Here is rich food for thought about the whole American experiment, secular as well as
religious. It is worth noting that when Cotton Mather died, full of warnings and fulmination, in
1728, Benjamin Franklin, so like him in his universality, so unlike him in his objectives, was
already a young man of twenty-two, making his way purposefully in Philadelphia. Whereas
Mather was obsessed by the need to save one's soul for the next world, Franklin was
preoccupied-like the vast majority of his fellow-countrymen-with getting on in this one. To move
from one man to the other is to cross a great watershed in American history.
We are now in the 18th century and the final pieces of the jigsaw of early America are beginning
to fit into place. From its growth-points on the coasts of New England and Virginia, now joined
by the middle colonies of Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New York, settler America was moving
north, and south, but above all west. The frontier was already a physical reality and a powerful
metaphysical concept by the year 1700. The overwhelming dynamic was the lust to own land.
Now, for the first time in human history, cheap, good land was available to the multitude. This
happy prospect was now open, and it remained so for the best part of the next two centuries; then
it closed, for ever. In the early 18th century, the movement to acquire land outside the original
settlements and charters, and dot it with towns, was just getting into its stride, which was not to
relax until the frontier ceased to exist in the 1890s. The advance from the shoreline and the
tidewater into the piedmont was what might be called Americas first frontier. It took place
everywhere in English America. Thus there was a push up the Housatonic Valley into the
Berkshires, leading to the foundation of Litchfield in 1719, Sheffield in 1725, Great Barrington
in 1730, Williamstown in 1750. In 1735, four closely linked townships were founded to bridge
the gap between these Housatonic settlements and the Connecticut River itself. Governor
Benning Wentworth (1696-1770), who was instrumental in separating New Hampshire from
Massachusetts, then granted lands west of the Connecticut in what was to become Vermont.
This northern push consisted mainly of Ulster Protestants, provoked into seeking a new,
transatlantic life by an Act prohibiting the export of Irish wool to England, by the enforced
payment of tithes to Anglican churches, and by the expiry of the original Ulster plantation leases
in 1714-18. So here were hardy frontier farmers, after three generations of fighting and planting
to defend the Protestant enclave against the Catholic-Irish south of Ireland, moving to expand the
new frontier in North America. They came in organized groups, and for the first time the
authorities had the resources to take them direct to the frontier, where they founded Blandford,
Pelham, and Warren, or settled in Grafton County in New Hampshire, and Orange, Windsor, and
Caledonia counties in Vermont. These were first-class colonists: lawabiding, church-going, hard-
working, democratic, anxious to acquire education and to take advantage of self-government. We
heard little of them: always a good sign.
This was only the beginning of the Ulster-Scotch migration. From 1720, for the next half-
century, about 500,000 men, women, and children from northern Ireland and lowland Scotland
went into Pennsylvania. A similar wave of Germans and Swiss, also Protestants, from the
Palatinate, Wurttemberg, Baden, and the north Swiss cantons, began to wash into America from
1682 and went on to the middle of the 18th century, most of them being deposited in New York,
though 100,000 went to Pennsylvania. For a time indeed, the population of Pennsylvania was
one-third Ulster, one-third German. Land in Pennsylvania cost only £10 a hundred acres, raised
to £15 in 1732 (plus annual quitrents of about a halfpenny an acre). But there was plenty of land,
and the rush of settlers, and their anxiety to start farming, led many to sidestep the surveying
formalities and simply squat. The overwhelmed chief agent of the Penn family, James Logan,