United States

The Frontier in American History

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Chapters

1. Chapter 1

Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes images of the original pages. See 22994-h.htm or 22994-h.zip: (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/2/9/...

2. Chapter 2

Why was it that the Indian trader passed so rapidly across the continent? What effects followed from the trader's frontier? The trade was coeval with American discovery. The Nor...

3. Chapter 3

When we consider the public domain from the point of view of the sale and disposal of the public lands we are again brought face to face with the frontier. The policy of the Uni...

4. Chapter 4

[6:1] Scribner's Statistical Atlas, xxxviii, pl. 13; McMaster, "Hist. of People of U. S.," i, pp. 4, 60, 61; Imlay and Filson, "Western Territory of America" (London, 1793); Roc...

5. Chapter 5

1 That wharas by the all dessposing hand of god who orders all things in infinit wisdom it is our portion to liue In such a part of the land which by reson of the enemy Is becom...

6. Chapter 6

One while the Enclosing of _Commons_ hath made Neighbours, that should have been like Sheep, to _Bite and devour one another_. . . . Again, Do our _Old_ People, any of them _Go...

7. Chapter 7

The richest parts remaining to be granted are on the northern branches of the Connecticut river, towards Crown Point where are great districts of fertile soil still unsettled. T...

8. Chapter 8

By the beginning of the eighteenth century the engrossing of the lands of lowland Virginia had progressed so far, the practice of holding large tracts of wasteland for reserves...

9. Chapter 9

Although the credit system relieved the difficulty in Pennsylvania, the lands of that colony were in competition with the Maryland lands, offered between 1717 and 1738 at forty...

10. Chapter 10

But the Piedmont settlers brought their own social order, and could not be well governed by the older planters living far away toward the seaboard. This may be illustrated by co...

11. Chapter 11

[96:3] McCrady, "South Carolina," 1719-1776 (N. Y., 1899), pp. 149, 151; Smith, "South Carolina," p. 40; Ballagh, in Amer. Hist. Assoc. "Report," 1897, pp. 117-119; Brevard, "Di...

12. Chapter 12

By the cessions of Virginia, New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, the Old Congress had come into nominal possession of an extensive public domain, and a field for the exerc...

13. Chapter 13

Up to this decade the pine belt of the Middle West, in northern Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota had been the field of operations of Indian traders. At first under English com...

14. Chapter 14

The task of the Middle West is that of adapting democracy to the vast economic organization of the present. This region which has so often needed the reminder that bigness is no...

15. Chapter 15

In this development of a foreign policy in connection with the Ohio Valley, we find the germ of the Monroe doctrine, and the beginnings of the definite independence of the Unite...

16. Chapter 16

England trembled on the brink of her great conquest, fearful of the effect of these far-stretching rivers upon her colonial system, timorous in the presence of the fierce people...

17. Chapter 17

At the same time the great river and its affluents became the highway of a commerce that reached to the West Indies, the Atlantic Coast, Europe, and South America. The Mississip...

18. Chapter 18

In the Revolutionary days, the settlers crossed the Alleghanies and put a barrier between them and the coast. They became, to use their phrases, "the men of the Western waters,"...

19. Chapter 19

We are now in a position to see clearly some of the factors involved in the Western problem. For nearly three centuries the dominant fact in American life has been expansion. Wi...

20. Chapter 20

In these transforming years since 1860, Ohio, finding the magician's talisman that revealed the treasury of mineral wealth, gas, and petroleum beneath her fields, has leaped to...

21. Chapter 21

In dealing with Western contributions to democracy, it is essential that the considerations which have just been mentioned shall be kept in mind. Whatever these contributions ma...

22. Chapter 22

The pioneer life from which Lincoln came differed in important respects from the frontier democracy typified by Andrew Jackson. Jackson's democracy was contentious, individualis...

23. Chapter 23

She gave to the world such types as the farmer Thomas Jefferson, with his Declaration of Independence, his statute for religious toleration, and his purchase of Louisiana. She g...

24. Chapter 24

On the other hand, an inharmonious group of reformers are sounding the warning that American democratic ideals and society are menaced and already invaded by the very conditions...

25. Chapter 25

New farm lands no longer increase decade after decade in areas equal to those of European states. While the ratio of increase of improved land declines, the value of farm lands...

26. Chapter 26

Bearing in mind the far-reaching influence of the disappearance of unlimited resources open to all men for the taking, and considering the recoil of the common man when he saw t...

27. Chapter 27

The past decade has witnessed an extraordinary federal activity in limiting individual and corporate freedom for the benefit of society. To that decade belong the conservation c...

28. Chapter 28

A principle is formulated by _a priori_ reasoning concerning facts of common experience; it is then tested by statistics and promoted to the rank of a known and acknowledged tru...

29. Chapter 29

This democracy was one that involved a real feeling of social comradeship among its widespread members. Justice Catron, who came from Arkansas to the Supreme Court in the presid...

30. Chapter 30

And all over the nation, in voluntary organizations for aid to the government, is being shown the pioneer principle of association that was expressed in the "house raising." It...

31. Chapter 31

Pennsylvania, 23, 27; coast and interior, antagonisms, 112; German settlement, 82, 100; Great Valley of, 68, 164; land grants, 101; new Pennsylvania of the Great Valley, 100; Sc...