The Westward Movement

The colonization of North America by the English was not complete with the founding of the seaboard settlements, but continued in a series of steps westward. At each step American society has returned to simple frontier conditions, under which it has been free to try out new experiments in democracy. Each stage of advance has made its special contribution to our institutions.

In a broad way these steps in the westward movement have corresponded with great physiograph

c areas. The seventeenth century had witnessed the occupation of the Tidewater region, between the coast and the Fall Line. Within that area there had been established two types of society which now projected themselves westward. The New England type was democratic, corporate, theocratic, and industrial, and here the township became the unit of local government. The Southern type, based on a plantation system, staple crops, and dependent labor, was aristocratic, individualistic, and expansive. Here the county became the unit of local government. Intermediate between these types was the society of the middle Tidewater. In spite of these special characteristics, due chiefly to American environment, Tidewater society at the end of the century was still largely European in thought and feeling.

The first half of the eighteenth century witnessed the movement of settlement into the next great physiographic region, the Piedmont, or the area lying between the Fall Line and the Appalachian Mountains. Here, under frontier conditions, was formed a society farther removed from that of Europe, and further modified by American conditions.

This westward movement was the resultant of numerous factors. To the frontier people were attracted by cheap land and unlimited opportunity. From the Tidewater settlements emigrants were driven by increase of population, scarcity of good land, and class conflicts. The less prosperous everywhere, and in the South indented servants who had served their rime, were glad to begin life anew on the frontier. Prosperous planters whose estates had been exhausted by tobacco sought the Piedmont, and left their former lands to become "old fields." Speculation in frontier lands became a passion, and while John Law floated his Mississippi Bubble in Louisiana, New England deacons and Virginia aristocrats alike built hopes of fortune on tracts purchased for a song on the border. The movement to the frontier was stimulated in some cases by intercolonial and international rivalry; thus the settlement of Georgia was at once a philanthropic experiment and a defensive movement against Spain. Of larger consequence than the emigrants from the Tidewater settlements were the new arrivals from Europe, who came in tens of thousands, attracted by cheap land and opportunity or driven by economic, political, or religious unrest.

Trails to the Piedmont had been opened by furtraders, who, even in the seventeenth century, had made their way into the wilderness in all directions: by official explorers, like Governor Spotswood; and by the Southern cattlemen who had established "cowpens" at long distances beyond the frontiers of settlement. The Indian barrier was removed at the turn of the century by a series of frontier wars, which either evicted the natives or broke their resistance. Of these the chief examples are King Philip's War in New England, the Susquehannah War in Virginia, the Tuscarora War in North Carolina, and the Yamassee War in South Carolina. The process of expansion, however, involved further struggles with the Indians, and border conflicts with French neighbors on the north and Spanish neighbors on the south.

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Under these influences the migration took place and by the middle of the century a continuous back-country settlement had been formed, all the way from Maine to Georgia. New England industries were coastwise, the Piedmont was rough and stony, and expansion was consequently slow. But the open spaces were nearly all filled in, to the northern boundary of Massachusetts, while long spurs of settlement were pushed up the rivers into Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, where French rivalry was encountered. In New York settlement was retarded by the practice of land leasing instead of sales, a relic of the patroon system. Nevertheless a narrow ribbon of settlement pushed up the Mohawk from Albany nearly to Oneida Lake, while the lower Hudson River settlements widened out toward Pennsylvania and into New Jersey.

Into the Southern Piedmont the movement was a double one. Some newcomers and many old settlers crossed the Tidewater and pushed over the Fall Line. But for the Germans, Swiss, and Scotch-Irish, Philadelphia was the chief port of entry and the main distributing point. Thence some pushed up the Delaware into New Jersey and northeastern Pennsylvania; others west into the valleys east of the Kittatiny Range. Those who followed, finding the lands occupied, and meeting here the mountain barrier to the westward march, moved south across the Susquehannah and up the Shenandoah Valley, whence they turned eastward into the Piedmont of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and even of Georgia. The Scotch-Irish in general kept nearest the outward frontier and became par excellence the Indian fighters.