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Restless Nation

University of Chicago Press

Chapter One

Americans were on the road before there were roads. Even in colonial times, when moving was arduous and there weren't many settlements to move to, both new arrivals and native-born Americans moved. The Puritans had no sooner created villages in Massachusetts than they were pushing out onto new farms, setting a pattern in which community "was dashed by transiency." In late-seventeenth-century Virginia, fewer than half of those appearing on county tax lists in one decade were living in the same county ten years later. There was greater stability in New England, but even one-third of its inhabitants moved in a typical decade. Rates of movement like these would turn out to be remarkably constant throughout American history (turnover rates in Boston were about 50 percent per decade in the middle of the nineteenth century, not too different from today).

By the time of the Revolution, settlers were pouring down the Great Wagon Road that ran eight hundred miles along the Appalachians from Philadelphia to Augusta, Georgia. Families established themselves in clearings in the forests and cut down the trees around them, often at great distances from their nearest "neighbors," if that is the right word for a family a mile down a very rough path. Thousands of applicants would appear whenever a land office opened to allocate parcels in a new area. In the half-century before the Revolution, the population of the southern colonies along the Appalachians was growing explosively, in many areas doubling every decade in spite of high mortality rates. Each year thousands flowed through the Shenandoah Valley heading south, most of them immigrants who had only recently arrived in Pennsylvania. The frontiers of northern New England, upstate New York, and western Pennsylvania were being settled at a similar pace. Not all the native Indians had been subdued by this time, and the Cherokee War of 1760-61 was especially vicious. The grim brutality of the attacks, by both sides, added to the macho "frontier" roughness. But land was an obsession, and people stampeded to claim it. Such activity continued along the frontier as it pushed westward over the next century.

Two hundred years ago migrants traveled at the pace they could walk, along muddy, rock-strewn trails accompanying their wagons-or in some cases crude carts with cross-sections of tree trunks as wheels. Luckier ones moved at the speed they could float or paddle canoes. In the years since, technological improvements have increased our speed, without satisfying our restlessness. They have only made it easier to indulge.

After the Revolution the new federal government, tiny though it was, recognized the importance of opening up new lands through improved transportation. It commissioned a comprehensive survey of roads, published in 1789; a coastal survey followed in 1796, complete with instructions for navigating major ports and harbors. In 1806 Congress appropriated thirty thousand dollars for a Great National Pike, known as the Cumberland Road, to run from Maryland to Ohio; by the time it opened in 1840, it extended all the way to Illinois. State and local governments also enthusiastically promoted infrastructure, first chartering private development companies and then, after the 1820s, frequently bankrolling canals and turnpikes themselves.

The new government's other main expenditures were on land. Territorial expansion held the government's attention from the start, as it fought Indians on the northwest frontier (what is now Ohio) in the 1790s, signing a 1795 treaty in which the British relinquished their claims to the area. An 1819 treaty with Spain, won after an illegal occupation by Andrew Jackson and his army, secured the Florida territory. After violence, the biggest expansion came via the marketplace. Thomas Jefferson, whose main concern as president was to limit the activities of the federal government, had to amend the constitution to allow the purchase of the Louisiana territory in 1803. In his most popular act as president, he more than doubled the size of the United States, igniting into full fury American dreams of land ownership. Forty years later President James Polk bullied Mexico into war to provide an excuse for capturing the vast lands of the southwest, from Texas to California. The resulting Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, in 1848, increased the size of the republic by another third: just in time for the gold rush, which represented expansionist frenzy at its height. In a single typical lifetime, from 1800 to 1850, the land available for settlement had more than tripled, gold had been discovered at the far end of the continent, and the image of the United States as the land of opportunity was more firmly entrenched than ever.

Water offered this country's first system of roads, for the continent was blessed with enormous stretches of coastline as well as a fantastic system of navigable rivers that proved crucial to opening up its land mass to exploitation. Beginning almost immediately after the Revolution, canals were built in order to perfect the work God had done in making the rivers. No fewer than thirty canal companies were established by 1790. In 1794, a two-mile canal-the nation's first-opened next to the Connecticut River in South Hadley Falls, Massachusetts. During the next half century, these and other companies dug-much of it by hand-almost five thousand miles of canals. Government was also heavily involved, as in New York State's $140-million public-works project that built the 340 miles of the Erie Canal, which opened in 1825 after nine years of construction. Construction like this was not only necessary for moving settlers west but also for transporting their produce east, making their migrations more lucrative.

It was the refinement of steamboat technology, especially in the 1830s, that definitively opened up so much of this land to the restless. Unlike Huck's raft, which only floated downstream with the flow of the Mississippi, steamboats had considerable power to go upstream as well, depositing people in remote areas. Flatboats and keelboats had taken three or four months to go upriver from New Orleans to St. Louis; steamboats took a week. The utility and excitement of steamboats were unmatched anywhere else in the world, for no other country could apply them so extensively. This new invention allowed boomtowns to spring up all along the extensive rivers of the Midwest, and the new country's love affair with transportation technology was in full bloom.

Sam Clemens's Missouri was filled with these towns. For each one that thrived, others failed; all were subject to the vicissitudes of migration and markets. The Clemens family moved to Hannibal at the end of 1839 because their town of Florida was being abandoned as insufficiently profitable. Although Sam's father never managed to benefit from Hannibal's rapid growth, many others did. The town was a regular steamboat stop, and young Sam was exposed to the gambling, prostitution, violence, duels, even murders, of boomtowns filled with restless young men. Because his father landed a job as the justice of the peace, Sam learned about all this firsthand. Most of all, he saw people on the move. He saw people arriving. Missouri had innumerable new towns, many of them founded on utopian principles of one sort or another. The Mormons, for instance, were living only sixty miles upriver in Nauvoo, Illinois. And he saw people...