In 1775, Patrick Henry called for "liberty or death," Paul Revere (and others) alerted the militia, and shots were fired at Lexington and Concord. The Second Continental Congress named George Washington Commander in Chief of the Continental Army camped around Boston. James Madison had recently completed his education and had just begun his political career, serving on the Orange County Committee of Safety.

1775 is also the year Daniel Boone and party of 30 men laid out the Wilderness Trail from southwest Virginia into Kentucky and Tennessee on the west side of the Appalachian Mountains. The Wilderness Trail took advantage of the Cumberland Gap, a natural pass through the ridges of the Appalachians into the fertile Valley of the Ohio. In Philadelphia, two distinguished Americans, Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Rush, organized the Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage. In England, Jane Austen, who was to become one of the greatest novelists of the English language, was born the seventh child of a country parson.

Population and Growth

The total population of the colonies in 1775 was about 2.5 million of whom a little less than 20% were slaves. The population was young (about half were under 16), evenly balanced between men and women, and growing rapidly: the population grew by about a third every ten years. In the ten years between 1760 and 1770, a half million were added. In forty years the population had tripled, growing from less than three quarters of a million in 1730 to more than two million in 1770. In 100 years it had gone from 112 thousand to 2.15 million, an increase of more then 1,000 percent.

The annual growth rate was about 3%, which might not seem high. Three per cent does seem low in many situations. We would be quite happy with a 3% unemployment rate combined with a 3% inflation rate. We would be disappointed with a 3% annual return on investments. But, in fact, 3% is extraordinarily high for an annual population growth rate. Had the United States population grown at this rate since 1900, our population in the year 2000 would be in excess of one billion.

Reproduction and Immigration

Most of this extraordinary increase resulted not from immigration but, instead, from extraordinary rates of reproduction:

"Plentiful food and a low density of settlement (conditions that help prevent epidemics) apparently caused death rates to be lower than in Europe and, at the same time, encouraged the rearing of large families. The high fertility of this population enabled the colonies to grow at an almost unprecedented rate for more than two centuries." (Bogue, page 18.)

The Puritans, contrary to stereotype, were the most prolific:

"In Waltham, Massachusetts, for example, completed marriages formed in the 1730s produced 9.7 children on the average. These Waltham families were the largest that demographic historians have found anywhere in the Western world, except for a few Christian communes which regarded reproduction as a form of worship. But they were not unique. In many other New England towns fertility rates rose nearly as high…" (Fischer, page 71)

The colonists were aware of the rapid growth. Benjamin Franklin, in 1751, the year of Madison's birth, explained the growth:

Land being thus plenty in America, and so cheap as that a labouring man, that understands Husbandry, can in short Time save Money enough to purchase a Piece of new Land sufficient for a Plantation [farm], whereon he may subsist a Family, such are not afraid to marry; for, if they even look forward to consider how their Children, when grown up, are to be provided for. they see that more Land is to be had at rates equally easy…" (Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc. in Jorgenson, page 217)

Franklin predicted a doubling of population every 20-25 years, which is quite consistent with the 3% per year calculated by Bogue:

"We may reckon 8 [births per marriage] of which if one half [4] grow up, and our Marriages are made…at 20 Years of Age, our people must at least be doubled every twenty years." (Jorgenson, page 217)

Franklin, in 1751 still expecting the colonies to remain part of England, predicted that in one hundred years there would be more Englishmen in the American colonies than in Britain (Jorgenson, page 222).

In addition to the growth by reproduction, however, there was an influx of people whom we sometimes call Scotch-Irish, but whom David Fischer calls borderers: "Throughout the long period from 1718 to 1775, the annual number of immigrants from Ireland, Scotland, and the north of England averaged more than 5,000 per year." (Fischer, page 608) The Scotch-Irish were not the Pilgrim urbanites of Plymouth or the Englishmen "gentlemen" of Jamestown who had to learn how to cope in the New World. They arrived in American knowing how to plant and fight and immediately moved westward looking for open land. They were to provide leadership in the westward push: Andrew Jackson and Sam Houston, among many others, were descendants of this immigrant stream.

Settlement Patterns

The two and one-half million colonists were strung along a narrow strip of land between the Atlantic and the Appalachians and stretching from Maine to Georgia (see map). The areas of the 13 American colonies in 1775 are shown in the darker pink shade extending along the Atlantic seaboard. The "Proclamation Line of 1763" was drawn by the British along the crest of the mountains in an attempt to halt the westward expansion of the colonies. While these are political boundaries, they do provide a rough approximation of colonial settlement. There were only about 50,000 colonists west of the Appalachians in 1775 in the fertile valley of the Ohio River, mostly on the Kentucky or south side of the Ohio.

The French are not on the map, driven out of North American by Britain in what the colonists called the French and Indian War, a war which was triggered by the competition for the Ohio Valley. The lighter shade shows the British claims (in addition to the colonies) stretching from the mountains to the Mississippi. The land west of the Mississippi are claimed by Spain. Although large areas are claimed by Britain and Spain, they were almost entirely occupied by the Native Americans. The Iroquois or Six Nations were centered in upstate New York and were the dominant power in the Ohio Valley.

Transportation Infrastructure

Colonial movement into the Ohio Valley was hampered by British policy and Native American resistance. However, the movement inward was also hindered by lack of efficient means of transportation. The colonists relied heavily upon navigable waterways for the movement of goods. Roads were bad, bridges were lacking and the railroad did not yet exist. Even when roads were built, a wagon pulled by draft animals carried too little, too slowly, at too great a cost, to be competitive with the water transportation of the day. In the Southern and Mid-Atlantic colonies, the flat coastal plain featured natural tidal waterways which provided a cheap method for the transportation of goods. George Washington's Mount Vernon, and many other plantations, were located on the Potomac and other rivers for exactly this reason. However, moving inward (west), the coastal plain gives way to the piedmont hills, and intermittent rapids replace the smooth tidal waters of the plain. The Potomac, for instance, drops 75 feet in half a mile at Great Falls. Moving further inward the Piedmont gives way to the many ridged Appalachian mountains — an even more serious obstacle (see map).

Boone's Wilderness Trail was to provide a path for settlers, but was too rough a track to provide for the efficient shipment of such products as corn, lumber and iron ore. Even before the Revolution, George Washington and others had begun to plan for canals. In the initial conception, the rivers would still be used: canals would be built only to circumvent the stretches of rapids. Their plans, however, went beyond the development of the piedmont. The planners dreamed of canals that would link rivers of the Ohio Valley with the ports of the East coast. These rivers of the Ohio Valley do not flow east into the Atlantic as do the rivers of the East coast. They flow west to the Mississippi and then south on the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. After the Revolution, the U.S. would need to acquire the Mississippi or provide alternative water routes; otherwise, the settlers west of the Appalachians might come to separate terms with the foreign power that controlled the Mississippi. After the Revolution, canals thus would be seen as important in promoting the unity of the country. Patriotism, as well as profit, motivated the canal builders.

In George Washington's vision, the Potomac River valley, which reached far inland and penetrated the initial ridges of the Appalachians, was a natural candidate to link the Ohio to the East. Washington's efforts prior to the Revolution to build canals to circumvent the Potomac's rapids foundered, however, due to a lack cooperation from Maryland. The era of canal building would come after the Revolution.
(For a discussion of George Washington's role in the development of the Potomac River canals, visit the
Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historical Park site.)

Commerce

In New England, there was no broad fertile coastal plain for agriculture (see map); the soil was thin and the growing season short. The colonists turned to other activities: lumbering, distilling, fishing, whaling, ship building, shipping and trading. New England's domination of shipping can be seen in a 1740 report compiled by Robert Dinwiddie, His Majesty's surveyer-general of the southern colonies. More than 1,500 ships were owned by colonists in New England. The rest of the colonies combined accounted for only 320 ships (Vaughan, page 33).

In an era when Britain expected the colonies to restrict themselves to the production of raw material for the Mother Country and all colonial trade to go through England, smuggling was a wide spread enterprise condoned and conducted by the best of of families. John Hancock, famous for his wealth and for his bold signature on the Declaration of Independence, was also known as the "Prince of Smugglers." Newport, Rhode Island, lacking the lumber and fish of its New England competitors, went most heavily into the slave trade. The infamous triangle was rum to Africa, slaves from Africa to the West Indies, molasses from the islands back to New Enland for distillation to rum, and the cycle would start again (Chamberlain, pages 10-13).

The iron industry was more widely spread through out the colonies and by 1775 there were more furnaces and forges in the colonies than in England and Wales. Pennsylvania and Philadelphia were to emerge as the center of iron manufacture and also as the center of banking and finance for the colonies and for the Revolution (Chamberlain, pages 12-16).

Implications

The implications of exponential growth and expansionist ambition are significant. The growth and ambition together provided the numbers, the self-confidence, and the sense of destiny that made possible the Revolution: "as early as the 1730's, some Americans came to look upon the rapid growth of the population…as as God's sign of approval for the virtuous lives of the colonists…" (Wells, page 285). Benjamin Franklin, writing in 1767 and no longer confident of a continuing union with Britain expresses a secular confidence in America's future:

"As to America, the advantages to her of such a union [with Britain] are not so apparent. She may suffer at present under the arbitrary power of this country [Britain]; she may suffer for a while in a separation from it, but these are temporary evils that she will outgrow…America, an immense territory, favoured by Nature with all advantages of climate, soil, great navigable rivers, and lakes, &c. must become a great country, populous and mighty; and will, in a less time than is generally conceived, be able to shake off any shackles that may be imposed on her, and perhaps place them on the imposers." (To Lord Kames, in Jorgenson, page 329)

The French threat had been eliminated and the colonials had gained valuable military experience in that war. The colonial population was now large enough to end British dominance of North America. England's resources were much greater than the colonies, but the logistical problems and cost of fighting a war across the Atlantic in era of sail were enormous. In the winter of 1775-1776, for example, forty transports left Britain; only eight reached the British army in Boston (Wright, page 129). Moreover, England had its European competitors to consider and a newly forming colonial empire in India, and could not focus its military might on America.

The American difficulties in the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 resulted from disunity and disorganization, not lack of American numbers. It was the American who ran out of powder at Bunker Hill and froze and starved at Morristown and Valley Forge, not the British. It was the Americans, not the British, who had to rely upon a band of pirate-entrepreneurs for their powder and cannon in the Battle of New Orleans.

The implications for the Native Americans of the rapid colonial growth and expansionist ambition were ominous. The time had gone when they might have hoped by unified effort to stop the westward movement of the colonists. Ninety years earlier in King Phillip's War, the population of Massachusetts was less than 50 thousand. There is no broad coastal plain in New England: the colonists were spread out and vulnerable along the river valleys and the narrow coastal plains (See map for the settlement patterns in 1700).

The Native Americans attacked fifty-two of New England's ninety towns, pillaging twenty-five and razing seventeen (Bourne, page 36). This devastation was wrought despite the opposition of the Six Nations, specifically the feared Mohawk, who aided England and the colonists. The Mohawk, with the encouragement of the British Governor of New York, struck a devastating blow against Phillip, killing all but 40 of his 400 warriors (Bourne, page 161). (The war continued with Phillip playing a diminished role in the war that bears his name.)

But by 1770 the colonies were no longer so exposed or vulnerable. There were simply too many colonists increasing too rapidly. The Native Americans numbered in thousands and the colonists in hundreds of thousands. The French had already been driven from the continent: the only possible ally for the Native Americans was the British and they were to prove unreliable. Native American victories would only slow the westward movement: Native American defeats would prove disastrous.