Conquered for You and Me
We took it. We'll lose it. Enjoy it while it's ours.
My final piece in a series about the concept of home in the United States. Hope you’ve liked it! —Jim
When the United States negotiated the Treaty of Paris with Great Britain in 1783, it didn’t only win political independence for thirteen colonies that had been created over the previous century and a half. The nation also acquired millions of acres of territory that extended west to the Mississippi River, north to the upper peninsula of Michigan, and south toward the Gulf of Mexico. This acquisition rested on the necessity of the Americans securing the acquiescence of Great Britain, the greatest military power on the planet at the time. But it was also a matter of its own military dominance. The indigenous peoples scattered across this swath of territory—Shawnees, Cherokees, Choctaws, and Creeks, among others—were not consulted. In the years that followed, they resisted the incursions of the American palefaces with greater or lesser degrees of success. But all eventually capitulated, their lands occupied. Just like the peoples (Abenaki; Lenape; Powhatan) who had been displaced by the colonists in the preceding century. Just as these indigenous peoples displaced the people who came before them.
Amid the welter of conflicting claims in the years that followed, Thomas Jefferson crafted the Northwest Ordinances, which carved up the area we’ve come to know five states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin into a series of 640-acre squares to be sold at a rate of a dollar apiece. This wasn’t quite the bargain it might seem, as the land had to be sold in chunks of 640 acres at a time, which was more than most people could afford. But the slices you could buy drifted down to 80 acres by 1820, and Congress allowed buyers to finance their purchase with as little as a five percent down payment. In 1803, the Jefferson administration made the Louisiana Purchase, which added another 1.9 billion acres to U.S. territory. There were of course all kinds of exclusions involved in terms of who could have this land and how, exclusions that we tend to foreground these days when discussing such things. But conquering empires survive and prosper by distributing the spoils of their victories to those they regard as their own, and in terms of sheer numbers, no society has ever distributed so much to so many as the United States has. The mass distribution of land literally gave a great many Americans a stake in their country. These homesteads cemented their allegiance—notably their military allegiance—to the nation at a time when the wobbly republic might well have lost its gigantic territorial gains to any number of rising or falling rivals. These included not only Native American peoples, but also the Spanish and British, who continued to be an imperial presence on the continent, as well as Alexander Hamilton’s killer, Aaron Burr, who hoped to carve an independent republic centered in modern-day Arkansas. Americans today tend to remember Andrew Jackson (he of the soon-to-be-vanishing $20 bill) as a murderous tyrant, which he was. But the victories he won over the Red Stick Creek people in 1814, the British at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815 (where he led a multiracial army), and his raid into Spanish Florida in 1818 solidified the United States and paved the way for its future dominion over Texas and the rest of the North American continent. That paving would eventually be literal: an interstate highway system that stitched the nation together. But long before that happened, other sinews—common language, common law, eventually a common currency—would bind together disparate deserts and rivers, prairies and forests, mountains and valleys. Like it or not, there are hundreds of millions of Americans, whenever or however they got here, who owe a debt to those who did the dirty work for which we both rightly and hypocritically condemn them.
For the rest of the nineteenth and entire twentieth centuries, the United States continued to adopt relatively liberal policies toward land/home ownership for its citizens. The Homestead Act signed into law by President Lincoln in 1862 never quite lived up to his most hopeful expectations, but still gave hundreds of thousands of Americans property if they promised to inhabit and improve it. During the Great Depression, the Roosevelt Administration created the Federal Housing Authority, which improved building standards and insured mortgages. The passage of the G.I. Bill in 1944 allowed millions of veterans (among them my father) to be guaranteed low-interest loans. By the end of the twentieth century, about 70% of Americans owned their own homes, an unprecedented proportion anywhere, anytime. From the sky, they look like little boxes, in the words of Malvina Reynold’s dismissive song, written in the year of my birth. But I regard them as an awesome sight.
From my little plot abutting the Hudson River, I can sense that tide receding. Declining U.S. economic preeminence is eroding homeownership rates. The rising tide crushed countless souls. Now other souls will be crushed when this wave breaks.
One of my favorite movies of all time is Michael Mann’s 1992 version of Last of the Mohicans. (There have been other good versions of the story, but I consider James Fenimore Cooper’s 1825 novel—the opening salvo of a nineteenth century pop culture franchise as popular and durable as Star Wars or Harry Potter—simply unreadable.) In the final scene of the movie, that last Mohican, Chingachgook, played by the Native American activist Russell Means, turns to his adopted white son, played by Daniel Day-Lewis, and recites the last lines of the movie. “The frontier moves with the sun and pushes the red man of the wilderness forests in front of it,” he says. “Until one day there will be nowhere left. Then our race will be no more, or not us.”
“That’s my father’s sadness talking,” his son responds.
“No, it is true,” Chingachgook says. “One day there will be no more frontier. Then men like you will go, too. New people will come. Work. Struggle.”
And then the five words that inhabit my days: “But once, we were here.”
As always, I feel smarter after reading one of your essays.
Growing up on Long Island, I suspect this passage may resonate with you as it did with me when I read Gatsby for the first time as a 16 year old.
Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.