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The Double Life of St. Louis Narratives of Origins and Maturity in Wade’S Urban Frontier

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The Double Life of St. Louis Narratives of Origins and Maturity in Wade’S Urban Frontier The Double Life of St. Louis Narratives of Origins and Maturity in Wade’s Urban Frontier ADAM ARENSON s Richard C. Wade summed up The Urban Frontier: The Rise of AWestern Cities, 1790-1830, his groundbreaking study of western urban development, he found occasion to quote William Carr Lane, St. Louis’s first mayor. In 1825, as Lane pressed the city council for the adoption of new municipal policies, he harkened back to an imagined past, a time when St. Louis “was the encamping ground of the solitary Indian trader.” Envisioning an origin story, Lane said that this first camp “became the depot and residence of many traders, under the organiza- tion of a village, and now you can see it rearing its crest in the attitude of an inspiring city.” Wade, reading across the history of Ohio Valley cities, could recognize Lane’s “history” as the rhetoric of a booster—and yet he delighted in what Lane’s story revealed as well as obscured about St. Louis’s history.1 Wade called Mayor Lane “the town’s most popular and powerful figure,” and “the West’s best student of urban affairs.”2 Such praise also __________________________ Adam Arenson is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Texas at El Paso. His book The Cultural Civil War: St. Louis and the Failures of Manifest Destiny is forthcoming. 1Richard C. Wade, The Urban Frontier: The Rise of Western Cities, 1790-1830 (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), 270, quoting Lane, St. Louis, Minutes, April 28, 1825, William Carr Lane Papers, Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis. 2Wade, The Urban Frontier, 277, 270. INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY, 105 (September 2009) ᭧ 2009, Trustees of Indiana University. ST. LOUIS 247 William Carr Lane, the first mayor of St. Louis. Lane’s early boosterism was, by the end of his life, darkened by the politics of slavery, abolition, and civil war. Courtesy of Encyclopedia Dickinsonia, http://chronicles.dickinson.edu/encyclo/ described Richard Wade himself, a genial leader for the community of urban historians. His books, essays, teaching, and mentorship provided a blueprint for the development of the study of the city in the United States.3 In The Urban Frontier, Wade established key precedents, trans- ferring the methods of his mentor, Arthur Schlesinger Sr., and those of colonial historian Carl Bridenbaugh from the study of the established __________________________ 3Among the appreciations of Wade’s work are Carl Abbott, “Review of Richard C. Wade, The Urban Frontier: The Rise of Western Cities, 1790-1830,” for H-Urban, H-Net Reviews (April 1997) at http://www.h-net.org/reviews/; Timothy R. Mahoney, David Hamer, and Edward K. Muller, “Wade and Urban History,” Urban History Newsletter, 13 (March 1995) 1, 13; Zane L. Miller, “Introduction,” in The Urban Frontier: The Rise of Western Cities, 1790-1830 (Urbana, Ill., 1996), xi-xx. I was privileged to meet Professor Wade at his last public appearance, at the Seminar on the City at Columbia University in November 2005, as arranged by Kenneth Jackson, and to discuss my work with him then. 248 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY eastern seaboard cities to the recovery of the history of cities in the American West.4 Demurring from Lane’s story, Wade insisted that “[t]he towns were the spearheads of the frontier,” as he wrote in his book’s justly famous first line. “Planted far in advance of the line of settlement,” he contin- ued, “they held the West for the approaching population.”5 Displaying a careful and lucid style, Wade’s work re-conceptualized the frontier as an urban and cosmopolitan space, and his innovative comparative methods shaped the conduct of urban history for generations. A half-century on, we can appreciate the foundational significance of The Urban Frontier, even while recognizing how methodological advances and a widening, transcultural perspective have altered the details of this frontier urban history. In the case of St. Louis, the intervening decades have revealed a double life of the city, a history of origins and maturity in competition with that portrayed in The Urban Frontier. Yes, in 1830 St. Louis was a fledgling city of the United States, carefully balancing economic and political ties from the fur-trade fringes to the centers of American power, its regional influence assured. But the city’s successes were still shaped by the patterns of its previous French and Spanish colonial rule, embod- ied in the accents and customs of the city’s elite. And—more so than for the other Ohio Valley cities considered in Wade’s study—the progress of St. Louis to 1830 was mere prelude, as the geography of slavery and freedom and the acquisition of lands further west brought transformative success and then lasting frustration to the city’s ambitions. Wade praised the city that William Carr Lane envi- sioned as of 1825; by the end of Lane’s long life, however, the criticism that he volleyed at his once-loved city revealed how St. Louis had been fundamentally changed by its place at the intersection of slavery politics and westward expansion, the center of the cultural Civil War.6 __________________________ 4See Arthur Meier Schlesinger, The Rise of the City, 1878-1898 (New York, 1933); Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness: The First Century of Urban Life in America, 1625-1742 (New York, 1938); and Bridenbaugh, Cities in Revolt: Urban Life in America, 1743-1776 (New York, 1955). For comments on these connections, see Abbott, “Review of Richard C. Wade”; Miller, “Introduction,” xii-xvi. 5Wade, The Urban Frontier, 1. 6Adam Arenson, “City of Manifest Destiny: St. Louis and the Cultural Civil War, 1848-1877” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2008). ST. LOUIS 249 “The story of Western urbanism begins . not where one might expect,” Wade mused, as he introduced the origins of St. Louis. Founded when a French merchant company laid out streets “a thousand miles through the wilderness,” St. Louis was a somewhat uneasy fit with the other Ohio Valley cities that Wade investigated—cities with more uniform stories of founding and transformation along the United States’ western frontier.7 Through his research, Wade demonstrated the fallacy of Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis. Solitary men creating clearings in the woods were not the vanguard of American civilization, as Turner had claimed.8 Wade’s analysis of urban development foreshadowed the work of “new western history” scholars, who would utilize a regional focus but reject Turner’s teleology completely.9 Yet while Wade inverted the order of Turner’s frontier progression, he ultimately preserved the same basic directional and national orientation, looking west at North America from the British colonies of the Atlantic seaboard. French planners did not found St. Louis as a “western” outpost per se; they saw it more as the northernmost city of the Caribbean, vital to their imperial concerns in North America after the loss of Quebec in the Seven Years’ War.10 The city site was on a high bluff, above the Mississippi River’s flood stage, and near the confluence with the Missouri River. Its location on the western bank, in the Louisiana Territory, was politically valuable but more incidental than intentional. __________________________ 7Wade, The Urban Frontier, 2-3, 1. Miller, “Introduction,” p. xvi, describes the comparative pairings among the five cities—“four situated on a major river and one (Lexington) not . three ‘slave’ cities (Lexington, Louisville, and St. Louis) with two ‘free’ cities (Pittsburgh and Cincinnati)”—though Pennsylvania’s 1780 emancipation law did not end slavery there until 1808. In my correspondence with Miller, this was his, rather than Wade’s, account of how these cities were chosen for research. Wade merely called them “six intolerably warm summer in Ohio valley cities,” Miller, e-mail correspondence with the author, August 2008; Wade, The Urban Frontier, x. 8Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Report of the American Historical Association (1893). 9For new western histories of the region, see Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York, 1987); Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A History of the American West (Norman, Ok., 1991). Miller, “Introduction,” p. xx, argued that Wade’s approach was neither exceptionalist nor regionalist, but I consider the processes he described more specific to the time and place described. 10Arenson, “City of Manifest Destiny,” chap. 1. 250 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY Wade had noted that “it was in the context of imperial rivalry that such Western cities as St. Louis and Pittsburgh had their origins,” but then he moved quickly to consider the cities’ acquisition by the United States, making the international origins inconsequential.11 William Carr Lane was born in Philadelphia in 1789 and had only been in St. Louis eight years when he defeated Auguste Chouteau, one of the city’s founders, in the first mayoral race.12 When Wade dismissed the founding French traders in favor of English-speaking leaders like Lane, he privileged one narrative of the city’s origins over another. In contrast, historian Jay Gitlin has painted a convincing portrait of St. Louis at the center of a French-speaking “bourgeois frontier.”13 Even the earliest French nickname for the town—Pain Court, or “little bread”—denoted pride for a settlement dedicated to commercial pursuits rather than farming, fur-trade historian J. Frederick Fausz has argued.14 In his book, Gitlin traces how the Chouteaus continued to be St. Louis’s most power- ful commercial and cultural brokers for generations after U.S. acquisi- tion, essential both to extending trade networks across the continent and to shaping civic improvement.
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