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The Frontier in American History

by Frederick Jackson Turner · English · Gutenberg #22994 · 737,451 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Frontier in American History

Author: Frederick Jackson Turner


        
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THE FRONTIER IN AMERICAN HISTORY

by

FREDERICK JACKSON TURNER







[Illustration]


New York
Henry Holt and Company
1921

Copyright, 1920
by
Frederick J. Turner


TO
CAROLINE M. TURNER
MY WIFE




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 free land. 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 free lands 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 even
reacted upon the Old World 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,
M. Adet, reported to his government that Jefferson could not be relied
on to be devoted to French interests, and he added: "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." 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.




CONTENTS


CHAPTER                                                       PAGE

   I THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE FRONTIER IN AMERICAN HISTORY        1

  II THE FIRST OFFICIAL FRONTIER OF THE MASSACHUSETTS BAY       39

 III THE OLD WEST                                               67

  IV THE MIDDLE WEST                                           126

   V THE OHIO VALLEY IN AMERICAN HISTORY                       157

  VI THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY IN AMERICAN
     HISTORY                                                   177

 VII THE PROBLEM OF THE WEST                                   205

VIII DOMINANT FORCES IN WESTERN LIFE                           222

  IX CONTRIBUTIONS OF THE WEST TO AMERICAN DEMOCRACY           243

   X PIONEER IDEALS AND THE STATE UNIVERSITY                   269

  XI THE WEST AND AMERICAN IDEALS                              290

 XII SOCIAL FORCES IN AMERICAN HISTORY                         311

XIII MIDDLE WESTERN PIONEER DEMOCRACY                          335

     INDEX                                                     361




I

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE FRONTIER IN AMERICAN HISTORY[1:1]


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.

Behind institutions, behind constitutional forms and modifications, lie
the vital forces that call these organs into life and shape them to meet
changing conditions. The peculiarity of American institutions is, the
fact that they have been compelled to adapt themselves to the changes of
an expanding people--to the changes involved in crossing a continent, in
winning a wilderness, and in developing at each area of this progress
out of the primitive economic and political conditions of the frontier
into the complexity of city life. Said Calhoun in 1817, "We are great,
and rapidly--I was about to say fearfully--growing!"[2:1] 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; 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 modified and developed that life
and reacted on Europe. Our early history is the study of European germs
developing in an American environment. Too exclusive attention has been
paid by institutional students to the Germanic origins, too little to
the American factors. The frontier is the line of most rapid and
effective Americanization. The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds
him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and
thought. It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch
canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the
hunting shirt and the moccasin. It puts him in the log cabin of the
Cherokee and Iroquois and runs an Indian palisade around him. Before
long he has gone to planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick;
he shouts the war cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion. In
short, at the frontier the environment is at first too strong for the
man. He must accept the conditions which it furnishes, or perish, and so
he fits himself into the Indian clearings and follows the Indian trails.
Little by little he transforms the wilderness, but the outcome is not
the old Europe, not simply the development of Germanic germs, any more
than the first phenomenon was a case of reversion to the Germanic mark.
The fact is, that here is a new product that is American. At first, the
frontier was the Atlantic coast. It was the frontier of Europe in a very
real sense. Moving westward, the frontier became more and more American.
As successive terminal moraines result from successive glaciations, so
each frontier leaves its traces behind it, and when it becomes a settled
area the region still partakes of the frontier characteristics. Thus the
advance of the frontier has meant a steady movement away from the
influence of Europe, a steady growth of independence on American lines.
And to study this advance, the men who grew up under these conditions,
and the political, economic, and social results of it, is to study the
really American part of our history.

In the course of the seventeenth century the frontier was advanced up
the Atlantic river courses, just beyond the "fall line," and the
tidewater region became the settled area. In the first half of the
eighteenth century another advance occurred. Traders followed the
Delaware and Shawnese Indians to the Ohio as early as the end of the
first quarter of the century.[5:1] Gov. 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.[5:2] The Germans in New York
pushed the frontier of settlement up the Mohawk to German Flats.[5:3] In
Pennsylvania the town of Bedford indicates the line of settlement.
Settlements soon began on the New River, or the Great Kanawha, and on
the sources of the Yadkin and French Broad.[5:4] The King attempted to
arrest the advance by his proclamation of 1763,[5:5] 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
Alleghanies into Kentucky and Tennessee, and the upper waters of the
Ohio were settled.[5:6] 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 and eastern Georgia.[6:1] 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[6:2] the settled area included Ohio, southern Indiana and
Illinois, southeastern Missouri, and about one-half of Louisiana. This
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 Astor's American Fur Company
operated in the Indian trade,[6:3] 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.[7:1]

The rising steam navigation[7:2] on western waters, the opening of the
Erie Canal, and the westward extension of cotton[7:3] 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 which 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."[7:4]

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.[8:1] Minnesota and Wisconsin still exhibited
frontier conditions,[8:2] 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.[8:3]
As the frontier had leaped over the Alleghanies, so now it skipped the
Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains; and in the same way that the
advance of the frontiersmen beyond the Alleghanies 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 census for 1890 reports, as previously
stated, that the settlements of the West lie so scattered over the
region that there 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 "fall line;" the Alleghany Mountains; the Mississippi; the
Missouri where its direction approximates north and south; the line of
the arid lands, approximately the ninety-ninth meridian; and the Rocky
Mountains. The fall line marked the frontier of the seventeenth century;
the Alleghanies that of the eighteenth; the Mississippi that of the
first quarter of the nineteenth; the Missouri that of the middle of this
century (omitting 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 and 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.[10:1] 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,[10:2]
and how our Indian policy has been a series of experimentations on
successive frontiers. Each tier of new States has found in the older
ones material for its constitutions.[10:3] Each frontier has made
similar contributions to American character, as will be discussed
farther on.

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 historian's labors to mark these various
frontiers and in detail compare one with another. Not only would there
result a more adequate conception of American development and
characteristics, but invaluable additions would be made to the history
of society.

Loria,[11:1] 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.[11:2] This page is familiar to the student of census statistics,
but how little of it has been used by our historians. Particularly in
eastern States this page is a palimpsest. What is now a manufacturing
State was in an earlier decade an area of intensive farming. Earlier yet
it had been a wheat area, 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?[12:1]

The Atlantic frontier was compounded of fisherman, fur-trader, miner,
cattle-raiser, and farmer. Excepting the fisherman, 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 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 trader's frontier, the rancher's frontier, or the
miner's frontier, and the farmer's frontier. When the mines and the cow
pens were still near the fall line the traders' pack trains were
tinkling across the Alleghanies, and the French on the Great Lakes were
fortifying their posts, alarmed by the British trader's 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 trader's frontier? The trade
was coeval with American discovery. The Norsemen, Vespuccius, Verrazani,
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 plainer 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 Platte, the lines of
western advance, were ascended by traders. They found the passes in the
Rocky Mountains and guided Lewis and Clark,[13:1] 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 fire-arms--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 La Salle,
"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 fissure 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
Duquesne 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, are 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 of 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.[14:1] 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 an 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 growing
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 to-day 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.[15:1]

The effect of the Indian frontier as a consolidating agent in our
history is important. From the close of the seventeenth century various
intercolonial congresses have been called to treat with Indians and
establish common measures of defense. Particularism was strongest in
colonies with no Indian frontier. This frontier stretched along the
western border like a cord 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 the
unifying tendencies of the Revolutionary period were facilitated by the
previous cooperation in the regulation of the frontier. In this
connection may be mentioned the importance of the frontier, from that
day to this, as a military training school, keeping alive the power of
resistance to aggression, and developing the stalwart and rugged
qualities of the frontiersman.

It would not be possible in the limits of this paper to trace the other
frontiers across the continent. Travelers of the eighteenth century
found the "cowpens" among the canebrakes and peavine pastures of the
South, and the "cow drivers" took their droves to Charleston,
Philadelphia, and New York.[16:1] 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.[16:2] The ranges of the Great Plains, with ranch and cowboy and
nomadic life, are things of yesterday and of to-day. The experience of
the Carolina cowpens guided the ranchers of Texas. One element favoring
the rapid extension of the rancher'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 raiser
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 pushed 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 post, 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.[16:3] In this connection mention 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 governmental expeditions from the days of Lewis and
Clark.[17:1] Each expedition was an epitome of the previous factors in
western advance.

In an interesting monograph, Victor Hehn[17:2] 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 Spangenburg says of a colony for which he was seeking lands
in North Carolina, "They will require salt & other necessaries which
they can neither manufacture nor raise. Either they must go to
Charleston, which is 300 miles distant . . . Or else they must go to
Boling's Point in V{a} on a branch of the James & 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."[17:3] This may
serve as a typical illustration. An annual pilgrimage to the coast for
salt thus became essential. Taking flocks or furs and ginseng root, the
early settlers sent their pack trains after seeding time each year to
the coast.[17:4] 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 Kanawha, 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. Though
Webster could declare that there were no Alleghanies in his politics,
yet in politics in general they were a very solid factor.

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 backwoodsman, 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 wont 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. Thence he passed to the frontier of Missouri, where his
settlement was long a landmark 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 are said to have been the first to camp on the
present site of Denver. His grandson, Col. 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.[19:1] Thus
this family epitomizes the backwoodsman'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 emigrants; 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 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; substantial edifices
     of brick, extensive fields, orchards, gardens, colleges, and
     churches are seen. Broadcloths, silks, leghorns, crapes, and
     all the refinements, luxuries, elegancies, frivolities, and
     fashions are in vogue. Thus wave after wave is rolling
     westward; the real Eldorado is still farther 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 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.[21:1]

Omitting those of the pioneer farmers who move from the love of
adventure, the advance of the more steady farmer is easy to understand.
Obviously the immigrant was attracted by the cheap lands 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 dear.
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 counties 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 to 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 onward.

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 colonial 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, settle
themselves where land is to be taken up and that will produce the
necessarys of life with little labour."[22:1] Very generally these
redemptioners were of non-English stock. 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. Burke and other
writers in the middle of the eighteenth century believed that
Pennsylvania[23:1] 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 colonization.[23:2] 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 eighteenth 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,
hams, bacon, and other things of their produce, all which, except beer,
our new townships begin to supply us with, which are settled with very
industrious and thriving Germans. This no doubt diminishes the number of
shipping and the appearance of our trade, but it is far from being a
detriment to us."[23:3]

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 consumer's 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 is perceived when we realize 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 improvement 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.[25:1] 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 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.[25:2] 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."

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 emigrants 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: "My own system of administration, which was to make
the national domain the inexhaustible fund for progressive and unceasing
internal improvement, has failed." The reason is obvious; a system of
administration was not what the West demanded; it wanted land. Adams
states the situation as follows: "The slaveholders of the South have
bought the cooperation of the western country by 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." 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.[26:1]

"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." 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: "I consider the preemption law merely declaratory of
the custom or common law of the settlers."

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 tide-water 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 tide-water part of the South represented typical Englishmen,
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 nonsectional, 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, tarrying in New York or Pennsylvania
on his westward march, lost the acuteness of his sectionalism on the
way.[28:1]

The spread of cotton culture into the interior of the South finally
broke down the contrast between the "tide-water" 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 1829-30, called to revise
the constitution, Mr. Leigh, of Chesterfield, one of the tide-water
counties, declared:

     One of the main causes of discontent which led to this
     convention, that which had the strongest influence in
     overcoming our veneration for the work of our fathers, which
     taught us to contemn the sentiments of Henry and Mason and
     Pendleton, which weaned us from our reverence for the
     constituted authorities of the State, was an overweening
     passion for internal improvement. I say this with perfect
     knowledge, for it has been avowed to me by gentlemen from the
     West over and over again. And let me tell the gentleman from
     Albemarle (Mr. Gordon) that it has been another principal
     object of those who set this ball of revolution in motion, to
     overturn the doctrine of State rights, of which Virginia has
     been the very pillar, and to remove the barrier she has
     interposed to the interference of the Federal Government in
     that same work of internal improvement, by so reorganizing the
     legislature that Virginia, too, may be hitched to the Federal
     car.

It was this nationalizing tendency of the West that transformed the
democracy of Jefferson into the national republicanism of Monroe and the
democracy of Andrew Jackson. The West of the War of 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.[29:1] 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: "I believe this Government
can not endure permanently half slave and half free. It will become all
of one thing or all of the other." 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 anti-social. It produces antipathy to control, and
particularly to any direct control. The tax-gatherer is viewed as a
representative of oppression. Prof. Osgood, in an able article,[30:1]
has pointed out that the frontier conditions prevalent in the colonies
are important factors in the explanation of the American Revolution,
where individual liberty was sometimes confused with absence of all
effective government. The same conditions aid in explaining the
difficulty of instituting a strong government in the period of the
confederacy. The frontier individualism has from the beginning promoted
democracy.

The frontier States that came into the Union in the first quarter of a
century of its existence came in with democratic suffrage provisions,
and had reactive effects of the highest importance upon the older States
whose peoples were being attracted there. An extension of the franchise
became essential. It was _western_ New York that forced an extension of
suffrage in the constitutional convention of that State in 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.[31:1] 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:

     But, sir, it is not the increase of population in the West
     which this gentleman ought to fear. It is the energy which the
     mountain breeze and western habits impart to those emigrants.
     They are regenerated, politically I mean, sir. They soon
     become _working politicians_; and the difference, sir, between
     a _talking_ and a _working_ politician is immense. The Old
     Dominion has long been celebrated for producing great orators;
     the ablest metaphysicians in policy; men that can split hairs
     in all abstruse questions of political economy. But at home,
     or when they return from Congress, they have negroes to fan
     them asleep. But a Pennsylvania, a New York, an Ohio, or a
     western Virginia statesman, though far inferior in logic,
     metaphysics, and rhetoric to an old Virginia statesman, has
     this advantage, that when he returns home he takes off his
     coat and takes hold of the plow. This gives him bone and
     muscle, sir, and preserves his republican principles pure and
     uncontaminated.

So long as free land exists, the opportunity for a competency exists,
and economic power secures political power. But the democracy born of
free land, strong in selfishness and individualism, intolerant of
administrative experience and education, and pressing individual liberty
beyond its proper bounds, has its dangers as well as its benefits.
Individualism in America has allowed a laxity in regard to governmental
affairs which has rendered possible the spoils system and all the
manifest evils that follow from the lack of a highly developed civic
spirit. In this connection may be noted also the influence of frontier
conditions in permitting lax business honor, inflated paper currency and
wild-cat banking. The colonial and revolutionary frontier was the region
whence emanated many of the worst forms of an evil currency.[32:1] The
West in the War of 1812 repeated the phenomenon on the frontier of that
day, while the speculation and wild-cat 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 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.[32:2]

The East has always feared the result of an unregulated advance of the
frontier, and has tried to check and guide it. The English authorities
would have checked settlement at the headwaters of the Atlantic
tributaries and allowed the "savages to enjoy their deserts in quiet
lest the peltry trade should decrease." This called out Burke's splendid
protest:

     If you stopped your grants, what would be the consequence? The
     people would occupy without grants. They have already so
     occupied in many places. You can not station garrisons in
     every part of these deserts. If you drive the people from one
     place, they will carry on their annual tillage and remove with
     their flocks and herds to another. Many of the people in the
     back settlements are already little attached to particular
     situations. Already they have topped the Appalachian
     Mountains. From thence they behold before them an immense
     plain, one vast, rich, level meadow; a square of five hundred
     miles. Over this they would wander without a possibility of
     restraint; they would change their manners with their habits
     of life; would soon forget a government by which they were
     disowned; would become hordes of English Tartars; and, pouring
     down upon your unfortified frontiers a fierce and irresistible
     cavalry, become masters of your governors and your
     counselers, your collectors and comptrollers, and of all the
     slaves that adhered to them. 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 lair of wild beasts that earth which
     God, by an express charter, has given to the children of men.

But the English Government was not alone in its desire to limit the
advance of the frontier and guide its destinies. Tidewater
Virginia[34:1] and South Carolina[34:2] gerrymandered those colonies to
insure the dominance of the coast in their legislatures. Washington
desired to settle a State at a time in the Northwest; Jefferson would
reserve from settlement the territory of his Louisiana Purchase north of
the thirty-second parallel, in order to offer it to the Indians in
exchange for their settlements east of the Mississippi. "When we shall
be full on this side," he writes, "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." 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
1824, Smyth, of Virginia, would draw an unchangeable line for the limits
of the United States at the outer limit of two tiers of States beyond
the Mississippi, complaining that the seaboard States were being drained
of the flower of their population by the bringing of too much land into
market. 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 "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."[35:1] 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. 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. And so various are the opinions and
habits, and so recent and imperfect is the acquaintance, and so sparse
are the settlements of the West, that no homogeneous public sentiment
can be formed to legislate immediately into being the requisite
institutions. And yet they are all needed immediately in their utmost
perfection and power. 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. It must
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."[36:1]

With the appeal to the conscience of New England, he adds appeals to her
fears lest other religious sects anticipate her own. The New England
preacher and school-teacher left their mark on the West. The dread of
Western emancipation from New England's political and economic control
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: "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 can not forget that
with all these dispersions into remote and still remoter corners of the
land the supply of the means of grace is becoming relatively less and
less." 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 of religious
organization in the United States. The multiplication of rival churches
in the little frontier towns had deep and lasting social effects. The
religious aspects of the frontier make a chapter in our history which
needs study.

From the conditions of frontier life came intellectual traits of
profound importance. The works of travelers along each frontier from
colonial days onward describe certain common traits, and these traits
have, while softening down, still persisted as survivals in the place of
their origin, even when a higher social organization succeeded. The
result is that to the frontier the American intellect owes its striking
characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness
and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to
find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the
artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous
energy;[37:1] that dominant individualism, working for good and for
evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with
freedom--these are traits of the frontier, or traits called out
elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier. Since the days when
the fleet of Columbus sailed into the waters of the New World, America
has been another name for opportunity, and the people of the United
States have taken their tone from the incessant expansion which has not
only been open but has even been forced upon them. He would be a rash
prophet who should assert that the expansive character of American life
has now entirely ceased. Movement has been its dominant fact, and,
unless this training has no effect upon a people, the American energy
will continually demand a wider field for its exercise. But never again
will such gifts of free land offer themselves. For a moment, at the
frontier, the bonds of custom are broken and unrestraint is triumphant.
There is not _tabula rasa_. The stubborn American environment is there
with its imperious summons to accept its conditions; the inherited ways
of doing things are also there; and yet, in spite of environment, and in
spite of custom, each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of
opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past; and
freshness, and confidence, and scorn of older society, impatience of its
restraints and its ideas, and indifference to its lessons, have
accompanied the frontier. What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks,
breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new
institutions and activities, that, and more, the ever retreating
frontier has been to the United States directly, and to the nations of
Europe more remotely. And now, four centuries from the discovery of
America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution,
the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of
American history.


FOOTNOTES:

[1:1] A paper read at the meeting of the American Historical Association
in Chicago, July 12, 1893. It first appeared in the Proceedings of the
State Historical Society of Wisconsin, December 14, 1893, with the
following note: "The foundation of this paper is my article entitled
'Problems in American History,' which appeared in _The Aegis_, a
publication of the students of the University of Wisconsin, November 4,
1892. . . . It is gratifying to find that Professor Woodrow
Wilson--whose volume on 'Division and Reunion' in the Epochs of American
History Series, has an appreciative estimate of the importance of the
West as a factor in American history--accepts some of the views set
forth in the papers above mentioned, and enhances their value by his
lucid and suggestive treatment of them in his article in _The Forum_,
December, 1893, reviewing Goldwin Smith's 'History of the United
States.'" The present text is that of the _Report of the American
Historical Association_ for 1893, 199-227. It was printed with additions
in the _Fifth Year Book of the National Herbart Society_, and in various
other publications.

[2:1] "Abridgment of Debates of Congress," v, p. 706.

[5:1] Bancroft (1860 ed.), iii, pp. 344, 345, citing Logan MSS.;
[Mitchell] "Contest in America," etc. (1752), p. 237.

[5:2] Kercheval, "History of the Valley"; Bernheim, "German Settlements
in the Carolinas"; Winsor, "Narrative and Critical History of America,"
v, p. 304; Colonial Records of North Carolina, iv, p. xx; Weston,
"Documents Connected with the History of South Carolina," p. 82; Ellis
and Evans, "History of Lancaster County, Pa.," chs. iii, xxvi.

[5:3] Parkman, "Pontiac," ii; Griffis, "Sir William Johnson," p. 6;
Simms's "Frontiersmen of New York."

[5:4] Monette, "Mississippi Valley," i, p. 311.

[5:5] Wis. Hist. Cols., xi, p. 50; Hinsdale, "Old Northwest," p. 121;
Burke, "Oration on Conciliation," Works (1872 ed.), i, p. 473.

[5:6] Roosevelt, "Winning of the West," and citations there given;
Cutler's "Life of Cutler."

[6:1] Scribner's Statistical Atlas, xxxviii, pl. 13; McMaster, "Hist. of
People of U. S.," i, pp. 4, 60, 61; Imlay and Filson, "Western Territory
of America" (London, 1793); Rochefoucault-Liancourt, "Travels Through
the United States of North America" (London, 1799); Michaux's "Journal,"
in _Proceedings American Philosophical Society_, xxvi, No. 129; Forman,
"Narrative of a Journey Down the Ohio and Mississippi in 1780-'90"
(Cincinnati, 1888); Bartram, "Travels Through North Carolina," etc.
(London, 1792); Pope, "Tour Through the Southern and Western
Territories," etc. (Richmond, 1792); Weld, "Travels Through the States
of North America" (London, 1799); Baily, "Journal of a Tour in the
Unsettled States of North America, 1796-'97" (London, 1856);
Pennsylvania Magazine of History, July, 1886; Winsor, "Narrative and
Critical History of America," vii, pp. 491, 492, citations.

[6:2] Scribner's Statistical Atlas, xxxix.

[6:3] Turner, "Character and Influence of the Indian Trade in Wisconsin"
(Johns Hopkins University Studies, Series ix), pp. 61 ff.

[7:1] Monette, "History of the Mississippi Valley," ii; Flint, "Travels
and Residence in Mississippi," Flint, "Geography and History of the
Western States," "Abridgment of Debates of Congress," vii, pp. 397, 398,
404; Holmes, "Account of the U. S."; Kingdom, "America and the British
Colonies" (London, 1820); Grund, "Americans," ii, chs. i, iii, vi
(although writing in 1836, he treats of conditions that grew out of
western advance from the era of 1820 to that time); Peck, "Guide for
Emigrants" (Boston, 1831); Darby, "Emigrants' Guide to Western and
Southwestern States and Territories"; Dana, "Geographical Sketches in
the Western Country"; Kinzie, "Waubun"; Keating, "Narrative of Long's
Expedition"; Schoolcraft, "Discovery of the Sources of the Mississippi
River," "Travels in the Central Portions of the Mississippi Valley," and
"Lead Mines of the Missouri"; Andreas, "History of Illinois," i, 86-99;
Hurlbut, "Chicago Antiquities"; McKenney, "Tour to the Lakes"; Thomas,
"Travels Through the Western Country," etc. (Auburn, N. Y., 1819).

[7:2] Darby, "Emigrants' Guide," pp. 272 ff; Benton, "Abridgment of
Debates," vii, p. 397.

[7:3] De Bow's _Review_, iv, p. 254; xvii, p. 428.

[7:4] Grund, "Americans," ii, p. 8.

[8:1] Peck, "New Guide to the West" (Cincinnati, 1848), ch. iv; Parkman,
"Oregon Trail"; Hall, "The West" (Cincinnati, 1848); Pierce, "Incidents
of Western Travel"; Murray, "Travels in North America"; Lloyd,
"Steamboat Directory" (Cincinnati, 1856); "Forty Days in a Western
Hotel" (Chicago), in _Putnam's Magazine_, December, 1894; Mackay, "The
Western World," ii, ch. ii, iii; Meeker, "Life in the West"; Bogen,
"German in America" (Boston, 1851); Olmstead, "Texas Journey"; Greeley,
"Recollections of a Busy Life"; Schouler, "History of the United
States," v, 261-267; Peyton, "Over the Alleghanies and Across the
Prairies" (London, 1870); Loughborough, "The Pacific Telegraph and
Railway" (St. Louis, 1849); Whitney, "Project for a Railroad to the
Pacific" (New York, 1849); Peyton, "Suggestions on Railroad
Communication with the Pacific, and the Trade of China and the Indian
Islands"; Benton, "Highway to the Pacific" (a speech delivered in the U.
S. Senate, December 16, 1850).

[8:2] A writer in _The Home Missionary_ (1850), p. 239, reporting
Wisconsin conditions, exclaims: "Think of this, people of the
enlightened East. What an example, to come from the very frontier of
civilization!" But one of the missionaries writes: "In a few years
Wisconsin will no longer be considered as the West, or as an outpost of
civilization, any more than Western New York, or the Western Reserve."

[8:3] Bancroft (H. H.), "History of California," "History of Oregon,"
and "Popular Tribunals"; Shinn, "Mining Camps."

[10:1] See the suggestive paper by Prof. Jesse Macy, "The Institutional
Beginnings of a Western State."

[10:2] Shinn, "Mining Camps."

[10:3] Compare Thorpe, in _Annals American Academy of Political and
Social Science_, September, 1891; Bryce, "American Commonwealth" (1888),
ii, p. 689.

[11:1] Loria, Analisi della Proprieta Capitalista, ii, p. 15.

[11:2] Compare "Observations on the North American Land Company,"
London, 1796, pp. xv, 144; Logan, "History of Upper South Carolina," i,
pp. 149-151; Turner, "Character and Influence of Indian Trade in
Wisconsin," p. 18; Peck, "New Guide for Emigrants" (Boston, 1837), ch.
iv; "Compendium Eleventh Census," i, p. xl.

[12:1] See _post_, for illustrations of the political accompaniments of
changed industrial conditions.

[13:1] But Lewis and Clark were the first to explore the route from the
Missouri to the Columbia.

[14:1] "Narrative and Critical History of America," viii, p. 10; Sparks'
"Washington Works," ix, pp. 303, 327; Logan, "History of Upper South
Carolina," i; McDonald, "Life of Kenton," p. 72; Cong. Record, xxiii, p.
57.

[15:1] On the effect of the fur trade in opening the routes of
migration, see the author's "Character and Influence of the Indian Trade
in Wisconsin."

[16:1] Lodge, "English Colonies," p. 152 and citations; Logan, "Hist. of
Upper South Carolina," i, p. 151.

[16:2] Flint, "Recollections," p. 9.

[16:3] See Monette, "Mississippi Valley," i, p. 344.

[17:1] Coues', "Lewis and Clark's Expedition," i, pp. 2, 253-259;
Benton, in Cong. Record, xxiii, p. 57.

[17:2] Hehn, _Das Salz_ (Berlin, 1873).

[17:3] Col. Records of N. C., v, p. 3.

[17:4] Findley, "History of the Insurrection in the Four Western
Counties of Pennsylvania in the Year 1794" (Philadelphia, 1796), p. 35.

[19:1] Hale, "Daniel Boone" (pamphlet).

[21:1] Compare Baily, "Tour in the Unsettled Parts of North America"
(London, 1856), pp. 217-219, where a similar analysis is made for 1796.
See also Collot, "Journey in North America" (Paris, 1826), p. 109;
"Observations on the North American Land Company" (London, 1796), pp.
xv, 144; Logan, "History of Upper South Carolina."

[22:1] "Spotswood Papers," in Collections of Virginia Historical
Society, i, ii.

[23:1] [Burke], "European Settlements" (1765 ed.), ii, p. 200.

[23:2] Everest, in "Wisconsin Historical Collections," xii, pp. 7 ff.

[23:3] Weston, "Documents connected with History of South Carolina," p.
61.

[25:1] See, for example, the speech of Clay, in the House of
Representatives, January 30, 1824.

[25:2] See the admirable monograph by Prof. H. B. Adams, "Maryland's
Influence on the Land Cessions"; and also President Welling, in Papers
American Historical Association, iii, p. 411.

[26:1] Adams' Memoirs, ix, pp. 247, 248.

[28:1] Author's article in _The Aegis_ (Madison, Wis.), November 4, 1892.

[29:1] Compare Roosevelt, "Thomas Benton," ch. i.

[30:1] _Political Science Quarterly_, ii, p. 457. Compare Sumner,
"Alexander Hamilton," chs. ii-vii.

[31:1] Compare Wilson, "Division and Reunion," pp. 15, 24.

[32:1] On the relation of frontier conditions to Revolutionary taxation,
see Sumner, Alexander Hamilton, ch. iii.

[32:2] I have refrained from dwelling on the lawless characteristics of
the frontier, because they are sufficiently well known. The gambler and
desperado, the regulators of the Carolinas and the vigilantes of
California, are types of that line of scum that the waves of advancing
civilization bore before them, and of the growth of spontaneous organs
of authority where legal authority was absent. Compare Barrows, "United
States of Yesterday and To-morrow"; Shinn, "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.

[34:1] Debates in the Constitutional Convention, 1829-1830.

[34:2] [McCrady] Eminent and Representative Men of the Carolinas, i, p.
43; Calhoun's Works, i, pp. 401-406.

[35:1] Speech in the Senate, March 1, 1825; Register of Debates, i, 721.

[36:1] Plea for the West (Cincinnati, 1835), pp. 11 ff.

[37:1] Colonial travelers agree in remarking on the phlegmatic
characteristics of the colonists. It has frequently been asked how such
a people could have developed that strained nervous energy now
characteristic of them. Compare Sumner, "Alexander Hamilton," p. 98, and
Adams, "History of the United States," i, p. 60; ix, pp. 240, 241. The
transition appears to become marked at the close of the War of 1812, a
period when interest centered upon the development of the West, and the
West was noted for restless energy. Grund, "Americans," ii, ch. i.




II

THE FIRST OFFICIAL FRONTIER OF THE MASSACHUSETTS BAY[39:1]


In the Significance of the "Frontier in American History," I took for 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 and to maintain a committee to settle garrisons on the
frontier with forty soldiers to each frontier town as a main
guard.[39:2] In the two hundred 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 townes
& but thinly peopled," were forbidden to remove without authority;[40:1]
in 1669, certain towns had been the subject of legislation as "frontier
towns;"[40:2] and in the period of King Philip's War there were various
enactments regarding frontier towns.[40:3] In the session of 1675-6 it
had been proposed to build a fence of stockades or stone eight feet high
from the Charles "where it is navigable" to the Concord at Billerica and
thence to the Merrimac and down the river to the Bay, "by which meanes
that whole tract will [be] environed, for the security & safty (vnder
God) of the people, their houses, goods & cattel; from the rage & fury
of the enimy."[40:4] 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 defense which had been illustrated by the impossible
equipment of the heavily armored soldier of the early Puritan regime
whose corslets and head pieces, pikes, matchlocks, fourquettes and
bandoleers, went out of use about the period of King Philip's War. The
fifty-seven 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 era the frontier fighter adapted himself to a
more open order, and lighter equipment suggested by the Indian warrior's
practice.[40:5]

The settler on the outskirts of Puritan civilization 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 defense were coinciding. As population advanced
into the wilderness and thus successively brought new exposed areas
between the settlements on the one side and 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 un-won 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 re-statement 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
"co-habitations," at the "heads," that is the first falls, the vicinity
of Richmond, Petersburg, etc., of her rivers.[41:1]

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 New
England town may have furnished a model for Virginia's efforts to create
frontier settlements by legislation.

An act of March 12, 1694-5, 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.[42:1] These eleven frontier towns included Wells, York,
and Kittery on the eastern frontier, and Amesbury, Haverhill, Dunstable,
Chelmsford, Groton, Lancaster, Marlborough,[42:2] and Deerfield. In
March, 1699-1700, the law was reenacted with the addition of Brookfield,
Mendon, and Woodstock, together with seven others, Salisbury,
Andover,[42:3] Billerica, Hatfield, Hadley, Westfield, and Northampton,
which, "tho' they be not frontiers as those towns first named, yet lye
more open than many others to an attack of an Enemy."[42:4]

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, Symsbury, Waterbury, Danbury, Colchester, Windham,
Mansfield, and Plainfield.

Thus about the close of the seventeenth and the beginning of the
eighteenth century there was an officially designated frontier line for
New England. The line passing through these enumerated towns represents:
(1) the outskirts of settlement along the eastern coast and up the
Merrimac and its tributaries,--a region threatened from the Indian
country by way of the Winnepesaukee Lake; (2) the end of the ribbon of
settlement up the Connecticut Valley, menaced by the Canadian Indians by
way of the Lake Champlain and Winooski River route to the Connecticut;
(3) boundary towns which marked the edges of that inferior agricultural
region, where the hard crystalline rocks furnished a later foundation
for Shays' Rebellion, opposition to the adoption of the Federal
Constitution, and the abandoned farm; and (4) the isolated intervale 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 and Lake George.[43:1] 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,[44:1] and the cattle industry was most
important to the early farmers.[44:2] 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 captivities 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 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,[44:3] and the half-breed children of captive Puritan
mothers, tell 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 1703-4, for example, the General Court of Massachusetts ordered five
hundred pairs of snowshoes and an equal number of moccasins for use in
specified counties "lying Frontier next to the Wilderness."[45:1]
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 co[=m]ander, range the woods to
indevour the discovery of an approaching enemy, and in especiall manner
from Westfield to Ousatunnuck.[45:2] . . . And for the incouragement of
our forces gone or going against the enemy, this Court will allow out of
the publick treasurie the su[=m]e of five pounds for every mans scalp of
the enemy killed in this Colonie."[45:3] 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.[45:4] One of the
most striking phases of frontier adjustment, was the proposal of the
Rev. 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."[45:5] 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.[46:1]

Thus we come to familiar ground: the Massachusetts frontiersman like his
western successor hated the Indians; the "tawney serpents," of Cotton
Mather'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 Pigwacket, who

                        many Indians slew,
     And some of them he scalp'd when bullets round him flew.[46:2]

Within the area bounded by the frontier line, were the 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,[46:3] 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 Alleghanies, as well as in the more obvious case
of the backwoodsmen of Kentucky and Tennessee, the frontier towns were
too isolated from the main settled regions to allow much military
protection 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
seventeenth century Virginia, great activity in protecting the frontier
was evinced 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.[47:1]

These were prototypes of the regular army post, and of rangers,
dragoons, cavalry and mounted police who have carried the remoter
military frontier forward. It is possible to trace this military cordon
from New England to the Carolinas early in the eighteenth 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 to-day it lies at the edge of Mexico and the
Pacific Ocean.

A few examples of frontier appeals for garrison aid will help to an
understanding of the early form of the military frontier. Wells asks,
June 30, 1689:

     1 That yo{r} Hon{rs} will please to send us speedily twenty
     Eight good brisk men that may be serviceable as a guard to us
     whilest we get in our Harvest of Hay & Corn, (we being unable
     to Defend ourselves & to Do our work), & also to Persue &
     destroy the Enemy as occasion may require

     2 That these men may be compleatly furnished with Arms,
     Amunition & Provision, and that upon the Countrys account, it
     being a Generall War.[48:1]

Dunstable, "still weak and unable both to keep our Garrisons and to send
out men to get hay for our Cattle; without doeing which wee cannot
subsist," petitioned July 23, 1689, for twenty footmen for a month "to
scout about the towne while wee get our hay." Otherwise, they say, they
must be forced to leave.[48:2] Still more indicative of this temper is
the petition of Lancaster, March 11, 1675-6, to the Governor and
Council: "As God has made you father over us so you will have a father's
pity to us." They asked a guard of men and aid, without which they must
leave.[48:3] Deerfield pled in 1678 to the General Court, "unlest you
will be pleased to take us (out of your fatherlike pitty) and Cherish us
in yo{r} Bosomes we are like Suddainly to breathe out o{r} Last
Breath."[48:4]

The perils of the time, the hardships of the frontier towns and
readiness of this particular frontier to ask appropriations for losses
and wounds,[48:5] 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. Here the minister's hand is probably absent:

     1 That wharas by the all dessposing hand of god who orders all
     things in infinit wisdom it is our portion to liue In such a
     part of the land which by reson of the enemy Is becom vary
     dangras as by wofull experiants we haue falt both formarly and
     of late to our grat damidg & discoridgment and espashaly this
     last yere hauing lost so many parsons som killed som
     captauated and som remoued and allso much corn & cattell and
     horses & hay wharby wee ar gratly Impouerrished and brought
     uary low & in a uary pore capasity to subsist any longer As
     the barers her of can inform your honors

     2 And more then all this our paster mr hobard is & hath been
     for aboue a yere uncapable of desspansing the ordinances of
     god amongst us & we haue advised with th Raurant Elders of our
     nayboring churches and they aduise to hyare another minister
     and to saport mr hobard and to make our adras to your honours
     we haue but litel laft to pay our deus with being so pore and
     few In numbr ather to town or cuntrey & we being a frantere
     town & lyable to dangor there being no safty in going out nor
     coming in but for a long time we haue got our brad with the
     parel of our liues & allso broght uery low by so grat a charg
     of bilding garisons & fortefycations by ordur of athorety &
     thar is saural of our Inhabitants ramoued out of town & others
     are prouiding to remoue, axcapt somthing be don for our
     Incoridgment for we are so few & so por that we canot pay two
     ministors nathar ar we wiling to liue without any we spand so
     much time in waching and warding that we can doe but litel els
     & truly we haue liued allmost 2 yers more like soulders then
     other wise & accapt your honars can find out some bater way
     for our safty and support we cannot uphold as a town ather by
     remitting our tax or tow alow pay for building the sauarall
     forts alowed and ordred by athority or alls to alow the one
     half of our own Inhabitants to be under pay or to grant
     liberty for our remufe Into our naiburing towns to tak cer for
     oursalfs all which if your honors shall se meet to grant you
     will hereby gratly incoridg your humble pateceners to conflect
     with th many trubls we are ensadant unto.[50:1]

Forced together into houses for protection, getting in their crops at
the peril of their lives, 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 to these petitions asking favors from the government
of the colony, we might impute to these early frontiersmen a degree of
submission to authority unlike that of other frontiersmen,[51:1] and
indeed not wholly warranted by the facts. Reading carefully, we find
that, however prudently phrased, 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 position so essential to the defense of
the settled eastern country.

The spirit of military insubordination characteristic of the frontier is
evident in the accounts of these towns, such as Pynchon's in 1694,
complaining of the decay of the fortifications at Hatfield, Hadley, and
Springfield: "the people a little wilful. Inclined to doe when and how
they please or not at all."[51:2] Saltonstall writes from Haverhill
about the same time regarding his ill success in recruiting: "I will
never plead for an 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."[51:3] 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 defense, 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,[52:1] she showed a realization that the Deerfield
people, who were "in a sense in the enemy's Mouth almost," as Pynchon
wrote, constituted her own frontier[52:2] 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 1689 Massachusetts and Connecticut sent agents to
Albany to join with New York in making presents to the Indians of that
colony in order to engage their aid against the French,[52:3] they
recognized (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 honor's Colony
and of all their Majesties countries."[52:4]

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 Maine coast was of great importance,
for it imparted a western tone to the life and characteristics of the
Maine 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 that river.
The line of the towns that occupied the waters of the Merrimac, tempted
the province continually into the wilderness of New Hampshire. The
Connecticut river towns pressed steadily up that stream, along its
tributaries into the Hoosatonic 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 Conn., to Build
     a Block House above Northfield, in the most convenient Place
     on the Lands called the Equivilant Lands, & to post in it
     forty Able Men, English & Western Indians, to be employed in
     Scouting at a Good Distance up Conn. River, West River, Otter
     Creek, and sometimes Eastwardly above the Great Manadnuck, for
     the Discovery of the Enemy Coming towards anny of the frontier
     Towns.[53:1]

The "frontier Towns" were preparing to swarm. It was not long before
Fort Dummer replaced "the Block House," and the Berkshires and 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 delenda 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.[54:1]

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: were similar phenomena in evidence here? Did
"Populistic" tendencies appear in this frontier, and were there
grievances which explained these tendencies?[54:2]

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
there 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 approved
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 Egleston 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."[55:1] The
frontier, as we shall observe later, was not always disposed to see the
practice in so favorable a light.

New towns 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 unassigned
lands, or purchasing the Indian title and then asking confirmation. In
others grants were made in advance of settlement.

As early as 1636 the General Court had ordered that none go to new
plantations without leave of a majority of the magistrates.[55:2] 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 assent 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 seventeenth and
early eighteenth century seems to indicate that this happened. In the
succeeding years of the eighteenth century the grants to leading men and
the economic and political motives in the grants are increasingly
evident. This whole topic should be made the subject of special study.
What is here offered is merely suggestive of a problem.[56:1]

The frontier settlers criticized 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 Merrimac
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.[56:2] 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
Firmin, and others. Firmin'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, "whenas others have no business but range from place to
place on purpose to live upon the countrey."[56:3]

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 Honorable Artillery Company and another to
Thomas Brattle of Boston. Apparently it was settled chiefly by others
than the original grantees.[57:1] Groton voted in 1685 to sue the
"non-Residenc" to assist in paying the rate, and in 1679 the General
Court had ordered non-residents having land at Groton to pay rates for
their lands as residents did.[57:2] Lancaster (Nashaway) was granted to
proprietors including various craftsmen in iron, indicating, perhaps, an
expectation of iron works, and few of the original proprietors actually
settled in the town.[57:3] The grant of 1653-4 was made by the Court
after reciting: (1) that it had ordered in 1647 that the "ordering and
disposeing of the Plantation at Nashaway is wholly in the Courts power";
(2) "Considering that there is allredy at Nashaway about nine Families
and that severall both freemen and others intend to goe and setle there,
some whereof 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 their ceiled houses & 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 lands is much raysed by our carrying on
public work & will be nothing worth if we are forced to quit the place)
doo beare 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 . . ."[57:4] In 1684 the selectmen inform the General Court
that one half of the proprietors, two only excepted, are dwelling in
other places, "Our proprietors, abroad," say they, "object that they see
no reason why they should pay as much for thayer lands as we do for our
Land and stock, which we answer that if their be not a noff of reason
for it, we are sure there is more than enough of necessity to supply
that is wanting in reason."[58:1] This is the authentic voice of the
frontier.

Deerfield furnishes another type, inasmuch as a considerable part of its
land was first held by Dedham, to which the grant was made as a
recompense for the location of the Natick Indian reservation. Dedham
shares in the town often fell into the hands of speculators, and
Sheldon, the careful historian of Deerfield, declares that not a single
Dedham man became a permanent resident of the grant. In 1678 Deerfield
petitioned the General Court as follows:

     You may be pleased to know that the very principle & best of
     the land; the best for soile; the best for situation; as lying
     in y{e} centre & midle of the town: & as to quantity, nere
     half, belongs unto eight or 9 proprietors each and every of
     which, are never like to come to a settlement amongst us,
     which we have formerly found grievous & doe Judge for the
     future will be found intollerable if not altered. O{r}
     minister, Mr. Mather . . . & we ourselves are much discouraged
     as judging the Plantation will be spoiled if thes proprietors
     may not be begged, or will not be bought up on very easy terms
     outt of their Right . . . Butt as long as the maine of the
     plantation Lies in men's hands that can't improve it
     themselves, neither are ever like to putt such tenants on to
     it as shall be likely to advance the good of y{e} place in
     Civill or sacred Respects; he, ourselves, and all others that
     think of going to it, are much discouraged.[59:1]

Woodstock, later a Connecticut 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 "go-ers," 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 go-ers 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
eighteenth century. Leicester, for example, was confirmed by the General
Court in 1713. The twenty shares were divided among twenty-two
proprietors, including Jeremiah Dummer, 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 Sewall (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 fifty 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.[59:2]

The author of a currency tract, in 1716, entitled "Some Considerations
upon the Several Sorts of Banks," remarks that formerly, when land was
easy to be obtained, good men came over as indentured servants; but now,
he says, 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.[60:1] He
therefore advocates that townships should be laid out four or five miles
square in which grants of fifty or sixty acres could be made to
servants.[60:2] 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 the 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 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.[60:3] When in 1762
Massachusetts sold a group of townships in the Berkshires to the highest
bidders (by whole townships),[60:4] 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 seventeenth century and become a common feature
of the grants for frontier towns in the eighteenth.[61:1] 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 town
records (1653):

     And, whereas Lotts are Now Laid out for the most part Equally
     to Rich and poore, Partly to keepe the Towne from Scatering to
     farr, and partly out of Charitie and Respect to men of meaner
     estate, yet that Equallitie (which is the rule of God) may be
     observed, we Covenant and Agree, That in a second Devition and
     so through all other Devitions of Land the mater shall be
     drawne as neere to _equallitie according to mens estates_ as
     wee are able to doe, That he which hath now more then his
     estate Deserveth in home Lotts and entervale Lotts shall haue
     so much Less: and he that hath Less then his estate Deserveth
     shall haue so much more.[62:1]

This peculiar doctrine of "equality" had early in the history of the
colony created discontents. Winthrop 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 new-comers became
numerous. In an increasing degree these new-comers 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.[63:1] Jonathan Edwards, in 1751, declared that
there had been in Northampton for forty or fifty 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."[63:2] The tendency to divide up the
common lands among the proprietors in individual possession did not
become marked until the eighteenth 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 eighteenth 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 enquiry 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."[63:3]

Cotton Mather is perhaps not a typical representative of the
conservative sentiment at the close of the seventeenth century, but his
writings may 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 Neighbours,
     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,
     heretofore, 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 any more?_ We read of Balaam, in Num. 22,
     23. He was to his Damage, _driven to the_ Wall, when he would
     needs make an unlawful Salley 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) Mather assures the
pioneers that they "dwell in a Hatsarmaneth," a place of "tawney
serpents," are "inhabitants of the Valley of Achor," 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." "Sirs," he says, "a
_Church-State_ well form'd 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 dues, drunkenness, and revels 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 nineteenth 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 fur 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 re-location 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's settlement in the Old Northwest
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 Utah and in parts of the Pacific Coast. New
England's sons had become the organizers 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 Mather were sealed.[66:1]


FOOTNOTES:

[39:1] Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, April,
1914, xvii, 250-271. Reprinted with permission of the Society.

[39:2] Massachusetts Archives, xxxvi, p. 150.

[40:1] Massachusetts Colony Records, ii, p. 122.

[40:2] _Ibid._, vol. iv, pt. ii, p. 439; Massachusetts Archives, cvii,
pp. 160-161.

[40:3] See, for example, Massachusetts Colony Records, v, 79; Green,
"Groton During the Indian Wars," p. 39; L. K. Mathews, "Expansion of New
England," p. 58.

[40:4] Massachusetts Archives, lxviii, pp. 174-176.

[40:5] Osgood, "American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century," i, p.
501, and citations: cf. Publications of this Society, xii, pp. 38-39.

[41:1] Hening, "Statutes at Large," iii, p. 204: cf. 1 Massachusetts
Historical Collections, v, p. 129, for influence of the example of the
New England town. On Virginia frontier conditions see Alvord and
Bidgood, "First Explorations of the Trans-Allegheny Region," pp. 23-34,
93-95. P. A. Bruce, "Institutional History of Virginia," ii, p. 97,
discusses frontier defense in the seventeenth century. [See chapter iii,
_post_.]

[42:1] Massachusetts Archives, lxx, 240; Massachusetts Province Laws, i,
pp. 194, 293.

[42:2] In a petition (read March 3, 1692-3) of settlers "in Sundry Farms
granted in those Remote Lands Scituate and Lyeing between Sudbury,
Concord, Marlbury, Natick and Sherburne & Westerly is the Wilderness,"
the petitioners ask easement of taxes and extension into the Natick
region in order to have means to provide for the worship of God, and
say:

"Wee are not Ignorant that by reason of the present Distressed Condition
of those that dwell in these Frontier Towns, divers are meditating to
remove themselves into such places where they have not hitherto been
conserned in the present Warr and desolation thereby made, as also that
thereby they may be freed from that great burthen of public taxes
necessarily accruing thereby, Some haveing already removed themselves.
Butt knowing for our parts that wee cannot run from the hand of a
Jealous God, doe account it our duty to take such Measures as may inable
us to the performance of that duty wee owe to God, the King, & our
Familyes" (Massachusetts Archives, cxiii, p. 1).

[42:3] In a petition of 1658 Andover speaks of itself as "a remote
upland plantation" (Massachusetts Archives, cxii, p. 99).

[42:4] Massachusetts Province Laws, i, p. 402.

[43:1] Convenient maps of settlement, 1660-1700, are in E. Channing,
"History of the United States," i, pp. 510-511, ii, end; Avery, "History
of the United States and its People," ii, p. 398. A useful
contemporaneous map for conditions at the close of King Philip's War is
Hubbard's map of New England in his "Narrative" published in Boston,
1677. See also L. K. Mathews, "Expansion of New England," pp. 56-57, 70.

[44:1] Weeden, "Economic and Social History of New England," pp. 90, 95,
129-132; F. J. Turner, "Indian Trade in Wisconsin," p. 13; McIlwain,
"Wraxall's Abridgement," introduction; the town histories abound in
evidence of the significance of the early Indian traders' posts,
transition to Indian land cessions, and then to town grants.

[44:2] Weeden, _loc. cit._, pp. 64-67; M. Egleston, "New England Land
System," pp. 31-32; Sheldon, "Deerfield," i, pp. 37, 206, 267-268;
Connecticut Colonial Records, vii, p. 111, illustrations of cattle
brands in 1727.

[44:3] Hutchinson, "History" (1795), ii, p. 129, note, relates such a
case of a Groton man; see also Parkman, "Half-Century," vol. i, ch. iv,
citing Maurault, "Histoire des Abenakis," p. 377.

[45:1] Massachusetts Archives, lxxi, pp. 4, 84, 85, 87, 88.

[45:2] Hoosatonic.

[45:3] Connecticut Records, iv, pp. 463, 464.

[45:4] Massachusetts Colony Records, v, p. 72; Massachusetts Province
Laws, i, pp. 176, 211, 292, 558, 594, 600; Massachusetts Archives, lxxi,
pp. 7, 89, 102. Cf. Publications of this Society, vii, 275-278.

[45:5] Sheldon, "Deerfield," i, p. 290.

[46:1] Judd, "Hadley," p. 272; 4 Massachusetts Historical Collections,
ii, p. 235.

[46:2] Farmer and Moore, "Collections," iii, p. 64. The frontier woman
of the farther west found no more extreme representative than Hannah
Dustan of Haverhill, with her trophy of ten scalps, for which she
received a bounty of L50 (Parkman, "Frontenac," 1898, p. 407, note).

[46:3] For illustrations of resentment against those who protected the
Christian Indians, see F. W. Gookin, "Daniel Gookin," pp. 145-155.

[47:1] For example, Massachusetts Archives, lxx, p. 261; Bailey,
"Andover," p. 179; Metcalf, "Annals of Mendon," p. 63; Proceedings
Massachusetts Historical Society, xliii, pp. 504-519. Parkman,
"Frontenac" (Boston, 1898), p. 390, and "Half-Century of Conflict"
(Boston, 1898), i, p. 55, sketches the frontier defense.

[48:1] Massachusetts Archives, cvii, p. 155.

[48:2] _Ibid._, cvii, p. 230; cf. 230 a.

[48:3] Massachusetts Archives, lxviii, p. 156.

[48:4] Sheldon, "Deerfield," i, p. 189.

[48:5] Massachusetts Archives, lxxi, 46-48, 131, 134, 135 _et passim_.

[50:1] Massachusetts Archives, lxxi, p. 107: cf. Metcalf, "Mendon," p.
130; Sheldon, "Deerfield," i, p. 288. The frontier of Virginia in 1755
and 1774 showed similar conditions: see, for example, the citations to
Washington's Writings in Thwaites, "France in America," pp. 193-195; and
frontier letters in Thwaites and Kellogg, "Dunmore's War," pp. 227, 228
_et passim_. The following petition to Governor Gooch of Virginia, dated
July 30, 1742, affords a basis for comparison with a Scotch-Irish
frontier:

We your pettionours humbly sheweth that we your Honours Loly and
Dutifull Subganckes hath ventred our Lives & all that we have In
settling ye back parts of Virginia which was a veri Great Hassirt &
Dengrous, for it is the Hathins [heathens] Road to ware, which has
proved hortfull to severil of ous that were ye first settlers of these
back woods & wee your Honibill pettionors some time a goo petitioned
your Honnour for to have Commisioned men amungst ous which we your
Honnours most Duttifull subjects thought properist men & men that had
Hart and Curidg to hed us yn time of [war] & to defend your Contray &
your poor Sogbacks Intrist from ye voilince of ye Haithen--But yet agine
we Humbly persume to poot your Honnour yn mind of our Great want of them
in hopes that your Honner will Grant a Captins' Commission to John
McDowell, with follring ofishers, and your Honnours' Complyence in this
will be Great settisfiction to your most Duttifull and Humbil
pettioners--and we as in Duty bond shall Ever pray . . . (Calendar of
Virginia State Papers, i, p. 235).

[51:1] But there is a note of deference in Southern frontier petitions
to the Continental Congress--to be discounted, however, by the
remoteness of that body. See F. J. Turner, "Western State-Making in the
Revolutionary Era" (_American Historical Review_, i, pp. 70, 251). The
demand for remission of taxes is a common feature of the petitions there
quoted.

[51:2] Proceedings Massachusetts Historical Society, xliii, pp. 506 ff.

[51:3] _Ibid._, xliii, p. 518.

[52:1] Connecticut Colonial Records, iv, p. 67.

[52:2] In a petition of February 22, 1693-4, Deerfield calls itself the
"most Utmost Frontere Town in the County of West Hampshire"
(Massachusetts Archives, cxiii, p. 57 a).

[52:3] Judd, "Hadley," p. 249.

[52:4] W. D. Schuyler-Lighthall, "Glorious Enterprise," p. 16.

[53:1] Sheldon, "Deerfield," i, p. 405.

[54:1] "I want to have your warriours come and see me," wrote Allen to
the Indians of Canada in 1775, "and help me fight the King's Regular
Troops. You know they stand all close together, rank and file, and my
men fight so as Indians do, and I want your warriours to join with me
and my warriours, like brothers, and ambush the Regulars: if you will, I
will give you money, blankets, tomahawks, knives, paint, and any thing
that there is in the army, just like brothers; and I will go with you
into the woods to scout; and my men and your men will sleep together,
and eat and drink together, and fight Regulars, because they first
killed our brothers" (American Archives, 4th Series, ii, p. 714).

[54:2] Compare A. McF. Davis, "The Shays Rebellion a Political
Aftermath" (Proceedings American Antiquarian Society, xxi, pp. 58, 62,
75-79).

[55:1] "Land System of the New England Colonies," p. 30.

[55:2] Massachusetts Colony Records, i, p. 167.

[56:1] Compare Weeden, "Economic and Social History of New England," i,
pp. 270-271; Gookin, "Daniel Gookin," pp. 106-161; and the histories of
Worcester for illustrations of how the various factors noted could be
combined in a single town.

[56:2] F. Merrill, "Amesbury," pp. 5, 50.

[56:3] B. L. Mirick, "Haverhill," pp. 9, 10.

[57:1] Green, "Early Records of Groton," pp. 49, 70, 90.

[57:2] _Ibid._

[57:3] Worcester County History, i, pp. 2, 3.

[57:4] J. G. Metcalf, "Annals of Mendon," p. 85.

[58:1] P. 96. Compare the Kentucky petition of 1780 given in Roosevelt,
"Winning of the West," ii, p. 398, and the letter from that frontier
cited in Turner, "Western State-Making" (_American Historical Review_,
i, p. 262), attacking the Virginia "Nabobs," who hold absentee land
titles. "Let the _great men_," say they, "whom the land belongs to come
and defend it."

[59:1] Sheldon, "Deerfield," i, pp. 188-189.

[59:2] These facts are stated on the authority of E. Washburn,
"Leicester," pp. 5-15: compare Major Stephen Sewall to Jeremiah Dummer,
1717, quoted in Weeden, "Economic and Social History of New England,"
ii, p. 505, note 4.

[60:1] Compare the Virginia system, Bruce, "Economic History of Virginia
in the Seventeenth Century," ii, pp. 42, 43.

[60:2] For this item I am indebted to our associate, Mr. Andrew McF.
Davis: see his "Colonial Currency Reprints," i, pp. 335-349.

[60:3] Hutchinson, "History of Massachusetts" (1768), ii, pp. 331, 332,
has an instructive comment. A. C. Ford, "Colonial Precedents of Our
National Land System," p. 84; L. K. Mathews, "Expansion of New England,"
pp. 82 ff.

[60:4] J. G. Holland, "Western Massachusetts," p. 197.

[61:1] Jos. Schafer, "Origin of the System of Land Grants for
Education," pp. 25-33.

[62:1] H. D. Hurd (ed.), "History of Worcester County," i, p. 6. The
italics are mine.

[63:1] Egleston, "Land System of the New England Colonies," pp. 39-41.

[63:2] _Ibid._, p. 41.

[63:3] T. Dwight, "Travels" (1821), ii, pp. 459-463.

[66:1] [See F. J. Turner, "Greater New England in the Middle of the
Nineteenth Century," in American Antiquarian Society "Proceedings,"
1920.]




III

THE OLD WEST[67:1]


It is not the oldest West with which this chapter deals. The oldest West
was the Atlantic coast. Roughly speaking, it took a century of Indian
fighting and forest felling for the colonial settlements to expand into
the interior to a distance of about a hundred miles from the coast.
Indeed, some stretches were hardly touched in that period. This conquest
of the nearest wilderness in the course of the seventeenth century and
in the early years of the eighteenth, gave control of the maritime
section of the nation and made way for the new movement of westward
expansion which I propose to discuss.

In his "Winning of the West," Roosevelt dealt chiefly with the region
beyond the Alleghanies, and with the period of the later eighteenth
century, although he prefaced his account with an excellent chapter
describing the backwoodsmen of the Alleghanies and their social
conditions from 1769 to 1774. It is important to notice, however, that
he is concerned with a backwoods society already formed; that he ignores
the New England frontier and its part in the winning of the West, and
does not recognize that there was a West to be won between New England
and the Great Lakes. In short, he is interested in the winning of the
West beyond the Alleghanies by the southern half of the frontier folk.

There is, then, a western area intermediate between the coastal
colonial settlements of the seventeenth century and the trans-Alleghany
settlements of the latter portion of the eighteenth century. This
section I propose to isolate and discuss under the name of the Old West,
and in the period from about 1676 to 1763. It includes the back country
of New England, the Mohawk Valley, the Great Valley of Pennsylvania, the
Shenandoah Valley, and the Piedmont--that is, the interior or upland
portion of the South, lying between the Alleghanies and the head of
navigation of the Atlantic rivers marked by the "fall line."[68:1]

In this region, and in these years, are to be found the beginnings of
much that is characteristic in Western society, for the Atlantic coast
was in such close touch with Europe that its frontier experience was
soon counteracted, and it developed along other lines. It is unfortunate
that the colonial back country appealed so long to historians solely in
connection with the colonial wars, for the development of its society,
its institutions and mental attitude all need study. Its history has
been dealt with in separate fragments, by states, or towns, or in
discussions of special phases, such as German and Scotch-Irish
immigration. The Old West as a whole can be appreciated only by
obliterating the state boundaries which conceal its unity, by
correlating the special and fragmentary studies, and by filling the gaps
in the material for understanding the formation of its society. The
present paper is rather a reconnaissance than a conquest of the field, a
program for study of the Old West rather than an exposition of it.

The end of the period proposed may be placed about 1763, and the
beginning between 1676 and 1700. The termination of the period is marked
by the Peace of Paris in 1763, and the royal proclamation of that year
forbidding settlement beyond the Alleghanies. By this time the
settlement of the Old West was fairly accomplished, and new advances
were soon made into the "Western Waters" beyond the mountains and into
the interior of Vermont and New Hampshire. The isolation of the
transmontane settlements, and the special conditions and doctrines of
the Revolutionary era during which they were formed, make a natural
distinction between the period of which I am to speak and the later
extension of the West.

The beginning of the period is necessarily an indeterminate date, owing
to the different times of colonizing the coastal areas which served as
bases of operations in the westward advance. The most active movements
into the Old West occurred after 1730. But in 1676 New England, having
closed the exhausting struggle with the Indians, known as King Philip's
War, could regard her established settlements as secure, and go on to
complete her possession of the interior. This she did in the midst of
conflicts with the exterior Indian tribes which invaded her frontiers
from New York and Canada during the French and Indian wars from 1690 to
1760, and under frontier conditions different from the conditions of the
earlier Puritan colonization. In 1676, Virginia was passing through
Indian fighting--keenest along the fall line, where the frontier
lay--and also experiencing a social revolt which resulted in the defeat
of the democratic forces that sought to stay the progress of
aristocratic control in the colony.[70:1] The date marks the end of the
period when the Virginia tidewater could itself be regarded as a
frontier region, and consequently the beginning of a more special
interest in the interior.

Let us first examine the northern part of the movement into the back
country. The expansion of New England into the vacant spaces of its own
section, in the period we have chosen for discussion, resulted in the
formation of an interior society which contrasted in many ways with that
of the coast, and which has a special significance in Western history,
in that it was this interior New England people who settled the Greater
New England in central and western New York, the Wyoming Valley, the
Connecticut Reserve of Ohio, and much of the prairie areas of the Old
Northwest. It is important to realize that the Old West included
interior New England.

The situation in New England at the close of the seventeenth century is
indicated by the Massachusetts act of 1694 enumerating eleven towns,
then on the frontier and exposed to raids, none of which might be
voluntarily deserted without leave of the governor and council, on
penalty of loss of their freeholds by the landowners, or fine of other
inhabitants.[70:2]

Thus these frontier settlers were made substantially garrisons, or "mark
colonies." Crowded into the palisades of the town, and obliged in spite
of their poverty to bear the brunt of Indian attack, their hardships are
illustrated in the manly but pathetic letters of Deerfield's minister,
Mr. Williams,[70:3] in 1704. Parkman succinctly describes the general
conditions in these words:[70:4]

     The exposed frontier of New England was between two and three
     hundred miles long, and consisted of farms and hamlets loosely
     scattered through an almost impervious forest. . . . Even in
     so-called villages the houses were far apart, because, except
     on the seashore, the people lived by farming. Such as were
     able to do so fenced their dwellings with palisades, or built
     them of solid timber, with loopholes, a projecting upper story
     like a block house, and sometimes a flanker at one or more of
     the corners. In the more considerable settlements the largest
     of these fortified houses was occupied in time of danger by
     armed men and served as a place of refuge for the neighbors.

Into these places, in days of alarm, were crowded the outlying settlers,
just as was the case in later times in the Kentucky "stations."

In spite of such frontier conditions, the outlying towns continued to
multiply. Between 1720 and the middle of the century, settlement crept
up the Housatonic and its lateral valley into the Berkshires. About 1720
Litchfield was established; in 1725, Sheffield; in 1730, Great
Barrington; and in 1735 a road was cut and towns soon established
between Westfield and these Housatonic settlements, thus uniting them
with the older extensions along the Connecticut and its tributaries.

In this period, scattered and sometimes unwelcome Scotch-Irish
settlements were established, such as that at Londonderry, New
Hampshire, and in the Berkshires, as well as in the region won in King
Philip's War from the Nipmucks, whither there came also Huguenots.[72:1]

In King George's War, the Connecticut River settlers found their
frontier protection in such rude stockades as those at the sites of
Keene, of Charlestown, New Hampshire (Number Four), Fort Shirley at the
head of Deerfield River (Heath), and Fort Pelham (Rowe); while Fort
Massachusetts (Adams) guarded the Hoosac gateway to the Hoosatonic
Valley. These frontier garrisons and the self-defense of the
backwoodsmen of New England are well portrayed in the pages of
Parkman.[72:2] At the close of the war, settlement again expanded into
the Berkshires, where Lennox, West Hoosac (Williamstown), and Pittsfield
were established in the middle of the century. Checked by the fighting
in the last French and Indian War, the frontier went forward after the
Peace of Paris (1763) at an exceptional rate, especially into Vermont
and interior New Hampshire. An anonymous writer gives a contemporary
view of the situation on the eve of the Revolution:[72:3]

     The richest parts remaining to be granted are on the northern
     branches of the Connecticut river, towards Crown Point where
     are great districts of fertile soil still unsettled. The North
     part of New Hampshire, the province of Maine, and the
     territory of Sagadahock have but few settlements in them
     compared with the tracts yet unsettled. . . .

     I should further observe that these tracts have since the
     peace [_i. e._, 1763], been settling pretty fast: farms on the
     river Connecticut are every day extending beyond the old fort
     Dummer, for near thirty miles; and will in a few years reach
     to Kohasser which is nearly two hundred miles; not that such
     an extent will be one-tenth settled, but the new-comers do not
     fix near their neighbors, and go on regularly, but take spots
     that please them best, though twenty or thirty miles beyond
     any others. This to people of a sociable disposition in Europe
     would appear very strange, but the Americans do not regard the
     near neighborhood of other farmers; twenty or thirty miles by
     water they esteem no distance in matters of this sort; besides
     in a country that promises well the intermediate space is not
     long in filling up. Between Connecticut river and Lake
     Champlain upon Otter Creek, and all along Lake Sacrament
     [George] and the rivers that fall into it, and the whole
     length of Wood Creek, are numerous settlements made since the
     peace.[73:1]

For nearly a hundred years, therefore, New England communities had been
pushed out to new frontiers in the intervals between the almost
continuous wars with the French and Indians. Probably the most
distinctive feature in this frontier was the importance of the community
type of settlement; in other words, of the towns, with their Puritan
ideals in education, morals, and religion. This has always been a matter
of pride to the statesmen and annalists of New England, as is
illustrated by these words of Holland in his "Western Massachusetts,"
commenting on the settlement of the Connecticut Valley in villages,
whereby in his judgment morality, education, and urbanity were
preserved:

     The influence of this policy can only be fully appreciated
     when standing by the side of the solitary settler's hut in the
     West, where even an Eastern man has degenerated to a boor in
     manners, where his children have grown up uneducated, and
     where the Sabbath has become an unknown day, and religion and
     its obligations have ceased to exercise control upon the heart
     and life.

Whatever may be the real value of the community type of settlement, its
establishment in New England was intimately connected both with the
Congregational religious organization and with the land system of the
colonies of that section, under which the colonial governments made
grants--not in tracts to individuals, but in townships to groups of
proprietors who in turn assigned lands to the inhabitants without cost.
The typical form of establishing a town was as follows: On application
of an approved body of men, desiring to establish a new settlement, the
colonial General Court would appoint a committee to view the desired
land and report on its fitness; an order for the grant would then issue,
in varying areas, not far from the equivalent of six miles square. In
the eighteenth century especially, it was common to reserve certain lots
of the town for the support of schools and the ministry. This was the
origin of that very important feature of Western society, federal land
grants for schools and colleges.[74:1] The General Courts also made
regulations regarding the common lands, the terms for admitting
inhabitants, etc., and thus kept a firm hand upon the social structure
of the new settlements as they formed on the frontier.

This practice, seen in its purity in the seventeenth century
especially, was markedly different from the practices of other colonies
in the settlement of their back lands. For during most of the period New
England did not use her wild lands, or public domain, as a source of
revenue by sale to individuals or to companies, with the reservation of
quit-rents; nor attract individual settlers by "head rights," or
fifty-acre grants, after the Virginia type; nor did the colonies of the
New England group often make extensive grants to individuals, on the
ground of special services, or because of influence with the government,
or on the theory that the grantee would introduce settlers on his grant.
They donated their lands to groups of men who became town proprietors
for the purpose of establishing communities. These proprietors were
supposed to hold the lands in trust, to be assigned to inhabitants under
restraints to ensure the persistence of Puritan ideals.

During most of the seventeenth century the proprietors awarded lands to
the new-comers in accordance with this theory. But as density of
settlement increased, and lands grew scarce in the older towns, the
proprietors began to assert their legal right to the unoccupied lands
and to refuse to share them with inhabitants who were not of the body of
proprietors. The distinction resulted in class conflicts in the towns,
especially in the eighteenth century,[75:1] over the ownership and
disposal of the common lands.

The new settlements, by a process of natural selection, would afford
opportunity to the least contented, whether because of grievances, or
ambitions, to establish themselves. This tended to produce a Western
flavor in the towns on the frontier. But it was not until the original
ideals of the land system began to change, that the opportunity to make
new settlements for such reasons became common. As the economic and
political ideal replaced the religious and social ideal, in the
conditions under which new towns could be established, this became more
possible.

Such a change was in progress in the latter part of the seventeenth
century and during the eighteenth. In 1713, 1715, and 1727,
Massachusetts determined upon a policy of locating towns in advance of
settlement, to protect her boundary claims. In 1736 she laid out five
towns near the New Hampshire border, and a year earlier opened four
contiguous towns to connect her Housatonic and Connecticut Valley
settlements.[76:1] Grants in non-adjacent regions were sometimes made to
old towns, the proprietors of which sold them to those who wished to
move.

The history of the town of Litchfield illustrates the increasing
importance of the economic factor. At a time when Connecticut feared
that Andros might dispose of the public lands to the disadvantage of the
colony, the legislature granted a large part of Western Connecticut to
the towns of Hartford and Windsor, _pro forma_, as a means of
withdrawing the lands from his hands. But these towns refused to give up
the lands after the danger had passed, and proceeded to sell part of
them.[76:2] Riots occurred when the colonial authorities attempted to
assert possession, and the matter was at length compromised in 1719 by
allowing Litchfield to be settled in accordance with the town grants,
while the colony reserved the larger part of northwestern Connecticut.
In 1737 the colony disposed of its last unlocated lands by sale in lots.
In 1762 Massachusetts sold a group of entire townships in the Berkshires
to the highest bidders.[77:1]

But the most striking illustration of the tendency, is afforded by the
"New Hampshire grants" of Governor Wentworth, who, chiefly in the years
about 1760, made grants of a hundred and thirty towns west of the
Connecticut, in what is now the State of Vermont, but which was then in
dispute between New Hampshire and New York. These grants, while in form
much like other town grants, were disposed of for cash, chiefly to
speculators who hastened to sell their rights to the throngs of
land-seekers who, after the peace, began to pour into the Green Mountain
region.

It is needless to point out how this would affect the movement of
Western settlement in respect to individualistic speculation in public
lands; how it would open a career to the land jobbers, as well as to the
natural leaders in the competitive movement for acquiring the best
lands, for laying out town sites and building up new communities under
"boom" conditions. The migratory tendency of New Englanders was
increased by this gradual change in its land policy; the attachment to a
locality was diminished. The later years showed increasing emphasis by
New England upon individual success, greater respect for the self-made
man who, in the midst of opportunities under competitive conditions,
achieved superiority. The old dominance of town settlement, village
moral police, and traditional class control gave way slowly. Settlement
in communities and rooted Puritan habits and ideals had enduring
influences in the regions settled by New Englanders; but it was in this
Old West, in the years just before the Revolution, that individualism
began to play an important role, along with the traditional habit of
expanding in organized communities.

The opening of the Vermont towns revealed more fully than before, the
capability of New Englanders to become democratic pioneers, under
characteristic frontier conditions. Their economic life was simple and
self-sufficing. They readily adopted lynch law (the use of the "birch
seal" is familiar to readers of Vermont history) to protect their land
titles in the troubled times when these "Green Mountain Boys" resisted
New York's assertion of authority. They later became an independent
Revolutionary state with frontier directness, and in very many respects
their history in the Revolutionary epoch is similar to that of settlers
in Kentucky and Tennessee, both in assertion of the right to independent
self government and in a frontier separatism.[78:1] Vermont may be
regarded as the culmination of the frontier movement which I have been
describing in New England.

By this time two distinct New Englands existed--the one coastal, and
dominated by commercial interests and the established congregational
churches; the other a primitive agricultural area, democratic in
principle, and with various sects increasingly indifferent to the fear
of "innovation" which the dominant classes of the old communities felt.
Already speculative land companies had begun New England settlements in
the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania, as well as on the lower Mississippi;
and New England missions among the Indians, such as that at Stockbridge,
were beginning the noteworthy religious and educational expansion of the
section to the west.

That this movement of expansion had been chiefly from south to north,
along the river valleys, should not conceal from us the fact that it was
in essential characteristics a Western movement, especially in the
social traits that were developing. Even the men who lived in the long
line of settlements on the Maine coast, under frontier conditions, and
remote from the older centers of New England, developed traits and a
democratic spirit that relate them closely to the Westerners, in spite
of the fact that Maine is "down east" by preeminence.[79:1]

The frontier of the Middle region in this period of the formation of the
Old West, was divided into two parts, which happen to coincide with the
colonies of New York and Pennsylvania. In the latter colony the trend of
settlement was into the Great Valley, and so on to the Southern uplands;
while the advance of settlement in New York was like that of New
England, chiefly northward, following the line of Hudson River.

The Hudson and the Mohawk constituted the area of the Old West in this
part of the eighteenth century. With them were associated the Wallkill,
tributary to the Hudson, and Cherry Valley near the Mohawk, along the
sources of the Susquehanna. The Berkshires walled the Hudson in to the
east; the Adirondacks and the Catskills to the west. Where the Mohawk
Valley penetrated between the mountainous areas, the Iroquois Indians
were too formidable for advance on such a slender line. Nothing but
dense settlement along the narrow strip of the Hudson, if even that,
could have furnished the necessary momentum for overcoming the Indian
barrier; and this pressure was lacking, for the population was
comparatively sparse in contrast with the task to be performed. What
most needs discussion in the case of New York, therefore, is not the
history of expansion as in other sections, but the absence of expansive
power.

The fur-trade had led the way up the Hudson, and made beginnings of
settlements at strategic points near the confluence of the Mohawk. But
the fur-trader was not followed by a tide of pioneers. One of the most
important factors in restraining density of population in New York, in
retarding the settlement of its frontier, and in determining the
conditions there, was the land system of that colony.

From the time of the patroon grants along the lower Hudson, great
estates had been the common form of land tenure. Rensselaerswyck reached
at one time over seven hundred thousand acres. These great patroon
estates were confirmed by the English governors, who in their turn
followed a similar policy. By 1732 two and one-half million acres were
engrossed in manorial grants.[80:1] In 1764, Governor Colden wrote[80:2]
that three of the extravagant grants contain,

     as the proprietors claim, above a million acres each, several
     others above 200,000. * * * Although these grants contain a
     great part of the province, they are made in trifling
     acknowledgements. The far greater part of them still remain
     uncultivated, without any benefit to the community, and are
     likewise a discouragement to the settling and improving the
     lands in the neighborhood of them, for from the uncertainty of
     their boundaries, the patentees of these great tracts are
     daily enlarging their pretensions, and by tedious and most
     expensive law suits, distress and ruin poor families who have
     taken out grants near them.

He adds that "the proprietors of the great tracts are not only freed
from the quit-rents, which the other landholders in the province pay,
but by their influence in the assembly are freed from every other public
tax on their lands."

In 1769 it was estimated that at least five-sixths of the inhabitants of
Westchester County lived within the bounds of the great manors
there.[81:1] In Albany County the Livingston manor spread over seven
modern townships, and the great Van Rensselaer manor stretched
twenty-four by twenty-eight miles along the Hudson; while still farther,
on the Mohawk, were the vast possessions of Sir William Johnson.[81:2]

It was not simply that the grants were extensive, but that the policy
of the proprietors favored the leasing rather than the sale of the
lands--frequently also of the stock, and taking payment in shares. It
followed that settlers preferred to go to frontiers where a more liberal
land policy prevailed. At one time it seemed possible that the tide of
German settlement, which finally sought Pennsylvania and the up-country
of the South, might flow into New York. In 1710, Governor Hunter
purchased a tract in Livingston's manor and located nearly fifteen
hundred Palatines on it to produce naval stores.[82:1] But the attempt
soon failed; the Germans applied to the Indians on Schoharie Creek, a
branch of the Mohawk, for a grant of land and migrated there, only to
find that the governor had already granted the land. Again were the
villages broken up, some remaining and some moving farther up the
Mohawk, where they and accessions to their number established the
frontier settlements about Palatine Bridge, in the region where, in the
Revolution, Herkimer led these German frontiersmen to stem the British
attack in the battle of Oriskany. They constituted the most effective
military defense of Mohawk Valley. Still another portion took their way
across to the waters of the Susquehanna, and at Tulpehockon Creek began
an important center of German settlement in the Great Valley of
Pennsylvania.[82:2]

The most important aspect of the history of the movement into the
frontier of New York at this period, therefore, was the evidence which
it afforded that in the competition for settlement between colonies
possessing a vast area of vacant land, those which imposed feudal
tenures and undemocratic restraints, and which exploited settlers, were
certain to lose.

The manorial practice gave a bad name to New York as a region for
settlement, which not even the actual opportunities in certain parts of
the colony could counteract. The diplomacy of New York governors during
this period of the Old West, in securing a protectorate over the Six
Nations and a consequent claim to their territory, and in holding them
aloof from France, constituted the most effective contribution of that
colony to the movement of American expansion. When lands of these tribes
were obtained after Sullivan's expedition in the Revolution (in which
New England soldiers played a prominent part), it was by the New England
inundation into this interior that they were colonized. And it was under
conditions like those prevailing in the later years of the expansion of
settlements in New England itself, that this settlement of interior and
western New York was effected.

The result was, that New York became divided into two distinct peoples:
the dwellers along Hudson Valley, and the Yankee pioneers of the
interior. But the settlement of central and western New York, like the
settlement of Vermont, is a story that belongs to the era in which the
trans-Alleghany West was occupied.

We can best consider the settlement of the share of the Old West which
is located in Pennsylvania as a part of the migration which occupied the
Southern Uplands, and before entering upon this it will be advantageous
to survey that part of the movement toward the interior which proceeded
westward from the coast. First let us observe the conditions at the
eastern edge of these uplands, along the fall line in Virginia, in the
latter part of the seventeenth century, in order that the process and
the significance of the movement may be better understood.

About the time of Bacon's Rebellion, in Virginia, strenuous efforts
were made to protect the frontier line which ran along the falls of the
river, against the attacks of Indians. This "fall line," as the
geographers call it, marking the head of navigation, and thus the
boundary of the maritime or lowland South, runs from the site of
Washington, through Richmond, and on to Raleigh, North Carolina, and
Columbia, South Carolina. Virginia having earliest advanced thus far to
the interior, found it necessary in the closing years of the seventeenth
century to draw a military frontier along this line. As early as 1675 a
statute was enacted,[84:1] providing that paid troops of five hundred
men should be drawn from the midland and most secure parts of the
country and placed on the "heads of the rivers" and other places
fronting upon the Indians. What was meant by the "heads of the rivers,"
is shown by the fact that several of these forts were located either at
the falls of the rivers or just above tidewater, as follows: one on the
lower Potomac in Stafford County; one near the falls of the
Rappahannock; one on the Mattapony; one on the Pamunky; one at the falls
of the James (near the site of Richmond); one near the falls of the
Appomattox, and others on the Blackwater, the Nansemond, and the Accomac
peninsula, all in the eastern part of Virginia.

Again, in 1679, similar provision was made,[84:2] and an especially
interesting act was passed, making _quasi_ manorial grants to Major
Lawrence Smith and Captain William Byrd, "to seate certain lands at the
head [falls] of Rappahannock and James river" respectively. This scheme
failed for lack of approval by the authorities in England.[84:3] But
Byrd at the falls of the James near the present site of Richmond,
Robert Beverley on the Rappahannock, and other frontier commanders on
the York and Potomac, continued to undertake colonial defense. The
system of mounted rangers was established in 1691, by which a
lieutenant, eleven soldiers, and two Indians at the "heads" or falls of
each great river were to scout for enemy,[85:1] and the Indian boundary
line was strictly defined.

By the opening years of the eighteenth century (1701), the assembly of
Virginia had reached the conclusion that settlement would be the best
means of protecting the frontiers, and that the best way of "settling in
co-habitations upon the said land frontiers within this government will
be by encouragements to induce societies of men to undertake the
same."[85:2] It was declared to be inexpedient to have less than twenty
fighting men in each "society," and provision was made for a land grant
to be given to these societies (or towns) not less than 10,000 nor more
than 30,000 acres upon any of the frontiers, to be held in common by the
society. The power of ordering and managing these lands, and the
settling and planting of them, was to remain in the society. Virginia
was to pay the cost of survey, also quit-rents for the first twenty
years for the two-hundred-acre tract as the site of the "co-habitation."
Within this two hundred acres each member was to have a half-acre lot
for living upon, and a right to two hundred acres next adjacent, until
the thirty thousand acres were taken up. The members of the society
were exempt from taxes for twenty years, and from the requirements of
military duty except such as they imposed upon themselves. The
resemblance to the New England town is obvious.

"Provided alwayes," ran the quaint statute, "and it is the true intent
and meaning of this act that for every five hundred acres of land to be
granted in pursuance of this act there shall be and shall be continually
kept upon the said land one christian man between sixteen and sixty
years of age perfect of limb, able and fitt for service who shall alsoe
be continually provided with a well fixed musquett or fuzee, a good
pistoll, sharp simeter, tomahawk and five pounds of good clean pistoll
powder and twenty pounds of sizable leaden bulletts or swan or goose
shott to be kept within the fort directed by this act besides the powder
and shott for his necessary or useful shooting at game. Provided also
that the said warlike christian man shall have his dwelling and
continual abode within the space of two hundred acres of land to be laid
out in a geometricall square or as near that figure as conveniency will
admit," etc. Within two years the society was required to cause a half
acre in the middle of the "co-habitation" to be palisaded "with good
sound pallisadoes at least thirteen foot long and six inches diameter in
the middle of the length thereof, and set double and at least three foot
within the ground."

Such in 1701 was the idea of the Virginia tidewater assembly of a
frontiersman, and of the frontier towns by which the Old Dominion should
spread her population into the upland South. But the "warlike Christian
man" who actually came to furnish the firing line for Virginia, was
destined to be the Scotch-Irishman and the German with long rifle in
place of "fuzee" and "simeter," and altogether too restless to have his
continual abode within the space of two hundred acres. Nevertheless
there are points of resemblance between this idea of societies settled
about a fortified town and the later "stations" of Kentucky.[87:1]

By the beginning of the eighteenth century the engrossing of the lands
of lowland Virginia had progressed so far, the practice of holding large
tracts of wasteland for reserves in the great plantations had become so
common, that the authorities of Virginia reported to the home government
that the best lands were all taken up,[87:2] and settlers were passing
into North Carolina seeking cheap lands near navigable rivers. Attention
was directed also to the Piedmont portions of Virginia, for by this time
the Indians were conquered in this region. It was now possible to
acquire land by purchase[87:3] at five shillings sterling for fifty
acres, as well as by head-rights for importation or settlement, and land
speculation soon turned to the new area.

Already the Piedmont had been somewhat explored.[87:4] Even by the
middle of the seventeenth century, fur-traders had followed the trail
southwest from the James more than four hundred miles to the Catawbas
and later to the Cherokees. Col. William Byrd had, as we have seen, not
only been absorbing good lands in the lowlands, and defending his post
at the falls of the James, like a Count of the Border, but he also
engaged in this fur-trade and sent his pack trains along this trail
through the Piedmont of the Carolinas,[87:5] and took note of the rich
savannas of that region. Charleston traders engaged in rivalry for this
trade.

It was not long before cattle raisers from the older settlements,
learning from the traders of the fertile plains and peavine pastures of
this land, followed the fur-traders and erected scattered "cow-pens" or
ranches beyond the line of plantations in the Piedmont. Even at the
close of the seventeenth century, herds of wild horses and cattle ranged
at the outskirts of the Virginia settlements, and were hunted by the
planters, driven into pens, and branded somewhat after the manner of the
later ranching on the Great Plains.[88:1] Now the cow-drovers and the
cow-pens[88:2] began to enter the uplands. The Indians had by this time
been reduced to submission in most of the Virginia Piedmont--as Governor
Spotswood[88:3] reported in 1712, living "quietly on our frontiers,
trafficking with the Inhabitants."

After the defeat of the Tuscaroras and Yemassees about this time in the
Carolinas, similar opportunities for expansion existed there. The cattle
drovers sometimes took their herds from range to range; sometimes they
were gathered permanently near the pens, finding the range sufficient
throughout the year. They were driven to Charleston, or later sometimes
even to Philadelphia and Baltimore markets. By the middle of the
century, disease worked havoc with them in South Carolina[89:1] and
destroyed seven-eighths of those in North Carolina; Virginia made
regulations governing the driving of cattle through her frontier
counties to avoid the disease, just as in our own time the northern
cattlemen attempted to protect their herds against the Texas fever.

Thus cattle raisers from the coast followed the fur-traders toward the
uplands, and already pioneer farmers were straggling into the same
region, soon to be outnumbered by the tide of settlement that flowed
into the region from Pennsylvania.

The descriptions of the uplands by contemporaneous writers are in
glowing terms. Makemie, in his "Plain and Friendly Persuasion" (1705),
declared "The best, richest, and most healthy part of your Country is
yet to be inhabited, above the falls of every River, to the Mountains."
Jones, in his "Present State of Virginia" (1724), comments on the
convenience of tidewater transportation, etc., but declares that section
"not nearly so healthy as the uplands and Barrens which serve for Ranges
for Stock," although he speaks less enthusiastically of the savannas and
marshes which lay in the midst of the forest areas. In fact, the
Piedmont was by no means the unbroken forest that might have been
imagined, for in addition to natural meadows, the Indians had burned
over large tracts.[89:2] It was a rare combination of woodland and
pasture, with clear running streams and mild climate.[89:3]

The occupation of the Virginia Piedmont received a special impetus from
the interest which Governor Spotswood took in the frontier. In 1710 he
proposed a plan for intercepting the French in their occupation of the
interior, by inducing Virginia settlement to proceed along one side of
James River only, until this column of advancing pioneers should strike
the attenuated line of French posts in the center. In the same year he
sent a body of horsemen to the top of the Blue Ridge, where they could
overlook the Valley of Virginia.[90:1] By 1714 he became active as a
colonizer himself. Thirty miles above the falls of the Rappahannock, on
the Rapidan at Germanna,[90:2] he settled a little village of German
redemptioners (who in return for having the passage paid agreed to serve
without wages for a term of years), to engage in his iron works, also to
act as rangers on the frontier. From here, in 1716, with two companies
of rangers and four Indians, Governor Spotswood and a band of Virginia
gentlemen made a summer picnic excursion of two weeks across the Blue
Ridge into the Shenandoah Valley. _Sic juvat transcendere montes_ was
the motto of these Knights of the Golden Horse Shoe, as the governor
dubbed them. But they were not the "warlike christian men" destined to
occupy the frontier.

Spotswood's interest in the advance along the Rappahannock, probably
accounts for the fact that in 1720 Spotsylvania and Brunswick were
organized as frontier counties of Virginia.[91:1] Five hundred dollars
were contributed by the colony to the church, and a thousand dollars for
arms and ammunition for the settlers in these counties. The fears of the
French and Indians beyond the high mountains, were alleged as reasons
for this advance. To attract settlers to these new counties, they were
(1723) exempt from purchasing the lands under the system of head rights,
and from payment of quit-rents for seven years after 1721. The free
grants so obtained were not to exceed a thousand acres. This was soon
extended to six thousand acres, but with provision requiring the
settlement of a certain number of families upon the grant within a
certain time. In 1729 Spotswood was ordered by the Council to produce
"rights" and pay the quit-rents for the 59,786 acres which he claimed in
this county.

Other similar actions by the Council show that large holdings were
developing there, also that the difficulty of establishing a frontier
democracy in contact with the area of expanding plantations, was very
real.[91:2] By the time of the occupation of the Shenandoah Valley,
therefore, the custom was established in this part of Virginia,[91:3] of
making grants of a thousand acres for each family settled. Speculative
planters, influential with the Governor and Council secured grants of
many thousand acres, conditioned upon seating a certain number of
families, and satisfying the requirements of planting. Thus what had
originally been intended as direct grants to the actual settler,
frequently became grants to great planters like Beverley, who promoted
the coming of Scotch-Irish and German settlers, or took advantage of
the natural drift into the Valley, to sell lands in their grants, as a
rule, reserving quit-rents. The liberal grants per family enabled these
speculative planters, while satisfying the terms of settlement, to hold
large portions of the grant for themselves. Under the lax requirements,
and probably still more lax enforcement, of the provisions for actual
cultivation or cattle-raising,[92:1] it was not difficult to hold such
wild land. These conditions rendered possible the extension of a measure
of aristocratic planter life in the course of time to the Piedmont and
Valley lands of Virginia. It must be added, however, that some of the
newcomers, both Germans and Scotch-Irish, like the Van Meters, Stover,
and Lewis, also showed an ability to act as promoters in locating
settlers and securing grants to themselves.

In the northern part of the Shenandoah Valley, lay part of the estate of
Lord Fairfax, some six million acres in extent, which came to the family
by dower from the old Culpeper and Arlington grant of Northern Neck. In
1748, the youthful Washington was surveying this estate along the upper
waters of the Potomac, finding a bed under the stars and learning the
life of the frontier.

Lord Fairfax established his own Greenway manor,[92:2] and divided his
domain into other manors, giving ninety-nine-year leases to settlers
already on the ground at twenty shillings annually per hundred acres;
while of the new-comers he exacted two shillings annual quit-rent for
this amount of land in fee simple. Litigation kept land titles uncertain
here, for many years. Similarly, Beverley's manor, about Staunton,
represented a grant of 118,000 acres to Beverley and his associates on
condition of placing the proper number of families on the tract.[93:1]
Thus speculative planters on this frontier shared in the movement of
occupation and made an aristocratic element in the up-country; but the
increasing proportion of Scotch-Irish immigrants, as well as German
settlers, together with the contrast in natural conditions, made the
interior a different Virginia from that of the tidewater.

As settlement ascended the Rappahannock, and emigrants began to enter
the Valley from the north, so, contemporaneously, settlement ascended
the James above the falls, succeeding to the posts of the
fur-traders.[93:2] Goochland County was set off in 1728, and the growth
of population led, as early as 1729, to proposals for establishing a
city (Richmond) at the falls. Along the upper James, as on the
Rappahannock, speculative planters bought headrights and located
settlers and tenants to hold their grants.[93:3] Into this region came
natives of Virginia, emigrants from the British isles, and scattered
representatives of other lands, some of them coming up the James, others
up the York, and still others arriving with the southward-moving current
along both sides of the Blue Ridge.

Before 1730 few settlers lived above the mouth of the Rivanna. In 1732
Peter Jefferson patented a thousand acres at the eastern opening of its
mountain gap, and here, under frontier conditions, Thomas Jefferson was
born in 1743 near his later estate of Monticello. About him were pioneer
farmers, as well as foresighted engrossers of the land. In the main his
country was that of a democratic frontier people--Scotch-Irish
Presbyterians, Quakers, Baptists, and other sects,[94:1] out of
sympathy with the established church and the landed gentry of the
lowlands. This society in which he was born, was to find in Jefferson a
powerful exponent of its ideals.[94:2] Patrick Henry was born in 1736
above the falls, not far from Richmond, and he also was a mouthpiece of
interior Virginia in the Revolutionary era. In short, a society was
already forming in the Virginia Piedmont which was composed of many
sects, of independent yeomen as well as their great planter leaders--a
society naturally expansive, seeing its opportunity to deal in
unoccupied lands along the frontier which continually moved toward the
West, and in this era of the eighteenth century dominated by the
democratic ideals of pioneers rather than by the aristocratic tendencies
of slaveholding planters. As there were two New Englands, so there were
by this time two Virginias, and the uplands belonged with the Old West.

The advance across the fall line from the coast was, in North Carolina,
much slower than in Virginia. After the Tuscarora War (1712-13) an
extensive region west from Pamlico Sound was opened (1724). The region
to the north, about the Roanoke, had before this begun to receive
frontier settlers, largely from Virginia. Their traits are interestingly
portrayed in Byrd's "Dividing Line." By 1728 the farthest inhabitants
along the Virginia boundary were frontiersmen about Great Creek, a
branch of the Roanoke.[94:3] The North Carolina commissioners desired to
stop running the line after going a hundred and seventy miles, on the
plea that they were already fifty miles beyond the outermost inhabitant,
and there would be no need for an age or two to carry the line farther;
but the Virginia surveyors pointed out that already speculators were
taking up the land. A line from Weldon to Fayetteville would roughly
mark the western boundary of North Carolina's sparse population of forty
thousand souls.[95:1]

The slower advance is explained, partly because of the later settlement
of the Carolinas, partly because the Indians continued to be troublesome
on the flanks of the advancing population, as seen in the Tuscarora and
Yemassee wars, and partly because the pine barrens running parallel with
the fall line made a zone of infertile land not attractive to settlers.
The North Carolina low country, indeed, had from the end of the
seventeenth century been a kind of southern frontier for overflow from
Virginia; and in many ways was assimilated to the type of the up-country
in its turbulent democracy, its variety of sects and peoples, and its
primitive conditions. But under the lax management of the public lands,
the use of "blank patents" and other evasions made possible the
development of large landholding, side by side with headrights to
settlers. Here, as in Virginia, a great proprietary grant extended
across the colony--Lord Granville's proprietary was a zone embracing the
northern half of North Carolina. Within the area, sales and quit-rents
were administered by the agents of the owner, with the result that
uncertainty and disorder of an agrarian nature extended down to the
Revolution. There were likewise great speculative holdings, conditioned
on seating a certain proportion of settlers, into which the frontiersmen
were drifting.[95:2] But this system also made it possible for agents of
later migrating congregations to establish colonies like that of the
Moravians at Wachovia.[95:3] Thus, by the time settlers came into the
uplands from the north, a land system existed similar to that of
Virginia. A common holding was a square mile (640 acres), but in
practice this did not prevent the accumulation of great estates.[96:1]
Whereas Virginia's Piedmont area was to a large extent entered by
extensions from the coast, that of North Carolina remained almost
untouched by 1730.[96:2]

The same is true of South Carolina. By 1730, settlement had progressed
hardly eighty miles from the coast, even in the settled area of the
lowlands. The tendency to engross the lowlands for large plantations was
clear, here as elsewhere.[96:3] The surveyor-general reports in 1732
that not as many as a thousand acres within a hundred miles of
Charleston, or within twenty miles of a river or navigable creek, were
unpossessed. In 1729 the crown ordered eleven townships of twenty
thousand acres each to be laid out in rectangles, divided into fifty
acres for each actual settler under a quit-rent of four shillings a year
for every hundred acres, or proportionally, to be paid after the first
ten years.[96:4] By 1732 these townships, designed to attract foreign
Protestants, were laid out on the great rivers of the colony. As they
were located in the middle region, east of the fall line, among pine
barrens, or in malarial lands in the southern corner of the colony, they
all proved abortive as towns, except Orangeburg[96:5] on the North
Edisto, where German redemptioners made a settlement. The Scotch-Irish
Presbyterians who came to Williamsburg, on Black River, suffered
hardships; as did the Swiss who, under the visionary leadership of
Purry, settled in the deadly climate of Purrysburg, on the lower
Savannah. To Welsh colonists from Pennsylvania there was made a
grant--known as the "Welsh tract," embracing over 173,000 acres on the
Great Pedee (Marion County)[97:1] under headrights of fifty acres, also
a bounty in provisions, tools, and livestock.

These attempts, east of the fall line, are interesting as showing
the colonial policy of marking out towns (which were to be
politically-organized parishes, with representation in the legislature),
and attracting foreigners thereto, prior to the coming of settlers from
the North.

The settlement of Georgia, in 1732, completed the southern line of
colonization toward the Piedmont. Among the objects of the colony, as
specified in the charters, were the relief of the poor and the
protection of the frontiers. To guard against the tendency to engross
the lands in great estates, already so clearly revealed in the older
colonies, the Georgia trustees provided that the grants of fifty acres
should not be alienated or divided, but should pass to the male heirs
and revert to the trustees in case heirs were lacking. No grant greater
than five hundred acres was permitted, and even this was made
conditionally upon the holder settling ten colonists. However, under
local conditions and the competition and example of neighboring
colonies, this attempt to restrict land tenure in the interest of
democracy broke down by 1750, and Georgia's land system became not
unlike that of the other Southern colonies.[97:2]

In 1734, Salzburgers had been located above Savannah, and within seven
years some twelve hundred German Protestants were dwelling on the
Georgia frontier; while a settlement of Scotch Highlanders at Darien,
near the mouth of the Altamaha, protected the southern frontier. At
Augusta, an Indian trading fort (1735), whence the dealers in peltry
visited the Cherokee, completed the familiar picture of frontier
advance.[98:1]

We have now hastily surveyed the movement of the frontier of settlement
westward from the lowlands, in the later years of the seventeenth and
early part of the eighteenth century. There is much that is common in
the whole line of advance. The original settlers engross the desirable
lands of the older area. Indented servants and new-comers pass to the
frontier seeking a place to locate their headrights, or plant new towns.
Adventurous and speculative wealthy planters acquire large holdings in
the new areas, and bring over settlers to satisfy the requirements of
seating and cultivating their extensive grants, thus building up a
yeomanry of small landholders side by side with the holders of large
estates. The most far-sighted of the new-comers follow the example of
the planters, and petition for increasing extensive grants. Meanwhile,
pioneers like Abraham Wood, himself once an indented servant, and
gentlemen like Col. William Byrd--prosecuting the Indian trade from
their posts at the "heads" of the rivers, and combining frontier
protection, exploring, and surveying--make known the more distant
fertile soils of the Piedmont. Already in the first part of the
eighteenth century, the frontier population tended to be a rude
democracy, with a large representation of Scotch-Irish, Germans, Welsh,
and Huguenot French settlers, holding religious faiths unlike that of
the followers of the established church in the lowlands. The movement of
slaves into the region was unimportant, but not unknown.

The Virginia Valley was practically unsettled in 1730, as was much of
Virginia's Piedmont area and all the Piedmont area of the Carolinas. The
significance of the movement of settlers from the North into this vacant
Valley and Piedmont, behind the area occupied by expansion from the
coast is, that it was geographically separated from the westward
movement from the coast, and that it was sufficient in volume to recruit
the democratic forces and postpone for a long time the process of social
assimilation to the type of the lowlands.

As has been pointed out, especially in the Carolinas a belt of pine
barrens, roughly eighty miles in breadth, ran parallel with the fall
line and thus discouraged western advance across this belt, even before
the head of navigation was reached. In Virginia, the Blue Ridge made an
almost equally effective barrier, walling off the Shenandoah Valley from
the westward advance. At the same time this valley was but a
continuation of the Great Valley, that ran along the eastern edge of the
Alleghanies in southeastern Pennsylvania, and included in its mountain
trough the Cumberland and Hagerstown valleys. In short, a broad
limestone band of fertile soil was stretched within mountain walls,
southerly from Pennsylvania to southwestern Virginia; and here the
watergaps opened the way to descend to the Carolina Piedmont. This whole
area, a kind of peninsula thrust down from Pennsylvania, was rendered
comparatively inaccessible to the westward movement from the lowlands,
and was equally accessible to the population which was entering
Pennsylvania.[99:1]

Thus it happened that from about 1730 to 1760 a generation of settlers
poured along this mountain trough into the southern uplands, or
Piedmont, creating a new continuous social and economic area, which cut
across the artificial colonial boundary lines, disarranged the regular
extension of local government from the coast westward, and built up a
new Pennsylvania in contrast with the old Quaker colonies, and a new
South in contrast with the tidewater South. This New South composed the
southern half of the Old West.

From its beginning, Pennsylvania was advertised as a home for dissenting
sects seeking freedom in the wilderness. But it was not until the exodus
of German redemptioners,[100:1] from about 1717, that the Palatinate and
neighboring areas sent the great tide of Germans which by the time of
the Revolution made them nearly a third of the total population of
Pennsylvania. It has been carefully estimated that in 1775 over 200,000
Germans lived in the thirteen colonies, chiefly along the frontier zone
of the Old West. Of these, a hundred thousand had their home in
Pennsylvania, mainly in the Great Valley, in the region which is still
so notably the abode of the "Pennsylvania Dutch."[100:2]

Space does not permit us to describe this movement of
colonization.[100:3] The entrance to the fertile limestone soils of the
Great Valley of Pennsylvania was easy, in view of the low elevation of
the South Mountain ridge, and the watergaps thereto. The continuation
along the similar valley to the south, in Maryland and Virginia, was a
natural one, especially as the increasing tide of emigrants raised the
price of lands.[100:4] In 1719 the proprietor's price for Pennsylvania
lands was ten pounds per hundred acres, and two shillings quit-rents. In
1732 this became fifteen and one-half pounds, with a quit-rent of a half
penny per acre.[101:1] During the period 1718 to 1732, when the Germans
were coming in great numbers, the management of the lands fell into
confusion, and many seated themselves as squatters, without
title.[101:2] This was a fortunate possibility for the poor
redemptioners, who had sold their service for a term of years in order
to secure their transportation to America.

By 1726 it was estimated that there were 100,000 squatters;[101:3] and
of the 670,000 acres occupied between 1732 and 1740, it is estimated
that 400,000 acres were settled without grants.[101:4] Nevertheless
these must ultimately be paid for, with interest, and the concession of
the right of preemption to squatters made this easier. But it was not
until 1755 that the governor offered land free from purchase, and this
was to be taken only west of the Alleghanies.[101:5]

Although the credit system relieved the difficulty in Pennsylvania, the
lands of that colony were in competition with the Maryland lands,
offered between 1717 and 1738 at forty shillings sterling per hundred
acres, which in 1738 was raised to five pounds sterling.[101:6] At the
same time, in the Virginia Valley, as will be recalled, free grants were
being made of a thousand acres per family. Although large tracts of the
Shenandoah Valley had been granted to speculators like Beverley,
Borden, and the Carters, as well as to Lord Fairfax, the owners sold
six or seven pounds cheaper per hundred acres than did the Pennsylvania
land office.[102:1] Between 1726 and 1734, therefore, the Germans began
to enter this valley,[102:2] and before long they extended their
settlements into the Piedmont of the Carolinas,[102:3] being recruited
in South Carolina by emigrants coming by way of Charleston--especially
after Governor Glenn's purchase from the Cherokee in 1755, of the
extreme western portion of the colony. Between 1750 and the Revolution,
these settlers in the Carolinas greatly increased in numbers.

Thus a zone of almost continuous German settlements had been
established, running from the head of the Mohawk in New York to the
Savannah in Georgia. They had found the best soils, and they knew how to
till them intensively and thriftily, as attested by their large,
well-filled barns, good stock, and big canvas-covered Conestoga wagons.
They preferred to dwell in groups, often of the same religious
denomination--Lutherans, Reformed, Moravians, Mennonites, and many
lesser sects. The diaries of Moravian missionaries from Pennsylvania,
who visited them, show how the parent congregations kept in touch with
their colonies[102:4] and how intimate, in general, was the bond of
connection between this whole German frontier zone and that of
Pennsylvania.

Side by side with this German occupation of Valley and Piedmont, went
the migration of the Scotch-Irish.[103:1] These lowland Scots had been
planted in Ulster early in the seventeenth century. Followers of John
Knox, they had the contentious individualism and revolutionary temper
that seem natural to Scotch Presbyterianism. They were brought up on the
Old Testament, and in the doctrine of government by covenant or compact.
In Ireland their fighting qualities had been revealed in the siege of
Londonderry, where their stubborn resistance balked the hopes of James
II. However, religious and political disabilities were imposed upon
these Ulstermen, which made them discontented, and hard times
contributed to detach them from their homes. Their movement to America
was contemporaneous with the heavy German migration. By the Revolution,
it is believed that a third of the population of Pennsylvania was
Scotch-Irish; and it has been estimated, probably too liberally, that a
half million came to the United States between 1730 and 1770.[103:2]
Especially after the Rebellion of 1745, large numbers of Highlanders
came to increase the Scotch blood in the nation.[103:3] Some of the
Scotch-Irish went to New England.[103:4] Given the cold shoulder by
congregational Puritans, they passed to unsettled lands about Worcester,
to the frontier in the Berkshires, and in southern New Hampshire at
Londonderry--whence came John Stark, a frontier leader in the French
and Indian War, and the hero of Bennington in the Revolution, as well as
the ancestors of Horace Greeley and S. P. Chase. In New York, a
Scotch-Irish settlement was planted on the frontier at Cherry
Valley.[104:1] Scotch Highlanders came to the Mohawk,[104:2] where they
followed Sir William Johnson and became Tory raiders in the Revolution.

But it was in Pennsylvania that the center of Scotch-Irish power lay.
"These bold and indigent strangers, saying as their excuse when
challenged for titles that we had solicited for colonists and they had
come accordingly,"[104:3] and asserting that "it was against the laws of
God and nature that so much land should be idle while so many christians
wanted it to work on and to raise their bread," squatted on the vacant
lands, especially in the region disputed between Pennsylvania and
Maryland, and remained in spite of efforts to drive them off. Finding
the Great Valley in the hands of the Germans, they planted their own
outposts along the line of the Indian trading path from Lancaster to
Bedford; they occupied Cumberland Valley, and before 1760 pressed up the
Juniata somewhat beyond the narrows, spreading out along its
tributaries, and by 1768 had to be warned off from the Redstone country
to avoid Indian trouble. By the time of the Revolution, their
settlements made Pittsburgh a center from which was to come a new era in
Pennsylvania history. It was the Scotch-Irish and German
fur-traders[104:4] whose pack trains pioneered into the Ohio Valley in
the days before the French and Indian wars. The messengers between
civilization and savagery were such men,[105:1] as the Irish Croghan,
and the Germans Conrad Weiser and Christian Post.

Like the Germans, the Scotch-Irish passed into the Shenandoah
Valley,[105:2] and on to the uplands of the South. In 1738 a delegation
of the Philadelphia Presbyterian synod was sent to the Virginia governor
and received assurances of security of religious freedom; the same
policy was followed by the Carolinas. By 1760 a zone of Scotch-Irish
Presbyterian churches extended from the frontiers of New England to the
frontiers of South Carolina. This zone combined in part with the German
zone, but in general Scotch-Irishmen tended to follow the valleys
farther toward the mountains, to be the outer edge of this frontier.
Along with this combined frontier stream were English, Welsh and Irish
Quakers, and French Huguenots.[105:3]

Among this moving mass, as it passed along the Valley into the Piedmont,
in the middle of the eighteenth century, were Daniel Boone, John Sevier,
James Robertson, and the ancestors of John C. Calhoun, Abraham Lincoln,
Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson, James K. Polk, Sam Houston, and Davy
Crockett, while the father of Andrew Jackson came to the Carolina
Piedmont at the same time from the coast. Recalling that Thomas
Jefferson's home was on the frontier, at the edge of the Blue Ridge, we
perceive that these names represent the militant expansive movement in
American life. They foretell the settlement across the Alleghanies in
Kentucky and Tennessee; the Louisiana Purchase, and Lewis and Clark's
transcontinental exploration; the conquest of the Gulf Plains in the
War of 1812-15; the annexation of Texas; the acquisition of California
and the Spanish Southwest. They represent, too, frontier democracy in
its two aspects personified in Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln. It
was a democracy responsive to leadership, susceptible to waves of
emotion, of a "high religeous voltage"--quick and direct in action.

The volume of this Northern movement into the Southern uplands is
illustrated by the statement of Governor Tryon, of North Carolina, that
in the summer and winter of 1765 more than a thousand immigrant wagons
passed through Salisbury, in that colony.[106:1] Coming by families, or
groups of families or congregations, they often drove their herds with
them. Whereas in 1746 scarce a hundred fighting men were found in Orange
and the western counties of North Carolina, there were in 1753 fully
three thousand, in addition to over a thousand Scotch in the Cumberland;
and they covered the province more or less thickly, from Hillsboro and
Fayetteville to the mountains.[106:2] Bassett remarks that the
Presbyterians received their first ministers from the synod of New York
and Pennsylvania, and later on sent their ministerial students to
Princeton College. "Indeed it is likely that the inhabitants of this
region knew more about Philadelphia at that time than about Newbern or
Edenton."[106:3]

We are now in a position to note briefly, in conclusion, some of the
results of the occupation of this new frontier during the first half of
the eighteenth century--some of the consequences of this formation of
the Old West.

I. A fighting frontier had been created all along the line from New
England to Georgia, which bore the brunt of French and Indian attacks
and gave indispensable service during the Revolution. The significance
of this fact could only be developed by an extended survey of the
scattered border warfare of this era. We should have to see Rogers
leading his New England Rangers, and Washington defending interior
Virginia with his frontiersmen in their hunting shirts, in the French
and Indian War. When all of the campaigns about the region of Canada,
Lake Champlain, and the Hudson, central New York (Oriskany, Cherry
Valley, Sullivan's expedition against the Iroquois), Wyoming Valley,
western Pennsylvania, the Virginia Valley, and the back country of the
South are considered as a whole from this point of view, the meaning of
the Old West will become more apparent.

II. A new society had been established, differing in essentials from the
colonial society of the coast. It was a democratic self-sufficing,
primitive agricultural society, in which individualism was more
pronounced than the community life of the lowlands. The indented servant
and the slave were not a normal part of its labor system. It was engaged
in grain and cattle raising, not in producing staples, and it found a
partial means of supplying its scarcity of specie by the peltries which
it shipped to the coast. But the hunter folk were already pushing
farther on; the cow-pens and the range were giving place to the small
farm, as in our own day they have done in the cattle country. It was a
region of hard work and poverty, not of wealth and leisure. Schools and
churches were secured under serious difficulty,[107:1] if at all; but in
spite of the natural tendencies of a frontier life, a large portion of
the interior showed a distinctly religious atmosphere.

III. The Old West began the movement of internal trade which developed
home markets and diminished that colonial dependence on Europe in
industrial matters shown by the maritime and staple-raising sections.
Not only did Boston and other New England towns increase as trading
centers when the back country settled up, but an even more significant
interchange occurred along the Valley and Piedmont. The German farmers
of the Great Valley brought their woven linen, knitted stockings,
firkins of butter, dried apples, grain, etc., to Philadelphia a

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