The Frontier in American HistoryTurner, Frederick Jackson
History
The Frontier in American History
Turner, Frederick Jackson
Frontier and pioneer life -- United States; Frontier thesis; United States -- History; United States -- Territorial expansion
Such was a conservative's impression of that pioneer movement of New
England colonists who had spread up the valley of the Connecticut into
New Hampshire, Vermont, and western New York in the period of which he
wrote, and who afterwards went on to possess the Northwest. New England
Federalism looked with a shudder at the democratic ideas of those who
refused to recognize the established order. But in that period there
came into the Union a sisterhood of frontier States--Ohio, Indiana,
Illinois, Missouri--with provisions for the franchise that brought in
complete democracy.
Even the newly created States of the Southwest showed the tendency. The
wind of democracy blew so strongly from the West, that even in the older
States of New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Virginia,
conventions were called, which liberalized their constitutions by
strengthening the democratic basis of the State. In the same time the
labor population of the cities began to assert its power and its
determination to share in government. Of this frontier democracy which
now took possession of the nation, Andrew Jackson was the very
personification. He was born in the backwoods of the Carolinas in the
midst of the turbulent democracy that preceded the Revolution, and he
grew up in the frontier State of Tennessee. In the midst of this region
of personal feuds and frontier ideals of law, he quickly rose to
leadership. The appearance of this frontiersman on the floor of Congress
was an omen full of significance. He reached Philadelphia at the close
of Washington's administration, having ridden on horseback nearly eight
hundred miles to his destination. Gallatin, himself a Western man,
describes Jackson as he entered the halls of Congress: "A tall, lank,
uncouth-looking personage, with long locks of hair hanging over his face
and a cue down his back tied in an eel-skin; his dress singular; his
manners those of a rough backwoodsman." And Jefferson testified: "When I
was President of the Senate he was a Senator, and he could never speak
on account of the rashness of his feelings. I have seen him attempt it
repeatedly and as often choke with rage." At last the frontier in the
person of its typical man had found a place in the Government. This
six-foot backwoodsman, with blue eyes that could blaze on occasion, this
choleric, impetuous, self-willed Scotch-Irish leader of men, this expert
duelist, and ready fighter, this embodiment of the tenacious, vehement,
personal West, was in politics to stay. The frontier democracy of that
time had the instincts of the clansman in the days of Scotch border
warfare. Vehement and tenacious as the democracy was, strenuously as
each man contended with his neighbor for the spoils of the new country
that opened before them, they all had respect for the man who best
expressed their aspirations and their ideas. Every community had its
hero. In the War of 1812 and the subsequent Indian fighting Jackson made
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