The Life of John Marshall
Chapter 32 : "Far in the west, a paltry spot of land, That no man envied, and that no man owned

"Far in the west, a paltry spot of land, That no man envied, and that no man owned, A woody hill, beside a dismal bog-- This was your choice; nor were you much to blame; And here, responsive to the croaking frog, You grubbed, and stubbed, And feared no landlord's claim."[852]

Nor was hostility to orderly society confined to this cla.s.s. Knox wrote Was.h.i.+ngton that, in Ma.s.sachusetts, those who opposed the Const.i.tution acted "from deadly principle levelled at the existence of all government whatever."[853]

The better cla.s.s of settlers who took up the "farms" abandoned by the first shunners of civilization, while a decided improvement, were, nevertheless, also improvident and dissipated. In a poor and slip-shod fas.h.i.+on, they ploughed the clearings which had now grown to fields, never fertilizing them and gathering but beggarly crops. Of these a part was always rye or corn, from which whiskey was made. The favorite occupation of this type was drinking to excess, arguing politics, denouncing government, and contracting debts.[854] Not until debts and taxes had forced onward this second line of pioneer advance did the third appear with better notions of industry and order and less hatred of government and its obligations.[855]

In New England the out-push of the needy to make homes in the forests differed from the cla.s.s just described only in that the settler remained on his clearing until it grew to a farm. After a few years his ground would be entirely cleared and by the aid of distant neighbors, cheered to their work by plenty of rum, he would build a larger house.[856] But meanwhile there was little time for reading, small opportunity for information, scanty means of getting it; and mouth-to-mouth rumor was the settler's chief informant of what was happening in the outside world. In the part of Ma.s.sachusetts west of the Connecticut Valley, at the time the Const.i.tution was adopted, a rough and primitive people were scattered in lonesome families along the thick woods.[857]

In Virginia the contrast between the well-to-do and the ma.s.ses of the people was still greater.[858] The social and economic distinctions of colonial Virginia persisted in spite of the vociferousness of democracy which the Revolution had released. The small group of Virginia gentry were, as has been said, well educated, some of them highly so, instructed in the ways of the world, and distinguished in manners.[859]

Their houses were large; their table service was of plate; they kept their studs of racing and carriage horses.[860] Sometimes, however, they displayed a grotesque luxury. The windows of the mansions, when broken, were occasionally replaced with rags; servants sometimes appeared in livery with silk stockings thrust into boots;[861] and again dinner would be served by naked negroes.[862]

The second cla.s.s of Virginia people were not so well educated, and the observer found them "rude, ferocious, and haughty; much attached to gaming and dissipation, particularly horse-racing and c.o.c.k-fighting"; and yet, "hospitable, generous, and friendly." These people, although by nature of excellent minds, mingled in their characters some of the finest qualities of the first estate, and some of the worst habits of the lower social stratum. They "possessed elegant accomplishments and savage brutality."[863] The third cla.s.s of Virginia people were lazy, hard-drinking, and savage; yet kind and generous.[864] "Whenever these people come to blows," Weld testifies, "they fight just like wild beasts, biting, kicking, and endeavoring to tear each other's eyes out with their nails"; and he says that men with eyes thus gouged out were a common sight.[865]

The generation between the birth of Marshall and the adoption of the Const.i.tution had not modified the several strata of Virginia society except as to apparel and manners, both of which had become worse than in colonial times.

Schoepf found s.h.i.+ftlessness[866] a common characteristic; and described the gentry as displaying the baronial qualities of haughtiness, vanity, and idleness.[867] Jefferson divides the people into two sections as regards characteristics, which were not entirely creditable to either.

But in his comparative estimate Jefferson is far harsher to the Southern population of that time than he is to the inhabitants of other States; and he emphasizes his discrimination by putting his summary in parallel columns.

"While I am on this subject," writes Jefferson to Chastellux, "I will give you my idea of the characters of the several States.

In the North they are In the South they are cool fiery sober voluptuary laborious indolent persevering unsteady independent independent jealous of their own liberties, zealous for their own liberties, but and just to those of others trampling on those of others interested generous chicaning candid superst.i.tious and hypocritical without attachment or pretensions to in their religion any religion but that of the heart.

"These characteristics," continues Jefferson, "grow weaker and weaker by graduation from North to South and South to North, insomuch that an observing traveller, without the aid of the quadrant may always know his lat.i.tude by the character of the people among whom he finds himself."

"It is in Pennsylvania," Jefferson proceeds in his careful a.n.a.lysis, "that the two characters seem to meet and blend, and form a people free from the extremes both of vice and virtue. Peculiar circ.u.mstances have given to New York the character which climate would have given had she been placed on the South instead of the north side of Pennsylvania.

Perhaps too other circ.u.mstances may have occasioned in Virginia a transplantation of a particular vice foreign to its climate." Jefferson finally concludes: "I think it for their good that the vices of their character should be pointed out to them that they may amend them; for a malady of either body or mind once known is half cured."[868]

A plantation house northwest of Richmond grumblingly admitted a lost traveler, who found his sleeping-room with "filthy beds, swarming with bugs" and cracks in the walls through which the sun shone.[869] The most bizarre contrasts startled the observer--mean cabins, broken windows, no bread, and yet women clad in silk with plumes in their hair.[870] Eight years after our present National Government was established, the food of the people living in the Shenandoah Valley was salt fish, pork, and greens; and the wayfarer could not get fresh meat except at Staunton or Lynchburg,[871] notwithstanding the surrounding forests filled with game or the domestic animals which fed on the fields where the forests had been cleared away.

Most of the houses in which the majority of Virginians then lived were wretched;[872] Jefferson tells us, speaking of the better cla.s.s of dwellings, that "it is impossible to devise things more ugly, uncomfortable, and happily more perishable." "The poorest people,"

continues Jefferson, "build huts of logs, laid horizontally in pens, stopping the interstices with mud.... The wealthy are attentive to the raising of vegetables, but very little so to fruits.... The poorer people attend to neither, living princ.i.p.ally on ... animal diet."[873]

In general the population subsisted on worse fare than that of the inhabitants of the Valley.[874] Even in that favored region, where religion and morals were more vital than elsewhere in the Commonwealth, each house had a peach brandy still of its own; and it was a man of notable abstemiousness who did not consume daily a large quant.i.ty of this spirit. "It is scarcely possible," writes Weld, "to meet with a man who does not begin the day with taking one, two, or more drams as soon as he rises."[875]

Indeed, at this period, heavy drinking appears to have been universal and continuous among all cla.s.ses throughout the whole country[876] quite as much as in Virginia. It was a habit that had come down from their forefathers and was so conspicuous, ever-present and peculiar, that every traveler through America, whether native or foreign, mentions it time and again. "The most common vice of the inferior cla.s.s of the American people is drunkenness," writes La Rochefoucauld in 1797.[877]

And Was.h.i.+ngton eight years earlier denounced "drink which is the source of all evil--and the ruin of half the workmen in this country."[878]

Talleyrand, at a farmer's house in the heart of Connecticut, found the daily food to consist of "smoked fish, ham, potatoes, strong beer and brandy."[879]

Court-houses built in the center of a county and often standing entirely alone, without other buildings near them, nevertheless always had attached to them a shanty where liquor was sold.[880] At country taverns which, with a few exceptions, were poor and sometimes vile,[881]

whiskey mixed with water was the common drink.[882] About Germantown, Pennsylvania, workingmen received from employers a pint of rum each day as a part of their fare;[883] and in good society men drank an astonis.h.i.+ng number of "full b.u.mpers" after dinner, where, already, they had imbibed generously.[884] The incredible quant.i.ty of liquor, wine, and beer consumed everywhere and by all cla.s.ses is the most striking and conspicuous feature of early American life. In addition to the very heavy domestic productions of spirits,[885] there were imported in 1787, according to De Warville, four million gallons of rum, brandy, and other spirits; one million gallons of wine; three million gallons of mola.s.ses (princ.i.p.ally for the manufacture of rum); as against only one hundred and twenty-five thousand pounds of tea.[886]

Everybody, it appears, was more interested in sport and spending than in work and saving. As in colonial days, the popular amus.e.m.e.nts continued to be horse-racing and c.o.c.k-fighting; the first the peculiar diversion of the quality; the second that of the baser sort, although men of all conditions of society attended and delighted in both.[887] But the horse-racing and the c.o.c.k-fighting served the good purpose of bringing the people together; for these and the court days were the only occasions on which they met and exchanged views. The holding of court was an event never neglected by the people; but they a.s.sembled then to learn what gossip said and to drink together rather than separately, far more than they came to listen to the oracles from the bench or even the oratory at the bar; and seldom did the care-free company break up without fights, sometimes with the most serious results.[888]

Thus, scattered from Maine to Florida and from the Atlantic to the Alleghanies, with a skirmish line thrown forward almost to the Mississippi, these three and a quarter millions of men, women, and children, did not, for the most part, take kindly to government of any kind. Indeed, only a fraction of them had anything to do with government, for there were no more than seven hundred thousand adult males among them,[889] and of these, in most States, only property-holders had the ballot. The great majority of the people seldom saw a letter or even a newspaper; and the best informed did not know what was going on in a neighboring State, although anxious for the information.

"Of the affairs of Georgia, I know as little as of those of Kamskatska," wrote Madison to Jefferson in 1786.[890] But everybody did know that government meant law and regulation, order and mutual obligation, the fulfillment of contracts and the payment of debts. Above all, everybody knew that government meant taxes. And none of these things aroused what one would call frantic enthusiasm when brought home to the individual. Bloated and monstrous individualism grew out of the dank soil of these conditions. The social ideal had hardly begun to sprout; and nourishment for its feeble and languis.h.i.+ng seed was sucked by its overgrown rival.

Community consciousness showed itself only in the more thickly peopled districts, and even there it was feeble. Generally speaking and aside from statesmen, merchants, and the veterans of the Revolution, the idea of a National Government had not penetrated the minds of the people.

They managed to tolerate State Governments, because they always had lived under some such thing; but a National Government was too far away and fearsome, too alien and forbidding for them to view it with friendliness or understanding. The common man saw little difference between such an enthroned central power and the Royal British Government which had been driven from American sh.o.r.es.

To be sure, not a large part of the half-million men able for the field[891] had taken much of any militant part in expelling British tyranny; but these "chimney-corner patriots," as Was.h.i.+ngton stingingly described them, were the hottest foes of British despotism--after it had been overthrown. And they were the most savage opponents to setting up any strong government, even though it should be exclusively American.

Such were the economic, social, and educational conditions of the ma.s.ses and such were their physical surroundings, conveniences, and opportunities between the close of the War for Independence and the setting-up of the present Government. All these facts profoundly affected the thought, conduct, and character of the people; and what the people thought, said, and did, decisively influenced John Marshall's opinion of them and of the government and laws which were best for the country.

During these critical years, Jefferson was in France witnessing government by a decaying, inefficient, and corrupt monarchy and n.o.bility, and considering the state of a people who were without that political liberty enjoyed in America.[892] But the vagaries, the changeableness, the turbulence, the envy toward those who had property, the tendency to repudiate debts, the readiness to credit the grossest slander or to respond to the most fantastic promises, which the newly liberated people in America were then displaying, did not come within Jefferson's vision or experience.

Thus, Marshall and Jefferson, at a time destined to be so important in determining the settled opinions of both, were looking upon opposite sides of the s.h.i.+eld. It was a curious and fateful circ.u.mstance and it was repeated later under reversed conditions.

FOOTNOTES:

[760] Weld, i, 37-38; also, Morris, ii, 393-94.

[761] Weld, i, 38.

[762] Baily's _Journal_ (1796-97), 108.

[763] _Ib._, 109-10.

[764] Professor Beard, in his exposition of the economic origins of the Const.i.tution, shows that nearly all of the men who framed it were wealthy or allied with property interests and that many of them turned up as holders of Government securities. (Beard: _Econ. I. C._, chap. V.) As a matter of fact, none but such men could have gone to the Federal Convention at Philadelphia, so great were the difficulties and so heavy the expenses of travel, even if the people had been minded to choose poorer and humbler persons to represent them; at any rate, they did not elect representatives of their own cla.s.s until the Const.i.tution was to be ratified and then, of course, only to State Conventions which were accessible.

[765] Weld, i, 47-48.

[766] Johnston to Iredell, Jan. 30, 1790; McRee, ii, 279.

[767] "Letters of a Federal Farmer," no. 2; Ford: _P. on C._, 292.

[768] _Ib._, no. 3, 302.

[769] De Warville made a record trip from Boston to New York in less than five days. (De Warville, 122.) But such speed was infrequent.

[770] Josiah Quincy's description of his journey from Boston to New York in 1794. (Quincy: _Figures of the Past_, 47-48.)

[771] De Warville, 138-39.

[772] Watson, 266.

[773] "The road is execrable; one is perpetually mounting and descending and always on the most rugged roads." (Chastellux, 20.)

[774] Elliott, ii, 21-22.

[775] "In December last, the roads were so intollerably bad that the country people could not bring their forage to market, though _actually offered the cash on delivery_." (Pickering to Hodgdon; _Pickering_: Pickering, i, 392.)

[776] Cooper, 1875-86, as quoted in Hart, iii, 98.

[777] _Ib._

[778] Watson, 270. Along one of the princ.i.p.al roads of New York, as late as 1804, President Dwight discovered only "a few lonely plantations" and he "occasionally found a cottage and heard a distant sound of an axe and of a human voice. All else was grandeur, gloom, and solitude." (Halsey: _Old New York Frontier_, 384.)