American Exceptionalism Part 16: The Frontier’s Impact on American Character

“When the culture of the East, its chief characteristic, is added to the strength of body and the strength of mind of the agricultural center, its special contribution, and these two great characteristics are constantly imbued with the spirit of independence and love of liberty which lives in the hearts of the dwellers of the mountains, their main quality added to the national character, there is every reason to believe that we shall have a people and institutions such as will be permanent; with such wealth of resources, of such high education and intelligence, and of such vitality, of such longevity, of such devotion to freedom and hostility to centralization and tyranny as shall enable this Nation of ours to stand indefinitely; and to maintain in the future years its manifest destiny of leading the peoples and nations of earth in the principles of free government, constitutional security and individual liberty. Under these and under these alone, the faculties, the aspirations and inspirations of mankind may be unfolded into their full flowering to the fruition of an ever greater and more humane civilization.”

― Charles Edwin Winter, Four Hundred Million Acres: The Public Lands and Resources (1932)

In 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner wrote, “In a recent bulletin of the Superintendent of the Census for 1890 appear these significant words: “Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. In the discussion of its extent, its westward movement, etc., it cannot, therefore, any longer have a place in the census reports.” This brief official statement marks the closing of a great historic movement. Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.”

He goes on to say, “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…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.”

Turner describes the American character forged on the frontier as “that coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom—these are traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier.”

Nowhere in the Old World was there a frontier as in America (both North and South). Free land on the border between civilization and “savagery.” The frontier meant danger and isolation, opportunity and self-reliance, daily challenges for the entire family, frequent droughts, storms, blizzards, disease and crime.  It meant building your own home out of mud and sod, digging wells, building fences, cutting your own wood, growing your own food, educating your own children, tending for your sick with what skills you had. Living on the frontier demanded courage, indomitability, perseverance, physical strength, self-reliance, and imagination.  It was particularly hard for the women who were sometimes driven half-insane by the isolation.

What kind of society, what kind of character, was built on these frontier experiences?

Rugged individualism and the government.  When the frontier was originally settled, government was rarely to be found. In the early years of the Republic when the frontier consisted of settlements along the Appalachian mountains and river valleys, most households were self-sufficient, producing their own food, clothes and shelter, and buying their few manufactured goods from itinerant peddlers and small shops. They carved their own roads out of the forest and depended on each other for protection from wandering criminals and from native peoples who were understandably hostile from being evicted from their lands.

Later, despite substantial public investments in roads, canals and especially railroads, despite the bivouacking of U.S, calvary throughout the West, and despite the important role of government agricultural agents, most Westerners were strongly in favor of limited government and valued their independence above everything else.

Violence.  All of us are used to depictions of the violence on the frontier. It has been portrayed by books and films as a place with little government authority, where cattlemen and farmers fought one another for land, and where disputes were settled by a gun, rather than a lawcourt. This view has been contradicted by many historians such as Roger McGrath who, in his book Gunfighters, Highwaymen and Vigilantes: Violence on the Frontier, argued that the idea that the West was violent is quite exaggerated.  McGrath points to the existence of many private mechanisms for dispute resolution such as  “land clubs” which were established even before the U.S. Government surveyed the land; “wagon trains” which often established written constitutions before setting out; and mining camps, which often had written contracts laying out legal and illegal behavior.

The one area where violence was widespread was in the decades long war between the U.S. Calvary and the Plains Indians. After the Civil War, the Army established a network of forts throughout the West, whose prime mission was to protect the trans-continental railroad (this is an important story of its own). According to Thomas J. DiLorenzo, “On June 27, 1865, General William Tecumseh Sherman was given command of the Military District of the Missouri, which was one of the five military divisions into which the U.S. government had divided the country. Sherman received this command for the purpose of commencing the twenty-five-year war against the Plains Indians, primarily as a form of veiled subsidy to the government-subsidized railroad corporations and other politically connected corporations involved in building the transcontinental railroads. He wrote his brother “Explaining in his letter that all Indians have been provided with reservations on which to live, Sherman concluded, “All (Indians) who cling to their old hunting grounds are hostile and will remain so till killed off.” He continued by calling the conflict a “predatory war” and insisted that the U.S. Army must “take chances and clean out Indians as we (the army) encounter them.”

If we accept the idea that the Frontier created a different kind of person, one more individualistic, more self-reliant, one less dependent on society, one hostile to government, one less thoughtful and more a person of action, one that tended to use violence to deal with conflict, one more adept in the realm of problem-solving than in the realm of ideas, one more racist and one more sure of the destiny of the white race to rule the North American continent, what does this “new man” [or woman] mean for the American character in its entirety?

How did this frontier man swallow up all the other “men,” the industrialist, the sweatshop worker, the store owner, the intellectual, the steelworker, the immigrant, the negro, the women? The answer is, of course, he didn’t. America is not made up of one type of culture, it is an amalgam of cultures. When Americans, went “over there” in 1917, their ranks were made up of cowboys and Jews, of frontiersmen and laborers, of writers and artists, of Italians and Germans, of farmers and teachers.

Turner’s ideas became the bedrock beliefs of American historicity. And then they weren’t.  According to John Faragher, Turner himself evolved. In fact, twenty-five years later, Turner himself wrote, “the national problem was “no longer how to cut and burn away the vast screen of the dense and daunting forest” but “how to save and wisely use the remaining timber.”  He now believed, that “imperious will and force” had to be replaced by social reorganization, he called for an expanded system of educational opportunity that would supplant the geographic mobility of the frontier. “The test tube and the microscope are needed rather than ax and rifle.” He wrote, “in place of old frontiers of wilderness, there are new frontiers of unwon fields of science.” Pioneer ideals were to be maintained by American universities through the training of new leaders who would strive “to reconcile popular government and culture with the huge industrial society of the modern world.”

Conclusions. Frederick Jackson Turner argued that the American frontier built an American character of individualism, self-reliance, and practicality, free from the legacy of European ideas and practices. This character was rural rather than urban, based on physical strength rather than mental acuity, individualistic rather than communal, technical rather than artistic, forward-looking rather than backward-looking, racialist rather than diverse.  

The American frontier forged a character, at least for those who lived on or near it, of self-reliance. But that character was only one of many characters which contributed to the idea of what it means to be an American. The American character is no more “Western” than it is “Eastern.” It is made up of both the Westerner Gary Cooper and the Easterner Frank Sinatra, of the Westerner Ronald Reagan and the Easterner Frank Reagan (hero of the CBS drama Blue Bloods), of the Rough Rider Teddy Roosevelt and the Eastern aristocrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt. America is an amalgam of many different strands of the American experience.