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- Herausgeber: DigiCat
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Frontier in American History," Frederick Jackson Turner presents a seminal examination of the role that the American frontier played in shaping the national character and democracy. Through a blend of historical analysis and sociological inquiry, Turner posits that the unique experience of westward expansion fostered a spirit of individualism, egalitarianism, and innovation that fundamentally defined American identity. The work, steeped in the context of the late 19th century, engagingly addresses themes of American exceptionalism while invoking the tension between civilization and wilderness in a rapidly changing society. Frederick Jackson Turner, a prominent historian, crafted this influential essay as part of his Ph.D. dissertation in 1893, coinciding with the official closing of the American frontier as declared by the Census Bureau. His upbringing in the Midwest, exposed to the realities of frontier life, informed his reflections on how this geographic expanse served not just as a backdrop but as an active agent in shaping American society and culture. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding the complexities of American identity and the historical significance of the frontier. Turner's insights remain relevant as they challenge readers to consider how geography influences social development and national consciousness, making it an enduring and thought-provoking work. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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The Frontier in American History
Table of Contents
Introduction
A moving border forged a nation even as it unsettled the meanings of place, power, and identity. Frederick Jackson Turner’s The Frontier in American History, first published in 1920, gathers essays that advance his influential frontier thesis within the genre of historical interpretation. Set largely in the expanding regions beyond the Atlantic seaboard, the book traces how successive waves of settlement shaped the United States from the colonial period to the closing of the frontier recorded in the 1890 census. Composed in the early twentieth century, it reflects a moment when American historians sought broad, unifying narratives grounded in social and geographic change.
As a collection, the volume offers a cumulative argument rather than a single linear story, and the reading experience unfolds through a sequence of essays that speak to one another. Turner writes in a confident, interpretive voice, synthesizing census data, local records, and political developments into sweeping yet accessible claims. The tone is analytical and persuasive, avoiding ornament while inviting debate. Readers encounter regional case studies alongside conceptual passages that define terms and trace patterns. The style favors clarity and repetition for emphasis, helping ideas resonate even when details grow dense, and encouraging careful, reflective engagement instead of hurried consumption.
Central to these essays is the proposition that the frontier functioned less as a fixed place than as a process that shaped institutions, habits, and expectations. Turner explores how expanding access to land, the creation of new communities, and recurring encounters with scarcity and opportunity influenced political participation and social mobility. He tracks tensions between local autonomy and national integration, and between improvisation and inherited tradition. The analysis underscores the interplay of environment, economy, and culture, suggesting that change at the edge of settlement reverberated backward into established regions, where practices and ideas were revised to meet novel conditions.
The book’s historical framing draws energy from the 1890 census declaration that the frontier line could no longer be traced, and from an address Turner delivered to a scholarly association in 1893 that inaugurated the thesis. Subsequent essays refine and extend the argument, reaching across the Appalachians, the Old Northwest, the Great Plains, and the Pacific slope to consider how migration, markets, and governance evolved. The organization is thematic rather than strictly chronological, allowing patterns to emerge by comparison. Throughout, Turner returns to problems of definition, periodization, and causation, inviting readers to weigh evidence and consider alternative lines of explanation.
Reading the volume today illuminates how national myths and social realities were woven together during a formative period of self-interpretation. Turner’s framework highlights the relationship between land policy, citizenship, and participation, and it clarifies how economic opportunity and risk were distributed across regions and classes. The work also sheds light on the persistence of localism within a continental nation, and on the push and pull between federal authority and community decision-making. By foregrounding movement, adaptation, and experimentation, the book equips contemporary readers to examine debates about migration, borders, resource use, and regional inequality with a longer historical and conceptual horizon.
Yet the collection’s power is inseparable from its limits. Turner’s focus on settlers, institutions, and expanding democracy often sidelines Indigenous nations, whose sovereignty, displacement, and resistance are essential to any account of expansion. The experiences of Black Americans, women, and immigrant communities receive far less attention than later scholarship would demand, and the roles of capitalism, imperial ambition, and environmental degradation are not fully explored. Approached critically, the book becomes both source and subject: a landmark interpretation that helped set agendas and a document of its time, best read alongside studies that center dispossession, diversity, ecology, and transnational connections.
To enter The Frontier in American History is to witness a historian attempting to map a nation’s character by following the shifting edge of settlement, a method that still frames public conversations about change and belonging. The essays reward patient, comparative reading, and they invite disagreement as a path to deeper understanding. Whether one approaches current invocations of new frontiers or seeks a foundation for studying borderlands and regions, Turner’s work remains a pivotal reference point. Its enduring value lies in the clarity of its questions and in the challenge it poses to refine, complicate, and responsibly reimagine the answers.
Synopsis
Frederick Jackson Turner’s The Frontier in American History, published in 1920, gathers essays written over several decades, including his 1893 address that introduced the frontier thesis. Turner frames the moving western boundary as the defining process in United States development, drawing on census data that identified the frontier’s closure at the end of the nineteenth century. He argues that repeated encounters with new environments and sparse institutions reshaped people, policies, and regional balances. Opening the collection, his programmatic essay sets the questions the book pursues: how expansion molded political practices, economic forms, and social ideals, and how regional experiences within a continental setting forged a national character.
Across these essays, Turner presents the frontier as a recurring process rather than a fixed place, emphasizing migration, settlement, and the continual readjustment of institutions. He contends that access to land and distance from established centers encouraged experimentation in governance, broad participation in politics, and a practical ethos that favored local autonomy. Successive waves—hunters, herders, small farmers, and town builders—confronted ecological constraints and market forces, producing a layered pattern of change. For Turner, this progression explains how European inheritances were simplified, adapted, or discarded, and how distinctively American practices emerged from repeated contact with new conditions at the edge of settlement.
Political development occupies a central place in Turner’s analysis. He links frontier experience to the expansion of popular participation, arguing that communities formed amid mobility and scarcity valued equality before law and responsiveness in offices close to voters. Essays on the West’s contributions trace how public land policy, internal improvements, and party competition were shaped by settlers’ demands and the interests of emerging towns and regions. By following debates over banking, tariffs, and representation across the expanding map, Turner treats the rise of mass democracy as rooted in western pressures that challenged older Atlantic seaboard norms and reconfigured national coalitions.
Economic change appears as a cascade of frontiers—of furs, minerals, cattle, timber, and grain—each inviting capital, technology, and labor while altering social relations. Turner follows the shift from subsistence to market-oriented production, the spread of transportation networks, and the rise of interior cities that redirected trade away from coastal gateways. He stresses how cheap land and abundant resources shaped opportunity and conflict, from claims and speculation to cooperative traditions and boosterism. These patterns, in his view, nurtured a competitive spirit and institutional flexibility that helped define American capitalism, even as integration into national and international markets reshaped local priorities.
Beyond the moving line itself, Turner develops a broader framework of sections, with particular attention to the Mississippi Valley and the Middle West as crucibles of national synthesis. He analyzes migration streams, river systems, and soil zones to explain distinctive mixes of agriculture, settlement patterns, and political attitudes. Essays on civic culture explore how voluntary associations, schools, and especially state universities expressed and reinforced frontier ideals of accessibility and public service. By tracing regional rivalries and alliances, he argues that national policy repeatedly emerged from bargaining among sections whose formative experiences on successive frontiers gave them different priorities yet a shared continental outlook.
Methodologically, Turner draws on census schedules, official surveys, travel narratives, and legislative records to chart population movement, land disposal, and institutional change. He periodizes expansion in stages and connects these cycles to national turning points, including wars and economic reorganizations, to show how power shifted among regions. As the 1890s announcement of a closed frontier reframes the narrative, later essays ask what happens when settlement no longer advances in the old way, and how sectional identities persist within an increasingly urban, industrial society. The collection thus moves from diagnosis of a formative process to reflection on its limits and legacies.
The Frontier in American History secured Turner’s thesis a central place in historical debate, influencing generations of research on regionalism, democracy, and economic development. Its sweeping model invited both extension and revision, prompting inquiries into environmental constraints, corporate power, and the roles of Indigenous peoples, African Americans, immigrants, and women in shaping borderlands and nation. While later scholarship reassessed claims and emphasized complexities Turner underplayed, the collection remains a touchstone for thinking about space, mobility, and institutional change. By linking continental expansion to national character and policy, the book continues to frame questions about how geography and society interact in American history.
Historical Context
Frederick Jackson Turner presented the central essay behind The Frontier in American History at the American Historical Association meeting in Chicago on July 12, 1893, during the World’s Columbian Exposition. He drew on the 1890 United States Census announcement that a continuous frontier line no longer existed, signaling the “closing” of the frontier. The setting was a city emblematic of industrial modernity and rapid urban growth, a contrast to the rural past Turner examined. His audience consisted of professionalizing historians and social scientists, many eager for broad interpretive frameworks that could explain national development at a moment of demographic change and regional integration.
Turner had trained at Johns Hopkins University under Herbert Baxter Adams, absorbing the German seminar method and Rankean emphasis on archival evidence. By 1893 he taught at the University of Wisconsin, where he integrated economic data, census reports, and state documents into historical analysis. The American Historical Association, founded in 1884, promoted rigorous professional standards, annual meetings, and a journal, creating an institutional forum for synthetic theses like Turner’s. His essays, written between the 1890s and 1910s, were collected as The Frontier in American History in 1920, reflecting Progressive Era interests in social causation, regional studies, and the connections between environment, institutions, and political behavior.
The long arc of westward expansion supplied Turner’s empirical canvas. Federal measures structured settlement and governance: the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 organized territorial admission; the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 doubled U.S. territory; the Mexican Cession of 1848 added vast southwestern lands; and the Oregon boundary settlement in 1846 secured the Pacific Northwest. Land policies such as the Preemption Acts, the Homestead Act of 1862, and the Morrill Land-Grant Acts encouraged smallholding and public education. Transportation initiatives, including the Pacific Railway Acts and completion of the first transcontinental railroad in 1869, integrated markets, drew migrants, and accelerated the pace of settlement across varied environments.
Indigenous nations shaped and constrained frontier processes, even as federal policy increasingly dispossessed them. The Indian Removal Act of 1830, subsequent treaty making and breaking, and recurring wars in the Plains and Southwest culminated in a reservation system tightened after the Civil War. The Dawes Act of 1887 authorized allotment of tribal lands, undermining communal holdings and transferring millions of acres to non-Native ownership. Violence such as the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre marked the period’s brutal coercion. Mission schools, policing, and assimilation campaigns framed the era Turner studied, though his emphasis largely privileged settler institutions and the transformative role of land.
Turner’s milieu included sweeping economic and social change. Industrialization concentrated capital and labor in cities such as Chicago, Pittsburgh, and New York, while waves of immigrants altered urban demographics after the 1880s. Farmers confronted volatile prices, railroad rates, and debt, spurring the Grange, Farmers’ Alliances, and the People’s (Populist) Party in 1892. Monetary and regulatory debates sharpened during the Panic of 1893, a severe contraction that intensified demands for reform. Against these pressures, the long-noted “safety valve” idea—migration to free or cheap land as economic relief—retained rhetorical power, informing how contemporaries interpreted mobility, opportunity, and regional adjustment.
In political culture, the expansion of white male suffrage during the Jacksonian era, the rise of local self-government in territories, and widespread jury service and militia participation supported claims that the frontier nurtured participatory habits. County and township institutions spread westward with settlers, adapting English-derived forms to American conditions. Free labor ideology, land distribution, and the availability of resources were cited by nineteenth-century commentators as foundations for independence and social mobility among settlers. These practices, along with experiences in communal defense and infrastructure building, provided concrete examples for arguments linking frontier conditions to distinctively American patterns of democracy and individualism.
By the 1890s, the closing of the continental frontier coincided with new debates over overseas expansion. The Spanish–American War of 1898 and acquisition of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam prompted discussion about alternative “frontiers” beyond North America. Conservation policies, championed by figures like Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot, reframed public land as a national resource requiring scientific management. Progressive reforms targeted corporate power and political corruption, while universities expanded social-science research. Turner’s emphasis on environment and institutional adaptation aligned with these currents, offering a historical explanation for national character at a moment when Americans reconsidered growth, power, and stewardship.
Turner’s frontier thesis reflected Progressive Era confidence in causal analysis, comparative methods, and the nation’s capacity for adaptation. Its stress on mobility, local institutions, and environmental challenges spoke to contemporaries confronting urbanization and global engagement. Yet the work also bore limits of its time: it centered Euro-American settlers, minimized the agency of Indigenous, Black, Mexican, and Asian communities, and downplayed industrial and urban forces. Its reach made it foundational in U.S. historiography and civics pedagogy, even as later scholars—especially in the late twentieth-century “New Western History”—reframed the West as a region of conquest, diversity, environmental constraint, and contested sovereignties.
The Frontier in American History
PREFACE
In republishing these essays in collected form, it has seemed best to issue them as they were originally printed, with the exception of a few slight corrections of slips in the text and with the omission of occasional duplication of language in the different essays. A considerable part of whatever value they may possess arises from the fact that they are commentaries in different periods on the central theme of the influence of the frontier in American history. Consequently they may have some historical significance as contemporaneous attempts of a student of American history, at successive transitions in our development during the past quarter century to interpret the relations of the present to the past. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the various societies and periodicals which have given permission to reprint the essays.
Various essays dealing with the connection of diplomatic history and the frontier and others stressing the significance of the section, or geographic province, in American history, are not included in the present collection. Neither the French nor the Spanish frontier is within the scope of the volume.
The future alone can disclose how far these interpretations are correct for the age of colonization which came gradually to an end with the disappearance of the frontier and free land. It alone can reveal how much of the courageous, creative American spirit, and how large a part of the historic American ideals are to be carried over into that new age which is replacing the era of free lands and of measurable isolation by consolidated and complex industrial development and by increasing resemblances and connections between the New World and the Old.
But the larger part of what has been distinctive and valuable in America's contribution to the history of the human spirit has been due to this nation's peculiar experience in extending its type of frontier into new regions; and in creating peaceful societies with new ideals in the successive vast and differing geographic provinces which together make up the United States. Directly or indirectly these experiences shaped the life of the Eastern as well as the Western States, and even reacted upon the Old World and influenced the direction of its thought and its progress. This experience has been fundamental in the economic, political and social characteristics of the American people and in their conceptions of their destiny.
Writing at the close of 1796, the French minister to the United States, M. Adet, reported to his government that Jefferson could not be relied on to be devoted to French interests, and he added: "Jefferson, I say, is American, and by that name, he cannot be sincerely our friend. An American is the born enemy of all European peoples." Obviously erroneous as are these words, there was an element of truth in them. If we would understand this element of truth, we must study the transforming influence of the American wilderness, remote from Europe, and by its resources and its free opportunities affording the conditions under which a new people, with new social and political types and ideals, could arise to play its own part in the world, and to influence Europe.
Frederick J. Turner.
Harvard University, March, 1920.
I
The Significance of the Frontier in American History[1:1]
In a recent bulletin of the Superintendent of the Census for 1890[1] appear these significant words: "Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. In the discussion of its extent, its westward movement, etc., it can not, therefore, any longer have a place in the census reports." This brief official statement marks the closing of a great historic movement[1q]. Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.
Behind institutions, behind constitutional forms and modifications, lie the vital forces that call these organs into life and shape them to meet changing conditions. The peculiarity of American institutions is, the fact that they have been compelled to adapt themselves to the changes of an expanding people—to the changes involved in crossing a continent, in winning a wilderness, and in developing at each area of this progress out of the primitive economic and political conditions of the frontier into the complexity of city life. Said Calhoun in 1817, "We are great, and rapidly—I was about to say fearfully—growing!"[2:1] So saying, he touched the distinguishing feature of American life. All peoples show development; the germ theory of politics has been sufficiently emphasized. In the case of most nations, however, the development has occurred in a limited area; and if the nation has expanded, it has met other growing peoples whom it has conquered. But in the case of the United States we have a different phenomenon. Limiting our attention to the Atlantic coast, we have the familiar phenomenon of the evolution of institutions in a limited area, such as the rise of representative government; the differentiation of simple colonial governments into complex organs; the progress from primitive industrial society, without division of labor, up to manufacturing civilization. But we have in addition to this a recurrence of the process of evolution in each western area reached in the process of expansion. Thus American development has exhibited not merely advance along a single line, but a return to primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line, and a new development for that area. American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier[2q]. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character. The true point of view in the history of this nation is not the Atlantic coast, it is the Great West. Even the slavery struggle, which is made so exclusive an object of attention by writers like Professor von Holst, occupies its important place in American history because of its relation to westward expansion.
In this advance, the frontier is the outer edge of the wave—the meeting point between savagery and civilization. Much has been written about the frontier from the point of view of border warfare and the chase, but as a field for the serious study of the economist and the historian it has been neglected.
The American frontier is sharply distinguished from the European frontier—a fortified boundary line running through dense populations. The most significant thing about the American frontier is, that it lies at the hither edge of free land. In the census reports it is treated as the margin of that settlement which has a density of two or more to the square mile. The term is an elastic one, and for our purposes does not need sharp definition. We shall consider the whole frontier belt, including the Indian country and the outer margin of the "settled area" of the census reports. This paper will make no attempt to treat the subject exhaustively; its aim is simply to call attention to the frontier as a fertile field for investigation, and to suggest some of the problems which arise in connection with it.
In the settlement of America we have to observe how European life entered the continent, and how America modified and developed that life and reacted on Europe. Our early history is the study of European germs developing in an American environment. Too exclusive attention has been paid by institutional students to the Germanic origins, too little to the American factors. The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization. The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin. It puts him in the log cabin of the Cherokee and Iroquois and runs an Indian palisade around him. Before long he has gone to planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick; he shouts the war cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion. In short, at the frontier the environment is at first too strong for the man. He must accept the conditions which it furnishes, or perish, and so he fits himself into the Indian clearings and follows the Indian trails. Little by little he transforms the wilderness, but the outcome is not the old Europe, not simply the development of Germanic germs, any more than the first phenomenon was a case of reversion to the Germanic mark. The fact is, that here is a new product that is American. At first, the frontier was the Atlantic coast. It was the frontier of Europe in a very real sense. Moving westward, the frontier became more and more American. As successive terminal moraines result from successive glaciations, so each frontier leaves its traces behind it, and when it becomes a settled area the region still partakes of the frontier characteristics. Thus the advance of the frontier has meant a steady movement away from the influence of Europe, a steady growth of independence on American lines. And to study this advance, the men who grew up under these conditions, and the political, economic, and social results of it, is to study the really American part of our history.
In the course of the seventeenth century the frontier was advanced up the Atlantic river courses, just beyond the "fall line[2]," and the tidewater region became the settled area. In the first half of the eighteenth century another advance occurred. Traders followed the Delaware and Shawnese Indians to the Ohio as early as the end of the first quarter of the century.[5:1] Gov. Spotswood[5], of Virginia, made an expedition in 1714 across the Blue Ridge. The end of the first quarter of the century saw the advance of the Scotch-Irish[3] and the Palatine Germans[4] up the Shenandoah Valley into the western part of Virginia, and along the Piedmont region of the Carolinas.[5:2] The Germans in New York pushed the frontier of settlement up the Mohawk to German Flats.[5:3] In Pennsylvania the town of Bedford indicates the line of settlement. Settlements soon began on the New River, or the Great Kanawha, and on the sources of the Yadkin and French Broad.[5:4] The King attempted to arrest the advance by his proclamation of 1763,[5:5] forbidding settlements beyond the sources of the rivers flowing into the Atlantic; but in vain. In the period of the Revolution the frontier crossed the Alleghanies into Kentucky and Tennessee, and the upper waters of the Ohio were settled.[5:6] When the first census was taken in 1790, the continuous settled area was bounded by a line which ran near the coast of Maine, and included New England except a portion of Vermont and New Hampshire, New York along the Hudson and up the Mohawk about Schenectady, eastern and southern Pennsylvania, Virginia well across the Shenandoah Valley, and the Carolinas and eastern Georgia.[6:1] Beyond this region of continuous settlement were the small settled areas of Kentucky and Tennessee, and the Ohio, with the mountains intervening between them and the Atlantic area, thus giving a new and important character to the frontier. The isolation of the region increased its peculiarly American tendencies, and the need of transportation facilities to connect it with the East called out important schemes of internal improvement, which will be noted farther on. The "West," as a self-conscious section, began to evolve.
From decade to decade distinct advances of the frontier occurred. By the census of 1820[6:2] the settled area included Ohio, southern Indiana and Illinois, southeastern Missouri, and about one-half of Louisiana. This settled area had surrounded Indian areas, and the management of these tribes became an object of political concern. The frontier region of the time lay along the Great Lakes, where Astor's American Fur Company operated in the Indian trade,[6:3] and beyond the Mississippi, where Indian traders extended their activity even to the Rocky Mountains; Florida also furnished frontier conditions. The Mississippi River region was the scene of typical frontier settlements.[7:1]
The rising steam navigation[7:2] on western waters, the opening of the Erie Canal, and the westward extension of cotton[7:3] culture added five frontier states to the Union in this period. Grund, writing in 1836, declares: "It appears then that the universal disposition of Americans to emigrate to the western wilderness, in order to enlarge their dominion over inanimate nature, is the actual result of an expansive power which is inherent in them, and which by continually agitating all classes of society is constantly throwing a large portion of the whole population on the extreme confines of the State, in order to gain space for its development. Hardly is a new State or Territory formed before the same principle manifests itself again and gives rise to a further emigration; and so is it destined to go on until a physical barrier must finally obstruct its progress."[7:4]
In the middle of this century the line indicated by the present eastern boundary of Indian Territory, Nebraska, and Kansas marked the frontier of the Indian country.[8:1] Minnesota and Wisconsin still exhibited frontier conditions,[8:2] but the distinctive frontier of the period is found in California, where the gold discoveries had sent a sudden tide of adventurous miners, and in Oregon, and the settlements in Utah.[8:3] As the frontier had leaped over the Alleghanies, so now it skipped the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains; and in the same way that the advance of the frontiersmen beyond the Alleghanies had caused the rise of important questions of transportation and internal improvement, so now the settlers beyond the Rocky Mountains needed means of communication with the East, and in the furnishing of these arose the settlement of the Great Plains and the development of still another kind of frontier life. Railroads, fostered by land grants, sent an increasing tide of immigrants into the Far West. The United States Army fought a series of Indian wars in Minnesota, Dakota, and the Indian Territory.
By 1880 the settled area had been pushed into northern Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, along Dakota rivers, and in the Black Hills region, and was ascending the rivers of Kansas and Nebraska. The development of mines in Colorado had drawn isolated frontier settlements into that region, and Montana and Idaho were receiving settlers. The frontier was found in these mining camps and the ranches of the Great Plains. The superintendent of the census for 1890 reports, as previously stated, that the settlements of the West lie so scattered over the region that there can no longer be said to be a frontier line.
In these successive frontiers we find natural boundary lines which have served to mark and to affect the characteristics of the frontiers, namely: the "fall line;" the Alleghany Mountains; the Mississippi; the Missouri where its direction approximates north and south; the line of the arid lands, approximately the ninety-ninth meridian; and the Rocky Mountains. The fall line marked the frontier of the seventeenth century; the Alleghanies that of the eighteenth; the Mississippi that of the first quarter of the nineteenth; the Missouri that of the middle of this century (omitting the California movement); and the belt of the Rocky Mountains and the arid tract, the present frontier. Each was won by a series of Indian wars.
At the Atlantic frontier one can study the germs of processes repeated at each successive frontier. We have the complex European life sharply precipitated by the wilderness into the simplicity of primitive conditions. The first frontier had to meet its Indian question, its question of the disposition of the public domain, of the means of intercourse with older settlements, of the extension of political organization, of religious and educational activity. And the settlement of these and similar questions for one frontier served as a guide for the next. The American student needs not to go to the "prim little townships of Sleswick" for illustrations of the law of continuity and development. For example, he may study the origin of our land policies in the colonial land policy; he may see how the system grew by adapting the statutes to the customs of the successive frontiers.[10:1] He may see how the mining experience in the lead regions of Wisconsin, Illinois, and Iowa was applied to the mining laws of the Sierras,[10:2] and how our Indian policy has been a series of experimentations on successive frontiers. Each tier of new States has found in the older ones material for its constitutions.[10:3] Each frontier has made similar contributions to American character, as will be discussed farther on.
But with all these similarities there are essential differences due to the place element and the time element. It is evident that the farming frontier of the Mississippi Valley presents different conditions from the mining frontier of the Rocky Mountains. The frontier reached by the Pacific Railroad, surveyed into rectangles, guarded by the United States Army, and recruited by the daily immigrant ship, moves forward at a swifter pace and in a different way than the frontier reached by the birch canoe or the pack horse. The geologist traces patiently the shores of ancient seas, maps their areas, and compares the older and the newer. It would be a work worth the historian's labors to mark these various frontiers and in detail compare one with another. Not only would there result a more adequate conception of American development and characteristics, but invaluable additions would be made to the history of society.
Loria,[11:1] the Italian economist, has urged the study of colonial life as an aid in understanding the stages of European development, affirming that colonial settlement is for economic science what the mountain is for geology, bringing to light primitive stratifications. "America," he says, "has the key to the historical enigma which Europe has sought for centuries in vain, and the land which has no history reveals luminously the course of universal history." There is much truth in this. The United States lies like a huge page in the history of society. Line by line as we read this continental page from West to East we find the record of social evolution. It begins with the Indian and the hunter; it goes on to tell of the disintegration of savagery by the entrance of the trader, the pathfinder of civilization; we read the annals of the pastoral stage in ranch life; the exploitation of the soil by the raising of unrotated crops of corn and wheat in sparsely settled farming communities; the intensive culture of the denser farm settlement; and finally the manufacturing organization with city and factory system.[11:2] This page is familiar to the student of census statistics, but how little of it has been used by our historians. Particularly in eastern States this page is a palimpsest. What is now a manufacturing State was in an earlier decade an area of intensive farming. Earlier yet it had been a wheat area, and still earlier the "range" had attracted the cattle-herder. Thus Wisconsin, now developing manufacture, is a State with varied agricultural interests. But earlier it was given over to almost exclusive grain-raising, like North Dakota at the present time.
Each of these areas has had an influence in our economic and political history; the evolution of each into a higher stage has worked political transformations. But what constitutional historian has made any adequate attempt to interpret political facts by the light of these social areas and changes?[12:1]
The Atlantic frontier was compounded of fisherman, fur-trader, miner, cattle-raiser, and farmer. Excepting the fisherman, each type of industry was on the march toward the West, impelled by an irresistible attraction. Each passed in successive waves across the continent. Stand at Cumberland Gap and watch the procession of civilization, marching single file—the buffalo following the trail to the salt springs, the Indian, the fur-trader and hunter, the cattle-raiser, the pioneer farmer—and the frontier has passed by. Stand at South Pass in the Rockies a century later and see the same procession with wider intervals between. The unequal rate of advance compels us to distinguish the frontier into the trader's frontier, the rancher's frontier, or the miner's frontier, and the farmer's frontier. When the mines and the cow pens were still near the fall line the traders' pack trains were tinkling across the Alleghanies, and the French on the Great Lakes were fortifying their posts, alarmed by the British trader's birch canoe. When the trappers scaled the Rockies, the farmer was still near the mouth of the Missouri.
Why was it that the Indian trader passed so rapidly across the continent? What effects followed from the trader's frontier? The trade was coeval with American discovery. The Norsemen, Vespuccius, Verrazani, Hudson, John Smith, all trafficked for furs. The Plymouth pilgrims settled in Indian cornfields, and their first return cargo was of beaver and lumber. The records of the various New England colonies show how steadily exploration was carried into the wilderness by this trade. What is true for New England is, as would be expected, even plainer for the rest of the colonies. All along the coast from Maine to Georgia the Indian trade opened up the river courses. Steadily the trader passed westward, utilizing the older lines of French trade. The Ohio, the Great Lakes, the Mississippi, the Missouri, and the Platte, the lines of western advance, were ascended by traders. They found the passes in the Rocky Mountains and guided Lewis and Clark,[13:1] Frémont, and Bidwell. The explanation of the rapidity of this advance is connected with the effects of the trader on the Indian. The trading post left the unarmed tribes at the mercy of those that had purchased fire-arms—a truth which the Iroquois Indians wrote in blood, and so the remote and unvisited tribes gave eager welcome to the trader. "The savages," wrote La Salle, "take better care of us French than of their own children; from us only can they get guns and goods." This accounts for the trader's power and the rapidity of his advance. Thus the disintegrating forces of civilization entered the wilderness. Every river valley and Indian trail became a fissure in Indian society, and so that society became honeycombed. Long before the pioneer farmer appeared on the scene, primitive Indian life had passed away. The farmers met Indians armed with guns. The trading frontier, while steadily undermining Indian power by making the tribes ultimately dependent on the whites, yet, through its sale of guns, gave to the Indian increased power of resistance to the farming frontier. French colonization was dominated by its trading frontier; English colonization by its farming frontier. There was an antagonism between the two frontiers as between the two nations. Said Duquesne to the Iroquois, "Are you ignorant of the difference between the king of England and the king of France? Go see the forts that our king has established and you will see that you can still hunt under their very walls. They have been placed for your advantage in places which you frequent. The English, on the contrary, are no sooner in possession of a place than the game is driven away. The forest falls before them as they advance, and the soil is laid bare so that you can scarce find the wherewithal to erect a shelter for the night."
And yet, in spite of this opposition of the interests of the trader and the farmer, the Indian trade pioneered the way for civilization. The buffalo trail became the Indian trail, and this became the trader's "trace;" the trails widened into roads, and the roads into turnpikes, and these in turn were transformed into railroads. The same origin can be shown for the railroads of the South, the Far West, and the Dominion of Canada.[14:1] The trading posts reached by these trails were on the sites of Indian villages which had been placed in positions suggested by nature; and these trading posts, situated so as to command the water systems of the country, have grown into such cities as Albany, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, Council Bluffs, and Kansas City. Thus civilization in America has followed the arteries made by geology, pouring an ever richer tide through them, until at last the slender paths of aboriginal intercourse have been broadened and interwoven into the complex mazes of modern commercial lines; the wilderness has been interpenetrated by lines of civilization growing ever more numerous. It is like the steady growth of a complex nervous system for the originally simple, inert continent. If one would understand why we are to-day one nation, rather than a collection of isolated states, he must study this economic and social consolidation of the country. In this progress from savage conditions lie topics for the evolutionist.[15:1]
The effect of the Indian frontier as a consolidating agent in our history is important. From the close of the seventeenth century various intercolonial congresses have been called to treat with Indians and establish common measures of defense. Particularism was strongest in colonies with no Indian frontier. This frontier stretched along the western border like a cord of union. The Indian was a common danger, demanding united action. Most celebrated of these conferences was the Albany congress of 1754[6], called to treat with the Six Nations, and to consider plans of union. Even a cursory reading of the plan proposed by the congress reveals the importance of the frontier. The powers of the general council and the officers were, chiefly, the determination of peace and war with the Indians, the regulation of Indian trade, the purchase of Indian lands, and the creation and government of new settlements as a security against the Indians. It is evident that the unifying tendencies of the Revolutionary period were facilitated by the previous coöperation in the regulation of the frontier. In this connection may be mentioned the importance of the frontier, from that day to this, as a military training school, keeping alive the power of resistance to aggression, and developing the stalwart and rugged qualities of the frontiersman.
It would not be possible in the limits of this paper to trace the other frontiers across the continent. Travelers of the eighteenth century found the "cowpens" among the canebrakes and peavine pastures of the South, and the "cow drivers" took their droves to Charleston, Philadelphia, and New York.[16:1] Travelers at the close of the War of 1812 met droves of more than a thousand cattle and swine from the interior of Ohio going to Pennsylvania to fatten for the Philadelphia market.[16:2] The ranges of the Great Plains, with ranch and cowboy and nomadic life, are things of yesterday and of to-day. The experience of the Carolina cowpens guided the ranchers of Texas. One element favoring the rapid extension of the rancher's frontier is the fact that in a remote country lacking transportation facilities the product must be in small bulk, or must be able to transport itself, and the cattle raiser could easily drive his product to market. The effect of these great ranches on the subsequent agrarian history of the localities in which they existed should be studied.
The maps of the census reports show an uneven advance of the farmer's frontier, with tongues of settlement pushed forward and with indentations of wilderness. In part this is due to Indian resistance, in part to the location of river valleys and passes, in part to the unequal force of the centers of frontier attraction. Among the important centers of attraction may be mentioned the following: fertile and favorably situated soils, salt springs, mines, and army posts.
The frontier army post, serving to protect the settlers from the Indians, has also acted as a wedge to open the Indian country, and has been a nucleus for settlement.[16:3] In this connection mention should also be made of the government military and exploring expeditions in determining the lines of settlement. But all the more important expeditions were greatly indebted to the earliest pathmakers, the Indian guides, the traders and trappers, and the French voyageurs, who were inevitable parts of governmental expeditions from the days of Lewis and Clark.[17:1] Each expedition was an epitome of the previous factors in western advance.
In an interesting monograph, Victor Hehn[17:2] has traced the effect of salt upon early European development, and has pointed out how it affected the lines of settlement and the form of administration. A similar study might be made for the salt springs of the United States. The early settlers were tied to the coast by the need of salt, without which they could not preserve their meats or live in comfort. Writing in 1752, Bishop Spangenburg says of a colony for which he was seeking lands in North Carolina, "They will require salt & other necessaries which they can neither manufacture nor raise. Either they must go to Charleston, which is 300 miles distant . . . Or else they must go to Boling's Point in Va on a branch of the James & is also 300 miles from here . . Or else they must go down the Roanoke—I know not how many miles—where salt is brought up from the Cape Fear."[17:3] This may serve as a typical illustration. An annual pilgrimage to the coast for salt thus became essential. Taking flocks or furs and ginseng root, the early settlers sent their pack trains after seeding time each year to the coast.[17:4] This proved to be an important educational influence, since it was almost the only way in which the pioneer learned what was going on in the East. But when discovery was made of the salt springs of the Kanawha, and the Holston, and Kentucky, and central New York, the West began to be freed from dependence on the coast. It was in part the effect of finding these salt springs that enabled settlement to cross the mountains.
From the time the mountains rose between the pioneer and the seaboard, a new order of Americanism arose. The West and the East began to get out of touch of each other. The settlements from the sea to the mountains kept connection with the rear and had a certain solidarity. But the over-mountain men grew more and more independent. The East took a narrow view of American advance, and nearly lost these men. Kentucky and Tennessee history bears abundant witness to the truth of this statement. The East began to try to hedge and limit westward expansion. Though Webster could declare that there were no Alleghanies in his politics, yet in politics in general they were a very solid factor.
The exploitation of the beasts took hunter and trader to the west, the exploitation of the grasses took the rancher west, and the exploitation of the virgin soil of the river valleys and prairies attracted the farmer. Good soils have been the most continuous attraction to the farmer's frontier. The land hunger of the Virginians drew them down the rivers into Carolina, in early colonial days; the search for soils took the Massachusetts men to Pennsylvania and to New York. As the eastern lands were taken up migration flowed across them to the west. Daniel Boone, the great backwoodsman, who combined the occupations of hunter, trader, cattle-raiser, farmer, and surveyor—learning, probably from the traders, of the fertility of the lands of the upper Yadkin, where the traders were wont to rest as they took their way to the Indians, left his Pennsylvania home with his father, and passed down the Great Valley road to that stream. Learning from a trader of the game and rich pastures of Kentucky, he pioneered the way for the farmers to that region. Thence he passed to the frontier of Missouri, where his settlement was long a landmark on the frontier. Here again he helped to open the way for civilization, finding salt licks, and trails, and land. His son was among the earliest trappers in the passes of the Rocky Mountains, and his party are said to have been the first to camp on the present site of Denver. His grandson, Col. A. J. Boone, of Colorado, was a power among the Indians of the Rocky Mountains, and was appointed an agent by the government. Kit Carson's mother was a Boone.[19:1] Thus this family epitomizes the backwoodsman's advance across the continent.
The farmer's advance came in a distinct series of waves. In Peck's New Guide to the West, published in Boston in 1837, occurs this suggestive passage:
Generally, in all the western settlements, three classes, like the waves of the ocean, have rolled one after the other. First comes the pioneer, who depends for the subsistence of his family chiefly upon the natural growth of vegetation, called the "range," and the proceeds of hunting. His implements of agriculture are rude, chiefly of his own make, and his efforts directed mainly to a crop of corn and a "truck patch." The last is a rude garden for growing cabbage, beans, corn for roasting ears, cucumbers, and potatoes. A log cabin, and, occasionally, a stable and corn-crib, and a field of a dozen acres, the timber girdled or "deadened," and fenced, are enough for his occupancy. It is quite immaterial whether he ever becomes the owner of the soil. He is the occupant for the time being, pays no rent, and feels as independent as the "lord of the manor." With a horse, cow, and one or two breeders of swine, he strikes into the woods with his family, and becomes the founder of a new county, or perhaps state. He builds his cabin, gathers around him a few other families of similar tastes and habits, and occupies till the range is somewhat subdued, and hunting a little precarious, or, which is more frequently the case, till the neighbors crowd around, roads, bridges, and fields annoy him, and he lacks elbow room. The preëmption law[7] enables him to dispose of his cabin and cornfield to the next class of emigrants; and, to employ his own figures, he "breaks for the high timber," "clears out for the New Purchase," or migrates to Arkansas or Texas, to work the same process over.
The next class of emigrants purchase the lands, add field to field, clear out the roads, throw rough bridges over the streams, put up hewn log houses with glass windows and brick or stone chimneys, occasionally plant orchards, build mills, school-houses, court-houses, etc., and exhibit the picture and forms of plain, frugal, civilized life.
Another wave rolls on. The men of capital and enterprise come. The settler is ready to sell out and take the advantage of the rise in property, push farther into the interior and become, himself, a man of capital and enterprise in turn. The small village rises to a spacious town or city; substantial edifices of brick, extensive fields, orchards, gardens, colleges, and churches are seen. Broadcloths, silks, leghorns, crapes, and all the refinements, luxuries, elegancies, frivolities, and fashions are in vogue. Thus wave after wave is rolling westward; the real Eldorado is still farther on.
A portion of the two first classes remain stationary amidst the general movement, improve their habits and condition, and rise in the scale of society.
The writer has traveled much amongst the first class, the real pioneers. He has lived many years in connection with the second grade; and now the third wave is sweeping over large districts of Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri. Migration has become almost a habit in the West. Hundreds of men can be found, not over 50 years of age, who have settled for the fourth, fifth, or sixth time on a new spot. To sell out and remove only a few hundred miles makes up a portion of the variety of backwoods life and manners.[21:1]
Omitting those of the pioneer farmers who move from the love of adventure, the advance of the more steady farmer is easy to understand. Obviously the immigrant was attracted by the cheap lands of the frontier, and even the native farmer felt their influence strongly. Year by year the farmers who lived on soil whose returns were diminished by unrotated crops were offered the virgin soil of the frontier at nominal prices. Their growing families demanded more lands, and these were dear. The competition of the unexhausted, cheap, and easily tilled prairie lands compelled the farmer either to go west and continue the exhaustion of the soil on a new frontier, or to adopt intensive culture. Thus the census of 1890 shows, in the Northwest, many counties in which there is an absolute or a relative decrease of population. These States have been sending farmers to advance the frontier on the plains, and have themselves begun to turn to intensive farming and to manufacture. A decade before this, Ohio had shown the same transition stage. Thus the demand for land and the love of wilderness freedom drew the frontier ever onward.
Having now roughly outlined the various kinds of frontiers, and their modes of advance, chiefly from the point of view of the frontier itself, we may next inquire what were the influences on the East and on the Old World. A rapid enumeration of some of the more noteworthy effects is all that I have time for.
First, we note that the frontier promoted the formation of a composite nationality for the American people. The coast was preponderantly English, but the later tides of continental immigration flowed across to the free lands. This was the case from the early colonial days. The Scotch-Irish and the Palatine Germans, or "Pennsylvania Dutch," furnished the dominant element in the stock of the colonial frontier. With these peoples were also the freed indented servants, or redemptioners, who at the expiration of their time of service passed to the frontier. Governor Spotswood of Virginia writes in 1717, "The inhabitants of our frontiers are composed generally of such as have been transported hither as servants, and, being out of their time, settle themselves where land is to be taken up and that will produce the necessarys of life with little labour."[22:1] Very generally these redemptioners were of non-English stock. In the crucible of the frontier the immigrants were Americanized, liberated, and fused into a mixed race, English in neither nationality nor characteristics. The process has gone on from the early days to our own. Burke and other writers in the middle of the eighteenth century believed that Pennsylvania[23:1] was "threatened with the danger of being wholly foreign in language, manners, and perhaps even inclinations." The German and Scotch-Irish elements in the frontier of the South were only less great. In the middle of the present century the German element in Wisconsin was already so considerable that leading publicists looked to the creation of a German state out of the commonwealth by concentrating their colonization.[23:2] Such examples teach us to beware of misinterpreting the fact that there is a common English speech in America into a belief that the stock is also English.
In another way the advance of the frontier decreased our dependence on England. The coast, particularly of the South, lacked diversified industries, and was dependent on England for the bulk of its supplies. In the South there was even a dependence on the Northern colonies for articles of food. Governor Glenn, of South Carolina, writes in the middle of the eighteenth century: "Our trade with New York and Philadelphia was of this sort, draining us of all the little money and bills we could gather from other places for their bread, flour, beer, hams, bacon, and other things of their produce, all which, except beer, our new townships begin to supply us with, which are settled with very industrious and thriving Germans. This no doubt diminishes the number of shipping and the appearance of our trade, but it is far from being a detriment to us."[23:3]
Before long the frontier created a demand for merchants. As it retreated from the coast it became less and less possible for England to bring her supplies directly to the consumer's wharfs, and carry away staple crops, and staple crops began to give way to diversified agriculture for a time. The effect of this phase of the frontier action upon the northern section is perceived when we realize how the advance of the frontier aroused seaboard cities like Boston, New York, and Baltimore, to engage in rivalry for what Washington called "the extensive and valuable trade of a rising empire."
The legislation which most developed the powers of the national government, and played the largest part in its activity, was conditioned on the frontier. Writers have discussed the subjects of tariff, land, and internal improvement, as subsidiary to the slavery question. But when American history comes to be rightly viewed it will be seen that the slavery question is an incident. In the period from the end of the first half of the present century to the close of the Civil War slavery rose to primary, but far from exclusive, importance. But this does not justify Dr. von Holst (to take an example) in treating our constitutional history in its formative period down to 1828 in a single volume, giving six volumes chiefly to the history of slavery from 1828 to 1861, under the title "Constitutional History of the United States." The growth of nationalism and the evolution of American political institutions were dependent on the advance of the frontier. Even so recent a writer as Rhodes, in his "History of the United States since the Compromise of 1850," has treated the legislation called out by the western advance as incidental to the slavery struggle.
This is a wrong perspective. The pioneer needed the goods of the coast, and so the grand series of internal improvement and railroad legislation began, with potent nationalizing effects. Over internal improvements occurred great debates, in which grave constitutional questions were discussed. Sectional groupings appear in the votes, profoundly significant for the historian. Loose construction increased as the nation marched westward.[25:1] But the West was not content with bringing the farm to the factory. Under the lead of Clay—"Harry of the West"—protective tariffs were passed, with the cry of bringing the factory to the farm. The disposition of the public lands was a third important subject of national legislation influenced by the frontier.
The public domain has been a force of profound importance in the nationalization and development of the government. The effects of the struggle of the landed and the landless States, and of the Ordinance of 1787, need no discussion.[25:2] Administratively the frontier called out some of the highest and most vitalizing activities of the general government. The purchase of Louisiana was perhaps the constitutional turning point in the history of the Republic, inasmuch as it afforded both a new area for national legislation and the occasion of the downfall of the policy of strict construction. But the purchase of Louisiana was called out by frontier needs and demands. As frontier States accrued to the Union the national power grew. In a speech on the dedication of the Calhoun monument Mr. Lamar explained: "In 1789 the States were the creators of the Federal Government; in 1861 the Federal Government was the creator of a large majority of the States."
