5.5 Land, Resources & The Environment in American Development (1600–1877)

An Under-Studied Blueprint Theme

"The role of the environment in United States history" is one of the twenty-one themes CLEP lists, and it is the one most test-takers skip. It rewards study precisely because it cuts across the other themes: environmental constraints explain migration patterns, crop choices, sectional economies, and federal land policy.

Two Ways of Holding Land

The first environmental encounter was a collision of property systems. Most eastern Native nations practiced usufruct: a village held the right to use particular resources — this hunting ground, that fishing weir, these cornfields — in a seasonal round, and rights were shared, overlapping, and revocable. They practiced sophisticated management, especially controlled burning, which cleared undergrowth, improved forage, and created the open, park-like woodlands that colonists described with wonder and mistook for untouched wilderness.

English colonists brought fee simple ownership: exclusive, permanent, bounded, alienable title held by an individual. Under the doctrine of vacuum domicilium and later John Winthrop's argument that land not "subdued" by tillage and fencing was legally vacant, colonists concluded that Native usage created no property right. Fencing, livestock, and plowing were thus not merely economic acts but legal claims, and free-ranging colonial hogs and cattle destroying unfenced Native cornfields became a recurring source of frontier war.

Colonial Resource Extraction

• Fur. The beaver trade drew French, Dutch, and English traders deep into the interior, and by the eighteenth century beaver were commercially extinct across much of the Northeast. Native nations were pulled into market dependence and into wars over hunting territory, most destructively the Beaver Wars of the seventeenth century.
• Timber. New England's white pines were reserved for Royal Navy masts under the Broad Arrow policy, an early and deeply resented conservation measure. Shipbuilding, potash, charcoal for iron, and firewood consumed forests rapidly; southern New England was largely deforested by 1800.
• Soil. Chesapeake tobacco exhausted fields in three to four years, and planters practiced long-fallow rotation, clearing new ground continuously. This is a structural reason the Chesapeake gentry always wanted more land.
• Fish and whales. Cod sustained New England's export economy; Nantucket and New Bedford whaling reached global range by the 1840s and had seriously depleted right and sperm whale populations before petroleum displaced whale oil after 1859.

Federal Land Policy: Turning Land into a Commodity

The national domain was the federal government's greatest asset, and how it was distributed shaped everything else.

The rectangular survey deserves emphasis. Older colonies used "metes and bounds," describing boundaries by trees and streams, which produced endless litigation. The 1785 grid made land legible, uniform, and easy to sell sight unseen — turning it into a financial commodity and enabling the speculative booms that ended in the Panics of 1819, 1837, and 1857. Fly over Ohio or Iowa today and the grid is still the dominant feature of the landscape.

Environment and the Sectional Economies

The South. Cotton depleted soil nitrogen quickly, and because enslaved labor was mobile capital, the rational response was to sell out and move west rather than fertilize. The result was a continuous westward roll from the Carolinas and Georgia into Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. Edmund Ruffin — later the fire-eater credited with firing an early shot at Fort Sumter — built his reputation on An Essay on Calcareous Manures (1832), which showed how marl could restore exhausted Virginia soils.

The North. New England's thin, stony soils could not compete once the Erie Canal brought western grain east, and thousands of farms were abandoned; the stone walls running through today's New England forests mark fields that reverted to woodland. Northern agriculture shifted toward dairy, market gardening, and mechanization — John Deere's steel plow (1837) and Cyrus McCormick's reaper (1831) made the tough prairie sod of Illinois and Iowa farmable at scale.

The West. The Plains posed a genuine environmental barrier. Stephen H. Long's 1820 expedition mapped the region as the "Great American Desert," unfit for cultivation. That verdict — mostly wrong, but reasonable given the technology of the day — helped justify designating the Plains as permanent "Indian country" during removal, and it kept overland migrants moving through toward Oregon and California rather than stopping.

Reworking Landscapes

• Canals and railroads cut through watersheds, drained wetlands, and consumed enormous quantities of timber; a single mile of track required thousands of wooden ties.
• Hydraulic mining in California, developed after 1853, blasted hillsides apart with water cannon and flushed roughly a billion cubic yards of debris into the Sacramento and San Joaquin river systems, raising riverbeds, burying farmland, and worsening floods until an 1884 federal injunction ended the practice.
• Steamboats stripped riverbank forests for fuel along the Ohio and Mississippi.
• Bison. Commercial hide hunting, expanding rail access, and the introduction of tanning processes for bison leather reduced a population of tens of millions to a few hundred animals by the early 1880s, destroying the material foundation of Plains Native life.

The First Conservationist Arguments

By mid-century, damage was visible enough to generate a response:

• Henry David Thoreau's Walden (1854) and the transcendentalist claim that nature had spiritual rather than merely commercial value.
• The Hudson River School painters, whose canvases treated American landscape as a source of national identity worth preserving — Thomas Cole's The Course of Empire (1836) is an explicit warning about civilization consuming its own foundation.
• George Perkins Marsh's Man and Nature (1864), written by a Vermonter who had watched his own state deforested and its streams silt up. Marsh argued systematically that human action had degraded the Mediterranean world and was doing the same in America, and that deforestation caused erosion, flooding, and climate change. It is the founding text of American conservation.
• The Yosemite Grant (1864), signed by Lincoln during the Civil War, which established the precedent for Yellowstone in 1872 and the national park system that followed.