Much of what was written about America during these years came from European visitors to the United States, men who arrived for touring or for business or for plain excitement – men like Dr. Priestley and Thomas Cooper, the Marquis de Lafayette, refugees from the French Revolution like Moreau de St. Mery, and most famous of all, Jean de Crevecoeur, who loved America, named his daughter America-Frances, and did his best to persuade the world to share his sentiments.  These gentlemen traveled, kept diaries, wrote letters home, wonderfully descriptive and fresh, filled with the sharp yet lighthearted perceptions of men of the world who can afford to be bemused by customs and foibles they need not share for long.  Well disposed, most of these travelers saw what they chose to see, and were ready to overlook the more uncomfortable aspects of this brave new society.

Accounts of travels in America were so well received in Europe and so popular that men eventually began to invent marvelous sights.  In America, there grew wondrous plants which yielded two kinds of fruits in a single harvest.  The potato – “food for the man who wants to be free” – grew everywhere without being cultivated.  And on and on.  Some of the most successful of these fanciful stories were written by men who had never, in fact, set foot in America at all.  And other writers, purporting to scorn such fantasies and look realistically upon the Western world, added little of value to the American myth.  The reason it was so cold in America, wrote one, was because of the great forests which covered the entire interior of the continent, right up to the Pacific Ocean.  These dense-growing trees kept the sun from the earth, which naturally stayed frigid.  Only on the seacoast was the climate mild, and becoming milder as the land was being cleared.  Another added his scientific observation that the American continent, having only recently been formed, had scarcely finished drying out; in many places the land was still a deep swamp.  Which also explained the meager vegetation, the scentless plants, feeble animals – and the short-bodied men, hairless, and impotent in the marriage bed.  A French naturalist agreed; American animals were inferior due to the meager grasses, which were not nearly as large and succulent as those of Europe.  It was also said that dogs ceased to bark after breathing American air.  Thomas Jefferson, reading all this in Paris, was irritated enough to send home for the skeleton of a moose.

Imagination was one thing, but the hard facts proved quite different.  Debarking from their ships, European travelers found in America less – sometimes horrifyingly more – than they had been led to expect.  The immigrant or visitor of 1790 found before him a country of about a million square miles and a population of about four million, divided roughly by the Mason-Dixon Line.  Of the Southern half, about three-eighths of the population was black, living mostly in Virginia, the most populous state of the Union.  The vast majority of the immigrants, with a strong dislike for the slavery system, usually avoided the South; there also was the general impression that only a slaveholder could make a go of it there, and few of the newcomers would have had enough capital to buy either a proper estate or the slaves to work it.  For this very reason, the South was destined to be outstripped in the growth of population – and consequently in political power – and the results were to prove tragic for the entire country.

New England, though a region of small farms, was not a very inviting place to the potential settlers either.  It was comparatively crowded; Connecticut, in particular, as many of the travelers noted, was as closely populated as England, and one passed continually through towns and villages.  Land prices were high there, and though there still was plenty of open country in the north, the stories of the long and frigid winters quickly deterred most immigrants.  The section had already been declining in relative importance for more than a hundred years, and was by now so notorious that people were said to be moving out at a rate of thousands each year.  Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island all began to exhibit the phenomena of an old country, though its cities, like Hartford, for example, had no palaces, no public gardens, and no galleries.  One French traveler was proudly shown the famous Charter Oak, and he remarked that “In this country everything which has any connection with liberty is sacred.”  Immigrants, however, regarded New England as a country for a poor man and his family to leave rather than to enter and settle.

The Shenandoah Valley and Kentucky were extraordinarily advertised, but these were regions which needed experienced, native pioneer stock; even the most avid supporters admitted that the raw wilderness was no place for unseasoned Europeans.  Indian wars rendered the Northwest forbidding during the 1790s, and though American military actions in 1795 pacified much of the Ohio country, the region as a whole had to wait until the late 1810s before there was sufficient security to attract settlers in any great numbers.

New York City, with its population of 33,000 in 1787 still showed the ravages of the late war.  The city had been occupied by the enemy for seven years, and the great fire had swept away almost every building on Broadway, including Trinity Church.  What remained was a collection of wooden hovels and gabled Dutch houses of yellow brick.  In the East and North rivers one could still see porpoises.  But at the end of the 18th century, it was the western parts of New York State and Pennsylvania that most stirred the imagination of new settlers.  It was during those years, in fact, that New York began its remarkable rise to the rank of Empire State – in the three decades that followed the first census of 1790, the state quadrupled in population, with more than 800,000 people in the western lands that had just been wrested from the Iroquois.  Starting in fourth place, New York soon became the most populous state of the Union.

The growth throughout the nation was, of course, largely rural.  In a country like the 18th-century United States, abundant in land and short on population, the cities were far less important; the second census of the United States reported only three percent of the people living in communities of 8,000 or more.  And outside of these towns, there was a harshness to this land which most of the romantic writers had neglected to mention.  Instead of the idyllic glen or rill, the visitors met with an uneven climate, incredibly bad roads or no roads at all beyond a forest trail, swollen rivers unbridged and nearly unfordable, and everywhere the unsightly tree stumps which the Americans considered with indifference or even with pride, symbolic of the forest conquered.  Here were storms of lightning and thunder unequaled at home, and snowstorms which raged for days on end.  Here were fireflies, hummingbirds, bullfrogs that roared in the swamps like calves taken from their mothers.  The flowering trees were entrancing; magnolias, “whose flowers perfumed the air . . . “ tulip trees which were said to rejuvenate old married couples – catalpas, sassafras, laurels . . .