What was the passing of the frontier in 1890

In his paper he argued that the hardship in the early days of the frontier, coupled with the American democratic institutions, fostered self-reliance and individualism that led to the rise of a society different from the rest of Europe although originating from Europe. However, the historical account has been dismissed as revisionist in failing to acknowledge the impact the westward settlements had on Native Indians who were decimated by diseases introduced by Europeans, massacred in wars and forced to abandon their lifestyle and live in small reservations.

Key Highlights The government continued to promote the westward expansion after the Civil War. In the Census Bureau broadcast the closure of the frontier, meaning that in the west there was no apparent tracts of land without settlers. Westward expansion After the Civil War, the government sought to continue to promote promoting the westward expansion.

Entrepreneurial capitalists of the New South extended the business of agriculture beyond the old plantations and into regions of small farms. There was an acute shortage of capital in the south, which posed major obstacles to rebuilding the economy.

Without hard currency, Southerners had to operate on credit. Wealthy individuals who extended credit for profit were called credit merchants. Many acquired large holdings of land in the post-Reconstruction south at the expense of small farmers. The "crop lien" system was one method of the commercialization of southern agriculture. The farmer was thus pressed by circumstances into making a large planting of a single cash crop—usually cotton. Many farmers cultivating the same product caused cash crop prices to drop.

Some farmers were able to use the crop lien form of credit to bootstrap themselves into independence and pay for their own seed and supplies in the following years. For other farmers, however, the crop lien proved to be a debt trap from which they could never climb out. Eventually, many lost their farms.

The planter or merchant who extended the credit was often seen as a villain. Their risk was high, however. The high interest the credit merchants charged partially reflected the risk they were taking. As a direct result of the crop lien system, many poor white and black farmers became landless tenant farmers or sharecroppers.

They generally got supplies and half the crop for their effort. Tenant farmers worked the land but used their own equipment and draft animals and bought their own seed. They usually earned three-fourths of the cash crop and two-thirds of the subsistence crop.

The owner of the land received the remainder as rent. This system encouraged taking as much as possible from the land on a short-term basis and making no provision for the long term. The economics favored using up the nutrients in the soil without replacing them, and there was no incentive to prevent erosion from wind or water. Tenants and landlords were constantly suspicious that they were being cheated and used by the other. By the s, 20 percent of southern farmers were tenants, most of whom were freed slaves.

By , 50 percent of southern farmers were tenants, many newly landless whites. This situation resulted in a massive migration of Americans out of the southern Cotton Belt. Farming lost its luster in other areas of the country, as well. The labor and equipment required for a cash crop operation were fixed costs that often ran high. Hay balers and combines were expensive, but farmers needed them to remain competitive. Farmers overproduced for the market in an effort to be as profitable as possible, but this drove prices down.

With improved ocean and rail shipping, other countries such as Argentina, Australia, Russia, and Canada began to sell their agricultural products in European markets that had formerly been the exclusive province of American farmers. A smaller market share further depressed farm prices for Americans. Farmers were caught in a squeeze between low prices for their products and high prices for the manufactured goods they needed.

Agricultural-related trusts, such as the barbed wire trust, fertilizer trust, harvester trust, and railroad trust, fixed high prices that farmers had no choice except to pay. Farmers were also hurt by the domestic marketing system, which had developed using multiple layers of middlemen, all taking a share of the profit at the expense of the farmers. Suddenly it was not enough to know how to raise a crop. Farmers also had to be keen businessmen to stay afloat, and many gave up or lost their land and moved to the city to take industrial jobs.

Successful farmers could produce near miraculous harvests with the new mechanized farm equipment, but with low prices they were sometimes no better off for all their effort. Natural disasters such as bitterly cold winters, drought, storms, insects, crop and livestock diseases, erosion, and depletion of the soil all took their toll.

The terrible heat and drought of the late s proved too much even for the bonanza farms. Many farmers of the plains were forced to give up, and the entire plains region became economically depressed in the s. Which factor most contributed to the urbanization of the United States during the s? Workers were drawn to industrial areas in the cities, increasing both urbanization and industrialization at the same time.

The growth of big business in the late s changed American society. Though Webster could declare that there were no Alleghanies in his politics, yet in politics in general they were a very solid factor.

The exploitation of the beasts took hunter and trader to the west, the exploitation of the grasses took the rancher west, and the exploitation of the virgin soil of the river valleys and prairies attracted the farmer. The land hunger of the Virginians drew them down the rivers into Carolina, in early colonial days; the search for soils took the Massachusetts men to Pennsylvania and to New York. As the eastern lands were taken up migration flowed across them to the west.

Daniel Boone, the great backwoodsman, who combined the occupations of hunter, trader, cattle-raiser, farmer, and surveyor—learning, probably from the traders, of the fertility of the lands on the upper Yadkin, where the traders were wont to rest as they took their way to the Indians, left his Pennsylvania home with his father, and passed down the Great Valley road to that stream. Learning from a trader whose posts were on the Red River in Kentucky of its game and rich pastures, he pioneered the way for the farmers to that region.

Thence he passed to the frontier of Missouri, where his settlement was long a landmark on the frontier. Here again he helped to open the way for civilization, finding salt licks, and trails, and land. His son was among the earliest trappers in the passes of the Rocky Mountains, and his party are said to have been the first to camp on the present site of Denver.

His grandson, Col. Boone, of Colorado, was a power among the Indians of the Rocky Mountains, and was appointed an agent by the Government. Generally, in all the western settlements, three classes, like the waves of the ocean, have rolled one after the other. It is quite immaterial whether he ever becomes the owner of the soil. He builds his cabin, gathers around him a few other families of similar tastes and habits, and occupies till the range is somewhat subdued, and hunting a little precarious, or, which is more frequently the case, till the neighbors crowd around, roads, bridges, and fields annoy him, and he lacks elbow room.

The next class of emigrants purchase the lands, add field to field, clear out the roads, throw rough bridges over the streams, put up hewn log houses with glass windows and brick or stone chimneys, occasionally plant orchards, build mills, schoolhouses, court-houses, etc.

Another wave rolls on. The men of capital and enterprise come. The settler is ready to sell out and take the advantage of the rise in property, push farther into the interior and become, himself, a man of capital and enterprise in turn. The small village rises to a spacious town or city; substantial edifices of brick, extensive fields, orchards, gardens, colleges, and churches are seen.

Broadcloths, silks, leghorns, crapes, and all the refinements, luxuries, elegancies, frivolities, and fashions are in vogue. Thus wave after wave is rolling westward; the real Eldorado is still farther on. A portion of the two first classes remain stationary amidst the general movement, improve their habits and condition, and rise in the scale of society.

The writer has traveled much amongst the first class, the real pioneers. He has lived many years in connection with the second grade; and now the third wave is sweeping over large districts of Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri. Migration has become almost a habit in the west. Hundreds of men can be found, not over 50 years of age, who have settled for the fourth, fifth, or sixth time on a new spot.

To sell out and remove only a few hundred miles makes up a portion of the variety of backwoods life and manners. Omitting those of the pioneer farmers who move from the love of adventure, the advance of the more steady farmer is easy to understand. Obviously the immigrant was attracted by the cheap lands of the frontier, and even the native farmer felt their influence strongly.

Year by year the farmers who lived on soil whose returns were diminished by unrotated crops were offered the virgin soil of the frontier at nominal prices. Their growing families demanded more lands, and these were dear. The competition of the unexhausted, cheap, and easily tilled prairie lands compelled the farmer either to go west and continue the exhaustion of the soil on a new frontier, or to adopt intensive culture.

Thus the census of shows, in the Northwest, many counties in which there is an absolute or a relative decrease of population. These States have been sending farmers to advance the frontier on the plains, and have themselves begun to turn to intensive farming and to manufacture.

A decade before this, Ohio had shown the same transition stage. Thus the demand for land and the love of wilderness freedom drew the frontier ever onward. Having now roughly outlined the various kinds of frontiers, and their modes of advance, chiefly from the point of view of the frontier itself, we may next inquire what were the influences on the East and on the Old World. A rapid enumeration of some of the more noteworthy effects is all that I have time for.

First, we note that the frontier promoted the formation of a composite nationality for the American people. The coast was preponderantly English, but the later tides of continental immigration flowed across to the free lands. This was the case from the early colonial days. With these peoples were also the freed indented servants, or redemptioners, who at the expiration of their time of service passed to the frontier.

In the crucible of the frontier the immigrants were Americanized, liberated, and fused into a mixed race, English in neither nationality or characteristics. The process has gone on from the early days to our own. In the middle of the present century the German element in Wisconsin was already so considerable that leading publicists looked to the creation of a German state out of the commonwealth by concentrating their colonization.

In another way the advance of the frontier decreased our dependence on England. The coast, particularly of the South, lacked diversified industries, and was dependent on England for the bulk of its supplies. In the South there was even a dependence on the Northern colonies for articles of food. This no doubt diminishes the number of shipping and the appearance of our trade, but it is far from being a detriment to us.

The legislation which most developed the powers of the National Government, and played the largest part in its activity, was conditioned on the frontier. Writers have discussed the subjects of tariff, land, and internal improvement, as subsidiary to the slavery question. But when American history comes to be rightly viewed it will be seen that the slavery question is an incident. In the period from the end of the first half of the present century to the close of the civil war slavery rose to primary, but far from exclusive, importance.

But this does not justify Dr. Even so recent a writer as Rhodes, in his History of the United States since the compromise of , has treated the legislation called out by the western advance as incidental to the slavery struggle. This is a wrong perspective. The pioneer needed the goods of the coast, and so the grand series of internal improvement and railroad legislation began, with potent nationalizing effects.

Over internal improvements occurred great debates, in which grave constitutional questions were discussed. Sectional groupings appear in the votes, profoundly significant for the historian. Loose construction increased as the nation marched westward. The disposition of the public lands was a third important subject of national legislation influenced by the frontier. The public domain has been a force of profound importance in the nationalization and development of the Government.

The effects of the struggle of the landed and the landless States, and of the ordinance of , need no discussion. The purchase of Louisiana was perhaps the constitutional turning point in the history of the Republic, inasmuch as it afforded both a new area for national legislation and the occasion of the downfall of the policy of strict construction.

But the purchase of Louisiana was called out by frontier needs and demands. As frontier States accrued to the Union the national power grew. In a speech on the dedication of the Calhoun monument Mr. 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 United States in dealing with its lands is in sharp contrast with the European system of scientific administration.

Efforts to make this domain a source of revenue, and to withhold it from emigrants in order that settlement might be compact, were in vain. The jealousy and the fears of the East were powerless in the face of the demands of the frontiersmen. Benton was the author of this system, which he brought forward as a substitute for the American system of Mr.

Clay, and to supplant him as the leading statesman of the West. Clay, by his tariff compromise with Mr. Calhoun, abandoned his own American system.

At the same time he brought forward a plan for distributing among all the States of the Union the proceeds of the sales of the public lands. His bill for that purpose passed both Houses of Congress, but was vetoed by President Jackson, who, in his annual message of December, , formally recommended that all public lands should be gratuitously given away to individual adventurers and to the States in which the lands are situated.

But this legislation was framed under frontier influences, and under the lead of Western statesmen like Benton and Jackson. It is safe to say that the legislation with regard to land, tariff, and internal improvements—the American system of the nationalizing Whig party—was conditioned on frontier ideas and needs. But it was not merely in legislative action that the frontier worked against the sectionalism of the coast.

The economic and social characteristics of the frontier worked against sectionalism. The men of the frontier had closer resemblances to the Middle region than to either of the other sections. Pennsylvania had been the seed-plot of frontier emigration, and, although she passed on her settlers along the Great Valley into the west of Virginia and the Carolinas, yet the industrial society of these Southern frontiersmen was always more like that of the Middle region than like that of the tide-water portion of the South, which later came to spread its industrial type throughout the South.

The Middle region, entered by New York harbor, was an open door to all Europe. The tide-water part of the South represented typical Englishmen, modified by a warm climate and servile labor, and living in baronial fashion on great plantations; New England stood for a special English movement—Puritanism.

The Middle region was less English than the other sections. It had a wide mixture of nationalities, a varied society, the mixed town and county system of local government, a varied economic life, many religious sects. It represented that composite nationality which the contemporary United States exhibits, that juxtaposition of non-English groups, occupying a valley or a little settlement, and presenting reflections of the map of Europe in their variety.

It was typical of the modern United States. It was least sectional, not only because it lay between North and South, but also because with no barriers to shut out its frontiers from its settled region, and with a system of connecting waterways, the Middle region mediated between East and West as well as between North and South.

Thus it became the typically American region. Even the New Englander, who was shut out from the frontier by the Middle region, tarrying in New York or Pennsylvania on his westward march, lost the acuteness of his sectionalism on the way. Before this process revealed its results the western portion of the South, which was akin to Pennsylvania in stock, society, and industry, showed tendencies to fall away from the faith of the fathers into internal improvement legislation and nationalism.

In the Virginia convention of —30, called to revise the constitution, Mr. Leigh, of Chesterfield, one of the tide-water counties, declared:. One of the main causes of discontent which led to this convention, that which had the strongest influence in overcoming our veneration for the work of our fathers, which taught us to contemn the sentiments of Henry and Mason and Pendleton, which weaned us from our reverence for the constituted authorities of the State, was an overweening passion for internal improvement.

I say this with perfect knowledge, for it has been avowed to me by gentlemen from the West over and over again. And let me tell the gentleman from Albemarle Mr. Gordon that it has been another principal object of those who set this ball of revolution in motion, to overturn the doctrine of State rights, of which Virginia has been the very pillar, and to remove the barrier she has interposed to the interference of the Federal Government in that same work of internal improvement, by so reorganizing the legislature that Virginia, too, may be hitched to the Federal car.

It was this nationalizing tendency of the West that transformed the democracy of Jefferson into the national republicanism of Monroe and the democracy of Andrew Jackson.