From The End of the Myth (Greg Grandin, 2019) pp14-6
The drive west waxed and waned and burst forth with great passion during key moments.
The first few decades of the 1700s were a period of relative theological calm. British colonists, still beset by wars, diseases, bad weather, and their own divisionism, recovered somewhat from the spiritual anguishes that had afflicted their Puritan settler forebears. Then came the Great Awakening in the 1730s, and hectoring jeremiads once again began to interpret global events – wars between European states – as the latest stage in the struggle between popery and true religion. Forest fever – the idea that migration was prophetic, that clearing the woods and filling the valleys with Christians was part of a messianic mission – returned. Settlers, who had begun to move over the Blue Ridge, into the Shenandoah and Ohio valleys, and through the Cumberland Gap, “were all great sticklers for religion and for Scripture quotations against the ‘heathen.’” They took it as a matter of faith – as was said of the Scotch-Irish who in the 1730s pushed the Conestoga people off nearly all of their land in western Pennsylvania – that it was “against the laws of God and nature, that so much land should be idle while so many Christians wanted it to labour on, and to raise their bread.”
Increasingly, in the decades before the American Revolution, western settlement was also understood in secular terms, as inducing not Christ’s Coming but social progress. Benjamin Franklin previewed this way of thinking in 1751, in a short pamphlet titled “Observations Concerning the Increase in Mankind.” In Europe, Franklin wrote, an excess population pushed at the limits of subsistence, trying to coax food out of exhausted soil, filling cities, driving down wages. “When Labourers are plenty,” he said, “their Wages Will be low.” America, in contrast, escaped this demographic trap. Population growth, rather than working to subdivide finite resources into smaller and smaller shares, multiplied wealth. Abundant, cheap, and bountiful land meant laborers could give birth to as many children as they needed, since their children too could just clear a forest and plant their own crops. Markets would grow in tandem with supply, allowing America to avoid the distortions -too little food, too many workers, too cheap wages, too crowded cities, too much production of manufactured goods without enough demand – that afflicted Europe. “So vast is the Territory of North-America,” Franklin wrote from his printing office in Philadelphia, “that it will require many Ages to settle fully; and till it is fully settled, Labour will never be cheap here.”
Franklin was an optimistic Promethean. He imagined history as a propulsive movement across the sea and land, east to west. We are “scouring our planet,” he wrote, “ by clearing America of woods.” There were, he estimated, a “million English souls” in America, a number that would double within a generation, until there would be more Englishmen on “this side of the water” than in Great Britain. Franklin here was putting forth a new way of thinking of racial differences, justifying his preference for people of his own “complexion” not by theological absolutes – of the kind that imagined Native Americans as agents of Satan and justified their removal from the land in the name of Providence – but by an assertion of a modern-sounding relativism. All people, he said, had a “partiality” for their own kind, as he did for white people: “I could wish their Numbers were increased.” Africa was “black,” Asia “tawny.” Most of Europe, Franklin thought, was “swarthy,” save for Great Britain and parts of Saxon Germany. In North America, white settlers were making “this side of our Globe reflect a brighter light to the eyes of inhabitants in Mars or Venus,” Franklin wrote. It was a deist jab, substituting the judgment of other (extraterrestrial) sentient beings for that of an omnipotent god.
The Seven Years’ War broadened horizons, spreading among an increasing number of people both Franklin’s kind of optimism (which linked prosperity to expansion) and a darker impulse (by which settlers came to believe the land was their inheritance, bounty for blood shed). Between 1756 and 1763, Europe split into two great coalitions – one led by Catholic France, the other by Protestant Great Britain – and waged a war that spilled out over nearly all the earth, to India, Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and South America. In northern America, Paris and London both deployed standing armies, settler militias, and indigenous allies, fighting for control of the continent.
The war (which in America actually started in 1754, as British and French colonists skirmished for control of the Ohio valley) was bloody. It was a long low-intensity, high-mortality slog of exhausting treks through pathless woods, massacres, burned villages, frantic retreats, hunger, thirst, and cannibalism, which all sides practiced, either as retribution or for survival. British “rangers” copied the fighting style of Native Americans, learning how to move through the landscape stealthily, in small units, and conduct quick raids. Rogers’ Rangers, for instance, dressed and lived “like the Indians,” putting scalping knives to France’s indigenous allies as they pacified the Connecticut valley. Upon approaching an Abenaki village near the Saint Lawrence River filled mostly with women and children, the rangers, according to one of its members, set about to “kill everyone without mercy.” Within less than fifteen minutes, “the whole town was in a blaze, and carnage terrible.” Hardly anyone escaped: “Those who the flames did not devour were either shot or tomohawk’ed.” “Thus the inhumanity of these savages was rewarded with a calamity, dreadful indeed, but justly deserved,” the ranger said.
Such imitation served not only a tactical but a psychic function: by killing as pitilessly as they imagined their victims killed, they could justify killing their victims pitilessly. And by acting as if they themselves were as native to the land as Indians, they could claim the land once Indians were removed from the land. “Fraternal genocide” was how one writer described settler mimicry: slaughtered “Indian brothers” became the “unappeased ghosts in the unconscious of the white man.” This was, in a way, the beginning of the blood meridian that Cormac McCarthy writes about in his novel, the horizon where endless sky meets endless hate. Or at least it was the beginning of the continentalization of the “barbarous years,” as Bernard Bailyn called the first decades of settler destruction of Native Americans.
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