From "THE ANNUAL REPORT OF THE AMERICAN HISTORICAL
ASSOCIATION" for 1893, pp. 199-227. By Professor Frederick J.
Turner, then of the University of Wisconsin.
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 cannot, 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 economical 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!" 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, has furnished 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 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....
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.