American freedom was built on endless conquest

JACOBIN

Story by Greg Grandin 

2mo / 10 min read

The Founders made expansion the precondition of American freedom. We must find an alternative

The Declaration of Independence of 1776 was, among other things, the colonists’ counter to the Royal Proclamation of 1763. The declaration, written by Thomas Jefferson, only referenced London’s effort to partition North America obliquely, complaining that King George III incited “the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages” to wage war on settlers. But two years earlier, Jefferson, in one of his first political tracts, had clearly condemned the Crown’s effort to restrict migration. “America was conquered,” Jefferson wrote in “A Summary View of the Rights of British America,” by its settlers, 

"at the expense of individuals, and not of the British public. Their own blood was spilt in acquiring lands for the settlement, their own fortunes expended in making that settlement effectual; for themselves they fought, for themselves they conquered, and for themselves alone they have right to hold."

“A Summary View” captures an argument, especially popular among the Virginia rebels in the years leading up to the American Revolution, that the ideal of modern liberty, founded on property rights, can be traced back hundreds of years to Saxon Germany. It was there, in the early centuries of the millennium, where freemen first governed themselves as equals, holding land “in absolute right,” in Jefferson’s words. When Old World lords tried to encumber their rights, these Saxon heralds of American freedom fled, first to Britain and then to the New World.

Saxons to Britain, Brits to America, Americans westward. Where Benjamin Franklin, in the early 1750s, provided a compelling political economy to justify wilderness expansion, Jefferson now gave settlers a moral history along with a usable analogy to express their grievances. Just as Norman lords, after their 1066 invasion of the British Isles, trampled on the rights of Saxon freemen and placed the “yoke” of feudalism on their necks, so too was George III violating the rights of their Virginian descendants.

It was “universal law,” Jefferson said, which “nature” had “given to all men,” that allowed his “ancestors” the right to leave their country of birth and go “in quest of new habitations, and of there establishing new societies.”

For Jefferson, the ability to migrate wasn’t just an exercise of natural rights but the source of rights, or at least their historically necessary condition. Liberty was made possible by the right to colonize, letting freemen, when their freedom was threatened, move on to find free land and carry the torch from one place to another. Our “Saxon ancestors,” Jefferson wrote, “left their native wilds and woods in the North of Europe” and “possessed themselves of the Island of Britain.” As they did so, no German prince presumed to claim “superiority” over them. By what law, then, did the Crown presume to claim superiority over colonists to settle “the wilds of America”?

The American Revolution answered: none at all. Hostilities between Great Britain and its former colonial subjects formally ended in 1783, with the signing of the Treaty of Paris, which, in laying out the terms of London’s defeat, set the new republic’s western border at the Mississippi River. The new nation came into the world doubling its size. King George, in the treaty’s first article, recognized the independence of the original thirteen colonies and, in the second article, ceded to them the territory between the Allegheny Mountains and the Mississippi. The United States then proceeded to move swiftly — as if weightless, as Octavio Paz would say — across the West. The “numbers are increasing while we are writing,” said Jefferson in 1786, of settlers moving into Kentucky.

The future president was here correcting a fashionable European opinion that the New World wasn’t bountiful but degenerative. Its soil was said to be weak, its animals stunted, its people — both natives and transplanted Europeans — devoid of vitality, barely able to rouse themselves to reproduce. Jefferson and others countered by stressing American power, plenty, and fertility, reflected in high birth and low mortality rates. This optimism would later be reflected in the idea that nature was boundless and that the frontier would serve as a place of perennial rebirth. When a European once insisted to Benjamin Franklin that Americans died young, Franklin answered that “the children of the first settlers are not yet dead!”

That a line running down the middle of the Mississippi served for a short time as the western border of the United States is apt, for the river gives an illusion of fixity when in fact it is in constant flux, in a perpetual state of creation. It is “the crookedest river in the world,” Mark Twain later wrote, making “prodigious jumps by cutting through narrow necks of land, and thus straightening and shortening itself.” US diplomats used this mutability to press for a more liberal interpretation of the Treaty of Paris. The British still controlled Canada, but it was Spain (which in the 1780s and ’90s controlled most of the land west of the Mississippi, as well as Florida) that stood in the path of the new nation.

Jefferson, now secretary of state, and his diplomats began to demand from Madrid the right of US ships to moor on the Mississippi’s west bank (which, according to the Treaty of Paris, was Spanish territory), since in those pre-steam days tacking from bank to bank was the best way to ascend upriver. “It is,” he said, “a principle that the right to a thing gives a right to the means without which it could not be used, that is to say, that the means follow the end.” Such a principle, Jefferson told Spain, was but “natural reason,” the “common sense of mankind.” Spanish officials recognized this demand for easement as a stalking horse. The United States was then working to revise the terms of the Treaty of Paris, claiming the freedom to use and, implicitly, to settle and administer all the navigable rivers flowing into the Mississippi, along with all the portage roads connecting all the navigable tributaries. This was a formidable amount of land, since the Mississippi basin, the world’s fourth-longest river system, sprawls across more than a million square miles. James Madison, as Jefferson’s secretary of state, would also press for access to all of Florida’s waterways. “Free communication with the sea,” Madison insisted, “is so natural, so reasonable, and so essential that eventually it must take place.”

Where would such demands stop?, the Spanish governor of New Orleans, the barón de Carondelet, wanted to know. Soon, Carondelet warned, the United States would use the pretext of “free navigation” to dominate “the rich fur trade of the Missouri, and in time the possession of the rich mines of the interior provinces of the very Kingdom of Mexico.” Spain, in response, tried to put into place a policy of containment. “We have to figure out a way to contain them,” one of its colonial governors said of Anglo settlers. “We have to contain the Americans within their limits,” wrote another.

But the United States was uncontainable. Nothing, Carondelet wrote, could check its “mode of growth.” Settlers were “multiplying in the silence of peace” that came after the American Revolution, the baron said, and, having pushed into the Ohio Valley and Kentucky, resisted “all authority.” When they “tire of one place, they move to another.”

Well beyond any expansive definition of the Mississippi, a host of individuals and institutions — veterans granted bounty lands for fighting in the Seven Years’ War, speculators, settlers who had purchased land from either Spain or France, real estate companies, and many of the original thirteen states — claimed western territory. Based on their old colonial charters, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia, for instance, said their territory ran all the way to the Pacific. “The land throughout from Sea to Sea” was how Virginia’s charter, granted in the early 1600s, defined its territory. “All that Space,” the charter said.

The United States used these many claims, in different ways depending on the circumstance, to push forward. In other words, the United States won independence from Great Britain in a revolutionary war that was fought, among other reasons, to deny Great Britain the right to establish a western border; then, once independence was recognized by the Treaty of Paris establishing a western border, the United States cited earlier grants issued by Great Britain to hop-skip over that border. What to do with all that space?

Vastness and Virtue

Benjamin Franklin had one idea: in the 1750s, he had sketched out a rudimentary political economy, which posited the continent’s abundant, affordable, and bountiful land as a safety valve, a way to ensure that families could grow and wages would stay high, demand would keep pace with supply, and agricultural production would harmonize with urban manufacturing. In the 1770s, Thomas Jefferson provided settlers a historical moral philosophy, telling them that their movement west wasn’t just a fruit of freedom but the source of freedom. Finally, in the 1780s, James Madison offered a political theory.

As the United States set about drafting a constitution in 1787, many delegates, despite Franklin’s and Jefferson’s odes to growth, fretted about size. They worried about the vices that come with vastness. The Spanish Empire was vast; so was Spanish despotism and corruption. Received political philosophy at the time — handed down both by the ancients, Aristotle and Cicero, and the moderns, Niccolò Machiavelli, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Montesquieu — held that republics were delicate flowers that could only be cultivated in small gardens. “It is in the nature of a republic to have only a small territory; otherwise, it can scarcely continue to exist,” Montesquieu instructed in his 1748 The Spirit of the Laws. “In a large republic, the common good is sacrificed to a thousand considerations.” What the “common good” was depended on perspective, but most republicans defined it as something greater than the sum total of individual interests. What republicans called virtue could be associated with culture, religion, blood, skin color, language, or martial courage, but in all cases it was a transcendent value that stood above personal pursuits and passions. Indeed, as Montesquieu writes, virtue was constantly threatened by those pursuits and passions, “sacrificed to a thousand considerations.” This is why many philosophers prior to Madison thought that vastness and virtue contradicted each other. Republics couldn’t be big and good, ambitious (in size) and virtuous. Too large a territory meant too many pursuits and passions, too many “considerations.”

For Madison, Montesquieu’s size limitations were unworkable. The United States was already large and getting larger. And there were too many seemingly irreconcilable ideas, held by merchants, farmers, and slavers, of how to define virtue. Madison figured out a way to harmonize these visions, offering a two-step revision of existing republican theory that was as simple as it was elegant. First, he said, Montesquieu’s “thousand considerations” didn’t threaten the common good. They were the common good. Madison’s Federalist No. 10, published in November 1787, offered a remarkably modern vision of society, rejecting a vision of republicanism that, in the name of virtue, sought to suppress what he called “diversity.” Instead, Madison put forth an ideal that defined virtue as diversity, as society’s plethora of uncountable impulses, opinions, desires, talents, thoughts, ambitions, and capabilities that create wealth, or “property.” And it is government’s “first object,” its primary obligation, to protect such wealth-producing diversity.

At the same time, Madison knew that wealth could destroy virtue by dividing society into opposing factions: “those who hold and those who are without.” Others who would participate in the drafting of the Constitution also recognized the problem that wealth posed to the general welfare. “The rich will strive to establish their dominion and enslave the rest,” thought Gouverneur Morris, who represented Pennsylvania at the Constitutional Convention. “They always did,” he said, and “they always will.” But they came up with cumbersome solutions: confiscate property every generation to prevent the formation of an aristocracy; establish a House of Commons and a House of Lords, each serving as a check on the other; or ensure an equal distribution of land among all households. Jefferson briefly had the idea of “subdividing” property, to avoid the growth of an impoverished wage-laboring class.

Madison had an easier solution, the second step in his revision of Montesquieu: “Extend the sphere.”

The word “sphere,” at the time of the Constitution’s drafting, was used to describe a number of issues related to politics, including the size of a nation’s population, the number of people who enjoyed the right to vote, and the extent of its trading relations. But in Federalist No. 10, Madison used it to mean raw size, territory, and physical space. Not just a large republic but an ever-enlarging republic would dilute the threat of political conflict and factionalism. Citizens spread thin over a wide territory would be less likely to join “common interest or passion,” to become “united and actuated” in their objectives, to “discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other.” Expansion would break up society “into a greater variety of interests and pursuits of passions, which check each other.” The amalgamation of power would be prevented, making it unnecessary to take government action, either to regulate concentrated wealth or to repress movements organized in opposition to concentrated wealth. “Extend the sphere,” Madison wrote, “and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests,” and you make it difficult for either a mob majority or a tyrannical minority to unite “to invade the rights of other citizens.”

Whatever one’s take on any of the debates of the day (especially the debate over slavery), and whatever one’s philosophical understanding of the relationship of republicanism to land, commerce, finance, and labor, most agreed on practicalities. All wanted to remove Spain from the Mississippi; all wanted the capacity to pacify hostile Native Americans and put down rebellions of poor people; and all wanted Great Britain to get out of the way of their commerce. All wanted “room enough,” as Thomas Jefferson would put it in his 1801 inaugural address, to be protected from Europe’s “exterminating havoc.”

Expansion became the answer to every question, the solution to all problems, especially those caused by expansion.