The thirteen colonies that would make up the United States declared independence from Britain in 1776. Freedom, however, takes many forms. Just a year earlier, the hunter Daniel Boone and thirty or so followers asserted an independence of a different sort. Plagued by debt, Boone left his home on the Yadkin River in North Carolina and wandered west. His party took advantage of a convenient notch in the Appalachian mountain range, the Cumberland Gap. They traveled some two hundred miles in a month, cutting through thick brush, cane, and reed in search of better land.
Boone and his followers found what they sought in the plains of Kentucky. The Shawnees who lived there had carefully culled the area’s trees, letting the grass grow high and the herbivores graze. For men used to a hardscrabble life, this was paradise. “So rich a soil we had never seen before; covered with clover in full bloom,” gaped one of Boone’s axmen. “The woods were abounding in wild game.” They named their new settlement Boonesborough, after the man who had brought them there.
Oases in the desert often vanish upon inspection, and it didn’t take long for Boone’s followers to reconsider their rapture. The teeming meadows were no mirage, but those meadows were the hunting grounds of the Shawnees, whose presence made it difficult for Boone’s party to venture beyond Boonesborough’s defended perimeter. Confined to their few rudimentary structures and beset on all sides, many of the town’s residents lost heart and returned home before the year was out.
Boonesborough’s achievements were, on the face of it, modest. Yet if the what of Boonesborough was underwhelming, the where carried a larger significance. The settlement was situated on the far side of the Appalachians, which for more than a century had formed a barrier—in law and practice—to British settlement in North America. By blazing his trail through the wilderness, Boone had opened a channel through which hundreds of thousands of whites would soon pour, dragging enslaved blacks along with them. Boone wasn’t exactly the “first white man of the West,” as one of his biographers insisted. But he was an early drop from a faucet that was about to be turned on full blast.
For European intellectuals, the rough-hewn, frontier-dwelling Boone was catnip. Enlightenment philosophes regarded him as man in his natural state, Romantics as a refugee from civilization. An obscure biographical account of Boone, originally published as an appendix to a history of Kentucky, made the rounds in Europe, where it was republished and speedily translated into French and German.
Boone showed up in European literature, too. The British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft had an affair with one of Boone’s acquaintances and, with him, published a fictionalized account of Boone’s life. The French Romantic François-René de Chateaubriand lifted passages from Boone’s biography for his influential epic, Les Natchez, about a Frenchman living among the North American Indians. Lord Byron, the leading poet of the age, devoted seven stanzas to Boone (the “happiest amongst mortals anywhere”) in his poem Don Juan.
Yet, oddly, Boone saw almost none of this. Though celebrated abroad, he wasn’t much revered at home during his lifetime. He died at the old age of eighty-five in 1820. That was the same decade Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died, both, as it happened by near-inconceivable coincidence, on the same day—the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The country went understandably crazy when Jefferson and Adams died. “Had the horses and the chariot of fire descended to take up the patriarchs,” a New York paper wrote, “it might have been more wonderful, but not more glorious.”
But for Boone’s death? Nothing of the sort. He died in the Territory of Missouri, west of St. Louis. He had no money and no land—he was living as a pensioner on his son’s small estate. Territorial legislators in Missouri wore black armbands in Boone’s honor, but the eastern papers took well over a month to even acknowledge his death, which they generally did with short notices. He was buried in an unmarked grave.
How could that happen? Why didn’t someone do something? Did the leading men of the country not know about Boone? They knew. Did they not understand what he represented? They understood.
They just didn’t like it.
The disregard in which Daniel Boone was held may come as a surprise. The United States, as the story is often told, was a buoyantly expansive nation from the start. Its founders had wrested liberty from an oppressive empire—turning subjects into citizens and colonies into states—and were eager to push their republican form of government westward across the continent, from sea to shining sea. Men like Daniel Boone, it would seem, were vital instruments of that national mission.
Yet Boone’s path was strewn with obstacles. The British had set the ridge of the Appalachians as the boundary to white settlement, making Boone’s journey west a crime. The end of British rule did little to improve Boone’s standing. The founders viewed frontiersmen like him with open suspicion. They were the nation’s “refuse” (wrote Ben Franklin), “no better than carnivorous animals” (J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur), or “white savages” (John Jay). George Washington warned, after the revolution, of the “settling, or rather overspreading the Western Country … by a parcel of banditti, who will bid defiance to all authority.” To prevent this, he proposed drawing a settlement boundary, just as the British had, and prosecuting as a felon any citizen who crossed it.
Part of the objection was social; the founders were men of culture and sophistication who found rough frontier life troubling. Yet there was a deeper issue involved. As Boonesborough’s settlers had discovered, the United States wasn’t the only country with claim to the land west of the Appalachians. Native peoples—organized as nations, tribes, confederacies, and other durable polities—had their own cartography, their own way of mapping North America. And, in the late eighteenth century, they could back their maps with force.
This was the raw nerve Daniel Boone had touched. By hauling white settlers west, he was invading Indian lands. That meant fighting, fighting of the sort that might easily draw the United States government in. It also meant a discomfiting blurring of the lines between European and Native. Boone had killed Indians, been captured by them many times, and seen a brother and two sons die by Indian hands. But he had also, during one of his stints in captivity, been adopted into a Shawnee family, receiving the name Sheltowee (meaning “Big Turtle”) and becoming “exceedingly familiar and friendly,” as he put it, with his “new parents, brothers, sisters, and friends.”
This was exactly the sort of business that put Washington in favor of enforcing a British-style settlement boundary. The matter wasn’t merely philosophical for him; it was also personal. Much of Washington’s wealth lay in large tracts of western land. That land would hold its value only if he could control its sale and settlement. “Banditti” such as Boone, who took land without consulting its eastern owners, were a threat. Boone himself was a particular threat, since his claims on Kentucky conflicted with Washington’s own.
Paper claims to distant land, such as Washington’s, were hard to maintain from the East. During the Revolutionary War, Washington had left his considerable estate in the unsteady hands of his distant cousin Lund Washington. Under Lund’s less than entirely watchful eye, squatters took up residence on Washington’s western holdings (not the Kentucky claims, but others farther north). Irate, Washington set out to put things right, crossing the Appalachians himself on a sort of landlord’s vengeance mission.
The expedition did little to temper his disdain for frontiersmen. He recorded that their clashes with Indians had incited “murders, and general dissatisfaction.” They “labour very little,” he harrumphed, and the merest “touch of a feather” would turn their loyalties away from the United States.
Washington set his affairs in order, but he remained doubtful about westerners’ political allegiances. His fears were confirmed in the 1790s, when backcountry men in Pennsylvania refused to pay a federal tax on alcohol and threatened armed secession. It was the Boston Tea Party all over again, this time with whiskey. Yet, notwithstanding his own recent leadership of a revolution against the financial machinations of a distant government, Washington’s sympathy for the rebels quickly ran dry. Their opposition, he complained to Jefferson, had “become too open, violent and serious to be longer winked at.”
Once again, Washington rode west across the mountains, this time to quash a rebellion. In the end, the uprising dispersed before Washington’s forces arrived. But the episode remains, as the historian Joseph Ellis has observed, the “first and only time a sitting American president led troops in the field.”
Washington’s impatience with frontiersmen didn’t mean that he opposed expansion. In the long term, he depended on it, both to strengthen the country and to profit from his western estates. The issue was the short term. The country was vast, but its government was weak. Squatters who rushed over the mountains were impossible to govern, and the wars they inevitably started were expensive to fight. Washington thus insisted that settlement proceed in a “compact” manner, under elite control. That way, the frontier would be not a refuge for masterless men like Boone but the forefront of the march of civilization, advancing at a stately pace.
To realize their vision, the founders created a distinct political category for the frontier: territory. The revolution had been fought by a union of states, but those states’ borders became ill-defined and even overlapped as they reached westward. Rather than dividing the frontier among the states, the republic’s leaders brokered deals by which none of the Atlantic states would extend to the Mississippi, which marked the western edge of the country. Instead, western land would go to the federal government. It would be administered not as states, but as territories.
The government accepted control of its first territory in 1784, when Virginia gave up its claims to a large swath of land north of the Ohio River. This cession came not two months before the United States formally received its independence when Britain ratified the Treaty of Paris. This meant that, from day one, the United States of America was more than just a union of states. It was an amalgam of states and territory.
By 1791, all Atlantic states except Georgia had followed Virginia and given up their far western claims. As a result, in that year only slightly more than half of the country’s land (55 percent) was covered by states.
What was this non-state territory? The Constitution was notably close-lipped, discussing the matter only in a single sentence. It granted Congress the power “to dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the United States.” Thus the founding document, which went into extravagant detail about amendments, elections, and the division of power, left wide open the question of how much of the land was to be governed.
Territorial policy was set, instead, by a series of laws, most famously the Jefferson-inspired Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which covered a large part of the present-day Midwest (similar laws covered other regions). The Northwest Ordinance has become part of the national mythology, celebrated in textbooks for its remarkable offer of statehood on “an equal footing with the original States in all respects whatever.” The territories merely had to cross a series of population thresholds: five thousand free men, and they could have a legislature; sixty thousand free inhabitants (or sooner, if Congress allowed), and they could be states.
But the operative word was could. None of this was automatic, for Congress retained the power to advance or impede territories, both of which it did. Sometimes it denied, ignored, or deflected statehood petitions. That is why Lincoln, West Dakota, Deseret, Cimarron, and Montezuma—all of which sought admission to the union—did not become states.
Moreover, Congress’s discretionary authority meant that until territories became states, the federal government held absolute power over them. Initially, territories were to be ruled by an appointed governor and three judges. Even after they gained legislatures, the governor retained the power to veto bills and dissolve the legislature.
“In effect,” wrote James Monroe, who drafted the ordinance, it was “a colonial government similar to that which prevail’d in these States previous to the revolution.” Jefferson conceded that the first stage resembled a “despotic oligarchy.”
That was an apt characterization. The first governor of the Northwest Territory, Arthur St. Clair, a conservative Scotsman who’d been Washington’s aide-de-camp, had little patience for the rambunctious frontier. He saw himself as a “poor devil banished to another planet.” The territory, in his eyes, was a “dependent colony,” inhabited not by “citizens of the United States” but by its “subjects” (“white Indians” is how one of the territorial judges described them). Feeling the territorial inhabitants too “ignorant” and “ill qualified” to govern themselves, St. Clair used his wide discretionary powers to impede the formation of states.
The same pattern held in Louisiana Territory, the land Jefferson acquired in 1803 from France. Eastern politicians fretted about the newly annexed land’s inhabitants: Anglo settlers, Catholics, free blacks, Indians, and mixed-race folk. “This Constitution never was, and never can be, strained to lap over all the wilderness of the West,” warned Representative Josiah Quincy, the future president of Harvard.
Jefferson understood the sentiment. The people of Louisiana were as “incapable of self-government as children,” he judged, adding that the “principles of popular Government are utterly beyond their comprehension.” Rather than putting Louisiana through the normal Northwest Ordinance procedures, Jefferson added a new initial phase, military government, and sent the U.S. Army to keep the peace. By 1806, the Territory of Louisiana hosted the largest contingent of the army in the country.
Jefferson’s appointed governor to Louisiana Territory, like Arthur St. Clair, griped about the “mental darkness” of Louisiana’s inhabitants. Allowing them to vote, he believed, “would be a dangerous experiment.”
Louisianians protested their disenfranchisement. “Do political axioms on the Atlantic become problems when transferred to the shores of the Mississippi?” they asked on a trip to the capital. Jefferson shrugged his shoulders and did nothing.
Thomas Jefferson wasn’t against expansion any more than George Washington was. It’s just that, like Washington, he envisioned it as a controlled process.
In his more fanciful moments, Jefferson imagined the United States spreading to “cover the whole Northern, if not the Southern continent with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar forms, and by similar laws.” Yet that vague fantasy was slated, in Jefferson’s mind, for “distant times.” When it came to the pace of expansion, his ambitions were strikingly modest. In his first inaugural address, he marveled at the “wide and fruitful land” from the Atlantic to the Mississippi and predicted that it would hold “room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation.”
Despite his seeming satisfaction with the country’s original dimensions, Jefferson came to be known as an expansionist for his acquisition of Louisiana, which extended the country far west of the Mississippi. Yet that was more of an impulse buy than a considered purchase. In sending negotiators to Paris to bargain with Napoleon, he wasn’t even trying to get vast tracts of western land. Rather, he wanted valuable ports on the Gulf of Mexico. The initial response of Jefferson’s emissary to Napoleon’s offer of all of French North America is telling: “I told him no, that our wishes extended only to New Orleans and the Floridas.”
Jefferson cared more about the ports than the land because he wasn’t searching for room for settlers. Even after annexing Louisiana, he didn’t see it as a home for whites. Much of the land still fell under Indian title, and “the best use we can make of the country for some time,” Jefferson wrote, was to keep it that way. In his vision, all the land except an area around New Orleans would be “shut up” against whites “for a long time to come.” Instead of rushing out to the edges of the new territory, whites would slowly populate the Mississippi Valley, “advancing compactly as we multiply.” Jefferson imagined the West would be settled not by nomadic hunters, like Boone (and like some Indians), but by small farmers. So long as they kept to their allotted territory and didn’t multiply too rapidly, they could be accommodated.
This was the founders’ vision. And, with the Louisiana Purchase, it seemed easily realized. If eastern Indians could be induced by treaty to move west of the settlement border and if whites could be kept east, “advancing compactly,” there’d be room for all, down to Jefferson’s imagined “thousandth and thousandth generation.”
Jefferson and Washington assumed that whites could be guided to settle the land, as they both put it, “compactly,” meaning that their growing numbers wouldn’t require too much room. It wasn’t an unreasonable assumption, especially given how slowly European populations had grown in the past. Between A.D. 1 and A.D. 1000, Western Europe had increased by only 6 percent. Things picked up in the next seven centuries, when its population more than doubled. But that still wasn’t exactly fast. By 1700, the best available statistics suggested that England was on track to double only once every 360 years.
The North American colonies weren’t much different, at least not at first. Disease took so many lives in Britain’s first permanent North American settlement at Jamestown, established in 1607, that it wasn’t until the 1690s that births outpaced deaths there. In the first century and a half after Jamestown’s establishment, the frontier of white settlement had crept west slowly, at one to two miles a year.
But by the mid-eighteenth century, something was changing. Ben Franklin was the first to notice it. In 1749 he organized a census of Philadelphia and began to collect population numbers on Boston, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. What he saw was startling. Not only was the colonial population growing, it was doubling once every twenty-five years. If that continued, Franklin predicted (with more than a little giddiness), in a century colonial North America would contain more Englishmen than Britain itself.
This was a revelation. Franklin is best remembered for his experiments with electricity and his many inventions (bifocals, the lightning rod, the circulating stove, the urinary catheter), but his demographic research was a large part of his legacy, too. His numbers quickly made the rounds in Europe, only sometimes with his name attached, and entered the thought of such philosophers as Adam Smith and David Hume. The grim prediction by the economist Thomas Malthus that food supply could never keep pace with population growth was largely based on Franklin’s North American calculations (which, Malthus gasped, indicated “a rapidity of increase probably without parallel in history”). Malthus, in turn, was an important influence on Charles Darwin, both of whose grandfathers knew Franklin well. The copy of Malthus’s book in Darwin’s library has the Franklin passages underlined.
Not only was Franklin influential, he was right. Shockingly right. More right than he had any reason to be. Full population figures for the United States were first collected in 1790, the year of Franklin’s death. A hundred years later, the 1890 census registered that the population had increased sixteenfold—i.e., a doubling every twenty-five years—Franklin had been off by less than one-seventh of a percent. And in 1855, exactly a hundred years after Franklin published his prediction that North American colonists would outnumber Britons in a century, the U.S. population surpassed that of Britain for the first time.
What Franklin had recognized, earlier than anyone else, was that a small population of English-speaking whites and their black slaves was going supernova. They inhabited a continent substantially cleared of its indigenous population by disease, they possessed powerful agricultural technologies, and they enjoyed close economic ties to Britain, the center of the Industrial Revolution. The combination was explosive.
The population of France at the time of U.S. independence was around thirty million. In 1900 it was slightly more than forty million. By contrast, the population of the United States at its independence was between three and four million—roughly one-tenth the size of France. And yet by 1900 it was seventy-six million, nearly twice France’s size. Although the frontier had advanced by fewer than two miles a year in the 150 years following Jamestown’s establishment, in the first half of the nineteenth century it shot west at nearly forty miles a year, stopping only when settlers reached the Pacific Coast.
This was growth like no one had ever seen. Part of it came from influxes from Europe and Africa, though in no decade in the nineteenth century did immigration ever account for more than a third of the increase. As Franklin pointed out, the bulk of it was handled the old-fashioned way, a fire hose of fecundity spraying settlers up and down the North American continent. With arable land stretching to the horizon, settlers spread like bacteria.
“Wave after wave has rolled on,” wrote a nervous Ojibwe thinker, “till now there appears no limit to the sea of population.”
You could see it in the cities the settlers built. Cincinnati, a village in 1810, had a nine-story steam-powered mill by 1815 and a fleet of 150 steamboats by 1830. Chicago grew from a settlement of fewer than a hundred people (and fourteen taxpayers) in 1830 to a towering megalopolis with the world’s first dense cluster of skyscrapers and more than a million residents in 1890—despite having burned to the ground in 1871.
That phoenix-from-the-ashes routine was surprisingly common. Constructed with maximal haste and minimal regard for the principles of zoning, settler cities burst into flame with alarming frequency. But not even fire could stop the endless torrent.
The growth of the white population was like a flash of dynamite, and it would explode the founders’ vision of the country. The great Jeffersonian system that had prevailed in the first decades, with western subjects semi-colonized, simply could not hold. There were too many Daniel Boones. The government gave up prosecuting squatters by the 1830s and instead let them buy their land. In the 1860s it began giving away parcels of public land as “homesteads” to nearly any citizen willing to live on them.
The territories with large white populations became states swiftly; California, swarming with gold-seekers, went from military government to statehood in two years. And though the inhabitants of the remaining territories still protested their lack of rights (the territorial system was “the most infamous system of colonial government that was ever seen on the face of the globe,” grumbled a delegate from Montana Territory), their cause for complaint diminished. Appointed governors lost some of their discretionary powers, and, after 1848, new territories skipped the first stage of government, absolute rule by federal officials, and went straight to having bicameral legislatures.
The culture changed, too. Rather than being despised “banditti” or “white savages” on the fringes of civilization, settlers acquired a new identity: pioneers. No longer scofflaws, they were the proud flag-bearers of a dynamic nation.
As squatters became pioneers, Daniel Boone’s reputation surged. After his death, he was retroactively claimed as an honorary founding father. A statue was placed on the steps of the Capitol in 1851: a frontiersman, bearing a conspicuous resemblance to Boone, fighting an Indian. It stood there for more than a century. In the realm of fiction, the immensely popular Leatherstocking novels of James Fenimore Cooper told, over many volumes (The Deerslayer, The Last of the Mohicans, The Pioneers, etc.), the tale of Natty Bumppo, also clearly based on Boone. Those novels, published from the 1820s to the 1840s, burned the character of the gruff frontier hero into the national consciousness. Natty Bumppo, Davy Crockett, Kit Carson, Wild Bill Hickok—you can trace a chain of Boone figures all the way forward to John Wayne and Han Solo.
The founders had always expected expansion of some sort, but only now, in the mid-nineteenth century, did outright and rapid continental conquest seem inevitable. In 1845 the United States Magazine and Democratic Review coined an indelible phrase and captured the prevailing mood when it wrote of the nation’s “manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.”
A country that had started out resembling the British Empire, with centers of power in the East and subordinated territory in the West, had been turned by the population bomb into something different: a violently expansive empire of settlers, feeding on land and displacing everything in its path.