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
good his claim, not only to the loyalty of the people of Tennessee, but
of the whole West, and even of the nation. He had the essential traits
of the Kentucky and Tennessee frontier. It was a frontier free from the
influence of European ideas and institutions. The men of the "Western
World" turned their backs upon the Atlantic Ocean, and with a grim
energy and self-reliance began to build up a society free from the
dominance of ancient forms.
The Westerner defended himself and resented governmental restrictions.
The duel and the blood-feud found congenial soil in Kentucky and
Tennessee. The idea of the personality of law was often dominant over
the organized machinery of justice. That method was best which was most
direct and effective. The backwoodsman was intolerant of men who split
hairs, or scrupled over the method of reaching the right. In a word, the
unchecked development of the individual was the significant product of
this frontier democracy. It sought rather to express itself by choosing
a man of the people, than by the formation of elaborate governmental
institutions.
It was because Andrew Jackson personified these essential Western traits
that in his presidency he became the idol and the mouthpiece of the
popular will. In his assault upon the Bank as an engine of aristocracy,
and in his denunciation of nullification, he went directly to his object
with the ruthless energy of a frontiersman. For formal law and the
subtleties of State sovereignty he had the contempt of a backwoodsman.
Nor is it without significance that this typical man of the new
democracy will always be associated with the triumph of the spoils
system in national politics. To the new democracy of the West, office
was an opportunity to exercise natural rights as an equal citizen of the
community. Rotation in office served not simply to allow the successful
man to punish his enemies and reward his friends, but it also furnished
the training in the actual conduct of political affairs which every
American claimed as his birthright. Only in a primitive democracy of the
type of the United States in 1830 could such a system have existed
without the ruin of the State. National government in that period was no
complex and nicely adjusted machine, and the evils of the system were
long in making themselves fully apparent.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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