The Significance of the Frontier in American History (1893)
Frederick Jackson Turner
Excerpted from The American Studies Hypertexts
Project
at the University of Virginia
Note that paragraph numbers refer only to this excerpt.
[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 can not,
therefore, any longer have a place in the census reports." This brief official
statement marks the closing of a great historic movement. Up to our own day
American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of
the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession,
and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.
[2]Behind institutions, behind constitutional forms and modifications, lie
the vital forces that call these organs into life and shape them to meet
changing conditions. The peculiarity of American institutions is, the fact that
they have been compelled to adapt themselves to the changes of an expanding
people--to the changes involved in crossing a continent, in winning a
wilderness, and in developing at each area of this progress out of the primitive
economic and political conditions of the frontier into the complexity of city
life. Said Calhoun in 1817, "We are great, and rapidly--I was about to say
fearfully--growing!" So saying, he touched the distinguishing feature of American life. All peoples show development; the germ theory of politics has been sufficiently emphasized. In the case of most nations, however, the development has occurred in a limited area; and if the nation has expanded, it has met other growing peoples whom it has conquered. But in the case of the United States we have a different phenomenon. Limiting our attention to the Atlantic coast, we have the familiar phenomenon of the evolution of institutions in a limited area, such as the rise
of representative government; into complex organs; the progress from primitive
industrial society, without division of labor, up to manufacturing civilization.
But we have in addition to this a recurrence of the process of evolution in each
western area reached in the process of expansion. Thus American development has
exhibited not merely advance along a single line, but a return to primitive
conditions on a continually advancing frontier line, and a new development for
that area. American social development has been continually beginning over again
on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this
expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the
simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American
character. The true point of view in the history of this nation is not the
Atlantic coast, it is the Great West. Even the slavery struggle, which is made
so exclusive an object of attention by writers like Professor von Holst,
occupies its important place in American history because of its relation to
westward expansion.
* * *
[2]In the settlement of America we have to observe how European life entered the continent, and how America modified and developed that life and reacted on Europe. Our early history is the study of European germs developing in an American environment. Too exclusive attention has been paid by institutional
students to the Germanic origins, too little to the American factors. The
frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization. The wilderness
masters the colonist. It finds him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes
of travel, and thought. It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the
birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the
hunting shirt and the moccasin. It puts him in the log cabin of the Cherokee and
Iroquois and runs an Indian palisade around him. Before long he has gone to
planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick, he shouts the war cry and
takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion. In short, at the frontier the
environment is at first too strong for the man. He must accept the conditions
which it furnishes, or perish, and so he fits himself into the Indian clearings
and follows the Indian trails. Little by little he transforms the wilderness, . . .
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. . .
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.
* * *
[3]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." . . . 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 emigrants; and, . . .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 emigrants 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, school-houses, court-houses, 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 rise in property,
push farther into the interior and become, himself, a man of capital and
enterprise in turn. The small village rises to a spacious town or city; . . .
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 traveled 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 50 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 backwoods life and manners.
* * *
[4] . . .we may next inquire what were the influences on the East and on the Old World . . .
* * *
[5]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. . . . In the crucible of
the frontier the immigrants were Americanized, 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.
* * *
[6]The public domain has been a force of profound importance in the
nationalization and development of the government. The effects of the struggle
of the landed and the 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, inasmuch 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."
* * *
[7]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 crossfertilization
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. . . .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.
[8]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. . . . Prof.
Osgood, in an able 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 was sometimes confused with absence of all effective
government. The same conditions aid in explaining the difficulty of instituting
a strong government in the period of the confederacy. The frontier individualism
has from the beginning promoted democracy.
* * *
[9]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 . . . .
[10]The East has always feared the result of an unregulated advance of the
frontier, and has tried to check and guide it.
* * *
[11]Washington desired to settle a State at a time in the Northwest;
Jefferson would reserve form 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. . . .
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.
[12]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. Lyman Beecher declared: "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. . . . Let no man at the East quiet himself and dream of liberty, whatever may become of the West. . . . Her destiny is
our destiny."
* * *
[1]From the conditions of frontier life came intellectual traits of profound
importance. The works of travelers along each frontier from colonial days onward
describe certain common traits, and these traits have, while softening down,
still persisted as survivals in the place of their origin, even when a higher
social organization succeeded. The result is that to the frontier the American
intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength
combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of
mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking
in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous
energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and
withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom-these are traits of
the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the
frontier. Since the days when the fleet of Columbus sailed into the waters of
the New World, America has been another name for opportunity, and the people of
the United States have taken their tone from the incessant expansion which has
not only been open but has even been forced upon them. He would be a rash
prophet who should assert that the expansive character of American life has now
entirely ceased. Movement has been its dominant fact, and, unless this training
has no effect upon a people, the American energy will continually demand a wider
field for its exercise. But never again will such gifts of free land offer
themselves. . . . 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.