American Traditions Concerning Property and Liberty

Abstract

When, over a century and a half ago, a poet saw a group of his countrymen about to set sail on their way to a new home in Georgia, he took a gloomy view of their prospects. He believed that they were leaving a land of scattered hamlets, sheltered cots, and cultivated farms, where ease, health, and plenty had prevailed, for a “dreary scene” around the “wild Altama”—a region of blazing suns, wild tornadoes, poisonous fields, and matted woods where lurked the “dark scorpion … vengeful snake … crouching tigers … and savage men more murderous still than they.” Posterity has liked best the poet's fond memories of his native village. Goldsmith, however, considered the practical politico-economic aspect of his poem to be its best feature. He had indeed paid some attention to actual economic changes that were causing a depopulation of the English countryside. His compatriots, he believed, were crossing “half the convex world,” not because they were dissatisfied with a land where simple pleasures and “light labour … gave what life required but gave no more,” but because such a manner of living was no longer possible in Britain: “trade's unfeeling train” had “usurped the land” and made it a place where the “man of wealth” extorted pleasures “from his fellow-creature's woe” and took up “a space that many poor supplied.”