Rosalea Barker: Rest stop

Well, possums, it’s time for a rest stop on our peregrination of these United States in the order in which they received statehood. The thirteen colonies that declared themselves independent of Great Britain on July 4, 1776, forming a loose Confederation, had all ratified the new US Constitution by May 29, 1790, and all that happened in the remaining 10 years of the 18th Century was that Vermont, Kentucky, and Tennessee were created from the already existing states.

We’ll get to them soon, along with Ohio, whose admission in 1803 marks the beginning of territorial expansion towards the West (if you exclude that part of Tennessee that was formerly the Southwest Territory). The map below, taken from an elementary school textbook published in 1964 by Benefic Press, gives an overview of where things stood in 1803. For a more detailed map, which includes the would-be 14th original state of Franklin, see here.

Click to enlarge

So, what have I learned about the foundations of this nation? I confess that mostly I’m puzzled, largely because the landscape that most occupies my mind at this point is actually a moonscape. Imagine if the Earth were to colonize the Moon. How would that go down? Would there be land grants? To whom? Would the colonists, once arriving there, realize they didn’t have to be subjected to the whims of whatever local palatine (more likely a corporation) they were ruled by?

And would they turn around and bite the hand of the country that had granted them their New World land, have an armed revolution, and create some new configuration of loosely allied states? Only to have, within a decade, their newfound independence curtailed at the state level by the strengthening of the role of a central (federal) government, as happened between the time of the 1777 Articles of Confederation and the 1787 writing of the US Constitution?

There is one essential difference—as far as we all know—between the Moon and the North American continent, of course. The Moon is not already inhabited. There’ll be plenty of time to explore what happened between the indigenous inhabitants and the United States as the nation starts its westward expansion. In the meantime, check out Episode 1 of We Shall Remain, a series that has just finished on PBS, where the events that followed the Pilgrims’ arrival on they Mayflower are examined from a Native American point of view.

In regards to the Revolutionary War, in the preface to his 1995 book The American Revolution in Indian Country Colin Galloway writes:

Because many Indians sided with the British, they have, from the Declaration of Independence onward, been portrayed as allies of tyranny and enemies of liberty. Yet Indian people in revolutionary America, whether they sided with rebels, redcoats, neither, or both, were doing pretty much the same thing as the American colonists: fighting for their freedom in tumultuous times. The Revolution was an anticolonial war of liberation for Indian peoples too, but the threat to their freedom often came from colonial neighbors rather than distant capitals, and their colonial experience did not end with American independence.

As for the colonists themselves, my reading about the formation of the various states makes one word stick in my mind: Fleedom. Yes, with an “l”. Every state seems to be have been formed as a result of somebody fleeing from something—usually religious and/or political persecution, at first in England or Europe, then in the new colonies themselves.

By the late eighteenth century, the religious and political turmoil in England was a hundred years in the past, but the concept of “freedom” had come to mean freedom for people “who agree to abide by my rules and live like me”. And the “me” you had to agree with was usually some person or entity made powerful by land ownership and wealth. No matter that the land was taken from people who were then not free to live off it as they had for thousands of years, and often worked by people who weren’t free but were shipped to the colonies/states by the boatload from Africa and sold at auction like farm animals.

It’s interesting to read the various things that each of the thirteen states wanted included in the original US Constitution—you can find them by clicking the links listed under the heading Ratification and Formation of the Government here. For with the exception of Maryland and the first five states to ratify it, every state’s ratification included a list of things it wanted changed in the interests of guaranteeing freedom and autonomy from the federal government. No wonder there was a Civil War within a couple of generations.

But to end on a lighter note, here’s a link to a local columnist’s view on why British comedy differs so much from American. In it the writer mentions the need to rely on physical humor because there were so many languages spoken in the country, right from the get-go. For while the fledgling United States was being born, its new inhabitants weren’t all of British stock by any means.

rosalea.barker@gmail.com

--PEACE—

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