Struggle for National Government

The West.

About this time the term "the West" appears. It meant then the western part of New York, the new territory north of the Ohio, and Kentucky and Tennessee. In settling land boundaries New York had transferred (1786) to Massachusetts, whose claims crossed her territory, the right to (but not jurisdic tion over) a large tract of land in central New York, and to an other large tract in the Erie basin. The sale of this land had carried population considerably west of the Hudson. Between 1790 and 1800 the population of Ohio had risen from almost nothing to 45,000, that of Tennessee from 36,00o to 106,00o, and that of Kentucky from 74,000 to 221,00o—the last-named State now exceeding six of the "old 13" in population. The difficulties of the western emigrant, however, were still enormous. He ob tained land of his own, fertile land and plenty of it, but little else. The produce of the soil had to be consumed at Mme, or near it; ready money was scarce and distant products scarcer; and comforts, except the very rudest substitutes of home manu facture, were unobtainable. The number of post offices rose dur ing these ten years from 75 to 903 ; the miles of post routes from 1,900 to 21,000, and the revenue from $38,000 to $231,000.

Patents.

The power of Congress to regulate patents was al ready bearing fruit. Until 1789 this power was in the hands of the States, and the privileges of the inventor were restricted to the territory of the patenting State. Now he had a vast and growing territory within which all the profits were his own. Twenty pat ents were issued in 1793, and 23,471 100 years later. One of the inventions of '793 was Eli Whitney's cotton gin.

Cotton.

When the Constitution was adopted it was not known that the cultivation of cotton could be made profitable in the southern States. The "roller gin" could clean only 6 lb. a day by slave labour. In 1784 eight bags of cotton, landed in Liverpool from an American ship, had been seized on the ground that so much cotton could not be the produce of the United States. Eli Whitney invented the saw-gin, by which the cotton was dragged through parallel wires with openings too narrow to allow the seeds to pass; and one slave could now clean i,000 lb. a day. The ex ports of cotton leaped from 189,000 lb. in 1791 to 21,000,00o lb. in i8oi, and doubled in three years more. The influence of this one invention, combined with the wonderful series of British in ventions which had paved the way for it, can hardly be estimated in its commercial aspects. Its political influences were even wider, but more unhappy. The introduction of the commercial element into the slave system of the South robbed it at once of the pa triarchal features which had made it tolerable; while it developed in slaveholders a new disposition to defend a system of slave labour as a "positive good." Slavery.—The development of a class whose -profits were merely the extorted natural wages of the black labourer was cer tain ; and its political power was as certain, though it never showed itself clearly until after 1830. And this class was to have a

peculiarly distorting effect on the political history of the United States. Aristocratic in every sense but one, it was ultra-Democratic (in a purely party sense) in its devotion to State sovereignty, for the legal basis of the slave system was in the laws of the several States. In time the aristocratic element got control of the party which had originally looked to State rights as a bulwark of indi vidual rights; and the party was finally committed to the employ ment of its original doctrine for an entirely different purpose—the suppression of the black labourer's wages.

Democracy and Nationality, 1801-29.—When Jefferson took office in i8o 1 his party, ignoring the natural forces which tied the States together even against their wills, insisted that the legal basis of the bond was in the power of any State to with draw at will. This was no nationality; and foreign nations natur ally refused to take the American national coin at any higher valuation than that at which it was current in its own country. The urgent necessity was for a reconciliation between democracy and nationality; and this was the work of this period. An under lying sense of all this has led Democratic leaders to call the war of 1812-15 the "Second War of Independence"; the result was independence of past ideas as the first had been of Great Britain.

Louisiana.—The first force in the new direction was the ac quisition of Louisiana in 1803. Napoleon had acquired it from Spain, and, fearing an attack upon it by Great Britain, offered it to the United States for $15,000,000. The Constitution gave the Federal Government no power to buy and hold territory, and the party was based on a strict construction of the Constitution. Pos session of power forced the strict-construction party to broaden its ideas, and Louisiana was bought, though Jefferson quieted his conscience by talking for a time of a futile proposal to amend the Constitution so as to grant the necessary power. The acquisition of the western Mississippi basin more than doubled the area of the United States, and gave them control of all the great river systems of central North America. The difficulties of using these rivers were removed almost immediately by Robert Fulton's util of steam in navigation (1807). Within four years steam boats were at work on western waters ; and thereafter the increase of steam navigation and that of population stimulated one another. The centre of population during this period advanced from about the middle of Maryland to its earlier extreme western limit ; that is, the centre of population was in 1830 nearly at the place which had been the western limit of population in 177o.