 Section 0 of the Frontier in American History. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Frontier in American History by Frederick Jackson Turner. Preface. In republishing these essays in collected form, it has seemed best to issue them as they were originally printed with the exception of a few slight corrections of slips in the text and with the omission of occasional duplication of language in the different essays. A considerable part of whatever value they may possess arises from the fact that they are commentaries in different periods on the central theme of the influence of the frontier in American history. Consequently, they may have some historical significance as contemporaneous attempts of a student of American history at successive transitions in our development during the past quarter century to interpret the relations of the present to the past. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the various societies and periodicals which have given permission to reprint the essays. Various essays dealing with the connection of diplomatic history and the frontier and others stressing the significance of the section or geographic province in American history are not included in the present collection. Neither the French nor the Spanish frontier is within the scope of the volume. The future alone can disclose how far these interpretations are correct for the age of colonization which came gradually to an end with the disappearance of the frontier and Freeland. It alone can reveal how much of the courageous, creative American spirit and how large a part of the historic American ideals are to be carried over into that new age which is replacing the era of Freelands and of measurable isolation by consolidated and complex industrial development and by increasing resemblances and connections between the new world and the old. But the larger part of what has been distinctive and valuable in America's contribution to the history of the human spirit has been due to this nation's peculiar experience in extending its type of frontier into new regions and in creating peaceful societies with new ideals in the successive, vast and differing geographic provinces which together make up the United States. Directly or indirectly, these experiences shaped the life of the Eastern as well as the Western States and influenced the direction of its thought and its progress. This experience has been fundamental in the economic, political and social characteristics of the American people and in their conceptions of their destiny. Writing at the close of 1796, the French minister to the United States, Monsieur Adet, reported to his government that Jefferson could not be relied on to be devoted to French interests and he added, quote, Jefferson, I say, is American. And by that name, he cannot be sincerely our friend. An American is the born enemy of all European peoples. End of quote. Obviously erroneous, as are these words, there was an element of truth in them. If we would understand this element of truth, we must study the transforming influence of the American wilderness, remote from Europe, and by its resources and its free opportunities affording the conditions under which a new people with new social and political types and ideals could arise to play its own part in the world and to influence Europe. Frederick J. Turner, Harvard University, March 1920. End of section 0. Section 1 of The Frontier in American History. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Frontier in American History by Frederick Jackson Turner. Chapter 1, The Significance of the Frontier in American History. Part 1. 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 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 Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of the 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 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 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 fortified 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 in 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. In the course of the 17th century, the frontier was advanced up the Atlantic river courses, just beyond the four line, and the Tidewater region became the settled area. In the first half of the 18th century, another advance occurred. Traders followed the Delaware and Shawnees Indians to the Ohio as early as the end of the first quarter of the century. Governor Spotswood of Virginia made an expedition in 1714 across the Blue Ridge. The end of the first quarter of the century saw the advance of the Scotch-Irish and the Palatine Germans up the Shenandoah Valley into the western part of Virginia, and along the Piedmont region of the Carolinas. The Germans in New York pushed the frontier of settlement up the Mohawk to German flats. In Pennsylvania, the town of Bedford indicates the line of settlement. Settlements soon began on the New River, or the Great Kanawa, and on the sources of the Yadkin and French Broad. The King attempted to arrest the advance by his proclamation of 1763, forbidding settlements beyond the sources of the rivers flowing into the Atlantic, but in vain. In the period of the Revolution, the frontier crossed the Alleghenies into Kentucky and Tennessee, and the upper waters of the Ohio were settled. When the first census was taken in 1790, the continuous settled area was bounded by a line which ran near the coast of Maine and included New England, except a portion of Vermont and New Hampshire, New York along the Hudson and up the Mohawk about Schenectady, eastern and southern Pennsylvania, Virginia well across the Shenandoah Valley, and the Carolinas in eastern Georgia. Beyond this region of continuous settlement were the small settled areas of Kentucky and Tennessee, and the Ohio with the mountains intervening between them and the Atlantic area, thus giving a new and important character to the frontier. The isolation of the region increased its peculiarly American tendencies and the need of transportation facilities to connect it with the East called out important schemes of internal improvement which will be noted farther on. The West, as a self-conscious section, began to evolve. From decade to decade, distinct advances of the frontier occurred. By the census of 1820, the settled area included Ohio, southern Indiana and Illinois, southeastern Missouri, and about one half of Louisiana. The settled area had surrounded Indian areas and the management of these tribes became an object of political concern. The frontier region of the time lay along the Great Lakes where Aster's American fur company operated in the Indian trade and beyond the Mississippi where Indian traders extended their activity even to the Rocky Mountains. Florida also furnished frontier conditions. The Mississippi River region was the scene of typical frontier settlements. The rising steam navigation on western waters, the opening of the area canal and the westward extension of cotton culture added five frontier states to the Union in this period. Grund, writing in 1836, declares, it appears then that the universal disposition of Americans to emigrate to the western wilderness in order to enlarge their dominion over inanimate nature is the actual result of an expansive power which is inherent in them and rich by continually agitating all classes of society is constantly throwing a large portion of the whole population on the extreme confines of the state in order to gain space for its development. Hardly is a new state or territory formed before the same principle manifests itself again and gives rise to a further emigration and so is it destined to go on until a physical barrier must finally obstruct its progress. In the middle of this century the line indicated by the present eastern boundary of Indian territory, Nebraska and Kansas marked the frontier of the Indian country. Minnesota and Wisconsin still exhibited frontier conditions but the distinctive frontier of the period is found in California where the gold discoveries had sent a sudden tide of adventurous miners and in Oregon and the settlements in Utah. As the frontier had leaped over the Alleghenies so now it skipped the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains and in the same way that the advance of the frontiersmen beyond the Alleghenies had caused the rise of important questions of transportation and internal improvement so now the settlers beyond the Rocky Mountains needed means of communication with the east and in the furnishing of these arose the settlement of the Great Plains and the development of still another kind of frontier life. Railroads fostered by land grants sent an increasing tide of immigrants into the far west. The United States Army fought a series of Indian wars in Minnesota, Dakota and the Indian territory. By 1880 the settled area had been pushed into northern Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota along Dakota rivers and in the Black Hills region and was ascending the rivers of Kansas and Nebraska. The development of mines in Colorado had drawn isolated frontier settlements into that region and Montana and Idaho were receiving settlers. The frontier was found in these mining camps and the ranches of the Great Plains. The superintendent of the sensors for 1890 reports as previously stated that the settlements of the west lie so scattered over the region that they can no longer be said to be a frontier line. In these successive frontiers we find natural boundary lines which have served to mark and to affect the characteristics of the frontiers namely the four lines the Allegheny Mountains the Mississippi the Missouri where its direction approximates north and south the line of the arid lands approximately the 99th Meridian and the Rocky Mountains. The four line marked the frontier of the 17th century the Alleghenies that of the 18th the Mississippi that of the first quarter of the 19th the Missouri that of the middle of this century emitting the California movement and the belt of the Rocky Mountains and the arid tract the present frontier. Each was won by a series of Indian wars. At the Atlantic frontier one can study the germs of processes repeated at each successive frontier. We have the complex European life sharply precipitated by the wilderness into the simplicity of primitive conditions. The first frontier had to meet its Indian question its question of the disposition of the public domain of the means of intercourse with older settlements of the extension of political organization of religious and educational activity and the settlement of these in similar questions for one frontier served as a guide for the next. The American student needs not to go to the prim little townships of Sleswick for illustrations of the law of continuity and development. For example, he may study the origin of our land policies in the colonial land policy. He may see how the system grew by adapting the statutes to the customs of the successive frontiers. He may see how the mining experience in the lead regions of Wisconsin, Illinois and Iowa was applied to the mining laws of the Sierras and how our Indian policy has been a series of experimentations on successive frontiers. Each tier of new states is found in the older ones' material for its constitutions. Each frontier has made similar contributions to American character, as will be discussed farther on. End of Section 1. Section 2 of The Frontier in American History This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Frontier in American History by Frederick Jackson Turner Chapter 1, Part 2. But with all these similarities, there are essential differences due to the place element and the time element. It is evident that the farming frontier of the Mississippi Valley presents different conditions from the mining frontier of the Rocky Mountains. The Frontier reached by the Pacific Railroad, surveyed into rectangles guarded by the United States Army and recruited by the daily immigrant ship, moves forward at a swifter pace and in a different way than the Frontier reached by the Birch canoe or the pack horse. The geologist traces patiently the shores of ancient seas, maps their areas, and compares the older and the newer. It would be a work worth the historians' labours to mark these various frontiers and in detail compare one with another. Not only would their result a more adequate conception of American development and characteristics, but invaluable additions would be made to the history of society. Lauria, the Italian economist, has urged the study of colonial life as an aid in understanding the stages of European development, affirming that colonial settlement is for economic science what the mountain is for geology, bringing to light primitive stratifications. America, he says, has the key to the historical enigma which Europe has sought for centuries in vain and the land which has no history reveals luminously the course of universal history. There is much truth in this. The United States lies like a huge page in the history of society. Line by line as we read this continental page from west to east we find the record of social evolution. It begins with the Indian and the Hunter. It goes on to tell of the disintegration of savagery by the entrance of the trader, the pathfinder of civilization. We read the annals of the pastoral stage in ranch life, the exploitation of the soil by the raising of unrotated crops of corn and wheat in sparsely settled farming communities, the intensive culture of the denser farm settlement, and finally the manufacturing organization with city and factory system. This page is familiar to the student of census statistics, but how little of it has been used by historians, particularly in eastern states this page is a palimpset. What is now a manufacturing state was in an earlier decade an area of intensive farming and still earlier the range had attracted the cattle herder. Thus Wisconsin now developing manufacture is a state with varied agricultural interests but earlier it was given over to almost exclusive grain raising like North Dakota at the present time. Each of these areas has had an influence in our economic and political history. The evolution of each into a higher stage has worked political transformations. But what constitutional historian has made any adequate attempt to interpret political facts by the light of these social areas and changes. The Atlantic frontier was compounded of fishermen, fur trader, miner, cattle raiser and farmer. Accepting the fishermen each type of industry was on the march toward the west, impelled by an irresistible attraction. Each passed in successive waves across the continent. Stand at Cumberland Gap and watch the procession of your civilization, marching single file, the buffalo following the trail to the salt springs, the Indian, the fur trader and hunter, the cattle raiser, the pioneer farmer and the frontier has passed by. Stand at South Pass in the Rockies a century later and see the same procession with wider intervals between. The unequal rate of advance compels us to distinguish the frontier into the traders frontier, the ranchers frontier or the miners frontier and the farmers frontier. When the mines and the cow pens were still near the fall line, the traders pack trains were tinkling across the Alleghenies and the French on the Great Lakes were fortifying their posts alarmed by the British traders, Birch canoe. When the trappers scaled the Rockies, the farmer was still near the mouth of the Missouri. Why was it that the Indian trader passed so rapidly across the continent? What effects followed from the traders frontier? The trade was co-evil with American discovery. The Norsemen, Vespusius, Verrazoni, Hudson, John Smith, all trafficked for furs. The Plymouth Pilgrims settled in Indian cornfields and their first return cargo was of beaver and lumber. The records of the various New England colonies show how steadily exploration was carried into the wilderness by this trade. What is true for New England is, as would be expected, even planar for the rest of the colonies. All along the coast from Maine to Georgia, the Indian trade opened up the river courses. Steadily the trader passed westward, utilizing the older lines of French trade. The Ohio, the Great Lakes, the Mississippi, the Missouri and the plate, the lines of Western advance were ascended by traders. They found the passes in the Rocky Mountains and guided Lewis and Clark, Fremont and Bidwell. The explanation of the rapidity of this advance is connected with the effects of the trader on the Indian. The trading post left the unarmed tribes at the mercy of those that had purchased firearms, a truth which the Iroquois Indians wrote in blood, and so the remote and unvisited tribes gave eager welcome to the trader. The savages, wrote the sale, take better care of us French than of their own children. From us only can they get guns and goods. This accounts for the trader's power and the rapidity of his advance. Thus the disintegrating forces of civilization entered the wilderness. Every river valley and Indian trail became a fisher in Indian society, and so that society became honeycombed. Long before the pioneer farmer appeared on the scene, primitive Indian life had passed away. The farmers met Indians armed with guns. The trading frontier, while steadily undermining Indian power by making the tribes ultimately dependent on the whites, yet through its sale of guns gave to the Indian increased power of resistance to the farming frontier. French colonization was dominated by its trading frontier. English colonization by its farming frontier. There was an antagonism between the two frontiers as between the two nations. Said Ducresne to the Iroquois, are you ignorant of the difference between the King of England and the King of France? Go see the forts that our King has established and you will see that you can still hunt under their very walls. They have been placed for your advantage in places which you frequent. The English on the contrary and no sooner in possession of a place than the game is driven away. The forest falls before them as they advance and the soil is laid bare so that you can scarce find the wherewithal to erect a shelter for the night. And yet in spite of this opposition to the interests of the trader and the farmer, the Indian trade pioneered the way for civilization. The Buffalo trail became the Indian trail and this became the trader's trace. The trails widened into roads and the roads into turnpikes and these in turn were transformed into railroads. The same origin can be shown for the railroads of the south, the far west and the Dominion of Canada. The trading posts reached by these trails were on the sites of Indian villages which had been placed in positions suggested by nature and these trading posts situated so as to command the water systems of the country have grown into such cities as Albany, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, Council Bluffs and Kansas City. Thus civilization in America has followed the arteries made by geology, pouring in ever-richer tide through them until at last the slender paths of Aboriginal intercourse have been broadened and interwoven into the complex mazes of modern commercial lines. The wilderness has been interpenetrated by lines of civilization going ever more numerous. It is like the steady growth of a complex nervous system for the originally simple inert continent. If one would understand why we are today one nation rather than a collection of isolated states he must study this economic and social consolidation of the country. In this progress from savage conditions lie topics for the evolutionist. The effect of the Indian frontier as a consolidating agent in our history is important. From the close of the 17th century various intercolonial congresses have been called to treat with Indians and established common measures of defense. Particularism was strongest in colonies with no Indian frontier. This frontier stretched along the western border like a court of union. The Indian was a common danger demanding united action. Most celebrated of these conferences was the Albany Congress of 1754 called to treat with the six nations and to consider plans of union. Even a cursory reading of the plan proposed by the Congress reveals the importance of the frontier. The powers of the general council and the officers were chiefly the determination of peace and war with the Indians, the regulation of Indian trade, the purchase of Indian lands and the creation and government of new settlements as a security against the Indians. It is evident that unifying tendencies of the revolutionary period were facilitated by the previous cooperation in the regulation of the frontier. In this connection maybe mentioned the importance of the frontier from that day to this as a military training school keeping alive the power of resistors to aggression and developing the stalwart and rugged qualities of the frontiersmen. It would not be possible in the limits of this paper to trace the other frontiers across the continent. Travelers of the 18th century found the cow pens among the canobricks and peavine pastures of the south and the cow drivers took their droves to Charleston, Philadelphia and New York. Travelers at the close of the war of 1812 met droves of more than a thousand cattle and swine from the interior of Ohio going to Pennsylvania to fatten for the Philadelphia market. The ranges of the Great Plains with ranch and cowboy and nomadic life are things of yesterday and of today. The experience of the Carolina cow pens guided the ranches of Texas. One element favoring the rapid extension of the ranch's frontier is the fact that in a remote country lacking transportation facilities the product must be in small bulk or must be able to transport itself and the cattle razor could easily drive his product to market. The effect of these great ranches on the subsequent agrarian history of the localities in which they existed should be studied. The maps of the census reports show an uneven advance of the farmer's frontier with tongues of settlement push forward and with indentations of wilderness. In part this is due to Indian resistance, in part to the location of river valleys and passes, in part to the unequal force of the centers of frontier attraction. Among the important centers of attraction may be mentioned the following fertile and favorably situated soils, salt springs, mines and army posts. The frontier army posts serving to protect the settlers from the Indians has also acted as a wedge to open the Indian country and has been a nucleus for settlement. In this connection mentioned should also be made of the government military and exploring expeditions in determining the lines of settlement. But all the more important expeditions were greatly indebted to the earliest pathmakers, the Indian guides, the traders and trappers and the French voyageurs who were inevitable parts of the governmental expeditions from the days of Lewis and Clark. Each expedition was an epitome of the previous factors in Western advance. In an interesting monograph Victor Henn has traced the effect of salt upon early European development and has pointed out how it affected the lines of settlement and the form of administration. A similar study might be made for the salt springs of the United States. The early settlers were tied to the coast by the need of salt without which they could not preserve their meats or live in comfort. Writing in 1752 Bishop Spangenberg says of a colony for which he was seeking lands in North Carolina they will require salt and other necessaries which they can either manufacture or raise. Either they must go to Charleston which is 300 miles distant or else they must go to Boyling's Point on a branch of the James and is also 300 miles from here. Or else they must go down the Roanoke I know not how many miles where salt is brought up from the Cape Fear. This may serve as a typical illustration. An annual pilgrimage to the coast for salt thus became essential. Taking flocks or furs and giseng route the early settlers sent their pack trains after seeding time each year to the coast. This proved to be an important educational influence since it was almost the only way in which the pioneer learned what was going on in the east. But when discovery was made of the salt springs of the Kanawa and the Holston and Kentucky and central New York the West began to be freed from dependence on the coast. It was in part the effect of finding these salt springs that enabled settlement to cross the mountains. From the time the mountains rose between the pioneer and the seaboard a new order of Americanism arose. The west and the east began to get out of touch of each other. The settlements from the sea to the mountains kept connection with the rear and had a certain solidarity. But the over mountain men grew more and more independent. The east took a narrow view of American advance and nearly lost these men. Kentucky and Tennessee history bears abundant witness to the truth of this statement. The east began to try to hedge and limit westward expansion. The Webster could declare that there were no Alleghenies in his politics. Yet in politics in general they were a very solid factor. End of section two. Section three of the frontier in American history. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The frontier in American history by Frederick Jackson Turner chapter one part three. The exploitation of the beasts took hunter and trader to the west. The exploitation of the grasses took the rancher west and the exploitation of the virgin soil of the river valleys and prairies attracted the farmer. Good soils have been the most continuous attraction to the farmer's frontier. The land hunger of the Virginians drew them down the rivers into Carolina in early colonial days. The search for soils took the Massachusetts men to Pennsylvania and to New York. As the eastern lands were taken up migration flowed across them to the west. Daniel Boone, the great backwards man who combined the occupations of hunter, trader, cattle raiser, farmer and surveyor learning probably from the traders of the fertility of the lands of the upper Yadkin where the traders were want to rest as they took their way to the Indians left his Pennsylvania home with his father and passed down the great valley road to that stream. Learning from a trader of the game and rich pastures of Kentucky he pioneered the way for the farmers to that region. Then he passed to the frontier of Missouri where his settlement was longer land mark on the frontier. Here again he helped to open the way for civilization, finding salt, licks and trails and land. His son was among the earliest trappers in the passes of the Rocky Mountains and his party is said to have been the first to camp on the present site of Denver. His grandson, Colonel A.J. Boone of Colorado was a power among the Indians of the Rocky Mountains and was appointed an agent by the government. Kit Carson's mother was a Boone. Thus this family epitomizes the backwardsman's advance across the continent. The farmer's advance came in a distinct series of waves. In Peck's New Guide to the West published in Boston in 1837 occurs this suggestive passage. Generally in all the western settlements three classes like the waves of the ocean have rolled one after the other. First comes the pioneer who depends for the subsistence of his family chiefly upon the natural growth of vegetation called the range and the proceeds of hunting. His implements of agriculture are rude, chiefly of his own make and his efforts directed mainly to a crop of corn and a truck patch. The last is a rude garden for growing cabbage, beans, corn for roasting ears, cucumbers and potatoes. A log cabin and occasionally a stable and corn crib and a field of a dozen acres the timber girdled or deadened and fenced are enough for his occupancy. It is quite immaterial whether he ever becomes the owner of the soil. He is the occupant for the time being, pays no rent and feels as independent as the Lord of the Manor. With a horse, cow and one or two breeders of swine he strikes into the woods with his family and becomes the founder of a new county or perhaps state. He builds his cabin, gathers around him a few other families of similar tastes and habits and occupies till the range is somewhat subdued and hunting a little precarious or which is more frequently the case till the neighbors crowd around, roads, bridges and fields annoy him and he lacks elbow room. The preemption law enables him to dispose of his cabin and cornfield to the next class of immigrants and to employ his own figures he breaks for the high timber, clears out for the new purchase or migrates to Arkansas or Texas to work the same process over. The next class of immigrants purchase the lands, add field to field, clear out the roads, throw rough bridges over the streams, put up hewn log houses with glass windows and brick or stone chimneys, occasionally plant orchards, build mills, schoolhouses, courthouses, etc. and exhibit the picture and forms of plain frugal civilized life. Another wave rolls on. The men of capital and enterprise come. The settler is ready to sell out and take the advantage of the rising property, push father into the interior and become himself a man of capital and enterprise in turn. The small village rises to a spacious town or city. Substantial edifices of brick, extensive fields, orchards, gardens, colleges and churches are seen. Broadcloths, silks, leghorns, crepes and all the refinements, luxuries, elegancies, frivolities and fashions are in vogue. Thus wave after wave is rolling westward. The real El Dorado is still further on. A portion of the two first classes remain stationary amidst the general movement, improve their habits and condition and rise in the scale of society. The writer has travelled much amongst the first class, the real pioneers. He has lived many years in connection with the second grade and now the third wave is sweeping over large districts of Indiana, Illinois and Missouri. Migration has become almost a habit in the west. Hundreds of men can be found not over fifty years of age who have settled for the fourth, fifth or sixth time on a new spot. To sell out and remove only a few hundred miles makes up a portion of the variety of backwards life and manners. Admitting those of the pioneer farmers who moved from the love of adventure, the advance of the more steady farmer is easy to understand. Obviously the immigrant was attracted by the cheap lines of the frontier and even the native farmer felt their influence strongly. Year by year the farmers who lived on soil whose returns were diminished by unrotated crops were offered the virgin soil of the frontier at nominal prices. Their growing families demanded more lands and these were deer. The competition of the unexhausted, cheap and easily tilled prairie lands compelled the farmer either to go west and continue the exhaustion of the soil on a new frontier or to adopt intensive culture. Thus the census of 1890 shows in the northwest many countries in which there is an absolute or a relative decrease of population. These states have been sending farmers to advance the frontier on the plains and have themselves begun to turn into intensive farming and to manufacture. A decade before this Ohio had shown the same transition stage. Thus the demand for land and the love of wilderness freedom drew the frontier ever onwards. Having now roughly outlined the various kinds of frontiers and their modes of advance chiefly from the point of view of the frontier itself we may next inquire what were the influences on the east and on the old world. A rapid enumeration of some of the more noteworthy effects is all that I have time for. First we note that the frontier promoted the formation of a composite nationality for the American people. The coast was preponderantly English but the later tides of continental immigration flowed across to the free lands. This was the case from the early days. The Scotch-Irish and the Palatine Germans or Pennsylvania Dutch furnished the dominant element in the stock of the colonial frontier. With these peoples were also the freed indented servants or redemptioners who at the expiration of their time of service passed to the frontier. Governor Spotswood of Virginia writes in 1717 the inhabitants of our frontiers are composed generally of such as have been transported hither as servants and being out of their time settled themselves where land is to be taken up and that will produce the necessaries of life with little labour. Very generally these redemptioners were of non-English stock. In the crucible of the frontier the immigrants were Americanised, liberated and fused into a mixed race, English in neither nationality nor characteristics. The process has gone on from the early days to our own. Burke and other writers in the middle of the 18th century believed that Pennsylvania was threatened with the danger of being wholly foreign in language, manners and perhaps even inclinations. The German and Scotch-Irish elements in the frontier of the south were only less great. In the middle of the present century the German element in Wisconsin was already so considerable that leading publicists looked to the creation of a German state out of the Commonwealth by concentrating their colonisation. Such examples teach us to beware of misinterpreting the fact that there is a common English speech in America into a belief that the stock is also English. In another way the advance of the frontier decreased our dependence on England. The coast, particularly of the south, lacked diversified industries and was dependent on England for the bulk of its supplies. In the south there was even a dependence on the northern colonies for articles of food. Governor Glenn of South Carolina writes in the middle of the 18th century our trade with New York and Philadelphia was of this sort draining us of all the little money and bills we could gather from other places for their bread, flour, beer, ham, bacon and other things of their produce or which, except beer, our new townships begin to supply us with goods which are settled with very industrious and thriving Germans. This no doubt diminishes the number of shipping and the appearance of our trade but is far from being a detriment to us. Before long the frontier created a demand for merchants. As it retreated from the coast it became less and less possible for England to bring her supplies directly to the consumers' wharfs and carry away staple crops and staple crops began to give way to diversified agriculture for a time. The effect of this phase of the frontier action upon the northern section was perceived when we realized how the advance of the frontier aroused seaboard cities like Boston, New York and Baltimore to engage in rivalry for what Washington called the extensive and valuable trade of a rising empire. The legislation which most developed the powers of the national government and played the largest part in its activity was conditioned on the frontier. Writers have discussed the subjects of tariff, land and internal improvement as subsidiary to the slavery question. But when American history comes to be rightly viewed it will be seen that the slavery question is an incident. In the period from the end of the first half of the present century to the close of the Civil War slavery rose to primary but far from exclusive importance. But this does not justify Dr. von Holst to take an example in treating our constitutional history in its formative period down to 1828 in a single volume giving six volumes chiefly to the history of slavery from 1828 to 1861 under the title constitutional history of the United States. The growth of nationalism and the evolution of American political institutions were dependent on the advance of the frontier. Even so recent a writer as Rhodes in his history of the United States since the compromise of 1850 has treated the legislation called out by the western advance as incidental to the slavery struggle. This is a wrong perspective. The pioneer needed the goods of the coast and so the grand series of internal improvements and railroad legislation began with potent nationalizing effects. Over internal improvements occurred great debates in which grave constitutional questions were discussed. Sectional groupings appear in the votes profoundly significant for the historian. Loose construction increased as the nation marched westward but the west was not content with bringing the farm to the factory. Under the lead of Clay Harry of the west protective tariffs were passed with the cry of bringing the factory to the farm. The disposition of the public lands was a third important subject of national legislation influenced by the frontier. The public domain has been a profound importance in the nationalization and development of the government. The effect of the struggle of the landed and landless states and of the ordinance of 1787 need no discussion. Administratively the frontier called out some of the highest and most vitalizing activities of the general government. The purchase of Louisiana was perhaps the constitutional turning point in the history of the republic in as much as it afforded both a new area for national legislation and the occasion of the downfall of the policy of strict construction. But the purchase of Louisiana was called out by frontier needs and demands. As frontier states accrued to the union the national power grew. In a speech on the dedication of the Calhoun Monument Mr. Lamar explained, in 1789 the states were the creators of the federal government. In 1861 the federal government was the creator of a large majority of the states. End of Section 3 Section 4 of The Frontier in American History by Frederick Jackson Turner. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Colleen McMahon. Chapter 1 The Significance of the Frontier in American History Part 4 When we consider the public domain from the point of view of the sale and disposal of the public lands, we are again brought face to face with the frontier. The policy of the United States in dealing with its lands is in sharp contrast with the European system of scientific administration. Efforts to make this domain a source of revenue and to withhold it from immigrants in order that settlement might be compact were in vain. The jealousy and the fears of the East were powerless in the face of the demands of the frontiersmen. John Quincy Adams was obliged to confess, quote, my own system of administration which was to make the national domain the inexhaustible fund for progressive and unceasing internal improvement has failed, end of quote. The reason is obvious. A system of administration was not what the West demanded. It wanted land. Adams states the situation as follows, quote, the slaveholders of the South have bought the cooperation of the Western country and the bribe of the Western lands abandoning to the new Western states their own proportion of the public property and aiding them in the design of grasping all the lands into their own hands, end of quote. Thomas H. Benton was the author of this system which he brought forward as a substitute for the American system of Mr. Clay and to supplant him as the leading statesman of the West. Mr. Clay, by his tariff compromise with Mr. Calhoun, abandoned his own American system. At the same time, he brought forward a plan for distributing among all the states of the Union the proceeds of the sales of the public lands. His bill for that purpose passed both houses of Congress but was vetoed by President Jackson who in his annual message of December 1832 formally recommended that all public lands should be gratuitously given away to individual adventurers and to the states in which the lands are situated. Quote, no subject said Henry Clay which has presented itself to the present or perhaps any preceding Congress is of greater magnitude than that of the public lands, end of quote. When we consider the far-reaching effects of the government's land policy upon political, economic and social aspects of American life, we are disposed to agree with him. But this legislation was framed under frontier influences and under the lead of Western statesmen like Benton and Jackson said Senator Scott of Indiana in 1841, quote I consider the preemption law merely declaratory of the custom or common law of the settlers, end of quote. It is safe to say that the legislation with regard to land, tariff and internal improvements the American system of the nationalizing Whig party was conditioned on frontier ideas and needs but it was not merely in legislative action that the frontier worked against the sectionalism of the coast the economic and social characteristics of the frontier worked against sectionalism. The men of the frontier had closer resemblances to the middle region than to either of the other sections. Pennsylvania had been the seed plot of frontier emigration and although she passed on her settlers along the Great Valley into the west of Virginia and the Carolinas yet the industrial society of these southern frontiersmen was always more like that of the middle region than like that of the tidewater portion of the south which later came to spread its industrial type throughout the south. The middle region entered by New York Harbor was an open door to all Europe. The tidewater part of the south represented typical Englishman modified by a warm climate and servile labor and living in baronial fashion on great plantations. New England stood for a special English movement, Puritanism. The middle region was less English than the other sections. 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. In short it was a region mediating between New England and the south and the east and the west. 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 democratic and non-sectional, if not national. Easy, tolerant and contented rooted strongly in material prosperity. 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, tearing in New York or Pennsylvania on his westward march, lost the acuteness of his sectionalism on the way. The spread of cotton culture into the interior of the south finally broke down the contrast between the tidewater region and the rest of the state and based southern interests on slavery. 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 1829 and 30 called to revise the Constitution Mr. Lee of Chesterfield, one of the tidewater counties declared, quote, 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 and trained 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 gentlemen 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 end of quote. 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 1812 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 on the tide of the father of waters north and south met and mingled into a nation 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 was the greatest of frontiersmen who declared quote I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half freight it will become all of one thing or all of the other end of quote nothing works for nationalism like intercourse within the nation mobility of population is death to localism and the western frontier worked irresistibly in unsettling population the effect 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 antisocial it produces antipathy to control and particularly to any direct control the tax gatherer is viewed as a representative of oppression Professor Osgood an enable article has pointed out that the frontier conditions prevalent in the colonies are important factors in the explanation of the American Revolution where individual liberty is 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 important upon the older states whose people 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 1821 and it was western Virginia that compelled the tide water region to put a more liberal suffrage provision in the constitution framed in 1830 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 an interesting illustration of the tone of frontier democracy in 1830 comes from the same debates in the Virginia convention already referred to a representative from western Virginia declared quote 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 immigrants 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 ableist 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 negros 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 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 end of quote 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 its benefits individualism in America has allowed a laxity in regard to governmental affairs which has rendered possible the spoils system and all of 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 wildcat banking the colonial and revolutionary frontier was the region once emanated many of the worst forms of an evil currency the west of the war of 1812 repeated the phenomenon on the frontier of that day while the speculation and wildcat banking of the period of the crisis of 1837 occurred on the new frontier belt of the next tier of states 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 new frontier and the new frontier and the new frontier 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 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 waves of advancing civilization bore before them and of the growth of spontaneous organs of authority where legal authority was absent compare barrows united states of yesterday and tomorrow shin mining camps and bancroft popular tribunals 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 end of footnote the east has always feared the result of an unregulated advance of the frontier tried to check and guide it the english authorities would have checked settlement at the headwaters of the atlantic tributaries and allowed the quote savages to enjoy their deserts in quiet lest the peltry trade decrease end of quote this called out berks splendid protest quote if you stopped your grants what would be the consequence the people would occupy without grants they have already so occupied 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 the particular situations already they have topped the appalachian mountains from thence they be held before them an immense plain one vast rich level meadow a square of 500 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 counselors your collectors and comptrollers and all the slaves that adhered to them such would and in no long time must be the effect of attempting to forbid as a crime and to suppress as an evil the command and blessing of providence increase and multiply such would be the happy result of an endeavor to keep as a layer of wild beasts that earth which god by an express charter has given to the children of men end of quote but the english government was not alone in its desire to limit the advance of the frontier and guide its destinies tidewater virginia and south carolina gerrymandered those colonies to ensure the dominance of the coast in their legislatures washington desired to settle a state at a time in the north west 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 quote when we shall be full on this side we may lay off a range of states on the western bank from the head to the mouth and so range after range advancing compactly as we multiply end of quote madison went so far as to argue to the french minister that the united states had no interest in seeing population extend itself on the right bank of the mississippi but should rather fear it when the oregon question was under debate in eighteen twenty four smith 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 even thomas benton the man of widest views of the destiny of the west at this stage of his career declared that along the ridge of the rocky mountains quote the western limits of the republic should be drawn and the statue of the fabled god terminus should be raised upon its highest peak never to be thrown down end of quote but the attempts to limit the boundaries to restrict land sales and settlement and to deprive the west of its share of political power were all in vain 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 1835 dr. lineman beecher declared quote it is equally plain that the religious and political destiny of our nation is to be decided in the west and he pointed out that the population of the west is assembled from all the states of the union and from all the nations of Europe and is rushing in like the waters of the flood demanding for its moral preservation the immediate and universal action of those institutions which discipline the mind and arm the conscience and the heart 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 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 a nation is being born in a day but what will become of the west if her prosperity rushes up to such a majesty of power while those great institutions linger which are necessary to form the mind and the conscience and the heart of that vast world will not be permitted let no man at the east quiet himself and dream of liberty whatever may become of the west her destiny is our destiny end of quote with the appeal to the conscience of new england he adds appeals to her fears lest other religious sex anticipate her own the new england preacher and school teacher left their mark on the west the dread of western emancipation from new england's political was paralleled by her fears lest the west cut loose from her religion commenting in 1850 on reports that settlement was rapidly extending northward in wisconsin the editor of the home missionary writes quote we scarcely know whether to rejoice or mourn over this extension of our settlements while we sympathize in whatever tends to increase the physical resources and prosperity of our country we cannot forget that with all these dispersions into remote and still remotor corners of the land the supply of the means of grace is becoming relatively less and less end of quote acting in accordance with such ideas home missions were established and western colleges were erected 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 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 expedience that masterful grasp of material things lacking in the artistic but powerful to affect great ends that restless nervous energy that dominant individualism working for good and for evil and with all 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 footnote colonial travelers agree in remarking on the phlegmatic characteristics of the colonists it is frequently been asked how such a people could have developed that strained nervous energy now characteristic of them Alexander Sumner, Alexander Hamilton page 98 and Adams history of the United States one page 60 nine pages 240, 241 the transition appears to become marked at the close of the war of 1812 a period when interest centered around the development of the west and the west was noted for restless energy Grund, Americans 2 chapter 1 end of footnote 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 unrestrained 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 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 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 end of section four section five of the frontier in American history this LibriVox recording is in the public domain the frontier in American history by Frederick Jackson Turner chapter two the first official frontier of the Massachusetts Bay part one in the significance of the frontier in American history I took from my text the following announcement of the superintendent of the census of 1890 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 the westward movement etc it cannot therefore any longer have a place in the census reports 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 decisions on the frontier with 40 soldiers to each frontier town as a main guard in the 200 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 towns but seemingly peopled were forbidden to remove without authority in 1669 certain towns had been the subject of legislation as frontier towns and in the period of King Philip's war there were various enactments regarding frontier towns in the session of 1675 to 6 it had been proposed to build offence of stockades or stone 8 feet high from the Charles where it is navigable to the Concord at Bilureka and thence to the Merrimack down the river to the bay by which means that whole tract will be environed for the security and safety under God of the people, their houses, goods and cattle from the rage and fury of the enemy 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 defence which had been illustrated by the impossible equipment of the heavily armoured soldier of the early Puritan regime whose courselets and head pieces pikes, matchlocks, forkets and bandoliers went out of use about the period of King Philip's war the 57 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 area the frontier fighter adapted himself to a more open order and lighter equipment suggested by the Indian warriors practice the settler on the outskirts of Puritan civilisation 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 defence were coinciding as population advanced into the wilderness and thus successively brought new exposed areas between the settlements on the one side 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 unwon 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 restatement 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 cohabitations at the heads that is the first falls the vicinity of Richmond, Petersburg etc of her rivers 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 London town may have furnished a model for Virginia's efforts to create frontier settlements by legislation an act of March 12 1694 to 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 these 11 frontier towns included Wells York and Kittery on the eastern frontier and Amesbury Haverhill, Dunstable, Chelmsford Groton, Lancaster, Marlborough and Deerfield in March 1699 to 1700 the law was reenacted with the addition of Brookfield Menden and Woodstock together with seven others Salisbury, Andover, Billerica, Hatfield, Hadley Westfield and Northampton which though they be not frontiers as those towns first named yet lie more open than many others to an attack of an enemy 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 Simsbury, Waterbury, Danbury, Colchester Wyndham, Mansfield and Plainfield thus about the close of the 17th in the beginning of the 18th century there was an officially designated frontier line for New England one of these enumerated towns represents one, the outskirts of settlement along the eastern coast and up the Merrimack and its tributaries a region threatened from the Indian country by way of the Winnepersawki Lake two, the end of the ribbon of settlement up the Connecticut Valley menaced by the Canadian Indians by way of the Lake Champlain and Winnuski River route to the Connecticut three, boundary towns which marked the edges of that inferior agricultural region where the hard crystalline rocks served as the foundation for Shea's rebellion opposition to the adoption of the Federal Constitution and the abandoned farm and four, the isolated interval 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 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 and the cattle industry was most important to the early farmers but the stages succeeded rapidly and intermingled after King Philip's war while Albany was still in the fur trading 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 captives 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 in 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 and the half breed children of captive Puritan mothers tells 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 1703-04 for example the general court of Massachusetts ordered 500 pairs of snowshoes and an equal number of moccasins for use in specified counties lying frontier next to the wilderness 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 commander range the woods to endeavor the discovery of an approaching enemy and in a special manner from Westfield to Ausatonic and for the encouragement of our forces gone or going against the enemy this court will allow out of the public treasury the sum of five pounds for every man's scalp of the enemy killed in this colony 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 one of the most striking phases of frontier adjustment was the proposal of the reverend 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 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 thus we come to familiar ground the Massachusetts frontiersmen like his western successor hated the Indians the tawny serpents of cotton mother'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 pig who many Indians slew and some of them he scalped when bullets around him flew within the area bounded by the frontier line with a 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 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 Alleghenies as well as in the more obvious case of the backwards men of Kentucky and Tennessee the frontier towns were too isolated from the main settled regions 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 17th century Virginia great activity in protecting the frontier was invinced 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 these were prototypes of the regular army post and of rangers, dragoons, cavalry and mounted police who have carried the remote and military frontier forward it is possible to trace this military cordon from New England to the Carolinas early in the 18th 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 today it lies at the edge of Mexico Pacific Ocean end of section 5 section 6 of the frontier in American history this LibriVox recording is in the public domain the frontier in American history chapter 2 part 2 a few examples of frontier appeals for Garrison 8 will help to an understanding of the early form of the military frontier Wells asks June 30 1689 1. That your honors will please to send us speedily 28 good brisk men that may be serviceable as a guard to us whilest we get in our harvest of hay and corn we being unable to defend ourselves and to do our work and also to pursue and destroy the enemy as occasion may require 2. That these men may be completely furnished with arms ammunition and provision and that upon the country's account the general war Dunstable, still weak and unable both to keep our garrisons and to send out men to get heave for our cattle without doing which we cannot subsist petition July 23 1689 for 20 footmen for a month to scout about the tone while we get our hay otherwise they say they must be forced to leave still more indicative of this temper is the petition of Lancaster March 11 1675 to 6 the governor and council and God has made you father over us so you will have the father's pity to us they asked a guard of men and aid without which they must leave dearfield pled in 1678 to the general court unless you will be pleased to take us out of your father like pity and cherish us in your bosoms we are like suddenly to breathe out our last breath the perils of the time the hardships of the frontier towns the frontier to ask appropriations for losses and wounds 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 and is probably absent one that whereas by the old disposing hand of God who orders all things in infinite wisdom it is our portion to live in such a part of the land which by reason of the enemy is become very dangerous and as by woeful experience we have felt both formally and of late to our great damage and discouragement and especially this last year having lost so many persons some killed some captivated and some removed and also much corn and cattle and horses and hay whereby we are greatly impoverished and brought very low and in a very poor capacity to subsist any longer as the bearers hereof can inform your honours two and more than all this our pastor Mr. Hobart is and hath been for above a year incapable of dispensing the ordinances of God amongst us and we have advised with the reverent elders of our neighbouring churches and they advise us to hire another minister and to support Mr. Hobart and make our address to your honours we have but little left to pay our dues with being so poor and few in number other to town or country and we being a frontier town and liable to danger there being no safety in going out nor coming in but for a long time we have got our bread with the power of our lives and also brought very low by so great a charge of building garrisons and fortifications by order of authority and there is several of our inhabitants removed out of town and others are providing to remove except something be done for our encouragement but we are so few and so poor that we cannot pay two ministers neither are we willing to live without any we spend so much time in watching and warning that we can do but little else and truly we have lived almost two years more like soldiers than otherwise and except your honours can find out some better way for our safety and support we cannot uphold as a town either by remitting our tax or to allow pay for building the several forts allowed and ordered by authority or else to allow the one half of our own inhabitants to be under pay or to grant liberty for our removal into our neighbouring towns to take cheer for ourselves all which if your honours shall see meet to grant you will hereby greatly encourage your humble petitioners to conflict with the many troubles we are incident unto forced to gather into houses for protection getting in their crops at the peril of their lies 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 these petitions asking favours from the government of the colony we might impute to these early frontiersmen a degree of submission to authority unlike that of other frontiersmen and indeed not wholly warranted by the facts reading carefully we find that however prudently praised 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 positions so essential to the defence of the settled eastern country the spirit of military in subordination characteristic of the frontier is evident in the accounts of these towns such as Pynchons in 1694 complaining of the decay of the fortifications at Hatfield, Hadley and Springfield the people a little willful inclined to do when and how they please or not at all Staltonstall writes from Haverhill about the same time regarding his ill success in recruiting I will never plead for a 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 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 defence 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 she showed a realisation that the Deerfield people who were in a sense the enemy's mouth almost as Pinchin wrote constituted her own frontier 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 1698 Massachusetts and Connecticut sent agents to Albany to join with New York in making presence to the Indians of that colony in order to engage their aid against the French they recognised 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 honors colony and of all their majesty's countries 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 main coast was of great importance for it imparted a western tone to the life and characteristics of the main 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 the river the line of the towns that occupied the waters of the Merrimack tempted the province continually into the wilderness of New Hampshire the Connecticut River towns pressed steadily up that stream along its tributaries into the Housatonic valleys and into the valleys between the Green Mountains of Vermont by the end of 1723 the general court of Massachusetts enacted that it will be of great service to all the western frontiers both in this and the neighboring government of Connecticut to build a block house above Northfield in the most convenient place on the lands called the equivalent lands and to post in it 40 able men English and western Indians to be employed in scouting at a good distance West River, Otter Creek and sometimes eastwardly above the Great Maddenuck for the discovery of the enemy coming towards any of the frontier towns the frontier towns were preparing to swarm it was not long before Fort Dumber replaced the block house and the Berkshires in 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 Dylenda 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 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 was similar phenomena in evidence here did populistic tendencies appear in this frontier evidences which explain these tendencies 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 they 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 approve 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 Eggleston 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 the frontier as we shall observe later was not always disposed to see the practice in so favorable a light Newtown 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 an unassigned lands or purchasing the Indian title and then asking confirmation in others grants were made in advance of settlement as early as court had ordered that none go to new plantations without leave of a majority of the magistrates 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 ascent 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 17th and early 18th century seems to indicate that this happened in the succeeding years of the 18th century the grants to leading men in the economic and political motives in the grants are increasingly evident this whole topic should be made at the subject of special study what is here offered is merely suggestive of a problem the frontier settlers criticize 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 Merrimack 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 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 Ferman and others Ferman'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 when as others have no business but range from place to place on purpose to live upon the country end of section six section seven of the frontier in American history this LibriVox recording is in the public domain the frontier in American history by Frederick Jackson Turner chapter two part three 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 honourable artillery company and another to Thomas Brattle of Boston apparently it was settled chiefly by others than the original grantees Groten voted in 1685 to sue the non-residents to assist in paying the rate and in 1679 the general court had ordered non-residents having landed Groten to pay rates for their lands as residents did Lancaster, Nashaway was granted to proprietors including various craftsmen in iron indicating perhaps an expectation of ironworks and few of the original proprietors actually settled in the town the grant of 1653 to four was made by the court after reciting one that it had ordered in 1647 that the ordering and disposing of the plantation at Nashaway is wholly in the court's power two considering that there is already at Nashaway about nine families and that several both free men and others intend to go and settle there somewhere of 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 old houses and 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 land is much raised by our carrying on public work and will be nothing worth if we are forced to quit the place do bear 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 in 1648 the select men inform the general court that one half of the proprietors too only accepted are dwelling in other places our proprietors abroad they say object that they see no reason why they should pay as much for their lands as we do for our land and stock which we answer that if there be not enough of reason for it we assured there is more than enough of necessity to supply that is wanting in reason this is the authentic voice of the frontier dearfield furnishes another type in as much as a considerable part of its land was first held by denim to which the grant was made as a recompense for the location of the natik indian settlement denim shares in the town often fell into the hands of speculators and shelled in the careful historian of dearfield declares that not a single dead man became a permanent resident of the grant in 1678 dearfield petition the general court as follows you may be pleased to know that the very principal and best of the land the best for soil the best for situation as lying in ye center and middle of the town and as to quantity near half belongs under eight or nine proprietors each and every of which are never like to come to a settlement among us which we have formally found grievous and do judge for the future will be found intolerable if not altered or minister mr. mother and we ourselves are much discouraged as judging the plantation will be spoiled if these proprietors may not be begged or will not be brought up on very easy terms out of their right but as long as the main of the plantation lies in men's hands that can't improve it themselves neither are ever like to put such tenants onto it as shall be likely to advance the good of the place in civil or sacred respects he ourselves and all others that think of going to it are much discouraged Woodstock later a kinetic 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 goers 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 goers 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 20th century Leicester for example was confirmed by the general court in 1713 the 20 shares were divided among 22 proprietors including Jeremiah Dahmer 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 Sewell 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 50 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 the author of a currency tract in 1716 entitled some considerations upon the several sorts of banks remarks that formally when land was easy to be obtained good men came over as indentured servants but now 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 he therefore advocates that townships should be laid out four or five miles square in which grants are 50 or 60 acres could be made to servants 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 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 the 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 when in 1762 Massachusetts sold a group of townships in the Berkshires to the highest bidders by whole townships 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 17th century and become a common feature of the grants for frontier towns in the 18th this practice with respect to 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 1553 and whereas lots are now laid out for the most part equally to rich and poor partly to keep the town from scattering too far and partly out of charity and respect to men of meaner estate yet that equality which is the rule of God may be observed we covenant and agree that in a second division and so through all other divisions of land the matter shall be drawn as near to equality according to men states as we are able to do that he which have now more than his estate deserve it in home lots and into veil lots shall have so much less and he that have less than his estate deserve it shall have so much more this peculiar doctrine of equality had early in the history of the colony created discontents Winther 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 newcomers became numerous in an increasing degree these newcomers 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 Jonathan Edwards in 1751 declared that there had been in Northampton for 40 or 50 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 the tendency to divide up the common lands among the proprietors in individual possession did not become marked until the 18th 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 18th 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 inquiry 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 Cotton Martha is perhaps not a typical representative of the conservative sentiment at the close of the 17th century but his writings 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 one while the enclosing of commons hath made neighbors that should have been like sheep to bite and devour one another again do our old people any of them go out from the institutions of God swarming into new settlements where they and their untaught families are like to perish for lack of vision they that have done so here too for have to their cost found that they were got unto the wrong side of the hedge in their doing so think here should this be done anymore we read of Balam in numbers 22 23 he was to his damage driven to the wall when he would needs make an unlawful sally forth after the gain of this world why when men for the sake of earthly gain would be going out into the warm sun they drive through the wall and the angel of the lord becomes their enemy in his essay on frontiers well defended 1707 Martha assures the pioneers that they dwell in a hats are meneth a place of tawny serpents are inhabitants of the valley of acor 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 says he says a church state well formed 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 Jews drunkenness and rebels 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 19th century this early spokesman for New England laid stress upon teaching anti-popery 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 third 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 relocation 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 settlement in the old north west 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 uta and in parts of the pacific coast new england's sons had become the organisers 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 martha were sealed end of section 7