The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America

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To the memories of Michael, Marilyn, Joel, Tani, Jean, Tom, and Emilia. And for Eleanor and her friends.

To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.

—Anne Carson

INTRODUCTION

Fleeing Forward

Poetry was the language of the frontier, and the historian Frederick Jackson Turner was among its greatest laureates. The United States lies like a huge page in the history of society, he wrote in 1893. Line by line as we read this continental page from West to East we find the record of social evolution.¹ Expansion across the continent, Turner said, made Europeans into something new, into a people both coarse and curious, self-disciplined and spontaneous, practical and inventive, filled with a restless, nervous energy and lifted by that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom. Turner’s scholarly career spanned the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, during the height of Jim Crow and the consolidation of anti-miscegenation and nativist exclusion laws, with the KKK resurgent. Mexican workers were being lynched in Texas, and the U.S. military was engaged in deadly counterinsurgencies in the Caribbean and Pacific. But what became known as Turner’s Frontier Thesis—which argued that the expansion of settlement across a frontier of free land created a uniquely American form of political equality, a vibrant, forward-looking individualism—placed a wager on the future.

The kind of Americanism Turner represented took all the unbounded optimism that went into the founding of the United States and bet that the country’s progress, moving forward on the frontier and into the world, would reduce racism to a remnant and leave it behind as residue. It would dilute other social problems as well, including poverty, inequality, and extremism, teaching diverse people how to live together in peace. Frank Norris, in 1902, hoped that territorial expansion would lead to a new kind of universalism, to the brotherhood of man when Americans would realize that the whole world is our nation and simple humanity our countrymen.²

Facing west meant facing the Promised Land, an Edenic utopia where the American as the new Adam could imagine himself free from nature’s limits, society’s burdens, and history’s ambiguities. No myth in American history has been more powerful, more invoked by more presidents, than that of pioneers advancing across an endless meridian. Onward, and then onward again. There were lulls, doubts, dissents, and counter-movements, notably in the 1930s and 1970s. But the expansionist imperative has remained constant, in one version or another, for centuries. As Woodrow Wilson said in the 1890s, a frontier people always in our van, is, so far, the central and determining fact of our national history. There was no thought, Wilson said, of drawing back.³

So far. The poetry stopped on June 16, 2015, when Donald J. Trump announced his presidential campaign by standing Frederick Jackson Turner on his head. I will build a great wall, Trump said.

Trump most likely had never heard of Turner, or his outsized influence on American thought. But there, in the lobby of his tower on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, he offered his own judgment on history. Referring specifically to the North American Free Trade Agreement and broadly to the country’s commitment to free trade, he said, We have to stop, and it has to stop now.

All nations have borders, and many today even have walls. But only the United States has had a frontier, or at least a frontier that has served as a proxy for liberation, synonymous with the possibilities and promises of modern life itself and held out as a model for the rest of the world to emulate.⁴

Decades before its founders won their independence, America was thought of as a process of endless becoming and ceaseless unfurling. In 1651, Thomas Hobbes described British colonialism in America as driven by an insatiable appetite, or Bulimia, of enlarging dominion.⁵ Thomas Jefferson, in a political manifesto he wrote two years before the Declaration of Independence, identified the right of departing from the country in which chance, not choice had placed settlers, of going in quest of new habitations as an element of universal law.⁶

True religion moved east to west with the sun, believed early American theologians, and if man could keep pace with its light, perhaps historical time itself could be overcome and decline avoided.⁷ The West, said one frontier writer, was the land of mankind’s second chance.⁸ It was, said Turner, a place of perennial rebirth. Are there new frontiers? The historian Walter Prescott Webb, writing in the early 1950s, said that what that perennial question revealed was nothing less than a rejection of the death instinct. You might as well ask, Webb said, is there a human soul?⁹ Faith in the regenerative power of the frontier resided in the fact that the West did offer, for many, a chance to shake off their circumstances. More than a few even got rich. The United States was great, in ambition as well as dimension.

The concept of the frontier served as both diagnosis (to explain the power and wealth of the United States) and prescription (to recommend what policy makers should do to maintain and extend that power and wealth). And when the physical frontier was closed, its imagery could easily be applied to other arenas of expansion, to markets, war, culture, technology, science, the psyche, and politics. In the years after World War II, the frontier became a central metaphor to capture a vision of a new kind of world order. Past empires established their dominance in an environment where resources were thought to be finite, extending their supremacy to capture as much of the world’s wealth as possible, to the detriment of their rivals. Now, though, the United States made a credible claim to be a different sort of global power, presiding over a world economy premised on endless growth. Washington, its leaders said, didn’t so much rule as help organize and stabilize an international community understood as liberal, universal, and multilateral. The promise of a limitless frontier meant that wealth wasn’t a zero-sum proposition. It could be shared by all. Borrowing frontier language used by Andrew Jackson and his followers in the 1830s and 1840s, postwar planners said the United States would extend the world’s area of freedom and enlarge its circle of free institutions.¹⁰

The ideal of the frontier contained within itself the terms of its own criticism, which is another reason why it serves as so powerful a national metaphor. Martin Luther King, Jr., argued that the ideal fed into multiple reinforcing pathologies: into racism, a violent masculinity, and moralism that celebrates the rich and punishes the poor. For over a year, from early 1967 until his murder in April 1968—as the United States escalated its war in Vietnam—King put forth, in a series of sermons and press conferences, a damning analysis. Military expansion abroad, he argued, quickened domestic polarization. The flame throwers in Vietnam fan the flames in our cities, he said; the bombs in Vietnam explode at home. At the same time, constant war served to deflect the worst consequences of that polarization outward.¹¹

King’s point is as simple as it is profound: A constant fleeing forward allowed the United States to avoid a true reckoning with its social problems, such as economic inequality, racism, crime and punishment, and violence. Other critics at the time were coming to similar conclusions. Some scholars argued that imperial expansion let the United States buy off its domestic white skilled working class, either through social welfare or higher wages made possible by third world exploitation. Others stressed the political benefits of expansion, which allowed the reconciliation of competing interests.¹² Still others emphasized more Freudian, even Jungian, motives: deep-seated violent fantasies, formed in long-ago wars against people of color on the frontier, projected outward; soldiers sublimating their own guilty desires, their own complicity in wartime atrocities, with ever more grotesque sadism.¹³

There is a lot to unpack in the argument that over the long course of U.S. history, endless expansion, either over land or through markets and militarism, deflects domestic extremism. How, for example, might historical traumas and resentments, myths and symbols, be passed down the centuries from one generation to another? Did the United States objectively need to expand in order to secure foreign resources and open markets for domestic production? Or did the country’s leaders just believe they had to expand? Whatever the answers to those questions, the United States, since its founding, pushed outward and justified that push in moral terms, as beneficial equally for the people within and beyond the frontier. The idea of expansion, the historian William Appleman Williams wrote in 1966, was exhilarating in a psychological and philosophical sense since it could be projected to infinity.¹⁴

Not, as it turns out, to infinity.

The United States is now into the eighteenth year of a war that it will never win. Soldiers who fought in Afghanistan and Iraq in the early 2000s are now seeing their children enlist. A retired Marine general recently said the United States will be in Afghanistan for yet another sixteen years, at least. By that point, the grandchildren of the first generation of veterans will be enlisting. Senator Lindsey Graham believes that the United States is fighting an endless war without boundaries, no limitation on time or geography.¹⁵ Another former officer (referring to the expansion of military operations into African countries like Niger) said the war will never end.¹⁶ And grandchildren down the line will be paying its bill, now estimated to approach six trillion dollars.¹⁷

While the United States is mired in an endless war, it can no longer imagine endless growth. An entire generation’s expectations have been radically foreshortened, as the 2007–2008 financial collapse has been followed by a perverse kind of recovery, marked by mediocre rates of investment, stockpiled wealth, soaring stocks, and stagnant wages.¹⁸ The roots of the current crisis reach back decades, to the economic restructuring that began in the 1980s with farm failures and deindustrialization, and continued forward with financial deregulation, crippling tax cuts, and the entrenchment of low-paying service jobs and personal debt. The nation’s political class, over the course of these decades, sold economic restructuring by ratcheting up the language of limitlessness. Nothing is impossible, Ronald Reagan said. There are no limits to growth.¹⁹ The presidents who followed—George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush—presided over an ideological bubble that proved as unrealistic as a prediction by one of Clinton’s top economists, who in 1998 said that the soon-to-be-busted dot-com boom will run forever.²⁰ All four presidents steadily upped the ante, pushing global engagement as a moral imperative, a mission that led the United States to the Persian Gulf and to its financially exhausting and morally discrediting global war.

Gaps exist in all nationalisms between ideal and experience. But in the years following defeat in Vietnam, the revival of the myth of rugged individualism and frontier limitlessness—at a moment when deindustrialization was making daily life precarious for an increasing number of people, when more and more people were reaching their limits—has created a punishing kind of dissonance. It was used to weaken the mechanisms of social solidarity, especially government-provided welfare and labor unions, just when they were most needed. In the mythology of the West, cowboys don’t join unions.²¹ The gap between myth and reality has now widened into a chasm.

The United States is a nation founded on the principle that government should leave individuals free to pursue their self-interest. Corruption and greed, even as the United States moved out in the world with a sense of moral mission, have not been foreign qualities. But it’s hard to think of a period in the nation’s history when venality and disillusionment have been so sovereign, when so many of the country’s haves have nothing to offer but disdain for the have-nots.

The 2016 election of Donald Trump as president of the United States—and all the vitriol his campaign and presidency have unleashed—has been presented by commentators as one of two opposing possibilities. Trumpism either represents a rupture, a wholly un-American movement that has captured the institutions of government; or he is the realization of a deep-rooted American form of extremism. Does Trump’s crass and cruel appeal to nativism represent a break from tradition, from a fitful but persistent commitment to tolerance and equality at home and defense of multilateralism, democracy, and open markets abroad? Or is it but the dark side, to use Dick Cheney’s resonant phrase, of U.S. history coming into the light? Breach or continuity?

What’s missing from most commentary is an acknowledgment of the role that expansion, along with the promise of boundlessness, played in relegating racism and extremism to the fringe. To be sure, previous cycles of dislocation have given rise to demagogues similar to Trump, such as George Wallace and Pat Buchanan. But the movements those nativists led remained marginal and were contained—geographically, institutionally, and ideologically. And the United States has had other presidents who were open racists. Before Richard Nixon put his southern strategy into place to win the votes of southern neo-Confederates, Woodrow Wilson cultivated what was left of actual Confederates, and their sons and grandsons, into an electoral coalition, re-segregating the federal bureaucracy and legitimating the KKK. Before Wilson, there was Andrew Jackson, who personally drove a slave coffle between Natchez and Nashville and presided over a policy of ethnic cleansing that freed up vast amounts of land for white settlers, putting the full power of the federal government to creating a Caucasian democracy.

What distinguishes earlier racist presidents like Jackson and Wilson from Trump, though, is that they were in office during the upswing of America’s moving out in the world, when domestic political polarization could be stanched and the country held together—even after the Civil War nearly tore it apart—by the promise of endless growth. Trumpism is extremism turned inward, all-consuming and self-devouring. There is no divine, messianic crusade that can harness and redirect passions outward. Expansion, in any form, can no longer satisfy the interests, reconcile the contradictions, dilute the factions, or redirect the anger.

The furies, as the writer Sam Tanenhaus described the conservative fringe that gained ground during Barack Obama’s presidency, have nowhere left to go.²² They whip around the homeland. Trump tapped into various forms of American racism: trading in birtherism, embracing law-and-order extremists, and refusing to distance himself from KKK and Nazi supporters, for instance. But it was the focus on the border and all that went with it—labeling Mexicans rapists, calling migrants snakes and animals, stirring up anger at undocumented residents, proposing to end birthright citizenship, and unleashing ICE agents to raid deep into the country, to stalk schools and hospitals, to split families and spread grief—that provided Trumpism its most compelling through-line message: The world’s horizon is not limitless; not all can share in its wealth; and the nation’s policies should reflect that reality. That argument isn’t new. Over the years, there have been two versions of it. One is humane, a recognition that modern life imposes obligations, that nature’s resources aren’t infinite, and that society should be organized in a way that distributes fortune as fairly as possible. The other thinks that recognition of limits requires domination.

To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing, the Canadian poet Anne Carson once said. With Trump, America finds itself at the end of its myth.

To talk about the frontier is also to talk about capitalism, about its power and possibility and its promise of boundlessness. Donald Trump figured out that to talk about the border—and to promise a wall—was a way to acknowledge capitalism’s limits, its pain, without having to challenge capitalism’s terms. Trump ran promising to end the wars and to reverse the extreme anti-regulatory and free-market program of his party. Once in office, though, he accelerated deregulation, increased military spending, and expanded the wars.²³ But he kept talking about his wall.

That wall might or might not be built. But even if it remains only in its phantasmagorical, budgetary stage, a perpetual negotiating chip between Congress and the White House, the promise of a two-thousand-mile-long, thirty-foot-high ribbon of concrete and steel running along the United States’ southern border serves its purpose. It’s America’s new myth, a monument to the final closing of the frontier. It is a symbol of a nation that used to believe that it had escaped history, or at least strode atop history, but now finds itself trapped by history, and of a people who used to think they were captains of the future, but now are prisoners of the past.

ONE

All That Space

America was, if it was anything, geography, pure space.

1.

The British colonies in North America were conceived in expansion. America was an aspiration, an errand, and an obligation, born out of violent Christian schism and Europe’s interminable religious and imperial conflicts. Depending on the intricacies of their particular interpretation of Revelation, the Protestants who settled New England might have understood flight across the Atlantic as a way of escaping European war. Or they might have seen migration as a chance to open a new front and win those wars on new soil. Here in the 1600s, in the eschatological nebula of the New World, was the first paradoxical image of America as simultaneously pristine and despoiled: empty and at the same time filled with primitives begging for deliverance, subordinated to Catholic Spain, which had conquered its part of the Americas a century earlier and stood as the great obstacle to Reformation England’s rise as a world power. "All yell and crye with one voice Liberta, liberta," Richard Hakluyt, a clergyman and court minister, wrote in the late 1500s, hoping to convince investors and his queen to establish an American colony.¹

As Puritan society frayed under the harsh conditions of settler life, the frontier threatened and beckoned. The dark woods were filled with witches. And they were witchy, inviting hither. The forest was the place where the community could be redeemed and given new purpose, a chance to once again start anew. Or it could be a place of more sorrows—wilderness sorrows, as two early Puritan patriarchs described the hardships that awaited those who ventured into uncharted territory—where whatever solidarity existed would be smashed into atoms as settlers scattered to escape the rule of the clergy. People are ready to run wild into the woods again and to be as heathenish as ever, warned Increase Mather. Expansion could be—often in the same sermon—held up as the cause of and solution to the difficulties of establishing Christian communities.

Either way, Native Americans had to get out of the way. They could die: They waste, they moulder away, they disappear, said one Puritan chronicler of indigenous people who had succumbed to European pestilence years before the arrival of the Mayflower in 1620, thus clearing the earth for the establishment of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. God made way for his people by removing the heathen and planting them in the ground, said another observer.² They could be murdered: the holy terror unleashed by the Puritans was, according to the historian Bernard Bailyn, driven by fears of what could happen to civilized people in an unimaginable wilderness and fears of racial conflicts in which God’s children were fated to struggle with pitiless agents of Satan, pagan Antichrists swarming in the world around them.³ Survivors could be enslaved: the first patent granted in colonial America, in 1626, was to a Virginian merchant and planter, William Claiborne, for inventing a device that would not just restrain Indians but also make them work. Claiborne was given an Indian to experiment on, for the tryall of his inventione.⁴ Colonial records do not say what this innovation might have been, only noting that it wasn’t successful.*

Or they could be pushed further and further west. The prodigious and restless population, complained New Orleans’s Spanish governor in 1794, progressively drives the Indian nations before them and upon us, seeking to possess for itself this entire vast continent which the Indians occupy between the Ohio and the Mississippi Rivers, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Appalachian mountains.⁵

More than a century and a half later, writing in the early 1950s, the Mexican author and diplomat Octavio Paz made much the same point:

America was, if it was anything, geography, pure space, open to human action. Since it lacked historical substance—ancient social classes, established institutions, religions, and hereditary laws—reality presented no obstacles other than natural ones. Men struggled not against history but against nature. And wherever there was an historical obstacle—indigenous societies, say—it was erased from history, reduced to a mere natural fact, and dispensed with accordingly.… Evil is outside, part of the natural world, like Indians, rivers, mountains, and other obstacles that must be domesticated or destroyed.⁶

The American Revolution is a permanent revolution, Paz went on, a nonstop expulsion of all elements foreign to the American essence and a constant invention of itself. And anything that stands in the way of that invention, anything that is in any way irreducible or inassimilable to perpetual creation—be it Native Americans, Spanish America, or history itself—is not American:

In other places, the future is one of man’s attributes: because we are men, we have a future. In Saxon America … the process is inverted, and the future determines the man: we are men because we are the future. And everything that has no future is not a man.

The United States, Paz said, offers no room for contradiction, ambiguity, or conflict. The nation flies forward swiftly, as if weightless, across the land. Trying to stop North Americans moving west, Stephen Austin, the founder of Texas, said over a century earlier, was like trying to stop the Mississippi with a dam of straw.⁷

2.

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.’⁸ 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.⁹

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.¹⁰ 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.¹¹

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.¹²

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.¹³ 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.

Great Britain won that war, taking from France an enormous swath of forestland, north from the Great Lakes down through the Ohio valley and west to the Mississippi. But London soon lost the peace. With France defeated, Spain became Great Britain’s last imperial competitor. The Spanish Crown, though, had by this time only a tenuous hold on its North American territories, leaving many British colonists, such as Franklin, anticipating one last battle, which would deliver all of North America and the Caribbean to Great Britain. In the coming future war, Franklin wrote in 1767, English speakers would be poured down the Mississippi upon the lower country and into the Bay of Mexico, to be used against Cuba, or Mexico itself.¹⁴

They already were pouring down, the overflowing Scum of the Empire, as the British governor described the drifters and squatters who rushed over the mountains and into the Mississippi valley. Crown officials did what they could to stop them. But they were in a bind, since Great Britain’s victory left it indebted to two opposing groups, whose interests couldn’t be reconciled. On the one side were British colonists, from east of the Alleghenies and Appalachia, who had served as foot soldiers against the French. They had been promised plots of frontier land in exchange for their military service. On the other side were Britain’s indigenous allies, who largely lived on the western side of the mountains in the trans-Appalachia valleys—Iroquois in the north, Cherokees, Choctaws, and Chickasaws in the south, and Seminoles in Florida, among others. Many of them too had fought for the Crown, and their contribution to London’s victory was no less essential than that of the white colonists.

In October 1763, the Crown tried to clarify the situation. King George III issued a proclamation prohibiting European settlement west of a fixed partition line, which ran along the crest of the Alleghenies: We do hereby strictly forbid, on Pain of our Displeasure, all our loving Subjects from making any Purchases or Settlements whatever, or taking Possession of any of the Lands above reserved. London even ordered settlers who had already crossed that line forthwith to remove themselves and return east. In issuing the decree, King George was essentially voiding the founding charters of colonies and revoking standing concessions that the Crown had bestowed on private companies over the years, including hundreds of thousands of acres ceded to the Ohio Company.¹⁵ In effect, London was recognizing a new kind of colony, comprised of indigenous nations separate but equal to those founded by Europeans on the Atlantic coast. They live under our protection, the proclamation said of indigenous peoples, and should not be molested or disturbed in the Possession of such parts of Our Dominions and Territories. The new arrangement wasn’t disinterested. British merchants knew that continued access to fur depended on keeping white settlers out of indigenous hunting grounds. Still, to let the savages enjoy their deserts in quiet, as the Lords Commissioners for Trade and Plantations said, was a powerful statement, as was George III’s use of the word nations to describe native peoples. Indigenous leaders understood the proclamation to be an affirmation of their sovereignty.¹⁶

British colonists knew it to be a violation of theirs, since they defined their sovereignty as the right to move west.

3.

King George’s partition was intolerable for squatter and squire alike, confirming to British colonists that their interests were now decoupled from the interests of the British Crown. Since God’s law and nature’s law were higher laws than George III’s law, they claimed the right to set up a new society as they saw fit, where they saw fit, before, beyond, or on top of the Alleghenies. There was no reversing the flow, warned Franklin. Neither royal nor provincial proclamations, nor the dread and horrors of a savage war, were sufficient, he wrote, to prevent the settlement of the lands over the mountains. The facts were already on the ground, the settlers already on the land.

The partition of North America was unworkable. The proclamation itself was incoherent, offering land to white veterans of the Seven Years’ War and protection of their land to Native Americans. The Crown stalled on the first and couldn’t deliver on the second. Its representatives in America, loyal colonial governors, took desperate measures to stop the procession west and to remove squatters from Indian lands, even threatening the felony of death without benefit of clergy. To no avail. Thousands of colonial volunteers in the war against France had received a firsthand view of the forbidden zone, the quality of its oaks and elms; its game and sources of water; the navigational potential of its rivers and tributaries; the nature of the soil; which crops would have to be planted, such as tobacco, flax, and cotton; and which ones grew unassisted. Native grapes and mulberries were just waiting to be plucked, hemp, said to spread spontaneously, to be cut. Witnesses to such bounty would not stay east of the Alleghenies.

As settlers moved forward, they terrorized Native Americans throughout the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. In 1763, the Scotch-Irish Paxton Boys rampaged through western Pennsylvania, murdering scores of Conestoga, scalping their victims and mutilating their corpses.¹⁷ Another example of frontier barbarism is Frederick Stump, an American-born son of German immigrants, who in 1755 helped found Fredericksburg, Pennsylvania. Stump got caught up in the roil of war, which first enriched, then ruined, then enriched him again. He did well as a small-scale land speculator and store owner in eastern Pennsylvania. But without having obtained permission from Philadelphia, he moved his family somewhere beyond the mountains. There, native people reportedly killed his wife and children, setting Stump, along with his bonded German servant, Hans Eisenhauer, on a course of retribution.* One sympathetic account describes Stump and Eisenhauer, who also went by the name John Ironcutter, hunting savages through valley and mountain, and when their victims climbed trees to get away from the hounds, their pursuers shot them down like wildcats.¹⁸ Stump became known as Indian Killer: that is, he killed Indians and he killed like an Indian, fighting the devil with fire and using methods practiced by his savage foes.¹⁹

The worst came in January 1768. In an eastern Allegheny hollow, Stump and Eisenhauer murdered eleven friend-Indians, as British officials called the victims: five men, three women, two children, and one infant. They scalped the dead and disposed of the bodies, throwing some in a hole hacked in a frozen river and burning the rest. News of the murders traveled through the region, especially throughout Indian lands. Quaker authorities in Philadelphia put a high bounty on Stump and Eisenhauer, and the two men were soon captured. A mob, though, made up of seventy to eighty white vigilantes and said to include members of the still-active Paxton Boys, came to their rescue. Armed with guns and tomahawks, the mob swarmed the old log jail where the two murderers were being held, in the town of Carlisle, and set them free.

Neither Stump nor Eisenhauer was ever brought to justice. Philadelphia issued another edict banning settlement on indigenous land. Again it was ignored. Stump fled to where no Quaker could touch him, down through Georgia and into Tennessee. There he became one of Nashville’s wealthiest men, a plantation owner, profitable distiller of mash whiskey, and a slaver. He also earned the rank of captain in Tennessee’s first militia expedition, clearing Creeks and Choctaws off the road from Nashville to Natchez.²⁰ Thus Stump was transformed from an outlaw into an agent of the law. He was part of a loose network of irregular rangers and formally organized militias that expanded the line of settlement outward, allowing whites to push north up to Maine and Canada, south into Spanish Florida, and west into the Mississippi valley.

Standing behind the squatters—behind men like Stump and Eisenhauer—were the squires who were also interested in western speculation, staking out enormous lots well west of the partition line, in what is now Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia, Ohio, west Florida, and western Pennsylvania. Many of these investors hailed from Virginia, including the men who would soon lead the revolt against royal