By S. E. Forman
In 1636 Thomas Hooker, the pastor of the church at Newton (now Cambridge), moved with his entire congregation to the banks of the Connecticut and founded the city of Hartford. Hooker did not like the way the Puritans acted in matters of government. He thought religious affairs and state affairs in the Massachusetts Bay Colony were bound too closely together. He thought also that more people ought to be allowed to vote than were allowed that privilege in the Puritan colony. Besides, was not the rich valley of the Connecticut a better place for homes than the rocky and barren hills around Boston? Hooker and his followers took their wives and children with them. They carried their household goods along and drove their cattle before them. As they moved overland through the roadless forests of Massachusetts, they took the first step in that great Westward Movement which continued for more than two hundred years and which did not come to an end until the far-off Pacific was reached.
At the opening of the eighteenth century in almost every colony there were great areas of vacant land, and colonial growth for many years consisted mainly in bringing these lands under cultivation and filling them with people. This development necessarily took a westward course, for if the English colonists went far to the north they met the French, and if they went far to the south they met the Spanish. In New York the Westward Movement between 1700 and 1740 was very slow, because the progress of the English was opposed not only by the French, but also by powerful tribes of Iroquois Indians. But in the western part of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and North Carolina the Indians were less troublesome and there were as yet no French at all. So it was from Pennsylvania and from the southern colonies that the settlers first began to move in considerable numbers toward the West.
Savannah in 1741.
The first important westward movement of population began with the settlement of the beautiful valley which lies between the Blue Ridge and the Alleghany Mountains and which is drained by the Shenandoah River. In 1716 Governor Spotswood of Virginia, with fifty companions, entered this valley near the present site of Port Republic, and with much ceremony took possession of the region in the name of King George of England. His purpose in pushing out into the valley was to head off the French, who at the time had already taken possession of the country west of the Alleghanies and were pushing east as fast as they dared.
Soon after the expedition of Spotswood the settlement of the Shenandoah began in earnest. First came a few settlers from the older parts of Virginia. Then came large numbers of the Scotch-Irish and Germans from Pennsylvania. These enterprising people by 1730 had crossed the Susquehanna and were making settlements in the Cumberland valley. In 1732 they began to move down into the Shenandoah valley and build rude cabins and plant corn-fields. In a few years so many people—Virginians, Scotch-Irish, and Germans—had settled in the valley that it became necessary for them to have some form of government. So in 1738 Virginia took the matter in hand and organized the Shenandoah region as a county and provided it with a regular government. Thus between 1700 and 1740 the strip of English civilization along the Atlantic seaboard was greatly widened, and the Frontier Line was carried westward over the Blue Ridge Mountains to the eastern base of the Alleghanies.
THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT IN COLONIAL TIMES.
Connecticut and Rhode Island.