 section 8 of the Frontier in American History. 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 17th century and in the early years of the 18th gave control of the maritime section of the nation and made way for the new movement of westward expansion which I proposed to discuss. In his winning of the west, Roosevelt dealt chiefly with the region beyond the Alleghenies, and with the period of the later 18th century, although he prefaced his account with an excellent chapter describing the backwards men of the Alleghenies and their social conditions from 1769 to 1774. It is important to notice, however, that he is concerned with the backward society already formed, that he ignores the New England frontier and its part in the winning of the west, and does not recognise 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 Alleghenies by the southern half of the frontier folk. There is then a western area intermediate between the coastal's colonial settlements of the 17th century and the trans-Allegheny settlements of the later portion of the 18th 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 Alleghenies and the hell of navigation of the Atlantic rivers marked by the Fall Line. 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 appears 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 programme 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 Alleghenies. 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 colonising the coastal areas which served as bases of operations in the west would 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 colonisation. In 1676 Virginia was passing through Indian fighting, keenest along the four 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. The date marks the end of the period when the Virginia tide water 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 back 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 17th century is indicated by the Massachusetts Act of 1694 enumerating 11 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 land owners, or fine of other inhabitants. 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 dearfields minister Mr. Williams in 1704. Parkman succinctly described the general conditions in these words. The exposed frontier of New England was between two and three hundred miles long, and consisted of farms and hamlets loosely scattered through an almost impervious forest. Even in so-called villages the houses were far apart, because, except on the seashore, the people lived by farming. Such as were able to do so fence their dwellings with palisades, or built them of solid timber, with loopholes, a projecting up a story like a blockhouse, and sometimes a flanker at one or more of the corners. In the more considerable settlements, the largest of these fortified houses was occupied in time of danger by armed men and served as a place of refuge for the neighbours. 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 into the House Atonic 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 town soon established between Westfield and these House Atonic 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 Londonary, New Hampshire, and in the Berkshires, as well as in the region won in King Philip's War from the Knitmocks, wither there came also Hugernots. In King George's War, the Connecticut River settlers found their frontier protection in such rude stockades as those at the sites of Keen, of Charleston, New Hampshire, number four, fought surely at the head of Deerfield River, Heath, and Port Pelham, Roe, while Fort Massachusetts, Adams, guarded the Husak gateway to the Husatonic Valley. These frontier garrisons and the self-defence of the backwards men of New England are well portrayed in the pages of Parkman. At the close of the war, settlement again expanded into the Berkshires, where Lennox, West Husak, 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. The richest parts remaining to be granted are on the northern branches of the Connecticut River, towards Crown Point, where are great districts of fertile soil still unsettled. The north part of New Hampshire, the province of Maine, and the territory of Saga Haddock, have but few settlements in them compared with the tracks yet unsettled. I should further observe that these tracks have since the Peace, i.e. 1763, been settling pretty fast. Farms on the river Connecticut are every day extending beyond the old Fort Dummer, for near 30 miles, and within a few years reach to Cohusso, which is nearly 200 miles. Not that such an extent will be one-tenth settled, but the newcomers do not fix near their neighbors, and go on regularly, but take spots that please them best, though 20 or 30 miles beyond any others. This to people of a sociable disposition in Europe would appear very strange, but the Americans do not regard the near neighborhood of other farmers, 20 or 30 miles by water they esteem no distance in matters of this sort, besides in a country that promises well the intermediate space is not long in filling up. Between Connecticut River and Lake Champlain upon Otto Creek, and all along Lake Sacrament, George, and the rivers that fall into it, and the whole length of Wood Creek are numerous settlements made since the Peace. For nearly 100 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 analysts 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. The influence of this policy can only be fully appreciated when standing by the side of the solitary settlers hut in the West, where even an Eastern man has degenerated to a bore in manners, where his children have grown up uneducated, and where the Sabbath has become an unknown day, and religion and its obligations have ceased to exercise control upon the heart and life. 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 tracks 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 18th century especially, it was common to reserve 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. 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 17th century especially, was markedly different from the practices of other colonies in the settlement of their backlands. For during most of the period, New England did not use her wild lands or public domain as the source of revenue by sale to individuals or to companies with the reservation of quit rents, nor attract individual settlers by head rights or 50-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 restraint to ensure the persistence of puritan ideals. During most of the 17th century, the proprietors awarded lands to the newcomers 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 refused to share them with the inhabitants who were not of the body of proprietors. The distinction resulted in class conflicts in the towns, especially in the 18th century, over the ownership and disposal of the common lands. End of Section 8. Section 9 of The Frontier in American History. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Frontier in American History by Frederick Jackson Turner, Chapter 3, Part 2. 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 flavour 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 17th century and during the 18th. 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 contagious towns to connect her Heusatonic and Connecticut Valley settlements. 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 Lichfield 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-former, 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. Riots occurred when the colonial authorities attempted to assert possession and the matter was at length compromised in 1719 by allowing Lichfield to be settled in accordance with the town and 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. 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 130 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 boon 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 role, 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, use of the birch seal as 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 and 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. 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 in 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 main coast under frontier conditions and remote from the oldest centers of New England developed traits in a democratic spirit that relate them closely to the westerners in spite of the fact that Maine is down east by preeminence. The frontier of the middle region in this period of the formation of the Old West was divided into two parts which happened 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 18th century. With them were associated the Walk Hill, tributary to the Hudson, and Cherry Valley near the Mohawk along the sources of the Susquehanna. The Berkshires walled the Hudson into 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, greatest states had been the common form of land tenure. Renssela Swick reached at one time over 700,000 acres. Those great Patroon estates were confirmed by the English governors, who in their turn followed a similar policy. By 1732, two and a half million acres were engrossed in menorial grants. In 1764, Governor Calden wrote that three of the extravagant grants contain, as the proprietors claim, above a million acres each, several others above 200,000. Although these grants contain a great part of the province, they are made in trifling acknowledgments. The far greater part of them still remain uncultivated, without any benefit to the community, and likewise a discouragement to the settling and improving the lands in the neighbourhood of them. For from the uncertainty of their boundaries, the patentees of these great tracts are daily enlarging their pretensions, and by tedious and most expensive lawsuits, distress and ruin poor families who have taken out grants near them. 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-six of the inhabitants of Westchester County lived within the bounds of the great manors there. In Albany County, the Livingstone Manor spread over seven modern townships, and the Great Van Renice Alley, a manor, stretched 24 by 28 miles along the Hudson, while still farther on the Mohawk were the vast possessions of Sir William Johnson. It was not simply that the grants were extensive, but that the policy of the proprietors favoured 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 upcountry of the South, might flow into New York. In 1710, Governor Hunter purchased a tract in Livingstone's Manor and located nearly 1500 Palatines on it to produce naval stores. But the attempt soon failed. The Germans applied to the Indians on Suchery 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 villagers broken up, some remaining and some moving farther up the Mohawk, where they, in accessions to their number, established the frontier settlements about Palatine Bridge, in the region where, in the revolution, Herkimer led these British frontiersmen to stem the British attack in the Battle of Orisgani. They constituted the most effective military defence of Mohawk Valley. Still another portion took their way across to the waters of the Susquehanna and at Tulpa Hocken Creek began an important centre of German settlement in the Great Valley of Pennsylvania. 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, was 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 colonised, 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 affected. 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-Allegheny 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 four line in Virginia, in the latter part of the 17th century, in order that the process and the significance of the movement may be better understood. End of section 9 Section 10 of The Frontier in American History This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Frontier in American History by Frederick Jackson Turner Chapter 3 Part 3 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 side of Washington through Richmond and onto Raleigh North Carolina and Columbia South Carolina. Virginia having earliest advance thus far to the interior found it necessary in the closing years of the 17th century to draw a military frontier along this line. As early as 1675 a statute was enacted providing that paid troops of 500 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 Matterpony, one on the Pamunkey, one at the falls of the James near the site of Richmond, one near the falls of the Apomatox and others on the Blackwater, the Nansamond and the Akamac Peninsula, all in the eastern part of Virginia. Again in 1679 similar provision was made and an especially interesting act was passed making Quasi-Minorial grants to Major Lawrence Smith and Captain William Byrd to see eight certain lands at the head falls of Rappahannock and James River respectively. This scheme failed for lack of approval by the authorities in England but Byrd at the falls of the James near the present site of Richmond, Robert Beverly on the Rappahannock and other frontier commanders on the York and Potomac continued to undertake colonial defence. The system of mounted ranges 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 and the Indian boundary line was strictly defined. By the opening years of the 18th 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 cohabitations upon the said land frontiers within this government will be by encouragement to induce societies of men to undertake the same. It was declared to be inexperient to have less than 20 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 20 years for the 200 acre tract as the site of the cohabitation. Within this 200 acres each member was to have a half acre lot for living upon and a right to 200 acres next adjacent until the 30,000 acres were taken up. The members of the society were exempt from taxes for 20 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 always ran the quiet statute. Is it is the true intent and meaning of this act that for every 500 acres of land to be guaranteed in pursuance of this act there shall be and shall be continuously kept upon the said land one Christian man between 16 and 60 years of age perfect of limb, able and fit for service who shall also be continually provided with a well fixed musket or fuzzy, a good pistol, sharp scimitar, tom hawk and five pounds of good clean pistol powder and 20 pounds of sizable leaden bullets or swan or goose shot to be kept within the fort directed by this act besides the power and shot for his necessary or useful shooting at game. Provided also that the said war like Christian man should have his dwelling and continual abode within the space of 200 acres of land to be laid out in a geometrical 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 cohabitation to be palisaded with good sound palisadeurs at least 15 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 fuzzy and scimito and altogether too restless to have his continual abode within the space of 200 acres. Nevertheless there are points of resemblance between this idea of society settled about a fortified town and the latest stations of Kentucky. By the beginning of the 18th century the engrossing of the lands of Lowland Virginia had progressed so far the practice of holding large tracts of wasteland for reserves and 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 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 at five shilling sterling or 50 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. Even by the middle of the 17th century fur traders had followed the trail southwest from the James more than 400 miles to the Catorbus and later to the Cherokees. Colonel 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 packed trains along this trail through the Piedmont of the Carolinas and took note of the rich savannas of that region. Charleston traders engaged in rivalry for this trade. It was not long before cattle raises from the older settlements learning from the traders of the fertile plains and pevine 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 17th 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. Now the cow drovers in the cow pens began to enter the uplands. The Indians had by this time been reduced to submission in most of the Virginia Piedmont as Governor Spotswood reported in 1712 living quietly on our frontiers trafficking with the inhabitants. After the defeat of the Tuscaroras and Yemisees 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 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 raises 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. Mcamee 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 barons 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. It was a rare combination of woodland and pasture with clear running streams and mild climate. 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 the James River only until this column of advancing pioneers should strike the attentuated line of French posts in the centre. 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. By 1714 he became active as a coloniser himself. Thirty miles above the falls of the Rappahannock on the Rappadan at Germana 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 ironworks 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. Sik Juvat Transcendir Monte was the motto of these nights of the Golden Horse Shoe as the Governor dubbed them but they were not the war-like 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 organised as frontier counties of Virginia. 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 new settlers to these counties they were 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 6000 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. By the time of the occupation of the Shenandoah Valley therefore the custom was established in this part of Virginia 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 Beverly 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 quit rents. The liberal grants per family enabled the speculative planters while satisfying the terms of settlement to hold large portions of the grant for themselves. Under the tax requirements and probably still more lax enforcement of the provisions for actual cultivation or cattle raising 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. End of section 10 Section 11 of the Frontier in American History This LibriVox recording is in the public domain The Frontier in American History by Frederick Jackson Turner Chapter 3 Part 4 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 upon 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 and divided his domain into other manors giving 99 year leases to settlers already on the ground at 20 shillings annually per 100 acres. While of the newcomers 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, Beverly's manor about Staunton represented a grant of 118,000 acres to Beverly and his associates on condition of placing the proper number of families on the tract. Thus speculative planters on this Frontier shared in the movement of occupation and made an aristocratic element in the upcountry. 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 tide water. As settlement ascended the Rappahannock and immigrants began to enter the valley from the north so contemporaneously settlement ascended the James above the falls succeeding to the post of the fur traders. Gouchland 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 headlights and located settlers and tenants to hold their grants. Into this region came Maters 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 Ravana. In 1732 Peter Jefferson planted 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 in grocers of the land. In the main his country was that of a democratic frontier people Scotch Irish Presbyterians Quakers Baptist and other sects out of sympathy with the established church in the landed gentry of the Lowlands. This society in which he was born was defined in Jefferson a powerful exponent of its ideals. Patrick Henry was born in 1736 above the falls not far from Richmond and he also was a mouthpiece of the interior of Virginia in the Revolutionary era. In short a society was already forming in the Virginia Piedmont which was composed of many sects of independent earmen 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 18th century dominated by the democratic ideals of pioneers rather than by the aristocratic tendencies of slave holding planters. As there were two New Englands so they 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 from 1712 to 1713 an extensive region west from Pamlico Sound was opened in 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 Bird's Dividing Line. By 1728 the farthest inhabitants along the Virginia boundary were frontiersmen about Great Creek a branch of the Roanoke. The North Carolina commissioners desired to stop running the line after going 170 miles on the plea that they were already 50 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 40,000 souls. The slower advances 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 Yemisee wars and partly because the line barons running parallel with the full line made its own of infertile land not attractive to settlers. The North Carolina low country indeed had from the end of the 17th century been a kind of southern frontier for Ogre for open Virginia and in many ways was assimilated to the type of the upcountry in its turbulent democracy, its variety of sex 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 head rights 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. But this system also made it possible for agents of later migrating congregations to establish colonies like that of the Moravians at Wacovia. 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. 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. The same is true of South Carolina. By 1730 settlement had progressed hardly 80 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. The Surveyor General reports in 1732 that not as many as 1,000 acres within 100 miles of Charleston or within 20 miles of a river or navigable creek were unpossessed. In 1729 the crowd ordered 11 townships of 20,000 acres each to be laid out in rectangles divided into 50 acres for each actual settler under a quit rent of four shillings a year for every 100 acres or proportionally to be paid after the first 10 years. 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 four line among pine barons or in malarial lands in the southern corner of the colony they all proved abortive as towns except Orangeburg on the North Addisto 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 Puri settled in the deadly climate of Purisburg 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 Petty, Marion County under headwrites of 50 acres also a bounty in provisions, tools and livestock. These attempts east of the four 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 there too 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 greater states already so clearly revealed in the older colonies the Georgia trustees provided that the grants of 50 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 500 acres was permitted and even this was made conditionally upon the holder settling 10 colonists. However under local conditions and the competition in 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. In 1734 Salzburgers had been located above Savannah and within seven years some 1200 German Protestants were dwelling on the Georgia frontier. While a settlement of Scotch Highlanders at Daria near the mouth of the Altmahar protected the southern frontier. At Augusta an Indian training fort 1735 whence the dealers in Peltry visited the Cherokee completed the familiar picture of frontier advance. We have now hastily surveyed the movement of the frontier of settlement westward from the Lowlands in the later years of the 17th and early part of the 18th century. There is much that is common in the whole line of advance. The original settlers engrossed the desirable lands of the older area. Indented servants and newcomers passed to the frontiers seeking a place to locate their headlights 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 humanry of small landholders side by side with the holders of large estates. The most far sighted of the newcomers followed the example of the planters and petitioned for increasing extensive grants. Meanwhile pioneers like Abraham Wood himself once an indebted servant and gentlemen like Colonel 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 18th century the frontier population tended to be a rude democracy with a large representation of Scotch, Irish, Germans, Welsh and huge not French settlers holding religious faith 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 the genius Piedmont area and all the Piedmont area of the Carolinas. The significance of the movement of settlers from the north into this vacant valley in the 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 barons roughly 80 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 Alleghenes and southeastern Pennsylvania and included in its mountain trough the Cumberland and Hadgestown valleys. In short a broad limestone bound of fertile soil was stretched within mountain walls southerly from Pennsylvania to southwestern Virginia and here the water gaps 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. 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. End of section 11 Section 12 of The Frontier in American History This LibriVox recording is in the public domain The Frontier in American History by Frederick Jackson Turner Chapter 3 Part 5 From its beginning Pennsylvania was advertised as a home for dissenting sex seeking freedom in the wilderness but it was not until the exodus of German redemptioners 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 13 colonies chiefly along the Frontier zone of the old west. Of these 100,000 had their home in Pennsylvania mainly in the Great Valley in the region which is still so notably the abode of the Pennsylvania Dutch. Space does not permit us to describe this movement of colonization. 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 water gaps there too. 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. In 1719 the proprietors price for Pennsylvania lands was 10 pounds per 100 acres and two shillings quit rents. In 1732 this became 15.5 pounds with a quit rent of a half penny per acre. 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. 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 and of the 670,000 acres occupied between 1732 and 1740 it is estimated that 400,000 acres were settled without grants. Nevertheless these must ultimately be paid for with interest and the concession of the right of preemption 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 Alleghenies. 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 40 shilling sterling per 100 acres which in 1738 was raised to five pounds sterling. 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 tracks of the Shenandoah Valley had been granted to speculators like Beverly, Borden and MacArthur's as well as to Lord Fairfax the owners sold six or seven pounds cheaper per 100 acres than did the Pennsylvania land office. Between 1726 and 1734 therefore the Germans began to enter this valley and before long they extended their settlements into the Piedmont of the Carolinas 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 Moravian's Mennonites and many lesser sex. The diaries of Moravian missionaries from Pennsylvania who visited them show how the parent congregations kept in touch with their colonies 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. These lowland Scotts had been planted in Ulster early in the 17th century. Followers of John Knox they had the contentious individualism and revolutionary temper that seemed 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 London Derry where their stubborn resistance balked the hopes of James II. However religious and political disabilities were imposed upon these Ulster men 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. Especially after the rebellion of 1745 large numbers of highlanders came to increase the Scotch blood in the nation. Some of the Scotch Irish went to New England. Given the cold shoulder by congregational puritans they passed to unsettled lands about Warchester to the frontier in the Berkshires and in southern New Hampshire at London Derry. Wentz 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 SP Chase. In New York a Scotch Irish settlement was planted on the frontier at Cherry Valley. Scotch Highlanders came to the Mohawk where they followed Sir William Johnson and became Tory raiders in the revolution. But it was in Pennsylvania that the centre of Scotch Irish power lay. These bold and indignant strangers saying as their excuse when challenged for titles that we had solicited for colonists and they had come accordingly 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 centre from which was to come a new era in Pennsylvania history. It was the Scotch Irish and German fur traders 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 as the Irish Krogan and the Germans Conrad Weiser and Christian Post. Like the Germans the Scotch Irish passed into the Shenandoah Valley and onto 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 by 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. Among this moving mass as it passed along the valley into the Piedmont in the middle of the 18th 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 Alleghenies 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 religious voltage quick and direct inaction. 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. 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 3000 in addition to over a thousand Scotch in the Cumberland and they covered the province more or less thickly from Hillsborough and Fayetteville to the mountains. 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 Newburn or Edenton. 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 18th century some of the consequences of this formation of the Old West. One. A fighting frontier had been created all along the line from New England to Georgia which bore the brunt of French 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 area. 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, Oriskini, 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. Two. 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 intended 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 species 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, if at all, but in spite of the natural tendencies of a frontier life a large portion of the interior showed a distinctly religious atmosphere. 3. 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 centres when the back country settled up, but an even more significant interchange occurred along the valley in Piedmont. The German farmers of the Great Valley brought their own woven linen, knitted stockings, furkings 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. 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 18th century Governor Glenn of South Carolina explained the apparent diminution of the colony's shipping thus. 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 settled with very industrious and consequently thriving Germans. It was not long before this interior trade produced those rivalries for commercial ascendancy between the coast wise 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 etc. The basis was being laid for a national economy and at the same time a new source of foreign export was created. Four. 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 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. Such a student observers as Franklin feared in 1753 that Pennsylvania would be unable to preserve its language and that even its government would become precarious. I remember, he declares, when they modestly declined into meddling 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. Dr. Douglas apprehended that Pennsylvania would degenerate into a foreign colony and endanger the quiet of the adjacent provinces. Edmund Burke regretting that the Germans 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. This is a phenomenon with which a succession of later frontiers has familiarized us. In point of fact the Pennsylvania Dutch remain 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. Five 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 contest between the property holding class of the coast and the debtor class of the interior where species was lacking and where paper money and a readjustment of the basis of 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 contest 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. End of section 12 Section 13 of the Frontier in American History by Frederick Jackson Turner This LibriVox recording is in the public domain The Frontier in American History Chapter 3 Part 6 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 appointment and religious freedom. The former is illustrated by the convention that met in Drackett, Massachusetts in 1776 to petition the states of Massachusetts and New Hampshire to relieve the financial distress and unfair legislative representation. 16 of the border towns of New Hampshire sent delegates to this convention. Two years later these New Hampshire towns attempted to join Vermont. 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. The opposition to the constitutions of 1778 and 1780 is tinctured with the same antagonism between the ideas of the newer part of the interior and of the coast. Shea's rebellion and the anti-federal opposition of 1787-88 found its stronghold in the same interior areas. The religious struggles continued until the democratic interior where dissenting sex was strong and where there is antagonism to the privileges of the congregational church finally secured complete disestablishment in New Hampshire, Connecticut and Massachusetts. But this belongs to a later period. 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 26 delegates while the five Frontier countries had but 10. The Frontier complained against the failure of the dominant Quaker party of the coast to protect the interior against the Indians. The three old wealthy counties under Quaker rule feared the growth of the West therefore made 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 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 county culminating in its triumph in the constitutional convention of 1776 which was chiefly the work of the Presbyterian counties. Indeed there were two revolutions in Pennsylvania which went on side by side. One are a revolt against the coastal property holding classes the old dominant Quaker party and the other are 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 90 miles long the inhabitants being obliged to travel 30 or 40 miles to their own courthouse. Some of the counties had 1700 tithables while others only a dozen miles square had 500. Justices of the peace disliked to ride 40 or 50 miles to their monthly courts. Likewise there was disparity in the size of parishes for example that of Verena on the upper James had 900 tithables many of whom lived 50 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 secretaries to establish their opinions among them 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 majesty's plantations and when one's schism has crept into the church it will soon create faction in the civil government. That Spotswood's fears were well founded we have already seen. As the sectories of the back county 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 primagenture 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 it's 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 tide water while the large populous counties of the upcountry suffered. Thus he wrote the 90,000 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. 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 upcountry. 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 to 30 the whole philosophy of representation was discussed and the coast defended its control as necessary to protect property 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 Dodridge put the case 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. Lee of Chesterfield County declared it is remarkable I mention it for the curiosity of the fact that if any evil physical or moral arise in any of the state south of us it never takes an orderly direction or taints the southern breeze whereas if any plague originate in the north it is short to spread to the south and to invade us sooner or later the influenza the smallpox the yaralloid 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 effectively arrests their progress. 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 and against the coast but as the zone of separation was more strongly marked the grievances were more acute. The tide of backwards 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 sea coast. 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 residents there for a part of the year but it was a source of oppression to the upcountry 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 upcountrymen to take affairs in their own hands and in 1764 to establish associations to administer lynch law under the name of regulators. The scoverlites or government 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. There still remained however the grievance of unjust legislative representation. 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 popular 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 upcountry 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 other house of representatives to the upper section thus providing a mutual veto. This South Carolina experience furnished the historical basis for Calhoun's argument for nullification and for the political philosophy underlying his theory of the concurrent majority. This adjustment was affected however only after the advance of the black belt toward the interior had a simulated 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. 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 and it had no redress for the legislature was so appointed that 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. As in New England in the days of Shay's 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 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 4000 and tried to secure terms of adjustment. In 1770 the courthouse at Hillsborough was broken into by a mob. The assembly passed some measures designed to conciliate the back country but before they became operative Governor Tryan's militia about 1200 men largely from the lowlands and led by the gentry whose privileges were involved met the motley army of the regulators who numbered about 2000 in the battle of the Alamance May 1771. Many were killed and wounded the regulators dispersed and over 6000 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 had been sometimes called for it had little or no 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 Alamance. The interior of the Carolinas was a region where neighbours 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 a quality 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 recognising the importance of the interior led to concessions in the Convention of 1776 in that state. Of the 44 sections of the Constitution 13 are embodiments of reforms sought by the regulators but it was in this period that hundreds of North Carolina backwardsmen 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. 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. It is needless to comment on the uniformity of the evidence which has been induced 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 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. End of section 13 Section 14 of The Frontier in American History This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Frontier in American History by Frederick Jackson Turner Chapter 3 Part 7 6. 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 free churches. Particularly the revolutionary constitutions of Pennsylvania and Virginia under the influence of the back country ensured religious freedom. The effects of the North Carolina upland area to secure a similar result were noteworthy though for the time ineffective. 7. 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 of 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. 8. 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 and tender laws etc. of this period were strongest in the interior. It was this region that supported Shea's Rebellion. It was, with some important exceptions, the same area that resisted the ratification of the federal constitution fearful of a stronger government and the loss of paper money. 9. The interior later showed its opposition to the coast by the persistent contest against slavery carried on in the upcountry of Virginia and North and South Carolina. Until the decade 1830 to 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 19th century. 10. These were the regions also in which were developed a 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. 11. The land system of the Old West furnished precedents which developed into the land system of the Trans-Allegheny West. The squatters of Pennsylvania and the Carolinas 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 McCuller 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 preemption right of 400 acres on the Western waters or 1000 for those who came prior to 1778 was in substance the continuation of a system familiar in the Old West. The grants to Beverly of over 100,000 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 200,000 acres on the Upper Ohio conditioned on seating a hundred families in seven years and for an additional grant of 300,000 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 in 1749 was authorized to take up 800,000 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 tracks for three pounds per hundred acres to settlers but finally lost its claim. The Mississippi Company including in its membership the Lees, Washington's and other great Virginia planters applied for two and one half million acres in the West in 1769. Similar land companies of New England origin like the Suscahana 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 70,000 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 vast scale. Twelve 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 Lichfield, 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 Alleghenies and settled on the Western waters. Daniel Boone going from his Pennsylvania home to the Adkin and from the Adkin to Tennessee and Kentucky took part in the whole process and later in its continuation into Missouri. The social conditions and ideals of the Old West powerfully shaped those of the Trans-Elegany 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. 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 Northwood colonization chiefly of the New England Plateau including New York and that portion formed by the Southwood colonization of the Virginia Valley and the Southern Piedmont was reflected in the history of the Middle West and the Mississippi Valley. End of Section 14 Section 15 of the Frontier in American History This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Frontier in American History by Frederick Jackson Turner Chapter 4 The Middle West Part 1 American sectional nomenclature is still confused. Once the West described the whole region beyond the Alleghenies but the term has hopelessly lost its definiteness. The rapidity of the spread of settlement has broken down old usage and as yet no substitute has been generally accepted. The Middle West is a term variously used by the public but for the purpose of the present paper it will be applied to that region of the United States including the census reports under the name of the North Central Division comprising the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin the old territory northwest of the river Ohio and their transmississippi sisters of the Louisiana purchase Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota It is an imperial domain. If the greater countries of Central Europe France, Germany, Italy and Austro-Hungary were laid down upon this area the Middle West would still show a margin of spare territory. Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Buffalo constitute its gateways to the eastern states. Kansas City, Omaha, St. Paul Minneapolis and Duluth Superior dominate its western areas Cincinnati and St. Louis stand on its southern borders and Chicago reigns at the center. What Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore are to the Atlantic seaboard these cities are to the Middle West. The Great Lakes and the Mississippi with the Ohio and the Missouri as laterals constitute the vast water system that binds the Middle West together. It is the economic and political center of the Republic. At one edge is the populism of the prairies at the other the capitalism that is typified in Pittsburgh. Great as are the local differences within the Middle West it possesses in its physiography in the history of its settlement and in its economic and social life a unity and interdependence which warrant a study of the area as an entity. Within the limits of this article treatment of so vast a region however can it best afford no more than an outline sketch in which old and well-known facts must if possible be so grouped as to explain the position of the section in American history. In spite of the difficulties of the task there is a definite advantage in so large a view. By fixing our attention too exclusively upon the artificial boundary lines of the States we have failed to perceive much that is significant in the westward development of the United States. For instance our colonial system did not begin with the Spanish War. The United States has had a colonial history and policy from the beginning of the Republic but they have been hidden under the phraseology of interstate migration and territorial organization. The American people have occupied a spacious wilderness. Vast physiographic provinces each with its own peculiarities have lain across the path of this migration and each has furnished a special environment for economic and social transformation. It is possible to underestimate the importance of state lines but if we direct our gaze rather to the physiographic province than to the state area we shall be able to see some facts in a new light. Then it becomes clear that these physiographic provinces in America are in some respects comparable to the countries of Europe and that each has its own history of occupation and development. General Francis A. Walker once remarked that the course of settlement has called upon our people to occupy territory as extensive as Switzerland, as England, as Italy and laterally as France or Germany every 10 years. It is this element of vastness in the achievements of American democracy that gives a peculiar interest to the conquest and development of the Middle West. The effects of this conquest and development upon the present United States have been of fundamental importance. Geographically the Middle West is almost determinous with the provinces of the lake and prairie plains but the largest share of Kansas and Nebraska and the western part of the two decoaters belong to the Great Plains. The Ozark Mountains occupy a portion of Missouri and the southern parts of Ohio and Indiana merge into the Allegheny Plateau. The relation of the provinces and of the lake and prairie plains to the rest of the United States is an important element in the significance of the Middle West. On the north lies the similar region of Canada. The Great Lakes are in the center of the whole eastern and more thickly settled half of North America and they bind the Canadian and Middle Western people together. On the south the provinces meet the apex of that of the Gulf Plains and the Mississippi unites them. To the west they merge gradually into the Great Plains. The Missouri and its tributaries and the Pacific Railroads make for them a bond of union. Another rather effective bond is the interdependence of the cattle of the plains and the corn of the prairies. To the east the province meets the Allegheny and New England Plateaus and is connected with them by the upper Ohio and by the line of the Erie Canal. Here the interaction of industrial life and the historical facts of settlement have produced a close relationship. The intimate connection between the larger part of the north central and the North Atlantic divisions of the United States will impress anyone who examines the industrial and social maps of the census atlas. By reason of these interprovincial relationships the Middle West is the mediator between Canada and the United States and between the concentrated wealth and manufacturers of the North Atlantic States and the sparsely settled Western mining, cattle raising and agricultural states. It has a connection with the south that was once still closer and is likely before long to reassert itself with new power. Within the limits of the United States therefore we have problems of interprovincial trade and commerce similar to those that exist between the nations of the old world. Over most of the province of the lake and prairie plains the Laurentide Glacier spreads its drift rich in limestone and other rock powder which farmers in less favoured sections must purchase to replenish the soil. The alluvial deposit from primeval lakes contributed to fatten the soil of other parts of the prairies. Taken as a whole the prairie plains surpass infertility any other region of America or Europe unless we accept some territory about the Black Sea. It is a land marked out as the granary of the nation but it is more than a granary. On the rocky shores of Lake Superior were concealed copper mines rivalled only by those of Montana and iron fields which now furnished the ore for the production of 80% of the pig iron of the United States. The Great Lakes afford a highway between these iron fields and the coal areas of the Ohio Valley. The gas and oil deposits of the Ohio Valley, the coal of Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, and East and Kansas, the lead and zinc of the Ozark region and of the Upper Mississippi Valley and the gold of the Black Hills all contribute underground wealth to the Middle West. The primeval American forest once spread its shade over vast portions of the same province. Ohio, Indiana, southern Michigan, and central Wisconsin were almost covered with a growth of noble deciduous trees. In southern Illinois, along the broad bottom lands of the Mississippi and the Illinois and in southern and southwestern Missouri similar forest prevailed. To the north in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota appeared the somber white pine wilderness interlaced with hardwoods which swept an ample zone along the Great Lakes till the deciduous forests triumphed again and in their turn faded into the treeless expanse of the prairies. In the remaining portions were openings in the midst of the forested area and then the grassy ocean of prairie that rolled to west and northwest until it passed beyond the line of sufficient rainfall for agriculture without irrigation into the semi-arid stretches of the Great Plains. In the middle of the 18th century the forested region of this province was occupied by the wigwams of many different tribes of the Yolongkwin Tongue, sparsely scattered in villages along the watercourses warring and trading through the vast wilderness. The western edge of the prairie and the Great Plains were held by the Sioux, chasing herds of bison across these far-stretching expanses. These horsemen of the Plains and the canoemen of the Great Lakes and the Ohio were factors with which civilization had to reckon for they constituted important portions of perhaps the fiercest native race with which the white man has ever battled for new lands. The Frenchman had done but little fighting for this region. He swore brotherhood with its savages, traded with them, intermarried with them, and explored the Middle West, but he left the wilderness much as he found it. Some six or seven thousand French people in all about Detroit and Vincennes and in the Illinois country and scattered among the Indian villages of the remote lakes and streams held possession when George Washington reached the site of Pittsburgh bearing Virginia's summons of eviction to France. In his person, fate knocked at the portals of a rising empire. France hurried her commanders and garrisons with Indian allies from the posts about the Great Lakes in the upper Mississippi, but it was in vain. In vain, too, the aftermath of Pontiac's widespread Indian uprising against the English occupation. When she came into possession of the lands between the Ohio, the Mississippi, and the Great Lakes, England organized them as a part of the province of Quebec. The daring conquest of George Rogers Clark left Virginia in military possession of the Illinois country at the conclusion of the Revolutionary War, but over all the remainder of the Old Northwest, England was in control. Although she ceded the region by the treaty which closed the Revolution, she remained for many years the mistress of the Indians in the fur trade. When Lord Shelburne was up raided in Parliament for yielding the Northwest to the United States, the complaint was that he had clothed the Americans in the warm covering of our fur trade, and his defence was that the peltry trade of the ceded tract was not sufficiently profitable to warrant further war. But the English government became convinced that the Indian trade demanded the retention of the Northwest, and she did in fact hold her post there in spite of the Treaty of Peace. Dundas, the English Secretary for the Colonies, expressed the policy when he declared in 1792 that the object was to interpose an Indian barrier between Canada and the United States, and in pursuance of this policy of preserving the Northwest as an Indian buffer state, the Canadian authorities supported the Indians in their resistance to American settlement beyond the Ohio. The conception of the Northwest as an Indian reserve strikingly exhibits England's inability to foresee the future of the region, and to measure the forces of American expansion. By the sessions of Virginia, New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, the old Congress had come into nominal possession of an extensive public domain, and a field for the exercise of national authority. The significance of this fact in the development of national power is not likely to be overestimated. The first result was the completion of the Ordinance of 1787, which provided a territorial government for the Old Northwest, with provisions for the admission of states into the Union. This federal colonial system guaranteed that the new national possessions should not be governed as dependent provinces, but should enter as a group of sister states into the Federation. While the importance of the article excluding slavery has often been pointed out, it is probable that the provisions for a federal colonial organization have been at least equally potential in our actual development. The full significance of this feature of the Ordinance is only appreciated when we consider its continuous influence upon the American territorial and state policy in the westward expansion to the Pacific, and the political preconceptions with which Americans approach the problems of government in the new insular possessions. The land ordinance of 1785 is also worthy of attention in this connection, for under its provisions almost all of the Middle West has been divided by the government surveyor in rectangles of sections and townships by whose lines the settler has been able easily and certainly to locate his farm and the forester his 40. In the local organization of the Middle West these lines have played an important part. End of section 15 Section 16 of the Frontier in American History This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Frontier in American History by Frederick Jackson Turner Chapter 4 Part 2 It would be impossible within the limits of this paper to detail the history of the occupation of the Middle West with the larger aspects of the flow of population into the region may be sketched. Massachusetts men had formed the Ohio Company and had been influential in shaping the liberal provisions of the ordinance. Their land purchase paid foreign soldiers certificates embraced an area larger than the state of Rhode Island. At Marietta in 1788 under the shelter of Fort Harmer their bulletproof barge landed the first New England colony. A New Jersey colony was planted soon after at Cincinnati in the Sims Purchase. Thus American civilization crossed the Ohio. The French settlements at Detroit and in Indiana and Illinois belonged to other times and had their own ideals but with the entrance of the American pioneer into the forest of the Middle West a new era began. The Indians with the moral support of England resisted the invasion and an Indian war followed. The conquest of Wayne in 1795 pushed back the Indians to the Greenville line extending irregularly across the state of Ohio from the site of Cleveland to Fort Recovery in the middle point of her present Western boundary and secured certain areas in Indiana. In the same period Jay's treaty provided for the withdrawal of the British posts. After this extension of the area open to the pioneer new settlements were rapidly formed. Connecticut disposed of her reserve land about Lake Erie to companies and in 1796 General Moses Cleveland led the way to the site of the city that bears his name. This was the beginning of the occupation of the Western reserve a district about as large as the parent state of Connecticut a New England colony in the Middle West which has maintained even to the present time the impress of New England traits. Virginia and Kentucky settlers sought the Virginia military bounty lands and the foundation of Chillicothea here in 1796 afforded a center for southern settlement. The region is a modified extension of the limestone area of Kentucky and naturally attracted the emigrants from the blue grass state. Ohio's history is deeply marked by the interaction of the New England middle and southern colonies within her borders. By the opening of the 19th century when Napoleon's session brought to the United States the vast spaces of the Louisiana purchase beyond the Mississippi the pioneers had hardly more than entered the outskirts of the forest along the Ohio and Lake Erie but by 1810 the government had extinguished the Indian title to the unsecured portions of the Western reserve and to great trucks of Indiana along the Ohio and up the Warbash Valley thus protecting the Ohio highway from the Indians and opening new lands to settlement. The embargo had destroyed the trade of New England and had weighted down her citizens with debt and taxation caravans of Yankee emigrant wagons precursors of the prairie schooner had already begun to cross Pennsylvania on their way to Ohio and they now greatly increased in number. North Carolina back countrymen flocked to the Indiana settlements giving the peculiar Hoosier flavour to the state and other southerners followed outnumbering the northern immigrants who sought the eastern edge of Indiana. Tecum Thee rendered desperate by the advance into his hunting grounds took up the hatchet made wide reaching alliances among the Indians and turned to England for protection. The Indian War merged into the War of 1812 and the settlers strove in vain to add Canadian lands to their empire. In the diplomatic negotiations that followed the war England made another attempt to erect the Old Northwest beyond the Greenville line into a permanent Indian barrier between Canada and the United States but the demand was refused and by the treaties of 1818 the Indians were pressed still farther north. In the meantime Indian treaties had released additional land in southern Illinois and pioneers were widening the bounds of the old French settlements. Avoiding the rich savannas of the prairie regions as devoid of wood remote from transportation facilities and suited only to grazing they entered the hard woods and in the early 20s they were advancing in a wedge shaped column up the Illinois valley. The southern element constituted the main portion of this phalanx of axe bearers. Abraham Lincoln's father joined the throng of Kentuckians that entered the Indiana woods in 1816 and the boy when he had learned to hew out a forest home but took himself in 1830 to Sangamon County, Illinois. He represents the pioneer of the period but his axe sank deeper than other men's and the plaster cast of his great sinewy hand at Washington embodies the training of those frontier rail splitters in the days when Fort Dearborn on the site of Chicago was but a military outpost in a desolate country. While the hard woods of Illinois were being entered the pioneer movement passed also into the Missouri Valley. The French lead miners had already opened the southeastern section and southern mountaineers had pushed up the Missouri but now the planters from the Ohio Valley and the upper Tennessee followed seeking the alluvial soils for slave labor. Moving across the southern border of free Illinois they had awakened regrets in that state at the loss of so large a body of settlers. Looking at the middle west as a whole in the decade from 1810 to 1820 we perceive that settlement extended from the shores of Lake Erie in an arc following the banks of the Ohio till it joined the Mississippi and then so long that river and up the Missouri well into the center of the state. The next decade was marked by the increased use of the steamboat. Pioneers pressed farther up the streams etching out the hardwood forest well up to the prairie lands and forming additional tracks of settlement in the region tributary to Detroit and in the southeastern part of Michigan. In the area of the gallon and lead mines of northwestern Illinois southwestern Wisconsin and northeastern Iowa southerners had already begun operations and if we accept Ohio and Michigan the dominant element in all this overflow of settlement into the middle west was southern particularly from Kentucky Virginia and North Carolina. The settlements were still dependent on the rivers for transportation and the areas between the rivers were but lightly occupied. The Mississippi constituted the principal outlet for the products of the middle west. Pittsburgh furnished most of the supplies for the region but New Orleans received its crops. The old national road was built piecemeal and too late as a whole to make a great artery of trade throughout the middle west in this early period. But it marked the northern borders of the southern stream of population running as this did through Columbus, Indianapolis and Vandalia. The 20 years from 1830 to 1850 saw great changes in the composition of the population of the middle west. The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 was an epoch making event. It furnished a new outlet and in net for northwestern traffic. Buffalo began to grow and New York city changed from a local market to a great commercial center. But even more important was the place which the canal occupied as the highway for a new migration. In the march of the New England people from the coast three movements are of a special importance. The advance from the seaboard up the Connecticut and Housatonic valleys through Massachusetts and into Vermont. The advance thence to central and western New York and the advance to the interior of the old northwest. The second of these stages occupied the generation from about 1790 to 1820. After that the second generation was ready to seek new lands and these the Erie Canal and Lake Navigation open to them and to the Vermonters and other adventurous spirits of New England. It was this combined New York, New England stream that in the 30s poured in large volume into the zone north of the settlements which have been described. The newcomers filled in the southern counties of Michigan and Wisconsin, the northern countries of Illinois and parts of the northern and central areas of Indiana. Pennsylvania and Ohio sent a similar type of people to the area adjacent to those states. In Iowa a stream combined of the southern element and of these settlers sought the wooded tributaries of the Mississippi in the southeastern part of the state. In default of legal authority in this early period they formed squatter governments and land associations comparable to the action of the Massachusetts men who in the first quarter of the 17th century squatted in the Connecticut Valley. A great forward movement had occurred which took possession of oak openings and prairies gave birth to the cities of Chicago Milwaukee, St. Paul and Minneapolis as well as to a multitude of lesser cities and replaced the dominance of the southern element by that of a modified Puritan stock. The railroad system of the early 50s bound the Mississippi to the North Atlantic Seaboard. New Orleans gave way to New York as the outlet for the middle west and the day of river settlement was succeeded by the era of inter-rivid settlement and railway transportation. The change in the political and social ideals was at least equal to the change in economic connections and together these forces made an intimate organic union between New England New York and the newly settled west. In estimating the New England influence in the middle west it must not be forgotten that the New York settlers were mainly New Englanders of a later generation. Combined with the streams from the east came the German migration into the middle west. Over half a million mainly from the Palatinate Wurtenburg and the adjacent regions sought America between 1830 and 1850 and nearly a million more Germans came in the next decade. The larger portion of these went into the middle west. They became pioneers in the newer parts of Ohio especially along the Central Ridge and in Cincinnati. They took up the hardwood lands of the Wisconsin counties along the Lake Michigan and they came in important numbers to Missouri, Illinois, Indiana and Michigan and to the river towns of Iowa. The migration in the 30s and 40s contained an exceptionally large proportion of educated and forceful leaders men who had struggled in vain for the idea of a liberal German nation and who contributed important intellectual forces to the communities in which they settled. The Germans as a whole furnished a conservative and thrifty agricultural element to the middle west. In some of their social ideals they came into collision with the Puritan element from New England and the outcome of the steady contest has been a compromise. Of all the states Wisconsin has been most deeply influenced by the Germans. By the later fifties therefore the control of the middle west had passed to its northern zone of population and this zone included representatives of the middle states New England and Germany as its principal elements. The southern people north of the Ohio differed in important respects from the southerners across the river. They had sprung largely from the humbler classes of the south although there were important exceptions. The early pioneer life however was ill-suited to the great plantations and slavery was excluded under the ordinance. Thus this southern zone of the middle west particularly in Indiana and Illinois constituted a meditating section between the south and the north. The Mississippi still acted as a bond of union and up to the close of the war of 1812 the valley north and south had been fundamentally of the same social organization. In order to understand what follows we must bear in mind the outlines of the occupation of the Gulf Plains. While settlement had been crossing the Ohio to the north west the spread of cotton culture and negro slavery into the north west had been equally significant. What the New England states and New York were in the occupation of the middle west Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia were in the occupation of the Gulf States. But as in the case of the north west a modification of the original stock occurred in the new environment. A greater energy and initiative appeared in the new southern lands. The pioneers devotion to exploiting the territory in which he was placed transferred slavery from the patriarchal to the commercial basis. The same expansive tendency seen in the north west revealed itself with a belligerent seasoning in the Gulf States. They had a program of action. Abraham Lincoln migrated from Kentucky to Indiana and to Illinois. Jefferson Davis moved from Kentucky to Louisiana and thence to Mississippi in the same period. Starting from the same locality each represented the divergent flow of streams of settlement into contrasted environments. The result of these antagonistic streams of migration to the west was a struggle between the Lake and Prairie Plainsmen on the one side and the Gulf Plainsmen on the other for the possession of the Mississippi Valley. It was the crucial part of the struggle between the northern and southern sections of the nation. What gave slavery and state sovereignty their power as issues was the fact that they involved the question of dominance over common territory in an expanding nation. The place of the middle west in the origin and settlement of the great slavery struggle is of the highest significance. End of section 16.