Forests were the most important feature of the landscape in revolutionary America. They provided shelter for wild animals; forage for livestock; and wood, the period's crucial building and heating material. By the mid-18th century, forests still covered nearly half of the present-day United States (excluding Alaska and Hawaii). The majority of forest--roughly 80 percent--blanketed the region between the Great Plains and Atlantic Ocean, interrupted only by isolated savannahs and prairies created by lightning and Native American fires. The remaining one-fifth of forests were on the coast of the Pacific Ocean and in portions of the Rocky Mountains, especially what became the states of Colorado, Wyoming, and Idaho. Variations in climate, precipitation, and soil composition made the North American forest remarkably complex and diverse. In the East, the forest included several species of pine--loblolly, longleaf, shortleaf, jack, red, and white--in addition to ash, aspen, birch, cottonwood, cypress, elm, fir, gum, hickory, oak, red cedar, and spruce. Douglas fir, lodgepole pine, ponderosa pine, hemlock fir, and Sitka spruce were a few of the dominant species in the West.

Though colonial farmers and Native Americans brought changes to forests, especially near the coast and alongside rivers, their comparatively small populations and limited technologies had a minimal impact. Indeed, by the 1750s, trees had recolonized many of the forest openings produced by Indian fires because smallpox and other diseases and epidemics had decimated Indian populations, and European Americans initially opposed the use of fire to clear land. However, human pressure on the forest intensified as the United States's population increased--from 1.6 million in 1760 to 7 million in 1810--and its economy expanded.

Carving a farm out of the forest was a difficult, laborintensive process. It took the average New England farmer a decade to clear 30-40 acres. A popular way to clear the land was by girdling--the process of killing a tree without toppling it by interrupting its sap flow through slicing the bark. Another method farmers employed was fire. Burning the land was inefficient, however, because it wasted wood, a precious resource used in home and fence construction or sold on the market. Regardless of the clearing technique, newly denuded lands produced prodigious yields: 45 bushels for wheat and 35 bushels for corn. Yet intensive monoculture promoted rapid soil exhaustion, and many farmers, expecting their initial good fortune to persist, suffered financial ruin by overextending themselves. Farmers also depended on the forest to raise livestock, releasing their cattle and swine into it to fatten on its grasses, acorns, beechnuts, chestnuts, roots, and saplings. Foraging animals had a tremendous impact on the forest ecosystem. Cattle and swine devoured young trees, preventing regrowth, and their hooves compressed the topsoil, encouraging water runoff, river sedimentation, and the spread of nonnative weeds. Free-ranging livestock also compelled farmers to construct fences to enclose their crops. The most popular fence design was the worm, or zigzag, fence since it took the least amount of labor; however, though it did not require digging postholes, it did require staggering amounts of trees.

Unlike agriculture or livestock, urbanization and the emerging market economy dictated widespread--and not just local--deforestation. The expansion of cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Boston created enormous demands for wood, which urban residents needed to cook and to heat their homes in the winter. Responding to this demand, farmers sold wood to fuel dealers, who shipped the commodity to cities on small sloops navigating the Atlantic coast. The European demand for potash put further pressure on northern forests. Made by baking and boiling wood ashes, potash was a key ingredient in bleach, calico, dyes, glass, saltpeter, and soap manufacturing. Potash's ranking as sixth in value amongst North American exports between 1768 and 1772 reveals its economic importance. When settlers cleared their land with fire, they enhanced the soil's fertility by working the potassiumrich ash into the ground. But potash production accelerated soil exhaustion by depriving the land of the ash and exposing it to the wind.

Production of naval stores also took a heavy toll on forests. After the Revolutionary War (1775-83), the production of turpentine, rosin, pitch, and tar expanded in the South. British and New England shipbuilders used tar to preserve ropes and timber; they needed pitch to caulk ships' planks and joints. The manufacture of pitch and tar consumed vast tracts of North Carolina's longleaf pine forests. Merchants in Roanoke, Bathtown, Beauford, and Brunswick, who exported 60 percent of the nation's naval stores, hired plantation owners to deliver the products. African-American slaves performed most of the production tasks, cutting large rectangular notches in longleaf trees (which killed them) to stimulate a flow of turpentine (resin) that collected in buckets and was then rolled in barrels to coastal cities. Though the naval-stores industry boomed in the early 19th century--Great Britain imported 40-50,000 barrels annually--it nearly destroyed the southeastern longleaf forest.

The timber required for industrialization--and especially the iron industry--dwarfed all other uses. Iron smelters consumed enormous amounts of charcoal, which came from burning hardwood trees. Eager to turn a quick profit, backcountry farmers chopped down all of their trees and sold them to nearby ironworks facilities. The average facility annually consumed 400 acres of oak, maple, hickory, and birch forests. Iron manufacturing proved so lucrative that, in 1807, North Carolina and Tennessee subsidized the industry, giving 3,000 acres of forest to any entrepreneur who opened an ironworks facility.

Though scholars dispute the amount of forests leveled for agriculture, subsistence, and domestic and international trade during the revolutionary era, it is clear that extended tracts of the Atlantic coast, urban hinterlands, river watersheds, and mountain hardwood forests near iron facilities were entirely stripped of trees. Early 19th-century inhabitants of the United States still had good reason to believe that the nation's timber was inexhaustible; forests had not yet felt the effects of steamboats, railroads, and advanced industrialization. Few people in this period were concerned with the ecological and cultural consequences of deforestation or embraced a conservationist ethic.

Bibliography:

1) Thomas R. Cox, et al., This Well-Wooded Land: Americans and Their Forests from Colonial Times to the Present (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985)

2) Donald Edward Davis, Where There Are Mountains: An Environmental History of the Southern Appalachians (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000)

3) Robert B. Outland III, Tapping the Pines: The Naval Stores Industry in the American South (Baton Rogue: Louisiana State University Press, 2004)

4) Michael Williams, Americans and Their Forests: A Historical Geography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)

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