Turner Frederick Jackson Turner: Three History Classics

1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4554-2844-1
Verlag: Seltzer Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 1289 Seiten

This file includes: The Character and Infuence of the Indian Trade in Wisconsin, The Frontier in American History, and The Rise of the New West.According to Wikipedia: 'Frederick Jackson Turner (November 14, 1861 - March 14, 1932) was an American historian in the early 20th century. He is best known for his essay 'The Significance of the Frontier in American History', whose ideas are referred to as the Frontier Thesis. He is also known for his theories of geographical sectionalism. In recent years western history has seen pitched arguments over his Frontier Thesis, with the only point of agreement being his enormous impact on historical scholarship and the American mind.'

Autoren/Hrsg.

Turner, Frederick Jackson

Leseproben

CHAPTER III  THE MIDDLE REGION (1820-1830)
   The middle states formed a zone of transition between the east and the west, the north and the south [Footnote: For earlier discussions of the middle colonies and states, see Tyler, ENGLAND IN AMERICA, chap, xvii.; Andrews, COLONIAL SELF-GOVERNMENT, chaps, v., vii., xviii., xix.; Greene, PROVINCIAL AMERICA, chaps. xvi.-xviii. (AM. NATION, IV., V., VI.)]. Geographically, they lay on the line of the natural routes between the Atlantic on the one side, and the Ohio and the Great Lakes on the other. [Footnote: Gallatin, WRITINGS, III., 49; Clinton, in LAWS OF THE STATE OF N.Y. IN RELATION TO ERIE AND CHAMPLAIN CANALS, I., 140.] The waters of the Susquehanna, rising near the lake region of central New York, flowed to Chesapeake Bay, which opened into the Atlantic far down Virginia's coast-line. The Great Valley ran through eastern Pennsylvania, across Maryland, and, in the form of the Shenandoah Valley, made a natural highway to the interior of North Carolina. New York City and Philadelphia saw in an intimate connection with the rising west the pledge of their prosperity; and Baltimore, which was both a metropolis of the south and of the middle region, extended her trade north to central New York, west to the Ohio, and south into Virginia, and, like her rivals, sent her fleets to garner the commercial harvest of the sea. In the composition of its population, also, the middle region was a land of transitions between sections, and a prototype of the modern United States, composite in its nationality. In New York an influential Dutch element still remained; the New England settlers had colonized the western half of the state and about equaled the native population. In Pennsylvania, Germans and Scotch-Irishmen had settled in such numbers in the course of the eighteenth century that, by the time of the Revolution, her population was almost evenly divided between these stocks and the English. [Footnote: See Lincoln, Revolutionary Movement in Pa., in University of Pa., Publications, I., 24, 35.] There was also a larger proportion of recent immigrants than in any other state, for by 1830 Pennsylvania had one unnaturalized alien to every fifty inhabitants.   Following the Great Valley in the middle of the same century, the Scotch-Irish and German settlers had poured into the up-country of the south, so that these interior counties of Virginia and the Carolinas were like a peninsula thrust down from Pennsylvania into the south, with economic, racial, social, and religious connections which made an intimate bond between the two sections. A multitude of religious sects flourished in tolerant Pennsylvania, and even the system of local government was a combination of the New England town and the southern county.   This region, therefore, was essentially a mediating, transitional zone, including in its midst an outlying New England and a west, and lacking the essential traits of a separate section. It was fundamentally national in its physiography, its composition, and its ideals--a fighting-ground for political issues which found their leaders in the other sections.   Compared with New England, the middle region was a rapidly growing section. The population of New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware combined was about two and three-quarter millions in 1820, and three and two-third millions in 1830. By that date New York alone balanced all New England in the number of its people. But it was its western half that permitted this growth of the middle section. During the decade 1820-1830, New York west of Oneida Lake increased in population by a percentage more than twice as great, and by an amount almost as great, as that of the populous eastern half of the state. By the end of the decade, about one-third of Pennsylvania's population was found west of her central counties. At that time New York and Pennsylvania became the most populous states in the Union. Virginia and Massachusetts, which in 1790 held the lead, had now fallen to third and eighth place respectively. New Jersey, meanwhile, lagged far behind, and Delaware's rate of increase was only five and one-half per cent. In 1829 a member of the Virginia constitutional convention asked: "Do gentlemen really believe, that it is owing to any diversity in the principles of the State Governments of the two states, that New York has advanced to be the first state in the Union, and that Virginia, from being the first, is now the third, in wealth and population? Virginia ceded away her Kentucky, to form a new state; and New York has retained her Genessee--there lies the whole secret." [Footnote: Va. Constitutional Convention, Debates (1829-1830), 405.]   In the closing years of the eighteenth century and the first decade of the nineteenth the New York lands beyond the sources of the Mohawk had been taken up by a colonization characteristically western. New England farmers swarmed into the region, hard on the heels of the retreating Indians. Scarcely more than a decade before 1820 western New York presented typically frontier conditions. The settlers felled and burned the forest, built little towns, and erected mills, and now, with a surplus of agricultural products, they were suffering from the lack of a market and were demanding transportation facilities. Some of their lumber and flour found its way by the lakes and the St. Lawrence to Montreal, a portion went by rafts down the Allegheny to the waters of the Ohio, and some descended the upper tributaries of the Susquehanna and found an outlet in Baltimore or Philadelphia; but these routes were unreliable and expensive, and by one of them trade was diverted from the United States to Canada. There was a growing demand for canals that should give economic unity to New York and turn the tide of her interior commerce along the Mohawk and Lake Champlain into the waters of the Hudson and so to the harbor of New York City. The Erie and the Champlain canals were the outcome of this demand.   It is the glory of De Witt Clinton that he saw the economic revolution which the Erie Canal would work, and that he was able to present clearly and effectively the reasons which made the undertaking practicable and the financial plan which made it possible. He persuaded the legislature by the vision of a greater Hudson River, not only reaching to the western confines of the state, but even, by its connection with Lake Erie, stretching through two thousand miles of navigable lakes and rivers to the very heart of the interior of the United States. To him the Erie Canal was a political as well as an economic undertaking. "As a bond of union between the Atlantic and western states," he declared, "it may prevent the dismemberment of the American empire. As an organ of communication between the Hudson, the Mississippi, the St. Lawrence, the great lakes of the north and west, and their tributary rivers, it will create the greatest inland trade ever witnessed. The most fertile and extensive regions of America will avail themselves of its facilities for a market. All their surplus productions, whether of the soil, the forest, the mines, or the water, their fabrics of art and their supplies of foreign commodities, will concentrate in the city of New-York, for transportation abroad or consumption at home. Agriculture, manufactures, commerce, trade, navigation, and the arts, will receive a correspondent encouragement. That city will, in the course of time become the granary of the world, the emporium of commerce, the seat of manufactures, the focus of great moneyed operations, and the concentrating point of vast, disposable, and accumulating capitals, which will stimulate, enliven, extend, and reward the exertions of human labor and ingenuity, in all their processes and exhibitions. And before the revolution of a century, the whole island of Manhattan, covered with habitations and replenished with a dense population, will constitute one vast city." [Footnote: View of the Grand Canal (N. Y., 1825), 20.]   Sanguine as were Clinton's expectations, the event more than justified his confidence. By 1825 the great canal system, reaching by way of Lake Champlain to the St. Lawrence, and by way of the Mohawk and the lakes of central New York to Lake Erie, was opened for traffic throughout its whole length. The decrease in transportation charges brought prosperity and a tide of population into western New York; villages sprang up along the whole line of the canal; the water-power was utilized for manufactures; land values in the western part of the state doubled and in many cases quadrupled; farm produce more than doubled in value. Buffalo and Rochester became cities. [Footnote: J. Winden, Influence of the Erie Canal (MS. Thesis, University of Wisconsin); U. S. Census of 1900, Population, I., 430, 432; Callender, in Quarterly Journal of Economics, XVII., 22; Hulbert, Historic Highways, XIV., chap. v.] The raw products of the disappearing forests of western New York-- lumber, staves, pot and pearl ashes, etc., and the growing surplus of agricultural products, began to flow in increasing volume down this greater Hudson River to New York City. The farther west was also turning its streams of commerce into this channel. The tolls of the canal system were over half a million dollars immediately upon its completion; for 1830 they were over a million dollars. [Footnote: McMaster, United States, V., 135; Canal Commissioners of N. Y., Report (January 17, 1833), App. A.] By 1833 the annual value of the products sent by way of the Erie and Champlain canals was estimated at thirteen million dollars. [Footnote: Pitkin, Statistical View (ed. of 1835), 577.] At the close of this decade the Ohio system of canals, inspired by the success of the Erie Canal,...