Influence of the American Frontier

Westward ho! The cry resounds throughout the whole of Euro-American history as immigrants moved from their initial, fragile settlements along the Atlantic Coast towards the lure of ever greener, richer, and emptier lands to the West. Although for much of the early part of settlement, European immigrants did not know exactly how much West there was, they wanted all of it, and this drive towards the Manifest Destiny - the idea that U.S. territorial expansion westward was not only inevitable but even divinely ordained - was a consuming force for much of the 18th and 19th centuries. This paper examines how both the reality and the idea of the western frontier influenced American society and institutions during the years 1600 to 1830, and how its influence differed from that of the ocean.

From the vantage point of the 20th century, the metaphor of the frontier seems at least as important as the reality of unsettled land (if not even more so). But this may only be the case because all one now has left is the idea of the frontier, not having had any actual land left for westward expansion for over a century. Certainly, for the farmer or rancher in 1720 or 1820, the possibility of cheap land to be had just over into the next territory could mean the difference between personal success and disaster. The frontier was myth and symbol and something to talk about, but it was also trees to be cut and fields to be cleared and planted and rivers to fish.

The reality of the frontier - with al

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armers (and perhaps for the male population in general) this meant that they now had to accept that hard work did not necessarily mean success. As long as the frontier had remained open, people could more easily believe in the sense of unlimited opportunities: The chances for success and the betterment of one's life were as open as the land itself.6 Once the frontier closed, the future was potentially no better than the present, which meant that it could be pretty grim indeed. At the point of the country's Centennial - roughly the same point in history that Kolodny is discussing - the working classes were in fact facing increasingly difficult times, in large measure as a result of the long-term effects of the Industrial Revolution beginning to be felt in a country now crossed by railroads and powered by steam. Even as the farmers were beginning to run out of new land to till, an increasing number of other working-class Americans were finding themselves disenfranchised as well, as Slotkin discusses. [Technological innovations] had made possible new forms of production; but they had also created a new and burgeoning class of factory workers, a "proletariat" whose conditions of life and work did not at all conform to the canonical e

Category: History - I