I’ve always been amazed by the incredible courage of immigrants. To leave everything behind—every person you know, every aspect of the culture you were born into—and to venture to a new life is a remarkable endeavor. To do so in the 17th Century, to get on some tiny ship to cross an unimaginably vast ocean to move to a continent you know virtually nothing about, is beyond my grasp.
Coming to the New World (putting aside its initial settlers, whose role in the American narrative is an unfortunate one that underlines the idea that it is the victors who get to write the history) depended initially on where you came from. That is, the major original explorers had fairly different agendas. The British mostly wanted people to settle down and create colonies where they would live, the Spanish mostly wanted to find resources and ship them back home, and the French wanted to convert the savages. At least, that’s the simplistic way of understanding the differences in approach of the major players. Those British settlers started with the east coast of North America, originally finding the easiest places to land and inhabit. The French came in from the north, through Canada, coming down to the Mississippi and eventually out through New Orleans, claiming the Louisiana Territory. The Spanish mostly went south. (As an aside, the line of demarcation which separated Spanish lands from Portuguese lands, which was drawn by the Pope, is an interesting construct. That is, the Pope gets to say who gets what when it comes to claiming new lands, which means that new lands are eminently claimable. This line was early on, when only the Iberians were out and about on the ocean. The French and English when their time came said pooh-pooh to the Pope, and that was the end of that, although they happily stuck with the idea of claiming whatever land came their way that wasn’t already claimed by someone else—from Europe that is.)
So mostly our country, at least in the beginning, is settled by the British. That includes Scots and Irish. Our country at that time is this vast unknown place across the ocean. And it comprises land never particularly far from that ocean. But the first move is crossing that ocean, the immigrant experience. All Americans started out as immigrants for the longest time. Different waves from different places followed over the years, but in terms of our study of the myth of the West, let’s stick with the Brits. Immigration is a different subject altogether.
While initially there was certainly interest and curiosity about the rest of this vast continent that settlers were hugging the edges of, there wasn’t a sense that it was part of a nation to come. The original colonies were perceived by their inhabitants as countries, not states. Countries separate from the Mother Country of England, countries separate from each other, although loosely confederated horizontally and vertically. After the Revolution, much arguing took place about what, exactly, these colonies were supposed to be. A literal loose confederation of the states wasn’t working too well, and the more centralized federal idea took hold. In 1787 that federal idea was put on paper, and we became the United States of America. But it was still plural states. These united states, not the United States. At least not in all minds. More than a few souls maintained that their states were their primary polity. It took the Civil War to finally end that idea (although a few on today’s Supreme Court seem as states-rightist as your most rabid CSA politician).
But the sense of the continent, as a whole, belonging to the federated states was something else. States-rightist Thomas Jefferson, of all people, really got the ball rolling on this with the Louisiana Purchase. For a man in debt his whole life, I guess he knew a bargain when he saw one. And he was always partial to French things, and here was a chance for him to get his hands on a really big, really cheap, French thing. Suddenly the idea that we would start moving west became part of our national image. This idea became crystallized as Manifest Destiny, the concept that it was not merely our wish to take over the whole continent, but it was our fate, our destiny. It was what we had to do.
Lewis and Clark were the first serious western tourists. Sacajawea was the first serious tour guide. The pioneers would follow shortly.
to be continued…
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