Part 6 (1/2)
Into these places, in days of alarm, were crowded the outlying settlers, just as was the case in later times in the Kentucky ”stations.”
In spite of such frontier conditions, the outlying towns continued to multiply. Between 1720 and the middle of the century, settlement crept up the Housatonic and its lateral valley into the Berks.h.i.+res. About 1720 Litchfield was established; in 1725, Sheffield; in 1730, Great Barrington; and in 1735 a road was cut and towns soon established between Westfield and these Housatonic settlements, thus uniting them with the older extensions along the Connecticut and its tributaries.
In this period, scattered and sometimes unwelcome Scotch-Irish settlements were established, such as that at Londonderry, New Hamps.h.i.+re, and in the Berks.h.i.+res, as well as in the region won in King Philip's War from the Nipmucks, whither there came also Huguenots.[72:1]
In King George's War, the Connecticut River settlers found their frontier protection in such rude stockades as those at the sites of Keene, of Charlestown, New Hamps.h.i.+re (Number Four), Fort s.h.i.+rley at the head of Deerfield River (Heath), and Fort Pelham (Rowe); while Fort Ma.s.sachusetts (Adams) guarded the Hoosac gateway to the Hoosatonic Valley. These frontier garrisons and the self-defense of the backwoodsmen of New England are well portrayed in the pages of Parkman.[72:2] At the close of the war, settlement again expanded into the Berks.h.i.+res, where Lennox, West Hoosac (Williamstown), and Pittsfield were established in the middle of the century. Checked by the fighting in the last French and Indian War, the frontier went forward after the Peace of Paris (1763) at an exceptional rate, especially into Vermont and interior New Hamps.h.i.+re. An anonymous writer gives a contemporary view of the situation on the eve of the Revolution:[72:3]
The richest parts remaining to be granted are on the northern branches of the Connecticut river, towards Crown Point where are great districts of fertile soil still unsettled. The North part of New Hamps.h.i.+re, the province of Maine, and the territory of Sagadahock have but few settlements in them compared with the tracts yet unsettled... .
I should further observe that these tracts have since the peace [_i. e._, 1763], been settling pretty fast: farms on the river Connecticut are every day extending beyond the old fort Dummer, for near thirty miles; and will in a few years reach to Koha.s.ser which is nearly two hundred miles; not that such an extent will be one-tenth settled, but the new-comers do not fix near their neighbors, and go on regularly, but take spots that please them best, though twenty or thirty miles beyond any others. This to people of a sociable disposition in Europe would appear very strange, but the Americans do not regard the near neighborhood of other farmers; twenty or thirty miles by water they esteem no distance in matters of this sort; besides in a country that promises well the intermediate s.p.a.ce is not long in filling up. Between Connecticut river and Lake Champlain upon Otter Creek, and all along Lake Sacrament [George] and the rivers that fall into it, and the whole length of Wood Creek, are numerous settlements made since the peace.[73:1]
For nearly a hundred years, therefore, New England communities had been pushed out to new frontiers in the intervals between the almost continuous wars with the French and Indians. Probably the most distinctive feature in this frontier was the importance of the community type of settlement; in other words, of the towns, with their Puritan ideals in education, morals, and religion. This has always been a matter of pride to the statesmen and annalists of New England, as is ill.u.s.trated by these words of Holland in his ”Western Ma.s.sachusetts,”
commenting on the settlement of the Connecticut Valley in villages, whereby in his judgment morality, education, and urbanity were preserved:
The influence of this policy can only be fully appreciated when standing by the side of the solitary settler's hut in the West, where even an Eastern man has degenerated to a boor in manners, where his children have grown up uneducated, and where the Sabbath has become an unknown day, and religion and its obligations have ceased to exercise control upon the heart and life.
Whatever may be the real value of the community type of settlement, its establishment in New England was intimately connected both with the Congregational religious organization and with the land system of the colonies of that section, under which the colonial governments made grants--not in tracts to individuals, but in towns.h.i.+ps to groups of proprietors who in turn a.s.signed lands to the inhabitants without cost.
The typical form of establis.h.i.+ng a town was as follows: On application of an approved body of men, desiring to establish a new settlement, the colonial General Court would appoint a committee to view the desired land and report on its fitness; an order for the grant would then issue, in varying areas, not far from the equivalent of six miles square. In the eighteenth century especially, it was common to reserve certain lots of the town for the support of schools and the ministry. This was the origin of that very important feature of Western society, federal land grants for schools and colleges.[74:1] The General Courts also made regulations regarding the common lands, the terms for admitting inhabitants, etc., and thus kept a firm hand upon the social structure of the new settlements as they formed on the frontier.
This practice, seen in its purity in the seventeenth century especially, was markedly different from the practices of other colonies in the settlement of their back lands. For during most of the period New England did not use her wild lands, or public domain, as a source of revenue by sale to individuals or to companies, with the reservation of quit-rents; nor attract individual settlers by ”head rights,” or fifty-acre grants, after the Virginia type; nor did the colonies of the New England group often make extensive grants to individuals, on the ground of special services, or because of influence with the government, or on the theory that the grantee would introduce settlers on his grant.
They donated their lands to groups of men who became town proprietors for the purpose of establis.h.i.+ng communities. These proprietors were supposed to hold the lands in trust, to be a.s.signed to inhabitants under restraints to ensure the persistence of Puritan ideals.
During most of the seventeenth century the proprietors awarded lands to the new-comers in accordance with this theory. But as density of settlement increased, and lands grew scarce in the older towns, the proprietors began to a.s.sert their legal right to the unoccupied lands and to refuse to share them with inhabitants who were not of the body of proprietors. The distinction resulted in cla.s.s conflicts in the towns, especially in the eighteenth century,[75:1] over the owners.h.i.+p and disposal of the common lands.
The new settlements, by a process of natural selection, would afford opportunity to the least contented, whether because of grievances, or ambitions, to establish themselves. This tended to produce a Western flavor in the towns on the frontier. But it was not until the original ideals of the land system began to change, that the opportunity to make new settlements for such reasons became common. As the economic and political ideal replaced the religious and social ideal, in the conditions under which new towns could be established, this became more possible.
Such a change was in progress in the latter part of the seventeenth century and during the eighteenth. In 1713, 1715, and 1727, Ma.s.sachusetts determined upon a policy of locating towns in advance of settlement, to protect her boundary claims. In 1736 she laid out five towns near the New Hamps.h.i.+re border, and a year earlier opened four contiguous towns to connect her Housatonic and Connecticut Valley settlements.[76:1] Grants in non-adjacent regions were sometimes made to old towns, the proprietors of which sold them to those who wished to move.
The history of the town of Litchfield ill.u.s.trates the increasing importance of the economic factor. At a time when Connecticut feared that Andros might dispose of the public lands to the disadvantage of the colony, the legislature granted a large part of Western Connecticut to the towns of Hartford and Windsor, _pro forma_, as a means of withdrawing the lands from his hands. But these towns refused to give up the lands after the danger had pa.s.sed, and proceeded to sell part of them.[76:2] Riots occurred when the colonial authorities attempted to a.s.sert possession, and the matter was at length compromised in 1719 by allowing Litchfield to be settled in accordance with the town grants, while the colony reserved the larger part of northwestern Connecticut.
In 1737 the colony disposed of its last unlocated lands by sale in lots.
In 1762 Ma.s.sachusetts sold a group of entire towns.h.i.+ps in the Berks.h.i.+res to the highest bidders.[77:1]
But the most striking ill.u.s.tration of the tendency, is afforded by the ”New Hamps.h.i.+re grants” of Governor Wentworth, who, chiefly in the years about 1760, made grants of a hundred and thirty towns west of the Connecticut, in what is now the State of Vermont, but which was then in dispute between New Hamps.h.i.+re and New York. These grants, while in form much like other town grants, were disposed of for cash, chiefly to speculators who hastened to sell their rights to the throngs of land-seekers who, after the peace, began to pour into the Green Mountain region.
It is needless to point out how this would affect the movement of Western settlement in respect to individualistic speculation in public lands; how it would open a career to the land jobbers, as well as to the natural leaders in the compet.i.tive movement for acquiring the best lands, for laying out town sites and building up new communities under ”boom” conditions. The migratory tendency of New Englanders was increased by this gradual change in its land policy; the attachment to a locality was diminished. The later years showed increasing emphasis by New England upon individual success, greater respect for the self-made man who, in the midst of opportunities under compet.i.tive conditions, achieved superiority. The old dominance of town settlement, village moral police, and traditional cla.s.s control gave way slowly. Settlement in communities and rooted Puritan habits and ideals had enduring influences in the regions settled by New Englanders; but it was in this Old West, in the years just before the Revolution, that individualism began to play an important role, along with the traditional habit of expanding in organized communities.
The opening of the Vermont towns revealed more fully than before, the capability of New Englanders to become democratic pioneers, under characteristic frontier conditions. Their economic life was simple and self-sufficing. They readily adopted lynch law (the use of the ”birch seal” is familiar to readers of Vermont history) to protect their land t.i.tles in the troubled times when these ”Green Mountain Boys” resisted New York's a.s.sertion of authority. They later became an independent Revolutionary state with frontier directness, and in very many respects their history in the Revolutionary epoch is similar to that of settlers in Kentucky and Tennessee, both in a.s.sertion of the right to independent self government and in a frontier separatism.[78:1] Vermont may be regarded as the culmination of the frontier movement which I have been describing in New England.
By this time two distinct New Englands existed--the one coastal, and dominated by commercial interests and the established congregational churches; the other a primitive agricultural area, democratic in principle, and with various sects increasingly indifferent to the fear of ”innovation” which the dominant cla.s.ses of the old communities felt.
Already speculative land companies had begun New England settlements in the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania, as well as on the lower Mississippi; and New England missions among the Indians, such as that at Stockbridge, were beginning the noteworthy religious and educational expansion of the section to the west.
That this movement of expansion had been chiefly from south to north, along the river valleys, should not conceal from us the fact that it was in essential characteristics a Western movement, especially in the social traits that were developing. Even the men who lived in the long line of settlements on the Maine coast, under frontier conditions, and remote from the older centers of New England, developed traits and a democratic spirit that relate them closely to the Westerners, in spite of the fact that Maine is ”down east” by preeminence.[79:1]
The frontier of the Middle region in this period of the formation of the Old West, was divided into two parts, which happen to coincide with the colonies of New York and Pennsylvania. In the latter colony the trend of settlement was into the Great Valley, and so on to the Southern uplands; while the advance of settlement in New York was like that of New England, chiefly northward, following the line of Hudson River.
The Hudson and the Mohawk const.i.tuted the area of the Old West in this part of the eighteenth century. With them were a.s.sociated the Wallkill, tributary to the Hudson, and Cherry Valley near the Mohawk, along the sources of the Susquehanna. The Berks.h.i.+res walled the Hudson in to the east; the Adirondacks and the Catskills to the west. Where the Mohawk Valley penetrated between the mountainous areas, the Iroquois Indians were too formidable for advance on such a slender line. Nothing but dense settlement along the narrow strip of the Hudson, if even that, could have furnished the necessary momentum for overcoming the Indian barrier; and this pressure was lacking, for the population was comparatively spa.r.s.e in contrast with the task to be performed. What most needs discussion in the case of New York, therefore, is not the history of expansion as in other sections, but the absence of expansive power.
The fur-trade had led the way up the Hudson, and made beginnings of settlements at strategic points near the confluence of the Mohawk. But the fur-trader was not followed by a tide of pioneers. One of the most important factors in restraining density of population in New York, in r.e.t.a.r.ding the settlement of its frontier, and in determining the conditions there, was the land system of that colony.