Читать книгу The Quiet Crisis - Stewart L. Udall - Страница 11
ОглавлениеThomas Jefferson
The land was ours before we were the lands.
—ROBERT FROST
On November 11, 1620, after sixty-six days on the stormy North Atlantic, a small ship hove to off the shores of Cape Cod. It is one of the lasting ironies of American history that the shores that were to be a symbol of hope for countless immigrants aroused deep forebodings in those who first came to stay. Nathaniel Morton, the keeper of the records for the Plymouth Colony, observed the face of the land and the faces of the seventy-three men and twenty-nine women aboard, and made this grim notation:
Besides, what could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wilde beasts and wilde men? And what multitudes of them there were, they knew not: for which way soever they turned their eyes (save upward to Heaven) they could have but little solace or content in respect of any outward objects; for summer being ended, all things stand in appearance with a weatherbeaten face, and the whole country, full of woods and thickets, represented a wilde and savage hew.
Somehow the entire first phase of New World colonization was summed up in this gloomy entry. As the Mayflower drew toward shore, probably all but the hardiest of its passengers were overwhelmed by fear of the wilderness that faced them. The colonists were ill equipped to pioneer. Civilization had robbed them of the primitive arts of their ancestors, and at best they brought with them the limited skills of city artisans and small farmers. Few knew the rudiments of fishing, of using native plants for food, of hunting wild animals, or of building homes in the wilderness. The indispensable colonists were those who knew how to farm, could catch Indian lore or Indian language on the run, and had the knack of making peace with the natives.
Yet frightened and ill prepared as they were, the colonists brought with them three things which would assure their predominance and ultimately change the face of the continent. First, they brought a new technology. One evening the sun going down over the Appalachians set on an age of polished stone; the next morning it rose on an age of iron. From the moment that the settlers won a foothold and set up their first forge, the sweep of American history was certain: the Indians would be subjugated; so, too, would be the land. When the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock they did not even have a saw, but they brought to the American continent Iron Age skills that spelled doom for the Indian way of fife. Once the blacksmiths and gunsmiths set up shop, once the horses and oxen arrived, the ax and gun and wheel would assert their supremacy.
Second, the colonists brought with them a cast of mind that made them want to remake the New World. The Indians could plan only from moon to moon, from season to season, and accepted the world the way they found it, but the newcomers believed they held their destiny in their hands and they planned accordingly. The Pilgrims were men of the Renaissance. Their forebears had developed trial-and-error experimenting into primitive science, and had nurtured the inventor’s gift. They knew how to organize as well, and by harnessing work animals to plow and wheel, they could reap where the Indian could not and could sell their surplus in markets overseas.
And, finally, these Europeans brought with them a concept of land ownership wholly different from the Indians’: fences and formal papers with wax seals attached were its emblems, and it involved exclusive possession of parcels of land. The European with a title to land owned it whole, no matter whose sweat went into farming it; owned it even if he were a hundred or a thousand miles away. It was his to use or misuse as he saw fit; and he wanted to get and hold as much of it as the law—or the King—would allow.
The influence of the settlers on the land was not as great, at first, as the land’s influence on them. As numerous colonies developed along the Atlantic seaboard, the problems and advantages of geography produced different relationships between men and land.
In the South, a warm climate, a wide coastal plain, and rich soil yielded surplus crops to support a leisure class, and led to the development of big plantations and the transplanting of feudal patterns of land ownership. After 1700, the crown and colonial assemblies gave immense grants to men like Lord Fairfax and Lord Granville, on the promise that they would promote settlement. These men led the lives of Old World barons. In 1705, Virginia’s historian, Robert Beverly, described them as “men not minding anything but to be masters of great tracts of land—lords of vast territory.” The plantations were farmed by sharecroppers and tenant farmers under a system which produced exportable surpluses, but impoverished whole generations of families. Even today, in some areas, nearly all titles (including such landmark estates as Mount Vernon and Monticello) are derived from the great colonial proprietors.
The narrow valleys of New England, however, with their stony soil and severe climate were ill suited to the creation of a plantation economy. This was subsistence-farming country, which could be made productive only through the careful and frugal labors of farmers, and there was little agricultural surplus to harvest for foreign ports or to support a feudal society. New Englanders seemed to gain a land of rugged independence from the very adversities they faced. The self-reliance later celebrated by Ralph Waldo Emerson was, in part at least, a by-product of these stony New England farms, and a by-product also of the fierce North Atlantic, where the sailors and whalers of Salem, Gloucester, Nantucket, and New Bedford lived and died.
Yet, along with the pattern of New England individualism, there were strong habits of cooperation, arising partly from the necessities of climate and soil, and partly from the fact that the region was settled by members of religious sects with strong group ties. As a result there developed such cooperative institutions as the town meeting, the community woodlot, and the common pasture. Today the Boston Common is the best-known example of a tradition of common land ownership which developed alongside the idea of individual ownership. The town common was, in a sense, the beginning of the public domain.
It was no accident of history that New England leaders called the Continental Congress into session and fired the shots at Concord Bridge, for it was in New England that men had learned to act together while maintaining their individualism; and it was there that the small farmer and the independent land-holder got a stake in America.
In the Middle Colonies, where the geography combined elements of both New England and the South, there were two kinds of landholding, with the large-estate system predominating. Farther from the seacoast, back in the Appalachian valleys, land ownership was modeled more on the New England pattern. There, beyond the domains of the great landlords, the very abundance of land encouraged the ambitions of immigrant commoners to acquire farms of their own, even as the demands of life in the wild hinterlands blurred old distinctions of class and caste. In the face of wolves, savages and blizzards, skill and comage measured men, and nature was the final arbiter of nobility. The hand of London or Charleston or Williamsburg could not reach into the back country; and if a man took up land in the mountains, who was there to stop him or to tell him how to live? The ideas of independence and free land were always inseparable.
Far in the Pacific Southwest another pattern of land use was developing under the aegis of the Franciscan and Jesuit padres. Of all the Europeans who came to America, these men of faith coveted land least. They came with cattle and seeds and saintliness, to build missions and to baptize. Unlike the Appalachian frontiersmen, the padres regarded the Indians as human beings to be civilized rather than as savages to be killed or subdued. In some areas they aided the natives in developing rude irrigation systems and followed the Indian custom of using land as a common asset—a practice which contrasted sharply with the patterns of individual ownership among the Eastern settlers.
Ultimately it was this system of private landholding, fostering a fierce independence of spirit, that was the undoing of the British rulers. They failed to understand that a virgin land settled by men bent on escaping feudal restraints would require a wholly new set of man-land relationships, and new social and political institutions as well. The frontier expanded and emboldened the thinking of the colonists, and democratic ideas seeped steadily into the dialogue of life. The squatter had no rights against the crown under Anglo-Saxon law, but squatter logic would in due course rule the new continent, overturn ancient laws and customs, and spell out the true meaning of land abundance.
The British failed to reckon the swift pace of American growth or to gauge its influence on the minds of men. Between 1700 and 1776 the population of the British colonies jumped nearly ninefold from 350,000 to 3,000,000, and Benjamin Franklin forecast that within a century there would be more English-speaking people in America than in the British Isles.
Most of these immigrants were land-hungry men. The vast stretches of unused land quickly convinced them that men strong enough to clear a thicket were entitled to own land outright. The mood of the newcomers was voiced by the Scotch-Irish squatters of western Pennsylvania who complained to the British governor that it was “against the laws of God and Nature, that so much land should be idle while so many Christians wanted it to labor on.”
However, in the 1760’s, King George and his ministers were oblivious to the hopes of the squatters. The biggest British blunder was the Proclamation of 1763, which prohibited settlement beyond the crest of the Alleghenies. As an expedient this order might have made sense, since the British needed time to formulate a plan for settling the Western lands and conciliating the Indians. But the effect of this proclamation was to close the very door that the French and Indian War had just been fought to open. At one stroke it angered the backwoods colonizers, ignored the Western land claims of the seaboard colonies whose original charters had contained “sea to sea” grants, and frustrated the ambitions of the politically powerful land companies that coveted the virgin soil of the Northwest Territory.
The man who, thirteen years later, would write the colonists’ answer to this proclamation, was then a seventeen-year-old boy in the back country of Virginia’s plantations. Neither Jefferson nor his father was an independent farmer on the far edge of Virginia’s planations. Neither Jefferson nor his father understood the facts of soil fertility. Jefferson’s explanation of the practices of Virginia tobacco growers —who exhausted the soil and then moved on—had in it no element of apology: “The indifferent state of agriculture among us does not proceed from a want of knowledge merely; it is from our having such quantities of land to waste as we please. In Europe the object is to make the most of their land, labor being abundant; here it is to make the most of our labor, land being abundant.”
But in later years, the mature Jefferson, always open to new ideas, came to see the value of husbandry. All his life he considered himself a farmer by occupation, and the easy habits, once condoned, he came to deplore as his experience broadened. He developed new ideas in horticulture, designed a better plow, imported Merino sheep, and introduced the threshing machine to American farmlands.
To him, agriculture was “the first and most precious of all the arts.” By eighteenth-century standards, his sense of husbandry was in the best European tradition, and in his later years he became an advocate of soil studies and crop rotation. Along with contemporaries like John Bartram and Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, he developed European farming practices, and sought to understand the art of renewing the soil for the benefit of future users as well as the current generation. “The land belongs to the living generation,” he once wrote. “They may manage it, then, and what proceeds from it, as they please, during their usufruct.”
Jefferson’s feeling toward the land was one of the strongest influences in the development of his political philosophy. “The small landholders,” he wrote, “are the chosen people of God . . . whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which he keeps alive that sacred fire which otherwise might escape from the face of the earth.”
To a man with these sentiments, the landowning tradition of the feudal aristocrats was an abomination. Jefferson believed that the system of land tenure and distribution adopted would ultimately determine the character of the new society. He saw in America’s surplus of resources an opportunity to develop a “natural aristocracy” of talent and virtue. He favored small freehold landownerships which would cause class distinctions to disappear. Growing as Jefferson would have had it grow, this country would have been a rural nation thinly populated by small farmers.
These were his theories, but Thomas Jefferson was more than a theorist; he was a practical reformer, who could go to the heart of, a political issue and win others to his opinions. In 1774, when most grievances against the royal reign were directed obliquely at Parliament, Jefferson struck hammer blows at tire King and his land policies. He publicly advocated free fifty-acre farms and boldly asserted that lands “within the limits which any particular society has circumscribed around itself, are assumed by that society and subject to their allotment.” He further counseled his countrymen to “lay this matter before His Majesty and to declare that he has no right to grant lands of himself.” The land question was the key to a society of equal opportunity, Jefferson was convinced, and the year he wrote the Declaration of Independence he struck a telling blow at the old order by pushing laws through the Virginia Assembly which abolished feudal entails and rights of primogeniture.
The first result of the Revolution—although this is a chapter of history that most Americans have forgotten—was a program of land reform. The Patriots expropriated and subdivided the Tory estates, and many huge holdings were sold cheaply, given free to small farmers, or parceled out to deserving war veterans. The uncertain claims of many squatters ripened overnight into fee titles that gave the owners the first installment of the new democracy—the right to vote.
The victory at Yorktown, however, did not decide who owned the unoccupied land beyond the Appalachians, and for a time this vexing problem threatened the unity of the Confederation. Settlement had continued during the war years, and seven of the colonies now asserted overlapping claims to the trans-Appalachian country. The crux of the matter was whether these seven colonies should take title to the unoccupied hinterland, or whether it should be a national estate.
Maryland vigorously asserted the case for a national solution by arguing that these lands, “wrested from the common enemy by the blood and treasure of the thirteen States, should be considered as common property. . . .” In the end the Maryland idea won out, and one by one, the colonies ceded over their rights to the lands of the West. Although Virginia’s claims were the largest and most legitimate, Governor Thomas Jefferson, in 1781, relinquished them with this observation: “The lands . . . will remain to be occupied by Americans and whether these lands be counted in the members of this or that of the United States will be thought a matter of little moment.”
This was our first great land decision, and it was formalized later through Jefferson’s work as chairman of the committee of the Confederation Congress, which shaped the historic Northwest Ordinance and the Land Ordinance of 1785. Thereafter, the unoccupied land would be owned by all of the people. The public domain had been created, and a basic ordinance had been enacted that would lead to the establishment of new states. Much later, the public domain would make possible a superb heritage of national forests, parks, and wildlife refuges.
The Northwest Territory, then, was secured for all the citizens of the United States—the vast rich valley, the country of the Shawnees and Cherokees, filled with deer and beaver and rich soil. There was an abundance to this land beyond the mountains that beguiled all Americans. During the early years of the eighteenth century, there grew up a vision of an agrarian paradise that would one day stretch to the western sea. In men’s minds the land that lay westward would be the Garden of the World.
Albert Gallatin, Jefferson’s Secretary of the Treasury, summed up the universal euphoria with the classic comment: “The happiness of my country arises from the great plenty of land.” There was so much of everything—so much land, so much water, so much timber, so many birds and beasts that neither Gallatin nor Jefferson envisioned the day when any natural resources would be depleted. And so, in spite of Jefferson’s belief in careful husbandry, his own era saw the beginnings of the Myth of Superabundance that would plunge us headlong into a century of land plunder and land abuse.
In the first years of the Republic, however, our land policies were not designed to get farm tracts into the hands of settlers. The new country had war debts to pay, and Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton turned to the public domain as a source of revenue. During the early years of the new republic immense areas were sold to land speculators and farm tracts were sold to some individuals.
As a national leader, Jefferson abandoned the idea of free family farms, and supported the Hamilton approach of selling all land for cash. In spite of Hamiltonian policies, the yeoman spirit still walked the hills of the back country, and pressures generated by land-starved men changed the system. The very richness of the land was a force for land reform. The poor squatters demanded, and usually got, pre-emption rights and lower prices, and their counterparts two generations later formed the Free Soil Movement, passed the Homestead Act, and helped fulfill Jefferson’s dream of an agrarian empire.
It was Jefferson’s basic understanding of the people-land equation, and his confidence in American prowess, that made him a master geopolitician. He understood each maneuver in the imperial power game being played on the chessboard of the American continent by the British, French, and Spanish. In 1802, when yellow fever and Touissant L’Overture’s counterattack in the swamps of Santo Domingo crushed Napoleon’s plans to restore France’s American empire, Jefferson dispatched James Monroe posthaste to Paris to offer a price for “Louisiana.” The crucial moment had come, and Jefferson acted swiftly to acquire the heartland of the continent for the American people.
The Louisiana Purchase extended the boundaries of the new nation beyond the rumor of wide rivers, almost beyond imagination. The deal consummated so quickly by Monroe and Talleyrand transferred an area as large as Western Europe for a price of less than three cents an acre. Napoleon himself gave this salute to Jefferson’s statesmanship: “This accession of territory consolidates the power of the United States forever, and I have given England a maritime rival who sooner or later will humble her pride.”
Timid, literal-minded men cast doubt on the President’s legal power to complete the transaction. But Jefferson knew that the Constitution had to grow with the country and his bold assumption of executive power has, over the years, been a ringing reply to those who would limit the role of presidential stewardship. Overnight the American nation was doubled in size, and Manifest Destiny, long before the phrase was invented, had its finest hour.
Jefferson’s first move was to send Lewis and Clark to chart this terra incognita, but the wisdom of the purchase was vindicated before the explorers made their report. Americans were already on the move. They were not, at first, Jefferson’s farmers. For even before events had forced Napoleon to contemplate a sale, a few adventurous men in buckskin had been moving westward through the dark forests of Louisiana.
Boys brought up in the colonies at the edge of the Big Wild were not, after the Revolution, going to stay at home. The tasks of land husbandry would be too tame or too troublesome for many of them, just as the institutions and values brought over from Europe were too binding and too cramped. The new nation, with all its appalling wastefulness, its openhandedness, its generosity and greed, its pride and its independence, was about to begin spreading rapidly from ocean to ocean.
