The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization. The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds him a European in dress industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin. It puts him in the log cabin of the Cherokee and Iroquois and runs an Indian palisade around him. Before long he has gone to planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick; he shouts the war cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion.[1]

However, Turner's ideas have never lacked critics. Millions of free European and enslaved African newcomers never saw the frontier. The Founders of the American Republic would be surprised to learn that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution "came out of the forest." Yet there is no escap-ing the fact that American history and the culture that it produced were hardly carbon copies of Europe.

This raises a related question: To what extent has American history followed the European pattern of development? In its comparatively brief span of less than four centuries, did it repeat the feudal (traditional) to capitalist (modern) journey, or did it skip the feudal stage and plunge into modernity right from the start? How can we explain the emergence of the United States as the world's most powerful-and most modern-nation by the mid-twentieth century? Can those from other nations with vastly different histories learn anything useful from the Americans?

The settlement-or invasion-of North America took place at a critical point in the history of England. In the l620s, Puritans who believed too many compromises had been made with the Catholic church, and merchants and middle-class landowners who resented the power of the titled aristocracy, challenged King Charles I' s claims to supremacy and "divine right." The result was a generation of civil war and revolution. While other European monarchs in the seventeenth century were consolidating their powers, the English executed one king in 1649 and expelled another in 1688. In so doing, they justified their actions in terms of the immutable common law of the land, natural rights, and ultimately, the right of revolution itself.

Twelve of the thirteen original colonies were settled during these tumultuous decades. Sometimes the colonists were led by friends and allies of the Stuart monarchy, as in most of the southern colonies; other times by the king's critics and enemies, as in the Puritan colonies of New England. Therefore, it is difficult to generalize about what the several hundred thousand English colonists had in common. Adventurers seeking more economic opportunity than that offered at home, religious zealots seeking to practice a faith not tolerated by the government, workers choosing to become temporary servants in the New World rather than permanent drudges in the Old-all of these were represented. But most were, in one way or another, "outsiders." As such, they were poor material for re-creating a traditional society, what ever may have been their intent.

The first waves of English invaders and colonists found themselves face to face with cultures vastly different from any that Europeans had seen before. In contrast to the complex Aztec and Inca civilizations of Central and South America, the indigenous peoples of eastern North America organized themselves into numerous small communities and lived by a mixture of hunting, fishing, and farming. Often nomadic, they possessed no written language and were unskilled in metallurgy. The arrival of the European had devastating effects on nearly every aspect of the Native Americans' existence.

Like the Portuguese and the Spanish, the first Virginians hoped to use the Native Americans either as slaves or cheap labor. Neither plan worked. Far less numerous than their counterparts in Latin America, and unused to European ways of agriculture, the Native Americans made poor slaves, for it was all too easy for them to disappear into the forest.

The northern colonists were less interested in the Native American population as a domestic labor force. Lacking the missionary zeal of their Catholic counterparts in Latin America, the Puritans were content to observe a few legal amenities whereby they "purchased" their land from local Native American groups, and then for the most part ignored them. The two cultures lived uneasily together until the steady growth of the New England colonies threatened to overwhelm the original inhabitants. Then, as in the southern colonies, fierce and brutal conflict resulted, sometimes wiping out whole Native American communities. The survivors were forced to retreat in the face of the white man's agriculture, which drove away their wild game; the white man's technology, for which their arrows and clubs were no match; and the white man's diseases, which ultimately destroyed whole societies and decimated others.

Still, the Native Americans left their mark on Europeans. French settlers in the Mississippi Valley, mainly hunters and trappers like the natives were less hampered by racial prejudices than the English and often married and allied themselves with the native peoples. New methods of warfare developed, suited to the tangled underbrush of the American forest rather than the open battlefields of Europe. New words of Native American origin enriched the European languages spoken in North America-tobacco, succotash, toboggan, moccasin, powwow-while place names, from Massachusetts to Mississippi, remained behind long after their originators had disappeared.

The colonists came to America with certain social, economic, or political blueprints to which they presumed the colony would conform.[3] Virginia was expected to become a thriving business enterprise, ex-ploiting the gold that would be found with the help of the Native Americans. Massachusetts was to be the "city on a hill," to which the rest of the sinful world would eventually turn for salvation. Maryland was conceived as a refuge for English Catholics and as a gigantic feudal manor, complete with peasants, country homes, and coats of arms. William Penn's blue-print for Pennsylvania called for a Quaker common-wealth based on brotherly love, religious toleration, and mutual forbearance. In each case, however, the original intention was substantially altered in the face of geographic and cultural realities.

In Virginia, so confident were the original Virginia Company investors in their ultimate success that the first boatload of settlers included a wig-maker, a perfumerer, and a goldsmith, to serve the needs of the upper class that was expected to result from the wealth generated by the enterprise. Disaster followed when no gold was to be found and no Native Americans could be coerced into supporting the colony. What saved the colony was tobacco, the so-called noxious weed. Tobacco-growing became so popular that laws were passed requiring colonists to grow corn on some of their lands, lest the people starve in the winter. Labor at first was provided by white indentured servants and later by African slaves.

The origins of slavery in a country that would later describe itself as "the land of the free" are not clear. Although the first Africans "sold" in North America arrived in Virginia in 1619, it is by no means certain what that meant. They may have been treated as indentured servants, serving for a fixed period of time, and then receiving land of their own. There are records of free blacks owning land in the years following 1619. But by 1650 they had disappeared, and servitude for Africans in America had become fixed and inherited. Neither of these conditions ever applied to Europeans and rarely to Native Americans. By 1700, there was no doubt about the status of African Americans in the southern colonies where white supremacy and black subordination became part of the legal and social order. Because tobacco, and later indigo, rice, and cotton, were most profitably grown on large plantations, cheap labor was in demand. That demand was fulfilled by Africans, vulnerable as they were in a hostile New World. In 1600, the idea of slavery repelled most English men and women, but a century later it had come to be accepted with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Thus soil, climate, and the unsuitability of Native-American forced agricultural labor conspired to produce a society quite different from that envisioned a century before by the Virginia Company investors. The Virginia countryside indeed sprouted stately homes that often were copies of English estates, but they were not examples of inherited privilege. Rather, they were the product of slavery, sharp practice, shrewd marriages, and luck. English civilization had met the New World frontier, and the result was neither English nor wilderness.

To the north, where climate and geography conspired against the plantation system, there was less demand for cheap labor. Also, the first generation of northern settlers often had their minds on other things. In the 1620s and 1630s, thousands of Puritans arrived in New England, convinced that God's wrath was about to descend on Old England. Led by John Winthrop, they believed that the Stuart monarchy had compromised the true Protestant faith in favor of a "Church of England" that was too close to the hated Roman Catholic church. But in seeking freedom to pursue their own austere religion, it never occurred to Puritans to tolerate others. Catholics, Quakers, and other dissenting Protestants had the liberty, Puritans said, to "stay away from New England." Yet, as in the case of Virginia's economy circumstances worked against the Puritan religious blueprint. Although the first generation may have been committed to Winthrop's vision of an orthodox "city on a hill," those who came later were motivated by more worldly concerns. With the economic growth and physical expansion of the New England colonies, church membership declined in many towns.

The presence of so much available land and the inability of the Native Americans to prevent European settlement made it difficult to enforce orthodoxy. Dissenters who did not wish to be martyrs could move away and form a separate community, as did Roger Williams and his followers in what was to become Rhode Island. By the end of the seventeenth century, some Puritan ministers were already preaching religious toleration. Whatever the original intent may have been, the openness of the continent eroded the concept of "one society, one faith." Religious freedom came to America not by design, but by circumstance.

If in Europe the possession of land was still the key to prestige and power, its abundance and fertility in America promised these to nearly every citizen. To a European visitor, the lines between the social classes, while always visible, were nonetheless blurred. Children and grandchildren of the servant class often acquired wealth and standing in English North America with an ease unknown elsewhere. The status of women, while remaining legally and politically subordinate to men throughout the colonial period and beyond, nonetheless improved. In the southern colonies, where fewer women emigrated, women took advantage of their scarcity to bargain for their rights. Wealthy widows, inheriting the lands of their late husbands could and did enter the business community and become established figures. Among the settlers at large, the descendents of Europeans in North America ate better, grew taller, married earlier, had larger families, and lived longer than their cousins on the other side of the ocean.

Can we thus conclude that Frederick Jackson Turner was right in his "frontier thesis"? Was it the frontier that liberated men and women from the yoke of Old World orthodoxy and feudalism? Did democracy really come out of the American forest? Three considerations should caution us before we accept Turner's argument completely.

First, the erosion of Old World practices and institutions took place over the opposition of a good portion of the colonial community, who regarded it as a sign of decay, not progress. There is something both quaint and pathetic in the attempts by the authorities in Virginia to limit horseracing to "men of the better sort," or the laws enacted in Massachusetts against ordinary' men and women wearing fine clothes that implied a higher social status. But these regulations, and dozens of others like them, reflected a deep-seated class consciousness that most citizens shared well into the eighteenth century. Second, the opportunities offered by the frontier and the abundance of cheap land did not always result in the freeing of the human spirit. Thousands of African slaves could attest to that. And finally, the long survival of Catholic orthodoxy in French Quebec and aristocratic dominance in Latin America suggest that the frontier did not have the same effect everywhere. The "cultural baggage" of settler communities has on occasion proved as important as the environment in which they sought to fashion new societies.

By the eighteenth century, then, American society was a distant outpost of the growing British Empire that showed signs of both uniqueness and conformity to European norms. Like Britain, it was a rural, agricultural society. There is also evidence that the social mobility often found in seventeenth-century America was diminishing. Most of the good land east of the Appalachians was occupied. By 1750, America had its own elite, recognizable by the powdered wigs and knee buckles worn by its members in imitation of the latest styles in London and Paris. The governing bodies in each of the colonies showed the same family names recurring from generation to generation. For some historians this was evidence of an emerging American "aristocracy." They point to the laws requiring landownership to vote, and even larger amounts to hold office, as proof that early America was only a reflection of the Europe from which its citizens emigrated.

Perhaps. But land was still cheap by European standards and more readily accessible to those who wished to enter public life. That certain families had emerged as a social elite was true enough but they held their position not by title but by virtue of their wealth and long-term residency. Moreover, they were always making room for newcomers.

Eighteenth-century America has been called a "deferential" society: one in which political and social leadership was held by an elite, not as a result of legal titles or feudal privilege, but through custom and tradition. Most eighteenth-century Americans assumed that those who had the education, the leisure, and the experience that came with wealth made good leaders. While the electorate may have been large, real power and responsibility gravitated to a relatively small number of people. Thomas Jefferson, who was one of them, would later refer to the elite as a "natural" aristocracy. The deferential society of eighteenth-century America was thus neither wholly traditional nor wholly modern. Its flexibility made it unlike anything in Europe at that time, but its class structure prevented it from being democratic in any twentieth-century sense. This was the society that produced the so-called Founding Fathers, who defined much of the political system under which Americans have lived for more than two hundred years.

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