The Land, The People, and the Law
Abraham Lincoln thought that a nation however much the whole might exceed the sum of its parts consists of nothing more than its people, its land, and its laws.
For the nations of the Old World, the three parts are inextricably bound up together in the long individual histories of those nations. But the United States, like all nations founded by European settlers in the great expansion of Western culture that began in the late fifteenth century, has no ancient history. At the beginning of American history, there was only the land.
The land that would become the United States presented a world that was at once hauntingly familiar and quite unlike the one in which the first European explorers and settlers had grown up. Western Europe was a world of dense population, concentrated in cities, towns, and villages; intense cultivation of arable areas; limited wildlife; and limited and carefully husbanded forests.
America was located in the same temperate zone and featured often familiar trees, plants, and animals, along with some exotic new ones, such as raccoons, skunks, maize, and rattlesnakes. But beyond the rocky shore of what is now the state of Maine and the vast sandy beach that stretches nearly unbroken from New Hampshire to Mexico and far beyond, lay a wilderness, upon which the hand of its human inhabitants had lain very lightly indeed.
This wilderness was a forest larger than all of western Europe, broken only by the occasional beaver meadow, bog, swamp, rock outcropping, mountain bald, and the slash and burn fields of Indians. It stretched from the water's edge to well past the Mississippi. From there it extended fingerlike along river and creek bottoms into the great plains that covered the center of the continent.
This huge forest was, of course, not uniform. In the North, great stands of white pine the preferred wood for the spars and masts of sailing ships alternated with hardwood forests, where maples, sycamores, and ash predominated in the lowlands, oaks and hickories on the drier and higher slopes. Farther south were stretches of different species of pine along the Atlantic seaboard, and these reached inward to where they met hardwood forests at higher elevations.
The eastern shore of North America is a welcoming one. A broad coastal plain made for easy settlement. Peninsulas such as Cape Cod and Delmarva; islands such as Long Island; and the barrier beaches farther south provided shelter for the early sailing ships. A series of rivers the Merrimac, the Charles, the Thames, the Connecticut, the Housatonic, the Hudson, the Raritan, the Delaware, the Susquehanna, the Potomac, the Rappahannock, the York, the James, the Peedee, the Ashley, the Cooper, the Savannah provided access to the deep interior for the small and relatively shallow drafted vessels of the day. As early as 1609, Henry Hudson, an Englishman in the employ of the Dutch, sailed his full rigged ship Half Moon 150 miles up the river later named for him, reaching as far as present day Albany. An overland trip so far inland would have required a month or more. Hudson, although moving cautiously in unfamiliar and narrow waters, covered the distance in a week.
And because these rivers had been formed when the sea level was lower than it is today, the subsequent rise drowned the rivers' mouths and provided harbors that rank among the finest on the North Atlantic. Many of the country's first cities Boston, Newport, New London, New York, Baltimore, Norfolk, and Charleston sprang up where these harbors are located.
The climate of North America that the first settlers encountered was, like the land, both familiar and exotic. It...
