University of Virginia Library

I
The Significance of the Frontier in American History[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] 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 hisotry
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 runnning 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.[3] 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.[4] The Germans in New York pushed the frontier
of settlement up the Mohawk to German Flats.[5] In Pennsylvania
the town of Bedford indicates the line of settlement.
Settlements had begun on New River, a branch of the Kanawha,
and on the sources of the Yadkin and French Broad.[6]
The King attempted to arrest the advance by his proclamation
of 1763,[7] 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.[8] 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.[9] 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[10] 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,[11] 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.[12]

The rising steam navigation[13] on western waters, the opening
of the Erie Canal, and the westward extension of cotton[14] 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 of 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."[15]

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.[16] Minnesota and
Wisconsin still exhibited frontier conditions,[17] 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.[18] 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 settle
ments, 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.[19] 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,[20] 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.[21] 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 charasteristics,
but invaluable additions would be made to the history
of society.

Loria,[22] 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.[23] 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?[24]

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,[25] 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.[26] 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.[27]

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
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.[28] 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.[29] 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.[30] 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.[31] Each expedition was an epitome of the
previous factors in western advance.

In an interesting monograph, Victor Hehn[32] 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."[33]
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.[34] 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.[35] 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:

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."[37] Very generally these redemptioners were of nonEnglish

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[38] 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.[39] 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."[40]

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 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[41] 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.[42]
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 I789 the States were the creators of the
Federal Government; in 1861 the Federal Government was
we 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 coöperation 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.[43]

"No subject," said Henry Clay, "which has presented
itself to the 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 preëmption 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.[44]

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:

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.[45] 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,[46]
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.[47]
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:

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.[48] 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.[49]

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:

But the English Government was not alone in its desire to
limit the advance of the frontier and guide its destinies. Tidewater
Virginia[50] and South Carolina[51] 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."[52]
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."[53]

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;[54] that dominant individualism, working
for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance
which comies 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.