The Westward Advance of the Atlantic Frontier

Abstract

URING the first century of settlement in British America, our ancestors held a beachhead which averaged hardly a hundred miles in depth along the Atlantic seaboard. This was a thin line indeed and often a precarious foothold. Curving around the north and northwest was the French colonial empire which gradually pushed its borders down the Ohio and Mississippi valleys to join with the Spanish colonial empire extending in an arc around the southern and southwestern periphery of the English territory. Squeezed between France and Spain, and frequently threatened by hostile Indians within the area of settlements, the English occupation of the Atlantic region looked theoretically hopeless. A modern disciple of geopolitics would have denied them any chance for survival, much less for expansion. But the English have never been a people to surrender to a theory of extinction. During their first century, the English colonists consolidated their gains, gave heed to a doctrine that God had especially reserved a portion of the American continent for them, and began a westward thrust up the inland waterways. They also welcomed a polyglot assortment of non-English immigrants who would help in the conquest of the West, and, ironically, would become inveterate enemies of England. By the time this movement was completed, the westward-moving Americans, as we must now call them, had overcome every handicap interposed by man or nature and had at last managed to make a garden even out of the desert of southern California. We are the inheritors of a doctrine and a movement which began before the middle of the seventeenth century. For a century after Captain John Smith first explored the James River, Englishmen dreamed of discovering a water route through the American continent to the South Sea and thence to Asia. The many fruitless voyages in search of the Northwest Passage are too