THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE FRONTIER IN

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AMERICAN HISTORY 1

FREDERICK J. TURNER

In a bulletin of the Superintendent of the Census for 1890 appear these significant words: "Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. In the discussion of its extent, its westward movement, etc., it cannot, therefore, any longer have a place in the census reports." This brief official statement marks the closing of a great historic movement. Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the 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!" So saying, he

1 Reprinted, by courtesy of the author and publisher, from the Fifth Yearbook of the National Herbart Society (University of Chicago Press, 1899). First edition printed in Report of American Historical Association for 1893.

touched the distinguishing feature of American life. All people show development; the germ theory of politics has been sufficiently emphasized. In the case of most nations, however, the development has occurred in a limited area; and if the nation has expanded, it has met other growing peoples whom it has conquered. But in the case of the United States we have a different phenomenon. Limiting our attention to the Atlantic coast, we have the familiar phenomenon of the evolution of institutions in a limited area, such as the rise of representative government; the differentiation of simple colonial governments into complex organs; the progress from primitive industrial society, without division of labor, up to manufacturing civilization. But we have in addition to this a recurrence of the process of evolution in each western area reached in the process of expansion. Thus American development has exhibited not merely advance along a single line, but a return to primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line, and a new development for that area. American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character. The true point of view in the history of this nation is not the Atlantic coast: it is the great West. Even the slavery struggle, which is made so exclusive an object of attention by some historians, occupies its important place in American history because of its relation to westward expansion.

In this advance, the frontier is the outer edge of the wave, -the meeting-point between savagery and civilization. Much has been written about the frontier from the point of view of border warfare and the chase, but as a field for the serious study of the economist and the historian it has been neglected.

The American frontier is sharply distinguished from the European frontier, — a fortified boundary line running through dense populations. The most significant thing about the American frontier is, that it lies at the hither edge of free land. In the census reports it is treated as the margin of that settlement which has a density of two or more to the square mile. The term is an elastic one, and for our purposes does not need sharp definition. We shall consider the whole frontier belt, including the Indian country and the outer margin of the "settled area" of the census reports. This paper will make no attempt to treat the subject exhaustively; its aim is simply to call attention to the frontier as a fertile field for investigation, and to suggest some of the problems which arise in connection with it.

In the settlement of America we have to observe how European life entered the continent, and how America modified and developed that life and reacted on Europe. Our early history is the history 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 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 peculiarly American part of our history.

Let us then grasp the conception of American society steadily expanding into new areas. How important it becomes to watch the stages, the processes, and the results of this advance! The conception will be found to revolutionize our study of American history.

Stages of Frontier Advance

In the Report on Population of the United States of the Eleventh Census, Part I, the student will find a series of maps representing the advance of population at each census period since 1790. By a consideration of these maps in connection with a relief map of the United States, and with the Reconnoissance Map of the United States showing the distribution of the geologic system (Fourteenth Annual Report of the United States Geological Survey, plate ii), and with the Contour Map of the United States (in blue and brown only, without culture data, published by the United States Geological Survey), it will become plain that for an adequate comprehension of the course of American history,

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it is necessary to study the process by which the advancing flood of settlement flowed into the successive physiographic We must observe also how these areas affected the life of the emigrants from the older sections and from Europe. When one examines these census maps by the side of Major Powell's map showing the physiographic regions of the United States, he comprehends the fact that there are American sections, neither defined by state lines, nor by the old divisions of New England, middle region, south, and west; he perceives that, in some respects, the map of the United States may be likened to the map of Europe; that the great physiographic provinces which have been won by civilization are economically and socially comparable to nations of the Old World. The study of the stages of frontier advance thus becomes the fascinating examination of the successive evolution of peculiar economic and social countries, or provinces, each with its own inheritance, its own contributions, and individuality.

Such a study of the moving frontier will show how, after the tide-water section was settled below the fall line 2 in the seventeenth century, a combined stream along the Great Valley and up the southern rivers that drain into the Atlantic, filled in the Piedmont region. This process occupied the first half of the eighteenth century. In the same period, settlement was ascending the Connecticut and the Housatonic in New England, and the Mohawk in New York. These river valleys, walled by the mountains and enriched with fluvial soils, became the outlet for increasing population, and they directed the flow of settlement. Thus two rival currents of settlement were already started by the middle of the eighteenth century. New England's stream was almost pure native stock. The stream that followed the Great Valley and occupied the Piedmont was dominantly ScotchIrish and German.

1 Physiography of the United States, pp. 98–99.

2 See Powell, Physiography of the United States, pp. 73-74.