1775 (32 page)

Over the next decade, changes in the Indian Boundary were mostly minor. In Virginia, despite promises of land to French and Indian War veterans and the efforts of the Ohio Company, the Indian Boundary was
not moved north or west of the Ohio River. The only major change, following the Fort Stanwix cession in 1768, was to open up eastern Kentucky lands abutting Virginia.
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As we saw in
Chapter 4
, the hopes and frustrations of Virginia’s land speculators became a driving force for revolution. The Indian Boundary was a related issue.

In North Carolina, a new Indian Boundary was redrawn
east
of the Proclamation Line in 1767 to reassure the Cherokee, even though it put thousands of recent settlers on shaky ground, west of lawful occupancy. According to the principal historian of these twists and turns, “here in the frontier beyond the North Carolina-Cherokee segment of the Southern Indian Boundary Line more than anywhere else along its great length…[the] line seemed to play a crucial role in determining the allegiance of a large group of frontiersmen in the Revolution.” To another chronicler, the line “did more than anything else to alienate the borderers.”
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In South Carolina, however, the border agreed on by the Cherokee and provincial officials at the Congress of Augusta in 1763 was slowly but significantly moved back into Cherokee country, which pleased settlers. The colony’s two-year war with the Cherokee had ended somewhat equivocally in 1761, and subsequent border conferences between 1766 and 1773 resulted in small additional Cherokee land concessions and further white incursions into Indian hunting grounds.
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Circumstances in the border region soon pitted some white Carolinians against others. The firming up of the Indian Boundary, by one analysis, explained the rapid emergence of backcountry’s vigilante-type Regulator movement. “The Dividing Line between the Cherokees and North and South Carolina was set between 1765 and 1768, and the South Carolina Regulation began in 1767…once the boundary between the Carolinians and their most threatening external adversary had been fixed, colonial leading men could address enemies within their own society.” According to colonial historian Tom Hatley, these included vagrants,
banditti,
horse thieves, runaway servants and slaves, and the like.
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From Virginia to Georgia, boundary modifications were major events, affecting frontier residents, surveyors, squatters, land company investors, provincial assemblies, and militia officers alike. At least one of the king’s ministers also paid close attention—the Earl of Hillsborough, who served as American secretary between 1768 and 1772. A huge landholder in Protestant northern Ireland, Hillsborough was also a long-standing alarm sounder about emigration to North America, which he wanted to halt. A government report in 1773 estimated that during the prior five years or so, Ulster had “been drained of one fourth of its trading cash and the like proportion of the manufacturing people” by transatlantic emigration.
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Back in 1753, Hillsborough had proposed—and Parliament had quickly rejected—a census in Britain to establish a basis for deciding when emigration should be blocked or allowed. Even at that early date, both George Washington and Benjamin Franklin had come to see the Irish peer as a dangerous enemy—Washington noted his “malignant disposition towards Americans.”
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Few issues engaged Washington more than threats to America’s westward expansion.

Officials had undertaken just one head count related to the southern backcountry. In 1755, John Stuart’s Indian Department had prepared a detailed survey of how many “gun-men”—musket or rifle-bearing warriors—the various Cherokee, Catawba, Creek, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Alabama tribal groups could put in the field (some 10,000).
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For various reasons, including the fur trade and minimizing defense costs, government policy implicitly favored the tribes and preferred to keep land-hungry Americans east of the Appalachians.

No record seems to have been kept of the influx of white settlers. Neither camp, British officials nor colonial plotters, had compiled or sought to make use of the frontier settlement detail displayed in
map 7
. Despite London’s fear of population growth, no grand strategic memorandum pondered the political and military implications, which abounded. Could cutting off British emigration to North America succeed? If the frontier could not be held back and the population of British North America reached 5 million by 1790, didn’t that argue for some kind of home rule in which the Americans paid for their own defense? Even the British military plan that coalesced in 1775 around reinvading the thirteen colonies from Canada down New York’s Champlain-Hudson corridor wound up stumbling almost as badly over out-of-date demographics as over flawed coordination in London.

To the dismay of generals whose images of America were time frozen in 1757 or 1760, large numbers of New England backcountry settlers had pushed farther west. General John Burgoyne’s later surrender at Saratoga in October 1777 was previewed months earlier when a major detachment of his force was overwhelmed near current-day Bennington, Vermont, and forced to surrender by flocking New England volunteers and militiamen. In a letter to Lord George Germain, Burgoyne, with verbal flair befitting
an amateur dramatist, later acknowledged that the Hampshire Grants had become a wasps’ nest: “A country unpeopled and most unknown [in] the last war…[it] now abounds in the most active and most rebellious race of the continent, and hangs like a gathering storm upon my left.”
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By contrast, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were widely informed, at least about their own colony’s vast hinterland. Jefferson’s father, a cartographer as well as a planter, had collaborated in the Fry-Jefferson map of 1755, which drew in detail western Virginia’s frontier and borderlands.
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We have seen how Virginia and South Carolina militia leaders gained wartime experience of their frontiers in 1761 and 1774; New Englanders, for their part, had cut military roads and freighted provisions northward for generations.

Of course, many of the seaboard merchants, lawyers, and gentry who led the Revolution in its early stages had only middling acquaintance with the backcountry in their own provinces and knew little about backcountries elsewhere. For example, many of the coastal North Carolinians in the forefront of the 1775–1776 opposition to British policy had also officered in the front ranks of the militia led by Royal Governor William Tryon when he crushed several thousand backcountry insurgents at the Battle of Alamance in May 1771. Not a few beaten farmers remembered the tidewater Whigs as bitterly as they did Tryon.

For all of these reasons, backcountry districts in roughly half of the thirteen colonies presented an internal challenge to Revolutionary leaders in 1775. Historians have focused on the South, but as
map 6
makes clear, there was also a northern backcountry, from Maine to the Mohawk Valley. A “middle” backcountry would have centered on Pennsylvania. Portions of its northeast were being contested by Connecticut even as Virginia claimed and occupied western territory around the Forks of the Ohio.

Backcountry discontents varied from colony to colony, reflecting the diverse origins of the migrants as well as their varied reasons for relocating between 1760 and 1775. Building a sense of community took time, and abusive, distant, or corrupt officials made poor relations worse. On top of which, not a few new arrivals were fleeing debt, harsh masters, court orders, or military service.

Especially below the Mason-Dixon Line, description of the inflow as a “stampede” hardly exaggerates. Between 1720 and 1780, about 49,000 square miles of territory west of Virginia’s Blue Ridge were settled, and of these, 32,000 square miles were occupied only during the two decades
between 1760 and 1780.
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To Bailyn, this phenomenon represented one of American history’s blind spots: “If, as seemed likely in 1771 and 1772, the struggle between Britain and her American colonies had been peacefully resolved and people had been free to concentrate on other major issues of the day, history would have recorded more clearly than it has the importance of a remarkable development of the 1760s and 1770s that was temporarily cut off by the Revolution…an extraordinary flood of immigration to British mainland North America, and closely associated with that, a sudden and immense spread of settlement in the backcountry of the coastal colonies and in the trans-Appalachian West.” Bailyn’s own encyclopedic survey,
Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of Revolution,
has helped to remedy the statistical neglect.
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The political yeast, however, also warrants attention.

For the Carolinas and Georgia, the great influx obviously affected the choice of loyalties in the pre-Revolutionary era. Lesser effects were felt in Virginia. For that matter, even across the roof of New England—through Maine and upper New Hampshire and the Hampshire Grants that became Vermont—growth ratios resembled the beanstalk effects in the Carolinas. The raw numbers and cultural upheaval were less, though, because northern New England’s great population explosion followed the Revolution.

Among all the volatile backcountries, center stage during the early 1770s went to the ballooning hinterlands of the Carolinas, with their attendant mixture of corruption, lawlessness, itinerant evangelists, hardworking families, and so-called Regulators. The warmer piedmont of South Carolina and Georgia beckoned a partly Celtic culture enthused over reports that pigs and even cattle could overwinter out of doors on acorns and grass. Flimsy cabin walls would suffice, and corn liquor was cheap. Generations of college students have absorbed the stereotype-laden portrait in
The Carolina Backcountry on the Eve of the Revolution,
compiled from the journals of Anglican preacher Charles Woodmason.
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As Woodmason elaborated, with disdain and sarcasm, this semianarchy extended to religion. Churches were few and far between. Denominational differences, revealing and important, were only loosely mapped. A score of Presbyterian congregations and churches planted in the migrations of the 1730s, 1740s, and 1750s to Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley and south into the Carolinas were the rock-hewn and education-conscious oldsters of dissenting religion in the southern backcountry. Located along the Great Wagon
Road from Pennsylvania, some attracted relatively learned ministers. Schools usually followed, and sometimes colleges.

Below Virginia, new Anglican churches in the southern backcountry were few. The small clapboard churches of the evangelical denominations generally lacked settled ministers. Hardly any were on hand to perform marriages or baptisms. Itinerants carried much of the burden. Many districts were unchurched, and denominational loyalties were fluid. Even many Scotch-Irish Presbyterians fell away.

The predominant religious thrust in both backcountries, northern and southern, was insurgent and evangelical—biblically flavored, salvationist, keening, and body shaking. It dissented not simply from the religious establishments of England and Scotland (Presbyterian) but from the churches of educated New England (Congregational) and the Plantation South (elite, unemotional Anglican). Despite having been founded in the seventeenth century by religious refugees, the Puritan meetinghouses of Massachusetts and Connecticut now found that they, in turn, had created refugees from their own middle-class culture and university-educated clergy. Many of the disenchanted fled to “Separate” or revivalist Baptist churches.

From the Green Mountains to the Blue Ridge and beyond, the backcountry revivalism of the 1760s and early 1770s extended the Great Awakening into circumstances that were politically as well as theologically unpredictable. Congregational ranks in New England were riven by the rise of evangelical and enthusiastic factions and breakaways. The movements that became Shakers, Universalists, and Free Will Baptists all established footholds in New England during those years, much as Quakers, Baptists, and Ranters gained traction in the 1640s amid the chaos of the English Civil War. By 1777 and 1778, the Revolution in New England had launched small but wild-eyed sects like the Come-Outers and the Merry Dancers, who blazed a lusty path in inland Maine.
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In the Hampshire Grants, political unrest and factionalism were abetted by denominational tumult: Anglicans, Baptists, and Dutch claiming under New York land grants, deists like Ethan Allen, Separates of various hues, Congregationalists akin to those elsewhere in New England, Scottish Covenanters, and many more. Where they can be sorted out, confused politics makes a bit more sense.

The emotional and charismatic dimension of the southern backcountry reached far beyond Baptists. Mystical and pacifist German offshoots of Pennsylvania’s Dunkers had migrated to the hills of southwestern Virginia
and parts of North Carolina. Their behavior in the 1750s discomforted both church Germans and Colonel George Washington, who accused them of consorting with raiding Cherokees.
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A German Lutheran district in the lower South Carolina backcountry was infected in the late 1750s by a so-called Webber heresy, in which some men believed they were God and others the Devil—and killed each other. The public hanging of Jacob Webber, however, reinforced immigrant German distrust of the Charleston elite and gave local pre-Revolutionary politics a Loyalist coloration.
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