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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; 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 writers like Professor
von Holst, occupies its important place in American history because of
its relation to westward expansion.
In this advance, the frontier is the outer edge of the wave-- the
meeting point between savagery and civilization. Much has been written
about the frontier from the point of view of border warfare and the
chase, but as a field for the serious study of the economist and the
historian it has been neglected. The American frontier is
sharply distinguished from the European frontier--a fortified boundary
line running through dense populations. The most significant thing
about the American frontier is, that it lies at the hither edge of free
land. In the census reports it is treated as the margin of that
settlement which has a density of two or more to the square mile. The
term is an elastic one, and for our purposes does not need sharp
definition. We shall consider the whole frontier belt including the
Indian country and 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.
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