America at the Fair Page 3

  2. FROM CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS TO CHICAGO

  The year 1893 marked 401 years since Christopher Columbus first landed in the New World. He was born in the Italian port city of Genoa and like many Genoese before him, Columbus went to sea as a boy. In 1476 his ship was on its way to England when French pirates attacked. Columbus escaped by jumping overboard and swimming six miles to the Portuguese coast. He made his way to Lisbon and settled there among the large Genoese community. Three years later he married the daughter of a Portuguese nobleman, who served as governor of Porto Santo in the Madeira islands. Columbus settled his wife in Madeira and continued his work on the seas.

  Columbus lived during the age of great discoveries. In 1487, King John II of Portugal sent the explorer Bartolomeu Dias on an expedition down the west coast of Africa to find a sea route to Asia. Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope, returning home after 17 months with the great news that an eastern passage to Asia was open. However, Columbus was convinced he could find a shorter route to Asia by sailing west. He tried to interest the Portuguese court in his idea but was turned down. Bitterly disappointed, Columbus moved to Spain and took his plan to King Ferdinand V and Queen Isabella I. The Spanish lagged well behind their Portuguese rivals in discoveries. After years of delay the Spanish court, embroiled in the Great Inquisition, finally agreed to finance Columbus’s journey in search of a westward passage to Asia. Leaving the port of Palos de la Frontera on August 3, 1492, Columbus set sail on his historic voyage to the New World, with 100 men and provisions for a year on the Santa Maria, along with the smaller ships the Pinta and the Niña.

  The small flotilla sailed southwest to the Canary Islands where it stopped for repairs and fresh supplies. On September 6, Columbus and his crew departed the charted world, sailing west at 150 miles a day into parts unknown. On the morning of October 12 they sighted land and came ashore on an island they called San Salvador. The islanders greeted Columbus and, believing that he had reached Asia, he called them Indians. Columbus had actually arrived in the Caribbean Islands, known to this day as the West Indies. Columbus continued further west to discover the larger islands of Cuba and Hispaniola. In January 1493 he turned his ships eastward and on March 15 reached Palos de la Frontera, Spain, eight months after leaving the same port.

  Columbus returned to the New World three times, leaving Spanish settlements on some 20 Caribbean islands. The Spanish grew sugarcane, but wanted gold and silver. By 1530 they had conquered Mexico and Peru, enriching themselves and their king. In 1565, the Spanish established a settlement at St. Augustine, Florida, their first on the North American mainland.

  The English arrived later in North America. In 1607—more than a century after Columbus’s first western voyage—the Virginia Company of London sponsored the settlement of 104 British men and boys at Jamestown, Virginia. Thirteen years later, settlers aboard the Mayflower reached the coast of Massachusetts and came ashore at a place they called Plymouth. Between 1620 and 1640, some 21,000 English men, women, and children arrived in Massachusetts to establish a permanent presence in the New World. Further south, Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania were also settled by the English. The French explored the north of the vast continent. In 1609, the Dutch came to the Hudson River Valley with an interest in the fur trade. They called their settlement New Netherlands but it lasted only to the Second Anglo-Dutch war of 1664. Their New Amsterdam became New York and Fort Orange was renamed Albany.

  In this advertisement, Christopher Columbus and his crew discover that the Empire harvester arrived in the New World before them. John F. Seiberling founded his farm machinery company in 1864 in Akron, Ohio. Built along the Ohio-Erie Canal, Akron was also home to the Buckeye Mower and Reaper Company. The Empire and Buckeye companies failed early in the 20th century as the International Harvester Corporation became dominant. Several rubber companies also had their start in Akron.

  “The Last of His Race.” This lone American buffalo looks forlorn as vast fields of grain, farmers, and machines now occupy the Great Plains. The caption reads: “What was only a few years ago the grazing ground of the buffalo is now the home of the McCormick.” This illustration is from an 1888 brochure by the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company of Chicago. In that year McCormick, one of hundreds of farm implement companies, sold 76,534 harvesters, binders, knotters, reapers, mowers, and other machines. McCormick claimed that a single harvester with two men and two horses, working from sunrise to sunset, could cut and bundle a 20-acre field.

  By the start of the Revolutionary War there were 13 colonies, primarily settled by the English and divided into four distinct cultures. Those who settled in the Northeast were largely Puritans who came in family groups from the southeastern counties of the home country. They were drawn from the broad middle of English society, with few aristocrats among them. In occupation and family structure, the New Englanders closely resembled the English they left behind. Fully two-thirds were artisans or farmers before they left England. In Massachusetts they established family farms, plied their crafts, or took to the sea. They traded farm products, wood, and dried cod mainly with the British sugar islands of Barbados and Jamaica and brought back sugar and molasses and built a thriving trade in rum.

  Those who settled in Virginia came largely from the south and west of England. The ladies and gentlemen of the first rank owned most of the land and assumed positions of authority in the colony. Breeding, property, status, and appearances counted for much in colonial Virginia. Fully three-quarters of the early Virginia settlers were indentured servants, brought from England to work the lands of their superiors. There were many more men than women, their skill level was low, and most were illiterate. It took five or more years for these white English-born servants to repay their passage and complete their indentures. After that time, they were awarded their freedom together with small parcels of land. The hierarchical system of Virginia was accentuated with the importation of African slaves and the evolution of the plantation economy.

  A third cultural style was established with the migration of English Quakers starting in 1675, largely from the North Midlands of England and Wales. These immigrants settled in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. The Quakers hoped to establish a society based on brotherly love, passivity, and simplicity of dress and manners. They were actively evangelical and welcomed converts from other nations. German, Swedish, Dutch, Finnish, and Danish Quakers came to settle and, in time, diluted the Englishness of the Mid-Atlantic colonies (Fischer 1989).

  The fourth cultural folkway in the British American colonies arose from the immigration of poor people from the north of England, the west of Scotland, and the north of Ireland. Mostly unskilled laborers, they left the British Isles after 1717 with the dream of owning land in the New World. They passed through Philadelphia on their way to the lands now known as Tennessee, Kentucky, and North and South Carolina. They were solitary, taciturn, and even suspicious. Unlike the Yankees, they had little interest in education. They were not bound by the status or rank of the Virginians, or the trust and fellowship of the Quakers.

  While these small bands of British colonists were settling into their new land, larger events were unfolding in Europe and the Caribbean. The love of sugar led to increasing friction between the European powers, fighting for control of the Caribbean islands. On the North American mainland, the French claimed the whole watershed of the St. Lawrence and Mississippi Rivers, settled the towns of St. Louis and New Orleans, and proclaimed their territory as New France. In 1752, the French attempted to occupy areas of Ohio and Pennsylvania claimed by the British. Robert Dinwiddie, lieutenant governor of Virginia, sent George Washington at the head of a column of troops to reassert British control of the Ohio Valley. In 1756 war between the British and the French—known to history as the French and Indian War—was officially declared. Battles raged from the Atlantic coast to the shores of Lakes Champlain and Ontario. By 1760 the British had beaten the French and were in control of most of the eastern half of North Ameri
ca. In the Treaty of Paris signed on February 10, 1763, the French gave up claim to all of North America east of the Mississippi. The French transferred New Orleans and the lands west of the Mississippi to Spain, to compensate it for the loss of Florida, which was surrendered to the British.

  Notwithstanding their military successes, the wars against the French depleted the British treasury. To help refill its coffers, the British imposed a series of new taxes on their colonists to pay for the troops stationed on American soil. These included taxes on molasses and sugar, especially from the French sugar islands, as well as a stamp tax. The 1773 Tea Act gave the monopoly of the American tea trade to the East India Company. These restrictions on trade, along with taxation without representation, enraged the colonists, who disobeyed British laws and attacked crown officials.

  The British sent a force of 4,000 men to Boston to regain control over the colonies. On March 5, 1770, the citizens of Boston clashed with the British troops guarding the customs house. Shots were fired and five colonists fell dead. This event has gone down in history as The Boston Massacre. In 1773, fifty citizens of Boston disguised in Indian dress boarded three vessels in the harbor and, to protest the Tea Act, threw overboard 90,000 pounds of tea. The Boston Tea Party was followed in 1774 by the first meeting of the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, an act of defiance that set the stage for the Revolutionary War. On June 17, 1775, British and American forces clashed on Breed’s Hill, known to history as the battle of Bunker Hill. On July 4, 1776, the second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence. Seven hundred ships carried 30,000 British and Hessian troops, with provisions and arms, to fight George Washington’s ragtag army of 18,000 men. The Revolutionary War raged for five years and ended in 1781 with the surrender of General Cornwallis’s army at Yorktown, Virginia. With outstanding leadership and the help of the French, the new nation endured. By 1800, the population of the United States had grown to over five million, living mainly on farms and in small communities. The only American towns of any size at the start of the 19th century were New York with 61,000 residents, Philadelphia with 41,000, Baltimore with 26,000, and Boston with 25,000. By contrast, the world’s largest city at the time, London, had a population of one million. The United States expanded enormously in 1803 with the purchase from the French of 500 million acres of land west of the Mississippi River. Known as the Louisiana Purchase, this territory doubled the landmass of the new nation and American farmers crossed the Mississippi to settle the new land.

  American Agriculture

  The organization of agriculture in the British colonies of North America was much influenced by the cultural patterns established by the early settlers. Those who arrived in Plymouth in 1620 and Boston in 1630 had anxious years until they learned how to till the soil of the New World and feed themselves. They soon ventured inland to establish family farms. The New England farmers worked hard to clear their land to grow crops and raise animals. Most of what they raised was for their own needs, with relatively little left over to barter or sell at the marketplace. The men cobbled shoes and the women spun flax and wool to weave cloth for the family needs. These conditions lasted for a century and a half until the small New England farms could no longer compete with the larger farms of New York state and those further west. Early in the 19th century, thousands left their New England farms for the fertile and abundant lands opening up in the Midwest. As farming declined, many of the Yankee farm girls came to the city to seek work in the textile mills of Waltham, Lowell, and Lawrence.

  The farmers who settled New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania in the 1600s were blessed with large tracts of fertile land, ample water, and a longer growing season. Here the system of indentured labor took hold, as thousands of young people paid for their passage by selling their labor for periods of up to seven years before being free to farm for themselves. In Maryland and Virginia, the employment of indentured servants from Europe gave way to slave labor to work the fields. North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia followed the Caribbean plantation system, using slaves transported in shackles from Africa. At the time of the Revolutionary War, slaves growing tobacco and rice made up one-third of the population of the South.

  These agricultural scenes were painted by H. Dalton Jones and his younger brother Francis C. Jones. Some of the paintings depict farming “the old way.” Others show corporate farming using horse-drawn plows and harvesters and even a steam tractor to power a threshing machine. The pictures were issued by the American Cereal Company as trade cards prepared by Armstrong & Company Lithographers of Boston.

  Eli Whitney was born in 1765 into a farming family from Westborough, some 30 miles to the west of Boston. After graduating from Yale University he traveled to the South, hoping to find a teaching post. It was during a visit to a plantation that he became interested in cotton, which the South could not profitably market because of the difficulty and expense of separating the husk and black seed from the white cotton boll. In 1793, Whitney invented the cotton gin, a machine that could rapidly remove the seed from the cotton. One man, turning the lever of the gin by hand, could produce up to 50 pounds of cleaned cotton a day. Whitney’s simple invention solved the manpower problem and made America competitive with cotton from India and Egypt. To extend this advantage, the acreage for cotton expanded across the South to Texas, and plantations and the slave economy grew. With cotton, the South had its great cash crop. Eli Whitney’s invention was imitated by many others. He gave up the cotton gin, returned to New England, and gained fame as a pioneer maker of muskets using interchangeable parts.

  National production of cleaned cotton rose from a mere 3,000 bales in 1790 to one million bales in 1835 and four million bales at the start of the Civil War. Three-quarters of the cotton grown in the South was sent to the textile mills of England and France, and much of the rest went by ship from the port of Charleston to New England to supply the burgeoning American mills. Trade between the North and South continued despite profound differences on slavery. The strong anti-slavery sentiment of the North was not fully shared by the owners and workers of the textile mills, whose livelihood depended upon buying cotton and, in return, selling manufactured goods to the South (McPherson 1988). The cotton and textile industries were further boosted after 1846 with Elihu Howe’s invention of the sewing machine. Many others copied Howe’s invention, in particular Isaac Merritt Singer, who brought sewing machines into homes and factories the world over.

  The great importance of cotton to the economies of England and New England convinced the South that it could retain its slave-owning way of life and avoid armed conflict with the North. After all, Cotton was king and America’s major export. Because of this, the economy of the South failed to industrialize. Instead, the southern states depended on Europe and the Northeast for its manufactured goods as well as for banking, insurance, and shipping. By the 1850s large steam-powered gins capable of turning six bales a day—each with 400 pounds of cotton—were beginning to replace slave labor. During the Civil War, cotton production in the South fell dramatically, bringing down the Southern aristocracy, the plantation way of life, and slavery. By 1864 Southern production fell so low that Britain turned to India and Egypt for the raw material for its Lancashire mills.

  The French and Spanish introduced sugarcane to southern Louisiana with its sub-tropical climate. After the Louisiana Purchase, American farmers crossed the Mississippi to grow sugarcane. In time a plantation society evolved in Louisiana, with the wealthiest farmers owning the greatest acreage and the largest number of slaves. These sugar aristocrats helped build New Orleans and supported its fine shops, opera house, and French restaurants. By 1840 New Orleans, with over 100,000 people, was the fourth largest city in the United States, a major port, and the nation’s largest slave-trading center. The 1860 Louisiana sugar crop, at 460,000 hogsheads, was the largest ever. On January 26, 1861, Louisiana was the sixth state to join the Confederate States of America. In the spring of that year, the Federal navy b
lockaded the port of New Orleans and crippled its sugar trade and river commerce. The 1862 sugar crop fell to 87,000 hogsheads and the aristocracy lay in ruins. Louisiana sugar never fully recovered from the Civil War. Instead the tropical island of Cuba supplied most of America’s sugar needs.

  The Route to the Interior and the Opening of the Midwest

  The Appalachian Mountains impeded access from the original 13 eastern states into the interior of the expanding nation. Roads were still very poor and travel by river and lake was treacherous. In 1817, DeWitt Clinton (1769–1828), the 10-term mayor of New York City, pushed through a highly ambitious plan to build a canal from the Great Lakes to the Hudson River. Immigrants using shovels and carts were employed to dig the canal and remove over 11 million cubic yards of earth. The Erie Canal started near the village of Buffalo on Lake Erie and flowed east to the upper Hudson River, north of Albany. The canal ran 363 miles through flat wilderness. It was 40 feet wide and about four feet deep. Eighty-three locks were built along the route of the canal before it joined the Hudson River. The river then carried the traffic south to New York.

  The canal was completed in 1825 and the towns of Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Utica, Schenectady, and Troy grew rapidly along it and the Hudson. Grains and other farm products from the Midwest were carried by barge down the canal to New York, which became the nation’s busiest port, far eclipsing its rivals Boston and Philadelphia. The population of New York in 1800 was 60,000, but 60 years later it had grown to 800,000 residents.