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JESUP W. SCOTT AND A WEST OF CITIES by CHARLES N. GLAAB |
Nineteenth-century writing about the meaning of the American westward movement often emphasizes primitive, romantic, or agrarian sides of this national experience. In the West, the American casts off the bonds of Old Europe, struggles against elemental forces of nature, finds republican virtue in the freehold, and adopts the values of an agricultural society. Scholars, justifiably, have paid considerable attention to these conceptions; themes to be found, for example, in such ephemeral western fiction as the dime novel have been submitted to meticulous analysis. Yet there remains another side of the western experience to be evaluated. Just as historians long failed to recognize the importance of town and city in the economic development of the West, interpreters of the character of our national culture have tended to overlook the impact of a western urban experience on American thought. A whole body of promotional material, widely read in its time, that celebrates the rise of western cities has been generally ignored. Quantitatively, at least, this kind of writing more than likely outweighs any other about the West, and to ignore it, for its lack of literary grace, is to neglect an important source for understanding another dimen- sion of the cultural meaning of the American westward movement.1 From the first days of settlement across the Appalachian Mountains, every region of the West had its newspaper editor, hired promoter, or local intellectual predicting greatness for a primitive hamlet or a city that NOTES ARE ON PAGE 56 |
4 OHIO HISTORY
existed only on paper. Usually this
involved little more than an assertion
of overwhelming natural advantages that
predestined such an outcome.
But a number of writers--Daniel Drake in
Cincinnati, Robert T. Van
Horn and William Gilpin in the Kansas
City region, Logan U. Reavis in
St. Louis, and Jesup W. Scott in
Toledo--went much further, and borrow-
ing openly from one another, shaped
nineteenth-century geographic ideas
into a vision of a magnificent urban
future for interior America.2
None of these figures can be considered
brilliant writers. Their style
was unpolished; their ideas were often
unoriginal, their arguments often
inconsistent. Still, their work is
important in indicating that the nine-
teenth-century faith in American
progress was not always tied to the
yeoman in his garden but often instead
to a West of thriving cities. This
is explicitly true in the case of Jesup
W. Scott, perhaps the most influential
of all the western urban promotional
writers. Where Drake was a blunt
propagandist for the economic interests
of his section, Gilpin an erudite
geographical determinist, Van Horn a
down-to-earth student of technology,
and Reavis a rhetorical prophet, Scott
might be termed a primitive demo-
grapher. He studied the census returns,
sensed better than most the
significance of the transportation
innovations of the century, and sought
to demonstrate statistically the
inevitable future greatness of the cities
of the Mississippi Valley and Great
Lakes regions. Narrow promotional
considerations warped portions of his
analysis. Yet, within broad limits,
he predicted accurately the character of
the highly urbanized upper Middle
West of today at a time when the region
was only in its first stages of
settlement and many saw it remaining a
land of farmers and space for
generations to come.3
Like a number of other
nineteenth-century students of the western city,
Scott became interested in the subject
largely because of his economic
stake in western town sites. Born in
Ridgefield, Connecticut, in 1799, he
had begun his business career in South
Carolina at the age of twenty.4
There he edited a newspaper, the Columbia
Telescope; practiced law,
which he had earlier studied briefly in
the North; and taught at the South
Carolina State Female College. His
efforts met with limited success, a
result he later considered fortunate.
"If I had made money in So Ca,"
he recalled to a cousin, "I might
never have moved from it. The illiberality
toward me as a Northern man--as a
Yankee, was not then joyous to me
but grievous."5 In 1830 Scott
returned to the family home in Connecticut,
and the next spring went west to the
booming Maumee River region in
Ohio to look after investments of his
father-in-law. At the time, this was
a land of grandiose urban ambitions
engendered by plans to construct
canals from the Wabash and Ohio rivers
to the western end of Lake
Erie. It was a period, Scott wrote, of
"memorable speculation in wild
lands, and wild cities."6
The town of Maumee was the largest along the
river, but spokesmen for eleven other
villages and cities that existed
only on paper--all located in a short
space of fifteen miles--competed
to make their site the canal terminus
and the new metropolis of the
JESUP W. SCOTT 5
West.7 Scott's father-in-law
warned him of the dangers in the popular
business activity of speculation in
western town lots and town sites--and
indicated why so many were willing to
take the risk. He wrote that nine
out of ten of his friends in Connecticut
had been ruined, most of them
through the purchase of wild lands.
"Yet," he continued, "some may
succeed--wherever your great city is
located the fortunate holder of land
[will] make a great profit. Toledo,
Miami, the foot of the Rapids & Put
in Bay--all say it is I--but they must
all be disappointed but one &
where will be all the fond expectations
of the others--gone to the winds."8
The panic of 1837 ended the canal boom
and dashed the hopes of most
of the Maumee Valley town speculators.
Scott had retired to the East
a year before with property estimated in
value at $400,000. The panic
forced him to liquidate many of his
holdings, including the family mansion
in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He returned
to the valley to recoup, and chiefly
owing to a tract of seventy acres of
land between the villages of Port
Lawrence and Vistula that he had purchased
in 1832, he succeeded magnifi-
cently in the long run. For the half of
the tract that he had retained
eventually formed the heart of Toledo,
which emerged from the years of
rivalry along the Maumee as the dominant
city of the region. Although
Scott did not finally identify his
interests with Toledo until several years
later, his holding there enabled him to
build a fortune in real estate and
to become, before his death in 1872, a
major benefactor of the city.9
The prospect that the great cities of
America might develop in the West
absorbed Scott from his first days in
the Maumee Valley region. Elabora-
tions on this theme were to make him, by
the 1850's, an important national
writer. In 1844 he recalled that while
he still lived in South Carolina he
had decided that the first city of the
nation and probably of the world
would be located on the great central
plain of interior America and that
a city on the west end of Lake Erie
would be of second or third rank.10
Whatever the merits of his contention,
Scott had begun to develop this
view at least as early as 1832. In an
early number of an obscure monthly
magazine, the Ohio Magazine and
Michigan Register and Emigrants Guide,
which he published for a year in
Florence, Ohio, Scott asserted that nature
had "marked out the head of lake
navigation for an important seat of
commerce." Although he thought at
this time, as he did for several years
thereafter, that Cincinnati would be the
first city of the interior, his
arguments could later be used to justify
the claims of a lake city--first
Maumee, then Toledo--to being the future
great city of the world. An
article entitled "Western
Villages," for example, developed the view that
towns in the West were growing much
faster than the region as a whole--a
theme that was to remain fundamental to
his work. Scott suggested that
owing to the great agricultural
fertility of the West, fewer and fewer
farmers would be necessary to sustain a
city population in the future,
thus intensifying the effects of this
trend. During this period he also
advanced a second of his basic
contentions--that domestic rather than
foreign commerce was the principal basis
of population growth. He argued
6 OHIO HISTORY
that in a civilized country internal
trade usually exceeded foreign trade
by a margin of ten to one; this led to
population concentrations in interior
cities, particularly in those located in
the "valleys of large rivers meander-
ing through a rich alluvial
territory." To justify this contention, Scott,
like most nineteenth-century urban
promoters, relied on a variety of
Biblical and historical precedents--Nineveh,
Sodom, Gomorrah, Babylon,
the "populous and splendid capitals
of Egypt," the cities of ancient Japan
and China. Since domestic commerce also
sustained the growth of a major-
ity of the modern cities of the world,
he thought it inevitable that future
great cities would grow at interior
locations most suitable as depots of
internal commerce. Because of its
advantages for this purpose, Cincinnati
was destined to become a great world
metropolis.11
In a series of articles published from
1838 to 1839 in a Columbus, Ohio,
magazine called The Hesperian or
Western Monthly Magazine, Scott filled
out these themes with masses of
supporting data.12 He surveyed the canal
system of the nation and evaluated its
importance in stimulating the
growth of the West. He compiled
elaborate population tables comparing
the growth rates of seaboard and
interior cities; these uniformly pointed
to the inevitable dominance of the
cities of the West. He collected masses
of trade statistics designed to show the
growing importance of interior
commerce and the relative decline of
foreign trade. His articles of the
1850's, published in national commercial
magazines, were largely revisions
of these early pieces.
Scott was always willing to predict the
location of the great central
metropolis to be created by the
expansion of internal commerce and the
movement of population westward. But in
the 1830's and 1840's he showed
little consistency in making the choice.
In an 1841 article written for a
Cincinnati handbook, he predicted that
by the year 2000 Cincinnati would
be the greatest city in the world.13 An
address delivered the next year to
the Maumee lyceum, which had as its
theme, "We are of a race inclined to
build great cities," compared the claims
of Maumee, Chicago, Cincinnati,
and Alton and found Maumee the likely
winner. Scott estimated that
within a few years only one in four
people would be needed in agriculture.
Projecting growth rates decade by
decade, he concluded that within a
hundred years 264 million people would
live in the Mississippi Valley,
176 million of them in cities. This
would provide for roughly 352 con-
centrations of half a million each. But
because of its key position in the
lake region, a section growing more
rapidly than any other part of the
interior, Maumee in a hundred years
could claim at least a million.14 By
1843 Scott had narrowed the claimants
down to two lake cities, Maumee
and Chicago. "On the whole,"
he wrote, "we deem Chicago alone, of all
the lake towns, entitled to dispute
future pre-eminence with Maumee.
The time may come . . . when the extent
and high improvement of the
country making Chicago its mart for
commercial operations, may enable
it at least to sustain the second place
among the great towns of the North
American valley, if not to dispute
pre-eminence with the first."15
JESUP W. SCOTT 7
By the mid-1840's, then, Scott had fixed
the main arguments to be
developed in his later work. First, he
emphasized that the future of the
United States lay in the development of
domestic commerce; this would
cause the large American cities to be
located in the interior of the country.
Second, he asserted that technological
advances in agriculture, coupled
with the natural fertility of the great
central valley of the continent,
would lead to a much higher percentage
of urban population in the future.
Third, he had decided that the great
interior cities would be located not on
rivers as he had earlier assumed, but on
the Great Lakes, where an enor-
mous expansion of trade was destined to
take place and to find a focus.
Scott was convinced that the growth of
cities was a vital and progressive
aspect of American development. If one
is to sustain the frequently ac-
cepted thesis that American intellectual
energies have been directed
against the city, it is necessary to
rule out the influence of a host of
lesser writers like Scott who viewed the
nineteenth-century city as the
exemplar of American growth and
progress. Scott was a dedicated urbanite
and defender of the city. "All
people take pride in their cities," he wrote
in 1848. "In them naturally
concentrate the great minds and the great
wealth of the nation. There the arts
that adorn life are cultivated, and
from them flows out the knowledge that
gives its current of thought to
the national mind."16
In 1844, while he edited the Toledo
Blade, Scott made a trip east. His
letters back to his newspaper were
largely paeans to urban growth. Even
a beautiful chain of islands on the edge
of Lake Erie that he observed
during the first stage of his journey
provided a message for city builders.
The idyllic scene needed nothing, he
wrote, "but the adornment which
the industry of men will one day bestow
to make it as sweet a picture
of rural beauty as can any where be
found in the West. . . . What lovely
spots will these islands be, when human
art shall have been exhausted
in decorating them with all that is
admirable in architecture, and orna-
mental in landscape gardening. What
beautiful seats of comfort and
pleasure will one day cover these
islands, when the cities that will then
adorn the shores of Erie, shall become
great and rich." Buffalo prompted
the observation that "every true
American must feel a glow of pleasure
and pride as he walks along the well
paved side walks of heir business
streets and witnesses the activity of
her citizens, and the display of com-
mercial equivalents in her well filled
stores and warehouses." The view
from the top of the city hall of New
York City of a "sea of houses"
stretching further than the unassisted
eye could penetrate evoked an en-
thusiastic endorsement of the future of
a city still "but in the gristle of its
existence."17 Scott never doubted
that the rise of cities was anything other
than a certain sign of the success of
the American experiment.
Scott's most significant writing is
contained in well over a dozen articles
published from 1843 to 1860 in the popular
commercial journals Hunt's
Merchants' Magazine and De Bow's Review.18 In them he compiled an
extraordinary amount of information on
canals, railroads, foreign and
8 OHIO HISTORY
internal commerce, steam power, and
other aspects of economic develop-
ment. But always his fundamental concern
was the rise of the city. This
was a development that had not attracted
the attention of the country's
"best minds"; yet surely, he
argued, the rapidity of the growth of cities
was "among the most remarkable
phenomena of human progress." Finding
the natural laws that impelled mankind
toward an urban society should
in fact be a primary aim of the student
of the United States.19
Basic to any such examination in the
mid-nineteenth century was geo-
graphical analysis. Unlike William
Gilpin and others among the western
urban prophets, Scott did not
continually emphasize the omnipotence of
geographic forces in determining the
course of American development.
In general terms, however, he accepted
this view and particularly stressed,
as did Gilpin, the importance of the
geographic unity of the interior of
North America in shaping the growth of
cities. He thought the term
"North American Valley" an apt
one to describe the vast area drained
by the Mississippi, St. Lawrence, and
Mobile rivers. It was a region with-
out physical barriers that reasonably
could be considered one great plain.
Through the development of both natural
and artificial channels of com-
merce, it was becoming unified
economically. As to resources, there was
no area of the world, with the exception
of the Amazon Valley, that was
richer. A favorable climate gave the
American interior plain an over-
whelming advantage over that region.
Scott argued that Europeans and
their descendants in the United States
had too closely associated great
cities with "salt, sea and
commerce." The interior of America for too
long had been thought of as a land of
gloomy forests and desert prairies.
People perhaps acknowledged in the
abstract the potentialities of a vast
transportation system of rivers, lakes,
and railroads, supplemented by
canals and macadamized highways, but had
only begun to recognize how
the locomotive and the steamboat were
actually creating easy interior com-
merce and stimulating the growth of
interior cities.20
Scott assumed that the growing railroad
system would tend to follow
main lines of river traffic and a
general north-south pattern. It was not
until much later that theory caught up
with technology and western
spokesmen accepted the fact already
apparent at this time--that railroads
could be built anywhere and that the
American railroad network was
being built in an east-west pattern. To
Scott, the routes of railroads were
"pointed out by the finger of
nature"; this meant lines that would comple-
ment the interior river system and
conform to the geographical harmony
of the North American interior. In an
1852 article, which predicted a
three-fold increase in railroad mileage
within twenty years, he described
a system of interior trunk lines
connecting the Gulf of Mexico and the
Great Lakes, which would tend to focus
interior trade on Toledo. This
network, through unifying economically a
natural geographic region,
would eliminate the political
differences that had begun to develop between
North and South. "Who can
doubt," he wrote, "that railroads and tele-
graphs will make us one country in heart
as in government; and that the
great plain already preponderating in
population, will fix within her
JESUP W. SCOTT 9
bosom, during the present century, the
great seats of commerce and power
of the nation."21
Substantial portions of many of Scott's
articles consisted of elaborate
population projections, both for the
region as a whole and for individual
cities, designed to show the future
concentration of urban population in
the West. In one of his early Hunt's
Merchants' Magazine articles, he set
the pattern for later calculations when
he predicted that by 1890 the
great interior valley would have a total
population of forty-eight million
with thirty-five million people in
cities. By this date the Atlantic slope
would have grown only to a twenty-one
million total; Canada and the
region west of the Rocky Mountains would
have respective totals of five
and two million. These figures clearly
indicated the future dominance of
the interior cities of America, Scott
asserted, particularly so since he felt
he had been unduly generous in assigning
the number of people that would
be required in agriculture. Although
Scott's statistics became more and
more detailed over the years, his
projections were always shaped to demon-
strate the same trend--the inevitable
rise to dominance of the cities of
the West over those of the eastern
seaboard. In an 1854 article, for example,
he estimated the population of the great
central plain--which he defined to
include portions of Canada and the
American Southwest--at fifteen million,
seven-eighths of this population on
farms. He counted about 600,000
people living in the cities and towns
that bordered on the Great Lakes
and the St. Lawrence River; the
Mississippi and Mobile river basins added
urban population of 800,000. Natural
increase for the region could be
calculated at 800,000 a year. Owing to
technological advances in agricul-
ture, most of this growth would be
absorbed in the interior cities, partic-
ularly in those located along the Great
Lakes.22
By the mid-forties, the lake cities
performed a key function in Scott's
calculations. He argued that although
the cost of railroad transportation
would steadily decline, commerce on the
waterways would always be less
expensive than overland commerce. The future
great cities, therefore,
would be located at strategic positions
along the Great Lakes, where the
interior railroad system would join
rivers and lakes. By the 1850's Scott
had narrowed the rivals for supremacy
down to Chicago and Toledo--the
holders of the "keys of commerce,
soon to become immense between the
great rivers and great lakes of the
continent." Expressing a notion later
to be embodied in the plans for a St.
Lawrence seaway, he predicted that
eventually improvement of the St.
Lawrence would enable the lake cities
to trade directly with the United
Kingdom and to reap the returns of
foreign commerce as well as the more
fundamental internal commerce.
"Ten millions of people," he
wrote, "such as are settling around our lakes,
with a commercial marine superior to
that of many of the great nations
of Europe, are not likely to be long
without a good passage-way to the
ocean; such a passage-way as will enable
fleets of merchantmen, of the
proper construction, to enter the field
of competition, on fair terms, with
the navigation of the Atlantic
border."23
Toledo and Chicago had other advantages.
No region in the United
10 OHIO HISTORY
States had a better climate than the
southern border of the Great Lakes.
The two cities were focal points for the
exchange of products of different
latitudes; nineteenth-century economic
analysis stressed that this provided
one of the most enduring bases of
commercial supremacy. Scott argued that
as manufacturing grew more important in
the United States, it too would
be concentrated in the lake region,
chiefly because a cold climate was
necessary to stimulate productivity.
"Perhaps," he suggested, "the highest
latitude in which are united the
advantages of cheap food, fuel, and raw
materials, may be set down, other things
being equal, as the most favor-
able for new manufacturing cities."
Scott admitted that no city could
attain first rank without manufactures,
but these would come as naturally
where commerce had established itself,
as "teeth in the mouth of an infant
child." In short, he concluded, it
seemed "almost absolutely certain" that
the "great manufacturing hives of
the North American plain" would grow
up on the border of the lakes.24
Although Scott seems to have recognized
by the 1850's that Chicago would be the
metropolis of the lake region, his
promotional interests obviously made it
necessary for him to continue to
argue Toledo's case. He vigorously
continued to do so for the rest of his
life. His last work contains a detailed
discussion of why Chicago's tempo-
rary ascendancy--which he attributed
primarily to a location near broad
fertile prairies instead of forest--was
not destined to last.25
Scott shared the view of many writers
about the West that geographical
and climatic forces determined patterns
of population movement, the routes
of transportation facilities, and the
location and growth of cities. He
emphasized this less than others,
relying more on an unsophisticated exam-
ination of population statistics to try
to prove his theories. Yet geographic
considerations were always fundamental
in his work. Although he was a
perceptive student of technology, his
belief in the inalterable unity of the
great interior plain led to his
misassessment of the significance of a major
technological innovation, the railroad;
and this represented his principal
prophetic failure. Railroads could, of
course, be built across desert and
mountain, joining the oceans, altering
the natural trade patterns imposed
by the interior system of waterways, and
leading to a continued high rate
of urbanization in the coastal regions.
Scott never seriously took this
possibility into account.
In Scott's later writings, geographical
determinism became explicit
as he, along with Gilpin, Reavis, and
numerous other writers, became a
disciple of the famed German explorer
and geographer Alexander von
Humboldt. The impact of Humboldt's
theories on nineteenth-century Amer-
ican thought has been insufficiently
evaluated; his view that climatic belts
encircling the globe determined the
development of high civilization, the
migration of populations, and the
location of great world cities enjoyed
a particular vogue among promotional
writers. Humboldt had demon-
strated, Scott wrote in his last work,
that an "excessive climate" and a
"continental climate" best
suited the upward progress of civilization. North
America, a large portion of which met
this requirement, thus provided a
large arena for the future development
of the human race:
JESUP W. SCOTT 11
The power of climate to control human
movements and habitation,
and to concentrate population in the
region best adapted to the de-
velopment of the best energies of man,
is manifested more and more
as knowledge extends, and the means to
remove to such best region,
become more and more ample. The tide of
human movement is west-
ward. It has culminated, or is
culminating, in Europe, on its extreme
western verge, in the middle climate
zone, in the great cities of
England, Germany and France. New York,
Philadelphia, Buffalo,
Cleveland, Toledo, Detroit, Chicago,
Davenport, St. Joseph, Omaha
and Denver are on the route of its
future movement.
On the great interior plain of North
America, he predicted, "will grow up
the greatest aggregation, the greatest
nation, the noblest empire of man,
and the greatest city."26 Scott's
adoption of Humboldt did not alter the
character of his analysis or the kind of
evidence he used to sustain it.
He merely had one more argument--fully
in accord with the best science
of his day--to add to all his others
justifying the magnificent future of
the cities of the West.
In a letter written in 1867 to a cousin
inquiring why he had not replied
to a query about moving to Toledo, Scott
summed up a lifetime spent in
urban promotion. His letter reflected
not only his adoption of the Hum-
boltian geographic rationale but also
the exuberance and buoyant optimism
so vital to urban prophecy:
I think I am in exactly the best
climate-on the isotherm of 50?? in
heat. It is the isotherm on and near
which mankind have chosen to
congregate in greatest numbers and built
up nearly all the great
modern cities. It is the climate of the
best grasses, the best grains,
the best fruits and--and--and the best
men. If not the best men how
has it happened that the largest cities,
the densest populated country
and greatest advancement in the arts of
civilization have been their
work.
Scott went on to relate how in 1828 and
1829 he had foretold that the
great cities of the nation would grow up
in the interior plain. He had
picked Cincinnati, St. Louis, Chicago,
and Toledo as sites for the great
metropolises of the center at a time
when the latter two were nothing
more than villages. Now Chicago and
Toledo were magnificent cities and
were yet only in the first stage of
development on their way to becoming
continental metropolises. It was true,
he admitted, that Toledo had lagged
behind Chicago. Still, ground that he
had bought in Toledo for $12 an
acre was now worth $12,000 per acre, and
lots that had sold for $25 when
he had first come there would now bring
$25,000. Soon the wood and
timber in the region would be exhausted,
and the countryside would be con-
verted into fields of the richest
quality, enabling the city to develop an agri-
cultural hinterland similar to
Chicago's. During the preceding year 1,099
buildings had been erected, and this
total would be exceeded in 1867. His
prophecy of Toledo's greatness would
still be realized. But in piling up
12 OHIO HISTORY
token upon token of growth, Scott
perhaps recognized his overexuber-
ance. "Hello, there," he
whimsically commented, "where is my pen carry-
ing me," and shifted his concern to
family subjects.27
In a sense, Scott had supplied an
epigraph for the work of a generation
of urban promoters, who often realized
they were exaggerating their as-
pirations but whose grandiose visions of
a West of cities came to be realiz-
ed. Little attention had been paid to
their writings, for scholars tend to
demand a degree of alienation in the
prophets they consider. With their
passionate commitment to doctrines of
American material progress, Scott
and his fellow western urban writers
were anything but alienated. The
rapid urbanization of the Midwest, the
intense rivalries between cities that
were so much a part of the region's
history, and the spirit of urban booster-
ism that lingers there suggest that in
equating progress with the growth of
cities, they correctly delineated a
significant aspect of the cultural attitudes
of the early American West.
THE AUTHOR: Charles N. Glaab is
an associate professor of history at the
University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee. His
The American City: A Documentary His-
tory has just recently been published.