For what seems like an eternity, writing and teaching the history of the West in the early American republic was dominated by the insights of Frederick Jackson Turner, architect of the famous American “frontier thesis.” According to the distillate of Turner’s insights that became ingrained in the popular mind (and too often, in the textbooks as well), the “frontier” was the place where Europeans became Americans. The frontier fostered the process, albeit mysterious, by which common American values and identity were forged, and its continual receding in the wake of westward movement, wrote Turner, “defined” American history. The frontier supposedly functioned as a “safety valve” against urban decay, industrial strife, and class conflict. It was the hope of America, and its disappearance (statistically in 1890) raised fevered questions about the future success of the American experiment in the twentieth century.

Well, now we know the American experiment has survived the twentieth century: if not exactly as Turner imagined, nevertheless arguably intact, still democratic, and more pluralistic than anybody could have imagined. As teaching strategies and materials evolved over the century just past, the study of the antebellum West fell into a comfortable “valley of democracy” approach (the phrase was John D. Barnhart’s), which offered up a saga of heroic pioneers taming the wilderness, planting institutions of freedom, and perfecting for successive generations the genius of American liberty. Then came the protests from voices forgotten or ignored: the Native American peoples, African Americans, Latinos, Asians, and other supposedly “unmeltable” ethnics, and from environmentalists appalled at the wreckage produced by our “conquest of nature.”

In the last generation so-called “new western historians” fashioned revisionist stories far more critical of the frontier experience—and far more difficult to integrate into primary and secondary school curricula. Teachers determined to tell the truth in a public school history class blanched (not unreasonably) at accounts of environmental rape, mayhem, and genocide as the defining themes of the American story; yet they could not repeat the heroic tales without embarrassment at what they distorted or concealed.

As a result of this confusion, teachers’ approaches to the rise of the West—especially in the antebellum period on the transappalachian frontier—have lost coherence and tend to offer apparently random stories of pioneering, maybe frontier slavery, Indian removal, Spanish or Mexican contributions, and occasional, often awkward, episodes of conflict. This is hardly the fault of teachers: the constitutive literature on which all teaching rests has not served up much of a platform from which to mount a coherent story of westward expansion in the early republic. What follows are some suggestions for how we might begin to assemble such a platform out of the scholarship now accumulating on the shelves of research libraries.

We will start by recovering that which is true in the old material. For all their faults, neither the Turner thesis nor Barnhart’s “valley of democracy” story was wholly wrong, even if both were seriously incomplete. The experience of pioneering did profoundly change the lives of westering Americans. In new settlements west of the Appalachian Mountains, men and women from different states and regions, raised on different customs, in different religious traditions, and cherishing conflicting views on race, ethnicity, law, politics, morality, and liberty itself were forced to make communities together at the same time they were struggling to make good their common claims to the land and the right of self-government. A less magical process than that implied in Turner’s mythical forest or the Ohio Valley’s “democratic” soil nevertheless taught Americans how to accommodate one another, how to define and exclude such “others” as Indians and blacks (or Catholics or Mormons or Mexicans of non-white descent), how to negotiate their differences in public through politics and law, and how to relocate in the realm of private (pluralistic) culture those convictions they could not win in public. John Mack Faragher’s Sugar Creek, Andrew R. L. Cayton’s studies of frontier Ohio and Indiana, Nicole Etcheson’s Emerging Midwest, and Elizabeth Perkins’s new Border Life, as well as countless articles in journals of western or southern history, the early republican period, and many states, offer rich examples of this process that expose both its accomplishments and its shortcomings.

Also true was Turner’s claim that pioneering somehow defined the American experience and shaped essential aspects of the national character. Pioneering itself produced a tragic combination of creativity and exploitation, of constructive and destructive behaviors. From the earliest settlements at Jamestown, Americans had been pioneering—seizing new lands, neutralizing rival claims, and bringing land into production according to the pioneers’ preferred definitions—as if their lives depended on it. For many revolutionary Americans it was the Proclamation of 1763, George III’s attempt to reign in his sprawling empire by restraining further pioneering, that sparked their commitment to independence. Pioneering was a private initiative to which the white residents of British North America had become so accustomed as to view it as a right, ancient and inviolable. After 1776 American governments at any level found themselves virtually powerless to stop—or even guide—the actions of private pioneers, and they quickly shaped policies to organize and routinize this process that was central to their future as a nation. A spate of studies of the Northwest Ordinance, growing out of recent bicentennial celebrations (especially Peter Onuf’s Statehood and Union and Onuf and Cayton’s Midwest and the Nation) develop new insights into that organic document and other federal policies that, taken together, institutionalized pioneering as central to the American experiment.

Out of the commitment to pioneering in the early United States naturally grew policies toward Indians that sought both peace and acquiescence from the native people still resident in the transappalachian West. Pioneering left no room for shared ownership and control of America’s western lands, so somehow the new self-governing republic had to fashion a strategy for emptying the West of rivals in order to satisfy the demands of its liberty-loving citizens. The U.S. Constitution reserved to Washington exclusive jurisdiction over “domestic dependent nations,” the better to rationalize negotiations and preserve the peace between Anglo-American pioneers and Indian communities. Careful new scholarship (for example, Richard White’s Middle Ground) has greatly improved and complicated our understanding of the frontier interactions between these peoples and the dynamics by which one group triumphed over the other.

Especially north of the Ohio River and before 1795, the strength of the confederated nations, first under Pontiac and then Little Turtle, justified one side of a two-edged national Indian policy: the promise to protect the Indians from pioneer incursions until such time as the natives sold their lands to Uncle Sam. The other side required that they sell land only to the United States, and it was with this cutting edge that federal authorities learned to carve up Indian resistance and secure “voluntary” removals. The gradual degradation of the pretense of voluntarism is reviewed briefly in Anthony F. C. Wallace’s useful paperback The Long Bitter Trail, which offers a quick overview and access to new literature as well.

Pioneers, of course, were not only men, and recent scholarship has done much to recover and integrate the experiences of women and children in a process that had been treated almost exclusively as a heroic masculine adventure. Joan Cashin’s Family Venture, as well as Faragher’s Sugar Creek, two studies by Annette Kolodny, and many others expose the tragic isolation, deep sadness, extraordinary hardship, and sometimes fruitless sacrifices experienced by women whose men chose to go pioneering—a decision often taken without consulting the women. Horrible stories from the overland migration to Oregon and California in the 1840s and 1850s, long familiar to students of the West, find rich antecedents in the narratives of women who earlier settled the Ohio and Mississippi valleys.

Part of what was wrong with the “valley of democracy” thesis lay in its depiction of slavery as an aberration at odds with the more important story of democracy. Following that assumption, historians wrote slavery out of the American pioneer tradition. In fact, slavery turned out to be an excellent tool with which pioneers could bring the antebellum Southwest—Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Missouri, and eventually Texas—into the American staple crop exporting economy. James Oakes’s Ruling Race nicely illustrates the importance of slavery both to the settlement of the Southwest and to the life-cycle of southwestern pioneer families (many of whom came west with coffles of slaves to build plantations, while others emigrated as lone pioneers only to buy slaves as soon as their fortunes improved). Newer works such as Ann Patton Malone’s Sweet Chariot and Daniel Dupre’s Transforming the Cotton Frontier sustain and enlarge Oakes’s suggestive findings.

Perhaps even more serious than the excision of slavery in the old historiography was the disappearance of the values, behaviors, and institutions of the modern capitalist system. The antebellum decades saw the explosion of a domestic entrepreneurial economy in the United States, and while historians disagree about whether it was just beginning or coming of age, few can fail to recognize its presence almost everywhere in America by the time of the Civil War. Less committed to historiographical conventions, historical geographers such as Robert Mitchell, Carville Earle, and D. W. Meinig were among the first to acknowledge the significance of production for the market, trade, money, and capitalistic intentions in the rise of the West. Historical sociologist Wilma Dunaway explains the dynamic in compelling terms in The First American Frontier, while The Wages of Independence, edited by Paul Gilje, provides an excellent introduction to the rise of antebellum capitalism in general.

Finally, the geographers’ perspective on the frontier economy, together with a general reintegration of pioneer experiences into the larger story of American development, is drawing new attention to the fact that the old “transportation revolution”—reinvented and improved as the “market revolution”—came not as an intruder in the peaceful wilderness. State histories and specialized studies prove that the demand for roads, canals, postal service, newspapers, money, even banks (supposed bêtes noires of Jacksonian “common men”), and finally railways came from the pioneers long before either they, their states, or outside capitalists found the cash, credit, or inclination to provide them.

Taken all together, the findings of the last generation of historians have given us a picture of the rise of the West every bit as important as Turner or Barnhart believed. If the American Revolution promised its people liberty, equality, and republican self-government, the West was the place where present and future generations would test that promise for most of a century. Democracy, slavery, and entrepreneurial capitalism all came of age on a moving frontier that literally constituted the field on which the American experiment was played. Mobility destabilized old hierarchies; the constant re-creation of community exposed common values as well as potential points of conflict; rapid growth fostered adaptive behaviors, accommodating habits, and flexible temperaments that, in turn, tolerated and encouraged rapid growth. The West spared two generations the need to reconcile clashing interests or contradictory claims as this reckless process gathered momentum: as long as ample frontiers remained, men and women could imagine (and imagination was what counted) they were free to deal themselves a whole new hand.

In this context another old chestnut, “manifest destiny,” takes on new life. If God intended the American experiment to be an example to a blighted world, then all that the founders’ sons and daughters experienced necessarily fell under the same dispensation. Thomas Hietala’s Manifest Design finds evidence of conscious maneuvering behind the progress of American conquest; but while the awareness of ambition belies the innocence once connected with that favorite expansionists’ phrase, it only verifies how important for Americans was the prospect of reinventing themselves, their communities, and their republican institutions. Michael A. Morrison’s Slavery and the American West ably shows the steps by which the promise of American republicanism became attached to the West, became contested in the West, and finally brought a conflict in the West that ignited the Civil War.

Not so long ago Americans imagined that the West—their historical frontier—provided them immunity from all responsibility for what they did or didn’t do in their meteoric rise to greatness. Scholarship no longer sustains that myth of innocence or claims of American exceptionalism; instead, the frontier appears to be the landscape on which energized, ambitious, self-directing Americans seized history itself (rather than the other way around) and gave it the indelible stamp of their own designs. For good and ill Americans struggled with their freedoms, desires, raw resources, tragic predecessors, and each other to produce both that which we enjoy and that which appalls us about the land in which we live—and teach.

Bibliography

Barnhart, John D. Valley of Democracy: The Frontier Versus the Plantation in the Ohio Valley, 1775-1818. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1953.

Cashin, Joan E. A Family Venture: Men and Women on the Southern Frontier. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Cayton, Andrew R. L. Frontier Republic: Ideology and Politics in the Ohio Country, 1780-1825. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1986.

———, ed. Contact Points: American Frontiers from the Mohawk Valley to the Mississippi, 1750-1830. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

———. Frontier Indiana. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.

Cronon, William. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the West. New York: W. W. Norton, 1991.

Dunaway, Wilma A. The First American Frontier: Transition to Capitalism in Southern Appalachia, 1700-1860. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

Dupre, Daniel. Transforming the Cotton Frontier: Madison County, Alabama, 1800-1840. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997.

Earle, Carville. Geographical Inquiry and American Historical Problems. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992.

Etcheson, Nicole. The Emerging Midwest: Upland Southerners and the Political Culture of the Northwest, 1787-1861. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996.

Faragher, John Mack. Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986.

Gilje, Paul A., ed. The Wages of Independence: Capitalism in the Early American Republic. Madison, WI: Madison House, 1997.

Hietala, Thomas. Manifest Design: Anxious Aggrandizement in Late Jacksonian America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985.

Jennings, Francis. Founders of America: How Indians Discovered the Land, Pioneered in It, and Created Great Classical Civilizations, How They Were Plunged into a Dark Ages by Invasion and Conquest, and How They Are Reviving. New York: Norton, 1993.

Kolodny, Annette. The Land before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630-1860. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984.

———. The Lay of the Land : Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975.

Limerick, Patricia Nelson. The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West. New York: Norton, 1987.

Malone, Ann Patton. Sweet Chariot: Slave Family and Household Structure in Nineteenth-Century Louisiana. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992.

Meinig, D. W. The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History. Vol. 2, Continental America, 1800-1967. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.

Mitchell, Robert D. Commercialism and Frontier: Perspectives on the Early Shenandoah Valley. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1977.

———, ed. Appalachian Frontiers: Settlement, Society, & Development in the Preindustrial Era. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991.

Morrison, Michael A. Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny and the Coming of the Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

Oakes, James. The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders. New York: Knopf, 1982.

Onuf, Peter S. Statehood and Union: A History of the Northwest Ordinance. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1987.

Onuf, Peter S. and Andrew R. L. Cayton. The Midwest and the Nation: Rethinking the History of an American Region. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.

Perkins, Elizabeth. Border Life: Experience and Memory in the Revolutionary Ohio Valley. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Turner, Frederick Jackson. Frontier and Section: Selected Essays, edited by Ray Allen Billington. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1961.

Wallace, Anthony F. C. The Long, Bitter Trail: Andrew Jackson and the Indians. New York: Hill and Wang, 1993.

Watson, Harry. Andrew Jackson vs. Henry Clay: Democracy and Development in Antebellum America. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1998.

White, Richard. “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A History of the American West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991.

———. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

John Lauritz Larson teaches American history at Purdue University and serves as co-editor of the Journal of the Early Republic. He has written Bonds of Enterprise: John Murray Forbes and Western Development in America’s Railway Age (1984) and Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States (forthcoming).