The Backcountry and the City: Colonization and Conflict in Early America (review)

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”/“rural” gulf.² 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 particularly dynamic pre-Revolutionary backcountry group. White’s fourth chapter considers the colonial “Institution”—that is, a political entity meant to “counter serial dispersal and group fusion by managing both tendencies” (141). He opens the chapter with an assessment of colonial Christianity as “institution,” particularly as represented through the missionary career of David Brainerd among the Native Americans of Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna Valley. White then turns to the emergence of a second “institution,” American federalism as the spawn of the failed Albany Plan of Union (1754); the chapter’s larger argument considers Native American roles in effecting American institutionalism and particularly American federalism.

White’s conclusion, “Toward an Antifederalist Criticism,” reworks an earlier article White published in American Literary History (1999); it argues that the traditional reading of Franklin’s Autobiography as the memoir of a prototypical American—the self-made man as well as the responsible citizen—is misguided. Especially given its insistence in parts III and IV upon the primacy of ends over means (as illustrated through Franklin’s blithe depictions of himself playing “group” against “group” to preserve the larger “institution”), White argues that the text is instead an apologetics of American federalism. In asserting that an unpacking of Franklin’s mythology may hold keys to the simultaneous unpacking of “the institutional appropriation of nationalism,” White finally advocates an American return to a kind of Marxist equilibrium he terms “creative antifederalism” (210).

The Backcountry and the City is an important contribution to early American social, political, and literary scholarship, verifying what many of us already suspect to be true about colonial American society: that frontier inhabitants played a larger, more crucial role in nation formation than they are generally allowed; and that, for better or worse, economics invariably dictates how human beings think and...