Deliberately placing the Native American dilemma aside for the moment, Washington chose to focus on those features of America’s new western empire that actually enhanced rather than contradicted republican values. More than a century before Frederick Jackson Turner described the western frontier as a “safety valve,” Washington was telling young men without prospects to seek their future in the Ohio Valley: “If I was a young man, just preparing to begin, or even if advanced in life, and had a family to make a provision for, I know of no country where I would rather fix my habitation than in
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