote much like their New England counterparts.
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