Frontier in American History — III - The Old West - Part 5

From its beginning, Pennsylvania was advertised as a home for dissenting sects seeking freedom in the wilderness.

But it was not until the exodus of German redemptioners,[100:1] from about 1717, that the Palatinate and neighboring areas sent the great tide of Germans which by the time of the Revolution made them nearly a third of the total population of Pennsylvania.

It has been carefully estimated that in 1775 over 200,000 Germans lived in the thirteen colonies, chiefly along the frontier zone of the Old West.

Of these, a hundred thousand had their home in Pennsylvania, mainly in the Great Valley, in the region which is still so notably the abode of the "Pennsylvania Dutch."

[100:2] Space does not permit us to describe this movement of colonization.

[100:3] The entrance to the fertile limestone soils of the Great Valley of Pennsylvania was easy, in view of the low elevation of the South Mountain ridge, and the watergaps thereto.

The continuation along the similar valley to the south, in Maryland and Virginia, was a natural one, especially as the increasing tide of emigrants raised the price of lands.

[100:4] In 1719 the proprietor's price for Pennsylvania lands was ten pounds per hundred acres, and two shillings quit-rents.

In 1732 this became fifteen and one-half pounds, with a quit-rent of a half penny per acre.

[101:1] 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.

[101:2] 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;[101:3] and of the 670,000 acres occupied between 1732 and 1740, it is estimated that 400,000 acres were settled without grants.

[101:4] 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 Alleghanies.

[101:5] Although the credit system relieved the difficulty in Pennsylvania, the lands of that colony were in competition with the Maryland lands, offered between 1717 and 1738 at forty shillings sterling per hundred acres, which in 1738 was raised to five pounds sterling.

[101:6] At the same time, in the Virginia Valley, as will be recalled, free grants were being made of a thousand acres per family.

Although large tracts of the Shenandoah Valley had been granted to speculators like Beverley, Borden, and the Carters, as well as to Lord Fairfax, the owners sold six or seven pounds cheaper per hundred acres than did the Pennsylvania land office.

[102:1] Between 1726 and 1734, therefore, the Germans began to enter this valley,[102:2] and before long they extended their settlements into the Piedmont of the Carolinas,[102:3] being recruited in South Carolina by emigrants coming by way of Charleston--especially after Governor Glenn's purchase from the Cherokee in 1755, of the extreme western portion of the colony.

Between 1750 and the Revolution, these settlers in the Carolinas greatly increased in numbers.

Thus a zone of almost continuous German settlements had been established, running from the head of the Mohawk in New York to the Savannah in Georgia.

They had found the best soils, and they knew how to till them intensively and thriftily, as attested by their large, well-filled barns, good stock, and big canvas-covered Conestoga wagons.

They preferred to dwell in groups, often of the same religious denomination--Lutherans, Reformed, Moravians, Mennonites, and many lesser sects.

The diaries of Moravian missionaries from Pennsylvania, who visited them, show how the parent congregations kept in touch with their colonies[102:4] 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.

[103:1] These lowland Scots had been planted in Ulster early in the seventeenth century.

Followers of John Knox, they had the contentious individualism and revolutionary temper that seem natural to Scotch Presbyterianism.

They were brought up on the Old Testament, and in the doctrine of government by covenant or compact.

In Ireland their fighting qualities had been revealed in the siege of Londonderry, where their stubborn resistance balked the hopes of James II.

However, religious and political disabilities were imposed upon these Ulstermen, which made them discontented, and hard times contributed to detach them from their homes.

Their movement to America was contemporaneous with the heavy German migration.

By the Revolution, it is believed that a third of the population of Pennsylvania was Scotch-Irish; and it has been estimated, probably too liberally, that a half million came to the United States between 1730 and 1770. [103:2] Especially after the Rebellion of 1745, large numbers of Highlanders came to increase the Scotch blood in the nation.

[103:3] Some of the Scotch-Irish went to New England.

[103:4] Given the cold shoulder by congregational Puritans, they passed to unsettled lands about Worcester, to the frontier in the Berkshires, and in southern New Hampshire at Londonderry--whence came John Stark, a frontier leader in the French and Indian War, and the hero of Bennington in the Revolution, as well as the ancestors of Horace Greeley and S. P.

Chase.

In New York, a Scotch-Irish settlement was planted on the frontier at Cherry Valley.

[104:1] Scotch Highlanders came to the Mohawk,[104:2] where they followed Sir William Johnson and became Tory raiders in the Revolution.

But it was in Pennsylvania that the center of Scotch-Irish power lay.

"These bold and indigent strangers, saying as their excuse when challenged for titles that we had solicited for colonists and they had come accordingly,"[104:3] and asserting that "it was against the laws of God and nature that so much land should be idle while so many christians wanted it to work on and to raise their bread," squatted on the vacant lands, especially in the region disputed between Pennsylvania and Maryland, and remained in spite of efforts to drive them off.

Finding the Great Valley in the hands of the Germans, they planted their own outposts along the line of the Indian trading path from Lancaster to Bedford; they occupied Cumberland Valley, and before 1760 pressed up the Juniata somewhat beyond the narrows, spreading out along its tributaries, and by 1768 had to be warned off from the Redstone country to avoid Indian trouble.

By the time of the Revolution, their settlements made Pittsburgh a center from which was to come a new era in Pennsylvania history.

It was the Scotch-Irish and German fur-traders[104:4] 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,[105:1] as the Irish Croghan, and the Germans Conrad Weiser and Christian Post.

Like the Germans, the Scotch-Irish passed into the Shenandoah Valley,[105:2] and on to the uplands of the South.

In 1738 a delegation of the Philadelphia Presbyterian synod was sent to the Virginia governor and received assurances of security of religious freedom; the same policy was followed by the Carolinas.

By 1760 a zone of Scotch-Irish Presbyterian churches extended from the frontiers of New England to the frontiers of South Carolina.

This zone combined in part with the German zone, but in general Scotch-Irishmen tended to follow the valleys farther toward the mountains, to be the outer edge of this frontier.

Along with this combined frontier stream were English, Welsh and Irish Quakers, and French Huguenots.

[105:3] Among this moving mass, as it passed along the Valley into the Piedmont, in the middle of the eighteenth century, were Daniel Boone, John Sevier, James Robertson, and the ancestors of John C. Calhoun, Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson, James K. Polk, Sam Houston, and Davy Crockett, while the father of Andrew Jackson came to the Carolina Piedmont at the same time from the coast.

Recalling that Thomas Jefferson's home was on the frontier, at the edge of the Blue Ridge, we perceive that these names represent the militant expansive movement in American life.

They foretell the settlement across the Alleghanies in Kentucky and Tennessee; the Louisiana Purchase, and Lewis and Clark's transcontinental exploration; the conquest of the Gulf Plains in the War of 1812-15; the annexation of Texas; the acquisition of California and the Spanish Southwest.

They represent, too, frontier democracy in its two aspects personified in Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln.

It was a democracy responsive to leadership, susceptible to waves of emotion, of a "high religeous voltage"--quick and direct in action.

The volume of this Northern movement into the Southern uplands is illustrated by the statement of Governor Tryon, of North Carolina, that in the summer and winter of 1765 more than a thousand immigrant wagons passed through Salisbury, in that colony.

[106:1] Coming by families, or groups of families or congregations, they often drove their herds with them.

Whereas in 1746 scarce a hundred fighting men were found in Orange and the western counties of North Carolina, there were in 1753 fully three thousand, in addition to over a thousand Scotch in the Cumberland;

and they covered the province more or less thickly, from Hillsboro and Fayetteville to the mountains.

[106:2] Bassett remarks that the Presbyterians received their first ministers from the synod of New York and Pennsylvania, and later on sent their ministerial students to Princeton College.

"Indeed it is likely that the inhabitants of this region knew more about Philadelphia at that time than about Newbern or Edenton."

[106:3] We are now in a position to note briefly, in conclusion, some of the results of the occupation of this new frontier during the first half of the eighteenth century--some of the consequences of this formation of the Old West.

I.

A fighting frontier had been created all along the line from New England to Georgia, which bore the brunt of French and Indian attacks and gave indispensable service during the Revolution.

The significance of this fact could only be developed by an extended survey of the scattered border warfare of this era.

We should have to see Rogers leading his New England Rangers, and Washington defending interior Virginia with his frontiersmen in their hunting shirts, in the French and Indian War.

When all of the campaigns about the region of Canada, Lake Champlain, and the Hudson, central New York (Oriskany, Cherry Valley, Sullivan's expedition against the Iroquois), Wyoming Valley, western Pennsylvania, the Virginia Valley, and the back country of the South are considered as a whole from this point of view, the meaning of the Old West will become more apparent.

II.

A new society had been established, differing in essentials from the colonial society of the coast.

It was a democratic self-sufficing, primitive agricultural society, in which individualism was more pronounced than the community life of the lowlands.

The indented servant and the slave were not a normal part of its labor system.

It was engaged in grain and cattle raising, not in producing staples, and it found a partial means of supplying its scarcity of specie by the peltries which it shipped to the coast.

But the hunter folk were already pushing farther on; the cow-pens and the range were giving place to the small farm, as in our own day they have done in the cattle country.

It was a region of hard work and poverty, not of wealth and leisure.

Schools and churches were secured under serious difficulty,[107:1] 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.

III.

The Old West began the movement of internal trade which developed home markets and diminished that colonial dependence on Europe in industrial matters shown by the maritime and staple-raising sections.

Not only did Boston and other New England towns increase as trading centers when the back country settled up, but an even more significant interchange occurred along the Valley and Piedmont.

The German farmers of the Great Valley brought their woven linen, knitted stockings, firkins of butter, dried apples, grain, etc. , to Philadelphia and especially to Baltimore, which was laid out in 1730. To this city also came trade from the Shenandoah Valley, and even from the Piedmont came peltry trains and droves of cattle and hogs to the same market.

[108:1] The increase of settlement on the upper James resulted in the establishment of the city of Richmond at the falls of the river in 1737. Already the tobacco-planting aristocracy of the lowlands were finding rivals in the grain-raising area of interior Virginia and Maryland.

Charleston prospered as the up-country of the Carolinas grew.

Writing in the middle of the eighteenth century, Governor Glenn, of South Carolina, explained the apparent diminution of the colony's shipping thus:[108:2] 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 coastwise cities, which still continue.

The problem of internal improvements became a pressing one, and the statutes show increasing provision for roads, ferries, bridges, river improvements, etc. [109:1] The basis was being laid for a national economy, and at the same time a new source for foreign export was created.

IV.

The Old West raised the issues of nativism and a lower standard of comfort.

In New England, Scotch-Irish Presbyterians had been frowned upon and pushed away by the Puritan townsmen.

[109:2] 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.

[109:3] Such astute observers as Franklin feared in 1753 that Pennsylvania would be unable to preserve its language and that even its government would become precarious.

[109:4] "I

remember," he declares, "when they modestly declined intermeddling in our elections, but now they come in droves and carry all before them, except in one or two counties;" and he lamented that the English could not remove their prejudices by addressing them in German.

[109:5] Dr. Douglas[109:6] 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."

[110:1] This is a phenomenon with which a succession of later frontiers has familiarized us.

In point of fact the "Pennsylvania Dutch" remained through our history a very stubborn area to assimilate, with corresponding effect upon Pennsylvania politics.

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

[110:2] V.

The creation of this frontier society--of which so large a portion differed from that of the coast in language and religion as well as in economic life, social structure, and ideals--produced an antagonism between interior and coast, which worked itself out in interesting fashion.

In general this took these forms: contests between the property-holding class of the coast and the debtor class of the interior, where specie was lacking, and where paper money and a readjustment of the basis 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, contests 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.