"My ancestors," says Devereaux Jarrett, who was born on a small plantation in New Kent County, Virginia, about 1733, "had the character of honesty and industry, by which they lived in credit among their neighbors, free from real want, and above the frowns of the world. This was also the habit in which my parents were. They always had plenty of plain food and raiment, suitable to their humble station. We made no use of tea or coffee; meat, bread, and milk was the ordinary food of all my acquaintance. I suppose the richer sort might make use of those and other luxuries, but to such people we had no access. We were accustomed to look upon what were called gentle folks as beings of a superior order. For my part, I was quite shy of them, and kept off at a humble distance. A periwig in those days, was a distinguishing badge of gentle folk. Such ideas of the difference between gentle and simple, were, I believe, universal among all my rank and age."
The distinction between gentle and simple was doubtless less absolute than the disillusioned Jarrett represents it to have been. Even in the South there were many gradations of wealth, and it was no uncommon thing for a man to rise, as Jarrett did himself, from mean birth to a considerable eminence. Yet in none of the colonies was the distinction altogether unreal. The mass of the voters,—small freehold farmers in the country and "freemen" in some of the towns,—holding themselves superior to the unfranchised, yet not claiming equality with the favored few; the tenant farmer or small shopkeeper, deferring to the freeholder and the freeman, but aware that fortune had placed him above the artisan and day laborer; the artisan and the day laborer, proud that none could call them "servant":—these were the simple folk who in all the colonies made the great majority of free citizens. Chiefly occupied with earning daily bread by the labor of their hands, many were content to escape the debtor's prison, the best well satisfied with a modest competence. They heard of countries beyond sea, but their outlook was bounded by the parish.
The provincialism of their minds was not dispelled by communion with the classics of all ages, and no cheap magazine or popular novel came to dull the edge of native shrewdness or curiosity. They read not at all, or they read the Bible, the Paradise Lost or the Pilgrim's Progress, or some chance book of sermons or of theology, or book of English ballads. Periwigs and gold braid were not for them, nor was it any part of their ambition to enter the charmed circle of polite society, to associate on terms of equality with the "best people" in the colony.
Yet with whatever semblance the older settlements might take on the character of European civilization, America was bound to be the land of opportunity so long as there was abundance of free land to entice the ambitious and the dispossessed. Early in the century, as good land became scarce in the older towns of New England, and proprietors began to deny the commons to the landless, venturesome and discontented men, accepting the challenge of a savage-infested wilderness, moved northward along the rivers into Maine and New Hampshire, or beyond the original Connecticut settlements into the valley of the Housatonic. Here land was less often than formerly disposed of to groups of proprietors intent to maintain the traditions of town and church; acquired by the older towns or by land agents, it was more often sold to companies or to individuals for the profit it would bring.
The famous New Hampshire grants, one hundred and thirty townships in the present State of Vermont, fell mainly to speculators who sold to the highest bidder, covenanted and uncovenanted alike, among the throng of home-seekers who pushed into this western country in the seventh decade of the century. Long before the Revolution opened, there thus existed in New England a fringe of pioneer settlements—such as Vassalboro and Durham on the Androscoggin and the Kennebec, Concord and Hinsdale on the Merrimac and the Connecticut, Pittsfield and Great Barrington on the Housatonic—which formed a newer New England, less lettered and scriptural than the old, where class distinctions were little known, where contact with the Indian and the wilderness had added a secular ruthlessness and ingenuity to the harsh Puritan temper, and where the individual, freed from an effective "village moral police," learned in the rough school of nature a new kind of conformity unknown to the ancient Hebrew code.
In the Middle and Southern colonies, even more than in New England, expansion of population into the interior was a notable feature of the eighteenth century. In 1700 the estate of William Byrd at the James River Falls was on the Indian frontier; North Carolina was unoccupied south of Albemarle Sound or west of the Nottaway River; there were few settlers in South Carolina north of the Santee, or south or west of it except the Charleston planters who had appropriated all the land within sixty miles of the coast and within twenty of every navigable river. Sixty years later the unoccupied coast regions were settled, and the surplus population of Virginia and Maryland, excluded from the tide-water by the engrossers of great estates, or oppressed by its restricted social conditions, had occupied the cheap lands of eastern North Carolina, or, following the James and the Rappahannock, had settled in the up-country between the "Fall Line" and the Blue Ridge.
Cattle-raisers, learning from Indian traders of the fertile interior, followed the trails with their "cowpens," which in turn gave place to permanent farms. In this back country, the great plantation was not often found, and slavery played little part. There were few superiors where farms were comparatively small, and where most men worked with their hands and consumed provisions raised by their own labor. Of those who came from the older settlements to occupy the up-country, many were "such as have been transported hither as servants, and being out of their time ... settle themselves where land is to be taken up that will produce the necessities of life with little labor." William Byrd described with engaging wit the ne'er-do-wells who maintained a precarious existence below the Dividing Line; and Governor Spotswood deplored the shiftless servants who lived on the Virginia frontier. Yet we may suppose that freedom often transformed the idle bondsman into an industrious freeholder. Nor were all the settlers of the Virginia back country emancipated servants. In 1732 Peter Jefferson patented a thousand acres at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was in this frontier community above the Fall Line that Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson were born; here they grew to manhood; here they were inspired with those ideals of society so inimical alike to the imperial designs of the British Government and to the complacent pretensions of the slave-owning aristocracies of the tide-water.
Yet the first distinctive American frontier was not created alone by the movement of population westward from the older settlements; like every successive frontier in our history, it became the mecca of emigrants from British and continental lands. Before 1700, exiled Huguenots and refugees from the Palatinate began to seek the New World; and during the eighteenth century men of non-English stock poured by the thousands into the up-country of Pennsylvania and of the South. In 1700 the foreign population in the colonies was slight; in 1775 it is estimated that 225,000 Germans and 385,000 Scotch-Irish, together nearly one fifth of the entire population, lived within the provinces that won independence. Persecution and the ravages of war, taxes that were heavy at any time and intolerable in time of famine, were among the causes that disposed many thousands of Protestant families from Ulster, and from the thickly populated districts of Switzerland and the Rhine country, to seek new homes in a land of better promise.
To cross the ocean was no slight undertaking for unlettered and home-keeping people. But since the founding of Pennsylvania knowledge of America had spread among the peasants of Germany, and there was no lack of "Neulanders"—the emigrant agents of that day—who described the New World in glowing terms, and stood ready for a consideration to carry any who wished to be transported to its shores. And the way was facilitated by the English and colonial Governments: to forestall the French in settling the interior, secure the trade of the Indians in time of peace, and erect a barrier against them in time of war, foreigners were accorded naturalization, land was offered on easy terms, and toleration granted to all Protestant sects.
Foreigners were not attracted to New England, where the Puritans scrutinized all newcomers with a jealous eye; while New York was avoided on account of the unhappy experience of Governor Hunter's Palatines and the refusal of the great landowners along the Hudson to grant freehold title. Most of the Germans, seeking homes in the best advertised and most German of all the colonies, landed at the port of Philadelphia. Germantown had been founded by Francis Daniel Pastorius in 1683, but it was not until forty years later, after the devastating wars of the Spanish Succession, that his countrymen occupied in force the neighboring counties of Lancaster, Montgomery, and Bucks, pushed up into Lehigh and Northampton, and across the Susquehanna into Cumberland and Adams. Much to their surprise, doubtless, for it was scarcely the business of the emigrant agent to inform them, they learned that land in this German mecca sold for from £10 to £15 per hundred acres, and bore a quit-rent of one halfpenny.
Many occupied the land as squatters, and it is estimated that 400,000 acres were settled without title between 1732 and 1740. But the newcomers or their children soon learned of better opportunities to the south, where Maryland land sold for from £2 to £5 per hundred acres, and the up-country forestallers, such as Carter and Beverley, under-sold the Pennsylvania land office in order to attract settlers. As early as 1726 the stream of German migration began, therefore, to move along the mountain slopes to the south and west. During the middle decades of the century, they occupied in increasing numbers the Piedmont of Virginia, crept southward along the west side of the Blue Ridge in the Shenandoah Valley, and out into the up-country of the Carolinas west of the great Pine Barrens.
At the same time as the Germans, and in even greater numbers, came the Scotch and Scotch-Irish, mostly disappointed settlers in Ulster who found land titles insecure there and the promise of religious liberty unfulfilled. A few, not easily discouraged, came to the Berkshires and the New Hampshire hills; more occupied the Mohawk and Cherry Valleys of New York; the great majority, like the Germans, settled in Pennsylvania and the up-country of the South. In Pennsylvania, they went for the most part beyond the German frontier, occupying the country from Lancaster to Bedford, the Juniata Valley and the Redstone country, and in the decades before the Revolution, attracted by free lands west of the Alleghanies, as far as Pittsburg on the upper Ohio. Like the Germans they pushed south into the Piedmont of Virginia, and along the Alleghany slope of the Shenandoah, and into the Southern up-country as far as the Savannah River. Sometimes mixing with the Germans, the main body of the Scotch-Irish was everywhere farther west.
Too martial to fear the Indians, and too aggressive to live at peace with them, they were the true borderers of the century, the frontier of the frontier, forming, from Londonderry in New England to the Savannah, an outer bulwark, behind which the older settlements, and even the peace-loving Germans themselves, rested in some measure of security.
The German or Scotch-Irish immigrant was doubtless grateful to the Government which offered him a refuge; but in the breast of neither was there any sentimental loyalty to King George, or much sympathy with the traditions of English society. Whether Mennonite or Moravian, German Lutheran or Scotch Presbyterian, they were men whose manner of life disposed them to an instinctive belief in equality of condition, whose religion confirmed them in a democratic habit of mind. That every man should labor as he was able; that no man should live by another's toil or waste in luxurious living the hard-earned fruits of industry; that all should live upright lives, eschewing the vanities of the world, and worshiping God, neither with images nor vestments nor Romish ritual, but in spirit and in truth:—these were the ideals which the foreign Protestants brought as a heritage from Wittenberg and Geneva to their new home in America. And if we may accept the impressions of an English observer, life in the Shenandoah Valley was in happy accord, in the middle of the century, with the arcadian simplicity of these ideals.
"I could not but reflect with pleasure on the situation of these people," says Richard Burnaby. "Far from the bustle of the world, they live in the most delightful climate, and the richest soil imaginable; they are everywhere surrounded with the most beautiful prospects and sylvan scenes; ... they ... live in perfect liberty; they are ignorant of want, and acquainted with but few vices. Their inexperience of the elegancies of life precludes any regret that they possess not the means of enjoying them; but they possess what many persons would give half their dominions for, health, content, and tranquillity of mind."
The description does not lack truth, but perhaps it somewhat smacks of fashionable eighteenth-century philosophy. And assuredly no region on the frontier was more favored than the famous Shenandoah Valley. Little question that conditions were less idyllic in other places. Missionaries who preached the Great Awakening in western Pennsylvania and in the Southern back country were often enough appalled by evidence of ignorance and low morals. And on the far outer frontier at White Woman's Creek, Mary Harris, still recalling after forty years' exile that "they used to be very religious in New England," told Christopher Gist in 1751 that "she wondered how white men could be so wicked as she had seen them in these woods."
Neither the lyric phrase of Burnaby nor the harsh verdict of Mary Harris fitly describes those interior communities that stretched from Maine to Georgia. But there, as elsewhere, doubtless, the practice of men's lives, even among the frontier Puritans of New England, or the German Protestants and Scotch Presbyterians of the Middle and Southern colonies, often fell short of their best ideals. Leaving the sheltered existence of long-settled communities, set down on a dangerous Indian frontier or at best in a virgin country, where customary restraints were relaxed, where churches were few and schools often unknown, where action more readily followed hard on desire and men's will made all the majesty of the law, the aggressive primary instincts had freer play, and society could not but take on a strain of the primitive. Even more than the original colonists, these dwellers on the second frontier caught something of the wild freedom of the wilderness, something of the ruthlessness of nature, something also of its self-sufficiency, something of its somber and emotional influence.
Between this primitive agricultural democracy of the interior and the commercial and landed aristocracy of the coast, separated geographically and differing widely in interests and ideals, conflict was inevitable. When, in 1780, Thomas Jefferson said that "19,000 men below the Falls give law to more than 30,000 living in other parts of the state," he was proclaiming that opposition between the older and the newer America which found expression in provincial politics from the middle of the eighteenth century, which made a part of the Revolution, and which in every period since has been so decisive a feature of our history. In the eighteenth century the frontier was the home of a primitive radicalism. Where offenses were elemental and easily detected, legal technicalities and the chicanery of courts seemed but devices for the support of idle lawyers; where debtors were most numerous and specie most scarce, few could understand why paper money would not prove a panacea for poverty; where every man earned his own bread and where submission to the inevitable was the only kind of conformity that was deemed essential, slavery and a state church were thought to be but the bulwark of class privilege and the tyranny of kings. After the French wars the interior communities of the Middle and Southern colonies, finding themselves unfairly represented in the assemblies, were first made aware that their interests were little likely to be seriously regarded either by the king's ministers or the merchants and landlords who shaped legislation at Williamsburg, Philadelphia, or New York.
For defending the border in the desolating war that drove the French out of America, it now seemed that they were to be rewarded by land laws made for the rich, an administration of justice burdensome for sparsely settled communities, a money system that penalized them for being debtors, or taxes levied for the support of a church which they never entered. And so, before the Revolution opened, the Western imagination had conjured up the specter of a corrupt and effete "East": land of money-changers and self-styled aristocrats and a pliant clergy, the haunt of lawyers and hangers-on, proper dwelling-place of "servants" and the beaten slave: a land of cities, scorning the provincial West, and bent on exploiting its laborious and upright people. And who could doubt that men who bought their clothes in London would readily crook the knee to kings? Who could question that special privilege in the colonies was fostered by the laws of trade, or that aristocracy in America was the reward of submission to England?