The Conquest of a Continent; or, The Expansion of Races in America

by Madison Grant

While the eastern community was growing, settlement began in the central portion of the State in what is known as the Cumberland district. This was for years almost isolated from the neighboring settlement to the east, the center of which was Nashville, while the eastern settlement headed in Knoxville, which became the capital.

During the Revolution the settlement of this territory continued steadily until the State had 10,000 or 12,000 inhabitants. North Carolina made liberal allotments of Tennessee lands to its soldiers who had fought in the Revolution, and this continued the stream of immigration. By the time that President Washington was inaugurated the eastern section of the State had some 30,000 inhabitants, the Cumberland district about 7000, and both were growing steadily. Western Tennessee was still Indian territory.

The population of Tennessee in 1790 was typical of the upland population of the South in its racial make-up. It is definitely a mere extension of the western part of North Carolina, though its inhabitants were often born in Virginia, and to a less extent in other States, as was true of the inhabitants of North Carolina itself.

In the Mississippi Valley at this period there were a few settlements established under the French and Spanish regimes, which had attracted a miscellaneous crowd of adventurers and traders. Since this territory did not become part of the United States until the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, it will be dealt with more fully in the next section. In this period we are dealing with comparatively small numbers for this entire region.

Of nearly 4,000,000 people, both white and black, in the United States in 1790, at the time of the first census, 95 per cent were living east of the Appalachians.

In territories of the present United States other than the settlements already covered, there were three little islands of population. One lay along the Mississippi in southwest Illinois, a remnant of the old French settlements with some English and American additions. A second was around Vincennes, Indiana, with a population like that of the Illinois settlements but more strongly American. A third was in Ohio, where settlement was just beginning, the first serious colonization being that made in 1788 at Marietta by New Englanders.

Although the Revolution grew out of economic and political causes, it represents primarily one of those costly and unfortunate internecine wars in which the Nordics have been prone to indulge at intervals for two or three thousand years, and which have done so much to weaken them as a race.

Had there been no complications the effects of the Revolutionary War might have been less permanent. Winner and loser would have lived on terms of peace with each other, as they did in England after the Civil War and in the United States after the Rebellion. But the hard feeling that goes with any conflict was intensified by several factors. The Ulster Scots, in particular, had reason to feel themselves badly treated by England, and they carried into, and through, the Revolution, an unusual animosity. This feeling of resentment was shared and kept alive by many other Americans through the injudicious behavior in Canada of a number of the English governments after the Revolution.

The tradition of one hundred and fifty years of common action of the colonies and the mother country in opposing France was forgotten overnight and a sentimental attitude for which there was astonishingly little actual basis led to a glorification of France and everything French for a generation or more—an attitude that has not entirely disappeared to this day. The antagonism toward Great Britain was maintained for political reasons during the next century mostly by Irish agitators. This ill feeling prevented the close co-operation between the two greatest sections of the English-speaking races, which would have meant so much for world peace and harmony, and which would have laid the basis for a closer co-operation of all the nations of predominant Nordic stock, in the interest of the progressive evolution of mankind. A first object of statesmanship should now be to regain that solidarity of the Nordics, in the interests not merely of world progress, but of the very survival of civilization.

Denominational questions in the United States were scarcely an issue after the Revolution, for the bitter sectarian feeling that had existed earlier was rapidly disappearing, and the Roman Catholics had not yet been able to raise the issue of bigotry, for the country was overwhelmingly Protestant. Of approximately 4,000,000 persons in the United States in 1790, Catholic writers make varying claims running as high as 35,000 or 45,000 persons of their faith. Without stopping to inquire how many of those claimed for Rome were merely nominal adherents, and how many were Negroes, one may remark that at the most, about one American in each one hundred might have had some affiliation with the Roman Church. When the Catholic hierarchy was established for the first time in the United States by the appointment of the Jesuit John Carroll as bishop of Baltimore in 1789, he reported to his superiors that there were about 16,000 Catholics in Maryland, including children and Negroes; something over 7000 in Pennsylvania, some 3000 French around Detroit, and about 4000 scattered through the rest of the country. To this total of 30,000 might be added the unknown but small number of nominal Catholics on the frontier, in the Mississippi Valley, and in other regions where there were no priests to minister to them, and where their children, at least, were fairly sure to grow up outside the church. It is probably accurate to say that there never has been a nation which was so completely and definitely Protestant as well as Nordic as was the United States just after the American Revolution.