YEARS OF GROWTH

 

Land was becoming scarcer and more expensive in the American colonies by the time they quarreled with Britain. After 1783 more and more people set off for the new territories between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River that the Treaty of Paris had granted to the United States. Armed only with axes, guns, and plenty of self-confidence, they journeyed across the mountains to make new farms and settlements out of the wilderness.

 

Many of the new settlers moved to lands north of the Ohio River. Amerindians who already lived on these lands saw the settlers as thieves who had come to steal their hunting grounds. They made fierce attacks on the newcomers' farms and settlements. The settlers struck back, sometimes destroying entire Amerindian villages.

 

The new government of the United States tried at first to keep peace by making treaties with the Amerindians. It also tried to make sure that settlers treated them fairly. A law of 1787 called the Northwest Ordinance said that the Amerindians' "lands and property shall never be taken from them without their consent; and in their property, rights and liberty they shall never be invaded or disturbed."

 

But the American government soon changed its ideas about not taking away the Amerindians' "lands and property." By 1817 President James Monroe was writing that their hunting way of life "requires a greater extent of territory than is compatible with the progress of civilized life and must yield to it. If the Indian tribes do not abandon that state and become civilized they will decline and become extinct."

 

Monroe believed that there was only one way for the Amerindians to survive. They would have to be moved from lands that white settlers wanted to other lands, further west. There, undisturbed by settlers, they would be free either to continue their old ways of life or to adopt those of white Americans.

 

In 1830 the United States government passed a law called the Indian Removal Act to put this policy into practice. The law said that all Indians living east of the Mississippi River would be moved west to a place called Indian Territory. This was an area beyond the Mississippi that was thought to be unsuitable for white farmers. Some people claimed that the Indian Removal Act was a way of saving the Amerindians. But most saw it simply as a way to get rid of them and seize their land.

 

The Cherokees were an Amerindian people who suffered greatly from the Indian Removal policy. Their lands lay between the state of Georgia and the Mississippi River. By the early nineteenth century the Cherokees had changed themselves from a stone age tribe into a civilized community.

 

Many owned large farms and lived in European-style houses built of brick. They had become Christians and attended church and sent their children to school. Their towns had stores, sawmills and blacksmiths' shops. They had a written language and published their own newspaper in both Cherokee and English. They even wrote for themselves a Constitution modeled on that of the United States.

 

None of this saved the Cherokees. In the 1830s Congress declared that their lands belonged to the state of Georgia and they were divided up for sale to white settlers. The Cherokees were driven from their homes and forced to march hundreds of miles overland to what is now the state of Oklahoma.

 

The worst year was 1838. In bitterly cold winter weather American soldiers gathered thousands of Cherokee men, women, and children, and drove them west. The nightmare journey lasted almost five months. By the time it was over, 4,000 of the Amerindians - a quarter of the whole Cherokee nation - were dead. This episode is still remembered with shame by modern Americans. It came to be called "The Trail of Tears."

 

Long before the Indian Removal Act the federal government had begun to organize the new western lands for settlement. It ordered that the lands should be surveyed and divided into square units called "townships." Each township was to be six miles by six miles in size and each was to be further divided into smaller square units, one mile by one mile, called "sections."

 

As each township was surveyed and marked out in sections the land was sold by auction. Land dealers sometimes bought whole townships. They usually sold the land later, at a higher price, to settlers arriving from the East.

 

Every year more settlers moved in. Many floated on rafts down the westward-flowing Ohio River. They used the river as a road to carry themselves, their goods and their animals into the new lands. Others moved west along routes like the Wilderness Road that Daniel Boone's axmen had cut through the Cumberland Gap in the Appalachians. Such roads were simply rough tracks, just wide enough for a wagon and full of holes, rocks and tree stumps. The average speed at which travelers could move along them was about two miles an hour.

 

For purposes of government the federal authorities divided the lands between the Appalachians and the Mississippi into two. The Ohio River marked the boundary between them. The area south of the Ohio was called the Southwest Territory and that to the north the Northwest Territory.

 

As the number of people living in them increased, each of these two big territories was divided again into smaller ones. Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin were eventually made out of the Northwest Territory. As each was formed it was placed under the rule of a governor appointed by Congress. When the number of white males living in a territory reached 5,000 it could elect its own law-making body. It could also send a representative to give its point of view in Congress. When the population of a territory reached 60,000 it became a new state, with the same rights and powers as the original thirteen states.

 

These arrangements for governing new territories were first introduced by the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. The plan that the Ordinance laid down for controlling the growth of the United States has been followed ever since. The importance of the plan is that it made sure that the original thirteen states were not able to control for their own benefit lands that were settled later. This meant that as the United States grew bigger it went on being a democratic union of equals.

 

Bryn O'Callaghan: An illustrated history of the USA; Longman, Harlow, 1990/1996, page 36 ff.