present, or perhaps any preceding, Congress, is of greater magnitude
than that of the public lands." When we consider the far-reaching
effects of the government's land policy upon political, economic, and
social aspects of American life, we are disposed to agree with him. But
this legislation was framed under frontier influences, and under the
lead of Western statesmen like Benton and Jackson. Said Senator Scott of
Indiana in 1841: "I consider the preemption law merely declaratory of
the custom or common law of the settlers."
It is safe to say that the legislation with regard to land, tariff, and
internal improvements--the American system of the nationalizing Whig
party--was conditioned on frontier ideas and needs. But it was not
merely in legislative action that the frontier worked against the
sectionalism of the coast. The economic and social characteristics of
the frontier worked against sectionalism. The men of the frontier had
closer resemblances to the Middle region than to either of the other
sections. Pennsylvania had been the seed-plot of frontier emigration,
and, although she passed on her settlers along the Great Valley into the
west of Virginia and the Carolinas, yet the industrial society of these
Southern frontiersmen was always more like that of the Middle region
than like that of the tide-water portion of the South, which later came
to spread its industrial type throughout the South.
The Middle region, entered by New York harbor, was an open door to all
Europe. The tide-water part of the South represented typical Englishmen,
modified by a warm climate and servile labor, and living in baronial
fashion on great plantations; New England stood for a special English
movement--Puritanism. The Middle region was less English than the other
sections. It had a wide mixture of nationalities, a varied society, the
mixed town and county system of local government, a varied economic
life, many religious sects. In short, it was a region mediating between
New England and the South, and the East and the West. It represented
that composite nationality which the contemporary United States
exhibits, that juxtaposition of non-English groups, occupying a valley
or a little settlement, and presenting reflections of the map of Europe
in their variety. It was democratic and nonsectional, if not national;
"easy, tolerant, and contented;" rooted strongly in material prosperity.
It was typical of the modern United States. It was least sectional, not
only because it lay between North and South, but also because with no
barriers to shut out its frontiers from its settled region, and with a
system of connecting waterways, the Middle region mediated between East
and West as well as between North and South. Thus it became the
typically American region. Even the New Englander, who was shut out from
the frontier by the Middle region, tarrying in New York or Pennsylvania
on his westward march, lost the acuteness of his sectionalism on the
way.[28:1]
The spread of cotton culture into the interior of the South finally
broke down the contrast between the "tide-water" region and the rest of
the State, and based Southern interests on slavery. Before this process
revealed its results the western portion of the South, which was akin to
Pennsylvania in stock, society, and industry, showed tendencies to fall
away from the faith of the fathers into internal improvement legislation
and nationalism. In the Virginia convention of 1829-30, called to revise
the constitution, Mr. Leigh, of Chesterfield, one of the tide-water
counties, declared:
One of the main causes of discontent which led to this
convention, that which had the strongest influence in
overcoming our veneration for the work of our fathers, which
taught us to contemn the sentiments of Henry and Mason and
Pendleton, which weaned us from our reverence for the
constituted authorities of the State, was an overweening
passion for internal improvement. I say this with perfect
knowledge, for it has been avowed to me by gentlemen from the
West over and over again. And let me tell the gentleman from
Albemarle (Mr. Gordon) that it has been another principal
object of those who set this ball of revolution in motion, to
overturn the doctrine of State rights, of which Virginia has
been the very pillar, and to remove the barrier she has
interposed to the interference of the Federal Government in
that same work of internal improvement, by so reorganizing the
legislature that Virginia, too, may be hitched to the Federal
car.
It was this nationalizing tendency of the West that transformed the
democracy of Jefferson into the national republicanism of Monroe and the
democracy of Andrew Jackson. The West of the War of 1812, the West of
Clay, and Benton and Harrison, and Andrew Jackson, shut off by the
Middle States and the mountains from the coast sections, had a
solidarity of its own with national tendencies.[29:1] On the tide of the
Father of Waters, North and South met and mingled into a nation.
Interstate migration went steadily on--a process of cross-fertilization
of ideas and institutions. The fierce struggle of the sections over
slavery on the western frontier does not diminish the truth of this
statement; it proves the truth of it. Slavery was a sectional trait that
would not down, but in the West it could not remain sectional. It was
the greatest of frontiersmen who declared: "I believe this Government
can not endure permanently half slave and half free. It will become all
of one thing or all of the other." Nothing works for nationalism like
intercourse within the nation. Mobility of population is death to
localism, and the western frontier worked irresistibly in unsettling
population. The effect reached back from the frontier and affected
profoundly the Atlantic coast and even the Old World.
But the most important effect of the frontier has been in the promotion
of democracy here and in Europe. As has been indicated, the frontier is
productive of individualism. Complex society is precipitated by the
wilderness into a kind of primitive organization based on the family.
The tendency is anti-social. It produces antipathy to control, and
particularly to any direct control. The tax-gatherer is viewed as a
representative of oppression. Prof. Osgood, in an able article,[30:1]
has pointed out that the frontier conditions prevalent in the colonies
are important factors in the explanation of the American Revolution,
where individual liberty was sometimes confused with absence of all
effective government. The same conditions aid in explaining the
difficulty of instituting a strong government in the period of the
confederacy. The frontier individualism has from the beginning promoted
democracy.
The frontier States that came into the Union in the first quarter of a
century of its existence came in with democratic suffrage provisions,
and had reactive effects of the highest importance upon the older States
whose peoples were being attracted there. An extension of the franchise
became essential. It was _western_ New York that forced an extension of
suffrage in the constitutional convention of that State in 1821; and it
was _western_ Virginia that compelled the tide-water region to put a
more liberal suffrage provision in the constitution framed in 1830, and
to give to the frontier region a more nearly proportionate
representation with the tide-water aristocracy. The rise of democracy as
an effective force in the nation came in with western preponderance
under Jackson and William Henry Harrison, and it meant the triumph of
the frontier--with all of its good and with all of its evil
elements.[31:1] An interesting illustration of the tone of frontier
democracy in 1830 comes from the same debates in the Virginia convention
already referred to. A representative from western Virginia declared:
But, sir, it is not the increase of population in the West
which this gentleman ought to fear. It is the energy which the
mountain breeze and western habits impart to those emigrants.
They are regenerated, politically I mean, sir. They soon
become _working politicians_; and the difference, sir, between
a _talking_ and a _working_ politician is immense. The Old
Dominion has long been celebrated for producing great orators;
the ablest metaphysicians in policy; men that can split hairs
in all abstruse questions of political economy. But at home,
or when they return from Congress, they have negroes to fan
them asleep. But a Pennsylvania, a New York, an Ohio, or a
western Virginia statesman, though far inferior in logic,
metaphysics, and rhetoric to an old Virginia statesman, has
this advantage, that when he returns home he takes off his
coat and takes hold of the plow. This gives him bone and
muscle, sir, and preserves his republican principles pure and
uncontaminated.
So long as free land exists, the opportunity for a competency exists,
and economic power secures political power. But the democracy born of
free land, strong in selfishness and individualism, intolerant of
administrative experience and education, and pressing individual liberty
beyond its proper bounds, has its dangers as well as its benefits.
Individualism in America has allowed a laxity in regard to governmental
affairs which has rendered possible the spoils system and all the
manifest evils that follow from the lack of a highly developed civic
spirit. In this connection may be noted also the influence of frontier
conditions in permitting lax business honor, inflated paper currency and
wild-cat banking. The colonial and revolutionary frontier was the region
whence emanated many of the worst forms of an evil currency.[32:1] The
West in the War of 1812 repeated the phenomenon on the frontier of that
day, while the speculation and wild-cat banking of the period of the
crisis of 1837 occurred on the new frontier belt of the next tier of
States. Thus each one of the periods of lax financial integrity
coincides with periods when a new set of frontier communities had
arisen, and coincides in area with these successive frontiers, for the
most part. The recent Populist agitation is a case in point. Many a
State that now declines any connection with the tenets of the Populists,
itself adhered to such ideas in an earlier stage of the development of
the State. A primitive society can hardly be expected to show the
intelligent appreciation of the complexity of business interests in a
developed society. The continual recurrence of these areas of
paper-money agitation is another evidence that the frontier can be
isolated and studied as a factor in American history of the highest
importance.[32:2]
The East has always feared the result of an unregulated advance of the
frontier, and has tried to check and guide it. The English authorities
would have checked settlement at the headwaters of the Atlantic
tributaries and allowed the "savages to enjoy their deserts in quiet
lest the peltry trade should decrease." This called out Burke's splendid
protest:
If you stopped your grants, what would be the consequence? The
people would occupy without grants. They have already so
occupied in many places. You can not station garrisons in
every part of these deserts. If you drive the people from one
place, they will carry on their annual tillage and remove with
their flocks and herds to another. Many of the people in the
back settlements are already little attached to particular
situations. Already they have topped the Appalachian
Mountains. From thence they behold before them an immense
plain, one vast, rich, level meadow; a square of five hundred
miles. Over this they would wander without a possibility of
restraint; they would change their manners with their habits
of life; would soon forget a government by which they were
disowned; would become hordes of English Tartars; and, pouring
down upon your unfortified frontiers a fierce and irresistible
cavalry, become masters of your governors and your
counselers, your collectors and comptrollers, and of all the
slaves that adhered to them. Such would, and in no long time
must, be the effect of attempting to forbid as a crime and to
suppress as an evil the command and blessing of Providence,
"Increase and multiply." Such would be the happy result of an
endeavor to keep as a lair of wild beasts that earth which
God, by an express charter, has given to the children of men.
But the English Government was not alone in its desire to limit the
advance of the frontier and guide its destinies. Tidewater
Virginia[34:1] and South Carolina[34:2] gerrymandered those colonies to
insure the dominance of the coast in their legislatures. Washington
desired to settle a State at a time in the Northwest; Jefferson would
reserve from settlement the territory of his Louisiana Purchase north of
the thirty-second parallel, in order to offer it to the Indians in
exchange for their settlements east of the Mississippi. "When we shall
be full on this side," he writes, "we may lay off a range of States on
the western bank from the head to the mouth, and so range after range,
advancing compactly as we multiply." Madison went so far as to argue to
the French minister that the United States had no interest in seeing
population extend itself on the right bank of the Mississippi, but
should rather fear it. When the Oregon question was under debate, in
1824, Smyth, of Virginia, would draw an unchangeable line for the limits
of the United States at the outer limit of two tiers of States beyond
the Mississippi, complaining that the seaboard States were being drained
of the flower of their population by the bringing of too much land into
market. Even Thomas Benton, the man of widest views of the destiny of
the West, at this stage of his career declared that along the ridge of
the Rocky mountains "the western limits of the Republic should be drawn,
and the statue of the fabled god Terminus should be raised upon its
highest peak, never to be thrown down."[35:1] But the attempts to limit
the boundaries, to restrict land sales and settlement, and to deprive
the West of its share of political power were all in vain. Steadily the
frontier of settlement advanced and carried with it individualism,
democracy, and nationalism, and powerfully affected the East and the Old
World.
The most effective efforts of the East to regulate the frontier came
through its educational and religious activity, exerted by interstate
migration and by organized societies. Speaking in 1835, Dr. Lyman
Beecher declared: "It is equally plain that the religious and political
destiny of our nation is to be decided in the West," and he pointed out
that the population of the West "is assembled from all the States of the
Union and from all the nations of Europe, and is rushing in like the
waters of the flood, demanding for its moral preservation the immediate
and universal action of those institutions which discipline the mind and
arm the conscience and the heart. And so various are the opinions and
habits, and so recent and imperfect is the acquaintance, and so sparse
are the settlements of the West, that no homogeneous public sentiment
can be formed to legislate immediately into being the requisite
institutions. And yet they are all needed immediately in their utmost
perfection and power. A nation is being 'born in a day.' . . . But what
will become of the West if her prosperity rushes up to such a majesty of
power, while those great institutions linger which are necessary to form
the mind and the conscience and the heart of that vast world. It must
not be permitted. . . . Let no man at the East quiet himself and dream
of liberty, whatever may become of the West. . . . Her destiny is our
destiny."[36:1]
With the appeal to the conscience of New England, he adds appeals to her
fears lest other religious sects anticipate her own. The New England
preacher and school-teacher left their mark on the West. The dread of
Western emancipation from New England's political and economic control
was paralleled by her fears lest the West cut loose from her religion.
Commenting in 1850 on reports that settlement was rapidly extending
northward in Wisconsin, the editor of the _Home Missionary_ writes: "We
scarcely know whether to rejoice or mourn over this extension of our
settlements. While we sympathize in whatever tends to increase the
physical resources and prosperity of our country, we can not forget that
with all these dispersions into remote and still remoter corners of the
land the supply of the means of grace is becoming relatively less and
less." Acting in accordance with such ideas, home missions were
established and Western colleges were erected. As seaboard cities like
Philadelphia, New York, and Baltimore strove for the mastery of Western
trade, so the various denominations strove for the possession of the
West. Thus an intellectual stream from New England sources fertilized
the West. Other sections sent their missionaries; but the real struggle
was between sects. The contest for power and the expansive tendency
furnished to the various sects by the existence of a moving frontier
must have had important results on the character of religious
organization in the United States. The multiplication of rival churches
in the little frontier towns had deep and lasting social effects. The
religious aspects of the frontier make a chapter in our history which
needs study.
From the conditions of frontier life came intellectual traits of
profound importance. The works of travelers along each frontier from
colonial days onward describe certain common traits, and these traits
have, while softening down, still persisted as survivals in the place of
their origin, even when a higher social organization succeeded. The
result is that to the frontier the American intellect owes its striking
characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness
and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to
find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the
artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous
energy;[37:1] that dominant individualism, working for good and for
evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with
freedom--these are traits of the frontier, or traits called out
elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier. Since the days when
the fleet of Columbus sailed into the waters of the New World, America
has been another name for opportunity, and the people of the United
States have taken their tone from the incessant expansion which has not
only been open but has even been forced upon them. He would be a rash
prophet who should assert that the expansive character of American life
has now entirely ceased. Movement has been its dominant fact, and,
unless this training has no effect upon a people, the American energy
will continually demand a wider field for its exercise. But never again
will such gifts of free land offer themselves. For a moment, at the
frontier, the bonds of custom are broken and unrestraint is triumphant.
There is not _tabula rasa_. The stubborn American environment is there
with its imperious summons to accept its conditions; the inherited ways
of doing things are also there; and yet, in spite of environment, and in
spite of custom, each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of
opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past; and
freshness, and confidence, and scorn of older society, impatience of its
restraints and its ideas, and indifference to its lessons, have
accompanied the frontier. What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks,
breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new
institutions and activities, that, and more, the ever retreating
frontier has been to the United States directly, and to the nations of
Europe more remotely. And now, four centuries from the discovery of
America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution,
the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of
American history.
FOOTNOTES:
[1:1] A paper read at the meeting of the American Historical Association
in Chicago, July 12, 1893. It first appeared in the Proceedings of the
State Historical Society of Wisconsin, December 14, 1893, with the
following note: "The foundation of this paper is my article entitled
'Problems in American History,' which appeared in _The Aegis_, a
publication of the students of the University of Wisconsin, November 4,
1892. . . . It is gratifying to find that Professor Woodrow
Wilson--whose volume on 'Division and Reunion' in the Epochs of American
History Series, has an appreciative estimate of the importance of the
West as a factor in American history--accepts some of the views set
forth in the papers above mentioned, and enhances their value by his
lucid and suggestive treatment of them in his article in _The Forum_,
December, 1893, reviewing Goldwin Smith's 'History of the United
States.'" The present text is that of the _Report of the American
Historical Association_ for 1893, 199-227. It was printed with additions
in the _Fifth Year Book of the National Herbart Society_, and in various
other publications.
[2:1] "Abridgment of Debates of Congress," v, p. 706.
[5:1] Bancroft (1860 ed.), iii, pp. 344, 345, citing Logan MSS.;
[Mitchell] "Contest in America," etc. (1752), p. 237.
[5:2] Kercheval, "History of the Valley"; Bernheim, "German Settlements
in the Carolinas"; Winsor, "Narrative and Critical History of America,"
v, p. 304; Colonial Records of North Carolina, iv, p. xx; Weston,
"Documents Connected with the History of South Carolina," p. 82; Ellis
and Evans, "History of Lancaster County, Pa.," chs. iii, xxvi.
[5:3] Parkman, "Pontiac," ii; Griffis, "Sir William Johnson," p. 6;
Simms's "Frontiersmen of New York."
[5:4] Monette, "Mississippi Valley," i, p. 311.
[5:5] Wis. Hist. Cols., xi, p. 50; Hinsdale, "Old Northwest," p. 121;
Burke, "Oration on Conciliation," Works (1872 ed.), i, p. 473.
[5:6] Roosevelt, "Winning of the West," and citations there given;
Cutler's "Life of Cutler."
[6:1] Scribner's Statistical Atlas, xxxviii, pl. 13; McMaster, "Hist. of
People of U. S.," i, pp. 4, 60, 61; Imlay and Filson, "Western Territory
of America" (London, 1793); Rochefoucault-Liancourt, "Travels Through
the United States of North America" (London, 1799); Michaux's "Journal,"
in _Proceedings American Philosophical Society_, xxvi, No. 129; Forman,
"Narrative of a Journey Down the Ohio and Mississippi in 1780-'90"
(Cincinnati, 1888); Bartram, "Travels Through North Carolina," etc.
(London, 1792); Pope, "Tour Through the Southern and Western
Territories," etc. (Richmond, 1792); Weld, "Travels Through the States
of North America" (London, 1799); Baily, "Journal of a Tour in the
Unsettled States of North America, 1796-'97" (London, 1856);
Pennsylvania Magazine of History, July, 1886; Winsor, "Narrative and
Critical History of America," vii, pp. 491, 492, citations.
[6:2] Scribner's Statistical Atlas, xxxix.
[6:3] Turner, "Character and Influence of the Indian Trade in Wisconsin"
(Johns Hopkins University Studies, Series ix), pp. 61 ff.
[7:1] Monette, "History of the Mississippi Valley," ii; Flint, "Travels
and Residence in Mississippi," Flint, "Geography and History of the
Western States," "Abridgment of Debates of Congress," vii, pp. 397, 398,
404; Holmes, "Account of the U. S."; Kingdom, "America and the British
Colonies" (London, 1820); Grund, "Americans," ii, chs. i, iii, vi
(although writing in 1836, he treats of conditions that grew out of
western advance from the era of 1820 to that time); Peck, "Guide for
Emigrants" (Boston, 1831); Darby, "Emigrants' Guide to Western and
Southwestern States and Territories"; Dana, "Geographical Sketches in
the Western Country"; Kinzie, "Waubun"; Keating, "Narrative of Long's
Expedition"; Schoolcraft, "Discovery of the Sources of the Mississippi
River," "Travels in the Central Portions of the Mississippi Valley," and
"Lead Mines of the Missouri"; Andreas, "History of Illinois," i, 86-99;
Hurlbut, "Chicago Antiquities"; McKenney, "Tour to the Lakes"; Thomas,
"Travels Through the Western Country," etc. (Auburn, N. Y., 1819).
[7:2] Darby, "Emigrants' Guide," pp. 272 ff; Benton, "Abridgment of
Debates," vii, p. 397.
[7:3] De Bow's _Review_, iv, p. 254; xvii, p. 428.
[7:4] Grund, "Americans," ii, p. 8.