The Fabric of America (40 page)

Another officer argued that such cruelty was inescapable: “We exterminated the American Indians, and I guess most of us are proud of it, or at least believe that the end justified the means; and we must have no scruples about exterminating this other race standing in the way of progress and enlightenment, if it is necessary.”

One critical difference existed between imperialism and westward expansion—the frontier. Right up to that line, the settlers had colonized the land, and the need to have it confirmed as property had given them an incentive to bring government with them. Because the territories carved out by Stephen Douglas's committee lay within the United States, immediate responsibility for devising the regulations that governed their lives, liberties, and property rested with Congress, and the template that it had to use was the U.S. Constitution. Most of the American empire, however, was not being colonized by settlers anxious for U.S. government, and Congress had no intention of admitting it into the Union.

In 1904 the Supreme Court had to deal with the dilemma that this posed. It came in the unlikely form of an appeal by Fred Dorr, editor of the
Manila Freedom
, who had headlined a juicy story about the private activities of a member of the Philippine governing commission with the eye-catching but unfortunately libelous words TRAITOR, SEDUCER AND PERJURER. Dorr argued that since the Philippines lay under U.S. control, he should have had the protection of the Constitution and been tried by a jury rather than by a judge under the civil code inherited from Spain.

The majority decision of the Supreme Court, written by Justice Edward D. White, dismissed his appeal on the grounds that Congress could devise its own regulations in any form not directly prohibited by the Constitution. It was a matter of being realistic. “If the United States, impelled by its duty or advantage, shall acquire territory peopled by savages,” White pointed out, the Constitution would require it to set up courts, empanel juries, and follow due process, but “to state such a proposition demonstrates the impossibility of carrying it into practice.” In other words, outside its frontier the United States could adapt and adjust its democratic procedures as it saw fit. Dorr, therefore, was not entitled to trial by jury despite living in an American colony.

This was the rational choice. Other nations faced by the conflict between democratic values and the command structure of empire had made similar decisions. What makes the case stand out, however, was the minority opinion of the “Great Dissenter,” Justice John M. Harlan. “Neither the life, nor the liberty, nor the property of any person, within any territory or country over which the United States is sovereign, can be taken,” Harlan declared, “under the sanction of any civil tribunal, acting under its authority, by any form of procedure inconsistent with the Constitution of the United States.”

This was what Lincoln's Constitution required: the guarantee of individual rights on a basis of absolute equality, as promised by the Declaration of Independence. There could be no adjustment to different races or different places—“the Constitution,” Harlan maintained, “is the supreme law in every territory, as soon as it comes under the sovereign dominion of the United States for purposes of civil administration.”

On one fundamental point, however, White and Harlan were in agreement—democratic values as practiced inside the frontier of the United States were not compatible with imperial rule. That was why the line that marked the limits of the nation was so important. The freedom that had
been won at such cost and defined the very nature of the United States could not be exported.

Even Roosevelt, the standard-bearer of imperialism, accepted that a fundamental error had been made and admitted in 1907 that he would be “glad to see the [Philippines] made independent.” When it was suggested that the Dominican Republic should be made an American colony, he exclaimed, “I have about the same desire to annex it as a gorged boa constrictor might have to swallow a porcupine wrong-end-to.”

A man has a right to be employed, to be trusted, to be loved, to be revered. The power of love, as the basis of a State, has never been tried.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON, “Politics,” 1844

When
Frederick Jackson
Turner delivered his speech entitled “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” to the American Historical Association in Chicago in 1893, he did so as a young Wisconsin professor with no reputation. His thesis, that the frontier deserved serious study by historians, could hardly have been more far-fetched. History was concerned with the study of constitutional and military events, while the frontier was the stuff of dime novels and Buffalo Bill Cody's traveling circus. Worst of all, Turner was offering a deliberate challenge to the University of Chicago's head of history, Professor Hermann von Holst, the supreme authority on the events leading to the Civil War. The seventh and final volume of von Holst's magisterial
Constitutional and Political History of the United States
had been published the year before, delineating with Teutonic thoroughness—it was originally written in German—the divisions, and especially the conflict across state lines, that slavery had triggered between federal and state constitutions.

What Turner's audience heard was an aggressive demolition of von Holst's analysis. “It is believed that many phases of our political history have been obscured by the attention paid to State boundaries and to the sectional lines of North and South,” Turner stated. “… But, from the point of view of the
rise and growth of sectionalism and nationalism, it is much more important to note the existence of great social and economic areas, independent of state lines, which have acted as units in political history.” The emphasis on states' rights and slavery was, he concluded simply, “a wrong perspective.” To say this in Chicago was equivalent to giving a middle-fingered salute to von Holst.

In place of the forces that divided the United States, Turner proposed that the most important element was the unifying experience of the settlers' expansion across the continent. “Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West,” he declared in his opening paragraph. It was important because, from the moment the first English colonists arrived, the infinite opportunities and extraordinary challenges presented by the wilderness had transformed the outlook of generations of immigrants pushing westward and “promoted the formation of a composite nationality for the American people.” Sweeping away arcane discussion about the significance of dusty paragraphs in half-forgotten constitutional conventions, Turner presented the influence of wide horizons and immense forests on living people with hopes and dreams. It was an exhilarating, easily understood picture. “The demand for land and the love of wilderness freedom drew the frontier ever onward,” and from the physical and psychological demands of building a cabin, breaking the virgin soil, and holding off hostile attacks emerged the distinctive characteristic that made Americans different—“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; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom.”

Frederick Jackson Turner

His speech began and ended with the report of the superintendent of the 1890 census that the empty places were now filled, and the “frontier line” no longer existed. But the elegiac tone was tempered in a defiant final paragraph: “America has [always] 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.”

Despite his eloquence, little suggested that his ideas, indeed the very phrases, would remain in currency more than a century after they were delivered. Lacking analytical detail, the speech failed to inspire enthusiasm among his audience of constitutional historians. Even the influential endorsement of Professor Woodrow Wilson of Princeton University missed the point about the frontier's continuing influence. What Wilson welcomed was the idea of the frontier as “a stage of development,” and he concluded that it must lead to the west becoming increasingly civilized and “eastern,” rather than that the western experience should leave a permanent imprint on the American character. This was an understandable mistake, because as Turner himself admitted the frontier had ceased to exist, making it difficult to explain how its influence could continue to affect future generations.

Yet the myth of the frontier captured the popular imagination because it
seemed to offer a historical explanation for the extraordinary phenomenon of westward expansion. Not only had the United States spread across the continent in little more than two generations, but it had created a society so homogeneous, despite its diversity, that to say
American
was to describe a set of characteristics that referred only to the citizens and society of the USA and specifically excluded all the other Americans in South, Central, and North America.

Turner's theory seemed the more credible because the myth of the frontier was already lodged in every American's imagination. History was in fact the last discipline to appreciate its power. Visually, the land of the frontier had provided the raw material for artists since Thomas Cole had depicted the upper Hudson Valley in the 1820s, when old-timers could still remember the Mohawks living there. In 1859 Albert Bierstadt traveled to the Rockies with a U.S. Public Land Survey party, then displayed its spectacular scenery to eastern eyes for the first time through a series of immense canvases. Most spectacularly of all, Thomas Moran's gigantic landscape
Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone
, painted after a visit to Yellowstone in 1871, had helped persuade Congress to set the area aside as the first national park in the country.

While painters dealt with the scenery of the frontier, writers concentrated on the people. Eighteenth-century Andrew Ellicott, recoiling from the fleas and squalor of Beeson Town, had allowed himself to be amused by the skewed language of the innkeeper there who solemnly predicted “there would be a great conjunction of Rain or Snow for there was a large Circumstance round the Moon.” But the nineteenth century took frontier struggles and sayings more seriously.

The style was set by James Fenimore Cooper's iconic character Natty Bumppo or Leatherstocking, who first appeared in
The Pioneers
in 1823. Raised by Delaware Indians, and conditioned by a life spent in the wilderness, Natty stood for simple virtues and the vast freedom of the unclaimed land. When he leveled his rifle at an intruder, saying, “If you come a foot nigher you shall have frontier punishment,” the reader knew he was not bluffing.

Cooper placed his stories in the past when the frontier lay no farther off than upstate New York, but the conflict between the liberty of the wilderness and the privileges of property was timeless. “There's two rights to all the land on ‘arth,” another frontier character, the squatter Thousandacres, said to a surveyor who was the symbol of the law in
The Chainbearer
. “One
of these rights is what I call a king's right, or that which depends on writin's, and laws, and sich like contrivances; and the other depends on possession. It stands to reason, that fact is better than writin' about it can be.”

But as the settlers moved out of the forest and into the prairie, the fictional frontiersman became less of a junction between Anglo- and Native-American cultures. A work of nonfiction, Timothy Flint's hugely influential 1826 memoir of missionary work among the newly arrived settlers in Missouri,
Recollections of the Last Ten Years
, created the template for the enduring image of the white frontiersman at war with the bloodthirsty Indian. “The antipathy between the two races seems fixed and unalterable,” Flint declared. “Peace there often is between them when they are cast in the same vicinity, but any affectionate intercourse, never.”

Unfortunately, Flint arrived in Missouri at the end of a long period of cultural harmony between natives and newcomers. What he saw were the last Shawnee being driven from their lands by the torrent of settlers who poured across the Mississippi—almost one hundred thousand had come by 1824—and laid the foundations for an exclusive property-owning democracy. Nevertheless, this was the frontier that provided the staple of the western adventure novels published in the 1840s. Unlike Cooper's forest-bound fiction, these placed their heroes in the wide-open spaces of the prairie, and while Natty Bumppo was half-Indian in his ways and outlook, the frontiersman of the westerns was the implacable enemy of the Indians.