Ohio History Journal




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



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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

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



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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

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



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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

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



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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

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



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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.