A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror
Page 18
With each new congregation that the itinerant ministers formed, new doctrines and sects appeared. Regional differences in established churches produced reasoned differences, but also encouraged rampant sectarianism. Each new division weakened the consensus about what constituted accepted doctrines of Christianity, to the point that in popular references America ceased being a “godly” nation and became a “good” nation that could not agree on the specifics of goodness. In education, especially, the divisions threatened to undermine the Christian basis of the young country. Other dangerous splits in doctrine developed over the proper relationship with Indians. Eleazar Wheelock (1711–79), for example, a Congregationalist and a key influence in the Awakening movement, founded a school for Indians that became Dartmouth College in 1769. To the extent that Indians were offered education, it had to occur in segregated schools like Wheelock’s, though he was not the first religious leader to establish a school. Religious groups of all denominations and doctrines accounted for the majority of quality education, especially at the higher levels. Brown University, in Rhode Island (1764), was established by the Baptists; Princeton, in New Jersey, by the Revivalist Presbyterians (1746), which later became a theological institute(1812); Yale, in New Haven, Connecticut, by the Congregationalists (1701); William and Mary, in Virginia, by the Anglicans (1693); and Georgetown College in Washington, D. C. (then Maryland), by the Jesuit father John Carroll (1789); and so on.
Frequently, however, rather than reinforcing existing orthodoxy, colleges soon produced heretics—or, at least, liberals who shared few of their founders’ doctrinal views. At Harvard University, founded to enforce Puritanism in 1636 by the Reverend John Harvard, its original motto, Veritas, Christo et Ecclesiae (Truth, Christ and the Church), and its logo of two books facing open and one facing downward to represent the hidden knowledge of God, were ditched when the school slipped into the hands of liberal groups in 1707. The new motto, simply Veritas, and its symbol of all three books facing up aptly illustrated the dominance of a Unitarian elite that dominated the school, including such notables as John Quincy Adams and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. By focusing on a rationalistic Enlightenment approach to salvation in which virtually all men were saved—not to mention the presumption that all knowledge could be known—the Unitarians (who denied the Trinity, hence the term “Unitarian,” from unity, or one) had opposed the Great Awakening of the 1740s. Henry Ware, at Harvard, and later William Ellery Channing, whose 1819 sermon, “Unitarian Christianity” established the basis for the sect, challenged the Congregational and Puritan precepts from 1805–25. At that point, the American Unitarian Association was formed, but much earlier it had exerted such a powerful influence in Boston that in 1785 King’s Chapel removed all references to the Trinity in the prayer books.20
Unitarians were not alone in their unorthodox views. Many sects strained at the limits of what was tolerable even under the broadest definitions of Christianity. Yet they still maintained, for the most part, a consensus on what constituted morality and ethics. Consequently, a subtle yet profound shift occurred in which the religious in America avoided theological issues and instead sought to inculcate a set of moral assumptions under which even Jews and other non-Christians could fit.
This appeared in its most visible form in education. Jefferson’s concern over state funding of a particular religion centered on the use of tax money for clerical salaries. Eventually, though, the pressure to eliminate any sectarian doctrines from public schools was bound to lead to clashes with state governments over which concepts were denominational and which were generically Christian. Church-state separation also spilled over into debates about the applicability of charters and incorporation laws for churches. Charters always contained elements of favoritism (which was one reason banks were steeped in controversy), but in seeking to avoid granting a charter to any particular church, the state denied religious organizations the same rights accorded hospitals and railroads. Even in Virginia, where “separation of church and state” began, the reluctance to issue religious charters endowed churches with special characteristics that were not applied to other corporations. Trying to keep religion and politics apart, Virginia lawmakers unintentionally “wrapped religion and politics, church and state ever more closely together.”21
The good news was that anyone who was dissatisfied with a state’s religion could move west. That dynamic would later propel the Methodists to Oregon and the Mormons to Utah. Meanwhile, the call of the frontier was irrepressible for reasons entirely unrelated to heaven and completely oriented toward Mammon. And every year more adventurers and traders headed west, beyond the endless mountains.
Beyond the Endless Mountains
The end of the American Revolution marked the beginning of a great migration to the West across the Appalachian Mountains. The migrants followed four major routes. Pennsylvania Germans and Scots-Irish moved south, down the Great Valley of the Appalachians, to settle in western Virginia and North Carolina. The Wilderness Road, blazed by Daniel Boone in 1775, led some of them into Kentucky and the Bluegrass region via the Cumberland Gap. One traveler described this route as the “longest, blackest, hardest road” in America. Carolinians traversed the mountains by horseback and wagon train until they found the Tennessee River, following its winding route to the Ohio River, then ascending the Cumberland south to the Nashville region. But the most common river route—and the most popular route to the West—was the Ohio. Migrants made the arduous journey over Forbes Road through the Alleghenies to Pittsburgh. There they built or bought a flatboat, purchased a copy of Zadok Cramer’s river guide, The Western Navigator, and launched their crafts and their fortunes into le belle rivière. If the weather and navigation depth was good, and fortune smiled upon them, the trip from Pittsburgh to Louisville took seven to ten days.22
During the decade following the Revolution, tens of thousands of pioneers moved southwest of the Ohio River. Harrodsburgh, Boonesborough, Louisville, and Lexington, in Kentucky, were joined by the Wautauga and Nashville settlements in the northeastern and central portions of what is now the state of Tennessee. Pioneers like Daniel Boone played an irreplaceable role in cutting the trails, establishing relations with Native Americans (or defeating them, if it came to a fight), and setting up early forts from which towns and commercial centers could emerge. Daniel Boone (1734–1820) had traveled from Pennsylvania, where his family bucked local Quakers by marrying its daughters outside the Society of Friends, through Virginia, North Carolina, then finally to explore Kentucky. Crossing the famed Cumberland Gap in 1769, Boone’s first expedition into the raw frontier resulted in his party’s being robbed of all its furs. Boone returned a few years later to establish the settlement that bears his name. When the Revolutionary War reopened hostilities in Kentucky, Boone was captured by Shawnee Indians and remained a prisoner for months, then had to endure a humiliating court-martial for the episode. Nevertheless, few individuals did more to open the early West to British and American settlement than Daniel Boone.23
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Daniel Boone, Civilizer or Misanthrope?
As Revolutionary-era Americans began to move beyond the “endless mountains” into the frontier of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys, they followed the trails blazed by Daniel Boone. Stories of Daniel Boone’s exploits as a hunter, pathfinder, Indian fighter, war hero, and community builder, loom large in the myth of the American West. Many of these stories are true. It is interesting to note, however, that the stories of Daniel Boone often portray him in two completely different ways—either as a wild, uncivilized frontiersman or as a leader of the vanguard aiming to tame and civilize that wild frontier. Was Daniel Boone running away from civilization, or was he bringing it with him? Was he a misanthrope or a civilizer, or both?
Born in Pennsylvania in 1734, Daniel Boone became a hunter at twelve years of age, soon staying away from home years at a time on long hunts. He worked his way down the eastern slope of the Appalachians before plunging into the unexplored reg
ions westward. From 1767–69, he blazed the Wilderness Trail through the Cumberland Gap to the Kentucky Bluegrass region, where, in 1775, he established Boonesborough, an outpost for his family and friends to settle the new West. He was subsequently captured and adopted by Shawnee Indians in 1778, fought Indian and Briton alike in the Revolutionary War, and was elected sheriff in 1782 and, later, to the legislature of the new state of Kentucky. During this time Boone also worked as a land company scout and land speculator. Drawn into protracted court battles over disputed land claims, Boone went bankrupt in 1798 and then moved his large family to the uninhabited expanses west of the Mississippi River. He died near St. Charles Missouri in 1820, having spent an eventful eight decades on the American frontier.
During the course of Daniel Boone’s life, stories of his exploits spread far and wide, and he became America’s first frontier folk hero. Thousands claimed to know the exact spot where Boone carved on a tree, here d. boone cill’d a bar (bear). Americans have told Boone’s stories for more than two hundred years, and his legend has appeared in formal artistic works ranging from James Fenimore Cooper’s novel The Last of the Mohicans (1827), and painter George Caleb Bingham’s rendering Daniel Boone (1851) to twentieth-century movies and television shows, the most famous being Fess Parker’s near-decade-long 1960s television role as Boone.
It is important to note the symbolic contrasts in the roles Daniel Boone takes on in the various famous stories about him. On the one hand, he is portrayed as a loner and a misanthrope who longs to escape society and live for years utterly alone in the wilderness. On the other hand, there is the Daniel Boone who was a husband and father, founder of Boonesborough, successful politician, and real estate developer. This Daniel Boone, another biographer wrote, was an “empire builder” and “philanthropist” known for his “devotion to social progress.”
Daniel Boone was above all else, an archetypal American. He loved the wilderness and the freedom that came with frontier individualism. Like all Americans, he simultaneously believed in progress and the advance of capitalism and republican political institutions. While he may have sometimes wished that America would always remain a sparsely inhabited wilderness, he knew that America could not and should not stand still.
Sources: Theodore Roosevelt, The Winning of the West, 6 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1889); John Mack Faragher, Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer (New York: Henry Holt, 1992).
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North of the Ohio, a slower pace of settlement took place because of strong Indian resistance. Even there, the white presence grew. Marietta, Ohio, became the first permanent American settlement in the region, but soon was joined by Chillicothe, Fort Wayne, and Detroit. Census figures in 1790 showed the non-Indian population at 73,000 Kentuckians and 35,000 Tennesseans, while the Old Northwest (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin) boasted 5,000, with numbers rising daily. Counting the pre-1790 residents, the combined American population in all areas between the Appalachian crest and the Mississippi River numbered an impressive 250,000. As one traveler later observed:
Old America seems to be breaking up, and moving westward. We are seldom out of sight, as we travel on this grand track towards the Ohio, of family groups, behind and before us…. Add to these numerous stages loaded to the utmost, and the innumerable travelers on horseback, on foot, and in light wagons, and you have before you a scene of bustle and business extending over three hundred miles, which is truly wonderful.24
On the eastern seaboard, the Confederation Congress watched the Great Migration with interest and concern. Nearly everyone agreed that Congress would have to create a national domain, devise a method for surveying and selling public lands, formulate an Indian policy, and engage in diplomatic negotiations with the British and Spanish in the Old Northwest and Southwest. Most important, Congress had to devise some form of territorial government plan to establish the rule of law in the trans-Appalachian West. Nearly everyone agreed these measures were necessary, but that was about all they agreed to.
Western lands commanded much of Congress’s attention because of the lingering problem of national domain.25 The Articles remained unratified because some of the landed states still refused to surrender their sea-to-sea claims to the central government, and Maryland refused to ratify the document until they did. This logjam cleared in 1781, when Virginia finally ceded her western claims to Congress. Maryland immediately ratified the Articles, officially making the document, at long last, the first Constitution of the United States. Although one state, Georgia, continued to claim its western lands, the remaining states chose to ignore the problem.
Congress immediately set to work on territorial policy, creating legal precedents that the nation follows to this day. Legislators saw the ramifications of their actions with remarkably clear eyes. They dealt with a huge question: if Congress, like the British Parliament before it, established colonies in the West, would they be subservient to the new American mother country or independent? Although the British model was not illogical, Congress rejected it, making the United States the first nation to allow for gradual democratization of its colonial empire.26
As chair of Congress’s territorial government committee, Thomas Jefferson played a major role in the drafting of the Ordinance of 1784. Jefferson proposed to divide the trans-Appalachian West into sixteen new states, all of which would eventually enter the Union on an equal footing with the thirteen original states. Ever the scientist, Jefferson arranged his new states on a neat grid of latitudinal and longitudinal boundaries and gave them fanciful—classical, patriotic, and Indian—names: Cherroneseus, Metropotamia, Saratoga, Assenisipia, and Sylvania. He directed that the Appalachian Mountains should forever divide the slave from the free states, institutionalizing “free soil” on the western frontier. Although this radical idea did not pass in 1784, it combined with territorial self-governance and equality and became the foundation of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787.
Jefferson also applied his social liberalism and scientific method to a land policy component of the Ordinance of 1784. He called for use of a grid system in the survey of public lands. Moreover, Jefferson aimed to use the national domain to immediately place free or, at least, cheap land in the hands of actual settlers, not the national government. His and David Howell’s land policy proposal reflected their agrarianism and acknowledgment of widespread de facto “preemption” (squatter’s rights) on the American frontier that was later codified into law. As economist Hernando DeSoto has argued in The Mystery of Capital, the American “preemption” process gave common people a means to get a legal title to land, which was an early basis for capital formation. This kind of liberal—and legal—land policy is not present in 90 percent of the world even to this day.27
By 1785, however, Jefferson had left Congress, and nationalists were looking to public lands sales as a source for much-needed revenue. A Congressional committee chaired by nationalist Massachusetts delegate Rufus King began to revise Jefferson’s proposal. Borrowing the basic policies of northeastern colonial expansion, Congress overlaid the New England township system on the national map. Surveyors were to plot the West into thousands of townships, each containing thirty-six 640–acre sections. Setting aside one section of each township for local school funding, Congress aimed to auction off townships at a rate of two dollars per acre, with no credit offered. Legislators hoped to raise quick revenue in this fashion because only entrepreneurs could afford the minimum purchase, but the system broke down as squatters, speculators, and other wily frontiersmen avoided the provisions and snapped up land faster than the government could survey it. Despite these limitations, the 1785 law set the stage for American land policy, charting a path toward cheap land (scientifically surveyed, with valid title) that would culminate in the Homestead Act of 1862. To this day, an airplane journey over the neatly surveyed, square-cornered townships of the American West proves the legacy of the Confederation Congress’s Land Ordinance of 1785.28
Congress then appointed Indian commissioners to sign treaties with the Iroquois, Ohio Valley, and southeastern “civilized” tribes. Treaty sessions soon followed at Fort Stanwix, Hopewell, and other sites. Obviously, these agreements did not “solve the Indian problem” nor did they produce universal peaceful relations between the races. On the other hand, the Indian Ordinance of 1786 did formalize the legal basis of land dealings between whites and Indians. Most important, it established the two fundamental principles of American Indian policy: the sovereignty of the national government (versus the states) in orchestrating Native American affairs, and the right of soil, which also necessitated written contractual agreements. To reiterate the points made in earlier chapters, the concept that land could be divided and privately owned was foreign to some, though not all, tribes, making the latter principle extremely important if only for claims against the government that might arise generations later.29