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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Winning of the West (Complete Edition)," Theodore Roosevelt presents a sweeping narrative that chronicles the westward expansion of the United States, blending historical analysis with vivid storytelling. This comprehensive work examines the interplay of pioneering spirit, conflict, and natural beauty that defined the American frontier during the 18th and 19th centuries. Roosevelt's prose, marked by a vigorous and engaging style, captures the challenges and triumphs of settlers, Indigenous peoples, and the evolving American identity. The book contextualizes the myths and realities of the West, delving into themes of conquest, resilience, and nation-building. Roosevelt, a prominent figure in American politics and history, was profoundly influenced by his upbringing and experiences in the rugged terrains of the West. His personal encounters with nature and the prevailing forces of capitalism and nationalism informed his views on expansionism and its complexities. The book reflects his belief in the necessity of the American spirit and his deep affinity for the land as critical components of national character and policy. This seminal work is not only a historical account; it is also an introspective examination of American ideals. It is highly recommended for readers interested in American history, literature, or the dynamics of cultural identity, as it offers profound insights into the formation of modern America. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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The Winning of the West (Complete Edition)
Table of Contents
Introduction
Axes bite into timber while empires and nations jostle for a continent’s future. Theodore Roosevelt’s The Winning of the West (Complete Edition) enters this charged landscape with a vigorous, panoramic narrative that seeks to explain how the United States extended beyond the Appalachians. Combining the cadence of adventure with the scaffolding of history, Roosevelt renders the frontier as both a physical battleground and an arena of political and cultural formation. The story he tells is about endurance and ambition, about order slowly emerging from peril, and about the contested meanings of conquest and citizenship that continue to shadow American memory.
The book is considered a classic because it fuses literary verve with historical sweep, offering a foundational account of how the trans-Appalachian world became part of the United States. It helped shape the public imagination of the frontier, embedding images of settlers, militias, river crossings, and rough-hewn governments into the nation’s cultural repertoire. Its endurance owes much to Roosevelt’s striking prose and the breadth of his canvas, which ranges from household struggles to geopolitical contests. Even as subsequent scholarship has revised or challenged its assertions, the work remains a touchstone in American letters for its energy, scope, and narrative ambition.
Authored by Theodore Roosevelt and originally published in multiple volumes between 1889 and 1896, The Winning of the West surveys the movement of American settlers beyond the Appalachians during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Complete Edition gathers these volumes into a single, continuous history. Roosevelt traces the pressures and processes that drove expansion, from local self-defense and communal organization to broader contests involving rival powers. Written before his presidency, the work reflects his early career as historian and public figure, and it frames westward growth as a crucible in which American institutions and identity were tempered.
Roosevelt’s purpose was to craft a readable yet researched chronicle that conveyed the drama of frontier life while arguing that national character was forged in adversity. He drew on published documents and earlier histories, as well as personal narratives available in his day, to assemble a story that binds individual grit to collective outcomes. His intention was not only to recount events, but to illustrate how civic order took shape under pressure. The result is a history that moves swiftly between the local and the strategic, attentive to leadership and community dynamics, and unapologetically invested in a consequential national project.
At its core, the book explores three entwined themes: contest, consolidation, and character. Contest involves the overlapping claims of Native nations, European empires, and American settlers on the same rivers, valleys, and trade routes. Consolidation concerns the slow, uneven spread of institutions—courts, militias, and governance—across a volatile landscape. Character refers to the ideals and habits Roosevelt believed expansion cultivated, from cooperation to self-reliance. These themes are threaded through episodes of migration and conflict, and while the narrative foregrounds the settler perspective, it continually acknowledges that the West was a site of ongoing, deeply consequential struggles over sovereignty.
Much of the book’s lasting appeal lies in its narrative technique. Roosevelt writes with propulsion, crafting portraits of communities and leaders that feel immediate without losing sight of broader patterns. He blends description of terrain and travel with explanations of how political decisions ripple outward to shape ordinary lives. The prose is concise yet emphatic, inviting readers to inhabit both the cabin and the council chamber. This stylistic vitality—neither purely academic nor merely anecdotal—helps the work cross the boundary between scholarship and literature, and has made it accessible to generations of readers seeking an account that is both informative and engrossing.
The Winning of the West has influenced how later writers and readers envision the American frontier, whether they emulate its sweeping storytelling or interrogate its assumptions. It contributed to a vocabulary of national self-understanding in which expansion, danger, and opportunity converge. Popular histories, school narratives, and cultural depictions of pioneers have often echoed its rhythms and emphases, even when revised by newer evidence or different ethical frameworks. Scholars and authors who disagree with Roosevelt’s framing nonetheless engage with it, recognizing its role in catalyzing debates about what the West meant and how its story should be told.
Placed in its nineteenth-century context, the book reflects the era’s confidence in nation-building narratives and the limits of its perspective. Roosevelt sought to be empirical and comparative, but he also wrote from assumptions prevalent in his time, particularly regarding Native peoples and cultural hierarchy. Contemporary readers may find moments that require critical distance. Engaging the text with historical awareness allows its strengths—clarity, synthesis, narrative stamina—to be appreciated alongside its shortcomings. In this way, the book functions as both a history of the frontier and an artifact of the intellectual and political climate that produced it.
Roosevelt structures the work to move between large arcs and granular scenes. He tracks how communities assemble defenses, commerce, and rudimentary laws, and how these local efforts intersect with international rivalries and national policy. Over time, the narrative follows the expansion from the trans-Appalachian corridors toward the river systems that knit the interior together. The pacing alternates between steady institutional growth and bursts of crisis, always returning to the question of how order emerges. This architecture keeps the reader oriented through complexity, balancing regional particularities with a coherent sense of direction and consequence.
The book’s relevance endures because it confronts issues that remain central: the costs and claims of expansion, the making of national identity, and the tension between myth and evidence. It invites reflection on who tells a nation’s story and how public memory is formed. In depicting communities under strain, it raises questions about civic responsibility, military force, and political compromise. These concerns do not belong to a single century. Readers encounter a formative narrative whose echoes can be heard in contemporary debates about land, law, belonging, and the narratives that bind or divide a plural society.
For modern audiences, The Winning of the West works on multiple levels. It is a spirited piece of narrative history, an index to Roosevelt’s mind and style, and a sourcebook for the imagery and arguments that have shaped frontier discourse. To read it is to trace the genealogy of a national story—its aspirations, blind spots, and enduring fascinations. Approached critically, it offers an opportunity to learn both from its insights and from its limitations. Approached appreciatively, it reveals a writer intent on capturing vast change in muscular prose, mindful of contingency yet convinced of direction.
In sum, this book endures for its large-canvas storytelling, its attention to the interplay of local grit and national destiny, and its capacity to provoke reflection on the meaning of the West. Its principal themes—contested sovereignty, institutional formation, and civic character—remain vital to understanding the American past and its legacies. Readers return to it for the energy of its narrative and the scope of its vision, as well as the challenge it poses to think carefully about history’s uses. The Winning of the West persists as a demanding, engaging classic with lasting appeal for thoughtful readers today.
Synopsis
The Winning of the West (Complete Edition) is Theodore Roosevelt’s multi-volume history of American expansion across the Appalachian barrier into the trans-Alleghany country and toward the Mississippi. Covering the late colonial era through the early nineteenth century, it traces settlement, warfare, diplomacy, and institution-building on the frontier. Drawing on journals, state papers, and local histories, the narrative follows how backwoods communities formed, defended themselves, and became territories and states. It organizes events geographically and chronologically, linking scattered raids and treaties to national policy. The central purpose is to explain how the West was secured for the United States through combined efforts of settlers, militias, regular troops, and federal governance.
Roosevelt begins with the backwoodsmen’s world: a society of small farmers, hunters, and stock-raisers of largely English, Scotch-Irish, and German descent. He describes their tools, long rifles, cabins, and log forts, and the migration routes through the Cumberland Gap and down the Ohio River. Early ventures include the Watauga settlements, the Transylvania enterprise, and Daniel Boone’s opening of Kentucky. The account outlines land companies, claims, and the fragile nature of frontier tenure. Relations with neighboring Native nations were tense and often violent, dictated by proximity, competing land use, and retaliatory cycles. This setting frames the enduring conditions under which frontier communities emerged and survived.
With the Revolutionary War, attention shifts to defense and strategic opportunity. Isolated stations in Kentucky and along the Holston and Clinch fought sieges and raids. Roosevelt highlights George Rogers Clark’s 1778–1779 expedition that seized British posts at Kaskaskia and Vincennes, weakening the British-Indian alliance and supporting American claims in the Northwest. The Overmountain Men’s role at King’s Mountain illustrates frontier militia contributions east of the mountains. Throughout, the narrative emphasizes the decentralized character of frontier warfare: small parties, rapid marches, and fortified homesteads. These efforts linked western survival to national independence, establishing conditions for later civil administration beyond the Alleghanies.
After 1783, the story turns to the founding of trans-Alleghany commonwealths. In Kentucky, a surge of migration, local conventions, and negotiations with the East resulted in statehood in 1792. In the upper Tennessee country, the Watauga Association prefigured self-rule; the attempted State of Franklin faltered, but Tennessee emerged as a state in 1796. The Cumberland settlements around Nashville governed themselves under the Cumberland Compact, blending militia service with rudimentary courts and land regulation. Conflicts with the Cherokee, including the Chickamauga towns, remained persistent. Spanish influence on the lower Mississippi complicated western politics. Treaties sought to stabilize boundaries while settlers consolidated farms and towns.
In the Old Northwest, national policy took shape through the Land Ordinance of 1785 and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. These measures set surveying practices, guaranteed civil liberties, and structured territorial government, guiding settlement at Marietta, Cincinnati, and other posts. Resistance by a confederation of Native nations—Miami, Shawnee, and others—led to sustained warfare. Campaigns under generals Harmar (1790) and St. Clair (1791) ended in severe defeats, exposing weaknesses in frontier defense and federal organization. Roosevelt details the resulting fort network, supply problems, and the interplay of territorial authorities with local militias. The setbacks prompted the creation of a more disciplined national force to secure the region.
Anthony Wayne’s reformed Legion of the United States provided that force. After training and fort-building, Wayne advanced, culminating in the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794. The Treaty of Greenville (1795) followed, opening much of Ohio to settlement and reducing large-scale conflict in the Northwest. Diplomatic agreements complemented military success: Jay’s Treaty hastened British evacuation of frontier posts, and Pinckney’s Treaty with Spain secured navigation on the Mississippi and the right of deposit at New Orleans. These measures stabilized commerce and migration, encouraged town growth, and integrated western communities into the national economy, while garrisons and roads maintained a durable peace.
The southwestern frontier saw parallel developments. Intermittent warfare with the Cherokee and Creek, including the campaign against the Chickamauga strongholds at Nickajack in 1794, diminished sustained hostilities. Spanish positions in Natchez and along the lower Mississippi influenced local allegiances and trade until boundary settlements advanced. The creation of the Mississippi Territory in 1798 formalized federal authority. River commerce expanded as flatboats carried produce downstream, connecting interior farms to Gulf markets. Western political currents—separatist talk, land speculation, and demands for protection—interacted with national leaders who balanced negotiation and force. By the century’s end, settlements spread, courts functioned, and raids, though recurrent, were less decisive.
Louisiana and the Northwest in the early 1800s mark the narrative’s broadening horizon. The retrocession of Louisiana to France and its 1803 purchase by the United States transformed strategic prospects, doubling national territory and strengthening western security. The government organized the Orleans and Louisiana territories, while the Lewis and Clark expedition surveyed the Missouri River corridor to the Pacific. Boundary questions with Spain persisted, and the Burr affair (1806–1807) tested loyalty and federal reach in the valley. Nonetheless, immigration into Missouri and the lower Mississippi increased, trade intensified, and a framework of forts, courts, and administrative districts extended American authority across newly acquired lands.
Roosevelt concludes that the West was secured by a combination of pioneer endurance, militia and regular army campaigns, statecraft, and federal legal frameworks. The process included treaties, surveys, and territorial institutions that transformed loosely held settlements into organized commonwealths. European rivalries mattered, but the United States consolidated control through persistence and policy. Relations with Native nations, central to the narrative, shaped the pace and character of expansion. By linking local fights and compacts to national outcomes, the work presents westward movement as a key to American nation-building, establishing durable control to the Mississippi and preparing for subsequent growth beyond it.
Historical Context
The work is set across the trans-Appalachian frontier from roughly the late 1760s to the first decade of the nineteenth century, when Euro-American settlers crossed the Alleghenies into the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. Its geography ranges from Kentucky and Tennessee to the Old Northwest (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois) and down the Mississippi to Spanish Louisiana and West Florida, with the Great Lakes and Detroit as northern pivots. Indigenous nations—Shawnee, Miami, Delaware, Cherokee, Creek, Chickasaw, and Choctaw—contested this advance. River systems functioned as highways, forts as nodes of authority, and imperial rivalries—British, Spanish, French—shaped the violent, fluid political landscape.
This time and place were defined by subsistence farming, deerskin and fur trades, and land speculation under charters and private companies. Settlements like Harrodsburg and Boonesborough in Kentucky and the Watauga settlements on the Holston formed clusters protected by blockhouses and militias. Migrants, often Scots-Irish and German, used the Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap and flatboats down the Ohio and Mississippi. Law was local and precarious, overlapping with claims by Virginia, North Carolina, and the nascent federal government. Access to New Orleans, British-held posts on the Great Lakes, and Native nations’ autonomy were decisive constraints on the frontier’s economy and security.
The great backcountry migration accelerated in the 1760s–1770s, with Scots-Irish and German settlers pouring from Pennsylvania and Virginia into the upper Holston, Clinch, and Watauga valleys. The Watauga Association formed in 1772, a quasi-compact of self-government that later became the Washington District of North Carolina. Daniel Boone’s opening of the Wilderness Road in 1775, under the Transylvania Company’s auspices, cut a passage into Kentucky through the Cumberland Gap. Roosevelt foregrounds these movements to argue that kin-based, militia-armed communities created republican institutions in real time. He depicts their cabins, stockades, and hunting parties as the social infrastructure from which western commonwealths would emerge.
Lord Dunmore’s War in 1774 pitted Virginia militia against Shawnee and Mingo forces on the Ohio. The decisive battle at Point Pleasant on 10 October 1774 saw Colonel Andrew Lewis defeat Chief Cornstalk’s warriors, compelling the Treaty of Camp Charlotte and a temporary cessation of hostilities south of the Ohio River. Roosevelt treats this conflict as a prelude to the Revolution in the West, asserting that it trained backwoods leaders and established lines of communication and supply. He connects the campaign’s riverine logistics and militia organization to later operations against Detroit-linked British-Indian coalitions.
The American Revolution in the West (1775–1783) forms the crucible of Roosevelt’s narrative. Kentucky’s precarious settlements—Boonesborough, Harrodsburg, and Logan’s Fort—survived the Bloody Sevens of 1777 and the great siege of Boonesborough in September 1778, when Shawnee under Blackfish and allied warriors assailed Daniel Boone’s garrison. Roosevelt narrates Boone’s capture in February 1778 and escape as emblematic of frontier resilience. In the Illinois Country, George Rogers Clark led Virginia state troops down the Ohio to seize Kaskaskia on 4 July 1778 and Cahokia shortly after, then executed a winter march to Vincennes, compelling Lieutenant Governor Henry Hamilton’s surrender of Fort Sackville on 25 February 1779. These operations undermined British authority south of the Great Lakes and set claims later affirmed by diplomacy. On the southern front, Dragging Canoe’s Chickamauga Cherokee waged a protracted war (1776–1794) from towns along the Tennessee, illustrating the conflict’s multi-theater character. Roosevelt places the Overmountain Men’s battle at Kings Mountain on 7 October 1780—where frontier riflemen crushed Major Patrick Ferguson’s Loyalists—at the center of his thesis that armed settlers, rather than eastern regulars alone, decided the war’s outcome in the backcountry. He also notes Spanish Governor Bernardo de Gálvez’s 1779–1781 campaigns taking Baton Rouge, Natchez, Mobile, and Pensacola, which indirectly relieved pressure on the Mississippi settlements. The book weaves these events into an argument that decentralized, locally led warfare, anchored by cabins, forts, and rivercraft, secured the Ohio Valley for the United States.
After independence, western polities crystallized. The State of Franklin (1784–1789), championed by John Sevier in present-day East Tennessee, sought autonomy from North Carolina but collapsed amid fiscal weakness and Cherokee diplomacy. Congress organized the Southwest Territory in 1790 with William Blount as governor; Tennessee entered the Union on 1 June 1796. In Kentucky, Danville conventions (1784–1792) debated separation from Virginia, culminating in statehood on 1 June 1792. Roosevelt treats these processes as evidence of frontier capacity for ordered self-government, emphasizing conventions, petitions, and militias as institutional bridges from settlements to statehood.
Diplomacy and treaty-making framed the ground rules of settlement. The Treaty of Fort Stanwix (1768) with the Iroquois opened lands south of the Ohio claimed by Virginia. The 1777 treaties at Long Island of the Holston sought peace with the Cherokee after 1776 raids but were contested by Dragging Canoe’s faction. Postwar federal efforts produced the Treaty of Fort McIntosh (1785) with Wyandot and Delaware, and the Treaty of Fort Harmar (1789), both disputed by many Native leaders. Roosevelt presents these compacts, sometimes signed by partial delegations, as inadequate stopgaps that encouraged overreach by settlers and fueled the organized Native resistance of the 1780s–1790s.
The Northwest Indian War (1785–1795) escalated conflict in the Ohio Country. Expeditions under Generals Josiah Harmar (defeated in 1790) and Arthur St. Clair suffered disastrous losses, notably St. Clair’s defeat on 4 November 1791 near the Wabash—the worst U.S. Army loss to Native forces. General Anthony Wayne rebuilt the army as the Legion of the United States, training at Legionville (1792–1793), then won the Battle of Fallen Timbers on 20 August 1794 near present-day Maumee, Ohio. The Treaty of Greenville on 3 August 1795 ceded most of Ohio. Roosevelt devotes sustained attention to Wayne’s methods, contrasting disciplined regulars with earlier militia failures.
The Land Ordinance of 20 May 1785 and the Northwest Ordinance of 13 July 1787 imposed a federal grid and a staged path to statehood. Townships six miles square, divided into 36 sections of 640 acres, enabled sales to the Ohio Company of Associates and private buyers; Marietta was founded on 7 April 1788, and Cincinnati soon after in Symmes’s Purchase. The Northwest Ordinance banned slavery north of the Ohio River and guaranteed civil liberties. Roosevelt treats these statutes as the legal architecture of civilization on the frontier, praising their republican design while noting how speculation and enforcement gaps complicated equitable distribution.
Control of the Mississippi and the right of deposit at New Orleans dominated western politics. Spain closed the port in 1784, and the proposed Jay–Gardoqui treaty of 1786, trading navigation for commercial concessions with Spain, enraged westerners. Pinckney’s Treaty (Treaty of San Lorenzo) on 27 October 1795 restored navigation, set the 31st parallel as the boundary, and granted deposit rights at New Orleans. General James Wilkinson’s intrigues with Spanish officials stoked fears of secession. Roosevelt uses these episodes to illustrate how precarious allegiance and commerce were before a strong national policy secured western loyalties.
The Jay Treaty with Great Britain, signed 19 November 1794 and implemented in 1796, required British evacuation of frontier forts such as Detroit, Niagara, and Michilimackinac. It regularized trade and commissions to settle debts, dampening immediate Anglo-American tensions. For the western country, the pullback disrupted British provisioning networks to Native confederacies and reduced the diplomatic leverage of Canada-based agents. Roosevelt links the treaty’s execution to the strategic opening for Wayne’s diplomacy and to the clearer assertion of U.S. jurisdiction along the Great Lakes line, even as it ignited partisan controversy in the East.
The Whiskey Rebellion in 1794 exposed the friction between federal fiscal policy and frontier subsistence economies. The 1791 excise on distilled spirits pinched western Pennsylvania producers who relied on whiskey as a medium of exchange. Violence peaked with the attack on John Neville’s Bower Hill in July 1794, prompting President George Washington to muster a militia army of roughly 13,000 that dispersed the resistance without pitched battle. Roosevelt frames the episode as a test of national sovereignty, arguing that the West’s integration required both local self-assertion and acceptance of federal authority to suppress vigilante justice and foster stable markets.
The Louisiana Purchase, concluded on 30 April 1803 for $15 million after Spain’s retrocession to France under the 1800 Treaty of San Ildefonso, doubled U.S. territory and secured New Orleans. Congress organized the Territory of Orleans in 1804 and, separately, the District (then Territory) of Louisiana north of it, initially administered from Vincennes and later St. Louis. The acquisition reshaped border diplomacy with Spain and Native nations across the Missouri and Arkansas basins. Roosevelt treats the purchase as the logical culmination of western aims for river control, connecting it to earlier settler demands for free navigation and strategic depth.
Exploration followed swiftly. The Lewis and Clark expedition departed Camp Dubois in May 1804, wintered at Fort Mandan (1804–1805), reached the Pacific at the mouth of the Columbia in November 1805, and returned in 1806, mapping routes and describing nations such as the Mandan, Shoshone, and Nez Perce. Zebulon Pike’s 1805 journey to the upper Mississippi and his 1806–1807 southwestern expedition, culminating in arrest by Spanish authorities in New Mexico, probed the plains and Rockies, naming Pike’s Peak. Roosevelt situates these ventures within the martial-settler ethos, reading them as reconnaissance for commerce, defense, and eventual settlement.
By the first decade of the nineteenth century, a new intertribal revival emerged under Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh, building Prophetstown near the Tippecanoe and Wabash in 1808 and urging resistance to piecemeal land cessions. Although the climactic battles came after Roosevelt’s terminal date, the causes lay in the treaties and defeats he documents—St. Clair’s disaster, Fallen Timbers, Greenville’s line, and accelerating settlement in Ohio and Indiana. Roosevelt’s narrative foreshadows this confrontation by emphasizing British influence from Canada, the contested legitimacy of treaties with partial councils, and the tension between aggressive squatters and federal agents pursuing managed expansion.
The book functions as an implicit political critique by contrasting the weak Articles-era confederation with the assertive federal policies that followed 1789. Roosevelt highlights failures of coordination, supply, and diplomacy in early campaigns, using St. Clair’s 1791 defeat as a case study in institutional inadequacy. He praises the later professionalization under Wayne, the clarity of territorially grounded law under the Northwest Ordinance, and treaties like Pinckney’s that quelled secessionist temptations. This argument critiques parochialism and faction, urging national cohesion as the remedy for frontier chaos, contraband trade, and foreign manipulation on the Great Lakes and the Mississippi.
At the same time, the narrative exposes the era’s social fractures—dispossession of Native nations, planter expansion into the Southwest, and tax burdens that sparked western insurrections. Roosevelt’s admiration for backwoods militias coexists with a call for order against lynch law and river piracy. His treatment of slavery is instrumental, contrasting a free Northwest with slaveholding Kentucky and Tennessee, thereby registering an early sectional divide rooted in federal statutes and migration streams. Though colored by late nineteenth-century assumptions about race and conquest, the work implicitly critiques speculative corruption, diplomatic cynicism, and political irresolution that compounded violence on the borderlands.
Author Biography
Introduction
Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) was an American statesman, naturalist, and remarkably productive author whose books, essays, and speeches helped define the nation’s Progressive Era. Before, during, and after his presidency, he wrote history, biography, travel narratives, and reflections on citizenship that combined vigorous prose with practical reform. Among his best known works are The Naval War of 1812, The Winning of the West, The Rough Riders, The Strenuous Life, African Game Trails, and his Autobiography. As a public intellectual-president, he popularized a strenuous ideal of civic duty, championed conservation, and expanded the reach of executive leadership, leaving an enduring imprint on American political and literary culture.
Education and Literary Influences
Roosevelt’s formal education culminated at Harvard College in the late 1870s, where he studied a broad curriculum that included history, natural sciences, and political economy. Chronic childhood illness had directed him toward books, but at Harvard he matched study with physical discipline, developing a lifelong belief that scholarship and strenuous effort belong together. After graduation he briefly attended Columbia Law School before turning to public service and writing. Parallel to classroom study, he practiced field naturalism, collecting specimens and keeping detailed notes. This habit of empirical observation shaped his historical method, his ranching years in the West, and his later contributions to nature writing.
His intellectual influences were eclectic yet traceable in his prose. He admired historians such as Francis Parkman for narrative sweep and frontier insight, and Thomas Babington Macaulay for clarity and moral fervor. Naval strategy interested him early; he read and later promoted the work of Alfred Thayer Mahan, aligning with arguments for sea power and national strength. As a naturalist, he drew on the observational traditions of Charles Darwin and John James Audubon, valuing careful description of species and habitats. Classical writers and Anglo American moralists reinforced his belief that civic virtue requires energy, discipline, and a willingness to undertake difficult public tasks.
Literary Career
Roosevelt’s literary debut came with The Naval War of 1812 in the early 1880s, a meticulously researched study written in his twenties. Its careful use of ship logs and comparative analysis earned him a reputation as a serious historian and sharpened his interest in national defense. In the late 1880s and early 1890s he published American statesman biographies, including Thomas Hart Benton and Gouverneur Morris, demonstrating command of political character and frontier expansion. His multivolume The Winning of the West traced migration, conflict, and settlement across the trans Appalachian frontier, blending archival work with an unapologetically nationalist interpretation that invited both praise and debate.
Time on his Dakota ranch informed Roosevelt’s western books and hunting narratives. Hunting Trips of a Ranchman and Ranch Life and the Hunting-Trail portrayed wildlife, weather, and range culture with candid detail and moral purpose. He wrote to instruct as well as entertain, insisting on fair chase principles and respect for habitat. Essays gathered in American Ideals articulated his standards for public service and citizenship. Across these works, his style remained direct, energetic, and fond of vivid example. He cultivated a voice that fused the scholar’s footpath with the saddle trail, placing firsthand experience alongside documentary research to persuade a wide readership.
The Spanish American War vaulted Roosevelt to national prominence and furnished material for The Rough Riders, a best selling account of volunteer cavalry service that solidified his celebrity. Around the turn of the century he published Oliver Cromwell and the essay collection The Strenuous Life, reinforcing themes of duty, discipline, and reform. Even while holding demanding offices, he continued to write articles and reviews. His books reached general audiences without sacrificing argument, a balance that critics noted. Admirers praised his force and clarity; detractors saw moralizing and martial enthusiasm. Either way, he stood as a rare political figure whose pen matched his podium.
After the presidency, Roosevelt resumed large scale writing and exploration. African Game Trails chronicled his Smithsonian sponsored safari and functioned as both travelogue and catalog of species observed. The Autobiography presented a self portrait of experiments in reform, conservation, and executive leadership, while Through the Brazilian Wilderness recounted a hazardous expedition on the River of Doubt in South America. He contributed hundreds of essays to leading magazines, including work for Outlook, addressing policy, literature, and outdoor life. By the mid 1910s he was one of the most widely read American political authors, his name carrying both literary cachet and controversy.
Beliefs and Advocacy
Roosevelt’s core beliefs combined civic nationalism, practical reform, and a conviction that character counts in public life. He advanced what he called the Square Deal, seeking a fair opportunity for labor and the middle class while disciplining monopolistic power through antitrust enforcement and regulation. He favored a strong but accountable executive, civil service professionalism, and the use of expert commissions. His writings framed reform as an ethical undertaking grounded in history and experience. He called for active citizenship, respect for law, and a willingness to confront corruption. The same ethos shaped his reading of past leaders and his portraits of American expansion.
Conservation formed a signature cause. Roosevelt helped institutionalize national forests, wildlife refuges, and national monuments, using executive authority and new statutory tools to place vast acreage under protection. He co founded a conservation club to promote fair chase hunting and scientific management, and he wrote extensively about game laws, watershed health, and habitat. In prose that mixed field observation with policy argument, he urged Americans to steward resources for posterity. His outdoor books and essays modeled an ethic of restraint and respect, presenting sport as compatible with science and public regulation. This synthesis became foundational for twentieth century conservation movements.
In foreign affairs, Roosevelt advocated preparedness, sea power, and measured engagement. He supported building a modern navy and sent a fleet on a global cruise to demonstrate capability and diplomacy. He backed construction of a canal linking the Atlantic and Pacific as a matter of strategy and commerce. Yet he also practiced mediation, receiving international recognition for helping to end the Russo Japanese War in the mid 1900s. His writings on war and peace emphasize deterrence, honor, and negotiation from strength. The result was an international posture that linked realism with responsibility, consistent with the brisk, admonitory tone of his essays.
Final Years & Legacy
In the years after leaving office, Roosevelt’s public life remained intense. A 1912 third party campaign reshaped American politics, and his progressive platform echoed arguments he had long advanced in print. He undertook a major African expedition and later a perilous South American journey, each producing books that combined adventure with scientific reportage. Health setbacks followed injuries and tropical illness, but he continued to write columns and longer works critiquing policy and urging national preparedness. His correspondence, speeches, and magazine pieces from the early to mid 1910s show undiminished verve and a sharpened sense that democratic vitality requires strenuous citizenship.
Roosevelt died in early 1919, prompting tributes that emphasized energy, courage, and service. Commentators noted that he had enlarged the modern presidency and fused authorship with statesmanship in unusual measure. His conservation system, from forests to refuges and monuments, set durable administrative patterns. As an author, he left a shelf of histories, biographies, travel narratives, and essays that remain in print and useful to scholars and general readers. His public ideal of a strenuous life influenced later reformers, conservationists, and presidents. Commemorations in civic memory, including his place on Mount Rushmore, underscore an enduring reputation shaped as much by pen as by policy.
The Winning of the West (Complete Edition)
* * * * *
—LOWELL.
Volume I
Preface
Much of the material on which this work is based is to be found in the archives of the American Government, which date back to 1774, when the first Continental Congress assembled. The earliest sets have been published complete up to 1777, under the title of "American Archives," and will be hereafter designated by this name. These early volumes contain an immense amount of material, because in them are to be found memoranda of private individuals and many of the public papers of the various colonial and State governments, as well as those of the Confederation. The documents from 1789 on—no longer containing any papers of the separate States—have also been gathered and printed under the heading of "American State Papers"; by which term they will be hereafter referred to.
The mass of public papers coming in between these two series, and covering the period extending from 1776 to 1789, have never been published, and in great part have either never been examined or else have been examined in the most cursory manner. The original documents are all in the Department of State at Washington, and for convenience will be referred to as "State Department MSS." They are bound in two or three hundred large volumes; exactly how many I cannot say, because, though they are numbered, yet several of the numbers themselves contain from two or three to ten or fifteen volumes apiece. The volumes to which reference will most often be made are the following:
No. 15. Letters of Huntington. No. 16. Letters of the Presidents of Congress. No. 18. Letter-Book B. No. 20. Vol. 1. Reports of Committees on State Papers. No. 27. Reports of Committees on the War Office. 1776 to 1778. No. 30. Reports of Committees. No. 32. Reports of Committees of the States and of the Week. No. 41. Vol. 3. Memorials E. F. G. 1776-1788. No. 41. Vol. 5. Memorials K. L. 1777-1789. No. 50. Letters and Papers of Oliver Pollock. 1777-1792. No. 51. Vol. 2 Intercepted Letters. 1779-1782. No. 56. Indian Affairs. No. 71. Vol. 1. Virginia State Papers. No. 73. Georgia State Papers. No. 81. Vol. 2. Reports of Secretary John Jay. No. 120. Vol. 2. American Letters. No. 124. Vol. 3. Reports of Jay. No. 125. Negotiation Book. No. 136. Vol. 1. Reports of Board of Treasury. No. 136. Vol. 2. Reports of Board of Treasury. No. 147. Vol. 2. Reports of Board of War. No. 147. Vol. 5. Reports of Board of War. No. 147. Vol. 6. Reports of Board of War. No. 148. Vol. 1. Letters from Board of War. No. 149. Vol. 1. Letters and Reports from B. Lincoln, Secretary at War. No. 149. Vol. 2. Letters and Reports from B. Lincoln, Secretary at War. No. 149. Vol. 3. Letters and Reports from B. Lincoln, Secretary at War. No. 150. Vol. 1. Letters of H. Knox, Secretary at War. No. 150. Vol. 2. Letters of H. Knox, Secretary at War. No. 150. Vol. 3. Letters of H. Knox, Secretary at War. No. 152. Vol. 11. Letters of General Washington. No. 163. Letters of Generals Clinton, Nixon, Nicola, Morgan, Harmar, Muhlenburg. No. 169. Vol. 9. Washington's Letters. No. 180. Reports of Secretary of Congress.
Besides these numbered volumes, the State Department contains others, such as Washington's letter-book, marked War Department 1792, '3, '4, '5. There are also a series of numbered volumes of "Letters to Washington," Nos. 33 and 49 containing reports from Geo. Rogers Clark. The Jefferson papers, which are likewise preserved here, are bound in several series, each containing a number of volumes. The Madison and Monroe papers, also kept here, are not yet bound; I quote them as the Madison MSS. and the Monroe MSS.
My thanks are due to Mr. W. C. Hamilton, Asst. Librarian, for giving me every facility to examine the material.
At Nashville, Tennessee, I had access to a mass of original matter in the shape of files of old newspapers, of unpublished letters, diaries, reports, and other manuscripts. I was given every opportunity to examine these at my leisure, and indeed to take such as were most valuable to my own home. For this my thanks are especially due to Judge John M. Lea, to whom, as well as to my many other friends in Nashville, I shall always feel under a debt on account of the unfailing courtesy with which I was treated. I must express my particular acknowledgments to Mr. Lemuel R. Campbell. The Nashville manuscripts, etc. of which I have made most use are the following:
The Robertson MSS., comprising two large volumes, entitled the"Correspondence, etc., of Gen'l James Robertson," from 1781 to 1814.They belong to the library of Nashville University; I had somedifficulty in finding the second volume but finally succeeded.
The Campbell MSS., consisting of letters and memoranda to and from different members of the Campbell family who were prominent in the Revolution; dealing for the most part with Lord Dunmore's war, the Cherokee wars, the battle of King's Mountain, land speculations, etc. They are in the possession of Mr. Lemuel R. Campbell, who most kindly had copies of all the important ones sent me, at great personal trouble.
Some of the Sevier and Jackson papers, the original MS. diaries of Donelson on the famous voyage down the Tennessee and up the Cumberland, and of Benj. Hawkins while surveying the Tennessee boundary, memoranda of Thos. Washington, Overton and Dunham, the earliest files of the Knoxville Gazette, from 1791 to 1795, etc. These are all in the library of the Tennessee Historical Society.
For original matter connected with Kentucky, I am greatly indebted to Col. Reuben T. Durrett, of Louisville, the founder of the "Filson Club," which has done such admirable historical work of late years. He allowed me to work at my leisure in his library, the most complete in the world on all subjects connected with Kentucky history. Among other matter, he possesses the Shelby MSS., containing a number of letters to and from, and a dictated autobiography of, Isaac Shelby; MS. journals of Rev. James Smith, during two tours in the western country in 1785 and '95; early files of the "Kentucke Gazette"; books owned by the early settlers; papers of Boon, and George Rogers Clark; MS. notes on Kentucky by George Bradford, who settled there in 1779; MS. copy of the record book of Col. John Todd, the first governor of the Illinois country after Clark's conquest; the McAfee MSS., consisting of an Account of the First Settlement of Salt River, the Autobiography of Robert McAfee, and a Brief Memorandum of the Civil and Natural History of Kentucky; MS. autobiography of Rev. William Hickman, who visited Kentucky in 1776, etc., etc.
I am also under great obligations to Col. John Mason Brown of Louisville, another member of the Filson Club, for assistance rendered me; particularly for having sent me six bound volumes of MSS., containing the correspondence of the Spanish Minister Gardoqui, copied from the Spanish archives.
At Lexington I had access to the Breckenridge MSS., through the kindness of Mr. Ethelbert D. Warfield; and to the Clay MSS. through the kindness of Miss Lucretia Hart Clay. I am particularly indebted to Miss Clay for her courtesy in sending me many of the most valuable old Hart and Benton letters, depositions, accounts, and the like.
The Blount MSS. were sent to me from California by the Hon. W. D. Stephens of Los Angeles, although I was not personally known to him; an instance of courtesy and generosity, in return for which I could do nothing save express my sincere appreciation and gratitude, which I take this opportunity of publicly repeating.
The Gates MSS., from which I drew some important facts not hitherto known concerning the King's Mountain campaign, are in the library of the New York Historical Society.
The Virginia State Papers have recently been published, and are now accessible to all.
Among the most valuable of the hitherto untouched manuscripts which I have obtained are the Haldimand papers[1], preserved in the Canadian archives at Ottawa. They give, for the first time, the British and Indian side of all the northwestern fighting; including Clark's campaigns, the siege of Boonsborough, the battle of the Blue Licks, Crawford's defeat, etc. The Canadian archivist. Mr. Douglass Brymner, furnished me copies of all I needed with a prompt courtesy for which I am more indebted than I can well express.
I have been obliged to rely mainly on these collections of early documents as my authorities, especially for that portion of western history prior to 1783. Excluding the valuable, but very brief, and often very inaccurate, sketch which Filson wrote down as coming from Boon, there are no printed histories of Kentucky earlier than Marshall's, in 1812; while the first Tennessee history was Haywood's, in 1822. Both Marshall and Haywood did excellent work; the former was an able writer, the latter was a student, and (like the Kentucky historian Mann Butler) a sound political thinker, devoted to the Union, and prompt to stand up for the right. But both of them, in dealing with the early history of the country beyond the Alleghanies, wrote about matters that had happened from thirty to fifty years before, and were obliged to base most of their statements on tradition or on what the pioneers remembered in their old age. The later historians, for the most part, merely follow these two. In consequence, the mass of original material, in the shape of official reports and contemporary letters, contained in the Haldimand MSS., the Campbell MSS., the McAfee MSS., the Gardoqui MSS., the State Department MSS., the Virginia State Papers, etc., not only cast a flood of new light upon this early history, but necessitate its being entirely re-written. For instance, they give an absolutely new aspect to, and in many cases completely reverse, the current accounts of all the Indian fighting, both against the Cherokees and the Northwestern tribes; they give for the first time a clear view of frontier diplomacy, of the intrigues with the Spaniards, and even of the mode of life in the backwoods, and of the workings of the civil government. It may be mentioned that the various proper names are spelt in so many different ways that it is difficult to know which to choose. Even Clark is sometimes spelt Clarke, while Boon was apparently indifferent as to whether his name should or should not contain the final silent e. As for the original Indian titles, it is often quite impossible to give them even approximately; the early writers often wrote the same Indian words in such different ways that they bear no resemblance whatever to one another.
In conclusion I would say that it has been to me emphatically a labor of love to write of the great deeds of the border people. I am not blind to their manifold shortcomings, nor yet am I ignorant of their many strong and good qualities. For a number of years I spent most of my time on the frontier, and lived and worked like any other frontiersman. The wild country in which we dwelt and across which we wandered was in the far west; and there were of course many features in which the life of a cattleman on the Great Plains and among the Rockies differed from that led by a backwoodsman in the Alleghany forests a century before. Yet the points of resemblance were far more numerous and striking. We guarded our herds of branded cattle and shaggy horses, hunted bear, bison, elk, and deer, established civil government, and put down evil-doers, white and red, on the banks of the Little Missouri and among the wooded, precipitous foot-hills of the Bighorn, exactly as did the pioneers who a hundred years previously built their log-cabins beside the Kentucky or in the valleys of the Great Smokies. The men who have shared in the fast vanishing frontier life of the present feel a peculiar sympathy with the already long-vanished frontier life of the past.
SAGAMORE HILL, May, 1889
Foreword
In the year 1898 the United States finished the work begun over a century before by the backwoodsman, and drove the Spaniard outright from the western world. During the march of our people from the crests of the Alleghanies to the Pacific, the Spaniard was for a long period our chief white opponent; and after an interval his place among our antagonists was taken by his Spanish-American heir. Although during the Revolution the Spaniard at one time became America's friend in the sense that he was England's foe, he almost from the outset hated and dreaded his new ally more than his old enemy. In the peace negotiations at the close of the contest he was jealously eager to restrict our boundaries to the line of the Alleghanies; while even during the concluding years of the war the Spanish soldiers on the upper Mississippi were regarded by the Americans in Illinois as a menace no less serious than the British troops at Detroit.
In the opening years of our national life the Western backwoodsman found the Spanish ownership of the mouth of the Mississippi even more hurtful and irksome than the retention by the British king of the posts on the Great Lakes. After years of tedious public negotiations, under and through which ran a dark woof of private intrigue, the sinewy western hands so loosened the Spanish grip that in despair Spain surrendered to France the mouth of the river and the vast territories stretching thence into the dim Northwest. She hoped thereby to establish a strong barrier between her remaining provinces and her most dreaded foe. But France in her turn grew to understand that America's position as regards Louisiana, thanks to the steady westward movement of the backwoodsman, was such as to render it on the one hand certain that the retention of the province by France would mean an armed clash with the United States, and on the other hand no less certain that in the long run such a conflict would result to France's disadvantage. Louisiana thus passed from the hands of Spain, after a brief interval, into those of the young Republic. There remained to Spain, Mexico and Florida; and forthwith the pressure of the stark forest riflemen began to be felt on the outskirts of these two provinces. Florida was the first to fall. After a portion of it had been forcibly annexed, after Andrew Jackson had marched at will through part of the remainder, and after the increasing difficulty of repressing the American filibustering efforts[2] had shown the imminence of some serious catastrophe, Spain ceded the peninsula to the United States. Texas, New Mexico, and California did not fall into American hands until they had passed from the Spaniard to his half-Indian sons.
Many decades went by after Spain had lost her foothold on the American continent, and she still held her West Indian empire. She misgoverned the islands as she had misgoverned the continent; and in the islands, as once upon the continent, her own children became her deadliest foes. But generation succeeded generation, and the prophecies of those far-seeing statesmen who foretold that she would lose to the northern Republic her West Indian possessions remained unfulfilled. At last, at the close of one of the bloodiest and most brutal wars that even Spain ever waged with her own colonists, the United States intervened, and in a brief summer campaign destroyed the last vestiges of the mediaeval Spanish domain in the tropic seas alike of the West and the remote East.
We of this generation were but carrying to completion the work of our fathers and of our fathers' fathers. It is moreover a matter for just pride that while there was no falling off in the vigor and prowess shown by our fighting men, there was a marked change for the better in the spirit with which the deed was done. The backwoodsmen had pushed the Spaniards from the Mississippi, had set up a slave-holding republic in Texas, and had conquered the Californian gold-fields, in the sheer masterful exercise of might. It is true that they won great triumphs for civilization no less than for their own people; yet they won them unwittingly, for they were merely doing as countless other strong young races had done in the long contest carried on for so many thousands of years between the fit and the unfit. But in 1898 the United States, while having gained in strength, showed that there had likewise been gain in justice, in mercy, in sense of responsibility. Our conquest of the Southwest has been justified by the result. The Latin peoples in the lands we won and settled have prospered like our own stock. The sons and grandsons of those who had been our foes in Louisiana and New Mexico came eagerly forward to serve in the army that was to invade Cuba. Our people as a whole went into the war, primarily, it is true, to drive out the Spaniard once for all from America; but with the fixed determination to replace his rule by a government of justice and orderly liberty.
To use the political terminology of the present day, the whole western movement of our people was simply the most vital part of that great movement of expansion which has been the central and all-important feature of our history—a feature far more important than any other since we became a nation, save only the preservation of the Union itself. It was expansion which made us a great power; and at every stage it has been bitterly antagonized, not only by the short-sighted and the timid, but even by many who were neither one nor the other. There were many men who opposed the movement west of the Alleghanies and the peopling of the lands which now form Kentucky, Tennessee, and the great States lying between the Ohio and the Lakes. Excellent persons then foretold ruin to the country from bringing into it a disorderly population of backwoodsmen, with the same solemnity that has in our own day marked the prophecies of those who have seen similar ruin in the intaking of Hawaii and Porto Rico. The annexation of Louisiana, including the entire territory between the northern Mississippi and the Pacific Ocean, aroused such frantic opposition in the old-settled regions of the country, and especially in the Northeast, as to call forth threats of disunion, the language used by the opponents of our expansion into the Far West being as violent as that sometimes used in denouncing our acquisition of the Philippines. The taking of Texas and of California was complicated by the slave question, but much of the opposition to both was simply the general opposition to expansion—that is, to national growth and national greatness. In our long-settled communities there have always been people who opposed every war which marked the advance of American civilization at the cost of savagery. The opposition was fundamentally the same, whether these wars were campaigns in the old West against the Shawnees and the Miamis, in the new West against the Sioux and the Apaches, or in Luzon against the Tagals. In each case, in the end, the believers in the historic American policy of expansion have triumphed. Hitherto America has gone steadily forward along the path of greatness, and has remained true to the policy of her early leaders who felt within them the lift towards mighty things. Like every really strong people, ours is stirred by the generous ardor for daring strife and mighty deeds, and now with eyes undimmed looks far into the misty future.
At bottom the question of expansion in 1898 was but a variant of the problem we had to solve at every stage of the great western movement. Whether the prize of the moment was Louisiana or Florida, Oregon or Alaska, mattered little. The same forces, the same types of men, stood for and against the cause of national growth, of national greatness, at the end of the century as at the beginning.
My non-literary work has been so engrossing during the years that have elapsed since my fourth volume was published, that I have been unable to go on with "The Winning of the West"; but my design is to continue the narrative as soon as I can get leisure, carrying it through the stages which marked the taking of Florida and Oregon, the upbuilding of the republic of Texas, and the acquisition of New Mexico and California as the result of the Mexican war.
Theodore Roosevelt
EXECUTIVE CHAMBER, ALBANY, N. Y. January 1, 1900.
Chapter I. The Spread of the English-Speaking Peoples
During the past three centuries the spread of the English-speaking peoples over the world's waste spaces has been not only the most striking feature in the world's history, but also the event of all others most far-reaching in its effects and its importance.
The tongue which Bacon feared to use in his writings, lest they should remain forever unknown to all but the inhabitants of a relatively unimportant insular kingdom, is now the speech of two continents. The Common Law which Coke jealously upheld in the southern half of a single European island, is now the law of the land throughout the vast regions of Australasia, and of America north of the Rio Grande. The names of the plays that Shakespeare wrote are household words in the mouths of mighty nations, whose wide domains were to him more unreal than the realm of Prester John[4]. Over half the descendants of their fellow countrymen of that day now dwell in lands which, when these three Englishmen were born, held not a single white inhabitant; the race which, when they were in their prime, was hemmed in between the North and the Irish seas, to-day holds sway over worlds, whose endless coasts are washed by the waves of the three great oceans.
There have been many other races that at one time or another had their great periods of race expansion—as distinguished from mere conquest,—but there has never been another whose expansion has been either so broad or so rapid.
At one time, many centuries ago, it seemed as if the Germanic peoples, like their Celtic foes and neighbors, would be absorbed into the all-conquering Roman power, and, merging their identity in that of the victors, would accept their law, their speech, and their habits of thought. But this danger vanished forever on the day of the slaughter by the Teutoburger Wald[3], when the legions of Varus were broken by the rush of Hermann's wild warriors.
Two or three hundred years later the Germans, no longer on the defensive, themselves went forth from their marshy forests conquering and to conquer. For century after century they swarmed out of the dark woodland east of the Rhine, and north of the Danube; and as their force spent itself, the movement was taken up by their brethren who dwelt along the coasts of the Baltic and the North Atlantic. From the Volga to the Pillars of Hercules, from Sicily to Britain, every land in turn bowed to the warlike prowess of the stalwart sons of Odin. Rome and Novgorod, the imperial city of Italy as well as the squalid capital of Muscovy, acknowledged the sway of kings of Teutonic or Scandinavian blood.
In most cases, however, the victorious invaders merely intruded themselves among the original and far more numerous owners of the land, ruled over them, and were absorbed by them. This happened to both Teuton and Scandinavian; to the descendants of Alaric, as well as to the children of Rurik. The Dane in Ireland became a Celt; the Goth of the Iberian peninsula became a Spaniard; Frank and Norwegian alike were merged into the mass of Romance-speaking Gauls, who themselves finally grew to be called by the names of their masters. Thus it came about that though the German tribes conquered Europe they did not extend the limits of Germany nor the sway of the German race. On the contrary, they strengthened the hands of the rivals of the people from whom they sprang. They gave rulers—kaisers, kings, barons, and knights—to all the lands they overran; here and there they imposed their own names on kingdoms and principalities—as in France, Normandy, Burgundy, and Lombardy; they grafted the feudal system on the Roman jurisprudence, and interpolated a few Teutonic words in the Latin dialects of the peoples they had conquered; but, hopelessly outnumbered, they were soon lost in the mass of their subjects, and adopted from them their laws, their culture, and their language. As a result, the mixed races of the south—the Latin nations as they are sometimes called—strengthened by the infusion of northern blood, sprang anew into vigorous life, and became for the time being the leaders of the European world.
