3.11 - Movement in the Early Republic

Moving West

A Flood of Settlers: After independence, Americans poured across the Appalachian Mountains, which Britain had tried to close to settlement in 1763. They followed the Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap, blazed by Daniel Boone in 1775, or floated down the Ohio River on flatboats.

New States: Kentucky became a state in 1792 and Tennessee in 1796. North of the Ohio River, New Englanders founded Marietta, Ohio, in 1788, the first permanent American settlement in the Northwest Territory.

Why They Went: Cheap land drew them west. Many Revolutionary War veterans were paid with land, and speculators bought huge tracts to resell.

Who Went: Migrants came from the eastern states (Scots-Irish and German farmers, New Englanders, and southern planters who brought enslaved people with them) and immigrants from overseas, many of them from Ireland.

Frontier Culture: The backcountry culture that grew in the colonial era kept spreading west. Frontier families valued independence, owned guns, often joined evangelical churches, and distrusted distant governments, eastern elites, and taxes.

Social and Political Tensions: Again and again, frontier people rose up against governments they felt ignored or exploited them.

Paxton Boys (1763-1764): Scots-Irish frontiersmen in Pennsylvania, angry that the Quaker-led colonial government wouldn't protect them from Native raids, murdered peaceful Conestoga people and marched on Philadelphia until Benjamin Franklin talked them into going home.
Regulators (1760s-1771): Backcountry farmers in the Carolinas protested corrupt officials, unfair taxes, and the lack of courts and law enforcement. In North Carolina, the governor's militia crushed them at the Battle of Alamance (1771).
State of Franklin (1784-1788): Settlers in what is now eastern Tennessee tried to form their own state, frustrated that distant North Carolina ignored them.
Shays's Rebellion (1786-1787) and the Whiskey Rebellion (1794): Farmers in western Massachusetts and western Pennsylvania resisted taxes and debt collection (see 3.6 and 3.9).
Fries's Rebellion (1799): German-speaking farmers in eastern Pennsylvania resisted a federal property tax passed to pay for the Quasi-War with France.

Ethnic Tensions: Different groups clashed on the frontier, above all settlers and Native nations. In the East, Federalists distrusted Irish and French immigrants as radicals, which helped lead to the Alien Acts (1798) (see 3.9).

Western Demands: Westerners wanted protection from Native nations, the right to ship crops down the Mississippi, and low taxes. When the federal government delivered (Fallen Timbers and Pinckney's Treaty), it won more western loyalty, and many westerners backed Jefferson's Democratic-Republicans.

Choosing Sides: Native nations kept weighing which alliances, with Europeans, other Native nations, or the United States, best protected their land and independence. During the Revolution, most sided with Britain, which had tried to limit settlement, but some, like the Oneida and Tuscarora, sided with the Patriots (see 3.4).

After 1783: Britain left its Native allies out of the peace treaty. The United States claimed their lands by conquest and pressured nations into giving up land, as the Iroquois did at the Treaty of Fort Stanwix (1784).

Northwest: The Western Confederacy (Miami, Shawnee, Delaware, Wyandot, and others) united several nations, relied on weapons and supplies from British forts, defeated two American armies (1790 and 1791), and then lost at Fallen Timbers (1794) when British support fell away (see 3.9).

Southeast: The Creek leader Alexander McGillivray played the powers against each other. He made a treaty with Spain (1784) for weapons and trade, then signed the Treaty of New York (1790) with the Washington administration. Some Cherokee, known as the Chickamauga, kept fighting settlers into the 1790s.

Tension with Britain: Americans blamed Britain for arming Native nations and encouraging attacks on settlers. This anger fed the crisis that led to the Jay Treaty and later helped bring on the War of 1812 (see Unit 4).

Slavery Expands in the South and West: The number of enslaved people grew from about 700,000 in 1790 to nearly 900,000 in 1800. Eli Whitney's cotton gin (1793) made short-staple cotton, which grew well inland, profitable, so cotton plantations spread across upland South Carolina and Georgia. Southern migrants also brought slavery into Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Mississippi Territory (1798).

Federal Policy Allowed It: Unlike the Northwest Ordinance, the Southwest Ordinance (1790), which organized the territory that became Tennessee, did not ban slavery, so the Ohio River became a dividing line between free and slave territory. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 let enslavers recover people who escaped to other states.

Antislavery in the North: Northern states ended slavery, though slowly. After Pennsylvania (1780) and Massachusetts (early 1780s), Connecticut and Rhode Island (1784), New York (1799), and New Jersey (1804) passed gradual abolition laws, which usually freed only children born after the law, and only once they reached adulthood. Groups like the New York Manumission Society (1785) and the Pennsylvania Abolition Society worked to free people and protect free Black Americans.

Petitions to Congress: In 1790, the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, with Benjamin Franklin as its president, asked Congress to end slavery and the slave trade. Southern members reacted angrily, and the House declared it had no power to interfere with slavery inside the states, a sign of how divided the regions already were.

Upper South: In Virginia and Maryland, some enslavers freed people after the Revolution, and the free Black population grew, but most kept slavery (see 3.5).

Fear of Revolt: The Haitian Revolution (1791) terrified white southerners. In 1800, an enslaved blacksmith named Gabriel planned a large revolt to capture Richmond, Virginia, and end slavery, but the plot was betrayed (see 4.11). Afterward, Virginia tightened its laws on enslaved and free Black people.

Result: By 1800, the regions were heading in different directions: the North toward ending slavery, the Upper South uneasy but still holding on to it, and the Deep South committed to expanding it. These differences would grow into the sectional conflict of the 1800s (see Units 4 and 5).