Economic conditions have their political implications, but it was the total impact of the frontier and not simply the commercial restrictions of some outside authority which made the Fair Play settlers self-reliant and independent "subsistence" farmers. The farmers' frontier did not result from the impact of any particular national stock groups, for Scotch-Irish, English, and German settlers reacted similarly. As the most recent historian of the Scotch-Irish, the most numerical national stock on this frontier, suggests, "authentically democratic principles, when the Scotch-Irish exhibited them in America, were rather the result of their experiences on colonial frontiers than the product of the Scottish and Ulster heritage."[43] The farmers' frontier with its characteristics of individualistic self-reliance was a product of the frontier itself.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Turner, The Frontier in American History, p. 18.
[2] Henry Bamford Parkes, The American Experience (New York, 1959), p. 44.
[3] Dunaway, The Scotch-Irish of Colonial Pennsylvania, p. 59.
[4] Paul A. W. Wallace, Indian Paths of Pennsylvania (Harrisburg, 1965), pp. 66-72, includes two maps.
[5] Chester D. Clark, "Pioneer Life in the New Purchase," The Northumberland County Historical Society Proceedings and Addresses, VII (1935), 18.
[6] Meginness, Otzinachson (1889), p. 400.
[7] Ibid., p. 401.
[8] Linn, History of Centre and Clinton Counties, p. 472.