THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE FRONTIER IN AMERICAN HISTORY
Frederick Jackson Turner THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE FRONTIER IN AMERICAN HISTORY 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 the!m 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 dev
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. They have been placed for your advantage in places which you frequent. 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. Or else they must go down the Roanoke --I know not how many miles--where salt is brought up from the Cape Fear. ' 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. Complex society is precipitated by the wilderness into a kind of primitive organization, based on the family. " 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. 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. 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. " "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. Said Calhoun in 1817, '"We are great, and rapidly ---I was about to say fearfully ---growing!" So saying, he touched the distinguishing feature of American life. Burke and other writers in the middle of the eighteenth century believed that Pennsylvania was "threatened with the danger of being wholly foreign in language, manners and perhaps even inclinations. 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. Calhoun, abandoned his own American system. 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.
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