The Frontier in American History

by Frederick Jackson Turner

All the positions on the left [east] bank of the Mississippi . . . without the alliance of the Western states are far from covering Louisiana. . . . When two nations possess, one the coasts and the other the plains, the former must inevitably embark or submit. From thence I conclude that the Western States of the North American republic must unite themselves with Louisiana and form in the future one single compact nation; or else that colony to whatever power it shall belong will be conquered or devoured.

The effect of bringing political unity to the Mississippi Valley by the Louisiana Purchase was profound. It was the decisive step of the United States on an independent career as a world power, free from entangling foreign alliances. The victories of Harrison in the Northwest, in the War of 1812 that followed, ensured our expansion in the northern half of the Valley. Jackson's triumphal march to the Gulf and his defense of New Orleans in the same war won the basis for that Cotton Kingdom, so important in the economic life of the nation and so pregnant with the issue of slavery.[189:1] The acquisition of Florida, Texas, and the Far West followed naturally. Not only was the nation set on an independent path in foreign relations; its political system was revolutionized, for the Mississippi Valley now opened the way for adding State after State, swamping the New England section and its Federalism. The doctrine of strict construction had received a fatal blow at the hands of its own prophet. The old conception of historic sovereign States, makers of a federation, was shattered by this vast addition of raw material for an indefinite number of parallelograms called States, nursed through a Territorial period by the Federal government, admitted under conditions, and animated by national rather than by State patriotism.

The area of the nation had been so enlarged and the development of the internal resources so promoted, by the acquisition of the whole course of the mighty river, its tributaries and its outlet, that the Atlantic coast soon turned its economic energies from the sea to the interior. Cities and sections began to struggle for ascendancy over its industrial life. A real national activity, a genuine American culture began. The vast spaces, the huge natural resources, of the Valley demanded exploitation and population. Later there came the tide of foreign immigration which has risen so steadily that it has made a composite American people whose amalgamation is destined to produce a new national stock.

But without attempting to exhaust, or even to indicate, all the effects of the Louisiana Purchase, I wish next to ask your attention to the significance of the Mississippi Valley in the promotion of democracy and the transfer of the political center of gravity in the nation. The Mississippi Valley has been the especial home of democracy. Born of free land and the pioneer spirit, nurtured in the ideas of the Revolution and finding free play for these ideas in the freedom of the wilderness, democracy showed itself in the earliest utterances of the men of the Western Waters and it has persisted there. The demand for local self-government, which was insistent on the frontier, and the endorsement given by the Alleghanies to these demands led to the creation of a system of independent Western governments and to the Ordinance of 1787, an original contribution to colonial policy. This was framed in the period when any rigorous subjection of the West to Eastern rule would have endangered the ties that bound them to the Union itself. In the Constitutional Convention prominent Eastern statesmen expressed their fears of the Western democracy and would have checked its ability to out-vote the regions of property by limiting its political power, so that it should never equal that of the Atlantic coast. But more liberal counsels prevailed. In the first debates upon the public lands, also, it was clearly stated that the social system of the nation was involved quite as much as the question of revenue. Eastern fears that cheap lands in abundance would depopulate the Atlantic States and check their industrial growth by a scarcity of labor supply were met by the answer of one of the representatives in 1796:

I question if any man would be hardy enough to point out a class of citizens by name that ought to be the servants of the community; yet unless that is done to what class of the People could you direct such a law? But if you passed such an act [limiting the area offered for sale in the Mississippi Valley], it would be tantamount to saying that there is some class which must remain here, and by law be obliged to serve the others for such wages as they please to give.

Gallatin showed his comprehension of the basis of the prosperous American democracy in the same debate when he said:

If the cause of the happiness of this country was examined into, it would be found to arise as much from the great plenty of land in proportion to the inhabitants, which their citizens enjoyed as from the wisdom of their political institutions.

Out of this frontier democratic society where the freedom and abundance of land in the great Valley opened a refuge to the oppressed in all regions, came the Jacksonian democracy which governed the nation after the downfall of the party of John Quincy Adams. Its center rested in Tennessee, the region from which so large a portion of the Mississippi Valley was settled by descendants of the men of the Upland South. The rule of the Mississippi Valley is seen when we recall the place that Tennessee, Kentucky, and Missouri held in both parties. Besides Jackson, Clay, Harrison and Polk, we count such presidential candidates as Hugh White and John Bell, Vice President R. M. Johnson, Grundy, the chairman of the finance committee, and Benton, the champion of western radicalism.