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Overlooked frontier drew risk-takers Big Country
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Published: October 5, 2008
AMERICAN LEVIATHAN: Empire, Nation and Revolutionary Frontier. By Patrick Griffin. Hill and Wang. 368 pages. $17.
In the popular imagination American history apparently proceeds from the Revolution to the Gold Rush with few stops in between, and the West that had to be won is understood to begin at St. Louis and end at the Pacific.
One of the pleasures of American Leviathan is the reminder that the original West was the backcountry just beyond the thinly settled Eastern Seaboard and particularly the "dark and bloody ground" of the old Northwest Territory. Patrick Griffin traces attempts to define a western frontier in the years between 1763, the end of the Seven Years War, and the victory at Fallen Timbers that solidified the American hegemony over the vast territory northwest of the Ohio valley.
At first, the British thought they could draw a line, the Proclamation Line, down the spine of the Appalachians and keep settlers and Indians separate and peaceable until such time as the Indians gradually became "civilized," or at least acclimatized to Western mores. It might conceivably have worked if sufficient legions had been committed to the enterprise, but Britain was trying to do empire on the cheap. Therefore, land-hungry settlers crossed the line in droves, and Indians and settlers chafed against one another in a state of near anarchy.
Incidents led to fire fights led to massacres in both directions. And as more new arrivals found the West thoroughly unsettled and no help forthcoming from the state, they took matters into their own hands. It is here that Griffin's title becomes germane. In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes argued that the obligation to the sovereign lasted only so long as the sovereign was able to protect the subject.
When first the British and then the American governments failed to protect the backcountry, in part because the war in the East put the ills of the West on the back burner, settlers took the law into their own hands. Griffin reads the Whiskey Rebellion, in particular, in this light. Being taxed by a government unwilling or unable to provide protection was too much.
It was only when the government assumed its responsibility to protect the West that its settlers agreed to be subject to it. And warily at that. Thus was born the frontier cussedness and suspicion of Eastern government that first found political expression in Jacksonian democracy and that continues to this day. Yet the irony is that only government had the power to provide the security so lacking for those crucial 30 years.
It is a fascinating chapter in the nation's history, running parallel to the Revolution in the East and too little attended to by most conventional accounts. Griffin tells it well and makes it clear that the usual categories do not apply. The British, for example, had a noble vision of peaceful coexistence but fecklessly failed to follow through. Some Indians were astonishingly brutal, yet others were as pacific as Quakers and suffered for it. Some frontiersmen were more savage than the "savages" they despised.
And many policymakers squandered opportunities for a more benign outcome until the only choice left was the exercise of brute force under the patina of manifest destiny.
■ Keith Monroe, a former Journal editorial writer, now writes from Greensboro.
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