Daily Inspiration Quote by Albert Bushnell Hart

Expansion is framed here not as an event but as a habit, the kind that hardens into ideology. Hart’s phrasing - “became accustomed” - is doing quiet work: it turns seizure into routine, ambition into muscle memory. Colonists aren’t depicted as debating whether to push outward; they’re practicing it, like a trade. That matters because it recasts empire as a cultural reflex rather than a series of discrete political decisions. The moral temperature drops. When something is “accustomed,” it feels natural, almost domesticated.

The coupling of “planting” and “claiming” is the subtext in miniature. “Planting new settlements” carries an agricultural innocence, the pioneer image of labor meeting land. “Claiming new boundaries” is the legalistic twin: lines drawn on paper, authority asserted at a distance, often before anyone has the power to enforce it. Hart’s sentence slides between these registers, showing how physical occupation and bureaucratic assertion fed each other. Settlers moved first; governments and charters raced to sanctify movement into maps, deeds, and jurisdictions.

As a historian writing in an era when American growth was frequently narrated as inevitable, Hart also hints at the mechanics behind that inevitability. Colonies competed with one another, not just with Indigenous nations or European rivals, and boundary-claiming became a kind of colonial sport: if you didn’t extend, you risked being boxed in. The line reads like description, but it’s also diagnosis: once expansion becomes customary, restraint starts to look like failure, and dispossession can hide inside administrative language.