Tuesday, December 6, 2016

Confluence

Had one of those serendipitous confluences of books this week that fill in the gaps in each while rendering a more complete picture of events for me.

The seventh grade is doing a modest research project on the Thirteen Colonies. As I was noting resources in the Dictionary of American History, I revisited the Atlas of American History; a similarly blue-bound mainstay. I ended up taking it home this weekend.


It is a humbling piece of work that prided itself on its integrity, its clarity, and the breadth of its scope. After reading the Introduction and Foreword ( something I rarely do) I am even more convinced we will not see its like again.

As I thumbed through the maps of 17th and 18th century America, it really brought home what a commercial landscape framed the settlement and expansion of the nation. My learning of American history was steeped in political conflicts, legendary figures, and patriot character, but the maps in the AoAH are rife with grants, charters, patents, land companies, reserves and various other parsings of property for resale and a dollar.
And then my wife, at a library book sale, brought home a copy of Brian Hall’s I Should be Extremely Happy in your Company; a novel about Lewis & Clark that is rich in historical detail and asides. After describing Lewis’s involvement with the Whiskey Rebellion in Pennsylvania and his subsequent military forays westward, Lewis premises his re-enlisted decision to his Mother with the rationale that he can use it to scope out new property to supplement their Virginia holdings. Indeed, he finishes by saying the General Washington, that intrepid surveyor, “owned half the Ohio Valley.” (While not half, the Colonial Williamsburg site does say that Washington held more that 52,000 acres of land [that's 81 square miles!] “sprinkled” around the country.)

Along with courage, pioneer spirit, and a yearning for freedom, the incentive at every turn for financial enterprise (often transparent and/or behind the scenes) was necessary and, in fact, a fundamental ingredient in the recipe of how we became us.

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