Washington Administrations - Domestic Issues
Domestic Issues
For many citizens, Washington's presidency was a time of reconstructing lives and fortunes that had been disrupted by the American Revolution (1775–83). It was a time when frontier settlement breached the Allegheny Mountains, and pioneers came pouring through the Cumberland Gap into the Ohio River basin and the Northwest Territories, encroaching on the lands of American Indians as they went. Frontier farmers fleeing high land prices, banks, and mortgage foreclosures, engaged in subsistence farming and relied on barter or on cooperative labor for projects that required more than one family's labor. In a sense they were fleeing the government itself, with its military draft, its taxes, its courts, and its jails. This migration became the subject of many folktales and legends—like Daniel Boone and James Fenimore Cooper's rough-hewn literary hero, Leatherstocking.
This was also a time when the foundations of...
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