Thomas Jefferson, a slaveholder who saw himself as a man of the Enlightenment, argued that Native Americans should be compelled to assimilate into white society and give up their hunting and fishing grounds to settlers. In 1824, President James Monroe wrote, “There is no object which as a people we can desire which we do not possess or which is not within our reach.” And, as the white men at the helm of the new nation’s government all agreed, what was within their reach was theirs to take.ĭisagreements emerged among the governing classes about how to deal with the Indigenous populations living on land that white elites and their settler underlings felt entitled to. The fixation with expansionism did not diminish with time. By the Trump Era, Grandin argues, these wars had largely run their course, resulting in a retreat to increasingly brutal U.S.-Mexico border repression as a symptom of the U.S. Grandin shows how wars against Native Americans led to wars of conquest outside the U.S., including in Latin America. 10, Madison argues that citizens spread over a large space are less likely to “discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other.” Madison wrote that by extending the size of the country, “you take in a greater variety of parties and interests,” thus avoiding mob rule or consolidation of power in the hands of a few. Liberty was made possible by the right to colonize, letting freemen, when their freedom was threatened, move on to find free land and carry the torch from one place to another.” And in James Madison’s Federalist Paper No. For Thomas Jefferson, Grandin writes, “The ability to migrate wasn’t just an exercise of natural rights but the source of rights, or at least their historically necessary condition. Benjamin Franklin’s version of political economy described the vast lands of the continent as a safety valve that ensured families would grow, wages would stay high, and demand would keep up with supply. The End of the Myth shows how the “Founding Fathers” of the United States held up westward expansion as a crucial part of the prosperous future they saw for white men in North America. The historian Greg Grandin’s new book The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America fits that bill perfectly. In this era of Make America Great Again baseball caps and undeserved nostalgia for an unjust past, it is a welcome tonic to read a well written, engaging historical overview of the settler colonialism that drove this country’s creation.
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