The Genesis of a Backcountry Identity

The Genesis of a Backcountry Identity

In the North American English[1] colonial experience and in the subsequent post- revolutionary American Republic, the ability to assimilate either individually or collectively into the hierarchy of power represented a continually evolving process. Previously, throughout Europe’s ancient régime, a ridged hierarchy had dominated the social interaction of every facet of life and dictated that social positioning was a product of one’s birth and not open to unwarranted acts of social promotion. With the opening of English colonization efforts in the new world during the seventeenth century, the ridged social hierarchy of the old world was transplanted to North America. Although the Puritan settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Area and the settlers at Jamestown came to North America with wildly divergent intentions, the two different groups nevertheless brought with them the social behaviors of the dominate English identity that they had both been accustom to. The geographical distance between England and North America, however, generated a logistically challenged environment that increasingly compelled colonial Americans to integrate their dominant English customs within the practical realities of living three thousand miles away from London. Maintaining traditional social order in the English North American colonies was therefore particularly problematic the farther west that English colonial expansion reached in North America. Consequently, in the ensuing one hundred and fifty plus years before colonial America entered the pre-revolutionary period in 1763[2], a gradual weakening of the traditional English hierarchical order of colonial life facilitated the development of a sectionalist conflict that would characterize the western expansion of North America.

The loosening of traditional social controls in the English North American colonies affected nearly every aspect of colonial society, but along the expanding frontier regions of colonial America the effects of the weakening hierarchy’s authority allowed a distinct frontier or backcountry identity to develop.[3] At the forefront of the backcountry’s collective identity lay the singular importance of land ownership because, as historian Alan Taylor suggests, “the distribution of …property would determine what sort of society would be reproduced over time as Americans expanded across the continent.”[4] Because property ownership ultimately represented the defining element for entrance into the governing ranks of early American society, some marginalized groups of white frontier settlers that were typically comprised of recently arrived immigrants, squatters, and tenant farmers, occasionally were compelled to rebel against the eastern colonial centers of authority. The Paxton