3.12 Movement in the Early Republic

Once the Proclamation of 1763 no longer applied, settlers flooded into Kentucky, Tennessee and the Ohio Valley, following routes like the Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap. Kentucky became a state in 1792 and Tennessee in 1796. New Englanders moved into upstate New York and Ohio.

Western settlers wanted cheap land, protection from Native nations and access to the Mississippi River and New Orleans to ship their crops. They often distrusted distant governments and Eastern elites, and many supported Jefferson's Democratic-Republicans.

Native nations had not been part of the 1783 peace, and they did not accept that Britain could give away their land. Many shifted alliances among Britain (which still held forts in the Northwest), Spain (which controlled Florida and Louisiana), other Native nations and the United States, choosing whatever best protected their land. In the Southeast, the Creek leader Alexander McGillivray played Spain and the United States against each other.

In the Ohio Country, a Western Confederacy of nations including the Miami, Shawnee and Lenape resisted American settlement. Led by Little Turtle (Miami) and Blue Jacket (Shawnee), they defeated two American armies, including a crushing defeat of General Arthur St. Clair's force in 1791, one of the worst losses the US Army ever suffered against Native forces.

In 1794 General Anthony Wayne's army defeated the confederacy at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, near present-day Toledo, Ohio. The British, who had encouraged Native resistance, refused to help. In the Treaty of Greenville (1795), Native leaders gave up most of present-day Ohio in exchange for goods and yearly payments. Jay's Treaty, around the same time, got Britain to leave its northwestern forts.

Farmers in western Pennsylvania turned much of their grain into whiskey, which was easier to transport over the mountains and was often used as money. Hamilton's 1791 excise tax on whiskey hit them hard. In 1794 some attacked tax collectors and threatened Pittsburgh.

Washington called up about 13,000 militia and rode out with them himself. The rebellion collapsed without a battle. The episode showed that, unlike under the Articles during Shays' Rebellion, the new federal government could enforce its laws. It also deepened Western support for the Democratic-Republicans, who opposed the tax.

While Northern states moved toward gradual emancipation (3.6), slavery grew in the South. The 1790 census counted about 700,000 enslaved people. Eli Whitney's cotton gin (1793) quickly separated seeds from short-staple cotton, which grew well across the inland South. Cotton suddenly became very profitable, and slavery spread with it into Georgia, the Carolina backcountry and later the Deep South (4.13).

The new government protected slavery in several ways. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 let owners capture people who had escaped to other states, and the Constitution's 1808 clause delayed any ban on the international slave trade. The growing gap between a North moving away from slavery and a South committing to it was the seed of later sectional conflict.