Frederick Jackson Turner
At the meeting of the American Historical
Association in Chicago, on 12 July 1893, a young historian from Wisconsin
read a paper on "The Significance of the Frontier in American History."
Frederick Jackson Turner achieved nationwide recognition with what he defined
as the "true point of view in the history" of the United States. Turner has
influenced whole generations of historians. Unfortunately after this peak
in his career he did not publish anything of similar significance as 'his'
thesis. ‑ Frederick Jackson Turner, History, Frontier, and Section (Albuquerque:
U of New Mexico P, 1993), pp.59‑62, 82, 87f.
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." 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 a 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
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.
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 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 trail. 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 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.
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. The frontier individualism has
from the beginning promoted democracy.
From the conditions of frontier life
came intellectual traits of profound importance. The works of travellers 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; that dominant individualism,
working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which
comes with freedom ‑ these are traits of the frontier,
or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier.