In early America the pursuit of land drove the movement west. “The population of the United States was like a body of water that was being steadily enlarged by internal spring and external tributes,” wrote historian Max Farand.1 Early America concentrated on becoming an ownership society or perhaps an ownership-exploitation society. Historian Edmund S. Morgan noted: “Ownership of property gave not only economic independence but also political independence to the average American.”2 The vast amount of available land created a society different from that from which many Americans had emigrated. Historian Bernard Bailyn observed: “The colonists lived in exceptional circumstances and shared a peculiar outlook. Unlike the inhabitants of the British Isles, they were not located at the center of their culture looking outward toward exotic margins. Their experience was the opposite. They lived on the far periphery looking inward toward a distant and superior metropolitan core from which standards and the sanctioned forms of organized life emanated. They lived in the outback, on the far marchlands, where constraints were loosened and where one had to struggle to maintain the forms of civilized existence.”3
Land formed America’s Founders – just as the Founders helped form the land, but for more than two centuries, America had been primarily a series of coastal settlements. Historian Forrest McDonald observed: “Of the Middle States, only Pennsylvania had a continuous line of settlement deep into the interior, and even in that state three-fourths of the population was concentrated in a small area near Philadelphia.”4
Still, Americans hugged the Atlantic coast. Theirs was relatively unique experience – divorced as they were from the “motherland.” George Washington clearly foresaw that the situation would change as colonists sought cheap land to plant and develop. That, in turn, would challenge the unity of the country’s disparate settlements and the leadership of the new government of an independent America. In the decade before the Revolutionary War, the westward movement of Americans suddenly accelerated. Max Farand noted: “Twenty years before the Revolution the expanding population had reached the mountains and was ready to go beyond. The difficulty of crossing the mountains was not insuperable, but the French and Indian War, followed by Pontiac’s Conspiracy, made outlying frontier settlement dangerous if not impossible.”5 Peace opened possibilities that warfare had prevented and postponed.
