Westward expansion

“ At more than one period, English colonists have been accused of believing that “it is the undoubted right of every Englishman to settle where he likes, to behave as he sees fit, and to call upon the Mother-Country to foot the bill.” [759] This, however, is not merely a colonial characteristic: it is the spirit developed upon every frontier, as the later history of American westward expansion may be called upon to illustrate; and, as we have pointed out, the whole chain of colonies formed the long encircling frontier of England. ”

“ The westward movement was by river valleys (a fact perhaps never sufficiently emphasized) and not until the Tennessee, Monongahela, Kanawha, and Kentucky Rivers were reached were any waters found to run parallel with the social movement itself. ”

“ When these elements had been extended westward to the remotest available point, and were liberalized by an expansion over the widest diameter, the freest pen expressed the most perfect equality, indicating a yet loftier terrace which it will probably require a long period fully to reach. At that time a fresh cluster of great men had risen so far in advance of the common mass, that it was only a minority who at first dared to adopt the views of more enlightened minds ”

“ Thus American development has exhibited not merely advance along a single line, but a return to primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line, and a new development for that area. American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, has furnished the forces dominating American character. ”

“ If slavery stopped the gap to immigration in the South, there was no such obstacle in the North, and from 1785 until almost the close of the nineteenth century the great exodus of the peoples poured Westward—the most wonderful and inspiring fact in all American history. ”

“ Travel for forty hours to the westward, and everything is in a transition state: there are rough roads and unfinished railroads; foundations of cities laid in soil scarcely cleared from the forest; splendid hotels within sound of the hunter's rifle and the lumberer's axe; while the elements of society are more chaotic than the features of the country. Every year a tide of emigration rolls westward, not from Europe only, but from the crowded eastern cities, forming a tangled web of races, manners, and religions which the hasty observer cannot attempt to disentangle. ”

“ Culture, the outgrowth of population, was first planted in the East; there it rooted and there it blossomed, and there humanity gathered its first fruits, but its ripened products have fructified upon its Western grafts. Westward indeed the star of Empire has made its way, and here on our Western Continent, under the ægis of our great Republic, under the influence of American liberty and freedom, it seems destined to reach its ascendant. ”

“ Westward you have an increasing degree of prosperity and material comforts and advantages of modern civilization, but Eastward you have such poverty among the millions as can not be conceived by people more favored. Westward you have civilizations never content with present attainment; but Eastward you have peoples whose highest ideals are only to be and to do what their fathers were and did before them. ”

“ In the eastern portion of our own land, too, where her first foothold was gained, and the grandest conquests in fervid simplicity were secured, that communion is losing strength, we fear; but in the great West, the billows of heavenly fire augment as they advance, and millions of beautiful, as well as fruitful plants will hereafter spring, in consequence of the yet wider and freer spreadings of the celestial flames. Glory be to God, a westward fusion of races has begun, an assimilation of nations is in progress; all arbitrary frontiers are giving way ”

“ The immense Territories on the slopes of the Rocky Mountains are drawing in an industrious population, and the railways that are reaching Westward have become the channels of a ceaseless progress. The temporary panic which has passed over our business interests with intense severity, like so many others that have swept over England and America, will probably be followed by a new revulsion of unusual prosperity, and there can be no doubt that the enormous wealth of the country will be soon brought into active use. ”

“ Democracy [Pg 250] rose against feudalism with the same success with which feudalism had overthrown monarchy, and on the same eastern edge of empire, rose a new tide of yet more ennobling might which swept gloriously westward over the field so providentially prepared. As we ascend the stream of time, successive generations and their achievements vanish like bubbles from the surface; but they nevertheless swell the precious undercurrent of civilization which, with perpetually augmented wealth and momentum, flows onward to its goal. ”

“ And of this new territory Jackson was made Governor.
Meanwhile more states were being added to the Union.
After the War was over, hundreds of families had found a new home, and a new life, in the unknown wilderness of the West. Indeed, so many people moved westward that the people in the East began to grow anxious. For it seemed to them that soon the eastern states would be left desolate, and they asked their State Governments to stop the people going west. "Old America seems to be breaking up and moving westward," said one man. ”

“ For a long period it seemed as if their journey westward was ended; that they had reached their Ultima Thule; that the western limit had been found.
For many centuries the millions rested in that belief, until the great discoveries of 1492 awakened them to new dreams of western possibilities. At once and under new incentives the westward march began again. The States of the Atlantic were settled and the wilderness subdued. No sooner was this but partially accomplished than the same spirit, "the western fever," seized upon the people. ”

“ The people who will migrate to the Westward whether they form part of the old, or of a new colony will be subject to their proportion of the Continental debt then unpaid. They ought not to be subject to more. They will be a people little able to pay taxes. ”

“ From the time that Eirek the Red sailed to the bleak shores of Greenland down to the brilliant exploit of Admiral Dewey in the Philippine Islands, how true it is, in view of each and every one of the events immortalized in this unequalled series of paintings, that, in the words of Bishop Berkeley,
"Westward the course of empire takes its way!" ”

“ WASHINGTON: THE PROMOTER OF WESTERN INVESTMENTS
What story of personal endeavor that had a part in building up a new nation on this continent can appeal more strongly to us of the Middle West than that of George Washington's shrewd faith which led him first to invest heavily in Western lands and signally champion that region as a field for exploitation? Indeed the record of that man's prescience in realizing what the West [Pg 40] would become, how it would be quickly populated, and how rapidly its acres would increase in value, is one of the most remarkable single facts in his history. ”

“ Now if it follow from hence, that the Pallaces of the greatest men will remove Westward, it will also naturally follow, that the dwellings of others who depend upon them will creep after them. This we see in London, where the Noblemens ancient houses are now become Halls for Companies, or turned into Tenements, and all the Pallaces are gotten Westward ”

“ This, surely, is the moral of our history. The East has spent and been spent for the West: has given forth her energy, her young men and her substance, for the new regions that have been a-making all the century through. But has she learned as much as she has taught, or taken as much as she has given? Look what it is that has now at last taken place. The westward march has stopped, upon the final slopes of the Pacific; and now the plot thickens. Populations turn upon their old paths; fill in the spaces they passed by neglected in their first journey in search of a land of promise ”

“ Whether the historian is analyzing old frontiers or charting new ones, the timeless question remains: does man have the intelligence adequate to secure his own survival? The old frontiers, such as the Fair Play territory of the West Branch of the Susquehanna, were free lands of opportunity for a better life, and the history of the westward movement of the American people gives ample proof of [Pg 111] their conquest. ”

“ Yet into this heterogeneous region, from all Europe, itself convulsed with revolution, Europe just beginning to awaken to the doctrine of the rights of humanity, there pressed westward ever increasing thousands of new inhabitants—in that current year over a third of a million, the largest immigration thus far known. Most of these immigrants settled in the free country of the North, and as the railways were now so hurriedly crowding westward, it was to be seen that the ancient strife between North and South must grow and not lessen, for these new-comers were bitterly opposed to slavery. ”

“ Nothing in ancient annals is comparable to the prodigious feats of human industry and skill which have been witnessed since the age of Washington began. Not to go east of our own immediate ancestors, it is interesting to see how the old haunts of power are now but the abandoned monuments of progress, the means of which are mostly mechanics, all the chief seats of whose influence have migrated to the West. Canterbury, Lincoln, Salisbury, and Winchester, have remained almost stationary ever since the United States were organized ”

“ The growth and development of the United States westward from the Atlantic seaboard has been effected by the poorer and less intelligent, but often the more venturesome, who constantly turned West to get cheaper land and a better chance. ”

“ In New York the Westward Movement between 1700 and 1740 was very slow, because the progress of the English was opposed not only by the French, but also by powerful tribes of Iroquois Indians. But in the western part of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and North Carolina the Indians were less troublesome and there were as yet no French at all. So it was from Pennsylvania and from the southern colonies that the settlers first began to move in considerable numbers toward the West. ”

“ He stands for the political style of a far-ranging, Western, Teutonic and especially German future, and his phrase “expansion is everything” is the Napoleonic reassertion of the indwelling tendency of every Civilization that has fully ripened—Roman, Arab or Chinese. It is not a matter of choice—it is not the conscious will of individuals, or even that of whole classes or peoples that decides. The expansive tendency is a doom, something daemonic and immense, which grips, forces into service, and uses up the late mankind of the world-city stage, willy-nilly, aware or unaware. ”

“ In the Middle States the building of numerous canals, turnpikes, and railways called for both skilled and unskilled laborers. But if everybody ran off to the West when wages were unsatisfactory, these improvements could not be made and the old communities would languish and decay.
Virginia and the South were less disturbed at the growth of the West, because of their system of slavery, and because the votes of the new States could be relied on to support Virginian and Southern policies in Congress—a legacy of the old Jeffersonian alliance of the South with the early West ”

“ With the westward movements of the millions of human beings who have occupied the North American continent have gone the institutions and constitutions of the east, modified in their journey westward by the varying conditions of the life of the people. ”

“ This, too, will not be an aggregate of ancient provincialisms, but an original homogeneous mass of American, continental mind, enriched from a thousand genuine sources of local sentiments. The newest States are in thought the freest and most original, which will cause the whole country to individualize itself more and more. The gigantic movement of independent intellect toward the West every hour deepens the contrast between itself and the petty insipidities it leaves behind. ”

“ From the survey which has been taken above of the spreading of ameliorating empire in the great West, it is evident that its central throne must soon rest on the granite heights beyond the great lakes, near the sources of the mighty Mississippi. Thither the free and brave millions are fast gathering, whose noble progeny will people the entire continent, and bless the world. The denizens of those wealthy regions, and the patriots of those happy times, will be both intelligent and brave beyond precedent, in conserving the republican institutions they have received to perfect and perpetuate. ”

“ There are signs that the West after achieving the reforms which it needs to-day--reforms which will free its economic life from the credit monopolies of the East, and give it a greater fluidity in the marketing of its products--will follow the way of all agricultural communities to a rural and placid conservatism. The spirit of the pioneer does not survive forever: it is kept alive to-day, I believe, by certain unnatural irritants which may be summed up as absentee ownership. The West is suffering from foreignly owned railroads, power-resources, and an alien credit control. ”