The period of American history from 1750 to 1820 was the scene of unprecedented upheaval. Those brief decades produced an explosive growth in population, linked to a massive movement of people of every description surging in all directions and ever westward from the Atlantic Coast. The impact was enormous. The critical events, say most historians, helped form the country’s sense of nationhood, its national purpose and its dynamic character.
In one generation, the United States came to occupy more territory than they had throughout the 150 years of Colonial America. Historian Gordon Wood writes: “It is impossible to exaggerate the significance of the westward movement of people. It was a stupendous work of human advancement in which the history of mankind affords no other example revealed in the ancient ruins.”
During the Revolutionary War, the native population numbered about 3.1 million in 13 Colonies strung along a narrow strip of the Atlantic Coast from Maine to Georgia. To the west, the Colonists were hemmed in by the Appalachian Mountains and by millions of acres of towering wilderness. Also, The Royal Proclamation of 1763 had restricted settlement west of the Appalachians.
Change, however, was underway. Preceding the Revolution, Colonial America was receiving a flood of new arrivals. Although precise records were not retained until 1820, the U.S. Census Bureau estimated that from the end of the Revolutionary War to 1819, 250,000 people emigrated to North America. They had crossed over the stormy Atlantic, crammed in primitive sailboats, on dangerous voyages lasting from 30 to 60 days, depending upon the weather.
Between 1750 and 1770, the colonists grew from one million to two million, and between 1770 to 1790 from two to four million. Georgia, for example, grew from 2,300 in 1751 to 33,000 in 1773. By 1810 the U.S. population had reached seven million; it was increasing 37 percent every decade.
Following the Revolution, a mixture of new emigrants and uprooted Colonists launched the vast westward settlement movement. The human current was encouraged by a craving for individual independence, personal ambition and the desire to settle and own land, and the acquisition of wealth.
In the European countries, from which most of the new immigrants originated, available lands were scarce and expensive. In America land was cheap. It was available for settlement and it was surrounded by abundant natural resources.
Nothing stopped the new settlers—neither Indians, nor bad roads or limited transportation, or crude farming implements. Their numbers were inexhaustible. By 1810 the U.S. held over 7 million citizens. Moreover, the Continental Congress had encouraged expansion. The Land Ordinance of 1785 and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 produced legal rules for surveying acreage, the buying and selling of land and for the admission of new territories.
The bands of society were loosened. Increasing numbers of settlers, promoters, speculators, surveyors, lawyers, distillers and the like spread out across the region in all directions, into the Ohio Valley and over North America’s eastern half. Kentucky, before the Revolution, claimed no white settlers. By 1780, it held more than 20,000 people, with not a single adult male born within its borders. By end of the century, the population had grown to 220,000 with not a single adult born within its borders.
By 1817 the United States was literally teeming with life, settlement and development. “Old America,” wrote Gordon Wood, “appeared breaking up and moving west.” New York’s population had quadrupled. Tennessee’s had multiplied ten times. By 1820 Ohio had grown from wilderness to become the 5th largest in the country. The original 13 states now numbered 22 with a population of 9.5 million people.
Like the whole of its history, the nation’s emergence is viewed from different angles. But few doubt the force of immigration and the western movement spanning the decades from 1750 to 1820.
Sources: The Radicalism of the American Revolution, Gordon S. Wood,1993; U.S. Census Bureau; ChatGPT.
• Retired attorney Jim Thomas lives in Atlanta. Email jmtlawyerspeak@ yahoo. com
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