"The Outskirts of Our Happiness": Race and the Lure of Colonization in the Early Republic

On December 22, 1820, at Plymouth Rock, in commemoration of the bicentenary of the Mayflowers arrival, Daniel Webster addressed a large crowd on the subject of coloniza tion. Since classical times, he argued, colonies had been the principal means for extend ing the reach of civilization. The Greeks and the Romans had opened northern Europe and Africa in this way; modern European nations had reached the Caribbean Sea and Asia with the same ambitions. The English settlement of North America, however, was distinguished from other instances of colonization. Whereas the Greeks and the Ro mans used migration to increase their power and influence and contemporary European powers acquired new markets and resources in their distant colonies, the American Pil grims sought only civil and religious liberty. Moreover, in America colonization contin ued unabated: Two thousand miles westward from the rock where their fathers landed,