to be transformed through the establishment of

permanent, organized
populations; the development of commercial and
economic activity; the
provision of good government; and the guarantee of the
fundamental
rights of the individuals living there.27 Having described
the main themes
involved in the practice of pre-revolutionary colonial
settlement in North
America, what I want to do now is to look at their
proximity to the subsequent
practice of post-revolutionary westward expansion, which
involved
the conversion of even greater swathes of territory into
states.
In part, the expansive tendencies of the American statesunion related
to the widely held belief that republican virtue would be
best safeguarded
in the context of a democratic political system by
ensuring the dispersal
of property ownership throughout the population. In
nineteenthcentury
Britain, they used property ownership to determine who
should
be given the franchise; in America, they gave everyone
the vote, but then
decided that everyone ought to own property.28 One of
the foremost
spokesmen for this point of view was Thomas Hart
Benton, the senator
from Missouri, who eloquently summarized the
Jeffersonian position on

western settlement in the following way:

Tenantry is unfavourable to freedom . . . The freeholder,
on the contrary, is the
natural supporter of a free government, and it should be
the policy of republics to
multiply their freeholders as it is the policy of monarchies
to multiply tenants.We
are a republic, and we wish to continue so: then multiply
the class of freeholders;
pass the public lands cheaply and easily into the hands of
the People; sell for a
reasonable price to those who are able to pay; and give
without price to those
who are not.29
One could hardly wish for a better statement of what
differentiated the
republican states-union of America from the predominant
monarchies
in the European states-system, to which (as we saw in
chapter 1) A.H.L.
Heeren and the English school attached such importance.
Jefferson himself had been closely involved in two key
developments
with regard to the settlement of the western territories
and the spread
of American republican civilization. As president, he
conducted the
Louisiana Purchase in 1803, dramatically expanding the
size of the public
27 This belief is a prominent theme in the classic thesis
on American expansion presented
in Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American
History (Tucson: University of

Arizona Press, 1986), but for a more recent, and

extremely good, discussion of the concept
of civilization in the context of American westward
expansion, see Harold Hyman,
American Singularity: The 1787 Northwest Ordinance, the
1862 Homestead and Morrill Acts,
and the 1944 G.I. Bill (Athens: University of Georgia Press,
1986).
28 For a less facetious interpretation, see Joyce Appelby,
Liberalism and Republicanism in the
Historical Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1992).
29 Cited in Benjamin Horace Hibbard, A History of the
Public Land Policies (New York: Peter
Smith, 1965), pp. 1423.