Page 112 - American Stories, A History of the United States

Byrd’s journal invites us to view the rapidly developing eighteenth-century backcountry
from a fresh perspective. it was not a vast empty territory awaiting the arrival of european set- 4.1
tlers. Maps often sustain this false impression. Depicting cities and towns, farms and plantations
clustered along the Atlantic coast, they suggest a “line of settlement” pushing outward into a
huge blank area with no mark of civilization. the people byrd met on his journey into the back- 4.2
country would not have understood such maps. the empty space on the maps was their home.
they experienced the frontier as populous zones of many cultures stretching from the english
and French settlements in the north all the way to the spanish borderlands in the far southwest. 4.3
the point is not to discount the significance of the older Atlantic settlements. During the eigh-
teenth century, britain’s 13 mainland colonies were transformed. their population grew at unprecen-
dented rates. German and scots-irish immigrants arrived in huge numbers. so, too, did African slaves.
Wherever they lived, colonial Americans of this period were less isolated from one another than 4.4
colonists had been during the seventeenth century. indeed, after 1690, men and women expanded
their cultural horizons, becoming part of a larger Anglo-American empire. the change was striking.
colonists whose parents or grandparents had come to the New World to confront a “howling wilder- 4.5
ness” now purchased items of european manufacture, read english journals, participated in imperial
wars, and sought favors from a growing number of resident royal officials. No one—not even the
inhabitants of the distant frontiers—could escape britain’s influence. the cultural, economic, and
political links connecting the colonists to the imperial center in London grew stronger with time.
this surprising development raises a difficult question. if the eighteenth-century colonists
were so powerfully attracted to Great britain, why did they ever declare independence? the
answer may be that as the colonists became more british, they also inevitably became more
American. this helps explain the appearance after midcentury of genuine nationalist sentiment.
Political, commercial, and military links that brought the colonists into more frequent contact
with britain also made them more aware of other colonists. it was within an expanding, prosper-
ous empire that they first began seriously to consider what it meant to be American.

tensions in the backcountry

4.1 What difficulties did Native Americans face in maintaining their cultural independence
on the frontiers of english and spanish settlement?
A ccurate population data from the colonial period are difficult to find. The first

national census did not occur until 1790. Still, pre-Revolutionary sources indi-
cate that the total white population of Britain’s thirteen mainland colonies rose
from about 250,000 in 1700 to 2,150,000 in 1770, an annual growth rate of
3 percent. Few societies in recorded history have expanded so rapidly. If the growth rate
had not dropped during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the United States today
would have more than one billion people. Natural reproduction was responsible for most
of the growth. More families bore children who in turn lived long enough to have children
of their own. Because of this sudden expansion, the colonial population was strikingly
young; approximately one-half of the populace at any given time was under age 16.
Not only was the total population increasing rapidly; it also was becoming more
dispersed and heterogeneous. Each year thousands of non-English Europeans arrived.
Unlike those seventeenth-century English settlers in search of religious sanctuary or
instant wealth (see Chapter 2), the newcomers generally hoped to obtain their own land
and become independent farmers. These people often traveled to the backcountry, Backcountry in the eighteenth
a region stretching approximately 800 miles from western Pennsylvania to Georgia. century, the edge of settlement
Although they planned to follow the customs they had known in Europe, they found it extending from western
far more demanding than they had anticipated to survive on the British frontier. They Pennsylvania to Georgia. this
region formed the second frontier
plunged into a complex, fluid, often violent society that included Native Americans, as settlers moved west from the
African Americans, as well as other Europeans. (See Map 4.1.) Atlantic coast into the interior.
The Spanish empire also continued to expand in the eighteenth century. As any-
one who visits the modern American Southwest discovers, Spanish administrators
and priests—not to mention ordinary settlers—left a lasting imprint on its cultural
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