If Britain were to come to dominate the seaboard colonies militarily, Jefferson mused, there was another option. Perhaps the hardiest of Virginians might move “beyond the mountains,” which suggested that Jefferson had been party to conversations about an extreme scenario in which the colonists devoted to the American cause might move to the interior of the continent. It is an early example in Jefferson’s papers of his envisioning the West as a source of liberty and a theater for reinvention. The
