Aging & Wisdom Quote by Albert Bushnell Hart

A deceptively tidy sentence that smuggles in an entire imperial worldview. Hart isn’t marveling at colonial ambition so much as normalizing its paperwork: “old charters” suggests venerable legitimacy, as if the act of writing something down in London could conjure ownership across a continent. The verb “had given title” is doing heavy ideological labor. Title to whom, exactly? Not to the Indigenous nations already governing, farming, trading, and fighting on those lands. Not to the enslaved people whose labor would make portions of that “title” profitable. The grammar quietly assigns agency to documents and erases the human conflicts they unleashed.

The geographic sweep - “from the Atlantic westward to the Pacific” - works like a cinematic pan shot, turning North America into an empty stage awaiting administrative lines. In the late 19th and early 20th century, when Hart was writing and teaching, that kind of phrasing fit a dominant historical style: state-building as destiny, expansion as a legal-rational process, conquest as cartography. It’s the Progressive Era’s confidence in institutions, translated into colonial history.

The specific intent is explanatory: to show how early English colonial charters created overlapping, extravagant claims that later shaped boundary disputes, federal expansion, and sectional politics. The subtext is more revealing: legitimacy flows from European law; “territory” is a neutral commodity; the continent is divisible by charter, not by lived sovereignty. Hart’s cool tone is itself a signal - a historian’s distance that, intentionally or not, reproduces the empire’s own self-justifying calm.