The history of America to 1815 was an active process of spreading Europeans into an unknown land. To condense the long narrative into three themes, it would be helpful to pose these three questions: What happened, how so, and which events followed that? Answering the questions one by one, I suggest three objects, water, a gun, and runaway ads. After achieving Independence from England, the newly formed nation the United States of America expanded along the water, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific. During the nation’s westward expansion, the wars and conquers of the US were successively achieved by the advanced technology and violence symbolized by a gun. The nation was not stable at all: As many runaway ads show, the internal tension between North and South was constantly increasing because of the difference in climate, industry, and view on slavery. As a result, the invention of a single country in the vast continent accompanied the internal conflict which resulted in the civil war in 1861.

Water: From East to West

Water can have various meanings, but I want to focus on the geographic aspect like the ocean or river, and the biological importance that it is crucial for human survival. From the first moment when the Europeans discovered and colonized the American continent, the most crowded and developed areas were in line along the coastline or river. Colonists and later the citizens of the United States slowly expanded their territory from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean, drawing ever-changing borderlines following the River branches, which acted as the most prominent geographic criteria. Because shipping could move both people and commodities more efficiently than in territorial ways, trade among harbors was prominent in the economy of the newly colonized continent.

After Christopher Columbus discovered the land over the Atlantic Ocean, water worked as a crucial factor for new dwellers. Even though Columbus was adamant urging that his destination was India, (Kupperman 34) the land, later called America, was novel, where the Native Americans had dwelled for a long time. For the Europeans who believed the west sea “stretching to the horizon” (Kupperman 3) was the end of the world, the America was the exotic and romanticized world full of possibility. With both enormous risks and equivalent rewards, privateers dared to cross the extremely wide ocean, encountering almost unlawful contestations with other ships. (Kupperman 42) Of course, the danger of the voyage was not confined to the human factor: An endless amount of water exhausted the adventurers with “a dreadful storm,” fearing the newcomers with nausea and limitation of sight. (Townsend 93)

However, the settlers finally succeeded to land in America and establish their residence. Jamestown, found in the Native Wowinchopunk’s peninsula on May 13, 1607, (Townsend 47-49) set the tradition of building colonies following the coastline, creating the communicating route with the Natives. The excess or lack of rain continuously teased both the original residents and newcomers of America: Suffering the Little Ice Age, the severe drought made even the Native people doubt the efficacy of their god and ask Europeans whether “Christian God would give them rain.” (Kupperman 33) Among lots of common things between colonists and Natives, several differences also emerged. The starkest difference is the notion regarding the land: Even though the Native appreciated the sovereignty of land like Europeans, they thought of the land as a “community usufruct,” not the exclusive and protected right as colonists’ concept. (Mandell 12) This difference ultimately contributed to dragging the Indians out from their original residence because European colonists regarded that their lands were only for them.

Early colonized cities in northern areas such as Philadelphia, Boston, and New York, later called New England, are all located on the shores, exploiting the full benefits of water to move people and commodities. One of the benefits was the inability to escape. Lots of people such as women, enslaved people, or even sailors were caught in the ship and kidnapped. Pocahontas, a well-known female Native American who first crossed the Atlantic Ocean to head to England, was one example: Even though she was aware of the “history of European kidnappings,” she was deceived, boarded on a ship, became the object of threat in “exchange for the English men and weapons.” (Townsend 104) Unable to step land, she was kidnapped to England and witnessed the “extraordinary size and bustle” of English capitalism. (Townsend 138) Britain was eager to catch the seamen of America, to retain its power over the sea: Even after the independence of America, the best American sailors were taken by Britain, because Britain regarded its citizenship as wide as possible. (Taylor 112) In the middle of dangerous voyages, commodities and humans actively crossed to enhance the extent of trade. As various English stuff flow into the American market and Indigenous community in the mid-eighteenth century, consumers are standardized and Anglicized simultaneously. (Breen 494) Even though Americans hated aristocrats and praised the notion of equity, the social status was divided “in relation to commodities” (Breen 495) that came across the Atlantic.

After the colonies in the Eastern shoreline of North America are established enough, the colonists turned their eyes westwards, reaching to Mississippi River. The most common living way of new dwellers was individual farmsteads. (Lemon 90) Locating the church in the center of town, people owned the land only near the center and bequeathed the farther lands to their heirs. Because the open fields were nearly endless, “distance [from the center of town] was a crucial variable.” (Lemon 93) Therefore, the open lands far from the coastline lacked “any central authority,” (Richter 160) neither of Native Americans nor of colonists. Harsh conflicts were inevitable: Following the squatters of so-called unowned land, lands were gradually bought by Colonists from Native Americans, in very vague measuring ways of the land, such as drawing “a line … towards the setting sun.” (Richter 165)

This expansion forcibly moved indigenous Americans, gathering them into the Six Nations of Indians. Even though the Coalition returned them some of the lost lands in an agreement with the Pennsylvania government in 1758, (Richter 173) unlawful invasion of individual squatters and expansion of the early United States never stopped. Crossing the originally agreed border of Mississippi River, Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, bought the whole branches of Mississippi from France, stealing Central America from the Natives. The Louisiana Purchase in 1803, (Onuf 124) created both internal political conflict regarding the cost within US and external military conflicts with Native Americans.

As the expansion proceeded, the establishment of new states and their joining to the American Union became accelerated and systemized, until the border of the United States reached the Pacific Ocean. Starting from Madison’s operation in 1810, the strategical model of expansion, which consists of rebellion, forming a new republic, and creating social turbulence to make the United States engage, was consecutively used. (Taylor 126) Of course, non-US citizens such as Native Americans and runaway slaves who formerly lived there resisted: the Red Sticks, a rebellion group of Native Americans in New Orleans defeated and largely massacred by the infamous general Jackson in New Orleans in 1814. (Taylor 130) Until 1815, the relentless attempt of the United States to expand its territory to the Pacific Ocean continued. Even though they could not settle another colony in the western shoreline yet, Lewis and Clark, with a Native woman Sacagawea, made an expedition to find the watery way to reach the Pacific Ocean from 1804 to 1806. 

Gun: Violence and Technology

How had this enormous expansion of the United States been done? This question should be answered in two ways: One would be the method that the United States used, and the other one would be the reason for its success. In my opinion, a gun can be a symbolic answer to both: Violence was prevalent in the American conquer, and the European technological advantage blocked Native Americans and enslaved African Americans from successful rebellion.

As Taylor extensively depicts, violence was prevalent in the American continent, from the characteristic of a nation to the individual personality. Wars among various ethnic groups were almost always occurring. Even more than a century before the American War of Independence, the Pequot, a native tribe, fought with English colonists and were defeated, reshaping the “alliances and boundaries” among the Native American groups in 1637. (Mandell 14-16) The tension was not confined to the American continent: In 1647, the rumor that the Dutch, the main rival of England, allied with many Native American groups, frustrated New England’s governors. (Mandell 23) Stuck among the English, French, Dutch, or Spanish emperors, Native Americans lost a great amount of their land during the American Revolution, even though they had little things to do with the revolution: “At gunpoint” of American commissioners, the Native Americans could not help but ceding most of their land. (Nash 131)

Struggles and conflicts were also widespread among the American people: the newly formed country was extremely unstable. The antagonism between patriots and courtiers (Wood 118) divided the American civil society, separating America itself from the traditional European social traditions. However, as clear gender discrimination of early America suggests, the separation from Europe was not complete: As Abigail Adams, who married John Adams, urges, “the ladies” were disregarded in politics and her husband even derided her, saying “I cannot but laugh.” (Nash 126-129) What’s more, the various demographic composition of the American continent, consisting of Native, Black, and White Americans, strengthened the internal turbulence of America. Mostly enslaved, African Americans always dreamed of being free, and “patriots killed some free Black civilians simply for being free.” (Taylor 129)

Because the early United States was vulnerable as a powder keg, machoism and violence were widespread even on a personal level. Thomas Jefferson was not an exception: He regarded slavery as a “state of war,” that could always threaten White Americans into the reversed social order. (Onuf 209) Andrew Jackson, the seventh president, went even further, making Jefferson recall him as “a dangerous man.” (Taylor 106) Including Jackson, southern machos actively committed “duels or brawls” to keep their social status or honor. (Taylor 109)

However, the violent and warlike tendency itself was not the reason for the success of the United States. The crucial factor was the technological advancement of Americans to Native people, which comes from the European tradition. From the first encounter, the difference in technology was evident to all Europeans and Native Americans. Pocahontas’s father, Chief Powhatan, was eager to gain some knowledge of Europe and ordered his soldiers to gather the English dead’s weapons. (Townsend 97) However, he could not boost his technology as advanced as Europeans in a short amount of time, making it “unfair to imply that … [his tribe] could have done more,” facing its ultimate loss. (Townsend 178) Suffering extreme latency compared to the United States, Native Americans had almost no diplomatic leverages except universal values like family or religion. In 1775, Oneida, one of the Six Native nations, referred to American governors as “brothers” and asked for “settl[ing] your own disputes betwixt yourselves [Old and New England]” by “respecting us Indians,” without any promise of compensation or threat. (Kirkland) After Native Americans also learned the importance of scientific endeavor, they could also use it to enhance their power, although limitedly: Tenskwatawa, a Native religious leader, succeeded in “predict[ing] the impending eclipse,” coalescing the Native people and humiliating the American governor who derided him. (Taylor 117) 

Throughout the United States, the White elites firmly hold the technological hegemony of violence. Enslaved African Americans were always the object of inhumane repression and threat of gunshots. They were even prohibited to fight in any wars of America, making them regard “the British as liberators.” (Taylor 123) Regarding the internal struggles within the United States, runaway ads contain lots of information to investigate further.

Runaway ads: Fugitives versus Slaveowners

While expanding outwards, the internal turbulence of the United States was never alleviated. Especially, slavery harshly tortured enslaved African Americans and strongly divided America into North and South, sustaining its life for several centuries. As the abolishment of slavery and Black emancipation started in the Northern United States, some enslaved people ran away northwards, being fugitives and searching for freedom. Runaway ads are the advertisements published in the Northern local newspapers, looking for fugitives. Most of them describe fugitives’ appearance and personality. By reading them, we can know about both the enslaved people’s desire for freedom and slaveowners’ view on their slaves. They work as evidence of active dynamics and progress in American politics.

The fact that the advertisements are published in the newspaper is meaningful: because most enslaved people were illiterate and could not access to any information in written letters. The literacy of enslaved people was deliberately controlled by slaveowners: Even the family of George Washington, the first president of the United States, kept most of their slaves illiterate. (Dunbar 103) It’s because if the slave can read, then he or she is more vulnerable to committing runaway: (Dunbar 82) One of the advantages of literacy might be reading a map. (Dunbar 101)

In the era lacking biological identification, the almost only method to detect the runaway was the appearance. Even though various expressions are stated in the ads — such as “thick lips” “brown complexion” “grey eyes” “sandy colored hair” “pub nose” (Smith 95-99) “much freckled” “black eyes” “bushy black hair” (Dunbar 99) — it is evident that these depictions are not sufficient at all to singularize the individual: thus every Black people, even legally free ones, had to fear the suspicious eyesight of runaway catchers. The atmosphere of emancipation spread gradually from north to south, but at an extremely slow rate. Free Black people had to sustain “a cautious and skeptical” mindset toward the goal of freedom. (Dunbar 126)

Violence also resonated within slavery. Both slaves and fugitives had to dread the treatment from the slaveowners. Many slaveholders actively used “violent punishment” or “the threat of sale,” (Dunbar 94) and their treatment towards the fugitives was even more brutal, such as whipping or beating, “sometimes in the presence of kinfolk and other slaves.” (Dunbar 104) Therefore, fugitives in southern not-yet-Americanized residences must fight in their best if they had to: because “their freedom depended on defeating American invaders.” (Taylor 128)

Of course, the cruelty might reside partly inside the slaveowners’ urge to sustain slavery, but that was not the only reason for them. It’s mostly because the slaves were not humans but properties to them. In financial difficulty, even the most powerful man in the country George Washington had been eager to catch his fugitive, Ona Judge. Furthermore, the institution of slavery itself needed to be protected by some White elites: Thomas Jefferson did almost nothing to solve the “contradiction” between the inhumane slavery and his radical view on freedom. (Onus 205) Onuf claims that this behavior was because Jefferson was both a racist and a nationalist: (Onuf 211) To gather all states and imagine a single nation, there needed to be a constant and dormant threat to the country, which was Black sovereignty.

However, not all Americans supported slavery as Jefferson did. Relatively independent of the plantation industry, Northerners gradually detected the weirdness of slavery and proceeded the emancipation. A different view on slavery between the South and North was amplified even into the general politics and the role of federal governments. The northern states became Federalists who supported “strong government, Christianity, and order.” (Robertson 1272) In opposition, the southern states became Republicans who is “in favor of minimal government.” (Robertson 1273) Both sides claimed themselves as the true defender of American values, consolidating their political ground by vilifying their counterparts. (Robertson 1264) In this emergence of the concept of a single nation and internal conflict, slavery did a crucial role.

*  *  *

In the land originally ruled by scattered multiple hunter-gatherer groups, the new nation, the United States of America, was actively imagined and gradually expanded its territory from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Lots of factors, from slavery to even everyday commodities, (Breen 507) contributed to sustaining this fragile imagination of a single nation. Through successive and violent wars with external forces such as Native Americans or European Imperials, the United States gradually solidified its identity as a single country. In opposition, internally, a sign of succession was emerging within the country: extremely varying views on the institution of slavery exacerbated the political conflict between North and South, enabling the coexistence of “local and national identity.” (Robertson 1280) This tension ultimately led to torn out the single country into two, breaking out the civil war in 1861.

Bibliography

• Kupperman, Karen Ordahl. 2012. The Atlantic in World History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Columbus, Christopher. 2017. Journal of Christopher Columbus’s First Voyage (1492). Vol. I, in Constructing the American Past, by Gorn J. Elliott, Randy Roberts, Susan Schulten and Terry D. Bilhartz. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Townsend, Camilla. 2004. Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma. New York: Hill and Wang.
• Mandell, Daniel R. 2010. King Philip’s War: Colonial Expansion, Native Resistance, and the End of Indian Sovereignty. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
• Nash, Gary B. 1986. The Urban Crucible: The Northern Seaports and the Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Lemon, James T. 1984. “Spatial order : households in local communities and regions.” In Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era, by Jack P. Greene, and J. R. Pole, 86-116. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
• Richter, Daniel K. 2016. “”No Savage Should Inherit”: Native Peoples, Pennsylvanians, and the Origins and Legacies of the Seven Years War.” In Trade, Land, Power: The Struggle for Eastern North America, by Daniel K. Richter, 155-176. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
• Breen, T. H. 2010. “”Baubles of Britain”: The American and Consumer Revolutions of the Eighteenth Century.” In Colonial America: Essays in Politics and Social Development, by Stanley Katz, John M. Murrin, Douglas Greenberg, David J. Silverman and Denver Brunsman, 491-507. Oxfordshire: Routledge.
• du Rivage, Justin. 2017. “Introduction.” In Revolution Against Empire: Taxes, Politics, and the Origins of American Independence, by Justin du Rivage, 1-23. Yale University Press: New Haven.
• Wood, Gordon S. 2011. “Radical Possibilites of the American Revolution.” In Major Problems in American History, Volume I (3rd ed.), by Elizabeth et al. Cobbs, 115-122. Boston: Cengage Learning.
• Nash, Gary B. 2011. “The Radical Revolution from the “Bottom Up”.” In Major Problems in American History, Volume I (3rd ed.), by Elizabeth et al. Cobbs, 122-133. Boston: Cengage Learning.
• Robertson, Andrew W. 2001. “”Look on This Picture . . . And on This!”: Nationalism, Localism, and Partisan Images of Otherness in the United States, 1787-1820.” American Historical Review 1263-1280.
• Onuf, Peter S. 2007. The Mind of Thomas Jefferson. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
• Taylor, Alan. 2021. American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
• Kirkland, Samuel. 1837. “Oneida Declaration of Neutrality, 1775.” In American Archives, by Peter Force, 1116-1117. Washington.
• Dunbar, Erica Armstrong. 2018. Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge. New York: 37 Ink/Atria Books.
• Jefferson, Thomas. 1853. “Thomas Jefferson’s Racism, 1788.” In Notes on the State of Virginia, by Thomas Jefferson, 149-155. Richmond.
• 1995. “Advertisements for Runaways in the Pennsylvania Gazette.” In Life in Early Philadelphia: Documents from the Revolutionary and Early National Periods, by Billy G. Smith, 94-99. University Park: Penn State University Press.
• Lee, Richard Henry, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, Thomas Jefferson, George Mason, and John Hancock. 1776. Declaration of Independence (1776). Accessed December 6, 2022. https://billofrightsinstitute.org/primary-sources/declaration-of-independence.