The shaping of America Book

Review title: Skitch, how did we get here?

One of the great movie lines from an often overlooked minor classic (That Thing You Do), my review title captures Meining's unique perspective on how geography shaped the European "discovery", exploration, and colonization of the Americas. He describes a simple set of activities ("seafaring, conquering, and planting", p. 7) set in a complex context of European sources, cross-ocean routes, commercial, national, or personal purposes, intended destinations, and encountered cultures, geographies and climates. The 500-page result takes the reader up to 1800 as the new American nation (a federated republic of regional societies surrounded by disparate and not always friendly geographies and peoples) stands on the threshold of continental expansion (covered in Volume 2) that spans coast to coast (Volume 3). He moves from the particular to the general, from history to theory, and back again multiple times throughout his account so that we understand what happened and can say something about why.

So, as the seafarers from two major European "hearths" plowed new furrows across the Atlantic they began the process of making a new world:
Generalizing more broadly once again, we can see that the two great thrusts out of the two creative source regions [the Spanish-Mediterranean "cultural hearth" and the British-Dutch Northwestern Europe "cultural hearth"] carried two distinct versions of European civilization across the ocean, initiating a Catholic imperial America in the south and a Protestant commercial America in the north. But these direct extensions were increasingly caught up into larger Atlantic circuits binding together four continents, three races, and several cultural systems, complicating and blurring the processes of extension and transfer. . . . . By 1630 Europe held dominion over every seaboard sector and huge portions of the interior. America had become incorporated into the routine concerns of European nations, but this was not simply an enlargement into a Greater Europe. It is better seen as a new Atlantic world. The ocean had become the "inland sea of Western Civilization," a "new Mediterranean" on a global scale, with old seats of culture on the east, a great frontier for expansion to the west, and a long and integral African shore. (p. 64-65)
One of the hearths and routes that Meinig includes is the "Middle Passage" of captured Africans from the west coast of that continent to the Caribbean Islands and then the eastern mainland shores from Brazil north through to the Chesapeake Bay where they were sold into slavery and became a key cultural and economic component of the geographic history. While writing decades before the creation of the 1619 Project--which places the fact of black slavery at the core if the American experience--and the controversy surrounding it, Meining has this to say: "We can at least insist that in place of the long-standing tendency to regard 'the Afro-American community created by the [slave] trade as an alien body on the periphery of national life' we must see it, quite the contrary, as an ancient, integral, and central component of American development." (p. 84)

As Meinig works his way south along the eastern coast of North America from Nova Scotia, he summarizes the major geography and settlement patterns of New England and Pennsylvania:
But there was also a difference so fundamental as to become the great characterizing contrast in the cultural geography of the two regions: the difference between Puritan corporate self-righteousness and Quaker individual tolerance; between the active discouragement of settlers of different ethnic backgrounds and religious beliefs and the active recruitment of a wide variety of peoples; between a remarkably uniform New England and a strikingly heterogeneous Pennsylvania. Each was a distinctive American creation. (p. 144)
In Virginia, the geographic and settlement pattern resulted in a very different "special kind of 'English Nation.' It was a hierarchical, Anglican, rural commercial society" (p. 149), based on the roots of the colony in the commercial search for wealth from gold, silver, and finally tobacco, the swampy and malarial southern riverside environment, and the near presence of a strong and at times hostile native population.

Creating a broad theoretical framework to summarize all of these new demographic patterns, Meinig uses the terms
--"encounter and change" (encounter in its definition both as chance meeting and meeting in battle) between Europeans and native Americans,
--"migration and change" as Europeans encountered new climates, geographies, plants, and minerals, and
--"enslavement and change" as Africans were captured and sold into slavery, subjugated to European masters, and forced into new environments and cultures.
All sides in these interactions were changed, challenged, threatened by aggressors, and acted as aggressors, as they variously tried to survive, establish dominance, assimilate or reject new influences, and reestablish stability (a "new normal") in a world irreversibly changed. Native Americans were addressed by "conquest and enclosure" in isolated communities in the older colonial coastal regions, by "articulation and interdependence" in those areas behind the coasts where the native tribes remained viable and the European and native communities interacted through agriculture and trapping and trading, and "participation and reverberation" where encounters often attempted to enforce domination or destruction by either party. While all this interdependent interaction sounds like a feel-good story of practical cooperation, Meinig reminds us that in these cultural meetings between Europeans, native Americans, and Africans that the Europeans never recognized the others' "rights of sovereignty, property, or corporate identity except in temporary, manipulative fashion, and could not envision a genuinely plural society that would encompass tribal, non-Christian peoples." (p. 212)

By 1750, the eastern seaboard from Canada down to Georgia was essentially a contiguous European settlement, albeit with wide variations of population and density, and limited penetration into the continent in most places due to economic constraints, conflicts with displaced natives, and lack of access to navigable rivers. Regional societies--Canada, New England, Hudson Valley (New York and eastern New Jersey), greater Pennsylvania (including western New Jersey, Delaware and parts of Maryland), greater Virginia (including tidewater Maryland and parts of North Carolina), and greater South Carolina (with parts of North Carolina and Georgia)--were more important to the daily flow of economic and cultural life than the nominal political boundaries that defined them, "now so firmly rooted in place that they could absorb . . . whatever geopolitical changes might be imposed upon them from afar as pawns in the vast worldwide game of European politics." (p. 250). Those shocks, first the British victory over France in their European war waged with native allies on the interior frontiers of those societies and then the confederation of the American colonies and their military and political separation from the British empire, were just beyond the horizon in 1750 and would represent the next great influence on the shape of the American geography.

Meinig describes the far reaching impacts of the great imperial wars (waged locally with native allies as the French and Indian War) and then the American Revolution on the geography and demographics of the emerging united colonies, including the inflows and outflows of population and the intercolonial movement of groups. While focusing on the core British colonies, he also documents the changes involving Spain and France at their southern and southwestern borders in Florida, Louisiana, and the Mississippi River, and France and England at their northern border in Canada (the Revolution resulting in not just one new country but two, p. 332, a Canada changed but loyal to the British). The geographical elements of the political, economic, and cultural tradeoffs that enabled the establishment of first the Articles of Confederation and then the Constitution was "an immense and remarkable political experiment and its success as a federation and a nation would be determined in no small part by how well it might cope with problems deeply embedded in its historical human geography." (p. 348) Slavery, of course, the deepest problem, would work its damage on the political and geographic landscape for the next century, and the latent racism it caused and effected all the way to today.

But the settlement of a governing political structure, including the establishment of a process for admitting new territories to the union as equal member states, opened the gates to allow a newly and properly named "American" population eager to burst beyond the coastal confines to flood west and south across the mountains and the Mississippi and push out and over the remaining native peoples and settlements. Regardless of whether history would find the outcome imperialist, genocidal, ordained by God, or manifest destiny, the result was to become a solid coast-to-coast political entity within the geographical bounds of the North American continent. Volume 1 stops in 1800 as the population clusters at the western colonial boundaries at the start of the Great westward migration; Volumes 2 and 3 take the story through the closure of the frontier in the 20th century. As he wraps up this opening volume at 1800, Meinig draws a general theory of the disintegration of empires (p. 370-375), and then applies it to both the original "British empire" of the United Kingdom (with its imperial capital at London, core of England, incorporated provincial colonies of Scotland, Wales and Ulster, and outlying protectorate of the Gaelic Highlands of Scotland and the west coast of Ireland) and then the North American British empire (p. 375-381). He points out the critical differences between the two applications: the greater distance between the imperial center and the colonies, the much larger size of the colonies and protectorates, and the perhaps surprisingly and ironically more British culture implanted in the American colonies than that encountered in Scotland, Wales, and Ireland ("There were no keener students of English political history and philosophy than these New England rebels" who initiated the Boston tea rebellion, p. 382). While extracting a general theory from the specific events of the geographic and historical population of the American colonies, Meinig makes the point that the events and outcomes of the process (native displacement or genocide, implantation of black slavery, and defeat of the British by a united colonial militia) were not inevitable outcomes of the theory or the process (p. 381).

Instead, America grew by its own inexorable logic applied to the vast lands between its distant coasts:
By leaps of logic peculiar to American thinking, nationalism and "natural rights" were extended to include territorial rights to the North American continent: a nation conceived in liberty had a right to a homeland; in order to enjoy that liberty the people must feel secure; in order to feel secure and to enjoy the freedom to develop their territory in accordance with the "immense designs of the Deity" they must have control of all areas strategic to their homeland. . . . It was clear that most American leaders and spokesmen simply recognized no unalterable barriers to expansion. Thomas Hutchins, official "Geographer to the United States," estimated the habitable area of North America to be three and a half million square miles and stated forthrightly: "If we want it, I warrant it will soon be ours." (p. 416-417)
And it would be but not yet. Meinig's map of the United States in North America in 1800 on p. 423 is a reminder that "In 1800 America was a vigorous but rude, provincial outlier of Western civilization." (p. 421)

And it was, and is. A republic, a federated republic of regional societies surrounded by disparate and not always friendly geographies and peoples, if we can keep it.

This is fascinating history and theory, well-populated with simple maps and diagrams showing complex spatial theories as they worked on land and water across time, contemporary paintings and sketches of the environment as seen by the participants, and a bibliography for following further. I will definitely follow Meining through the remaining volumes to find out the answer to the question:

"Skitch, how did we get here?"
"I have led you here, for I am Spartacus."