The story of the growth and expansion of the colonies/states during the life of James Madison will be told in subsequent sections. This material should add depth of understanding for a number of topics: the Revolution, the role of immigration versus reproduction, the big-state small state controversy at the Constitutional Convention; the fate of the Native Americans; the divisions over slavery; the controversy over internal improvements; the War of 1812; and other issues.

Putting this section together was an education for the JMU editor who was quite uniformed about the growth and expansion of the colonies and the early U.S. He had a vague idea that the country was growing rapidly but assumed that this was due to large scale immigration. He thought that the Cumberland Gap was a few miles west of Cumberland, Maryland, and that the Ohio Valley was largely contained in the State of Ohio. He could never understand why there was so much fuss over what he thought was a single state. His reaction to his discovery of his own ignorance has been to fill the following sections with maps — maps of political boundaries, settlement patterns, and topography — maps that he wished he had seen earlier. Nonetheless, the editor is probably still making errors, and he hopes that others will help him to correct these errors.