He tried vigorously to uphold the “American system,” and succeeded in passing the tariff of 1828; he tried to maintain the influence of the United States on both the American continents; but he remained as unpopular as his Election of 1828. rival grew popular. In 1828 Adams was easily displaced by Jackson. Calhoun was re-elected vice-president.
Democracy and nationality.196. Jackson's inauguration in 1829 closes this period, as it ends the time during which a disruption of the Union by the peaceable withdrawal of any State was even possible. The party which had made State sovereignty its bulwark in 1798 was now in control of the Government again; but Jackson's proclamation in his first term, in which he warned South Carolina that “disunion by armed force is treason,” and that blood must flow if the laws were resisted, speaks a very different tone from the speculations of Jefferson on possible future divisions of the United States. And even the sudden attempt of South Carolina to exercise independent action (§ 206), which would have been looked upon as almost a right forty years before, shows that some interest dependent upon State sovereignty had taken alarm at the evident drift of events, and was anxious to lodge a claim to the right before it should slip from its fingers for ever. Nullification was but the first skirmish between the two hostile forces of slavery and democracy.
Slavery.197. When the vast territory of Louisiana was acquired in 1803 the new owner found slavery already established there by custom recognized by French and Spanish law. Congress tacitly ratified existing law by taking no action; slavery continued legal, and spread further through the territory; and the State of Louisiana entered as a slave State in 1812. The next State to be carved out of the territory was Missouri, admitted in 1821. A Territory, on applying for admission as a State, brings a constitution for inspection by Congress; and, when it was found that the new State of Missouri proposed to recognize and continue slavery, a vigorous opposition spread through the North and West, and carried most of the senators and representatives from those sections with it. In the house of representatives these two sections had a greatly superior number of members; but, as the number of Northern and Southern States had been kept about equal, the compact Southern vote, with one or two Northern allies, generally retained control of the senate. Admitted by the senate and rejected by the house, Missouri's application hung suspended for several years, until it was successful by the admission of Maine, a balancing Northern State, and by The Missouri compromise. the following arrangement, known as the Missouri compromise of 1820:—Missouri was to enter as a slave State; slavery was for ever prohibited throughout the rest of the Louisiana purchase north of lat. 36° 30′, the main southern boundary of Missouri; and, though nothing was said of the territory south of the compromise line, it was understood that any State formed out of it was to be a slave State, if it so wished (§ 249). Arkansas entered under this provision in 1836.
198. The question of slavery was thus set at rest for the present, though a few agitators were roused to more zealous opposition to the essence of slavery itself. In the next decade these agitators succeeded only in the conversion of a few recruits, but these recruits were the ones who took up the work at the opening of the next period and never Sectional divergence. gave it up until slavery was ended. It is plain now, however, that North and South had already drifted so far apart as to form two sections, and that, as things stood, their drift for the future could only be further apart, in spite of the feeble tie furnished by the Missouri compromise. It became evident, during the next forty years, that the wants and desires of these two sections were so divergent that it was impossible for one Government to make satisfactory laws for both. The moving cause was not removed in 1820; one of its effects was got out of the way for the time, but others were soon to take its place.
The settled area.199. The vast flood of human beings which had been pouring westward for years had now pretty well occupied the territory east of the Mississippi, while, on the west side of that stream, it still showed a disposition to hold to the river valleys. The settled area had increased from 240,000 square miles in 1790 to 633,000 square miles in 1830, with an average of 20.3 persons to the square mile. There was still a great deal of Indian territory in the Southern States of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, and in Florida, for the southern Indians were among the finest of their race; they had become semi-civilized, and were formidable antagonists to the encroaching white race. The States interested had begun preparations for their forcible removal, in public defiance of the attempts of the Federal Government to protect the Indians (1827); but the removal was not completed until 1835. In the North, Wisconsin and Michigan, with the northern halves of Illinois and Indiana, were still very thinly settled, but everything The steamboat. indicated early increase of population. The first lake steamboat, the “Walk-in-the-Water,” had appeared at Detroit in 1818, and the opening of the Erie Canal added to the number of such vessels. Lake Erie had seven in 1826; and in 1830, while the only important lake town, Detroit, was hardly yet more than a frontier fort, a daily line of steamers was running to it from Buffalo, carrying the increasing stream of emigrants to the Western territory.
The land system.200. The land system of the United States had much to do with the early development of the West. From the first settlement, the universally recognized rule had been that of absolute individual property in land, with its corollary of unrestricted competitive or “rack” rents; and this rule was accepted fully in the national land system, whose basis was reported by Jefferson, as chairman of a committee of the Confederation Congress (1785). The public lands were to be divided into hundreds of ten miles square, each containing one hundred mile-square plots. The hundred was called a “township,” and was afterward reduced to six miles square, of thirty-six mile-square plots of 640 acres each. From time to time principal meridians and east and west base lines have been run, and townships have been determined by their relations to these lines. The sections (plots) have been subdivided, but the transfer describes each parcel from the survey map, as in the case of “the south-west quarter of section 20, township 30, north, range 1 east of the third principal meridian.” The price fixed in 1790 as a minimum was $2 per acre; it has tended to decrease, and no effort has ever been made to gain a revenue from it. When the nation acquired its Western territory it secured its title to the soil, and always made it a fundamental condition of the admission of a new State that it should not tax United States lands. To compensate the new States for the freedom of unsold public lands from taxation, one township in each thirty-six was reserved to them for educational purposes; and the excellent public school systems of the Western States have been founded on this provision. The cost of obtaining a quarter section (160 acres), under the still later homestead system of granting lands to actual settlers, has come to be only about $26; the interest on this, at 6 per cent., represents an annual rent of one cent per acre, making this, says F. A. Walker, as nearly as possible the “no-rent land” of the economists.
Immigration.201. The bulk of the early westward migration was of home production; the great immigration from Europe did not begin until about 1847 (§ 236). The West as well as the East thus had its institutions fixed before being called upon to absorb an enormous foreign element.
