PART 1: THE REVOLUTION GOES WEST
I: THE FRONTIER AND THE MEN IT CREATED
In the aftermath of the War of 1812, two facts were solidified:
First, As the French were powerless to assist the Americans in any way and the American campaign had no effect on the British war effort in Europe, the fates of the two spheres were truly separated, the Monroe doctrine had been vindicated.
Second, as the breaking of Tecumseh's Confederacy had proven, the British could not hope to check the growing power of the United States by supporting native alliances.
In other words, the Americans were left in glorious solitude as the deciders of the fate of our Continent. The Union could spread its wings from coast to coast and plant new states and dispense with the rich and fertile lands between the two great oceans.
This is not to say that the subduing of the numerous and warlike tribes of the Native Americans was a forgone conclusion, nor that mischief could not be caused by the old world colonial governments of Spain, France, Britain and their successor powers.
But there was no longer a question regarding a "contest for North America". The better part of this bountiful continent was in the hands of the American Republic. Foreigners could do little but delay it taking possession.
In this environment the Western Frontier, previously a dangerous space dominated by the secure and settled East, had, despite retaining much of the danger, safer for American settlement and was ready to stand upon its own economic and political legs. Thus, the politics of the Union would soon fall under the influence of the West and the unique characters it produced
The conditions in the Frontier had defined and shaped its inhabitants and the societies that emerged from it. These conditions were many and varied, but I believe that at least one reality can be identified as an underlying cause: the dearth and immaturity of institutions that were well developed in the East and which the American settlers had to learn how to replicate and nurture in their new societies to allow them to flourish.
II: THE RAISING OF THE PILLARS: HOW AMERICAN INSTITUTIONS WERE REMADE IN THE FRONTIER
The most important of these institutions were the Law system, the Education system, Organized Religion, Government and Cities. The reason for the dearth of these elementary institutions of Civilization was the American way of expansion and settlement, which was unique and unlike any other colonization movement in the 19th Century.
THE PATTERN OF SETTLEMENT:
Americans came to the Frontier as individuals, private associations and families. Unlike the Second British Empire or the French colonial enterprises, the government played little to no role in the organization and sponsorship of the initial settlement, beyond the "opening" of a new Frontier. Even this "opening" mostly consisted of removing the threat from the strongest polity (European or Native) that could have made American settlement too hazardous for most settlers to attempt, as well as removable of any treaty prohibitions on settling in lands recognized as the rightful pale of Foreign (Native or European) powers.
It is important to note that in many cases there was no drastic step of "opening" a Frontier. In almost all cases, Americans were already individually settling the land before the government of the United States had turned its attention to it.
Even when settlement was done by prearranged and incorporated groups that funded, supplied and organized their expedition and settlement before embarking on the journey westward, they would consistently find, besides the Natives, isolated American individuals and families that preceded them by years, even decades.
These groups were not consternated by their presence. As a matter of fact, they often relied on these prior settlements in their plans.
THE LAW:
Americans were, from the beginning, a legal minded people.
Anglo-American civilization was transplanted across the Atlantic out of England of the 16th-18th centuries. This was exactly the period when the importance and standing of the legal profession had risen greatly in England in comparison to the Clergy and the armed Aristocracy. The latter was defanged and tamed by Henry VII and the former by his sons and grandchildren. To be a gentleman was to be a Judge of the Peace, which required at least some knowledge of Law.
The leaders of the initial settlement in North America belonged to these class (albeit the Northern Puritans belonged to a more commercial and pious sort than the second-sons of noble families dominating Virginia). They ruled their colonies using forms and instruments derived from - or at least inspired by - the Common Law.
While lawyers were educated in an apprenticeship system well into the 19th century (despite universities offering law courses as part of their curricula, which many aspiring lawyers took before their apprenticeship), we must not mistake this as a show of the primitivism of American Law. The network of legal practitioners and bars was robust and had produced excellent attorneys and judges throughout the Colonial and the Early Republic period.
The nature of the Frontier and the American settlement-pattern of individuals and (less often) nuclear families settling on virgin land (or land recently acquired, one way or another, from the Natives) meant that the network of legal practitioners that have evolved in the East were still absent.
However, Americans did not lose their respect for the Law and their legal (even litigious) culture just because they moved out west of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
The result was that even men with mere smattering of the Law, acquired formally back East or by self-education, were sought after and respected by their neighbors. They were advantageously placed when the nascent state was populated and secured enough to develop true political institutions.
EDUCATION:
Similarly, by the end of the 18th century, Americans were perhaps the most literate society in the world. America had the best distribution of universities per capita. The mother country had merely 3 universities. The American colonies had 9, teaching a much smaller population.
New England was the first region in the world to have a universal system of basic public schooling for children of both sexes and all economic classes.
Even in the South literacy was very high among free southerners (it was discouraged amongst slaves, unless their masters saw it advantageous to teach them).
The emergence of such a system so early on in the lives of the original colonies was enabled by the character of their settlement by well organized groups, which had been legally incorporated ahead of their landing (in the case of the Plymouth Rock Pilgrims, literally so).
Such groups could replicate and adapt institution on a society-wide scale almost from the first moment (Harvard College is only slightly younger than the Massachusetts Bay Colony itself).
However, such conditions did not exist in the new Frontier. As we have already established, the New Frontier was settled by individuals and families breaking into newly opened lands. They were rarely part of a wider organization or incorporated at the early stages of their settlement. As a result higher education lagged behind in the Frontier, the most significant institute of higher learning until the aftermath of the Civil War was Transylvania University of Lexington, Kentucky, which opened its doors in 1780.
The fortunes of elementary and secondary education were more mixed, depending heavily on the location and character of the emerging Frontier community. Additionally, the availability of elementary and secondary schooling depended on the stage of development frontier communities found themselves in.
The older and more populous a community would become, the better institutions it will posses.
We must remember that the "Frontier" was not fixed in place- the progress of individual entry to newly opened land, its development and community- formation, were continuous motions that saw Anglo-American civilization expand and roll across the Continent.
It is fair to say that by the time a region reached such a level of development, socialization, security and improvement as to allow for a regular school system to exist, it ceased to be part of the Frontier, but retained memories and attitudes from its days as such.
GOVERNMENT:
Security and improvement: those were the hardest goals. Neighboring pioneers could agree to settle disputes according to what the most learned amongst them remembered of the Law. They could agree, once they had families, to cooperate in the rearing of their children. But only once the community had reached a certain mass could certain economic enterprises be undertaken and certain level of security be reached.
The ultimate goal was to achieve the recognition and protective, nurturing embrace of the United States Government .
While the various states (and later the Federal Government) have constructed forts as far as their territorial claims reached, the day to day defense of settlers from attack was up to the settlers themselves.
The great and venerable State of Tennessee has its origins in the Colony (and later Commonwealth) of Virginia's inability to secure peace and order in the westernmost regions it claimed, coupled with the need of the settlers to create some sort of government structure. This they attempted first in the form of the "Watauga Association", of whose laws the little we know come from their petition for annexation by the government of North Carolina.
Brigadier General Rufus Putnam spent his entire career after the Revolutionary War settling the Ohio Country and making it a respectable, recognized and fully integrated part of the United States. He was not an exception to the rule, rather, his example set the rule of American Frontier settlement.
Western frontiersmen and pioneer were not the Anarchist heroes they are often portrayed as, seeking to escape the influence of the Federal and State governments back East. They were adventurous, ambitious people, hungry for wealth, independence and social standing. They desired all of those within the context of their society - that is, American society, which they saw themselves as expanding and enriching rather than abandoning.
They sought the coordination that only the authority of the Congress and its appointed governors could create, the protection of the United State Army, and the resources "Internal Improvement" programs and commerce with the older states - which they hoped the Federal Government could steer in their direction by way of tariffs on European imports - would bring.
ORGANIZED RELIGION:
But the Federal Government could not protect and coordinate one institution: the Church.
Already in Colonial times, the almost uniform regional blocks of religious allegiance were breaking down.
The formerly strict Congregationalist Massachusetts was generating one new sect after another, dissidents spreading new and old sects such as Baptism, Quakerism (which formerly had to flee to Rhode Island) and Unitarianism, even adopting the cross-Atlantic phenomenon of Methodism since the First Great Awakening of the 1730-40s.
The tightening of British influence in the years immediately preceding and succeeding the French and Indian War led to entrenchment of Anglican presence in New England. Merely a year after the end of the Revolution(1784), these disparate Anglican churches had formed the Episcopalian Church.
A similar phenomenon occurred in the South.
Long a bastion of traditional Anglicanism, the echoes of the Great Awakening's thunder-like fire-and brimstone sermons rolling down from the North had ignited the drive towards Baptism and Methodism.
Presbyterianism had already penentrated the Western frontier of Virginia with Scot-Irish settlers and spread both west into the Appalachians and east into the Old Dominion.
These various movement were the basis to much of the Second Great Awakening of the 19th Century.
It is no surprise therefore that such dissident religious movements were highly represented in the Frontier.
But while the old established churches in the East could rely on their age and prestige to shore up their position even as the old official state-churches have been abolished (Massachusetts tarried the longest keeping the Establishment of the Congregationalist Church as the State-Church until 1833).
In the west, sectarian distribution was mixed and could carry no social stigma. Some of the most remarkable and prestigious men in the Frontier belonged to churches that in the East were mostly prominent amongst the poor, the outcast, foreign and enslaved.
Henry Clay grew up as a Baptist (he would not convert to Episcopalianism until 1847, 5 years before his death). Andrew Jackson was a Presbyterian, Abraham Lincoln was born to Baptist parents, but himself belonged to no particular church and had on numerous occasions expressed his religious views in deep fiery and sincere terms:
Washington D.C., September 1862
The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God.
Both may be, and one must be, wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time.
In the present civil war it is quite possible that God's purpose is something different from the purpose of either party -- and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect His purpose.
I am almost ready to say that this is probably true -- that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet. By his mere great power, on the minds of the now contestants, He could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest. Yet the contest began. And, having begun He could give the final victory to either side any day. Yet the contest proceeds.
This fragment - which Abraham Lincoln wrote for himself, sitting alone in his office while the Civil War raged all around him - was used again and again in his speeches in the following years. He had attended a dissident Calvinist church in his late years.
The fluidity and ease in which Americans in the West had moved along lines of religious thought and affiliation (and the serious thought they accorded to it) were remarkable. Western Americans did not stay in the religion of their parents out of passive habit, but journeyed throughout life in a never-ending Pilgrim's Progress to find their faith, whether the journey terminated where it started or not.
The 1st Amendment to the Constitution of the United States prevented territorial governors (appointed by Congress) from imposing any outside standards on the emerging religious character of the territory under their charge.
Nor were they capable of coordinating the various small churches in an attempt to create some sort of territorial established church equivalent to the established churches maintained by some of the original states in the East (the 1st Amendment, like the rest of the Constitution, did not bind the several states until the ratification of the 14th Amendment).
Together with the emergence of the Second Great Awakening, the West was left ripe to the emergence of multiple, rambunctious and boiling over of religious feelings, zeal, ideals and groupings.
The incredible multiplicity of Protestant sects in the United States, outside the (increasingly blurry) circles of the old established churches and their break-off bodies, is largely the result of this period. The fate of the established churches in the Western frontier, where they became merely another set of churches competing for believers among all the rest, would prefigure their fate in their old bastions as well.
CITIES:
But while the West failed to build uniform cities of God, it excelled in building cities for Man.
Chicago, Cleveland, Omaha, St. Louis, Houston- those are just some of the cities that did bot exist or were mere villages in 1800 that by the Civil War were great cities in their own right.
Americans had piled in only decades such regional metropoles that Europe could not hope to do in centuries.
For that reason, America never devolved into a dependency on a single metropolis as lesser countries did.
For America, it means nothing if New York is misgoverned and plagued by crime, if Washington D.C. is unhealthy or if Boston declines. There is always a hungry, ambitious state and city in the wings, willing to accept the residents, wealth and commerce neglected by others.
These cities, many of which started their life as forts, where local militias (and less frequently, Federal troops) were garrisoned under the command of the territorial governor and his lieutenants and benefitted greatly from their relative security.
This security, along with the necessary improvements that were done to accommodate the garrison, the supply networks that weaved themselves around these forts and the need of local leaders to travel to them in order to speak to the governor, made them ideal nucleus for commercial and political activities.
As soon as the leading men of the territory knew and trusted each other sufficiently to organize an election, a legislature was convened. Usually, at this point the territory had been sufficiently secured and developed to create a pre-planned capital, usually constructed on land ceded by Congress specifically for that purpose.
The forts, which were Federal property, retained their land while cities either grew around or besides them or developed independently at some distance.
(To be Continued)