The Backcountry and the City: Colonization and Conflict in Early America

Ed White. The Backcountry and the City: Colonization and Conflict in Early America. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2005. 236 pp.

Keith Lawrence, Brigham Young University

A revisionist consideration of colonial dynamics undergirding the American Revolution, Ed White's The Backcountry and the City employs a Marxist paradigm to argue that, largely as a consequence of ongoing urban/rural conflicts in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century colonial America, distinctively "American" formulations of liberty, individualism, democracy, republicanism, antifederalism, and "rights" had permeated colonial American politics and society long before the Revolutionary moment itself. Appealing to Marxist foundationalists like J. Franklin Jameson, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Barrington Moore Jr.,1 White posits a persistent divide between the colonial city dweller and his peasant farmer neighbor on the frontier, two distinct bodies from whose natural conflicts gradually emerged a kind of practical government, a utilitarian means of negotiating their respective demands or wills that stopped short of institutionalizing the ever-expanding "backcountry" yeomanry.

White breaks his discussion into five parts: "Divides," "Seriality," "Fusion," "Institution," and a conclusion entitled "Toward an Antifederalist Criticism." In the first of these, "Divides," White briefly delineates the colonial American "urban'V'rural" gulf.3 In his second chapter, White establishes separation, dispersal, individualism, isolation - "Seriality" - as the distinguishing marker not only of the colonial American frontier but of any liberal society. Here, White traces the early eighteenth-century unfolding of ineffectual land-use laws through which the Penn family sought recourse against backcountry "squatters" who (in White's euphemistic phrase) "quietly possessed" Penn lands and refused to pay rent or to leave. White then argues that the backcountry gradually acquired a voice through "collective seriality," heroically bartering for greater protection from marauding Indians as well as from urban abuse.3

In its movement toward "collective seriality," the second chapter thus prefigures the third, "Fusion," which describes how "serial" individuals may come together - may begin to see and define themselves according to "group existence" (82). Here, White relies on the Narrative (1799) of James Smith to show the gradual emergence of backcountry "group formation" during the last half of the eighteenth century, describing Smith's alignment with his captors and other Indian groups as well as with other frontier whites. In this context White portrays the so-called Paxton Boys of the early 1760s as a...