7. The Land Companies

It is eminently significant of the spirit of the age, which was inaugurating an era of land hunger unparalleled in American history, that the first authentic records of the trans-Alleghany were made by surveyors who visited the country as the agents of great land companies. The outbreak of the French and Indian War so soon afterward delayed for a decade and more any important colonization of the West. Indeed, the explorations and findings of Walker and Gist were almost unknown, even to the companies they represented. But the conclusion of peace in 1763, which gave all the region between the mountains and the Mississippi to the British, heralded the true beginning of the westward expansionist movement in the Old Southwest, and inaugurated the constructive leadership of North Carolina in f he occupation and colonization of the imperial domain of Kentucky and the Ohio Valley.

In the middle years of the century many families of Virginia gentry removed to the back country of North Carolina in the fertile region ranging from Williamsborough on the east to Hillsborough on the west. There soon arose in this section of the colony a society marked by intellectual distinction, social graces, and the leisured dignity of the landlord and the large planter. So conspicuous for means, intellect, culture, and refinement were the people of this group, having "abundance of wealth and leisure for enjoyment," that Governor Josiah Martin, in passing through this region some years later, significantly observes: "They have great preeminence, as well with respect to soil and cultivation, as to the manners and condition of the inhabitants, in which last respect the difference is so great that one would be led to think them people of another region." This new wealthy class which was now turning its gaze toward the unoccupied lands along the frontier was "dominated by the democratic ideals of pioneers rather than by the aristocratic tendencies of slave-holding planters." From the cross- fertilization of the ideas of two social groups--this back- country gentry, of innate qualities of leadership, democratic instincts, economic independence, and expansive tendencies, and the primitive pioneer society of the frontier, frugal in taste, responsive to leadership, bold, ready, and thorough in execution- -there evolved the militant American expansion in the Old Southwest.

A conspicuous figure in this society of Virginia emigrants was a young man named Richard Henderson, whose father had removed with his family from Hanover County, Virginia, to Bute, afterward Granville County, North Carolina, in 1742. Educated at home by a private tutor, he began his career as assistant of his father, Samuel Henderson, the High Sheriff of Granville County; and after receiving a law-license, quickly acquired an extensive practice. "Even in the superior courts where oratory and eloquence are as brilliant and powerful as in Westminster hall," records an English acquaintance, "he soon became distinguished and eminent, and his superior genius shone forth with great splendour, and universal applause." This young attorney, wedded to the daughter of an Irish lord, often visited Salisbury on his legal circuit; and here he became well acquainted with Squire Boone, one of the "Worshipfull Justices," and often appeared in suits before him. By his son, the nomadic Daniel Boone, conspicuous already for his solitary wanderings across the dark green mountains to the sun-lit valleys and boundless hunting-grounds beyond, Henderson was from time to time regaled with bizarre and fascinating tales of western exploration; and Boone, in his dark hour of poverty and distress, when he was heavily involved financially, turned for aid to this friend and his partner, who composed the law-firm of Williams and Henderson.

Boone's vivid descriptions of the paradise of the West stimulated Henderson's imaginative mind and attracted his attention to the rich possibilities of unoccupied lands there. While the Board of Trade in drafting the royal proclamation of October 7, 1763, forbade the granting of lands in the vast interior, which was specifically reserved to the Indians, it was clearly not their intention to set permanent western limits to the colonies. The prevailing opinion among the shrewdest men of the period was well expressed by George Washington, who wrote his agent for preempting western lands: "I can never look upon that proclamation in any other light (but I say this between ourselves) than as a temporary expedient to quiet the minds of the Indians." And again in 1767: "It (the proclamation of 1763) must fall, of course, in a few years, especially when those Indians consent to our occupying the lands. Any person, therefore, who neglects the present opportunity of hunting out good lands, and in some measure marking out and distinguishing them for his own, in order to keep others from settling them, will never regain it." Washington had added greatly to his holdings of bounty lands in the West by purchasing at trivial prices the claims of many of the officers and soldiers. Three years later we find him surveying extensive tracts along the Ohio and the Great Kanawha, and, with the vision of the expansionist, making large plans for the establishment of a colony to be seated upon his own lands. Henderson, too, recognized the importance of the great country west of the Appalachians. He agreed with the opinion of Benjamin Franklin, who in 1756 called it "one of the finest in North America for the extreme richness and fertility of the land, the healthy temperature of the air and the mildness of the climate, the plenty of hunting, fishing and fowling, the facility of trade with the Indians and the vast convenience of inland navigation or water carriage." Henderson therefore proceeded to organize a land company for the purpose of acquiring and colonizing a large domain in the West. This partnership, which was entitled Richard Henderson and Company, was composed of a few associates, including Richard Henderson, his uncle and law-partner, John Williams, and, in all probability, their close friends Thomas and Nathaniel Hart of Orange County, North Carolina, immigrants from Hanover County, Virginia.

Contents