The further removed we are from want and danger, the more generous our consciences.

From The Road to Guilford Courthouse by John Buchanan. Page 206.

The men and women who were the Over Mountain People have been portrayed by uncritical patriotic writers as without exception stainless heroes and heroines, and by the hypercritical in our time as unprincipled aggressors and little better than savages whose sole legacies to the future were violence, bigotry, and ignorance. Both portrayals widely miss the mark.

Pioneering is a messy business; combined with conquest it is an ugly business and has been since human beings began coveting the property of others. We pay little attention today to the moral questions involved in similar folk movements that began before recorded time and have continued since. Like their predecessors throughout the world, eighteenth-century Over Mountain Americans were people living under vastly different assumptions than exist in America in the late twentieth century. The British novelist L. P Hartley put it well: “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” To which we may add that the further removed we are from want and danger, the more generous our consciences.