All That Space

"America was, if it was anything, geography, pure space."

1.

The British colonies in North America were conceived in expansion. America was an aspiration, an errand, and an obligation, born out of violent Christian schism and Europe's interminable religious and imperial conflicts. Depending on the intricacies of their particular interpretation of Revelation, the Protestants who settled New England might have understood flight across the Atlantic as a way of escaping European war. Or they might have seen migration as a chance to open a new front and win those wars on new soil. Here in the 1600s, in the eschatological nebula of the New World, was the first paradoxical image of America as simultaneously pristine and despoiled: empty and at the same time filled with primitives begging for deliverance, subordinated to Catholic Spain, which had conquered its part of the Americas a century earlier and stood as the great obstacle to Reformation England's rise as a world power. "All yell and crye with one voice Liberta, liberta," Richard Hakluyt, a clergyman and court minister, wrote in the late 1500s, hoping to convince investors and his queen to establish an American colony.

As Puritan society frayed under the harsh conditions of settler life, the frontier threatened and beckoned. The dark woods were filled with witches. And they were witchy, inviting hither. The forest was the place where the community could be redeemed and given new purpose, a chance to once again start anew. Or it could be a place of more sorrows — "wilderness sorrows," as two early Puritan patriarchs described the hardships that awaited those who ventured into uncharted territory — where whatever solidarity existed would be smashed into atoms as settlers scattered to escape the rule of the clergy. "People are ready to run wild into the woods again and to be as heathenish as ever," warned Increase Mather. Expansion could be — often in the same sermon — held up as the cause of and solution to the difficulties of establishing Christian communities.

Either way, Native Americans had to get out of the way. They could die: "They waste, they moulder away, they disappear," said one Puritan chronicler of indigenous people who had succumbed to European pestilence years before the arrival of the Mayflower in 1620, thus clearing the earth for the establishment of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. "God made way for his people by removing the heathen and planting them in the ground," said another observer. They could be murdered: the holy terror unleashed by the Puritans was, according to the historian Bernard Bailyn, driven by "fears of what could happen to civilized people in an unimaginable wilderness and fears of racial conflicts in which God's children were fated to struggle with pitiless agents of Satan, pagan Antichrists swarming in the world around them." Survivors could be enslaved: the first patent granted in colonial America, in 1626, was to a Virginian merchant and planter, William Claiborne, for inventing a device that would not just restrain Indians but also make them work. Claiborne was given an Indian to experiment on, for the "tryall of his inventione." Colonial records do not say what this innovation might have been, only noting that it wasn't successful.

Or they could be pushed further and further west. The "prodigious and restless population," complained New Orleans's Spanish governor in 1794, "progressively drives the Indian nations before them and upon us, seeking to possess for itself this entire vast continent which the Indians occupy between the Ohio and the Mississippi Rivers, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Appalachian mountains."

More than a century and a half later, writing in the early 1950s, the Mexican author and diplomat Octavio Paz made much the same point:

America was, if it was anything, geography, pure space, open to human action. Since it lacked historical substance — ancient social classes, established institutions, religions, and hereditary laws — reality presented no obstacles other than natural ones. Men struggled not against history but against nature. And wherever there was an historical obstacle — indigenous societies, say — it was erased from history, reduced to a mere natural fact, and dispensed with accordingly. ... Evil is outside, part of the natural world, like Indians, rivers, mountains, and other obstacles that must be domesticated or destroyed.

The American Revolution is a permanent revolution, Paz went on, a nonstop expulsion of all "elements foreign to the American essence" and a "constant invention of itself." And anything that stands in the way of that invention, anything that is "in any way irreducible or inassimilable" to perpetual creation — be it Native Americans, Spanish America, or history itself — "is not American":

In other places, the future is one of man's attributes: because we are men, we have a future. In Saxon America ... the process is inverted, and the future determines the man: we are men because we are the future. And everything that has no future is not a man.

The United States, Paz said, "offers no room for contradiction, ambiguity, or conflict." The nation flies forward "swiftly, as if weightless," across the land. Trying to stop North Americans moving west, Stephen Austin, the founder of Texas, said over a century earlier, was like "trying to stop the Mississippi with a dam of straw."

2.

The drive west waxed and waned and burst forth with great passion during key moments.

The first few decades of the 1700s were a period of relative theological calm. British colonists, still beset by wars, diseases, bad weather, and their own divisionism, recovered somewhat from the spiritual anguishes that had afflicted their Puritan settler forebears. Then came the Great Awakening in the 1730s, and hectoring jeremiads once again began to interpret global events — wars between European states — as the latest stage in the struggle between popery and true religion. Forest fever — the idea that migration was prophetic, that clearing the woods and filling the valleys with Christians was part of a messianic mission — returned. Settlers, who had begun to move over the Blue Ridge, into the Shenandoah and Ohio valleys, and through the Cumberland Gap, "were all great sticklers for religion and for Scripture quotations against the 'heathen.'" They took it as a...