Review of the Book:

Wilderness At Dawn: The Settling of the North American Continent
by Ted Morgan

Edward J. Dodson

[Published by Simon & Schuster 1993. This review was writte in July 2014]

I first read Ted Morgan's remarkable book a decade ago. Earlier this year, while collecting notes for a lecture I was preparing on the great landed families of the colonial period in North America, I was pulled by the story he told to give the book a second reading. The experience did not disappoint. Morgan's choice of details and his writing style stimulate the reader in a manner similar to what one experiences reading a great novel. In the Introduction he informs his reader of the approach taken:

"What I would like to do in this book is tell the story of an empty continent filling with people, from the time of the first arrivals before recorded history. This will not be the 'Great Man' version of events, but the story of the men and women, red, black, and white, who were in North America ahead of the great men." [p.11]

Because the human occupation of North America began so much later than on the Eurasian continent or that of the African continent, the patterns of a settled existence were delayed until the natural environment could no longer support a growing population without the adoption of enhanced methods of food production. A need to migrate rather than the call of adventure brought Asians to North America. As Ted Morgan states:

"These men were not explorers seeking a new world, but panic-stricken refugees escaping a natural cataclysm." [p.23]

For thousands of years our footprint on the North American continent was light. We were relatively few number and our inability to produce a surplus a more powerful circumstance than our ignorance of what was required by our environment to support life. As Ted Morgan explains:

"They didn't deplete their resources, because they weren't equipped to take more than they could use. Storage facilities were nonexistent. They seemed to have an instinct for keeping their population in balance with their food supply. …They didn't settle in villages that grew into towns, and they didn't have the epidemics that decimated the crowded and unsanitary cities of Europe."[p.33]

All that changed with the introduction of farming:

"Farmers are in a different relationship with nature, because they are working the land instead of taking what it naturally offers. …The forager's attitude toward nature is deferential; he is grateful for its bounty and leaves the landscape alone. But the farmer's attitude is territorial; the piece of land he works becomes his field, the crop his crop, grown with the sweat of his brow. Instead of hunting, he must learn to assume a defense role, as land disputes arise and marauders raid planted fields."[p.35]

From this point on in the history of every group of people, "random skirmishes of hunter-gathers become regular cycles of war and peace over boundaries."[p.37] Or, perhaps even more accurately than the author's choice of words, what occurs are temporary periods of nonviolence rather than real peace. Morgan goes on to introduce the reader to the first Old World explorers and adventurers of the late fifteenth century. His is a description of groups of people in almost continuous conflict over territory, over resources, over commerce, and over other peoples who could be enslaved and their labor cheaply exploited. The reader is presented with just enough of the details of the stories of Christopher Columbus and those who came westward in his wake to appreciate the hardships they endured as well as the consequences of the intolerant world views they universally embraced. Morgan reminds his readers that written histories come for the most part from the victors:

"The history of America's settlement has been written and taught from an Anglocentric point of view, partly because England ousted Spain and France, partly because many of the early entradas concentrated on plunder rather than settlement, slaughtering Indians as they went."[p.88]

Spain expanded its territorial empire in the Western hemisphere largely at the expense of the peoples they encountered because they were found to have access to gold and silver deposits. The Spanish reach into North America extended only to small settlements in Florida and New Mexico before being challenged by the French and English. As these and other European powers fought one another in an endless series of wars, they sought alliances with the indigenous tribal peoples who controlled the territory just beyond that occupied by European colonizers. Providing the tribal peoples with modern weapons and supplies pulled them into conflicts the ultimate result of which was never in their self-interest. Morgan's description of the French efforts as half-hearted and plagued by mismanagement will be new to few readers who have studied this historical period. One is quick to realize that the French strategy of trying to control a vast interior territory from a few settlements along the St. Lawrence River would eventually falter:

"Quebec wasn't attractive to farmers, because the growing season was a brief 150 days, and fruit trees would die when temperatures dropped below zero. In addition, the St. Lawrence was frozen solid for three and a half months .. so that the colony was cut off from France at least six months a year. … Given these circumstances, it's understandable that enthusiasm for New France in the mother country was lukewarm. People didn't go to Quebec voluntarily, they were sent, as landless laborers impressed into the army, or refugees from the poorhouse."[101]

The arrival of Europeans and the what they brought with them - manufactured domestic goods, the rifle, alcoholic spirits and diseases for which the indigenous peoples had no resistance - quickly destroyed the tribal peoples way of living developed over thousands of years. Within just one or two generations essential survival skills were lost. The changing attitude toward one animal, the beaver, reveals much:

"Using them only for their own needs, the Indians hunted them sparingly. But now, offered European goods like kettles and knives, they abandoned their conservationist principles and hunting rituals, moving form a subsistence economy of balance with their resources to a trade economy of supply and demand. …To improve their standard of living, the Indians overhunted."[103]

A chain reaction of destruction followed. When the beaver population was removed, habitat for other game animals was destroyed. Without game animals the tribes removed themselves voluntarily to be replaced by European farmers, or they fought wars that only temporarily halted the encroachment of Europeans, while their own numbers declined and could not be rebuilt. The thought of sharing the land never entered into the thinking of the Europeans. Morgan quotes an Algonquin neighbor of the English in Jamestown, naively saying: "Now they have all the land they could possibly want."[p.123] Few of the leaders of the tribal peoples understood the extent to which the hunger for land brought wave after wave of Old World migrants to North America.

What Ted Morgan provides from this point on in the book is a detailed exploration into the methods by which the continent was carved up and sold off. North America offered the greatest opportunity in history to the largest number of people to enrich themselves as land speculators and land owners. Under the head-right system, colonists from England - including indentured servants -- gained the opportunity to claim and clear five hundred acres of "Virginia" land. A steady supply of new arrivals replaced the many who died en route or within the first year or two from disease, starvation or at the hands of the local tribal warriors. Attacks provoked counterattacks, resulting in the rapid depopulation of tribes from the regions of European occupation. In this way, the James River region was cleared of its original inhabitants by 1624. And, already, a landed elite had arisen:

"There was a rising class of wealthy planters. …No family of planters was so poor that it did not have hogs and poultry, and malt and barley to make good ale; few had to drink water, and the better sort were well furnished with sack and aquavit. …Indentured servants who had served their terms could obtain land at favorable rates and join the plantation society. …With the easy acquisition of land, Virginians became upwardly mobile, except for the slaves."[p.132]

Everywhere up and down the Atlantic coast, Europeans began to arrive, establish settlements where natural harbors existed and along inland rivers, then move to the interior. The reception they received from the tribal people they encountered varied. Plague of some sort decimated the tribal peoples of Cape Cod before arrival of the Pilgrims, which enabled these Europeans to establish themselves without opposition. However, even the Pilgrims could not resist the lure of land. The beginning practice of treating the land as a commons was soon abandoned, in favor of "a free-market economy, assigning a lot to each household, with an acre per head."[p.144] Within a few years the colonists were spreading out beyond the town to establish larger farmsteads. Morgan tells us the early leaders were "confronted with two of the quandaries of the American experience:

"One, as long as there was land to move to, you could not get people to stay put. Two, it was impossible to maintain ethnic or religious purity in a country where all sorts of new people kept arriving."[p.149]

What early political theorists described as the land question throughout the Old World, where in every society a landed aristocracy held almost all land and took in rents from peasants and tenant farmers, also took hold in North America. The differences were still considerable, but they were differences in degree only. Nobles influential at court received large grants of land, portions of which were sold to individuals, to religious and ethnic groups seeking to start anew in North America, and to mercantile companies and land speculators. In this game, corruption and fraud were commonplace, and not only the Europeans adapted to their new circumstances:

"There [arose] a kind of fatalism, as if the Indians had accepted the idea of being cheated out of their land. In fact, the Dutch were fairly scrupulous in their land deals, and after 1630 insisted on written deeds, because of the Indian habit of wanting to sell the same piece of real estate more than once."[p.156]

Actually, as Morgan soon points out, the tribal peoples never fully grasped the European concept of land ownership. The tribes held territory, to be sure, and defended their territorial sovereignty against invaders, but they did not think of nature as a commodity to be bought and sold. Morgan writes that the signing of contracts and the issuance of deeds "meant nothing to the Indians,"

"… whose concept of land wasn't based on ownership but on use; the land belonged to those people who hunted and farmed on it."[p.171]

And yet, for all of the reasons already stated, the wilderness was cleared of its tribal inhabitants and transformed into an ever-moving "hinterland" of growing towns surrounded by cultivated farmland. In the process, the unique character of the Europeans as Americans quickly developed:

"In the hinterland, there was a strict class system in which everyone had an assigned status, whereas the frontier was egalitarian. Servants became landowners, and women ran schoolhouses and became, through repeated marriages, considerable landowners. The involvement of townspeople in government was greater on the frontier, because the population was thin and the offices were numerous."[p.186]

Here, Morgan alludes to an important means of wealth acquisition: intermarriage. The high death rate of adults at relatively young ages created many opportunities to expand one's holdings or acquire the landed property of a newly-made widow. The book is filled with short essays describing the experiences of the diverse peoples whose combined efforts and experiences changed - or at least redirected for nearly two centuries -- the course of history. The vast diversity of experience leads Morgan to a romantic concluding assessment, one that the very events and trends he documents challenges:

"America was a smoking test tube, a braying infant, a blank page; it was change made palpable, change glorified, change as a stated goal, fluid, undetermined, unfixed, defying the logic of the centuries, observing its distant horizon lines, a ship that had strayed from the fleet and was off on its own uncharted course."[p.491]

This promise that North America offered came closest to reality in just one of the British colonies: Pennsylvania. One could argue this was in spite of its Quaker origins rather than because of the Quaker presence, although the freedom to practice one's faith without interference by the government was a significant break with Old World norms. William Penn was mostly an absentee colonizer, and John Blackwell, the person he appointed to run things in his absence, departed after only one year, writing of the Quakers:

"Each prays for his neighbor on First Days [Sundays] and then preys on him the other six."[p.283]

What the Quakers did understand was how to do business profitably. They comprised the early propertied elite of the growing port city of Philadelphia, and with the rapid influx of people and commerce the land they held climbed in value. The story of the "walking purchase" by which the Penn family acquired from the Delaware tribe a huge tract of land in the northeastern part of Pennsylvania is repeated by Morgan as a classic example of how tribal peoples were removed by quasi-legal means. The Penns were also in conflict over dominion of the lands west of the Susquehanna River all the way to the Ohio River, claimed as well by Virginia (and by the French). Even so, investors were already looking west even though numerous tribal groups populated the region:

"In 1747, a group of prominent Virginians, including the Fairfaxes, Lees, and Washingtons, had formed the Ohio Company and petitioned the crown for five hundred thousand acres in what is today western Pennsylvania."[p.315]

Morgan devotes about ten pages to the role played by George Washington in the events leading to the French and Indian War, and to his military service under General Edward Braddock, whose army panicked and was decimated by a French and Indian force on his way to take Fort Duquesne. Despite this and subsequent military disasters, British forces emerged victorious over the poorly-supplied and undermanned French. Morgan's description of the 1763 treaty is apt:

"The Treaty of Paris was like that point in a card game where a new deck is brought in. The consequences were far-reaching. For one thing, the British, having got rid of the French for the benefit of the Americans, would soon outwear their welcome. …More North American territory changed hands at the Treaty of Paris than through any other international agreement before or since."[pp.337-338]

Only the presence of the warriors aligned with the Ottawa chief Pontiac slowed the migration of European-Americans from the "crowded" coastal regions and into the newly-opened territories. British authority attempted to stem this migration by law, but the power to enforce the measure did not exist. Within a few years after departure of the French, a land office opened in the rapidly growing town that became Pittsburgh. On its first day of business,

"… three thousand buyers stormed the office… Within four months, a million acres had been sold."[p.348]

What the historian Charles Andrews called the period of salutary neglect was ending for British subjects in North America. Not only had the war against France created a crushing national debt, the vast new territory added to the empire had to be governed and defended. Why should the revenue for these necessary measures not come from those who most directly benefited? asked Britain's ruling elite. As many as one-third of Britain's colonial subjects saw things rather differently:

"Americans had made the land their own by fighting for it. England had won Canada with American help, but Americans had won their own country as well, and now they had to win it again."[p.369]

By the deliberating process of the two Continental Congresses a critical mass of opposition to British rule and occupation emerged. Morgan reminds us of the hopeful sentiment expressed by Patrick Henry:

"The distinctions between Virginians, Pennsylvanians, New Yorkers, are no more. I am not a Virginian but an American."[369]

In reality,

"This was not a statement of fact but a rallying cry, for there were plenty of distinctions. But there was also a common purpose."[p.369]

The story of the war for independence is filled with heroics, atrocities, profiteering, suffering, the compromising of principles and of widespread want. Neither the British nor the new American government had the power to stem the flood of people into the frontier wilderness. With independence gained, the Congress of the United States was faced with the challenge of bringing governance to this vast territory:

"Like an heir to a great fortune, the Congress acquired a public domain requiring management. This vast and growing capital of government-owned land was the key difference between the United States and other countries. The means of disposal, perhaps more than anything else, would determine the nation's character. In America, the history of land distribution is more instructive than the history of the battles. Behind most events, there is a little voice whispering, 'Cheap land, cheap land, cheap land', and in the modulation of that voice much can be learned."[p.405]

A committee headed by Thomas Jefferson drafted what became the Land Ordinance of 1785, establishing the "township" as the territorial jurisdiction for local government and the means by which land would be sold:

"Purchase [of land within a township] would be at public auction, with the lowest bid a dollar an acre, and payment in cash. …With this one decision on the division of land into townships and sections, [the Congress] determined what kind of country America would be. It would not be a country of great estates and tenant farmers. It would not be like Europe, where only kings, the nobility, and the church could own land. It would be country where anybody could own land, a pie with millions of slices, a country where the buying and selling of acreage was a simple as a day's shopping."[p.406]

Morgan does not stop to reflect on how things played out after the founding generation established our fundamental system of property law and taxation. He quickly moves on to describe the process by which this vast territory was surveyed and disposed of by a government desperate for revenue and heavily influenced by politically-connected land speculators. At the same time, the war had decimated many of the tribes as far west as the Ohio River Valley and dealt a death blow to the once powerful Iroquois League, the majority of whom had aligned themselves with the British. Treaties signed between the United States government and the tribes were ignored by settlers. The tribal peoples faced a very dark future:

"The tribes had lost their self-reliance and become dependent on the white man for trade goods; they were unable to make their own guns and ammunition. As the dispenser of trade goods, the white man had the means of obtaining land. There was no need to go to war to take Indian land when it could be bought for a pittance. But the question remained of what to do with the Indians once their land had been acquired."[p.426]

No boundary line between the races could be enforced. Incursions by settlers into any lands allocated to the tribal people brought on certain, if brief, warfare, always resulting in the removal of the surviving "Indians" to yet another distant location. "The tribes were 'nations' allowed to negotiate with only one other nation - the United States."[p.428] No practical means of sharing the land was seriously contemplated, although some tribes did turn to agriculture and the raising of domesticated animals. One important part of the story Morgan omits is that of the Cherokee nation's efforts to secure a future by adopting the cultural norms and political organization of the whites. Even those who expressed concern over the verdict of history were resigned to the flow of events. Morgan records this comment by Henry Knox in a letter to Anthony Wayne:

"If our modes of population and war destroy the tribes, the disinterested part of mankind and posterity will be apt to class the effect of our conduct and that of the Spaniards in Mexico and Peru together."[p.435]

Not even the great Shawnee warrior-statesman Tecumseh was able even slow the influx of white Americans into land still occupied by indigenous peoples. Tecumseh went down fighting rather than accept a future without sovereignty or dignity. Black Americans also suffered the absence of both sovereignty and dignity with far less capacity to fight for what was rightfully theirs. The experience of black Americans was varied, of course, and Morgan tells us about a man named Caesar, born into slavery in New York in 1737 and because of the laws enacted to liberate enslaved people and prohibit slavery Caesar ended up as "the last person to die a slave north of the Mason-Dixon Line, in 1852, at the age of 115."[p.491]

Morgan captures the feeling of optimism in the American System shared by white Americans, an optimism that was already subject to challenge even in the early nineteenth century:

"These years saw the rise of an American personality. …This new race rejected Europe, and turned west instead of east. When they looked west, they saw a seemingly infinite abundance of land, where they could settle and become Americans, liberated from the restraints and conventions of Europe. Here would be none of the privileges and inequalities of the old order, which were all founded on land scarcity. Like corn or wheat, democracy was a crop that sprouted from the ground."[p.483]

What few foresaw was the speed with which the frontier disappeared, and as a consequence the disappearance of the nation's "highest expression of egalitarianism."[p.493] With each passing year, the system of landed privilege that drove so many from the Old World was to become a very real threat to the promise of democracy for the people of the United States of America.