the interest which Governor Spotswood took in the frontier. In 1710 he
proposed a plan for intercepting the French in their occupation of the
interior, by inducing Virginia settlement to proceed along one side of
James River only, until this column of advancing pioneers should strike
the attenuated line of French posts in the center. In the same year he
sent a body of horsemen to the top of the Blue Ridge, where they could
overlook the Valley of Virginia.[90:1] By 1714 he became active as a
colonizer himself. Thirty miles above the falls of the Rappahannock, on
the Rapidan at Germanna,[90:2] he settled a little village of German
redemptioners (who in return for having the passage paid agreed to serve
without wages for a term of years), to engage in his iron works, also to
act as rangers on the frontier. From here, in 1716, with two companies
of rangers and four Indians, Governor Spotswood and a band of Virginia
gentlemen made a summer picnic excursion of two weeks across the Blue
Ridge into the Shenandoah Valley. _Sic juvat transcendere montes_ was
the motto of these Knights of the Golden Horse Shoe, as the governor
dubbed them. But they were not the "warlike christian men" destined to
occupy the frontier.
Spotswood's interest in the advance along the Rappahannock, probably
accounts for the fact that in 1720 Spotsylvania and Brunswick were
organized as frontier counties of Virginia.[91:1] Five hundred dollars
were contributed by the colony to the church, and a thousand dollars for
arms and ammunition for the settlers in these counties. The fears of the
French and Indians beyond the high mountains, were alleged as reasons
for this advance. To attract settlers to these new counties, they were
(1723) exempt from purchasing the lands under the system of head rights,
and from payment of quit-rents for seven years after 1721. The free
grants so obtained were not to exceed a thousand acres. This was soon
extended to six thousand acres, but with provision requiring the
settlement of a certain number of families upon the grant within a
certain time. In 1729 Spotswood was ordered by the Council to produce
"rights" and pay the quit-rents for the 59,786 acres which he claimed in
this county.
Other similar actions by the Council show that large holdings were
developing there, also that the difficulty of establishing a frontier
democracy in contact with the area of expanding plantations, was very
real.[91:2] By the time of the occupation of the Shenandoah Valley,
therefore, the custom was established in this part of Virginia,[91:3] of
making grants of a thousand acres for each family settled. Speculative
planters, influential with the Governor and Council secured grants of
many thousand acres, conditioned upon seating a certain number of
families, and satisfying the requirements of planting. Thus what had
originally been intended as direct grants to the actual settler,
frequently became grants to great planters like Beverley, who promoted
the coming of Scotch-Irish and German settlers, or took advantage of
the natural drift into the Valley, to sell lands in their grants, as a
rule, reserving quit-rents. The liberal grants per family enabled these
speculative planters, while satisfying the terms of settlement, to hold
large portions of the grant for themselves. Under the lax requirements,
and probably still more lax enforcement, of the provisions for actual
cultivation or cattle-raising,[92:1] it was not difficult to hold such
wild land. These conditions rendered possible the extension of a measure
of aristocratic planter life in the course of time to the Piedmont and
Valley lands of Virginia. It must be added, however, that some of the
newcomers, both Germans and Scotch-Irish, like the Van Meters, Stover,
and Lewis, also showed an ability to act as promoters in locating
settlers and securing grants to themselves.
In the northern part of the Shenandoah Valley, lay part of the estate of
Lord Fairfax, some six million acres in extent, which came to the family
by dower from the old Culpeper and Arlington grant of Northern Neck. In
1748, the youthful Washington was surveying this estate along the upper
waters of the Potomac, finding a bed under the stars and learning the
life of the frontier.
Lord Fairfax established his own Greenway manor,[92:2] and divided his
domain into other manors, giving ninety-nine-year leases to settlers
already on the ground at twenty shillings annually per hundred acres;
while of the new-comers he exacted two shillings annual quit-rent for
this amount of land in fee simple. Litigation kept land titles uncertain
here, for many years. Similarly, Beverley's manor, about Staunton,
represented a grant of 118,000 acres to Beverley and his associates on
condition of placing the proper number of families on the tract.[93:1]
Thus speculative planters on this frontier shared in the movement of
occupation and made an aristocratic element in the up-country; but the
increasing proportion of Scotch-Irish immigrants, as well as German
settlers, together with the contrast in natural conditions, made the
interior a different Virginia from that of the tidewater.
As settlement ascended the Rappahannock, and emigrants began to enter
the Valley from the north, so, contemporaneously, settlement ascended
the James above the falls, succeeding to the posts of the
fur-traders.[93:2] Goochland County was set off in 1728, and the growth
of population led, as early as 1729, to proposals for establishing a
city (Richmond) at the falls. Along the upper James, as on the
Rappahannock, speculative planters bought headrights and located
settlers and tenants to hold their grants.[93:3] Into this region came
natives of Virginia, emigrants from the British isles, and scattered
representatives of other lands, some of them coming up the James, others
up the York, and still others arriving with the southward-moving current
along both sides of the Blue Ridge.
Before 1730 few settlers lived above the mouth of the Rivanna. In 1732
Peter Jefferson patented a thousand acres at the eastern opening of its
mountain gap, and here, under frontier conditions, Thomas Jefferson was
born in 1743 near his later estate of Monticello. About him were pioneer
farmers, as well as foresighted engrossers of the land. In the main his
country was that of a democratic frontier people--Scotch-Irish
Presbyterians, Quakers, Baptists, and other sects,[94:1] out of
sympathy with the established church and the landed gentry of the
lowlands. This society in which he was born, was to find in Jefferson a
powerful exponent of its ideals.[94:2] Patrick Henry was born in 1736
above the falls, not far from Richmond, and he also was a mouthpiece of
interior Virginia in the Revolutionary era. In short, a society was
already forming in the Virginia Piedmont which was composed of many
sects, of independent yeomen as well as their great planter leaders--a
society naturally expansive, seeing its opportunity to deal in
unoccupied lands along the frontier which continually moved toward the
West, and in this era of the eighteenth century dominated by the
democratic ideals of pioneers rather than by the aristocratic tendencies
of slaveholding planters. As there were two New Englands, so there were
by this time two Virginias, and the uplands belonged with the Old West.
The advance across the fall line from the coast was, in North Carolina,
much slower than in Virginia. After the Tuscarora War (1712-13) an
extensive region west from Pamlico Sound was opened (1724). The region
to the north, about the Roanoke, had before this begun to receive
frontier settlers, largely from Virginia. Their traits are interestingly
portrayed in Byrd's "Dividing Line." By 1728 the farthest inhabitants
along the Virginia boundary were frontiersmen about Great Creek, a
branch of the Roanoke.[94:3] The North Carolina commissioners desired to
stop running the line after going a hundred and seventy miles, on the
plea that they were already fifty miles beyond the outermost inhabitant,
and there would be no need for an age or two to carry the line farther;
but the Virginia surveyors pointed out that already speculators were
taking up the land. A line from Weldon to Fayetteville would roughly
mark the western boundary of North Carolina's sparse population of forty
thousand souls.[95:1]
The slower advance is explained, partly because of the later settlement
of the Carolinas, partly because the Indians continued to be troublesome
on the flanks of the advancing population, as seen in the Tuscarora and
Yemassee wars, and partly because the pine barrens running parallel with
the fall line made a zone of infertile land not attractive to settlers.
The North Carolina low country, indeed, had from the end of the
seventeenth century been a kind of southern frontier for overflow from
Virginia; and in many ways was assimilated to the type of the up-country
in its turbulent democracy, its variety of sects and peoples, and its
primitive conditions. But under the lax management of the public lands,
the use of "blank patents" and other evasions made possible the
development of large landholding, side by side with headrights to
settlers. Here, as in Virginia, a great proprietary grant extended
across the colony--Lord Granville's proprietary was a zone embracing the
northern half of North Carolina. Within the area, sales and quit-rents
were administered by the agents of the owner, with the result that
uncertainty and disorder of an agrarian nature extended down to the
Revolution. There were likewise great speculative holdings, conditioned
on seating a certain proportion of settlers, into which the frontiersmen
were drifting.[95:2] But this system also made it possible for agents of
later migrating congregations to establish colonies like that of the
Moravians at Wachovia.[95:3] Thus, by the time settlers came into the
uplands from the north, a land system existed similar to that of
Virginia. A common holding was a square mile (640 acres), but in
practice this did not prevent the accumulation of great estates.[96:1]
Whereas Virginia's Piedmont area was to a large extent entered by
extensions from the coast, that of North Carolina remained almost
untouched by 1730.[96:2]
The same is true of South Carolina. By 1730, settlement had progressed
hardly eighty miles from the coast, even in the settled area of the
lowlands. The tendency to engross the lowlands for large plantations was
clear, here as elsewhere.[96:3] The surveyor-general reports in 1732
that not as many as a thousand acres within a hundred miles of
Charleston, or within twenty miles of a river or navigable creek, were
unpossessed. In 1729 the crown ordered eleven townships of twenty
thousand acres each to be laid out in rectangles, divided into fifty
acres for each actual settler under a quit-rent of four shillings a year
for every hundred acres, or proportionally, to be paid after the first
ten years.[96:4] By 1732 these townships, designed to attract foreign
Protestants, were laid out on the great rivers of the colony. As they
were located in the middle region, east of the fall line, among pine
barrens, or in malarial lands in the southern corner of the colony, they
all proved abortive as towns, except Orangeburg[96:5] on the North
Edisto, where German redemptioners made a settlement. The Scotch-Irish
Presbyterians who came to Williamsburg, on Black River, suffered
hardships; as did the Swiss who, under the visionary leadership of
Purry, settled in the deadly climate of Purrysburg, on the lower
Savannah. To Welsh colonists from Pennsylvania there was made a
grant--known as the "Welsh tract," embracing over 173,000 acres on the
Great Pedee (Marion County)[97:1] under headrights of fifty acres, also
a bounty in provisions, tools, and livestock.
These attempts, east of the fall line, are interesting as showing
the colonial policy of marking out towns (which were to be
politically-organized parishes, with representation in the legislature),
and attracting foreigners thereto, prior to the coming of settlers from
the North.
The settlement of Georgia, in 1732, completed the southern line of
colonization toward the Piedmont. Among the objects of the colony, as
specified in the charters, were the relief of the poor and the
protection of the frontiers. To guard against the tendency to engross
the lands in great estates, already so clearly revealed in the older
colonies, the Georgia trustees provided that the grants of fifty acres
should not be alienated or divided, but should pass to the male heirs
and revert to the trustees in case heirs were lacking. No grant greater
than five hundred acres was permitted, and even this was made
conditionally upon the holder settling ten colonists. However, under
local conditions and the competition and example of neighboring
colonies, this attempt to restrict land tenure in the interest of
democracy broke down by 1750, and Georgia's land system became not
unlike that of the other Southern colonies.[97:2]
In 1734, Salzburgers had been located above Savannah, and within seven
years some twelve hundred German Protestants were dwelling on the
Georgia frontier; while a settlement of Scotch Highlanders at Darien,
near the mouth of the Altamaha, protected the southern frontier. At
Augusta, an Indian trading fort (1735), whence the dealers in peltry
visited the Cherokee, completed the familiar picture of frontier
advance.[98:1]
We have now hastily surveyed the movement of the frontier of settlement
westward from the lowlands, in the later years of the seventeenth and
early part of the eighteenth century. There is much that is common in
the whole line of advance. The original settlers engross the desirable
lands of the older area. Indented servants and new-comers pass to the
frontier seeking a place to locate their headrights, or plant new towns.
Adventurous and speculative wealthy planters acquire large holdings in
the new areas, and bring over settlers to satisfy the requirements of
seating and cultivating their extensive grants, thus building up a
yeomanry of small landholders side by side with the holders of large
estates. The most far-sighted of the new-comers follow the example of
the planters, and petition for increasing extensive grants. Meanwhile,
pioneers like Abraham Wood, himself once an indented servant, and
gentlemen like Col. William Byrd--prosecuting the Indian trade from
their posts at the "heads" of the rivers, and combining frontier
protection, exploring, and surveying--make known the more distant
fertile soils of the Piedmont. Already in the first part of the
eighteenth century, the frontier population tended to be a rude
democracy, with a large representation of Scotch-Irish, Germans, Welsh,
and Huguenot French settlers, holding religious faiths unlike that of
the followers of the established church in the lowlands. The movement of
slaves into the region was unimportant, but not unknown.
The Virginia Valley was practically unsettled in 1730, as was much of
Virginia's Piedmont area and all the Piedmont area of the Carolinas. The
significance of the movement of settlers from the North into this vacant
Valley and Piedmont, behind the area occupied by expansion from the
coast is, that it was geographically separated from the westward
movement from the coast, and that it was sufficient in volume to recruit
the democratic forces and postpone for a long time the process of social
assimilation to the type of the lowlands.
As has been pointed out, especially in the Carolinas a belt of pine
barrens, roughly eighty miles in breadth, ran parallel with the fall
line and thus discouraged western advance across this belt, even before
the head of navigation was reached. In Virginia, the Blue Ridge made an
almost equally effective barrier, walling off the Shenandoah Valley from
the westward advance. At the same time this valley was but a
continuation of the Great Valley, that ran along the eastern edge of the
Alleghanies in southeastern Pennsylvania, and included in its mountain
trough the Cumberland and Hagerstown valleys. In short, a broad
limestone band of fertile soil was stretched within mountain walls,
southerly from Pennsylvania to southwestern Virginia; and here the
watergaps opened the way to descend to the Carolina Piedmont. This whole
area, a kind of peninsula thrust down from Pennsylvania, was rendered
comparatively inaccessible to the westward movement from the lowlands,
and was equally accessible to the population which was entering
Pennsylvania.[99:1]
Thus it happened that from about 1730 to 1760 a generation of settlers
poured along this mountain trough into the southern uplands, or
Piedmont, creating a new continuous social and economic area, which cut
across the artificial colonial boundary lines, disarranged the regular
extension of local government from the coast westward, and built up a
new Pennsylvania in contrast with the old Quaker colonies, and a new
South in contrast with the tidewater South. This New South composed the
southern half of the Old West.
From its beginning, Pennsylvania was advertised as a home for dissenting
sects seeking freedom in the wilderness. But it was not until the exodus
of German redemptioners,[100:1] from about 1717, that the Palatinate and
neighboring areas sent the great tide of Germans which by the time of
the Revolution made them nearly a third of the total population of
Pennsylvania. It has been carefully estimated that in 1775 over 200,000
Germans lived in the thirteen colonies, chiefly along the frontier zone
of the Old West. Of these, a hundred thousand had their home in
Pennsylvania, mainly in the Great Valley, in the region which is still
so notably the abode of the "Pennsylvania Dutch."[100:2]
Space does not permit us to describe this movement of
colonization.[100:3] The entrance to the fertile limestone soils of the
Great Valley of Pennsylvania was easy, in view of the low elevation of
the South Mountain ridge, and the watergaps thereto. The continuation
along the similar valley to the south, in Maryland and Virginia, was a
natural one, especially as the increasing tide of emigrants raised the
price of lands.[100:4] In 1719 the proprietor's price for Pennsylvania
lands was ten pounds per hundred acres, and two shillings quit-rents. In
1732 this became fifteen and one-half pounds, with a quit-rent of a half
penny per acre.[101:1] During the period 1718 to 1732, when the Germans
were coming in great numbers, the management of the lands fell into
confusion, and many seated themselves as squatters, without
title.[101:2] This was a fortunate possibility for the poor
redemptioners, who had sold their service for a term of years in order
to secure their transportation to America.
By 1726 it was estimated that there were 100,000 squatters;[101:3] and
of the 670,000 acres occupied between 1732 and 1740, it is estimated
that 400,000 acres were settled without grants.[101:4] Nevertheless
these must ultimately be paid for, with interest, and the concession of
the right of preemption to squatters made this easier. But it was not
until 1755 that the governor offered land free from purchase, and this
was to be taken only west of the Alleghanies.[101:5]
Although the credit system relieved the difficulty in Pennsylvania, the
lands of that colony were in competition with the Maryland lands,
offered between 1717 and 1738 at forty shillings sterling per hundred
acres, which in 1738 was raised to five pounds sterling.[101:6] At the
same time, in the Virginia Valley, as will be recalled, free grants were
being made of a thousand acres per family. Although large tracts of the
Shenandoah Valley had been granted to speculators like Beverley,
Borden, and the Carters, as well as to Lord Fairfax, the owners sold
six or seven pounds cheaper per hundred acres than did the Pennsylvania
land office.[102:1] Between 1726 and 1734, therefore, the Germans began
to enter this valley,[102:2] and before long they extended their
settlements into the Piedmont of the Carolinas,[102:3] being recruited
in South Carolina by emigrants coming by way of Charleston--especially
after Governor Glenn's purchase from the Cherokee in 1755, of the
extreme western portion of the colony. Between 1750 and the Revolution,
these settlers in the Carolinas greatly increased in numbers.
Thus a zone of almost continuous German settlements had been
established, running from the head of the Mohawk in New York to the
Savannah in Georgia. They had found the best soils, and they knew how to
till them intensively and thriftily, as attested by their large,
well-filled barns, good stock, and big canvas-covered Conestoga wagons.
They preferred to dwell in groups, often of the same religious
denomination--Lutherans, Reformed, Moravians, Mennonites, and many
lesser sects. The diaries of Moravian missionaries from Pennsylvania,
who visited them, show how the parent congregations kept in touch with
their colonies[102:4] and how intimate, in general, was the bond of
connection between this whole German frontier zone and that of
Pennsylvania.
Side by side with this German occupation of Valley and Piedmont, went
the migration of the Scotch-Irish.[103:1] These lowland Scots had been
planted in Ulster early in the seventeenth century. Followers of John
Knox, they had the contentious individualism and revolutionary temper
that seem natural to Scotch Presbyterianism. They were brought up on the
Old Testament, and in the doctrine of government by covenant or compact.
In Ireland their fighting qualities had been revealed in the siege of
Londonderry, where their stubborn resistance balked the hopes of James
II. However, religious and political disabilities were imposed upon
these Ulstermen, which made them discontented, and hard times
contributed to detach them from their homes. Their movement to America
was contemporaneous with the heavy German migration. By the Revolution,
it is believed that a third of the population of Pennsylvania was
Scotch-Irish; and it has been estimated, probably too liberally, that a
half million came to the United States between 1730 and 1770.[103:2]
Especially after the Rebellion of 1745, large numbers of Highlanders
came to increase the Scotch blood in the nation.[103:3] Some of the
Scotch-Irish went to New England.[103:4] Given the cold shoulder by
congregational Puritans, they passed to unsettled lands about Worcester,
to the frontier in the Berkshires, and in southern New Hampshire at
Londonderry--whence came John Stark, a frontier leader in the French
and Indian War, and the hero of Bennington in the Revolution, as well as
the ancestors of Horace Greeley and S. P. Chase. In New York, a
Scotch-Irish settlement was planted on the frontier at Cherry
Valley.[104:1] Scotch Highlanders came to the Mohawk,[104:2] where they
followed Sir William Johnson and became Tory raiders in the Revolution.
But it was in Pennsylvania that the center of Scotch-Irish power lay.
"These bold and indigent strangers, saying as their excuse when
challenged for titles that we had solicited for colonists and they had
come accordingly,"[104:3] and asserting that "it was against the laws of
God and nature that so much land should be idle while so many christians
wanted it to work on and to raise their bread," squatted on the vacant
lands, especially in the region disputed between Pennsylvania and
Maryland, and remained in spite of efforts to drive them off. Finding
the Great Valley in the hands of the Germans, they planted their own
outposts along the line of the Indian trading path from Lancaster to
Bedford; they occupied Cumberland Valley, and before 1760 pressed up the
Juniata somewhat beyond the narrows, spreading out along its
tributaries, and by 1768 had to be warned off from the Redstone country
to avoid Indian trouble. By the time of the Revolution, their
settlements made Pittsburgh a center from which was to come a new era in
Pennsylvania history. It was the Scotch-Irish and German
fur-traders[104:4] whose pack trains pioneered into the Ohio Valley in
the days before the French and Indian wars. The messengers between
civilization and savagery were such men,[105:1] as the Irish Croghan,
and the Germans Conrad Weiser and Christian Post.