he existence of the frontier and to the passage of legislation regarding tariff, land, and internal improvements that were themselves related to frontier needs and ideas. Turner says that the purchase of the Louisiana Territory was especially important:
[It] 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.
Turner says that the frontier promoted the formation of a composite nationality for the American people:
The coast was preponderantly English, but the later tides of continental immigration flowed across to the free lands. . . In the crucible of the frontier the immigrants were Americanized, liberated, and fused into a mixed race, English in neither nationality nor characteristics. The process has gone on from the early days to our own.
Jack D. Forbes agrees that the frontie
...