Authors: T.R. Fehrenbach
The needs of organization were few: an arrangement for militia, which rarely went beyond agreement for all males to assemble on call, under an already elected leader; a justice of the peace to issue writs; and a clerk and sheriff at the court's disposal. The immense difference between this and the Latin-American colonies was that the initiative came from the frontier. There were no appointed officers, responsible to a distant rear.
While the Kentuckians considered themselves "independent" counties of Virginia, the Tennesseeans went much further. The first free and independent commonwealth in North America was formed in 1772 in what is modern Tennessee. Here the frontiersmen created a civil government, complete with courts responsible to no others, and five commissioners to set the law. The Commonwealth of Wautauga made its own treaty with the Cherokees, the ultimate exercise of sovereignty. These county governments, and the spirit that brought them forth, were nothing new; they came directly from centuries of British tradition. But the frontier people showed they were adaptive, psychologically independent, and capable of running their own affairs. The movement west, in 1769, revealed a beginning American "revolution" some years before 1776.
A marked feature of Western county governments, incorporated into the Wautauga "constitution," was a psychological disestablishmentarianism, both toward the organic English law and organized religion. The return toward social or folk law was of course abortive; the desire for religious freedom was not. Eastern lawyers crowded the frontier long before churches could be organized.
By 1775, Anglo-American settlement was firmly fixed across the mountains. But the situation of these scattered, struggling colonies was extremely difficult. The American Revolution both robbed them of potential Eastern support and turned a terrible tide of Indians against them. It was deliberate British policy to arm and incite the Indians against Americans on the frontier, but this act of dominant British policy (once vehemently and angrily denied by British authorities in the 19th century) backfired. It made the Westerners, who were none too loyal to the rebellious coastal colonies themselves, violently anti-British. British officers leading Indians and the "hair-buyers" in Detroit, who paid for white scalps, were the renegades supreme, traitors against both white civilization and the white race. British Indian policy, which might have made sense to gentlemen safely ensconced in London, fired a smoldering, and lasting, hatred of Great Britain across the entire Middle Border.
Though Boonesboro was under siege again and again by British-incited Algonkians, the policy had to fail. Each year during the Revolution, almost unnoticed everywhere except by British officers in the West, 20,000 Anglo-Americans crossed over the mountain frontier. This population stream cemented the West to Anglo-America in a way the ephemeral victories of George Rogers Clark in the Northwest never did. When the British ceded the region to the United States at Paris in 1783, they were merely acknowledging, and the Americans accepting, a fait accompli.
Kentucky's worst times came late in the war years. In 1782, Indians and British rangers marauded through Kentucky, burning and killing. This summer, against Boone's sage and cool advice, a large band of armed settlers under Hugh McGarry, Harlan, Trigg, and Todd attacked the more numerous British and Indians at Blue Licks. The result of this battle was disaster. Although Boone, a militia captain, fought well himself, his son Israel was killed here, and seventy Kentuckians were slain. Seven more were captured and burned alive. The whole frontier was in flames, and in despair. Thirty-seven more whites were carried off in one raid. But if the frontiersmen were not able to meet the war parties and beat them in the forests, they were able to hold their fortified outposts with relative ease. The Indians were not equipped, and had no stomach, for protracted siege.
And there were too many whites now south of the Ohio. George Rogers Clark raised four hundred Kentucky volunteers and went into the Miami and Shawnee country north of the river. He was able to burn most of the Miami villages and destroy the Indians' corn just as the winter descended. All of the Amerinds east of the Mississippi were primarily agricultural, unable to live on game alone. This gambit, which worked against the Iroquois in New York earlier and years later against other Ohio tribes and the Creeks of the south, ended the Indian danger. The tribes starved, and the frontier had uneasy peace for a few more years, though Indian raids were again endemic by 1787.
The horde of sturdy hillbillies, pacifying the frontier, pulled the United States along behind them. The United States claimed the Mississippi as its western boundary, knowing that some thousands of its claimed citizens were already there. Even those policy-makers in the East who had no interest in, or a distaste for, the savage West, realized that history had already been made since 1769. The pacifistic Thomas Jefferson, clear-sighted in the power of the White House, understood that once a hundred thousand Anglo-Americans were in the Mississippi drainage, the United States must control New Orleans or lose that land and people, even if the nation had to go to war. By a fortuitous historical accident, Jefferson was able to acquire the Louisiana Territory in 1803, and thus push the inevitable Anglo-Latin conflict further west. The people went first across the mountains; dominant American policy only followed. Government pursued its people, and under the American system, was responsive to them.
This was a rhythm of cause and effect that later Latin American and European observers never quite understood, because they did not understand the makeup or ethic of Anglo-American frontier society. They saw the machinations of the American independent government easily—its attempts to buy more territory to the west, its support of the movement west with roads, harbors, military posts, and surveys. Americans of the frontier, even while vociferously demanding help and protection from the more powerful East, tended to overlook this support for natural emotional reasons. Again and again the western regions were able to force a reluctant government to move the remaining Indians out with troops, from the Ohio country to Texas. The historic support for Amerind rights, both in North and Hispanic America, invariably came from the distant governments. Both Washington and Madrid would have preferred to civilize the Indians under gentler terms. Ironically, Spanish policy failed in large measure because of Royal control of colonization, while Anglo-American, almost against the will of its nominal rulers, proved eminently successful.
The Spanish, for centuries, put forts and villas and missions in the wilderness, only to be frustrated by the failure of Hispanic populations to attack the frontier. In 20th-century South America, the same process was going on. Governments built roads into the interior, and sometimes, as with Brasilia, even cities, only to see the people with no frontier instinct move the other way, crowd already crowded coasts, and congregate into insupportable slums.
When the Peace of Paris was signed in 1783, most men thought it would require another thousand years for Anglo-America to fill the region between the Appalachians and the Mississippi. This estimate was intelligent, based on the slow progress of British America over two hundred years. It reckoned without either the birthrate of 18th-century Anglo-America or the restless ferocity of the Celtic borderers. Hundreds of veterans of the Revolutionary War left their bones in graves beside the inner river, and no government or power then on earth could have held them back.
What was not inevitable was the course of the organic expansion of the United States. Kentucky and the other regions, remote, distant, and disaffected in many cases from Burgesses and Congress, might easily have solidified into separate English-speaking commonwealths, with national as well as local sovereignty. Or they might have become affiliated with countries such as France or Spain. The West seethed with separatist sentiment and conspiracies, from Sevier's State of Franklin to Burr's grandiose dreams; Spain, through James Wilkinson and others, worked mightily to separate the Trans-Appalachian West. These regions found both Eastern establishments and taxes insupportable; they distrusted the deferential society and its gentry, and its writs and land laws more. They made their own local government and were determined to stand by it.
The solution was by any standard brilliant, and a credit to the continuing political instinct of the English-speaking race. To this time no nation on earth had ever treated a colony, or extension of its citizenry into new lands, as an equal. Colonies might be treated badly or well, but they were always dependencies, subject to metropolitan rule. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which laid the basis for new territories to be granted entry into the Union as equal, sovereign states, subject to only the broadest of limitations, broke new ground. It created a pattern that permitted the United States to absorb, with only minor difficulty, Kentucky and Tennessee. Statehood offered the western regions—even before national sentiment was fixed and firm, in the next century—enormous material advantages, both economically and for defense. Political union, as the legal equal of Old Virginia, was irresistible to all except a few by 1787, and, in 1792, Kentucky became a state. At this point, probably, the doom of Hispanic empire on the continent was sealed.
By 1784, pending these arrangements, the inrush of settlers across the mountains had become a torrent. The grim Anglo-Celt hunter had torn an irreplaceable breach in the forbidding frontier, and as Theodore Roosevelt wrote in his
Winning of the West
:
All men who deemed that they could swim in troubled waters were drawn toward the new country. The more turbulent and ambitious spirits saw roads to distinction in frontier warfare, politics, and diplomacy. Merchants dreamed of many fortunate adventures, in connection with river trade or the overland commerce by pack train. Lawyers not only expected to make their living by their proper calling, but also to rise to the first places in the commonwealths, for in these new communities as in the older States, the law was then the most honored of professions, and that which most surely led to high social and political standing. But the one great attraction for all classes was the chance of procuring large quantities of fertile land at low prices.
The western regions were still struggling, and conditions were still bad, when the rush began. Colonel William Fleming of Virginia, who later helped the settlers break with Virginia and form their own state, left a vivid description of Kentucky in 1780. Boonesboro and Harrodsburg were unlike the clean and beautiful valleys of 18th-century Appalachia; they were filthy settlements, where human offal and dead animal skins littered the ground. The water was polluted, and people were sickly. Many children died. Because of the Indian problem, corn and vegetable food was scarce; the people lived almost exclusively on smoke-cured buffalo meat, which they cooked by boiling without salt. In the outlying cabins where families still lived, conditions were even worse. But with a grim, almost instinctual tenacity, the people were holding on. They were forted up, and they had come to stay.
Five years later, things were remarkably different. New people were coming in. These not only helped, but immeasurably changed, the old frontier. Already, by the 1780s, there was a definite pattern of colonization in Trans-Appalachia, one which with regional variations held true for a hundred years.
The first white men in new country were hunters and trappers. French Canada produced thousands of these, but on the fringes of Anglo-America this type was usually Scots or Anglo-Celt. This vanguard sometimes traded with the Indians, but never adopted Indian ways; they blended neither with the natives nor the forest. If they wintered with Indians, and begat half-blood offspring, they usually abandoned these, thus maintaining racial purity of a sort. Boone himself was of this class: explorer, hunter, warrior, and finally, trader.
These men were borderers, a filter between the wild frontier and the farmer-hunters, who came next. They were skilled in forest lore and knowledgeable about the Indian enemy. They were leaders in the worst of Indian years, and their advice was often sought, if not invariably followed. Many of them—and again Boone was one of these—had a certain respect and admiration for the Indians. But their gravitation was back toward civilization, and their own kind. They might try to prevent an Indian war, but when it came, blood called to blood, and their skill and ferocity was decisive on the settler side. Few became renegades, or "Indian-lovers," the most despised terms on the whole frontier.
The borderers were extremely able warriors in their own milieu. They were entirely different from the farmer militia (which came in their wake and with which later Americans sometimes confuse them). These were the kind of men who won the timely victory at King's Mountain, and marched to New Orleans with Jackson from Tennessee. They should not be confused with farmer militia of these times. The farmer militiaman was of sturdy stock, but he only took down his gun in time of war, and marched in some semblance of military battalions. This industrious militia had as little discipline as the backwoodsman, but it totally lacked his forest skills, as St. Clair's defeat on the Ohio in 1790 proved. The real frontiersman lived with his rifle in his hand, and he could smell an Indian ambush miles away.
He was not totally admired by the more civilized frontier. Boone and Wetzel took scalps as a matter of course, and if Boone left evidence that he could live in Indian country all alone and kill a bear, he could spell neither "killed" nor "bear." Hunters planted corn only intermittently and with reluctance, and the true settler pioneer soon crowded them. By the 1780s, many of the survivors of Kentucky's worst years were pushing on, toward the Illinois. Boone's own descendants moved on, hunters still, till they reached the western ocean.