What was romantic about frontier settlement

Far fewer were produced. Miller , the Old West became a stage on which s critiques of American capitalism and imperialism played out. Arguably, though, the reversing of traditional western roles did not reach its apotheosis until when Dances with Wolves won eight Academy Awards. Dances with Wolves reigned at the box office and at the Oscars, but over the last quarter century, the best historical scholarship has aimed at more than mere inversion of old myths about the Old West.

One important direction has been to compare and connect what happened in the American West with parallel places and processes elsewhere.

The most compelling western histories written in the last quarter century confront the complexities of past and present. This begins with the recognition of how deep that past is, with histories that commence well before the West was American and with excavations that reveal the diversity and dynamism of Native America prior to the arrival of European colonizers. From archaeological and other sources, historians have now recovered rich precolonial worlds and complex societies that continued after Indians encountered people from Europe and Africa, weaving a fascinating new understanding of how natives and newcomers met and mingled.

Rescuing indigenous people from the condescension of New Age romanticism that turns them into ever peaceful, perfect ecologists, newer histories have shown how Indians not only resisted European colonialism, but also in some parts of North America carried out their own expansions.

The best of these newer western histories detail as well how prolonged interactions resulted in ethnic crossings as well as ethnic cleansings. Most visibly, this intercourse produced mixed-race offspring, but historians have also tracked a wide range of exchanges that led to a blending of cultures. Such amalgamations have remained a hallmark of western American cultures in the 20th and now the 21st centuries. 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.

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 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. 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 —30, called to revise the constitution, Mr. Leigh, of Chesterfield, one of the tide-water counties, declared:. One of the main causes of discontent which led to this convention, that which had the strongest influence in overcoming our veneration for the work of our fathers, which taught us to contemn the sentiments of Henry and Mason and Pendleton, which weaned us from our reverence for the constituted authorities of the State, was an overweening passion for internal improvement.

I say this with perfect knowledge, for it has been avowed to me by gentlemen from the West over and over again. And let me tell the gentleman from Albemarle Mr. Gordon that it has been another principal object of those who set this ball of revolution in motion, to overturn the doctrine of State rights, of which Virginia has been the very pillar, and to remove the barrier she has interposed to the interference of the Federal Government in that same work of internal improvement, by so reorganizing the legislature that Virginia, too, may be hitched to the Federal car.

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 , 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.

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 will become all of one thing or all of the other.

Mobility of population is death to localism, and the western frontier worked irresistibly in unsettling population. The effects 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. Osgood, in an able article, [45] 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 ; and it was western Virginia that compelled the tide-water region to put a more liberal suffrage provision in the constitution framed in , 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.

A representative from western Virginia declared:. But, sir, it is not the increase of population in the West which this gentleman ought to fear. It is the energy which the mountain breeze and western habits impart to those emigrants.

They are regenerated, politically I mean, sir. They soon become working politicians; and the difference, sir, between a talking and a working politician is immense. The Old Dominion has long been celebrated for producing great orators; the ablest metaphysicians in policy; men that can split hairs in all abstruse questions of political economy.

But at home, or when they return from Congress, they have negroes to fan them asleep. But a Pennsylvania, a New York, an Ohio, or a western Virginia statesman, though far inferior in logic, metaphysics, and rhetoric to an old Virginia statesman, has this advantage, that when he returns home he takes off his coat and takes hold of the plow.

This gives him bone and muscle, sir, and preserves his republican principles pure and uncontaminated. 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 it 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. 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. The East has always feared the result of an unregulated advance of the frontier, and has tried to check and guide it. If you stopped your grants, what would be the consequence? The people would occupy without grants. They have already so occupied in many places. You cannot station garrisons in every part of these deserts.

If you drive the people from one place, they will carry on their annual tillage and remove with their flocks and herds to another. Many of the people in the back settlements are already little attached to particular situations. Already they have topped the Appalachian mountains. From thence they behold before them an immense plain, one vast, rich, level meadow; a square of five hundred miles.

Over this they would wander without a possibility of restraint; they would change their manners with their habits of life; would soon forget a government by which they were disowned; would become hordes of English Tartars; and, pouring down upon your unfortified frontiers a fierce and irresistible cavalry, become masters of your governors and your counselers, your collectors and comptrollers, and of all the slaves that adhered to them.

But the English Government was not alone in its desire to limit the advance of the frontier and guide its destinies. Tidewater Virginia [49] and South Carolina [50] 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 the Oregon question was under debate, in , 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. 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 , Dr. 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. It must not be permitted. 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. 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.

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; [53] 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.

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.

Since the meeting of the American Historical Association, this paper has also been given as an address to the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, December 14, I have to thank the Secretary of the Society, Mr. Reuben G. Thwaites, for securing valuable material for my use in the preparation of the paper. Abridgment of Debates of Congress, v. Bancroft ed. Monette, Mississippi Valley, I, p. Auburn, N.

Grund, Americans, II, p. Peck, New Guide to the West Cincinnati, , ch. S, Senate, December 16, A writer in The Home Missionary , p. What an example, to come from the very frontiers of civilization! Bancroft H. See the suggestive paper by Prof. Shinn, Mining Camps. See pages , , , post, for illustrations of the political accompaniments of changed industrial conditions. But Lewis and Clarke were the first to explore the route from the Missouri to the Columbia.

Lodge, English Colonies, p. Flint, Recollections, p. See Monette, Mississippi, I, p. Hehn, Das Salz Berlin, Records of N. Hale, Daniel Boone pamphlet. Weston, Documents connected with History of South Carolina, p. See, for example, the speech of Clay, in the House of Representatives, January 30, See the admirable monograph by Prof. Adams Memoirs, IX, pp. Compare Roosevelt, Thomas Benton, ch. Political Science Quarterly, II, p. Compare Sumner, Alexander Hamilton, Chs. Compare Wilson, Division and Reunion, pp.

On the relation of frontier conditions to Revolutionary taxation, see Sumner, Alexander Hamilton, Ch. I have refrained from dwelling on the lawless characteristics of the frontier, because they are sufficiently well known. The gambler and desperado, the regulators of the Carolinas and the vigilantes of California, are types of that line of scum that the waves of advancing civilization bore before them, and of the growth of spontaneous organs of authority where legal authority was absent.

The humor, bravery, and rude strength, as well as the vices of the frontier in its worst aspect, have left traces on American character, language, and literature, not soon to be effaced. Debates in the Constitutional Convention, — Plea for the West Cincinnati, , pp. Former Confederate soldiers were able to don the uniform of a newly unified country and earn patriotic recognition while still fighting to exert racial superiority over people of color.

He failed to imagine that the seductiveness and the convenience of the frontier would, instead, propel America through a new century of global expansion. As America thrust itself into the wider world, it simultaneously began a process of shoring up its domestic borders.

Business interests shielded Mexican migrants from such immigration quotas. But the act provided for the formation of the U. Border Patrol: the previously irregular and ad-hoc policing of the boundary was replaced by a new paramilitary police force that would come to wield extraordinary power along the Mexican border.

Through the nineteen-twenties, Mexicans entering the United States had been required to present themselves at official ports of entry, where they were often doused with kerosene by immigration agents and stripped from head to toe to be shaved of their hair in accordance with delousing procedures.

But, in , Congress passed a law—introduced by Senator Coleman Blease, an unabashed racist who defended the lynching of black men during his tenure as the governor of South Carolina—that made it a crime for migrants to enter the United States outside official ports of entry, with the newly established Border Patrol providing the muscle for its enforcement.

At the close of the Second World War, 5. Border Patrol, came from Japanese internment camps that had recently been ordered closed by the Supreme Court. Despite its white-supremacist roots, the Border Patrol has evolved into an agency where more than half of its members are of Latinx descent. Just as the military has long promised social mobility to immigrants and minority populations, the Border Patrol provides rare access to financial security and the privileges of full citizenship, especially for those living in rural border communities.

In America, even at the individual level, citizenship politics often wins out over identity politics. As a member of the patrol, I never witnessed anything as straightforwardly depraved as the beatings, torture, rape, and murder Grandin describes. As young trainees, my colleagues and I were taken to storied places in the desert—a remote pass where earlier generations of agents were rumored to have pushed migrants from clifftops and hidden their corpses, a stretch of road where an agent had run over a Native American lying drunk and asleep on the road, an isolated patch of scrubland where agents had force-fed smugglers fistfuls of marijuana and turned them loose to walk through the wilderness barefoot and stripped to their underwear.

The forms of violence that I observed and was complicit in were subtler—the destruction of food and water caches, a pervasive attitude of dismissal and neglect, a persistent use of dehumanizing slurs. He interrupted our work to project onto a screen at the front of the room photographs of a body he had just encountered in the desert.

In the images, he was squatting, with two thumbs up and a broad smile, beside a dead man whose flesh had rotted from his bones after months under the unforgiving sun. Donald Trump can be distinguished from his predecessors, Grandin argues, because of his willingness to meet conservative and nativist demands at their logical end point—by closing off instead of moving out.