by H. W. Brands
In feature he was by no means good-looking. His face was long and narrow, his features sharp and angular and his complexion yellow and freckled. But his eyes were handsome. They were very large, a kind of steel-blue, and when he talked to you he always looked straight into your own eyes. I have talked with him a great many times and never saw him to avert his eyes from me for an instant. It was the same way with men. He always looked them straight in the eye, as much as to say, “I have nothing to be ashamed of and I hope you haven’t.” This and the gentle manner he had made you forget the plainness of his features.
When he was calm he talked slowly and with very good selected language. But if animated by anything, then he would talk fast and with a very marked North-Irish brogue, which he got from his mother and the Crawfords who raised him—all of whom grew to maturity in the old country. But either calm or animated, there was always something about him I cannot describe except to say that it was a presence, or a kind of majesty I never saw in any other young man.
Every culture has its founding myth, its tale of how it came to be. For those peoples who fancy themselves forever in place, this often includes an account of the creation of the world. For others it involves how they got to where they are. The journeys entail hardship and loss; not everyone reaches the promised land. But those who do get there live on in the collective consciousness.
The founding myth of middle Tennessee was the story of an epic boat trip down the Holston and Tennessee rivers and then up the Ohio and Cumberland. The leader of the journey was John Donelson, a Virginian with a wife, eleven children, and a fervent belief that fortune awaited him if he only knew where to look. In 1779 Donelson guided a boat he called the Adventure and some thirty or forty other craft carrying perhaps sixty families, including his own, to a valley in the heart of the trans-Appalachian wilderness, hundreds of miles from anything that passed for civilization. Donelson had visited the Cumberland Valley and decided that the soil in the river bend near the Big Salt Lick was as fine as any in North America. He arranged with James Robertson, another Virginian, to establish a colony there. Robertson would take a small party overland to ready the way for the larger group, which Donelson would direct, with all their worldly possessions, by water.
The river journey began at Fort Patrick Henry, on the western slope of the Blue Ridge. The demands of the harvest had kept these farm families working till late autumn, and preparations for the journey delayed them further, so that they got off only three days before Christmas 1779, when the cold weather had already set in. “Took our departure from the fort,” Donelson wrote in his journal of the voyage, “and fell down the river to the mouth of Reedy creek, where we were stopped by the fall of water and most excessive hard frost.”
For two months the emigrant fleet struggled with the cold and the winter’s low water. Rain eventually raised the river but created problems of its own. “Rain about half the day,” Donelson recorded on March 2, 1780. “About twelve o’clock Mr. Henry’s boat, being driven on the point of an island by the force of the current, was sunk, the whole cargo much damaged, and the crew’s lives much endangered, which occasioned the whole fleet to put on shore and go to their assistance.” Vessel, crew, and cargo were rescued with difficulty. And amid the excitement one member of the expedition, a young man, wandered off and didn’t return, “though many guns were fired to fetch him in.” For three days the young man stayed missing—“to the great grief of his parents”—till Donelson felt obliged to order the flotilla on. Luckily the lad, realizing he was lost, headed downstream and caught the last boats before they disappeared into the west. Two days later the bitter cold returned, claiming the life of one of the Negro slaves. The day after that, a woman of the expedition bore a child.
Indians were a constant danger. They threatened the main body of the fleet and preyed on those who became separated. Donelson described the “tragical misfortune of poor Stuart, his family and friends, to the number of twenty-eight persons.” A member of the Stuart group had come down with smallpox, whereupon Donelson decreed that they should follow the main body at a distance, keeping a kind of floating quarantine. This turned out to be their death sentence. “The Indians, . . . observing his helpless situation, singled him off from the rest of the fleet, intercepted him, killed and took prisoners the whole crew.” Others in the expedition shuddered in helpless horror. “Their cries were distinctly heard by the boats in the rear.”
In mid-March the expedition reached the Muscle Shoals of the Tennessee River, an infamous stretch of rapids. “The water being high made a terrible roaring, which could be heard at some distance among the driftwood heaped frightfully upon the points of the island, the current running in every possible direction. Here we did not know how soon we should be dashed to pieces, and all our troubles ended at once. Our boats frequently dragged on the bottom, and appeared constantly in danger of striking; they warped as much as in a rough sea.” When, to the amazement of all, the expedition passed this trial without loss of life, Donelson thanked “the hand of Providence.”
They reached the Ohio in late March. “Our situation here is truly disagreeable,” Donelson wrote from the banks of the larger river. “The river is very high, and the current rapid, our boats not constructed for the purpose of stemming a rapid stream, our provision exhausted, the crews almost worn down with hunger and fatigue.” Donelson’s plan was to ascend the Ohio to the mouth of the Cumberland, and the Cumberland to the Big Salt Lick. But some of those who had traveled downstream so many weeks couldn’t bear the thought of pushing their way up, against the Ohio’s spring torrent, and so chose to continue down the Ohio to the Mississippi. Donelson stuck to the original plan. “I am determined to pursue my course, come what will.”
The distance to the Cumberland’s mouth was only fifteen miles, but it consumed four hard days of rowing, poling, and picking their way through the eddies close to the Ohio’s shore. When they reached the Cumberland, some in the group thought it looked too small to be that river. Donelson couldn’t be certain. “But I never heard of any river running in between the Cumberland and Tennessee,” and so he ordered the fleet to enter the stream. Within a day it broadened, suggesting that they were indeed on the right river. They assuaged their hunger by shooting buffalo that came down to the stream to drink. The beasts had had a hard winter; their flesh was edible but poor. By contrast a swan, having wintered in the south, “was very delicious.” Yet the swan meat didn’t go far, and the food situation grew more dire. “We are without bread, and are compelled to hunt the buffalo to preserve life. Worn out with fatigue, our progress at present is slow.”
Progress continued to be slow for three more agonizing weeks. The travelers supplemented their buffalo diet with greens they called “Shawnee salad.” Several of the travelers decided they could go no farther and dropped out along the river. But on April 24, after four months on the water, the resolute core of the expedition reached its goal. “This day we arrived at our journey’s end at the Big Salt Lick, where we have the pleasure of finding Captain Robertson and his company. It is a source of satisfaction to us to be enabled to restore to him and others their families and friends, who were entrusted to our care and who, some time since perhaps, despaired of ever meeting again. Though our prospects at present are dreary, we have found a few log cabins which have been built on a cedar bluff above the lick by Capt. Robertson and his company.”
The remarkable thing about the Donelson voyage was not the hardship the emigrants survived, which, though daunting, differed in degree rather than kind from the trials men and women in the West endured every day. Rather, the remarkable thing was the little distance the voyagers netted for all their time and effort. Their river miles amounted to nearly a thousand, but they ended up barely a fifth that far from the place they started. A crow might have completed the journey in a day, humans walking on a decent road in a week. But there was no such road, making the roundabout trip by water the only feasible way to transport families and their belongi
ngs.
Transportation wasn’t a problem for the people of the frontier alone. During the 1780s the difficulty of distance was a rock on which the Union nearly broke—although whether it was more dangerous than other submerged boulders was a matter of interpretation. In the aftermath of the Revolutionary War, the United States were decidedly plural, having united for the purpose of fending off the British, a purpose that vanished upon the peace. The Articles of Confederation continued to link them, but because the articles had been drafted deliberately weak, the links bound no state to do much it didn’t want to do. The national government could requisition operating funds from each state but couldn’t compel payment, which meant that it often didn’t get paid. It could preach amity and cooperation to the states but couldn’t prevent their waging economic war on one another. It could urge the states to keep their defenses strong but couldn’t support a decent army or conscript anyone to fight.
The weaknesses of the Confederation caused many Americans to worry that their republican experiment was coming undone. When domestic unrest broke out in Massachusetts, led by Revolutionary War veteran Daniel Shays, the worries mounted. When the British refused to relinquish control of forts in the Ohio Valley, which they had promised in the Paris treaty to do, the weakness at the center became a source of national embarrassment. Those most worried and embarrassed mobilized in favor of a stronger central government. James Madison and Alexander Hamilton organized a convention at Annapolis in 1786. When the turnout proved disappointing, they rescheduled for Philadelphia the following summer.
The Philadelphia convention initially confronted what seemed an insurmountable barrier: the requirement under the Articles of Confederation that amendments receive the unanimous endorsement of the states. But what Madison, Hamilton, and the others couldn’t climb over they skirted, proposing not to amend the Articles but to write an entirely new constitution. It was a bold gambit, one that risked angry disavowal by those who had sent the delegates to Philadelphia. Yet it was a move they considered necessary in view of the current crisis. The delegates aimed to craft a stronger union, one with the energy and power to accomplish the purposes of a proud and growing nation. They worked through the hot Pennsylvania summer, meeting in closed session in the same hall where the Continental Congress had approved independence eleven years earlier. In September they revealed their blueprint to the world, asking the states to ratify the new charter and put the old, weak government out of its—and their—misery.
The Philadelphia charter was elegant in places, workmanlike in others, downright clunky in yet others. Like all works of committee it embodied compromise. One obvious compromise regarded representation in the new Congress. States with few inhabitants had wanted to maintain the Confederation principle of one vote per state. Heavily peopled states desired representation by population. The result was a hybrid legislature, with the Senate embodying the small-state position and the House of Representatives the big-state view. Another compromise determined the selection of the president: not by the Congress or by the states directly but by an electoral college created anew every quadrennium. Who would the president represent, then? It was a fair question. Some in the convention sought to ban slavery, deeming it antithetical to the basic principles of liberty and self-government. Yet the slave-thick southern states stood together, defending their peculiar institution as necessary to their economic development. The most the antislavery delegates could win was a delayed (and only implicit) ban on the overseas slave trade, by common consent the worst aspect of the slave system.
But the truly fateful compromise, the one that made the others—especially the slavery finesse—potentially lethal was the waffling on where sovereignty in the new government lay. Were the states supreme, or the national government? Many of the delegates were lawyers, and their lawyerly skill was never more evident than in their ability to cloud this central issue. Readers weren’t nine words into the preamble before they were scratching their heads. “We the people of the United States of America”—how was this to be construed? An emphasis on “people” suggested national primacy. A stress on “States” pointed to the states, as did the facts that the delegates to the convention voted by states and that the proposed constitution was referred to the states for ratification, with equal weight given to every one.
The waffle didn’t fool opponents of the new constitution, who spied a centralist plot in the Philadelphia proceedings. Many of the old revolutionaries turned away, complaining that the proposed government would deprive them of liberties hard won by war. To replace the grasping authority of Britain, they declared, with that of a central American government would be ironic, tragic, and stupid.
But the supporters of the constitution were clever. They contended that the new government would be strictly limited to the powers expressly granted it. Where the charter was silent, they said, the states would take precedence. Even as they winked to assure themselves and their friends that the new government would be a signal improvement over the Confederation, they cooed to skeptics that nothing much, really, had changed.
The compromises contained in the constitution—especially on slavery and sovereignty—would vex America for decades. Andrew Jackson as president would find himself tripping over the loose ends the drafters left lying across the American frame of government. But in the autumn of 1787 another aspect of the constitutional debate drew almost as much attention. For decades political theorists had contended that republics could sustain themselves only in compact geographical areas. Pointing to the city-states of Greece and to preimperial Rome, they argued that compactness created a sense of common purpose and allowed citizens and rulers to know one another well, and that these advantages diminished dangerously over distance. What republic had ever survived being extended over a large geographical area? None the drafters of the constitution could cite. As this reasoning pertained to the American situation, it supported the antifederalists, who contended that New Hampshire could never know Georgia, nor the hamlets on the frontier the cities of the seaboard. Single states stretched the republican principle already; a centralized government would snap it. More prosaically, the long distances in America made centralized government unworkable. If the citizens of Massachusetts or South Carolina had to travel to Philadelphia (or New York or wherever the national capital turned out to be) every time they needed to conduct their government business, they would have no time for more productive activities. One reason America broke away from Britain was that getting decisions out of London took so long.
The federalists countered this complaint in various ways, but none more ingenious than that devised by James Madison. In the tenth article of the collection that became known as the Federalist Papers, Madison turned the received reasoning about the size of republics on its head. Extensive republics, he asserted, were actually more stable than small ones. In a small republic, one or two factions could easily conspire against the general interest, engineer a majority, and subvert the liberties of the rest. In a large republic, the factions would be more dispersed, rendering conspiracy and subversion more difficult and rare. “Extend the sphere,” Madison said, “and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or, if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength and to act in unison with each other.” What others considered a weakness of large republics—the dispersion of their people and the diversity of their interests—Madison touted as a strength.
Whether Madison’s argument convinced anyone was hard to tell. At times he himself didn’t appear to believe it. But it definitely didn’t persuade the residents of the backcountry villages and farms, who cherished their independence and didn’t look kindly on ceding any of it to a distant government they neither knew nor trusted. Frontier antifederalists in the Carolinas damned the constitution as the death of liberty and held a funeral. “The peopl
e had a coffin painted black, which, borne in funeral procession, was solemnly buried, as an emblem of the dissolution and interment of public liberty,” an eyewitness recorded. “They feel that they are the very men who, as mere militia, half-armed and half-clothed, have fought and defeated the British regulars in sundry encounters. They think that after having disputed and gained the laurel under the banners of liberty, now, that they are likely to be robbed both of the honour and the fruits of it.”
But not for decades would the voice of the West mean much in American politics. Despite the complaints of the frontiersmen, the constitution was ratified, and the country embarked on its great experiment in federalism.
The alienation of the West from the East would give Andrew Jackson his opportunity in national politics; for now it contributed to one of the great—failed—experiments in American history. At the time John Donelson had reached the Big Salt Lick, the valley of the Cumberland was part of North Carolina. Yet during the next half decade, the government of North Carolina decided that its western region was too much trouble to govern, and it ceded the district to the United States. The Confederation Congress, amid its own troubles, was slow to respond, with the result that the territory that would become Tennessee hung in legal limbo, lacking a government of any kind.
Nearly all the inhabitants had emigrated from states that had recently written constitutions to replace their colonial charters, and to these emigrants it came naturally to write another constitution, for a state of their own. They named their state Franklin, after the Founding Father with the greatest interest in the West. For decades before the American Revolution, Benjamin Franklin had argued that the West held the key to America’s future. At the end of the Revolutionary War he directed the negotiations that ensured that the United States owned the territory all the way to the Mississippi River. Though Franklin had never been anywhere near the Mississippi—being a city boy his entire life—he instinctively appreciated the importance of the great river for the future of the West. When Spain demanded control of the Mississippi as a condition for assisting the United States against Britain, he rejected the idea out of hand. “A neighbor might as well ask me to sell my street door,” he said.
