The spring of 1815 brought peace to Michigan Territory. But peace spelled destitution. No longer supplied by the English, bands of hungry Indians swooped down on farmhouses of French settlers, their former friends, burning fences, stealing fruit from orchards, and killing cattle. At the same time the homeless and starving settlers of River Raisin hovered around Detroit, expecting the territorial officials to turn the stones in the streets into bread. Governor Cass distributed what little food remained in the territory, but starvation was so widespread that he had to petition the Federal Government for help. At President Madison’s request Congress voted the territory a special appropriation.
Lewis Cass, who had succeeded William Hull in 1813, worked diligently to alleviate the general suffering as quickly as possible. Though born and schooled in comfort at Exeter, New Hampshire, and though young in years–he was only thirty-two–he was a veteran in his knowledge of pioneer vicissitudes. When he was seventeen years old he journeyed on foot over the Allegheny Mountains to seek his fortune in the Great Lakes Frontier.
In Marietta, Ohio, he studied law and at the age of twenty was admitted to the bar. Four years later he was elected to the legislature of Ohio, where he originated a bill that inaugurated the movement that led to the defeat of Burr’s conspiracy. In 1807 President Jefferson appointed him United States marshal of Ohio, a post which he held until the outbreak of the War of 1812. In appreciation of his brilliant record in that conflict, President Madison promoted him to civil governor of Michigan Territory.
With the assistance of the territorial secretary, William Woodbridge, a scholarly and retiring gentleman who, like Cass, had migrated to Ohio from New England, the governor undertook the great task of converting the lackadaisical French settlements to active American communities. He must make them prosperous and progressive in peace and able to defend themselves in case the British attacked them. He must advertise the strategic value and the physical charms of the territory; he must attract the tide of immigration until it carried “the schoolhouse and the newspaper into the farthest corner of the land, where the Jesuit had, a century before, planted his cross and sang his ave.”
In May, 1815, the War Department authorized Cass to distribute $1,500 among the poor of the territory. This was indeed a paltry sum; but at the end of the war the government was in no financial position to “do more than dribble out its dollars.” The money in the form of flour brought temporary relief to the settlers of River Raisin; it hardly ameliorated the condition of the territory.
No occasional alms could bring prosperity to settlers who insisted on using primitive methods of farming. Those living in and around Detroit were better off and were content with their big orchards; but the poorer ones, relieved for the present from want, made no effort to clear the unbroken forest that hemmed them in to the riverbanks. Cass felt that American aggressiveness alone could cure Gallic lethargy.
Good old Yankee stock–from which he himself had sprung–that was the tonic Michigan needed to grow and prosper! He was amazed to discover that the French settlers were ignorant of the spinning wheel and the loom, that they drew their manure over the ice in the winter in order to dump it into the lake in the spring, that they threw away their sheep wool, and that they looked on soap-making as an experiment from which few cared to profit.
The governor favored direct measures to change this situation, but he soon realized that indirect methods would be more efficacious. If he could offer Eastern farmers land for sale in unlimited quantity, if he could convince them of its value, would they not flock to the territory in large numbers? Would not the Americanization of Michigan then be assured? He bent all his efforts to obtaining the answers to these questions.
At the beginning of the war Congress had passed an act in which it offered volunteers two million acres of land in Michigan. To attract settlers to the territory as quickly as possible, Cass requested Edward Tiffin, Surveyor General of the United States, to have it platted. The surveyors duly appeared in early winter and began to work in the southeastern part of the territory, between the Mau-mee and the Raisin rivers. Cass had communicated with the Indians and had obtained from them a promise that the surveyors would not be molested. But the chain men and axmen soon returned home with a gloomy tale of the territory.
Either wet weather or hardships or fatigue or dread of attack had so perverted their judgment that they described the interior of Michigan to Tiffin as an endless swamp unworthy of their efforts. They may have been influenced by the unfavorable report which Monroe had made for President Jefferson before the Northwest Territory was organized. After reconnoitering in scattered sections of the territory, Monroe had written Jefferson that most of it was “miserably poor, especially that near the Lakes Michigan and Erie… The district, therefore, within which these fall will never contain a sufficient number of inhabitants to entitle them to membership in the confederacy.”
Tiffin swallowed the surveyors’ report wholesale and spewed it to Josiah Meigs, Superintendent of the General Land Office. At about the same time Tiffin declared in his official report to the Federal Government that the two million acres reserved for the volunteers “will not contain anything like one hundred part of that quantity or is worth the expense of surveying it.”
He described Michigan as a territory of swamps and lakes with intermediate spaces of sandhills on which grew no vegetation save very small scrubby oaks. Meigs hastened to assure President Madison that scarcely one acre in a thousand was fit for cultivation. The president believed him and advised Congress in February 1816 that the quota of bounty lands assigned to Michigan should be transferred to Illinois and Missouri.
Cass read a copy of the official report with undisguised anger. His pen raced across the paper in a protest to Meigs: “The quality of the land in this Territory has been grossly misrepresented.” He added that Tiffin’s description was based on incorrect information; but the newspapers emphasized the doings of Congress and naturally accepted its version of the controversy. So did the geographer Jedediah Morse, who in his widely used Traveller’s Guide represented the sandhills of Michigan as “extending into the interior as far as the dividing ridge… some times crowned with a few stunted trees, and a scanty vegetation, but generally bare, and thrown by the wind into a thousand fantastic shapes.”
Cass lost a battle but he was determined to win the war. He began to bombard Meigs with long letters, reminding him that the surveyors had come to Michigan in the wettest season the territory had ever known and that they had run the line along a dividing ridge be- tween waters running east and waters running west. No wonder they got their feet wet! Furthermore, two of the surveyors had by no means agreed with the others in disparaging the territory; on the contrary, they had praised it in glowing terms!
He continued this verbal siege for several months while he instructed Meigs on the proper method of conducting the surveys, boasted that he had many potential land buyers, and predicted that the territory would be quickly settled. At last Meigs surrendered. In the summer of 1816 he wrote Cass that he had instructed Tiffin to resume the surveys and that, as soon as they were completed, he would issue in Detroit a proclamation that the Michigan lands were open for sale. By the end of September Tiffin’s crew was at work in the Michigan woods.
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