University of Virginia Library

III
The Old West[1]

It is not the oldest West with which this chapter deals. The
oldest West was the Atlantic coast. Roughly speaking, it took
a century of Indian fighting and forest felling for the colonial
settlements to expand into the interior to a distance of about
a hundred miles from the coast. Indeed, some stretches were
hardly touched in that period. This conquest of the nearest
wilderness in the course of the seventeenth century and in the
early years of the eighteenth, gave control of the maritime section
of the nation and made way for the new movement of westward
expansion which I propose to discuss.

In his "Winning of the West," Roosevelt dealt chiefly with
the region beyond the Alleghanies, and with the period of the
later eighteenth century, although he prefaced his account
with an excellent chapter describing the backwoodsmen of the
Alleghanies and their social conditions from 1769 to 1774.
It is important to notice, however, that he is concerned with a
backwoods society already formed; that he ignores the New
England frontier and its part in the winning of the West, and
does not recognize that there was a West to be won between
New England and the Great Lakes. In short, he is interested
in the winning of the West beyond the Alleghanies by the
southern half of the frontier folk.

There is, then, a western area intermediate between the
coastal colonial settlements of the seventeenth century and the
trans-Alleghany settlements of the latter portion of the eighteenth
century. This section I propose to isolate and discuss
under the name of the Old West, and in the period from
about 1676 to 1763. It includes the back country of New
England, the Mohawk Valley, the Great Valley of Pennsylvania,
the Shenandoah Valley, and the Piedmont—that is,
the interior or upland portion of the South, lying between the
Alleghanies and the head of navigation of the Atlantic rivers
marked by the "fall line."[2]

In this region, and in these years, are to be found the beginnings
of much that is characteristic in Western society, for the
Atlantic coast was in such close touch with Europe that its
frontier experience was soon counteracted, and it developed
along other lines. It is unfortunate that the colonial back
country appealed so long to historians solely in connection
with the colonial wars, for the development of its society, its
institutions and mental attitude all need study. Its history
has been dealt with in separate fragments, by states, or towns,
or in discussions of special phases, such as German and Scotch-Irish,
immigration. The Old West as a whole can be appreciated

only by obliterating the state boundaries which conceal
its unity, by correlating the special and fragmentary studies,
and by filling the gaps in the material for understanding the
formation of its society. The present paper is rather a reconnaissance
than a conquest of the field, a program for study
of the Old West rather than an exposition of it.

The end of the period proposed may be placed about 1763,
and the beginning between 1676 and 1700. The termination of
the period is marked by the Peace of Paris in 1763, and the
royal proclamation of that year forbidding settlement beyond
the Alleghanies. By this time the settlement of the Old West
was fairly accomplished, and new advances were soon made
into the "Western Waters" beyond the mountains and into the
interior of Vermont and New Hampshire. The isolation of the
transmontane settlements, and the special conditions and doctrines
of the Revolutionary era during which they were formed,
make a natural distinction between the period of which I am
to speak and the later extension of the West.

The beginning of the period is necessarily an indeterminate
date, owing to the different times of colonizing the coastal areas
which served as bases of operations in the westward advance.
The most active movements into the Old West occurred after
1730. But in 1676 New England, having closed the exhausting
struggle with the Indians, known as King Philip's War, could
regard her established settlements as secure, and go on to complete
her possession of the interior. This she did in the midst
of conflicts with the exterior Indian tribes which invaded her
frontiers from New York and Canada during the French and
Indian wars from 1690 to 1760, and under frontier conditions
different from the conditions of the earlier Puritan colonization.
In 1676, Virginia was passing through Indian fighting—keenest
along the fall line, where the frontier lay—and also experiencing
a social revolt which resulted in the defeat of the

democratic forces that sought to stay the progress of aristocratic
control in the colony.[3] The date marks the end of the
period when the Virginia tidewater could itself be regarded
as a frontier region, and consequently the beginning of a more
special interest in the interior.

Let us first examine the northern part of the movement into
the hack country. The expansion of New England into the
vacant spaces of its own section, in the period we have chosen
for discussion, resulted in the formation of an interior society
which contrasted in many ways with that of the coast, and
which has a special significance in Western history, in that it
was this interior New England people who settled the Greater
New England in central and western New York, the Wyoming
Valley, the Connecticut Reserve of Ohio, and much of the
prairie areas of the Old Northwest. It is important to realize
that the Old West included interior New England.

The situation in New England at the close of the seventeenth
century is indicated by the Massachusetts act of 1694 enumerating
eleven towns, then on the frontier and exposed to raids,
none of which might be voluntarily deserted without leave of
the governor and council, on penalty of loss of their freeholds
by the landowners, or fine of other inhabitants.[4]

Thus these frontier settlers were made substantially garrisons,
or "mark colonies." Crowded into the palisades of the
town, and obliged in spite of their poverty to bear the brunt of
Indian attack, their hardships are illustrated in the manly but
pathetic letters of Deerfield's minister, Mr. Williams,[5] in 1704.
Parkman succinctly describes the general conditions in these
words:[6]

Into these places, in days of alarm, were crowded the outlying
settlers, just as was the case in later times in the Kentucky
"stations."

In spite of such frontier conditions, the outlying towns continued
to multiply. Between 1720 and the middle of the century,
settlement crept up the Housatonic and its lateral valley
into the Berkshires. About 1720 Litchfield was established;
in 1725, Sheffield; in 1730, Great Barrington; and in 1735
a road was cut and towns soon established between Westfield
and these Housatonic settlements, thus uniting them with
the older extensions along the Connecticut and its tributaries.

In this period, scattered and sometimes unwelcome Scotch-Irish
settlements were established, such as that at Londonderry,
New Hampshire, and in the Berkshires, as well as in the region

won in King Philip's War from the Nipmucks, whither there
came also Huguenots.[7]

In King George's War, the Connecticut River settlers found
their frontier protection in such rude stockades as those at the
sites of Keene, of Charlestown, New Hampshire (Number
Four), Fort Shirley at the head of Deerfield River (Heath),
and Fort Pelham (Rowe); while Fort Massachusetts (Adams)
guarded the Hoosac gateway to the Hoosatonic Valley. These
frontier garrisons and the self-defense of the backwoodsmen
of New England are well portrayed in the pages of Parkman.[8]
At the close of the war, settlement again expanded into the
Berkshires, where Lennox, West Hoosac (Williamstown), and
Pittsfield were established in the middle of the century.
Checked by the fighting in the last French and Indian War,
the frontier went forward after the Peace of Paris (1763) at
an exceptional rate, especially into Vermont and interior
New Hampshire. An anonymous writer gives a contemporary
view of the situation on the eve of the Revolution:[9]

For nearly a hundred years, therefore, New England communities
had been pushed out to new frontiers in the intervals
between the almost continuous wars with the French and
Indians. Probably the most distinctive feature in this
frontier was the importance of the community type of
settlement; in other words, of the towns, with their Puritan
ideals in education, morals, and religion. This has always
been a matter of pride to the statesmen and annalists of New
England, as is illustrated by these words of Holland in his
"Western Massachusetts," commenting on the settlement of
the Connecticut Valley in villages, whereby in his judgment
morality, education, and urbanity were preserved:

Whatever may be the real value of the community type of
settlement, its establishment in New England was intimately
connected both with the Congregational religious organization
and with the land system of the colonies of that section, under
which the colonial governments made grants—not in tracts to
individuals, but in townships to groups of proprietors who
in turn assigned lands to the inhabitants without cost. The
typical form of establishing a town was as follows: On application
of an approved body of men, desiring to establish a
new settlement, the colonial General Court would appoint a
committee to view the desired land and report on its fitness;
an order for the grant would then issue, in varying
areas, not far from the equivalent of six miles square. In the
eighteenth century especially, it was common to reserve certain
lots of the town for the support of schools and the ministry.
This was the origin of that very important feature of
Western society, federal land grants for schools and colleges.[11]
The General Courts also made regulations regarding the common
lands, the terms for admitting inhabitants, etc., and thus
kept a firm hand upon the social structure of the new settlements
as they formed on the frontier.

This practice, seen in its purity in the seventeenth century

especially, was markedly different from the practices of other
colonies in the settlement of their back lands. For during
most of the period New England did not use her wild lands, or
public domain, as a source of revenue by sale to individuals or
to companies, with the reservation of quit-rents; nor attract
individual settlers by "head rights," or fifty-acre grants, after
the Virginia type; nor did the colonies of the New England
group often make extensive grants to individuals, on the ground
of special services, or because of influence with the government,
or on the theory that the grantee would introduce settlers on
his grant. They donated their lands to groups of men who
became town proprietors for the purpose of establishing communities.
These proprietors were supposed to hold the lands
in trust, to be assigned to inhabitants under restraints to ensure
the persistence of Puritan ideals.

During most of the seventeenth century the proprietors
awarded lands to the new-comers in accordance with this theory.
But as density of settlement increased, and lands grew scarce
in the older towns, the proprietors began to assert their legal
right to the unoccupied lands and to refuse to share them with
inhabitants who were not of the body of proprietors. The distinction
resulted in class conflicts in the towns, especially in the
eighteenth century,[12] over the ownership and disposal of the
common lands.

The new settlements, by a process of natural selection,
would afford opportunity to the least contented, whether because

of grievances, or ambitions, to establish themselves.
This tended to produce a Western flavor in the towns on the
frontier. But it was not until the original ideals of the land
system began to change, that the opportunity to make new
settlements for such reasons became common. As the economic
and political ideal replaced the religious and social
ideal, in the conditions under which new towns could be established,
this became more possible.

Such a change was in progress in the latter part of the
seventeenth century and during the eighteenth. In 1713, 1715,
and 1727, Massachusetts determined upon a policy of locating
towns in advance of settlement, to protect her boundary claims.
In 1736 she laid out five towns near the New Hampshire border,
and a year earlier opened four contiguous towns to connect
her Housatonic and Connecticut Valley settlements.[13]
Grants in non-adjacent regions were sometimes made to old
towns, the proprietors of which sold them to those who wished
to move.

The history of the town of Litchfield illustrates the increasing
importance of the economic factor. At a time when Connecticut
feared that Andros might dispose of the public lands
to the disadvantage of the colony, the legislature granted a
large part of Western Connecticut to the towns of Hartford
and Windsor, pro forma, as a means of withdrawing the lands
from his hands. But these towns refused to give up the lands
after the danger had passed, and proceeded to sell part of
them.[14] Riots occurred when the colonial authorities attempted
to assert possession, and the matter was at length compromised

in 1719 by allowing Litchfield to be settled in accordance
with the town grants, while the colony reserved the larger
part of northwestern Connecticut. In 1737 the colony disposed
of its last unlocated lands by sale in lots. In 1762
Massachusetts sold a group of entire townships in the Berkshires
to the highest bidders.[15]

But the most striking illustration of the tendency, is afforded
by the "New Hampshire grants" of Governor Wentworth,
who, chiefly in the years about 1760, made grants of a hundred
and thirty towns west of the Connecticut, in what is now
the State of Vermont, but which was then in dispute between
New Hampshire and New York. These grants, while in form
much like other town grants, were disposed of for cash, chiefly
to speculators who hastened to sell their rights to the throngs of
land-seekers who, after the peace, began to pour into the Green
Mountain region.

It is needless to point out how this would affect the movement
of Western settlement in respect to individualistic speculation
in public lands; how it would open a career to the land
jobbers, as well as to the natural leaders in the competitive
movement for acquiring the best lands, for laying out town sites
and building up new communities under "boom" conditions.
The migratory tendency of New Englanders was increased by
this gradual change in its land policy; the attachment to a

locality was diminished. The later years showed increasing
emphasis by New England upon individual success, greater
respect for the self-made man who, in the midst of opportunities
under competitive conditions, achieved superiority. The
old dominance of town settlement, village moral police, and
traditional class control gave way slowly. Settlement in communities
and rooted Puritan habits and ideals had enduring
influences in the regions settled by New Englanders; but it was
in this Old West, in the years just before the Revolution, that
individualism began to play an important rôle, along with the
traditional habit of expanding in organized communities.

The opening of the Vermont towns revealed more fully than
before, the capability of New Englanders to become democratic
pioneers, under characteristic frontier conditions. Their economic
life was simple and self-sufficing. They readily adopted
lynch law (the use of the "birch seal" is familiar to readers of
Vermont history) to protect their land titles in the troubled
times when these "Green Mountain Boys" resisted New York's
assertion of authority. They later became an independent
Revolutionary state with frontier directness, and in very many
respects their history in the Revolutionary epoch is similar to
that of settlers in Kentucky and Tennessee, both in assertion of
the right to independent self government and in a frontier separatism.[16]
Vermont may be regarded as the culmination of the
frontier movement which I have been describing in New England.

By this time two distinct New Englands existed—the
one coastal, and dominated by commercial interests and the
established congregational churches; the other a primitive

agricultural area, democratic in principle, and with various
sects increasingly indifferent to the fear of "innovation" which
the dominant classes of the old communities felt. Already
speculative land companies had begun New England settlements
in the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania, as well as on
the lower Mississippi; and New England missions among the
Indians, such as that at Stockbridge, were beginning the noteworthy
religious and educational expansion of the section to
the west.

That this movement of expansion had been chiefly from south
to north, along the river valleys, should not conceal from us
the fact that it was in essential characteristics a Western movement,
especially in the social traits that were developing. Even
the men who lived in the long line of settlements on the Maine
coast, under frontier conditions, and remote from the older
centers of New England, developed traits and a democratic
spirit that relate them closely to the Westerners, in spite of the
fact that Maine is "down east" by preëminence.[17]

The frontier of the Middle region in this period of the formation
of the Old West, was divided into two parts, which
happen to coincide with the colonies of New York and Pennsylvania.
In the latter colony the trend of settlement was into
the Great Valley, and so on to the Southern uplands; while the
advance of settlement in New York was like that of New England,
chiefly northward, following the line of Hudson River.

The Hudson and the Mohawk constituted the area of the Old
West in this part of the eighteenth century. With them were
associated the Wallkill, tributary to the Hudson, and Cherry
Valley near the Mohawk, along the sources of the Susquehanna.
The Berkshires walled the Hudson in to the east; the Adirondacks
and the Catskills to the west. Where the Mohawk Valley

penetrated between the mountainous areas, the Iroquois
Indians were too formidable for advance on such a slender
line. Nothing but dense settlement along the narrow strip
of the Hudson, if even that, could have furnished the necessary
momentum for overcoming the Indian barrier; and this pressure
was lacking, for the population was comparatively sparse
in contrast with the task to be performed. What most needs
discussion in the case of New York, therefore, is not the history
of expansion as in other sections, but the absence of expansive
power.

The fur-trade had led the way up the Hudson, and made
beginnings of settlements at strategic points near the confluence
of the Mohawk. But the fur-trader was not followed by a
tide of pioneers. One of the most important factors in restraining
density of population in New York, in retarding the settlement
of its frontier, and in determining the conditions there,
was the land system of that colony.

From the time of the patroon grants along the lower Hudson,
great estates had been the common form of land tenure.
Rensselaerswyck reached at one time over seven hundred thousand
acres. These great patroon estates were confirmed by the
English governors, who in their turn followed a similar policy.
By 1732 two and one-half million acres were engrossed in
manorial grants.[18] In 1764, Governor Colden wrote[19] that
three of the extravagant grants contain,

He adds that "the proprietors of the great tracts are not
only freed from the quit-rents, which the other landholders in
the province pay, but by their influence in the assembly are
freed from every other public tax on their lands."

In 1769 it was estimated that at least five-sixths of the inhabitants
of Westchester County lived within the bounds of the
great manors there.[20] In Albany County the Livingston manor
spread over seven modern townships, and the great Van Rensselaer
manor stretched twenty-four by twenty-eight miles along
the Hudson; while still farther, on the Mohawk, were the vast
possessions of Sir William Johnson.[21]

It was not simply that the grants were extensive, but that the
policy of the proprietors favored the leasing rather than the
sale of the lands—frequently also of the stock, and taking
payment in shares. It followed that settlers preferred to go to
frontiers where a more liberal land policy prevailed. At one
time it seemed possible that the tide of German settlement,
which finally sought Pennsylvania and the up-country of the
South, might flow into New York. In 1710, Governor Hunter
purchased a tract in Livingston's manor and located nearly
fifteen hundred Palatines on it to produce naval stores.[22] But
the attempt soon failed; the Germans applied to the Indians
on Schoharie Creek, a branch of the Mohawk, for a grant of
land and migrated there, only to find that the governor had
already granted the land. Again were the villages broken up,
some remaining and some moving farther up the Mohawk,
where they and accessions to their number established the frontier
settlements about Palatine Bridge, in the region where, in
the Revolution, Herkimer led these German frontiersmen to
stem the British attack in the battle of Oriskany. They constituted
the most effective military defense of Mohawk Valley.
Still another portion took their way across to the waters of the
Susquehanna, and at Tulpehockon Creek began an important
center of German settlement in the Great Valley of Pennsylvania.[23]

The most important aspect of the history of the movement
into the frontier of New York at this period, therefore, was
the evidence which it afforded that in the competition for settlement

between colonies possessing a vast area of vacant land,
those which imposed feudal tenures and undemocratic
restraints, and which exploited settlers, were certain to lose.

The manorial practice gave a bad name to New York as a
region for settlement, which not even the actual opportunities
in certain parts of the colony could counteract. The diplomacy
of New York governors during this period of the Old
West, in securing a protectorate over the Six Nations and a
consequent claim to their territory, and in holding them aloof
from France, constituted the most effective contribution of that
colony to the movement of American expansion. When lands
of these tribes were obtained after Sullivan's expedition in the
Revolution (in which New England soldiers played a prominent
part), it was by the New England inundation into this
interior that they were colonized. And it was under conditions
like those prevailing in the later years of the expansion of
settlements in New England itself, that this settlement of interior
and western New York was effected.

The result was, that New York became divided into two distinct
peoples: the dwellers along Hudson Valley, and the
Yankee pioneers of the interior. But the settlement of central
and western New York, like the settlement of Vermont, is a
story that belongs to the era in which the trans-Alleghany West
was occupied.

We can best consider the settlement of the share of the Old
West which is located in Pennsylvania as a part of the migration
which occupied the Southern Uplands, and before entering
upon this it will be advantageous to survey that part of the
movement toward the interior which proceeded westward from
the coast. First let us observe the conditions at the eastern
edge of these uplands, along the fall line in Virginia, in the
latter part of the seventeenth century, in order that the process
and the significance of the movement may be better understood.

About the time of Bacon's Rebellion, in Virginia, strenuous
efforts were made to protect the frontier line which ran along
the falls of the river, against the attacks of Indians. This
"fall line," as the geographers call it, marking the head of
navigation, and thus the boundary of the maritime or lowland
South, runs from the site of Washington, through Richmond,
and on to Raleigh, North Carolina, and Columbia, South Carolina.
Virginia having earliest advanced thus far to the interior,
found it necessary in the closing years of the seventeenth
century to draw a military frontier along this line. As early
as 1675 a statute was enacted,[24] providing that paid troops of
five hundred men should be drawn from the midland and most
secure parts of the country and placed on the "heads of the
rivers" and other places fronting upon the Indians. What
was meant by the "heads of the rivers," is shown by the fact
that several of these forts were located either at the falls of
the rivers or just above tidewater, as follows: one on the lower
Potomac in Stafford County; one near the falls of the Rappahannock;
one on the Mattapony; one on the Pamunky; one at
the falls of the James (near the site of Richmond); one near
the falls of the Appomattox, and others on the Blackwater, the
Nansemond, and the Accomac peninsula, all in the eastern part
of Virginia.

Again, in 1679, similar provision was made,[25] and an especially
interesting act was passed, making quasi manorial grants
to Major Lawrence Smith and Captain William Byrd, "to seate
certain lands at the head [falls] of Rappahannock and James
river" respectively. This scheme failed for lack of approval
by the authorities in England.[26] But Byrd at the falls of the

James near the present site of Richmond, Robert Beverley on
the Rappahannock, and other frontier commanders on the York
and Potomac, continued to undertake colonial defense. The
system of mounted rangers was established in 1691, by which a
lieutenant, eleven soldiers, and two Indians at the "heads" or
falls of each great river were to scout for enemy,[27] and the
Indian boundary line was strictly defined.

By the opening years of the eighteenth century (1701), the
assembly of Virginia had reached the conclusion that settlement
would be the best means of protecting the frontiers, and that
the best way of "settling in co-habitations upon the said land
frontiers within this government will be by encouragements to
induce societies of men to undertake the same."[28] It was
declared to be inexpedient to have less than twenty fighting men
in each "society," and provision was made for a land grant to
be given to these societies (or towns) not less than 10,000 nor
more than 30,000 acres upon any of the frontiers, to be held
in common by the society. The power of ordering and managing
these lands, and the settling and planting of them, was to
remain in the society. Virginia was to pay the cost of survey,
also quit-rents for the first twenty years for the two-hundred-acre
tract as the site of the "co-habitation." Within this two
hundred acres each member was to have a half-acre lot for living
upon, and a right to two hundred acres next adjacent, until
the thirty thousand acres were taken up. The members of the

society were exempt from taxes for twenty years, and from the
requirements of military duty except such as they imposed upon
themselves. The resemblance to the New England town is obvious.

"Provided alwayes," ran the quaint statute, "and it is the
true intent and meaning of this act that for every five hundred
acres of land to be granted in pursuance of this act there shall
be and shall be continually kept upon the said land one christian
man between sixteen and sixty years of age perfect of
limb, able and fitt for service who shall alsoe be continually
provided with a well fixed musquett or fuzee, a good pistoll,
sharp simeter, tomahawk and five pounds of good clean pistoll
powder and twenty pounds of sizable leaden bulletts or swan
or goose shott to be kept within the fort directed by this act
besides the powder and shott for his necessary or useful shooting
at game. Provided also that the said warlike Christian
man shall have his dwelling and continual abode within the
space of two hundred acres of land to be laid out in a geometricall
square or as near that figure as conveniency will admit,"
etc. Within two years the society was required to cause a half
acre in the middle of the "co-habitation" to be palisaded
"with good sound pallisadoes at least thirteen foot long and
six inches diameter in the middle of the length thereof, and set
double and at least three foot within the ground.

Such in 1701 was the idea of the Virginia tidewater assembly
of a frontiersman, and of the frontier towns by which the Old
Dominion should spread her population into the upland South.
But the "warlike Christian man" who actually came to furnish
the firing line for Virginia, was destined to be the Scotch-Irishman
and the German with long rifle in place of "fuzee" and
"simeter," and altogether too restless to have his continual
abode within the space of two hundred acres. Nevertheless
there are points of resemblance between this idea of societies

settled about a fortified town and the later "stations" of Kentucky.[29]

By the beginning of the eighteenth century the engrossing
of the lands of lowland Virginia had progressed so far, the
practice of holding large tracts of wasteland for reserves in the
great plantations had become so common, that the authorities
of Virginia reported to the home government that the best lands
were all taken up,[30] and settlers were passing into North Carolina
seeking cheap lands near navigable rivers. Attention was
directed also to the Piedmont portions of Virginia, for by this
time the Indians were conquered in this region. It was now
possible to acquire land by purchase[31] at five shillings sterling
for fifty acres, as well as by head-rights for importation or settlement,
and land speculation soon turned to the new area.

Already the Piedmont had been somewhat explored.[32] Even
by the middle of the seventeenth century, fur-traders had followed
the trail southwest from the James more than four hundred
miles to the Catawbas and later to the Cherokees. Col.
William Byrd had, as we have seen, not only been absorbing
good lands in the lowlands, and defending his post at the falls
of the James, like a Count of the Border, but he also engaged in
this fur-trade and sent his pack trains along this trail through
the Piedmont of the Carolinas,[33] and took note of the rich savannas

of that region. Charleston traders engaged in rivalry
for this trade.

It was not long before cattle raisers from the older settlements,
learning from the traders of the fertile plains and peavine
pastures of this land, followed the fur-traders and erected
scattered "cow-pens" or ranches beyond the line of plantations
in the Piedmont. Even at the close of the seventeenth
century, herds of wild horses and cattle ranged at the outskirts
of the Virginia settlements, and were hunted by the planters,
driven into pens, and branded somewhat after the manner of
the later ranching on the Great Plains.[34] Now the cow-drovers
and the cow-pens[35] began to enter the uplands. The Indians
had by this time been reduced to submission in most of the
Virginia Piedmont—as Governor Spotswood[36] reported in
1712, living "quietly on our frontiers, trafficking with the
Inhabitants."

After the defeat of the Tuscaroras and Yemassees about this
time in the Carolinas, similar opportunities for expansion
existed there. The cattle drovers sometimes took their herds
from range to range; sometimes they were gathered permanently
near the pens, finding the range sufficient throughout
the year. They were driven to Charleston, or later sometimes

even to Philadelphia and Baltimore markets. By the
middle of the century, disease worked havoc with them in
South Carolina[37] and destroyed seven-eighths of those in North
Carolina; Virginia made regulations governing the driving of
cattle through her frontier counties to avoid the disease, just
as in our own time the northern cattlemen attempted to protect
their herds against the Texas fever.

Thus cattle raisers from the coast followed the fur-traders
toward the uplands, and already pioneer farmers were straggling
into the same region, soon to be outnumbered by the tide
of settlement that flowed into the region from Pennsylvania.

The descriptions of the uplands by contemporaneous writers
are in glowing terms. Makemie, in his "Plain and Friendly
Persuasion" (1705), declared "The best, richest, and most
healthy part of your Country is yet to be inhabited, above the
falls of every River, to the Mountains." Jones, in his "Present
State of Virginia" (1724), comments on the convenience of
tidewater transportation, etc., but declares that section "not
nearly so healthy as the uplands and Barrens which serve for
Ranges for Stock," although he speaks less enthusiastically
of the savannas and marshes which lay in the midst of the
forest areas. In fact, the Piedmont was by no means the
unbroken forest that might have been imagined, for in addition
to natural meadows, the Indians had burned over large
tracts.[38] It was a rare combination of woodland and pasture,
with clear running streams and mild climate.[39]

The occupation of the Virginia Piedmont received a special
impetus from the interest which Governor Spotswood took in
the frontier. In 1710 he proposed a plan for intercepting the
French in their occupation of the interior, by inducing Virginia
settlement to proceed along one side of James River only,
until this column of advancing pioneers should strike the attenuated
line of French posts in the center. In the same year
he sent a body of horsemen to the top of the Blue Ridge, where
they could overlook the Valley of Virginia.[40] By 1714 he
became active as a colonizer himself. Thirty miles above the
falls of the Rappahannock, on the Rapidan at Germanna,[41] he
settled a little village of German redemptioners (who in return
for having the passage paid agreed to serve without wages for
a term of years), to engage in his iron works, also to act as
rangers on the frontier. From here, in 1716, with two companies
of rangers and four Indians, Governor Spotswood and a
band of Virginia gentlemen made a summer picnic excursion
of two weeks across the Blue Ridge into the Shenandoah Valley.
Sic juvat transcendere montes was the motto of these
Knights of the Golden Horse Shoe, as the governor dubbed
them. But they were not the "warlike christian men" destined
to occupy the frontier.

Spotswood's interest in the advance along the Rappahannock,
probably accounts for the fact that in 1720 Spotsylvania and

Brunswick were organized as frontier counties of Virginia.[42]
Five hundred dollars were contributed by the colony to the
church, and a thousand dollars for arms and ammunition for
the settlers in these counties. The fears of the French and
Indians beyond the high mountains, were alleged as reasons
for this advance. To attract settlers to these new counties,
they were (1723) exempt from purchasing the lands under the
system of head rights, and from payment of quit-rents for
seven years after 1721. The free grants so obtained were
not to exceed a thousand acres. This was soon extended to
six thousand acres, but with provision requiring the settlement
of a certain number of families upon the grant within a certain
time. In 1729 Spotswood was ordered by the Council to produce
"rights" and pay the quit-rents for the 59,786 acres
which he claimed in this county.

Other similar actions by the Council show that large holdings
were developing there, also that the difficulty of establishing
a frontier democracy in contact with the area of expanding
plantations, was very real.[43] By the time of the occupation
of the Shenandoah Valley, therefore, the custom was
established in this part of Virginia,[44] of making grants of a
thousand acres for each family settled. Speculative planters,
influential with the Governor and Council secured grants of
many thousand acres, conditioned upon seating a certain number
of families, and satisfying the requirements of planting.
Thus what had originally been intended as direct grants to the
actual settler, frequently became grants to great planters like
Beverley, who promoted the coming of Scotch-Irish and German

settlers, or took advantage of the natural drift into the
Valley, to sell lands in their grants, as a rule, reserving quitrents.
The liberal grants per family enabled these speculative
planters, while satisfying the terms of settlement, to hold large
portions of the grant for themselves. Under the lax requirements,
and probably still more lax enforcement, of the provisions
for actual cultivation or cattle-raising,[45] it was not difficult
to hold such wild land. These conditions rendered possible
the extension of a measure of aristocratic planter life in
the course of time to the Piedmont and Valley lands of Virginia.
It must be added, however, that some of the newcomers,
both Germans and Scotch-Irish, like the Van Meters, Stover,
and Lewis, also showed an ability to act as promoters in locating
settlers and securing grants to themselves.

In the northern part of the Shenandoah Valley, lay part of
the estate of Lord Fairfax, some six million acres in extent,
which came to the family by dower from the old Culpeper and
Arlington grant of Northern Neck. In 1748, the youthful
Washington was surveying this estate along the upper waters
of the Potomac, finding a bed under the stars and learning the
life of the frontier.

Lord Fairfax established his own Greenway manor,[46] and
divided his domain into other manors, giving ninety-nine-year
leases to settlers already on the ground at twenty shillings
annually per hundred acres; while of the new-comers he exacted
two shillings annual quit-rent for this amount of land
in fee simple. Litigation kept land titles uncertain here, for
many years. Similarly, Beverley's manor, about Staunton,
represented a grant of 118,000 acres to Beverley and his associates

on condition of placing the proper number of families
on the tract.[47] Thus speculative planters on this frontier
shared in the movement of occupation and made an aristocratic
element in the up-country; but the increasing proportion
of Scotch-Irish immigrants, as well as German settlers, together
with the contrast in natural conditions, made the interior
a different Virginia from that of the tidewater.

As settlement ascended the Rappahannock, and emigrants
began to enter the Valley from the north, so, contemporaneously,
settlement ascended the James above the falls, succeeding
to the posts of the fur-traders.[48] Goochland County
was set off in 1728, and the growth of population led, as early
as 1729, to proposals for establishing a city (Richmond) at
the falls. Along the upper James, as on the Rappahannock,
speculative planters bought headrights and located settlers
and tenants to hold their grants.[49] Into this region came
natives of Virginia, emigrants from the British isles, and scattered
representatives of other lands, some of them coming up
the James, others up the York, and still others arriving with
the southward-moving current along both sides of the Blue
Ridge.

Before 1730 few settlers lived above the mouth of the Rivanna.
In 1732 Peter Jefferson patented a thousand acres at
the eastern opening of its mountain gap, and here, under frontier
conditions, Thomas Jefferson was born in 1743 near his
later estate of Monticello. About him were pioneer farmers,
as well as foresighted engrossers of the land. In the main his
country was that of a democratic frontier people—Scotch-Irish

Presbyterians, Quakers, Baptists, and other sects,[50] out of
sympathy with the established church and the landed gentry
of the lowlands. This society in which he was born was to
find in Jefferson a powerful exponent of its ideals.[51] Patrick
Henry was born in 1736 above the falls, not far from Richmond,
and he also was a mouthpiece of interior Virginia in the
Revolutionary era. In short, a society was already forming
in the Virginia Piedmont which was composed of many sects,
of independent yeomen as well as their great planter leaders
—a society naturally expansive, seeing its opportunity to deal
in unoccupied lands along the frontier which continually
moved toward the West, and in this era of the eighteenth century
dominated by the democratic ideals of pioneers rather
than by the aristocratic tendencies of slaveholding planters.
As there were two New Englands, so there were by this time
two Virginias, and the uplands belonged with the Old West.

The advance across the fall line from the coast was, in North
Carolina, much slower than in Virginia. After the Tuscarora
War (1712–13) an extensive region west from Pamlico Sound
was opened (1724). The region to the north, about the Roanoke,
had before this begun to receive frontier settlers, largely
from Virginia. Their traits are interestingly portrayed in
Byrd's "Dividing Line." By 1728 the farthest inhabitants
along the Virginia boundary were frontiersmen about Great
Creek, a branch of the Roanoke.[52] The North Carolina commissioners
desired to stop running the line after going a hundred
and seventy miles, on the plea that they were already fifty
miles beyond the outermost inhabitant, and there would be no
need for an age or two to carry the line farther; but the Virginia

surveyors pointed out that already speculators were taking
up the land. A line from Weldon to Fayetteville would
roughly mark the western boundary of North Carolina's sparse
population of forty thousand souls.[53]

The slower advance is explained, partly because of the later
settlement of the Carolinas, partly because the Indians continued
to be troublesome on the flanks of the advancing population,
as seen in the Tuscarora and Yemassee wars, and partly
because the pine barrens running parallel with the fall line
made a zone of infertile land not attractive to settlers. The
North Carolina low country, indeed, had from the end of the
seventeenth century been a kind of southern frontier for overflow
from Virginia; and in many ways was assimilated to the
type of the up-country in its turbulent democracy, its variety
of sects and peoples, and its primitive conditions. But under
the lax management of the public lands, the use of "blank
patents" and other evasions made possible the development of
large landholding, side by side with headrights to settlers.
Here, as in Virginia, a great proprietary grant extended across
the colony—Lord Granville's proprietary was a zone embracing
the northern half of North Carolina. Within the area,
sales and quit-rents were administered by the agents of the
owner, with the result that uncertainty and disorder of an
agrarian nature extended down to the Revolution. There were
likewise great speculative holdings, conditioned on seating a
certain proportion of settlers, into which the frontiersmen were
drifting.[54] But this system also made it possible for agents
of later migrating congregations to establish colonies like that
of the Moravians at Wachovia.[55] Thus, by the time settlers

came into the uplands from the north, a land system existed
similar to that of Virginia. A common holding was a square
mile (640 acres), but in practice this did not prevent the accumulation
of great estates.[56] Whereas Virginia's Piedmont area
was to a large extent entered by extensions from the coast,
that of North Carolina remained almost untouched by 1730.[57]

The same is true of South Carolina. By 1730, settlement
had progressed hardly eighty miles from the coast, even in the
settled area of the lowlands. The tendency to engross the lowlands
for large plantations was clear, here as elsewhere.[58] The
surveyor-general reports in 1732 that not as many as a thousand
acres within a hundred miles of Charleston, or within
twenty miles of a river or navigable creek, were unpossessed.
In 1729 the crown ordered eleven townships of twenty thousand
acres each to be laid out in rectangles, divided into fifty
acres for each actual settler under a quit-rent of four shillings
a year for every hundred acres, or proportionally, to be paid
after the first ten years.[59] By 1732 these townships, designed
to attract foreign Protestants, were laid out on the great rivers
of the colony. As they were located in the middle region,
east of the fall line, among pine barrens, or in malarial lands
in the southern corner of the colony, they all proved abortive
as towns, except Orangeburg[60] on the North Edisto, where

German redemptioners made a settlement. The Scotch-Irish
Presbyterians who came to Williamsburg, on Black River,
suffered hardships; as did the Swiss who, under the visionary
leadership of Purry, settled in the deadly climate of Purrysburg,
on the lower Savannah. To Welsh colonists from Pennsylvania
there was made a grant—known as the "Welsh
tract," embracing over 173,000 acres on the Great Pedee
(Marion County)[61] under headrights of fifty acres, also a
bounty in provisions, tools, and livestock.

These attempts, east of the fall line, are interesting, as showing
the colonial policy of marking out towns (which were to
be politically-organized parishes, with representation in the
legislature), and attracting foreigners thereto, prior to the
coming of settlers from the North.

The settlement of Georgia, in 1732, completed the southern
line of colonization toward the Piedmont. Among the objects
of the colony, as specified in the charters, were the relief of
the poor and the protection of the frontiers. To guard against
the tendency to engross the lands in great estates, already so
clearly revealed in the older colonies, the Georgia trustees provided
that the grants of fifty acres should not be alienated or
divided, but should pass to the male heirs and revert to the
trustees in case heirs were lacking. No grant greater than
five hundred acres was permitted, and even this was made conditionally
upon the holder settling ten colonists. However,
under local conditions and the competition and example of
neighboring colonies, this attempt to restrict land tenure in
the interest of democracy broke down by 1750, and Georgia's
land system became not unlike that of the other Southern
colonies.[62]

In 1734, Salzburgers had been located above Savannah, and

within seven years some twelve hundred German Protestants
were dwelling on the Georgia frontier; while a settlement of
Scotch Highlanders at Darien, near the mouth of the Altamaha,
protected the southern frontier. At Augusta, an Indian trading
fort (1735), whence the dealers in peltry visited the Cherokee,
completed the familiar picture of frontier advance.[63]

We have now hastily surveyed the movement of the frontier
of settlement westward from the lowlands, in the later years of
the seventeenth and early part of the eighteenth century.
There is much that is common in the whole line of advance.
The original settlers engross the desirable lands of the older
area. Indented servants and new-comers pass to the frontier
seeking a place to locate their headrights, or plant new towns.
Adventurous and speculative wealthy planters acquire large
holdings in the new areas, and bring over settlers to satisfy the
requirements of seating and cultivating their extensive grants,
thus building up a yeomanry of small landholders side by side
with the holders of large estates. The most far-sighted of the
new-comers follow the example of the planters, and petition
for increasing extensive grants. Meanwhile, pioneers like
Abraham Wood, himself once an indented servant, and gentlemen
like Col. William Byrd—prosecuting the Indian trade
from their posts at the "heads" of the rivers, and combining
frontier protection, exploring, and surveying—make known
the more distant fertile soils of the Piedmont. Already in the
first part of the eighteenth century, the frontier population
tended to be a rude democracy, with a large representation of
Scotch-Irish, Germans, Welsh, and Hugenot French settlers,
holding religious faiths unlike that of the followers of the
established church in the lowlands. The movement of slaves
into the region was unimportant, but not unknown.

The Virginia Valley was practically unsettled in 1730, as
was much of Virginia's Piedmont area and all the Piedmont
area of the Carolinas. The significance of the movement of
settlers from the North into this vacant Valley and Piedmont,
behind the area occupied by expansion from the coast is, that
it was geographically separated from the westward movement
from the coast, and that it was sufficient in volume to recruit
the democratic forces and postpone for a long time the process
of social assimilation to the type of the lowlands.

As has been pointed out, especially in the Carolinas a belt of
pine barrens, roughly eighty miles in breadth, ran parallel
with the fall line and thus discouraged western advance across
this belt, even before the head of navigation was reached. In
Virginia, the Blue Ridge made an almost equally effective
barrier, walling off the Shenandoah Valley from the westward
advance. At the same time this valley was but a continuation
of the Great Valley, that ran along the eastern edge of the
Alleghanies in southeastern Pennsylvania, and included in its
mountain trough the Cumberland and Hagerstown valleys. In
short, a broad limestone band of fertile soil was stretched
within mountain walls, southerly from Pennsylvania to southwestern
Virginia; and here the watergaps opened the way to
descend to the Carolina Piedmont. This whole area, a kind
of peninsula thrust down from Pennsylvania, was rendered
comparatively inaccessible to the westward movement from
the lowlands, and was equally accessible to the population
which was entering Pennsylvania.[64]

Thus it happened that from about 1730 to 1760 a generation
of settlers poured along this mountain trough into the southern
uplands, or Piedmont, creating a new continuous social and
economic area, which cut across the artificial colonial boundary

lines, disarranged the regular extension of local government
from the coast westward, and built up a new Pennsylvania in
contrast with the old Quaker colonies, and a new South in contrast
with the tidewater South. This New South composed the
southern half of the Old West.

From its beginning, Pennsylvania was advertised as a home
for dissenting sects seeking freedom in the wilderness. But it
was not until the exodus of German redemptioners,[65] from
about 1717, that the Palatinate and neighboring areas sent the
great tide of Germans which by the time of the Revolution
made them nearly a third of the total population of Pennsylvania.
It has been carefully estimated that in 1775 over
200,000 Germans lived in the thirteen colonies, chiefly along
the frontier zone of the Old West. Of these, a hundred thousand
had their home in Pennsylvania, mainly in the Great
Valley, in the region which is still so notably the abode of the
"Pennsylvania Dutch."[66]

Space does not permit us to describe this movement of colonization.[67]
The entrance to the fertile limestone soils of the
Great Valley of Pennsylvania was easy, in view of the low elevation
of the South Mountain ridge, and the watergaps thereto.
The continuation along the similar valley to the south, in
Maryland and Virginia, was a natural one, especially as the
increasing tide of emigrants raised the price of lands.[68] In

1719 the proprietor's price for Pennsylvania lands was ten
pounds per hundred acres, and two shillings quit-rents. In
1732 this became fifteen and one-half pounds, with a quit-rent
of a half penny per acre.[69] During the period 1718 to 1732,
when the Germans were coming in great numbers, the management
of the lands fell into confusion, and many seated themselves
as squatters, without title.[70] This was a fortunate possibility
for the poor redemptioners, who had sold their service
for a term of years in order to secure their transportation
to America.

By 1726 it was estimated that there were 100,000 squatters;[71]
and of the 670,000 acres occupied between 1732 and 1740, it
is estimated that 400,000 acres were settled without grants.[72]
Nevertheless these must ultimately be paid for, with interest,
and the concession of the right of preëmption to squatters made
this easier. But it was not until 1755 that the governor offered
land free from purchase, and this was to be taken only west of
the Alleghanies.[73]

Although the credit system relieved the difficulty in Pennsylvania,
the lands of that colony were in competition with the
Maryland lands, offered between 1717 and 1738 at forty shillings
sterling per hundred acres, which in 1738 was raised to
five pounds sterling.[74] At the same time, in the Virginia Valley,
as will be recalled, free grants were being made of a
thousand acres per family. Although large tracts of the Shenandoah
Valley had been granted to speculators like Beverley,

Borden, and the Carters, as well as to Lord Fairfax, the owners
sold six or seven pounds cheaper per hundred acres than did
the Pennsylvania land office.[75] Between 1726 and 1734, therefore,
the Germans began to enter this valley,[76] and before long
they extended their settlements into the Piedmont of the Carolinas,[77]
being recruited in South Carolina by emigrants coming
by way of Charleston—especially after Governor Glenn's
purchase from the Cherokee in 1755, of the extreme western
portion of the colony. Between 1750 and the Revolution,
these settlers in the Carolinas greatly increased in numbers.

Thus a zone of almost continuous German settlements had
been established, running from the head of the Mohawk in
New York to the Savannah in Georgia. They had found the
best soils, and they knew how to till them intensively and
thriftily, as attested by their large, well-filled barns, good
stock, and big canvas-covered Conestoga wagons. They preferred
to dwell in groups, often of the same religious denomination
—Lutherans, Reformed, Moravians, Mennonites, and
many lesser sects. The diaries of Moravian missionaries from
Pennsylvania, who visited them, show how the parent congregations
kept in touch with their colonies[78] and how intimate,

in general, was the bond of connection between this whole German
frontier zone and that of Pennsylvania.

Side by side with this German occupation of Valley and
Piedmont, went the migration of the Scotch-Irish.[79] These
lowland Scots had been planted in Ulster early in the seventeenth
century. Followers of John Knox, they had the contentious
individualism and revolutionary temper that seem natural
to Scotch Presbyterianism. They were brought up on the
Old Testament, and in the doctrine of government by covenant
or compact. In Ireland their fighting qualities had been
revealed in the siege of Londonderry, where their stubborn
resistance balked the hopes of James II. However, religious
and political disabilities were imposed upon these Ulstermen,
which made them discontented, and hard times contributed to
detach them from their homes. Their movement to America
was contemporaneous with the heavy German migration. By
the Revolution, it is believed that a third of the population of
Pennsylvania was Scotch-Irish; and it has been estimated,
probably too liberally, that a half million came to the United
States between 1730 and 1770.[80] Especially after the Rebellion
of 1745, large numbers of Highlanders came to increase
the Scotch blood in the nation.[81] Some of the Scotch-Irish
went to New England.[82] Given the cold shoulder by congregational
Puritans, they passed to unsettled lands about Worcester,
to the frontier in the Berkshires, and in southern New
Hampshire at Londonderry—whence came John Stark, a frontier

leader in the French and Indian War, and the hero of
Bennington in the Revolution, as well as the ancestors of Horace
Greeley and S. P. Chase, In New York, a Scotch-Irish
settlement was planted on the frontier at Cherry Valley.[83]
Scotch Highlanders came to the Mohawk,[84] where they followed
Sir William Johnson and became Tory raiders in the
Revolution.

But it was in Pennsylvania that the center of Scotch-Irish
power lay. "These bold and indigent strangers, saying as
their excuse when challenged for titles that we had solicited
for colonists and they had come accordingly,"[85] and asserting
that "it was against the laws of God and nature that so much
land should be idle while so many Christians wanted it to work
on and to raise their bread," squatted on the vacant lands,
especially in the region disputed between Pennsylvania and
Maryland, and remained in spite of efforts to drive them off.
Finding the Great Valley in the hands of the Germans, they
planted their own outposts along the line of the Indian trading
path from Lancaster to Bedford; they occupied Cumberland
Valley, and before 1760 pressed up the Juniata somewhat
beyond the narrows, spreading out along its tributaries, and
by 1768 had to be warned off from the Redstone country to
avoid Indian trouble. By the time of the Revolution, their settlements
made Pittsburgh a center from which was to come a
new era in Pennsylvania history. It was the Scotch-Irish and
German fur-traders[86] whose pack trains pioneered into the
Ohio Valley in the days before the French and Indian wars.
The messengers between civilization and savagery were such

men,[87] as the Irish Croghan, and the Germans Conrad Weiser
and Christian Post.

Like the Germans, the Scotch-Irish passed into the Shenandoah
Valley,[88] and on to the uplands of the South. In 1738
a delegation of the Philadelphia Presbyterian synod was sent
to the Virginia governor and received assurances of security of
religious freedom; the same policy was followed by the Carolinas.
By 1760 a zone of Scotch-Irish Presbyterian churches
extended from the frontiers of New England to the frontiers
of South Carolina. This zone combined in part with the German
zone, but in general Scotch-Irishmen tended to follow the
valleys farther toward the mountains, to be the outer edge of
this frontier. Along with this combined frontier stream were
English, Welsh and Irish Quakers, and French Huguenots.[89]

Among this moving mass, as it passed along the Valley into
the Piedmont, in the middle of the eighteenth century, were
Daniel Boone, John Sevier, James Robertson, and the ancestors
of John C. Calhoun, Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Stonewall
Jackson, James K. Polk, Sam Houston, and Davy Crockett,
while the father of Andrew Jackson came to the Carolina Piedmont
at the same time from the coast. Recalling that Thomas
Jefferson's home was on the frontier, at the edge of the Blue
Ridge, we perceive that these names represent the militant
expansive movement in American life. They foretell the settlement
across the Alleghanies in Kentucky and Tennessee; the
Louisiana Purchase, and Lewis and Clark's transcontinental

exploration; the conquest of the Gulf Plains in the War of
1812–15; the annexation of Texas; the acquisition of California
and the Spanish Southwest. They represent, too, frontier
democracy in its two aspects personified in Andrew Jackson
and Abraham Lincoln. It was a democracy responsive to
leadership, susceptible to waves of emotion, of a "high religeous
voltage"—quick and direct in action.

The volume of this Northern movement into the Southern
uplands is illustrated by the statement of Governor Tryon, of
North Carolina, that in the summer and winter of 1765 more
than a thousand immigrant wagons passed through Salisbury,
in that colony.[90] Coming by families, or groups of families
or congregations, they often drove their herds with them.
Whereas in 1746 scarce a hundred fighting men were found in
Orange and the western counties of North Carolina, there were
in 1753 fully three thousand, in addition to over a thousand
Scotch in the Cumberland; and they covered the province more
or less thickly, from Hillsboro and Fayetteville to the mountains.[91]
Bassett remarks that the Presbyterians received their
first ministers from the synod of New York and Pennsylvania,
and later on sent their ministerial students to Princeton College.
"Indeed it is likely that the inhabitants of this region
knew more about Philadelphia at that time than about Newbern
or Edenton."[92]

We are now in a position to note briefly, in conclusion, some
of the results of the occupation of this new frontier during the
first half of the eighteenth century—some of the consequences
of this formation of the Old West.

I.

• A fighting frontier had been created all along the line
  from New England to Georgia, which bore the brunt of French
  

  ---

  107

  
  
  
  and Indian attacks and gave indispensable service during the
  Revolution. The significance of this fact could only be developed
  by an extended survey of the scattered border warfare of
  this era. We should have to see Rogers leading his New England
  Rangers, and Washington defending interior Virginia
  with his frontiersmen in their hunting shirts, in the French and
  Indian War. When all of the campaigns about the region of
  Canada, Lake Champlain, and the Hudson, central New York
  (Oriskany, Cherry Valley, Sullivan's expedition against the
  Iroquois), Wyoming Valley, western Pennsylvania, the Virginia
  Valley, and the back country of the South are considered
  as a whole from this point of view, the meaning of the Old
  West will become more apparent.

II.

• A new society had been established, differing in essentials
  from the colonial society of the coast. It was a democratic
  self-sufficing, primitive agricultural society, in which
  individualism was more pronounced than the community life
  of the lowlands. The indented servant and the slave were not
  a normal part of its labor system. It was engaged in grain
  and cattle raising, not in producing staples, and it found a
  partial means of supplying its scarcity of specie by the peltries
  which it shipped to the coast. But the hunter folk were already
  pushing farther on; the cow-pens and the range were giving
  place to the small farm, as in our own day they have done in
  the cattle country. It was a region of hard work and poverty,
  not of wealth and leisure. Schools and churches were secured
  under serious difficulty,[93] if at all; but in spite of the natural
  

  ---

  108

  
  
  
  tendencies of a frontier life, a large portion of the interior
  showed a distinctly religious atmosphere.

III.

• The Old West began the movement of internal trade
  which developed home markets and diminished that colonial
  dependence on Europe in industrial matters shown by the
  maritime and staple-raising sections. Not only did Boston
  and other New England towns increase as trading centers
  when the back country settled up, but an even more significant
  interchange occurred along the Valley and Piedmont. The
  German farmers of the Great Valley brought their woven linen,
  knitted stockings, firkins of butter, dried apples, grain, etc., to
  Philadelphia and especially to Baltimore, which was laid out
  in 1730. To this city also came trade from the Shenandoah
  Valley, and even from the Piedmont came peltry trains and
  droves of cattle and hogs to the same market.[94] The increase
  of settlement on the upper James resulted in the establishment
  of the city of Richmond at the falls of the river in 1737.
  Already the tobacco-planting aristocracy of the lowlands were
  finding rivals in the grain-raising area of interior Virginia and
  Maryland. Charleston prospered as the up-country of the
  Carolinas grew. Writing in the middle of the eighteenth century,
  Governor Glenn, of South Carolina, explained the apparent
  diminution of the colony's shipping thus:[95]
  

  Our trade with New York and Philadelphia was
  of this sort, draining us of all the little money and
  bills that we could gather from other places, for
  their bread, flour, beer, hams, bacon, and other
  things of-their produce, all which, except beer,
  our new townships begin to supply us with which are
  

  ---

  109

  
  

  

  settled with very industrious and consequently
  thriving Germans.

  It was not long before this interior trade produced those
  rivalries for commercial ascendancy, between the coastwise
  cities, which still continue. The problem of internal improvements
  became a pressing one, and the statutes show increasing
  provision for roads, ferries, bridges, river improvements, ete.[96]
  The basis was being laid for a national economy, and at the
  same time a new source for foreign export was created.

IV.

• The Old West raised the issues of nativism and a
  lower standard of comfort. In New England, Scotch-Irish
  Presbyterians had been frowned upon and pushed away by
  the Puritan townsmen.[97] In Pennsylvania, the coming of the
  Germans and the Scotch-Irish in such numbers caused grave
  anxiety. Indeed, a bill was passed to limit the importation
  of the Palatines, but it was vetoed.[98] Such astute observers as
  Franklin feared in 1753 that Pennsylvania would be unable
  to preserve its language and that even its government would
  become precarious.[99] "I remember," he declares, "when
  they modestly declined intermeddling in our elections, but
  now they come in droves and carry all before them, except in
  one or two counties;" and he lamented that the English could
  not remove their prejudices by addressing them in German.[100]
  Dr. Douglas[101] apprehended that Pennsylvania would "degenerate
  into a foreign colony" and endanger the quiet of the
  adjacent provinces. Edmund Burke, regretting that the Germans
  

  ---

  110

  
  
  
  adhered to their own schools, literature, and language,
  and that they possessed great tracts without admixture of English,
  feared that they would not blend and become one people
  with the British colonists, and that the colony was threatened
  with the danger of being wholly foreign. He also noted that
  "these foreigners by their industry, frugality, and a hard way
  of living, in which they greatly exceed our people, have in a
  manner thrust them out in several places."[102] This is a phenomenon
  with which a succession of later frontiers has familiarized
  us. In point of fact the "Pennsylvania Dutch"
  remained through our history a very stubborn area to assimilate,
  with corresponding effect upon Pennsylvania politics.

  It should be noted also that this coming of non-English
  stock to the frontier raised in all the colonies affected, questions
  of naturalization and land tenure by aliens.[103]

V.

• The creation of this frontier society—of which so large
  a portion differed from that of the coast in language and
  religion as well as in economic life, social structure, and ideals
  —produced an antagonism between interior and coast, which
  worked itself out in interesting fashion. In general this took
  these forms: contests between the property-holding class of the
  coast and the debtor class of the interior, where specie was
  lacking, and where paper money and a readjustment of the
  basis or taxation were demanded; contests over defective or
  unjust local government in the administration of taxes, fees,
  lands, and the courts; contests over apportionment in the legislature,
  whereby the coast was able to dominate, even when
  its white population was in the minority; contests to secure
  the complete separation of church and state; and, later, contests
  

  ---

  111

  
  
  
  over slavery, internal improvements, and party politics in
  general. These contests are also intimately connected with
  the political philosophy of the Revolution and with the development
  of American democracy. In nearly every colony prior
  to the Revolution, struggles had been in progress between the
  party of privilege, chiefly the Eastern men of property allied
  with the English authorities, and the democratic classes, strongest
  in the West and the cities.

  This theme deserves more space than can here be allotted
  to it; but a rapid survey of conditions in this respect, along
  the whole frontier, will at least serve to bring out the point.
  In New England as a whole, the contest is less in evidence.
  That part of the friction elsewhere seen as the result of defective
  local government in the back country, was met by the
  efficiency of the town system; but between the interior and the
  coast there were struggles over apportionment and religious
  freedom. The former is illustrated by the convention that met
  in Dracut, Massachusetts, in 1776, to petition the States of
  Massachusetts and New Hampshire to relieve the financial distress
  and unfair legislative representation. Sixteen of the border
  towns of New Hampshire sent delegates to this convention.
  Two years later, these New Hampshire towns attempted to join
  Vermont.[104] As a Revolutionary State, Vermont itself was an
  illustration of the same tendency of the interior to break away
  from the coast. Massachusetts in this period witnessed a campaign
  between the paper money party which was entrenched in
  the more recently and thinly-settled areas of the interior and
  west, and the property-holding classes of the coast.[105] The
  opposition to the constitutions of 1778 and 1780 is tinctured
  

  ---

  112

  
  
  
  with the same antagonism between the ideas of the newer part
  of the interior and of the coast.[106] Shays' Rebellion and the
  anti-federal opposition of 1787–88 found its stronghold in the
  same interior areas.[107]

  The religious struggles continued until the democratic interior,
  where dissenting sects were strong, and where there was
  antagonism to the privileges of the congregational church,
  finally secured complete disestablishment in New Hamphshire,
  Connecticut, and Massachusetts. But this belongs to a later
  period.[108]

  Pennsylvania affords a clear illustration of these sectional
  antagonisms. The memorial of the frontier "Paxton Boys,"
  in 1764, demanded a right to share in political privileges with
  the older part of the colony, and protested against the apportionment
  by which the counties of Chester, Bucks, and Philadelphia,
  together with the city of Philadelphia, elected twenty-six
  delegates, while the five frontier counties had but ten.[109]
  The frontier complained against the failure of the dominant
  Quaker party of the coast to protect the interior against the
  Indians.[110] The three old wealthy counties under Quaker rule
  feared the growth of the West, therefore made few new counties,
  and carefully restricted the representation in each to preserve
  the majority in the old section. At the same time, by a
  property qualification they met the danger of the democratic
  city population. Among the points of grievance in this colony,
  

  ---

  113

  
  
  
  in addition to apportionment and representation, was the difficulty
  of access to the county seat, owing to the size of the back
  counties. Dr. Lincoln has well set forth the struggle of the
  back country, culminating in its triumph in the constitutional
  convention of 1776, which was chiefly the work of the Presbyterian
  counties.[111] Indeed, there were two revolutions in Pennsylvania,
  which went on side by side: one a revolt against the
  coastal property-holding classes, the old dominant Quaker
  party, and the other a revolt against Great Britain, which was
  in this colony made possible only by the triumph of the
  interior.

  In Virginia, as early as 1710, Governor Spotswood had complained
  that the old counties remained small while the new
  ones were sometimes ninety miles long, the inhabitants being
  obliged to travel thirty or forty miles to their own court-house.
  Some of the counties had 1,700 tithables, while others only a
  dozen miles square had 500. Justices of the peace disliked to
  ride forty or fifty miles to their monthly courts. Likewise
  there was disparity in the size of parishes—for example, that
  of Varina, on the upper James, had nine hundred tithables,
  many of whom lived fifty miles from their church. But the
  vestry refused to allow the remote parishioners to separate,
  because it would increase the parish levy of those that
  remained. He feared lest this would afford "opportunity to
  Sectarys to establish their opinions among 'em, and thereby
  shake that happy establishment of the Church of England
  which this colony enjoys with less mixture of Dissenters than
  any other of her Maj'tie's plantations, and when once Schism
  has crept into the Church, it will soon create faction in the
  Civil Government."

  ---

  114

  
  
  

  That Spotswood's fears were well founded, we have already
  seen. As the sectaries of the back country increased, dissatisfaction
  with the established church grew. After the Revolution
  came, Jefferson, with the back country behind him,
  was able finally to destroy the establishment, and to break
  down the system of entails and primogeniture behind which
  the tobacco-planting aristocracy of the coast was entrenched.
  The desire of Jefferson to see slavery gradually abolished
  and popular education provided, is a further illustration of
  the attitude of the interior. In short, Jeffersonian democracy,
  with its idea of separation of church and state, its
  wish to popularize education, and its dislike for special privilege,
  was deeply affected by the Western society of the Old
  Dominion.

  The Virginian reform movement, however, was unable to
  redress the grievance of unequal apportionment. In 1780
  Jefferson pointed out that the practice of allowing each county
  an equal representation in the legislature gave control to the
  numerous small counties of the tidewater, while the large populous
  counties of the up-country suffered. "Thus," he wrote,
  "the 19,000 men below the falls give law to more than 30,000
  living in other parts of the state, and appoint all their chief
  officers, executive and judiciary."[112] This led to a long struggle
  between coast and interior, terminated only when the slave
  population passed across the fall line, and more nearly assimilated
  coast and up-country. In the mountain areas which did
  not undergo this change, the independent state of West Virginia
  remains as a monument of the contest. In the convention of
  1829–30, the whole philosophy of representation was discussed,
  and the coast defended its control as necessary to protect property
  

  ---

  115

  
  
  
  from the assaults of a numerical majority. They feared
  that the interior would tax their slaves in order to secure funds
  for internal improvements.

  As Doddridge put the case:[113]
  

  The principle is that the owners of slave property
  must be possessed of all the powers of government,
  however small their own numbers may be,
  to secure that property from the rapacity of an
  overgrown majority of white men. This principle
  admits of no relaxation, because the weaker
  the minority becomes, the greater will their need
  for power be according to their own doctrines.

  Leigh of Chesterfield county declared:[114]
  

  It is remarkable—I mention it for the curiosity
  of the fact—that if any evil, physical or moral,
  arise in any of the states south of us, it never
  takes a northerly direction, or taints the Southern
  breeze; whereas, if any plague originate in the
  North, it is sure to spread to the South and to
  invade us sooner or later; the influenza—the
  smallpox—the varioloid—the Hessian fly—the
  Circuit Court system—Universal Suffrage—all
  come from the North, and they always cross above
  the falls of the great rivers; below, it seems, the
  broad expanse of waters interposing, effectually
  arrests their progress.

  ---

  116

  
  
  

  Nothing could more clearly bring out the sense of contrast
  between upland and lowland Virginia, and the continued intimacy
  of the bond of connection between the North and its
  Valley and Piedmont colonies, than this unconscious testimony.

  In North and South Carolina the upland South, beyond the
  pine barrens and the fall line, had similar grievances against
  the coast; but as the zone of separation was more strongly
  marked, the grievances were more acute. The tide of backwoods
  settlement flowing down the Piedmont from the north,
  had cut across the lines of local government and disarranged
  the regular course of development of the colonies from the
  seacoast.[115] Under the common practice, large counties in
  North Carolina and parishes in South Carolina had been projected
  into the unoccupied interior from the older settlements
  along their eastern edge.

  But the Piedmont settlers brought their own social order,
  and could not be well governed by the older planters living
  far away toward the seaboard. This may be illustrated
  by conditions in South Carolina. The general court in
  Charleston had absorbed county and precinct courts, except
  the minor jurisdiction of justices of the peace. This was well
  enough for the great planters who made their regular residence
  there for a part of each year; but it was a source of oppression
  to the up-country settlers, remote from the court. The difficulty
  of bringing witnesses, the delay of the law, and the
  costs all resulted in the escape of criminals as well as in the
  immunity of reckless debtors. The extortions of officials, and
  their occasional collusion with horse and cattle thieves, and
  the lack of regular administration of the law, led the South
  Carolina up-country men to take affairs in their own hands,
  and in 1764 to establish associations to administer lynch law
  under the name of "Regulators." The "Scovillites," or government
  

  ---

  117

  
  
  
  party, and the Regulators met in arms on the Saluda
  in 1769, but hostilities were averted and remedial measures
  passed, which alleviated the difficulty until the Revolution.[116]
  There still remained, however, the grievance of unjust legislative
  representation.[117] Calhoun stated the condition in these
  words:
  

  The upper country had no representation in the
  government and no political existence as a constituent
  portion of the state until a period near
  the commencement of the revolution. Indeed, during
  the revolution, and until the formation of the
  present constitution, in 1790, its political weight
  was scarcely felt in the government. Even then
  although it had become the most populous section,
  power was so distributed under the constitution
  as to leave it in a minority in every department
  of government.

  Even in 1794 it was claimed by the up-country leaders that
  four-fifths of the people were governed by one-fifth. Nor was
  the difficulty met until the constitutional amendment of 1808,
  the effect of which was to give the control of the senate to the
  lower section and of the house of representatives to the upper
  section, thus providing a mutual veto.[118] This South Carolina
  experience furnished the historical basis for Calhoun's argument
  for nullification, and for the political philosophy underlying
  

  ---

  118

  
  
  
  his theory of the "concurrent majority."[119] This adjustment
  was effected, however, only after the advance of the black
  belt toward the interior had assimilated portions of the Piedmont
  to lowland ideals.

  When we turn to North Carolina's upper country we find
  the familiar story, but with a more tragic ending. The local
  officials owed their selection to the governor and the council
  whom he appointed. Thus power was all concentrated in the
  official "ring" of the lowland area. The men of the interior
  resented the extortionate fees and the poll tax, which bore with
  unequal weight upon the poor settlers of the back country.
  This tax had been continued after sufficient funds had been
  collected to extinguish the debt for which it was originally
  levied, but venal sheriffs had failed to pay it into the treasury.
  A report of 1770 showed at least one defaulting sheriff in
  every county of the province.[120] This tax, which was almost
  the sole tax of the colony, was to be collected in specie, for
  the warehouse system, by which staples might be accepted,
  while familiar on the coast, did not apply to the interior.
  The specie was exceedingly difficult to obtain; in lack of it,
  the farmer saw the sheriff, who owed his appointment to the
  dominant lowland planters, sell the lands of the delinquent
  to his speculative friends. Lawyers and court fees followed.

  In short, the interior felt that it was being exploited.[121] and
  it had no redress, for the legislature was so apportioned that
  

  ---

  119

  
  
  
  all power rested in the old lowland region. Efforts to secure
  paper money failed by reason of the governor's opposition
  under instructions from the crown, and the currency was contracting
  at the very time when population was rapidly increasing
  in the interior.[122] As in New England, in the days of
  Shays' Rebellion, violent prejudice existed against the judiciary
  and the lawyers, and it must, of course, be understood
  that the movement was not free from frontier dislike of taxation
  and the restraints of law and order in general. In 1766
  and 1768, meetings were held in the upper counties to organize
  the opposition, and an "association"[123] was formed, the
  members of which pledged themselves to pay no more taxes
  or fees until they satisfied themselves that these were agreeable
  to law.

  The Regulators, as they called themselves, assembled in
  the autumn of 1768 to the number of nearly four thousand, and
  tried to secure terms of adjustment. In 1770 the court-house
  at Hillsboro was broken into by a mob. The assembly passed
  some measures designed to conciliate the back country; but
  before they became operative, Governor Tryon's militia, about
  twelve hundred men, largely from the lowlands, and led by the
  gentry whose privileges were involved, met the motley army of
  the Regulators, who numbered about two thousand, in the
  battle of the Alamance (May, 1771). Many were killed and
  wounded, the Regulators dispersed, and over six thousand men
  came into camp and took the oath of submission to the colonial
  authorities. The battle was not the first battle of the Revolution,
  as it has been sometimes called, for it had little or no
  

  ---

  120

  
  
  
  relation to the stamp act; and many of the frontiersmen
  involved, later refused to fight against England because of
  the very hatred which had been inspired for the lowland Revolutionary
  leaders in this battle of the Alamance. The interior
  of the Carolinas was a region where neighbors, during the
  Revolution, engaged in internecine conflicts of Tories against
  Whigs.

  But in the sense that the battle of Alamance was a conflict
  against privilege, and for equality of political rights and power,
  it was indeed a preliminary battle of the Revolution, although
  fought against many of the very men who later professed
  Revolutionary doctrines in North Carolina. The need of
  recognizing the importance of the interior led to concessions
  in the convention of 1776 in that state. "Of the forty-four
  sections of the constitution, thirteen are embodiments of
  reforms sought by the Regulators."[124] But it was in this period
  that hundreds of North Carolina backwoodsmen crossed the
  mountains to Tennessee and Kentucky, many of them coming
  from the heart of the Regulator region. They used the device
  of "associations" to provide for government in their communities.[125]

  In the matter of apportionment, North Carolina showed the
  same lodgment of power in the hands of the coast, even after
  population preponderated in the Piedmont.[126]

  It is needless to comment on the uniformity of the evidence
  which has been adduced, to show that the Old West, the interior
  region from New England to Georgia, had a common
  grievance against the coast; that it was deprived throughout
  most of the region of its due share of representation, and neglected
  and oppressed in local government in large portions of
  

  ---

  121

  
  
  
  the section. The familiar struggle of West against East, of
  democracy against privileged classes, was exhibited along the
  entire line. The phenomenon must be considered as a unit,
  not in the fragments of state histories. It was a struggle of
  interior against coast.

VI.

• Perhaps the most noteworthy Western activity in the
  Revolutionary era, aside from the aspects already mentioned,
  was in the part which the multitude of sects in the Old West
  played in securing the great contribution which the United
  States made to civilization by providing for complete religious
  liberty, a secular state with tree churches. Particularly the
  Revolutionary constitutions of Pennsylvania and Virginia,
  under the influence of the back country, insured religious freedom.
  The effects of the North Carolina upland area to secure
  a similar result were noteworthy, though for the time ineffective.[127]

VII.

• As population increased in these years, the coast gradually
  yielded to the up-country's demands. This may be illustrated
  by the transfer of the capitals from the lowlands to the
  fall line and Valley. In 1779, Virginia changed her seat of
  government from Williamsburg to Richmond; in 1790, South
  Carolina, from Charleston to Columbia; in 1791, North Carolina,
  from Edenton to Raleigh; in 1797, New York, from New
  York City to Albany; in 1799, Pennsylvania, from Philadelphia
  to Lancaster.

VIII.

• The democratic aspect of the new constitutions was
  also influenced by the frontier as well as by the prevalent Revolutionary
  philosophy; and the demands for paper money, stay
  

  ---

  122

  
  
  
  and tender laws, etc., of this period were strongest in the interior.
  It was this region that supported Shays' Rebellion; it
  was (with some important exceptions) the same area that resisted
  the ratification of the federal constitution, fearful of a
  stronger government and of the loss of paper money.

IX.

• The interior later showed its opposition to the coast by
  the persistent contest against slavery, carried on in the up-country
  of Virginia, and North and South Carolina. Until the
  decade 1830–40, it was not certain that both Virginia and
  North Carolina would not find some means of gradual abolition.
  The same influence accounts for much of the exodus of
  the Piedmont pioneers into Indiana and Illinois, in the first
  half of the nineteenth century.[128]

X.

• These were the regions, also, in which were developed
  the desire of the pioneers who crossed the mountains, and settled
  on the "Western waters," to establish new States free from
  control by the lowlands, owning their own lands, able to determine
  their own currency, and in general to govern themselves
  in accordance with the ideals of the Old West. They were
  ready also, if need be, to become independent of the Old
  Thirteen. Vermont must be considered in this aspect, as well
  as Kentucky and Tennessee.[129]

XI.

• The land system of the Old West furnished precedents
  which developed into the land system of the trans-Alleghany
  West.[130] The squatters of Pennsylvania and the Carolinas
  

  ---

  123

  
  
  
  found it easy to repeat the operation on another frontier. Preemption
  laws became established features. The Revolution
  gave opportunity to confiscate the claims of Lord Fairfax,
  Lord Granville, and McCulloh to their vast estates, as well as
  the remaining lands of the Pennsylvania proprietors. The 640
  acre (or one square mile) unit of North Carolina for preemptions,
  and frontier land bounties, became the area awarded
  to frontier stations by Virginia in 1779, and the "section" of
  the later federal land system. The Virginia preëmption right
  of four hundred acres on the Western waters, or a thousand
  for those who came prior to 1778, was, in substance, the continuation
  of a system familiar in the Old West.

  The grants to Beverley, of over a hundred thousand acres in
  the Valley, conditioned on seating a family for every thousand
  acres, and the similar grants to Borden, Carter, and Lewis,
  were followed by the great grant to the Ohio Company. This
  company, including leading Virginia planters and some frontiersmen,
  asked in 1749 for two hundred thousand acres on
  the upper Ohio, conditioned on seating a hundred families in
  seven years, and for an additional grant of three hundred
  thousand acres after this should be accomplished. It was proposed
  to settle Germans on these lands.

  The Loyal Land Company, by order of the Virginia council
  (1749), was authorized to take up eight hundred thousand
  acres west and north of the southern boundary of Virginia, on
  condition of purchasing "rights" for the amount within four
  years. The company sold many tracts for £3 per hundred
  acres to settlers, but finally lost its claim. The Mississippi
  Company, including in its membership the Lees, Washingtons,
  and other great Virginia planters, applied for two and one-half
  million acres in the West in 1769. Similar land companies
  

  ---

  124

  
  
  
  of New England origin, like the Susquehanna Company and
  Lyman's Mississippi Company, exhibit the same tendency of
  the Old West on the northern side. New England's Ohio Company
  of Associates, which settled Marietta, had striking resemblances
  to town proprietors.

  These were only the most noteworthy of many companies of
  this period, and it is evident that they were a natural outgrowth
  of speculations in the Old West. Washington, securing military
  bounty land claims of soldiers of the French and Indian
  War, and selecting lands in West Virginia until he controlled
  over seventy thousand acres for speculation, is an excellent
  illustration of the tendency. He also thought of colonizing
  German Palatines upon his lands. The formation of the
  Transylvania and Vandalia companies were natural developments
  on a still vaster scale.[131]

XII.

• The final phase of the Old West, which I wish merely
  to mention, in conclusion, is its colonization of areas beyond the
  mountains. The essential unity of the movement is brought
  out by a study of how New England's Old West settled northern
  Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, the Adirondacks, central
  and Western New York, the Wyoming Valley (once organized
  as a part of Litchfield, Connecticut), the Ohio Company's
  region about Marietta, and Connecticut's Western Reserve on
  the shores of Lake Erie; and how the pioneers of the Great
  Valley and the Piedmont region of the South crossed the Alleghanies
  and settled on the Western Waters. Daniel Boone,
  going from his Pennsylvania home to the Yadkin, and from
  the Yadkin to Tennessee and Kentucky, took part in the whole
  process, and later in its continuation into Missouri.[132] The
  

  ---

  125

  
  
  
  social conditions and ideals of the Old West powerfully shaped
  those of the trans-Alleghany West.

  The important contrast between the spirit of individual colonization,
  resentful of control, which the Southern frontiersmen
  showed, and the spirit of community colonization and control
  to which the New England pioneers inclined, left deep traces
  on the later history of the West.[133] The Old West diminished
  the importance of the town as a colonizing unit, even in New
  England. In the Southern area, efforts to legislate towns into
  existence, as in Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia, failed.
  They faded away before wilderness conditions. But in general,
  the Northern stream of migration was communal, and
  the Southern individual. The difference which existed between
  that portion of the Old West which was formed by the northward
  colonization, chiefly of the New England Plateau (including
  New York), and that portion formed by the southward
  colonization of the Virginia Valley and the Southern Piedmont
  was reflected in the history of the Middle West and the Mississippi
  Valley.[134]