257. Population and Area.—The country over which Washington began to preside in 1789 was very different from the great nation it has grown to be. Counting about seven hundred and fifty thousand slaves, the population did not quite reach four millions. Eleven years later, by the second census, that of 1800, this population had increased to 5,308,480; but the area of 827,844 square miles was not yet settled at the ratio of six and a half persons to a square mile. It was only along the Atlantic coast from Virginia to Massachusetts that the original wilderness had been fairly conquered by settlements that furnished a population of from twenty-five to ninety inhabitants to the square mile.

258. Boundary Disputes.—The boundaries of this immense and practically unoccupied area were in dispute to the north, northwest, and south. The British still kept garrisons at Detroit, Niagara, and other forts. In the region bordering on the Gulf of Mexico, Spanish claims conflicted with those of the Americans, and Spain denied the inhabitants of the new settlements beyond the Alleghanies any practical use of the lower Mississippi. A treaty with Spain in 1795 helped to mend these matters.

259. The West.—The Westerners, who were thus deprived of the full use of their great waterway and whom Spanish agents endeavored to detach from the Union, were few in numbers. Kentucky and Tennessee were practically the only organized settlements; but a popular movement toward Ohio and the Northwest was beginning, and by the end of the century the Mississippi Territory had been formed in the region which Georgia claimed north of the Gulf. Most of the settlers in these outlying communities had moved westward from the frontier portions of the adjoining older states. Thus many of the immigrants to Tennessee came from North Carolina. Often they were of Scotch-Irish stock, deeply religious, hardy and frugal. They drove out the Indians, killed the wild beasts, cleared lands for their farms, and raised their large families in a rude independence. On the foundations they laid, great commonwealths have been erected which should not in their present wealth and power forget the bold adventurers who crossed the mountains in wagon trains or floated down the Ohio in large flat-bottomed boats.^[103]

260. The Older Commonwealths.—Within the original colonies state lines were much confused. Vermont did not formally succeed in throwing off New York’s claim and becoming a state until 1791. Connecticut still claimed a strip of land along the northern border of the Northwest Territory. Maine continued to constitute a district of Massachusetts. The population of all the states was chiefly of English descent and was, on the whole, homogeneous, although the amount of intercourse between state and state was still small. Virginia was the most populous of the states, Massachusetts ranking next. Each was typical of the region to which it belonged, the presence of slavery more or less retarding the South, and the comparative absence of it favoring New England.

261. Occupations.—Although the country had grown considerably in population and wealth during the eighteenth century, the people had not greatly changed in character or in their pursuits. The confusion engendered by the Revolution was slowly passing away, but the revived industries ran along much the same narrow lines as of old. At Washington’s accession to the Presidency public and private finances were in a bad shape, but speedy improvement followed the reforms of Hamilton, shortly to be described (§ 266). Agriculture was still the main calling—the nation being, on the whole, one of farmers. Commerce, however, was a surer source of wealth, especially in the East, where there was a good deal of shipping. But manufacturing was in its infancy, as we at once perceive when we learn that even in 1800 not quite four per cent of the people lived in towns.

262. The Towns.—The country people had no such incentives to flock to cities as they have to-day. There were no railroads or steamboats to make the journey easy. On the contrary, roads were bad and travel by water was both uncomfortable and dangerous. Nor were the towns, of which Philadelphia with seventy thousand inhabitants, New York with sixty thousand, Baltimore with twenty-six thousand, Boston with twenty-four thousand, and Charleston with twenty thousand, were the chief, especially attractive. Sanitation was little attended to, save in Philadelphia after the terrible yellow fever epidemics of 1793 and 1797. There were few theaters. The newspapers were small and uninfluential sheets. Good colleges and schools and libraries were scarcely to be found. Life was comparatively simple and lacking in interest and brilliancy. Indeed the country gentleman, especially in the South, found his rural sports and his rounds of social visiting more enlivening than the life led by his town friends.

SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE.

263. Dominance of the Colonial Spirit.—In their mental attitude toward life the American people had changed about as little as in their occupations and customs. Although in Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin they had produced two great writers, in Franklin and Benjamin Thompson (Count Rumford, 1733–1814) eminent scientists, and in Benjamin West (1738–1820) and J. S. Copley (1737–1815) distinguished painters; although they had developed as great statesmen and political writers as any country could name, they still had no literature, or art, or science worthy of being called national. In other words, though the people of the United States had won their political independence, they were still, in their modes of thought and action, dominated by the spirit of colonial dependence. There were many persons who not merely imitated English manners and dress, read English books, and wrote in the current English style, but who even shared, in the main, English political ideas and prejudices. There were others who were fully as much influenced by French modes of thought and life. Here and there, in great men like Washington or Franklin, we find a sturdy originality that smacks of the soil, and undoubtedly the plainer people were little affected by foreign ideas and customs. But the towns still preserved their colonial attitude of dependence on Europe, and this was in the main true of the prosperous country families as well. In fact, the seaboard colonies were, in a way, outskirts of Europe, just as the Western communities were outskirts of the Atlantic seaboard. There was little of the enterprise and activity which throughout America to-day keep small communities from stagnating. In short, our forefathers of three generations ago were in many ways a very different race of beings from their descendants of to-day.

264. Virtue and Happiness of the People.—Yet it would be a great mistake to suppose that the drawbacks just enumerated were in the main apparent to the American people themselves, or that they are greatly to be insisted upon in a sketch of the civilization of the period. American life might at the close of the eighteenth century seem dull and narrow to travelers from Europe, but we know that a happy, brave, free, religious people inhabited a land that yielded abundant returns to their labors, and we may readily believe that their lives were fully as useful as ours are to-day. Nor should it ever be forgotten that amid these provincial surroundings arose the greatest figure that modern history can show, and that the American people were wise enough to choose electors who would make him President.