"It was on the first of May, in the year 1769, that I resigned my domestic happiness for a time, and left my family and peaceable habitation on the Yadkin River, in North-Carolina, to wander through the wilderness of America, in quest of the country of Kentucke…"
—Daniel Boone, in John Filson’s The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke, 1784
"The land we live on, our fathers received from God, and they transmitted it to us, for our children, and we cannot part with it… Where is the land on which our children and their children after them are to lie down!"
—Cornplanter, the Seneca leader, to President George Washington, 1790, prior to the making of a sacred treaty to last "as long as the grass shall grow"
"The Western Country will one Day give us trouble—to govern them will not be easy."
—John Jay
A RAPTUROUS IDEA OF PROPERTY
As we all know, the thirteen original colonies hugged the Atlantic shore. Moreover, they were hemmed in by Appalachian Mountains, and, further to the west, by other claimants to the vast, uncharted land on the other side of those mountains: Native Americans, the Spanish, the French, and the British. But the Founders were obsessed with the West from the beginning. George Washington, a surveyor by profession before he was a soldier, never heard of a land deal that did not tempt him. Before the Revolution, Washington owned over 63,000 acres of trans-Appalachia, and he wanted more. So did Thomas Jefferson, who built Monticello facing west. British efforts to stem the flow of Virginians across the mountains were among the principal causes of the Revolution. Richard Henderson, a judge in North Carolina and a sponsor of Daniel Boone’s scouting expeditions, possessed, in his own words, "a rapturous idea of property." During the years before the Revolution, and for many years after it, speculation in property was considered an honorable way of getting rich. Why this obsession? Stephen Ambrose explains: "constant expansion was critical, because the Virginia plantation of the day was incredibly wasteful. The low ground or inferior bottomland was planted to corn to provide food for slaves and animals. Fertile land—identified by hardwood growth—was saved for tobacco. The planters had their slaves gird large trees and leave the trees to die while plowing lightly around them. Slaves created hills for tobacco with a hoe, without bothering to remove the trees. After three annual crops of tobacco, these ‘fields’ grew wheat for a year or so before being abandoned and allowed to revert to pine forest. The planters let their stock roam wild, made no use of animal manure, and practiced only the most rudimentary crop rotation. Meanwhile, the planters moved their slaves to virgin lands and repeated the process. The system allowed the planters to use to the maximum the two things in which they were really rich, land and slaves. Tobacco, their only cash crop, was dependent on an all-but-unlimited quantity of each…. Tobacco wore out land so fast there could never be enough." (Corn took almost as heavy a toll on the land as tobacco.) But it wasn’t only wealthy planters who sought land. Land hunger was universal. For people of modest means, or even no means at all, the acquisition and development of fertile land was an attainable goal. It’s true that lack of capital, labor-intensive farming, and poor transportation limited most farmers to a subsistence level, but this was better than most European peasants could hope for. Americans, the great historian David Potter observed, were the "people of plenty." Another fine American historian, John Opie, writes: "One of the world’s great agricultural success stories took hold when the independent property-owning farmer appeared on the American landscape. This legendary figure dominated American expansion westward…. The frontier farmer remained undertooled, undercapitalized, and isolated, but the American landscape, with its fertile soil and forgiving climate, was the foundation for a remarkable shift from scarcity to an abundance of food….