Frederick Jackson Turner - from the Significance of the Frontier

     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.... 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.... 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.... In this advance, the frontier is the outer edge of the wave-the meeting point between savagery and civilization. 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 purpose does not need sharp definition.... 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....

The Power of the American Environment - 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.... 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.... Before long he has gone to planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick.... 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 . . . little by little he transforms the wilderness, but the outcome is not the old Europe.... The fact is, that here is a new product that is American.... Moving westward, the frontier became more and more American.... Thus the advance of the frontier has meant a steady movement away from the influence of Europe.... 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...... [Effects of the Frontier on American Government] First, we note that the frontier promoted the formation of a composite nationality for the American people.... In another way the advance of the frontier decreased our dependence on England.... The legislation which most developed the powers of the national government, and played the largest part in its activity, was conditioned on the frontier.... The growth of nationalism and the evolution of American political institutions were dependent on the advance of the frontier.... The pioneer needed goods of the coast, and so the grand series of internal improvement and railroad legislation began, with potent nationalizing effects.... Loose construction [liberal interpretation of the Constitution] increased as the nation marched westward.... 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 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.... The most important effect of the frontier has been in the promotion of democracy.... The frontier is productive of individualism. Complex society is [diluted] by the wilderness into a kind of primitive organization based on the family.... From the conditions of frontier life came intellectual traits of profound importance.... 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-those are traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier.... The people of the United States have taken their tone from the incessant expansion.... 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. 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.