Part 7 (1/2)

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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 s.h.i.+llings annually per hundred acres; while of the new-comers he exacted two s.h.i.+llings annual quit-rent for this amount of land in fee simple. Litigation kept land t.i.tles uncertain here, for many years. Similarly, Beverley's manor, about Staunton, represented a grant of 118,000 acres to Beverley and his a.s.sociates 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 establis.h.i.+ng 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 spa.r.s.e 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 Yema.s.see 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 a.s.similated 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 acc.u.mulation 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 towns.h.i.+ps 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 s.h.i.+llings a year for every hundred acres, or proportionally, to be paid after the first ten years.[96:4] By 1732 these towns.h.i.+ps, 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 hards.h.i.+ps; as did the Swiss who, under the visionary leaders.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.s 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 compet.i.tion 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 pa.s.s 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 pet.i.tion 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 a.s.similation 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 c.u.mberland 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]

s.p.a.ce 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 s.h.i.+llings 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 t.i.tle.[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 compet.i.tion with the Maryland lands, offered between 1717 and 1738 at forty s.h.i.+llings 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 pa.s.sed to unsettled lands about Worcester, to the frontier in the Berks.h.i.+res, and in southern New Hamps.h.i.+re 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 t.i.tles that we had solicited for colonists and they had come accordingly,”[104:3] and a.s.serting that ”it was against the laws of G.o.d 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 c.u.mberland 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.

Like the Germans, the Scotch-Irish pa.s.sed into the Shenandoah Valley,[105:2] and on to the uplands of the South. In 1738 a delegation of the Philadelphia Presbyterian synod was sent to the Virginia governor and received a.s.surances of security of religious freedom; the same policy was followed by the Carolinas. By 1760 a zone of Scotch-Irish Presbyterian churches extended from the frontiers of New England to the frontiers of South Carolina. This zone combined in part with the German zone, but in general Scotch-Irishmen tended to follow the valleys farther toward the mountains, to be the outer edge of this frontier.