multiplication of rival churches in the little frontier towns had deep and lasting social effects. The
religious aspects of the frontier make a chapter in our history which needs study.
9
Library of Congress
United States population distribution in 1890,
in Gannett, Statistical Atlas of the United States, 1898
from
he
From the conditions of frontier life came intellectual traits of profound importance. The works of
travelers along each frontier from colonial days onward describe certain common traits, and these traits
have, while softening down, still persisted as survivals in the place of their origin, even when a higher
social organization succeeded. The result is that to the frontier the American intellect owes its striking
characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that
practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things,
lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy;
5
that dominant
individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes
with freedomthese are traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of
the frontier. Since the days when the fleet of Columbus sailed into the waters of the New World,
America has been another name for opportunity, and the people of the United States have taken their
tone from the incessant expansion which has not only been open but has even been forced upon them.
He would be a rash prophet who should assert that the expansive character of American life has now
entirely ceased. Movement has been its dominant fact, and, unless this training has no effect upon a
people, the American energy will
continually demand a wider field
for its exercise. But never again
will such gifts of free land offer
themselves. For a moment, at the
frontier, the bonds of custom are
broken and unrestraint is
triumphant. There is not tabula
rasa. The stubborn American
environment is there with its
imperious summons to accept its
conditions; the inherited ways of
doing things are also there; and
yet, in spite of environment, and
in spite of custom, each frontier
did indeed furnish a new field
opportunity, a gate of escape from
the bondage of the past; and
freshness, and confidence, and
scorn of older society, impatience of its restraints and its ideas, and
indifference to its lessons, have accompanied the frontier. What the
Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom,
offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that,
and more, the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States directly,
and to the nations of Europe more remotely. And now, four centuries
the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under t
Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.
[End]
of
5
Colonial travelers agree in remarking on the phlegmatic characteristics of the colonists. It has frequently been asked how such a people
could have developed that strained nervous energy now characteristic of them. Compare Sumner, “Alexander Hamilton,” p. 98, and
Adams, “History of the United States,” i, p. 60; ix, pp. 240, 241. The transition appears to become marked at the close of the War of 1812,
a period when interest centered upon the development of the West, and the West was noted for restless energy. Grund, “Americans,” ii,
ch. i. [Footnote in Turner, Frontier, 1920]