Filibustering America

 This morning I ran across a link to America as Filibuster Society by Nick Burns On American Affairs. I find the argument convincing overall - that it was the adventuring filibuster gobbling up the frontier, not the mere line on the map, that made America. The particular paragraph that grabbed me was this one:

Filibusterism was not the sole method of westward expansion—at times it contended with the state’s urge to plan, which asserted itself, after the filibuster chaos of the settlement of Kentucky and the immediate trans-Alleghenian frontier, in the orderly squares of the Northwest Ordinance, and in the “internal improvements” credo of the Whigs. But it was always a major force and often the chief motivator. Settlers de­ployed the tactics of filibusterism to draw the country across the continent in anxious collaboration with the U.S. government: first ad­vancing beyond the territory where they could be protected from Indian attack, then obtaining further concession from their own government. Military incursions, new forts, fresh treaties banishing Native Americans further outward, all of these consolidated the previously outlying settle­ments, after which the settlers moved on, pushing the new boundaries and beginning the cycle anew.

Perhaps my attraction comes from this being congruent with some of my ideas I am trying to put in "Chasing Ashes". The strangeness of a place called Indiana not having a large Native American presence. That the State of Indiana putting up a historical marker on US 50 to the east of Versailles celebrating the Greenville Treaty line - west of which was the territory of the Native Americans. (And the land west of the marker encompasses most of the state!) Finally, how that between my Livingston ancestors arriving in Ripley County in the southeast of Indiana in 1819 and my Hasler ancestors arriving in southwest-central Greene County in 1849, the Native Americans were removed from Indiana.

I forego any more quotations because the article is too closely argued for excerpts to give it justice. Follow the link above and give it a read.

American Affairs may be a journal worth keeping an eye on, too. It claims to be non-partisan.

sch 8/25