CHAPTER III

THE SHENANDOAH COUNTRY AND THE TENNESSEE

THE full intention of the British Government (if indeed it had a real intention), when it proscribed the occupation of the West beyond the sources of the rivers flowing into the Atlantic, is not yet known. There was at least a new feeling of imperial responsibility, and a hope to make the colonies more fruitful. In 1768, for the first time, one of His Majesty's principal secretaries of state was made Secretary of State for the Colonies, and the share of the Board of Trade in colonial government was somewhat lessened. It was the opinion of Washington, whose hopes may have shaped his judgment, that the proclamation was only "a temporary expedient to quiet the minds of the Indians," and one sure to be abandoned "when those Indians consent to our occupying the lands." In the treaties of Fort Stanwix and Hard Labour, the Royal Government accepted cessions of land from the tribes in the country beyond the line, and neither then nor later did it refuse to listen to colonial overtures for the erection of additional provincial establishments in the West.

The history of these projected colonies, the creation of any one of which might have changed the course of American development, throws light upon the lust for lands with which many Americans were inspired. The possibility of their creation for barrier purposes was discussed by Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Pownall, both of whom were members of the Albany Congress of 1754. In the following year, Samuel Hazard of Philadelphia aspired to form a colony abreast of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Carolina, and running from one hundred miles west of Pennsylvania to the Mississippi, and even beyond it. "Charlotiana," to embrace the triangle between the Wabash, the Mississippi, and the Upper Lakes, was discussed at about the same time. The proclamation did not stop the hopeful speculation, and two schemes known by the names of Illinois and Vandalia were under consideration until the Revolu

'F. J. Turner, "Western State Making in the Revolutionary Era," in American His torical Review, vol. 1; G. H. Alden, "New Governments west of the Alleghanies before 1780," in University of Wisconsin Bulletin (Historical Scries, vol. 11), and “The State of Franklin," in American Historical Review, vol. viii.

tion checked their course. These had the support in England of Dr. Franklin who was there as colonial agent, and in the colonies of William Johnson, now Sir William and superintendent of Indian affairs because of his military services. From 1767 to 1772 the various branches of the British Government were pondering whether a petition supported by colonial magnates of such eminence ought to be rejected, and in August of the latter year the Board of Trade was directed to go ahead with the details. The proposed boundaries for Vandalia fix its location southwest of Pennsylvania, with the Ohio at its north, an irregular mountain line between the Fairfax Stone and Cumberland Gap on its south, and the Kentucky River on its west. The transaction went so far that the governor of Virginia was warned not to grant lands in trespass upon the proposed colony, a warning that could not have been needed had the Proclamation of 1763 been vigorously in effect. Independence came before the new charter was issued, leaving Virginia still able to claim the full extent of her own charter boundaries.

While the speculators were thinking in terms of huge provincial grants, the frontier farmers continued steadily at their task of clearing farms. From southwest Pennsylvania they advanced up the Shenandoah and its parallel neighbors into the valley country beyond the Blue Ridge. For half a century after the initial settlements at Harris's Ferry and Harper's Ferry the overflow from Virginia and Pennsylvania, strongly reinforced by immigrant homeseekers, sought out new locations behind the counties of the lowland region. About ninety miles southwest of Harper's Ferry, another gap through the Blue Ridge let in a secondary stream of men who had crossed Virginia along the line of the James River. The organization of Frederick County, with Winchester as its. seat, occurred in 1743. Staunton, the seat of Augusta, held its first court in 1745. And in 1749 Virginia and North Carolina found it profitable to extend their common boundary westward until it reached the Laurel Fork of the Holston.

The Cumberland Mountains form to-day a part of the boundary of Kentucky and Virginia. On either slope their streams drain not into the Potomac basin, but the other way, into the Mississippi. On the west, the Cumberland River here starts its way across Ken

The State historian of New York, Dr. James Sullivan, has recently edited three fine volumes of The Papers of Sir William Johnson (1921), which are particularly rich for the years 1745 to 1774.

tucky to its entrance into the lower Ohio. East of the Cumberland Mountains are the upper tributaries of the Tennessee River, of which the Clinch and Holston are the most imposing. Between the tributaries of the Potomac, flowing northward, and those of the Tennessee and Cumberland flowing southward there is no pronounced watershed to obstruct the course of frontier advance. Easily the pioneers passed along the parallel valley trails, with minor trails entering from east of the Blue Ridge, and with corresponding ways opening west,. where the New River cuts across to a junction with the Great Kanawha, or where the Cumberland Mountains are broken by Cumberland Gap (which is where the southern boundary of Virginia crosses them). As a military measure the Virginia troops crossed the low watershed in 1756, and descended the Holston to a point some twenty-five miles below the present site of Knoxville, where they built Fort Loudoun. For the same reasons Fort Prince George on the Savannah, near its head, was constructed in the same year. The settlements were well in the rear of these outposts when they were planted, and Fort Loudoun could not be held with the troops available. But with the return of peace, the military trails became the roads of entry for the people.3

Virginians dominated in this expansion of settlement, as was natural because of their situation, but it is impossible to overlook the North Carolinians who joined the march after it came abreast of their own colony. The great difference between the relation of North Carolina to the mountain colonies, and that of Virginia, is that the settlements of North Carolina had not ascended the eastern slopes of the mountains. In Virginia by 1760 the seaboard plantations merged gradually into those of the up-country, and these in turn were continuous up to the Blue Ridge. In North Carolina there was a broad expanse of unoccupied land between the main colony and the tributaries of the Tennessee River.

The development of county government in Virginia and North Carolina kept uneven pace with the need for it among the border settlements. Heretofore there had often been a lapse of several years after the legal creation of a county before its first officers qualified. Now there were frequently many settlers and a need to

This is the theme of Theodore Roosevelt, The Winning of the West (1889–96), romantically written, with emphasis upon the heroic virtues. Archibald Henderson, Conquest of the Old Southwest (1920), traverses much of the same ground, helped by the mass of monographic literature that has appeared since Roosevelt wrote, and inspired by family enthusiasm and a real literary zest.

register land titles and probate estates before the colonial legislatures became aware of the fact. Wherever it happened that a group of settlers outran the operation of established law there was a tendency for them to frame some kind of legal institutions for themselves. They were never embarrassed by isolation, though sometimes exasperated by apparent neglect. The Pilgrim group on the Mayflower in 1620 set a precedent that their successors followed in unnumbered cases. Along the southern borders of the Virginia-Carolina valleys there were four clearly defined experiments of this sort in the fifteen years after the treaties of Fort Stanwix and Hard Labour. In their earlier phases they seem to represent a protest against colonial or imperial attempts to restrict their spread; later they are merged in the aftermath of the American Revolution.

The Watauga settlement was made about 1769, and gave rise to an early exhibition of the frontier aptitude for self-government. It began in the normal expansion from what is now the southwest corner of Virginia into what has become the northeast corner of Tennessee. The Watauga River is an eastern tributary of the Holston, making a junction with the latter a little south of the Virginia line. In the absence of surveys, the settlers picked the choice locations for themselves before they learned that they were encroaching upon the lands of North Carolina. They claimed their title under the Virginia cabin right, by which one cabin and an acre of corn gave foundation for a claim to four hundred acres. In 1771 and 1772 the settlement grew in size because of the entry of a rebellious group of North Carolina colonists who had been on the losing side at the battle of the Alamance.

The factions in North Carolina politics that produced this insurrection, with its culminating conflict on May 16, 1771, show a social cleavage. Similar classes prevailed in nearly every other colony, and tended sharply to divide the people according to their property interests. The first made counties in a colony gained representation in the assembly, and used their votes to prevent the extension of representation after the growth of the community made additional counties inevitable. There was everywhere

John S. Bassett, "The Regulators of North Carolina," in American Historical Association, Annual Report, 1894; C. H. Lincoln, The Revolutionary Movement in Pennsylvania (1901); William A. Schaper. "Sectionalism and Representation in South Carolina," in American Historical Association, Annual Report, 1900; Charles H. Ambler, Sectionalism in Virginia from 1776 to 1861 (1910); are among the most useful studies of this social section

irregular and discriminating representation; but rarely was it as pronounced as in North Carolina where the original counties clung to their five assemblymen, allowing the new counties only two. The resentment against this injustice was increased by questions of land ownership. The strip of territory along the Virginia line belonged to Earl Granville who was loath to grant land titles, but preferred a quit-rent. The taxes levied by the province, when added to the claims of Granville, made a burden heavier than the frontiersmen were willing to carry. The injustice was aggravated by a loose method of accounting, and a wasteful fee system that made it possible for the sheriffs to abuse their position to their private profit. The remoteness of the courts, and the cost of attending them, gave additional grievance. The result was mob violence - a real peasants' revolt-in which the regulators tried to improve their situation by force. In retaliation the provincial government took punitive measures against the frontiersmen that culminated in the pitched and disastrous battle of the Alamance. The "regulation" was ended in blood and the leaders of the regulators were hanged. Many of their followers left North Carolina in indignation, and shifted to the Watauga district, only to find that here too they were under the jurisdiction of the native colony.

The participants in the movement into new lands were gener ally unimportant men, whose very names can be determined only after a more careful search of title deeds and recorded wills than any historian has yet made. Often only partly literate, or worse, they left few formal records of their life, and their monument in tilled fields tells nothing of their personality except as it reveals their stubborn industry. In the Watauga, however, two men stand forth whose names personify the movement in which they led. James Robertson, whose origin appears to have been Scotch, was under thirty years of age when he took the lead in the group. Born in Virginia, in Brunswick County in 1742, he drifted south into North Carolina when Raleigh was still unfounded, and Wake County, in which it now exists, was an active frontier. The roughand-tumble of border existence here is suggested by the fact that within two years of its creation the court of Wake County had to do justice twice in the case of ears bitten off in personal encounters. Here too was a center of the violence of the regulators, although Robertson left the community before the battle of the Alamance. In the Watauga region he was a natural leader, with a fame little dimmed by that of his great associate, John Sevier.