Frontier in American History — III - The Old West - 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 flavor in the towns on the frontier.

But it was not until the original ideals of the land system began to change, that the opportunity to make new settlements for such reasons became common.

As the economic and political ideal replaced the religious and social ideal, in the conditions under which new towns could be established, this became more possible.

Such a change was in progress in the latter part of the seventeenth century and during the eighteenth.

In 1713, 1715, and 1727, Massachusetts determined upon a policy of locating towns in advance of settlement, to protect her boundary claims.

In 1736 she laid out five towns near the New Hampshire border, and a year earlier opened four contiguous towns to connect her Housatonic and Connecticut Valley settlements.

[76:1] Grants in non-adjacent regions were sometimes made to old towns, the proprietors of which sold them to those who wished to move.

The history of the town of Litchfield illustrates the increasing importance of the economic factor.

At a time when Connecticut feared that Andros might dispose of the public lands to the disadvantage of the colony, the legislature granted a large part of Western Connecticut to the towns of Hartford and Windsor, _pro forma_, as a means of withdrawing the lands from his hands.

But these towns refused to give up the lands after the danger had passed, and proceeded to sell part of them.

[76:2] Riots occurred when the colonial authorities attempted to assert possession, and the matter was at length compromised in 1719 by allowing Litchfield to be settled in accordance with the town grants, while the colony reserved the larger part of northwestern Connecticut.

In 1737 the colony disposed of its last unlocated lands by sale in lots.

In 1762 Massachusetts sold a group of entire townships in the Berkshires to the highest bidders.

[77:1] But the most striking illustration of the tendency, is afforded by the "New Hampshire grants" of Governor Wentworth, who, chiefly in the years about 1760, made grants of a hundred and thirty towns west of the Connecticut, in what is now the State of Vermont, but which was then in dispute between New Hampshire and New York.

These grants, while in form much like other town grants, were disposed of for cash, chiefly to speculators who hastened to sell their rights to the throngs of land-seekers who, after the peace, began to pour into the Green Mountain region.

It is needless to point out how this would affect the movement of Western settlement in respect to individualistic speculation in public lands; how it would open a career to the land jobbers, as well as to the natural leaders in the competitive movement for acquiring the best lands, for laying out town sites and building up new communities under "boom" conditions.

The migratory tendency of New Englanders was increased by this gradual change in its land policy; the attachment to a locality was diminished.

The later years showed increasing emphasis by New England upon individual success, greater respect for the self-made man who, in the midst of opportunities under competitive conditions, achieved superiority.

The old dominance of town settlement, village moral police, and traditional class control gave way slowly.

Settlement in communities and rooted Puritan habits and ideals had enduring influences in the regions settled by New Englanders; but it was in this Old West, in the years just before the Revolution, that individualism began to play an important 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 (the use of the "birch seal" is familiar to readers of Vermont history) to protect their land titles in the troubled times when these "Green Mountain Boys" resisted New York's assertion of authority.

They later became an independent Revolutionary state with frontier directness, and in very many respects their history in the Revolutionary epoch is similar to that of settlers in Kentucky and Tennessee, both in assertion of the right to independent self government and in a frontier separatism.

[78:1] Vermont may be regarded as the culmination of the frontier movement which I have been describing in New England.

By this time two distinct New Englands existed--the one coastal, and dominated by commercial interests and the established congregational churches; the other a primitive agricultural area, democratic in principle, and with various sects increasingly indifferent to the fear of "innovation" which the dominant classes of the old communities felt.

Already speculative land companies had begun New England settlements in the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania, as well as on the lower Mississippi;

and New England missions among the Indians, such as that at Stockbridge, were beginning the noteworthy religious and educational expansion of the section to the west.

That this movement of expansion had been chiefly from south to north, along the river valleys, should not conceal from us the fact that it was in essential characteristics a Western movement, especially in the social traits that were developing.

Even the men who lived in the long line of settlements on the Maine coast, under frontier conditions, and remote from the older centers of New England, developed traits and a democratic spirit that relate them closely to the Westerners, in spite of the fact that Maine is "down east" by preeminence.

[79:1] The frontier of the Middle region in this period of the formation of the Old West, was divided into two parts, which happen to coincide with the colonies of New York and Pennsylvania.

In the latter colony the trend of settlement was into the Great Valley, and so on to the Southern uplands;

while the advance of settlement in New York was like that of New England, chiefly northward, following the line of Hudson River.

The Hudson and the Mohawk constituted the area of the Old West in this part of the eighteenth century.

With them were associated the Wallkill, tributary to the Hudson, and Cherry Valley near the Mohawk, along the sources of the Susquehanna.

The Berkshires walled the Hudson in to the east; the Adirondacks and the Catskills to the west.

Where the Mohawk Valley penetrated between the mountainous areas, the Iroquois Indians were too formidable for advance on such a slender line.

Nothing but dense settlement along the narrow strip of the Hudson, if even that, could have furnished the necessary momentum for overcoming the Indian barrier; and this pressure was lacking, for the population was comparatively sparse in contrast with the task to be performed.

What most needs discussion in the case of New York, therefore, is not the history of expansion as in other sections, but the absence of expansive power.

The fur-trade had led the way up the Hudson, and made beginnings of settlements at strategic points near the confluence of the Mohawk.

But the fur-trader was not followed by a tide of pioneers.

One of the most important factors in restraining density of population in New York, in retarding the settlement of its frontier, and in determining the conditions there, was the land system of that colony.

From the time of the patroon grants along the lower Hudson, great estates had been the common form of land tenure.

Rensselaerswyck reached at one time over seven hundred thousand acres.

These great patroon estates were confirmed by the English governors, who in their turn followed a similar policy.

By 1732 two and one-half million acres were engrossed in manorial grants.

[80:1] In 1764, Governor Colden wrote[80:2] 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 acknowledgements.

The far greater part of them still remain uncultivated, without any benefit to the community, and are likewise a discouragement to the settling and improving the lands in the neighborhood 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 law suits, 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-sixths of the inhabitants of Westchester County lived within the bounds of the great manors there.

[81:1] In Albany County the Livingston manor spread over seven modern townships, and the great Van Rensselaer manor stretched twenty-four by twenty-eight miles along the Hudson; while still farther, on the Mohawk, were the vast possessions of Sir William Johnson.

[81:2] It was not simply that the grants were extensive, but that the policy of the proprietors favored the leasing rather than the sale of the lands--frequently also of the stock, and taking payment in shares.

It followed that settlers preferred to go to frontiers where a more liberal land policy prevailed.

At one time it seemed possible that the tide of German settlement, which finally sought Pennsylvania and the up-country of the South, might flow into New York.

In 1710, Governor Hunter purchased a tract in Livingston's manor and located nearly fifteen hundred Palatines on it to produce naval stores.

[82:1] But the attempt soon failed; the Germans applied to the Indians on Schoharie Creek, a branch of the Mohawk, for a grant of land and migrated there, only to find that the governor had already granted the land.

Again were the villages broken up, some remaining and some moving farther up the Mohawk, where they and accessions to their number established the frontier settlements about Palatine Bridge, in the region where, in the Revolution, Herkimer led these German frontiersmen to stem the British attack in the battle of Oriskany.

They constituted the most effective military defense of Mohawk Valley.

Still another portion took their way across to the waters of the Susquehanna, and at Tulpehockon Creek began an important center of German settlement in the Great Valley of Pennsylvania.

[82:2] The most important aspect of the history of the movement into the frontier of New York at this period, therefore, was the evidence which it afforded that in the competition for settlement between colonies possessing a vast area of vacant land, those which imposed feudal tenures and undemocratic restraints, and which exploited settlers, were certain to lose.

The manorial practice gave a bad name to New York as a region for settlement, which not even the actual opportunities in certain parts of the colony could counteract.

The diplomacy of New York governors during this period of the Old West, in securing a protectorate over the Six Nations and a consequent claim to their territory, and in holding them aloof from France, constituted the most effective contribution of that colony to the movement of American expansion.

When lands of these tribes were obtained after Sullivan's expedition in the Revolution (in which New England soldiers played a prominent part), it was by the New England inundation into this interior that they were colonized.

And it was under conditions like those prevailing in the later years of the expansion of settlements in New England itself, that this settlement of interior and western New York was effected.

The result was, that New York became divided into two distinct peoples: the dwellers along Hudson Valley, and the Yankee pioneers of the interior.

But the settlement of central and western New York, like the settlement of Vermont, is a story that belongs to the era in which the trans-Alleghany West was occupied.

We can best consider the settlement of the share of the Old West which is located in Pennsylvania as a part of the migration which occupied the Southern Uplands, and before entering upon this it will be advantageous to survey that part of the movement toward the interior which proceeded westward from the coast.

First let us observe the conditions at the eastern edge of these uplands, along the fall line in Virginia, in the latter part of the seventeenth century, in order that the process and the significance of the movement may be better understood.