Anxiety Over Western Expansion

THE PANOPLIST AND MISSIONARY HERALD, Retrograde Movement of National Character (1818)

Land policy was another arena of political debate. Federalists supported the sale of large tracts of the western territories to ensure an orderly settlement. By contrast, once Jeffersonian Republicans took office, they worked to reduce the federal minimum on land purchases from 640 acres (which excluded everyone but wealthy speculators) to 320 acres in 1800, and to even smaller amounts in subsequent years. By 1832, the minimum plot available for sale had been reduced to 40 acres, opening the territories to yeomen farmers, the same men whom Jefferson praised as God’s chosen. Not everyone agreed that the westward movement that territorial expansion invited was a good thing. In this selection, an article from a Christian monthly magazine published in 1818, the author describes his anxiety.

The manner in which the population is spreading over this continent has no parallel in history. The first settlers of every other country have been barbarians, whose habits and institutions were suited to a wild and wandering life. As their numbers multiplied, they have gradually become civilized and refined. The progress has been from ignorance to knowledge, from the rudeness, of savage life to the refinements of polished society. But in the settlement of North America the case is reversed. The tendency is from civilization to barbarism.

Every one knows the manner in which our new settlements are formed. Single families, sometimes single individuals, proceed from this cultivated country, and, leaving behind them the religion and institutions of their fathers, they penetrate the western forest. It is usually several years before they are able to erect a comfortable dwelling-house, and many more before they can enjoy some of the most common privileges of older settlements. During this whole period, they are from necessity without schools, without ministers, without any of that influence, or those institutions which form the sober, steady, sterling character of older parts of the country. By the time that they are able to support these institutions, long habit has made them easy without them. With many the expense is an objection; and, not unfrequently a new generation have sprung up, who are unacquainted with their value, and unwilling to make any sacrifices for their support. In such a soil we should naturally suppose that infidelity and error of every species would take root and flourish. And such is the fact. The accounts which we hear represent the state of these settlements as deplorable for ignorance and irreligion.

The tendency of the American character is then to degenerate, and to degenerate rapidly; and that not from any peculiar vice in the American people, but from the very nature of a spreading population. The population of the country is out-growing its institutions.

But would we have a more convincing evidence of this degeneracy, let us go back to the days of our fathers. It is but a few years; our aged men can almost reach the time, when they first landed on these shores. They were good men, men of prayer, upright, and perfect in their generations, men who walked with God. Go now to our western borders — and who are these without Bibles, without Sabbaths — to whom the news of a Savior was never preached — who blaspheme God day and night? Are these the sons of the pilgrims? — these the children of their prayers — these the offspring for whom they endured persecution — the perils of the sea, and the perils of the wilderness — for whom they toiled and bled to procure the blessings of the Gospel? You search history in vain for degeneracy like this. Yet this is the beginning of sorrows. Could we draw aside the veil from the future, we might see these degraded men giving birth to settlements still more remote; we might see whole nations sprung from their loins — yes, we might see these men, at whose degeneracy we are now shocked, regarded as venerable, as holy, by their still more degenerate offspring. We talk of India — of Juggernaut — of the bloody rites of Pagan worship — but who can tell, how soon our own Missouri will be a Ganges, and our own children pass through the fire to Moloch.

M. N.

The Panoplist and Missionary Herald, vol. 14 (1818), 212–213.

READING AND DISCUSSION QUESTIONS