Movement in the Early Republic

Kentucky had about 74,000 people at the first census in 1790 and about 221,000 in 1800; Tennessee passed 100,000 by 1800. Almost all of them had crossed the Appalachians since the Revolution, onto land that Shawnee, Cherokee, Miami and other nations still lived on and hunted. Every one of those moves raised a question that the new federal government had to answer: who controlled the West, the settlers, the Indian nations, the states, Britain and Spain, or the United States? Migration also carried slavery west and south at the same moment that northern states were ending it, so the movement of people was reshaping the map of slavery too.

Why Americans poured west, and why it meant conflict

The Proclamation of 1763 (Topic 3.2) had tried to hold settlers east of the mountains. Independence removed that barrier, and the Treaty of Paris (1783) gave the United States a claim to everything east of the Mississippi between British Canada and Spanish Florida. No Indian nation signed that treaty or accepted that its land had been transferred.

Several forces pushed and pulled people west:

• Population growth. The American population was doubling roughly every 25 years, and farm families in the East needed land for their children.
• Land policy and speculation. Congress paid veterans with land warrants and sold western land to pay its debts under the Land Ordinance of 1785 and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 (Topic 3.7). Companies of speculators founded Marietta (1788) and Cincinnati (1788) on the Ohio River.
• Immigration. Scots-Irish and German newcomers kept arriving after the war, and many headed straight for the backcountry, as their parents had in the colonial period.
• Forced migration. Planters moving to Kentucky and Tennessee brought enslaved people with them, so a large share of westward "migrants" had no choice in the move.

Kentucky became a state in 1792 and Tennessee in 1796, and Ohio followed in 1803. Each step depended on taking land from Native nations, which is why the 1780s and 1790s on the frontier were years of almost constant war.

How Indian nations used alliances to defend their land

American Indian nations were not a single bloc, and they did not simply fight or give up. They kept judging which partner (Britain, Spain, the United States, or one another) could best help them hold their land, and they switched when the balance changed.

North of the Ohio River. After 1783 the United States treated the Indian nations of the Ohio country as defeated enemies who had lost their land along with Britain, and forced land cessions at Fort Stanwix (1784) and Fort McIntosh (1785) from a few chiefs. The nations answered by uniting. The Western Confederacy (Shawnee, Miami, Delaware, Wyandot, Ottawa, Potawatomi, Ojibwe, Kickapoo and others) told Congress in 1786 that land could be ceded only by all the nations acting together, and they came to insist on the Ohio River as the boundary. When the United States sent armies, the confederacy, led by the Miami war chief Little Turtle and the Shawnee leader Blue Jacket, beat Josiah Harmar's force in 1790 and then destroyed Arthur St. Clair's army on the Wabash on November 4, 1791, killing more than 600 soldiers, the worst defeat an American army ever suffered against Native forces.

The British connection. Britain made the war possible for the confederacy. Despite the 1783 treaty, British troops stayed in forts on American soil at Detroit, Niagara and Michilimackinac, citing American failures to pay prewar debts owed to British merchants and to compensate Loyalists. Traders from Detroit supplied the confederacy with guns, powder and goods. In 1794 the governor of Canada told an Indian council that war between Britain and the United States was likely, and British troops built Fort Miamis on the Maumee River, inside U.S. territory. To Americans, every settler killed in the Northwest looked like the work of British agents, and western anger at Britain added to the crisis over ship seizures that Jay's Treaty tried to settle (Topic 3.10).

How the alliance broke. Congress rebuilt the army as the Legion of the United States under Anthony Wayne, who drilled it for two years. On August 20, 1794, at Fallen Timbers near present-day Toledo, Wayne's troops routed the confederacy. The retreating warriors ran to Fort Miamis, and the British commander shut the gates on them, refusing to start a war with the United States. That closed door taught the confederacy that British support stopped where British interests did. In Jay's Treaty (1794) Britain agreed to leave the Northwest forts by 1796. Without British backing, the confederacy signed the Treaty of Greenville on August 3, 1795, ceding most of present-day Ohio for $20,000 in goods and an annuity of $9,500 a year. The treaty did recognize that Native nations owned the land beyond the line until they chose to sell, which made it a basis for later Indian claims and a target of later American pressure.

In the South and among the Iroquois. The same strategy of shifting partners appears elsewhere. The Creek leader Alexander McGillivray signed a treaty with Spain at Pensacola in 1784 to get arms against Georgia, then signed the Treaty of New York with the Washington administration in 1790 when Spanish help looked less reliable. Chickamauga Cherokee fought settlers in Tennessee until 1794. The Six Nations of the Iroquois, split by the Revolution, saw some members move to Canada under Joseph Brant while the Senecas and others in New York stayed out of the Ohio war and in November 1794 signed the Treaty of Canandaigua, in which the United States recognized their lands in New York.

Frontier cultures and the tensions they fed

The backcountry cultures that formed in the colonial period (Topic 2.3) grew as settlers spread west: Scots-Irish and German farm families, evangelical Baptist and Methodist preaching, a habit of armed self-reliance, and resentment of coastal elites who made laws far away. These settlers had already risen against eastern governments in the colonial era, in Bacon's Rebellion (1676), the Paxton Boys' march (1764) and the Carolina Regulators (1760s-1771).

The sharpest clash in the 1790s was the Whiskey Rebellion. Hamilton's financial program included a 1791 federal excise tax on distilled spirits. In western Pennsylvania, farmers turned grain into whiskey because a horse could carry far more value over the mountains as whiskey than as bulk grain, and whiskey served as money in a region short of cash. The tax hit them hard: it had to be paid in cash, large eastern distillers could pay a flat yearly fee that lowered their rate, and accused violators were tried in federal court in Philadelphia, hundreds of miles away. Farmers tarred and feathered collectors, and in July 1794 an armed crowd attacked and burned the home of the regional tax inspector, John Neville. Washington's proclamation of August 7, 1794, called the resistance "treason" and ordered the insurgents to disperse. He then raised about 13,000 militiamen from four states and rode with them himself. The rebellion collapsed without a battle; two men were convicted of treason, and Washington pardoned both.

The response showed that the new government, unlike the Confederation during Shays' Rebellion (Topic 3.7), could enforce federal law in the interior. It also pushed many westerners toward Jefferson's Democratic-Republicans, who called the tax and the army an attack on liberty. Westerners had other grievances against the East: until Pinckney's Treaty (1795) Spain controlled New Orleans and could close the Mississippi to their crops, and some Kentucky leaders, including James Wilkinson, secretly negotiated with Spain about separating the West from the Union.

Migration also fed ethnic tension. Federalists distrusted the Irish and French immigrants who voted for the Democratic-Republicans, and in 1798 they raised the residency requirement for naturalization to 14 years and passed the Alien Acts (Topic 3.10).

Slavery moves west and the regions divide

The same years saw slavery spread into the Deep South and the new West while it declined in the North. That divergence created distinct regional attitudes toward slavery.

In the North, gradual abolition. Revolutionary ideas about natural rights, Quaker and evangelical antislavery, and the small role of slavery in northern economies made emancipation possible there. Vermont's 1777 constitution barred adult slavery. Pennsylvania's Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery (1780) freed no one who was already enslaved; it declared that children born to enslaved mothers after the law passed would be servants until age 28 and then free. Massachusetts courts effectively ended slavery in the Quock Walker cases (1781-1783). Connecticut and Rhode Island passed gradual laws in 1784 and New York in 1799. "Gradual" meant slow: tens of thousands of people were still enslaved in the North in 1800, and New York's last enslaved people were not freed until 1827. The Northwest Ordinance's ban on slavery north of the Ohio extended this pattern west. Antislavery groups such as the Pennsylvania Abolition Society and the New York Manumission Society (1785) went to court for free Black people and in 1790 petitioned Congress, with Franklin's signature, to act against slavery; the House answered that it had no power to interfere with slavery inside the states.

In the upper South, doubt without abolition. Virginia's 1782 law allowed owners to free enslaved people privately, and the state's free Black population grew from fewer than 3,000 when the law passed to about 12,800 at the 1790 census and about 20,000 in 1800. Jefferson wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia that slavery corrupted masters and endangered the republic, yet he freed almost none of the people he held. Upper South leaders often wished slavery would end someday but would not abolish it.

In the lower South and the West, expansion. South Carolina and Georgia insisted on protecting the Atlantic slave trade until 1808 (Topic 3.8). Kentucky's 1792 constitution protected slavery, and Kentucky's enslaved population rose from about 12,000 in 1790 to about 40,000 in 1800. When Congress organized the Mississippi Territory in 1798, it rejected a proposal to ban slavery there. Eli Whitney's cotton gin (1793) made short-staple cotton profitable inland, and American cotton exports climbed from under 200,000 pounds in 1790 to nearly 18 million pounds in 1800, the start of a boom that Period 4 covers.

White southerners' fears grew with events in the Caribbean and at home. The 1791 revolution of enslaved people in Saint-Domingue (Haiti) sent refugee planters to American ports with stories of rebellion. In 1800 an enslaved blacksmith named Gabriel organized a plan to seize Richmond, Virginia, and force an end to slavery; it was betrayed and stopped by a storm, and Gabriel and 25 others were hanged. Virginia's response was to tighten control, not to loosen slavery, and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 had already committed the federal government to returning escapees across state lines.

Worked examples

Where students lose points

On the exam

The skill here is making connections (5.A): questions ask what pattern links frontier resistance movements, Indian confederacies, or regional views of slavery across periods, so be ready to connect the 1790s backward to Period 2 and forward to Tecumseh, the cotton boom and the sectional crisis. A treaty, proclamation or law from this topic can serve as a short-answer source.