The Oxford History Of the United States 1783-1917

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Telephone No. 447. Vol. if Rochdale Public Libraries

CENTRAL LENDING DEPARTMENT.

Preface

HIS book was written during my tenure of the

chair of American History at Oxford, and in the hope of introducing British readers to the history of the United States. English historians such as Charnwood, Henderson, and Trevelyan have already illuminated certain high peaks of American history. I am proposing to guide their countrymen, as it were, through the valleys into the plains: to tell a story of intrinsic interest which may also serve to explain the United States of to-day.

The questions asked by my English friends and pupils have largely determined the scope and direction of the narrative. I have incorporated descriptions of the country and the people at different periods. I have devoted considerable space to the outstanding personalities from Washington to Wilson, to social and economic development, to Anglo-American and Canadian- American relations, to the Civil War, and to the forty years preceding America’s entry into the Great War. Interest in America and her history is so rapidly increasing among the younger generation that I have felt justified in adding a selected bibliography of the vast literature of the subject.

My excuse, for offering this book to my fellow countrymen also, is the point of view from which it was written. For, as an English poet (Charles Ashleigh) has said, ‘ England provides you with a quiet place in which to sit down in peace to write about America. And it gives you a far-off place of calm from which to view America.’ Oxford is a haven of scholarly ease and quiet contemplation, compared with American vi PREFACE universities, and the youth who give life and purpose to her ancient cloisters have a questioning and critical spirit, disturbing to the complacencies of other lands as well as their own. In that cool, sophisticated atmosphere, our country seemed more youthful and elemental than she ever did at home. The unity of her history was more easy to comprehend, the significance of it more ready to grasp.

Among the many persons who have encouraged and helped me to write this book, I wish particularly to thank certain colleagues at Oxford: Kenneth Bell, Reginald Coupland, Keith Feiling, Sir Charles Firth, Richard and Mary Sturge Gretton, John Johnson, Ephraim Lipson, Murray Wrong, and the late Professor Egerton. ‘Their advice, criticism, and example have set for me a standard of excellence that I canmot hope to have attained; their friendship is the most precious fruit of my golden years at Oxford.

BLEAKHOUSE, S. E. M.

Petersoroucu, N.H.

August 1927

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CONTENTS VOLUME I

. THE UNITED STATES IN 1790 . THE NORTH

1. New England. 2. New York. 3. Pennsylvania.

THE.SOUTH . , ; : : 1. Physiographic Sections. 2. Delaware and Maryland. 3. Virginia. 4. The Carolinas and Georgia. 5. ‘The hope of the human race.’

THE BEGINNING OF FOREIGN RELATIONS 1. Permanent American Aspirations. 2. British Policy after the War.

LOYALISTS AND THE WESTERN PROBLEM 1. American Treatment of the Loyalists. 2. The Debts. 3. The North-West Posts, the Fur Trade, and the Mississippi Valley. 4. Indians and Backwoodsmen. 5. Spanish Policy in the South-West.

CONFEDERATION AND CONSTITUTION 1. The Articles of Confederation. 2. The Day of the Debtor. 3. Shays’s Rebellion. 4. The Federal Convention. 5. The Federal Constitution. 6. The Frame of Government. 7. Ratification.

WASHINGTON AND THE NEW GOVERNMENT 1. The Prospect. 2. Pater Patriae. 3. The Federal Government.

ENTER HAMILTON : : 7 1. A Philosophy of Self-Interest. 2, Brilliant Finance. 3. The Sectional Test : Massachusetts and Virginia.

RISE OF AN OPPOSITION . : . 1, Thomas Jefferson. 2, The Breach with Hamilton. 3. The Virginia-New York Alliance. 4. Hamilton’s

Report on Manufactures.

1. The Two Poles. 2. Lord Sheffield answered. 3. Nootka Sound. 4. Grenville’s American Policy. 5. Neutrality. 6. Citizen Genet.

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CONTENTS FEDERALISTS AND REPUBLICANS 1. The French Revolution, Precipitant of Parties. 2. Physiocracy v. Mercantilism. 3. The Party Structure. THE CRISIS INANGLO-AMERICAN RELATIONS 1. The Proposed Indian Buffer State. 2, Neutral Rights. 3. Jay’s Mission and Treaty.

THE FRONTIER GATES SWING OPEN .

1. The Fallen Timbers. 2. The Whisky Rebellion. 3. A Settlement with Spain.

COLONIAL POLICY AND THE PUBLIC DOMAIN 1. Territorial Government. 2. Public Land and Democratic Society. 3. The Indians.

THE BREACH WITH FRANCE : 1. An Anglo-American Entente. 2. Washington’s Farewell Address. 3. Federalist Apprehensions and French Policy. 4. The X YZ Mission. 5. Naval Hostilities. 6. Adams, Hamilton, and Talleyrand.

ADAMS SOWS AND JEFFERSON REAPS 1, Adams strikes for Peace. 2. The Alien and Sedition Acts. 3. The Kentucky and Virginia Resolves of 1798. 4. The Election of 1800-1.

JEFFERSONIAN DEMOCRACY I. Jefferson’s Ambition. 2. Simplicity and Sete 3. Reform.

TRIPOLI AND LOUISIANA 1. The Barbary Corsairs. 2. An American Rapes

PLOTS AND CONSPIRACIES 1. Crumbling Federalism. 2. The judi ees 3. Burr’s Adventure.

THE FOUR LEAN KINE . : 1. Gun-Boats. 2. Impressment. 3. Embargo. 4. Sedition.

1, Madison v. Canning. 2. West Florida. 3. His Majesty loves the Americans. 4. Northward the Course of Empire. §. Tecumseh and Tippecanoe.

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Contents

THE WAR OF 1812 ; : , 1. An Unpopular War. 2. On to Canada. 3. The Fir-built Frigates. 4. The Lake Front in 1813. 5. Chippewa to New Orleans.

OPPOSITION AND PEACE EAT

1. New England and the War. 2. The Hartford Convention. 3. Negotiations at Ghent.

II The Norge 1790

1. New England eBay England, including the five States of New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, is a distinct physiographic as well as a political province ; a varied rolling surface, largely on granite bed-rock, with isolated summits up to seven thousand feet in altitude. Excepting tidewater Virginia, it was the oldest settled part of the Union, and had an even million people, one-quarter of the total. These were not the descendants of Mayflower passengers. ‘The seed of the Pilgrim Fathers had not yet. spread much beyond the ‘ Old Colony ’—Plymouth County and Cape Cod, which had been annexed to Massachusetts in 1692. ‘The New Englanders of 1790 were, however, largely of English puritan origin, products of the great migration of 1630-7, with later English accretions, and a strong dash of Ulster. Climate, soil, and religion had produced in a century and a half a strongly individualized type, the Yankee, perhaps the most persistent ingredient of the American mixture.

The Yankee was the American Scot; and New England was an eighteenth-century Scotland without the lairds. A severe climate, a grudging soil that had to be cleared of boulders as well as trees, and a stern puritan faith, dictated the four gospels of education, thrift, ingenuity, and righteousness. By necessity rather than choice, the New Englanders acquired an aptitude for maritime enterprise and trading. Between

1 The term Yankee means properly a New Englander, or one of the old New England stock ; and in that sense only is employed here.

NEW ENGLAND 13 the Hudson river and the Penobscot there were some two-score market towns and seaports, actively engaged in building ships from local timber, in trading overseas, and in striving to surpass Boston’s population of eighteen thousand. Headlands such as Cape Cod and Cape Ann were fringed with fishing villages, which fitted out schooners for the Grand Banks and Labrador ; off the coast lay Nantucket, the whaling metropolis. At Boston the representatives’ chamber of the Commonwealth was graced by a corresponding symbol to the woolsack: the ‘sacred codfish’, whose salted flesh, esteemed alike by Spanish peasants, West India slaves, and American backwoodsmen, was the Yankee staple. The seamen of Salem had already ventured to the East Indies with much success when Boston, in 1790, celebrated the return of her ship Columbia, laden with tea, silk, and porcelain, from a voyage around the world. On her next voyage the Columbia sailed up a great river that Vancouver had passed by, gave it her name, and to its banks her flag.

The New England States were divided, politically, - into townships, about thirty square miles on an average, containing from a hundred to several thousand people. Each was a unit for purposes of local government, conducting its own affairs by town-meeting and selectmen, supporting common schools by local rates, and electing annually to the State legislature a representative, whose votes and doings were keenly scrutinized by his constituents. The nucleus of every township was the meeting-house, part town hall, part place of worship, bordering on the village green. Outlying farms, by 1790, in most places outnumbered those with a village house-plot ; and the common fields had been divided in severalty, and enclosed by uncemented stone walls. There was plenty of timber to supply the large open fire-places. Families were large, but estates were seldom divided below a hundred acres; a

14 THE NORTH

Yankee farmer hoped to make a scholar or minister out of one son, to provide for a second with a tract of wilderness, and let the rest earn their living by working for hire, going to sea, or learning a trade. Until 1830 or thereabouts the American merchant marine was manned largely by New England lads who were seeking the wherewithal to purchase land and set up housekeeping.

Compact settlement and village life might well have produced in New England a second merry England, but for the two kill-joys of hardship and puritanism. ‘This latter force had altered its quality without its pervasiveness. Puritanism was less grim than in the seventeenth, less petty than in the nineteenth century. ‘ Holy days’ were still proscribed, and the puritan sabbath was still observed ; but there was plenty of dancing and drinking at rural barn-raisings, or corn-huskings ;* and on public occasions such as ship-launchings, ordinations, college commencements, and ‘Thanksgiving Day—the puritan substitute for Christmas. On the whole, living was plain in New England; and the ample, generous tone of new countries was little in evidence. Even in the family of President Adams, we are told, the children were urged to a double portion of hasty-pudding, in order to spare the joint that was to follow. Idleness was the cardinal sin. If a Yankee had nothing else to do, he whittled barrelbungs from a pine billet, or carved a model of his last ship; and he usually had much else to do. New England housewives spun, wove, and tailored their woollen garments, and made cloth for sale. Small fulling mills and paper mills were established at the numerous waterfalls; and distilleries in the seaports turned West India molasses into that beverage of grate-

1 A ‘raising ’ was the ceremony of erecting a house- or barn-frame, after the timbers had been properly cut and fitted; a corn-husking was a similar gathering to strip the sheaths from the ears of maize.

NEW ENGLAND 15 ful memory, New England rum. Wooden ware was made by snow-bound farmers for export to the West Indies ; or nails were cut and headed from imported nail-rods, at fire-side forges; and in parts of eastern Massachusetts there was a domestic industry of bootmaking. Connecticut, in particular, had attained a nice balance between farming, seafaring, and handicraft, which made the people of that State renowned for steady habits and mechanical ingenuity. Before the century was out, Eli Whitney of New Haven devised the cotton gin, and interchangeable parts for firearms ; inventions which, for weal or woe, have probably affected the human race as deeply as those of Hargreaves and Arkwright. New England was ripe for an abrupt transition from handicraft to the factory system; but the success of her seafarers, and the facility of emigration, postponed industrial revolution for another generation.

Rhode Island, still true to the principles of her founder, Roger Williams, enjoyed complete religious liberty in 1790; and the Baptists, the most numerous sect in that State, had their own Rhode Island College, later Brown University. The Vermont frontiersmen never set up an established church. Elsewhere in New England every one was enrolled in some parish and paid church rates; normally in the town parish, which was generally Congregational in polity and Calvinist in theology. New England puritanism, in later generations, was to blossom into philosophy and belles-lettres ; but in 1790 the New England intellect was mainly concerned with politics, and with getting on in the world. In Connecticut a group of ‘ Hartford wits ’ was producing Hudibrastic satire, and one dreary epic, Joel Barlow’s ‘ Columbiad’. Noah Webster ventured to controvert the Johnsonian orthography in his American spelling-book of 1783, a prelude to the great dictionary ; while at Boston Jedediah Morse rescued

G THE NORTH

American geography from the clutches of Guthrie, and in company with other patriotic elders, who wished to prove that the Muses could flourish in a new-world republic, founded the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Massachusetts Historical Society.

The New Englanders were very well satisfied with themselves in 1790, and had reason to be ; for they had struck root in a region where nature was not lavish, and produced a homogeneous, cohesive, and not unhappy society. Disorderly as colonists when royal governors attempted to thwart their will, the Yankees quickly passed through the cruder phases of democracy. For another generation the leadership of their clergy, well-to-do merchants, and conservative lawyers would not be successfully challenged. Outside New England, where they were familiar as traders and pedlars, the Yankees were regarded much as ‘ North Britons’ then were by the English: often envied, sometimes respected, but heartily disliked.

2. New York

New York State was not homogeneous in 1790, and was never destined to attain homogeneity. Founded by the United New Netherland Company as a trading station in 1614, the Dutch, Flemish, and Walloon settlers were already outnumbered by English when the Duke of York seized the colony in 1664. In 1790 the old ‘ Knickerbocker’ families shared a social ascendancy with the descendants of English and Huguenot merchants ; there were many villages where Dutch was still spoken; and Albany was still thoroughly Dutch, ruled by mynheers who lived in substantial brick houses with stepped gables. But the Netherlandish element comprised only one-sixth of the three

* Washington Irving popularized the term by his History of New

York by Diedrich Knickerbocker (1809). ‘There was an actual

‘at family of that name living near Albany.

NEW YORK 17 hundred thousand inhabitants of New York. State. For the rest, there were Germans in the Mohawk Valley and Ulster County ; a few families of Sephardic Jews at New York City; an appreciable element of Scots and Irishmen, and a strong majority of English, among whom the Yankee element was fast increasing. The Episcopal Church had been disestablished in the Revolution, but, with the exception of the Dutch Reformed, was the only church to which a gentleman could belong.

New York was only the fifth State in population in 1790: a fourfold increase in thirty years made it first, in 1820. It was the settlement of the interior that made the difference. In 1790 the inhabited area of New York followed the Hudson river from New York City to Albany, whence one branch of settlement continued up the Mohawk toward Lake Erie, and a thin line of clearings pushed up by Lake George and Lake Champlain, which Burgoyne had found a wilderness. There were also a few islands of settlement, such as Cooperstown, where James Fenimore Cooper was cradled, in the midst of the former hunting grounds and cornfields of the Six Nations. It was as if the Thames valley alone had been conquered by the Saxons, and the remainder of England left a wilderness for the aborigines. Socially, New York was the most aristocratic of the colonies, not excepting Virginia. ‘The royal governors had continued the Dutch policy of granting princely estates along the Hudson and in Albany County to magnates like the Van Rensselaers, Livingstons, Ogdens, and Schuylers,' and these ‘ patroons ’, as they were called, admitted settlers only as tenants. During the war New York City had been constantly in British occupation, and the Colony had given more soldiers to the King than to Congress. In consequence, some of the larger grants had been con-

t The Sch is hard, as in other American names of Dutch origin.

18 THE NORTH fiscated and divided; but most of the patroons managed to retain their estates. One out of every six New York families held slaves in 1790, and nine more years elapsed before gradual emancipation began. All existing freemen in the two cities, and (20 freeholders outside, could vote for assembly men, but only {100 freeholders could choose state senators or the governor ; and the tenantry and smaller freeholders were unfranchised, unless granted a temporary faggot-holding by their landlords. For a generation the story of New York politics was to be, in the main, a struggle for the prestige and profit of office between the great Whig families, struggles waged by the means familiar to English eighteenth-century politics. Anticipating future developments, the landlords wisely seized every opportunity to improve their fortunes through alliance with mercantile firms, with lawyer-statesmen like Hamilton and Rufus King, and by speculation in western land.

The Hudson, in its course of a hundred and fifty miles between Albany and New York, passes through some of the finest scenery in America; especially at West Point, where it forces its way through the chain of highlands that connect the Berkshire hills of Massachusetts with the Pennsylvania Appalachians. New York City owed its prosperity, and its thirty-three thousand inhabitants, to a unique position at the mouth of this river, the greatest tidal inlet between the St. Lawrence and the Plate. It was the natural gateway to the Iroquois country, which was settled between 1790 and 1820; and in 1825 the Erie Canal, following the lowest watershed between the Atlantic States and the Lakes, made New York City the principal gateway to the West, and the financial centre of the Union. The merchants did not need to be so venturesome as those of New England and Baltimore, and they spent more on good living than on churches and

NEW YORK 19 schools. ‘They too had a family college—Columbia (late King’s) ; but while Boston was forming learned institutions, and Philadelphia supporting a Philosophical Society, New York was founding the Columbian Order, better known as Tammany Hall. Yet it was in the midst of this wealthy, gay, and somewhat cynical society that Alexander Hamilton reached manhood, and Washington Irving was born.

New Jersey, a farming State of less then 200,000 inhabitants, has been compared with a barrel tapped at both ends by New York and Philadelphia. ‘Travellers along the road between these two cities admired the Jersey apple orchards, the well-cultivated farms, and, at the pleasant village of Princeton, the college of Nassau-Hall, whose brick building, one hundred and eighty feet long and four stories high, was reputed to be the largest in the Thirteen States. At the falls of the Passaic river, near Newark, an incorporated company had just founded Paterson, the first factory village in America. South of this main road was a region of pine barrens and malarial marshes.

s 3. Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania, the second largest State in the Union, with a population of 435,000, had acquired a certain uniformity in diversity. -Her racial heterogeneity, democratic polity, and social structure, ranging from wealthy and sophisticated merchants to the wildest frontiersmen, made Pennsylvania a microcosm of the America to be. Philadelphia, with its evenly spaced and numbered streets crossing at right angles, was the principal port of immigration for a century previous to 1825; and the boat-shaped, linen-covered wagons of the Pennsylvania Dutch needed but slight improvement to become the ‘ prairie schooner’ of westward advance.

The State had just passed its centenary. It had well

20 THE NORTH fulfilled the pious intention of its founder, to make a refuge for the religiously oppressed. William Penn’s first families of English, Welsh, and Irish Quakers had lost much of their primitive simplicity, and had withheld a fair share of political power from the new-comers; but they had granted complete religious liberty to the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, and to the half-dozen German sects who established themselves in the province. ‘These democratic elements, under the philosophical leadership of Franklin, had pushed the Quakers into the Revolution, and imposed on the State an unicameral legislature annually elected by manhood suffrage. ‘The constitution of 1776 declared that the House ‘ shall consist of persons most noted for wisdom and virtue’; but that even the wisest and most virtuous might serve only four years out of every seven, lest long-continued power corrupt them. As the Quakers expected, the government thus constituted became notoriously factious and incompetent. In 1791 a new constitution with a bi-cameral legislature was adopted, but manhood suffrage was retained. Pennsylvania was still liberal in the eighteenth-century sense ;! but the democratic tide would soon prove irresistible.

Negro slavery had never taken root in Pennsylvania ; it was not needed. Penn’s contemporaries improved upon the system of indented service by which Virginia had been supplied with labour in the previous century. German peasants were imported from the Rhineland to Philadelphia, where, in order to pay their passage, their services were sold by the shipmaster for a term of years, to householders and farmers. ‘There was much cruelty and extortion in the process; but these ‘ redemptioners’ were protected by law, and given an outfit when their term of service ended. Most of the prosperous German farmers of Pennsylvania had been

™ It was the first American State to allow aliens to hold land.

PENNSYLVANIA 21 redemptioners themselves, or were descended from immigrants of that class. Without some such system it would have been impossible for poor European peasants to reach America.

Philadelphia, admirably situated at the mouth of the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers, and with a population of 45,000 in 1790, was easily the first city in the United States for commerce, architecture, and culture. During the next ten years it was the seat of the Federal Government and of a more brilliant republican court than the city of Washington could show for a century tocome. Owing largely to Quaker influence, Philadelphia was well provided with penal,: charitable, and educational institutions which European philosophers regarded as model; and they greatly prized membership in Franklin’s foundation, the American Philosophical Society. It was here ‘ by Delaware’s green banks’ that Tom Moore in 1804 found Dennie and Ingersoll and Brockden Brown, but for whom

Columbia’s days were done, Rank without ripeness, quickened without sun.

These ‘ sacred few’ were producing pallid imitations of the Spectator, dreary tragedies of medieval Europe, novels of mystery and horror ; ignoring the rich colour and wilderness flavour of youthful Pennsylvania.

A few miles from Philadelphia one reached the garden spot of eighteenth-century America, a belt of Triassic lowland—trich soil developed on limestone and shales—that crosses the Delaware, Schuylkill, and Susquehanna rivers, and extends into Maryland. The fortunate inhabitants of this region were reaping huge profits in 1790 by reason of the European crop failures of 1789; and were to prosper still more through the

t The Duc de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt’s description, Des Prisons de Philadelphie (Amsterdam, 1799, also in English and Spanish translations), had considerable influence on the development of penal institutions in Europe.

22 THE NORTH wars that flowed from the French Revolution. ‘ ‘The whole country is well cultivated’, wrote a Dutch financier who passed through this region in 1794, ‘ and what forests the farmers keep are stocked with trees of the right kind—chestnut, locust, walnut, maple, white oak. It is a succession of hills, not too high, and the © aspect of the country is very beautiful.’ Reading and Lancaster—which latter, with four thousand inhabitants, was the largest inland town in the United States; the York and Cumberland valleys, and the counties of Berks and Bucks, that one finds on the map of this region, create an inaccurate picture of a transplanted England; the bulk of the farmers and townspeople were German. ‘They were by far the best husbandmen in America, using a proper rotation, with clover and root crops. Their houses were commonly of stone, and heated by stoves; their fences of stout posts and rails; but what most impressed travellers were the great barns, with huge gable-end doors, through which a loaded wagon could drive on to a wide threshing-floor, flanked by spacious hay-lofts, cattle and sheep pens, and horse stables. ‘The Germans were divided into a number of sects, some of which, like the Amish Mennonites, have retained their quaint costumes and puritanism into the twentieth century. They supported six weekly newspapers in their own language, and were as keen household manufacturers as the Yankees; but Chastellux found them lacking in public spirit, compared with the English-speaking Americans, ‘ content ... with being only the spectators of their own wealth,’ and with the standards of a German peasant.

Lancaster was the parting point for two streams of westward emigration. One wagon road took a southwesterly direction, crossed the Potomac at Harper’s Ferry, and entered the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia,

t Theophile Cazenove, ‘Journal (Haverford College Studies), p. 72.

PENNSYLVANIA 23 between the Blue Ridge and the Appalachians. ‘The

Pittsburg wagon road struck out north-westerly, crossed the Susquehanna by ford or ferry at Harrisburg (the future capital of Pennsylvania), and followed the beautiful wooded valley of the Juniata to its headwaters. This region was inhabited mainly by Ulstermen, although in the easternmost section they were rapidly being bought out by the more thrifty and land-hungry Germans. North of it, and west of the upper Susquehanna, Pennsylvania was still a mountainous virgin forest. After a long, painful pull up the rocky, rutty wagon road, to an elevation of some 2,500 feet, you attained the Alleghany front, an escarpment from which, by a rolling, densely wooded plateau, you descended westward to where the Alleghany and Monongahela rivers come together to form the Ohio. At this point you reached Pittsburg, a thriving village in the midst of virgin coal and iron deposits, the most important of three inner gateways to the far west. Already fleets of covered wagons were bringing in settlers destined for Kentucky, and goods to be distributed down the mighty valley of the Ohio and Mississippi.

Ill THE SOUTH 1790 1. Phystographic Sections ApEn TEE IVE miles south of Philadelphia the post-road crossed Mason and Dixon’s line,* an internal boundary that bulks large in American history. Originally drawn to divide Pennsylvania from Delaware and Maryland, in 1790 it was already recognized as the boundary between the farming or commercial, and the plantation States. From 1804 to 1865 it divided the free and the slave States ; and even yet it is the boundary of sentiment between North and South.

The South, which we may define as all of the original area of the United States south of Mason and Dixon’s Line, and of the Ohio River, is divided into distinct physiographic provinces, roughly parallel to the Appalachians and the sea. All the old Southern States cut obliquely across three or more of these provinces, which differ so in climate, geography, and population, as to divide the States into so many distinct communities. Between the ocean and the mountains are two distinct plateaus: the coastal plain, or lowlands, with a sandy soil and (south of the Chesapeake) a pine forest ; and the piedmont, or upper country, with a somewhat better soil, a deciduous forest, and a more varied surface. The division between them is the fall line, a fault in the underlying rocks that produces waterfalls in the

* Mason and Dixon’s line is the parallel latitude of 30° 43’ 26-3” between the south-western corner of Pennsylvania and the arc of a circle of twelve miles’ radius drawn from Newcastle (Delaware) as a centre ; and along that arc to the Delaware river. Most of it was run in 1763 by two English surveyors named Mason and Dixon, in consequence of Lord Hardwicke’s decision, in 1750, of a long-standing controversy between the proprietors of Maryland and Pennsylvania.

PHYSIOGRAPHIC SECTIONS 25 rivers, establishes the head of navigation, and, eventually, towns or cities.t The piedmont ends at the Blue Ridge, a long range of even-crested mountains.?_ Between them and the Appalachians is the Great or Shenandoah Valley, a long, broken, and wooded plateau of limestone formation, from which the headwaters of such rivers as the James and Roanoke, Kanawha, Cumberland and Tennessee, break through the Blue Ridge to reach the Atlantic, or through the Appalachians to reach the Ohio. The Appalachian mountains,3 arranged in such parallel folds that a view from one of them suggests immense ocean waves, are the backbone of the eastern United States. Although they seldom reach an elevation exceeding six thousand feet, their steep slopes and often inaccessible ridges confined human migration to the ‘gaps’ or passes. ‘The coastal plain sweeps around the southern end of the mountains in Alabama, and meets the dppalachian plateaus that merge into the intertor lowlands along the Ohio.

2. Delaware and Maryland

Delaware, formerly an autonomous portion of the Penn proprietary, was the least populous State of the ‘Union ; and apart from the flour-milling regions about Wilmington, a farming community, steadfastly conservative in politics.

' Baltimore and Georgetown (Maryland), Washington (District of Columbia), Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Petersburg (Virginia), Halifax, Raleigh, and Salisbury (North Carolina), Augusta, Macon, and Columbus (Georgia), and Montgomery (Alabama), are on the fall line. In Maryland and Virginia the river valleys are ‘drowned’ in their lower courses, becoming mere inlets to Chesapeake Bay; consequently the fall line is near the coast, and the coastal plain is called the tide-water region.

2 In Carolina the Blue Ridge widens, and is called the Great Smoky Mountains.

3 The older term was Alleghanies, which is still used for that part of the Appalachians in Maryland and Pennsylvania. Each important fold of the Appalachians has a different name, such as Cumberland Mountain, Lookout Mountain, Dan’s Mountain.