The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History - Volume 2: Continental America, 1800-1867

The Shaping of America #2

by D.W. Meinig

Continental America offers a rather different way of looking at a period of enormous expansion, development, and crisis in the career of the United States. Although it stands as a discrete, coherent work, it is best understood as a continuation of the special kind of description and assessment set forth in Atlantic America, 1492-1800, the opening volume of this geographic interpretation.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, American History, Geography

636 pages, Paperback

First published April 28, 1993

About the author

Donald William Meinig was an American geographer who made influential contributions to historical, regional, and cultural geography, and who served for decades as Maxwell Research Professor of Geography at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. Educated at Georgetown University and the University of Washington, he began his academic career at the University of Utah before holding a Fulbright position at the University of Adelaide in 1958, later joining Syracuse University in 1960, where he remained until his retirement in 2004. At Syracuse, he chaired the geography department, trained more than twenty doctoral students, and helped shape the Maxwell School. His scholarship reflected both western American and national themes, producing pioneering studies on the Mormon cultural region, Texas, and the Southwest, while his most ambitious work was the four-volume The Shaping of America, published over nearly two decades, offering a sweeping interpretation of the nation’s geographic development. He also collaborated with his former student John Garver on thematic regional maps for the National Geographic Society, reaching millions of readers. Meinig’s honors included Fulbright and Guggenheim fellowships, the Charles P. Daly Medal of the American Geographical Society, and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the British Academy. His work combined rigorous scholarship with literary sensibility, leaving a lasting impact on geography.

Reviews

[Todd Stockslager · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review title: America, spread your golden wings

"Sail on freedom's wind across the sky", continues this inspiring refrain from the American Adventure show at Disney World's Epcot theme park in Orlando. This 30-minute retelling of American history always leaves me humming that line for days afterward. In the interest of time and place--no one comes to the Happiest Place on Earth for a lesson in geographical history--it also compresses out of its story much of the much of the true story of the journey of that American eagle across the sky from sea to shining sea to a Continental America. That history lesson comes in the excellent but more sobering form of the second volume of D. W. Meinig's The Shaping of America ( Volume 1 carried the story from its European roots to the establishment of the new American government of the 13 Eastern seaboard colonies as of 1800) which takes us through the rapid and massive expansion of states and territories to the west and south through the Louisiana Purchase, the Mexican War, and the violent expulsion of native Americans and expropriation of their lands in the first half of the 1800s.

Meining is writing a massive account of how geography (the land, water, and natural features, and the people who occupy and move across them) shaped the history, politics, language, transportation, infrastructure, and the cultural and religious beliefs of the people of America. He uses historical narrative to drive the story, data and maps to place the story in geographic context, and theoretical analysis to make sense of and provide applications to the broader abstract forces at work so we can understand and compare them across time and place. This may seem like a dry academic exercise (indeed my used edition was a university textbook in an earlier life based on the still-attached stickers encouraging the student to return rental textbooks during finals week) but any student or reader interested in American history will find that history and interest broadened and deepened by Meinig's approach and writing skill. There is much to learn about how America spread its wings and expanded its scope to the edges of the continent, which can deepen the reader's appreciation of the tenacity and temerity of the men and women who did it, while at the same time opening the reader's eyes to the danger and damage those same adventurers inflicted on the land and peoples as they did it, damage that reverberates down to this year's headlines.

One of the key lenses through which Meinig makes sense of our history is that of America as a federation of states (these--plural--United States), a national government (the--singular--United States), and an empire (the United States as America, the continent). While manifest destiny was claimed by many 19th century leaders for this American expansion not just western but outward in every direction (p. 169, p. 427), Meinig points out that there is no geographic or natural logic that made the sea-to-sea outcome inevitable, and indeed, he includes two "might-have-been" maps of a Lesser and a Greater United States based on possible outcomes of historic events that shaped the country. (see p. 211-218). These truly "American" events also shaped the other inhabitants of the continent to our north ("as yet feeble and unfocused" Canada taking shape as a nation based on a "determination not to be American", p. 57), south (Mexico fighting to retain its territory against encroaching colonies from the north and east as well as the US military during the Mexican War), and coastal waters (Cuba viewed by many US politicians as a potential slave state, and Alaska purchased from Russia to remove another potential European influence on the American continent).

Of course, as we know and as Meinig documented well in Volume 1, the land over which America spread its golden wings was neither empty nor "free" for the taking. In this volume, beginning with the push of European settlers into the Ohio Valley and the western woods of Georgia, Meinig documents the consistent and persistent approach to native encounters as "awash in deceit and cynicism, regarded by many--probably most--Americans as simply an expedient to pry the Indians out of their Eastern lands and shove them out of sight."

But there is no reason to doubt that some public officials and concerned citizens were deeply committed to the official rationale: removal as an act of rescue, resettlement as an impetus for cultural change, the whole project a national attempt at a kind of geographical social engineering. That the Indians formally agreed to all these provisions, actually requested and specified many of the tools and teachers they were to be supplied with, must not be taken as representing general agreement within any one tribe or nation as to the desirability, direction, or pace of culture change. Here the benign language of treaties masks the ambivalence and factionalism, the pain and despair of captive peoples under relentless pressures to make themselves into something that seemed to contradict all that they had ever been. (p. 100)

Imperial mistreatment of Native Americans would be consistent through time, geography, and tribe as Meinig retells the tragic murder, forced migration, and ignorant merging of cultures and tribes of native Americans into marginal western reservations. This last effect is easily overlooked:

American Whites commonly assumed that any two or more Indian tribes could and should, whenever appropriate to larger purposes, easily cooperate, amalgamate, fuse into some larger body, or dissolve into individual family units. This assumption rested on a widespread belief that all Indian tribes were basically alike, that they had no real history, that they were not really “nations” in any European sense. (p. 180)

Indeed I made the same mistake in my recent review of News of the World, an excellent novel about the attempt to return a young German girl from her native captors to her surviving European relatives in post Civil War Texas. When I referenced the four-way cultural clash of "Hispanics, white settlers, newly-freed blacks, and still-unconquered native Americans", I failed to recognize the sometimes volatile mixture of several distinct tribes in that region documented by Meinig arising out of natural rivalries and new forced neighbors due to American removal policies. The understanding provided by Meinig enhanced my appreciation for the storytelling of the novel and the movie based on it, increased my desire to see the movie again, and will hopefully heighten my awareness of my own blind assumptions about culture and race in the future.

Given the eventual outcome of history, the what-is that did happen, the largest section of this volume is given over to the description of the great westward movement of the cultural, economic, and geopolitical precedents from the original 13 states. Meinig describes four distinct cultures following roughly latitude lines: New England with missionary intent and zeal to the upper midwest, Midlands (primarily Pennsylvania and New York) with germanic practicality to the central midwest, Upland South from Virginia and North Carolina with backwoods individualism to Tennessee, Kentucky, and Arkansas, and the Cotton Belt with patriarchal plantation slave-production to the humid regions of the Gulf of Mexico and the lower Mississippi. As each of these peoples populated the land first west and north of the Ohio River and then west of the great Mississippi, Meinig devotes chapters to the new patterns of emerging cities, agriculture and industry, and territorial boundaries and governments. Ultimately such a mass movement becomes a story of transportation from rivers to canals to roads to rail to telegraph. It is a story of failed attempts at national policy and investment defaulting to commercial and speculative investment that benefited individuals, peoples, cities, and regions differentially but over time achieved something like a national system. (p. 349)

One of the most important factors blocking national transportation systems and government support for them was the growing divide between free and slave states, the corrosive influence of slavery growing in scope and intensity as states and territories expanded west. Indeed, that tension between federation and nation was raised to fighting words by southern leaders intent on keeping their black slaves in chains:

A few years later, in a debate over the funding of "national" roads, Senator Smith of South Carolina warned against this "insidious word": "the term National was a new word that had crept into our political vocabulary," he said, but "it was a term unknown to the origin and theory of our Government"; indeed, it had been specifically expunged from the draft of the Constitution. (p. 399)

The attempted compromises--pairing admission of free and slave states, searching for latitudinal compromises that instead hardened boundaries--leading up to the final split in 1861 only succeeded in building on the tension between federation (were states free to leave?) and nation that Washington, Jefferson, and others acknowledged at our founding (p. 461-475). When the split finally came, it wasn't merely a north/south, Yankee/Fireater split, as Meinig illustrates in another of his insightful maps on p. 488, but a series of fracture lines driven by the existence, acceptance, and importance of slavery to the regions, economies, and cultures of these now disunited states.

Meinig explicitly avoids conclusions on the causes and objectives of the American Civil War, focusing instead on the geopolitical factors and outcomes. But when he writes "If the objective of the war was not only to deny secession but to abolish slavery as an archaic labor system unsuitable to a modern state and a cripplingly divisive problem in national politics" (p. 519), he has perhaps inadvertently exposed the fracture line that still divides America today. In the aftermath of the war, the victorious Union army and politicians were only interested in reuniting the states (to "deny secession") and reestablishing business and life as usual (to abolish an "archaic labor system"), with little concern from the Northern white population for what to do to help millions of now-free former slaves live under their new circumstances and with no expectation of treating them as equals under the law, while the defeated southerners violent intent was to reestablish physical and legal control over the blacks in their midst with as little differentiation from slavery as possible. Neither side of the white majority culture and political parties, save a few radical abolitionists and small sects of devout Christians, were ready and willing to state the objective of abolishing slavery as a moral stain on American government and history, and a mortal sin against God and humanity that must be faced, with forgiveness begged, mercy given, and equality established. Despite the marginal improvements since reconstruction and Jim Crow through the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s, the stain of that objective unfaced rears its ugly head today as black lives still don't matter and still-empowered white racism tries to block black voters, discount their votes, or gerrymander them into insignificant voting ghettos. We had come out of the Civil War as a politically singular nation, the United States of America, with deeply divided cultures we were then and now unable and unwilling to reconcile.

So America the nation did spread its wings over America the continent and it is indeed a dramatic history. That it is a history of dynamic success as a political experiment, an economic miracle, and a cultural creation that changed the world is not diminished by understanding the excellent geographical perspective provided by Meinig. Learning more about the land, water, and peoples underneath freedom's wind will deepen the reader's appreciation of the history and of the need for humility to become better Americans and better humans.

[JC NoKey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Florida was the lair of "murderous In-battles in Indians," "runaway Negroes," "white renegades," "villainous outcasts," "foreign ad-venturers." In the words of John Quincy Adams during the negotiations with and herds Spain, the whole province was "a derelict, open to the occupancy of every enemy, and over more civilized or savage, of the United States, and serving no other earthly purpose than about with
as a post of annoyance to them." A good deal of evidence was cited in support of such fervent characterizations.

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Offers a different perspective on the development of North America and related areas from the Atlantic beginnings of Volume 1. As with the first volume, this is a fresh and interesting perspective that for years I read sections randomly or looked up specific incidents. Some of the sections are very good; overall from start to finish it is perhaps a little less than the previous volume. Again, there are passages in which the author is a little too academic, but they do not mar the larger narrative.

[Will · Rating 2 out of 5]

"The greatest internal challenge to the functioning of the United States was its rapidly and extensively changing human geography. Although every new state joined as an equal in terms of its sovereign authority, these new western states perforce differed in kind as political societies. For whereas in 1789 each of the thirteen states was in fact a preexisting sovereignty and in some significant degree a distinct organic society, these new additions were to an important degree arbitrarily defined pieces of thinly settled national territory shaped in congressional committees and debates. The most obvious exceptions were the sovereign Republic of Texas and those states formed around substantial captive populations, as Louisiana, and later New Mexico and Utah. For the rest, such older rooted populations as those at Mobile, Vincennes, Detroit, or St. Louis were much too small and weak to shape the character of the new encompassing state. All such places were soon swamped by the influx of Americans.
[...]
The United States was not only a nation and a federation, it was also, as always, a set of regional societies, and it was the changing human geography of these societies that was the most important dynamic in the fate of the nation and federation. And here, again, a critical feature in this geopolitical shaping of the United States was the fact that these state boundaries were set before the full pattern of regional societies would become apparent in these western lands. Thus congressional discussions focused much more on general standards of size and shape and showed a strong preference for simple geometric boundaries than on a careful drawing of lines so as to encompass similar peoples and exclude others. The consequences for politics at both state and federal level could not be readily foreseen; in come cases they could be very great, in others not. For example, if the land lying west of Georgia had been divided in half longitudinally so as to form two states elongated east-west following the pattern of Kentucky and Tennessee, the general character of these states would not have been markedly different from that of Alabama and Mississippi because the entire area was given a sufficiently common imprint by early migrations and the subsequent development of the cotton belt. But if the land lying directly west of Pennsylvania and Virginia had been divided latitudinally (say, along 40*N) and, given the long reach of that line, subdivided into eastern and western quarters (say, along 87*W, so as to give each of the northern states access to Lake Michigan), the resulting states would have become markedly, profoundly, different in character from Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois; the southern pair created by such a division (40*N) would have been two more 'Kentuckys' - heavily dominated by Upland Southerners, with Cincinnati and the Miami Valley a somewhat greater enclave than Louisville, while the northern pair would have been almost purely Yankee and Midland in cultural character. As it happened, the longitudinal division into three states set Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois in the path of three streams of migration that would fill them with diversity and tensions."

[Mhd · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is an amazingly detailed effort. Clearly, it is a fine book and the whole series is incredibly admirable. Every sentence is important and this is certainly not the history of high school classes in the 1960s! I didn't finish it in this go, but that's me and not this book! I do intend to finish it later.