The Significance of the Frontier

Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier" http://newark.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Texts/frontier.html

1 of 27 2003-10-09 09:04

The Significance of the Frontier in

American History1

By Frederick Jackson Turner

Electronic edition prepared by Jack Lynch,

Rutgers University -- Newark

The text and notes come from chapter 1 of The Frontier in

American History (New York: Henry Holt, 1921). Paragraph

numbers are my own.

[1] In a recent bulletin of the Superintendent of the Census for 1890 appear

these significant words: "Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of

settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated

bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. In the

discussion of its extent, its westward movement, etc., it can not, therefore, any

longer have a place in the census reports." This brief official statement marks

the closing of a great historic movement. Up to our own day American history

has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West.

The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance

of American settlement westward, explain American development.

[2] Behind institutions, behind constitutional forms and modifications, lie the

vital forces that call these organs into life and shape them to meet changing

conditions. The peculiarity of American institutions is, the fact that they have

been compelled to adapt themselves to the changes of an expanding people --

to the changes involved in crossing a continent, in winning a wilderness, and in

developing at each area of this progress out of the primitive economic and

political conditions of the frontier into the complexity of city life. Said Calhoun

in 1817, "We are great, and rapidly -- I was about to say fearfully --

growing!",2 So saying, he touched the distinguishing feature of American life.

All peoples show development; the germ theory of politics has been

sufficiently emphasized. In the case of most nations, however, the development

has occurred in a limited area; and if the nation has expanded, it has met other

growing peoples whom it has conquered. But in the case of the United States

we have a different phenomenon. Limiting our attention to the Atlantic coast,

we have the familiar phenomenon of the evolution of institutions in a limited

area, such as the rise of representative government; into complex organs; the

Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier" http://newark.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Texts/frontier.html

2 of 27 2003-10-09 09:04

progress from primitive industrial society, without division of labor, up to

manufacturing civilization. But we have in addition to this a recurrence of the

process of evolution in each western area reached in the process of expansion.

Thus American development has exhibited not merely advance along a single

line, but a return to primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier

line, and a new development for that area. American social development has

been continually beginning over again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth,

this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new

opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society,

furnish the forces dominating American character. The true point of view in the

history of this nation is not the Atlantic coast, it is the Great West. Even the

slavery struggle, which is made so exclusive an object of attention by writers

like Professor von Holst, occupies its important place in American history

because of its relation to westward expansion.

[3] In this advance, the frontier is the outer edge of the wave -- the meeting

point between savagery and civilization. Much has been written about the

frontier from the point of view of border warfare and the chase, but as a field

for the serious study of the economist and the historian it has been neglected.

[4] The American frontier is sharply distinguished from the European frontier

-- a fortified boundary line running through dense populations. The most

significant thing about the American frontier is, that it lies at the hither edge of

free land. In the census reports it is treated as the margin of that settlement

which has a density of two or more to the square mile. The term is an elastic

one, and for our purposes does not need sharp definition. We shall consider the

whole frontier belt including the Indian country and the outer margin of the

"settled area" of the census reports. This paper will make no attempt to treat the

subject

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