Great Salt

Congregationalists, and Presbyterians. They sent a num cer of families into the field, and their efforts to raise money for the work resulted in a general diffusion of interest in the Oregon territory. The missionaries encountered an active rivalry from the French Catholic priests who came from Canada and acknowledged English authority. The rivalry of the Protestant and Catholic missions developed into one of American and English, and the former appealed to the United States government to assert its claims, occupy the territory, and encourage settlement by giving stable land titles. Their cause found many champions in Congress, particularly Senator Linn of Missouri, who was familiar with the situation through the reports of the fur traders of the Missouri. Congress often discussed the matter between 1837 and 1843, and thousands of government documents carried accounts of the fertility of the soil throughout the country. The result of this religious and political agitation was that in 1842, when a government Indian agent went overland to Oregon, he was joined by a hundred and fifty settlers, and the next spring, from Arkansas, Illinois, and other states there came groups of settlers with their wagons displaying signs “For Oregon." Over a thousand pioneers passed over the mountains in 1843, and actual settlement was begun.

The vast interior valley of the Great Salt Lake also owed Lake valley. its opening to religious impulse. Joseph Smith, a magnetic, visionary young man of a family which had followed a usual course of New England migration from Connecticut to Vermont and thence to New York, about 1830 proclaimed himself the prophet of a new faith, and published the Book of Mormon as an exposition of his beliefs. An important phase of this new religion was its insistence on the communal life. There was at this time a widespread interest in communism, both in America and in Europe. Religious sects like the American Shakers and the German Rappists founded such settlements, the most notable being that at New Harmony

on the Wabash under the direction of Robert Dale Owen. Associations to apply the doctrines of the French philosopher Fourier attempted experiments all the way from Massachusetts to Wisconsin and Iowa. Of all these efforts that of the Mormons alone proved to have the elements of permanence and growth. Converts were numerous from among Smith's rural neighbors in central New York and also among the foreign immigrants. The Mormons were unpopular in the districts in which they settled. Persecution

drove them from New York to Ohio, from Ohio to Missouri, and then to Illinois. Here they prospered for a time, but opposition to them was increased when Smith and other leaders adopted the practice of polygamy. After the death of Smith at the hands of a mob in 1844, they .despaired of living a peaceful life amid a population of alien religion, and decided, under their new leader, Brigham Young, to seek peace in the wilderness. In 1847 a host of men, women, and children, with wagons and cattle, started westward across the plains, and undertook a pilgrimage which demanded all their faith. They halted near the Great Salt Lake, in a territory which at that time belonged to Mexico, but which seemed so remote from all settlement and government that they hoped to work out their whole religious and social polity without interference for years to come. Through the fifties their missionaries practically acted as immigration agents in drawing converts from the East and from Europe.

The most attractive of all the portions of the Far West, California. but the least accessible from the Atlantic coast, was California, and there Spanish settlement, moving north from Mexico, had done much to establish a civilization and a language alien to that of the United States. Still the hold of Mexico was regarded as but feeble. The infant republic of Texas aspired to annex it, and, with ports on both oceans, to control the transcontinental trade. In the United States there was great fear that England might secure it, in

Historical accounts. Transportation and Commerce.

Immigration.

Know-Nothingism.

Occupation

of the West.

.

exchange for the heavy debts due to her by Mexico. Webster considered the harbor of San Francisco twenty times as valuable as the whole Texan territory. Actual settlement lagged, owing to distance and the difficulty of transportation; but many of the American whaling vessels which frequented the Pacific stopped at the California ports for supplies; a few Americans settled in the country to trade with them; and some of those who came overland to Oregon continued down the coast in search of a more genial climate. All together by 1845 several hundred Americans were residing in California, and there was a general disposition to regard it as a future field for American settlement.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

Adams, C. F., Origin and Problems of Railroads, 36–79. Bishop, J. L., American Manufactures, II, 342-424. Coman, K., Industrial History of the United States, ch. VII. Homans, I. S., Jr., Foreign Commerce of the United States (1857). Mayer, E., Origin of the Pacific Railroads (Publications of Minn. Hist. Soc., vol. VI). Rhodes, J. F., United States, III, ch. I. Semple, E. C., American History and its Geographic Conditions, 246-273, 337-390. Smith, T. C., Parties and Slavery, 1-109. Spears, J. R., American Merchant Marine, chs. IX, XI-XV.

Bromwell, W. J., History of Immigration (with statistics). Byrne, S., Irish Emigration to the United States. Faust, The German Element in the United States, chs. 15, 16. Sartorius, A., Baron von Walterhausen, Die Zukunft des Deutschthums in der Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika. Smith, R. M., Emigration and Immigration, chs. III-VIII.

Lee, J. H., The Origin and Progress of the American Party. Schmeckebier, L. F., History of the Know-Nothing Party in Maryland (Johns Hopkins Historical Studies, XVII, nos. 4, 5). Seisca, L. D., Political Nativism in the State of New York (Columbia Univ. Studies in Hist., vol. XIII, no. 2). Stickney, C., Know-Nothingism in Rhode Island (Brown University Historical Seminary, Papers).

Bancroft, H. H., Oregon. Coman, K., Economic Beginnings of the Far West. Garrison, Westward Extension, 3-43. Linn, W. A., Story of the Mormons. Royce, J., California, ch. III.

CHAPTER XVIII

INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL RENAISSANCE

activity.

THE intellectual activity of the period 1830 to 1860 was as Intellectual remarkable as the economic, and was inseparably inter- Newspapers. woven with it. The development of a real and widespread democracy demanded an adaptation of the newspaper to the new circumstances, but without the progress of transportation facilities this would have been almost impossible. Every improvement in communication meant the more rapid and more complete diffusion of news, and finally the invention of the electric telegraph, first used in 1844, enabled the voters, from one end of the country to the other, to read the same news at the same time and to vote with an approximately equal knowledge of each public question. The greater ease in transmitting news decreased the importance of the Washington newspapers, for the metropolitan dailies began to keep correspondents in the capital, with whom they could communicate constantly. In 1857 New York had so far succeeded to the position of news center, that the practice of having an officially recognized government organ at Washington was brought to an end. The new city papers were more independent than the Washington presses had been, which were dependent on government printing for their profits. The New York Sun led the way in endeavoring to support itself by selling its copies cheaply, amusing its readers, and so increasing its circulation. The Herald, under the editorship of the astute James Gordon Bennett, quickly adopted the new practice, and the Tribune, edited by Horace Greeley, and many others followed. In the place of the old advertising sheet with a few antiquated letters and verbose

Movement of thought.

Foreign influences.

editorials written by an editor looking for some petty office as a reward of his party faithfulness, came a paper with news columns most prominent, often with sensational headings and "faked" stories, and with a page of short, crisp editorials written by men whose business and social prestige was too great to allow them to accept ordinary government appointments. Unlike the editors of to-day, most of those at this period owned their papers and were therefore their own masters, and they exerted a greater personal influence than either their predecessors or their successors.

The press was an instrument necessary to the existence of democracy at the time, like the party organization and the spoils system. Other intellectual movements were in progress which were to do much to determine the direction in which the ruling democracy should move. American thinkers and writers were in intellectual communion with the wisest and best in Europe, and were making contributions of their own to literature and science and art. America began to count in the world of thought. The newspapers were but one of the agencies by which this intellectual activity was diffused among the people.

Before the Revolution, American architecture had followed the English, and the finest buildings were of the Georgian style. There followed a period when French influence combined with a democratic reverence for the republics of the past to give a classical tone to American taste, and a Greek portico was considered a necessity for a patriotic dwelling or public building. To the people of this new generation, with their minds stimulated by the more subtle philosophy of the Germans and with Goethe as an inspiration, the beauties of Italy particularly appealed. The steamship made European travel for the first time a customary pleasure, and while the fashionable began to seek Paris during the later fifties, it was Rome that drew the more influential. Here the sculptors Crawford and Story worked, Hawthorne drew in