LETTER XVI

State Legislatures—A predilection for dividing Counties, laying out New Towns and Roads—The influence of Slavery on the habits of People who live in the neighbourhood of Slave-Keeping States—Elopements from Kentucky—Banking.

Jeffersonville, (Indiana,) March 10, 1820.

The legislatures of new States consist only of a few members. The consequence is, that public acts for the exclusive advantage of private individuals are occasionally passed through influence or intrigue; and the commendations which I have bestowed on the general government of America must not be held to apply indiscriminately to the administration of thelocalgovernments, at least in newly established {189} states. Much of the business (it is said) is privately arranged, before the questions are discussed in the house. Combinations are formed for effecting particular purposes. These are calledlog rolling; a very significant metaphor, borrowed from the practice of several farmers uniting in rolling together large timber to be burnt. A number of bills are frequently conjoined by their movers, so that a member who takes a deep interest in one must vote for all of them, to obtain the suffrage of the separate partizans. The member who deserts from the cabal might be leaving his own motion without any other supporter but himself. An enlightened gentleman told me, that he was induced to vote for the ridiculous law of this State regarding intercourse between whiteand coloured people, in consequence of its being previously conjoined with other bills.

The laying out of new counties, county towns, and lines of road, seems to be a gratifying duty to back-wood legislators. Where a county includes a considerable tract of country, it must be divided into two. Where it is not large enough to admit of bisection, the county wanted must be made up from the extremities of four or five which are contiguous. A large population is not a prerequisite: yet the convenience of the people is the pretext. A few neighbours who propose that their settlement should be made the nucleus of the new establishment, petition the Assembly for a subdivision. If this is granted, commissioners are appointed to fix the new seat of justice. An eager contest for private advantage ensues, and although the ostensible object is public convenience, the new city is perhaps placed near the outline of its jurisdiction.

You will be much surprised to hear of the avidity which prevails in this country for towns consisting of a very few log cabins. For a convenient {190} distribution of seats of justice, and for roads that are at best openings cut through the woods, with the stumps remaining, without side ditches, and without any other bridges through marshes or streams, than a few pieces of timber laid down side by side across the way. But an explanation is made, when you are told that pettifoggers by this means create situations for themselves, and a few of their constituents who are in the employment of squires, county commissioners, prosecuting attornies, supervisors of roads, and constables. With numbers the design is to increase the value of their contiguous lands at the public expense, instead of improving them by their own industry. By such means, they frequently succeed in selling at an advanceof fifty, or even a hundred per cent, per annum; and remove to more recent settlements, where they are able to purchase a larger extent of land, and where they can continue their favourite trade of making counties, towns, and roads.

Towns are laid out by persons who sell lots of about a fourth or a fifth part of an acre: these sometimes sell at from a hundred to three hundred dollars, even in situations where scarcely a single spot of the neighbouring woods is cleared. After a town has made some progress in point of improvement and population, lots usually rise in price, from three hundred to a thousand dollars; and, in the larger towns, to a much higher value. At present the mania of purchasing town lots is rather declining. Holders are unwilling to see the prices reduced. They continue to talk of former rates, and to keep them up; on exchanging one lot for two, say, that for the better one, one thousand dollars is paid in two lots worth five hundred each. Their conduct very much resembles that of a person who said, that he sold a dog at forty guineas, and explained the transaction by stating, {191} “that he was paid in two dogs, each worth half that sum.” I lately saw a town lot sold for state or county taxes, at a fourth part of the price paid for it two years ago. The rents of the worst kind of houses amount to upwards of fifty per cent, per annum, on the price of erection. A miserable cabin, that could scarcely be let at all in your country, or would not rent at £1 10s. a-year, gives here as much per month. The people are of consequence closely crowded together; several families frequently inhabiting a house of one apartment, without any inner door, so that when the street door is open, passengers may see the inmates at table, and the other particulars of the house. The bedsare ranged round the walls, like so many looms in a weaver’s work-shop. In various instances I have seen families living in temporary huts, built of small pieces of decayed timber collected in the woods, laid upon one another in the manner in which sawyers erect piles of timber to be dried. The roofs were covered with bark, and the interstices of the walls left open, so that at a distance I could count the persons within, as if they had been birds in a cage. Near to this place a family lately lived, for several weeks, under an old waggon that was turned upside down. In towns along the banks of the Ohio, a class of people are to be seen, who depend on traffic with travellers, and with the scanty population in the rear of them. Without extravagant profits on the trifling capital employed, they could not subsist. Many of them seem to be immoral, dissipated, and without rural or domestic industry. Few of their lots are cultivated as gardens; and the spinning-wheel, (so far as I have observed,) is not to be seen in their houses.

The evils of slave-keeping are not confined to the parts of the country where involuntary labour {192} exists, but the neighbourhood is infected. Certain kinds of labour are despised as being the work of slaves. Shoe-blacking, and, in some instances, family manufactures, are of this class of labours; and it is thus, that in some of the small towns on thenorth sideof the Ohio, the mechanic and the labourer are to be seen drawing water at the wells; their wives and daughters not condescending to services that are looked upon to be opprobrious. It was for the same reason, that on one occasion, some paupers in a poor’s house at Cincinnati refused to carry water for their own use.

Elopements from Kentucky into Indiana are frequent.Since my arrival in this very town, I have witnessed two examples. I do not now allude to slave-keepers losing their negroes, but their white daughters, who escape to get married. In a former letter I mentioned the watchfulness of parents over young ladies in Kentucky, and would only add, that there, as elsewhere, restraint does not seem to be conducive to contentment. Those who are acquainted with the state of society in Turkey, are perhaps the most able to give a decided opinion on this very interesting subject.

Of upwards of a hundred banks that lately figured in Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee, the money of two is now only received in the land-office, in payment for public lands. Many have perished, and the remainder are struggling for existence. Still giving for theirrags“bills asgood as their own;” but, except two, none pay in specie, or bills of the United States Bank. Discount varies from thirty to one hundred per cent.

The recent history of banking in these western States, is probably unrivalled. Such a system of knavery could only be developed in a country where avarice and credulity are prominent features {193} of character. About four years ago, the passion for acquiring unearned gains rose to a great height; banking institutions were created in abundance. The designing amongst lawyers, doctors, tavern-keepers, farmers, grocers, shoemakers, tailors, &c. entered into the project, and subscribed for stock. Small moieties must actually have been advanced to defray the expenses of engraving, and other incidents necessary to putting their schemes in operation. To deposit much capital was out of their power; nor was it any part of their plan. Their main object was to extract it from the community. A common provision in charters, stipulated,that the property of each partner was not liable, in security, to a greater amount than the sum he had subscribed. This exempted the banks from the natural inconveniences that might be occasioned by the insolvencies and elopements of members. Money was accumulated in great abundance, as they bought property; lent on security; and became rich. But their credit was of short duration. When it was found, that a few of them could not redeem their bills, the faith of the people was shaken. A run on the paper shops commenced; and a suspension of specie payments soon became general. Had the people been at liberty to recover a composition, as in the bankrupt concerns of Britain, the evil might have, in some measure, been remedied before this time; but chartered privileges granted by legislators concerned in the fraud, prevented legal recourse. Even these could not have been sufficient protection, but for the co-operation of subsequent laws dictated by the same interest. The state of Indiana, for example, passed in 1818, what was called “the replevy law,” liberating the debtor for a year from the claim of the creditor, who refuses to accept depreciated money. This {194} law, though sufficiently injurious to creditors, could give no stability to swindling banks. It was, therefore, succeeded by an act during last session, prohibiting landed property to be sold by execution, under two-thirds of the appraised value, and that to be ascertained by five freeholders. The debtor is by the same act allowed to set apart any portion of his property he chooses, to discharge execution. Freeholders, it may be observed, are a class of men naturally adverse to depreciating their own land, by setting a low value on that of their neighbours. This disposition is the more dangerous at present, especially when lands are falling considerably in price, in consequenceof the depreciation of the money which lately stamped such a high value on property. In Kentucky, a total suspension of law process for sixty days, was followed by a “replevy law.” In the State of Ohio, enactments similar to those of Indiana were passed. Here is a combination of laws for the protection of knaves, who have swindled the people.[117]Those who have either bought property on credit, or borrowed money, whileragspassed at a high price, have got debts of a great amount to pay, while property can no longer be sold at former prices. Debtors of this description have united with bankers, in getting the infamous laws passed just noticed. While the property law was pending in the Assembly of Indiana, debtors were in full activity sending forward petitions in favour of the impolicy, and persuading the ignorant of the propriety of the measure. In the small town of Jeffersonville, two petitions were made. These unnatural expedients, however, cannot long serve the purpose intended. Land continues to fall. The debtor may, for a short time, be kept out of jail, and the peculator from being stripped of his ill-gotten gains; but the public is {195} receiving dearly bought instructions, and must set a watch over future elections.

Although the relations of debtor and creditor are equal in the amount of property involved in their transactions; and although the obligations imposed by contracts naturally render creditors the more powerful class in civilizedsociety, the recent proceedings of legislatures in this western country, would lead us to believe, that a majority in numbers or artifice, or perhaps in both, stands on the debtor side of the ledger. Republicans are not to be whipped like slaves, nor openly and directly taxed to such extent as Europeans are, but they may be deluded. Men of their own electing have practised upon them with success, and the emoluments to be gained in this way, are apparently the great stimulus that prompts men to intrude themselves into State governments. No rational mind can discover profit enough in two dollars per day; or patriotism enough in cheating their constituents; or popularity enough in eloquence that few can hear, and none can ever see in print, to collect talent and integrity in council.

At first sight, it would appear to be a paradox, that any individual State can be allowed to grant charters to banks, or to frame laws that protect pecuniary fraud, while a section of the constitution of the United States prohibits such procedure by the following words:—“No state shall coin money; emit bills of credit; make any thing but gold and silver coin a tender in paying of debts; pass any ex post facto law; or law impairing the obligation of contracts.” The western States cannot avoid being brought to issue with the above very distinct clauses, as every charter granted by them, is an act tolerating the substitution of paper, instead of gold and silver; and their replevy laws, and property {196} laws, are in reality, making paper a legal tender. Besides, several establishments are chartered under the appellations of State Banks; and that in Kentucky, for example, consists partly of stock owned by the State. The conduct of Congress is not marked by any known act of partiality towards the makers of unconstitutional money. On the contrary, the collectors of the United States’ revenue are not allowed to accept of depreciatedbills. Their receiving the money of inferior banks while at par, though apparently countenancing them, has been, in effect, the best means hitherto adopted for effecting their ruin. The receivers of revenue lodge the money received in the United States’ Bank, whose officers almost immediately present the money to the Banks that issued it, and demand payment in specie, or bills of the United States’ Bank. It has been in this way that many of the paper manufacturers were obliged to suspend specie payments; and it was partly on account of this mode of operating on local banks, that several State Assemblies voted an enormous tax to be levied on the branches of the United States’ Bank situated in the respective States.—That tax was mentioned in a former letter, with a notice that the supreme court had given judgment in favour of the National Bank; and the reasonings on which the decision was founded, were published in a most luminous style. The supreme court being the arbitrator in all questions rising out of the constitution, Congress have the power of making the United States a party in defending against encroachments in the prerogative of the general government. In the present banking concern, they prudently decline interference, seeing that experience will soon open the eyes of a people who can, at any time, counteract the {197} abuse by excluding bankers, and their adherents, from State legislatures. On this occasion, there can be no necessity for forcing the interests of the people down their throats, nor can there be any danger that this infraction of the constitution will be perpetuated. That the present disorders in banking are not extended over the whole of the United States is manifested by the tables of exchange periodically published at New York. These show that the depressions of money are chiefly confined to the western country, where the substantial capitalis small, and where, (there is reason to believe,) a large proportion of the people are less acute.

The error committed in the Western States, is not in consequence of any defect exclusively inherent in the democratic system of government; as the fraud is neither matured nor confirmed in the older States, and as England suffers under an evil of the same kind, and apparently in a more dangerous form. Her restriction act of 1797, is not understood to be opposed by any recognized constitutional principle. It emanated from the highest authority in the land. It is not yet repealed, and twenty-four bank-directors still have it in their power to regulate themoneyvalue of all the property in the empire.[118]

Amidst all the pecuniary inconveniences of this country, the personal liberty of men is not in danger of being assailed by the hand of constituted authority. May the time soon come, when the people shall have understanding enough to take care of their property.

FOOTNOTES:[117]This practically stopped execution sales, as the freeholders appraised property so high that no bidder would offer two-thirds of the appraised value. Flint regards the replevin laws as a protection to knaves; as a matter of fact, they were a protection to the majority of the people of the Western States, who had bought their lands on credit, and in the depreciated state of paper money found themselves helpless to pay, and their land about to be sold at a great sacrifice. See McMaster,History of the United States, iv, pp. 506-510.—Ed.[118]Essay on the Justice and Expediency of Reducing the Interest of the National Debt. By Mr. J. R. McCulloch. Edinburgh, 1816.—Flint.

[117]This practically stopped execution sales, as the freeholders appraised property so high that no bidder would offer two-thirds of the appraised value. Flint regards the replevin laws as a protection to knaves; as a matter of fact, they were a protection to the majority of the people of the Western States, who had bought their lands on credit, and in the depreciated state of paper money found themselves helpless to pay, and their land about to be sold at a great sacrifice. See McMaster,History of the United States, iv, pp. 506-510.—Ed.

[118]Essay on the Justice and Expediency of Reducing the Interest of the National Debt. By Mr. J. R. McCulloch. Edinburgh, 1816.—Flint.

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