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THE FRONTIER IN AMERICAN HISTORY
by
FREDERICK JACKSON TURNER
[Illustration]
New York
Henry Holt and Company
1921
Copyright, 1920
by
Frederick J. Turner
TO
CAROLINE M. TURNER
MY WIFE
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.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE FRONTIER IN AMERICAN HISTORY 1
II THE FIRST OFFICIAL FRONTIER OF THE MASSACHUSETTS BAY 39
III THE OLD WEST 67
IV THE MIDDLE WEST 126
V THE OHIO VALLEY IN AMERICAN HISTORY 157
VI THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY IN AMERICAN
HISTORY 177
VII THE PROBLEM OF THE WEST 205
VIII DOMINANT FORCES IN WESTERN LIFE 222
IX CONTRIBUTIONS OF THE WEST TO AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 243
X PIONEER IDEALS AND THE STATE UNIVERSITY 269
XI THE WEST AND AMERICAN IDEALS 290
XII SOCIAL FORCES IN AMERICAN HISTORY 311
XIII MIDDLE WESTERN PIONEER DEMOCRACY 335
INDEX 361
I
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE FRONTIER IN AMERICAN HISTORY[1:1]
In a recent bulletin of the Superintendent of the Census for 1890 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. 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. 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," 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, 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 and the Palatine
Germans 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] Fremont, 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, 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 cooperation 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 V{a} 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 preemption law 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."
When we consider the public domain from the point of view of the sale
and disposal of the public lands we are again brought face to face with
the frontier. The policy of the United States in dealing with its lands
is in sharp contrast with the European system of scientific
administration. Efforts to make this domain a source of revenue, and to
withhold it from emigrants in order that settlement might be compact,
were in vain. The jealousy and the fears of the East were powerless in
the face of the demands of the frontiersmen. John Quincy Adams was
obliged to confess: "My own system of administration, which was to make
the national domain the inexhaustible fund for progressive and unceasing
internal improvement, has failed." The reason is obvious; a system of
administration was not what the West demanded; it wanted land. Adams
states the situation as follows: "The slaveholders of the South have
bought the cooperation of the western country by the bribe of the
western lands, abandoning to the new Western States their own proportion
of the public property and aiding them in the design of grasping all the
lands into their own hands." Thomas H. Benton was the author of this
system, which he brought forward as a substitute for the American system
of Mr. Clay, and to supplant him as the leading statesman of the West.
Mr. Clay, by his tariff compromise with Mr. Calhoun, abandoned his own
American system. At the same time he brought forward a plan for
distributing among all the States of the Union the proceeds of the sales
of the public lands. His bill for that purpose passed both Houses of
Congress, but was vetoed by President Jackson, who, in his annual
message of December, 1832, formally recommended that all public lands
should be gratuitously given away to individual adventurers and to the
States in which the lands are situated.[26:1]