University of Virginia Library

II
The First Official Frontier of the Massachusetts Bay[1]

In the Significance of the "Frontier in American History,"
I took for my text the following announcement of the Superintendent
of the Census of 1890:

Two centuries prior to this announcement, in 1690, a committee
of the General Court of Massachusetts recommended the
Court to order what shall be the frontier and to maintain a
committee to settle garrisons on the frontier with forty soldiers
to each frontier town as a main guard.[2] In the two hundred
years between this official attempt to locate the Massachusetts
frontier line, and the official announcement of the ending of
the national frontier line, westward expansion was the most
important single process in American history.

The designation "frontier town" was not, however, a new
one. As early as 1645 inhabitants of Concord, Sudbury, and

Dedham, "being inland townes & but thinly peopled," were
forbidden to remove without authority;[3] in 1669, certain towns
had been the subject of legislation as "frontier towns;"[4] and
in the period of King Philip's War there were various enactments
regarding frontier towns.[5] In the session of 1675–6 it
had been proposed to build a fence of stockades or stone eight
feet high from the Charles "where it is navigable" to the
Concord at Billerica and thence to the Merrimac and down
the river to the Bay, "by which meanes that whole tract will
[be] environed, for the security & safty (vnder God) of the
people, their houses, goods & cattel; from the rage & fury of
the enimy."[6] This project, however, of a kind of Roman
Wall did not appeal to the frontiersmen of the time. It was
a part of the antiquated ideas of defense which had been illustrated
by the impossible equipment of the heavily armored
soldier of the early Puritan régime whose corslets and head
pieces, pikes, matchlocks, fourquettes and bandoleers, went
out of use about the period of King Philip's War. The fifty-seven
postures provided in the approved manual of arms for
loading and firing the matchlock proved too great a handicap
in the chase of the nimble savage. In this era the frontier
fighter adapted himself to a more open order, and lighter
equipment suggested by the Indian warrior's practice.[7]

The settler on the outskirts of Puritan civilization took up the
task of bearing the brunt of attack and pushing forward the
line of advance which year after year carried American settlements

into the wilderness. In American thought and speech
the term "frontier "has come to mean the edge of settlement,
rather than, as in Europe, the political boundary. By 1690 it
was already evident that the frontier of settlement and the
frontier of military defense were coinciding. As population
advanced into the wilderness and thus successively brought
new exposed areas between the settlements on the one side
and the Indians with their European backers on the other,
the military frontier ceased to be thought of as the Atlantic
coast, but rather as a moving line bounding the un-won wilderness.
It could not be a fortified boundary along the charter
limits, for those limits extended to the South Sea, and conflicted
with the bounds of sister colonies. The thing to be
defended was the outer edge of this expanding society, a changing
frontier, one that needed designation and re-statement with
the changing location of the "West."

It will help to illustrate the significance of this new frontier
when we see that Virginia at about the same time as Massachusetts
underwent a similar change and attempted to establish
frontier towns, or "co-habitations," at the "heads," that is
the first falls, the vicinity of Richmond, Petersburg, etc., of
her rivers.[8]

The Virginia system of "particular plantations" introduced
along the James at the close of the London Company's activity
had furnished a type for the New England town. In recompense,
at this later day the New England town may have furnished
a model for Virginia's efforts to create frontier settlements
by legislation.

An act of March 12, 1694–5, by the General Court of Massachusetts
enumerated the "Frontier Towns" which the inhabitants
were forbidden to desert on pain of loss of their lands
(if landholders) or of imprisonment (if not landholders),
unless permission to remove were first obtained.[9] These
eleven frontier towns included Wells, York, and Kittery on
the eastern frontier, and Amesbury, Haverhill, Dunstable,
Chelmsford, Groton, Lancaster, Marlborough,[10] and Deerfield.
In March, 1699–1700, the law was reënacted with the addition
of Brookfield, Mendon, and Woodstock, together with
seven others, Salisbury, Andover,[11] Billerica, Hatfield, Hadley,
Westfield, and Northampton, which, "tho' they be not frontiers
as those towns first named, yet lye more open than many
others to an attack of an Enemy."[12]

In the spring of 1704 the General Court of Connecticut, following
closely the act of Massachusetts, named as her frontier

towns, not to be deserted, Symsbury, Waterbury, Danbury,
Colchester, Windham, Mansfield, and Plainfield.

Thus about the close of the seventeenth and the beginning of
the eighteenth century there was an officially designated frontier
line for New England. The line passing through these
enumerated towns represents: (1) the outskirts of settlement
along the eastern coast and up the Merrimac and its tributaries,
—a region threatened from the Indian country by way
of the Winnepesaukee Lake; (2) the end of the ribbon of
settlement up the Connecticut Valley, menaced by the Canadian
Indians by way of the Lake Champlain and Winooski River
route to the Connecticut; (3) boundary towns which marked
the edges of that inferior agricultural region, where the hard
crystalline rocks furnished a later foundation for Shays'
Rebellion, opposition to the adoption of the Federal Constitution,
and the abandoned farm; and (4) the isolated intervale
of Brookfield which lay intermediate between these frontiers.

Besides this New England frontier there was a belt of settlement
in New York, ascending the Hudson to where Albany
and Schenectady served as outposts against the Five Nations,
who menaced the Mohawk, and against the French and the
Canadian Indians, who threatened the Hudson by way of Lake
Champlain and Lake George.[13] The sinister relations of leading
citizens of Albany engaged in the fur trade with these
Indians, even during time of war, tended to protect the Hudson
River frontier at the expense of the frontier towns of New
England.

The common sequence of frontier types (fur trader, cattle-raising

pioneer, small primitive farmer, and the farmer engaged
in intensive varied agriculture to produce a surplus for export)
had appeared, though confusedly, in New England. The
traders and their posts had prepared the way for the frontier
towns,[14] and the cattle industry was most important to the early
farmers.[15] But the stages succeeded rapidly and intermingled.
After King Philip's War, while Albany was still in the furtrading
stage, the New England frontier towns were rather
like mark colonies, military-agricultural outposts against the
Indian enemy.

The story of the border warfare between Canada and the
frontier towns furnishes ample material for studying frontier
life and institutions; but I shall not attempt to deal with the
narrative of the wars. The palisaded meeting-house square,
the fortified isolated garrison houses, the massacres and captivities
are familiar features of New England's history. The
Indian was a very real influence upon the mind and morals as
well as upon the institutions of frontier New England. The
occasional instances of Puritans returning from captivity to
visit the frontier towns, Catholic in religion, painted and
garbed as Indians and speaking the Indian tongue,[16] and the
half-breed children of captive Puritan mothers, tell a sensational
part of the story; but in the normal, as well as in such
exceptional relations of the frontier townsmen to the Indians,

there are clear evidences of the transforming influence of the
Indian frontier upon the Puritan type of English colonist.

In 1703–4, for example, the General Court of Massachusetts
ordered five hundred pairs of snowshoes and an equal number
of moccasins for use in specified counties "lying Frontier next
to the Wilderness."[17] Connecticut in 1704 after referring to
her frontier towns and garrisons ordered that "said company
of English and Indians shall, from time to time at the discretion
of their chief com̅ander, range the woods to indevour the
discovery of an approaching enemy, and in especiall manner
from Westfield to Ousatunnuck.[18] . . . And for the incouragement
of our forces gone or going against the enemy, this
Court will allow out of the publick treasurie the sum̅e of five
pounds for every mans scalp of the enemy killed in this Colonie."[19]
Massachusetts offered bounties for scalps, varying
in amount according to whether the scalp was of men, or
women and youths, and whether it was taken by regular forces
under pay, volunteers in service, or volunteers without pay.[20]
One of the most striking phases of frontier adjustment, was
the proposal of the Rev. Solomon Stoddard of Northampton
in the fall of 1703, urging the use of dogs "to hunt Indians
as they do Bears." The argument was that the dogs would
catch many an Indian who would be too light of foot for
the townsmen, nor was it to be thought of as inhuman; for the
Indians "act like wolves and are to be dealt with as wolves."[21]
In fact Massachusetts passed an act in 1706 for the raising and
increasing of dogs for the better security of the frontiers, and

both Massachusetts and Connecticut in 1708 paid money from
their treasury for the trailing of dogs.[22]

Thus we come to familiar ground: the Massachusetts frontiersman
like his western successor hated the Indians; the
"tawney serpents," of Cotton Mather's phrase, were to be
hunted down and scalped in accord with law and, in at least
one instance by the chaplain himself, a Harvard graduate, the
hero of the Ballad of Pigwacket, who

Within the area bounded by the frontier line, were the
broken fragments of Indians defeated in the era of King
Philip's War, restrained within reservations, drunken and
degenerate survivors, among whom the missionaries worked
with small results, a vexation to the border towns,[24] as they
were in the case of later frontiers. Although, as has been said,
the frontier towns had scattered garrison houses, and palisaded
enclosures similar to the neighborhood forts, or stations, of
Kentucky in the Revolution, and of Indiana and Illinois in the
War of 1812, one difference is particularly noteworthy. In
the case of frontiersmen who came down from Pennsylvania
into the Upland South along the eastern edge of the Alleghanies,
as well as in the more obvious case of the backwoodsmen of
Kentucky and Tennessee, the frontier towns were too isolated
from the main settled regions to allow much military protection

by the older areas. On the New England frontier, because it
was adjacent to the coast towns, this was not the case, and here,
as in seventeenth century Virginia, great activity in protecting
the frontier was evinced by the colonial authorities, and the
frontier towns themselves called loudly for assistance. This
phase of frontier defense needs a special study, but at present
it is sufficient to recall that the colony sent garrisons to the
frontier besides using the militia of the frontier towns; and
that it employed rangers to patrol from garrison to garrison.[25]

These were prototypes of the regular army post, and of rangers,
dragoons, cavalry and mounted police who have carried
the remoter military frontier forward. It is possible to trace
this military cordon from New England to the Carolinas early
in the eighteenth century, still neighboring the coast; by 1840
it ran from Fort Snelling on the upper Mississippi through
various posts to the Sabine boundary of Texas, and so it passed
forward until to-day it lies at the edge of Mexico and the
Pacific Ocean.

A few examples of frontier appeals for garrison aid will
help to an understanding of the early form of the military
frontier. Wells asks, June 30, 1689:

Dunstable, "still weak and unable both to keep our Garrisons
and to send out men to get hay for our Cattle; without
doeing which wee cannot subsist," petitioned July 23, 1689,
for twenty footmen for a month "to scout about the towne
while wee get our hay." Otherwise, they say, they must be
forced to leave.[27] Still more indicative of this temper is the
petition of Lancaster, March 11, 1675–6, to the Governor and
Council: "As God has made you father over us so you will
have a father's pity to us." They asked a guard of men and
aid, without which they must leave.[28] Deerfield pled in 1678
to the General Court, "unlest you will be pleased to take us
(out of your fatherlike pitty) and Cherish us in yor Bosomes
we are like Suddainly to breathe out or Last Breath."[29]

The perils of the time, the hardships of the frontier towns
and readiness of this particular frontier to ask appropriations
for losses and wounds,[30] are abundantly illustrated in similar
petitions from other towns. One is tempted at times to attribute
the very frank self-pity and dependent attitude to a minister's
phrasing, and to the desire to secure remission of taxes,
the latter a frontier trait more often associated with riot than
with religion in other regions.

As an example of various petitions the following from Groton
in 1704 is suggestive. Here the minister's hand is probably
absent:

Forced together into houses for protection, getting in their
crops at the peril of their lives, the frontier townsmen felt
it a hardship to contribute also to the taxes of the province

while they helped to protect the exposed frontier. In addition
there were grievances of absentee proprietors who paid no
town taxes and yet profited by the exertions of the frontiersmen;
of that I shall speak later.

If we were to trust to these petitions asking favors from the
government of the colony, we might impute to these early frontiersmen
a degree of submission to authority unlike that of
other frontiersmen,[32] and indeed not wholly warranted by the
facts. Reading carefully, we find that, however prudently
phrased, the petitions are in fact complaints against taxation;
demands for expenditures by the colony in their behalf; criticisms
of absentee proprietors; intimations that they may be
forced to abandon the frontier position so essential to the
defense of the settled eastern country.

The spirit of military insubordination characteristic of the
frontier is evident in the accounts of these towns, such as
Pynchon's in 1694, complaining of the decay of the fortifications
at Hatfield, Hadley, and Springfield: "the people a little
wilful. Inclined to doe when and how they please or not at
all."[33] Saltonstall writes from Haverhill about the same time
regarding his ill success in recruiting: "I will never plead for
an Haverhill man more," and he begs that some meet person
be sent "to tell us what we should, may or must do. I have
laboured in vain: some go this, and that, and the other way at
pleasure, and do what they list."[34] This has a familiar ring
to the student of the frontier.

As in the case of the later frontier also, the existence of a

common danger on the borders of settlement tended to consolidate
not only the towns of Massachusetts into united action
for defense, but also the various colonies. The frontier was
an incentive to sectional combination then as it was to nationalism
afterward. When in 1692 Connecticut sent soldiers from
her own colony to aid the Massachusetts towns on the Connecticut
River,[35] she showed a realization that the Deerfield people,
who were "in a sense in the enemy's Mouth almost," as
Pynchon wrote, constituted her own frontier[36] and that the
facts of geography were more compelling than arbitrary colonial
boundaries. Thereby she also took a step that helped to
break down provincial antagonisms. When in 1689 Massachusetts
and Connecticut sent agents to Albany to join with
New York in making presents to the Indians of that colony
in order to engage their aid against the French,[37] they recognized
(as their leaders put it) that Albany was "the hinge"
of the frontier in this exposed quarter. In thanking Connecticut
for the assistance furnished in 1690 Livingston said:
"I hope your honors do not look upon Albany as Albany,
but as the frontier of your honor's Colony and of all their
Majesties countries."[38]

The very essence of the American frontier is that it is the
graphic line which records the expansive energies of the people
behind it, and which by the law of its own being continually
draws that advance after it to new conquests. This is one
of the most significant things about New England's frontier
in these years. That long blood-stained line of the eastern
frontier which skirted the Maine coast was of great importance,

for it imparted a western tone to the life and characteristics
of the Maine people which endures to this day, and it
was one line of advance for New England toward the mouth
of the St. Lawrence, leading again and again to diplomatic
negotiations with the powers that held that river. The line
of the towns that occupied the waters of the Merrimac, tempted
the province continually into the wilderness of New Hampshire.
The Connecticut river towns pressed steadily up that
stream, along its tributaries into the Hoosatonic valleys, and
into the valleys between the Green Mountains of Vermont.
By the end of 1723, the General Court of Massachusetts
enacted,—
The "frontier Towns" were preparing to swarm. It was not
long before Fort Dummer replaced "the Block House," and
the Berkshires and Vermont became new frontiers.

The Hudson River likewise was recognized as another line
of advance pointing the way to Lake Champlain and Montreal,
calling out demands that protection should be secured
by means of an aggressive advance of the frontier. Canada

delenda est became the rallying cry in New England as well
as in New York, and combined diplomatic pressure and military
expeditions followed in the French and Indian wars and
in the Revolution, in which the children of the Connecticut
and Massachusetts frontier towns, acclimated to Indian fighting,
followed Ethan Allen and his fellows to the north.[40]

Having touched upon some of the military and expansive
tendencies of this first official frontier, let us next turn to its
social, economic, and political aspects. How far was this first
frontier a field for the investment of eastern capital and for
political control by it? Were there evidences of antagonism
between the frontier and the settled, property-holding classes
of the coast? Restless democracy, resentfulness over taxation
and control, and recriminations between the Western pioneer
and the Eastern capitalist, have been characteristic features
of other frontiers: were similar phenomena in evidence here?
Did "Populistic" tendencies appear in this frontier, and were
there grievances which explained these tendencies?[41]

In such colonies as New York and Virginia the land grants
were often made to members of the Council and their influential
friends, even when there were actual settlers already on the
grants. In the case of New England the land system is usually
so described as to give the impression that it was based on a

non-commercial policy, creating new Puritan towns by free
grants of land made in advance to approved settlers. This
description does not completely fit the case. That there was
an economic interest on the part of absentee proprietors, and
that men of political influence with the government were often
among the grantees seems also to be true. Melville Egleston
states the case thus: "The court was careful not to authorize
new plantations unless they were to be in a measure under the
influence of men in whom confidence could be placed, and
commonly acted upon their application."[42] The frontier, as
we shall observe later, was not always disposed to see the
practice in so favorable a light.

New towns seem to have been the result in some cases of the
aggregation of settlers upon and about a large private grant;
more often they resulted from settlers in older towns, where
the town limits were extensive, spreading out to the good lands
of the outskirts, beyond easy access to the meeting-house, and
then asking recognition as a separate town. In some cases
they may have been due to squatting on unassigned lands, or
purchasing the Indian title and then asking confirmation. In
others grants were made in advance of settlement.

As early as 1636 the General Court had ordered that none
go to new plantations without leave of a majority of the
magistrates.[43] This made the legal situation clear, but it
would be dangerous to conclude that it represented the actual
situation. In any case there would be a necessity for the
settlers finally to secure the assent of the Court. This could
be facilitated by a grant to leading men having political influence
with the magistrates. The complaints of absentee proprietors
which find expression in the frontier petitions of the
seventeenth and early eighteenth century seems to indicate that

this happened. In the succeeding years of the eighteenth century
the grants to leading men and the economic and political
motives in the grants are increasingly evident. This whole
topic should be made the subject of special study. What is
here offered is merely suggestive of a problem.[44]

The frontier settlers criticized the absentee proprietors, who
profited by the pioneers' expenditure of labor and blood upon
their farms, while they themselves enjoyed security in an eastern
town. A few examples from town historians will illustrate
this. Among the towns of the Merrimac Valley, Salisbury
was planted on the basis of a grant to a dozen proprietors
including such men as Mr. Bradstreet and the younger Dudley,
only two of whom actually lived and died in Salisbury.[45]
Amesbury was set off from Salisbury by division, one half of
the signers of the agreement signing by mark. Haverhill was
first seated in 1641, following petitions from Mr. Ward, the
Ipswich minister, his son-in-law, Giles Firmin, and others.
Firmin's letter to Governor Winthrop, in 1640, complains that
Ipswich had given him his ground in that town on condition
that he should stay in the town three years or else he
could not sell it, "whenas others have no business but
range from place to place on purpose to live upon the countrey."[46]

Dunstable's large grant was brought about by a combination
of leading men who had received grants after the survey of
1652; among such grants was one to the Ancient and Honorable
Artillery Company and another to Thomas Brattle of
Boston. Apparently it was settled chiefly by others than the

original grantees.[47] Groton voted in 1685 to sue the "non-Residenc"
to assist in paying the rate, and in 1679 the General
Court had ordered non-residents having land at Groton
to pay rates for their lands as residents did.[48] Lancaster
(Nashaway) was granted to proprietors including various
craftsmen in iron, indicating, perhaps, an expectation of iron
works, and few of the original proprietors actually settled in
the town.[49] The grant of 1653–4 was made by the Court after
reciting: (1) that it had ordered in 1647 that the "ordering
and disposeing of the Plantation at Nashaway is wholly in the
Courts power"; (2) "Considering that there is allredy at
Nashaway about nine Families and that severall both freemen
and others intend to goe and setle there, some whereof
are named in this Petition," etc.

Mendon, begun in 1660 by Braintree people, is a particularly
significant example. In 1681 the inhabitants petitioned that
while they are not "of the number of those who dwell in their
ceiled houses & yet say the time is not come that the Lord's
house should be built," yet they have gone outside of their
strength "unless others who are proprietors as well as ourselves,
(the price of whose lands is much raysed by our carrying
on public work & will be nothing worth if we are forced
to quit the place) doo beare an equal share in Town charges
with us. Those who are not yet come up to us are a great and
far yet abler part of our Proprietors . . ."[50] In 1684 the
selectmen inform the General Court that one half of the proprietors,
two only excepted, are dwelling in other places, "Our
proprietors, abroad," say they, "object that they see no reason
why they should pay as much for thayer lands as we do for

our Land and stock, which we answer that if their be not a
noff of reason for it, we are sure there is more than enough
of necessity to supply that is wanting in reason."[51] This is
the authentic voice of the frontier.

Deerfield furnishes another type, inasmuch "as a considerable
part of its land was first held by Dedham, to which the grant
was made as a recompense for the location of the Natick
Indian reservation. Dedham shares in the town often fell into
the hands of speculators, and Sheldon, the careful historian of
Deerfield, declares that not a single Dedham man became a
permanent resident of the grant. In 1678 Deerfield petitioned
the General Court as follows:

Woodstock, later a Connecticut town, was settled under a
grant in the Nipmuc country made to the town of Roxbury.
The settlers, who located their farms near the trading post
about which the Indians still collected, were called the
"go-ers," while the "stayers" were those who remained in
Roxbury, and retained half of the new grant; but it should
be added that they paid the go-ers a sum of money to facilitate
the settlement.

This absentee proprietorship and the commercial attitude
toward the lands of new towns became more evident in succeeding
years of the eighteenth century. Leicester, for example,
was confirmed by the General Court in 1713. The twenty
shares were divided among twenty-two proprietors, including
Jeremiah Dummer, Paul Dudley (Attorney-General), William
Dudley (like Paul a son of the Governor, Joseph Dudley),
Thomas Hutchinson (father of the later Governor), John
Clark (the political leader), and Samuel Sewall (son of the
Chief Justice). These were all men of influence, and none of
the proprietors became inhabitants of Leicester. The proprietors
tried to induce the fifty families, whose settlement
was one of the conditions on which the grant was made, to
occupy the eastern half of the township reserving the rest as
their absolute property.[53]

The author of a currency tract, in 1716, entitled "Some Considerations

upon the Several Sorts of Banks," remarks that formerly,
when land was easy to be obtained, good men came
over as indentured servants; but now, he says, they are runaways,
thieves, and disorderly persons. The remedy for this,
in his opinion, would be to induce servants to come over by
offering them homes when the terms of indenture should
expire.[54] He therefore advocates that townships should be
laid out four or five miles square in which grants of fifty or
sixty acres could be made to servants.[55] Concern over the
increase of negro slaves in Massachusetts seems to have been
the reason for this proposal. It indicates that the current
practice in disposing of the lands did not provide for the poorer
people.

But Massachusetts did not follow this suggestion of a homestead
policy. On the contrary, the desire to locate towns to
create continuous lines of settlement along the roads between
the disconnected frontiers and to protect boundary claims by
granting tiers of towns in the disputed tract, as well, no doubt,
as pressure from financial interests, led the General Court
between 1715 and 1762 to dispose of the remaining public
domain of Massachusetts under conditions that made speculation
and colonization by capitalists important factors.[56]
When in 1762 Massachusetts sold a group of townships in the
Berkshires to the highest bidders (by whole townships),[57] the
transfer from the social-religious to the economic conception

was complete, and the frontier was deeply influenced by the
change to "land mongering."

In one respect, however, there was an increasing recognition
of the religious and social element in settling the frontier, due
in part, no doubt, to a desire to provide for the preservation of
eastern ideals and influences in the West. Provisions for
reserving lands within the granted townships for the support
of an approved minister, and for schools, appear in the seventeenth
century and become a common feature of the grants for
frontier towns in the eighteenth.[58] This practice with respect
the New England frontier became the foundation for the
system of grants of land from the public domain for the support
of common schools and state universities by the federal
government from its beginning, and has been profoundly influential
in later Western States.

Another ground for discontent over land questions was furnished
by the system of granting lands within the town by
the commoners. The principle which in many, if not all,
cases guided the proprietors in distributing the town lots is
familiar and is well stated in the Lancaster town records
(1653):

This peculiar doctrine of "equality" had early in the history
of the colony created discontents. Winthrop explained
the principle which governed himself and his colleagues in
the case of the Boston committee of 1634 by saying that their
divisions were arranged "partly to prevent the neglect of
trades." This is a pregnant idea; it underlay much of the
later opposition of New England as a manufacturing section
to the free homestead or cheap land policy, demanded by the
West and by the labor party, in the national public domain.
The migration of labor to free lands meant that higher wages
must be paid to those who remained. The use of the town
lands by the established classes to promote an approved form
of society naturally must have had some effect on migration.

But a more effective source of disputes was with respect to
the relation of the town proprietors to the public domain of
the town in contrast with the non-proprietors as a class. The
need of keeping the town meeting and the proprietors' meeting
separate in the old towns in earlier years was not so great
as it was when the new-comers became numerous. In an
increasing degree these new-comers were either not granted
lands at all, or were not admitted to the body of proprietors
with rights in the possession of the undivided town lands.
Contentions on the part of the town meeting that it had the
right of dealing with the town lands occasionally appear, significantly,
in the frontier towns of Haverhill, Massachusetts,

Simsbury, Connecticut, and in the towns of the Connecticut
Valley.[60] Jonathan Edwards, in 1751, declared that there had
been in Northampton for forty or fifty years "two parties
somewhat like the court and country parties of England. . . .
The first party embraced the great proprietors of land, and
the parties concerned about land and other matters."[61] The
tendency to divide up the common lands among the proprietors
in individual possession did not become marked until the
eighteenth century; but the exclusion of some from possession
of the town lands and the "equality" in allotment favoring
men with already large estates must have attracted ambitious
men who were not of the favored class to join in the movement
to new towns. Religious dissensions would combine to
make frontier society as it formed early in the eighteenth century
more and more democratic, dissatisfied with the existing
order, and less respectful of authority. We shall not understand
the relative radicalism of parts of the Berkshires, Vermont
and interior New Hampshire without enquiry into the
degree in which the control over the lands by a proprietary
monopoly affected the men who settled on the frontier.

The final aspect of this frontier to be examined, is the attitude
of the conservatives of the older sections towards this
movement of westward advance. President Dwight in the era
of the War of 1812 was very critical of the "foresters," but
saw in such a movement a safety valve to the institutions of
New England by allowing the escape of the explosive advocates
of "Innovation."[62]

Cotton Mather is perhaps not a typical representative of the
conservative sentiment at the close of the seventeenth century,
but his writings may partly reflect the attitude of Boston Bay

toward New England's first Western frontier. Writing in 1694
of "Wonderful Passages which have Occurred, First in the Protections
and then in the Afflictions of New England," he says:

In his essay on "Frontiers Well-Defended" (1707) Mather
assures the pioneers that they "dwell in a Hatsarmaneth," a
place of "tawney serpents," are "inhabitants of the Valley of
Achor," and are "the Poor of this World." There may be significance
in his assertion: "It is remarkable to see that when
the Unchurched Villages, have been so many of them, utterly
broken up, in the War, that has been upon us, those that have
had Churches regularly formed in them, have generally been
under a more sensible Protection of Heaven." "Sirs," he says,
"a Church-State well form'd may fortify you wonderfully!"

He recommends abstention from profane swearing, furious

cursing, Sabbath breaking, unchastity, dishonesty, robbing of
God by defrauding the ministers of their dues, drunkenness,
and revels and he reminds them that even the Indians have
family prayers! Like his successors who solicited missionary
contributions for the salvation of the frontier in the Mississippi
Valley during the forties of the nineteenth century, this early
spokesman for New England laid stress upon teaching antipopery,
particularly in view of the captivity that might await
them.

In summing up, we find many of the traits of later frontiers
in this early prototype, the Massachusetts frontier. It lies at
the edge of the Indian country and tends to advance. It calls
out militant qualities and reveals the imprint of wilderness
conditions upon the psychology and morals as well as upon the
institutions of the people. It demands common defense and
thus becomes a factor for consolidation. It is built on the
basis of a preliminary fur trade, and is settled by the combined
and sometimes antagonistic forces of eastern men of property
(the absentee proprietors) and the democratic pioneers. The
East attempted to regulate and control it. Individualistic and
democratic tendencies were emphasized both by the wilderness
conditions and, probably, by the prior contentions between
the proprietors and non-proprietors of the towns from which
settlers moved to the frontier. Removal away from the control
of the customary usages of the older communities and
from the conservative influence of the body of the clergy,
increased the innovating tendency. Finally the towns were
regarded by at least one prominent representative of the established
order in the East, as an undesirable place for the re-location
of the pillars of society. The temptation to look upon
the frontier as a field for investment was viewed by the clergy
as a danger to the "institutions of God." The frontier was
the Wrong side of the Hedge."

But to this "wrong side of the hedge" New England men
continued to migrate. The frontier towns of 1695 were hardly
more than suburbs of Boston. The frontier of a century later
included New England's colonies in Vermont, Western New
York, the Wyoming Valley, the Connecticut Reserve, and the
Ohio Company's settlement in the Old Northwest Territory.
By the time of the Civil War the frontier towns of New England
had occupied the great prairie zone of the Middle West
and were even planted in Mormon Utah and in parts of the
Pacific Coast. New England's sons had become the organizers
of a Greater New England in the West, captains of industry,
political leaders, founders of educational systems, and
prophets of religion, in a section that was to influence the
ideals and shape the destiny of the nation in ways to which the
eyes of men like Cotton Mather were sealed.[63]