History of the United StatesBeard, Charles A. (Charles Austin)
History
History of the United States
Beard, Charles A. (Charles Austin)
United States -- History
In Massachusetts, the westward movement is recorded in the founding of
Springfield in 1636 and Great Barrington in 1725. By the opening of the
eighteenth century the pioneers of Connecticut had pushed north and west
until their outpost towns adjoined the Hudson Valley settlements. In New
York, the inland movement was directed by the Hudson River to Albany,
and from that old Dutch center it radiated in every direction,
particularly westward through the Mohawk Valley. New Jersey was early
filled to its borders, the beginnings of the present city of New
Brunswick being made in 1681 and those of Trenton in 1685. In
Pennsylvania, as in New York, the waterways determined the main lines of
advance. Pioneers, pushing up through the valley of the Schuylkill,
spread over the fertile lands of Berks and Lancaster counties, laying
out Reading in 1748. Another current of migration was directed by the
Susquehanna, and, in 1726, the first farmhouse was built on the bank
where Harrisburg was later founded. Along the southern tier of counties
a thin line of settlements stretched westward to Pittsburgh, reaching
the upper waters of the Ohio while the colony was still under the Penn
family.
In the South the westward march was equally swift. The seaboard was
quickly occupied by large planters and their slaves engaged in the
cultivation of tobacco and rice. The Piedmont Plateau, lying back from
the coast all the way from Maryland to Georgia, was fed by two streams
of migration, one westward from the sea and the other southward from the
other colonies--Germans from Pennsylvania and Scotch-Irish furnishing
the main supply. "By 1770, tide-water Virginia was full to overflowing
and the 'back country' of the Blue Ridge and the Shenandoah was fully
occupied. Even the mountain valleys ... were claimed by sturdy pioneers.
Before the Declaration of Independence, the oncoming tide of
home-seekers had reached the crest of the Alleghanies."
[Illustration: DISTRIBUTION OF POPULATION, 1790]
Beyond the mountains pioneers had already ventured, harbingers of an
invasion that was about to break in upon Kentucky and Tennessee. As
early as 1769 that mighty Nimrod, Daniel Boone, curious to hunt
buffaloes, of which he had heard weird reports, passed through the
Cumberland Gap and brought back news of a wonderful country awaiting the
plow. A hint was sufficient. Singly, in pairs, and in groups, settlers
followed the trail he had blazed. A great land corporation, the
Transylvania Company, emulating the merchant adventurers of earlier
times, secured a huge grant of territory and sought profits in quit
rents from lands sold to farmers. By the outbreak of the Revolution
there were several hundred people in the Kentucky region. Like the older
colonists, they did not relish quit rents, and their opposition wrecked
the Transylvania Company. They even carried their protests into the
Continental Congress in 1776, for by that time they were our "embryo
fourteenth colony."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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