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
Among this moving mass, as it passed along the Valley into the Piedmont,
in the middle of the eighteenth century, were Daniel Boone, John Sevier,
James Robertson, and the ancestors of John C. Calhoun, Abraham Lincoln,
Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson, James K. Polk, Sam Houston, and Davy
Crockett, while the father of Andrew Jackson came to the Carolina
Piedmont at the same time from the coast. Recalling that Thomas
Jefferson's home was on the frontier, at the edge of the Blue Ridge, we
perceive that these names represent the militant expansive movement in
American life. They foretell the settlement across the Alleghanies in
Kentucky and Tennessee; the Louisiana Purchase, and Lewis and Clark's
transcontinental exploration; the conquest of the Gulf Plains in the
War of 1812-15; the annexation of Texas; the acquisition of California
and the Spanish Southwest. They represent, too, frontier democracy in
its two aspects personified in Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln. It
was a democracy responsive to leadership, susceptible to waves of
emotion, of a "high religeous voltage"--quick and direct in action.
The volume of this Northern movement into the Southern uplands is
illustrated by the statement of Governor Tryon, of North Carolina, that
in the summer and winter of 1765 more than a thousand immigrant wagons
passed through Salisbury, in that colony.[106:1] Coming by families, or
groups of families or congregations, they often drove their herds with
them. Whereas in 1746 scarce a hundred fighting men were found in Orange
and the western counties of North Carolina, there were in 1753 fully
three thousand, in addition to over a thousand Scotch in the Cumberland;
and they covered the province more or less thickly, from Hillsboro and
Fayetteville to the mountains.[106:2] Bassett remarks that the
Presbyterians received their first ministers from the synod of New York
and Pennsylvania, and later on sent their ministerial students to
Princeton College. "Indeed it is likely that the inhabitants of this
region knew more about Philadelphia at that time than about Newbern or
Edenton."[106:3]
We are now in a position to note briefly, in conclusion, some of the
results of the occupation of this new frontier during the first half of
the eighteenth century--some of the consequences of this formation of
the Old West.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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